Sherlock fic: Five times Sherlock didn’t eat out, and one time he ate in.
“Where did you live before?
“Hmm?” Sherlock stops staring out of the window, into the bright lights of midnight, and tries hard to let his brain slow down. It had been easier to do that with the orange blanket, although orange isn’t a colour he is keen on encouraging.
“Around here, was it? I just wondered. You seem to know the area pretty well.”
He knows all of London pretty well. He replies with a short “Yes,” since really, what else is there to say? Orange, he thinks, and assimilates a short list of reasons why orange is an unspeakably useless aid against shock.
“Ah,” says John, cutting in through number twenty-three, and Sherlock knows that sound already, knows that it means anything from a range of ‘This answer means nothing to me’ all through the spectrum up to ‘This question meant nothing to you’. He hopes John will learn to nuance the sound a little better; meanings work better when refined.
That said, the man does have a reason for being less than refined this evening, having shot and killed a man, even if outwardly he seems none the worse for it. Sherlock can see that his companion’s hand is rock steady. He supposes it would have to be; twirling Chinese noodles round a fork as if they were spaghetti looks far from easy.
He doesn’t mind, either, when John waves his fork around while making comments or asking questions in between bites. Table manners are such an inane set of rules he can’t but be delighted when they are broken with such aplomb.
He, of course, omits them rather than breaks them, and it’s not as much fun, but it cannot be helped.
“You sure you’re not hungry?” John asks for the third time.
“Me? No.” He gives the same answer.
*
It is such a relief not to have to order food any more; not to have to stare at a full plate for the privilege of sitting at a decent look-out point, always slightly distracted by the sheer waste of it.
John never refuses when Sherlock proposes going into a restaurant (not that John ever refuses anything - not that he gives him a chance, perhaps he should try that, one day, when there’s time, just there never will be, there never is enough time) and Sherlock doesn’t really have time to notice what he orders, much less whether he actually eats it; and it is a relief, also, to have something he can work on tuning out. It’s good to be able to tune things out - it reminds him that he is able to - and he knows that, should such matters become relevant later, John will be there to tell him what he had.
It takes John five restaurants (one Italian, three Chinese, one Indian - although the menu is nothing one would ever find in India and the proprietor is Bangladeshi) before his curiosity gets the better of him and he asks “Don’t you ever eat?”
“I drink coffee,” says Sherlock distractedly, since the girl three tables down is trying not to cry and it’s vaguely irritating him since he cannot work out why. (Two tables down is an embarrassing first - and most likely last - date; one table down is friends meeting, rushed, haven’t seen each other in a while, they keep speaking over each other.)
“That’s not one of the major food groups,” John rallies.
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Come on, Sherlock, you can’t live entirely on coffee.”
City girl - she’s almost in uniform. Lost her job, lost her boyfriend, no… not quite lost her boyfriend - perhaps she’s lost her ring - he’s not close enough to tell, and although it’s probably entirely boring he finds he wants to know why, he has to know why, then he can solve it and her face won’t look like that any more…
That is far too simplistic. He hates himself when he gets simplistic. That makes him too much like everyone else, and all he’s ever known is that he is not everyone else, since everyone else can be put back together, and that has never worked for him.
“Have you finished?”
“Nearly, but -”
“Good, let’s go.”
On the way past the girl’s table he manages to deduce (closer observation, that was all that was needed) that her boyfriend is cheating on her and she’s out on a revenge mission to cheat in her turn, but won’t go through with it, not tonight.
That’s much better.
*
When he proposes the ninth restaurant John says, “I’m only going if you eat something.”
Sherlock stares at him as if he’s grown two heads. “But you’re the one who’s hungry.”
“I, well,” John blusters, “Yes, I’m hungry, but I can wait until you are, if you like.”
“Nonsense. You get irritable when you’re hungry. I’m paying, come on, there’s a good chap.”
“But -”
Sherlock arches an eyebrow.
“Oh, I don’t know why I bother,” John mutters under his breath, and Sherlock smiles quite without meaning to. He’s learning.
*
In the thirteenth restaurant - Thai - Sherlock says, “Everyone else eats.”
John double-takes, and Sherlock focuses at a point over his shoulder, where the waiters are arguing over a mixed-up bill (the younger of them is fighting a losing battle, even though it wasn’t her who made the mistake, but it’s too late now, the bill was undercharged and the businessmen have left the restaurant - Sherlock could go up and tell the waiters where they work - the floor of the building, even, but it’s too late now) and keeps the sigh in until after John has said “Excuse me?”
“I’m too busy to eat,” Sherlock explains. “There’s too much going on in these places, it’s bad for the digestion.”
“Right,” John says, drawing out the vowel just enough to edge the word into the realm of the sarcastic. “And at home?”
