Title: Coffee and Influenza (Pretty Normal, All Things Considered)

Summary: Dealing with gods and monsters never actually gets any easier, but the attractive roommate makes it more manageable. Even if he is a giant dick. Part two of the series. Direct sequel to "I've Never Been a Fan of Fishing".

Author's Note: Thank you all for the astounding reaction and feedback to the first part! Every single one of you is beautiful. Especially you. And maybe also you. But not you. I highly advise reading the first part before this one.

It's been two months. Two long strange months since the rouge acolyte and hacking up his own lungs and Sherlock being something decidedly fantastic. You'd think John would be getting used to the strange range of assignments he was forced to do after nearly half a year being spent on them.

Hint: He is not.

"And I mean, I can't be the only one who sees this thing. Even Jenny from down the road keeps finding giant hairballs in her flowerpots. Her little bichon brings them inside, bless its little heart-" John just nods, because that's all he can do as the elderly woman knits and recites the exact same eight sentences for the fifth time in twenty minutes. There's some big furry thing that isn't supposed to be there, and Sherlock has given John the task of distracting the elderly woman, (was her name Heather? Susie?), while Sherlock did the dirty work. It should've been a nice reprieve from getting thrown around like a rag doll, having to just sit with this woman for a little bit while someone else did all of the hard parts.

Second Hint: It was not.

I can't leave yet. I'm going to be stuck here forever. Oh God, Sherlock has trapped me here forever. What is she even fucking knitting? Looks like a scarf. Shit, maybe I can hang myself with it. Oh fuck, she's starting over again. No, I don't care about the thing in the garden and yes I know about Jenny and her dog and no it isn't going to eat you, Jesus...

"John, the anomaly has been taken care of." The relief that floods John, if compared to an actual flood, would've been akin to the story of Noah, and he'd have to build a giant fuck-off ark just to navigate the torrential downpour of oh thank fucking God. Anne or Ginger or whatever, smiled at Sherlock's appearance in her kitchen, setting down the needles and beckoning him in.

"Oh, dearie, did the thing give you any trouble?" How the hell did she remember him and not John?

"Not at all. Come along, John, we have other obligations to fulfill." John could've kissed him. Would've kissed him probably, if he were brave and not confused out of his mind about this whole 'ninety percent sure he's in love with his roommate' thing. But John isn't brave, or at least he doesn't think he is, so he just stands up and tries to bid the elderly woman a farewell. This does not work.

By the time Rosie, (he finally figured it out, point for John), let them go, they were burdened with a pie and the sun was beginning to set. Overall, a success, considering John couldn't bake, which meant by association, neither could Sherlock.

"How did she remember you? She forgot me every five minutes and I was sitting right across from her." John asked, peering into the foiled tin as they walked. He didn't know what kind of pie it was, but it looked good, so that's all that counted.

"Selective short term memory loss."

"Bullshit. That's not a thing."

"How would you know? You didn't complete med school."

"Yeah, not my fault." He let it go, because John didn't actually have that much of a choice and demigods could lock up their mouths tighter than a bank vault on the moon. Maybe he should've been paying more attention to the sympathetic sideways glance Sherlock was directing his way, and how no one on the street even made a second glance to him. John wouldn't notice until it was too fucking late, and everything went to shit.

But that's how the story always goes, isn't it?

Before John was unexpectedly kidnapped, and then stuffed into a flat with Sherlock to go fight and kill things that shouldn't exist beyond a horror novel or a two year old's drawing of the dog, his idea of theology and belief systems had been faltering into agnostic at best. He didn't expressly believe in any one religion per say, but he was pretty damn sure someone out there was the reason for his luck being absolute shit.

So when Mycroft had stolen him away one rainy Monday morning in the middle of a lecture hall when everyone else had cleared out and John had sworn that the pompous looking man in the suit was another professor in, John's wonky belief in theology was flipped on its head. And then lit on fire.

There were, from what he had gathered, around seven gods, each with a specific job, and each with approximately eighteen million children who were all giant dicks. They ran everything like a giant corporation and it was fucking weird as hell to figure that out. It was one thing to believe your life was ruled over by some old man in the sky in a cloudy palace surrounded by winged bastards. People wanted hellfire, they wanted reincarnation, they wanted angels and karma and prophets and bodhisattvas. No one wanted to believe the entire scope of life was run like a company, because that either made you the drones putting shit together, or you were the product on the line.

And you weren't good product either. You were the shit from the off brand company nobody actually wanted but they still bought because the nice shiny stuff is too expensive.

