The house fills with noise: TVs downstairs shout and babble, the heating clanks back into life, the refrigerator shudders and whirs up to its regular buzz. Outside, too, there is a racket as people switch everything on and prove that there really is power.
Joan's bedroom light was off when the power went out but the passage light was on and is burning bright into the room. They never shut the door and are now squinting, breathless under the covers, as the end of the crisis declares itself in a yellow glare.
Sherlock sits up, his hair sticking up all over his head. "Work," he says, "I can work."
Joan scrabbles for her T shirt. She pulls it on and he slides out of bed and scoops his jeans off her floor. "I'll get coffee," she says.
Everything happening between them five minutes previously has fizzled away. They hustle into clothes, not looking at each other. Joan feels stunned, as if the light were a taser and not an innocuous low watt bulb.
She is also angry, with him for abandoning her, them, at such a moment, and with herself for expecting anything else. Of course, the work. The work comes first. It always has and it always will. She ought not to wish for any other reaction from him.
And now that the power is back, they can do so much, can eliminate many possibilities, quickly, can contact the police, can act upon whatever they find. This is a good thing. This is why she is here with Sherlock at all, to work like this, to place solving the puzzle above all else. She loves it too, even if right now she is still heaving in breaths from how his mouth was listening to her desires and how her hands were drinking in his need, even if she is wishing the power could have stayed off for another – eight hours or so, so that they could finish what they started and maybe even get some sleep...
She pulls her sweater down over her head and as her eyes emerge she sees that Sherlock is standing by the door of her room, clothed except for bare feet, staring at her.
She tries to read his face but he has put up his barrier, a distortion filter of neutrality so that she cannot read anything except bland disinterest. As she focuses on his eyes they move and look beyond her to the window, where lights are flickering on across the hillside, creating her familiar view. "Coffee," she repeats. "It's fine. I'll be down in a moment."
The bland mask sharpens into a frown. Sherlock says, "Ha," and goes downstairs. She hears his bare feet on the wooden floor of the front room. The volume of the TVs increases.
Joan composes herself and dresses properly, in fresh clothes. Treat it like a new day, a day which has started with disappointment and no sleep and coolness between herself and her partner and friend. Great.
They sip coffee, which is comforting, and Sherlock looks at many things on the computer. He clicks through so rapidly that Joan cannot watch and instead looks again at the map showing their imagined chain of events through the city. Beside her he clicks and taps and stabs the Enter key, the sounds of his frustration with the case and himself.
They can prove that it was sabotage. They believe they know the identity of the main instigator. But they have no proof of his connection, except for Sherlock's unrecorded interview with him, and no idea why the thing was done at all.
After half an hour Sherlock gets up and begins pacing. His feet slap the floor and Joan can hear the rasps of his jeans as he moves, even over the newly restored house-noises. Lack of sleep has drawn in her senses, so that movement seems fuzzy, but sound is harsh and shocking.
"We don't even know what he's done," says Sherlock, facing her in the bay window, the wall of TVs behind him, volume down. "Apart from damage the power supply." The screens show scenes from the blackout aftermath, but Joan cannot focus on them.
"Isn't that enough to arrest him?" Joan asks, and gets a stony stare in return. Of course it is not enough. The criminal might be caught but the puzzle would remain, and Sherlock cannot exist beside a puzzle.
"Ok," she says, "how can we find out?"
Sherlock walks up and down, never passing within two feet of where Joan is sitting at the desk. "What was meant to happen yesterday? Something was supposed to happen, that was prevented or altered by the power cut. We need to find out what was scheduled."
Joan considers the sack of newspapers which arrives at the house each day, the mountain of internet data, the endless events which take place in New York every day of the year.
"There's too much," she says. "Starting from nothing, there's just too much."
"We have to try," says Sherlock. His eyes are shadowed, his chin dark with two days' growth. Fatigue has added sourness to the sanguine twist of his mouth. Joan can feel her own need for sleep dragging at her. It is not surprising that inspiration will not come, when exhaustion smothers the room.
Joan sighs. "I am starting to think my old job was the easier one." She is trying to be flippant but cannot get the tone quite right. Too tired.
Sherlock's head snaps up. His eyes are bright again. "Watson, that's it."
He returns to the desk, squeezing onto the chair beside her until she gets up and gives it to him. He starts rummaging on the internet.
"What?" She is standing at his elbow, unable to follow what he is checking. He has fifteen pages open.
"His previous job. Our disaster expert. I've been focussing on how his current job links him to this. But it doesn't, of course it doesn't, the security in place at the stock exchange is too good. It's his old job which matters. Look." Sherlock points to a business networking website.
Joan looks. The guy's online resume lists a number of firms named for their chief partners. They mean nothing to her.
