Rating: T
Warnings: More angst and angry John, a few mildly offensive sexuality slurs and severe bovine distress.
A/N: Aaand, here it is! I'm sorry it's taken so long and become half the story I wanted it to be in about twice as many words, and warped from comic relief into angst. I guess h/c does that to you. I have no idea what to do next and would appreciate some ideas! I've been reading a lot of zombie apocalypse fiction and was thinking of trying my hand at that, but I don't think I'd be able to keep it at a short-and-sweet hurt/comfort oneshot, which is what I'm trying to do here. This chapter excepted, of course. Things are taking longer at the moment because I've started writing a version of 'Megamind' with the characters from Sherlock and I'm really enjoying it, so it's taking up most of my attention. But I thought I should scribble this out first.

For my anonymous reviewer Putmoneyinthypurse,thank you for making my day and I'm sorry for the vividly nauseating images you must have been plagued by. I will of course take this opportunity to recommend that you read some of my other work; I think you'd like On A Different Note, and judging by your penname you'd like my puppeteer-Moriarty fic Hell and Night, too. Hope you can collect your somewhat dissembled self. Thank you so much for your reviews, I really, really appreciate them. I'd love it if you could sign in so I could reply to you in person. Enough blowing of my own trumpet? Okay.

-for you!

Cattle Rustling

Sherlock is – and by God, this has got to be his least favourite word in the English language – bored.

He's tried not to be. He really has, John, honest – but there doesn't seem to be any helping it today. There's nothing to do. No-one cares enough about the world to sacrifice their own ego and give him a call or a case. Molly's on holiday and the last time he tried to smuggle body parts from the morgue without her was a dismal failure, not helped by the fact that Lestrade refused to back him up. Those ears had been central to the case in question, how could he not see that?

Anyway, the woman who covers her shift when she's on leave had an abusive father and so is more than a little uptight and controlling and fearsome when angered. He'd known that before he angered her, of course. He'd just slightly misjudged the extent of her fearsomeness.

This feeling is unbearable. It really is like an itch under the skin, like every muscle is itching and Sherlock can't possibly itch them all at the same time, and he's tired to the point of being completely beyond sleep so he lies unmoving on the sofa and experiments with how long his body can lie there and scream restlessly at him to bloody DO SOMETHING before it actually physically explodes.

He gives up and twitches convulsively; the scream is sated for the barest of moments before starting up again, high and frenzied, millimetres below his skin. In this fit of shutupshutupshutup movement he vaults the back of the sofa and catches sight of the fridge through the doorway.

"I can't remember everything, Sherlock. I'm not like you." John slammed the fridge door. The yellow Post-it bearing the note 'buy milk' grinned back at him and he huffed, empty-handed, glancing at the cup of black tea on the bench. Sherlock smirked.

"How's it working, then, John?" he said insouciantly, and was rewarded with a glare bearing the emotional maturity of a nine year-old.

"Shut up. Most of the time it works. I see the note and I remember. You know what, Sherlock? If you were feeling unusually helpful one day, you could have a look at them and see if there are any you could do."

Sherlock just looked at him, because they both knew the statistical likelihood of that happening. "All right, then," John relented, "if you're feeling exceptionally bored, perhaps."

"Hmm," he'd mused teasingly. "Errand-bored. May it never come to that."

Sherlock sweeps dramatically into the kitchen. Well, it has. Yes, it has certainly come to that.

But there is only one forlorn note, in a shade of yellow too washed-out to be cheerful. Sherlock plucks it listlessly from the fridge and holds it in his hand. Call Harry. The string of numbers underneath dances in front of his eyes; when Sherlock is in this state everything dances tauntingly.

Well, that isn't much use. It's not something he can occupy himself with. He pictures John's face if he did call her; that sort of you-did-WHAT? look he gets on a fairly regular basis, usually when looking at his flatmate over the top of a wound in his own flesh or somebody else's decomposing body part. Actually, now he thinks of it, it's that look that usually spurs him on.

He drops the note and picks up the phone. He knows John wrote the note because he's been feeling guilty for a while about not having made the slightest contact with his sister for months, so he dials the number he memorised thirty seconds ago, lifts the phone to his ear, and thinks of that look. John doesn't have plans next weekend, does he? Well, you do now, buddy.

"Hello?"

Sherlock puts on his best hi-I'm-normal telephone voice. "Hi, is that Harry Watson?" he asks brightly.

"Um… no… it's Lucy here." Oh. He scrambles for the piece of paper on the floor; did he get a digit wrong? "Harry's gone into town. She'll be back in a few hours. Can I take a message?"

