AN: This is my first foray into the realm of Sherlock. I did my best to pick out the unforgiveable Americanisms, but without a proper Brit-pick, I'm sure to miss something. If you'd let me know what those happen to be, I'd be most appreciative. J
This story will consist of six short chapters. I hope to have a new one posted every day.
Sherlock had always had an appreciation for beauty, and while John was many things, beautiful was not one of them.
It wasn't something he had ever mentioned, not even at their first meeting, when he had flayed his potential flatmate's life open and waited to see just how he would bleed. This product of genetics and a life harder than most, etched in lines across John's face, told a simple truth to the world that Sherlock felt no need to belabor upon. Grass was green, water was wet, the stars were lovely, and John Watson was not.
He would have deleted this knowledge, along with every other memory of the man, if John hadn't rolled back his shoulders in the wake of Sherlock's deductions and expressed his admiration in three simple, unassuming words. It had been unexpected and intriguing, and less than twenty-four hours later, with a corpse cooling in the back of an ambulance and laughter on his lips, he knew that there was precious little about John that he would ever want to delete. People had drifted in and out of his life before, capturing his interest for a few bright moments before plunging into the realm of the banal, but John… John was fascinating.
Months passed, and the room in his mind palace, dedicated to a man with a soldier's bearing and an abhorrent taste in clothing, steadily grew. Here was where he went when he wanted to revisit the knowledge that John would kill for him, that he laughed when others fled, and that he had been the first person Sherlock had ever called a friend. It was here where he hid the realization that he trusted John more than family, and that he had become uncomfortably close to essential to the continued functioning of Sherlock Holmes. John may not have been attractive, but this fact was left to molder in a corner, abandoned in favor of shelves lined with shinier, far more interesting things.
Sherlock was content with his collection of deductions about his flatmate, and he was very used to being right. This state of affairs probably would have never changed, if it hadn't been for a cup of tea.