A/N: For HilsonMarvey27. Please enjoy!

The East End flat was trashed. It was clear from the décor that it had once been a very nice home – small, but warm and welcoming. The furniture, drapes, and wallpaper all beamed out at the inhabitants in sunny yellows and grassy greens, interrupted periodically by a fat vase of bright satin flowers, most of which were now tipped and broken. The glass coffee table was overturned; the television set blared a snowy screen in response to the DVD player having been unplugged. A framed photograph lay broken on the sage-hued carpet: a blushing couple on their wedding day. Surrounded by all this destruction lay the body of a woman, a brunette beauty in her early thirties.

"Has anyone touched her?" Sherlock demanded, standing at the threshold of the sitting room with both arms out to hold back anyone who might wish to enter. He spoke over his shoulder to Lestrade, and his tones were clipped, each word succinct. "Has she been moved?"

"No," Greg answered. "We've been waiting for you. Forensics has been in to take photographs, but that's it."

"And?"

"Neighbour called it in. Said he heard a scream and some commotion coming from the Ericksons' flat. Inspector Taylor found the body of... Catherine Erickson... just as it is. Cause of death looks like a heart attack, we'll know more after an autopsy – but the room is in a shambles. Obviously there was a struggle. There's a white powder on her lips, so we think she might have been poisoned."

"Orally?" John chimed in, peering into the room from behind one of Sherlock's outstretched arms. "Could someone be forced to swallow poison?"

Lestrade shrugged. "We've seen that happen before, haven't we? S'why I called you two."

Sherlock sniffed and floated away into the sitting room, bending low to examine the body, his sterile gloved hands flitting over her upturned face, her throat, her wrists. He unbuttoned her blouse and examined her torso, snapping out the magnifying glass to inspect her collarbones. John started to follow, but Sherlock held up a hand. "Wait," he said swiftly. After another moment's consideration, he stood and walked away from the body, toward the threshold. He turned a full circle and swept his hyper-alert gaze over the room.

"Well?" asked the DI.

"She wasn't murdered," Sherlock said, sounding unsurprised by his own conclusion.

Lestrade blinked. "What? How's that?"

"Look at the carpet!" Sherlock ordered, his voice thin with impatience. He knelt and swept a hand over the short fibres. His glove appeared to turn the carpet a slightly darker shade of green, until he moved his hand back over it and it returned to its original colour. "As the fibres are pushed against the grain of the weave underfoot, they appear darker because of the sheen of the thread. So, every time someone steps into this room, they leave a footprint." He straightened and gestured toward the room as a whole. "Leaving out the prints left by your men and by me, do you see the signs of a struggle in the carpet?"

John and Lestrade both looked. They could make out Sherlock's narrow footprints, as well as two other pair criss-crossing this way and that, but they all looked normal, unhurried. Sherlock swept back into the room and pointed at one of his own prints. "That's the print of a normal gait. They all are. John." He waved his flatmate into the room.

With a glance at Lestrade, John entered the room. Sherlock took him by the arm and placed him in front of one of the upturned vases. "Suppose I pushed you into that table there. You'd resist." The detective placed his hands flat against John's shoulders and pushed gently, a small-scale mimicry of what would have been done to the woman lying dead. John responded in kind by bringing up his hands in a defensive pose, trying to push Sherlock away while retaining his balance. Sherlock pushed harder, for effect, and John stumbled back. Sherlock caught his flatmate before he fell, and then pulled him away from the scene of their struggle. The two of them gazed down at the carpet.

The prints they had left behind were far different from the others. Sherlock's were pressed harder into the carpet, and John's dragged backwards, leaving wide swaths of dark fabric before the pitter-patter of his off-balance stumble.

"Got it," Lestrade said, nodding in agreement. "Then what killed her?"

"Well, the poison, obviously." Sherlock knelt beside the body again. He swept a finger over the woman's lips and lifted it to his face, sniffing it once before dabbing it lightly against the tip of his tongue. He stood, turned a circle, and then re-examined the body. Soon, his face darkened and he scowled. "Suicide," he spat without warning, rising and snapping his gloves off.

"Suicide?" Lestrade repeated, dumbfounded.

Sherlock's glare could have lit the fireplace. "Yes. She's trying to frame her husband, wanted it to look like he'd killed her, and he wasn't even here. There are no defensive wounds, no substantial bruising or obvious injuries, and yet the destruction of the room seems to indicate there was some sort of massive struggle here. Furthermore – poison? Administered orally? Why go to the trouble of procuring and then forcing her to swallow poison when he could have just as easily shot her in the face or slit her throat? If he was going to poison her, he would have put it in her morning coffee, her food, her make-up, wouldn't have forced it down her throat, it'd be too difficult, and the point of poison is subtlety in the first place. On the other hand, she couldn't slit her own throat or shoot herself – women are far too vain and primarily commit suicide by poison or overdose. Only she wasn't expecting her poison of choice to leave behind a residue on her lips. It's obvious: Mrs. Erickson killed herself, but trashed the room to make it look as if someone else had – probably her husband."

"But why would she do that?"