Sherlock hates it when this happens, when he opens himself up, just a little bit, gives a person a hint about himself, and then that person goes and asks a question they weren’t invited to ask. It is completely unfair and he’s suddenly feeling that familiar and hated sense of being crushed under an ice-cold cube of dense, destructive air that pushes down through his head, invades his lungs, settles in his stomach and he’s being irrational.
“I like restaurants,” he says petulantly, which isn’t an answer to anything, and now he’s going to sound childish, but -
“Okay,” says John, and Sherlock decides to be irritated, yet again, at how inbetween John is when he wants to be. Most of the time he loves it - always something to work on, something to figure out. But they’re in restaurant number thirteen and they’ve been living together for sixteen days and it has never, never taken him this long to figure anything out before.
Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration.
Perhaps he shouldn’t categorise John as a ‘thing’.
“John,” he says, hesitant, not quite looking at him (since there’s a stain on the edge of the tablecloth, and he tries to pretend for as many as three seconds he doesn’t know what it is, just to give himself some time) “I appreciate the concern, I really do, but my health is in no immediate danger.”
“I’m not concerned.” He knows that’s John’s way of calling him out.
“Of course you’re concerned. You’re a doctor.”
“No,” John shakes his head. “No. Doctors feign concerned, otherwise we’d never -”
“Only the bad ones,” says Sherlock. He’s only ever known bad ones, up until now.
*
Sherlock sweeps into a newsagent’s on the way home and buys a packet of biscuits that he’s certain he’s never tried before, then broods darkly on the sofa until John finally gets the hint and puts the kettle on.
“It was an honest question,” John calls through from the kitchen, “I don’t need you to prove anything.”
He adds “To me,” in a voice he presumably thinks is low enough not to carry through, except he’s in Sherlock’s line of sight and lip reading is second nature.
Sherlock pulls up the sash and throws the first biscuit out of the window as if it were a discus, takes a gulp of the air that, even one storey up, tastes just a little different, and then returns to his previous position, sat on the back of the sofa with his hands clasped loosely together; a waiting pose rather than a thinking pose.
He wonders how much John has noticed: that he turns away even when drinking coffee; that if he’s handed tea with milk in he simply treats it as an accessory to blending in; that Angelo’s offer of food on the house can be made with impunity because he knows Sherlock will never take him up on it; that multivitamins are stashed away in the flat as secretively as any drug.
Of course, the drugs are stashed away even more secretively, they’re there to prove to himself that he can resist. Or they’re there for dire emergencies. He’s never let himself decide which, probably because they’re there for both.
“There.”
“You’re angry with me,” Sherlock states it as a bored, bald fact.
“I’m not. I’m not angry.”
“You are. Slamming the door, the mug, you’ve been talking to yourself in the kitchen the entire time you were in there and you’ve put sugar in your tea as well as in mine; you’re distracted.”
“You’re making a great effort to be distracting.”
“Hmm. I wouldn’t call it a great effort.”
John waits, staring at him. Sherlock likes that stare, it’s a little unnerving without meaning to be; the kind of expression he feels comfortable around.
It is not however, unnerving enough to help, but he has decided this has to be done. It takes more effort than Sherlock can quantify to eat just one biscuit, right here, right now - he has thought about it, prepared himself too much, he should have just ducked into a darkened doorway and forced them down his throat on the street - it tastes of mildly flavoured cardboard and it is all he can do not to gag.
John doesn’t look at him after the first bite, but buries his head in the newspaper.
“You get it, then,” Sherlock says, starting to time himself with a bleak sense of the inevitable.
“Sherlock,” says John, voice a little odd from behind the rustling print, and Sherlock learns about some upcoming tightening of the football transfer rules, which is almost certainly useless to him, and memorises the shape and details of a new Omega, which is not (since it is exactly the type of watch that Mycroft would hate, and his birthday is coming up, and this cannot be a coincidence). “It doesn’t matter.”
There hadn’t been a pause, he supposed, except in his own mayfly world. “It matters to me,” Sherlock found himself saying, savagely.
“Yes,” John agrees. “It does. But I’ve sat in enough therapy sessions to appreciate how many things there are that don’t need to be said. And it will make the shopping easier.”
“I’ll give you a list,” Sherlock says.
John doesn’t twitch the newspaper down, doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even appear to listen.
Sherlock exhales slowly. “Help yourself to biscuits,” he said, on the way out of the room.
*
When Sherlock stops outside the fourteenth restaurant, John says, “Do you think we could just go to the pub?”
Sherlock pretends to think about this.
“You don’t like Japanese?” he asks.
“I’d rather go to the pub,” says John. “I’m the one who’s eating.”
Which sounds logical enough on the surface, Sherlock supposes, although he can come up with half a dozen reasons why the pub is not a good option.
Yet with a little stimulation, he should be able to multiply that number of objections by at least four point five.
“The pub then,” says Sherlock. “In the interests of research.” And as John falls into step beside him, he adds, “Just this once.”
He can feel John smiling, so broadly that he is sure people will stare.
Apparently there is time after all.
[2,026]