06.

Three very long days later, I finally had my room the way I wanted it. It was smaller than I was used to, but bigger than my childhood room. After having stayed at home again, any extra square footage felt like a gift. It was more than I could have dared ask for, having a flatmate again at twenty-four. I refused to view this as backtracking – I couldn't, or I would never get out of bed.

Already it was a struggle to go about my daily routine, but somehow, I was managing. I had thought that living with Sherlock would be, well, something other than what it was. We had barely spoken since I had invited him out to find furniture. I thought perhaps I'd scared him off completely, but he still said hello in the morning. Excused himself at night.

I was already at the end of my rope with it all. The lack of socialization was doing nothing to keep me from becoming irreversibly depressed. It was happening already, I could feel it. I had stopped answering my phone yesterday, around the time I'd lost my appetite. Now, in the middle of the night, it seemed that the memory of John was also robbing me of rest. I was exhausted, mind, body, and soul, and I couldn't close my eyes. For over two hours, I'd laid in my new bed under my new comforter in John's old room and ached for sleep that wouldn't come.

In the quiet, I could hear rain. Cars passed every so often, tires skating through the puddles left chaotically scattered on the streets below. There was the occasionally rumble of thunder, a periodic flash of light through my veiled window. And the gentle scratching of a pen on paper from the living room that preceded the intermittent playing of a violin. Sherlock was awake, but this was not uncommon. He'd warned me about his habits the day I'd rushed to see Ella Thompson. Sherlock had been, if nothing else, true to his word.

I rolled over with a sigh, punching the pillow under my head with the greatest impatience. Lull me to sleep, I willed it. Please.

At this point, I was contemplating walking downstairs and out into the street to hand the first person I saw a fistful of money before asking them to knock me out. Another ten or fifteen minutes passed – I knew because I checked my cell. I'd heard you weren't supposed to when you were trying to rest. Something about blue light. But it was time to give up the ghost. I wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

I threw back the covers and walked quietly to my door. It opened without much of a sound, but the sounds of the violin quieted into a whisper as I made my way to the living room. Sherlock was looking directly at me as I emerged from the hall.

"Are you wearing child's pajamas?" He asked. Ever the gentleman.

I looked down at my ratty Buggs Bunny pajama set with a shrug. I should have retired them a while ago, that was true. But my parents had retrieved them for me during one of their trips to America. My mother had gotten it in her head that she wanted to visit every American theme park that she could during a single summer. One happened to be Six Flags in a sunny little state called Georgia. And for all their adventures, all I got was one set of pajamas and a coffee mug. I couldn't help it if I was a little too attached to them.

Sherlock took my shrug as an answer and leaned over to scribble something on a sheet of paper before looking back at me. "It's 3 a.m." He said.

"I couldn't sleep." I gestured wearily to the violin. "You don't mind an audience, do you?"

"It makes no difference."

Contrarily, he began to put away his violin as I sank gratefully into the red armchair across from him. I pretended not to notice but wondered if I was intruding. Then again, I hardly thought Sherlock to be the kind of person that wouldn't say if I were. Instead, he'd started staring at me. He didn't seem scrutinizing, but he wasn't curious either. Which meant he was seeing everything he needed to see and that I had no control over what I was giving him.

"You should stop that." I said, lowering my gaze to the floor. There were crumpled pieces of paper there, abandoned in a rush. I focused on them to keep my cheeks from burning. "Stay out of my head. I don't remember extending you an invitation in the first place."

Sherlock leaned back, and the calculating look vanished from off his face. "Habit." He said.

"Not with me. I'm not one of your cases." I leaned down and snatched one of the mangled wads of paper up from the rug. I didn't try to straighten it out, just rolled it in my palm. I needed something like this, I decided. A portable outlet for social stresses. "Speaking of which, you aren't accepting any, are you? I've been here for three days. Your inbox is bursting. All you've done is sip tea and scribble and play your violin." Four sentences in, and now he was the one refusing to look at me. "Why?"

"I don't see you rushing off to join the masses." Sherlock muttered. "Or how this is any of your concern."

It wasn't. However, the lateness of the hour and lack of sleep had rendered me rather infantile and I was less than appreciative of his attempt to deduce my behavior. A moment of silence and half a beat later, Sherlock had started drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. It was a gesture of boredom, a sign that I was wasting his time. I could feel my skin grow hot and start to prickle – a sign that I was about to lose it.

