Title: Five ways to look after an injured flatmate
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Rating: General
Length: 2650
Content Notes: Humour.  John is a bit of an idiot, but he gets there in the end.  Also for the watsons_woes July 14th (Rehabilitation/Recovery) challenge.  Perhaps not as direct a fill of the "Numbers" prompt as I would have liked, but my brainstorming kept bringing me back to this format, so....  *shrug*
Warnings: None
Summary: In the first moments after John went down to a bullet, it seemed like Sherlock was worried whether he lived or died. Now, he doesn't seem to care at all... or does he?



1: Yeah, he just took off.  He does that.

“Worth the wound my arse,” muttered John, surveying the waiting room with narrowed eyes.

He remembered thinking that.  He remembered thinking it, with all his heart, the way he’d once thought ‘please, God, let me live,’ when he’d seen the way Sherlock had snarled at that counterfeiter who’d grazed John’s leg with a potshot—the look on the self-professed sociopath’s face as he rushed to the place where John had fallen, demanding that he be okay…

It was worth the wound, he’d thought.  Worth it, to see behind the indifferent mask that Sherlock wore over the great heart beneath, the heart that so many people—including Sherlock—appeared to think was a charmingly romantic fantasy of John’s.

Of course, John had thought it was worth the wound before the A&E doctors had stitched up the laceration from where the bullet had clipped him, before they’d issued him with a cane and strict instructions to avoid using the leg as much as possible for at least two weeks to allow the muscle time to heal, and before he’d returned to the waiting room to find it full of wounded and ill and their anxious companions… and no Sherlock.

Where are you? he tapped out in a text message, just in case.

Busy - SH

Great.  Well, if Sherlock was in that kind of mood, there was no use trying to pry information out of him.  Certainly no use ringing.

Greg Lestrade, on the other hand, picked up on the third ring.

“John!” he said.  “How are you?  Sherlock said you couldn’t come because you were getting your leg seen to, are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” said John.  “Just a graze, really.  But ‘couldn’t come’?  Come where?”

“Well, we’ve got another case, don’t we?  No rest for the wicked, I guess.  We’ll have to work through the paperwork for that counterfeiting case and the guy who shot at you after we’ve done our best to get this next one off the street—because whoever’s done this, it’s not pretty.”

“Oh,” said John.  Of course that was why Sherlock was gone.  For a moment, John indulged in thinking about Sherlock whirling around another crime scene, brilliant and alive and joyful in the way he only was when they were solving a crime.  Adrenaline surged briefly at the idea of joining him… and then died down again as his leg throbbed with pain.  The only place John was going to be able to go was home.  To bed.  “All right.  Well, good luck then.”

“Thanks mate,” said Greg, sounding harassed.  “I think we’ll need it for this one.”

John stared at the phone disconsolately, and then tucked it into his pocket and took another few, experimental steps.  No, there was no way he could manage the tube like this, not even if he took one of the insulting reserved for disabilities seats that he’d managed to avoid after Afghanistan.

On the other hand, the locum shifts he’d managed to pick up recently had petered out when he’d proved a pretty unreliable source of emergency cover whenever there was a case on—and his army pension check didn’t come in until next week.  There wouldn’t be anything on his card, and his wallet had been empty this morning when he went to grab a protein bar to keep him going for a couple of hours more until they could make it to Garrideb’s house.

Somehow, he was going to have to make the tube work.

He double-checked the billfold of his wallet, just to make sure, and was delighted to find a raggedy looking twenty pound note he didn’t remember tucked between a couple of receipts.  Just enough to cover a cab fare home.

John sighed in relief, the immediate problem taken care of, at least.

Hopefully Sherlock would be able to tell him about the case later.


2: Soon as we get all this rubbish cleaned out

The cab dropped him off at the kerb and sped away.  John struggled to keep the door open with his hip while he managed to get one foot, the cane, and his other foot through the doorway into the front hall.  The stairs up to his bedroom towered above him ominously.

No.  He couldn’t make it.  Best thing would be to head up inside and watch TV for a while before attempting the second leg.
In the living room, Sherlock was deep in his thinking pose of the day in his armchair—the inverted crucifix, John had mentally dubbed this one: legs up the wall, arms along the front of the couch, and head hanging over the front.

Apparently he had been busy though: busy spending the time John was being stitched up and painstakingly making his way home, rearranging the furniture in 221B’s living room to recreate… something.  The towering piles of books and papers that usually interspersed the furniture had been shuffled around, lining up with the desk and the couch in a strangely useless grid pattern.  Nothing was in the same place it had been left that morning, and the only clue appeared to be that the wall under the smilie face was papered with diagrams of rooms populated by boxes and lines in different positions.  From a crime scene, maybe? A series of crime scenes?  It was hard to tell at that distance, and there was no way John was crossing all the way to the other wall to find out.

