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Some people take years to work out what they want to be when they grow up. Some children go through hobby after hobby, phase after phase; they want to be an actor today and an astronaut tomorrow, and a firefighter the week after that. Some people do not discover that a particular field is interesting to them until late in their high school or university years, when they find themselves enjoying a class and decide that it is a subject that they would like to pursue in the future. Some people are still trying to work out what they want to be well into adulthood, treating their current jobs as temporary until they find something that they are really passionate about.
Kitty Riley was not one of those people. Kitty was the sort of person who knew exactly what she wanted to be since she was a child. Sure, she did not always know the word – at first, she just knew that she wanted to be a writer, but she didn't have the language to be more specific than that. Since she had started high school, however, and since she had learnt about the opportunities that were out there, Kitty had known that she wanted to be a journalist. She did not know exactly what type of journalist she wanted to be just yet, but that was okay. She had time to work that out. She hadn't even graduated yet.
That being said, Kitty knew that it was never too early to start preparing herself for her future. Journalism was not an easy business to break into, after all. Kitty did not want to turn into a thirty-year-old woman who was still searching for her first big break. This was why everything Kitty did in high school was with the intention of preparing herself for the future. She spent her Tuesday lunchtimes in the writing club (even though most of the members of the writers club were more interested in writing fiction, while her interest lay in the real world). She wrote for the school newspaper, because she knew that having her name in the by-line of an article – even in something as small-scale as a school newspaper – would be beneficial. And, of course, in the modern day of technology that she lived in, Kitty took advantage of the several different social media platforms that she had access to. Most importantly, she ran a blog.
Kitty used a pen-name on her blog, just in case she ended up looking back on it in one, two, five years' time and realised that her writing was not as good as it could have been. By using a pen-name, she had the option of keeping it a secret from anyone if she wanted to – friends, family, potential employers – but if it was successful, she could announce to the world that she was the writer behind it. Either way, blogging was an excellent way to start making a name for herself, and it gave her a way to practice. That, and she had developed a bit of a fan base from it.
Kitty had wanted a fan base when she first started her blog. Of course she did. If she could get somewhat famous as a writer before she left school, it would help her in the long run. When she had first started her blog, she had been foolish enough to believe that achieving this would be easy. She would make a few interesting blog posts, tag them in ways that got people's attention, and boom, Kitty's blog would go viral and she would be famous. Unfortunately, Kitty was very quick to discover that it was not that easy. She was lucky to get hits in the double digits, let alone anything else.
She tried several different types of posts, determined not to give up, desperate to work out what kinds of posts would make her blog the most popular. She compiled information from different newspaper articles, taking in stories that had been told in slightly different ways across papers and turning them into a single, coherent narrative. She wrote about smaller-scale events in her school that people would not be able to read about in any other paper. She interviewed her peers and wrote about people's hobbies or their plans for the future. Sometimes, she even wrote about herself, giving her readers a vague insight into the writer behind the blog. Yet, none of these posts worked out.
Yet Kitty was determined, and after months and months of trying out different styles and glaring at her hit counter as though it would make it increase, she found it – the post that people wanted to read. Really, once she found it, it was so obvious; she should have thought of it sooner. After all, there were some things in the world that were bound to get people's attention, especially the people of her main audience of high school students. There was nothing a high school student loved more than a little bit of gossip.
Kitty looked for stories – the kind of things that people would whisper about in the hallways and pass through the grapevine with the addition of "You didn't hear it from me" – and she would write about them. Stories about secret relationships, about the kind of things that people got up to in their spare time, the kind of things you might not know about just by looking at someone. Once Kitty started looking, she found dozens upon dozens of stories to be told. There were more than enough to fill up several blog posts, and the more blog posts she wrote, the higher her hit counter would climb. As her blog took off, people started commenting, leaving anonymous tips about something they had overheard, and it would give Kitty something to look out for, in case there was another story there to be told. It was almost like being a detective.
Of course, some stories were always going to be more popular than others. Some stories happened to be more interesting, or more controversial, or just well-written, and these stories would be the ones that got more hits and comments than any others. Some of her most popular posts surrounded two particular individuals at her school: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.
OoO
The first time Sherlock Holmes met John Watson, Kitty Riley just so happened to be present. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson met in a maths class. Maths was the only class that Kitty shared with Sherlock Holmes. For the most part, their interests were so different that their class schedules did not overlap – Sherlock Holmes liked science, and Kitty liked writing and art and other such subjects in which there were no right answers. The only reason why Kitty was also taking a maths class was because it was compulsory. She would have dropped it years ago, if she had the choice. (Really, why did maths need to be compulsory? Sure, she could understand the need for basic arithmetic, but why did the alphabet need to be involved?)
