(Author's Note: So this is my first try at writing Johnlock. I don't ship it beyond just an extremely close platonic friendship/soulmate thing, but I know a lot of people ship it non-platonically! We'll see how far it gets before it breaks my suspension of disbelief. Hopefully I haven't done the characters a disservice, all the same. This first portion was written as a gift fic to Sylvia, currently aka "glowing neon," who requested Johnlock amongst others. Nothing explicit as of yet. Title from Philip Larkin's "Is It For Now or For Always?")

The hours stretched on into days, and days to weeks. It was all John could do to ensure Sherlock was entertained, and now even those efforts were growing sparse and halfhearted. A gentle "Why don't you try to find a book?" had become a rather more irritable "Can't you find something to read already?" – and Sherlock had begun staring at him rather clinically, as if John himself might prove a suitable test subject for an experiment on contagious disease.

"Not good enough, John."

John hadn't said anything. He glanced up, brows raised, but Sherlock was already pacing.

"All – all this. I mean, you're entertaining enough, when you really set your mind to it, when you really try, but this monotony is distinctly unsatisfying."

"Oh." John turned his attention back to the newspaper, flipping a page. "Have you tried finding something to – "

"Read it all."

"Go to the library. You could get to Euston Street within the half hour. And Mycroft landed you a subscription at the London Library over on St. James's. Nearly four hundred quid worth of annual borrowing privileges you're not using."

Sherlock sighed, with a dismissive little flutter of his hands, as if John's words were chalk dust to be physically shaken off of himself. "I never asked Mycroft to do any of that. Besides, I don't want to go to the library."

John shrugged. "Not my problem." But he could feel Sherlock staring at him – not at him, through him – and put down his paper. "What? I'm not your babysitter, Sherlock." It was a bit harsher than he had perhaps intended, and he could see hurt spring into his friend's sharp-featured face, drawing the detective's mouth up tight in an unpleasant grimace and making him seem, for the moment, a creature of positively inhuman angles.

"Bored." It was the complaint of a malicious child who had two compelling courses: entertainment or destruction.

John sighed. It was difficult enough to contain his own ennui at moments like this, but he had grown accustomed to tamping it down, packing it away, and forgetting about it. Sherlock utterly lacked that skill, and the last thing John wanted to do was to address the issue neither of them wanted to: they were waiting. It would start soon, according to Sherlock. "Very soon," Sherlock had said, mimicking Moriarty's lilt. It had been two weeks, however, and nothing had happened. And Sherlock had even worked his way through every possible threat Moriarty could offer.

With a hand rubbing his temple, John stared at Sherlock, watching his flatmate simmer in slowly boiling anger. "Sherlock," he began, again trying to stay placid, "why don't you play something on your violin? Why don't you go watch a film? Why don't you get yourself a sandwich at Greggs?" He paused. Sherlock was still glaring at him, like a vengeful sídhe. It was enough to make him snap: "Why don't you amuse yourself for once, for Christ's sake?!"

Sherlock drew back as if John had struck him. John bristled, feeling oddly righteous anger flood him. For days, weeks now, he'd been trying to provide Sherlock with entertainment – and why? Only because Sherlock asked him. He would do anything if Sherlock asked him, but he could only do so much. The admission didn't feel as contradictory as he'd dreaded it would.

"I am sorry," Sherlock said. It was mechanical.

"No, you're not. If you were, you wouldn't use me like that. You'd have your own life."

"You don't." Spoken by anyone else, the response would have seemed cruel, but, as malicious as Sherlock could be, he was utterly incapable of true malice when it came to social cues, as clueless about how to leverage them as insults as to employ them as graciousness.

Besides, John realized, Sherlock was right. Their lives were more than entwined in each other; their lives were each other. That anger he had felt so energized by only a few seconds ago began to recede, but what it left in its wake was something different, something new. The figure who had just stalked to stand before him was not merely his flatmate, but was the person with whom he'd shared his life for the past few months. Years, now. And what that newspaper had said about the two of them couldn't be entirely incorrect if they spent so much time –

He drew a breath, pushing himself to stand. "Tea?" It was the easiest possible way to escape the situation and get rid of the curious tension that tightened his voice. "Mrs. Hudson got us a new pot, did you see?"

"Not the red one anymore?"

"Hasn't been the red one since before the silver one, and that awful one she brought back from her trip up to Edinburgh."

"Tartans on it?"

John felt himself smile a little. "You did notice."

"Not at all. What else would it be? That sounds dreadful."

"It was," John agreed, searching for the tin of loose tea and the strainer. Sherlock had been in the cabinets, he realized. Nothing was where it should be, and everything was disarrayed. He moved a few things back to where they belonged, putting them in military order: most useful first, less likely to be used in the back. He had thought Sherlock would understand that type of prioritizing, but clearly he'd hoped for too much. "If you'd have paid attention, you'd have noticed."

"Does it matter what color teapot we have, John?"

"Nope."

"Fine." Sherlock shrugged; the matter was settled as far as he was concerned. John could tell that much, and tried to tell himself he didn't care, either.

John couldn't help but stare, though, his hands going through the motions of making tea. In his own way, Sherlock was usually a comfortable presence, but right now John Watson felt anything but comfortable. His hands shook a little as he doled out the tea – shaking? Why? – and he watched as the tiny leaves settled in the strainer, dark against the fine mesh of metal, then clicked the strainer shut, dropping it into the water, sending a small ripple across the surface and hearing the infuser clink the pot's inner shell as his hand trembled again.

"Your hands are shaking." Sherlock was using his most clinical tone. "You aren't stressed. You're emotional." A thin film of disdain coated those words. "Stop it. There is nothing to be emotional about."

"Sherlock, I – "

But Sherlock was no longer listening. Pushing out whatever stored, spiteful energy he still had within him, the tall man moved for the bookshelves, gazing amidst them. At last, a cry, nearly relieved, issued from him, and he yanked a book out carelessly by the hardbound spine. The book was a slightly one, easily twenty or thirty years old, and one John recognized as his own. But the only material possessions Sherlock ever cared about were his skull and his violin.

"Find something?" John realized that he sounded almost relieved, too.

"Perhaps. I haven't read this."

"Impossible."

"Improbable. Not impossible." Sherlock settled with the book, arms and legs sprawled out as if the sofa was made for only one person to sit upon, and read the title aloud. "Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel García Márquez. No wonder I've never read it."

John was unable to help himself. "Too sentimental?"

"No. I never read things in translation."

"You can read Spanish?" Sherlock just stared at him, and John continued, his voice thick with embarrassment at the question. "Christ, of course you can read Spanish. You'll like it, though. All they do is write letters to each other."

Sherlock focused on him, scrutinizing him. But this scrutiny was different. It wasn't the eerie gaze which John had endured before, and it wasn't the scientific look of possible unwitting experimentation. It was a new look, wide-eyed, as if John were some new species of bacterium Sherlock had never seen before – a look of discovery.

"Is that as far as you think I'm capable?"

John shrugged. He couldn't look at Sherlock anymore, even though Sherlock was watching him with an uncomfortable unfamiliarity, as if John Watson, flatmate and ex-army doctor, no longer existed and some new, foreign entity had taken his place. He cleared his throat, turning back to the safety of the kitchen. "Tea up." And now that unwelcome tremor had crept into his voice.