Maintaining a Personal Life

Chapter Ten

The next morning John allowed himself a moment to marvel at how remarkably little had actually changed despite the recent monumental shift in his relationship with Sherlock. Once they'd gotten home the night before, he'd had to bully Sherlock into changing out of his wet clothes by refusing to surrender the book until Sherlock was warm and dry ("Wouldn't it be something if Sherlock Holmes' last case was a case of pneumonia?"*). Sherlock had then spent the rest of the evening wrapped in his own thoughts while he poured over the evidence, ignoring everything else—including John for the most part, aside from randomly asking John to hand him things.

John had given up and left for bed around 1am. When John returned downstairs a few hours after sunrise, Sherlock had taken over the kitchen table with a full spread of laboratory paraphernalia that somehow included two more microscopes than John had been aware that Sherlock even owned, and several racks of test tubes filled with various substances. Chemistry and labs had never been John's strongest area—he understood the basics, of course, but he'd been happy to leave all that behind in medical school to focus on the more hands on aspects of medicine. John had always preferred dealing with living patients in a bustling hospital or the field to the cold, impersonal equipment tucked away in a sterile lab.

A small smile settled on John's mouth as he stood in the doorway to the kitchen and watched Sherlock hover from one microscope to the next with the growing agitation of an impending revelation. This was Sherlock in his element, buzzing over his laboratory like an excited bee over a field of clover. The impersonal equipment that put John off spoke to Sherlock in his native tongue – science. Sherlock hardly looked the part of a proper scientist at the moment, however, with a dressing gown wrapped around him and presumably still nothing but pants on underneath since the man had been too impatient to put on proper clothes after stripping out of his soaking wet ones. His hair had gone all fluffy from the rain and was particularly unruly this morning.

Eventually John wandered over, giving the table a wide berth. As he passed Sherlock, he experimentally let his hand brush the back of the busy scientist's neck. It was the sort of absently affectionate gesture that he wouldn't have thought twice about in any of his past relationships, but Sherlock was a rule unto himself. John wouldn't have been surprised if Sherlock flinched away and hissed at him for intruding on his experiments, so he counted it as a win that Sherlock didn't respond at all.

"Tea or coffee?" John asked as he made his way to the sink. He didn't bother waiting for a reply as he answered himself, "Coffee, I think. You've barely slept all week."

"Of course," Sherlock said abruptly, jumping up and striding over to his laptop on the desk where he began typing rapidly.

John shook his head as he dug out the coffee from a cabinet and set about making the strongest brew they had. He couldn't decide if he was disappointed or thrilled that he still had the same mercurial, difficult Sherlock he'd always had to deal with in the midst of a particularly consuming case. To be perfectly honest, John was mostly relieved. He doubted he could have handled it if Sherlock had suddenly become a doting sop, making eyes at him over dead bodies and spouting poetry instead of cutting observations. The very idea was a bit horrifying.

When John exited the kitchen with a mug of coffee he'd ruined with an excess of sugar just for a certain prickly genius with a sweet tooth, he found said genius still hunched over his laptop. Next to Sherlock on the desk was the book of poetry, written entirely in French with a title that John could barely pronounce. Of course the words flowed off Sherlock's tongue like honey, because the man was like a bloody pocket translator. John wasn't sure how many languages Sherlock was actually fluent in— probably all of them.

The book was laid open to a particular passage that appeared to have been underlined in a dark ink that bled into the page slightly where it had been exposed to the rain:

Le loup criait sous les feuilles

En crachant les belles plumes

De son repas de volailles:

Comme lui je me consume. *

"That looks promising," John remarked as he set the mug down at Sherlock's elbow. He was fairly certain that if anyone could identify a murderer from one single line of ink on paper, it was Sherlock Holmes.

"Sloppy," Sherlock muttered, sounding almost disappointed as he shut the lid on the laptop abruptly. He glanced down at the coffee and then up at John, blinking as though only just realizing John had entered the room. Sherlock picked the mug up and took a long, thoughtful sip from it before he said, "I need you to go to Bart's and pick up the preliminary autopsy findings. They'll have looked over it by now, at least."

"Can't you just have it emailed?" John asked with a frown, not especially eager to go running about London before he'd even had breakfast.

"No."

John waited for him to elaborate, but Sherlock infuriatingly just stood up and walked back to the kitchen with his coffee. John bit back a surge of annoyance. Even though he knew that he'd goaded Sherlock to solve the case quickly and therefore had no right to complain when the detective sunk deeply into his own head to do it, being treated like an occasionally useful prop was never John's favourite part of the process. John supposed he'd been a bit spoiled lately, since over the past year or so Sherlock had been noticeably more inclusive and had begun letting John into his head more than he ever used to before. Being so abruptly shut out now grated a little.

Still, it was fine. Whatever worked, so long as by the end of this a murderer was behind bars and Sherlock was in bed with John. Just because he was glad that Sherlock's impossible personality hadn't significantly changed didn't mean he wasn't keen to have the man's body eager and pliant against his own again... Clearing his throat, John shook his head and returned to the kitchen.

"I don't suppose this can wait until I've had some toast—" John had barely finished his sentence when Sherlock looked over at him with an expression of horror that most people reserved for watching helpless puppies run over in the street. John sighed, resigned to his fate. "Fine."

-

**from Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. Translation:
Beneath the bush a wolf will howl
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
I, like him, devour myself.