"You can't be serious," John said to Mark under his breath. He could hardly respond, his eyes darting to see if the screaming children had heard what John had said. "This is our day."

They were a group of fourth years, climbing all about the chairs, running around the room with disregard for any art supplies in their way. John had to snap a chastisement at a kid who had begun taking out a set of watercolors: "Don't touch those, Carter!" he shouted, crossing his arms across his chest in the way he often did when scolding his students. When he had students.

He turned his attention back to soft eyed Mark, who seemed to be in a daze. "They're not going to calm down, John, it's a Wednesday. If you want to get anything done you'd better wait till tomorrow."

John uncrossed his arms. "You can't be serious!" he repeated. "Did Anderson do this again? Was this Anderson?" A loud sound clattered on the right and neither of them blinked, adjusting to the constant stream of energy jumping around the art room. "I'll go."

"Thank you," Mark replied, nodding. "Sorry that the kids needed to use the room again. Take it up with Phil."

"Anderson isn't capable of much of anything," John said quite seriously, which prompted some warm laughter from Mark. John shook his head, going into the war zone of the art room after the kids trampled through it. He salvaged as much as he could - a tube of his favorite expensive paint had been completely emptied onto the floor, the rich pigment already dying the concrete a shade of cobalt. He cursed under his breath, looking for his chief brush, which he had gotten in Italy - only to find it had all the bristles ruthlessly ripped out. He could see a small child playing with them when he turned to look, and John could do nothing but stare in a horror akin to finding a dead body in the bathtub. He felt helpless. He could even hear Mark chuckling, getting amusement from his agony.

Eventually, he had to brace himself and move on. He took his easel under his arm, as well as an unfinished illustration, and looked Mark defiantly in the eyes as he passed him, all the way to the door. The terseness died as soon as he stepped out, the yelling of children nothing but giddy echoes.

He didn't remember whether or not Sherlock had classes today, only that he was the only available person to go to. And the fact of the matter was that after the overthrow of the art room, he needed to work on something else besides art.

It was day three, and Sherlock wasn't giving away a single thing. Most of John's questions were cleverly evaded. Or if they were too forthcoming, he outright insulted John and ignored the question completely. He knew not a single thing about John besides the things he'd magically extrapolated, yet he could tear John apart with a mathematical precision akin to a scalpel.

When John walked in, he deposited his art supplies in his chair, tentatively walking through the large enclosure to look for Sherlock. Folders and papers were scattered everywhere, musical notation written upon a chalkboard juxtaposed to the window. It was quiet. Much more quiet than usual; the sound seemed to be smothered by strange, low October clouds. And Sherlock wasn't rattling off tunes in instants of pure frustration, running his long pale fingers through ebony hair.

He didn't dare call out his name for fear of sounding too eager. It was when he was losing hope, ready to sit down in his chair, when Sherlock finally popped his head out of his office. His shoulders were bare, and he looked like he'd just woken up. "John," Sherlock said, shortly, as alert as he'd ever been. "Come here."

"Why?" John started walking toward him, maneuvering past several metal music stands.

"Because, I need you," Sherlock explained hastily, almost rolling his eyes from the John's idiocy. John rolled his eyes right back, slipping into Sherlock's office.

When he saw, he nearly left again. There was paint all over Sherlock's four walls, in smudges and strange hieroglyphs. It was black and red and insane, improvised lines that were squiggly and thick written on the plaster, like locks of dark hair. Paint was all over Sherlock's bare skin; he'd stripped down to his boxers to avoid getting paint on any of his clothes. And where he kept meeting his fingers and his nose - black fingerprints. Encrusted just as thickly into his hair was a scarlet so intense that it made John squint in distaste.

He sat by Sherlock, on the floor, crossing his legs. "What's this?" he asked, looking over to Sherlock's smudged, soot covered face.

"It's supposed to be music."

"Then why is it on the wall, and not on a piece of paper?"

Sherlock shared a look with John. He frowned. "We ran out."

John thought back to the explosions of paper and materials, and then to Sherlock's peculiar wording. "We?"

The moment of subtle satiation was interrupted by Sherlock's brashness. "I," he revised, "You don't buy the paper."

"Neither do you."

Sherlock smirked, then. "Caught me."

John was taken aback pleasantly by the genuine smile (which was not attached to an innuendo, to say the least), and momentarily did nothing but stare blankly, trying to realign. A smile lit up once he realized the Sherlock was trying, in his own way, to be endearing.

"So... uh, what do you need me for?"

Sherlock stroked his chin a couple of times, drawing blackness along his jawline. "I'd like the wall to be painted correctly. I... can't."

"You what?" John laughed. "Couldn't hear you."

Sherlock seemed to pout, if that were even possible. "I'm not saying it again, you annoying idiot."

