Everything Else is Transport

Chapter 1

It was a windy, rainy sort of day in the middle of September, which felt a lot more like the end of October than anything. It was cold, and the rain passed the windows of 221 B Baker Street in horizontal bursts. John Watson leaned his forehead against the cold windowpane, looking up and down the street at the few people who were braving the weather, armed with umbrellas and ponchos.

"No one will come today."

John didn't look up. "They might."

"Or," Sherlock protested blandly, "they might not."

The kettle in the kitchen was just coming to the boil, so John tore himself away from the window. Sherlock was sitting perched in his chair, in an awkward squatting position that could not have been very comfortable after a while. He had, however, stayed in the same position for the last four hours, without even shifting his weight. Maybe he was stuck, John mused as he strode past and into the kitchen.

It was for once scrupulously clean, surgically clean in fact. There was not a single thing out on the table, the worktops, and even the stove was scrubbed clean. At first, the change had been a pleasant one, when John had stumbled in earlier that morning, but it was slowly starting to get on his nerves. He had had to dig the kettle out of the wardrobe, and found the tea in one of the slippers Sherlock usually kept stuffed with stale tobacco. That Sherlock was the one to have done this was clear, though not at first glance. As a practice of deduction, John had ruled Mrs Hudson out as the culprit, as whenever she cleaned for them (which was rarely) she always used cleaning products with a wide variety of chemically produced scents, and always left some sort of heart-warming decoration on the table, like a doily, a nice sugar bowl or just a flower in a tea-cup. No, this had Sherlock written all over it. The total odourlessness of the room has troubling, to say the least; it was reminiscent of an operating room, or a laboratory. That he had started to think like Sherlock, or how he imagined he might think, was at least equally troubling.

From the start of the morning, when he had first noted this bizarre change in housekeeping habits, John had decided that he would not, under any circumstance ask why, because he had a very distinct feeling that not only was the answer going to be unhelpful, it was also most likely going to be both insulting and only lead to more questions he wasn't really sure he wanted to either ask or know the answer to. However, as all the contents of the kitchen, including the lab equipment, had instead been placed seemingly at random in the apartment to the point where the only free surface was the one Sherlock had claimed for his perch, the curiosity was gnawing with increasing force.

"Did you do all of this last night?" he blurted out before he managed to stop himself. He braced himself for the answer by putting his mug down on the worktop and gripping the edge of it.

"I did. What, don't you like it?"

Well, two out of three wasn't bad. It was both unhelpful and only invited more questions. Insulting couldn't be far behind then.

"No, no, I like drinking tea I found in your slipper from a mug I found in the bathtub. Thank you, I guess."

"I didn't do it for you," said Sherlock quickly, clearly wanting John to continue asking so that he would be able to explain all the fantastic reasoning that lay behind the midnight cleaning-fit. John was too familiar with the pattern to actually fall into the trap once again; it only ever ended with him telling Sherlock how amazing and brilliant he was without knowing exactly how they got there. The gnawing curiosity only got stronger, though.

"I'm not going to ask you why you did it, you know."

"No, why would you?" asked Sherlock with a voice that he implied both that he thought that it was obvious beyond words, and that he knew that John didn't think it was obvious at all. It was not a rhetorical question, and even though John couldn't see Sherlock, he was certain that he was expected to respond.

"You are preparing… for… for a…" John started, trying to make it up as he went along, but found that he only made himself look like a bigger prat than if he had gone along with Sherlock's planned scenario from the beginning. He could almost hear the patronising, smug smile through the wall. "Did you do this just to mess with me, or did you have an actual purpose? Fuck."

He had cracked; he had walked straight into the trap that had been so obviously laid out. He was a weak man, and he felt even weaker as he automatically filled a cup for Sherlock and went to give it to him. He still hadn't moved, but nodded towards a foot-tall pile of papers on the small table next to the chair. John made a start to remove the papers, only to be forcefully thrown to the floor before his fingers touched the papers. The tea went flying out of his hands. Gasping for breath, he tried to clear his head, but only managed to splutter and gasp, as the pressure didn't ease from his chest. Sherlock had sprung like some kind of predator from the chair, catching John completely unaware and now held him put with a knee hard in the chest, effectively keeping him from regaining his breath.

"Are you high?" John coughed in exasperation and panic. It had been a purely rhetorical question.

