After his experience at the mosque, Sherlock had been determined to keep deducing John in order to avoid the trap of complacency as far as his flatmate's skills were concerned. Unfortunately, John clearly had other ideas, taking a great deal of childish delight in actually surprising him. Quite why he was focusing on this whilst hanging precariously from a twenty-foot cliff somewhere near Weston Super-Mare, he did not know. All that mattered was that John, all five feet seven of him, was currently a good deal further down than him, negotiating the outcrop at the mid-point of the rock face with a chipper kind of elegance.
"You alright up there, Sherlock? You look as if you're hanging on for dear life."
"And you're not, I suppose?"
After a few minutes of looking down at John, who had managed to belay round the jagged rock and was holding on to a chink in the granite with one hand whilst effortlessly stepping into another fissure, Sherlock gave up looking. He heard the familiar clack of footsteps on the pebbles below and, gritting his teeth, began to make a tentative beeline for solid ground.
Peering up from the shingle beach at the foot of the sheer drop, John directed him to the left, giving him tips on the best hand and foot holds on the trickiest bits of the path. With no choice but to follow his best friend's directions, Sherlock straightened his back, flicking his head to the left and down as the doctor called out which move to make next. Exasperated, hands muddied and green with a fine layer of lichen, Sherlock chose to jump the last eight feet from a hanging position.
Brushing the dust from his coat, he glared balefully down at John, who was regarding him with a peculiar half-smile and the cocked head he usually reserved for patients under the age of ten who might require a lollipop to keep them from squirming off their mothers' laps. "What?"
"What do you mean, what?"
"What's up with you, Sherlock?" Receiving no answer, he sighed. "We're on the beach, so we need to go north to get to the cave for the next cipher."
"Mm." With that, Sherlock strode away, leaving John to half-run to catch him up. Whirling round snappishly at the tug on his sleeve, Sherlock stopped dead in front of John as the waves lapped at the shale.
"Sherlock! What is your problem?" John bit out, irritated at the sudden worsening in the detective's mood. At the sideways glance from the dark-haired man, his face cleared, a chuckle bubbling up in his throat and a sweet smile forming on his lips. "You're annoyed because you didn't deduce that I can rock-climb, aren't you?"
With a slight incline of the head which John took to mean 'you're right', the taller man enquired, "Where did you learn? It won't have been the army..." He trailed off, sorting through his memory banks to find a plausible solution.
"I did a summer as a camp counsellor in America before I started uni; one of the prerequisites was an outward bound course, so I took climbing, hiking, mountaineering and abseiling as my Duke of Edinburgh activities that year. No great mystery, Sherlock-just a kid who didn't particularly want to spend his free time at home and played a lot of sport instead..."
John loped off along the beach towards their quarry, leaving Sherlock dumfounded in his wake.