John was a patient man. He was no saint, certainly, he had his moments, but to survive Sherlock Holmes and emerge with any measure of sanity required an exceptional level of emotional stability. Even so, it got to him sometimes, it would get to anyone, the experimenting and the flippancy and the loud, late nights, but John had started a little game with himself to make things blow over a bit more easily.
He had begun keeping a running tally of all the things that he could do better than Sherlock could.
When the two had first met, John would have said there was nothing that Sherlock couldn't do if he put his mind to it, but he knew better now. He had seen the man behind the pompousness and the bluster and John, better than anyone, knew that Sherlock was in fact a mere mortal like the rest of us. He was sure. He had a list to prove it, and every time he could add an entry to that list, he would smile triumphantly and glance at Sherlock fondly and think of how best to use the realisation against his flatmate the next time he was being particularly annoying.
Open a jar.
Sherlock could not open a jar to save his life. John had an easy enough time of it, he met with the occasional toughie, but he had never encountered a lid that had bested him in the long run. Not so with Sherlock. Maybe it was the length of those pale fingers, maybe it was poor circulation, maybe it was the ever-present catalogue of burns and abrasions, but the common jam jar lid was one of Sherlock's most hated enemies. He had tried hand towels, hot water, even a square of textured latex rubber he had cut specifically for that purpose (John had never asked where the latex had come from) but if he could open one in ten of the jars and bottles he encountered, it was lucky. Never once had he asked John for help of course, he would never have dreamed of it, instead his strategy was simply this: 1) acquire jar 2) do battle with jar 3) if unsuccessful, become increasingly violent with jar 4) if still unsuccessful, replace jar in cabinet and henceforth ignore forever.
Thus, for the last few months, without so much as a word about it to the incorrigible Sherlock, John had taken to methodically removing any new jars of non-perishables from the grocery bag before putting them away, popping the lids open, then replacing them, tightly enough to keep the contents from spoiling, but not air-seal tightly, so that his flatmate would be able to open them. Now, every time he saw Sherlock munching pensively on toast covered in blackberry jam, he would smile fondly to himself and think Score: one for John Watson today.
Play trivia games.
You wouldn't think it, would you? That big brain of his, that speed of cognition, all that seemingly random knowledge, but Sherlock was really completely awful at the sort of things trivia games seemed to consider relevant. Once, in a fit of boredom, he had succumbed to John's pestering and agreed to play Trivial Pursuit ("It has 'trivial' right in the name, John. What is the point? Do you really enjoy this? This is such a waste of time.") and had been soundly and staggeringly beaten. He had stopped trying and begun flicking cards across the room after only about three questions ("Who in their right mind would care which Pope standardized the modern calendar?" "The square mileage of China is completely irrelevant to my life." "The Solar System is a category? An ENTIRE category?") but John had flipped through a few cards just to rub it in the detective's face a bit, and had discovered that the only questions Sherlock could answer were ones related to anatomy, machinery, or historical murders. After a quarter hour of this, and once Sherlock had a substantial strop on, John put the game away and suggested chess instead. At chess Sherlock had beaten him in less than forty seconds, and the problem of boredom was quickly weighing heavily on both of them once again.
Tie a tie.
Admittedly, this seemed to be more a refusal to learn than an actual inability. John didn't understand why, but in spite of his otherwise very snappy fashion sense, he seemed to have some fierce ideological opposition to ties of any sort. Since they had moved in at 221B, Sherlock had been forced to wear a tie on three occasions (two disguises for cases, and one charity dinner that Mycroft had somehow tricked him into attending, along with John who was definitely not his date, as he had insisted to at least fifteen people that night). Each time, Sherlock had accomplished the necessary application of formalwear by approaching John sourly and wordlessly holding the strip of printed silk inches from his face until the good doctor caught on.
"Let me teach you how," he had offered, struggling to get the length right as he reached with considerable difficulty around Sherlock's shoulders. He could only tie a tie from behind, he had only ever needed to do it on himself until now, so if he tired to tie it as he stared at it straight on it came out all wonky.
"Don't bother; it's not as if I'll ever need to do this again." Yet even by the third time, John continued to irritably insist and Sherlock continued to adamantly refuse, and both of them knew that they would never get anywhere with the matter. John eventually resigned himself to the fact that he would likely be tying Sherlock's ties at least a few times a year for the rest of their cohabitation (perhaps for the rest of their lives, perhaps the two were interchangeable), and he found that surprisingly, he was okay with that.
Cook literally anything at all.
John had begun to suspect long ago that his reptilian tendency to eat only once every few days was, in reality, simply an adaptive reaction to the fact that he could hardly boil water without burning it. ("Toast, Sherlock? Seriously? It's toast, you don't even have to do anything to it, you put it in the toaster. It's a machine that makes toast for you, novel, isn't it? Don't look at me like that; just put the damn bread in the toaster. See, that was easy...Christ! Sherlock, it was only turned to 3, how did you set it on fire?") Yes, for the record, one can in fact burn water, and Sherlock had done it just last week.
John figured that after a few years living on his own, and in true Sherlock fashion, he must have decided that rather than learning to cook, he would simply learn to not eat. It didn't make sense (of course it didn't) especially considering how carefully the man could handle pipettes and solutions and Bunsen burners and all other forms of heating and measurement, but that was Sherlock for you: uncanny. John was no chef himself, but he could manage a few dishes without catastrophic results, and Sherlock did not seem to particularly care if things were a bit overdone or under-seasoned or generally bachelor-y, so John just went right on being okay at cooking, and Sherlock went right on being God-awful at it.
This is how it happened that at 221B, the boys didn't eat anything that was not either cooked with the stumbling care of John Watson or delivered to them in premade form.
This is something I began out of boredom and couldn't help but find sort of cute. I'll probably add more chapters if I get bored again (which I will) or come up with a few more clever or silly things that John can best Sherlock at. Any and all suggestions are welcome and will be considered.