Ah-ha. "Oh. Yes, it's – no, wait." Hardly as coherent as his usual brain-flow, but Sherlock has just had something of a humdinger. What if he and Harry's new partner Lucy could arrange some sort of surprise get-together? The Watsons would hate them for a while, but John's used to that kind of pleasure by now. He's come to realise that Sherlock operates in a way that hurts at first, but when your brain finally catches up to where his was when it started hurting you suddenly don't mind at all. "My name's Sherlock, I'm living with Harry's brother John at the moment."

There is silence on the other end of the phone. A sort of breathy, pregnant silence that Sherlock has come to recognise as the sound of being… well, recognised. "Oh! Yes, Harry mentioned you – the private detective."

"Consulting detective," he corrects out of habit. "Of course she did. I only called because John's been saying that he should get in touch with Harry again but he's not quite sure how, so I thought I'd step in." And it's not even a lie. Sometimes, just after John's left the room, Sherlock lies on the sofa and refuses to go to bed and wonders what Doctor John Watson has done to him and how on Earth he managed it. Sherlock's life sometimes seems to be split into two parts: before John and after him.

Before John there was only Sherlock. He did what he wanted when he wanted to, insulted cops and took advantage of good people like Mrs Hudson to get his way. But now there are moments when John makes him want to do something just to make the doctor smile, just to make him keep caring. John will say that that's what friends are for.

"Great," Lucy on the other end of the phone says happily. She has a deep voice for a woman, and Sherlock guesses that she and Harry would look almost exactly like your stereotypical lesbian couple. Which isn't what he'd expected. "Oh… we've got my parents coming over next weekend. And then we're busy until… God, I'm sorry."

Sherlock actually bites his lip. You see this? This man leaning against the kitchen doorframe biting his lip because the clever little surprise he'd planned in the last few minutes for his flatmate isn't going to work? This would never have happened without Doctor John Watson. "What about tomorrow?"

Lucy laughs. "Oh. Well, we're supposed to be doing a spot of cattle-rustling tomorrow. I don't really know if that's your thing."

Sherlock smiles in what John would call a devious manner. "Sounds perfect. We'd love to help."

"Where the hell are we going?" John asks as the cab pulls off the dusty road and onto a simple gravel thing. "Sherlock, for God's sake, if we've been in this cab for an hour just to go and see some interesting farm homicide, I swear…"

"Oh, relax, John," Sherlock chides amusedly. "This stretch of farmland hasn't seen a homicide in at least fifty years."

He glances across at John, smiling tightly. The doctor rolls his eyes. "Then what are we doing here?"

Sherlock smiles wider. "It's a surprise."

John gives that grumpy little huff Sherlock has come to know quite well. "I hate surprises."

The cabbie stops before a metal farm-gate. "Can't go no further, sir," he says brightly. "Road stops past that gate."

John groans; Sherlock, however, is in fine spirits. "Thank you," he says brightly to the cabbie, ignoring John's look of shock at the expression. "Come on, John."

"Look, if we're here… Christ, I don't know what can have got you this excited… if we're here excavating the remains of Jack the Ripper or something, I am getting back in this cab."

Sherlock smirks. "Calm down, John. You'll like this surprise." Then he frowns. Will he? "Well, I think you will. Maybe it was a bad idea."

John now looks like he is mere seconds and a breath of wind away from having a heart attack. "Maybe it was a – for God's sake, Sherlock, last time I heard those words come out of your mouth you'd set fire to the shower curtain."

Sherlock chuckles – that had been a bad idea. And he'd known it from the start. They reach the door and Sherlock rings the buzzer. John looks around, puzzled. "I've seen that car before," he muses. "Sherlock, what –"

The door opens and John suddenly knows exactly what. "Harry?"

The sallow-faced woman who has opens the door is nothing like what Sherlock expected Harry Watson to look like. "John! What are you doing here?"

John looks at Sherlock, who has suddenly become extremely interested in the water-feature by the door. "I'm not entirely sure." Sherlock looks back at him, finally, and John gives him an I'll-talk-to-you-later glare. "Harry, this is my flatmate Sherlock."

Harry looks the detective up and down and smirks. "Flatmate, eh? All right, I'll buy that. Lucy!" A more thickset woman with cropped hair and ruddy cheeks appears at her shoulder. "This is my brother John and his flatmate Sherlock."

Lucy winks at Sherlock and shakes John's hand. "I'd invite you in, but we were actually just about to go out to get the cows –"

"Oh, no," Sherlock interrupts quickly, "we're here to help." John looks on in abject terror as his flatmate pulls two pairs of – are those Wellingtons? – from the large bag John had refrained from asking the contents of for the whole cab ride.

