Prompt: Line drawn in the sand.
A/N: Okay, I'm aware that 1. there is technically no sand involved, and 2. I cannot do prompts in order. Oh well.
Somehow, everything had gone wrong.
The train wreck that had been their afternoon had first gone off the rails that morning when Sherlock had broken a teacup. It had been a dumb thing to yell at him about, John knew, but he was tired, he was running late for work, and Sherlock had already broken two teacups that week and John really did not want to spend the money to buy more.
He could have just taken a deep breath, sighed, and told Sherlock to sweep up the shards so he didn't get glass in his feet (Heaven knew he never wore shoes if he could help it), but instead his lack of patience that morning had gotten the better of him.
And now he was kneeling in the mud having his patience tested once more.
Sherlock had been drawing in the mud, still cold and thick from yesterday's downpour, for hours now. At least, it felt like hours to John, who had been kneeling silently at his side the whole time he'd been scrawling crooked arrows and unreadable letters (he assumed they were letters) in the ground with his thin fingers.
John tucked his chapped hands into his coat once the wind began to blow. The small section of the park they'd wound up in smelled of fresh-cut grass, rain, and mud, all three scents seeming to freeze inside his nostrils.
"Come on, Sherlock," John said. "Your fingers are going to turn blue. Stop. You'll figure it out."
Not long after John had returned from work that afternoon, Lestrade had sent them off on a case. A quick one, Sherlock had said. One that'd only take a perfunctory glance at the crime scene, with time for chasing down the criminal, making an arrest, and having dinner at Angelo's afterward.
Yet here they were, deductions done and dusted, arrest warrants lined up, and absolutely no idea where the chap behind all the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans had escaped to.
It was that last piece of the puzzle that was driving the detective batty.
"Leave it up to Lestrade. He'll figure it out. We've worked out who did it already. Scotland Yard can do the rest."
Sherlock stopped his primitive mud doodles and sighed. John expected him to state the obvious: he'd much rather not leave this delicate work up to imbeciles; he wanted the satisfaction for himself; they shouldn't leave such a determined unstable psychopath on the loose; it'd be faster if they just took care of business themselves…
"Can't think."
"C'mon." John tugged on his gloves. Why couldn't they just suddenly grow long enough to cover that sliver of skin between his wrist and his coat sleeves? "You're Sherlock Holmes. Of course you can think."
No response other than a grunt. Sherlock began to draw arrows pointing in all directions: first straight ahead, then behind them; off to the left, off to the right, and finally at John.
"You could out-think anyone. You could out-think—oh, I don't know, and entire team of rocket scientists."
"How cliché."
John sighed. A day of practically not speaking to him and then he decides to break the silence with one of his quietly biting little smirk-ridden snides.
He shouldn't have expected anything different.
But maybe he'd wanted, hoped for something a little more.
"Talk to me."
"You don't want to listen." Another arrow straight ahead, another pointing back to John.
"Try me."
Silence. Harsher gusts of wind, stronger deep breaths of mud-and-dirty-hair stench. The grass was cold, prickly beneath John, on that naked spot on his arm.
But he waited.
"Why wouldn't I want to listen to you?"
"A multitude of reasons." John couldn't see Sherlock's face, but he could tell he was rolling his eyes. "But most likely teacups."
John took a breath as the harsh smash of glass on the linoleum from that morning returned to him, as if someone had broken the teacup anew.
"Still thinking 'bout that, are you?" John asked, his voice low and gentle.
"Still pissed at me, are you?"
"What?"
"Oh, do come on. It's not that complicated of a question." But Sherlock's tone struck John as considerably less self-assured than normal, the heaving smug sarcasm gone.
John frowned. The echo of the cheap cup shattering continued in his mind, but so did other details of the scene now emerging from his trove of memories. Himself shouting, taking unconscious steps forward (with his fists clenched) toward Sherlock. The nigh-imperceptible flinching that under different circumstances John would have written off as flaws in his memory from strange malfunctions of desire (maybe—maybe—he'd just wanted some kind of reaction from his friend).
"You think I'm angry with you about that." John almost cringed at himself. He really was the master of only the painfully obvious sometimes. He had, after all, been pissed at his friend that morning, but that had been the morning, and this was now, and they weren't at Baker Street anymore but here in the middle of a swampy park with his best friend drawing nonsense in the mud like a complete loon, and, fuck, now he had it figured out.
"You know I'm not angry anymore, right?" John scooted closer to Sherlock, still trying to keep his boots out of the soggy excuse for an open field. He considered putting a hand on his shoulder but decided he'd better keep his contact strictly verbal. "I was just in a mood this morning, and I let my temper get the better of me when I shouldn't have. But I'm not trying to excuse how I acted like a total dick to you, and, much as you might like me to, I'm not trying to rationalize any of this."
Sherlock still didn't look up. John heard his loud, rhythmic breathing, and in some mysterious way, found himself half-smiling that they were here. In the middle of an environmental travesty, but here. Together.
"What I mean, Sherlock, is that I'm sorry. Sorry for yelling at you and being rude."
The detective glanced at him. John couldn't quite read his gaze, but he could tell it was gentler—softer?—than usual.
For a few moments, he continued to doodle lopsided figures and crooked arrows in the mud. John waited at his side. Sheltering him from the wind.
Then, he took a breath and pressed his folded hands, still covered in mud, to his lips.
"He went down to Bayswater. Tube station. Probably by the ticket kiosks topping off his Oyster card."
Sherlock turned to John.
"If we're lucky, incompetent American tourists will delay him long enough. Let's go."
Sherlock jumped to his feet, adjusted his coat collar, and took another glance at John, whose half-smile had now become a full grin. Sherlock mirrored it.
And then they were off again.