A/N: hey guys! My phone broke :( I'm going to have to slow updates to one chapter a week on Monday, sorry! Anyway, enjoy :D

"John?"

"Yeah," John replied, paying no attention at all. He was reading at the dinner table - resigned to the fact that there was nothing to talk about anymore.

"I'm going to have to cancel our date; Allison has to go to the gynecologist while Mark is on watch."

"Hm," John said, not looking up.

She searched his face for some semblance of interest, but gave up when she realized there was nothing she could do or say - short of an explosive argument - to get John out of his head. "May we go Wednesday?"

John exhaled, and his eyes darted up to look at Claire for a millisecond at most before turning his attention back to the leaden textbook in his hands. "Sure," he murmured, turning to the next page.

***

Whether or not Sherlock ever ate what John made him, he never heard a word of thanks, and John didn't care for a second.

Music littered the air. John had officially moved into Sherlock's office to use as an art room, although Sherlock didn't know it yet. (The light was better over in this wing, anyway.)

So while Sherlock was composing his symphonies for the orchestra, John would paint endlessly, from beaches to countryside to representations of misty eyed wives and beautiful men sunbathing in Greece. Every line would feel like it was meant to connect to another; to support the architecture of the painting on top of it.

Ever so often, Sherlock would pause his playing, and lean over John's shoulder to look. Sometimes, he would try to be constructive. When he really loved what John was painting, Sherlock said absolutely nothing. He just leaned down and touched their cheeks together so minutely that John sometimes thought he was having tactile hallucinations, and then Sherlock began playing his music again with more intensity.

He'd started to forget more about Moriarty's assignment. He was doing this for himself, even if it hurt him, in the end. The fact of the matter was, that despite himself, John liked to spend time with Sherlock - although he was callous, self-centered, and overly cynical. He liked the way Sherlock played violin. He liked the music. He liked the way Sherlock spoke about Anderson. He liked the way Sherlock didn't talk for hours on end.

"So," John prompted, later one afternoon. John was reclined back into his seat, reading a medical book about heart conditions. It was boring him out of his mind, and when he'd looked up, he'd noticed the perfect distraction smoking a cigarette. "What does the remarkable Sherlock Holmes do outside of work?"

Sherlock shrugged and leaned back into the wall he was perched on, pulling smoke from his cig. "I like to read," he stated. "Chemistry books."

"Seems a bit bland."

"The contrary," Sherlock said. "Chemical reactions are quite fun, at times. More relevantly, I'm technically in university, right now. I need to read those for my minor." He shut his eyes, closed off from the world.

Jesus. "How old are you?"

"I'm legal, if that's what you're worried about."

John barked out a sardonic laugh. "Legal," he muttered unintelligibly. "Hardly."

"I'm as legal as one of my preference can be."

"But how on earth are you in university?" John asked. "I was in UNI in '32."

"Was that the year you ended it with your ex-boyfriend?"

John set his jaw, entirely unamused. "You're a pain in my arse, Sherlock," John snapped.

Sherlock proceeded to completely ignore what he'd previously said, instead explaining how and why he was here, yet still in college. "I'm majoring in the arts," Sherlock said, "and this is essentially a field assignment. A long one. My brother can do things of the sort."

"Your..."

"Brother. Yes, this is the first time I'm mentioning him, because he's an absolute bloody bore, and lazier than pre-revolutionary French monarchs. And his name is Mycroft, just in case you ask out of sheer conversationalism, because we both know you knew I had a brother."

"A real pain in my arse."

"He works for Military Intelligence - rather, is Military Intelligence."

Maybe it was horrible of John to hear those words and immediately think of exploiting them to Moriarty. He immediately shook past the feeling of growing unease and instead asked more questions, hoping to keep Sherlock from asking anything about him - not that he needed to ask. If Sherlock asked him a question, it would be phrased as an incredibly invasive statement, and leave a bad taste in his mouth. "So..." he eased out experimentally. "Have you ever done anything for him?"

"Clarify."

"Has he ever asked you to help him for a secret mission?"

"Plenty of times."

John's gut clenched up. He swallowed. "...Like what?"

"Can't remember," Sherlock said, in a voice that did not denote forgetfulness in the least. "Blast."

"You don't tell me things," John said, unwilling to press further. He was secretly relieved that Sherlock was such a stubborn arse all the time.

"Hm?"

