A/N: Fill for a prompt presented by the lovely and talented Lemon Zinger. As follows:
It's one of those nights when it's too hot to sleep. What do [Sherlock and John] do to pass the night?
There were eleven cracks in the ceiling. There were forty-two individual floorboards visible between the edge of the bed and the door. There were nine drawers in the dresser. There were six items upon the bedside table: a watch, a mobile phone, a glass of water, a lamp, a book, and a coin. There was one drawer in that table, as well, with eight sets of socks in the drawer.
And John was running out of things to count. That was what he did when he couldn't sleep. He stared at the ceiling or the floor and he counted tiles or lines or cracks. Only this time he had not fallen asleep and so he'd moved on to counting other things, and now when he felt he had counted and catalogued every single bloody object in the room, he was growing frustrated and increasingly restless. It was not normally quite this hard for him to fall asleep, especially after a difficult case like the one they had just closed, but tonight it was just... hot.
Climate control in Baker Street was something of a game of chance. When it worked, it worked wonderfully; but more often than not, it simply didn't work. John had never paid it much mind. Sherlock seemed impervious to normal human discomforts, and he himself was pretty adaptable. The problem, then, was that this time he was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sleep, but this damnable heat seemed to have gotten into his very bones.
Up to this point, John had tried everything. He'd turned his pillow over, thrown off the bedclothes, stripped naked, pulled the cool sheets back on, turned on a fan, opened the window... Nothing helped.
You're being ridiculous, he thought to himself. You spent a year in Afghanistan. It was hot there. You must have slept sometimes.
Yes, his brain answered slimily, but this is not Afghanistan. You aren't focussed on more important things like not getting your head blown off, so there's processing power left to think about things like the heat and the humidity and the sickening way your skin sticks to itself from the sweat.
"Oh, to hell with it," John growled to his empty bedroom. He reached over and clicked on the bedside lamp, peeling himself away from the tangled sheets as his fingers began groping for his clothes. He dressed himself and sat in front of the fan for a moment, allowing the welcome breeze to dry the sweat from his face and neck. His t-shirt was already starting to adhere to his chest. He felt like a living, breathing ball of grime.
As he padded downstairs, he could hear muffled sounds of movement. He peered into the hallway as his feet hit the main floor. Sherlock was standing in the threshold of the bathroom, wearing pyjama bottoms and no shirt. He was leaning his head against the doorjamb, lips parted and gaze vacant underneath a shock of dark, wet curls. He looked rather faint.
John raised an eyebrow.
"Cold shower," Sherlock murmured by way of explanation.
John had to admit it wasn't a terrible idea, but knew that his flatmate probably felt the heat all the more now for having just stepped from the chilly water. For his part, he would not be making a similar mistake. They could weather this, and after all, this was London – for all they knew, it would snow in an hour!
"Couldn't sleep?" Sherlock said now, fixing a level gaze on John.
Why are you asking when you already know the answer? John thought irritably. He kept his mouth shut and shook his head.
"Heat rises," the detective pointed out. "You may have better luck in my room, or on the sofa."
Sighing, John shook his head. "No point. It really isn't much cooler down here than it was up there."
Sherlock nodded knowingly and finally stepped from the bathroom. He walked past John and stood in the sitting room, and seemed to cast about for what to do, apparently lost. John had heard him try to sleep earlier, too. For once. But Sherlock's attempts had been even shorter-lived than his own, the detective rising after just forty-five restless minutes. John remembered listening to him groan his disapproval, slip from his bed, and begin his aimless prowl about the flat.
Slogging through the humid air, John went to the sofa and collapsed into it. He found the remote sandwiched between a cushion and a jar of diseased liver segments, and clicked on the television.
The reporter onscreen was pretty, but she wore a grim expression. "London's heat wave still shows no signs of letting up as – "
And that was as far as she got before John shut it off again.
Silence snaked through the flat.
"We have to do something to take our minds off it," John said after an extended pause.
Sherlock glanced wistfully toward the microscope on the dining table, swaying slightly as he spoke. "We could dissect cancerous fish scales."
"You could dissect cancerous fish scales." Normally, John might have had something more intelligent to say, but his brain was addled. He realised that the sofa cushions enveloping him seemed to make him even warmer, and his exposed skin was sticking to the upholstery.
Sticking. Sticky. Stuck. Word of the day.
With a long, ragged sigh, John separated himself from the furniture and stalked toward the kitchen. Defiantly, he yanked open the door to the refrigerator and stood basking in the cool air that billowed out. For several blissful moments, he didn't even think about the electricity bill. But then, eventually, he laid eyes upon the – well, eyes – that were sitting placidly in a petri dish on the top shelf. Next to what looked like a human brain in a vat of formaldehyde. Beside some canned fingers. Alongside a plateful of esophagus. John was used to the occasional head in the icebox, but –
"Sherlock, the fridge is full of body parts."
