Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (7 page)

“Oh, plainjane!” cried Charlotte. The year fours looked around accusingly at the noise, but seemed to dismiss this as typical sixth-form behaviour and went back to their shoot ’em up.

Jane disentangled herself from her friend, who always smelt faintly of coffee and cigarettes: Charlotte’s two favourite vices. “Do you really have to read
all
my fanfic?”

“Can’t your best friend take an interest in your hobbies? Anyway, how I am supposed to work out why Eric Sadler would take your notebook full of dirty fanfiction unless I study the subject?”

“He took it because he’s a scumbag. My scumbag ex who wants to embarrass me horribly, a bit like what you’re doing right now. And
hey
! Who said it was dirty?” Jane could feel herself blushing.

“Well, you won’t tell me what’s in it. What am I supposed to assume?”

“It’s private, okay?” It was hard to say ‘no’ to Charlotte—the girl was a star student and proficient in five languages, but Jane often found herself wondering if Charlotte knew what ‘no’ meant in any of them.

“Spoilsport. Go on. We’ve known each other forever. What have you got to hide from me?”

“I just can’t tell you.” It was impossible to hide anything from Charlotte for long, but this time, Jane had to. She really had to.

“Please?” Charlotte actually fluttered her eyelashes.

“You don’t have to know everything all the bloody time!”

Charlotte’s face clouded, and she turned away, back to the words on the computer screen. Even as she said it, Jane knew she was making a mistake. If there was one thing Charlotte hated it was a mystery: she never let go until she had all the answers.

When Ms. McManus had given everyone detention because no-one would own up to the graffiti in the girls’ bathrooms, Charlotte had worked out the culprit. When a masked flasher had turned up at the school disco, Charlotte had worked out his identity. (Mr. Harrison had been working out some issues after his divorce. The school had a new maths teacher now.)

If you had a problem to solve, a mystery to unravel, then Charlotte was your woman. She wouldn’t be nice about it, but she’d find the answers. Such brutal honesty did not win her many friends.

Being seventeen years old and hanging out in the school computer labs writing fanfiction did not win you many friends either, which explained why Charlotte and Jane had remained so close.

It wasn’t the only reason they were friends. In the years since they’d met, sitting next to each other in Harrison’s maths lessons,Jane had come to appreciate Charlotte’s intelligence, her energy, the way she always made life much more interesting.

What she didn’t appreciate about Charlotte was how she sulked when her curiosity was denied.

“Do you want my help or not?” Dark eyebrows knitted together, Charlotte studied the screen, still not meeting Jane’s eyes.

Why had Eric taken the notebook? What was he going to do with it? Where was he keeping it, and how could they get it back? Jane
needed
to get it back. Charlotte would solve this.

“Yes. I do want your help. But I still can’t tell you what’s in the notebook.”

Charlotte sighed, and rolled her eyes. “Then either do something useful or let me study the problem in peace.”

There was no talking to her when she was like this. Jane left Charlotte in the computer lab, reading around ‘plainjane’s’ own unique corner of Sherlock Holmes fandom.

Holmes and Watson had always been beloved characters in pop culture, but recent reboots for TV and film had seen interest soar. The internet was full of fan forums, fanart, cosplay, fanfiction.

Quite a lot of the fan-created works focused on the two characters as each other’s romantic interests—a dynamic some of the reboots did nothing to dispel. The reboots even played with the idea: emphasising Holmes’s jealousy of Watson’s wife, the awkwardness of their living arrangement, or the adulation of Sherlock shown in Watson’s written accounts of their adventures.

Then again, as Jane was always quick to point out, quite a lot of fanfiction did not focus on this homoerotic dynamic. (Hers did.)

Jane herself specialised in alternate universes, or ‘AUs’ for short. AUs took the characters and situations from the original work, and placed them in different worlds, different stories. The characters might be aliens, barbarian warriors or rock stars, but at the end of the day they were still themselves.

Jane had written about Sherlock and Watson as vampires, serial killers, subversive radio hosts, WW2 super-soldiers; the list went on. Jane was, she had to admit, mildly internet-famous for her AUs.

