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He’s never used a term of endearment on anyone, other than “dear” itself, which he uses on Mycroft when he’s done something rash (roll right onto a military base) or is being ingratiating (my windows just imploded) or (more likely) sarcastic. And no-one has ever used a term of endearment on him (discounting that waitress at the coffee shop who called him “darling” and told him not to be stingy with his sugar while John rolled his eyes), that he can remember, not even his own mother.
***
Well, that’s not quite true, is it. Mrs. Hudson calls him “dear”; she calls him “love”; once she even called him son (he thinks), when he’d stumbled upstairs, coughing, grimed (lime, iron oxide and river silt), hair scrambled into rusty peaks.
He knocked over a lamp and a pile of books on retro realist criminology, and Mrs. Hudson came to see he was alright, that the oxides weren’t really blood, that the cough wasn’t really pneumonia; never mind the carpets for tonight, son. “Go to sleep,” she might have said.
***
He needs a case. He needs a fix. He can’t upend the flat thoroughly enough.
“Sherlock,” John says.
“John,” he says back.
Proper names are not endearments. Proper names are not balms.
He’s never used a term of endearment on anyone--or just barely.