I took a deep breath and tried again. "I want to help you." I said. The drumming stopped. "I want this," I gestured to both him and the flat around us, "to have not been a mistake. For that to happen, you have to use your words. I don't know you. I'm not John, I can't just look at you and tell if you need to be left alone. You have to tell me."

Sherlock's fingers twitched like he might start the drumming again. If he had, I would have stormed off to my room and refused to come out until he wasn't present. But he seemed to think better of it and grew fidgety as he searched for what I'd requested; words.

"I don't have any." He said, slow and deliberate. The process of being straightforward was, for both of us, excruciating. "For them. The people crowding my inbox, as you said."

"You don't have any words." I repeated. I tried to keep a stupid look from appearing on my face, knowing that he would pick up on it immediately. He had plenty of words now, didn't he? When he found my questions inane and my presence to be a nuisance. But as I let his admission sink in, I realized he didn't. I remembered the quiet; the hello, the goodnight. He sat alone, sipping tea. He ignored his phone. He hadn't told me to bugger off when I'd interrupted him playing or become vocally annoyed when I'd taken shots at his antisocial behavior.

"No." He said but offered no more information.

"You mean, you don't want to talk to them?"

"No." Sherlock repeated, growing frustrated. "Aren't you listening?" He stood from his chair in a fit of agitation and stalked to the window, where he quickly turned his back on me to look out over Baker Street. He seemed to take a deep breath. His voice was quieter when he spoke again. "I do express myself, Katherine, it simply isn't the way you are used to."

"How?"

"This is absurd." His voice rose again, and I saw his fists clench at his sides, as if he were trying not to combust. I knew that feeling, knew I shouldn't push him. But I spoke again and put the final nail in the coffin of the conversation.

"I want to understand." My voice was almost pleading, I sounded pathetic. He had no patience for that. Instead of staying put at the window, he'd grabbed his coat and rushed for the door before I could even stand.

Sherlock said something about going for a walk, but it was raining, and it was dark and freezing out. I knew he was just trying to get away from me. I managed to stand, but the door was already shut. I'd never opened my mouth to say a word. And it occurred to me that, though Sherlock had, he had never insulted me by saying that I couldn't understand.

I realized then that I knew more about what he was going through than I thought. I floated back and forth from John's chair to the sofa for a few hours, chewing my lip, watching the door.

Having had an adequate amount of time to think about what he said, I had figured out what he meant. And I was now a woman possessed. I couldn't sit down, couldn't breathe – I wanted to tell him that I knew. It wasn't that he didn't have things to say, it was that he had no interest in saying them. He felt there was no point in explaining the unexplainable. He didn't use words, he used his violin. Music was his outlet. That was why he never slept. There was no relief in sleep, only when he played. It was why he didn't speak, just scribbled.

It was why I'd stopped answering my phone and started sleeping so much. I didn't have an outlet. I wanted to tell him that, tell him everything.

By 5 in the morning, I realized that I was wasting my time. He never came back, and I couldn't call.

He'd left his phone.

When I awoke, I was still on the sofa. The morning light streamed in from the window Sherlock was so fond of looking out of, blinding my tired eyes as I groaned into the cushions. A quick glance at my cell told me it was not even mid-morning. I'd slept a grand total of four hours. Everything was as it had been when I'd accidentally dozed – vacant.

Sherlock still hadn't come back.

I sat up, rubbing at my eyes as I tried to shake exhaustion from my limbs. I glanced toward the door with a sigh. If I were to apologize properly, I should look halfway decent when Sherlock decided to return. I made my way to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and crawled into a scalding shower where I stayed for nearly an hour.

I tried not to make a rush for the living room when I was decent again. If Sherlock had come home, I would be damned before I looked like I'd been worried. The apologies that I'd wanted to share the previous night were gone. In their place were a long list of expletives that I would have loved to hurl at him, should he have been sitting in his chair by the fireplace.

He wasn't.

A feral sound of frustration escaped me before I could hush it. I rolled my eyes and skulked back down the hall to my room. How dare he behave this way! It was unbecoming of a grown man. Disappearing for hours at a time with no word, no way to check on him. I sat down on the edge of my bed, hair dripping. Should I call the police? Could he be hurt? The moron could have been lying in a ditch somewhere for all I knew. I stood again, prowling instead of pacing as I weighed my options. I could go out and look for him myself, but I couldn't begin to guess his favorite haunts.

