A/N- Just a short one-shot-y-style thing. It came from me having a hole in my sock and not being able to sleep, basically. Yeah. My life is really interesting.

Sherlock's sock had a hole in it.

Sherlock's sock had a hole in it, and he couldn't sleep.

He didn't feel like sleeping right now anyway, but John was probably right in saying that he needed to, after being awake for almost eighty hours straight, tracking down a guy who'd murdered his neighbour with a pair of barbeque tongs and then tried to pin it on the neighbour's visiting cousin while he ran away with said neighbour's wife.

It was quite an entertaining case, Sherlock mused absently. Not particularly intellectually challenging, of course- the guy had actually been rather clever, making the murder seem a spontaneous crime of passion while in reality it had been carefully plotted out and definitely very pre-meditated by both the guy and the victim's wife, but it was nothing to Sherlock. And hearing some of the excuses, fake alibis and flat-out blatant lies he had tried to make them believe had made Sherlock roll his eyes at the total far-fetched stupidity of it all. He had of course seen straight through the first false alibi immediately- there wasn't even a bus that ran that route at that hour. The second had been a little harder and had required a short analysis of the mud on the bottom of the guy's shoes to prove that he hadn't been where he said he was, but it had still only taken a matter of hours.

Sherlock sighed. Thinking over the case was not distracting him from his more immediate problem of the hole in the toe of the sock he was currently wearing. It was on his right foot, and was fairly large - he could feel his big toe poking out of it, and now his second one, too. He rolled over onto his side and dug the toes of his other foot into the sock to try and stretch the fabric back to where it was before, but it was no good. He flopped back onto his back.

He considered his options. There were four of them, as far as he could figure.

He could take the sock off. But he didn't want to do that. His foot would get cold. And it would feel like he was admitting defeat, although undoubtedly to admit defeat to a sock was a rather preposterous and illogical thing to do.

Or he could go and get another sock. He nodded to himself- this seemed like a rather sensible idea. But he was half-way out of bed when he remembered that most of his clothes, including all his other socks, were in the wash that he had been neglecting to do for the last few days and had only done tonight because he only had one more clean shirt left.

He dropped back down onto his bed in a huff, yanking his grey t-shirt back down over his stomach as he did so.

He could give up on trying to sleep completely and go and play his violin, or take the microwave apart again. But he thought that maybe waking up your flatmate at three in the morning via violin playing simply because you couldn't sleep would be one of those things that John would consider A Bit Not Good. And the last time he'd taken the microwave apart both John and Mrs Hudson had been so cross with him that, as well as making him pay for the repair bills (even though he hadn't gotten it that wrong. Who even cared if the wiring for one-minute and ten-minute buttons had been switched? It was only a hot-cross bun.), he'd been denied access to his violin for two weeks and John had (very childishly, Sherlock thought) hidden his favourite blue dressing gown.

So maybe not.

His last option was to ignore the hole. He tried for a moment, tried to disregard the fact that there was a very uncomfortable circle of fabric around his first two toes, and force the annoying tickling of the loose bits of thread out of his mind…

It wasn't working. He couldn't take it any more.

Suddenly, he ripped the sock off his foot in fury and threw it across the room. That was better.

For a moment, at least. A second later, Sherlock sighed.

Sherlock's foot was cold.

Sherlock's foot was cold and he couldn't sleep.

A/N- Oh, and by the way. In case you've never tried it, DO NOT put a hot cross bun in a microwave for ten minutes. My sister did once, and what followed involved something exploding, a whole lot of smoke and a blackened inside-of-the-microwave. Not good.