John comes out of his bedroom with only pyjama bottoms and rumpled hair. It seems that, since as Sherlock has been back, his body decided to catch up on all the lost sleep of about a month and a half in as short a time as possible.

The rest of their apartment is quiet, so John thinks that, even at 11.44am, he is the first person up. That is, right up until the point that he catches Sherlock standing in the kitchen, his back to John, weighing a human body part in his hands. John never had disposed of the stuff in the fridge, and now he bitterly regrets it. Still, there is an expression on Sherlock’s face, an expression John recognises as deep in statistical analysis, and John decides against making his presence known before Sherlock is ready to acknowledge him.

After a while, Sherlock turns and opens the fridge door, putting the nondescript body part back where it came from. As John watches, Sherlock goes to the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Delight touches his features when he first locates cheap Tesco plastic gloves, and then begins dutifully to fill one up with water.

John finds himself curious over watching what Sherlock is about despite himself.

The street facing window in the kitchen is already open. Without so much as tying a knot in the top of the glove designed for covering one’s hands during the chore of washing up, Sherlock’s long fingers pinch it up the top, hover it just outside the window, and then simply let it drop.

“Sherlock!” cries John, abandoning all ideas of waiting for Sherlock to realise he is standing there in his own time.

“Oh, good morning, John! I thought it was time for you to wake up.”

He is already busy pulling out and filling another glove with water.

John is agape when Sherlock deigns to look at him again.

“Oh, I assure you the centrifical force surrounding these water… uhm, gloves will keep the water leakage to a minimum. At least until it hits its target.” He’s smiling as he says this. Damn him, he’s finding the whole scenario amusing. “Without proper experimentation, I cannot know whether they will burst the way proper water balloons have a propensity to upon impact.”

John rushes into the kitchen, sure that he’s stood by for more than enough of this. He reaches out for the filled glove in Sherlock’s hand about half a second before he lots go.

“Oops,” Sherlock says, looking not in the least bit sorry.

John thinks he can hear the beginnings of an outcry on the streets.

“Sherlock, there are people down there!” John reminds him.

“Reporters, John,” Sherlock says in answer. “Hardly people. Besides, I’m just taking matters into my own hands.”

John doesn’t know why he asks, but he does anyway. With a certain amount of resignation, “Matters into your own hands?”

“Precisely.” For a small mercy, Sherlock leaves off filling a new water glove in order to offer this explanation. “Lestrade informed us he would not be able to guarantee dispersing this crowd without potentially causing new dramas, did he not?”

“You know he did,” John grumbles.

“Therefore I just took out the middleman. It’s very efficient, I assure you.” This said with one of Sherlock’s patented thin-lipped smiles.

“You don’t think this is going to create a drama?!” John asks him.

“I didn’t drop body parts from the fridge, John.” Sherlock widens his eyes as though that would have been a most grave mistake. “That would have caused a problem.”

“Yes,” John murmurs. “The public probably don’t need to know about that particular habit of yours.”

No matter how he tries, John can’t quite keep his lips from curving. Thankfully, Sherlock lowers his eyes before he sees it. Or does he? The more genuine curving of his own lips would tend to suggest otherwise.

“No indeed.” The break is clearly over. Sherlock starts to fill a new water glove. “I can tie this one up at the wrist, if you’d like,” he offers to John. “Use it towards an experiment as to whether the plastic of these gloves really is thin enough to burst upon impact.”

“This is a very bad thing you are doing,” John reiterates, just in case Sherlock has any strange ideas that they are somehow partners in this crime because of the timing when John happened to get out of bed.

“Oh, I know. Isn’t it?” Sherlock extends his arm, handing John the full water glove, tied up at the wrist and everything. John hesitates, looking into Sherlock’s pale eyes. Oh, who is he kidding? They both know he’s going to take it. Of course they are partners in crime.

The two grown men stand by the open street facing window in their apartment, dropping water gloves at the group of people foolish enough to have decided to outstay their welcome on the doorstep of 221B Baker Street.

In the end, Sherlock’s experiment does succeed in giving them a few hours of respite from the reporters, so John calls that a win.

*

Molly comes over, and she is so flustered in those first few minutes of seeing them both, of John seeing that she knew all along that Sherlock was still alive.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, looking between Sherlock and John, but mostly at John. She probably can’t imagine any apologies would be owing to Sherlock, and John would have to say she was right. “I’m so, so sorry!”

“It’s alright. It’s alright, Molly. Really.” John puts a hand on her shoulder and guides her to sit.

Sherlock’s already sitting down, and there’s a smirk on his face that John thinks must be at the cost of Molly’s extreme nervousness. John wonders if he’s even thought to thank her for the huge and amazing help she’s been to him. He likes to think he has but, truthfully, he isn’t sure.

“He’s back now. Let’s have an end to all of that, hm?” John suggests as he joins the other two in sitting.

“Yes. Oh yes.” But her actions doing suit her words. As she sits there, still so flustered, John doesn’t know what more he can say to her, except…

John decides to bring out the water glove story, with the help of some of Sherlock’s annotating narration.

“What he means to say is, it really was all Sherlock’s fault,” John is quick to qualify.

Sherlock shoots him a look but John has learned how to be a smart ass in the time he’s been Sherlock’s flatmate. John think he sees something like approval in Sherlock’s gaze before he looks away.

“Oh, I don’t doubt it was.” Molly’s personal battle against grinning broadly seems to be a losing one. “You probably got all of their equipment wet.”

“Not our problem,” murmurs Sherlock, and John can’t help but agree.

Molly goes to work after seeing them. John wonders if she organised it that way so that she would have an easy excuse to get away if things didn’t go well here. 

“You’re happy again,” she says to him privately, while Sherlock is still upstairs in their apartment.

“Yeah,” John agrees. “I am, a bit.”