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tweedandtinsel2011-01-16 11:32 am
oxfordtweed) wrote in tweedandtinsel2011-01-16 11:32 am
Case Closed
Fandom: Sherlock
Character/s: Holmes, Watson, OC
Word Count: 4000
Rating: G
Summary: Everybody always asks the exact same questions, and Sherlock hates it. Of course, leave it up to John to find a way to find a way to be even more irritating.
Notes/Warnings: In which I finally do something with Watson in. The third, and likely final, part of the Study in Sexuality series. Allusions to ASIP and TBB. Set between TBB and TGG (sort of).
A few people have been asking what happened with Carol. Well, here’s the answer.
It was a well-rehearsed speech. Sherlock had had more than a few various assistants, flatmates, colleagues, and any other word one could possibly use for the sort of person he would drag through London with him, and every one of them had sooner or later taken the conversation down an avenue Sherlock was loathe to travel again.
But in a way, he was almost glad that this Dr John Watson had chosen to get it over sooner, rather than later. He hadn’t even properly moved in yet, which meant that the fallout would be minimal, and they could both just go on with their lives and avoid something that was sure to be very, very messy.
It was always messy. Either his colleague would want to push to become something more, or they would push to set Sherlock up with someone who was certain to be perfect for him.
Very messy.
Sherlock hadn’t even gone through the first line of his speech before John cut him off. Great, he was going to be one of those sort; wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He had almost certainly spent his entire university career and as much as his army career oversexed and pursuing anything with legs.
“It’s all fine,” he said, shaking his head.
Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was the qualifier, the inflection, or the inflection placed upon the qualifier, but something about the way John said it was surprising. He’d been told before that it was all fine, and had even believed it once, but he still hadn’t expected it.
More unexpected still was how John didn’t press the issue. It was, Sherlock had to admit, entirely possible that he had just been trying that tedious small talk thing, and in the course had just happened to stumble upon the one subject that managed to make Sherlock more than a little tetchy.
The subject had remained dropped for a little over a month, until John had refused Sherlock’s advice on dating, on the grounds that Sherlock was the last person he’d go to for dating advice. His comment had been thrown out there so completely casually that Sherlock wasn’t even sure that it was a conscious jab, or just intended as hyperbole. John rarely said things just because they hurt, but he also wasn’t the sort to call everything the ‘best in the world,’ or compare mildly inconvenient circumstances to something like having one’s testicles chewed on by honey badgers, so it didn’t seem like it had been intended to be either.
It was just a comment. Possibly, Sherlock realised, an attempt at pretending to be clever. Everybody Sherlock spent even the smallest amount of time with would point out his complete and total disinterest in dating, and it was entirely possible that John was trying to point this out by way of not-very-clever snipe. But once again, the subject had been dropped as quickly as it had been mentioned, so Sherlock wasn’t sure. And in the end, John had taken his advice anyway, so it really didn’t matter.
“Go to bed.”
Sherlock ignored his flatmate, keeping his focus instead on the Beauchene skull he’d started building after John had suggested for the fiftieth time to get a hobby.
“Busy,” Sherlock responded flatly, working a bit of wire through one of the tiny holes he’d drilled through the bone.
“It’s been four days,” John said as he rushed between the kitchen and the sitting room. “Unless you’ve been sleeping while I was at the surgery the last two days, which doesn’t seem likely, since you showed up unannounced both days.”
He slid into his coat and swore as he checked his watch.
“I’ll sleep when I’m finished,” Sherlock said distantly. He’d been working on his skull for the duration of the four days he’d been awake, save the time spent pretending to be a doctor so he could ‘treat’ the hypochondriacs that clogged up reception at the surgery, and even he was starting to notice faint tremors in his hands as he worked on the more delicate pieces.
“Will you?” asked John. He didn’t sound convinced.
“Yep,” said Sherlock, not even trying to sound convincing. He looked at his watch. “You’d better hope that your train is late. Otherwise, you’ve just missed it.”
John hissed another curse and rushed toward the stairs, slamming the door behind him. As soon as Sherlock heard the front door slam shut as well, he sighed deeply and rested his head on the table. To be tired was one thing. He was more than tired. He was exhausted. If he didn’t know that such a thing wasn’t very possible, he would have sworn that there was sand in his muscles and hot embers behind his eyes. His chest was burning, and the effort of even breathing made him feel like he’d just run a marathon.
Being tired was easy. Everybody could do that without even thinking about it. Being sleepy was a trick Sherlock was almost willing to attribute to witchcraft. No matter how badly his bones burned and his muscles ached, his eyes did not want to close. There were only so many ways he could distract himself; only so many reasons he would be able to forget, if just for a few hours, that the transport was running on empty.
