thisherlockspeare:
An ordinary day of 221B Baker Street
I really love that they have breakfast together. I just do, I love that. I like the scene it suggests, and the many other scenes it’s clearly built upon. There’s a familiarity about it all; they’ve done this before. They do this all the time. They have a routine of sorts. This is their life. It’s good.
John gets up, takes a shower, gets dressed: Sherlock doesn’t bother. He just pulls on his dressing gown and sits down to eat.
Does John wake up first?
Everything suggests that he does; he’s the one who’s dressed. Not that that’s the most definitive evidence in the world. Sometimes, we know, Sherlock doesn’t appear to bother getting dressed all day. In canon, Watson notes Holmes’ typical late mornings. And John, on the other hand, has probably spent most of his adult life in the military; a life full of early mornings. That’s a tough habit to break. Can I make a presumption, then? (This is fiction, not science, after all. I don’t need water-tight evidence to form an opinion and run off on a tangent. Obviously.) That’s it, settled: John wakes up first. Most of the time, surely.
Does John wake Sherlock for breakfast? Or does he move as quietly as he can through the morning, putting the kettle on, picking up the paper, peering into the fridge, waiting to hear a familiar huff and grumble from Sherlock’s bedroom? Any moment now. Any moment. Look at John: he’s happy. He likes his breakfasts with Sherlock. So he waits for it: any moment now, Sherlock will wake up and join him. He doesn’t ask for company; he just gets it.
Does Sherlock wake up when John puts the kettle on? Does he wake up to the sound of John pulling plates down from a cupboard, or running water into the sink? Or is it when John’s in the shower that he wakes up, to the sound of water running, the sound of it hitting John’s skin, then drifts off into a half-sleep again until he hears the kettle boil?
In any case, Sherlock gets up. Eventually. Before his breakfast is cold. Just in time, probably.
He rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He yawns. he doesn’t bother to do up his dressing gown. John probably says, “Good morning,” or something like it. A dig about the evening before, a complaint about an experiment, or too much noise in the night, or a question about a case. Do they pick up a conversation where they left off? Something half-finished from the evening before? Or new things, random things, the things you say in the morning. “I dreamed I was on boat.” I can’t imagine Sherlock would be that interested in hearing about dreams, or relating them. But you start conversations like that in the morning, just because. It’s the familiarity. “We were going in circles, and no one noticed.” Nothing that requires a comment. Just things you say.
And they have breakfast, drink coffee, read the paper. They probably chat about the headlines. It’s an ordinary day. Nothing remarkable. It’s moments before the next thing happens.
This is probably as happy as either of these men will ever be.
