I get that this Fourth of July story is really late, but I didn't have Wi-Fi all last week. Enjoy!
I never think something amazing or slightly ridiculous will happen on a pretty unsuspecting day, but, despite the fact that I live with Sherlock Holmes, I'm very wrong most of the time.
I read the paper this morning, while my flatmate is sprawled across the couch, probably with nicotine patches on. His curls flop over his eyes, obscuring his expression. It's summer. The sky is empty of clouds, and if I look outside, heat is coming up in waves from the ground. Plus, it's humid. I feel way too hot to do anything, and I briefly think about taking off my shirt. That's what all the men used to do in Afghanistan when the training was over and the day was above 35 degrees C. But I don't really feel comfortable taking off my shirt in the presence of Sherlock.
This has been going on for a few months now; I'll take a shower and dress in the bathroom, because I don't want him to see me. He probably wouldn't care, after all, he calls his body his 'transport' and doesn't look at anyone else's differently. It's about me. Stupid, but I can't help it. The whole thing is like a nervous habit.
After getting that notion out of my head, I continue reading the paper. "Hey, Sherlock?" He doesn't answer, not moving a muscle to tell me he'd heard. "There's been some acts of arson lately. Some Americans setting fires in British Government buildings, burning important documents. Why hasn't your brother said anything?"
Sherlock rolls over just enough so I can see one of his multi-colored eyes. "My brother refuses to ask me for help when he can figure it out on his own. Obviously, he's just being stubborn. One of his more annoying traits."
"I can think of more than one person that stubborn," I mutter, snapping the newspaper and returning to it.
Several minutes pass before either of us says anything more. Suddenly, Sherlock unfolds from the couch and rushes into his bedroom, emerging soon after wearing a t-shirt and light-toned jeans. How he came to own casual clothes, I really have no idea. "John."
"Yes, Sherlock?"
"I need to go out for a while." He begins to walk out of the flat, snatching a wallet from his Belstaff. "Don't wait for me."
"Why?" I ask.
"There's some shopping I need to do for the holiday." Sherlock doesn't turn around to answer me, just keeps going down the stairs.
"What holiday?" I shout as I hear the front door open, but he doesn't answer. The man left going who knows where in a t-shirt and says there's a holiday. I abandon my newspaper and walk into the kitchen, searching in the fridge for my container of sun tea. Today is going to be interesting.
Sherlock strolls through London, ignoring the awed looks from passersby. He despises being stared at like an animal in the zoo. The sidewalk is painfully warm, even through his shoes. His strides are far enough apart, however, for it not to be an issue.
The stand is about a mile from the flat. Sherlock finds it again in a part of the city with the greatest concentration of homeless people. He had it strategically placed here so the network could make sure everything was abnormal. As soon as it became very abnormal, Sherlock was to be called. And so, here he is, everything perfectly extra abnormal.
"Hey, you! This is a private establishment, and if you're not going to buy anything, leave!"
Sherlock smirks before he turns around, schooling his expression into a thug-look. "'ey. Y'all have any of them firework dohickeys? I need some of those."
The young man stares at Sherlock. His hard face melts into a devilish smile of someone who thinks they know more than they do. "What're you doin' with 'em?" The detective notes the change in accent. Americans. Lovely.
"I wanna do a purdy show for them English folks. Mebbe I'll add the people in, just fer fun."
The man makes a jerking motion with his head, and Sherlock follows him. "Always cool to see a true patriot in this town. Buncha English losers won' let us celebrate, so we gonna do it our way."
Sherlock discretely takes out his mobile and flips to a recording application. "So, if I'm gonna be gettin' stuff from ya, doncha think I need a name?"
"Alrigh' then. The name's Washington Smith."
"What're y'all doin' with yer fireworks? We could 'ave a joint show." Sherlock hates the accent, hates the not-English English that he has to speak, but the trickery is just too amusing. The young man in what Sherlock can only assume is what the adolescent American idiots call a 'bro tank' begins to tell him everything, and Sherlock gets some free fireworks in addition to the confession. What a lovely day this is, he thinks to himself. Crime-solving and explosives.
I wait up for Sherlock, of course. Stupid guy should know better than to say that before walking out. When he finally comes back, I glare at him and say, "Are you willing to tell me where you went?" He's carrying three boxes stacked on top of one another. I don't spare more than one glance at them.
Sherlock smiles at me happily, like a child that got a new toy for Christmas. "You'll see, John. It's marvelous."
"Really?"
He nods. "Yes. And it's pretty. Every female this side of the Thames knows you like that."
I blush, to my horror. "Shut up. And since when do you own a t-shirt?"