He was willing to admit defeat. His skull was almost finished — maybe an hour’s work left on it, at most — and as much as he hated to admit it, John was right. Four days was a long time to go without sleeping, especially without a case to distract him. Whimpering in a way that would have been positively embarrassing for anyone else to hear, Sherlock pulled out his phone and punched out a hasty text message before turning his attention back to his skull.
John had learned to expect the strange and unusual when he walked into 221b, especially when Sherlock had been without a case for so long. He’d learned to just accept graffiti and bullet holes and the furniture nailed to the ceiling, and could even laugh at some of it.
Sherlock asleep on the sofa was only mildly unusual. Sherlock asleep on the sofa with his head in the lap of a strange woman was enough to make John momentarily wonder if he was in the right flat.
“Who—” he started to ask, but the strange woman shushed him rather violently. She was probably right, though. Best not to wake Sherlock, if he was actually asleep.
John stood still for a few moments before deciding that this was exactly the sort of unexpected thing he should learn to expect, and walked to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Nothing else Sherlock did ever made sense, so if he wanted to have a secret girlfriend, then who was John to say anything about it?
He made two cups, and as he brought the second out to Sherlock’s apparently secret girlfriend, John noticed that the detective’s arms were wrapped rather tightly around the woman’s waist. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d wound up with bruises where Sherlock’s fingers were digging into her skin.
Pretending to ignore all of this, he smiled his charming little smile and handed her a mug. She stopped messing with Sherlock’s hair long enough to take the mug and set it down on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” she said quietly. The television was off, so John didn’t have to strain to hear her, which was nice. “You must be John.”
At least she had manners, John couldn’t help noting. She was already more than he could have expected.
“Yeah,” he said, easing himself into the chair he’d claimed as his own.
“I’m Carol,” she introduced.
John nodded, and then realised that the name wasn’t ringing any bells. “Sorry, he never mentioned you before.”
The woman called Carol rolled her eyes, and John got the distinct impression that if Sherlock hadn’t been asleep, that she would have swatted at him. She also had better will power in that department than her apparent boyfriend, John noted.
He liked her already.
“Where’d you two meet?” John asked curiously, unable to help feeling slightly odd for having a normal conversation in the flat. Or at all, the way things had been going recently.
Carol brushed Sherlock’s hair off of his forehead, and started petting his head as though he were a very large and very clingy cat. He must have tightened his grip, because Carol jumped slightly and bit back what might have had the potential to be a very loud verbal reaction.
“We went to uni together,” she said, smiling through the pain.
John had half expected her to say that she’d met him during one of his cases — maybe Sherlock had arrested her neighbour or cousin or something. Suddenly, he had an echo of Mycroft asking just how many friends he suspected a man like Sherlock to have.
“That’s... Right. OK.”
Carol laughed. “In fairness, he only mentioned you in a, ‘John will be upset with me if I’m awake when he gets home,’ sort of way.”
“Is that actually what he said?” asked John, not at all surprised to hear something like this.
“More or less,” said Carol. “He must like you, though. He usually doesn’t give a toss what his flatmates think.”
That did surprise John. Not that Sherlock didn’t care about what his flatmates thought, but that he apparently cared what John thought. Then again, if Sherlock was hiding girlfriends, who knew what else he was hiding?
“I didn’t think he liked anybody,” said John casually. “When we first met, he said... all this wasn’t his area.” He waved his hand vaguely toward Carol and Sherlock.
She laughed again, and this time, John got the very distinct impression that she was laughing at him. “It’s not,” she said. “If anything, we’re both married to our work.”
John was starting to feel annoyed with this situation. “That’s what I thought,” he said, hoping that he wasn’t coming off as annoyed as he felt. “So you can imagine my confusion, when after he tells me that he doesn’t date, that I come home to all this.”
Carol shook her head and reached down to move Sherlock’s hand from where it seemed to have been causing more pain than she could handle.
“Just friends,” she clarified. “Some days, not even that. It depends on how much of an arse he’s being.”
It was John’s turn to laugh. “I’ve ‘moved out’ twice already,” he said. “I know what you mean. So, what? He just texts you, and you come running? Your boss can’t like that very much.”
It would have sounded scathing, if John hadn’t been guilty of doing exactly the same thing when he received one of Sherlock’s texts.
“Not quite,” said Carol. “Usually, he just shows up at my flat. I eventually just gave him a key to stop him picking the lock. And I don’t have a boss. That’s the best part of freelancing.”
“Freelancing?” asked John with a light laugh. “You two are perfect for one another.”
“God, don’t tell him that.”
John wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know what the story behind that reaction was, but he was certain that whatever it was, it had been something terribly difficult to recover from. He understood completely.
It was nearly half ten that night when Sherlock awoke with a sudden gasp. He quickly lifted his head and cringed as his skin tore away from where his face had stuck to the leather cushion of the sofa. Carol was supposed to be there, preventing that from happening. Annoyingly, she’d gotten quite skilled at getting up and leaving without waking Sherlock.
“Good morning,” said John from his chair on the other side of the room. “Er, evening, I guess. Sleep well?”
Sherlock took a moment to respond. The time just after waking up, even without chemical aids, was almost as bad as the feeling in his brain when he’d been unable to sleep for too long. Every thought in his brain was slow to form and seemed to only come to him in bits and pieces.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
There was a knot in one of the floorboards. Sherlock stared at it for several minutes while he let his hard drive reboot. Something was bothering him, deep in his mind. It was like a fishhook in his brain that he couldn’t quite get at — something he should really deal with, but until he figured out what it was, it would just continue to bother him.
“How long was I out?” he asked. No, that wasn’t it. It was close, but not quite right.
John checked his watch. “About eleven hours,” he said. “She said you finally passed out just before midday. How’s your neck? That didn’t look very comfortable, but I didn’t want to wake you.”
That was it. Sherlock was still lying on his stomach, and he slowly moved to sit up, ignoring the way his neck and back popped loudly and violently. It hadn’t been very comfortable, but he’d only noticed it as John pointed it out.
“Fine,” he answered, waiting for the other set of inevitable questions. Questions that didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Sherlock was too tall to sleep comfortably on the sofa. Questions that carried hidden layers of implication and accusations, and that Sherlock was sick to tears of answering.
He watched with a heightened level of confusion as John put down the book he’d been reading and got to his feet.
“I’m off to bed,” he announced. “I’ve got to go back in tomorrow. I’ve got my earplugs, but still try to keep it down. Supper’s in the fridge.”
Sherlock watched him as he made his way out the door and up the stairs.
“Yeah,” he said after his flatmate.
He was glad that John wasn’t playing this game by the normal set of rules, but it was also maddening. There was a script everybody always followed, but John seemed to have never even looked at it. He wasn’t saying the right things, so Sherlock had no idea what was going to come next. His well-rehearsed, permanent run of Hamlet had been recast with the recurring players of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he wasn’t sure that it was working.
Sherlock waited until he heard John’s bedroom door shut before getting to his feet and rushing to his bedroom to change out of his pyjamas. He needed to take a walk, he’d decided.
Sixteen days. 390 hours, 12 minutes, and 34 seconds since his last case. John had begun to make himself scarce during the day, under the agreement that Sherlock could do as he pleased in the flat so long as it, 1. stayed out of John’s bedroom, 2. stayed out of the bath tub, and 3. didn't burn down the house.
Sherlock had tried almost everything he knew to distract himself. He’d worked down a long mental list, and had come to reviewing blood spatter patterns. Which meant that he had to create spatter patterns on the walls. He had several dozen plaster skulls, which were filled with a home-made blood analogue (John had banned the use of actual blood in these experiments), and had taken to smashing them with whatever he could find.
John returned home later that night and stood in the door while Sherlock took a small chainsaw to one of his skulls, sending a shower of red sticky mess all over the flat.
“Mrs Hudson’s going to have a fit,” John pointed out once Sherlock let the chainsaw idle.
“I’ll clean it up,” he said.
“Will you?” John doubted this somehow.
“Of course.”
John shook his head and retreated, going into the kitchen from the corridor.
“Don’t touch the heads!” Sherlock shouted at him. He’d left several severed pig heads on the table, which had also bore the brunt of Sherlock’s boredom, and had been battered with every sharp, blunt, and broken object in the flat.
“Why pigs?” asked John, although he was relieved that they were pigs, and not people.
“Closest human analogue I could get at short notice.” Sherlock watched as the thick, red liquid ran down the wall. “The skin is almost the same as a human, and reacts in much the same way.”
The chainsaw started up again, and John retreated up to his bedroom to fetch his laptop. Eventually, curiosity got the better of him, and he moved to the stairs, where he could work on his blog and watch Sherlock at the same time. When Sherlock finally ran out of stand-in skulls and blood, John put his laptop aside and helped with the clean-up.
“I imagine you’ll be going over to hers, then?” asked John as he picked up large pieces of plaster from the floor and shoved them into a bin bag.
Sherlock turned sharply to look at him. “What do you mean?” he asked defensively.
John didn’t stop his clean-up efforts. “It’s been a few days,” he said simply. “Carol said you like to go over there when you can’t sleep, and you’ve been really cranky again lately, so I’d imagine you’re starting to get run down again.”
