Author's Note: Yeah, I know that I'm writing a few too many stories at the moment, but I got this idea and it wouldn't leave me alone. Sherlock wouldn't leave me alone. It's true, he can actually be rather annoying. Wrong. Sherlock, this is my author's note! You can't just go around hacking everything I write! Wrong again. Obviously I can hack everything you write, since I am doing so presently. I do not need your sass right now! Please, may I just begin the story? Not quite yet, you still need to write a disclaimer. You are not my mother! I am well aware of that. First of all, I am not, nor have I ever been female. Second, I am British while you are American. Third... SHERLOCK! Just shut up for a minute would you? Fine. Thank you.

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock or any of the characters. Obviously. SHERLOCK! Sorry. No, you're not. Amazing. You were actually correct for once. *Glares at Sherlock* As I was saying before an annoying Consulting Detective interrupted me, all rights go to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whoever, if anyone, currently holds the copyright to Sherlock Homes, and the BBC.

There's one last thing I must say before we begin, parts of this story will be bold and in first person from my point of view with italicized writing being Sherlock, like in the A/N. Most of it will be the story and in third person. Now, ON WITH THE SHOW! It is a story, not a show. *facepalm* Sherlock...

Real last thing, I'm collaborating on this story with a good friend of mine, Samdroid, without whom, this would not be possible. He is writing as Sherlock, and I am writing as John.

It was a rainy day in London. Such weather was unsurprising, at least to Sherlock Holmes. He was running down the street, his curly hair plastered to his head, collar up. He had thrown on at the last minute a grey oversized trench coat, but to no avail. He was soaked. One of the advantages, however, of a trench coat, is the utter unrecognizability of its wearer. No one payed attention to the Consulting Detective as he ran towards the scene of the city's latest mishap. A woman was dead. She lay close enough to his aging Baker Street apartment to render a cab useless. However, Holmes was never one to walk anywhere he could just as easily run.

He stopped suddenly as though he had forgotten something, then looked up to the dark clouds which had given London its own trench coat. He was deducing from them one of the city's many forgotten memories, or at least he appeared to be. In reality he was quite confused and didn't know why.

I stopped writing. I had not intended for Sherlock to stop walking. I was very confused. It was as though Sherlock was controlling himself... Like he was alive... But, that's impossible... I returned my hands to the keyboard and continued typing.

At last, Sherlock reached his destination. He gave Lestrade a quick nod as he walked past. The presence of Donovan and Anderson never even entered his consciousness. They were in a small, dingy alley, and the deceased was lying on the ground, her head and limbs twisted into grotesque, mangled shapes. Next to her lay half a pink umbrella. Crouching low on the ground near the corpse, Sherlock could observe much that the idiotic police would not. He shouted Lestrade's name into the empty space in front of him. He rarely felt the need to look at whom he was talking to.

"What is it?" inquired the older man.

"Lift her left hand," Sherlock instructed.

"Alright 'Olmes, I'll play your game, but I'm tellin' you- this time, we figured it out without your help." Sherlock looked carefully at her ring finger. It was broken. Sherlock nodded to himself.

"Well?" Lestrade prompted.

"No, you figured it out first, didn't you. Lets hear what the great inspector has come up with this time," Sherlock sneered.

"Well, alright then. Her name's Elysa Rider. She attended a party last night at the Rose Noir, a club off Hempstead Road. We found the ticket in her pocket. Last night at that same club, there was a robbery and some of the women there were kidnapped. Without going into details, we found their bodies nearby. I talked to her husband and he said that he hadn't seen her since she left for the party. He was devastated. As was then obvious, she had been taken with the others and murdered by the same gang. I have a team out now apprehending the murderers."

"Well, if you ignore all of the obvious clues, then sure, that makes sense. Now here's where you're wrong. One, her umbrella. Who, when being kidnapped, stops to grab their umbrella. The answer is no one: she left willingly. Two, her finger. Not only is it broken, but it has a light band near where it meets the palm. She was married for some time then, and her ring was forcibly removed. Now you said her husband was devastated. Most people are very bad at faking sadness, especially devastation. Even you would have noticed that. But his story was false. Most married people don't go to nightclubs without their spouse, so he must have been busy. I would say that he was busy quite a lot, long enough for Elysa to bore of his tedious nights spent pounding leather into soles."

"Excuse me?" interjected Lestrade.

"Her boredom over-" Continued Holmes, unmoved.

"How did you know he was a cobbler?" Lestrade asked, interrupting the other man.