It was a pity that ‘mildly internet-famous’ wasn’t something that one could put on a university application, considering all the hours she’d spent writing fic when she could have been doing her homework, or even doing something her mother would call ‘healthy,’ like playing sports, spending time outdoors or kissing boys.

The fans loved her though—‘plainjane’ had quite a following. It fascinated Jane that even AUs where the characters had completely normal, mundane lives could win a huge readership if enough love and attention were put into the details, the characterisation, the dialogue. Coffee-shop AUs, for some reason, were quite trendy. Perhaps because young fans of the shows with plenty of writing time on their hands were more likely to be able to write their way around a coffee shop than an investment bank or a lawyer’s office. Jane had lost count of the number of fics she’d written on her laptop at Starbucks.

Jane’s own coffee-shop story, a multi-chapter epic titled ‘Where the Barista Knows Your Name,’ was one of her most popular works. She was genuinely proud of it, unlike so much of her other work she’d never quite got around to deleting online. That was the problem with being even mildly internet-famous. All your earliest mistakes stayed around to haunt you.

When Jane was about halfway down the road to the bus-stop home, she stopped as a sudden thought hit her.

Oh, god,
she thought,
please don’t let Charlotte find the Star Force fic.

Excerpt from ‘Where The Barista Knows Your Name’ (subtitle: ‘And Everything Else About You, Just By Looking At Your Shoes’), Chapter One, published by plainjane on fanfictionhouse.net, category: Literature: Sherlock Holmes: AUs, 12
^th
July 2014.

Keywords: coffee shop AU, character: Sherlock Holmes, character: John Watson, angst, fluff, John/Sherlock. With thanks to beta readers singlecrow and ladymoonray!–plainjane

T
HE NEW BARISTA
was getting on John Watson’s nerves. He didn’t smile, he didn’t tell the patrons to ‘have a nice day!’ but the customers loved him. They loved his party trick. John seemed to be the only patron it didn’t impress. “I’ll have my usual; and what does she want?” asked one girl with pink hair and a nose piercing, pushing forward a blonde who smiled and blushed prettily.

The man (
Sherlock Holmes
was the name on his tag) studied her, but only for a moment before turning back to the espresso machine. “She’ll have the double espresso Americano—the ink on her hands and the bags under her eyes show she’s been up all night studying for something, probably... some kind of veterinary sciences exam, going by the cat, dog and yes, that is rabbit fur on her clothes.

I’m adding a vanilla caramel shot. She wants a sugar boost, but prefers vanilla notes to citrus or cocoa, judging by her perfume. ”

“He’s good!” The girls giggled in triumph and ran to the end of the bar to await their coffees, making far too much noise, in John’s hungover opinion.

He stared mournfully into his decaff latte. He’d wanted it caffeinated, but he hadn’t wanted to prove the smug barista right.
He thinks he knows me
, thought John.
He’s only just met me.

Well not ‘only just.’ To be fair, they’d been dancing this dance for a whole week now. John would come in every day, first for his morning coffee, and then later, for a tomato mozzarella bagel and lunchtime caffeine hit.

Before Sherlock’s arrival, this had been the best coffee shop within ten minutes of the hospital where John worked.

Until the Battle of the Decaff Latte.

Until John had lied to the barista seven days ago, insisting that he did indeed want decaff, just to wipe the smug grin off the bastard’s face. Oh, the man hadn’t said anything about it at the time, but you could tell it bothered him. They’d barely exchanged any words since, but there had been a battle of wits going on...

On Wednesday, Sherlock the barista had played dirty.

He’d brought over a regular latte to John’s table, with just the right amount of foam, and with one of those plastic-wrapped, caramelised biscuits you get with coffee, that John adored but could never find in the supermarket. John had never seen tables waited at the café in all his years as a customer, but the barista insisted (sir) that wasn’t this his drink (sir) and actually apologised for messing up John’s order, trying to take away John’s decaff and replace it with the regular coffee.

John gritted his teeth as he remembered insisting that no, decaff was exactly what he wanted. He could swear the barista had waved the regular latte (which had smelled amazing) under his nose a few times, just to really rub it in.

At least in this seat next to the counter, he could enjoy the coffee aromas. Rich, dark, roasted—it smelled like freshly-brewed heaven. Here he could also hear the espresso machine singing its tempting siren wail. Oh, god, he was losing his mind...

