Born in Black and White

Chapter 3

After Kairi finished her Pho, she became agitated and couldn't focus on the show she usually loved to watch or the book that she tried to pick up. All she could focus on was the leather folder sitting neatly on her coffee table, surrounded by remnants of a demolished Pho Tai.

She stood carefully and made her way into her bedroom, with a tired Appa at her heels. She tried to be distracted by tidying up her place, but in all honesty, there wasn't much to tidy up. She rid her face of makeup, leaving her pale skin without any cover and her hair tied up in yet another messy bun. She changed into her most comfortable t-shirt, long woolly socks and grabbed her laptop and cell phone and made her way out into her front room again.

Sitting carefully in her overstuffed chair and making sideways glances at the leather folder, she put on her glasses and began to absent-mindedly type on her keyboard. She did mild research on her newest acquaintances. She stumbled across plenty of internet articles speculative on the sexuality of Mr. Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Though some of them made her blush, she distinctly remembered how John's eyes had raked over her body and face when they were being introduced. She had a hard time believing someone with that intense of a stare could be interested in anything less than the opposite sex. But then again, there was Sherlock Holmes. The enigma. The pompous enigma. The pompous utterly frustrating enigma. She stopped herself before she went on a tirade. The man inspected literally every visible centimeter of her body and yet it seemed as if the Vulcan hardly cared more for her than a scrap of trash on the street. The trash probably had more mystery to it in his mind. She didn't think she was that hideous. Maybe a little rounder in some areas than most lanky British women, but she always thought her face was cute and simple. Her eyes were a very clear blue, very cyan in nature with almost white speckles surrounding the pupil. Her hair was a platinum blonde, mostly from dyeing it, but it was originally blonde at one time, long ago before she fell in with her rockabilly ways. She realized she let herself become distracted by her own personal deduction and started to violently jab the keys. As if it would make the insecurity go away.

After the more saucily written articles, she found Sherlock Holmes' personal blog. She tried to read through some of his more recent studies but found herself wanting to fall asleep - and this coming from someone who reads, writes, and edits computer code for a living. She would remember that fact come any restless nights in the future.

It wasn't that his experiments weren't interesting, but his explanation of research was frightfully dull. In a few posts she could see the excitement in his writing, but for the most part, it seemed like it was written by a Robot - and not the fun kind with hookers and blackjack.

She went back to her Google search and realized she had missed the link right above his own personal blog. It was the blog of John Watson. She clicked on it, took a look around the basic page and decided it would be fun to inspect its elements. She glanced through the laughable code - what you could expect from a basic blogging website intended for the everyday housewife - and was sorely tempted on figuring out a way to hack into its web server and change all the O's to little hearts. Maybe just the ones in Sherlock Holmes' name.

She quickly quashed the temptation and clicked on the most recent blog post and read through the lengthy description of their most recent case. Where Holmes' blog was detail oriented, rather blase in its ability to depict its importance to the reader, and dreadfully boring, Watson's blog was rather enticing. His words weren't fancy, though she knew he was educated, but each and every sentence was filled with an emotion. It was amazing as much as it was captivating. Kairi sat there for what felt like hours, knees cuddled up to her chest and laptop balancing precariously on the arm of her favorite chair, reading John's words and eventually feeling the tiniest inkling of obsession. Now she knew why they were famous. It obviously was not the charm or the elegant brilliance of the young detective, but his charismatic mate who seemed to be the only person in the world truly capable of bringing out an excellence and a sort of humanity in Sherlock Holmes no one had ever experienced before.