Kitty spent most of her time in this class doodling in her margins and pretending she had some sort of idea of whatever the teacher was talking about.
On this particular Monday morning, Kitty was absently drawing flowers in the margins of her notebook when the door to the classroom opened. She had no way of knowing at the time that the unassuming boy who entered – a boy only a little bit taller than her, with short, blond hair and a jumper that was just a little bit too big for him – would have such a drastic impact on her life (or, at least on her blog). The boy introduced himself as John Watson. When the teacher instructed him to tell the class a little bit about himself, he explained that he had just moved to London with his family, but it was hard for him to answer the question of where he was from originally, because he had moved around so much as a child. He had a twin sister, and his favourite subject was science – specifically biology. When he graduated, he planned on going into medicine.
When the teacher asked John Watson to take a seat, Kitty had to suppress a wince. She happened to know that there was only one spare seat in the classroom that day. That seat was in the back row, directly behind her, and it was empty for a reason – namely, that it was a seat next to Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes was rude and arrogant and unfriendly towards everyone he met. Kitty had only seen him for a few hours a week in this very maths class, but she had already developed a dislike of him. She couldn't help but feel sorry for this new boy, knowing that he was about to have the most unwelcome start to a first day at a new school as he possibly could.
She watched John weave his way through the desks to get to the spare seat at the back. She caught his eye briefly as he walked past, and he flashed her a smile, which she returned with an apologetic expression. He did not know why her expression was apologetic – she could see that in the bemused look that briefly crossed his face – but he was about to find out. Oh, he was about to find out, all right.
She heard the sound of chair legs scraping along the floor behind her, followed a moment later by what had to be the sound of John Watson taking a seat. At the same time, the teacher turned back to the whiteboard, beginning to write up various complicated-looking equations that Kitty would not have paid attention to in any circumstance. Rather, her attention was on the two boys behind her, and specifically on the new boy, when she heard him say, "Hey."
She wished that she could have given him some sort of warning before he sat down, to tell him not to interact with Sherlock. Sherlock would take the casual greeting as an open invitation to speak his mind, and there was no way that that would end well.
Behind her, Sherlock said, "Military family."
Kitty bit her lip. She already knew where this was going. The only thing worse than Sherlock's tendency to talk to people like they were below him – mere mortals beside a God whose intelligence was beyond anything they had ever seen (or at least, that's how Kitty assumed Sherlock saw himself) – was this: Sherlock's "deductions". Sherlock had some way of reading people's minds. Somehow, he just knew about things that he shouldn't. Kitty remembered how he had announced that Phillip Anderson had been cheating on his girlfriend with Sally Donovan, even though the two of them were cautious about how they acted at school. She remembered how he had made certain comments about which person Sebastian Wilkes had spent a night with earlier in the year. She remembered once when she had failed a maths test, and Sherlock Holmes had known, even though she had been so careful not to show anyone the grade when her paper was handed to her. She had wanted to keep it a secret. Around Sherlock, that was a waste of time.
Needless to say, being the subject of one of Sherlock Holmes' "deductions" was not a pleasant experience. Sherlock could bring up any deep, dark secret that you wanted to keep hidden, and he either did not realise, or did not care, that people's secrets were usually secret for a reason. Kitty hoped to herself that this new boy in class did not have any secrets that he wanted to keep hidden, because having those secrets brought up on the very first day would hardly be a good start. First days at new schools were hard enough without someone like Sherlock Holmes in the picture.
Behind her, John said, "How did you know that?"
Sherlock replied, "Even an idiot could tell that you have a certain degree of familiarity when it comes to moving schools. It's certainly not a leap to assume that this is due to at least one of the members of your immediate family serving in the military." A pause, and then he continued, "That family member is an army doctor, I'd assume, given your plans for the future. Makes sense that you have a role model of sorts that has inspired you to become a doctor. It's certainly a good thing that your lifestyle and your exposure to the military has inspired you and motivated you, instead of causing you an inordinate amount of stress and leading you to find unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drinking. Pity, really. You said she was your twin sister, yes? That's quite young for someone to develop an alcohol addiction. I take it that came from someone else in your family, too."
Kitty stared down at the notebook on her desk. Even hearing Sherlock make these deductions about someone else – a perfect stranger, no less – made her feel tense. She could not imagine how painful it was to listen to these deductions as the subject of them. Sherlock Holmes had just ruined whatever chances John had had of having a fresh start and settling in easily to his new school. Things about his personal life, such as his sister's alcohol dependency, undoubtedly would have been the kinds of things that John would have wanted to keep to himself, and now Sherlock had gone and –
Behind her, John said, "Christ. That's... How on earth did you know all that? That's amazing."