Sherlock raises one eyebrow but then sighs and explains. "Stockbrokers," he says. "Specialist stockbrokers. They deal in stocks for materials used in high tech industries, especially new materials, specifically, silicon carbide."
He drums his fingers in a complex rhythm on the desk, his eyes wide. "The power outage. It's a sales pitch, Watson, a terrible, dangerous, effective sales pitch."
A sales pitch. From an ex stockbroker-? Joan waits but Sherlock does not explain.
She can be patient. But to help with that, she could use some more coffee. Or, a better idea, some cocoa.
Sherlock's eyes flicker as he considers the possibilities, but still he does not share his thought with her. He scowls as if some other idea is intruding on him.
Joan gets up and goes into the kitchen, remembers that the milk for cocoa will be spoiled, and hunts about for herbal tea instead. As she stands sorting through the box of teabags on the kitchen table, Sherlock comes in and stands by the chair on the other side. He places his hands on the back of the chair and looks down at the table, rocks back and forth on his toes.
Joan waits. Whatever is bothering him, he will say. The refrigerator hums and the clock ticks and Sherlock cannot be silent when he has something on his mind.
She pauses with her hands in the box of sweet smelling infusions, watching him. His shoulders are bunched and the muscles on his arms stand out, the tattoos half exposed by the short T shirt sleeves.
Sherlock raises his head and meets her eye. His expression is cold. "I don't appreciate being lied to," he says.
"What?" Joan jerks back from the box of teabags and scatters chamomile across the table.
"I do not require the cushion of a lie in order to function," Sherlock says. "I expect you, I want you, to tell me the truth. Even if you think it is unpalatable to me, do me that courtesy. Do not belittle me by attempting to predict what I might think about something without giving me the chance to make that judgement for myself."
He is holding the back of the chair in a white knuckle grip.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," says Joan.
"Think!" he snaps.
She narrows her eyes. "I don't lie to you. I haven't."
He glares at her. She has never seen him angry like this, not with her. And not just angry – he is trembling. He is upset. All this emotion, it is not what he needs. He just needs to be able to focus on the work.
And then she realises her lie.
"I told you it was fine," she says. When the lights came back on, she told him it was fine that he should go and start work immediately, even though she wanted him to stay in bed with her and forget work at least for a while. She could kick herself. Of course he would notice that she was fibbing. He might not be the world's most socialised person but he is one of the cleverest, and highly attuned to deception in every form.
His eyes acknowledge that she is right. "When clearly it was not fine. You chose to tell me a lie."
She takes a breath and lets it out slowly. She is not angry with him. But this needs to be fixed. "I wanted to let you do the thing you wanted," she says.
"You could not stop me doing what I want, and it is not for you to try," says Sherlock.
He releases the back of the chair and stalks away. She hears him go past the kitchen into his bedroom. The door shuts.
She hesitates, unsure what to do. She is sorry that she made a mistake, because she really ought to have known better than to apply the usual social rules to any situation involving Sherlock. But she does not think an apology will help. She could go in, guns metaphorically blazing, and demand that – what? That he never speak to her like that again? Pathetic.
She is still standing by the table when Sherlock's door opens again and he comes back in.
He stands in the doorway, still quivering, strung out, and says clearly, "Do not try to predict me. If you want to know what I want then ask. When I want to know what you want I will ask. There is no requirement for guessing and no benefit to anybody from introducing falsehood. We are both adults and can communicate without recourse to behaviours which artificially prioritise the needs of one person over the other."
He stares at her, blinking rapidly, then turns and walks away again. This time the door slams.
Joan drops into a chair and rubs her hands over her face. She still does not know what she ought to say or do. Perhaps nothing.
She does however have one piece of old news, and one thing just learned: she is bad at this relationship business, and Sherlock, strangely, is good.
She stands up and treads the creaking passage to his bedroom. Knocks on the door.
It opens as if he has been standing right behind it waiting for her.
"What do you want?" she asks with carefully balanced inflection. "I'm asking."
His shoulders relax and the corners of his mouth turn up. "I want things to be like they were before."
She gapes at him. The stress had fallen away and now he is looking at her with steady eyes and no trace of tension. The thing that he wants, now expressed, has soothed him. "Oh," she says. "Well." Since they are doing total honesty. "That might be a problem," she says. "Because I don't know if I can do that."
She maintains dignity as she walks away and climbs the stairs. Her room is blissfully quiet and dark. She locks the door behind her.
Then she lies down on her bed and Sherlock's presence, his scent, is still on the sheet, and on her and she does not want to wash it away. She pulls the covers up around her neck and closes her eyes. She is tired. She needs sleep. Tears will not help anything.
Unhelpful tears leak onto her pillow and her hair and run down annoyingly into her ears until she has to sit up and scrub her face with her T shirt. Then she forces stillness upon herself and deliberately thinks of nothing, listening to the background noises of a relieved city, until sleep comes.