"You don't... emote. It's annoying."

"You can have me as I am," Sherlock stated evenly, "or not at all."

***

John started showing up whenever he felt like it. Be it rain or shine, if John needed to talk to someone who could care less about his personal life, or get a painting done without being pressured to engage in a boring conversation about how the next door neighbor was having sex out of wedlock, he'd go to Sherlock. Silence had taken on a new form; now it was comforting, and peaceful.

Today, he arrived at the music room carrying a large cardboard box that he couldn't see over. John gracelessly stumbled in, setting it on the floor as soon as possible. Sherlock barely turned.

"Hey," John panted, putting his hands to his knees. "Sherlock."

"Yes," a droning voice said, still not looking up. His eyes were glaring at some composition, which was sucking in all of his attention. He had a pencil in his hand.

"I need to go out to the local art store so I can buy supplies," John said, stepping a bit closer.

"You don't need my permission, John; did you come here just to tell me that?"

"No, no - I need you to come with me," John clarified. When Sherlock said nothing in response, John had to ease up closer to catch a look at what he was doing. "Hey," John repeated, his eyes darting between the paper Sherlock was holding and Sherlock's look of intense concentration. "Hey."

Sherlock finally glanced up. "Were you speaking to me?"

"Oh my God, Sherlock. What are you doing?"

Sherlock looked back to his paper and seemed to scribble something onto it. "Editing," he mused, his eyebrows furrowed. "Sometimes the compositions don't sit well with me, so I play with them a bit. This one has a problem with rests - they should be longer, to match the overall tone-"

"Sherlock," John said firmly. "Come on."

"Busy."

"You're not busy. Let's go."

"Why?"

"Mark is teaching."

"Yes, and I have a class in twenty minutes."

"So?" John snorted in frustration. "Give it to Mr. Haversham."

"And expose my students to his lazy bow work? No, thank you. They'll be playing God awful versions of Jesu by Tuesday."

"Just fucking come," John said. "It'll be fun."

Sherlock blinked, crossing his arms across his chest.

John's voice softened. "I swear," he murmured. "It's not a date, or whatever you might think it is. I just need someone to help me carry things. Canvasses are heavy."

Sherlock began walking towards the door. "Fine."

***

John'd been to this place plenty of times. With Claire, two years ago. Before she got tired of his artistic tendencies; his over-analysis of color and shape. With James, when he first moved to Bristol. He didn't like much; he mostly just poked fun at the naked sculptures, and how most of them weren't especially good. With Mark and John's father, when they met in year five, and both loved painting with a vicious intensity.

John's dad would take them to the gallery every month so they could look at the newest paintings, and John watched the rise and fall of the greatest artists, and the worst. He'd grown up here. Life in color was electric.

The gallery echoed with every click of marble tile, the relative silence making sound all the more present. The place looked so new age and eccentric that John often thought it resembled something built in the future. Everything about it was geometric, obsessed with symmetry and light. Electric fluorescents brightened up each painting, which were organized in neat columns of three.

Sherlock looked like he was stepping onto Saturn. His eyes took in everything: from the architecture, to the people milling about, to the paintings themselves.

"There's an art store on the far side of the gallery," John said breathlessly, carrying his box with both hands. "Get a shopping cart."

Sherlock paid him no attention, instead waltzing across the expanse with clicking heels and staring at an abstract painting. "I don't get it," he murmured.

John put down the box in the middle of the walkway. "Sherlock," he groaned. "We'll look at this stuff later."

"He used both acrylic and tempera," Sherlock whispered. "Why?"

"Oh," John snorted. "I thought you were actually curious in terms of the emotional significance of the painting. Which, by the way, is fear."

Sherlock squinted, and looked away from the painting, back to John. "Fear?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

Sherlock glanced back at the painting.

"The yellow and blue signify intense emotion. The black is darkness." John stepped forward, right up next to Sherlock, close enough to brush shoulders. "The shapes are haunting," he continued. His finger traced the forms in the air, that were like ghosts, recognizing death. They were small, nebulous, with darkness seeping into their undefined bodies.

"Why would someone paint this?"

"War." John tilted his head. "I think this signifies war."

"It looks like a bad composition to me," Sherlock stated. "It's hardly centered."

"Which makes it all the more jarring."

Sherlock stepped back a few paces. Softly: "I don't... feel anything."

