Chapter Text
John couldn't breathe. He also felt like he was about to piss himself, but he fought to keep that from happening while trying to restart his respritatory system.
"Keep talking to me, John," Sherlock's voice buzzed through the cell phone in the doctor's hand. "What do you see?"
"Nothing," John gasped as another low, terrifying rumble filled the dark lab room. "I don't see anything, but it's in here, I know it's in here-" His voice choked off in a terrified whimper as a large, warped shadow passed over the sheet covering the bent metal cage he was cowering in.
"Talk to me, John. Do you see it?"
"It's here," John whispered, mercilessly squashing the desire to scream, or possibly vomit as another growl sounded, much closer, and the shadow stilled outside the sheet. John took a deep breath and shut his eyes. This was it. He was going to die, mauled by a genetically engineered hound from hell. He would say there were worse ways to go, but there really wasn't. Burning to death might be a bit worse. But not by much.
"John?"
He wanted to say something to his half-mad genius of an arsehole roommate, but what do you say to man that irritated the hell out of you with his bizarre experiments and unpredictable behavior when you're about to die? Thanks for being such a dick all the time? Sorry I took your eyeballs out of the fridge to make room for the milk?
"John! What do you see?"
"The hound, Sherlock," John barely dared to breathe, hearing heavy footfalls coming towards him. God, this was it. This was the end. "Sherlock, I-I don't-" And then the sheet was flung aside, letting in bright light and the unbelievably beautiful and welcome sight of a tall, pale man in a dark coat with dark curls and the most unusual green eyes John had ever seen. John wanted nothing more than to kiss him at that moment, so welcome was he over the sight of the monsterous hound.
"John!" Sherlock said, holding out his hand to the doctor huddled in the corner of the cage, staring at the detective as if he were some kind of deity come down to Earth. Sherlock didn't put too much stock in the expresion, he was more interested in the details of John's body language and the little hints around his eyes and mouth and hands that told him he believed he really had been chased and cornered by the fabled hound. Experiment confirmed. They were being drugged.
Sherlock was completely unprepared for John to bypass his outstretched hand and throw his strong arms around his neck. Shock and something hot flooded his belly as John clutched him close to his body, gasping a few terrified, dry sobs into his ear.
"God, Sherlock," he huffed, and the detective felt something strange tingle down the length of his spine. Baffled, he patted John's back until he pulled away, and then left the facility with him following.
~*~
John was still very cross with him when they returned to London after the Baskerville case.
"Don't be angry, John, it was a controlled experiement in a closed lab. Nothing bad could have happened to you," Sherlock sighed, seeing long lines of screamingly angry in John's crossed arms and slouched posture.
"You drugged me, Sherlock. You drugged me! How could you drug me?" John snarled, refusing to look at him. The detective sighed and ran a hand back through his messy hair.
"I needed to know."
John sat in stony silence for a moment before snapping, "That's your problem, you know. You always have to know. You don't ever make an assumption, never take a chance on a gut feeling. It's all deduction and reasoning and logic and science. And while you're brilliant about all that, you're a bloody moron when it comes to how the rest of the world works. You trample all over Molly whenever you see her, you trash our flat every other day, purposefully irritate and embarrass Anderson and Donovan-which I really don't mind anyway-and you bloody drug your flatmate for an experiment that could have been solved with a few simple drug tests!" John wrapped up his little rant with an irritated huff at the blank, almost condensending look on Sherlock's face, a look that said, "I already knew all that. Why do you feel the need to repeat the obvious?" John turned and stared back out the window, grumbling to himself.
Sherlock leaned back into the seat, pondering his flatmate's outburst. He supposed it had been a bit extreme to use John as a guneia pig; he could have used Lestrade in a pinch. But there were repercussions to drugging a DI of Scotland Yard. Dull. And John's suggestion of drug testing...well, the drugging of the doctor had been much more informative. Sherlock sighed and popped the collar of his coat up around his ears as he leaned back into his seat. This could be a very long ride home.
~*~
Two weeks after the Baskerville Hound case, John came home from work at the hospital to find the flat covered in a strange mixture of loose papers, scattered chicken feathers, speckles of blood, and a few free roaming, half-naked chickens. The clucking birds fluttered away in panic at John's entrance, who restrained the urge to drop the grocieries he'd fetched on the way home in order to strangle the man sitting on the sofa in a bathrobe with his fingers steapled under his chin.
"I think...I might kill you," John said, watching one of the birds settle into his favorite chair, still clucking away.
"Nonsense. You like me far too much to kill me," Sherlock said without opening his eyes. "I'm afraid there's not too much room in the fridge. I'm conducting an experiment with the bird droppings."
"And the feathers?" John sighed, wondering what had possessed Sherlock to half-pluck the live animals.
"They were taking too long. I frightened them into providing me with the excriment I needed," Sherlock replied, making John's mouth fall open. Why was it that the doctor had little trouble picturing an impatient Sherlock Holmes chasing chickens and scaring them into shitting themselves?
"Is this for a case? Or just because you're bored?" John asked, going into the kitchen to put away what he'd bought. There was, in fact, little room in the refridgerator, since many of the clear shelves were stacked with petri dishes of chicken droppings. "That's disgusting. You do know that we eat what comes out of this fridge, right?"
"I don't eat when I'm on a case," Sherlock answered, opening his eyes and turning his head to look at John. "It clouds my thinking." John frowned and then sighed in resignation as he put the last of the grocieries away.
"What's this one?" he asked, wandering back out into the living room. He shooed the bird in his seat onto the floor, then grimanced at the present it had left behind for him. He chose to sit on the couch instead, next to the detective who was looking at him curiously. Sherlock filled him in on the details of the case of a girl found murdered in a barn, and how she'd been killed. After texting Lestrade the answer, Sherlock decended into silence, watching the telly without seeing it. John glanced from the B-rated movie playing to Sherlock, watching the detective's brain whirl and spin and accelerate and move from one puzzle to the next, doing his best to keep the boredom at bay.
"I suppose that I do, in fact, owe you an apology of sorts," the dark-haired man said finally. If John had been drinking tea, he'd have spat it out. Instead, he settled for sitting up suddenly, startling the chicken that had settled on the back of the couch.
"What?" the doctor demanded. Sherlock I'm-too-smart-for-the-rest-of-the-world Holmes never apologized.
Never.
"For drugging you. In hindsight, it does seem a bit....extreme. There were other ways I could have conducted the experiement," Sherlock scowled at him. He didn't like what John's body was telling him. Disbelief, confusion, suspicion, smugness, aggression, defensive. Though, it wasn't as if he hadn't expected it. But then...consideration. Faith. Forgiveness. Affection.
Trust.
"You're forgiven," John said, turning back to the telly and missing the expression of shock on Sherlock's face. The pale detective felt as if he'd just been socked in the gut. No one, and he meant no one, not even Mycroft had taken one of his rare, almost non-existent apologies at face value. No one took his offering of half-hearted peace right next to the promise of future, probably-not-right-by-society's-standards escapades and smiled while looking at some terrible straight-to-television-movie. No one. But John had. Something warm and fluttery-feeling bloomed in the pit of Sherlock's stomach, different from the rushing heat he'd experienced when John had hugged him and cried out for him in the lab, but somehow, exactly the same. Suddenly very uncomfortable, Sherlock jumped to his feet and bolted for his room, leaving a confused John Watson behind him.
The doctor blinked after his flatmate's abrupt departure, but shrugged and took it in stride, putting it down as one more of the strange behavioral patterns of Sherlock Holmes.