Of Immaturity, Genius and Fan-clubs

I know the "pulling plaits" thing has been done before, but I just wanted to play with the idea a little. Constructive criticism welcome . Yes, I made a Bewitched joke. Because I am also a dork.

Sherlock Holmes had a fan-club. An honest to goodness fan-club. She shouldn't be surprised really since she was a founding member and president of the Sherlock Holmes fan-club for a very long time. She just thought it was her own private fan-club. Meetings were held late at night, in her head, after glass of wine or two. But this was real. His new found fame had brought him a whole new group of clients, but along with that came the admirers. Young girls in deerstalkers and short skirts, older women in deerstalkers and scarves, young men in long coats and suits. Molly couldn't fault them for admiring his cool style, his cleverness, his overall dangerous and detached air. She admired it on a weekly basis. On the other hand, she knew about all this years ago! And here were all these new groupies acting like they discovered Sherlock Holmes was hot.

But if she was honest with herself, and she tried to be, he was also kind of a dork. And she would know. It takes one to know one after all. When you stripped him of the epic coat, the designer suit, and rapid-fire deductions, what you had was an overgrown 12-year-old who liked to play with gross things, pull faces, and pester the girlish woman who allowed him far too many liberties in her place of work.

Molly glanced at the man in question, currently occupying her lab. Honestly, look at him there, blue eyes popping behind the safety goggles as he heated up something dank and foul-smelling in a flask. Not that she looked much better in her own goggles and gloves, but then, she didn't have people throwing themselves at her. His hair was a ridiculous, fluffy mess, standing out from his head because he'd repeatedly scratched his head in frustration. Thanks for sharing your dandruff there, Sherlock, Molly thought testily. How many cultures had he contaminated with that little snowfall?

And the demands! Like a little baby, he was, always yanking on the sleeve of her lab coat, needing something.

"Molly, bring me a new slide."

"Molly, give me a spleen."

"Molly, lie on the floor and hold your left arm in the air. I need to test a theory."

Molly, Molly, Molly. Always asking for things, but never for the one thing she'd gladly give him.

She was glaring into her own microscope now, trying very hard to get her own work completed, when she felt a tug on her braid. She looked up in astonishment at the petulant face of the world's most annoying consulting detective. "Did you just pull my hair?" she gasped.

"You are not paying attention. I need another flask and a cup of coffee," he demanded. No, I'm sorry. No, please. No, thank you. Why was she hopelessly in love with him again?

She pondered this as she made her way slowly back to the lab from the canteen with a side trip to the supply closet. She may not be the most captivating of women (not like some of the ones she'd seen approaching him lately), but men liked her. She was feminine and friendly. She was very clever and very accomplished when she wasn't being compared to the genius currently rampaging through her lab. Compared to the average person, she was most definitely above average. You didn't get to her position at this age if you weren't pretty darn good at what you do, though you didn't have a lot of dates when you worked as hard as she did, either. She was a successful woman in a male-dominated field. She was awesomeness in a lab coat. Plenty of other men could see this—maybe she'd start to give those others more of a chance. That Darren—the one in the main office with the glasses- was fit and always laughed at her jokes. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sherlock Holmes! Who will you harass for eyeballs when I'm married, living in the country and having Darren's babies? All alone, you'll be, except for John, Mrs. Hudson, your legions of fans…she sighed. No, there probably wouldn't be a vast hole in his life if she left. And she never really liked the country anyway.

"Finally!" he huffed in impatience when she returned with the requested items, "Get lost in conversation with Derwood from admin?" he sneered. Molly blinked up at him. How did he do that? How could he know who she'd been thinking about?

"Aside from the dreary fact that he chose to work in administration—hospital administration, Molly-the man is obviously well on his way into a gambling addiction, and his complexion and menu choices in the canteen hint at high blood-pressure. Despite his generally fit appearance, he is on the verge of adult onset diabetes or heart attack, and early widowhood would just not suit you, Molly. I also suspect a slight unresolved Oedipal complex based upon his choice of neckties."

Molly stared. Offended, angry, maybe a little turned on.

"And, his sense of humor is abysmal," Sherlock added after a moment and held the new flask up to the light for inspection. Or not.

"Derwo-, I mean, Darren is a very nice man, and I don't see anything wrong with working in administration, I mean…" she began, flustered.

"Ah, coffee!" he interrupted and took the cup from her hand. The nerve of the man!

He made the most absurd faces whenever he took a sip of the coffee, wrinkling his nose, twisting his mouth up. And how many chins did he have when he did that? Ludicrous! And the belch afterward! He couldn't even be bothered to excuse himself. Had he really deleted all social niceties or was it just around her?

"Pardon you!" she said primly. He didn't even look up, as he replied "Transport." Yes, right, bodies as transport. Let those bodily functions rip as needed. The work, the mind was paramount—who cared what the body got up to as he turned his marvelous mental powers to the problem at hand. Speaking of which, Sherlock in his mind palace was a genuinely alarming sight as he rolled his eyes, shook his head, and waved his hands as if he were being attacked by flies. You really couldn't call it sexy. The seizures in the midst of his genius were frightening, disturbing. Fascinating, maybe, but sexy, no. She supposed it said something that he allowed her to be in the same room with him when he retreated into his own mind like that. The last time he'd needed to do this while at the lab, he'd made two interns cry before they conceded to leaving their experiments untended while he fell into his trance.

She wondered what the sighing girls in his fan club would think if they could see him lost in the depths of his mind palace. Would they be scared of his slack-jawed intensity? And while she herself had found his cropping of her dead co-worker strangely compelling, what would those ear-hat wearing women waiting for a glimpse of him outside think of it. Would they be appalled at his disregard for the dead? Or if they had seen him last week when he was suffering from a summer cold? Would they go gooey over the way he honked his nose on the tissue she'd handed him (she thought she was going to go mad if she heard one more sniffle) and tossed it over his shoulder? He really was an uncivilized child. A child who was currently grinning wickedly to himself as he watched the ooze in the flask coagulate and release an even fouler odor.

"Smell that!" he said triumphantly, waving the stinking container beneath her nose. She took a whiff and shrugged helplessly. "That is the perfume of conviction! Oh, yes, Molly, we've got him!"

He did a little awkward wiggle of victory as he grinned at her. Oh, wasn't he a clever boy! Wasn't he just! Come now, pat me on the head. Tell me how brilliant I am! Yes, yes, yes, damn it, he was.

"That's unbelievable!" She sparkled up at him, and as he began to explain how this nasty bit of science would convict a very terrible man, she saw the burning genius of him. The halo of delight that glowed around him as he solved the puzzle—Oh, right, that's why she loved him. This was what made her want to reprimand that other little boy, spank him soundly and tell him to behave himself! Don't let the fire of your brilliance be dimmed by such puerile antics.

But those antics made him human. And she liked humanity. She liked pulling it apart. Looking at its innards laid bare. Finding its secrets and carefully putting it together again. She loved his coolness, his cleverness, but the base humanity of him was what made the light of his intelligence bearable by mere mortals like her.

Anyway, she'd never been one to be put off by disgusting things. Her own sense of humor was rather morbid and immature (see Mrs. Hudson, re: hip. Whoops!), and she rarely irrigated the bowels of corpse without making some kind of poop joke. She had a very high tolerance for what turned other people off. Found the repulsive and hideous fascinating, in fact. So there it was, she was forlornly in love with an obnoxious child of a man who had hordes of groupies falling at his feet. Unless he decided to grow up, she couldn't say that she truly held out any hope that he could ever feel the same. But then again, everyone knew what it meant when the boy you liked pulled your hair.