"No. Good idea though," Sherlock said and smiled the kind of smile that made John wince at the prospect of some new hell he would be put through. He did however get up and let John get back up into a sitting position. He started towards the bookcase, for an expensive-looking leather case the size of a book.

"It wasn't a suggestion," John groaned in a tetchy voice, as the case was zipped open.

Sherlock's cocaine use was an annoying habit John had learnt to tolerate if not accept. What bothered him the most wasn't the abuse of narcotics, which he actually didn't mind that much, but how awfully cavalier he was about it. It was bothering him that Sherlock's inclination to cocaine wasn't a dependency, which would have been easier both to condemn and condone, but just something he did, like biting his nails. The only thing more provoking than a man who claimed to stand above trivialities like addiction was someone who actually did. While the drug-use certainly came and went depending on cases and workload, those slumps of tedium could often last for several months, at which time he sometimes would inject (in the case of cocaine, which was by far the most usual) up to three times a day, always the same dosage. Then an interesting case would invariably turn up, and he went off the drugs completely without showing any signs of withdrawal. This also happened when Mycroft did his occasional drug raid, and the lack of withdrawal-related symptoms concerned John almost more as a medical man than as a friend.

"The brain is like a muscle, if it is not flexed it will atrophy," Sherlock explained as he very calmly spread the leather case open on the large stack of paper. He had obviously seen John's disapproving glares, since he had done no effort to disguise them.

"Yeah, we both know that's not true. And the brain isn't a muscle," John grunted and got to his feet, still a bit shaky.

"I didn't say that the brain is a muscle, I said the brain was like a muscle."

"Which isn't true either."

"Would you like some?" he asked in the voice of someone who offered a cup of tea.

"No. Thank you," John added gruffly and ran his fingers through his hair.

John had always thought himself a man of integrity, and was very rarely swayed by peer pressure, but watching Sherlock assemble his kit, filling the syringe with the pre-made solution (he never made the solution before using) with the same calm domestic attitude as he did when sorting through bills made him feel like a younger brother who desperately wanted to do whatever his older brother did, just because he did it. He wanted to be as strong, as certain on his character, as to know that he wouldn't become addicted. Damn it. He kicked himself mentally as the medically trained side of him tried to reasonably explain that addiction had nothing to do with strength of character. But it had to come down to will power in the end, didn't it? How else could he just breeze through?

"Your loss," Sherlock muttered. He rolled up his sleeve, and strapped on a tourniquet he had clearly stolen from St. Bart's, and made yet another track mark with the same detached focus as John when administering a vaccine shot.

John reached for his tea, to have something to hide behind as he glanced at Sherlock with the needle. Sadly, the mug was shattered on the floor by the fireplace from the tackle.

He wanted to turn away, but as a medical man he found the following oddly fascinating. Sherlock removed the tourniquet with the ease of a man untying his shoes, flexed his arm to encourage the blood to circulate. As the cocaine worked its way through his system, he took a deep breath and let it out between his teeth. Then he hopped up, packed up the kit, zipped the case up and put it back in the shelf, next to a leather-bound copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

"So what should we do today?" he asked as he put the needle in the HAZMAT bin in the kitchen, which was kept next to the recycling.

It was as though nothing had happened. He was just normal. Well, as normal as Sherlock ever was. The word freak inadvertently popped into his head. There was no way he could be normal, could it, if there was no difference between him sober and all… coked up? John had seen people, and good people at that, ruin their lives trying to handle a habit Sherlock considered 'a bit of mental stimulation'.

"I can't believe that people do this for fun," Sherlock said matter-of-factly, pinching the bridge of his nose, clearly feeling the full effects of the drug. "What must their normal state of mind be?"

"Not a very nice state of mind at all, I would imagine," John answered coolly.

Sherlock shrugged non-committally. "Let's go out."

"No, it's freezing out there."

"We won't stay outside."

"Yes, I know, but we'll end up at a train station, and I'll be bored."

"You'll be bored?" Sherlock asked with a raised eyebrow. "I think there might be some cocaine left, if you'd care to help yourself to some."

"That's not what I meant."

"I find that narcotics provide a perfectly adequate relief from boredom."

"Well, I don't." John folded his arms.

"I said adequate, not acceptable."

"Either way."

"I might have some morphine as well, somewhere…"

"I don't want any drugs. Of any kind."

"Then stop whinging and get your coat. We're going to Victoria Station."