A/N: For Ellipsis52. Please enjoy!
"It's broken."
"No," drawled Sherlock disbelievingly, squinting at John through the steady rainfall. "It would hurt more if it was broken."
John's lips were a thin line as he probed Sherlock's forearm with his fingertips. The site was already beginning to swell. He palpated the break carefully.
Sherlock yelped.
"Broken," John pronounced again, scanning the suddenly tense face of his flatmate with a grim sigh. He stood from his crouched position, blue eyes scanning the fresh crime scene for Lestrade. When he managed to catch the DI's eye, he shook his head vehemently, to indicate that Sherlock would be of no further help here. This elicited a confused frown from Lestrade, who immediately excused himself from a conversation with a constable and hurried over.
"What's this then?" Greg asked looking down at Sherlock, clearly bemused.
The consulting detective was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, cradling his injured arm in his good one. The rain was soaking him clean through, and the look he gave Lestrade could only be described as plaintive.
"Broken arm," John said, when Sherlock did not seem inclined to explain. "He'll need to go to hospital."
"He can't give a statement first?" Lestrade asked, hunching his shoulders slightly as though he expected John to hit him.
John nearly did. "No, he cannot."
"Eh," Lestrade sighed, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "At least when he chose to fall from a third-story window, he aimed for my suspect." He flashed a grin.
"Thank heavens for that," agreed John.
The true test of how well a person knows their flatmate lies in the filling out of medical forms on their behalf. Such a situation might arise if said flatmate is incapacitated severely enough to warrant a trip to A&E and has somehow lost use of their dominant hand. This was the situation John had suddenly found himself in.
"Who's your GP?"
"You."
"Sherlock, I'm not your GP."
"You put sutures in my head two weeks ago, treated me for flu three weeks before that, insisted upon bandaging a stab wound early last month, along with a full round of antibiotics, and – "
"Yes, okay, fine," John interrupted, writing his own name into the provided space. "Blood type A positive... No pre-existing conditions... No allergies... Right? Allergies?"
"None."
"Right then..."
"This is ridiculous," Sherlock spat suddenly. Pain was making him cranky.
"What is?"
"This! Can't you just... do what you do, and have done with it?" He fluttered his uninjured hand to indicate John's doctorly voodoo.
"No, Sherlock. You need X-rays, you need the bone set, you need a cast. I can't do any of that."
"What kind of doctor are you?"
Just as John was considering violating his hippocratic oath, a nurse appeared in the waiting area doorway and chirped, "Sherlock Holmes?"
"Crepes."
John looked up from his magazine and narrowed his eyes at his flatmate. Sherlock was comfortably arranged on a hospital cot with an IV going into his uninjured arm, pumping painkillers into his veins. This had been going on for some minutes. At first Sherlock had protested, with all the usual exclamations of ridiculous and pointless and boring as he was being cannulated. The nurse was incredibly patient and perplexingly chipper in spite of all this. After the job was done and she left, Sherlock settled for muttering unsavoury deductions about everyone who passed by the foot of his bed. Then, thankfully, he was quiet for precisely ninety seconds. This was about the time that his eyes became glassy and his breathing evened into a slow, lazy rhythm through a slightly slack jaw.
Then he said, "Crepes."
For a few moments after, John chewed his lip. Do I open this can of worms? he wondered. He decided he would, and gently laid the magazine aside, steeling himself. "Crepes?"
Sherlock looked piqued by John's voice. "Mm?"
"You said, 'crepes'. What about them?"
Sherlock nodded slowly, his expression mild and relaxed. "Flour, eggs, milk, butter. Sugar." He giggled. "Sugar."
Again, John was at a loss. "Hungry?"
"What? No. No, of course not. Are you?"
"...No..." John eyed his friend suspiciously.
The doctor – the proper doctor, the one who could do X-rays and set bones and apply casts – appeared then. She was a pleasant woman, plump and smiling and waving an envelope containing Sherlock's films. "Mr. Holmes," she greeted, stepping around the privacy divider. She gave John a polite nod. "I've just seen your films – looks like a clean break. We'll just set it and cast it and you'll be off."
"She's pretty, John," said Sherlock. He leaned toward John conspiratorially, despite the fact he was speaking in a normal voice. "Red hair, blue eyes, light skin and just the right proportion of body fat to her height – she's your type. You should ask her out, John. She's a doctor. A doctor, John! You would have things to talk about."
It was John who coloured then, not the pretty red-headed doctor. "Sherlock, shut it." He smiled politely at the doctor.
"But – but John! John, she's a doctor." Sherlock said this last word in a stage whisper, as though there was any hope of hiding the conversation from his practitioner.
"Sorry," John muttered helplessly, now unable to even look at her. He focussed on a green floor tile, fixated upon it.
"S'alright," the young redhead said easily. "The drugs would make anyone loopy. Well, if you don't have any questions, I'll meet you in a room in a couple of minutes. A nurse will be round to take you there."
"John," Sherlock whined. "She's pretty. By your standards anyway. And a redhead! John! John! John?"
"I get... to pick... the colour?"
"Oh god," John moaned quietly, "please don't let him pick the colour, please just slap something on and – "
"Of course you get to pick the colour!" the nurse chimed in a voice far too high-pitched to be real.
"Black!" Sherlock cried, his face determined and his good hand balled into a fist of triumph. "So that when I am pursuing London's hardened criminals into the night, they will not notice my weakness! Then I will strike them in the brain pan with my cast."
"Brain pan?" John echoed.
"Or blue! Like John's eyes." Sherlock paused to bat his eyelashes at John. "Or orange! No, no – green. Green, John!"
