#ienji

A Christmas Tiff

Here is the thing about John Hamish Watson: you do not fuck with John Hamish Watson when the two of you have practically been living on top of each other for the past year… especially when John Hamish Watson has been working doubles at the hospital for two weeks and hasn't slept more than two hours night in that whole time and is drunk as hell off cheap champagne and rum cake...

... which is precisely what the world's only consulting detective Sherlock Holmes learned upon deducing out loud that John Hamish Watson had a lingerie fetish (which was accurately deduced based upon the observance, analysis, and integration of the facts that Lestrade was wearing a pair of women's panties, John was intensely interested in having a whispered conversation with him whereupon they vaguely gestured in the general region, and upon stealing his phone, Sherlock found that John had been looking up fetish shops nearby).

In the silence that followed Sherlock’s droll observation, Mrs. Hudson tutted and whispered an admonishing, “Sherlock.”  In her mind, they’d been having a very lovely Christmas party and it was a shame that Sherlock had to go and ruin it.  There was certainly no call for it.

The others did not respond quite so succinctly.  Molly, red-faced at the thought of Sherlock knowing what kind of underwear John wore, couldn’t decide whether to swallow the champagne she’d just taken a sip of or spit it out and was trying not to choke while she made the decision.  Lestrade was thoroughly glad that Sherlock hadn’t made the connection between John’s fetish and their conversation all night and had just noticed that the elastic was cutting into his left thigh and was thus feeling very uncomfortable.  John’s date, a somewhat vapid but exceedingly mothering MRI tech with a pixie cut named Susan, thought Sherlock’s comment the most crude she’d ever heard and wondered how John could stand to live with him.

Coincidentally, John was wondering that very same thing himself.

However, being John Hamish Watson, a discharged soldier, hardened medical doctor, massively sleep-deprived individual, and one pissed (in two different ways) bloke, he wasn’t about to start some sissy argument on the subject.  Instead, he was going to go on the attack.  That’s what Winston Churchill would have done.

John finished his glass of champagne in one swig and slammed it onto the mantelpiece, his eyes boring into Sherlock’s.  “The only time Sherlock masturbates is when he’s gone six days without sleeping and needs to reorganize his ‘mind palace.’  And he’ll do it in the common room in my bathrobe.”

The silence, if anything, was even more strained.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow and gave John a cool look.  “It’s a focusing method, John, and the texture of your bathrobe –”

“Three days ago I was kidnapped mid-shift from the hospital by a group of street urchins, tied up, thrown in a trunk, and driven out to the country.  That’s how Sherlock invited me to meet his mother.”

A crease of anger shot down Sherlock’s forehead.  “I told you at the time, she and Mycroft were being insufferable, prattling on about renovations to the flat and brushing my hair.  I needed you to form a distraction –”

“Then, when we got home the next day, Sherlock was so grateful for my help that he composed me a sonata.  Not that he would admit to doing so.”

Sherlock’s lips grew thin and white.  “It was a piece I’ve been working on for some time, John, and I had thought you’d have the erudition to appreciate it once I’d finally finished the composition.”

“Another thing Sherlock Holmes will never admit to is still having his blanky, which he keeps in his left-hand trouser pocket.  It’s there now.  Ask to see it if you like.”

Sherlock flicked a quick glance around the room, none but Molly noticing the faint pink glow on the tip of his long, aristocratic nose.  “It’s a family heirloom.  It makes sense to keep it on one’s person.  It’s a repository of Holmes history.”

“It was hand-stitched from a dress of his mother’s that he was particularly fond of when he was two years old.”

“John, I fail to see how any of this has anything to do with tonight.”

“Actually, I’m quite interested in knowing all this, this stuff,” Molly threw in nervously.  She giggled under Sherlock’s scrutiny.  “I mean, it’s so rare to hear you talk about yourself so, um, why not?”