"I'll get to that later. As I was saying, her boredom overcame her, and she found a new lover, though she didn't care to divorce. Over time, Mr. Rider became suspicious. Last night he followed her to the club and when he saw her leave with another man he became furious. The lover fled at the sight of danger, after all he was only interested in Elysa for her looks, and her husband attacked her. In a fit of jealous rage, he ripped her wedding ring from her finger. He then proceeded to beat her to death with her umbrella. He didn't realize until after he had began to leave that he still had half of it clenched in his fist. You'll find that half in one of the nearby dumpsters," Sherlock informed the Detective Inspector.

"Brilliant, but... you left out the cobbler bit."

Sherlock sighed impatiently before continuing. "Her shoes are very old, yet, other than the wear of last night, they've not a blemish or a tear. Shoes like that are expensive to maintain, yet at the same time her dress is made of very cheap materials. The only way she could afford to wear shoes like that is if her husband repaired them himself. Therefore, he's a cobbler."

"You know Holmes, some of us back at the Yard think that you hire people to go around placing all these clues every time some crime is committed so that you can poke fun at us later. I want you to know that I disagree, for now."

Sherlock did not so much as nod in acknowledgement of Lestrade's accusation and instead left, returning to Baker Street.

He entered 221B and sat in his favorite chair. He held his fingers together underneath his chin and allowed his gaze to flicker to the empty chair across from his. John should be home soon. John Watson was Sherlock's flatmate and best friend. He had left to visit his alcoholic sister, Harry, in the hospital. She had been drinking and crashed her car into a tree. He was due home in twenty minutes.

Sherlock did not enjoy waiting, it was just so boring. He was thinking about shooting some more holes into the smiley face on the wall when he received a text.

Almost home. Harry's fine, just a bit bruised. -JW

Sherlock smiled and a warm feeling permeated him. He became confused. He had been feeling that strange warmth around his best friend more and more lately. He did not understand it at all. He began to analyze this odd emotion, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Very familiar footsteps. John.

Sherlock stayed seated. He noticed his heart rate increased as the door opened.

"Hello, Sherlock," John greeted his flat mate with a tired smile. Sherlock felt himself smile in reply. "Fancy some tea?"

"Yes, please." John looked at Sherlock bemusedly. Sherlock never said please... The expression was not unnoticed by Sherlock, who rolled his eyes.

A few moments later, although it felt much longer to Sherlock, the kettle whistled. He deduced that it would take John two minutes, give or take ten seconds, to return with the tea. Right on schedule, he heard John returning. Sherlock was startled to hear a loud crash coming from the direction of the kitchen followed by a very annoyed exclamation of "Bloody hell!"

Sherlock stood and turned to see what had happened. John was kneeling on the floor by a broken teapot. Sherlock opened his mouth to voice his displeasure in a loud manner, but all that came out was laughter. John looked up at him with a blush painting his cheeks. If anyone else had been laughing at his mistake, John would have been more than a little annoyed and would have said as much, but this was Sherlock. The man who normally behaved more like a machine than a human being with his perpetually serious nature. To say that John was surprised by his best mate's sudden burst of laughter would be an understatement. John was positively speechless. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, which made the other man laugh even more. After a few moments, John joined in.

Sherlock abruptly stopped laughing, yet his smile remained. "What are you laughing at, Watson?" He looked at the still laughing John suspiciously. "Did you put something in my coffee this morning?"

John's laughter died down as well. "What?"

"You heard me," Sherlock merely stated.

"Of course not!" John chuckled again. "Blimey, for a second there, Holmes, I thought you put something in my coffee."

"Ah, Watson, but I did not put anything in your coffee, so either we are both being played for fools, or this bloody boredom has gotten to my nerves." Sherlock looked thoughtful for a moment. "Watson, I need you to do a favor for me."

"What do you want, Sherlock?"

"I need you to perform a test for the presence of hallucinogenics, sedatives, and just general narcotics. And, by the way, you can disregard any positive result for heroin."

"SHERLOCK!"

"Do as I instructed. Please." Sherlock had just said please twice in one day. Solely because of the peculiarity of said occurrence, John did as he was told. The tests came out negative for everything. Including heroin.

Sherlock still was not satisfied. Something was different that day. "Maybe it's hypnosis," he muttered. "Watson, I need you to do one last thing for me."

"What is it now?" John practically sighed.

"I need you to stab me in the leg with that needle," Sherlock said.

"Is that really necessary?" John stammered, just barely hanging onto his composure.

"Well, you could just as easily tie a rope to my leg and throw me out the-" Sherlock was interrupted by a needle being stabbed into his leg. Aside from the pain, he felt no different. "OW... Watson... I am still smiling, WHY AM I SMILING?" he demanded. "I must not be hypnotized. If I have been neither drugged nor hypnotized, and I'm obviously not dreaming, then what is wrong with me?"

Sherlock pondered the question. When John began to bandage his leg, the feeling of John's hands on his leg sent a peculiar tingling sensation through him, confusing the situation even more and distracting him from his thoughts.

