The builders were calling it a night as John arrived home after his shift, and he moved his bike aside so that they could manoeuvre out of the front door with their ladders and equipment. One of them, he noticed, gave him a bit of a strange look, suppressing a smile – no doubt something to do with his cycling Lyrcras again. London was full of cyclists, so why was the sight of a man in his forties wearing entirely appropriate cycling gear something worth smirking about? He got enough of stick like that from Sherlock.

As he wrestled the bike in through the front door and attempted to prop it where it would be most out of the way, the door to his flat opened and Mrs Hudson came hurrying towards him, a frown on her face and a finger against her lips.

"You're worse than the builders with that thing," she scolded. "It's taken me an hour to get Rosie down to sleep."

"Sorry," John muttered, slightly disappointed that he had missed the opportunity to say goodnight to his little girl. The paperwork that went with being a GP was getting more onerous by the week. "But thank you for getting her down."

"She was exhausted, poor dear," Mrs Hudson. "But she's a stubborn little thing and wouldn't settle. We went out for a little drive to calm her down."

John felt his eyes widen as the realisation dawned.

"In the Aston Martin?" he balked.

She looked at him in the same patient way she regarded his infant daughter.

"Of course! What else? I don't have a fleet of cars stashed away in a secret underground garage, John."

"To be honest, Mrs Hudson, nothing much would surprise me these days."

Apart from anything, he acknowledged he was slightly miffed that Rosie had taken a ride in Mrs Hudson's pretty spectacular sports car when she hadn't so much as allowed him to sit in it.

"We just went for a little pootle around, we weren't drag-racing on Horse Guard's Parade," the older woman continued. "Rosie loves it when we go out for a little spin. 'Course it won't work when Molly and Sherlock's little one comes along – not enough space."

John unclipped his helmet and hung it on the handlebars of his bike, doing his best to straighten his hair.

"Yeah, Astons aren't really designed with multiple baby seats in mind," he replied.

Mrs Hudson smiled, throwing a glance towards the upstairs flat before returning her gaze to him.

"Well, it's nice to have that problem," she smiled, patting him on the arm.

"Yeah," John agreed, returning the smile. "It is."

He knew how much her makeshift family meant to Mrs Hudson, and that she considered Rosie – and Sherlock and Molly's imminent arrival - to be her grandchildren. He still found it slightly surreal that his two best friends were about to become parents (and he strongly suspected that he was about to become swept up in a whole new world of Sherlock-directed chaos), but he had to admit that the excitement was contagious.

"I've had the slow-cooker on all day, so there's a casserole almost ready," Mrs Hudson said. "Enough for all of you. Tell Sherlock when you pop up later, otherwise he'll be ordering take-away again – you're both past forty now and need to think about your salt intake."

"Er…thanks," John said, resisting the urge to remind his landlady about his medical degree. After all, there was a home-cooked meal at stake. He was about to move past her to head down to his flat when Mrs Hudson spoke again.

"I think he's at a bit of a loose end up there," she said, nodding towards the door of 221B. "He's been down here twice today, even took Rosie into the garden while I did the hoovering. I expect he's missing those really good murders."

"Hmm," John said in response, unsure he wanted to know how Mrs Hudson defined a 'really good murder'.

He had worried about how Sherlock would cope with the changes to his work, self-imposed though they were. Since Molly reached the halfway point of her pregnancy, he had been restricting himself to sixes and below (the occasional seven when it didn't appear too dangerous). Now that there were only five weeks until her due-date, he was no longer accepting clients at Baker Street and was trying to occupy himself with puzzling through cold-cases, mostly online. John knew this had to be mind-numbing for Sherlock, and in the old days it would have been enough for him to fall victim to his vices, but now there was the bigger picture to consider. Molly hadn't asked Sherlock to change his behaviour, to alter the way he worked, but she didn't need to – he did it without prompting and because he wanted to. The transformative nature of love was something to behold.

"Well, it won't be for much longer," he told her. "Molly finishes work at the end of the week."

Mrs Hudson's face broke into a smile.

"I know, and it's about time," she said. "Poor girl is on her feet all day in that place and she must be so uncomfortable. I suppose at least it isn't too warm for her there."

John gave a short laugh, but he couldn't help but feel sympathy for poor Molly. Mary would have told her she was lucky that she was 'all tummy', but these days it really looked like she was smuggling a watermelon under her lab coat – Lestrade had joked that there had to be a twin hiding in there, too, but it just seemed the baby did not take after its mother, size-wise.

"She'll keep him busy," John smiled. "Either that, or she'll drive him out of the flat with her DVD box sets. That's all Mary did in the weeks before Rosie arrived – watched films and complained about heartburn and her ankles."

"You shush, John Watson," Mrs Hudson admonished. "Men have no idea what women go through to bring their children into the world. It's Sherlock's turn to look after Molly, make a fuss of her."

John's eyebrows shot up to his hairline; that situation could go either way. He had witnessed a handful of spectacular shouting matches between Sherlock and Molly during this pregnancy, fuelled by fluctuating hormones and Sherlock's thick-headedness – but to be fair, he got the impression that the more explosive the argument, the more they enjoyed making up afterwards. And he knew it never ran very deep – strangely, considering who was involved, theirs was probably the most stable relationship John knew.

"Well, I'll go up and see him once I've had a shower," he told Mrs Hudson.

"Probably for the best, dear," she replied, giving the air a quick sniff. "I thought that smell was something the builders left behind."

"No, apparently it's me," he said, shortly, feeling small prickles of irritation up his back. Honestly, all he was trying to do was stay fit and do his bit for the city's carbon monoxide levels.

He took off his cycling cleats in an effort to enter the flat quietly and prevent waking his daughter. He didn't need to look behind him to know that Mrs Hudson was still there, hovering; he could feel her eyes on him.

"What?" he asked, without looking around.

"Oh, nothing dear," she replied lightly. "I've just never been sure about Lycra on men. Makes things seem a bit…familiar, that's all. Not quite decent."

Shuddering slightly – and forgoing a response – John made his way into his new home in 221C.