“Why not indeed?” Lestrade countered, putting his hands in his pockets and leaning against the mantelpiece.  “Let’s have us a bit of fun and see if the great Sherlock Holmes is human, after all.”

‘Serves you right to have your dirty laundry bared,’ Susan thought, standing protectively at John’s side and trying to ignore the nagging thought as to what kind of flatmate could possibly know so much about another flatmate.

“Well, I haven’t the time to hear such nonsense dragged out in public,” Mrs. Hudson said with a sniff.  Gathering her shawl and purse, she stood.  “If you boys want to be nasty, that’s your own affair, but the rest of you should be ashamed for encouraging this.  I’ll be down the street at Mr. Cartwright’s.  At least that man knows how to behave in public.”  Her chin out, Mrs. Hudson exited the flat with a great deal of dignity.

The awkward silence that followed Mrs. Hudson’s departure only lasted a few beats before Lestrade clapped a hand on John’s back and said with forced cheer, “Well, mate, what else have you got to tell us about our consulting detective?”

John, still quite unsteady but beginning to feel that he was going too far, looked in Sherlock’s direction.  Sherlock had moved to the window and was resolutely studying the street.  He absolutely would not acknowledge John, and for some reason that made John even angrier than before.  “Just apologize for being a bloody sod already!” he wanted to shout.  That’s all he needed, just a proper, half-hearted apology like any normal human being could give, but, no, that wasn’t Sherlock Holmes’ way.

Which is why he spent much of the night telling Molly, Lestrade, and the nearly forgotten Susan about the time Sherlock had tried to extract the four humors from a cadaver, the time he called BBC Radio and ranted about the absurdity of the universe being made of a bunch of vibrating strings, the night he almost shot John in the hand and spent the next week personally changing his plaster, and the time at the shop when he undressed four of the mannequins to better explain the deviations from proper anatomy and had to be forcibly removed by two burly security guards named Bob and Tom.  During all this, Sherlock never moved from the window and never said a word, at least not until early that morning when Lestrade and Molly, thoroughly titillated and exhausted, left (Susan had slipped out hours ago.).  Then and only then did Sherlock gather his overcoat and scarf and exit the flat.  John, by now sober, watched him leave and then tucked himself into bed, where he slept until well into the afternoon.

                                                      ---

Sherlock didn’t come home for three days, and during that time John went from feeling uncomfortable and chagrinned to being downright angry at Sherlock’s petulant attitude.  That anger carried him through the first day after Sherlock returned (naturally, mum on his whereabouts) and into the second.  Indeed, it probably could have carried him through a good five days of tense silent treatment (as was the routine) had John not noticed a few changes in his friend.  For example, Sherlock began to cover the body parts in the fridge with Tupperware containers or cloths.  He began to neatly pile up and store his notebooks when he was done with them.  He refrained from having tea when John was in the flat, and he would often come back from his walks with his skull in hand (This was, he later learned from Mrs. Hudson, because Sherlock had taken to walking around talking to it again, something he hadn’t done in almost a year.).

At first, these changes had little bearing on John or his anger, and he disregarded them.  It was only when Mrs. Hudson mentioned Sherlock’s use of the skull that he began to register and understand the changes.  Sherlock was, quite simply, withdrawing from John.  He had seen John’s drunken confessions as complaints, and since Sherlock Holmes was an intensively private and (yes, no matter what his old college “chums” might say) an intensely sensitive individual, he had withdrawn his confidence and personality from John.  In Sherlock’s eyes, the two of them had gone back to being colleagues.

Sherlock Holmes, the great consulting detective and the great 6’ twelve stone toddler.  They’d all been having a laugh, hadn’t they?  And wasn’t it Sherlock who’d started it all with that comment about John liking woman’s underwear?  You’d expect the man everyone called a machine to be able to deal with a bit of light teasing once in a while.