If Sherlock intuited what the tight control in John's voice meant, he didn't show it. "They won't keep in this heat!" he cried. Shouldn't that be obvious? "I had to put them somewhere!" By now he had appeared at John's side, the jar of diseased liver in hand. He hovered at John's shoulder, waiting for him to politely move out of the way, and when he didn't, he gave a long-suffering sigh and leaned around him to place the jar in beside the fingers. As he did, his chest pressed into John's outstretched arm, and his sweaty skin slimed across John's own moist flesh.
"Oh pardon me, am I in the way?" John snapped.
"Yes.
"Okay?"
"Okay what?"
"You could speak, you know, instead of just waiting for me to accommodate, you lazy, self-centred clod!"
Sherlock appeared put-out by the sudden, unwarranted insult.
Silence again, and this time it crashed instead of snaked. Slowly, Sherlock peeled himself away and slunk to his fish scales. John stepped out of the cool embrace of the fridge and closed it. He stood staring at the closed refrigerator door. Sherlock, for his part, seemed to be staring through the fish scales rather than at them.
For a long time, no one spoke.
"I'm going to take a shower," John said to the refrigerator.
Neither of them moved.
"Right." With a huff, John started to go, but stopped up short in alarm as Sherlock shot up from his chair and clamped a hand around John's wrist, pulling him away from the refrigerator.
"No," the detective said with authority. "That would be pointless." He let go John's arm and opened the fridge, swiftly removing several articles and tossing them into a canvas bag that lived on the worktop beside.
John realised with unending annoyance that Sherlock had pulled him out of the way to continue to avoid politely excusing himself like a normal person. He started to consider being angry all over again.
"Come with me!" Sherlock commanded sharply. Again his fingers closed around John's wrist.
It was with great surprise that John realised he was being led toward the door. "You're not dressed," he observed. "And neither am I. And I haven't got my keys."
"Now you have," Sherlock said, snatching them off the hook by the door. He deftly placed them into the right pocket of John's pyjama bottoms and shouldered the canvas bag, leading his flatmate out of the door.
John was silent until they reached the street and started walking. "Where are we going?" he demanded.
"Hush." The moon lit Sherlock's angular features with a stark glow that somehow seemed to suit him. His fingers twitched around John's wrist, then shifted to grip his hand instead as they walked. They rounded the block and soon found themselves on the wrong side of their building. Sherlock let go John's hand now and passed him the bag before setting his shoulder against a door that read 'service entrance'.
The door gave with surprising ease, but both of them were drenched in sweat as they stumbled through it. The exertion of their short walk had worsened their collective calefaction, and now every brief contact they had with one another was muculent and waxy.
Beyond the service door was another service door, which read Speedy's, and a stairwell. The stairwell was not guarded or hidden behind a locked door, and Sherlock hummed his approval. "Come," he said swiftly, taking the canvas bag from John and preceding him up the stairs.
There were several flights of these stairs. John found himself stopping frequently to catch his breath, which seemed to enter his lungs sluggishly. It was terribly difficult to coax the oxygen from its humid environment; even Sherlock showed signs of strain as they reached the final landing.
Sherlock pushed the door open and John was greeted by the moon and the bright lights of London stretching out before him.
They'd emerged on the roof.
"Heat rises," John pointed out, but there was not much feeling in his voice. It couldn't possibly be hotter on the roof than it was in their cramped flat, and at least he could be reasonably certain there were no human remains to be stumbled upon up here. He followed Sherlock through the doorway, holding it open for a moment while Sherlock found a brick with which to prop the automatically-locking door. Then the two of them strode to the middle of the structure and stopped, surveying their new domain.
In an apparent gesture of approval, Sherlock set down the bag and threw himself down beside it, stretching out on his back with no regard for how the filth on the roof would stick to his sweat-slicked back as he lay shirtless against it.
John sighed sharply. He very much wanted to continue being sour and angry and bitter, but if even Sherlock couldn't manage to keep that up, then how could he be expected to do any different? With a final glance around, John lowered himself beside Sherlock and sat back, bracing his weight on his hands so that he could crane his neck and squint up at the clear midnight sky.
The rustle of fabric beside him caught his attention, and his eyes slid down to observe Sherlock emptying the canvas bag. He had squirreled a couple of containers of strawberries into it, and now he pried the lid off one before popping one of the red berries into his mouth and settling back down.
"Strawberries," John said, his voice faint with exhaustion. He picked one from the container and nibbled on the end. "On the roof. In the middle of the night."
"Mm."
"Now Mrs. Hudson won't be persuaded that we're not a couple."
Sherlock laughed, and it was a deep, rumbling, musical thing. "I'm not sure she ever could have been."
They both crunched into a few more ripe berries as the sounds of late-night traffic floated through the shimmering, superheated air.
"I'm sorry I called you a lazy, self-centred clod."
To this, Sherlock did not have a response, but he reached out with red-stained fingers and patted John's bent knee.
It wasn't cooler on the roof, and the strawberries quickly soaked up the seeping heat, making them mushy and unpleasant to eat. Somehow, though, the boys of 221b ended up lying half-awake on the roof, hazy eyes on the sky, as the sun started to peek up beyond the horizon with the threat of another sweltering day to come. For now, however, they had at least survived another night.
And it's better than counting ceiling tiles, John thought drowsily as the sky became grey with pre-dawn light.