A Lesson in Trust – Part 3

It had been eight days since Sherlock had manipulated Joan into her peony blossom tattoo—eight days since they had blurred the lines between professional and romantic associates.

Joan sat at the table sipping on her morning smoothie perusing a book about symbolism. She was determined to uncover the meanings of all of Sherlock's tattoos even if it meant reading every book and article in the brownstone for inspiration. After that first day he had been quite careful about giving away any details that might aid her in her research of him, and although she really was enjoying the game, the investigation of Sherlock Holmes, she was also very annoyed at how well he was able to conceal himself.

She tried all manner of ways to distract him, to make him let his guard down even just a tiny bit, but it appeared that unlike most people, even sex was not able to jumble Sherlock's mind enough into giving away his secrets.

Joan reached over her shoulder to scratch but stopped herself just in time. Her tattoo had been peeling for days. It was one of the most annoying and unyielding sensations she had experienced in a long while. More than once she had seen Captain Gregson give her a questioning look as she fidgeted trying to ignore the itchy sensations. She offered no excuse and Gregson never formally asked for one.

In a strange way, Joan found great pleasure in her acquaintances' ignorance of her new body art. It was like having a secret: one that made her think of strength, of discovery, and of Sherlock.

Things had been quite comfortable between Sherlock and Joan, and in many aspects it was as if nothing had changed. They still worked as consulting detectives together, Joan still went for daily runs, and Sherlock still did things that infuriated Joan (like surprise self-defense training sessions), but the main difference seemed to be that when things got particularly tense between them they both woke up in Sherlock's bed or on the couch or on the rug in the study...

"Ah, I see you've turned to J.C. Cooper now." Sherlock said moving past the table to the kettle to pour himself a cup of tea.

Joan attempted to stay focused on her research.

"Well, very little is accomplished without constant vigilance." She muttered remembering when he told her that very same thing just after throwing a pillow at her head—another of his self-defense training exercises.

He smirked at her response and ran his fingers across her shoulder blade taking a moment to admire the blossom.

"It's very nearly finished peeling." Her skin shivered at his light touch. "And what have you learned from Mrs. Cooper?" He asked joining her at the table.

"I'm working on it." She replied closing the book when he tried to see what page she was reading. They had recently solved a kidnapping case and Joan was enjoying the lull in their schedule. She spent her extra time pondering over Sherlock's unsolved tattoos. She was going to take her time in piecing together the information now. She had already twice more attempted (and failed) to deduce the meaning of the banner on his right shoulder that read: "sister mother father brother" so she wanted to be fairly certain before telling him her ideas again. This, naturally, frustrated Sherlock; he wanted to know the sequence of her thoughts and track her progress in breaking down the clues from the information she had. Instead he was left to study her—as she was studying him—to try and deduce her progress. It was a bit of a process and Sherlock didn't like having to take the extra steps.

"What do you have planned for today?" She asked Sherlock letting her eyes slowly look him over. Apart from when it was a bit drafty, he had now found little reason to wear a shirt around the brownstone. Joan could see his toned chest and the top of his boxers peeking out over the edge of his wrinkled trousers.

"I prefer to see where the day takes me rather than planning it out, although I am going out to the apiary presently. Would you like to join me?"

. . .

It was pleasantly warm on the rooftop as Joan and Sherlock sat on the bench directly in front of the apiary. Usually when Sherlock went up there he spent an inordinate amount of time silently staring at the bees while they worked. Joan wondered what was going on in his mind as he stared at them captivated by their movements.

When they first sat down Joan was watching Sherlock while he watched the bees, but after a short while Sherlock began rattling off some of the facts he stored in his brain about bees and she couldn't help but turn her attention to the buzzing apiary.

"Out of the 20,000 plus species of bees, there are only seven species of honeybees. That of course then breaks down into the forty-four subspecies of the Apis genus to categorize the pollination variances and different geographic locations of each species."