Sherlock brushes past me on his way to his bedroom. "It was necessary once, for a case a few years ago. I do not own any more, if you need to borrow my clothes anytime."
"No, that's fine, Sherlock." Why would I want to borrow his clothes? He's a hell of a lot taller than me. I huff and pour myself another glass of sun tea.
He practically flies back toward me when he's back in his white button-up and slacks. "John, we need to lie low for a while. Until eleven o'clock pm. Can you not leave the flat until then?"
"Why?" I fold my arms.
"There's a slight chance that I was followed and the young man I stole merchandise from will tip off the local police. Not that they could ever arrest me, but they'll come after you too, and I can't have you in prison," he replies frankly, as if he doesn't recognize that stealing is wrong, and I don't want to be blamed for his actions.
"Wait, why is me being in prison so impossible to you?" I ask. I mean, he probably at least tolerates me since we've lived together for a year, but likes me? I don't know about that. Of course, I like him, much more than I care to admit, but he's a high-functioning sociopath, and he is under no obligation to like me. God, I sound like a bloody teenager.
Sherlock rolls his eyes. "If you were in prison, you wouldn't be with me. That is unacceptable and illogical. I need you and you need me, therefore, we cannot be separated by something as idiotic as metal bars that I can easily break you out of anyway."
I back away from him slowly, noticing how close we are all of the sudden. "Oh. Alright. I'll stay here." I sit in my chair and pick up a book that I don't look at the title of before reading. I end up learning about the various parasitic species that live in England. Oh well. It's a distraction from the way Sherlock's deducing me right now.
Hm, Sherlock thinks. What about the explanation I gave to John made him more unobservant than usual and his pupils enlarge? It's far to bright outside for his pupils to have enlarged naturally, and the severe inobservance to his surroundings suggests observation elsewhere.
But where?
John hasn't met any women lately.
His job is remarkably mundane and dull.
He wouldn't question the arsonist case this much.
Did he talk to Gavin Lestrade about something vaguely interesting?
Did Mrs. Hudson get him hooked on a different crap telly show? Perhaps a soap opera?
Sherlock searches through his mind palace concerning John's behavior towards him recently. Annoyance, frustration, continuation of the domestic gestures toward Sherlock such as tea-making, grocery-shopping, staying. Oh, a refusal to leave the bathroom after a shower. Shrugging away from close proximity to Sherlock. What does it mean when a normal person does that? Especially with someone they know well. It is a bodily anomaly, of that Sherlock is certain, but what sort of anomaly?
The detective trots to the kitchen and opens the fridge, removing the two equal size containers of sun tea he'd put in there earlier that week. One of them, the control group in his experiment, is at full volume. The other, the one with the carefully placed bacteria, is at a diminished volume. "John, did you drink some of this tea?"
"Yes, why?"
"You ruined my experiment," Sherlock pouts. "I had two equal size containers filled with the same amount of liquid, one with bacteria, and one without. My hypothesis was that the sun portion of the recipe for sun tea would cause the bacteria to grow, but now I'll never know, because you drank some of the bacteria-filled tea!" He turns to face John. "I am quite disappointed."
John gapes at him. "I was drinking tea with bacteria in it?! Why the hell was it in the fridge and not labeled?"
"It is labeled! Experiment BT01C and BT01D. C for Control and D for Dependent. Simple."
"Then why was it in the fridge?"
"I left it on the counter and you put it in the fridge, throwing another variable into my otherwise flawless experiment." Sherlock pours out the two containers in the sink. "Now I'll have to start all over."
"Please don't," John says, fixing Sherlock with a look that generally means John's version of revenge, but this time means...something else. The genius is uncomfortable with not being able to read his flatmate's face like a book.
"Fine," he answers, rinsing out the tea containers. "I'll be in my mind palace. Don't tap me unless it's vital to our survival or eleven o'clock pm."
I grab takeaway from Angelo's at around six pm. When I tell Angelo what I want, and that I'm getting things for Sherlock as well, he winks at me and asks if it's going to be a night in. I always tell him I'm not gay, so I don't understand why he still thinks we're together.
Actually, virtually everyone I've spoken to with Sherlock is under the impression we're romantically involved. First of all, WHAT?! Second of all, WHY?! I'm really nothing special, just an army doctor that likes danger. But if anyone could tolerate Sherlock enough to date him, it would probably be me. Still, that doesn't give everyone the green light to get in a tizzy over us. Jesus.
When I get back to the flat, I see lights on the roof. I don't think much of it then, but I do wonder how the lights got up there.
