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The man doesn’t say anything that might actually make sense, like ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’. He just takes the phone John is offering and stares at him for several eons past awkward and then says, “A suntan.”
“Sorry?”
“You have a suntan. On your face,” the stranger says. “And your hands,” he adds, as though that makes the out-of-nowhere statement any less bizarre.
“Oh.” John blinks, caught off guard. “Yes. I’m just back in London after serving in Afgha–”
“–nistan!” the man finishes along with him. “I was about to say that.”
“Oh,” John says again, because it sounds less rude than ‘O... kaaaay.’
John hears the door swing open behind him and a woman carrying a mug of coffee enters the lab. She holds out the mug towards the man but he doesn’t take it, even though he says, “Ah, Molly. Coffee. Thank you.”
The man is still staring at John and still not making any move to actually take the mug when the woman, Molly, says hesitantly, “Sherlock, I thought you wanted coffee.” She holds the mug out more insistently until the man, whose name is Sherlock apparently, takes it without bothering to look at it.
“Coffee!” Sherlock, exclaims suddenly.
“Coffee?” John repeats, eyes shifting to Molly for a moment. She smiles back at him nervously, her shoulders rising and falling with a perplexed shrug.
“I’d like to have coffee,” Sherlock clarifies. Confusingly.
John glances down at the mug in Sherlock's hand, steam still curling up out of the dark liquid. “Isn’t that coffee you have right there in your hand?”
Sherlock looks down at the mug like he’s just realized it exists. He frowns. “No. I mean yes. I mean no, that’s not–” He sets the mug down on the worktop too fast and coffee sloshes over the rim. “I mean, sometimes people have coffee.”
“Uh...yes,” John agrees, though ‘yes’ rises up more like a question. “I suppose they do.”
Sherlock grimaces and shakes his head. “I was wondering if you’d like to have coffee.”
“I can get some coffee for him,” Molly offers and starts for the door.
“No!” Sherlock shouts, inexplicably, his voice high with all of the urgency of a person trying to stop someone from being hit by a runaway bus.
“No?” John and Molly ask in unison.
Sherlock’s eyes widen. “Unless you’d like some now? Would you like some now? I could go and–”
John catches Sherlock’s arm to stop him. “I actually just had some.” Sherlock stares at John’s hand. John lets go and wonders if he’s offended the man by touching him so freely. When Sherlock looks up John offers him a smile as an apology. “But thank you.”
John didn’t think it was possible for a person to stare at someone any harder than this man has already stared at him, but somehow Sherlock manages it. “I play the violin when I’m thinking. Not that I’m ever not thinking. Thinking is something I do a lot. All the time in fact.”
John looks over at Mike who’s arching his eyebrows at Sherlock as though the man’s just said ‘I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob’. Mike frowns and reaches across the worktop and starts turning the various bottles John had seen Sherlock working with, checking the labels from what John can gather. John does a double take before diving back into the fray. “That’s... nice. I like the violin.”
For some reason John can’t begin to fathom Sherlock looks just as stunned as if a circus clown had just bounced into the room and hit him in the head with a squeaky oversized mallet. “You do?”
John’s wondering if it’s just his imagination that this Sherlock fellow keeps drifting closer to him. “Sure,” John says, puzzled by why that would be so unusual. “Sounds quite lovely.”
The corners of Sherlock’s mouth slide haltingly upward in what John thinks could win an award for World’s Clumsiest Smile. If such a thing needed to exist. The smile disappears as Sherlock chokes out, “Sometimes,” he clears his throat, “That is to say occasionally, not always, but sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Although sometimes I talk rather a lot. Not ‘a lot’ as in too much. Just more than I do on the days I don’t talk at all. It’s a perfectly normal amount of talking is what I’m saying.”
“Sherlock, are you feeling ok?” Molly asks at the same moment Mike says “Are you all right there, Sherlock?”
“Flatmates,” Sherlock blurts out, seeming to ignore the others entirely.
“Flatmates?” John asks, trying to keep up with yet another wild change of direction in the conversation.
“Yes, I need a flatmate. And so do you. We should be flatmates.” Sherlock seems to notice he’s been steadily moving forward and backs up a step or two. “I mean, we could be flatmates. If you’d like.”
Oh. Right. The reason Mike brought him here. Pretty strange of this man to ask when they’ve only just met though, John thinks. Most people with any common sense would like to get to know someone a least a little bit first. What if they don’t get on at all? That would be... hang on. John looks back over at Mike. "Oh. You told him about me?"
Mike doesn't answer. He's still too busy looking at Sherlock likes he's just done the fandango and belted out 'Galileo, Galileo, Figaro Magnifico'. Do all of Sherlock's friends look at him like that? Well, at any rate, John's genuinely curious now. "How did you know I needed a flatmate?"
Sherlock straightens up, and for a moment John thinks he almost looks authoritative, shrewd. “Got my eye on a nice little place in central London,” Sherlock says as he casually leans one hand on the worktop. Or at least it would have been casual if his hand hadn’t slipped off the edge and caused him to almost face-plant into his experiment. He rights himself, letting out what sounds to John like a growl as he does so. “We’ll meet there tomorrow evening; seven o’clock.” He immediately heads for the exit, talking faster as he goes. “Sorry, gotta dash. I think I left... things... places.”
John’s dumbstruck for a moment. Sherlock is frustrating and odd, chaotic almost. But John finds the unpredictability interesting at least. And the guy seems friendly enough, towards John anyway. So it’s not that John’s opposed to the idea of sharing a flat with him. After all needs must, and some company at home might do John some good, even if this conversation is like a crossword in a blender.
But Sherlock also seems like he might be a bit daft, which John worries might make them incompatible in the long run. Therefore: “Is that it?”
Sherlock skids to a stop. “Is that what?”
Yep, daft, John concludes. Or forgetful at the very least if he thinks that’s enough to be going on with. “We don’t know a thing about each other,” John explains plainly, but kindly, so the man will understand the problem at hand. “I don’t know where we’re meeting. I don’t even know your name.”
Sherlock stares back at him with a look John can’t quite put a finger on. Maybe he’s finally about to spew out some explanation for how he knew John was looking for a flatmate. Or maybe he’s about to vomit. Looks like it could go either way. He takes a great breath, but then “The name’s Sherlock Holmes,” is all Sherlock Holmes says at last, “and the address is 221B Baker Street.” His face contorts briefly and John thinks maybe Mr. Holmes has got something stuck in his eye. He lets out a strangely dejected sigh and stammers out something that might be “Afternoon” on his way out the door. He makes it a step through it before banging it back open again. “I just– forgot my coat,” he says, and John thinks that he sees the man’s cheeks flush red.
Mr. Holmes crosses the room and retrieves his phone, flings himself into his coat, picks up his scarf, drops his scarf, picks it up again, and a moment later he’s out of the room once more. The tail of his coat momentarily catches in the door before he yanks it free, and his footsteps down the hallway sound only slightly slower than those of a man fleeing a burning building.
John’s left reeling from the encounter and wondering how in the world Mike Stamford, who’s a pretty calm and quick-witted man, came to be friends with someone so easily flustered and, near as John can tell, a tad thick. He looks towards Mike expectantly, but Mike’s just looking back at him with a dazed expression.
“No,” Mike says. “He’s never like that.”