Finding out that he was part of an assembly line and that there was no real end to life or death was not enlightening in any way. It was damn scary and suddenly made the world a lot less interesting. Why did that woman lose her keys? Why did the little boy suffer from parental abuse? Why did that millionaire win the lottery? Why did the earthquake end two hundred lives? Because every single thing was preplanned with more precise detail that a fucking sculpture made from the tip of a pencil.

That was frightening. Your life isn't your own, it's a file to be stowed away in a cabinet in the void of the universe. And even when you die, it isn't over because they stuff into a new body, and everything begins right over again. Endless cycle, the 9 to 5 office job of the universe that stretches for eons instead of fifty years with no retirement in sight.

For some reason, Sherlock didn't quite understand the depressing realization it was. In fact, he found it kind of funny.

"Why does it bother you?" He would ask whenever John even hinted at his dislike for the whole thing in this half laughing, half irritated way of his. Easy for Sherlock to say. His 'Mummy' is a god in charge fate or what the hell ever, which as John has found, is just a fancy way of saying 'keeping the drones in line so they don't fuck things up'.

John didn't have a real answer for that. Maybe he had expected more. Or less. Anything but the large scale production line overseen by people in suits. An agnostic hope the it's either something completely mystical, or nothing at all. Not the clinical way it was run. Angels and demons. Not sometimes demons, but mostly assholes with umbrellas.

"How can it not bother you?"

"I never believed in gods, even as a child. They aren't gods, John. They aren't a religion. They are people with power who do a job. God implies they have some interest in their subjects. They do not. The value of life is an illusion created by a child with an expansive imagination for their own fantasy game." He turns the page of the newspaper, hardly paying attention at all. "The faster you except that, the easier your job will become."

"That made me feel so much better on the subject. Thanks." At least John could distract himself by imagining about how bad of a psychiatrist Sherlock would've made.

John, more increasingly as the need to express awe, disgust, and horror in voluminous amounts is rapidly expanding, has found himself muttering or shouting or squealing in a high-pitched tone 'Oh my God'. Every time, he would add on a drawn out questioning 's', glancing around to make sure the appropriate listeners would hear. Political correctness wasn't his strong point and generally he didn't give a flying fuck, but when your managers are divine beings, you have to be a little bit more careful. He could be blaspheming, for God(s?)' sake.

Plus, it made Sherlock snicker nearly every time. So there.

He liked making Sherlock laugh. Any display of emotion he could draw out of the man whose range was somewhere between apathetic and extremely agitated with little in between gave John a nice little boost to his ego. Maybe a boost to other things too. Not that John was doting on that. Especially after the fact that Sherlock had decided to spend most of the morning three days ago half naked on his violin before disappearing to go talk to Lestrade.

John also did not spend the later portion of the evening locked in his room, on his bed, thinking very very hard about the fact that Sherlock had decided to spend most of the morning half naked on his violin. He also did not, in the midst of wondering what it might be like to have explicit permission to touch, and subsequently be touched by, Sherlock, push a hand into his pants and take a firm and necessary grip on his already hard cock. He also did not, in any way shape or form, allow his fingers of his unoccupied hand drift down past his leaking dick and further to his ass for the first time since he was seventeen and cheeky after accidentally stumbling upon (searching for) gay porn on his sister's laptop.

Of course, he didn't do any of that. And if he did, not saying explicitly that he did, John may or may not have found that his fingers were woefully too short to do anything more than skirt around his prostate in a fevered attempt to replicate what it may be like for someone else to be doing the exact same thing to him. Still was a very satisfying way to spend the evening though he's pretty damn sure Sherlock had his activities deduced the second he walked in the door. Probably five minutes before, more accurately.

This thing with Sherlock, the thing about Sherlock, it nagged him constantly since two months ago when he was gasping for air and Sherlock was effectively beating the ever living fuck out of his assailant. It wasn't that John didn't want to acknowledge it, seeing how he already had and that train had left the station, but it was that this whole feeling thing was confusing, especially with Sherlock.

To be honest, there were times still when he absolutely hated the man, like when he decided to play the violin at two in the morning badly. Like when he left mold cultures in the tea kettle. Like when he threw a fit over being bored and sulked on the sofa while insulting everything he could think of about John. It was easy to hate the man then.

It was easy to hate him when he did something extraordinary too. Once he took a bullet to the forehead and didn't even flinch. That fucked with John's nightmares for a while, because not only was he seeing Cthulhu in his bathtub, but Sherlock walking around with a gaping hole in his skull. That had been fun. Or when Sherlock did that weird disappearing thing, where he'd be in one place and then eight miles away in the next. Or when Sherlock would stop blinking or breathing for no reason other that he just really didn't need to because his body operated on a different set of rules then everyone else.