Sherlock sighed deeply. “All right. You have questions.”
John looked up at him, slightly confused. “Yeah,” he said. “I just asked it. She told me that’s where you go when you disappear for a night, and I was just wondering when you’ll be going over there again.”
Sherlock tried to figure out the hidden meaning, but it frustrated him that he couldn’t find one.
“We’re not dating,” he settled on, using his foot to move bits of plaster skull closer to John.
“I know,” John said easily. “I never said you were.”
That was not what John was supposed to say, which left Sherlock at a loss for what he was supposed to say next.
“OK,” he said. He must have looked as lost as he felt, because John laughed slightly.
“What?” John asked, shaking his head lightly. “Was I supposed to argue that with you?”
“Yes!” Sherlock said before he could stop himself. “Why aren’t you?”
John was still laughing. “Uhm, OK,” he said. “Yes, you — I’m sorry, I can’t. Why am I meant to be arguing with you over this?”
“Why aren’t you?” asked Sherlock, completely forgetting about the corn syrup mixture that was drying on the wallpaper.
“Because you’re not dating her,” John ventured. “Just because two people of the opposite sex happen to be friends doesn’t mean they’re shagging. I thought you, of all people, would know that.”
“I of all people?” asked Sherlock.
“Are you just looking to start a row, now?” John asked, wincing lightly as he got to his feet. “Because there are better things to have a go round about, than… this.” He waved his hand vaguely in Sherlock’s direction.
Sherlock pulled on his hair with both of his hands, not sure when he had lost complete control. “Are you intentionally being as difficult as possible?” he asked, determined to see this, whatever it was, through the end.
“Me?” asked John. “I’m not the one picking a fight over my own preferences.”
He dropped the bin bag on the floor and reached for his coat.
“Where are you going?” Sherlock demanded.
“Out,” said John. “You’re in a mood, and I don’t want to deal with it.” Still holding onto his coat, he quickly made his way down the stairs.
Once again, John Watson had managed to completely confound Sherlock. Nothing he’d said had made any amount of sense, and Sherlock sat down on the ruined sofa to try to piece it all together. He was tired, and not feeling very well on top of it, thanks to going 393 hours and 23 minutes without a case, and his thoughts were uncomfortably muddled.
John hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and yet, he was driving Sherlock crazy. Somehow, John had managed to completely and totally avoid every stupid question, every insinuation, and every action that would normally send Sherlock round the bend. And in his avoidance of all of this, he had still managed to make Sherlock crazy from it.
What had he meant by ‘preferences?’ Sherlock didn’t ‘prefer’ one way or another. If anything, he ‘preferred’ to be left alone, and he was fairly certain that John hadn’t meant it in that context. And why hadn’t he pressed the issue with Carol? Most people did, and while John wasn’t most people, he certainly had every reason to. He had spoken with Carol, which meant that he would have seen the two of them together. Anybody would have their suspicions after seeing that, Sherlock had to admit.
So, John had a reason to believe what he was told. Carol said they weren’t dating, and he believed it. And true, John could be terribly trusting of Sherlock, to a point that Sherlock had several times found himself wanting to test just how far John would trust him. But John was taking the word of a complete stranger, which was a stretch for someone with supposed trust issues.
‘You of all people.’ That was up there with Sherlock being the last person John would go to for dating advice. It would have been a completely ridiculous thing to say if it weren’t true-;
But… it’s all fine.
The inflection on the qualifier. Thebrother sister who preferred drink over a loving wife. A sister who would have had to have been open and out of the closet for presumably some time. John didn’t press the issue because he’d already been trained out of it, probably as much as several decades earlier. Being heterosexual did not automatically translate to being insensitive or intolerant. John didn’t press the issue because there was no issue to be pressed. He’d stopped Sherlock’s speech that first night at Angelo’s to save them both the agony and embarrassment.
Yet again, John Watson was surprising in his compassion and understanding.
Stupid. How could Sherlock have missed it? John was not most people, and he could not be expected to do the sort of things most people did. Most people were not doctors who went to war and killed people to save lives. Most people didn’t have crippling night terrors as they relived the panic and pain of the lives they failed to save. Most people would not put up with pig heads in the kitchen and blood analogue sticking to every surface of the sitting room.
Sherlock had to sigh at that. Maybe he did need sleep, if he was failing to see what was right in front of him. He reached for his coat, but stopped at the last moment to look around at the corn syrup that had begun to crystallise on the walls.
He needed to clean this up first. He didn’t want to, but he’d said that he would, and there was the potential for John to actually move out for good if he came home to find Sherlock gone and everything in the flat ruined (again).
