Author's Note: Yay, first fanfic! :) Just a little banter between the Baker Street boys, hope y'all enjoy it! I'm not sure if I got the voices and the characters' attitudes down correctly, but it's my first time writing them, sorry, so hopefully it's tolerable. Remember, REVIEWS ARE LOOOOVE 3 heehee
"The answer's no," Sherlock stated flatly as John entered the flat.
John stopped at the top of the stairs, cup of tea dangling loosely in his slack morning grip. "Sorry, what?"
Sherlock sighed condescendingly and turned to face him from a seat at a chemistry lab table which, John noticed, had somehow magically appeared in the middle of the living room in the five minutes since he had left to grab a cup of tea from the shop downstairs (because all of the chamomile they had in the flat had been either stuffed in a dead man's mouth to measure the time it took for tea stains to appear in saliva after death, shredded to bits and tossed onto the street below, much to the chagrin of commuting passerby, or simply thrown out because well, John, it was getting in the way of the experiments, and really, what's more important here, your morning cuppa or the lives of thousands of potential murder victims?)
Leave it to Sherlock to refer to the citizens of England as not people, but potential murder victims. That was probably how he saw everyone, now that John thought about it. He shuddered, and decided to rethink his choice of living with a flatmate whose mind was more frequently on violent methods of decapitation than what was up next on the telly.
"John, I said the answer's no." Sherlock repeated lazily, aquamarine irises boring into the side of his head like an azure drill. "Really, are you going deaf? I already put up with your slight limp and your damaged shoulder, not to mention your lack of mental capabilities. If you're going to go and get yourself a hearing disability, I shall have to find a new, less unstable flatmate." He turned back to his now violently smoking experiment with a slight huff.
"Just thinking." John meandered over to the table, peering over Sherlock's angular shoulders, just because he knew Sherlock hated it when he breathed down the back of his neck while he was working, before the detective's words got a hold on him. "Sorry, but did you just call me unstable?"
"It wasn't unjustified."
John spluttered for a moment. "Oh, of course. I'm the unstable one. This coming from a man who enjoys disintegrating Mrs. Hudson's couch cushions with seven different types of acid just because there haven't been any cases in the past twenty minutes."
With a groan of exasperation, Sherlock swiveled in his chair once more, an irked expression that John knew too well arching his eyebrows and puckering his face like a toddler about to throw a wicked tantrum. "It was not acid, but a diluted corrupting agent of seventy percent, it had been twenty-three minutes and thirty-two seconds, and really, what use are bloody couch cushions to anyone, except getting in the way when you want to sit down?"
"You nearly blew up her sitting room."
"I was bored!"
"It took two biohazard teams and Lestrade's division to clean it up, and you didn't even use anything radioactive this time!" This time, the thought drifted through his mind, and he almost snorted derisively at the ridiculousness of the situation. Because, of course, there had been more than one time, and of course, there would be many more.
The poor hazmat guys would have a better time wading through uranium soup than facing another Sherlock Experiment Clean Up again.
Sherlock clenched his fists, drew his knees up to his chest, crossed his enrobed arms across the tops of his kneecaps, screwed up his eyes until his face was a map of pale valleys and ridges, and shot John the most venomous look he could muster. "I. Am. Working."
"By the way," John said offhandedly, ignoring Sherlock's fit of pique, "What''s no?" He raised his now-lukewarm chamomile to his lips, sniffed the earthy liquid deeply, glanced suspiciously at Sherlock and the lab table full of volatile chemicals and salts that were of the Very-Easy-To-Tip-Into-John's-Drink-To-See-What-Happens variety, and set the cup on the side table on a stack of disorganized newspapers before backing quickly away to the kitchen. "And what's the lab table for?"
"Experiments." Sherlock said darkly, the ghost of a sinister grin playing about his thin lips and tugging the ends of his mouth up in a catlike manner. John rolled his eyes and stuck his head in the fridge, narrowly avoiding a human arm which had been plunged haphazardly into the fruit drawer and hung out of the shelf at an odd, rigid angle. The metallic smell of coagulated blood and swollen, rotting veins assaulted John's nose, and he reeled back with a retch just as Sherlock called airily from his setup. "Oh, and the no was about the arm."
"The - the arm?" John gasped, dashing to the window and flinging it open in a desperate ploy for fresh, non-corpse-y air. He hoped that if anyone was loitering in the alleyway below, they would have the good sense to move. Quickly.
"Yes, the arm." John could hear Sherlock's eyes roll, envision him steepling his fingers under his chin and closing his eyes tranquilly as he drawled out a dramatic huff. "The answer's still no, by the way. I won't move it."
"It's in the bloody fruit drawer!" John howled out the window. Several shutters snapped shut in a hurry, and a few pairs of eyes down on the street cast worried glances at 221B Baker Street before hurrying away. No sense to be there once the chemicals and bullets started flying, they knew by now.
"Would you rather it be in the vegetable?"
John cast his eyes to the clouds looming above the clustered rows of apartment buildings and shops. "Please, God, just kill me with lightning, it'll be better than spending another month's rent with this man."
"I can hear you, you know."
"Did it on purpose, Sherlock."
"Ah. Sarcasm," his flatmate intoned, still bent over a bubbling, mint-green flask and waving clouds of steam away from his unmasked face. "Touché. But I know I'm still your favorite, John." It was stated as a simple fact, like the ones they uncovered at crime scenes or on the run, put blatantly forth in Sherlock's rapid-fire, staccato, this-is-a-fact-and-not-to-be-disputed tone, and John felt a smile slip across his face in spite of himself. Leave it to Sherlock, of all people, to throw him into a black mood and drag him out of in within five minutes flat. He was sure the chemicals were beginning to get to him.
"Right. Fine." John flung his hands into the air and turned from the window, his stomach still queasy but his gills a little less green, and puttered off into the back of the flat. "You win, I'm not debating whether or not a severed human limb should be placed in the fridge." He ruffled Sherlock's disorganized curls as he passed, a little bit because he was still set off about the fact that there was an arm in the fruit drawer, for Christ's sake, who puts human limbs in the fridge, but mostly just to let his flatmate know that he wasn't actually that mad, and that everything was okay. Sherlock, he thought as he passed through the halls, was like a puppy in that sense - he needed that reassurance, needed that comfort, that pat on the head when he made a social blunder as he most often did. Someone just had to set him gently back on the right path, tell him it was all right, everyone makes mistakes, you just happen to make ones much more violent and explosive than others, and we'll try again tomorrow, okay? Yes, living with Sherlock was a hassle, John pondered, but really, the man wasn't God, as much as he'd like to think so, and he needed him. And John, as much as he tried to hide it, knew he needed Sherlock as well. The whole package, too - even the frozen limbs thawing all over the pears, and the explosions rocking the house in the night and leaving behind a curious odor of burnt hair in the morning, and the mess in the flat which frequently oozed through the carpet and ate a hole through the floor which Mrs. Hudson complained about and John always got his leg stuck in, and the witty, biting insults -
John paused for a second mid-stride before tearing back into the sitting room. "LACK OF MENTAL CAPABILITIES!?" he screeched, bearing down on Sherlock but not quite getting there, because, of course, he had tripped and fallen through the hole which had been eaten through the floor by Sherlock's spilled experiment - well, obviously, he would spill it all over the flat - and now half of him was dangling through Mrs. Hudson's ceiling, and the other half was flailing madly, trying to gain purchase on the slippery ground, and Sherlock was standing over him with a bemused expression playing across his face.
"Oh, yes," he said to himself, although John saw him grin wickedly and knew he was saying it just loud enough for him to hear. "An unstable flatmate, indeed."