A/N- Sorry it took so long to get this up. I meant to put it up a couple of days ago but I had a bunch of work I had to do and in the middle of everything I had to go back to school.
John doesn't like the summer.
It reminds him of the war, and even though maybe Mycroft was right and he wasn't haunted by the war, he missed it; it was the constant and ever-changing… excitement… of the battlefield that John missed, not the swelteringly hot landscape he and so many others had endured for so many months.
The heat in the city, though, is different from the heat in the desert. In the city, it is humid and obtrusive and heavy, pressing in on you from every direction and crowding around you like far too many people. In the desert, it is light and high up, and seems to radiate from everywhere at once, making blurry lines out of the distant horizon and mercilessly burning any exposed skin in an instant.
But the differences don't make him like it any more.
He still enjoys his ever-frequent cups of tea, but it's not as satisfying when the warmth it gives him only made him feel uncomfortable, when it makes the inside of his body just as hot as the outside.
And John finds it harder to escape the heat. In winter, he can just throw on a jumper; eat or drink something hot; or curl under a blanket, and he feels better, but in summer the heat reaches everywhere, an ever-present, too-hot second skin. It's harder to sleep when it's hot, for this reason. He wakes more often during the night, tossing and turning, covered in a thin sheen of sweat and breathing heavily after another series of snapshots of exactly what he didn't miss about the war - all those people he couldn't save, that he should have been able to save because he was a doctor and it was his job. He gets up, goes downstairs, gets a drink of water, sometimes interrupting Sherlock doing an experiment on how blood discolours various liquids (no wonder they never seem to have any milk) on the way.
It isn't that Sherlock particularly likes the summer. But he doesn't like the winter, and so by proxy he prefers the summer.
His brain works better with the heat, and everything speeds up- like reacting ethanoic acid with sodium carbonate. In summer, he doesn't need to rely on anything to keep his body at a reasonable temperature- no coats or blankets that would slow him down and hinder his movement. He can just be, and he likes that. Likes being independent. Hates relying on outside things, or people. He always has, because by relying on anything besides himself, he opens himself up to a far greater chance of failure or being let down by people whose intellect is inferior to his own. It feels like admitting a weakness.
It's not something that comes up very often, not something that many people know about him, but Sherlock loves ice cream. When he was younger, Mycroft used to take him to the shops after school, and Sherlock would get mint chocolate chip in a cup and Mycroft would get a cone with a double scoop of caramel-toffee crunch. Those memories are comfortable and secure, the ones he associates with ice cream and summer.
A/N2- I used Google to find that chemical reaction, so if it's not right, let me know.
