Title: Grudge

Prompt: July 12

Word count: 225


" 'The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious'," read the doctor, annoyance coloring his voice. " 'I would like to take this opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice . . . a confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.'" Watson stopped reading and let his expression – which Holmes read so easily – make his commentary.

Holmes merely picked up a decades-old copy of The Strand. " 'He was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction . . . when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece . . . our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions . . . he had a horror of destroying documents'."

They grinned ruefully at each other and declared a truce.