Kitty frowned.
Had she heard that correctly? Had the new boy really just called Sherlock's deductions "amazing"? That was certainly not the reaction that she expected. It wasn't the reaction that Sherlock's deductions usually got, either. Kitty had heard the way people responded to Sherlock's deductions on multiple occasions. They called him "creepy" or "weird". They usually told him to "piss off". They most certainly did not call him "amazing". That was notwhat people usually said.
Judging by the silence behind her, Sherlock might have been thinking the exact same thing.
OoO
The only thing stranger than John's unexpectedly positive reaction to Sherlock's deductions on their first meeting was when John came into class the next day and sat down next to Sherlock without hesitation. One of the girls in the middle row was sick on that day, so there was another spare seat that John could have easily taken, but even given the choice, he sat next to Sherlock.
Clearly, this new boy was weird.
OoO
After the first week, Sherlock and John dropped off Kitty's radar for a little while. She still shared that maths class with them, of course, and she also shared the same English class with John. However, for a while, she paid no attention to them. She had no reason to take note of anything that the two of them were doing. She had more important things on her mind. She needed to look for topics of interest of her blog, and the new boy at her school being strange enough to spend time with Sherlock Holmes voluntarily, while weird, was not something that would interest her audience.
The next time Kitty really, really paid attention to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson was during a lunch hour over six months later.
It was one of the rare, sunny days in London, and the majority of the student body was taking advantage of the pleasant weather. The courtyard was bustling with students, far more so than it usually was during lunch. Some people were sitting on benches and reading or writing or studying. Some were sitting with circles and playing with their hair and gossiping with their friends. Others were just wandering through the courtyard and getting some sun before they had to go back inside for the afternoon.
Kitty liked it when the courtyard was like this, because it was the ideal place for people-watching. People-watching was Kitty's favourite pastime, because it was one of the best ways for Kitty to find inspiration for blog posts. Everyone in the courtyard had a story; everyone was living their own lives as the protagonists of their own little worlds. Kitty's job as a budding journalist was to be the one to bring each of those stories into the light, to sit there in the courtyard and watch and listen and work out which of those stories deserved to be brought to a wider audience.
Her eyes drifted over the crowd, searching for stories among each of the students there. Most of the students in the courtyard were too caught up in their own heads to notice her staring – and she wasn't staring, not really, because her eyes did not linger on a single person or group of people for too long. She watched each person, or group, only for a matter of seconds, long enough to work out what they were doing and make a judgement as to how interesting their story was, and if the story wasn't interesting, she would dismiss them and move on. The unfortunate truth of life was that, although everyone had their own story, most of those stories were not actually that interesting.
One person did catch her staring, however. As Kitty's eyes drifted over the crowd, they locked, for a split second, with those of Sherlock Holmes. He was sitting on a bench on the other side of the courtyard, watching the crowd just like Kitty was. Kitty looked away quickly; she did not want to give Sherlock any reason to think that she had been staring – which she had not been, especially not at him. She didn't want Sherlock thinking something crazy, like that Kitty liked him. That was the problem with boys, Kitty thought. The slightest bit of attention was indicative of your attraction, as far as they were concerned. Catching their eye briefly meant you must have been staring. A well-mannered greeting might as well have been a confession of love. Treating a boy in any way that wasn't overtly rude meant liked him (and sometimes, even treating him in a way that was overtly rude meant you liked him, too).
Granted, this was only based on Kitty's experience with most of the boys at their high school. As she thought about it, however, she realised that she did not think Sherlock would be quite the same. Sherlock was clever, without a doubt, but if there was one place where his genius was lacking, it was in the realm of feelings. One of the other girls at their school, Molly Hooper, was rather infatuated with Sherlock (for God knows what reason), and Kitty often thought that everyone at the school knew this except for Sherlock himself. Molly's interest had always seemed to go right over Sherlock's head. Perhaps it was because he believed himself to be too good for anyone at the school. He would never stoop so low as to date one of the girls in his class.
She glanced back at Sherlock Holmes to make sure that he did not think she had been staring, and she found that his own gaze had moved on from her as well. His eyes drifted over the crowd just as Kitty's had been doing moments ago, and she wondered for a moment if maybe he was like her – if he was also looking for the stories of each of the other people in the courtyard. He would not be searching for stories to write them down in blog posts, like Kitty did, but perhaps he was sitting in the courtyard and trying to make deductions, like he did from those nearly-unnoticeable details that he could somehow see when everyone else couldn't. Perhaps that skill was one that he practiced over time.
