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Waking up with a cast on one arm and a pounding headache wasn't, as far as Eric was concerned, the picture perfect way to greet a morning.
Upon opening his eyes, however, he quickly decided he wasn't all that upset. Mostly because along with the pain and discomfort there appeared to be a pair of grey-blue eyes staring intently into his face, the press of a warm (if somewhat uncomfortably bony) body against his, and the distinctly foreign sensation of being... safe.
Why he should feel safe when a bloody nutcase with terrifying fighting skills was staring him right in the face Eric had no idea. But he did. Really quite sound and secure in general. Compared to the usual knot of undefined neurotic worry that tended to dominate his existence it was practically heaven.
... but it was also really, really weird.
He was so preoccupied with this puzzling lack of anxiety that he didn't immediately notice Sherlock had been saying something.
"Wha'...?" he asked, blinking back up into the other boy's gaze. Sherlock frowned in vague consternation and poked him in the side (evidently they were tangled up in an awkward half-hug, half-sprawl again; Eric really had to figure out how Sherlock kept managing to get him in this position) before not-quite-irritably repeating himself.
"I said it's almost ten," he reiterated, gesturing toward the bedside clock with his shoulder. "Your arm is going to start hurting very badly if you don't get up and take a pain reliever soon."
"Oh... yeah, I guess so." To be honest his arm was already hurting pretty badly, but Eric wasn't all that bothered by it. He'd broken his fair share of bones back when he was younger, after all, and had a couple bad dislocations thanks to football. But with Rose and Bailey to look after there really hadn't been much time to fret over his own health, so he'd gotten pretty good at ignoring things like lack of sleep, hunger and injuries.
Sherlock didn't seem inclined to let him sweep this one under the rug, though. He pushed himself up on one arm (Eric noticed with some amusement that the skinny prat had stolen one of his shirts out of the clothes hamper sometime last night) and turned to regard the rest of the bedroom over his shoulder.
"Where did you put the pills they gave you at the hospital?"
Eric scrunched his face up trying to remember. Everything from last night was sort of... hazy.
"Er... in me coat pocket, I think," he finally recalled.
He and Sherlock both looked over at Eric's coat, hanging on the closet door a good few metres away. After a moment Sherlock huffed to himself and let his arm give out, flopping gently down on Eric's uninjured side with a sullen frown.
"I don't want to get out of bed," he muttered petulantly.
Eric shrugged, ignoring the twinge of pain the action produced in his wrist. "So don't."
"But oxycodone has a biological half-life of four hours, and it's been nearly seven since you took any."
That was a valid enough point, but Eric was more interested in how completely weird it was for anyone to just know something like that off the top of their head.
"Is yer brain like a giant library?" he asked somewhat blankly. For some reason he was picturing just like... stacks and stacks of books all crammed into the other boy's skull. No wonder the prat always seemed so distracted - his whole head must be full of little bits of knowledge all constantly clamouring for his attention every which way he looked.
Sherlock blinked at him with an expression of vague confusion. "What does that have to do with pills or not getting out of bed?"
Eric shrugged again. "Nothin', just wondering."
"Oh, well..." Sherlock trailed off, glancing away with a sort of thoughtful look on his face. "I think a library implies some degree of organisation. So no, not really."
"What's it like, then?"
Sherlock frowned at him. "What's your brain like?"
"I... dunno? I never really thought about it," Eric admitted after a slight pause. "Maybe like... shelves, I guess? Wit' stuff on 'em?"
That really didn't cover the spaces around the shelves - the writhing storm of anxiety and fear and buried terror of old memories... but he figured that wasn't really the sort of stuff you talked about with someone you'd just started dating yesterday.
"Shelves," Sherlock repeated flatly. He rolled his eyes and let his head flop down onto Eric's chest. "How utterly boring and practical."
"Well I ain't exactly a big thinker, am I?" Eric countered with a quirked smile for Sherlock's obvious exasperation.
Sherlock didn't reply besides a halfhearted hmph, evidently halfway to falling asleep or zoning out or whatever it was he did when he was tired but still half-tweaked on coke. Taking that as a cue that they were more or less done with conversation Eric let his eyes drift shut. True, his arm was actually starting to hurt like a right bitch... but maybe if he just focussed on something else he could force himself to go back to sleep anyway. He decided to work on keeping his breathing as even as possible - that usually did the trick.
After a few moments, though, Sherlock raised his head again. "I told you your arm would start hurting."
"Who says it's hurtin'?" Eric replied in a sleepy grumble. He opened one eye to find Sherlock regarding him with an odd, sort of half-stern, half... something... expression.
"You're attempting to breathe at regular eight-second intervals, an obvious distraction technique."
Eric huffed an annoyed sigh and opened both eyes, scowling slightly. "An' it were workin' just fine until you went an' bothered me 'bout it."
They stared each other down for a brief moment, before Sherlock's face abruptly shifted into a devious smirk. "If it's distraction you're after I can think of a few more effective options than breathing patterns."
"Can y'now?" Eric responded, trying to contain a snort of laughter. Not that Sherlock was all that bad at flirting, really - because granted that was a rather sly come-on, and quite hot besides - but it was just, y'know... Sherlock. Making an innuendo. The very thought was hilarious simply for how completely impossible it should have been.
Still, Eric found his smile creeping into a grin. Sherlock smiled too, then leaned forward to kiss him.
And what followed after that, Eric had to admit, was a pretty damned good distraction.
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