One mozzarella bagel and one unsatisfying coffee later, John dropped his paper cup into the bin outside the cafe, and found himself looking up into grey smoke and darker, greyer eyes behind it. John was surprised to find himself thinking how beautiful these eyes were, but stopped when he realised who they belonged to.

The barista inhaled from a long, thin cigarette and, being tall, bent down to John’s level. “Why did you lie to me?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, with dawn still disappearing from the sky, Jane met Charlotte at the back gates of the school.

Jane had known Charlotte would be there —they did this every day before lessons started. And Charlotte wasn’t the kind to hold grudges. Quick to anger, but quick to forgive—Jane found it refreshing. Eric had held onto grudges like they were his only friends. Always jealous of her time, he’d once fallen out with her when she’d helped Charlotte steal school records (crucial clues in the case of the School Disco Flasher) instead of going bowling with him, and he hadn’t talked to her for nearly a month.

“I brought you a coffee.” Jane held out the peace offering.

Like the coffee, her breath steamed in the crisp morning air. “Mmm, thanks.” Charlotte fished a packet of Mayfairs out of her long black coat, and lit one with practised ease. “I brought you a culprit.”

Charlotte gestured with the cigarette to where classrooms could be seen through the wrought iron fence. The lights were on inside and among other early arrivals Jane could see Eric quite clearly, sitting at his desk, probably finishing last night’s homework. It was something he struggled with, now that he didn’t have Charlotte and Jane to help him with the answers. “We already have a culprit. That is the exact culprit we already have. He confessed, remember?”

“And what did he say, exactly? Tell me again.”

“I confronted him, as he was the only person in the library with me when the notebook went missing. He actually admitted his guilt! I asked him what he was planning to do with my book and he told me he hadn’t decided yet. What could he mean by that?”

Charlotte took out her phone and checked the time. “Are you listening to me?”

“If he hasn’t decided what to do with it yet, he’s likely keeping it close by. Any move he makes against you is going to happen at school—you know how afraid he is of your mum—but he’s unlikely to keep the book on his person in case we pay one of the rugby team to hold him upside down and empty his pockets.”

“That’s not fai—oh wait, yes we have done that.” They’d found deciding evidence in the curious case of the Kidnapped School Tortoise.

Suddenly, a persistent, repetitive ringing noise started up from inside the school. Jane realised why it sounded unfamiliar—she had never heard the fire alarm from outside the school grounds before. It sounded muted and strange.

Charlotte put her phone away with a satisfied smile. “That was you?”

“Those rugby boys will do anything on a dare.”

They’ll do anything for you, is more like it,
thought Jane. In Jane’s seventeen-year-old opinion, Charlotte was far too old to be doing the puppy-dog-eyes look at eighteen. But it worked. It was the hint of mischief behind the pleading grey eyes that Jane herself couldn’t resist—she wondered if others saw it too. “There, look!” Charlotte grabbed her and pointed at Eric’s classroom. It was emptying fast as students made their way to the fire assembly point on the lawn, but Eric was skulking behind. As soon as he was alone he bent down in front of one of the filing cabinets and fished around the back of the unit. “He must have known I’d break into his locker...” Charlotte muttered under her breath.

“You did what? For me? That’s sweet.”

Eric pulled out Jane’s notebook—royal blue and designed like a British police public call box—and hid it under his jacket, before darting out the door to follow the other students. “Yes!” Jane felt relief flooding through her body. Charlotte had pulled through—another of her moments, her brilliant flashes of cleverness. At moments like this, Jane wondered why she ever doubted her.

“Let’s get him!” Jane was raring to go, but Charlotte pulled her back.

“We know his hiding place now. We can wait.”

“Why? Let’s do it now!”

“Be logical about this. Even if you really want to physically wrestle the book out of Eric’s hands—”

“And give him a good sock on the nose to boot.”

“—and give him a good sock on the nose to boot, scrapping over stolen property in view of the whole school, who will right now be assembling in fire-alarm formation on the front lawns, is likely to draw more attention to you and your secret notebook than you’d prefer, isn’t it?”