"Sherlock," John hisses – why he's whispering he's not quite sure – "this is a bad idea. This is such a bad idea. Why did you do this?"

Sherlock smirks. "The note, John."

John's had about as much as he can take, squared, of Sherlock's cryptic are-you-really-stupid-enough-to-not-understand? sentences. "What note?"

"You left a note on the fridge to call Harry. So I did."

This catches the doctor a little off-guard. "You… just did it?"

The detective shrugs. "I was bored."

"Oh. Of course." John looks up the hill again, and up it and up it because it's a rather impressive one, and wonders how his sister could have turned into a right proper farmer without him knowing. And wonders even harder how he'd ended up at the bottom of a hill with Sherlock Holmes waiting for his sister and her lover to push a cow their way so they could wave their arms and look frightening. "Oh, this is a bad idea," he vocalises again, noticing with some kind of savage pleasure that Sherlock has that look on his face that he gets when John repeats himself. "It's all right for you, you're more intimidating than I am."

Sherlock knows he is many things, and that intimidating, should he so wish, is one of them. But he knows that there are no circumstances in which he is more intimidating than John Watson. "You underestimate yourself, Doctor Watson," he says languidly. "Size or not, I'm afraid you cut a far more intimidating figure than I do."

John considers this. "What about –"

"Elementary. He ran away from me because he saw you coming up behind me."

"He wasn't even looking at me!" John protests. Sherlock smirks.

"Face it, John, with your distinctly military air you can be enormously intimidating."

John takes a deep breath and Sherlock takes a moment to appreciate the effort the doctor goes to for him. "Sherlock," he says, perfectly calm, "Harry is about to lead three cows around that corner. Cows do not look at military history. They look at stature. You're taller than me – much taller than me, which you're constantly reminding me, thank you – so you're more of a threat."

Sherlock shrugs this off. "How do you know what cows are scared of?" he asks condescendingly. He forgets that John may not be a genius in the way he is, but John paid attention at school and hasn't quite mastered the technique required to delete unnecessary information. And probably wouldn't use it if he ever did, because he's been around long enough to know that the strangest piece of information might come in handy one day.

Apparently this is one of those times. "How do I – Sherlock, it's – oh. Right. Sorry." John takes a deep breath and actually makes soothing motions with his hands. "The Earth goes round the sun. People get upset when you tell them they're stupid. And most animals are frightened of animals that are bigger than them."

Sherlock thinks this one through. The earth goes round the sun – yes, well, he knows that, now, doesn't he? It's been repeated enough to be drilled into his head past the point of no return. People get upset when you tell them they're stupid – someone he respected had told him once that it's not an insult if it's true. They may have been being sarcastic, but that's irrelevant. And the last one? As Harry and Lucy's shouts get louder around the hill, he's forced to admit that that, too, sounds fairly logical.

So he draws himself up to his full height and sucks in a deep breath in case that will make him taller – a vain hope, but it has been known to be effective – and is vaguely aware of John pitifully doing the same beside him. Then a large cow with rather impressive horns charges around the corner, followed by two black calves.

Sherlock panics. He's a consulting detective, and sure he's used to unusual situations but this – standing stock still beside an electric fence while three horned, angry cows charge towards him - this is new territory for the genius. He hears John let out something that sounds suspiciously like a squeal, and his brain clicks back on just in time for him to throw up his hands warningly.

The lead cow, which happens to be the biggest, black and menacing with horns reminiscent of something big, black and menacing, veers off to one side. Luckily it's the side that Harry and Lucy wanted the cows to go, because the other two follow the biggest one and neither Sherlock nor John would have the faintest idea how to correct them if they'd gone the wrong way. The detective and his doctor watch as the bull and the two calves slow down halfway up the neighbour's drive; it's not until a few minutes after that that Harry and Lucy come around the corner.

"Perfect," Lucy pants. She has a happy, ruddy face and in the exertion it's gone even redder, but she's beaming and Sherlock, in his usual disconnected way, can see why Harry likes her. They're quite similar, too; they make a nice couple. They'll probably make a nice couple for a long time. She waves an arm towards the cows. "If you two bring up the rear, we'll go one on each side." And she's off again, running in a wide arc until she's up alongside the cows. Harry runs after her, arcing in the opposite direction with barely a glance in her brother's direction.

John, however, sends plenty of glances in Sherlock's direction. He's beginning to regret this. Why had he butted in and tried to fix John's family problems? It's not like John tries to make him have lunch with Mycroft.