And that would be unacceptable. Carol refused to share space with him for longer than 24 hours at a time, and Sherlock needed someone close by to keep him from doing anything apocalyptically stupid. And John was pretty decent at it, usually. Even when he did leave before the results of the slightly stupid ideas could be cleaned up.
Character/s: Holmes, Watson, OC
Word Count: 4000
Rating: G
Summary: Everybody always asks the exact same questions, and Sherlock hates it. Of course, leave it up to John to find a way to find a way to be even more irritating.
Notes/Warnings: In which I finally do something with Watson in. The third, and likely final, part of the Study in Sexuality series. Allusions to ASIP and TBB. Set between TBB and TGG (sort of).
A few people have been asking what happened with Carol. Well, here’s the answer.
It was a well-rehearsed speech. Sherlock had had more than a few various assistants, flatmates, colleagues, and any other word one could possibly use for the sort of person he would drag through London with him, and every one of them had sooner or later taken the conversation down an avenue Sherlock was loathe to travel again.
But in a way, he was almost glad that this Dr John Watson had chosen to get it over sooner, rather than later. He hadn’t even properly moved in yet, which meant that the fallout would be minimal, and they could both just go on with their lives and avoid something that was sure to be very, very messy.
It was always messy. Either his colleague would want to push to become something more, or they would push to set Sherlock up with someone who was certain to be perfect for him.
Very messy.
Sherlock hadn’t even gone through the first line of his speech before John cut him off. Great, he was going to be one of those sort; wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He had almost certainly spent his entire university career and as much as his army career oversexed and pursuing anything with legs.
“It’s all fine,” he said, shaking his head.
Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was the qualifier, the inflection, or the inflection placed upon the qualifier, but something about the way John said it was surprising. He’d been told before that it was all fine, and had even believed it once, but he still hadn’t expected it.
More unexpected still was how John didn’t press the issue. It was, Sherlock had to admit, entirely possible that he had just been trying that tedious small talk thing, and in the course had just happened to stumble upon the one subject that managed to make Sherlock more than a little tetchy.
The subject had remained dropped for a little over a month, until John had refused Sherlock’s advice on dating, on the grounds that Sherlock was the last person he’d go to for dating advice. His comment had been thrown out there so completely casually that Sherlock wasn’t even sure that it was a conscious jab, or just intended as hyperbole. John rarely said things just because they hurt, but he also wasn’t the sort to call everything the ‘best in the world,’ or compare mildly inconvenient circumstances to something like having one’s testicles chewed on by honey badgers, so it didn’t seem like it had been intended to be either.
It was just a comment. Possibly, Sherlock realised, an attempt at pretending to be clever. Everybody Sherlock spent even the smallest amount of time with would point out his complete and total disinterest in dating, and it was entirely possible that John was trying to point this out by way of not-very-clever snipe. But once again, the subject had been dropped as quickly as it had been mentioned, so Sherlock wasn’t sure. And in the end, John had taken his advice anyway, so it really didn’t matter.
“Go to bed.”
Sherlock ignored his flatmate, keeping his focus instead on the Beauchene skull he’d started building after John had suggested for the fiftieth time to get a hobby.
“Busy,” Sherlock responded flatly, working a bit of wire through one of the tiny holes he’d drilled through the bone.
“It’s been four days,” John said as he rushed between the kitchen and the sitting room. “Unless you’ve been sleeping while I was at the surgery the last two days, which doesn’t seem likely, since you showed up unannounced both days.”
He slid into his coat and swore as he checked his watch.
“I’ll sleep when I’m finished,” Sherlock said distantly. He’d been working on his skull for the duration of the four days he’d been awake, save the time spent pretending to be a doctor so he could ‘treat’ the hypochondriacs that clogged up reception at the surgery, and even he was starting to notice faint tremors in his hands as he worked on the more delicate pieces.
“Will you?” asked John. He didn’t sound convinced.
“Yep,” said Sherlock, not even trying to sound convincing. He looked at his watch. “You’d better hope that your train is late. Otherwise, you’ve just missed it.”
John hissed another curse and rushed toward the stairs, slamming the door behind him. As soon as Sherlock heard the front door slam shut as well, he sighed deeply and rested his head on the table. To be tired was one thing. He was more than tired. He was exhausted. If he didn’t know that such a thing wasn’t very possible, he would have sworn that there was sand in his muscles and hot embers behind his eyes. His chest was burning, and the effort of even breathing made him feel like he’d just run a marathon.
Being tired was easy. Everybody could do that without even thinking about it. Being sleepy was a trick Sherlock was almost willing to attribute to witchcraft. No matter how badly his bones burned and his muscles ached, his eyes did not want to close. There were only so many ways he could distract himself; only so many reasons he would be able to forget, if just for a few hours, that the transport was running on empty.
