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Day 3: Gaming/ Watching a Movie
It started out simply enough: Sherlock needed to prove the killer had done the killing, due to the amount of video game logic applied to the scene of the crime and the method of the murder.
And in order to prove this theory, he had to to some field research.
Field research, as it so often does, turned into an accidental pastime.
Pastimes, however harmless, can become obsessions.
This obsession had started after that one measly case, all those years ago. And Sherlock Holmes indulged in it every Tuesday evening, when John was usually at some unsuccessful date.
On this particular Tuesday night, John left the apartment around 7:00. If his clothes, general anxiety, and amount of cologne were any indicators, he was likely meeting up with the veterinarian, and they were probably going to an expensive vegan place for dinner.
This would mean Sherlock had the flat to himself for roughly 2-3 hours, depending on the success of the date, after which John would likely come home, and with some meat-filled takeout in hand. By which time, Sherlock would need to have concluded this week’s session and be moodily playing the violin, lest John think he actually acted like a regular human being when John wasn’t looking.
When the door clicked shut, Sherlock waited an additional eight minutes and forty-two seconds, until he saw his flatmate step into a taxi. Then he darted from the window and into his room, and pulled out one of the few boxes of treasures this austere man possessed: a trunk from his boarding school days, filled with all manner of detritus from his life before John: a few photos of himself as a child with his family (before he’d divulged his father’s secret), a small arrangement of tokens and trophies from smaller mysteries solved in school, and of course, his video game collection.
He had amassed a variety of consoles and platforms over the years, and now his trunk was barely able to fit anything else in it. There was another trunk, just beside it, under the bed, which was half-full with an arrangement of cartridges and discs of various games that had earned the rare honor of having actual replay value for Sherlock Holmes.
What was he in the mood for tonight? What would soothe his button-mashing needs? He scanned the titles, deciding against the newer games and their plots and brilliant graphics; the middling to older games weren’t going to cut it, either. He had that feeling: it was time for patterns and repetitions, and doing the same bloody level over and over and over again until his fingers submitted fully to the command of his brain.
Pac Man, it was, then.
He pulled out his old Atari 2600, the joystick pad, and the cartridge and took them to the living room. After a few minutes’ fiddling, the game was up and running. Blue-lined mazes, seemingly random-patterned ghosts, and a whole board full of wafers and fruits were his for the taking.
He made it to the eighth board when the door to their sitting room opened, and John came shuffling back in. Sherlock sat up quickly, simultaneously swiveling to John and leaving a ghost to kill Pac Man. The midi-theme of Pac Man’s death made for a completely appropriate sound effect: the look of confusion and amusement that registered on John’s face as he realized what he’d walked in on.
“You’re home early,” Sherlock noted, his attempts at casual completely failing. He’s only been gone fifteen minutes. Why is he home so early? How am I going to bluff my way out of this one?
“You’re playing Pac Man,” John replied. “Why are you playing Pac Man?”
“For a case,” Sherlock answered automatically, his desire to turn back to his game combatting utterly with his sense of self-preservation. He couldn’t let his flatmate see him being so… ordinary. He tensed, prepared for John’s mockery.
But the derision never fell. Instead, John plopped down on the couch beside him. “Budge up. You’re on the eighth board? I can never make it past the second or third.”
Something eased in Sherlock’s chest. “I made it this far, all on first tries,” he mumbled, still all-too-aware of John’s presence to really be able to give the game his full attention. Another ghost caught him.
“I’m not throwing you off, am I?” John asked, and Sherlock could tell he was fighting the urge to smirk. He shifted, toeing his boots off and tucking them under the coffee table.
“No, no,” Sherlock lied, bristling slightly. His fingers twitched the joystick, and this time he dodged the ghost, gathered all the wafers, and cleared the board.
He scanned the arcade of his mind palace, trying to dredge up video gaming etiquette. Given that the room was fairly sparse when it came to anything other than patterns and code combinations, the particular information was easy to find.
“Would… would you like a turn?” he asked as he cleared the ninth level.
John chuckled. “I’ve never gotten this far. But maybe some other time. I’ll just watch, for now.”
Sherlock made a noise of assent, and continued playing. After a while John asked about his video game collection, and Sherlock brought his one-man Pac Man tournament to an end. Sherlock acquainted John with his collection, under promise of pain, torture, and public humiliation lest he ever breathe a word of it to anyone. In the end John had agreed, seeming to sense Sherlock’s need for secrecy here, and they decided on a game to play together, from amongst the various consoles that Sherlock owned.
Together.
Sherlock had never actually played with another person, and so the experience was an entirely alien one for him. They tried Halo in co-op mode, which John wound up taking command of and essentially schooling Sherlock in team-oriented assassinations.
So Sherlock one-upped him by utterly destroying him at Portal. John’s timing kept failing him as the levels got more and more complex, but Sherlock (both from having played the game before and because well, his understanding of physics was vastly superior to John’s) managed to make it halfway through the game before John resigned his controller in favor of watching Sherlock continue to enervate GLaDOS.
“If there’s one villain out there who’s your intellectual equal,” John said at one point, laughing, “It may be her. Her? Can robots be ‘her’?”
“The voice is female,” Sherlock agreed, tapping in the sequence to set up the orange and blue portals just in time to hurl a companion cube through to activate a particular lever just as the moving platform hit its apex. “So it is acceptable to refer to GLaDOS as female, I think.”
By the time Sherlock noticed that John had dozed off on the couch, it was half-three in the morning. He cut off the console and stretched, his muscles stiff from his position on the couch for the last several hours. He stood, pulled the afghan over his flatmate, and went to bed.
And so, when John’s dates ended early for one reason or another, he did have something to look forward to on failed Tuesday nights: gaming night with the world’s only consulting detective.