Oh no, wait, there was once. Or twice. At least once a month, actually. Sherlock brushes off John's glares, instead tugging at his jacket sleeve. "Come on, John!" he cries like he's having the time of his life – and actually, now that the initial panic has worn off, the thrill of the chase is starting to pulse in his veins – and takes off after the two women, his Wellingtons making that delightful plodding noise that only Wellingtons in a muddy driveway can make. John sighs, and follows.

By the time they get up the drive and into the field that leads to the cattleyard, Sherlock's actually starting to look on the animals with something resembling fondness. All three of them are young, he realises, and when he asks about it Harry softens slightly and tells him that their mother is on someone else's land frolicking with their bull, and the payment for that "service" is any female calves that are born out of it. Charming. He concludes from this that the aim of today's jaunt is to load the smallest calf, the girl, into the horsefloat he can see by the cattleyards.

The cynic inside him smiles wryly and says, good luck.

Lucy gestures at them to spread out and close in on the bored-looking bovines to force them through the gates into the cattleyards. Sherlock goes one way; John makes a step towards him. Always touchy about his height, apparently John is really feeling it today. But Harry clears her throat, looks pointedly in the other direction and says in a voice that is already grating on Sherlock's ears, it's anybody's guess how John put up with it all those years, "No, John, you go that way."

John gives Sherlock a slightly pleading look, but goes where his sister directs him. The biggest cow turns its head towards him and lows gently. Sherlock can't stop the chuckle as he takes another step forwards and the cows jerk away from him, see Lucy, and stop, panicking, aware that they're being backed into a corner. It's a little bit like chasing criminals. Well, not really, but he can see the resemblance. The bull tries a step towards him so he lifts his hands slightly and it reconsiders; the two calves shrink behind it. He suddenly wants to laugh, now things are predictable again in good ways and John, too, is smothering a smile.

They back the cows into the yard and manage to shut the gates one by one until all three bovines are trapped in one small pen. Sherlock stands on a bench beside the yard-press and watches the two women chase the animals around, opening and closing gates. He's not sure why he feels content.

"Sherlock," Lucy calls suddenly from the pen closest to him, "can you pull on that rope quickly and open the yard-press? We want the cows to go through one by one so we can trap the one we want." Obligingly, Sherlock pulls on the rope and the rusty red metal screams in protest, but opens slowly. Sensing the out, the biggest cow makes a break for it and runs into the yard-press; without prompting, out of instinct, Sherlock flicks the rope again and the yard-press shuts, trapping the animal. Lucy laughs.

"Well done," she says genially. "Now pull the rope on the other side and let him out." Sherlock does so. He looks back at John, standing next to him on the rail and looking slightly put out.

"Do you want to do the next one?" he mutters teasingly. John looks as though a Herculean effort is the only thing preventing a childish display of his tastebuds, but shoves his flatmate over and grabs the rope.

The next calf proves infinitely more tricky. The two of them that are left are smaller, now, and though John and Lucy try together to time the opening and closing of the press so that only one calf gets through, somehow the other always manages to squeeze their way in there with it. Sherlock watches Harry, her sallow face reddened by the exertion of chasing the animals around the myriad pens, mud splattered up her legs, hazel eyes that are the only link between the siblings fixed on the difficulties her brother and her girlfriend are having with her pet cows, mouth curling upwards into the slightest of smiles. And Sherlock is immensely glad; if things keep going like this, the day could turn out damn-near perfect.

After a few more minutes of this, Harry interjects. "Just keep both of them in there and try and get the girl's head wedged in the other side," she suggests. Sherlock thinks this sounds rather painful, but Lucy looks over at her gratefully and he deduces that this isn't a terrible idea. So the Watson sister swings her solid legs over the fence and takes her brother's place, nudging him aside with a sisterly 'scuse-me. John's hip bumps against Sherlock's as he is moved aside and the detective wonders for a moment whether this was unnecessarily rude of her, but John's face isn't telling.

A few minutes of the two women manoeuvring gates and calves manage to see the youngest cow jammed at the neck in the far side of the yard-press. Sherlock can't help the look of distaste as she writhes and thrashes around in panic. He looks at John; the doctor shares the same look. He supposes it can't be helped.

Harry slips around until she's facing the captive calf, a halter in her hands. The girl sees her coming and bellows, low and desperate, thrashing and charging against the metal press. Sherlock flinches away; the pure suffering in the calf's voice is awful. It screams and screams and rams itself into the metal, Harry stepping back out of harm's way. Sherlock feels a hand touch his and grabs it, hardly registering that it must belong to John before he squeezes it and shuts his eyes and wishes he could shut his ears too. John shuffles closer, this is affecting him too, and Sherlock presses his body into his flatmate's and hopes this is comfort.