He was willing to admit defeat. His skull was almost finished — maybe an hour’s work left on it, at most — and as much as he hated to admit it, John was right. Four days was a long time to go without sleeping, especially without a case to distract him. Whimpering in a way that would have been positively embarrassing for anyone else to hear, Sherlock pulled out his phone and punched out a hasty text message before turning his attention back to his skull.
John had learned to expect the strange and unusual when he walked into 221b, especially when Sherlock had been without a case for so long. He’d learned to just accept graffiti and bullet holes and the furniture nailed to the ceiling, and could even laugh at some of it.
Sherlock asleep on the sofa was only mildly unusual. Sherlock asleep on the sofa with his head in the lap of a strange woman was enough to make John momentarily wonder if he was in the right flat.
“Who—” he started to ask, but the strange woman shushed him rather violently. She was probably right, though. Best not to wake Sherlock, if he was actually asleep.
John stood still for a few moments before deciding that this was exactly the sort of unexpected thing he should learn to expect, and walked to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Nothing else Sherlock did ever made sense, so if he wanted to have a secret girlfriend, then who was John to say anything about it?
He made two cups, and as he brought the second out to Sherlock’s apparently secret girlfriend, John noticed that the detective’s arms were wrapped rather tightly around the woman’s waist. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d wound up with bruises where Sherlock’s fingers were digging into her skin.
Pretending to ignore all of this, he smiled his charming little smile and handed her a mug. She stopped messing with Sherlock’s hair long enough to take the mug and set it down on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” she said quietly. The television was off, so John didn’t have to strain to hear her, which was nice. “You must be John.”
At least she had manners, John couldn’t help noting. She was already more than he could have expected.
“Yeah,” he said, easing himself into the chair he’d claimed as his own.
“I’m Carol,” she introduced.
John nodded, and then realised that the name wasn’t ringing any bells. “Sorry, he never mentioned you before.”
The woman called Carol rolled her eyes, and John got the distinct impression that if Sherlock hadn’t been asleep, that she would have swatted at him. She also had better will power in that department than her apparent boyfriend, John noted.
He liked her already.
“Where’d you two meet?” John asked curiously, unable to help feeling slightly odd for having a normal conversation in the flat. Or at all, the way things had been going recently.
Carol brushed Sherlock’s hair off of his forehead, and started petting his head as though he were a very large and very clingy cat. He must have tightened his grip, because Carol jumped slightly and bit back what might have had the potential to be a very loud verbal reaction.
“We went to uni together,” she said, smiling through the pain.
John had half expected her to say that she’d met him during one of his cases — maybe Sherlock had arrested her neighbour or cousin or something. Suddenly, he had an echo of Mycroft asking just how many friends he suspected a man like Sherlock to have.
“That’s... Right. OK.”
Carol laughed. “In fairness, he only mentioned you in a, ‘John will be upset with me if I’m awake when he gets home,’ sort of way.”
“Is that actually what he said?” asked John, not at all surprised to hear something like this.
“More or less,” said Carol. “He must like you, though. He usually doesn’t give a toss what his flatmates think.”
That did surprise John. Not that Sherlock didn’t care about what his flatmates thought, but that he apparently cared what John thought. Then again, if Sherlock was hiding girlfriends, who knew what else he was hiding?
“I didn’t think he liked anybody,” said John casually. “When we first met, he said... all this wasn’t his area.” He waved his hand vaguely toward Carol and Sherlock.
She laughed again, and this time, John got the very distinct impression that she was laughing at him. “It’s not,” she said. “If anything, we’re both married to our work.”
John was starting to feel annoyed with this situation. “That’s what I thought,” he said, hoping that he wasn’t coming off as annoyed as he felt. “So you can imagine my confusion, when after he tells me that he doesn’t date, that I come home to all this.”
Carol shook her head and reached down to move Sherlock’s hand from where it seemed to have been causing more pain than she could handle.
“Just friends,” she clarified. “Some days, not even that. It depends on how much of an arse he’s being.”
It was John’s turn to laugh. “I’ve ‘moved out’ twice already,” he said. “I know what you mean. So, what? He just texts you, and you come running? Your boss can’t like that very much.”
It would have sounded scathing, if John hadn’t been guilty of doing exactly the same thing when he received one of Sherlock’s texts.
“Not quite,” said Carol. “Usually, he just shows up at my flat. I eventually just gave him a key to stop him picking the lock. And I don’t have a boss. That’s the best part of freelancing.”
“Freelancing?” asked John with a light laugh. “You two are perfect for one another.”
