Work Text:
A Night In
It had been over a week since the end of their last case, and the case itself had hardly been satisfying. Murderers just weren’t trying hard enough these days; all their crimes were too sloppy, too full of passion and lacking in calculation, too boring. Sherlock had only agreed to take it on because there had been so few murders of late. A dry spell for criminal activity in and around London. Tragic. At least for consulting detectives and the men who had to live with them.
Sherlock, of course, did not take kindly to his lack of work. He had gone from complaining to sulking to trying to get fresh body parts from the morgue (but no one had died of anything interesting), and finally settled on ear-splitting violin music. At four in the bloody morning.
John had to be in to the surgery at eight, but the racket coming from the sitting room drew him out of his admittedly fitful slumber. He dragged himself out of bed and briefly considered yelling at his flatmate, but one look at him, glaring out the window like the streets of London had personally offended him, made the doctor think better of it. He sighed, ran a hand through his hair, and flopped onto the sofa, flipping the telly on to find the usual amalgamation of rubbish watched only by insomniacs and drunken uni students. John would know; he had been both.
At the sound of the Viagra ad that sprung up when John switched it on, Sherlock turned to face John, raising one eyebrow but continuing to scratch his bow across the strings erratically. John looked up at him from his place on the couch and inclined his head at the spot next to him. When Sherlock ignored the invitation to sit, John again held his gaze, this time giving him a variation of the ‘come hither’ look that had earned him the name Three Continents Watson. It had worked on a fair share of women, this attempt at sultry eyes coupled with an inclination of his head and prolonged eye contact. He did not expect it to work on Sherlock Holmes.
But it did.
Or maybe Sherlock was just bored of the violin. John wasn’t sure which he hoped was the reason.
Regardless, Sherlock placed his violin back into its case and sat down beside John. Rather too close, but Sherlock was not known for his understanding of social norms. Neither of them cared much for personal space anyway, so it was all fine.
John continued flipping idly through the channels (infomercial, crap talk show, infomercial, adult video store ad, infomercial, infomercial) until he finally settled on a rerun of some American procedural crime drama. Partly because it was the only thing with some semblance of plot, and partly because he had recently learned that Sherlock had a special file folder in his mind palace that was just bursting with his hatred for procedural crime dramas. Well, John had made up the bit about the file folder, but he liked to think that’s how it worked.
Sherlock groaned at John’s choice of program, and John smirked in turn. As the mundane details of the fictitious serial killer unfolded onscreen, Sherlock yelled at the inaccuracies, nearly tore his hair out at the obvious clues the supposed detectives were missing, rolled his eyes at the romance between the male and female leads, and finally settled on ignoring the show entirely and watching John watch it.
John, to Sherlock’s great chagrin, had gotten caught up in the show by the time the second episode in the apparent marathon of terrible crime shows began. He had stopped listening to Sherlock’s ranting and was instead staring intently at the screen. Sherlock watched with interest at the light from the screen playing across his face. He took it upon himself to deduce the setting of each scene based on the reflections he could see on John’s skin (blue, dark, too many strobe-like effects: chase scene through the streets at night); a quick glance at the screen told him he was right, but the victory was shallow without an audience. Plus he could hear the audio. An unfair advantage on his part.
Bored again, Sherlock turned back to the screen, shifting his position to work out the stiffness he had developed from sitting still for so long. In doing so, his thigh brushed against John’s, and he waited a long moment before shifting away. At the touch, John looked away from the program with a start. He then took a moment to look at their legs, which were still very close together, and then turned his gaze back to Sherlock. There was just the hint of a question in his eyes, and the light of a thousand answers to questions not yet conceived shone in Sherlock’s.
A shrill scream and the sound of a gunshot made them both jump. Whatever moment they had been about to have was gone when they next locked eyes. The pair of them broke into childish giggles Mycroft would love to chide them for; John returned to watching (now with the added difficulty of trying to figure out which character had been shot), and Sherlock decided to give watching John another go (this time looking for something wholly unrelated to the show).