Prompt: John is actually a bee who turned himself human. NO IT MAKES SENSE I SWEAR

So Johnbee is all buzzing around and making honey and stuff and then he's like, "Wow my owner looks kind of sad why does he look sad can I cheer him up :3," and then he like, wishes himself human and then he shows up with a stripey jumper and is all like, "Hi Sherlock I am here to bee your friend."

okay no it actually doesn't make sense at all

(Look, someone else got there first with the true crack fill, okay! Argh, dammit meme.)

bee to the blossom

The virgin Queen flies in summer. The drones congregate, watch and wait, and one warm afternoon (twenty degrees or warmer) she flies and they follow.

One drone does not. He watches the Beekeeper watching them, muttering under his breath, making scentless dance marks on a piece of flattened wood pulp. He smells alone, and there is nothing more abhorrent to a bee.

The drone flies to him and tells him the distance and quickest route to the nearest high-yield flowerbed. Obviously the Beekeeper has lost his way and can't find his hive, but there's a good chance at least some will be among the flowers.

"Not interested in flying?" The Beekeeper says. "I wouldn't be if I were you: succeed and you die, fail and you live until Autumn - when you're killed by the workers."

The drone repeats himself with a little exasperation. Humans. Sometimes they seem so unaware of such basic things: the time of day, the exact distance between obstacles, the most efficient route to what they want.

The Beekeeper watches, scrawls a rudimentary copy of the dance on his wood pulp. "I'm sure it's a very nice patch of flowers," he says after a moment of frowning contemplation. "But it's not for me."

The alone scent gets stronger with his words, and the drone wonders, considers why such good information would make him worse. Perhaps he knows he won't find his hive there, perhaps he is certain because his hive swarmed and he was left behind. Perhaps the winter (the drone has never seen one, never will, and yet he knows it, the same way he can calculate the position of sun in the sky on the opposite side of the Earth) killed them, perhaps illness. Perhaps the flowers died.

The beekeeper watches the swarm, and the drone thinks.

In the two months since the drone has left his cell, the Beekeeper has never brought a companion with him, never acknowledged the need for one. The drone finds this a terrible thing. Nearly half his adult lifetime has passed, and the Beekeeper remains solitary. It is unthinkable. Humans have more time (the old Queen remembers the keeper, and she has reached the near unimaginable age of three summers) but the drone does not, and with the immediacy of something that will not live long, he wants to see the Beekeeper happy now.

The problem is that the Beekeeper does not seem to realise he is lonely, and makes himself more alone every time he tries to communicate with others of his kind. Human dances, the drone decides, are unnecessarily complex, and his human just a bit hopeless.

Attempting to communicate is an exercise in folly given that they speak two very different languages, and have very different cultures. One of them is going to have to change.

He was right about the problem being language, the drone decides. Humans don't know pheromones when they scent them, and have seemingly decided to give up the knowledge of how to read the body in favour of a language consisting primarily of sounds; no wonder the Beekeeper is constantly misstepping.

That's okay though, because he can dance for the both of them.

"Why do you stay, John?"

John blinks, still a little unused to way he has to say something obvious when he thought his body did it for him. "Because I like you."

Sherlock makes an exasperated noise, as if the thought is unbelievable. "You could have gone anywhere, done anything - why did you come here?" His body adds 'to me?'

John says at last the first words he said the moment he acquired his new body, the ones he practised constantly to be sure he had them right, the ones more important than what he chose as his name. He says: "I'm here to be your friend."