It was a bad habit, one he had picked up from John.
He was content with Marmite, to be perfectly honest, but then... John had bought the jam.
And then it was jam on this, and jam on that, jam on the toast and jam in the porridge and jam on the honey butter rolls cooked up with dinner. And it was so disgusting... but so good.
He preferred blueberry, although John liked strawberry. They mostly settled on raspberry because they both enjoyed it and, rather than buying several jars to go to waste (or to be used on an experiment, John said) they switched off on flavours. This week, however, it was grape.
Sherlock grabbed the butter knife from the drawer and the jam from the fridge. He was in a rush. Molly had texted him to say that his experiment results had come back and he wanted to get on with it. But, he was hungry and, since he was on a case, he didn't have time for anything heavier than toast with jam.
So, he grabbed the jam and the bread, threw it down on the counter, and grabbed a piece of the bread from the bag.
"Where's the fire?" John asked, looking away from his laptop.
"Barts'," Sherlock replied, screwing the lid off the jam and dropping the bread in the toaster. "Experiment. Could lead to missing convict."
He went back to his room to change his clothes and returned to find his toast on the counter, spread generously with jam, and John munching on his own piece as he stood by.
"Thanks," he said absently, biting into a corner of the toast and holding it between his lips as he threw his coat on. Already he could taste the strong grape flavour in his mouth and he hadn't even taken a bite yet. His stomach grumbled in anticipation but he finished putting his coat on.
He was halfway down the stairs before he took a bite. Grape flooded his sense of taste, strong and so sweet, and he tilted his head; had John bought a new brand? He must have. Tasted stronger than usual. Maybe it was going off. He didn't know.
It was still grape, though, and it was jam. It fulfilled the purpose.
He crushed the globules of jam between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, licking his lips repeatedly throughout taking bites. It was sticky, so sticky, and not very conducive to going on to solve a case when one's fingers were sticky from the residue. But that was the charm. The taste, the consistency... It was delicious. It made an otherwise bland piece of toast have a certain flare to it.
Sherlock licked his lips again, taking another large bite as he hailed down a cab.
"Bartholomew's," he said to the cabbie, swiping a bit of jam from the corner of his mouth. He frowned as his fingers pulled in the tell-tale signs of jam stuck on his skin and he wiped them impatiently on his coat as he opened the door.
With one last bite, he shoved the rest of the toast in his mouth and got into the cab.
For the next hour, whenever he moved his tongue, parted his lips to sigh, any movement of his mandibles and he was reminded of the taste of grape, of jam, and of a habit that was clearly doing no good for his teeth at all.
(I've never actually had grape jam. Did I do a good job describing something that seems to have very little to describe about it? :p)
Had to do jam. Grape is a flavour I'm most familiar with. I'm allergic to strawberry so I couldn't fake-write the taste of that; I have no idea what it tastes like. Raspberry is something I don't like to begin with; thus, couldn't write that. I suppose I could have done apple... yum.
I do not own Sherlock. Thank you!