"Stop it, I can't think while you're touching me!" Sherlock complained while attempting to remove the offending hands from his leg.

"I'm terribly sorry, Sherlock, but I don't want you to bleed out on our living room floor!" John countered. He continued bandaging despite Sherlock's protests.

"John, uh, John, I really don't think this is necessary," Sherlock maintained. "You did sterilize that needle though, didn't you?" He began to look a bit concerned. John almost wanted to slap him for being so difficult. John had noticed that Sherlock was acting increasingly more obnoxious lately. It confused him almost as much as his own apparently growing inability to keep his eyes off of the man.

"Of course I did, I'm a bloody doctor!" John growled, his reverie lasting less than a minute. "Just because you don't care about your health and physical well being does not in any way mean that I can't." John only barely stopped himself from wincing. Had he really just said that out loud?

Sherlock, as always, noticed John's near-wince. He decided to file it away in his Mind Palace to analyze later. "Fine, fine, thank you; this is just all so bloody unnecessary," he complained, sounding a tad bit like a spoiled child who had bored of his new toy. "I need something to do, a game to fight."

John sighed and began packing up his medical equipment. "Was your most recent case not to your liking than, Sherlock?"

Sherlock scoffed. "It was hardly a case. The only mystery is how Lestrade is still alive."

John was flummoxed. "What the devil are you going on about?" he inquired.

"No, I mean the only real mystery I've come across in months is how Lestrade's genes haven't been eliminated yet," Sherlock quipped.

After having lived with Sherlock for an extended period of time, his attitude towards Lestrade should no longer surprise John in the least, but it still somehow managed to. "I can't express how glad I am that he was not here to hear you say that," John announced. "He's honestly not that bad a bloke, Sherlock."

Holmes rolled his eyes. "I could care less about how he is as a 'bloke,' he's the most annoyingly perpetrating threat to the safety of London."

"Oh, Sherlock," John sighed, knowing it was a lost cause to argue any more. "It's getting late, fancy some supper?"

Sherlock was surprised. "You-you don't have one of those things you do... with women?" he inquired, curiosity, shock, and slight disdain evident in his tone.

"You mean a date?" John smirked.

"Sure, call it what you wish. You don't have one?" Sherlock tried to suppress the hopefulness in his voice. Luckily for him, John was not as observant as he.

"Not tonight, no," John replied.

"Okay then. I'll get my supply of antidotes."

John was taken aback. "Antidotes? Whatever for?"

"Your, well, what you call cooking," Sherlock answered bluntly.

John was hurt. He buried that hurt beneath sarcasm. "Like you could do any better."

"I could, I just don't practice. It's a waste of time." John decided that at a later date he would get Sherlock to prove his so-called expertise. That would be interesting. Besides, Holmes was wrong about John's cooking. The only time Sherlock had ever even tasted his cooking was when the dinner he was preparing had burned because they had been called away urgently to a crime scene.

"In favor of avoiding yet another argument, how about we go out for supper?" John suggested. Sherlock nodded in agreement, his mind secretly wondering if it would be anything like one of John's countless "dates".

John offered a hand to assist Sherlock to his feet, which the latter accepted after a moment's hesitation. The moment their hands touched, both men felt a bolt of electricity, which they both deliberately ignored. John was astounded by just how lightweight Sherlock was. I will have to force him to eat more often, he decided. As Sherlock dusted himself off, he felt a peculiar weight in his pocket which was most decidedly not there a few seconds previously. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube of lipstick. When he saw it, he froze, filled with astonishment and apprehension. There was also a note with it that had his name written on it in what appeared to be a very convincing forgery of his own handwriting. He left the note in his pocket to deal with later, but every now and then when John was not looking, he snuck a peak at it.

"Watson, you didn't let anyone into the flat, did you?" he asked cautiosly.

John's eyebrows knit together. "No, of course not," he responded. "Why?"

"And you weren't bribed on in other ways induced into saying that by a rather dangerous looking woman?" Sherlock questioned in the same cool manner.

John felt offended. "Do you actuallythink that I would accept a bribe to lie to you?" he demanded.

Sherlock shrugged. "She can be very convincing," Sherlock remarked. Hearing how little Sherlock trusted him damn near broke his heart in two, but this time even the great Sherlock Holmes couldn't read it on his face.

"Sherlock Holmes, you are my best mate, I would not lie to you!" John seethed, even though deep down he knew that was a lie. There were some truths, well one really, that he was not ready to acknowledge himself, let alone share.