Or just on those soft mornings and Sherlock isn't doing anything particularly extraordinary, but John knows he hasn't eaten in like a week and possibly been awake for longer, yet he's bright eyed and bushy tailed and John just had to be violently reminded that Sherlock isn't a person, and he has immortality and super healing and does all this weird shit that John just will never be able to match or understand.

John's just a man, average in every aspect, over half-way to 26 without a degree or any direction, pining for a fucking demigod. He didn't know if he hated Sherlock for that, or himself. Either way, it was fucking terrible.

Then there were other times, times when John was so far down the rabbit hole, he could neither see the real world nor the crazy shit that encompasses Wonderland, only this stupid infatuation that surrounded him hopelessly. Prime example, just two days ago when he and Sherlock were running about on a case for Lestrade, looking for the killer of a woman in an alarming amount of pink. Sherlock had invited him, asked to examine the corpse using his incomplete medical knowledge, encouraged his opinion, and asked for nothing more than his presence.

It had been, well, not fun, but at least interesting. They had run half across London and had dinner at some restaurant where Sherlock got free food, which was good. The cabbie had tried to poison Sherlock, which had actually been pretty funny considering the circumstance, and John had shown up in time with Lestrade to arrest the murderer. They had gotten along, almost like friends, and it had pulled at John's heartstrings as they left the crime scene, playing him like a fiddle as he realized they probably never would be. Maybe in a different life, where circumstances were more favorable but now, definitely not. John was work, a patient to a therapist, not someone to befriend or care about beyond the payoff. Sometimes, John could pretend Sherlock may care for him in a friendly manner, when the man asked if he was hurt or hungry or just seems somewhat interested in his well being.

John knew this was all part of his job however. Written down and agreed upon and the only reason they were even stuck together.

Even with this, there were these moment where John couldn't help himself, when Sherlock didn't remind John that he was a mere mortal and Sherlock was of divine birth and right. When Sherlock ran with ambition toward a goal, forgetting any power he may be hiding. When he relied on his massive intellect and nothing else. When he was too impatient to look back and wait for John but he knew that John was close behind. When he was as human as the rest of them and John felt for those precious few hours that Sherlock was a tangible being within his reach as they laughed off an adrenaline rush that had nothing to do with monsters or possessed house wives. When they were close and smiling and nothing mattered and John just wanted it to last forever and press a hand into Sherlock's in a way that had nothing to do with a fevered lust but a need to be just physically close and-

God, he was in deep shit.

Well, didn't fucking matter anyways, because the next morning after catching the cabbie and all of those nice little affectionate feelings, Sherlock's gone again, without a single trace, and the whole process starts over once more. John hadn't been completely pissed at first, just frustrated like he always was after the customary five hour wait period before giving up and, yeah, Sherlock wouldn't be back for at least two days. Stuck in the flat again.

So John had tried passing the time like he usually did, which came easier since he started typing up the assignments Mycroft gave them so he had written evidence he wasn't going absolutely bonkers, but soon that lost its glamour as the nagging thought of Sherlock not being there finally hit him full force. Instead of dwelling on it, he tried to take a walk, letting the monotony of mindless steps take up his time. This used to work back in med school when studying and exams got too be too much. An hour of just walking was always a solution.

Too bad he didn't get very far. Too many blocks away from 221 Baker St., and John gets blocked by a hooded faceless acolyte. When John tries to pass, he is grabbed and stopped. Why John is surprised is beyond him. He goes to the shop, and there's an acolyte in the isle over. After each assignment, there's like eight of the bastards. Look outside his window, and hey, guess what? A fucking acolyte watching the flat.

"Fuck off!" Okay, so it wasn't the best thing to shout in the middle of the street, but no one around him noticed at all so what did he care? Well, when he woke up from subsequently blacking out, because those fuckers do that, he was on the sofa in 221B and a neat folded little card was placed on the armrest telling him to 'be kinder to the acolytes' and generally just mocking him with its crisp off-white, more-than-expensive-in-fact-he-probably-couldn't-b uy-five-of-these appearance.

Obviously, he burnt the thing, got more sloshed than he had ever been since his first year of med school, and woke up the next morning with a raging hangover and permeating air of disappointment in himself. There's an underlying guilt trip waiting to shove itself into the light that 'hey dumbass, this is how Harry died' but he's ignoring that for favor of toast, water, and daytime television.

