They slammed the doors of the Land Rover in unison - just at the moment that Sherlock's fingers turned the key in the ignition and that John's fingers pressed the button to turn on the radio (to an 80s rock station).
With that, the duo sped away from the sleepy little Grimpen Village, Sherlock with his coat-collar turned up and John trying to pull off a pair of designer sunglasses.
"They really don't suit you," said Sherlock grumpily once they were safely on the main road.
Safe being a relative term, given Sherlock's propensity to take turns at twice the speed he ought.
"Well, it's not as if you wear them," returned John, grasping on the handle above the door without a thought to his time riding in the back of a military truck listening to shelling. He was
"True," acknowledged the great consulting detective, "they obstruct the peripherals."
"But you've got light eyes," returned John. "People with light eyes are more susceptible to macular degeneration as they age."
"It'll be a miracle if I make it past forty, I don't think macular degeneration is much of a concern," returned Sherlock.
This bleak thought that Sherlock saw his demise as so imminent at not even thirty years old was...
...it was really just very bleak, John thought, and he turned to his friend, sliding the glasses down his nose so he could look over them.
"This had better not be-" he said, his voice full of warning.
"-No! Don't be ridiculous, John, you should know better. Suicidal ideation's for the weak."
Still, the way Sherlock was clenching the steering wheel and staring fervently, fascinatedly, fantastically straight ahead was disconcerting, and made John wonder if his friend's vehemence wasn't trying to convince the listener as much as the speaker.
They had brushed too close against that kind of despair in the past twenty-four hours.
No, Henry! No, no!
Maybe something had been activated in Sherlock's psyche, even unbeknownst to himself.
"So, what then?" asked John, never one to let a touchy subject go if he could help. Unlike Sherlock, who preferred to let difficult things be forgotten and ignored and deleted once they'd been said.
Sherlock's solemn face pinched into a scowl. "Don't tell me you've forgotten the incident at the pool."
"Oh. Well..."
In the hard gray light of day, especially after having had such a terrifyingly real (but illusory) experience of fear in the labs of Baskerville, John couldn't help but feel like Moriarty was as grave a threat as they'd believed at the time.
No, he decided as he closed his eyes against the sun as it poked briefly from the clouds in front of them, he just wanted to feel like Moriarty wasn't a threat.
After all, it was easy to forget that there was a madman lurking in the shadows when dealing with all these different types of madness in this last case.
"Oh, look, a goldfinch," said Sherlock, absently looking out the window.
"Where?" asked John, leaning forward and craning his head, not because he cared overmuch about seeing the thing but because - well, it was what one did when one's conversation-partner pointed something out, wasn't it?
"Long gone!" said Sherlock with a too-cheerful tilt of the head. "Oh, a picnic area."
"Five minutes ago you tore me away from my breakfast because you said we only had half an hour to get to a train station thirty miles away," replied John.
"As ever, John, you see but you do not observe," returned the detective with false sweetness, "Oh, a monarch butterfly."
"Now you're just...ergh."
John turned his back on Sherlock and pressed his face against the window-glass with all the poutyness of a girl denied a visit to the mall, which meant that Sherlock, ever vying for attention, began to chatter glibly.
"I see...a rabbit. A pebble. A blade of grass. A hair. A molecule. An airplane. A leaf. A speck of dust. A drop of sweat."
This elicited no response from John, despite how ridiculous a speech it was; as Sherlock paused to gauge John's interest, John crossed his arms and firmly looked out the window with renewed attention.
"God, I hate the country," said Sherlock with a snarl, rolling all of the windows in the car down. "So, so, soboring."
It was a rather nice morning, with heavy patches of clouds alternating with doses of intense sunshine and blue sky. The wind was brisk, however, especially at the speed Sherlock was driving (an obscene one).
"Don't," muttered John sternly, "my coat's in the back."
Sherlock didn't respond, peevishly, and John was reduced to scolding.
"Sherlock...roll the windows up."
No response. It seemed that Sherlock had withdrawn into his thoughts, or was pretending to have withdrawn. He was wont to do both and either of those things often.
John pressed the button to at least roll up his window, but found that it wouldn't respond. Sherlock had locked it.
"Oh, come off it, Sherlock," John said, responding to his inability to control his comrade by pretending he had some control over his comrade. "I'm going to count to three."
This didn't make Sherlock react in any way.
"One."
Nothing.
"Two."
Nothing.
"Three."
Nothing. Except John was incredibly fed up.
"You know how remarkably apologetic you were after telling me off the other night?" he said, not looking at Sherlock, speaking on intuition, "I'd like to see some more of that, come to think of it - I should be more angry that you deliberately poisoned me with unpredictable gaseous substances. And triedto with the sugar."
This curt reminder of Sherlock's too-recent failures as a friend and as a detective caused an instant reaction; one hasty swipe and they were sealed from the wind again.
"Cold increases basal metabolism. Good after a heavy breakfast," said Sherlock with some irritation, but this irritation was hiding a mute apology.
John sighed - it wasn't much, but it was enough for his too-forgiving heart to acknowledge.
"Thank you. And are you implying that I'm gaining weight?"
Sherlock's avoided answering that question, instead turning up the volume of the radio - initially too loud, just to make John look at him with a really, Sherlock? tilt of the head, then to a more agreeable level.
