The Flipside 2: Venus Envy
Summary: In which space is very big, and Sherlock and John desperately need a way to enliven the tedium.
A/N - With apologies to Gene Roddenberry for my misuse of the TOS episode "Mudd's Women". In my defence, the original episode was also cracky as hell.

When Sherlock was a boy in the labs, someone – he didn't remember who – had taken pity on him and given him a battered copy of Treasure Island. The doctors had found out, as they always did, and the book was taken away from him – but not before he discovered a whole new world of grand adventure, treacherous pirates and hidden treasure.

The good ship 221B, while lacking the power and aerodynamic grace of the Enterprise, was nevertheless everything he had ever imagined in those long-ago daydreams: no elite white starship, but a creaking, black-hulled vessel with tattered sails and a cutthroat crew.

That is, the 221B's hull was black, in the sense that it was ion scarred and pocked with the marks of a thousand tiny impact sites. The sails were tattered – if one could stretch the metaphor so far – in the sense that the engine never ran cleanly and John was forever cursing and banging away with a hydrospanner as if he knew anything about mechanics or engineering. The crew was cutthroat only in the sense that Sherlock had once been a psychopathic genetically engineered supersoldier, and John was his loyal companion, who had once executed a man in cold blood to protect him.

Still. It was a grand, reckless adventure, and Sherlock threw himself joyfully into it.

That was before he discovered the truth that every spacefarer knows, but is never mentioned in the stories: space is vast beyond imagining, and even at warp speed it takes a long timeto reach your destination.

The strident, outraged tones of Sherlock's violin echoed strangely in the corridors of the 221B. Down in the engine room, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, John tinkered with the warp core, trying to follow the outdated manual; he was a doctor, not an engineer, but Sherlock – who had far more experience of 23rd century technology and starship design – always claimed that he had far better things to do with his time. John wondered what, precisely, Sherlock was doing other than lounging about in his dressing gown and affecting die-away airs. He hadn't even risen from his padded couch for two days.

John's mouth tightened, but really, he knew better than to complain; Sherlock was abrasive and elusive and his moods swung like a pendulum, and when he was like this there was no dealing with him, only enduring him.

"Well, what about your experiments?" John had asked that morning, referring to the clutter of glass beakers and uncertain compounds littering the mess area, where Sherlock liked to test and examine the effects of artificial gravity – and zero gravity – on experiments he had once run on Earth. Sherlock was fascinated by the 221B'sunreliable gravity generator; he loved the unpredictable shutdowns that John had spent so long trying to fix, loved the ominous clunk that meant the onset of sudden weightlessness.

John, who had to clean everything up afterwards and who lived in terror of every tiny thing suddenly becoming an airborne projectile and punching a hole in the ship, or worse, in him or Sherlock, was not so fond of the effect. But Sherlock refused to help him fix it.

Sherlock had sighed, flapped his hand dismissively. "Dull," he'd complained. "It's all so – so dull, John, everything, even you, so just – go away and leave me alone."

"Right, then," John had snapped, holding onto his patience by a thread, "I'll be in the engine room if you need me." John saw it, then, the irresistible impulse in Sherlock's eyes to lash out, to say something vicious and cutting if only because he was bored and there was nothing else on which to vent his frustration, but he also saw the new restraint, the new-learned control that came of one too many fights within such an enclosed space, with no way to escape each other if things escalated or became unforgiveable. They were learning, slowly, to live with each other and their unfamiliar new existence.

But God, they needed something to enliven the tedium.

That something came on the fourth day of Sherlock's grand sulk, just before John was ready to take up his hydrospanner and murder him.

A sudden proximity alarm brought them out of warp, the autopilot wrenching them suddenly up and to the right.

"What the hell –?" John swore, staggering and flailing for balance. His morning cup of tea slid off the table and shattered on the floor, spraying everywhere; cursing, he brushed himself off, grabbed his last piece of toast and ran for the bridge.

There was a small, old-fashioned merchant ship far too close to their starboard bow, weaving a drunken, shuddering course that would have caused a collision had the autopilot not wrenched the 221B away in the nick of time.

"Bloody fool, watch where you're – how the hell does this communication thing work?" John demanded, pressing buttons at random. "Sherlock!" he shouted.

A long, dressing-clad arm reached over John's shoulder and flipped a single switch. There was a brief moment of garbled static, and then for the first time in months, John heard another voice other than his own or Sherlock's.

"Captain Leo Walsh, at your service," came the florid, overblown voice. "Er…would you be after providing us with some assistance?"

("Are you crazy, Sherlock?" John demanded. "An unregistered ship, the worst attempt at an Irish accent I've heard since I spent St Patrick's Day in New York –"

"Exactly," Sherlock replied, eyes shining.)

Captain Leo Walsh, self-styled honest merchant and purveyor of wives for lonely settlers, stepped off the 221B's transporter platform and proved to be a plump, moustachioed rogue with a twinkling smile and a rather overpowering charm.

He had charlatan written all over him.

But the next arrivals drove all other thoughts from John's mind.

A blonde.

A brunette.

A redhead.

All three of them were tall, intoxicatingly beautiful, and smiling at Dr John Watson as though they were delighted to see him. Old habits die hard, and old, well-worn skills came to the fore: John smiled back, all self-deprecating charm and boyish grin, and stepped up to help them off the platform like a gentleman.

"Well, well, men will always be men," Walsh said, smiling indulgently.

He failed to see Sherlock's dagger-like glare.

Sherlock scowled furiously.

The Blonde, the Brunette and the Redhead were focusing the full force of their attention on John, who, poor, susceptible Normal that he was, had succumbed utterly to their wiles.

(The Brunette, the boldest of the three, tried to fix her interest with Sherlock and was savagely rebuffed.)

Perhaps John could be forgiven if he failed to notice Sherlock's enraged stroppiness, or Leo Walsh's self-satisfied moustache-twirling; the Blonde, the Brunette and the Redhead focused the full force of their attention on him, and for a very pleasant moment he was lost in a fantasy of feminine laughter, red lips and scented perfume.

It escalated to the point where Sherlock, who for the past four days had ignored him in an ennui-driven sulk, bodily dragged him from the mess where he was eating, three beautiful women hanging off his every word, manhandled him inside their shared cabin and shagged him silly, barring the door to any and all rivals.

John awoke the next morning with a silly, infatuated smile, to be greeted by Sherlock and the knowledge that Leo Walsh's – true name Harry Mudd – women were not quite so beautiful and radiant without their drugs, and that Sherlock had dumped them on a frozen world with three rich, lonely miners while John slept like a baby, dazed by the afterglow.

What John didn't know was that before seeing them off, Sherlock had learned how to synthesise the drug.