Sometimes, though, he wished that Sherlock could just work with a diorama.

“What’s the case?” asked John.

He eyed the winding aisle between the door to the kitchen and his chair—which was still, fortunately for Sherlock’s health, settled comfortably in front of the TV with an unobstructed view—and propped his cane against the kitchen wall.  It’d probably be easier manoeuvring all the way through there by keeping one hand on the furniture.  Although he’d have to keep an eye on things to make sure Sherlock didn’t become inspired again and shift everything around him, leaving him trapped.

“Mmph,” huffed Sherlock, waving a hand without opening his eyes or otherwise changing his posture, apparently oblivious to the social niceties of how-are-you and can-I-get-you-anything.  “You’ve been talking to Lestrade.  A four—not even worth going to the crime scene.  It was obviously the step-son.”

“Right,” said John, as he picked his way across the room.  He was right, it had felt better walking hand over hand along the furniture.  “Well, you can put all this back where it goes in a week or two, once I’ve got rid of this damn cane—for the moment, it’s not so bad like it is.  Although Mrs Hudson’s going to hit the roof when she sees it.”

It was only after John had settled into his chair that he remembered the necessity of fetching the remote control, which… now he looked, wasn’t in its usual spot on the coffee table anyway.  Given the level of disruption in the room, it could well take weeks to track down.  Unfortunately, not a task John was feeling up to right now.  His leg was really throbbing now that he had nothing else to focus on to block out the dull, burning ache that he remembered all too well from being shot the first time.  A book probably wasn’t going to cut it.

He shifted, trying in vain to find a better position, and reached behind himself to rearrange the Union Jack cushion, only to find—

“Aha!” he muttered, victorious, and brandished the control at the TV.  Apparently he’d even managed to accidentally leave Doctor Who in the DVD drive.  Brilliant.


3: I play the violin when I’m thinking.  Would that bother you?

John came awake suddenly, sweaty sheets pinning him to the bed, to the sound of Sherlock playing ‘Ode to a Strangled Cat’ downstairs.

He wrestled the sheets away from where they were pressing on his hurt leg and lay back down, momentarily exhausted by the battle.  Why Sherlock so rarely played nicely when John was trying to sleep, he would never understand.  Surely, on a statistical level, at some point the bouts of Brahms or Mendelssohn that John knew Sherlock was perfectly capable of would have to coincide with when John was trying to sleep rather than with an impassioned lecture on how John was a complete and utter musical Philistine.  Unless, of course, Sherlock was doing it deliberately to be irritating, which could never be discounted.

Mrs Hudson had left a cup of sympathetic tea and a couple of consolatory biscuits on the bedside table, which was very kind of her, because her hip was bad enough in the winter that she barely ever managed to make it all the way up the stairs.  The biscuits were a particular stroke of luck, because it was time for John’s painkillers, too, and even with the stairs in the way between himself and the kitchen, he wasn’t supposed to take them on an empty stomach.

By the time he’d downed the biscuits and washed the painkillers down with the tea—which was miraculously still hot—the sounds from downstairs had transitioned into the haltingly repetitive sounds of composition, tentative phrases which broke off half way through and then restarted from the beginning, each time playing just a little further, or just a little differently, before stopping again.

As the oxycodone took effect, John fell asleep with a smile, lulled by the faint, lilting strains of the violin.  No, a well-played violin didn’t bother him at all.


4: Don’t eat when I’m working.  Digesting slows me down

John hobbled into the kitchen, and poked disconsolately at the loaf of bread on the counter.  At least there was bread, it seemed, but he hadn’t eaten a proper meal for twenty-four hours, and he needed to make sure he got some iron and protein if his body was going to heal properly.

“Have you already eaten, Sherlock?” he asked, looking at the dirty plate in the sink.  Really, the man could have got something for John, too.

“I did ask if you wanted some,” called Sherlock in response.  “You didn’t answer.”

“I was asleep!” John yelled back, furious.  “I’ve been shot, Sherlock!  I know it was only a graze, but I’m taking oxycodone!  I’m going to be asleep a lot for the next few days!”

“Mmm, well, there could be leftovers in the fridge,” said Sherlock, sounding dubious.  “Can’t really remember.  Not the bottom shelf, though—those are the spleens.”

