Work Text:
The nights were cold and quiet.
John had never been a good sleeper, but now wakefulness seemed to cling to him, like the dark clung to the corners of his bedroom. Sometimes, when John was lying awake in the small hours he would remember- suddenly and inexplicably- how shitty a flatmate Sherlock had been. At these times John would wonder what it even was he missed about him.
Sherlock was messy, for starters. He’d leave his dishes in the sink and his books on the breakfast table and his wet towels on the banister and his used nicotine patches everywhere . And then if John so much as moved an inch in the wrong direction, he’d come over all Obsessive Compulsive.
Then there were the late night violin concertos, starting anywhere between twelve am and three thirty am and driving John up out of bed to shout hoarsely from the landing.
The constant bad attitude.
The frankly disgusting ‘experiments’ festering in the kitchen – eyeballs in the microwave, fingers in the fridge, some poor bloke’s head in the freezer.
The muttering, the careless insults, the leaping around on the furniture.
Trying to live with Sherlock, John told himself, was like trying to catch butterflies with a saucepan- pointless, difficult and frustrating beyond measure.
He was better off without him. He got more sleep. He ate better.
Mealtimes with Sherlock were practically non-existent. Whether this was a product of his uncomfortable childhood Christmas dinners with Mycroft John had no idea, but whatever it was, Sherlock rarely cooked or ate anything himself, and when he did he had the manners of a camel. John had expected Sherlock to be poised and delicate, or at least presentable at the dining table, but he was mistaken. When he ate, Sherlock ate like he was never going to eat again – usually sans cutlery.
Before moving into 221B, John had had an idea of what a flatmate should be like. Surely everyone did?
Well, for John, his imaginary flatmate was someone with which to share friendly banter and cereal and maybe cable television. The flatmate was clean, fairly tidy, polite and well dressed. Said flatmate did not wander the flat in a sheet. He did not watch god-awful reality TV while John was trying to blog. He did not over-analyse. He did not criticise. He did not spray paint the walls and he certainly did not offend every single one of John’s girlfriends to the point that they broke up with him.
Flatmates were meant to be encouraging on that front, weren’t they? They were supposed to subtly match-make from behind the scenes, not drive away every woman that came over the threshold!
Based on that checklist alone, Sherlock was a spectacularly bad flatmate. But there was more.
Sherlock was exhausting. Being in the same room as him had sent John’s stress levels skyrocketing, and that was nothing compared to when Sherlock was elsewhere, doing god-knows-what with god-knows-who and leaving John to bite his nails next to the window and wait. Just wait.
There were the moody depressions, the low points when Sherlock would lie sullenly in his pyjamas, staring into space; not talking, not eating, not even moving for hours on end.
And then there was That Night. Two thirty am. One gunshot in the silence – bang. John had gone tearing out of bed, legged it down the corridor into Sherlock’s bedroom (which, under any other circumstance, was strictly off limits).
Shit, he’s done it, he’s gone and done it, sick-of-this-world-Sherlock, why the fuck didn’t I couldn’t I wouldn’t I stop him...
As it turned out, Sherlock hadn’t done it. No, one of the paisley blooms on the wallpaper had been on the receiving end. Sherlock said it had been ‘distracting him’.
Callous, selfish, unstable Sherlock.
It had always been a lingering thought. And now it had happened.
Sherlock’s suicide, John thought, had probably been inevitable. But now, in the messy aftermath, John was beginning to realise that the things he had hated about Sherlock had been the things that made his own life worth living.
He would do it again. He would give up his lady friends, his job, his fucking peace-of-mind to have his best friend back.
And that was the truth.