Hair Raising
"Don't touch him."
Sherlock ducked down the alley until he was in a pool of street light, then started rifling through his wallet.
"Are you listening, Sherlock?"
Seconds later he spun around and grabbed John's arse.
"Stop it!" John clapped both hands over his own bum. "What're you doing?"
Sherlock shoved his hands below John's hands and clutched. "Wallet John, wallet."
John Hamish Watson-Holmes stood to his full, stroppy height, which had the interesting and immediate effect of causing Sherlock to reduce his own. "A bribe," Sherlock hissed, "I need money for a bribe."
The good doctor stepped back, nodded curtly. "There, was that so hard? Words, just a few Sherlock, that's all I ask, now if—hey!"
Finished with contrition, Sherlock again groped his husband's behind, looking for—there!
Sherlock yanked John's wallet free, tugged out a few bills. "Twenty pounds will be enough, I'll give it back when we get home."
John laughed at the idea of Sherlock replacing anything at all ever—the cap on the toothpaste, twenty borrowed pounds, the sword in the stone if he'd happened on that. "Listen, I want you to—"
Sherlock was already heading down the alley but not so fast that John, teeth gritted, strop right back on, couldn't dart out a hand and snatch at the swirl of a coat hem.
"Gah!"
The great detective tripped, spun, scowled, hissed: "John Watson-Holmes if we lose this lead—"
A small man again deployed every inch of his smallness to shut a tall man right the hell up. "Don't. Touch. Him. Do you hear me?"
Sherlock huffed an acknowledgement that he heard. Then, pointedly glaring at John's pinch-fingered grip, he spun around and took off down the alley. If John was going to hang on to that hem he was going to be moving at speed very shortly.
But it was good, it was all good. By the time Sherlock got to the end of his coat—and the alley—John had let go and returned to the shadows, tossing his husband a double thumbs-up as the lanky git dashed across Victoria Embankment and toward the shadows of Waterloo bridge for his assignation with the informant.
And while he skirted traffic—flaring that damn coat so he looked bigger, much like a kitten will puff up to appear more powerful—the good doctor nodded to himself and knew, he absolutely knew with one hundred percent certainty that Sherlock was going to let the informant touch him.
...
"It's not like I didn't tell you."
"Shut up John."
John could shut up. However John was not going to shut up.
"Are you a doctor Sherlock?"
Sat forlorn in the middle of the tub, an aggrieved consulting detective tugged his bare legs to his naked chest, wrapped an unclothed arm around the lot, then dug the nails of the other hand into his scalp.
"I'll take that as a no." John smacked Sherlock's hand out of his curls.
"You may be a super-genius, and you may know exactly what to say to a larcenous stockbroker five weeks on the run and living under an abutment, and everyone at the Met may have given you a nod of approval on the speed with which you closed the case…"
As his husband pontificated Sherlock's other hand crept into his hair and he got a good, bloody scratch going before John pinched him.
"Ouch!"
"…but not one of you is a doctor. None of you are me. Now…" John snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, took a battle stance though on his knees tubside, "will you listen next time I tell you not to touch someone?"
Sherlock was about to answer that purely rhetorical question when Dr. Watson leaned forward and mashed a handful of creamy goo into Sherlock's hair.
"THAT BURNS!"
Even as long arms flailed, even as twelve and a half stone of naked outrage writhed beneath him, John Watson rubbed treacly, eye-stinging medication into his husband's inky locks.
"I told you not to touch him," the good doctor said in purely conversational tones.
"YOU'RE KILLING ME!"
The knuckles of one wildly-waving hand thumped John's head, a pointed elbow clipped him in the shoulder, but it wasn't until Sherlock knocked himself half-unconscious with a hard knee to his own temple that John got some well-deserved cooperation.
"I never tell you how to deduce, what bribes to pay, the sort of statement to give at the Met—"
"YES YOU DO!"
"—I let you do your job and all I ask is the common courtesy that you let me do mine."
"I CAN'T BREATHE!"
