Maintaining a Personal Life

Chapter One

It was two hours after sunrise one rather overcast morning when Sherlock Holmes stomped up the stairs to 221B Baker Street. The dramatic clomp to his steps and the scowl etched on his face were clear indications of his particularly foul mood. He'd just devoted eight fruitless hours to following an insipid moron about on a stake-out that proved mind-numbingly dull without the presence of John Watson. Usually the many varied expressions that John's face rotated through when he was thoroughly bored was entertainment enough on a slow night. Sherlock had been deprived of this diversion, however, since John was currently embroiled in a project of his own that he called 'maintaining a personal life'.

The parameters of this project dictated that at least one night a week, John would go out with 'mates' to a noisy pub where they would drink beer, watch some sort of sports game, and pretend to care about the mundane details of one another's lives. Sherlock was supposed to respect the sanctity of these nights and understand that John would not respond to any texts below an urgency level of 7.5. After a great deal of debate on the subject, there was an actual list tacked onto the wall above the desk that detailed what exactly constituted an urgency level of 7.5 and what did not. (Boredom was in fact underlined and highlighted under the NOT column.)

For the most part, Sherlock made his very best effort to respect this arrangement because John was noticeably more relaxed since embarking upon his Personal Life Project. In the year following the Mary debacle, John had not been particularly easy or pleasant to live in close quarters with and in fact there had even been times when John's unpleasantness had rivalled Sherlock's own rather impressively. Sherlock had discovered that watching John Watson embroiled in a misery that Sherlock was unable to cleverly alleviate was completely intolerable, so now he found himself willingly sacrificing a night a week or so just to hear John tromping up the steps at 2 am humming a jaunty tune or laughing under his breath.

What made Sherlock freeze in his tracks not two paces off the staircase on this particular night were the sounds of someone fumbling about and opening drawers in the kitchen while the kettle boiled. Whoever was doing so clearly did not know where anything was located, judging from the number of times the same cabinets were opened and shut. Not Mrs Hudson then, and certainly not John, who could be heard humming under the spray of the shower in the bathroom.

John normally only hummed or sang in the shower after particularly vigorous intercourse. The volume and enthusiasm of his musical aspirations appeared to have a direct correlation to his level of satisfaction with his most recent sexual activity. This morning John's humming echoed fairly loudly through the flat and into the stairwell.

A woman, then. It had been several months since Sherlock had been forced to endure this particular hardship regularly, after a steady string of women winning a one night only all-access pass to Dr Watson's Bed in the months immediately following the official dissolution of John's ill-fated marriage. At the time, Sherlock had clandestinely thumbed through several books with ridiculous titles on the variation of 'dealing with divorce', so he understood that this was considered the 'rebound process'. He'd rather hoped it would be over with by now.

Granted, none of those books had a chapter on how to handle ending a marriage to a secret international assassin with a stolen identity who used to work for your greatest enemy, and the subsequent stillbirth of the only reason you'd even attempted to forgive her in the first place.

Sherlock steeled himself to face the nightly catch, straightening his shoulders and pasting a bland expression on his face as he opened the door and stalked into the sitting room. He methodically shrugged off his coat, hung it up, and then sat down at the desk to boot up his laptop, determined to ignore John's leftover until she saw fit to conveniently disappear. It was moderately pathetic when they lingered too long the next morning— John always professed that he intended to call them later, but he almost never did. As much as Sherlock disliked that these women interacted with John at all, he derived a significant amount of satisfaction from knowing that they were on a whole quite disposable and interchangeable.