Disclaimer: This story is "fan-fiction", based on the Television programme: "Sherlock", 2010 onwards contemporary TV series 'reimagining' which remains the intellectual property of creators/producers Steve Moffatt, Mark Gatiss, Steve Thompson, BBC1 et al.

It is not owned by "The Cat's Whiskers"; no money is being made, and it is purely for the enjoyment of fans of the show, etc., etc. Legal counsel has advised that "fan-fiction" falls within the bounds of "fair use" as defined by UK law (1740) and US law (1976).

All 'Original characters, plots and story-settings remain the intellectual property of 'The Cat's Whiskers' and may not be reproduced or continued or expanded without her express permission to reproduce, continue or expand same. The Cat's Whiskers may be contacted at any time via Private Messaging for this purpose to request same.

All excerpts of and reference to on-screen dialogue and aired episodes (including deleted scenes, episode commentaries, gag reels, additional (a.k.a. 'bonus') content) and on-screen named characters remain the property of the screenwriter(s).

Notice: You are expressly and explicitly permitted and encouraged to save this story to your personal computer and/or other such device for your personal reading pleasure (only) if you so wish. Some years ago I suffered a serious loss of much of my works due to a computer software malware issue, and I managed to get 60 percent of it back thanks to other writers and readers who had saved my stories on their computers or knew about "web caching" and the Wayback Machine™ website archive service. Since I err on the side of paranoia, if I one day need to go through that process again [aaagh!] for any reason, you may be the reader who is able to help because you have the story saved on your hard drive/memory stick/iPad etc. Please do not, however, circulate the stories without asking me first. I can be contacted in all instances via Private Messaging Service.

Summary: John Watson: the sidebar nobody was interested in, doggedly still sweeping up the shattered shards of Sherlock Holmes' life on his own, supporting and supported only by Mrs Hudson…until…

Rating - important: for Fan Fiction Dot Net site purposes only: K+ to M for references to suicide, psychopathy, sociopathy, BSDM, general family dysfunction and sundry unpleasantness. Why? See Author's Note after Chapter 1.

Setting: This is the second of a two part story: Part 1, which you do need to have read first for this to make more sense, was set general mid-late Season 2 and is told from John's POV. This Part 2 is a few months set after the famous Season 2 finale, before the premiere of Season (when it will probably become AU) and again is mostly from John's POV.

Story content note: See Author's Note after Chapter 1.

Credit/shout-out/blame-placement: This story has been posted to for 'The Hobbet' who asked if I'd written any Sherlock fan-fiction…Yes, in a word.

Holmesian Logic

Part 2

Chapter 1

Hmmm…

Just like the first one, the second collapsible storage/transfer cardboard box wasn't as big as his memory had thought it was…Although maybe in the past he had just crammed stuff into it like it was a form of TARDIS and only sheer luck had saved him from having the bottom fall out of it whilst he was carrying it –

Oh and isn't that a statement to conjure with…No doubt his therapist, she would have claimed that unconsciously he'd known that - had he continued his visits to her, that was, following that single revisit he'd made, but his perception at that session was too coloured, after Sherlock had…

'…Fire your therapist – she thinks your leg injury is psychosomatic – which it is, by the way – but she thinks the cause is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Afghanistan. You're not traumatised, you miss it…'

Words from the first verbal exchange – 'conversation' would be too grandiloquent a description – at Bart's…if he'd known then what he knew now about what he was getting himself into…He'd have shot James Moriarty on sight when he slithered into the lab pretending to be Molly Hooper's in-the-closet 'boyfriend'…

Box on the big old table they had used as a work desk/dumping ground…But this was going to require a re-think…Sherlock's pulp fiction collection alone took up enough room to wallpaper a room…especially since about a month before…before Then, Sherlock had gotten onto Westerns somehow – of course Mr OCD immediately and relentlessly started haunting second hand book shops and market stalls, adding novellas to his already vast collection of potboilers, Aga sagas, old time crime and Mills & Boon 183-pagers. There was still the entire Sheriff of Rockabye County series by J.T. Edson on Sherlock's bedside cabinet waiting for him to…waiting forever…

Unless he went out and bought another hundred weight of storage boxes…or else made some ruthless room clearance choices…That idiotic black 'steer' head on the wall with the headphones trailing from it seemed to look back at him with a sarcastic 'Nooooo? Mate, yer reckon?' expression…But then, it, like the books and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the bumph in the flat was Sherlock's rammel, like two of his 'taste' in silk dressing gowns, the sapphire and the blue/white pinstripe, still strewn over the back of the sofa – he could have packed his stuff in both the two smaller-than-realised cardboard boxes without issue, because other than clothes there was only his Browning…

Which wasn't on the table top where he'd put it a minute ago…had he?

No, he hadn't taken it upstairs with him. He had put it right there on top of the Complete Professor Challenger Stories Omnibus and George McCoy's Guide to the Working Ladies of London, so where the…

He heard no sound; he felt the change in air pressure, looking around

And he saw dead people…

…continued in Chapter 2…

© 2013, The Cat's Whiskers

All rights reserved

Author's Note:

Rating Note: This story has a "rating" only for Fan Fiction Dot Net site purposes only. It is has no "rating" otherwise.

Why? I do not believe that written works should be age-rated; it is a foolish and cruel form of censorship that discourages and de-incentivises reading at all, for both knowledge and pleasure which is disastrous for the hope of producing the next generation of Keats, Milton, Twain, Shakespeare, Christie, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cavendish, Blyton, C.S. Lewis, Joss Whedon, John Sullivan, Ian la Frenais & Dick Clement, James Perry & David Croft, Roy Clarke, Ronnie Barker & Ronnie Corbett, Eric Kripke, Jaime Paglia, Kyle Killen, and so on. Children know when they are being patronised, condescended to and cotton-wool bubble-wrapped from how the World Really Works and nothing is more guaranteed to stop them reading for pleasure and for knowledge as fast as that.