An epiphany struck me and I dashed to the front door and ripped it open before nearly tripping down the stairs. Mrs. Hudson came around the corner first, looking startled. Whether it was by my appearance or the crazed twist of my features, I didn't know.

"Mrs. Hudson, would you happen to have any idea where Sherlock usually goes when he's sulking?"

She frowned and reached out to pat my arm. "Fighting already? I told him to behave. He just doesn't listen anymore."

"It was my fault, really." I said. "But that's not important. Do you have an idea of where he might have gone?"

"Gone off and left his phone again?" Mrs. Hudson shook her head. "Oh, dear. Let me think for a moment."

The moment passed. And then another. And another.

"Mrs. Hudson."

"Just another moment dear, let me think."

I realized very quickly that this was useless and asked her to call up to me should she think of something in a while. I ran back up the stairs and closed myself in the flat. Nearly out of breath, I walked back to my room to find my cell should Sherlock call from a different number for some reason.

Then again, when he left earlier in the morning, he'd been well and truly upset. Chances were that some of that was aimed at me. Not all of it could be grief. That meant that chances also were that he wouldn't be calling. And I wouldn't know if he were alive until he showed back up at the door.

Grumbling to myself, I flopped dejectedly over on my bed and shoved music into my ears. It was so loud that I was sure, should anyone else have been in the flat, they would have heard it as well. Losing my hearing to the loud cacophony of AC/DC was the least of my problems and was a welcome distraction during the hours that followed. Hours which I spent googling the almost forgotten blog that my father had mentioned in the days before my move to Baker Street.

In the beginning, I'd hesitated. Was it really right to go snooping around? But it was a blog – it was public information. So, I typed exactly what he'd said into the search box. The Science of Deduction.

It was the first result on the page. I raised an eyebrow and clicked it without much expectation. I skimmed, becoming more and more interested as I went. Sherlock called himself "the world's only consulting detective". Was that true? It sounded to me as though, despite his popularity, he'd just created a job for himself out of thin air. It didn't seem official at all. And I would have doubted his skill had I not been witness to the incredible volume of e-mails and text messages he received daily asking for his help.

But in all the time John had lived here, it was 'Sherlock' this and 'Sherlock' that, and 'you should meet my flatmate, that's the only way to understand what I'm talking about'.

Well, I'd met him.

I still didn't understand. So, I did what any self-respecting member of today's society would do and kept digging for more dirt. I couldn't find much. It seemed that Sherlock had archived many of his older cases and I was denied access to their details. Disappointed, I surfed through some of his more recent posts. One in particular caught my eye.

'Analysis of Tobacco Ash: DELETED!'

No need to shout about it, I thought as I clicked on it. I was then redirected to a folder which he'd so very originally named 'Case Files', which held several of Sherlock's last cases that he had apparently taken on with my brother. This was what I'd come here for. I narrowed my eyes and clicked on one labeled 'The Blind Banker' and I was once again redirected, but not to the place I expected.

I suddenly found myself in the middle of another blog. John's. There it all was, every single case they'd taken together. And I had never known about any of it.

The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson greeted me brightly, displaying a smiling picture of my brother next to a sulking Sherlock wearing… a deer stalker? I right-clicked and saved the image to my desktop for later.

Looking at my brother, I felt a dull ache start in my chest and work its way to my heart. I swallowed and tried to push it down as I scrolled to read more posts. One, 'A Strange Meeting', was almost at the very bottom of the line. I clicked.

It was all about the first time John had clapped eyes on the world's only consulting detective. I read with an eagerness that was foreign to me. Fondness followed unexpectedly. John wrote of his therapist, our therapist, Ella Thompson and his friend Mike Stamford and their trip to Bart's Hospital to see Sherlock. Since I knew all about Mike, he'd been at John's funeral, I skimmed until the information was relevant to the reason I'd opened the web browser in the first place.

"Except, he didn't. He didn't introduce us. The man knew who I was. Somehow he knew everything about me. He knew I'd served in Afghanistan and he knew I'd been invalided. He said my wound was psychosomatic so he didn't get everything right but he even knew why I was there, despite the fact that Mike hadn't told him.

