**Believe it or not, I still own nothing, fancy that!**

Of The Smiths and Cacti

Louise juggled with her black messenger bag and flask of coffee to try and retrieve her key card from her well-worn jacket pocket. Now a normal person would have put their bag down on the floor to easily pull the card from her obstacle of a pocket quite easily. She however was not a normal person and that would have been far too simple for her.

After another good 30 seconds or so, struggling with herself, she managed to reach the object of her current desire and swipe it without ever spilling her coffee at all.

Pushing one of the doors open with her shoulder, she moved over to the coat hooks, set her bag away, proceeding to remove her jacket and replace it with her crisp white lab coat, 2 year old ID card hanging from the breast pocket, embroidered just above the pocket was her name, which she smiled at every time, it did make her feel somewhat important.

Turning around and flicking the lights on, she shrieked as illuminated in front of her, at her desk was the annoyingly recognizable lanky frame and mess of dark curls that she'd unfortunately grown accustomed to every now and again in her lab.

"For the love of all that is good and fucking holy, how and why the fuck are you in my fucking lab?! You nearly gave me a bloody heart attack!" Lou all but screamed, her heart still pounding from finding the intrusion of the infamous consulting detective who had previously sat waiting in the dark in her lab, which she was pretty sure she locked last night.

"I left my scarf here." Sherlock justified with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "I did rather think you were a morning person, so I got here around 5.00, after 10 minutes I assumed you weren't going to make an appearance anytime soon so I took it upon myself to let myself in. I hacked the security system; dreadfully easily, I might add. You may want to speak with someone about an upgrade." He finished, looking disturbingly pleased with himself.

Louise merely stood there flabbergasted for a few seconds before walking over to her desk and leaning on it, looking Sherlock dead in the eye.

"Did you move anything?" Was the first thing to come out of her mouth, eyes quickly scanning the layout of the room, giving it a quick once over, agitatedly blowing her dark side fringe out of her eyes.

"I didn't touch a thing; I've just been sat here thinking, as I do. The last time I moved something you started doing that high pitched squeaky speed-talking thing. It was extremely irritating." Sherlock answered, removing himself from Louise's chair and starting off the Newton's Cradle once more.

"Idonotdoahighpitchedsqueakything!" Louise blurted out, unable to stop herself, which only rewarded her with a smug 'oh really' look from Sherlock which aggravated her to no end. Stopping the cradle, she perched herself at the edge of her desk as the constantly concentrating faced detective was staring intently at her cactus experiments.

"Sometimes, just sometimes I want to smash your stupid face in." Lou smiled sweetly, before bringing her coffee to her lips and taking a sip, welcoming the much needed caffeine.

"Irrational and illogical, if anything my face is the face of great intelligence." He retorted, picking up the clipboard located beside the cacti and reading through the experiment log.

"No, Mr Holmes, your brain holds the intelligence; you don't even really need your face that much. It's pointy and angular and I'm not going to lie, I've wanted to poke it in the past for the sheer curiosity of wanting to know just exactly how far your cheekbones protrude from your face." She shrugged, not at all surprised by the direction the conversation was currently going in.

"You've been listening to The Smiths again haven't you Miss Bell?" Sherlock stated, rather than questioned, not tearing his eyes away from the clipboard as he flipped to the next page.

"Bitch I might have been…" Louise mumbled to herself, walking over to him and pulling the clipboard from his hands. "Do you mind? My experiment isn't ready to be observed by other actual human beings at this point in time." She said, shooing him away from her experiment so as he wouldn't be quite as tempted to touch her cacti.

Sherlock merely ignored her though and strode right back over to the plant life, crouching down so he was eye level to the botany.

"You always get slightly more irritated, and/or curious when you listen to The Smiths. It suits you. Makes you seem less dull, I'd prescribe lots more of Morrissey's depressive tones, rather that incessant droning of Michael Bublé that you for some reason insist on playing in the lab." Sherlock finally finished, poking the cactus delicately with a pen, to which Louise slapped him upside the head to stop his prodding.

"Firstly, you leave my Bubble-man alone, he's got the voice of an angel!" Lou defended. "Secondly, stop fiddling with my plants. Don't you have cases you could and should be working on?" She asked, raising her eyebrow and tapping her foot, her impatiens quickly growing.

"Solved it already, boring. Far too easy and there are no more interesting cases to be had, I just need a nice quadruple homicide or something to tide me over…" He ground out, getting just as agitated as she was by his being in the lab.

"Then go home Mr Holmes, go do whatever it is you do when you have spare time." She demanded softly, already exasperated, strolling over to the door and opening it for him, gesturing to the corridor.

"Can't." He stated simply, not moving from his position in the centre of the lab.

"Can't? What do you mean can't?" Louise sighed, letting go of the door and pinching the bridge of her nose.

"Noxious gasses are currently occupying my flat, a slight underestimation on my part I regret to admit, though I have correctly estimated that the gasses should dissipate completely in 3-5 days." Sherlock stated simply as if it was the most normal explanation in the world. Lou couldn't help but shake her head; a home was no place to be experimenting with noxious gasses.

"Mr Holmes, I don't think you're going to have a flat to go back to in 3-5 days! There's no way any landlord in their right mind would keep you as a tenant after a stunt like that!" She explained, wide eyed at his inability to grasp the mind-set of the non-criminal population.

Sherlock furrowed his eyebrows at that, realising he hadn't taken into account there were other people in the block of flats, he didn't particularly care how they thought of him or his early hours experiments, however he realised they could and would take action with the realisation they've got noxious gasses sealed in the flat above, below and around them. Looking towards Louise, he found the only thing that managed to escape him was a look of realisation and a downtrodden, "Oh."

Louise knew she was going to regret her suggestion the second it came out of her mouth, yet decided to open her trap anyway.

"You said you didn't really sleep if you have something to work on, as I recall. If you wanted, I could hire you personally to continue research on my cactus samples through the nights, if you'd like." She offered, moving back towards the beanpole of a man and handing him back the clipboard. "Just until you find another flat." She finished with a small, sympathetic smile.

"Why?" He responded quickly, taking back the research notes and flipping through them once again.

"Because I've been told I'm a nice person, and I can't in good conscience let you go walk abouts around London every night aimlessly, you're liable to get bored, piss someone off and get the shit kicked out of you." She chuckled, playing that mental image play in her head for a second before reaching into her pocket, and throwing him her nearly empty pack of cigarettes.

"C'mon, we'll go have a fag and I'll brief you on what I'm doing with the cactus DNA." Lou smiled, grabbing her coat and making for the back exit as they always did.

"Very resourceful and opportunistic of you Miss Bell, almost commendable traits." Was all Sherlock said, following her box of Chesterfields in hand. That was as close to gratitude Louise was going to get and she understood that.

"You're welcome Sherlock." She shook her head, opening the back door to go and smoke.

Thank you to all my shiny new followers, you kind of rock and I'm glad I'm not a complete failure, so yay me!

Do leave a quick scribble to tell me how I'm doing or if you think I'm able to improve in any way, it'd mean a lot!

DeathFrizbee