He was watching the apiary as he spoke, occasionally glancing at Joan to see her reaction, and perhaps to make sure that she was still listening. Joan had always been mesmerized by Sherlock's extensive knowledge base. She knew that he was particularly fond of bees and assumed that he knew a great deal about them, but she felt herself awestruck by his words all the same. She watched the bees trying to see which ones were different from each other.

"The honey that is gathered for human consumption is typically taken from the nectar produced by Apis mellifera or Apis cerana. They are common in Europe and Asia respectively." He pointed out the two types of bees to Joan before pointing to another. "And this one is native to Turkey and Iran; you remember Gerald Lydon's gift: it is an Osmia avosetta." Joan nodded and said, "Yes, the bee in the box." Sherlock gave a nod of affirmation and looked back to the bees. "It is part of the family Megachilidae, not Apidae which is the honeybee family. This is a solitary bee. That added with it's variation in genus and family should have, by all accounts, made it unable to reproduce with the other bees here. And yet, nature is infinitely wily." Sherlock said giving Joan a small smile.

"So box bee got another bee pregnant?" Joan asked looking at Sherlock.

"Quite so, which means the offspring should be classified as an entirely new species. The first newborn of which, is about to crawl its way into the sunlight." Sherlock gestured to the magnifying glass strategically positioned in front of a part of the apiary and Joan smiled leaning forward to take a closer look.

"As the discoverer of the species, the task of naming the new creatures falls upon me. Allow me to introduce you to Euglassia Watsonia." Joan was staring intently at the bees since she had never seen a bee hatch and didn't see Sherlock move, but she could feel the sudden warmth of his hand as it held hers. She turned to face him with a slightly shocked smile, "you named a bee after me?"

He was still looking at the bees, but gave her hand a slight squeeze. Joan grinned remembering that it was his sign of affirmation. "You named a bee after me." She repeated proudly before she turned her attention back to the bees, back to her bee.

The rooftop was like a different world. There were ambient city noises mixed with the buzzing of the bees but there were no other distractions. Sherlock and Joan sat up there for what felt like hours to Joan, but she was content to watch the bees and to watch Sherlock while he held her hand. She like him best when he was like this: pensive and calm. She could still feel a slight hum of energy exuding from him—especially where their hands connected—but he wasn't fidgeting like he usually did when he was searching for something in his mind, going through his knowledge to find an answer. Instead it was as if he had found a brief moment of peace.

. . .

Joan steadied the pizza box on the palm of her left hand while she unlocked the front door. She had managed to pull herself away from the apiary and from Sherlock in order to get them lunch from a pizza place a few blocks away.

"Sherlock?" She called, unsure if he was still sitting on the rooftop blissfully watching the bees at work.

"Living room."

She followed his voice and directions and found him perched on the couch intently reading something. She set the pizza box on the coffee table and caught the title of the book as Sherlock shifted to get a slice from the box. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper, the book that Joan had at breakfast.

Joan shrugged out of her cardigan and joined Sherlock on the couch, grabbing a slice of her own.

He was still perusing the book after Joan finished her second slice so she decided to entertain herself by revisiting the sleeve of tattoos on Sherlock's left shoulder. She turned to face him completely, resting her back against the arm of the couch and crossing her legs on the cushion between herself and Sherlock. She reached out tentatively at first not wanting to startle Sherlock if he had been too engrossed in his reading to realize her intentions. His body instinctively tensed at her touch and then relaxed.

She lazily let her fingers trace over the images she had already deciphered: the large sand hourglass symbolizing the finite amount of time one is given while providing the reminder that once time has passed it cannot be retrieved again.

Next Joan's fingers swirled around as they followed the design of a Chinese dragon. She felt that, much like a dragon, Sherlock was bold, strong, valiant, had thick skin, and was sometimes quite bothersome—although Sherlock never actually confirmed that Joan was correct in her deductions he did nod his head as she explained that particular image, appreciative of her insights.

She ran her fingers over the rose that took up the bottom corner of the woven images. She still wasn't sure about this one. The other images were strong, masculine, and in way harsh when compared to the rose. In fact, when she was perusing through J.C. Cooper's book she had been hoping for some inspiration for this image as well as for the banner of familial names that decorated Sherlock's right shoulder blade.

