Work Text:
She waits for an evening when he’s busy with his bees to head over to the hardware store in a borrowed pickup truck. She comes back with a ladder, drywall, backing support board, and construction adhesive.
Measure, saw, sand, glue. She can feel herself start to ease up the longer she works, muscles loosening and breath coming slower. The part of the ceiling she cuts out is ruined and rotted, and she has to spend extra time cleaning the joists of honey, but by the end of the night she has the backing support in place. Four days later, the job is fully done, and Joan walks the hallway, honeyless and smug.
Some people bake or garden to relax. She fixes things.
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“Ants,” he says.
“Ants,” she repeats, glancing up from her paper. “What about them?”
“There aren’t any more,” he says, squinting at the floorboard his face is pressed against. “There used to be a line of them here—” he draws a finger along the wood—“and now there’s not.” He puts the finger into his mouth consideringly.
“Sherlock, stop, that’s gross,” she says, face scrunching. “And no, there aren’t any more ants, because I fixed the ceiling. It was the honey.”
“Mm, I noticed,” he says. He pops up to his feet and looks at her, eyebrows raised. “I thought you weren’t going to tidy things. You were insulted by the very suggestion, were you not?”
She lets a tiny laugh go. “This isn’t tidying.” A pointed glance at the piles of his things lying on every flat surface. “Tidying’s up to you. Fixing things—that’s different.” She shrugs. “There’s no point in living somewhere that makes us hate waking up.”
He stills for a moment. “Thank you, Joan Watson,” he says quietly.
She smiles. “You’re welcome, Sherlock.”