John took his elbow in his hand. "Come on," he said, pulling gently. "You're thinking too hard. Don't hurt yourself."

The shop was much cozier; inviting. Yellow lamps lit up the wooden room in warm light, and the carpeted floors felt vastly different to the touch. On the right side of the room were paintbrushes and paints, and on the left there were canvasses. In the middle, there were ten rows of assorted art supplies - like clay, and sculpting tools, and mixing palettes. John paused by the brushes, looking over them. "I need a new brush," John said in passing. "One of the kids broke my favorite one, but it's only available in certain shops in Britain and Italy."

Sherlock said nothing, mulling this over until John began rolling over to the left side of the room. They brushed past a busy employee and Sherlock stopped specifically to give her a dirty look.

"We need twenty, stack them up high," John said.

"That's two pounds, John," Sherlock said, confused. "Why do you need this when it's so bloody expensive?"

"Because, I do," John replied, reaching down to pick up the heavy canvasses, three at a time. Sherlock stood there, watching quite blankly.

"Are you going to help, or not?" he asked, setting them down into the box he brought.

Sherlock frowned, and then put one canvas at a time in the box rather delicately. "You said this would be interesting," Sherlock grumbled, leaning down.

John huffed as he continued transporting the canvasses from the shelf to his cart, power lifting rapidly. "I said no such thing," John bit in a hoarse whisper.

"I don't know how you dragged me into this," Sherlock grumbled, still picking up only one canvas at the time. When a hair fell into his face, he made a very great deal out of gently brushing the hair away.

"Charm?" John offered, setting the last canvasses down. "Lots of begging?" He straightened up, placing his hands on his hips and looking at the work he'd done. Then, he took the cart in his hands, and began pushing again, towards the right end of the store. His feet made a muted sound against the carpet. Sherlock hung close. Every once in a while, he would abruptly pause in walking to look a label over, and Sherlock would promptly trip over his feet.

"So..." John started. "Who are your favorite painters?"

Sherlock's eyes took in the features of John's face, although John was staring forward, padding quietly through the store and picking things up, one at a time. "Picasso," Sherlock replied coldly.

"Picasso is overrated."

"I know. I hate him. I just said that because I don't have a favorite painter, and I didn't want you to pry further."

"That's alright," John said as he kept on walking. His eyes scoured the shelves for good materials. "Picasso can make a balanced composition, but in terms of style, he isn't the most aesthetic."

"I thought art wasn't strictly about aesthetics."

John stopped rolling the cart, and looked up at Sherlock. "So you have been paying attention."

Sherlock scoffed indignantly. "Only because you've forced me to."

John looked satisfied, and began walking again. "Do you have a favorite anything? Or are you one of those people who gets off on being utterly detached from the world? Come on. You've gotta be more interesting than that."

"You'll laugh."

"No, I won't," John assured him. "I swear."

"You will; everyone does."

"I promise. It could be utterly insane, but I won't laugh." John smiled encouragingly. "Go on."

Sherlock paused, then blurted out: "I love mysteries." He shifted his weight to his other foot, putting his hands behind his back. "I wanted to be a consulting detective."

John nodded slowly before picking up a tube of paint and dropping it into a cart. "I suppose you'll tell me I'm stupid if I ask you what that is."

"I'll tell you that whether or not you ask," Sherlock replied quite quickly.

"Oh, thanks," John grumbled. "Good to know."

His words were met with silence; Sherlock was staring with a heated conviction at the ceiling. "If the police were out of their depth, they would come to me," he murmured, tracing the cracks in the wall with his eyes. "Or, rather, I wish they did. My life would be so much less dull."

"You met me," John stated, his voice shamefully hopeful.

This time, it was Sherlock's turn to stop walking. With a gentle timbre John had never heard before, Sherlock said, "Yes, I did."

***

"Things feel different, now," Sherlock murmured, walking past the different paintings in the art gallery. His hands were together behind his back, and he walked gracefully, clinically. "But it's beautiful, isn't it?"

"I thought you didn't care about things like that," John responded. He was standing behind Sherlock. Watching art cross the room, watching color bend and move, gorgeous in its own right. He didn't know a human could occupy space and not seem real.

"I can appreciate beauty," Sherlock replied. He bent down to inspect a painting, peering intensely, observing. "To not acknowledge the virtuous is to ignore reality."

"So you like it?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Told you that you would," John murmured, "don't lie. I know."