"Sherlock!" I call up the stairs. "Sherlock, I brought dinner!" He doesn't answer.
"Sherlock?" I look in his chair to see he hasn't moved since I found out there was bacteria in my tea. "I have dinner for you."
"Why did you bother me?" he asks. If looks could kill, I would be dead right now.
"You told me not to tap you unless something vital to our survival is happening." I tap him on the shoulder, grinning. "Food, dinner more specifically, is vital to your survival whether you like it or not. So, I tapped you."
Sherlock gives me the 'please go die in a hole' eyes, but says, "Fine. If you so insist, doctor."
We eat together, watching crap telly until ten thirty. Sherlock shouts at the characters on the screen, and I laugh, and he glares at me and explains why this or that is illogical, and I laugh more. This is our version of domestic. I kind of love it.
Okay, whoa. Love is a four-letter word when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. Enjoy. I kind of enjoy it.
At ten thirty, Sherlock stands up and begins to clean up our takeaway. Now, that's really strange, but I just let him. Maybe he feels bad about the tea incident and is trying to make up for it.
"John?" he asks.
"Yeah?"
"There's three boxes on my bed labeled 'Fireworks'. Would you take two of them?"
My mouth falls open. "You...Not only did you steal from a shifty guy, but you stole explosives? You have some explaining to do, Holmes."
Sherlock heads into his room, and I follow him. "And why do I have to take two when you're the one who stole them? Impolite much," I continue.
"Because the two I was going to have you take are lighter. And yes, I stole explosives. Have you wondered during this whole day why American arsonists were here? Why I went out in boring clothes?"
I pick up a box. "I didn't think explosives had anything to do with it."
"Well, now you know." He picks up a bigger box, and I grab the other smaller box, stacking it on top of the first.
"No, I don't."
"It'll all make sense to your funny little brain soon, John. Believe me, the end product is marvelous." His eyes are glowing again, almost like a cat's in the dark. "First, we need to get up on the roof of 221 Baker Street."
Apparently, there's a set of stairs that go up to the roof that I had no idea existed until now. They aren't very big, more of a steep-angled ladder than actual steps, but I manage to get up. Sherlock quickly climbs the stairs, getting to the top and waiting for me impatiently. "Come on, John. The show's about to start."
"What show?" I wonder breathlessly, trying to keep my balance on the tilted roof.
"You're going to see fireworks from near Big Ben. The arsonists planned to destroy that quintessential British symbol last. One burst of golden showers, and then we set off the signal to Lestrade to go in and arrest them. Then, as victory, we light off the remaining fireworks in these boxes." He looks at me. I can almost hear him thinking, 'That is perfectly enough for his lesser mind to understand'.
"Explain, please. From the beginning," I say.
"But-"
"Sherlock, the show has fifteen minutes until it starts."
He shakes his head. His messy black curls undulate around each other as he does that. Blue-gray-green-gold eyes sparkle with mischief. "The surprise is worth it. You've never seen fireworks in real life, have you?"
I stare at him. How could he have known that? "No. How-"
"No, John. You are going to see fireworks go off, and then, I'll tell you how I did it." Sherlock looks so serious now. He stole fireworks, not just to solve a case, but to give them to me. We could work on his methods, but that is the nicest thing he's ever done for me.
"Okay, Sherlock."
When eleven o'clock pm comes, Sherlock restlessly glances around. "The first one should have went off. Why hasn't it gone off yet? Do you think Lestrade caught them too early? Americans are always late."
"Calm down, Sherlock," John says, smiling. "It's fine. Their watches might be different than ours."
Sherlock still looks out over London, fidgeting just slightly. He dislikes fidgeting, but it happens when a case is not moving, or moving too slowly. Inaction brings the fidgeting on. Sherlock suddenly feels a hand on his shoulder, a thumb tracing over his collarbone. It feels intimate, and it's unfamiliar, and he likes it very much, more than he thought he would. "You're doing the hand twitching thing again," John tells him, not that he didn't know, to the back of his head.
"And?" Sherlock replies.
"This happens when we're waiting generally, and you don't enjoy waiting."
"No," he agrees. "I don't enjoy waiting."
"So I'm distracting you," John says simply, running his calloused hand up and down and up and down Sherlock's left shoulder blade. Sherlock has always been uncomfortable with physical contact, but with John it is natural. There's a reason Moriarty liked calling him The Virgin, because it's true. People touching him, especially like that, makes him feel sick, and they're inferior anyway, but John isn't a person. He's a doctor, a soldier, a highly dangerous man that stays beside Sherlock Holmes because he wants to. No person is at all similar to John. Sherlock wonders how he could have been without John for so long without his mind palace falling apart.
