Unfortunately, this A/N is devoted to formalities. Ugh. Those pesky things.
This is the last chapter. Finis. Done. I owe my dear friend Sherlock-in-the-TARDIS a sort of AU chapter, but in this story arc? I am done. I have no plans for a sequel and after the AU, will probably never approach this sort of thing again. That's just how I roll. You may not see another multi chapter from me for a while, as I need to come up with a new idea – I'm going to collab with columbine-and-asphodel, and will certainly post one-shots, but no big stories for the foreseeable future. (If anyone has prompts, though, I will attack them in earnest!)
Also, this draft is giving me HELL. But I'm posting. There's probably some very obvious errors, so if anyone sees something unclear or just completely wrong, please let me know. I have no beta, so this is all under my tired eyes.
UPDATE: And yes. Ugh. I posted the wrong chapter last night *bangs head repeatedly on desk* More proof (if I needed any) that getting about three hours of sleep a night just doesn't work. Period. So sorry about that, girls. This is the real chapter *facepalm*
Written to "Gasoline Rainbows" by Amy Kuney. One big fat metaphor song, which pretty much describes this fic.
Disclaimer: If I owned Sherlock, I'd convert my happiness to energy and power the world.
Warnings: ¿Qué?

If you think your life is boring, you should really meet a lamp.

They don't have anything going on in their little everyday lives. The only thing they can do is switch on and off, on and off. Two different states – just two, mind you. And that's all they ever do. Oh, maybe once in a while someone will replace the bulb, or in a rare case move the lamp a few feet, but for the majority of its life a lamp just sits in the same place and clicks on and off.

Lamps are very gracious about this. You'll never hear a lamp complain. Ever. They know that they're really quite lucky – after all, the threat of the garbage heap is imposed upon every lamp at a young age. They serve their human owners as best they can, then die cheerfully in body under the crushing jaws of the trash compactor. Their souls are left intact and they sort of float away up to some sort of lamp heaven, the existence of which can neither be proved nor denied.

But everything has its exceptions. Every primary school has its bullies, every litter of puppies has its runt.

The lamp in 221B Baker Street was not so happy about its mundane existence. It longed for more; a change in its lifestyle, if you will. It had the restless wanderer syndrome, which is very common in young humans, and wanted to see as much of the world as possible. (In addition, it was not in any way religious and had no promise of a comforting afterlife.) Its owners were not aware of this desire to travel, and as such the lamp was confined to a hideously dull existence on the bedside table. It entertained itself as best it could, and after three years of nothing, resigned itself to the fact that the flat's occupants were, in all probability, the only people it would ever know. So it tried to become fond of them and stay up to date on their day-to-day activities.

It failed rather spectacularly.

However much it tried to prove otherwise, lamps are not exactly observant creatures and this one was no exception. This lamp felt very stupid indeed when, one night, it noticed that John had not come to bed and whispered the question regarding his whereabouts to the room at large. The pillow just sort of looked at it and said in a voice that obviously implied Wow, you're even stupider than I thought, "He's been gone for six months now, dear."

The lamp felt a bit bad about this, but then realized that the electrical socket was, for some impractical reason, asleep at 2 AM, and decided to surprise the thing by sucking out a solid 600 volts very rapidly. The socket retaliated by sending back a power surge and the light bulb actually exploded from the force of it, sending shards of glass flying around the room and waking up Sherlock, who, before actually replacing the light bulb, meticulously calculated the trajectory and speed of each shard of glass. (The socket had definitely won that round of the battle.)

So the lamp continued onwards, all the while trying to improve its faulty observational skills, but with nothing really to mark its day-to-day existence – that is, until the gossip started.

It must have been about 2 months after the skirmish between the lamp and the electrical socket when news came that John was back. The duvet was a little apprehensive, due to the fact that it had very nearly been ripped on several occasions, but the overall mood of the room was overtly happy. The lamp, although mostly neutral on the prospect of John's return, was a bit intrigued, as John always brought more interesting use of the lamp. It stayed on later into the night and turned off at more random times when John was there, as opposed to Sherlock, who only turned on the lamp if the streetlamp outside was off and he really couldn't see the tip of his nose, let alone the pages of his book.