Joan had all kinds of information about roses in her head, but most of it dealt with poetry and romance. Neither of those aspects seemed to fit in with the combination of images that covered Sherlock's left shoulder and bicep.

"Although the insights into historical and religious symbolism are remarkable, I'm not sure how you expect this book to help you deduce the meanings of my tattoos, Watson." Sherlock said shutting the book and tossing it on top of the pizza box.

"Reading a book on symbols isn't meant to tell me what your tattoos mean so much as to help trigger something in my mind so that I can decipher its meaning using what I know of you."

"For example…" He prodded; his intention in asking was to get information on Joan's newest interpretations.

"Well… like banners. Cooper says that banners often relate to conquest or the act of conquering something—typically land, which is then marked with a banner or flag. So I use that information to help work through possibilities for the banner on your right shoulder blade."

"So you think I have made a conquest of a sister, mother, father, and brother?" Sherlock asked skeptically.

"No. I use the information to give me ideas. One possibility is that you may have conquered the necessity of family or familial bonds and keep them behind you. However, since I don't think that is even remotely close to the reason why you have that tattoo, I can at least cross it off of the list of possibilities."

"That's a thorough process. Although it will probably take you near six months to come to a reasonable deduction for the tattoo if you are going to go through every possibility however slim the connection to me and my life may be."

She frowned at him hoping that it wouldn't take her that long. "You could speed things up if you told me what it meant—or gave me some kind of hint…" She said playfully.

"I much prefer to hear what you think from an unbiased perspective."

She pushed the banner from her mind and returned back to the tattoo that was directly in front of her: the shoulder sleeve with the rose. She knew that several states held the rose as the state flower, including New York. But aside from his living in New York, Sherlock had shown no real affinity for the state. "No," Joan reasoned with herself. "Being the state flower for any state would be irrelevant in this case."

Joan pinched the bridge of her nose as her mind flooded with all of the knowledge, images, and references it had to roses. She flicked through Shakespearean quotes, florist color meanings, which of her former lovers had given her roses, the different smells roses had, the thorns, the leaves, the pollen, the bees… She wondered how Sherlock was able to filter through his brain when he was working a case, because she was getting frustrated just trying to assign meaning to a tattoo.

"Are you alright?" Sherlock asked watching her regress into her mind while staring at his arm.

"Just … thinking." She said giving her head a slight shake.

"About?"

"How are you able to file away so much information in your head?"

"Ah, that is easy enough to explain. Memory works in a fairly predictable pattern: things move from short-term to long-term memory based on the associations we assign these new things. For example, if you happen to read about something that you find dull you will make very few connections to the new material because you are disinterested or perhaps because you know very little about it. However, if you read about something you find interesting you make more connections from the new material to your existing knowledge and move that material to long-term memory more quickly. So it isn't really a matter of being able to arbitrarily memorize facts or scenarios, but rather it is a matter of being interested in the fact and assigning it to other memories or links already established in your mind."

Joan blinked at him nearly overwhelmed by his explanation.

"So, you just find everything interesting."

"I'm not necessarily interested. I'm just able to make a connection between the new information and something I already know."

Joan rolled her eyes and leaned back against the arm of the couch. Sherlock had a way of making things sound so simple and obvious even when they weren't.

"You do it too, Watson. With the Gerald Lydon case you were able to process information into your long-term memory about genetic coding and the CAA disorder because of your previous knowledge as a doctor."

Joan thought over what Sherlock had said and ultimately agreed with him. She hadn't noticed it before, but she followed the exact same process Sherlock did—she just had a much smaller network of existing information.

"What else have you deduced about me that I haven't figured out for myself yet?"

"That's a bit of a jumbled request. Do you want me to tell you something I have deduced about you that you don't know that I have deduced, or something that I have deduced about you that you have not yet deduced about your own character?"

"What?"

"Exactly my point. You have to be precise in your demands."

She groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose again. "Just tell me something about myself that I don't seem to already know."