Perhaps it's lucky neither woman is looking at them; Lucy is trying to stroke soothing lines down the calf's rump without getting her fingers crushed and Harry is taking deep breaths before making another pass at the head, trying to slip the halter around its neck without getting impaled on the stubs of baby horns.

Sherlock somehow manages to slip away from it all in his mind, to focus on John's hand clutching his like a lifeline and the doctor's stocky side against him and drift upwards with that until he can't hear the screams anymore. Then he opens his eyes and it's over; somehow Harry has managed to work the halter behind the calf's ears and attach the lead-rope to it, and Lucy's telling John to open the yard-press again and let them go.

Harry is bowled over in the charge; John laughs as she lands on her bottom in the mud. Sherlock smiles, too, but he's aware of the delicacy of their relationship as John's sister glares up at him, but Lucy's laughing too and so she has no choice but to shrug and laugh too, a genuine sort of rumble that goes right to her hazel eyes and she looks like John when she laughs, Sherlock notices. She should laugh more often.

Eventually they get up and the two women chase the three cows around the myriad pens in the yard, trying to stamp on the lead-rope and control the calf they want to control. Sherlock wonders if the two of them should be helping, standing on the ledge beside the yard-press, their sides still touching even though they've dropped hands. Sherlock knows Harry won't understand their relationship. But the two women seem perfectly synched, and they've done this before without help, he knows. So he props his elbows on the fence and watches.

He knows he could never do this for a living. Or as a hobby. He'd been having fun before, but the sight of the calf bellowing desperately and slamming herself into the yard-press is still there when he closes his eyes and it hurts. He knows he's not the most compassionate of people, and that John doesn't like this, and that he hurts people and sees people hurt and killed all the time and likes it, in a disconnected way that means it's work and it's exciting, but this is different. This is an animal out of its wits with fear, and it's awful.

Interesting.

Harry ends up horizontal more than once in the ensuing chase; for some reason, Lucy manages to remain on her feet even when she's holding the rope, leaning backwards on her heels to counter the weight of the still-struggling calf. Step by step, she drags it back into the pen closest to the horse-float and ties it to the fence. Harry, panting, covered in mud, closes the gate behind her, trapping them in.

Sherlock looks around. There's so much open space around the float's door; with the calf still struggling like she's being led to her death – God knows what it'd be like to work in an abattoir – the backing-into-a-corner trick won't work and the number of times Lucy or Harry has been forced to let go of the rope suggest dragging her in won't work either. He casts a glance at the square pen on the other side of the paddock and jumps down off the ledge. "John," he says softly, nodding towards it. John – bless him – understands and follows.

Together they drag the pen until it bridges the gap between the float and the fence. Lucy watches approvingly. "Make good farmers, you two," she says lightly. John and Sherlock look at each other.

"I hardly think so," Sherlock drawls. John just snorts. As if to prove this point, they both jump the pen so that it's between them and the frantic calf as Lucy anchors herself firmly to the post and Harry opens the gate; the cow makes a few blind charges at the pen and at Harry, and Lucy narrowly avoids being speared by the blunt horns; then suddenly, over without warning, she has run up the ramp into the float and Lucy's dropped the leadrope and jammed up the door and Harry's holding it shut while she slams the bolts home.

Silence but for the sounds of panting and the muffled lows and thuds from the cow in the horse-float. Sherlock looks at John and John looks at Sherlock and Sherlock looks at Harry and Harry looks at Lucy and Lucy smiles.

"Well now," she says happily, "that wasn't so hard." Sherlock looks back at John, whose face is endearingly arranged in a you-what? expression. "Lunch, anyone? I baked bread."

John shakes his head in something that looks like amazement, but makes no further reply, so Sherlock steps in. "Sounds lovely. Thanks, Lucy. Are you just going to leave the cow in there?"

He can see that John appreciates the role-reversal in today's adventures; Sherlock's been the polite one all day. Lucy grins brightly, missing the dark look that passes between them at Sherlock's smug face. "She'll be fine in there till after lunch. Then I'll drive up to Maureen's."

So the four of them walk up the two long drives and back to Harry and Lucy's. Sherlock tries to engage Harry in typical conversation ("So, how did you two meet?") and is slowly overtaken by John. As they get to the front door, the two women finally finish their unnecessarily long story of someone's bag breaking outside the supermarket and turn the conversation their way.

"What about you guys? How'd you meet?" Lucy asks. Sherlock smiles gently.

"A mutual acquaintance introduced us," he summarised fondly. John snorts.

"Yeah, and then you were bloody rude," he retaliates, though Sherlock is pleased to note that his tone has slipped from genuinely sulky to just faking it. He feigns outrage, so John elaborates. "The only thing you said to me was my own life story. Oh, and that you'd left your riding crop in the mortuary."

