Chapter Text
SUNDAY
“Sherlock, for the last time, answer your brother or I’ll throw your phone out the window.”
Absorbed in the contemplation of a test tube whose contents were boiling over a Bunsen burner, Sherlock Holmes did not even dignify his roommate with a glance.
“Sherlock, I’m serious. He’s tried to call you fifty times, and I know he’ll keep trying until you answer him. Or until I throw your phone out the window.”
“Two government officials allegedly murdered. I’m not interested. He can deal with it himself.”
“OK. Fine. Alright. Just tell him.”
“Hold the phone for me then. I don’t want to interrupt my experiment.”
John sighed and took his friend’s mobile.
“Mycroft? John here. I’m putting Sherlock on.”
Should he worry that the situation didn’t bother him too much? He was so used to the oddities and rudeness of the youngest Holmes (and the insistence of the elderly) that keeping his phone close to his right ear while he was handling probably toxic substances felt almost natural.
“Mycroft? What can I do for you?” Sherlock asked in his most annoying tone, the one he used with his brother before telling him to get lost.
“You know very well what you can do for me. Take care of this case before it becomes unmanageable!”
“I haven’t changed my mind since Thursday.”
“There’s been a new death.”
“Boring.”
“Sherlock, don’t make me-”
“I’d like to see you try. Hang up, John,” the detective added as he stepped away from the phone.
With a new sigh, John complied, not without a compassionate thought for Mycroft. Being the older brother of a sociopathic genius like Sherlock Holmes was no easy task.
“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked you to answer him.”
“What are you complaining about? I answered. Boring.”
“There were still three murders.”
“Three deaths”, Sherlock corrected.
“No evidence that they have been murdered?”
“No.”
“But then why does Mycroft insist so much?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t want to waste my time talking to you about a trivial case that I’m not going to investigate anyway. I have far more interesting things to do.”
John took a deep breath and counted to ten before releasing the air he had been holding in his lungs. Anger was a feeling he was familiar with, but he had never experienced it as much as since he started sharing an apartment with Sherlock. This kind of response, these refusals, exasperated him more than anything else (“anything else” being the violin at three in the morning, the gunshots fired into the wall, the silence into which Sherlock could suddenly lock himself, the rudeness he always displayed). In cases like this, he felt like a particularly obtuse, stupid, and uninteresting man, as if he was nothing compared to Sherlock and especially like he was nothing to him.
However, in friendship, there needs to be a bit of consideration from both sides, otherwise, well, it’s no longer friendship, is it? It becomes an embarrassing one-sided relationship that risks ending badly.
John got up from the armchair in which he had been quietly sitting for about twenty minutes, with the pleasant prospect of drinking a nice hot cup of tea while watching a television show. He had not foreseen the foul smell emanating from Sherlock's test tube, nor the background noise of his phone, which had been ringing incessantly since noon. He had not foreseen his roommate's talent for getting on his nerves with a single phrase.
His gaze fell on the mantelpiece, where Sherlock “stored” his mail. The bank logo caught his attention. He was waiting for a response regarding a problem with a defective credit card, and he approached to check that the envelope was indeed addressed to him. A little surprised to find that it was, and that the detective had taken care of picking up the mail, he reached out to take the letter that was meant for him.
“Is it me hallucinating or, for the first time, you did something about our life together in this apartment?”
“What?” Sherlock asked, without looking up from his experiment.
“No, nothing,” John replied, pushing one or two envelopes aside to see if he had received anything else. “I was wondering why you took the mail.”
A scream from his roommate made him jump. Three letters fell to the floor.
“JOHN, NO!”
“Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you? You scared me to death, you lunatic!”
A second later, Sherlock had abandoned the test tube and Bunsen burner on the table. Two seconds later, he was next to John, feverishly examining his hands.
“Did you cut yourself?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
John's gaze met Sherlock's, and for a moment, he saw in his friend's eyes a glimmer close to absolute panic. Then the detective took a step back and shrugged. John was about to ask what on Earth this was about, but the horrible smell rising behind them led him to more pragmatic considerations.
“Sherlock, he sighed, I think your experiment melted the table.”