She watched as his eyes moved from person to person, and she couldn't help but wonder what he saw. Kitty was clever too – she had to be, because she needed to be able to find stories that weren't obvious to other people – but that did not mean she could do what Sherlock Holmes did. He could see so much more than she could, see things that she did not even know were there. She wondered how he had learnt to do that. Had he always been able to make deductions? Had he always noticed things, even as a child? Or had he grown up practicing it for years and years, playing games of make believe and pretending to be a detective or a spy?
It would be nice to be able to do what Sherlock Holmes did. It would definitely add another element to her blog.
Now, Kitty was actually staring – not because she was interested, absolutely not, but because she had found herself caught up in Sherlock's story. She hadn't even realised she was staring, for a moment. She shook her head, and went to turn away, to look for another story in one of the other people there, but something made her stop.
The thing with Sherlock was that he rarely showed emotion. His expression was cold and calculating by default. Kitty couldn't think of a time when she had actually seen him smile, and when he spoke his voice was almost monotonous. Sometimes, Kitty thought he might be a robot. It would certainly explain a thing or two. What this meant, of course, was that whenever Sherlock did show emotion, it was obvious, because it was so different to his usual, blank expression. This was why, for a moment, Kitty could not tear her eyes away.
It wasn't quite a smile, or anything that simple. It was subtle, obvious to Kitty only because she had just so happened to have been watching him moments earlier, so she could see the contrast with the sterner expression that had been on his face mere seconds ago. The lines on Sherlock's face seemed to smooth out, and his eyes seemed to soften. It was hard to put a name on the expression, but it was definitely something positive. There was something calm and content about the look – happy, but not the kind of happiness that was associated with bright smiles and loud laughter. The expression almost looked warm – and to use that word was bizarre, because Kitty had never known Sherlock to be anything but cold.
She followed Sherlock's gaze, and it only took her a second to realise why such a warm expression had come over Sherlock's face. John Watson was heading towards him. John Watson did have a bright smile on his face, but that was hardly strange. John was much more human than Sherlock was. He often smiled like that.
But Sherlock – Sherlock did not show emotions. He didn't show happiness, or sadness, or anything except for the occasional smugness. Yet, here Kitty was, sitting in a courtyard, watching the way that John Watson was able to make Sherlock Holmes – machine-like Sherlock Holmes – feel something so strongly that it brought an emotional expression to his otherwise blank face.
That was interesting.
OoO
Kitty wrote about the encounter between John and Sherlock when she got home that afternoon.
At a glance, it certainly wasn't the most interesting of stories. It was little more than a simple emotional expression. However, Kitty had been writing blog posts for a while, and she knew what kinds of blog posts tended to do better than others. Her hit counter had gradually increased since she had started writing – she easily got more hits on any post she posted nowadays than when she had first started out – but some posts were just that little bit more interesting to her readers, and one such type of post was of the romantic sort.
Kitty knew that the majority of her readership was made up of teenagers, based on the statistics trackers on her blog. This was hardly surprising, given she wrote about high school-based gossip. Teenagers were always falling in love, falling in and out of relationships. Perhaps it was a hormonal thing, or perhaps it was just the unavoidable result of spending thirty or so hours with one another a week. It was only natural that being around their classmates for so long would lead to feelings.
Kitty liked writing about relationships, because she could live vicariously through the posts. She did not have time for boys in her life. She was too busy preparing for her future career – and besides, why on earth would she want to date any of the morons she went to school with? However, Kitty could enjoy writing about the people she'd catch watching each other in class, and there was always a little bit thrilling when she saw two people who she knew would be perfect for each other start holding hands. Kitty was no matchmaker, but with the sheer amount of time she spent people-watching at school, of course she would start picking up on the hints that said that they liked each other a little bit more than friends.
Kitty wouldn't have thought, in the past, that anyone would be a good match for Sherlock Holmes, but the way he looked at John that day made her question that.
She may have tweaked the post a little bit as she wrote it, exaggerating the truth just a little bit. The expression on Sherlock's face had been soft, but it might not have necessarily been the expression of longing that Kitty claimed it was in her blog. It was hardly a big deal, though. It wasn't an outright lie; it was just a little bit of a stretch. Journalists did have to put their own spin on things from time to time, after all.
