The tea made me sleep long enough for his experiment to wear off, and I woke to find Holmes still in his armchair, staring at me. He had obviously not expected his experiment to affect me so strongly, and he nearly drove me mad over the next few hours, worriedly making sure I suffered no lingering effects from either his experiment or the tea. Around reassuring him that I was fine, I made a point to specify several times how much I hated chamomile, hoping he would realize that he could not dose me without my knowledge. I, at least, would probably find it highly amusing if he tried, but only time would tell if he believed me.
I refrained from trying to use his worry to make him promise anything, however. I knew better than to think he would go along with any promise I could want.
It seemed to take forever, but he finally calmed down later that evening, and life returned to normal, with him in and out of the flat at all hours as he traced leads on various small cases. I helped when I could and saw patients when Holmes had no need of me. I had an informal practice I ran out of Baker Street, and the handful of patients that came to me each week were more than enough to occupy me when Holmes' cases had no use for a second person. Holmes remained on edge for a day or two, probably expecting retribution of some sort, but he eventually relaxed when I made no mention of the incident. He thought I had decided to let it go, and I saw no reason to correct him. He would find out otherwise soon enough.
Five days passed before I saw my chance. Holmes hurried out as I arrived home from an errand, calling something about returning in a few days, and I waved him off, hiding my mischievous grin until after I had closed the door.
"What are you planning, Doctor?"
My grin changed to more of a smirk as Mrs. Hudson stared at me from the door to her rooms. "Are you sure you want to know?" I asked in return.
She thought for a moment. "This has something to do with that experiment last week, doesn't it?"
"Of course it does," I replied easily. "Do you want to help?"
"I know better," she said with a faint laugh. The door shut behind her with a faint click, and I chuckled as I climbed the stairs to my room.
It took several minutes to find the kit I had carried in Afghanistan, but I finally spotted it in the depths of one of the boxes beneath my bed. I carried it and a newer, smaller version I kept in the desk in my room down to the sitting room, where I opened them on that desk.
Several sewing needles and multiple spools of black, white, and grey thread lay exactly where I remembered placing them, and my grin returned. This was going to be immensely entertaining—for me, anyway.
Threading a needle, I entered his room and began working. First, I short sheeted his bed, then, using the fine stitches I used when suturing a wound, I sewed every trouser leg shut at the knee and every shirtsleeve shut at the elbow. I made sure to hide my stitches within the fabric, and when I finished, I put each piece back to the way I had found it. I hoped he would not notice my handiwork until he found it difficult to dress, but even if he noticed it before that, the reaction would be worth it. Maybe this would make him think twice about using me in another experiment.
I nearly laughed at the thought. I was beginning to doubt anything could do that. If nothing else, his reaction might quell the faint lingering irritation I still felt at the disorientation his experiment had caused. The few times I had been plagued with such vertigo before his experiment, the sensation had accompanied a high fever, leaving me more delirious than lucid, and I decided I preferred that over being fully aware as the room whirled around me on an axis of its own. I never wanted to experience such a thing again, and I thought he needed something extremely inconvenient to even the score a bit.
Finishing the last pair of trousers, I put the sewing kits back in their places and lost myself in the pages of a novel. I had two or three days of silence ahead of me, and I planned to make full use of them.
.
"Watson?"
The door below slammed shut, and I looked up from my journal as Holmes strode through the door four days after he had left.
"It must have been an interesting case," I said with a grin, mostly to get a rise out of him.
One keen glance noted everything from the journal in my hand to the manuscripts on my desk, plus many other things I could never guess, and he brushed the comment off with the flick of his hand.
"It was not a case, a fact which you already know," he chided, tossing his overcoat to the back of his chair.
I smirked. He was right. I had known it probably was not a case. A several-day case outside London would likely have required both of us, and he would have either waited for me to return before leaving or left directions on how to follow him.
"What was it, then?"
"Mycroft needed something from our parents' estate and could not retrieve it himself," he answered, heading toward his room. "It was a simple matter to wait for the current residents to leave before I entered the back garden."
The current residents? If his parents did not live there anymore, why did he still refer to it as their estate?
He entered his bedroom before I could voice the question, and I decided it would be safer to remain quiet.
I heard him moving around, dumping his valise on his bed as he always did before reaching into his wardrobe to change out of his travel clothes. He paced the length of the room, unable to hold still even when tired from several days' travel, and I started a countdown, noting where he was and when he would find the modifications I had made to his clothes.
Three…two…one…
"Watson!"
I could not kill the large grin that split my face, but I did silence it, hiding my expression in my journal.
"Watson!"
I fought to keep my voice level. "Is something the matter, Holmes?"
"You know very well what the problem is!" his frustrated answer came from the depths of the bedroom. "What did you do to my clothes?!"
"Well, you did ask Mrs. Hudson to take in a few of your shirts last week," I called back, barely keeping my amusement out of the words.
"This is not what I meant!"
I could not speak without laughing aloud, and I made no answer, listening to him dig further into his wardrobe to check every piece of clothing he had. Any second now…
"Watson!"
Still unable to speak without laughing, I said nothing, and silence reigned for several minutes. Footsteps finally came to the door, and, shaking with silenced laughter, I looked up as he walked into the sitting room, scowling darkly at me.
I had left one outfit alone in my sabotage, knowing he would not want to wear his travel-soiled clothes until we could fix what I had done, but he absolutely despised the tailored suit one of our more eccentric clients had given him. I completely understood why—even dark blue looked extremely out of place on a man I had only seen wear black, brown, and grey when not in disguise. I laughed harder.
"The experiment?" he confirmed after a moment, still scowling at me.
It took another minute to get my laughter under control. "Of course," I finally replied, still grinning widely. "I could not turn the room on its end, but this worked well enough. It will take you three or four hours to remove all those stitches."
He rolled his eyes at my amusement—and at the symmetry. "You have seen me with a needle," he replied, refusing to voice that he did not want to fix it alone. I merely smirked and handed him a pair of sewing scissors. I had good reason to leave him to fix it himself, and he knew it. He strode back into his bedroom without a word, and I returned to my journal, still unable to kill my wide grin.
I finished what I was doing and slowly put my journal away before retrieving the other pair of sewing scissors I had left in my desk. He worked alone for about twenty minutes before I joined him, but the relief in his gaze when he heard me enter faded behind a forced scowl when I chuckled at the sight of him in a blue suit. Even his darkest glare could not kill my amusement, and he finally rolled his eyes and turned back to the shirt in his hand. Together, it took only a couple of hours to set his wardrobe to rights, but I hoped he used this as incentive not to use me in another experiment. My friend was a detective genius, but some things were apparently harder for him to learn than others, one of which being the fact that I was not his test subject. We had been arguing about this for nearly twenty years. I would have thought a brilliant detective such as my friend would have put the clues together by this point.
His irritation remained visible nearly the entire time we sat in his room tearing out stitches, and I got so much amusement out of his reaction that I almost confessed what I had done to his sheets. He ruined that himself, however, shortly before I went to bed. The near confession became a scowl when he made a remark about the drivel I must have written while he was gone, and I thought twice about taking back half of my revenge.
He did not find what I had done to his bed until he tried to lie down. I chuckled when his irritated growl carried through the floorboards.
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