As all this runs through the genius' head, the first burst of gold sparks hits the dark sky. "John, light the fuse!" Sherlock shouts, laughing now from the exhilaration of pieces of an enormous puzzle coming together.
The doctor removes his hand from Sherlock's shoulder (Sherlock finds he misses it) and carefully makes his way to where the red-packaged firework is placed. John strikes a match, and in the light that flares up, the detective can see his partner's hazel eyes burning gold. The sound of fizzing enters the air, and soon the sky is filled with a splash of bright green.
Sherlock watches John's facial expression as he witnesses the pyrotechnical display for the first time. His eyes widen, his mouth falls open, and he is in awe. "It's beautiful," he whispers into the smoke.
"That's why I got them. I wanted you to see something beautiful," Sherlock whispers back, but doesn't know why. John scrapes his gaze along the detective, as if he is acting a lie detector.
One last burst goes off near Big Ben, but then everything is silent over in that part of London. "So," Sherlock says in a business-like tone. "Today is July 4th, the United States of America's Independence Day, celebrating the day they weren't a British colony. Typically, fireworks are set off on this day in the US. The American arsonists were using the explosives to basically laugh at us."
"Quite vengeful considering that whole independence thing happened over two hundred years ago," John remarks.
"Quite. The arsonists come over to Britain, set up shop in London about a mile from us. They started to become troublesome, so Mycroft asked me to take care of it, but I didn't want to. Two days ago, there was a program on television with fireworks. the way you looked at it, I could tell you hadn't seen any in real life, so I told my brother I would take the job.
"I faked an American accent and put on American clothes, and went over to the stand where the arsonists were selling the fireworks to their compatriots. I robbed them to remove potential damaging materials and recorded a confession from the leader. Giving the confession to Lestrade, I worked out a plan for the yard to catch their criminals. They would set off the first gold firework, and then I would set off a green one, the signal for the arsonists to trust me further, and for the Yard to move in on them." He pauses. "And now, we get to use the rest of these. Come on, John. Which one do you want to set off next?"
John points numbly to a violet firework and Sherlock strikes a match. "Light it up," the doctor says, a laugh emerging in his voice. And Sherlock does.
The night passes in a sea of sparks. When we only have one firework left, I look at Sherlock and say, "This is the last one."
"Yes, John."
"Thank you, Sherlock. This was..." I stare at the layer of smoke above us. "Amazing."
He smirks at me, but it's a kind smirk, if there is such a thing. "You're welcome."
And then, everything falls into place. Why I felt self-conscious around Sherlock, why I would do anything for him, why I stay, why I'm always with him, why I feel awe when I look at him, why I touch him.
I am in love with Sherlock.
Why did Sherlock go to all of this trouble to make sure John saw fireworks? What was so important about it? Why did John's touch, and John's speech, and John's not-peopleness matter?
Maybe this is what love is, Sherlock thinks.
As I strike the last match, I look at him. "Sherlock?"
"Yes, John?" My whole body tingles.
"Let's get married."
"What?" He looks so surprised I have to giggle a little.
"We're practically one of those old married couples anyway. Besides, I love you," I reply frankly, as if I don't recognize this is quite possibly the most insane thing I've ever done concerning Sherlock Holmes.
"It would be unacceptable and illogical for you to go," Sherlock says. "We need each other." He restates thing he said earlier today, but I don't know whether that's good or bad. "And I love you too." Wait, back up.
"You love me too?" I ask, touching the lit end of the match to the fuse.
"I love you too," he repeats, grinning. "You are quite a doubtful man today, John Watson. Should I be worried?"
I smile back. The firework begins its ascent into the sky. "No, Sherlock." I step forward, rise up a bit on my toes, and kiss him. Light fills the sky, the biggest firework we had exploding into smithereens.
We kiss until the last sparks burn out, and when Sherlock pulls away, he's breathless. "John, let's get married."
"Yes. Let's do that," I answer, hugging him. We stay there for a few quiet, peaceful moments, until Mrs. Hudson climbs the roof access stairs.
"Boys, what are you doing up here?" Her hands are on her hips, and she looks pretty formidable, but Sherlock knows what to say.
"John proposed to me with fireworks. We apologize if it caused any distress."
Of course, Mrs. Hudson is overjoyed, and we get off with a warning. I kiss Sherlock on the cheek and smile. "John?" he asks.
"Yes, love?"
"Can we get fireworks for our wedding?"
No offense to any Americans reading, I'm an American and I wasn't intentionally trying to insult any of us. Please review! Rubidium, iron, and titanium fireworks to those that do!