Glancing warily at the bottom shelf, John found several containers lined up along the top shelf, and smiled in relief at the sight of a couple that were definitely rice, and—ooh, was that beef korma written on the lid?  John’s favourite.  Sherlock had obviously accidentally over-ordered again.  He tended to do that at the completion of a case, when the ravenous hunger he’d been ignoring for days caught up with him all at once and exceeded the limits of what any human being could consume in one sitting.

Carefully, John popped open the lid of his chosen container and performed a cautious double-check of the contents.  Sherlock did sometimes reuse takeaway containers in his experiments, and John had had more than one nasty surprise when he discovered minced liver labelled Dhal or an assorted collection of big toes in vinegar instead of the Pho he’d been saving.

No, it looked safe, and quite distinct from the red-grey jellied bulges lined up in the containers along the bottom shelf.  He was about to close the fridge, in fact, and escape with his prize, when he realised that there was a full, unopened carton of milk gleaming at him from the door.  It made him feel momentarily queasy in a suspicious kind of way.

He was sure they’d been nearly out, before, but…  Ah.  Mrs Hudson again, of course.

Well, Sherlock wasn’t going to do whatever it was he did to make milk disappear to this carton.  Not before John had made himself at least one cup of tea to go with his dinner, using unequivocally uncontaminated milk.


5: Just this once, dear.  I’m not your housekeeper.

Painfully, laboriously, John made his way down the stairs to Mrs Hudson’s flat.

It was a week and a half since the gunshot that had kept him essentially confined to the upper floors, and she’d been making it up the stairs at least a couple of times a day to leave him cups of exquisitely timed tea, placed on his bedside table for when he awoke or beside his armchair moments before he entered the room.  He'd managed not to run into her, which was surprising, but a bit of a relief if he was honest.  John had always hated being made a big deal over when he was unwell, and Mrs Hudson could very quickly drive him up the wall.  He appreciated her all the more for what must have been a superhuman effort not to smother him.

And then, this morning—the day after he knew he had to get his laundry done, but had been unable to find a way to make it work down the stairs to the machine and back up again with a cane and a laundry hamper—he’d gone to delve into his hamper to search out the least offensive garments and begin the process of re-wearing backwards, inside-out, and backwards and inside out, only to discover his hamper empty and his drawer full of clean, fresh-smelling clothing.

The woman was wonderful.  Despite her continued insistence on not being a housekeeper, she did make exceptions.  A lot of exceptions, particularly in times of need.  Exceptions that deserved a personal thank you from someone, at least, given Sherlock took her mothering atrociously for granted.

The timing of said thank you on John’s part, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with the smells of baking that had been emanating from 221A all morning.

Well, perhaps a little.  Well.  It was a long way down the stairs.  Clearly John was going to need some pastry fortification before attempting the even further journey back up again.

“Oh, John!” said Mrs Hudson, opening the door at his tap and obviously thrilled to see him.  “I’m so glad you’ve managed to make it down for a visit!  I did hope the scones would do the trick. And Sherlock, too!”

John glanced back to see the detective behind him, apparently having followed him down on cat feet.  He’d undoubtedly smelled Mrs Hudson’s scones long before John did.  Possibly he’d deduced them before she’d even retrieved the ingredients from the cupboard.

“Have you been baking, Mrs Hudson?” John demurred politely, as they were both hustled in to her table, sat down, and supplied with cups of tea and plates.

“You know perfectly well they’re about to come out of the oven,” she scolded.  “And now I’ve managed to get you both downstairs, you can take some back up with you.  I’ve been so worried about you, John, but I just couldn’t make it all the way up those stairs, not with my hip the way it’s been lately.  Sherlock has been looking after you, though, hasn’t he?”

John blinked at her in momentary puzzlement, and then smirked as a number of puzzle pieces abruptly slid into place to form a picture.  He gave Sherlock a sideways look.

Sherlock determinedly didn’t look back, his face a study in blankness.

Eliminate the possibilities…

“Oh yes, Mrs Hudson,” John told her, all innocence.  “He’s been so attentive that—if I didn’t know better—I’d say he’s been practically fussing.”

“Sherlock,” she said, warm and motherly and proud as she put down the teapot and wrapped her arms around him where he sat.  “He is such a good boy, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is,” agreed John.

Half-hidden by Mrs Hudson’s embrace, hair mussed and his cheek squashed out of shape against her, Sherlock gave John a filthy look that wasn’t entirely convincing.

John just grinned back at him.  He’d been right the first time, obviously.

This was absolutely worth the wound, and the recovery.  Every moment of it.



A/N: Inspiration taken from CaffieneKitty's take on Mrs Hudson's insistent tea and angry biscuits. :)