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“Arrogant, imperious, pompous, aren’t I?”
Sherlock said the words in a tone so arrogant, imperious, and pompous that John didn’t know whether he should laugh at it or make a witty remark.
The detective was sprawled on the sofa with his laptop open, scrolling past something that looked curiously like John’s blog, all white and green with short entries adhering it.
“Yes, you are.” John settled on a simple answer and looked back at the screen of his own laptop. It had been a day since he wrote up his short summary of their over-the-night adventure with the awful cabbie. Two days since it happened. Three days since he met Sherlock Holmes, and have yet to form his opinions about him.
Madman, of course. He called him a madman in his previous blog posts, and that was pretty accurate if one was to describe Sherlock. But other than that, John found himself unable to write words that could describe him properly, which he had to do in his next entry, a more thorough summary of the case since people were apparently so intrigued about how their little adventure went.
“You know, the word ‘imperious’ would suit Mycroft more than it would do me.”
“Yeah, remind me not to ask you about... the… Christmas… dinners he spoke of… earlier.” This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. We came to a crime scene and found the corpse of a serial adulterer, who seemed to be missing her suitcase.
God help him, an elementary schooler could write even better than that.
“You’re writing again.”
“Hm?”
This time when John glanced up Sherlock was looking straight at him with his unreadable eyes. Sometimes John wondered if it was a blessing for him to have such unreadable eyes that, instead, could read everyone in a matter of seconds. “Yes, I’m writing again. Yeah.”
This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. It was crazy, like something picked out of the telly. It was the craziest night of my life.
Now he sounded like Harry.
“You were less… interested in the idea of writing a blog before.” Sherlock’s fingers scrolled, and John knew he was reading the entries from the previous year.
“So you’re not an expert on psychology.”
“I find no use in studying the minds lesser than my own.”
Anyone would feel offended within a second, yet John couldn’t find any reason to. It was, exactly like the tone Sherlock used, a mere fact, though it was very much an insult as well.
This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. I went crazy.
John backspaced faster than he wrote the last sentence and stood up, leaving the desk with his entry saved as draft. “I’m going to go buy milk.”
Sherlock never bought milk.
Or tea. Or any grocery, on that matter. He did, however, pay his part of the bills and make sure to leave some space in the fridge for actual edible stuffs rather than frozen body parts. And he cleared out some space on the dining table for them to eat, although they mostly ate in the lounge now. So he wasn’t half bad as everyone around him seemed to think.
“I thought you were going to pretend you didn’t stalk me and see how long until I noticed.”
John put the two mugs down on the table. Sherlock was still in his nightgown, carefully inserting drops of purple-coloured chemical substance into a glass of yellow-coloured one. Someday he was going to blow up the flat and he wouldn’t even realize he did.
“There’s a difference between stalking and analyzing. Also, you’ve already noticed, as you wrote an entry about the secret code I got from ‘Anonymous’ on your blog last night.”
“Right.” John sipped his tea, his brows wrinkling at the heat. “So am I right? Could the Roman Emperor be Caesar?”
Sherlock smiled and put down his pipet. He took a quick look at his tea and grabbed a bowl of sugar from the cabinet, and did all of this within such unnecessarily long seconds that John knew he wasn’t going to get an answer.
“And you said you were analyzing—what? My blog?”
Sherlock smiled to his tea.
This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. I asked questions that he found so obvious he never minded elaborating upon them. Or he’s just a prick. Either will do.
Five days since John wrote up the quick summary, and an abundant of missed calls from Harry since then.
It wasn’t that he was avoiding her. Well, to be honest, yes, he was. But it was for a perfectly sound reason, John told himself. He wanted to take this part of his life as slow as he could, chewing stuffs as long as possible before swallowing them down. His first night at 221B Baker Street had been a whirlwind—from going to see a crime scene to be actually responsible in one, all in the span of hours. So naturally he was afraid that whatever all of this was, it would break if he kept up the pace. He wanted to slow down, to take everything in deep breaths, to keep his fragile little bubble of world in shape before the life he knew before said hi to him again and woke him up from this magnificent, unerringly fast-paced dream. And answering questions Harry got was sure enough to be a trigger.
With the thought in mind, he waited until his phone stopped blinking at him. He wouldn’t reject Harry’s calls, he would just… ignore them. The latter would have many more excuses.
Still, he wouldn’t be able to avoid them much longer.
John cleared his throat and focusing back on the blinking cursor in his laptop screen.
