Be Good Sherlock

[merryghoul]

Title: Be Good Sherlock | AO3
Rating: G
Word Count: 517
Characters: Sherlock, John, Lestrade
Summary: I wear leotards with sequins and skate on ice. What else is there to say?
A/N: au_bingo : figure skating
sherlockbbc_fic : Ice skating AU (prompt at link above). Inspired by Be Good Johnny Weir.

I’m Sherlock Holmes. I wear leotards with sequins and skate on ice. What else is there to say?
Ever since I was 12, I’ve been skating. Some call me a “natural.” I’m not a natural at all. I know when and where to execute my axels and salchows. It’s not something someone’s born with.

Can you imagine how boring that would be, to wake up out of the womb and skate all over the delivery room? Yawn.

For three consecutive years I’ve won gold the British Skating Championships. That is, until last year. Despite falling while attempting to complete a triple axel, my rival Jim Moriarty won the gold. He’s not a master of skating by any means, but he is a master of threatening to kill the spouses and children of the judges in the competition. He’s trying to end my career because he irrationally hates me. He’s even threatened to turn me into human leather. It could be worse. He hasn’t taken a cue from Tonya Harding’s Destroy Your Rival’s Skating Career yet.

I have time. It’s six months before the next British Skating Championship and I will win the gold, despite whatever ridiculous threats Moriarty makes to the judges. And although I don’t need him, I have a new coach—Gary Lestrade. He wants me to stop practicing until I can hardly move my legs, but I don’t listen.

Gary is one of those coaches that taught at the upper level of British skating back in who knows when. Nevertheless he has enough confidence in me to let me analyze my own mistakes. If I stumble around the exact point where I’m supposed to do a triple lutz—for this routine, it’s around the part where Lady Gaga is singing “with a boy and a girl and a (huh) and a game”—I remember where I am on the ice by the thickness of the tracks I’ve made in the ice and the position I am in the arena. It takes some getting used to whenever I move my routines from venue to venue, but I manage it.

Gary’s coached two other people, but they’re not nearly as exciting as I am. I haven’t the foggiest idea who they actually are. John Watson is his assistant coach and my medic.

I’ve gotten a few stress fractures and broken bones from rehearsing various routines over and over again. It’s nice to have him run out to the ice and test my limbs before deciding whether

I’ll skate again for the day. If he decides I can’t skate, he’ll wrap my limbs up, hold my hand and tell me it’s okay that I can’t push myself. I really don’t need the encouragement, but there’s something about the way he holds my hand. It warms my heart. Sometimes I wish he’d punch me instead, but I want to look professional in front of Lestrade. I don’t ask for it.

Then, when John and I get home—we live together ever since he was kicked out of his first flat—I let John punch me.