The nurse was beaming. "There's a glow-in-the-dark one!" she chimed in, before John could stop her.
"Glow in the dark..." Sherlock's eyes widened in wonder. "Oh... my god..."
John snorted. "Giving up on the idea of using the cast as a weapon, then?"
"Of course not, John, don't be daft. A glow-in-the-dark weapon is still a weapon, only better, because it glows!" He made a bashing-someone-over-the-head motion with his uninjured arm.
"Uh, Sherlock, I don't think you'll be doing any hardened-criminal-chasing until your arm's healed," said John gently.
Sherlock's head lolled back on the exam table, and he looked at John with great, big, wet doe's eyes. "Will you make my tea for me? While my arm is in a cast?"
"...I already make your tea, Sherlock."
"Hmm, true." The detective's eyelids fluttered and he grinned softly, as though he were looking back on a fond memory. "John loves me," he blurted without warning.
John pursed his lips and glanced once at the pretty nurse, once at the pretty doctor, and then back at Sherlock, and wondered why everyone in the room was so pretty. It was not the first time someone had made vaguely homosexual implications about him aloud – Mrs. Hudson couldn't seem to pass a week without one or two escaping her lips – but it was the first time Sherlock had done so. "Platonically," he added.
Sherlock pouted. "Don't you love me?"
"Platonically," repeated John.
"Tectonically, I love you too."
"Platonically, Sherlock. Means non-romantically."
"John, this is bromance."
"What?"
Some hours later, they ended up back at the flat, whereupon Sherlock collapsed upon the couch and slept off the rest of the drugs in relative quiet. Why he couldn't have done that at the hospital, John would never know, but he was certain that he would have to strike that particular hospital off the list of potential places to go when he couldn't treat himself or Sherlock on his own. He was also certain that he would never see the pretty doctor again, and it was a damn shame.
Still, John was at least satisfied that he'd actually succeeded in delivering Sherlock to an A&E with little fuss. So, there was a victory to be had, even if it was a small one.
Later that night, he was rearranging the events of the afternoon for appropriate presentation in his blog, when Sherlock stirred on the couch with a groan, sat up, and promptly said, "Crepes."
John felt his heart sink into the vicinity of his intestines. "What did you say?"
"Crepes," Sherlock said again. "I said 'crepes'. Why did I say that?"
"You... You don't remember?"
"Remember what?"
"A... conversation about crepes, from earlier? From the hospital?" John watched his friend carefully.
"I remember very little from the hospital," replied Sherlock, clearly annoyed by this fact. "Aside from the obscenely long time we were kept waiting and the insistence that I needed pain management, which I clearly did not." He huffed in dissatisfaction, and then clamped his good hand down over his stomach. "I am famished."
"I'll fix you something,stay put." John scampered to the kitchen – scampered, not walked, because he was quite pleased that Sherlock remembered nothing of their conversations at the hospital – and fixed tea and toast. He returned to a sour-looking flatmate, and explained kindly, "Try this first, the painkillers might make you a bit queasy. If you keep it down, we'll try something stronger."
Soon, it became evident that the detective's grimace of displeasure was not in response to the meal that Jon had prepared, but to the limp L-shape of plaster that used to be his arm. Tearing his eyes away from it, however, he looked up at John and accepted what was offered, his stomach growling audibly. "Thank you," he murmured, and promptly knocked over his tea with the unwieldy cast.
John had an epiphany then, and it consisted of this: I am in for a very long six weeks.
There was a hole in the wall. John was staring at it as though it would talk, and tell him of its reason for existing, but it did not, and so he was forced to look at his flatmate, who was standing beside him and also staring at the hole.
"It's this thing!" Sherlock cried, waving his arm about. He nearly took John's head off with the cast in the process of this demonstration. "I can't do a thing with it. It's only been a week, John, how am I meant to survive for another five? This isn't going to work. I can't type, I can't hold a gun, I can't even tie my shoes – take it off. Take it off!"
"I can't take it off," John said for the hundredth time. "And you could tie your shoes, if you tried. Your fingers are completely free, if you practise, you – "
"It hurts," Sherlock whined.
"What do you need shoes for, anyway!" John cried. "You aren't supposed to be working cases, you don't have a proper job otherwise, and you don't do the shopping – so why on earth would you need to leave the flat at all?"
"Who says I'm leaving the flat?"
"If you're not, then you don't need shoes on!"
"I like my shoes! They are expensive and Italian and fit me very well."
"And they make you taller," John offered.
Sherlock had nothing to say to this.
For a long time, they stood staring at the hole in the wall in silence. John was in disbelief that Sherlock had made that hole with a plaster cast that was surrounding a newly broken bone. Sherlock was in disbelief that John didn't appreciate his shoes.
John heaved a sigh of resignation. Up to this point, it had been relatively easy to keep Sherlock from finding out that his cast could glow in the dark. The injury still caused him quite a bit of pain, especially toward the end of the day, so he usually took his prescribed painkillers right after dinner and then passed out on the couch. He also seemed to be sleeping until morning because of the medicine, so at no point was he ever really alone in the dark with his cast. John had kept this a secret from him out of pure, unadulterated spite, but now he thought it might be time for the big reveal.
"Maybe this will make you feel better," said John, as he went to the windows. He drew the drapes and then trudged across the room to turn off the lamps.
The cast glowed a brilliant green in the darkness of the flat.
Sherlock 'oohed' and 'aahed' for a moment.
"You may not perform experiments on the cast," John clarified.
"No," Sherlock agreed. "But, John, get a thick black marker. We are going to play Pictionary. In the dark."
John suppressed a groan. There were worse things.