I googled him when I got back to the flat and found a link to his website The Science of Deduction.

It's mad. I think he might be mad. He was certainly arrogant and really quite rude and he looks about 12 and he's clearly a bit public school and, yes, I definitely think he might be mad but he was also strangely likeable. He was charming. It really was all just a bit strange.

So tomorrow, we're off to look at a flat. Me and the madman. Me and Sherlock Holmes."

A hand reached out and pushed my laptop closed. I ripped the music out of my ears and looked up to find a man that wasn't Sherlock standing not five feet from my bed. I started screaming before I could help myself.

"Wait!" The man shouted. "Wait just a minute!" He saw that I was diving for the pepper spray in my bedside table and took ten steps back, hands raised. "OI! JUST A SECOND!"

Pepper spray in hand, poised to strike, I stared him down. "What is it? Who are you? What are you doing in my flat?"

The man scoffed, running a hand through his salt and pepper hair. "Look here, I didn't know anyone moved in. This is Sherlock Holmes' flat, yeah?"

"Yeah." I replied, waving the pepper spray again. He took another step back.

"I'm D.I. Lestrade. I have a warrant – "

I dropped the pepper spray when he held up his badge and a warrant and rushed past him and out into the hall to find the entire flat crawling with police. Sherlock's papers were being rifled through, the cushions being ripped up to be checked over – nothing was left unturned. Mouth hanging open, I turned back to Lestrade. "A warrant for what?"

Two officers donning blue gloves pushed past us and into my room. I stormed after them, ready to pounce should they find it necessary to start digging through my underwear drawer. "This is ridiculous." I said, turning back to Lestrade. "I have the right to know what you're doing in this flat."

"As do I."

I was going to make myself sick spinning to look at people. But I knew that voice. Down the hall, Sherlock stood with his arms crossed over his chest. He nodded to Lestrade before gesturing to the madness around us in question. He did nothing to keep them from digging through his things, or mine for that matter.

My underwear drawer opened with a squeak, and I poked my head around the corner. "Hey!" I shouted. "Keep your filthy paws off." The officer who was unlucky enough to have opened it realized I meant business and slammed it shut in the same breath. I turned back to Lestrade.

"Drugs bust." He said, then looked at Sherlock. "So, where is it this time? What have you got?"

I scoffed. "This guy? A junkie? Please."

Sherlock shifted, looking a little more than uneasy as he cleared his throat. "Katherine…"

It took a second to sink in. I blinked. I gasped. And then I hit his arm harder than I would have thought possible. "Sherlock." I hissed.

He winced. "Well…"

"SHERLOCK!" I gritted my teeth to lower the volume of my voice before trying again. "In the flat?"

He shook his head. "No." He said and then repeated the phrase to Lestrade. "No."

I'd had more than enough. I grabbed my cell and excused myself from the scene, marching down the stairs and out onto the street. I sat on the curb until Lestrade and his cronies had finished their business. And then I sat for a few minutes more.

Feeling that I had sufficiently gathered my wits, I sighed and began the trek back inside. Sherlock was lying on the sofa, plucking sheepishly at the strings of his violin. He looked up when I made my entrance but said nothing. I stood at the edge of the sofa for a moment before I reached out and tapped the end of his shoe.

"Budge over." I said.

He blinked at me for a minute before he bent his knees and made room for me to sit down, which I did with as little sighing as possible for his benefit.

"No shouting, then?" He mumbled, avoiding eye contact as if he were expecting me to explode at any given moment.

"Not about this." I said. "But the next time you storm out on me without your cell, I'll call down the whole of Scotland Yard upon you."

His lips twitched at that. "Family trait. You worry far too much."

I reached out again and thumped his shoe with my knuckles to add emphasis to my threat. "I mean it."

Sherlock plucked at his violin again. "I know."

I knew that he would never apologize for making me worry because he saw it as unnecessary. But he was here and Lestrade was gone and both of us were either too tired or too relieved to be angry with the other anymore.

I closed my eyes and settled into the sofa. Before long, Sherlock set aside his instrument, but I never opened my eyes to find out why. And just before I dozed, I heard the familiar sound of tapping fingers against the screen of a phone.

He was answering his e-mail.