Harry trips over her own Wellingtons on her way through the door. "What?"

Sherlock smiles winningly. "I'm a consulting detective," he excuses. "I help the police solve murders. There was this one guy who they all thought was whipped to death with a riding crop, but I was sure the bruising wasn't right…" the story carries them inside the house and to the kitchen table, cradling cups of tea. The house smells gorgeously like fresh, warm bread.

It's nice, Sherlock thinks in surprise, with Harry and Lucy bumbling about together in the kitchen, chatting away nicely about how different programs like CSI are from reality, John laughing, the two women occasionally bumping into each other and laughing with puppydog eyes full of love. They've been together long enough to have moved past the honeymoon phase of their relationship, so Sherlock mutters gently to John when they're not listening that they suit each other.

John just smiles happily. Lucy eventually plonks a platter on the table with a belletristic selection of sliced bread and ham and an assortment of salad items. It looks lovely. Sherlock, surprisingly, is starving, so he tucks in. John sends him another surprised look.

"So," Harry says snidely as she sits down beside them and nudges John conspiratorially. Alarm bells fail to go off in anyone's head. "You managed to successfully steer the conversation away from you two. Now I'm dragging it back."

John laughs into his ham sandwich. "Fair enough." Sherlock takes a tentative bite of his own, finds it more than palatable, so tucks in with gusto.

"Go on, then," Harry prompts. "Give me the juicy details."

John finally gets it. "Oh! Harry, we're not… you know. We're friends."

Sherlock smirks. He'd known this would come eventually. Harry would try and categorise their relationship. The one that didn't fit into any of the boxes. The Watson sister's eyebrows skyrocket. "Yeah, like hell you are. You might be able to fool your normal friends, Johnny-boy, but you can't fool me. I saw you holding hands before."

John sighs. "Yeah. Well, I'm not sure I expect you to understand but Sherlock and I are just friends."

Sherlock frowns at that last bit. Just friends? What could possibly be more than what they were? "I don't know if just friends is really the right description," he says offhandedly, making John look at him sharply. What's happening to him today? He's moved from compassion to domestic bliss to something almost akin to jealousy in the space of the morning. "Or would you add a new dimension to being lovers that I wouldn't have experienced, too?"

There's a moment when they look at each other at Harry's kitchen table and they both remember the same day and the same thoughts that happened on that day, and John feels guilty and Sherlock knows it. He's right, of course. There's nothing in the world that could be more than what they already have. "No, of course, sorry."

Harry looks from one to the other and seems reluctant, but accepts it without question. "Okay." She tucks into her sandwich and Lucy starts a new conversation briskly.

"We're thinking about getting beehives," she says happily. "What do you think?"

Sherlock loves bees. It's one of those irrational loves that he really shouldn't have, like strawberry jam and scarves, but it's there nonetheless and the thought of having acquaintances with beehives is insanely attractive. "Yes!" he says immediately. John laughs. "I love bees."

Lucy laughs. "Me too. My parents used to keep bees, and I was always upset when they wouldn't let me go near them. When I moved to the city for university my main concern was that I wouldn't be able to have a beehive there. Now I've got Harry and this house," she reaches across and takes her spouse's hand, "I can get them again."

Harry laughs nervously. "I have to say, the thought scares me a little," she says. John laughs too.

"I know how you feel," he says emphatically. Sherlock looks at him in surprise.

"Really? Which hobbies of mine do you find intimidating?"

John rolls his eyes. "The ones where I open the fridge to find that you've stored a jar of severed testes on top of the salad I was going to have for lunch. The ones where I go to have a bath to find that I'm competing for space in the tub with some new kind of Frankenstein monster."

This is exaggeration, of course. The testes had been kept well away from any food items and the Frankenstein monster had been one, definitely inanimate, corpse that had been recently autopsied, hence the scars. But Sherlock concedes the point anyway. "Okay. That's fair. In my defence, I find the rate at which you're destroying your brain with all the IQ reruns frankly alarming."

"QI," John corrects automatically. Harry laughs.

After a while, Harry excuses herself to the bathroom. John turns to Lucy.

"Does she still drink?" he asks quietly. Lucy smiles fondly after her partner.

"Every now and then. She's come a long way from her ex-wife, though."

Sherlock never did find out what happened between Harry and Clara. He's mildly interested because the relationship is something that he deduced from looking at Harry's old phone alone, and he's always sort of wanted to fill in the gaps in his picture. In the course of today he's gained a face to go with the name, but the important questions haven't been answered. He knows that generally this sort of question isn't acceptable in this sort of social situation, so he doesn't ask. But he's desperately curious.