"Who cares?" Sherlock cried. He stormed from the room, brushing past Lestrade to throw his used gloves down into a waiting bin bag. "She's dead, it was suicide, work it out. Can't be that hard. Unhappy marriage, boring housewife's life, cheating spouse. Pick one!" He snatched his coat from a kitchen chair and shrugged into it, fingers flying over the buttons. "Call me when a real case comes up."

John and Greg were left gaping at each other across the sitting room.

"What's his problem?" the DI asked, frowning.

Sighing, John shook his head and turned up his palms. "You know what he's like when there aren't any cases. He's been like this for weeks now."

Lestrade's frown became a scowl, and he stared at the floor.

John cleared his throat. "Don't suppose you've got any cold cases he can work on?"

"No, not a thing. He solved them all during the last dry spell."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

Thank you for all your suggestions. John typed, rapid-fire, into the text field of his blog. But I really think what Sherlock needs right now is for someone to be murdered, kidnapped, or otherwise maimed. Unfortunately.

Amidst a chorus of disapproving whines from Sherlock, John had blogged the dry spell. "I don't want anyone thinking we've abandoned the blog," John had countered. "All I'm going to do is give a short update letting them know we're still around, but having a bit of a lag in work. Sherlock, this blog pays our rent. Especially when there are no cases." And it was a fair point. He hadn't been anticipating the enormous response, however.

Within hours, six users had commented on the most recent post, all of them suggesting different things for the boys to do with their time. Take a holiday! said one. Enroll in a course at the university, advised another. Write a book, suggested a third. And on it went, until John's e-mail was overflowing with the thoughts of the well-intentioned, hundreds of messages from eager fans who joked good-naturedly about Sherlock's plight or made wise, thought-provoking suggestions as to what they should do with their time off. One person said that John and Lestrade plot a crime of their own. Someone else built on that comment and declared that it ought to be Lestrade who disappeared, and John could steer Sherlock off the right trail for a couple of weeks. John was ashamed to admit that he was sorely tempted. This dry spell was maddening for everyone involved, and John was growing weary of the increasing insanity of the resulting 'experiments'.

"I think I'll take a walk," Sherlock announced out of the blue one evening. He already had his coat on.

John peeled his drowsy gaze away from the telly and looked over at Sherlock, unsure that he'd heard him correctly. A walk? No eyeballs in the oven? No new poisons to test on the neighbour's dog? "It's late," he said, but there was a little voice in his head that told him not to get in the way if Sherlock was actually going to invest his time in something at last. Even if it was as aimless as a walk. At least he wasn't moping around the flat or setting John's hair on fire.

"Bored," Sherlock offered in response. He wriggled his hands into his gloves, pale eyes glowing in the eerie light of the television.

"Maybe you'll run into a mugger." It was a joke, of course – ha ha, then you won't be bored, will ya? –but John tensed just as soon as the words escaped his mouth. He straightened a little. "Want some company?"

Sherlock waved him off. "No, I'm fine. Won't be out long. Don't stay up."

They said their goodbyes, and John sat up a little, fishing his mobile out of his pocket. He had every intention of staying up.

Fortunately, Sherlock returned just forty-five minutes later. His cheeks and nose were pink from the cold, but he looked the better for it, and his mood seemed improved.

"Good walk?" John asked, rising and stretching as he prepared to head up to bed.

Sherlock nodded. "It's nice to get out once in a while."

John thought this was a very odd thing for him to say, but didn't mention it. Sherlock's nosedives into boredom often made him do odd and eccentric things, and John was quite used to it. He shrugged it off. "Good," was his reply, and he excused himself to bed.

The next day dawned with still no worthwhile cases. E-mails trickled in throughout the day with requests for help with the mundane – missing pets, adulterous spouses, burglaries and break-ins. "Not even a four," Sherlock proclaimed, reading over John's shoulder. He huffed. "I'm going for a walk."

"Alone?"

"If you don't mind."

And so it began: Sherlock's walks. They were his response to boredom, it seemed, and John was glad at first. It seemed that the activity – or maybe the cold – brightened Sherlock's mood just a shade. At the very least, it distracted him for a little while. Days passed and it became a regular habit of Sherlock's to have a walk alone in the afternoon. He went at least three times a week at first, then four, and then every other day.

Gradually, though, whatever positive effect these outings had began to dwindle. Sherlock began returning home from these walks dark-eyed and tense, and often shut himself in his bedroom for hours afterward. The first time this happened, John thought the behaviour so odd that he wondered if his flatmate was ill or had run into trouble. He banged on the door of his bedroom and was greeted by a very not-ill but clearly irritated Sherlock, and so he backed off.

"It must be the lack of cases," John told Mycroft one evening. "Why are you worried about it? Don't you know where he goes?"

"Contrary to popular belief, I don't have time to follow my brother everywhere," Mycroft said thinly. "That's your job."

John's expression fell, but he chose not to respond to the comment. Instead he took a breath to steady himself, and said, "It's probably just not working for him anymore. Walking – wherever he goes – was a good distraction at first, but... well, you know him, he gets bored."

"Mm," Mycroft hummed, eying John carefully. "It doesn't worry you?"

"I'm always worried." John laughed mirthlessly. "But he comes back every time."

And it was true. Until one night, when it wasn't. Until one night, when Sherlock did not return home.