"You know what," Sherlock droned, obviously invested in the painting more than this conversation.

"That you're human," John replied, voice firm, certain.

Sherlock froze, eyes shifting, looking somewhere left of John as if he heard something in the next room.

"You came here last before the war started," Sherlock murmured to himself, abruptly changing the subject.

"How do you know that?" John asked, pulling up directly next to Sherlock's looming figure.

"The woman in the art store didn't recognize you, but you recognized her. You haven't been here in months; perhaps years. And people don't just stop doing things for no reason. They follow the laws of inertia just as religiously as an object would. There is always a causation. I think it was the war."

"Good guess," John told him. "But no."

"What was it?"

"Coincidentally, as the war started, another one of my sister's many horrible boyfriends gave her a few stitches."

Sherlock almost looked startled for a moment - there was a flash of concern in his eyes - but John blinked and the disturbed surprise was gone. "Oh," was all he managed.

"Yeah. She kept on telling the police she got blasted and hit her head on the stairs." John readjusted his position and leaned forward onto the bar that separated the people from the paintings. "I stopped coming; I was so tied up between work and Harriet I barely had time to appreciate the peace before it ended. The fighting began about a month later. And by the time I came back here... there was nothing to see. Everything was a reflection of the war."

"But the transformation is what's so incredibly interesting," Sherlock said. "Chaos to disposition. Like different densities, settling on top one another before being shaken again."

"Maybe it's interesting to you," John admitted. "You seem to see everything differently."

"Hardly. I just notice more than the average human being." His eyes were still bound to the painting, pulling apart each shade and throwing them back together again in a mess of darkness and light. The painting Sherlock was fixated on was aptly named: "Juxtaposition."

John looked skeptical. "You can't be an expert in every field. Art, science, music... it's not possible."

"Why not?"

"Because - it's simply not possible."

Sherlock looked over at John, his eyes set in deep thought. "If someone told you that you would be here with me three years ago, would you have thought that was possible?"

"So you're saying that you're an expert in every field," John stated.

"No, Christ. Of course not."

"Then - why-"

"I'm saying that what you believe to be possible doesn't always align with reality. Perception and speculation are all distractions from the truth."

"Ah." John crossed his arms on his chest, licked his bottom lip. "So, uh, you think I'm blinding myself from the truth?"

"It doesn't matter what I think," he replied measuredly. Sherlock glanced at John, looking away from the piece to survey his expression. "Who am I to decide what the truth is?"

"I thought you were an avid supporter of objectivism."

"I'm human." He shrugged. "As you said. Inherently subjective." Sherlock clarified, "If there was an analytical instrument for art, it would be vastly more accurate than my own finite skills of deduction. You can't find data in color, negative space."

"Just emotion," John murmured more to himself, his eyes consuming the painting. "How you feel." John stepped closer to Sherlock, the movement firm, confident - as if John was occupying his own element.

Sherlock's eyes raked across John's body. John knew that because he could sense it. Down his spine, curling at the base of his skull to make a home there.

John was in his element, yes - he knew every painter, every painting, every medium, the stories behind them. He'd been here hundreds of times, and would hopefully be here hundreds of times more. He knew this place. Like it was a blessed extension of who he was.

A minute passed in silence before Sherlock said anything. John was starting to mill away to the other side of the gallery, not expecting much of a conversation, but not entirely surprised when it came. "Do you like cinema?"

John turned. Confusion bloomed in his temple, like a migraine. "Why do you ask if you've probably already deduced it?"

"I was trying to be..." John could see Sherlock purse his lips in distaste, even though Sherlock had his eyes affixed to some other painting. "Polite."

"Well, yeah, I like cinema," John said, brows forming a crease. "Why do you ask?"

"I think you should go." He turned to look John in the face, but immediately glanced away, slightly to the left, a little downcast, as if he couldn't summon the courage to speak.

John cocked his head very slightly, then nodded, still puzzling. "...Okay."

"With me," Sherlock blurted out. His eyes were glaring holes through the wall behind John's head. "I would like that."

John smiled. Sherlock wouldn't make eye contact with him, but through the tentative tone of voice, there was a subtle firmness. He knew what he was saying, what he wanted. John would have touched his arm if there weren't people passing them by, people milling around them but somehow not in the same space. To show him it was okay. It was okay to ask.

John grinned like he was trying to keep a secret. "When?"