“God, don’t tell him that.”
John wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know what the story behind that reaction was, but he was certain that whatever it was, it had been something terribly difficult to recover from. He understood completely.
It was nearly half ten that night when Sherlock awoke with a sudden gasp. He quickly lifted his head and cringed as his skin tore away from where his face had stuck to the leather cushion of the sofa. Carol was supposed to be there, preventing that from happening. Annoyingly, she’d gotten quite skilled at getting up and leaving without waking Sherlock.
“Good morning,” said John from his chair on the other side of the room. “Er, evening, I guess. Sleep well?”
Sherlock took a moment to respond. The time just after waking up, even without chemical aids, was almost as bad as the feeling in his brain when he’d been unable to sleep for too long. Every thought in his brain was slow to form and seemed to only come to him in bits and pieces.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
There was a knot in one of the floorboards. Sherlock stared at it for several minutes while he let his hard drive reboot. Something was bothering him, deep in his mind. It was like a fishhook in his brain that he couldn’t quite get at — something he should really deal with, but until he figured out what it was, it would just continue to bother him.
“How long was I out?” he asked. No, that wasn’t it. It was close, but not quite right.
John checked his watch. “About eleven hours,” he said. “She said you finally passed out just before midday. How’s your neck? That didn’t look very comfortable, but I didn’t want to wake you.”
That was it. Sherlock was still lying on his stomach, and he slowly moved to sit up, ignoring the way his neck and back popped loudly and violently. It hadn’t been very comfortable, but he’d only noticed it as John pointed it out.
“Fine,” he answered, waiting for the other set of inevitable questions. Questions that didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Sherlock was too tall to sleep comfortably on the sofa. Questions that carried hidden layers of implication and accusations, and that Sherlock was sick to tears of answering.
He watched with a heightened level of confusion as John put down the book he’d been reading and got to his feet.
“I’m off to bed,” he announced. “I’ve got to go back in tomorrow. I’ve got my earplugs, but still try to keep it down. Supper’s in the fridge.”
Sherlock watched him as he made his way out the door and up the stairs.
“Yeah,” he said after his flatmate.
He was glad that John wasn’t playing this game by the normal set of rules, but it was also maddening. There was a script everybody always followed, but John seemed to have never even looked at it. He wasn’t saying the right things, so Sherlock had no idea what was going to come next. His well-rehearsed, permanent run of Hamlet had been recast with the recurring players of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he wasn’t sure that it was working.
Sherlock waited until he heard John’s bedroom door shut before getting to his feet and rushing to his bedroom to change out of his pyjamas. He needed to take a walk, he’d decided.
Sixteen days. 390 hours, 12 minutes, and 34 seconds since his last case. John had begun to make himself scarce during the day, under the agreement that Sherlock could do as he pleased in the flat so long as it, 1. stayed out of John’s bedroom, 2. stayed out of the bath tub, and 3. didn't burn down the house.
Sherlock had tried almost everything he knew to distract himself. He’d worked down a long mental list, and had come to reviewing blood spatter patterns. Which meant that he had to create spatter patterns on the walls. He had several dozen plaster skulls, which were filled with a home-made blood analogue (John had banned the use of actual blood in these experiments), and had taken to smashing them with whatever he could find.
John returned home later that night and stood in the door while Sherlock took a small chainsaw to one of his skulls, sending a shower of red sticky mess all over the flat.
“Mrs Hudson’s going to have a fit,” John pointed out once Sherlock let the chainsaw idle.
“I’ll clean it up,” he said.
“Will you?” John doubted this somehow.
“Of course.”
John shook his head and retreated, going into the kitchen from the corridor.
“Don’t touch the heads!” Sherlock shouted at him. He’d left several severed pig heads on the table, which had also bore the brunt of Sherlock’s boredom, and had been battered with every sharp, blunt, and broken object in the flat.
“Why pigs?” asked John, although he was relieved that they were pigs, and not people.
“Closest human analogue I could get at short notice.” Sherlock watched as the thick, red liquid ran down the wall. “The skin is almost the same as a human, and reacts in much the same way.”
The chainsaw started up again, and John retreated up to his bedroom to fetch his laptop. Eventually, curiosity got the better of him, and he moved to the stairs, where he could work on his blog and watch Sherlock at the same time. When Sherlock finally ran out of stand-in skulls and blood, John put his laptop aside and helped with the clean-up.
“I imagine you’ll be going over to hers, then?” asked John as he picked up large pieces of plaster from the floor and shoved them into a bin bag.
Sherlock turned sharply to look at him. “What do you mean?” he asked defensively.