Kitty didn't just write about the look, as well. That wasn't long enough. Instead, she went back to the start, and wrote about that first maths class, when she had heard John sit behind her and call Sherlock amazing. At the time, Kitty had thought this was weird. She had not thought at the time that this was the start of something, anything more than a friendship, but she stretched the truth on that a bit as well.
Kitty knew the post would be popular, because posts about love and relationships and romance generally were. She did not realise, however, precisely how successful the post would be.
There was something particularly exciting about the concept of a love story between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Perhaps it was the fact that they were both boys, so there was an element of 'forbidden love' to it. On top of that, some of Kitty's readers went to Kitty's school, so they knew the kind of person that Sherlock was and they knew, just as Kitty did, how strange it was for Sherlock to express anything that could even be considered romantic. Whatever the reason, the hit counter on this particular post shot up, and suddenly, Kitty was getting comments from people who desperately wanted more. After all, Kitty had given them no more than a taste – a mention of a boy who never smiled letting a fond expression cross his face, just for a moment. People wanted more than that. People wanted to know if there really was something there, if something could really come of this.
Maybe, Kitty thought to herself, a post like this deserved a sequel.
OoO
Once Kitty started looking, it was everywhere.
Kitty would have thought that writing posts that even so much as alluded to a love story between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes would be next to impossible. "Sherlock Holmes" and "love story" were not words that belonged in the same sentence. And yet, as soon as Kitty started looking for evidence that she could write about to prove to her readers that a love story was exactly what was blossoming between the two boys, it was everywhere.
The thing was, Sherlock Holmes wasn't nice to anyone except John. Most of the time, Sherlock behaved in a way that was outright rude. Anything that was not outright rude, therefore, would seem kind in contrast. And Sherlock was more than just kind to John – more than just the kind of meaningless politeness that, for most people, would be a baseline for treating strangers and acquaintances-who-were-not-quite-friends. Sherlock would say things that were not quite compliments, but coming from him, they might as well have been declarations of love. Sherlock would tell John his ideas were decent, or that he had a marvellous ability to stimulate genius in others. Sure, they were hardly compliments, but they were definitely something different to Sherlock's usual treatment, and his tendency to tell everyone that they were idiots.
Of course, Kitty did sometimes hear him call John an idiot too – followed by "Everyone is, don't make that face" – but the fact still remained that sometimes, he would say something that, when you picked apart the insult and the high-and-mighty tone, was actually a compliment.
Kitty was fairly sure that John knew that these comments were Sherlock's versions of compliments, too, because she had caught him hiding a smile when Sherlock said them from time to time.
It was something else to go in her blog.
OoO
They weren't the only thing that Kitty wrote about, of course. Kitty did not want her blog to have such a narrow focus. She wanted to have a wide range of posts; she didn't want to be like a Sherlock+John fan blog. After all, eventually Kitty would graduate and she would likely never see Sherlock or John again, and the last thing she needed was to have locked herself so tightly into such a narrow focus for her blog that she suddenly had nothing to write about. However, Kitty made sure to at least mention a thing or two about Sherlock and John every few weeks, because it was what the people wanted. The comments proved how hooked people were on this particular story. She would be a bad writer if she completely ignored her readers' desires.
She tried to stay as close to the truth as she could manage. She could not go ahead and write about Sherlock and John getting together (even though she was sure that that was what peopled wanted), because anyone who went to her school would see John and Sherlock and know that this was a lie, and then Kitty would lose all of her credibility. However, she had no problems with tweaking the truth a little bit. It wasn't hard to just exaggerate what she saw when Sherlock looked at John, or when John looked at Sherlock. She caught them stealing glances at each other so often, it wasn't hard to push that just that little bit further.
They were almost always together, which meant it was always very easy for Kitty to find something to write about. The only times they were ever apart were during the classes that they did not share. If they were in the same class, they were always sitting side-by-side. Kitty was fairly certain she had seen them passing notes from time to time. Outside of class hours, too, they were together – they joined one another for lunch, and waited outside classrooms at the end of the day so that they could walk home together.
The more Kitty watched them, the more convinced she became that there really was something there. Maybe there was more truth in her blog posts than she would have originally believed.
Sometimes, Kitty would go a little bit further than just writing about them, too. Her audience wanted more, more, more, and Kitty was willing to do whatever it took to keep them coming back. Sometimes, she would manage to catch pictures of them on her phone that she could add to her posts. They were never the clearest pictures, because she could only take the photos on her camera phone, usually when hidden behind walls, but it was something. It made her feel a little bit like a spy, peering around corners with her phone raised.
