Sherlock managed to get back into the house and up to his room without anyone seeing him and without making too much noise. Once up there, he sat down rather heavily on the bed and considered the problem that was his ankle. This would be difficult to keep hidden.
He was pretty sure it wasn't broken. He had never broken a bone before, but he was fairly certain he would know if that was the case. In fact, it seemed to be a relatively minor injury. It was bruised and swollen, of course, and it would certainly get more swollen and darker where it was bruised, but he thought it would probably be okay. Eventually.
He was fairly certain that ankles, sprained, twisted, or broken, were supposed to be wrapped and iced somehow, and that was a problem. He didn't have Ace bandages and he had no idea where any were in the house, or even if there were any in the house. He thought for a moment; the bathroom closet, maybe? It was worth a look.
He walked around his room a few times to get the hang of walking without a limp, just in case someone came upstairs while he was walking to or from the bathroom, then he set off.
The bathroom was by John's room, all the way down the hall, which hadn't seemed nearly as far when he had been exploring the upper floor yesterday. Right now, though, when every step shot a jolt of pain up his leg, it seemed like the hallway that would never end.
The bathroom was a cheery affair, all blue and white, with ridiculous little ducks absolutely everywhere, from the hand towels to the shower curtain to the rug on the floor, which was shaped, unsurprisingly, like a duck. It was dreadful. The closet was no different.
He searched through the extremely disorganized closet for a few minutes, digging through piles of towels and boxes filled with everything from toothpaste to band-aids to little tiny hotel lotions. It looked like someone had started a collection; there must have been 40 or 50 of them. Finally, behind a container full of spare toothbrushes, all the same model in the exact same color, he found what he needed: proper bandages.
He grabbed them and stuck the whole roll in his pocket - he didn't know how much he might need and he could always put the excess back later - then set off, back down the hall and into his room, where he shut and locked the door.
He sat down heavily on his bed and pulled out the roll of bandages. On second thought, he thought it might be gauze, although he wasn't quite sure if there was a difference between Ace bandages and gauze; maybe they were the same thing. Well, whatever he had now would have to do the trick. He pulled his pants leg up to his knee and winced when he saw his foot. It was twice as swollen as it had been before and there was no way that he would be able to get that into a shoe. Excellent.
He set about the business of wrapping it up. He had never wrapped an ankle before, or even seen it done, so it was all guess work, but he did the best he could and wrapped it as tightly as he could. Then he spent a few more minutes practicing walking on it without limping, which was difficult but possible, and lay back down on his bed, foot on a pillow and under a blanket, to reread his chemistry textbook.