Sherlock timidly followed Y/N to the loo after she had retrieved a glass from the cupboard and a piece of paper from the table. It had writing on it, Sherlock's looping, slightly-sideways-slanting hand, but she doubted that was important. If it was, he didn't protest. It seemed to be the least of his worries as she made her way into the bathroom.
"Where was it?" Y/N is a little bit scared of spiders---she'd be willing to bet that everyone is, in all honesty---but the fact that Sherlock is more scared of them seemed to have somehow pitched her into another sphere of confidence.
Said man was currently occupying one side of the door frame, sort of clinging to the jamb with one hand like the fearless hero he is. "It was in the shower." He glanced around, the fact that it had moved setting his plentiful, already-frayed nerves on edge. "...But now it's not."
Sarcastically: "Yes, thank you, detective, I can see that."
"Do you think it escaped?"
Y/N cackled a little laugh. "Did you try to contain it by shutting the door?"
Mr Holmes is a man of immense mental aptitude, courage, and resilience. That is why the image of him using a shower door as a barrier between a small, harmless, slightly fluffy creature and himself is, frankly, hilarious.
If Y/N had turned around now she would have noticed his cheeks redden. "No, I noticed the shower door was open, so I shut it. The fact that a shower could also double as a spider containment unit is merely happenstance."
Deadpan: "You're pathetic."
Sherlock glared at her. "Just get it out. While you look for it, I'm going to use Mrs Hudson's loo."
If she hadn't seen his quite obvious discomfort, Y/N would have assumed that was an excuse to run for the hills.
ð·ð·ð·
When Sherlock returned several minutes later, Y/N still had nothing to show for her efforts. He found her cautiously lifting shampoo bottles one by one and inspecting them. She'd been bracing herself for the inevitable shock of spinning Sherlock's Nivea Men's body wash around to find an eight-legged critter staring back at her with it's dark, multitudinous eyes, and the tension was getting to her. She really didn't want to show Sherlock that she was ever so slightly dreading that moment, so took a deep breath and placed the last of the bottles back on the lip of the bath.
"Was it a big spider?" She asked, trying to sound interested more than anything else.
"Massive," was the reply, but Y/N decided that Sherlock, in his current state, probably wasn't a reliable source. He'd been in and out of there so fast he probably couldn't even be sure it was a spider; it probably just appeared as a black blur.
"How big is 'massive'?"
Sherlock thought for a second. He still wasn't daring to venture beyond the doorway, even keeping his sock-covered feet well away from the part of the floor where wood ended and linoleum began; as if the entire bathroom was infected with a deadly disease. "About eight centimetres. All the way across, I mean, like if its legs were all flat."
Y/N put her hands on her hips and said conclusively: "Well it probably can't have gotten into any of the cupboards, then. She's probably female; female spiders are typically larger."
"I don't care about its sex," Sherlock laughed, but it sounded brittle. "I just want it out. Have you checked behind the---"
"I've checked everywhere, calm down, she can't have gone far." A look of clarity lit Y/N's eyes.
"What? What is it?"
"Almost everywhere," she amended. "I think I know where she is. Close the door."
It was almost touching how the idea of shutting Y/N in a room with a spider seemed to make Sherlock very alarmed.
"Why?"
Y/N gently teased his fingers from the door jamb, and he let her, hands cold and clammy and, now, surprisingly pliant. Like ice cream. The touch made Sherlock's shoulders settle an inch or two into their usual position but he was still hesitant to move back enough for Y/N to imprison herself inside the little room.
"I need to shut the door to get to the dressing gown you keep on the back of it." She hadn't wanted to tell him this because---
"If it's in there I'm never wearing that ever again." His palms rose to a surrender position and he reversed until his back bumped into the wall and Y/N rolled her eyes.
With him out of the way, she used her foot to shut the door, and was grateful for the privacy so she could take a moment to steady herself. It was a strange and alien experience, feeling a nagging sense of dread whilst in a bathroom. And their bathroom is rather nice, seeing as they both have rather an affinity for bathing. The only time anyone ever feels any amount of anxiety whilst in a room where it's commonplace to be nude is when taking a pregnancy test, Y/N thought as she readied herself with a cup in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.
Sherlock has many dressing gowns. Well, more than the average person. There's three that Y/N knows of, and they are one of the few versatile items Sherlock owns. They're versatile as in he wears them when he feels like it, not because it's two o'clock on a Tuesday.
That's not hyperbole.
He has a sock index.
Anyway, if the spider is currently residing within one of the few items Sherlock feels truly at peace within---no itchy labels, no rigid timetables, no too-tight buttons---that would truly be beautifully ironic. Cats are known for choosing the lap of the most feline-averse person in a room to plonk their fluffy behinds down upon. It seems that, in their own way, spiders do the same sort of thing. Y/N almost giggled when she gave one blue silk sleeve a little shake and a scurrying whirl of legs made a hasty exit.
Eight centimetres was about right, Y/N pondered as the legs came to an abrupt halt, having carried the spider all the way to the opposite wall. Y/N wondered if spiders got tired, because it didn't protest when she gently placed the cup over the creature, careful not to catch any of its many limbs. She then slid the sheet of paper neatly under the cup, letting the spider climb onto it in its own time, before taking the whole thing, triumphantly, away from the wall.