And that's basically how the past few days have been. Fucked up, annoying, a wee bit happy, but mostly John wants to run his head into a brick wall until he wakes up or reincarnates as someone with a lot better luck and less attractive roommates. Or at least more mortal ones.

Now he was just waiting, for Sherlock to get back or for Mycroft to pop in and send him off to fuck all, whichever happened first. It was times like these he wanted his old life back. He remembers being a stupid little kid and pretending to fight dragons and evil soldiers and aliens and giant squid, always wanting something more than suburbs and bullies. Of course, he grew up, but the idea of a fantastical adventure still stuck with him, being the hero and saving the day. John does that now, kind of, and he'd give anything for a nine to five and the freedom that came with not knowing how the universe worked.

There's an irony in there somewhere but John will be damned if he's not ignoring that too.

Sherlock does eventually show up, but only in time for Mycroft too as well, and without a second to even breathe in the childish hatred between the brothers, John and Sherlock were off on another adventure to find a magical unicorn or fairies or some other whimsical bullshit.

Just kidding. It's probably something with claws.

They were hunting something out in a forest, somewhere. John didn't know because it was one of the few times that Sherlock had been allowed (whatever Sherlock did in his past to put him as mandatory John-sitter also got him restrictions on any demigod powers, which meant Mycroft had to deem it necessary for anything above lifting a particularly heavy box), to blink them to their location, which basically meant it was really fucking far away and nobody wanted to pay for a plane ticket. What they were hunting had no name, since Mycroft had a bloody annoying habit of just giving them a file and saying 'okay, go find it' and then fucking off to God knew where.

What John did know was that it looked kind of like a bird, kind of like a spider, and it liked to spit acid, so that was a plus.

He was calling it bider. A spird? Arachnorapter? Whatever.

Sherlock was crouched down next to him by a fallen log listening to the screeching clicking of the vulrantula flapping and crawling around them. It was nerve wracking at best.

"You're angry." Sherlock says to him, suddenly, in a quiet off hand way, which is Sherlockian for 'I'm right and your wrong so there'.

"No, I'm not." Was John's very mature and thought out reply. He was not in the mood for this. He didn't do good with expressing his feelings, especially to someone who eighty percent of the time didn't even have any. Plus, John has to live with the bastard, and avoiding undue conflict was something to always strive for.

"Why are you angry?"

"I'm not, Sherlock. Leave it." Good job, now he won't ever leave it.

"What did I do, John?"

"Jesus, Sherlock! It's nothing, so shut it and look out for the… thing, whatever it's called."

"Cashtuknakal." John just sort of looks at him, eyebrows knitted as he tries to repeat the mouthful before giving up and going back to searching the din of the woods fruitlessly.

"Right."

"Obviously, you are bothered by something, so there for it is not 'nothing'. As it is my job to ensure you are to the best of your abilities for these assignments, I need to be sure you are up for the task."

"Oh, I'm so glad you're just 'doing your job'. Why don't you go disappear for a few more days? That'll put me in a right good mood." Sometimes, John wonders why he was born with a working mouth.

"You are angry about that?"

"Yes! No. I don't know. It's not like you ever tell me or warn me when you decide to fuck off." He didn't want to say the last part, it just tumbles out and cackles at him. Sherlock finds this odd, brow furrowing and head titling.

"Why would that bother you?" John sort of wishes he could sew his mouth shut but the words come out before he can grab them, much to his horror.

"I can't leave the sodding flat without you! Go too far and a fucking hooded bastard drags me back home. It's not like I fucking want to be stuck there for four days straight while you go and do whatever the hell it is you do." He feels pathetic saying it, because it is pathetic. He has to rely on a single person for basically everything, which hasn't been the case since he was a toddler.

"John, I-" Sherlock tries, but is interrupted by loud screeching noise. Not surprisingly, their bickering led the bird-spider-hybrid-from-hell out of its hiding place. The whole ordeal ended with John hanging off one of its eight hairy legs and Sherlock shooting it down with a single precise shot. Surprisingly, John landed without so much as a twisted ankle, and they were off, riding into the sunset, if you counted back to the flat as the sunset and riding as sitting in a cab after blinking to cab appropriate place (Sherlock's temporary power somehow stopped working twenty minutes from home of-fucking-course) while decidedly not talking.

Sherlock did try though, kind of. "Good thing it didn't bite you. A paralytic poison of that potency would have killed you in an instant."

John's response was a grunt, a shrug, and why was that supposed to make him relax? He and Sherlock needed to have a conversation about how pointing out one's imminent brush with death actually did not calm the nerves. Ever.