And then, when John asked, "Well?" in an attempt to follow-up, Sherlock began to hum along with the music, absently.
He was quite good at humming, actually, but that wasn't a surprise given his natural abilities at musicianship.
With a sigh, John turned to look out the window again, absorbing the countryside, which he actually found pleasant in its craggy dreariness.
They drove for a while in relative silence, John admiring the scenery, Sherlock humming lowly.
Then the song changed, and John recognized it as a song that was rather popular at the moment; BBC had used it as a background to a trailer for a new crime drama of late.
To his surprise, his friend progressed from humming to singing along with the song - kind of.
"Fa...fa fa fa...fa...mi...mi mi mi so...fa..."
Those weren't the lyrics, John could hear. Besides, Sherlock seemed to be enunciating the words as if they were Italian.
Fate will not force us, they will stop decrying us...they will not control us...we will be victorious...
But the notes were right. Mostly. Sometimes a little warbly, but then again John hadn't ever heard Sherlock sing before in any circumstance. So probably not very practiced.
"What are you-"
"-Solfège."
John wondered when the last time was that he'd got out a whole question in their dialogues.
"What?"
Did a single-word, monosyllable question count?
"Think Sound of Music," Sherlock answered.
"Ah." John felt like he should understand, but he didn't really, and his silence was testament to his confusion enough.
Sherlock sighed. "Do, a deer, a female deer. A tragic series of puns."
This made John laugh; he wasn't as well read up on music things as Sherlock was, but it was amusing to think that somewhere in Sherlock's mind palace dwelt a pretty Austrian novice and her guitar.
"Isn't that the type of thing you would normally delete?" asked John, turning down the music for the sake of conversation.
"What, the musical or the method?"
"What method? I thought it was just a song."
"No, John." Thereupon Sherlock launched into a brief musical history lesson, concluding his lecture with, "so you see, given that I have a musical memory akin to Mozart's, it actually saves space to replace syllables of mundane song lyrics with seven simple syllables. The melody will stick either way, irrespective of my choice to remember it, so why complicate matters by remembering real words? I've preserved several hundred thousand neurons from having to carry this excessive load with the aid of solfège. Because, you may have noticed, our daily experience is supersaturated with music. Pretty terrible music, as it is. Like this crap. Do I really need to know the words to something like, say, Smooth Criminal? or Can't Touch This?"
"You're so funny," said John, laughing a little, faux-punching Sherlock in the shoulder with an gentle tap.
"Or - good grief - Sexy Naughty Bitchy Ugly Nasty whatever."
John couldn't help but really laugh at that.
"There's some things I can't help but remember, though," Sherlock went on, grinning impishly. "Muscle memory can get in the way of conscious efforts to delete audible memory," Sherlock continued ranting, a touch of a smile ghosting his face. "For example, I will never be able to live a life where Harold Hill's Ya Got Trouble doesn't crop up, undesired, from time to time."
"What?" John was unacquainted with...whatever that was. He actually wasn't sure that he'd heard right.
"My mother fancied I'd do well on the stage for some time, what with my ability to reproduce patter songs verbatim when she played soundtracks in the car. It broke the poor woman's heart when I stood up at my first audition for a role and couldn't remember the words because the music wasn't playing."
John suddenly began to wonder what had brought on this self-revelatory speech. He couldn't remember Sherlock saying anything about his mother before, ever, aside from one conversation with Mycroft.
Sensing John's musings, Sherlock said, abruptly, as though he'd been confronted with the surprise aloud, "Don't friends disclose things like this?"
"Erm. I'm not sure if 'disclose' would be the right word, but yeah, that's about right," said John, his heart feeling warmer at the knowledge that Sherlock, in his backwards way, was trying to be a friend.
With the background image he had in his mind of a little twelve-year-old wunderkind Sherlock standing with a blank, supercilious look in front of a kind-looking older woman with tears in her eyes and two or three tired drama teachers who couldn't see what she saw, John couldn't help but wonder how much practice Sherlock had in that department.
Things must have always been difficult for people who loved Sherlock, so John doubted many people had dared to care.
"All right, this has been a dreadfully amusing conversation, John, but we're nearly at the station now."
How much of it was actually conversation?
John just smiled as they pulled off the road into the tarmac parking lot of the car rental center.
In spite of - no, because of all his faults, Sherlock was really like no other individual John had ever encountered.
Which meant that, sadly, John was all the more certain that it would be The Wrong Thing To Do to fall in love with Sherlock Holmes.
But funny things could happen - after all, how often was it that twice in ten minutes one could run across the same song in two different places? Because when they entered the rental center, that same song that Sherlock was singing to was playing on the public announcement system.
They will not force us.
They will stop decrying us.
They will not control us.
We will be victorious.
John couldn't get the idea out of his head that maybe - as adolescent and reactionary a song as it was - it really was a fitting anthem for him and his crime-solving mate.
And, even funnier - for all his talk about the uselessness of song lyrics - when John approached the door to the loo a minute after Sherlock went in, he stopped and didn't go in, because he could hear a rich baritone voice belting the words.
Which meant that John would lean cooly against the door, put on his sunglasses, and pretend to have the misapprehension that it was a single-stall bathroom so that he could listen.