Except it hadn’t been “light teasing” and Sherlock Holmes didn’t know how to socialize.  John did.  John knew better, and John knew that if he wanted Sherlock’s confidence back he’d need to do something that would show he still cared, that the two of them weren’t just colleagues, that he didn’t mind when Sherlock acted like his complete prat of a self around him.

John sighed and rubbed his shoulder, the stress bringing out old war wounds.  Then he had a thought.

---

The next morning Sherlock was at the kitchen table conducting his experiments as usual when John emerged from the bathroom clad in his bathrobe.  John issued a curt, “’Morning, Sherlock,” to which Sherlock responded with a barely audible “Hm.”  Then John sat down, picked up the morning paper, and flicked it open before wincing dramatically and shouting, “Damn this leg of mine!”

John could feel Sherlock pause minutely behind him.

While rotating his shoulder, John began rubbing his leg, keeping up a solid stream of invectives the whole time.  After a few minutes when he felt the pain would have subsided somewhat, he gingerly picked up the paper and went back to reading it.

Sherlock, his brain cataloguing, was silent for a few seconds.

“I see the psychosomatic pain has returned,” he muttered at last.

“What was that, Sherlock?” John called.

“Your leg.  Or was it your arm?  You seem to have trouble differentiating between the two.”

“Just now, you mean?  It’s not uncommon, Sherlock.  In fact, it’s something I see daily at the hospital.” 

Sherlock made no respond.

“Have you ever heard the joke about the king who ordered this bloke’s testicles cut off?  The bloke later came back, kidnapped the king’s son, and held him at the top of a tower and said he’d throw the boy off unless the king cut off his own testicles.  Naturally, the king went away, said he had, and came back.  The bloke asked where he felt the pain, and the king said in his stomach.  The bloke said it wasn’t where the pain would be and ordered him to do it proper.  This went on back and forth for some time before finally the king chopped off his own testicles and answered correctly: the pain was in his teeth.  Then, just to be nasty, the bloke dropped the boy anyway.”

Sherlock sighed.  “John, I haven’t time to listen to old folk tales.”

“It’s not a folk tale, Sherlock, not exactly.  It was a way to explain medical fact before people knew how.  The truth is that the body’s nerves are so closely interconnection that we feel pain in completely separate parts of our body, parts that shouldn’t have anything to do with each other.  The most common examples are pain radiating from the front of your shoulder to the back along the rotator cuff, pinching neck nerves causing headaches at the crown of your pain, or having shoulder pain as a sign of appendicitis.  I have a similar problem with my arm and my leg, so I can be minding my own business, picking things up, putting them down, throwing a pen, and I’ll get this great stab of pain in my leg.  It’s bloody inconvenient, but at least it’s not as often as it used to be.”

Sherlock made no acknowledgement of the information, and John let it drop.  That wasn’t quite what he’d wanted to say to Sherlock, but it was something.  Maybe it was even something Sherlock actually hadn’t known.  He had the strangest gaps in his knowledge base like that bit about the sun or Newton’s three laws or –

 “That’s it, John!” Sherlock suddenly cried, his chair clattering to the floor as he stood.  “Don’t you see?  That was why Jacob Marrow got off – he’d had hip surgery, not foot!  The gait that he purposefully used in front of us was completely different than the one he’d used on the night of the murder!  Ah, stupid, stupid, you’re getting old and stupid, Sherlock!”  Without waiting for John to reply, he grabbed his coat on the way out and dashed from the flat.  Seconds later, John heard him bellow for a taxi.

---

 The next morning, two things told John that his friendship and all its attendant problems with Sherlock Holmes had been renewed.  One was the announcement in the morning paper of the arrest of Jacob Marrow for the murder of local businessman Mark Sheppard.  The second was the presence of two eyes in his bag of bread.  Resisting the urge to smile, John slammed the fridge door closed and bellowed, “Sherlock!  What have I told you about putting your experiments in with the food?”

 “It keeps them from drying out,” Sherlock replied.