This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. He hypnotized me into thinking that I lived a much more exciting life than the one I had before. Or, since he prefers a more scientific choice of words, he brainwashed me into thinking it. Maybe it’s another one of his experiments. Have I mentioned that he kept toes in our fridge?
“Honestly, John, you couldn’t just fucking do that to me! I’m your fucking sister!”
“Yes. Yes, sorry. Sorry.”
John didn’t need to be either of the Holmeses to know that the call would’ve been disastrous, yet he still flinched at the volume Harry chose to speak in. Thankfully there was no roaring music in the background, which means Harry Watson screamed because of her emotional state, not because she was out drinking in pubs at midnight again and couldn’t hear her own voice clearly. John hadn’t decided which thought distressed him more.
“I’m sorry, Harry. Alright? I’ll answer my phone next time.”
The girl on the other end still didn’t seem at ease. “What the hell happened?! You chased a fucking serial killer through London then you ate at a Chinese restaurant?!”
That was actually a pretty good summary of the night. “Yeah.” John glanced at his bedroom door, wondering if Harry’s voice was so loud that it woke his flatmate downstairs. It couldn’t be since he didn’t put his phone on loudspeaker, but no one could never be sure when it came to Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand, he might still be awake at this hour.
“I’ll tell you next time. Tomorrow. Maybe.” John thought he was playing safe by calling Harry at night, but the call still gave him a headache. He wasn’t ready to share this world, his world in 221B yet. With anyone. Not even Harry, nor his therapist, nor Bill Murray. The little bubble was his, and his only.
He realized after a while that the other end was a complete silence.
“Harry?”
“You like it, don’t you?”
John hesitated.
“What?”
“Everything.”
He could almost see the smile on his sister’s lips, the one he so often saw in their childhood before life happened.
And despite all, he could feel the same smile slowly tugging on his lips.
“John.”
“Hm?”
“John.”
He finally looked up from his laptop. A quiet evening in 221B, with rain softly hitting the pavement outside and the familiar scent of tea filling up his nasal cavity. It was all so peaceful except for the fact that he still hadn’t written a word of the next paragraph of his entry, having backspaced so many times he lost count already.
Sherlock was looking at him from the sofa, eyes unreadable as ever be. “Do you think I’m mad?”
John needed time to process that, and when he finished, a frown formed between his brows. “You really were analyzing my blog, weren’t you?”
Sherlock rolled his eyes in his usual I-won’t-bother-to-elaborate-just-answer-my-question look.
John coughed. “Well. Yes. You are. A madman, very much so.” He hesitated before adding, “but a good kind.”
They both sat in silence for quite a while that John had turned his attention back to the screen when Sherlock murmured under his breath, “I see.”
There was an unusual gleam in his eyes. A strangely familiar gleam. Like the tea they sipped a minute ago; something warm and spoke of home.
John pondered in front of his screen, before deciding to read his previous entries like Sherlock did. Maybe it would help. He had to share his bubble sooner or later after all, and if he did, he had to make sure he got everything right. He got the facts of the case right, and most of all, he got Sherlock right. John hadn’t realized since when he wanted to do him justice, for once, after all the things people said about him. To make the world see Sherlock Holmes as he saw him.
He skimmed through the entry on January 29th and found the adjectives he was looking for. Mad. Arrogant. Rude. Public school. Likeable.
Charming.
John blinked twice at the last one then decided to move on to the next entry before his brain started overthinking.
Mad.
Still mad.
Mad, mad, and…
He paused.
Fascinating.
Wasn’t that what he said at Sherlock at the crime scene?
No, not quite. Maybe he had said some other variations of it—was it fantastic? Brilliant, maybe. And before, in the cab, John was sure he called him amazing before he somehow forgot his own initial opinion.
Words died on his fingertips.
No one would believe him, much less people who had the chance to speak to the man in question himself. For God’s sake, even he forgot about it. But it was... true. In every sense of word, it was true.
John knew what he saw in Sherlock when he narrated all those deductions without so much of a stop for breath, when they ran though the dark alleyways of London chasing a man who had killed four persons, when just the previous week Sherlock genuinely looked ignorant of second-grade astronomy lessons. He looked at Sherlock and was simply fascinated on the spot by the fact that he just… existed.
His breath caught in his throat.
And the world might not share his view about it, but he couldn’t care less about them. If he had to share this part of his life, he had to make sure they all look at it through his eyes.
This is what happened on the night I moved in with Sherlock Holmes. When I first met Sherlock, he told me my life story.
And this time, he didn’t backspace.