This bit of randomness is a double drabble, missing scene from my Mistake story arc, and based on a true experience of my college days. Yeah, don't ask.
He looked up as Holmes sneaked into the airy sitting-room like a guilty school-boy, carefully avoiding the nurse and her patient and sidling over to him, hands suspiciously hidden.
"What on earth have you got?" Watson asked in amusement, wishing that he could simply get up and see.
Holmes grinned in that I-want-to-hear-you-laugh-again way that had become so familiar in the last week or so, and plopped himself down in the next chair.
"Look," said he, pulling a wriggling object from his pocket. "I found him on the verandah outside."
Watson watched with interest as a slender neck and head emerged cautiously from the smooth shell, before both it and all four legs retreated on the instant, finding itself definitely not in its own habitat.
"What the devil –" he began to chuckle. "Why on earth, Holmes, did you bring a turtle in here?"
The retired detective shrugged genially. "He was in my way. And you haven't been outside in a while, I thought you might like to see some wildlife. If he will cooperate and come out of that blasted shell, that is." Holmes frowned and tapped his knuckles experimentally on the shell, receiving no answer.
He held it up, and before Watson could protest stuck a slender finger into the head-hole.
"OW!"
"Err…yes, Holmes, I believe turtles do bite."
--
Holmes had finished yowling, and Watson had finished laughing, before the nurse noticed the animal slowly working its way across the floor. The detective hastily scooped it up, frowning thoughtfully at it.
"We might as well do something with it," he pondered mischievously.
"As in…?"
Holmes shook for a moment in silent laughter and then bolted from the room after shoving the startled turtle into Watson's hands. He returned momentarily, again avoiding medical personnel, and scooted closer to Watson's bath-chair.
None of the nurses paid undue heed to the childish snickering coming from that corner of the room, well knowing the patient and his bizarre friend by now.
They did, however, some ten minutes later, very much notice a small turtle crawling blissfully about the halls, its shell adorned with a conspicuous pad of bandaging – as if to convince any onlooker that it was a patient and belonged in the sanatorium.
Watson's attending physician passed by a moment later, paused, and picked up the animal with a tolerant sigh. Judging from how carefully his primary patient and the patient's friend were hiding behind a rather large newspaper spread, it took no deduction to see who was responsible for the ridiculous joke.
That Watson chap had better recover soon, before Sherlock Holmes drove the entire sanatorium to change its name to Bedlam.