Kitty wasn't stalking them, of course – she wasn't that weird – but the school was only so big, and it was just so easy for her to happen to run into them while they were together, for her to pull out her phone and snap a quick photo that could go on her blog post that weekend. It was surprisingly easy, too, to get photos that supported her theory that Sherlock and John were a couple. For example, whenever Sherlock looked at people, his gaze was intense, like he was looking into them. It might have been no more than his attempts to make a deduction, but when caught on camera, it was too easy to interpret the intense stare when Sherlock looked at John as something of longing. The right words in the text could all but force the readers of Kitty's blog to interpret the picture in that way. So, whenever Kitty had the opportunity, she snapped a picture for her blog, and those pictures almost always seemed to say exactly what Kitty wanted them to.
OoO
This went on for months.
OoO
When the school year came to an end, and everyone left for the summer, Kitty's Sherlock-and-John themed blog posts went on hold temporarily. As much as Kitty wanted to maintain the large fanbase that had grown over the past several months, Kitty was not going to stalk Sherlock and John outside of school. That would be weird. Instead, Kitty wrote about other things over the holidays, and she ignored the one or two comments that she got from anonymous users who made it clear to her that they were only there for her Sherlock-and-John posts and didn't care about anything else Kitty had to say. All the same, Kitty couldn't deny that she was glad when school finally did go back, because she could go back to writing the posts that had played such a substantial role in developing her blog and increasing her readership.
For the first time since Kitty had started school, she found herself hoping, as she got her class timetable for the year, that she would share a class with Sherlock Holmes. She was in luck, too, because she was sharing English with both John and Sherlock. She would have preferred it to be maths, really, because she liked English as a subject and didn't want too much of her attention taken away by the two boys, but with their vastly different interests, it was really only the compulsory classes that Kitty had any hope of sharing with Sherlock Holmes. She would take what she could.
She overheard the boys talking in the first week back at school, and they made reference to something that had happened over the break, making it clear that they had spent some of their school holidays together. That got mentioned on the blog, too.
OoO
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
The thing with social media was that word spread fast. The rumour mill was powerful enough at school even without social media involved; with social media, rumours could spread in what felt like a heartbeat. It was only natural that Kitty's growing online popularity would mean that more and more people were familiar with John and Sherlock and the relationship between them (regardless of whether that was real, or whether it was just a figment of Kitty's imagination, turned into a series of blog posts). It was only to be expected that eventually, word would spread to John and Sherlock, too.
Sherlock and John were not the only people at Kitty's school who had at least featured in her blog, but to her knowledge, they were the first to discover it. Maybe Kitty would have gotten away with it if it was just one blog post, but a series was not quite so easy to hide.
She was there the day it came out into the open – and that wasn't because she had been stalking them, of course. Admittedly, yes, she had chosen a locker in the hallway where Sherlock Holmes had his locker because it gave her a better chance of catching a good story, but that wasn't stalking. It would only be stalking if Kitty made an effort to go to her locker at the same time as Sherlock Holmes, and Kitty didn't do that. The fact that she happened to be at her locker at the same time as Sherlock Holmes on the very day when John approached him was pure chance.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw John go up to Sherlock and grab his arm with one hand. "Have you seen this?" John asked, showing Sherlock something on his phone. From where she was standing, Kitty could not see John's phone screen, but a few possibilities immediately sprang to mind.
Sherlock proved her assumption to be correct when he said, "Looks like a picture of us."
"It's not just a picture of us," said John. "Look at this. There are pages and pages of them. Not just pictures, too. There are stories. It's like we're being stalked!"
"We're not being stalked," Sherlock said, closing his locker door. Kitty found herself hoping that they would not walk away. She hoped they would stay by the lockers so she could hear them talk. Sherlock continued, "The photos, and the stories, only centre around times when we are at school. It's obvious the writer is just one of our classmates, and she has certainly not made the effort to stalk us beyond school grounds."
"She?" repeated John.
"Female writing is very distinctive," Sherlock said, and he turned to walk away, but John caught his arm to stop him.
"Wait, wait, wait," John said. "You knew about this?"
"My name is not a common one," Sherlock said. "It would hardly escape my notice – or my brother's notice – if it was repeatedly appearing on a website. I like to be aware of my digital footprint."
"Why haven't you mentioned it, then?"
Sherlock shrugged his shoulders dismissively. "It hardly seemed relevant."
"Not relevant?" John repeated incredulously. "Sherlock, someone is taking photos of us and writing stories about us. Stories about how we're secretly dating, of all things. How is that not relevant?"
Kitty could have sworn Sherlock tensed at the statement – but after spending so long looking for evidence that proved that John and Sherlock were dating, maybe she had lost her grip on objectivity.