"Alright, you can stop talking now. If you were lying, I would have figured out by now." John opened his mouth to protest, but Sherlock held up a hand to stop him, "There are some situations, John, were you may think you're protecting me by not saying something. Perhaps someone has a gun to either of our heads. You know what, forget that; just, be careful of anyone who looks like they actually know what there doing."

John turned away from Sherlock under the pretext of putting away his medical equipment. In all actuality, he had turned so that Sherlock would not see his panic at the thought of someone threatening his Consulting Detective. His Consulting Detective? John shook away those thoughts. I'm not gay, he reminded himself.

"Miss Adler must have gotten much more creative," Sherlock noted. At the sound of Irene's name, John immediately tensed and his retreat halted. This, Sherlock did notice. He filed it away in his mind palace for examination when he had time. At that moment, there were more pressing matters at hand. Speaking of which, "Have you seen my hydraulics kit?" Sherlock asked the still frozen form of John Watson.

John finally moved to face his flatmate again with no trace of the single tear lingering on his face. "In the cupboard," John answered, sending a silent thanks to whatever higher power kept his voice steady. "Why?"

"God, must I explain every little detail?" Sherlock exclaimed with more than a hint of annoyance, running a hand through his chocolate curls, which John would have found attractive, had he not just been insulted. Wait, did John just unintentionally mentally call Sherlock attractive? The truth he did not want to face came very close to surfacing in that split second of surprise, but he suppressed it. "I can't very well just open this without welcoming the very real possibility of our own deaths."

John was confused, both by the possible threat of imminent demise coming from what looked strikingly similar to a tube of lipstick and by the cold panic that once again accompanied the thought of Sherlock being in danger. "But... that's just a tube of lipstick," John observed, still befuddled. "How could it be that dangerous?"

Sherlock looked as though he was speaking to an idiot. "Irene Adler, and anything to do with her, is extremely dangerous. That's all you need to know for now," he explained curtly, bored with having to explain so very many things when he really wanted to make sure that they were not going to meet an untimely death.

John held up his hands in a motion that could only mean 'stop right there'. "Hang on a minute. You're Sherlock bloody Holmes, couldn't you just deduce whether or not it's dangerous without exposing us to certain death?" he wondered.

Sherlock sighed. "Well, how else am I supposed to figure out if it's hers? If I knew the color maybe I could figure out-" Sherlock's rant was interrupted by John.

"You do know that there's a little circle thing on the bottom of lipstick tubes that shows or says what the color is, right?" he asked gently, trying not to offend his flatmate too much.

It worked. Sherlock was not offended. He was, however, embarrassed. He tried to suppress a blush, but his cheeks turned very slightly pink. John actually found it rather endearing, which he refused to acknowledge. "Oh... Why would I know that?" Sherlock growled.

"I suppose you wouldn't..." John smirked, his voice containing a small measure of laughter at his friend's expense.

Sherlock's jaw ground together a minutely small amount as he examined the bottom of the tube. The color was far too light. "Well, now that you mention it, this is all wrong. Light pink?" he scoffed. "No, no, no, Irene would use only the deepest of reds."

"Spent much time admiring her lips, have we, Sherlock?" John teased, a corner of his mind praying that Sherlock would deny it sincerely. Once again, John pushed such ridiculous thoughts from his mind. Those thoughts were ridiculous, weren't they? Thankfully, none of his internal dialogue played on his face.

Sherlock, being so very Sherlock, did not understand that it was not truly a question, but open mockery. He did, however, through the jumbled, confusing mess that was his emotions figure out that John thinking he was admiring Irene's lips was quite a bit not good. "Not admiring, no. Just noticing. That's what I do, I'm a detective, I detect. I'm just doing my job!"

Although he refused to acknowledge it and instead focused on changing the subject, John was actually relieve that Sherlock did not spend his time gawking at Irene's mouth. It made him wonder if he spent time gawking at her other commodities... John refused to linger on that thought. He actually remembered that there was something he had wanted to say. "So, if it's not Irene's, how the hell did it get in your trouser pocket?" he demanded, visibly wincing at how possessive and jealous that sounded. I am NOT gay! he told himself yet again. Really, he had needed to remind himself of that far too many times recently for his liking. He blamed his absolutely gorgeous flatmate. Even straight men can find their friends good looking, can't they? he wondered silently. The voice of the man who had been causing his emotional turmoil brought him back to reality.

"That's a question for later, John," Holmes said, secretly pleased at how possessive and jealous John had sounded. "I think I know a wonderful place to eat." He had changed the subject for one reason, he had realized that the handwriting on the note had in fact not been a forgery. It truly was his handwriting. As the pair put on jackets, or trench coats in Sherlock's case, and left their flat, Sherlock was smiling. He was excited to have such a fascinating new mystery on his hands. He could not wait to read the contents of the note, but for the time being, he was going to dinner with his John.