John's first day back at work is, predictably, a hectic one.
And of course his mental state isn't helped in the slightest for the constant, nagging worry circling away at the back of his mind. Sherlock's alone. Sherlock's still very much in the midst of an unpleasant round of detox (though hopefully the majority of the boy's physical symptoms will have subsided by now – he'd seemed more or less alright this morning after all). John's been trying desperately to convince himself that his friend is strong enough to resist temptation.
It isn't going well.
Because, unfortunately, convincing himself of that particular belief also necessitates forgetting all about said friend being a sixteen year old with a chronic lack of impulse control... and somehow John hasn't quite mastered the mental acrobatics to manage that yet.
It's his mid-afternoon break and he's leaning against the nurses' station with a coffee and a biscuit, staring at his mobile in his hand and wondering if it would be worthwhile to try calling Sherlock. When he'd left for work the boy had looked to be halfway to falling back asleep already, bundled up under his ever-growing nest of afghans and comforters and whatever other blanket-like objects he's found around the flat. (John's fairly sure the collection is less for warmth and more of a security thing, considering how the majority of them always seem to end up on the floor before night's end. Pointing that out to Sherlock would probably not be a good idea though, so he's carefully kept his theories to himself.) He doesn't want to risk waking his irascible houseguest if the teenager still hasn't gotten up... but then again he also really, really wants to make sure his guest is still in his flat.
He's just gotten to the point of pulling out his phone (maybe he'll just send a text?) when he's startled by the device buzzing in his hand.
Bored. - SH
John grins and stifles a relieved laugh as a nurse walks past. He's still not entirely sure how Sherlock even got his phone number (John doesn't recall ever having mentioned even owning a mobile, but then he supposes he shouldn't expect anything less of Sherlock) but the boy's certainly made no qualms about texting him at all hours of the day or night, usually with some variation on the same message he's just received. The little dose of normalcy goes a long way toward easing John's fears.
You can use my laptop if you want, John texts back, smiling.
Already am. - SH
John's face quirks in a bemused, vaguely disconcerted expression.
I left it password protected, he points out.
In a manner of speaking. Took me less than a minute to guess yours. Not exactly Fort Knox. - SH
John shakes his head and takes a sip of his coffee.
I'm going to come home to a completely dismantled computer, aren't I?
Ye of little faith. - SH
Chuckling, John finishes the last of his drink and straightens up from the desk he'd been leaning against. Only two more hours of work to go. And for the first time since leaving the flat this morning, he's beginning to think Sherlock might be alright.
:::
John does not, in fact, come home to a dismantled computer.
No, what he finds when he opens the door to his flat that afternoon is a scene far stranger.
Sherlock is sprawled on the couch, head hanging off one of the armrests with his feet propped up on the back, with a newspaper held open in front of his face. John's coffee table is strewn with what looks to be a weeks'-worth of news clippings alongside a slew of computer printouts, hand-written notes scrawled over everything in pen. And… for some reason the entire flat smells of lemon.
John blinks, looks around. The television and cabinet are spotless, as are the countertops in the kitchen, the floor, the windows… every single flat surface looks to have been thoroughly and obsessively cleaned. His furniture's been straightened as well, everything forming perfect right angles and horizontal lines. All his medical journals are arranged in perfectly straight rows on the bookshelf, the afghans and miscellaneous bedding Sherlock's been collecting sit folded neatly on the couch cushions.
It's… otherworldly.
"Did you… tidy up my flat?" John utters in complete disbelief. Of all the things he'd expected Sherlock to do when left to his own devices, cleaning had not been one of them.
Sherlock tilts his head back to regard John upside-down from his reclined position on the sofa.
"I was bored," he offers by way of explanation. John has no response for that besides utter bafflement. After a tense second of them staring at each other Sherlock suddenly shifts to sit up properly, looks around as his face pulls into a slightly worried frown. "Sorry, I didn't… if something's in the wrong spot, maybe? Or is it the lemon smell? Sorry about that, I think I messed up the dilution ratio of the soap. Didn't really notice until later, though I did have the window open for awhile to try and air it out but it got rather cold and I thought maybe the heating bill would get too steep so I tried to turn the thermostat off but I couldn't find the controls and then the-"
"Sherlock," John cuts off, eyes widening at the teenager's rapidly-accelerating speech. Sherlock cuts off and blinks over at him, looking a bit lost and uncertain. John schools his face into a smile. "It's fine, it looks great. That was very nice of you to do."
Sherlock flashes John one of his rare, completely genuine grins. Then abruptly his face falls into a frown again.
"I got distracted before I could finish though… sorry."
John shakes his head. "That's alright," he assures. Then, to change the subject before Sherlock can argue (or apologise again, which always makes John uncomfortable) he gestures to the mess of papers littering his coffee table. "What's all this, then?"
Sherlock's frown disappears as his eyes seem to light up.
"Oh it's brilliant, John, serial suicides!" he exclaims, sounding for all the world like a kid at Christmas. "Someone's been killing random civilians but making it look self-inflicted somehow, utterly genius. I'm trying to figure out how he's done it. Poison, obviously, but how does he get them to take it?"
John blinks and tries not to let himself look too disturbed. Sherlock tends to get overenthusiastic about extremely off-putting subject matter, a fact John's learnt well after one too many pressing inquiries concerning the sort of traumatic injuries he's seen at work.
"Isn't that the job of the police to figure out?" he hedges.
Sherlock makes a disgusted noise and flips a hand dismissively. "The police! Useless, they couldn't catch a murderer if he were staring them straight in the face."
