AUTHOR'S NOTE

I was inspired by playing the actual game, Flappy Bird. I kept hitting the pipes, and my obsessed brain thought 'God, what if Sherlock played this game?' Light bulb moment, you might say, so I wrote this.

Since my first story (a multi-chapter called Honeymoons and Hostages) is not going into much progress as of late, I give you a tardy Valentine's story to aid my writer's block. Enjoy.

DISCLAIMER: The only way I am associated to the game Flappy Bird, the show Sherlock, BBC or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is through my hyperactive imagination.

-Happy

Flapping Boredom

By MadameHappy

Sherlock was bored. Surprise surprise.

There weren't any recent experiments in progress, no interesting cases to solve, and the wall remained unscathed since John brought the gun to work with him. He couldn't play Cluedo on his own (Cluedo was boring anyway), and Molly didn't have any spare body parts at the morgue for him to cut up and experiment on. Violin was boring, books were boring, everything was boring.

To make matters worse, John scanned and took away all the cigarettes, nicotine patches and other stimulators that Sherlock could have kept himself doped up on.

All in all the boredom was threatening to kill him if he didn't do something.

With Sherlock sitting agitatedly on his armchair, there was nothing left to do but to scroll over at his phone, hoping that at any second now Lestrade would give him a text about some sort of locked-room triple homicide mystery. When nothing came, he scrolled through his applications.

His eye caught an app that had a pixelated yellow bird as its logo and his eyes narrowed. He didn't remember downloading this.

Ah. He remembered now. Mrs. Hudson had mentioned this game when she borrowed his phone. She must have installed it.

He looked at the title.

Flappy Bird.

What a ridiculous name. What made this game so popular? He had good reason to be ashamed with the human race for thinking up such brain-melting rubbish that would very soon cause the doom of society. Soon however his irritation for said race slowly faded to slight curiosity for why the app was so famous.

He didn't know whether it was the suffocating boredom or the irresistible curiosity that made him start playing, but he opened the app, and pressed play.

It was idiotic, and frustrating. His first few tries ended up with the bird's beak on the ground when he didn't realize you had to continuously tap at the bird to keep it moving, and when he figured that out the next attempts had the bird smashing against green pipes when he didn't know how to get it through the gaps.

After thirty attempts he finally managed to get the bird completely through the pipe gap, and got one point. He felt oddly pleased with himself, for some reason...

...Until he saw Mrs. Hudson's high score.

Honestly, old ladies must have so much time on their hands. How did Mrs. Hudson get 143 points?

He frowned, the prospect of a challenge making his eyes flare. He pressed play again. He needed to beat this score.

It was odd, John thought as he made his way home, that Sherlock didn't text him today.

You'd think that after leaving a sulking consulting detective at home with nothing to do, you would get enough text messages on your phone to fill up five phone inboxes. But there was nothing. Not even one painfully stretched out boooorrreeed. The phone remained silent.

Slightly confused, he walked up the stairs and opened the door to the flat. He found Sherlock curled up like a cat on his armchair, tapping carefully on his iPhone.

John hung up his coat. "Got a case then-"

"Shut up."

John rolled his eyes as headed to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, letting it boil as he prepared two mugs of tea. He glanced over at Sherlock while he tapped away, and smiled, stifling a chuckle. His expression was extremely amusing.

His brows were furrowed, lips pursed to a thin line as he stared at the screen unblinkingly, keeping up his rhythmic tapping. John wondered what he could possibly be doing. He obviously wasn't typing anything; his thumb was the only finger tapping and it kept to one spot.

The kettle whistled. John poured the hot liquid to each of the mugs and dropped the tea bags. Then he added the sugar and milk. He grabbed the mugs and went over to the small table that separated their armchairs and set them down there. Finally he went behind Sherlock's armchair and looked at the iPhone's screen.

He burst out laughing.

"John!"

Sherlock glared as the bird hit the pipe and fell down to the ground, beak-first. He glared at the screen that displayed a large 89 as his score, and glared again at Mrs. Hudson's high score. Finally he directed his eye-daggers to John, who was still laughing. "I was doing something."

"That bored, were you?" John said, his amusement obvious as he held out Sherlock's mug of tea, which he took and sipped reluctantly.

"Better than nothing," he said, grabbing the phone and going back to his tapping.

However hilarious it was seeing Sherlock so tied up to a game, John was secretly glad he wasn't shooting down walls or playing his violin at ungodly hours. "Well, I'll leave you to it then," he said, leaving for his bedroom. "Night."

Sherlock hummed and kept tapping.

The next day, in the middle of work, John received a text.

312 points. Beat Mrs. Hudson. Bored. I set the curtains on fire. SH