Welcome! (Prompting: part i)
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This is a fic prompting meme based around the BBC series Sherlock, written by Stephen Moffat & Mark Gattis.
( Read more... )
Prompts from this post can be filled on the Overflow Post
This is a fic prompting meme based around the BBC series Sherlock, written by Stephen Moffat & Mark Gattis.
( Read more... )
“Stop trying to be perceptive at two fifty-three -“
“I’m always perceptive, I refuse to stop, and it’s two fifty-four -”
“Whatever, and don’t mind me, just go back to what you were doing. I shan’t disturb you now. Oh, and thanks for.” He lifted his mug in salute, shook out the paper, and settled back, pausing after a few seconds and glancing up to find Sherlock still staring at him. “Well?” he said.
“The tea,” Sherlock prompted.
“Is hot,” said John irritably, “so unless you want me to burn my mouth you will have to wait until it is three o’clock - or thereabouts,” he added quickly. He wasn’t sure if it was easier or harder to deal with Sherlock when he was awake or half-asleep, or whether feeling perfectly comfortable right here, right now, just meant he was getting used to dealing with the younger man’s idiosyncrasies.
Sherlock started pacing up and down the other half of the room.
“You’ve put the skull away,” John said, in an effort to start a conversation, seeing as Sherlock looked on the verge of descending into a thoroughly bad mood, and on balance John wasn’t sure he wouldn’t rather take the nightmare, which had the advantage of being more familiar.
“It was looking at me funny,” Sherlock glared at the space on the mantelpiece where the skull wasn’t. “And it can’t even make tea any better than I can, so I put it in a drawer. Perhaps you should keep your cane at the bottom of the stairs, even though you don’t actually need it and I shouldn’t encourage you.”
“I don’t need it,” John said, nettled, and then, wondering if this fuss wasn’t actually just caused by interest in his nightmares, said, “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it tonight.”
“Why would you need to talk about it at all?” Sherlock said. “I can guess at what you dream about quite reasonably enough to satisfy my curiosity, even without all the shouting, so there is utterly no need for me to ask you. Besides, I shouldn’t dream of telling you my dreams, so there’s absolutely no reason I would insist on you telling me yours. There. You can have your secrets; I don’t know everything.”
“You do actually sleep then?” John did his best to ignore Sherlock’s air of having bestowed a great favour upon him, and surveyed the wreck of the living room. He admitted to himself that he sometimes quite liked it, the mess; his own quarters - room, he kept reminding himself - being functional and tidy by virtue of being mostly bare. Being surrounded by other people’s clutter was a reminder: this is your world now, this is how you are going to have to live. He wasn’t entirely sure that the nightmares weren’t actually a reaction to that fact, a clinging to his world - to his previous world.
“Of course I sleep,” Sherlock sniffed in a rather affected manner, as if John had entirely missed the point.
“I can’t see you going to a doctor for sedatives, somehow,” John found himself commenting.
Sherlock shot him a startled look, and then began to laugh. “It’s three o’clock,” he said.
“Hm? Oh, the tea.”
Sherlock was the last man you could call military, and yet there were some things - the precision, the lack of explanations, the need to live on the edge - that made this world something that hung in the inbetween, in the twilight hours, something very particular, and different, and familiar.
John took a sip of the tea, which still tasted slightly strange - he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the mug had previously held - but, if he didn’t think about it too much, bearable, and nodded. “That’ll do,” he said, and was rewarded with one of Sherlock’s cheeky, all-too-knowing grins.
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Captcha says "ME! crematory" - not sure how I feel about that.
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(I'm sure in his mind tea has always arrived ready-formed, and the hows of making it just never interested him. I have my suspicions as to exactly what he did, but perhaps that'll have to be another fic ;)
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“But then how would you be an Englishman, John? Taking your tea without milk.”
“I’d be an Englishman drinking tea at three o’clock in the morning when there isn’t any milk.”
XD;;;
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You've got the characterizations just right. I can see Holmes flailing about the flat looking distinctively frazzled about tea. Honestly, I'm not exactly sure he understands how to make tea. Probably hopes that if he puts the water and the leaves next to each other, they'll procreate.
:) So wonderful. Love it.
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