A/N: Short and silly. Two hundredth post – the third time. Still feels a bit unreal. Again, this collection will end at 221B (221 posts, ending with a word starting with the letter B; don't ask me why, I made the rules, but it was a long time ago).
Now, I must go, don't want to be late for snooker night with the gang. Even if I'm a worse snooker player than a writer (and that says a lot). I love a bit of strategic play. -csf
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'John, have you seen my thumbs?'
'Fridge, crisps drawer.'
A slow, knowledgeable smirk spreads across a side of Sherlock's face, as he keeps himself rooted to the spot over the Persian rug. Tussled pyjama bottoms, t-shirt turned inside out, dark hair in artistic disarray.
'No, my actual thumbs.'
John looks up from the living room table, laid out for breakfast by Mrs Hudson, who never fails to mother her boys. He instantly goes into what Sherlock likes to secretly names "doctor mode". Flexibly, all his alertness pinned on his flatmate, John gets up from a soft-boiled egg, still chewing, and zones in on Sherlock's long digit, violin calloused, nimble fingers. The smudged thumbs are expertly manoeuvred by the doctor's gentle hands.
'Silver nitrate stains. Told you to wear gloves, mate.'
The detective's light blue-grey eyes widen and he snarls to himself: 'Of course it is, I didn't need you to tell me that!'
'Pfft! You have already forgot all about your precipitate experiments from yesterday, haven't you?'
'All finished. I proved my theory.'
'Perhaps you could now clean up the mess in the kitchen table, then?'
'No, it's fine, you can do it, John.'
The doctor huffs and mutters under his breath, returning to his breakfast.
'You're bored.' A statement, calmly delivered by John Watson.
Sherlock's eyes wander all around the room in an agitated manner. The he stands up straighter, eyebrows shooting up in a proclamation of innocence.
'Just drop it, John. You're not tricking me into cleaning the kitchen!'
John smiles brightly in response. More patiently, he invites: 'Have a seat, Sherlock.'
Amazingly, the detective does just that, sitting across from John, the soft morning light a high contrast game of lights and shadows across his pale skin and sharp facial structure.
John looks away, gathering his thoughts and a strategy.
'Hypothetically, I need to get rid of a body, Sherlock.'
The taller man's visage darkens considerably. 'Who?' His voice is thunderous.
John smiles, which considerably shatters the tension in the room.
'No one in particular, just yet. I was wondering, is there a perfect crime?'
'Don't be a fool, John…. Of course, there are perfect crimes. Dead bodies have been found in Elizabethan houses undergoing structural renovation. Arsenic has leached from an old grave so heavily that it poisoned an old rector in a Sunday school with a penchant for boiled cabbages. Angry men have killed their neighbours in besieged cities and left them for casualties of war. History has stumbled upon many perfect crimes, John, uncovering them by mere chance. It's not much of an extrapolation to assume that a significant number of others are yet undiscovered.'
John pointedly looks away to his armchair's side table.
'Just got a new notebook, leatherbound and padlocked. Perfect for a compilation of perfect murders, Sherlock. All hypothetical, of course.'
The detective blinks. 'But I solve crimes.'
'And I blog about it. Let's turn all that on its head, shall we?'
'Will you be my ghost writer?' Sherlock demands, pouty and childlike. And a further play on words. As a mental exercise, Sherlock has often planned the killing of many of his acquaintances. He likes to save the gnarliest of crimes for me, he tells me.
'Yeah, sure.'
'Fine, pick up a pen, John. Let's extrapolate.'
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Two weeks later
DI Lestrade all but shouts at us: 'What do you mean, John wrote down the cypher before we used it, but I absolutely cannot give the notebook as police evidence in the case against the counterfeiters, Sherlock?'
'Um, it's private,' Sherlock splutters, grabbing tightly onto the leather bound, padlocked, notebook. He looks a bit like a child with a teddy bear he won't surrender to the adult in the room.
'What? Is it your personal diary?'
'No, it's John's.'
I groan at that description. Can't we, I don't know, just fake new evidence with another of my notebooks?
Sherlock must have read my mind, for he booms in my defence:
'John will not be parted from any of his diaries!'
"Notebooks", mate, let's call them "notebooks", please.
'Why?' Lestrade just asks.
'He loves his… stationery,' is the best thing a certified genius can come up with.
I roll my eyes and grab the leatherbound, padlocked, notebook from Sherlock's grasp, open it and rip out the page with the cypher. 'There!' I hand it over to the inspector. 'That's all you're getting—'
'John?'
'—Unless you want to join in. Tonight, at midnight, in 221B. Bring a torch light, a funny hat and marshmallows.'
What can I say? Sherlock and I developed a few rituals over this gory new pastime.
Still beats anagrams and crosswords in the cruzade against boredom.
Greg Lestrade looks a bit baffled, staring from me to Sherlock.
'I'm in,' he declares simply in the end. 'Please don't let it be a dead body you're hiding from me.'
Sherlock and I chuckle, making him further uneasy, but in the end it's easy to promise. It's not about one dead body, of course not. We've got a book with 200 pages to fill. Well, 199 pages now.
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