He studied her face for a while enjoying her expression of anticipation. He could definitely sympathize with her desire—wanting to know what someone you care about thinks of you. Joan had been kind of enough to show Sherlock this through her deductions of his tattoos, and though he wanted to think of something that would be profound his mind kept jumping back to key physical markers he had filed away about her during their first interactions.

"You have been physically attracted to me since our first meeting when you barged into this brownstone as my sober companion."

"How could you possibly know that?" Joan scoffed pushing herself forward off the arm of the couch looking at him disbelievingly.

"It's quite easy to deduce physical attraction. There are clear indicators that are hard to fake—emotional attraction, however, is much more complex involving any variation of mental and physical tells which makes it more difficult to deduce."

"So what were my indicators to make you so sure that I was physically attracted to you?" Joan challenged crossing her arms over her chest.

"There's no need to be defensive about it, Watson. I'm sure a number of people would react similarly when placed into a situation comparable to the one you faced."

She leaned back against the arm of the couch again her arms still crossed over her chest, her eyes slightly narrowed. Sherlock turned toward her on the couch, bending his left leg up on the cushion between them and letting his right leg dangle over the side. Sensing her indignation, he filtered through the details in his mind to get straight to the point.

"When I first spoke to you I asked you if you believed in love at first sight and then continued talking along the same train of thought while I stood mere inches in front of you. By standing so close I was able to observe that your pupils dilated, your nostrils flared, your pulse accelerated, and when we shook hands your palms were sweaty. All of these are key physical indicators of attraction."

Joan opened her mouth but then closed it when she could think of nothing to say. She remembered that incident well. Sherlock was watching several televisions all on different channels. He paused them when she entered, but still hadn't focused on her. She ran through her speech about being his sober companion and then he spoke, slowly moving closer to her talking of love and feeling an instantaneous connection. And then he pressed play and the exact same words were said through the television showing a day-time soap opera.

Sherlock put his hand on Joan's knee and continued with his explanation.

"By watching the signs one can see that this," he gestured between them, "had been building up since the first day of our acquaintance. Then when you add in the close living quarters, our constant proximity to one another, and the stress and tension caused by the work that we do, rational thought leads me to believe that we would have wound up here eventually."

Joan was quiet for a few moments, silently working through all of what Sherlock had just said.

"So when you manipulated the situation for my tattoo and wrote in the book… was that all in anticipation that I would sleep with you?"

"Of course not! Ordinarily I find sex repugnant. It's messy and distracting, and I wouldn't have gone through such circuitous methods if the exercise had just been about having sex. I did, however, anticipate that when you found my note we might share some sort of deeper camaraderie, but I never anticipated that it would lead to us connecting in such a physical way."

"But then why… why all the games and secret notes in books you're giving me to read and—"

"I enjoy your company, your insights, your reactions. And, honestly, I don't know what I would do without you. And I don't mean 'you' my sober companion, or my associate detective, but you—Joan Watson."

Joan's arms loosened and she shifted so that she was leaning against Sherlock.

"So, any more deductions about my remaining tattoos?" Sherlock asked once Joan was comfortable.

"You couldn't let me enjoy that for just a moment, could you?" She asked annoyed.

"You were the one who said you were going to figure them all out. I'm just curious as to your progress."

"I will figure them all out… eventually."

"You can just tell me that you have no new theories, I won't be disappointed." Sherlock stated patting her arm.

"I'd like to—if you approve—take my time. I'm not in any rush here." She replied trying her best to imitate an English accent.

"And what would you like to do in the mean time?" He asked tapping his fingers on the couch cushion.

Joan tugged on his trousers.

"I'm sure we'll think of something." She said with a smirk.

AN: I know I said that this story was finished after the first chapter… and the second chapter… so at the risk of being wrong a third time, it is my intention to leave the story here. I know that the tattoo deductions haven't been completely resolved, but I didn't want to force the story or the interpretations. So until this particular Joanlock muse strikes me again, this is all she wrote!

FYI, Honeybee information was mostly taken from: wiki/Honey_bee and I couldn't really tell what all was in the tattoo sleeve Jonny Lee Miller has, so I took some liberties with what I thought the images were and made some omissions.