Sherlock Earns a Beating

 I'm sure all of you have had that moment where you rediscover something (a book, a picture, a movie, a scrap of short story scribbled on your college history notes) that you re-experience and it's fantastic and you wonder why in the world you don't remember it and never did anything with it. I just did that with this little fanfiction snippet for BBC's Sherlock with a fem!Watson. 

Enjoy! I know I did. :D

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"I'm not entirely sure why you engage in this sort of self-punishment, Joan." He had appeared to be ignoring them for the most part, which Joan had been grateful for, until he decided to open his mouth. Joan Watson broke off the rather serious conversation she'd been having with her girlfriend to glare at her flatmate. Sherlock was in the kitchen, messing with his "chemistry set." Something about blood and ash. And heavens knew, Sherlock knew about ash.

"What are you going on about now, Holmes?" Perhaps on another day, she would have ignored him and the stupid words that fell out of his mouth whenever he opened it. Right now, however, she was frustrated and annoyed with him. Sherlock glanced at her in surprise, as though he hadn't thought that he'd spoken his thought out loud. Probably the case.

"What?" He was doing his level best to look innocent, which annoyed Joan further, mostly because she knew he was honestly trying to spare her feelings. She scowled at him, standing there with a test tube in his hand, framed by the doorway.

"What's this rubbish about self-punishment?" Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but Joan could have sworn she saw a tell-tale smirk on her flatmate's face; the smirk that told her she'd just asked for an explanation she didn't want to hear.

"Well, to be perfectly honest, Joan, I'm not sure why the two of you are in a relationship at all. You're not attracted to her, she's not attracted to you, and you're not even lesbian. You try awfully hard, though. Maybe that's the appeal. Really, she's just so desperate for a steady relationship, she would have settled for anyone willing to move in with her." Sherlock gave the girlfriend a critical once-over and shook his head. "Married once, engaged twice- possibly more, still paying the lawyer's fees from her divorce, and taking care of her ex-husband's cat. Would have been better off keeping the bird."

"Holmes!" Joan wasn't surprised, but she was appalled. Whatever else Sherlock might have been, he wasn't openly antagonistic to people he didn't hate. "Could you possibly not say those things out loud to the girl I'm planning to live with?" Sherlock cocked his head to one side, his eyebrows pinching together as he studied her.

"Well, I'm sure the three of you will be very happy," he said suddenly, as though changing the subject. "Don't let me ruin your delusions of relational bliss."

"Three of us?" Joan traded a glance with Rayna, who looked confused and a touch angry.

"Sorry. Two of you. The two of you. Yes. I just... miscounted." Sherlock wasn't looking at them anymore. He was staring into the bottom of the tube in his hand, which appeared to be half-full of grey-brown sludge. Joan thought she felt the bottom of her stomach drop into her shoes.

"Three of... Sherlock, what do you know? You had better tell me what you're playing at-"

"Honestly, Joan, the signs are quite obvious." There was that smug tone she hated so much, and yet tolerated day after day after day. "Increased appetite, changing tastes, sensitivity to odors. You're putting on weight, you got sick this morning- you blamed that on nerves, but when I asked you about it, you got angry with me. More moodiness than usual. There's only one likely explanation. Congratulations, by the way."

The silence that fell over the two women now was rather thick. Stifling, almost. Rayna's mouth was open now, and her eyes were filling with tears. Joan shook her head, looking from Sherlock to her girlfriend and back.

"Oh... god..." Joan buried her face in her hands just in time for Rayna to stand up and grab her purse.

"I. Can't. Believe. This." Rayna was struggling not to cry and losing the battle. "All this time, you... you... Joan, I can't... you're..." Joan lifted her head slightly, still a little too stunned to cry.

"Rayna, I swear I didn't- it's not what it looks like. Please." But the woman wasn't listening. She was shouldering her bag and leaving. Quickly. Stumbled on the third step from the bottom, the way a lot of their clients did when Sherlock drove them off with declarations of how boring they were.

"Sherlock, I can't believe you would-"

"Tea?"

"What?" Joan wasn't sure what to think at this point. Her world had been turned upside down, and he was offering her tea? Since when did Sherlock ever make tea, even for himself?

"I asked if you wanted tea. If you don't, that's understandable. You should be getting your second round of morning sickness about now." Sherlock went about his business as though he observed this kind of thing about his flatmate all the time. Joan would have started screaming at him if he hadn't been right about the morning sickness. She spent a miserable half hour in the toilet, not throwing up but not willing to emerge into the world at large, either.

This was some sort of nasty joke. It had to be. Why would Sherlock do this to her? It made no sense! When Joan returned to the kitchen, she was red-eyed and ready to punch something.

"The real question, of course, is who the father is." Sherlock lifted a beaker and frowned at it, swirling the sickly-looking contents around and studying the patterns in it. "A mystery for the ages. Possibly even worth looking into. What man could possibly get close enough to you to-"

"Damn it all, Sherlock!" Joan's voice cracked as she interrupted him, and the detective glanced at her, eyebrows raised. "The only man I've slept with in the last five years is you! And you, you... you curly-haired bastard... you had to... oh god.... Why did you do that, Sherlock? Why? You had no right to drive her off. She was different from the others. It would have worked. We would have made it work. And you had to ruin everything."

The detective seemed a bit shell-shocked, blinking at her as he processed her words and the implications thereof. "Of course it wouldn't have worked. You hated the way she drank coffee." That dismissed, he turned the subject to the more important matter. "What do you mean... you slept with me?"

"Christ, Sherlock, you were drunk. I was drunk! The only reason I know it happened is because I woke up first! And you were there. And... oh god, I think I'm going to be sick."

"Not in here." The man was galvanized into action by the threat to his precious experiment, and sprang around the table to usher Joan out of the room. He deposited her in her armchair and kicked the wastepaper bin between her legs so she could throw up if she needed to, which he doubted.

"What am I going to do?" she moaned, running her hands through her short blond hair and ending up looking rather like a hedgehog.

"Well, I would assume that either you will carry the baby to term, or you won't. Either you'll keep it, or you won't." Sherlock was clearly still being logical, as the "normal" portion of his brain was too overloaded to handle anything more at this point. He had fathered a child. That had to be a shocker. Joan defaulted to her first set response at that point, and leapt to her feet, slamming her knee into Sherlock's stomach.

"THIS IS ALL YOUR BLOODY FAULT!"

"Not... necessary..." Sherlock wheezed, doubled over and bracing himself against her armchair.

"Like hell it is! And so is this!"

It was quite some time before either of them made any sense at all.