John did not move back into the bedroom right away. He had left the flat due to a fight regarding an affair (a nasty business, the doorframe informed the general vicinity) and now he and Sherlock were a bit unstable around each other. They didn't full-out fight, exactly – more like nipped at each other's throats. (The bed nearly collapsed from laughter at the double entrende and after that, almost all hope of normal, albeit polite, conversation was lost.)

The lamp did not lose sight of its ultimate goal of freedom. It made the mistake of confiding in the bedside table that John might possibly have found a new lamp, and the lamp would get to go outside, but the table responded with a snarl, "Yeah, on the way to the junk heap!" The unpleasant experience left the lamp very irritated and wondering why it didn't just throw itself against the wall right now and end it all.

It would have, too, if the doorframe had not screamed "INCOMING!" and the room quickly stood at attention, just to have the door itself splinter to bits from the force of two men crashing through it. The duvet fainted with an exclamation of "Sweet Jesus!" and a discarded textbook on the floor smugly began collecting bets.

Sherlock nearly knocked over the lamp at one point (John all but picked him up and threw him onto the bed – he overbalanced and nearly fell over, grabbing onto the headboard to stay on the bed; unfortunately one of his flailing limbs had hit the lamp) but luckily John caught the teetering thing just in time and then – oh wondrous joyful day! – actually switched it on. The lamp heard a roll of murmurs spread around the room at this, and then heard the objects turn to another, possibly more interesting and definitely more scandalous topic, but it didn't care. It was being used. Unexpected usage was always a welcome change to its everyday routine and if it illuminated some, well, rather more interesting things, it wasn't going to complain.

Afterwards, the mad humans lay tangled in a mess of limbs and sheets, neither of them all too interested in having another go but not about to go to sleep, either. The room was completely abuzz about various topics (most of them ones that would make even the horniest of teenage girls cringe) and the lamp was glowing so brightly that the socket kept having to back off a bit on the electricity being delivered, lest there be a power surge and the fuse be tripped. The lamp was not worried about tripping the fuse, but it did rather want to set some sort of mood and it was not about to let something so trivial as recommended watt usage get in its way.

Eventually, Sherlock nuzzled his face into John's neck and said a bit too hopefully, "Perhaps I am forgiven, then?"

John laughed. "Perhaps."

"Really?"

"No."

"Oh."

"Let's just call it a truce and leave it at that."

"Ah."

The duvet sighed happily – so loudly that conversation broke off in order for the humans to speculate about the origins of the sound. The bed started berating the poor duvet for calling such attention to itself, but at that point the aforementioned humans had abandoned their earlier intentions and were far too busy snogging to notice anything short of a nuclear explosion.

After fifteen minutes of silence (well, near silence – a few of the boxes residing underneath the bed had gotten bored and begun to tickle the bedsprings, which eventually resulted in an enormous creaking from the mattress), John finally reached over his lover and flicked off the lamp. Their faces glowed ghostly pale in the light from the streetlamp outside.

– Finis –

Thousands of thanks to storm101 (who wrote my first review), alisseadreams, TheSecondclassKid, Innominato, thefreakandthegeek, Puskul, sung-me, raven612, unintentionalgenius, pyrodactyl, goodluck-yukikaze, akisura12, karenwalkerdesigns, Her Lee, pillyfish, Coletta, Secret-H, columbine-and-asphodel, bbvampygrl, atoafriend, Chromatisse, HPdork4ever, hoshizuna, Pinguin1993, FinnieKittie, tigga7, rubberhazard, haveacreamteaonme, Goodfairy, Little Missile, rockerchick511, Angelellbaby, Jodi2011, Nephyria, kyranyu, Regency, SecretSnow, WingsAndWater, Pholo, Sandyangel, VolceVoice, iantojones3, TuuliQ, santokee, HoWi, skrillqueen, Cainchan, Mirith Griffin, outofcornflakes, Catindahat, Snowracer, Moogfifi, Soapiefan, Winnie The Pig, silentcrow, Xenon Z, anguslovinghippos, Indoril-Sai, VengeSP, Mitsy-R-Emrys, StarGazingAtMidnight, Sherlock-in-the-TARDIS, E. G. Drummond, IndigoTardisTurtle, Sopsi, Elizabeth Emme, and any and all anonymous readers. And more than love to farfleetingfair and twilarila98, who bridged worlds just for me.