Sherlock's voice when he spoke next was terser. "The stories are harmless. Written by a teenager for teenagers. It's hardly as though their opinions on their details of our relationship have any bearing on us. The writer will lose interest eventually and will move onto another story."
"Sherlock, they think we're dating," John said. "Anyone at the school who has ever read that blog thinks we're dating."
"And?"
John made a gesture with both hands, as if the "and" was obvious. Maybe it was, to him. Maybe Sherlock didn't care what people thought, but John did.
When John did not reply verbally, Sherlock once again turned to walk away. "As I said, the posts are harmless," Sherlock said. "The writer will eventually lose interest, and until she does, it hardly affects our day-to-day lives."
"The posts are not harmless," John said, once again grabbing Sherlock's arm and forcing him to turn back. "Sherlock, for God's sake. They think we're gay."
"And what does that matter?" Sherlock replied, and this time just for a second, he wasn't as calm and collected as he always was. His voice sounded harsher, tenser. If Kitty didn't know any better, she might have thought that he was upset.
John didn't reply. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him hold Sherlock's gaze for a moment, and she thought something in his expression changed, but it was hard to tell from where she was standing. She did see him open his mouth, probably to say something, but before he had the chance, Sherlock shook his hand off, turned, and walked away. This time, John did not try to stop him.
OoO
The words "And what does that matter?" echoed in Kitty's head for the rest of the day. Each iteration was laden with just a little bit more emotion, a little bit more hurt. Kitty wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much she was just making up in her head.
OoO
When they got into class the next morning, John arrived after Kitty, but before Sherlock. He took his usual seat at the back of the room.
When Sherlock got in, instead of sitting next to John like he normally would, he sat at the vacant desk at the front of the class.
Kitty swore she saw John's shoulders fall when Sherlock took a seat, and she didn't see either of them make eye contact with one another for the duration of class.
OoO
That afternoon, Kitty deleted every post about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson from her blog.
People complained, of course. A portion of her readership was there purely for the posts that centred on the two boys, and the moment all of those posts vanished, people started asking questions. She ignored all of these comments, and she stopped checking her hit counter on her blog. She didn't want to see how drastically it had decreased now that the Sherlock-and-John posts were gone, and frankly, she didn't care. It wasn't that important anymore.
John and Sherlock weren't talking now, and it was her fault. It wasn't the first time that Kitty had spread gossip through her blog, but it was the most drastic consequences that had ever followed, and Kitty wasn't heartless. For her to not care whatsoever that her blog posts had caused Sherlock and John to stop talking to each other – well, she would have to be just as bad as Sherlock Holmes himself.
It was made even worse by the fact that, over the next few weeks, Sherlock seemed more human than she had ever given him credit for before. It wasn't as though he was roaming the halls weeping or anything quite so dramatic, but it felt as though his expression looked a little bit softer than it usually did. Sadder, even.
She didn't see him and John together during their lunch times anymore, and they stopped sitting with each other during class. Kitty saw both of them seek each other out with their eyes, whether they were consciously aware of it or not, but their eyes never met. They never saw the other looking back at them in the same way that they had been looking moments ago. They had no way of knowing that both of them were really doing the exact same thing.
It didn't make sense, Kitty thought. Clearly they both hated the silence between them, and yet neither were actually willing to approach the other and attempt to repair the damage and move past it. They were both sitting there suffering, without making any effort to make things better.
Boys were idiots, Kitty thought, but maybe thinking that was just her way of making herself feel better, blaming them for their inability to get past it rather than blaming herself for starting it in the first place.
OoO
Two and a half weeks after The Incident (as Kitty kept referring to it in her head, which she couldn't help but think sounded an awful lot like the title of a blog post), Kitty found Sherlock sitting by himself at lunch time. Once, this would hardly be an unusual sight, because Sherlock used to always sit by himself at lunch. Now, however, it was like something was missing. John had become like Sherlock's better half, and seeing them apart seemed wrong.
Sherlock's head was in a book, and there was a sandwich beside him that he had clearly not made any effort to eat. He seemed too caught up, for the moment, to notice that Kitty was staring.
She wasn't sure what compelled her to do it. Perhaps it was the fact that guilt had been eating at her mind for almost three weeks now. Perhaps, instead, it was just because she was a good person – empathetic, compassionate, and unable to walk past someone who was so clearly not-okay. Whatever the reason, Kitty knew that she had to go over there and say something. It was the right thing to do.
She took a deep breath, feeling her heart start to race with an illogical sort of anxiety, and once she felt she was ready, she walked over to where he was sitting and stopped before him.