"Think there's a few blokes in prison right now who'd dispute that," John points out rather bemusedly. He finally gets around to hanging his coat up and moves off toward the kitchen to hunt down some tea and biscuits, finding himself staring around with a sort of blank awe at the spotless countertops as he does so.
"And how many of their fellows are in fact innocent men, wrongly convicted?" Sherlock replies with a derisive scoff. "You could catch every murderer in the country if you imprisoned the entire population, John. A stellar arrest record is no indication of competency."
Out of the teenager's sight, John quirks an exasperated smile and rolls his eyes. Sherlock's frequent moments of apparent self-doubt and hesitation (usually about social situations) always seem to come packaged with a completely contradictory superiority complex regarding anything intellectual. It's confusing at best, but then John figures that's probably just how Sherlock is – can't do anything by halves, always has to be as complicated as possible.
"So what's your theory then?" he asks, deciding it'd probably be best to just humour his guest's macabre interest for now. After all a talking, enthusiastic Sherlock (even if the enthusiasm's been sparked by a series of tragic deaths) is far better than the trembling, agonised boy of the last few days. And anyway Sherlock did clean his flat. John still can't quite believe that. Everything's just so… neat.
Though it's not, he notes as he hunts around for the tea supplies, particularly organised. At least not in any manner he can make heads or tails of – the tea is in the drawer with the silverware and the sugar is over by the sink for some reason. But they were definitely put there on purpose, because in both instances the items are meticulously aligned with whatever corners they happen to be nearby. John finds himself wondering vaguely if Sherlock might have some sort of OCD. Does cocaine even treat that? It seems like hard stimulants would be just about the last thing you'd want to give someone with rampant compulsions, but then again-
"I can feel you thinking," Sherlock's voice quips not-quite-irritably from the other room. John rolls his eyes again and turns toward the open walkway between the sitting room and kitchen nook to flash Sherlock a 'stop being a brat' expression. The boy just fixes him with an unimpressed stare in response – a look which unfortunately loses rather a lot of impact when delivered with one's head hanging upside-down off the edge of the couch cushions.
"Do you have some sort of moral objection to using furniture properly?" John questions after a brief pause to work out how exactly Sherlock's even managing to avoid sliding off the sofa in that position. His friend huffs imperiously and juts his jaw – an action which, again, is rendered fairly ridiculous by the whole being-upside-down thing.
"There's no such thing as 'proper'. That's just a word people use when they don't have an adequate explanation for why you shouldn't do something," Sherlock informs him matter-of-factly. John raises his eyebrows in a dubious look, but the boy just carries on speaking without giving him a chance to respond. "Anyway so he's got to be coercing them to take the poison somehow, but how? There's no signs of a scuffle, no external injuries… not to mention that all of the victims have been found in locations they had no business being anywhere near. The killer must have transported them there by some means, gave them the pill and then… what? How do you convince someone to swallow poison?"
"Maybe he just... talks to them?" John suggests with a shrug. He starts to move back into the kitchen, but stops short as something occurs to him. "Hang on, how do you even know all that?"
"Know all what?" Sherlock asks offhandedly. John turns around to see that the teenager's eyes have slipped closed, hands up in front of his face in some sort of vaguely prayer-like posture.
"How do you know where the victims were found, and that there were no injuries, and that the poison was in pill form? None of that was in the papers." Even as he asks John begins to wonder if he really wants to know. With his luck Sherlock will have used his laptop to…
"Oh. I hacked into New Scotland Yard's internal network and printed off the case files," Sherlock explains in a tone of bland disinterest, removing one of his hands from the strange praying gesture to indicate the papers littering John's coffee table. "Well, I say hacked… really I just called their IT department and pretended like I'd forgotten my employee password. Granted me access in less than ten minutes. Idiots, the lot of them."
John sputters. "Y-you used my laptop to hack the bloody police –"
"Relax, I used a proxy," Sherlock quips, managing to sound both infuriatingly smug and utterly bored at the same time. "That laptop thinks it's in Russia at the moment, and the signal's being routed through six different countries and a satellite array. You're fine."
"Sherlock! You can't just -" John starts, but Sherlock cuts him off with a noise of excitement.
"Pink!" he suddenly exclaims for no apparent reason whatsoever. John blinks.
"Er... what?" he mutters somewhat less than eloquently.
"Pink, John!" Sherlock cries again in a slightly exasperated tone, like he thinks his meaning should be obvious. (It's not in the slightest.) In a flash he's off the sofa and bounding across the flat to retrieve his wrinkled pullover from where he'd apparently hung it on a doorknob.
"Hang on, wait!" John calls as he drops the teabag he'd been holding to hurry into the other room. Sherlock's busy tying his shoes as quickly as possible. "Where do you think you're going?"
Sherlock glances up at him with a look that clearly says 'seriously?' - most likely because John's got his hands on his hips like a disapproving mother hen. John glances down at his own posture with a slightly embarrassed cough and quickly shifts his arms to cross in front of his chest instead.
"You can't go out now, it's half past six," he asserts in what he likes to think of as his 'doctor voice'. Sherlock just rolls his eyes.
"Yes, mum, I'm aware of the time," he quips blandly. Shoes tied he springs up from where he'd sat down on the floor and puts a hand on the doorknob. "I'll only be gone an hour or so, don't wait up!" he calls, and with that the boy darts out of the flat.
John swears to himself, scrubs his hands through his hair agitatedly for a few indecisive seconds. For god's sake he's just got home, he's got work to do - studying and finding something for dinner and... and good lord Sherlock could be running headlong into danger.
Without a second thought John grabs his coat and runs after his friend.