“The body craves sugar when it’s low on protein.”
Sherlock looks up, offense already creasing his brow at being interrupted, though in all honesty he hadn’t been doing anything more important than tidying away some odds and ends in his mind palace.
“So it’s…it’s meat or beans you really want, but if you don’t know it, then you find yourself just grabbing a handful of sweets.”
“John, if this is an attack upon my eating habits,” Sherlock sighs, but his personal physician shakes his head.
“Thirst gets confused for hunger, too. And there’s water in most foods anyway, so it works a bit, but it would’ve been better to actually drink a glass of water. Would’ve been what the body really needed.”
For a lecture on healthy-minded living, John’s body language screams discomfort. Sherlock looks harder, pays more attention, snaps the connections to everything else unrelated and unnecessary that he’d been maintaining peripheral awareness of.
Steady strings of words. Rehearsed. But needing to be forced out. And on the flip side, unable to be kept inside any longer.
Hands never still; twisting and plucking at each other, scraping through hair, rubbing down denim-clad thighs. Keeping grounded. Distracting from unpleasant emotion.
Words about wellness, but not speaking about health. Not speaking as a doctor at all.
Determined to see something through and with a plan in place, but not with the calm of a good leader in battle. Not the captain, not sitting hunched over in his chair like that.
So it was John, just John, needing to communicate something important - not dangerous or mysterious or exciting but important - not to the detective or genius but to his flatmate and friend.
Sherlock feels a stab of fear. He’s going to make a bloody hash of this, isn’t he.
“And…and when I’m not around, you talk to the skull or the air or a bloody balloon,” John continues, waving a hand at the mantle. “And it’s something, it lets you order your thoughts, but it’s not what you…well, what you want, is it?”
A look - expectant? beseeching? - indicates that some sort of response is requested. Sherlock shakes his head.
“You’ve asked, before. Well, it’s been a throwaway thing really, you’ve not been expecting a real answer, but you’ve asked. Why I keep dating ‘all these boring women’.” John’s hands still after the air quotes, and he takes a deep breath. On the tail end of the exhale, he looks up, and his expression has calmed as well.
Like a soldier who’s come to terms with not surviving the next battle, Sherlock thinks, and his palms prickle as they unconsciously close into fists.
“I wanted to explain,” John says. “Maybe you don’t even care, but it’s for me too. I want more from you, but I can’t have it, so I date women I won’t fall in love with instead. It’s not what I want, but it helps manage the cravings, do you see?”
amandla
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