"If you'd just do that we wouldn't have to do this—"
Sherlock went fetal, slamming forehead to knees and arms around legs and he might have made huge, huge sounds of aggrievement but John was still on a roll.
"—and by that I mean if you'd just listen to my professional opinion when I tell you not to touch a man who has been living under a bridge for five weeks then—"
"I DIDN'T TOUCH HIM," Sherlock yelled in the vicinity of his solar plexus.
John rolled his eyes. "Head lice don't care who makes the first dance move, Sherlock. You touch him, he touches you, same difference to the head lice tango. All these bloody buggers care about is that one head gets near another and—"
"BLAH BLAH BLAH!" shouted Sherlock in the general direction of his itchy groin.
"Stand up you shouty, big baby."
Sherlock took a shaky-shuddery breath and whined, "I AM NOT A BIG BABY."
"And get your hand off your crotch."
Sherlock continued to scratch his privates. "IT ITCHES!"
"You can't get head lice in pubic hair."
Sherlock would beg to differ but he was entirely too disgruntled to give John the satisfaction of an argument. He just continued to maul his crotch with one hand and his head with the other.
"If you get that goo in your eyes you'll go instantly blind, so get your hands off your person and put the shower on and rinse out the treatment."
Sherlock was pretty sure John was lying about the blindness, but just-in-case he stopped scratching long enough to turn on the shower and it would be very true to say he was not even a little bit sorry the spray caught John in the eye.
"I'M SORRY JOHN!"
John was too busy swearing to reply.
...
"Do you feel better?"
Curled onto the sofa, back to the room, bare-naked spine radiating indignation, petulance, and also a desire for curry, Sherlock did not answer.
"I have no idea why you're angry at me, I didn't give you head lice. I tried to prevent you from getting head lice, so why this is my fault I really can't imagine. Yellow, green, or red?"
Sherlock lay very still, busy marshalling a fool-proof argument as to why all of this was John's fault. "Yellow please."
As John went to call in their curry order Sherlock brought to bear all of his considerable genius on figuring out how John could be blamed for the fact that his head felt funny, his crotch still itched, and maybe he was having trouble seeing out of his left eye. After a good and solid three minutes of super-geniusing—enough time for John to call in the order, turn on the telly, find something inane to watch, and also start scratching own head—Sherlock hit the nail on the head. "WORDS!"
John ignored the bellow from the belly of the sofa and said conversationally, "I got some nan. And papadums, too. I know how you like foods that shatter."
Ha. Now that Sherlock knew he had the entire upper hand he would not be diverted so easily (though he does quite like when comestibles surrender dramatically, and has been known to eat an entire half kilo of cinder toffee for the sheer joy of its brittle break between the teeth).
Still fetal-curled on the sofa—nude of course, because he felt it was more dramatic that way—Sherlock shouted again, "WORDS JOHN WATSON!"
John pondered. The food would be delivered in about twenty-five minutes. There was just rubbish on the telly. And John was bored. With a shrug the good doctor figured he might as well engage his toddler for the next little bit, being as there just was nothing much else to do.
"Yes, words, they are the simple, simple things I ask of you when—"
"YOU DIDN'T GIVE ME ENOUGH OF THEM!"
John pondered some more. If they were going to converse like civilised barbarians, the yelling would have to stop. "The yelling has to stop," John said conversationally, and then he added, somehow already knowing this discussion was not going to turn out as planned, "Explain."
Sherlock's curved spine straightened, his pert bum perted and John could feel the vulpine grin on Sherlock's face before he saw it.
The good detective rose to a seated position and said in purely conversational tones, "You didn't give me enough words, Watson, so this is all your fault—"
"What now?"
"—and let me tell you why."
I've never had Sherlock call John by his surname. Writing that sentence scandalised me completely. This story was inspired by the without-peer Chocolamousse who requested I expand on an entry in Minutiae 38, said entry inspired by Benedict saying he has extremely sensitive hair follicles. P.S. And yet, once again, a "Surely this'll be a brief one chapter fic," turns into a crack ode of so-far three chapters.