The above rating is listed so it conforms to ' ' requirements to rate all stories. This story contains mildly intemperate language entirely in context by very stressed people and sundry mild references to violence, drugs and rock 'n' roll, all of which can be seen and heard on daytime soaps (how's that for pre-watershed) by anyone from toddler age upwards.

Unfortunately Western social culture today after forty years of the liberal bigotry of Political Correctness is a pornographic and paedophilic society where promiscuity and selfishness are glorified as "good" and self-control, self-respect and personal responsibility are vilified, and as a result most of this stuff is now pre-watershed TV or actually watchable for free as live-action porn anywhere you spot any group of 12-25 year olds at about 11:00pm on a weekend.

The content in here is very tame compared to sexting, hook-ups, misogynistic and misandrist supposed 'erotica' reading and the casual daily porn viewing most third graders and older are now accessing from their smartphones in the school lunch break in between mainlining heroin as an expression of their 'right to self-expression' and dealing smack to the Babies and Toddlers group, because hey, if mum and dad are happy to dose them up with Ritalin to keep them quiet, quiescent and out of the way whilst they focus on their career, retail therapy, golf weekend or whatever's really important, what's wrong with big sis or bro getting in on some of that pocket money supplementing action?

I kid you not – according to police research data by 2013 one of the world's most successful 'new' online dot-com businesses (founded 2011) was "Silk Road" which sells illegal drugs by mail order direct from the manufacturers to any customer who can pay, cutting out the 'middle-man' drug traffickers/gangs/lords. They saw 200 percentage growth in the first 18 months of business, which is beyond satire.

Story Content Note: As with all my fan-fiction, I have tried to keep this story as accurate as to "canon" as possible. I have no option but to avoid the whole "pot-kettle-black" thing because I teach Creative Writing and wrote a textbook; Writing Fan-Fiction for New Writers (Is it 'Real Writing' and is it Useful?) © The Cat's Whiskers 2010-2012 and I am, therefore, very keen on 'Taking Your Writing Seriously'. My view is that fan-fiction is an excellent 'primer' for someone who has just started out writing (whatever type) and also for anyone moving into fiction writing from another writing field, as was the fact in my case.

If you are writing an AU story, you do have leeway, but otherwise it is only courteous and respectful to your readers, and a good way of honing your research skills, to make as much effort to be as accurate to canon as possible – if you are serious about being a proper writer, you need to learn and practice doing proper research and getting facts right – otherwise you will end up being a "must read" for all the wrong reasons – like people only watch Ben Hur for the centurion wearing the wristwatch, or Braveheart for the battle scene where the man falls over to reveal a pair of very modern jeans under his kilt – or the collectible historical romance set in 17th Century England where the hero invites the heroine to 'freshen up' in his indoor bathroom…with flushing WC.

It also shows your respect to the creators of the show, the scriptwriters and production crew who film the series and work long into the night editing it all together, often in atrocious weather or stuffy little mixing suites but who never get the glory; remember the cameraman and boom operator are also out there filming in the howling gale/downpour for fifteen solid hours and they never get any red carpet treatment. If you've ever gone to a fan convention/Comic Con have you ever taken ten seconds away from salivating over Benedict Cumberbatch's cheekbones or Lara Pulver's particulars, depending on which way you sway, to let Steve Thompson or Steve Moffat bask in the fan-love? For another example, all those shows filmed in England or Vancouver, where the weather is wet or wetter - and the actors themselves, who work very hard and put a lot of time and effort into getting their on-screen characters "right" and again work through illness/injury (e.g., Jared Padalecki's broken wrist in Supernatural, and Alex O'Loughlin's shoulder injury in Hawaii 5-0) or things like pregnancy (e.g., Erica Cerra in A Town Called Eureka) and other stresses to give the viewer good value.

As well as being respectful to everyone involved with the show you are writing about, adhering to canon tropes also gives you great story material. Shows like A Town Called Eureka is very good for giving you snippets of plausible sounding 'real life' Scienceze, without drifting into Star Trek techno-babble. One of the best things about Hawaii 5-0 the 2010 reimagining is that because all the episode titles are in Polynesian, and both Polynesian and Pidgin are used in the show, is that it really makes you think about words and context and language – making sure that character 'A' really does talk like that does a great deal for honing your ear for dialogue and helps you create fictional realisms by giving your characters 'authentic' voices – Danny Williams uses words like 'ergo' and 'commensurately' in context and with precision, even in the midst of a cargument or Danno-rant, but he does not use words (unlike Steve McGarrett/Chin Ho Kelly/Kono Kalakaua/Kamekona), such as 'brah', 'hoa', 'lanai', 'aloha' 'da kine', 'pakalolo' etc.

I have tried my best in this regard, but it has been a bit difficult: dark colours, especially dark eye-colour, don't show up well on screen And of course, that doesn't account for the fact that in Real Life, every person's eyes change colour several times a minute, depending on the amount of literal light reaching the eye, the individual's emotions, their physical level of tiredness or alertness and so on; any accurate/true-to-life novel would never contain anything else other than 400 pages of what colour a person's eyes were every twenty seconds or so.

The same applies to everyone else – if you have ever watched any TV shows regularly and then met or seen some of the cast in real life you will know that moment of surprised 'Huh' because the camera really does change how a person's height, weight, body posture, hair-colour, eye-colour, skin tone and voice sounds appear to be from what they actually are, as well these also being just as much affected by the person in question being ill, tired, happy, alert, etc. Not to mention of course that actors go into 'make-up' which again alters the colour of their eyes, skin-tone, etc.