John recognises the curious face and sighs. "Later, Sherlock," he says gently, and Sherlock can buy that. "You've really changed her," he says, turning back to his sister's girlfriend. "I appreciate that."

"She does too," Lucy replies. They smile.

Harry sits back down, and Sherlock can tell from a look that she's managed to sneak a drink in somewhere. Not enough to be obvious, but just enough so that the addict inside her will be satisfied for a moment. He narrows his eyes. He knows that feeling.

He excuses himself after her. When the door is shut and locked behind him, he thinks furiously. Harry is lying to Lucy about her drinking habits. Should he tell John? John who's so happy taking part in the fairytale reunion going on in the living room?

He pulls the lid off the top of the toilet, and sure enough, there's a half-full bottle of whiskey bobbing around with the water. He feels sick. Why do drunks always hide their alcohol in the toilet tank? How can they possibly think it's safe in there when they must know that every other drunk in the world stashes it there?

He takes it out and replaces the lid, gently leaving the bottle on top. Lucy will find it there, even if John doesn't.

When he gets back to the table John looks at him in surprise. "That was quick," he jokes.

Sherlock smiles and joins in, amping his voice up an octave until it resembles a child's. "I washed my hands." Actually he didn't, but given that he didn't use the toilet either he thinks that's okay.

He looks at Harry, and Harry looks back and in that look he can tell that she knows. She knows he's found the bottle and something shifts in her expression from relaxed and happy to vicious and tense. "You two are shagging," she insists stubbornly. "You must be. You're like an old married couple."

Sherlock tries to just shrug it away, but inexplicably John rises to the bait. "Oh, and anyone who acts like they live together must be shagging, Harry? Just because you've never lived with anyone for more than three weeks without shagging them means that I can't either? For God's sake, drop it."

Harry's piggy little eyes narrow into an expression Sherlock will never see on John's, and suddenly the resemblance just isn't there anymore. "Well, you want to, anyway," she retorts childishly. "I always knew you did. Couldn't shut up about Sherlock bloody-BRILLIANT Holmes." Sherlock watches in dismay as the peaceable family conversation billows into a full-blown shouting match. "That's why you joined the army, too, isn't it, John? All the man-on-man action?"

John snaps, getting to his feet. "You're one to talk, Harry! Are you seriously questioning my sexuality like it's a bad thing?" Sherlock casts a seriously frightened look at Lucy, whose cheerful face bears the same shocked, nonplussed expression as his own. She returns it and shrugs bewilderedly. How did this happen so fast? It wasn't like Sherlock was going to say anything about the whiskey bottle.

"You always acted like you were braver than me, John. More noble. The soldier striding into bloody battle – funny, isn't it? That I'm the one sitting here completely open about being gay and you're still hiding in your little closet too piss-scared to come out and tell your best friend you secretly lust over his arrogant arse."

Sherlock blinks at the insult. He's been called arrogant before, sure, but he'd been trying so hard to be nice today. John, too, reacts more to the insult to Sherlock than the comments about his sexuality. "How dare you," he snarls, his face red and angry. "How dare you – you don't know anything about Sherlock and I. God, Harry, I thought you'd changed!" Sherlock can hear tears in John's voice and this shocks him, shocks him more than the screaming calf had. "I bet you've even got a bottle of whiskey stashed away somewhere, haven't you? You haven't changed at all." He wants to fold the smaller man in his arms and rock him and hold him there until his stupid sister doesn't matter anymore, but he knows this would just make her worse. John takes a deep breath that manages to calm him down not a bit.

"Come on, Sherlock," he says, calling the shots for once. The detective recognises that this is usually his line, but doesn't say anything. John's not really in the mood. "It looks like we've outstayed our welcome. It was nice to meet you, Lucy."

Before any of the other three have a chance to process this, Sherlock's wrist is claimed by John's hot palm and he's being dragged out the door, which slams behind them. Sherlock, still not fully understanding what happened in there, shies away from John's thunderous face.

The army doctor stomps off down the drive. Sherlock orders a cab as he follows; it'll be a while. John waits until they're at the gate, out of earshot of the house, before he blows up. "What the hell were you thinking?" he shouts. Sherlock frowns; he's fairly sure Harry started that argument without him. He opens his mouth to say so, but John isn't having any of it. "Oh, that's right, you were bored. You thought you'd come and visit my sister because you were fucking bored." It's the first time Sherlock has heard John swear, and he doesn't like it. "You couldn't even tell me? Give me some warning this was going to happen?"