John didn’t stop his clean-up efforts. “It’s been a few days,” he said simply. “Carol said you like to go over there when you can’t sleep, and you’ve been really cranky again lately, so I’d imagine you’re starting to get run down again.”
Sherlock sighed deeply. “All right. You have questions.”
John looked up at him, slightly confused. “Yeah,” he said. “I just asked it. She told me that’s where you go when you disappear for a night, and I was just wondering when you’ll be going over there again.”
Sherlock tried to figure out the hidden meaning, but it frustrated him that he couldn’t find one.
“We’re not dating,” he settled on, using his foot to move bits of plaster skull closer to John.
“I know,” John said easily. “I never said you were.”
That was not what John was supposed to say, which left Sherlock at a loss for what he was supposed to say next.
“OK,” he said. He must have looked as lost as he felt, because John laughed slightly.
“What?” John asked, shaking his head lightly. “Was I supposed to argue that with you?”
“Yes!” Sherlock said before he could stop himself. “Why aren’t you?”
John was still laughing. “Uhm, OK,” he said. “Yes, you — I’m sorry, I can’t. Why am I meant to be arguing with you over this?”
“Why aren’t you?” asked Sherlock, completely forgetting about the corn syrup mixture that was drying on the wallpaper.
“Because you’re not dating her,” John ventured. “Just because two people of the opposite sex happen to be friends doesn’t mean they’re shagging. I thought you, of all people, would know that.”
“I of all people?” asked Sherlock.
“Are you just looking to start a row, now?” John asked, wincing lightly as he got to his feet. “Because there are better things to have a go round about, than… this.” He waved his hand vaguely in Sherlock’s direction.
Sherlock pulled on his hair with both of his hands, not sure when he had lost complete control. “Are you intentionally being as difficult as possible?” he asked, determined to see this, whatever it was, through the end.
“Me?” asked John. “I’m not the one picking a fight over my own preferences.”
He dropped the bin bag on the floor and reached for his coat.
“Where are you going?” Sherlock demanded.
“Out,” said John. “You’re in a mood, and I don’t want to deal with it.” Still holding onto his coat, he quickly made his way down the stairs.
Once again, John Watson had managed to completely confound Sherlock. Nothing he’d said had made any amount of sense, and Sherlock sat down on the ruined sofa to try to piece it all together. He was tired, and not feeling very well on top of it, thanks to going 393 hours and 23 minutes without a case, and his thoughts were uncomfortably muddled.
John hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and yet, he was driving Sherlock crazy. Somehow, John had managed to completely and totally avoid every stupid question, every insinuation, and every action that would normally send Sherlock round the bend. And in his avoidance of all of this, he had still managed to make Sherlock crazy from it.
What had he meant by ‘preferences?’ Sherlock didn’t ‘prefer’ one way or another. If anything, he ‘preferred’ to be left alone, and he was fairly certain that John hadn’t meant it in that context. And why hadn’t he pressed the issue with Carol? Most people did, and while John wasn’t most people, he certainly had every reason to. He had spoken with Carol, which meant that he would have seen the two of them together. Anybody would have their suspicions after seeing that, Sherlock had to admit.
So, John had a reason to believe what he was told. Carol said they weren’t dating, and he believed it. And true, John could be terribly trusting of Sherlock, to a point that Sherlock had several times found himself wanting to test just how far John would trust him. But John was taking the word of a complete stranger, which was a stretch for someone with supposed trust issues.
‘You of all people.’ That was up there with Sherlock being the last person John would go to for dating advice. It would have been a completely ridiculous thing to say if it weren’t true-;
But… it’s all fine.
The inflection on the qualifier. The
Yet again, John Watson was surprising in his compassion and understanding.
Stupid. How could Sherlock have missed it? John was not most people, and he could not be expected to do the sort of things most people did. Most people were not doctors who went to war and killed people to save lives. Most people didn’t have crippling night terrors as they relived the panic and pain of the lives they failed to save. Most people would not put up with pig heads in the kitchen and blood analogue sticking to every surface of the sitting room.
Sherlock had to sigh at that. Maybe he did need sleep, if he was failing to see what was right in front of him. He reached for his coat, but stopped at the last moment to look around at the corn syrup that had begun to crystallise on the walls.
He needed to clean this up first. He didn’t want to, but he’d said that he would, and there was the potential for John to actually move out for good if he came home to find Sherlock gone and everything in the flat ruined (again).
And that would be unacceptable. Carol refused to share space with him for longer than 24 hours at a time, and Sherlock needed someone close by to keep him from doing anything apocalyptically stupid. And John was pretty decent at it, usually. Even when he did leave before the results of the slightly stupid ideas could be cleaned up.
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Thanks for reading! :D