"Fine, fine," John allowed. "You want me to paint the music?"

"Not saying it again."

***

John's arm was beginning to ache from all of the reaching, with Sherlock watching him paint in the corner with a facial expressions befitting a bored child. He looked like he wanted to get up and shoot something. Maybe the wall, maybe John, maybe both. But they were both waiting, making very slight chess moves, watching each other from their periphery, wondering who would break and prompt a conversation first.

Somehow, John knew that if he spoke first, Sherlock would shrivel back - as if to prove that he didn't need to say anything if he didn't want to. John didn't know very much about Sherlock, but of what little he did know, he'd extrapolated it from the way he stood when he thought no one was looking.

Leaned up against something; desperate to let air out.

John pretended he couldn't see him sitting in the corner of the room, and worked harder.

It only took thirty minutes, which was a lot less than John had bet on. Sherlock had a timidity in his voice that was laced with something nonchalant. Even then, his words were an assumption when they were supposed to be phrased like a question. "I take it you studied art here," he stated.

"I didn't study," John replied, letting his tongue stick out between his lip. "What made you think that?" He heard a soft rustle as Sherlock attempted to think out an answer that complimented and insulted John at the same time.

Instead, he just said, "You're good," and left it at that.

"I went to London for university and met Claire via her father, who was ecstatic to find out I was George Watson's son. The politician."

"Hm," Sherlock responded, trying to sound uninterested.

"I studied medicine until I was twenty-four, then traveled to Bristol with Claire so I could get a job working at some hospital," John said, still painting neat notations. "Claire didn't want to start a family in London."

"And you didn't want to start a family," Sherlock said, smiling from the irony.

John finally turned around to look at him. He tried to piece Sherlock together, as he often did, mashing up jagged shards of his psyche and his physicality. Somehow, he seemed to defy logic. None of his pieces fit together to make something that looked pretty, or perfect, or even halfway decent.

Nothing about Sherlock was decent. John had to look away to avoid hurting himself.

"I wanted to be an artist," John admitted, slowing his painting. He paused with the brush poised to make another stroke. "But I couldn't support the family I was going to have if I was an artist, and her father knew that. Suffice it to say he was upset that I didn't want to be a politician, like my father. So. I settled."

"I hear resentment."

John stilled painting. "Anyway. Art always interested me. Color theory, you know. How shades and tints correlate to each other."

Sherlock nodded gently, his eyes skimming John's mural on the far wall. John was starting to close up, adding finishing touches and redoing some notes that were misshapen. "I think music and painting are very similar."

"How so?"

John shrugged, stepping back to see at the fully illustrated wall. He could still spot remnants of Sherlock's misguided attempts behind a few coatings of white paint. They looked like ghosts, trying to break through an opaque mirror; indistinct forms of both darkness and light. "They're both forms of individual expression," John mused quietly. "When there is no liberty, there is always art. No one can take that away. Not Hitler, not England."

"I suppose not," Sherlock replied. When John looked back, he noticed the black paint on Sherlock's face had dried. He gave Sherlock his softest smile and turned around, crouching down to look at him, eye to eye.

"I need to paint - you should get washed up." John reached out and touched the red paint crusted in Sherlock's hair, using a thumb to push the locks out of his face. "How did you get paint in your hair?"

Something indistinct and rushed out escaped Sherlock's mouth, that faintly resembled an answer. "Experiment," it sounded like - except all four syllables were slurred into one. He looked almost... bashful - or as close as he'd ever come to being bashful - and the next second he'd disappeared from the office.

He came back from the locker rooms fifteen minutes later, by the time John had already set up his easel and began to work. He was wearing a bathrobe over his lithe, lean figure, walking barefoot through the door; his feet making soft padding noises as they wet the floor, water trickling down his legs and leaving marks in the shape of his feet. John looked around to catch him as he was fleeing into his office. "Did you just..." he trailed, "...walk around the academy wearing nothing but a bathrobe?"

"Yes," Sherlock immediately answered, looking indignant. "Is that an issue?"

John's face was quizzical, then amused. "No. No, I guess not."

Sherlock's eyes faltered from John's to his painting. His expression immediately became sharper, more exact - he approached from the side, his eyebrows furrowing. Finally, he said something.

"It's a rip off."

John's stomach sank. "You don't like it?"

"I never said I didn't like it. I said it was a rip off."

"Of whom?"

"Albert Lebourg. Armand Guillaumin. Any 19th century impressionists, actually."

"That means it's inspired by, not copied from."

"Even so, your strokes are long and uncontrolled, to the point of abstraction. If you tighten them, it'll make the painting more realistic."

"I'm not trying to be individualistic, or the best. I just want to..." John cut himself off, and then began his sentence again, with more confidence, more certainty. "It's not always about realism, Sherlock."

