"John," Mary asked one morning over a steaming mug of white coffee, "how do you put up with Sherlock Holmes?"
It was three weeks after the haunting circus night and although John still had to see Mary every day at work, neither had made a move to develop their relationship further, mainly as the last time they tried she'd been caught up in a hostage situation and nearly been killed by a Chinese cult which had kind of put her off getting involved in a relationship like that. However as life and love goes, she couldn't quite bring herself to stop being friends with John Watson or stop hoping that something would spark something more.
"How do I put up with him?" John parroted, "I guess, I just feel like I should. That or I can't be bothered to go house hunting, take your pick," he attempted to joke. He was getting sick of how tense the air surrounding the two always was, and no matter how hard he tried he could never find a break in it. Although he was going to try for as long as it took with her, however long that may be.
The feeling that he had two separate lives had always comforted him in a way. Usually, he could just turn off his phone and stay indoors to avoid Mycroft whenever it all got too much for him, which, he happily admitted, was not very often. The thrill of the game was of the intensity that John Watson had not found in anything else since his return from Afghanistan, and for the first time in a long time, when he ran with Sherlock Holmes, he ran like he had purpose. However since Mary found out about his second life with a sociopathic consulting detective, his lives had been blurred together, so that even as he was working at the surgery, or out doing the shopping, he was still the man who worked companionably with Sherlock Holmes.
That night when he returned to 221B from the surgery, he was unsurprised to find Sherlock sat at the kitchen table looking at a sample of blood down the microscope, surrounded by miscellaneous parts of a human body. Two hands and a foot seemed to be perched on the table nearby, the index fingers of both hands cut away with a scalpel that lay not one centimeter away from where his hand now sat, fingers tapping treacherously near to the blade. John knew that if it any other man insisted on tapping his fingers so close to a sharp blade every day they would by now have no fingers left, however this wasn't any other man, and so he still suffered not a single scratch.
The flat mates had long since done away with the common pleasantries such as greetings when one came in to the room, as ninety nine percent of the time in the first week they'd lived together, Sherlock would be on the pivotal moment of a case where he almost had it all figured out, and then John would shake his concentration and he would be sulking for days.
As John opened the fridge he heard Sherlock complaining of how "there was no chemical fault in either the protective layer of the hand or the blood and inside the hand", and how the police had got it wrong "again". "Pickled eggs?" John offered, knowing the sure refusal but no longer being able to stand being in a room with a human being and not utter a single word, he was a person after all. Sherlock made a non-committal noise. "Or we have eyeballs, if you'd prefer?" Sherlock made the noise again, and John was struck with the urge to tell him he was 'listening but not observing' but decided against it, sure Sherlock would somehow prove him wrong anyway.
He shoved the fridge door shut behind himself and made to go and sit and read a book, however before he could pick a book, he heard Sherlock start talking to himself, loud enough that it was obvious he wanted John to take notice. "The police sending me these hands is quite frankly probably the least useful thing they have ever sent me, they have absolutely nothing wrong with them at all. The police are completely useless and quite frankly I would not trust one to solve a case of vehicle theft never mind sort out a murder enquiry. The only thing we can learn from these hands is that she had a sugary snack, probably a diet chocolate bar judging by the levels of fructose in his bloodstream, and that she was of a medium height. If they had just let us in to the crime scene… Her hands tell us nothing. I could have learnt everything in five minutes from the prints I would have found in there, and then they say that they're keeping the streets safe while actively preventing that happening."
Hearing this same rant every day, John did nothing but sigh agreeably in reply.
"We could have this murderer locked up if the police weren't preventing it…"
John hummed in response.
"What am I saying…" Sherlock said, standing up and becoming animated at last, "John, grab my coat. Why I thought that we had to have the detective inspector's thumbs up to go to the crime scene… We will just have to be sneaky about it."
"How?" John said, handing Sherlock his coat.
"Well, I don't believe I've met half the police on this case; we'll just have to get two police coats from one of the cars and then we can walk in like we're doing our job; which of course we will be. The officer on this case always keeps spare coats in the car; he's the most forgetful officer Scotland Yard has, and God forbid he's not in proper uniform when he's looking for a pay rise."