"Are you hurt or-"

"I'm fine. I just need to sleep, alright?" Sherlock accepted it, letting them be quiet for the trip while John mentally threw himself out the door and bashed his head on the pavement to be eaten by all sorts of ugly nasty things. So he was acting like a child. Who gave a fuck?

Sometimes, after an assignment, when it was all said and done and if it was completed near the evening, John found himself unable to sleep. He'd be laying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, desperately trying to will his eyes to stay closed as images of him being flailed around by the monstrosity of the week flashed before him. Sometimes it would take him hours to fall asleep, the clock flashing 5:30 a.m. before he finally nodded off into a dreamless unconsciousness, but most of the time he'd still be awake by the time the sun rose and he'd get up to slump around the flat like a sloth with a broken leg.

Tonight was no different, so instead of lying there until the morning told him to give up, he did so of his own initiative, wandering downstairs at half past three only to find Sherlock still awake, not surprising, staring at something tiny through a microscope on the kitchen table, also not surprising. John stood in the living room, just watching him with burning tired eyes, his earlier frustration now buried under exhaustion. And half a bottle of wine.

"I was wondering how many nights of insomnia it would take for you to give up. I had surmised at least one more than this, but I am more than willing to correct my mistake." John would be rolling his eyes, but he didn't have the energy, so instead he flopped onto the sofa in a huff, rubbing at his face and groaning.

"Do you ever sleep?" He's lived with the man for six months now. You'd think he'd know.

"My need for sleep is minimal. I can go weeks without it, if I wish. Though some nights, I prefer it."

"Figures. What are you doing?"

"Observing different effects of caffeine on the influenza virus."

"Pretty tame for you. Tell me about it." John heard him shift, and he looked over to Sherlock, seeing his obviously confused expression. "I'm serious. Tell me. Don't leave out any gory details. Might bore me enough to go to sleep." Sherlock opens his mouth to reply, the scathing retort just at the tip of his tongue, but swiftly shuts it again and nods.

John settles himself down just in time for Sherlock to begin, outlining what led him to the experiment and the contextual differences between the sources of caffeine he was using for the particular test. It was boring as hell, to be honest but it wasn't so much the tedious nature of his words that lulled John, but the canter of his voice. The deep baritone wrapped in silken dulcet tones that softened the urgency of his own thoughts to over analyze something he didn't have the mental capacity for helped him relax, finally. His eyes drifting shut to the warmth and quiet interest in which Sherlock told him about his (pointless) experiment and before he even knew it, he was carried off to sleep.

He didn't notice, deep in slumber, how Sherlock stood up twenty minutes later. How he carefully walked over to John so he would not wake him. How he smoothed a small fringe of John's hair out of his face, (it was getting a mite too long and John was neglecting getting it cut. Or maybe Sherlock just hadn't given him the time), and how he took an old quilt, given to him by a long since dead friend, and laid it upon John's prone form. How he took a seat in his customary chair, and just watched, for at least three or four hours, just rested, observing and just...

Thinking.

John woke up the next morning, a crick in his neck and an old quilt that was probably Sherlock's thrown over him sometime while he was snoring on the sofa. Just after noon, and John took a second to stretch and look around, surprisingly rested and peaceful for having slept like a rock at a funny angle. Sherlock was nowhere to be seen, and yes, John peeked into his room, seeing a made bed and no trace of the demigod in sight. It was only a little bit of a creepy thing to do, but he didn't take any dirty laundry back to his room to moon over, so that's a plus.

The early irritation was beginning to seep into him until he went to the kitchen, hunger prompting him, where he found a small scrap of paper resting on the microscope addressed to him. He almost pinched himself to make sure this wasn't some form of near death induced dream or hallucination. Almost.

John,

Out till Thursday.

-Sherlock

John read it five times, a small smile widening and widening with each re-read. He looked around, chuckled a bit, and pinned the note to the fridge where later he would write 'actually amazed right now' in small print under Sherlock's scrawl. There was still a head in the fridge and what looked like a cockroach in the butter. Notes and books cluttered the tables and chairs, and next to the jam was the leftovers of Sherlock's late night experiment. When Sherlock finally returned, Mycroft would still come around with an assignment where John would probably get hurt and/or emotionally scarred.

Too be honest, the note wasn't much.

But it was a start.

A.N: Part three sooner or later. If you can figure out what happens in the next part, I'll be very much impressed, and might even clap. Though you won't hear it. (If you do hear it, wow. Props to you.) Thoughts and comments are welcome.