Sherlock raised his head the moment Kitty's form cast a shadow over the pages of his book. He looked her up and down in the way that he did before he made deductions. It was funny, really. If it were anyone else, Kitty might have thought that they were checking her out. With Sherlock, the thought in no way crossed her mind.
She opened her mouth to speak, but she barely managed to take a breath before Sherlock cut her off.
"If you're here to apologise for your blog, don't bother. It's a waste of both of our time."
Kitty blinked, gaping for a moment like a fish. "How did you—"
"The posts about John and me most frequently centred around occurrences during either last year's maths class and this year's English class, and they stopped suddenly within a couple of days after John found them and approached me. You're the common denominator – you were present in all of those situations. Hardly a leap."
Kitty hesitated, and then, unable to hide her curiosity, she asked, "Did you know it was me before John approached you?"
"I had my suspicions," Sherlock replied.
Kitty nodded in understanding, and then she hesitated again, shifting her weight between her feet. Already, this was the longest conversation she had ever had with Sherlock Holmes – and far longer than any conversation she previously would have wanted to have with him, if she had any choice in the matter. After a moment, she turned and took a seat on the bench beside Sherlock. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sherlock stiffen, pursing his lips into a line.
"Why are you sitting with me?" he said.
Kitty did not answer that specific question (perhaps in part because she wasn't sure what answer she should give). "I won't apologise, because you told me not to," she said. "But... you and John were close. Really close. Surely a few blog posts isn't enough to get between you, right?"
Sherlock did not reply. His gaze remained fixed somewhere on the other side of the courtyard. Kitty thought that was probably better than him going ahead and dismissing her words outright.
She continued, "I know I have no right to give you any advice—"
"No, you don't," Sherlock interrupted.
Ignoring him, Kitty continued, "—but the thing is, you're both avoiding one another. You're cutting him out, you're not sitting with him in class anymore, and that's as much your doing as it is his. And maybe you're both just making matters worse, when you could solve all of this by just talking to each other."
"You have no idea what you're talking about," Sherlock said tightly.
"Maybe," Kitty said. "I know you think you're so much smarter than everyone else. Especially me. But I'm not actually stupid, you know. And no offence, but I don't think you actually understand friendships as well as you understand most things. So, I might actually understand this kind of thing better than you do."
"I understand perfectly well in theory."
"Theory isn't practice. I understand maths in theory, but that doesn't mean I can solve any of the equations our teacher keeps setting us."
"That's a very different example."
"Maybe so." Kitty paused, and then continued, "Look. I just really think you should talk to him. The things I wrote on my blog weren't entirely lies. I might have exaggerated a little bit, but you two were really close. There's a reason why people believed me so easily when I claimed there really was something there."
"You don't know what you're talking about," said Sherlock, and it certainly did not escape Kitty's notice how tight his voice had become.
"I am smart, Sherlock," she said. "Not like you, I know, but I am. I understand people, maybe even better than you do. Thing is, you're sitting here all mopey—"
"I'm not mopey."
"—like you've lost a friend, but you were the one who pushed him away first. You were the one who chose to sit by yourself in English that day."
"This conversation is over," Sherlock said, abruptly getting to his feet. Kitty had half a mind to reach out and grab his arm to stop him, but she didn't think it would end well. Instead, she just spoke up before he was out of ear shot.
"Talk to him, Sherlock," she said. "Just trust me."
Sherlock walked away without another word.
OoO
Sherlock clearly did not take Kitty's advice straight away. For the next few days, she still saw him and John sitting at separate desks in class, both constantly glancing at each other out of the corner of their eyes without ever noticing that the other was doing the exact same thing. It was frustrating, even though whether or not they were ever friends again did not affect Kitty at all.
(Well, maybe it affected her a little bit, because if they were friends again, she didn't have to feel guilty anymore, but that was beside the point.)
After class one day, however, when John got up first to leave, Sherlock scampered to his feet before he was out of sight and rushed after him. When Kitty herself made it out into the hall, she saw the two of them were standing beside the lockers, talking in low tones to one another. She couldn't make out what they were saying in the busy hallway, and this time, she knew better than to hang around.
In class the next day, they were back to their normal seat, sitting side by side once more.
Perhaps, Kitty thought to herself, if her current plans for journalism did not pan out, she could start an advice column instead.
OoO
A few weeks later, when they were leaving the school grounds one afternoon, Kitty could have sworn that, for a moment, she saw John and Sherlock's hands brush together by their sides.
But maybe she was just making up stories.