Sherlock feels about six inches tall. "It was a surprise," he says in a voice that reflects his revised height.

"You know I hate surprises," John reprimands, calming down slightly. Sherlock almost smiles in relief, but before his face has time to process this intention the moment's gone, replaced by another wall of anger. "And you know my sister and I don't get on! How could you think this was a good idea!"

Sherlock is shell-shocked. He doesn't quite understand how the situation, which had been going so nicely, had turned on him so quickly. "You said you wanted to see her," he says plaintively.

"I said I wanted to see her!" John fumes. "Not that I wanted you to drag me out to her new house and go bloody cattle-rustling with her new girlfriend!"

"But you would have forgotten," Sherlock defends desperately. "John –"

"No, Sherlock! I know you don't think other people's brains should be able to deal with normal life, but I've managed with mine for thirty-eight years and I don't need you to try and patch up my family for me! This – this is exactly what I didn't want to happen, this is why I hadn't called Harry yet. I was just going to meet her for coffee somewhere, I didn't want her to…"

"What?" Sherlock asks, suddenly scandalised at the thought of what that sentence was going to be. "You didn't want her to what, John, meet me? Like you don't bring your girlfriends home, like you're ashamed of me?"

"That's not – maybe if I'd had time, if we'd had time, if we'd been able to prepare ourselves, we could have tried to be civil with each other, but I didn't want… I didn't want her to…"

A crazy thought flicks through Sherlock's head. Maybe he'd underestimated the extent of John's attraction to him. Maybe John is really in agony like Harry had suggested. "You didn't want her to what?" he whispers desperately, because he has to know, because if John is hurting because he wants Sherlock sexually then for God's sake he can have him, he can have him body and soul if that's what he wants, as long as he stays.

"I didn't want her to ruin you!" John yells, his face angry and red and awful, his hands clenched into white-knuckled, shaking fists. "Harry ruins everything and I didn't want her to ruin you, because you – your friendship, this stupid, twisted, incredible friendship we've had, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me and I didn't want her to ruin this, too!"

"She hasn't ruined it," Sherlock says quietly. John's voice is on the edge of tears again, raised so loud the neighbours so impossibly far away must be able to hear him, and Sherlock's scared, really scared, probably for the first time ever. She hasn't ruined it, John, please tell me she hasn't. Tell me that jumped-up whisky-soaked bull-queer hasn't ruined the only friendship I've ever really had – I didn't know what friendship was until I met you, you're the only friend I have and I can't lose you, John, John, please don't leave me. "I'm really sorry, John," he squeaks. "I just thought…"

John looks at him and all the anger drains visibly from his face like water from a bathtub. He sort of sags inwardly, completely deflated. "I know," he says. "It's not your fault. I just… why does Harry have to…"

His face crumples and suddenly he's crying, John is crying, and Sherlock is so overcome by shock he doesn't know what to do for a moment and just stands there, watching his military little doctor collapse into himself, tears coursing down his weather-beaten cheeks. Then the instinct he shuts off for everyone except John kicks in and he folds his flatmate into his long, pale arms and holds him there until John is wiping his nose on Sherlock's periwinkle shirt and sniffing helplessly. "Why does she get to me so much?" he says finally.

Sherlock knows about how annoying siblings are. "Brothers and sisters have that power," he says wisely. "It's the point of their existence. They know exactly how to make you angry and they drive deep and hard."

John chuckles as a cab rounds the corner and steps away from Sherlock gratefully. "You're lucky Mycroft doesn't do that."

Sherlock snorts derisively. "He does," he insists petulantly. "That's what happens every time you make me have lunch with him." And it's mostly true; although both Sherlock and Mycroft pretend to be above such stupid rivalry no-one can deny it exists, and the two of them each vie for power over the other in petty, childish ways that can be ignored at first sight but always come back to haunt Sherlock afterwards. He'll lie in bed and wonder if he's really as horrible a person as his brother paints.

John coughs delicately, wipes his eyes and opens the door of the cab. "I'm very sorry," he says in a farcical polite voice. "I'll stop forcing you to have lunch with your brother."

Sherlock huffs and climbs into the cab after him. "I'd make a similar affirmation, but you already know how likely I am to do that again." He looks up at the cabbie and smiles brightly. "221B Baker Street, please," he says politely.

John groans. "Oh, God, yes," he says tiredly. "Just take me home."

A/N: Yes, that is a true story. Is it that obvious? I now know for sure that I could never work in an abattoir. Thanks for reading, I know this story is far from perfect because of the length of time it took me to finish it (rule of thumb is, if it takes longer than two days for me to write a oneshot it's not going to be very good) so I'd appreciate your feedback!

-for you!