In the Negative
"Are you okay?"
"No."
The one word answer was abrupt, and infinitely more poignant than it should have been. 'No' was a word that was thrown out often in everyday life. No, really! No, thank you. No, don't do that. But when it was Sherlock Holmes saying no to are you okay?, there was something wrong on a deeper level than John imagined he could understand.
"Okay," he said slowly, pushing open the door the rest of the way. Sherlock turned his head towards the wall and draped his arm over his eyes. John stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "What's going on?"
Sherlock's arm fell away from his face slowly, and his fingers curled into the blankets rumpled on the bed. He didn't speak, and his stayed glued on the ceiling.
"You haven't left your room in three days, which is a bit of a stretch, even for you," John needled. "I mean, I just want to know if you're okay-"
"I said I'm not."
John frowned. "What's wrong?"
Sherlock tilted his head, catching the edge of John's gaze. He was silent for a long moment before grunting a nonexplanatory sort of noise, and waving his hand towards the heavens.
"Sherlock-"
"I don't know, okay?" Sherlock dropped his hand again. "I just..." His eyes flickered around the nondescript ceiling. "There's no cases."
"Yeah..." John said slowly. "But you have those experiments, right? The ones you started a few days ago with the-"
"No," Sherlock interrupted.
"What?"
"No. No, I need a case. ... A case." His eyes never left the ceiling. It looked like he had barely left the bed as a whole, judging from his hair and the wrinkles in his pyjamas. "I just... can't."
"Why not?"
"I can't, alright?" Sherlock snapped, and John took a metaphorical step back. He'd touched a line, one that Sherlock seemed to realise a split second after he retorted. The look that crossed his face wasn't exactly regret nor irritation, but a cross between the two, with the slightest hint of apology in his foggy eyes. "I can't," he repeated, as his eyes fluttered shut and he sighed.
John licked his lips and stepped away from the doorway, finally crossing the room. "What can I do?"
"Mmm." Sherlock twisted his fingers into the blankets again. "Nothing. Really. I just..." He trailed off, and swallowed. His voice was small when he continued: "need".
"Need what?"
"I don't know. I don't know, I don't know." Sherlock wrapped his arms around his head, rolling over.
"Hey." John reached over, hesitated, and then gripped his shoulder. He never knew, really, but Sherlock didn't flinch from the touch this time. "It's okay. You're okay."
"That... is currently debateable." And Sherlock would be the only one who could manage to sound simultaneously loathing and near tears at the same time. His fingers were curled into his hair, though, twisting and untwisting the already frazzled locks.
"Okay. Um." John rubbed idly at Sherlock's shoulder, unconsciously falling into a synchronous pattern with Sherlock twisting his hair. He was trying to think of something that would not only distract the detective from the tedium, amongst any other things, but something that wouldn't bore him as well. Mindless telly wouldn't cut it, not that it often did.
But then he was reminded of something, something he'd seen on a craft show the other week too early in the morning when they didn't sleep because of cases and... now he remembered why he had bothered to remember it.
"Stay here," he said to Sherlock, and squeezed his shoulder before turning away. He caught Sherlock's shaky exhale and glanced around the room, smiling to himself when he spotted a wrist coil keychain amongst Sherlock's tat. "Here." He hooked it off the desk and tossed it to Sherlock, who didn't make an effort to catch it but picked it up after it fell to the blankets. "Hang tight," John said, and went to get his laptop from the sitting room table.
It only took a minute and a quick Questsearch to find what he was looking for. It took longer to actually find the things he wanted around the flat because of Sherlock's tendency to take things whenever it fancied him, and then not put them back. But after a few minutes, he had found the all purpose glue and the starch, and the food colouring, which was behind the toaster for some odd reason. And a quick pop down to 221A and Mrs Hudson knowing better by now that questioning them was pointless, John walked back into Sherlock's room.
"Okay, come on."
Sherlock glanced up from pulling at the wrist coil, looking over his shoulder slightly at John. "What?"
"Come out here, I think I've got something you might enjoy."
Sherlock looked at him for another moment before letting go of the coil, and it bounced back to the skin of hist wrist with a snap. "What?" he asked, rolling out of bed. He stumbled on his feet and made his way over to John.
"Come on."
Sherlock followed him slowly. Warily, even, his eyes flicking across the hallway and the kitchen as they stepped into it. Like was he expecting some lavish scheme or something, but John knew better.
He pointed to the starch and glue. "There."
Sherlock stared at it for a moment, and then his head fell infinitesimally to the side.
"You can make your own play dough. Putty, actually," John explained. "And then, if you want, you can tell me all about how exactly it happens, because I don't get it, either, combining glue and starch, it sounds like a mess but it makes play putty. Saw in on the telly a couple weeks ago."
Sherlock stared at the starch and the glue. And then John.
Which, in turn, made him uncomfortable. "Uh... there's food colouring and, oh, got this from Mrs Hudson, I mean, if you're interested..." He fished the tube of glitter out of his pocket, shaking it slightly.
"Glitter," Sherlock breathed, and then shook his head quickly. "This really makes play dough." He blinked and sank into the chair, looking up at John. "Explain."
John smiled, leaning over his shoulder. "You need that whole thing of glue, pour it in there." He nudged the plastic bowl over. It would be binned later, or kept for this sort of thing, maybe.
"And add the starch." Sherlock screwed the cap off the glue, squeezing it out into the bowl. "How much?"
"Half of the amount of the glue, a tablespoon at a time." John leaned on the table. "What colour do you want?"
"Black wouldn't be good for glitter," Sherlock muttered. And we don't have black food colouring, John added mentally. "Blue. No. Orange." He nodded, and measured out the starch.
"Okay. Mix that up now, first. And then you keep adding more, afterwards."
"I've got it." Sherlock already had his hands in the bowl.
He'd gotten him out of his room, John thought. He'd gotten him to do something. He'd gotten him to make play putty.
Good day. Good day.
John pulled the chair out next to Sherlock to sit down and watch.
"Colour."
"Not yet. Wait until you've got more in there."
Sherlock huffed softly, and bit the cuff of his dressing gown to pull his sleeve up and out of the goop that would, with kneading, become putty in Sherlock's capable hands.
"Here." John reached over to fold his sleeve back.
"Thank you." Sherlock didn't look up from the bowl of glue and starch. He was going to make a terrible mess - already was, frankly, by the glue strewn across the table from his hands when he reached back to measure out more starch. But at least he was interested. "What's the glitter? Not extra fine? It gets everywhere and there's no texture to it."
"Flakes."
Sherlock glanced up. "Really?"
"Yeah."
Sherlock flexed his fingers in the putty. "... John, help me measure."
John smiled to himself and reached for the graduated cylinder to measure out the fifteen milliliters for another tablespoon.
AN: I keep trying my hand at Aspie!lock... and hopefully I'm not horrifically far off when it comes down it, that's my biggest fear that I'm writing it wrong. I don't want to offend anyone with wrong details. Alas. Huge thank you to whitchry9 (is that your name on here? :o) for answering lots of questions for me about Asperger's in general, and I highly recommend, if you haven't, to read her Aspie!lock stories.
As usual, I do not own Sherlock. Thanks for reading!