"Yes, well. Wouldn't you know."

John pushed Sherlock too forcefully to be playful. "You know what? I bet you couldn't draw a stick figure person, never mind a complex painting with layers and color concepts."

"I can draw a stick figure," Sherlock protested clinically.

"Jesus." John stopped painting so he could take a moment to appreciate how utterly clueless to the world Sherlock was - despite the fact that he boasted a massive intellect that could make the brightest Oxford graduates shrivel. "You really don't know a single thing about human nature, do you?"

"Why would I waste my time thinking about whose feelings are going to get hurt? I say what I mean. People get into all kinds of trouble, trying to be polite. You, for example. You haven't ended it with your fiancée yet, and no one seems to know why except you."

"Are you asking why I haven't?"

"No, but you can tell me."

"Because." John's eyes searched the floor underneath Sherlock's feet for an answer. "Because I loved her - or was with her - for a long time, and... I owe it to her to try."

"John," Sherlock scoffed incredulously. "You're cheating on her."

John said nothing.

"Whatever you think the reason is, the fact remains. You're queer."

"It's more complicated than that," John hissed.

"It isn't."

"Something you don't seem to understand is that life isn't just black and white - good and bad is made of shades of gray, and sometimes you do things you know aren't... right."

"That's what people say when they're afraid," Sherlock insisted.

"I thought we were talking about art," John muttered, turning back to his painting and trying to piece it back together, trying not to feel like he was a sham. Sherlock's criticism rang in his mind. "It's not always about realism," he said, running his paint brush over a cloud. "Sometimes life is surreal. Sometimes it's based on perception much more than facts."

"You're not being practical. It's tiresome."

"And if every piece of art was practical?" John said, his tone starting to harden, "Would you be happy then?"

Sherlock hesitated. His words were being staunched as he tried to articulate something he wasn't used to. Maybe an apology was forming at his lips, hidden somewhere underneath the cutting sarcasm. "I'm not trying to be..."

"A dickhead?" John snapped. "Yeah, I know. But you are one."

"I know."

"I should really tell you to piss off."

"I know that, too."

"You're insufferable."

Sherlock smiled, very slightly. "...I know."

"Try not to be."

In response, he pulled a chair up next to John's stool, sitting down and arranging his bathrobe neatly over his knees. "I wouldn't hold out too much hope," he said, smirking.

The next few hours, Sherlock watched John paint and talked about murder mysteries. Every once in a while, he would make John laugh. John used to think he was made up of radioactive isotopes, unstable and ready to wipe you out at a moment's notice, resulting in instantaneous combustion. He still thought that, but...

Sherlock's laugh was starting to change his mind. It was warm, and not spiteful, genuine in genuineness's purest form. When he smiled, all his teeth showed, and his cheeks made perfectly shaped triangles, and his eyes nearly disappeared. It wasn't even as if he was trying to agreeable. When he found something funny, very rarely, he'd laugh.

He seemed to keep on challenging John to do better, cleverly disguising it as repugnance. Tightening brushstrokes, mixing colors more exactly - it was all a veil to hide what he meant to say.

"I like it," John could almost fathom the words. Somewhere, in Sherlock's tone, he was telling John that exact thing. He looked like a father that was trying to be kind to his boy but couldn't yet grasp how, backing out of phrases as he said them. And John knew that he was being exact because he didn't know how to be delicate; because he wanted John to improve; because he wanted John to approach things practically.

Sherlock's eyes would sometimes soften as he spoke to John. And if he was really concentrating, his brows would furrow, and he'd point out something John never really thought about before, and John would love it. Sherlock thought more about things than anyone John'd met in his life.

A couple hours of talking, and Sherlock became tired, dozing off quietly in the warm afternoon sun that was filtering persistently through the windows. Sherlock fell asleep as John finished. He packed up and resisted the urge to rouse Sherlock awake. Unsure of what to do, John stood in front of him, briefcase in one hand.

The light was giving his skin a warm glow. His lips were an intense rose, parted so John could see teeth hidden in his mouth. His chest rose and sank like a tide. When he was sleeping, it was especially apparent how young Sherlock actually was. There was not a line to be seen; his face was creaseless, unwrinkled, fresh. When he was sleeping, Sherlock was someone else. John put his briefcase on the ground and tried to memorize him.

After a few minutes, John decided to draw a quick sketch of Sherlock in his notebook, partly out of indulgence, and partly out of genuine artistry. It looked lazy, but good, and he decided to work on it later.

He quickly made Sherlock some dinner for when he woke up. He boiled some gruel and put it on the table next to Sherlock, with a note written next to it: Eat.

On the way home, John huddled inside his coat and outlined the rest of Sherlock's body in his sketchbook, lit with afternoon light.