Even though you know it won't, there's always that slight itch of fear at the back of the brain that the paper will, somehow, give out and the spider will scuttle up your arm. Y/N couldn't even hear this fear, at present, though, because she was too distracted by the moment she'd been waiting for.
Y/N isn't malicious. Not really. But she did find a certain amount of pleasure in the absolute horror that drained Sherlock's face of blood as she pushed the door open and his eyes fell on the cup now barely a foot from his rapidly rising and falling chest.
"Found her," Y/N said casually, smiling because she'd sounded so convincingly casual it made her proud.
Sherlock had backed away from her, the material of his shirt sliding against the wall with a whispering sound of silky friction. His pupils followed the spider (now chilling compliantly on one side of the upturned glass) as if it was the tip of a knife, his every muscle tensed and ready to throw himself out of harm's way. The doorknob of his bedroom prodded him in the back and he realised he was cornered. Y/N watched his adam's apple bob up and then down his long pale throat as he swallowed around the lump of anxiety rapidly forming there.
"Great, well done," he said, the most amusing hint of nervousness strangling his baritone into a slightly higher pitch. He seemed both glad that the spider had been captured, and dismayed that it had been Y/N to do so. He knew what she was probably going to do with it. Because what are friends for if not to scare each other shitless?
"Yep," Y/N popped the 'p', her ease only making Sherlock reach one hand behind him to feel around for the brass of the door handle. Y/N had stepped closer to him, slowly, so slowly Sherlock hadn't even noticed her move. He just knew that a second ago the spider hadn't been so near to him that he could count each individual beady eye. But now it was, and that was Not Good. "Do you wanna say goodbye to it?"
Finally, his desperate fingers found the cool brass they'd been seeking and he didn't hesitate to grab it with the rest of his hand.
Y/N had caught onto what he was doing now, that evil smirk teasing the corner of her lips in a way that made Sherlock's abdomen knot with white terror, and a sensation he didn't recognise. Maybe if he wasn't scared out of his wits, he would have dug deeper into what that sensation was, or, more importantly, what it meant that his female flatmate could elicit such a reaction.
But he is scared out of his wits, so instead of contemplating this strange awakening of---whatever that feeling had been, he desperately twisted the doorknob and pushed himself back against the wood of the door as hard as he could.
Obviously, as open things with hinges seem to do when a six-foot human being throws all of their weight against them, the door swung free of the jamb and Sherlock swung with it, sort of falling into his bedroom backwards as if sucked inside by a vacuum.
Righting himself, too distracted by Y/N and the thing she was still holding to feel at all shamed by his less than graceful retreat, Sherlock brushed imaginary dust from his pristine shirt. He could feel the material sticking slightly to his clammy palms as they passed over it, and he tried to stand as straight as he possibly could manage, the added distance between himself and the spider restoring a millimetre of his self-control.
He sounded more level as he instructed with an impressive amount of confidence: "Put it out the living room window." He'd made one mistake, though. He'd instructed, and that betrayed his unease.
He never usually issues a direct order to Y/N.
He's not sure why.
"There's a window in here," Y/N mused aloud, leaning a little through the door frame to get a look at what she was referring to, feigning surprise as if she'd only just noticed its existence. "Why walk to the living room?" She took a few strides calmly into the room, for every one of hers Sherlock made two of his own in the opposite direction.
"The ones in the living room open further." That confidence he'd faked a second ago had rapidly trickled away, along with the last of the blood from his face. With his high cheekbones, alabaster complexion, deep-set eyes and angular jawline, he almost looked like a roman statue. The effect was ruined by the flurrying pulse obviously beating in his chest. He's very much alive, and ready to bolt if need be.
Y/N had stopped to observe him properly, her calculating eyes analysing him with scrutiny and he didn't like it.
For some reason, he didn't want her to see him as weak.
"You'll always be afraid if you don't face your fear, Sherlock. Wanna hold her?"
He shook his head, wanting to say 'no' but all he could manage was a strangled sound because she'd got closer, so close he'd had to start moving around the bed. He was being worked into a corner again.
All of a sudden, Y/N dove forwards, taking one giant step forwards; so it begins. The relentless teasing. Luckily, Sherlock had been mentally preparing for this and had mapped an escape route, which he took now with admirable agility and speed. He side-stepped lithely onto the mattress of his bed, ran/hobbled over it as it dipped below his weight, leapt off the other side and disappeared into the hallway.
Y/N was following him, laughing, obviously, her shorter legs and desire not to cause too much distress to her new spider friend slowing her down some, not that it mattered. Sherlock had no place to run. He had planned to make a break from the apartment itself, maybe hide out at Mrs Hudson's, but when he reached the door it was locked and by the time he'd turned around to rake the surrounding area for a set of keys, Y/N was already so close she started out a yelp from the detective's throat.
He took up a run again, circling the living room, looping around the dining table, then back to the door again several times, leading them both in a giant, dizzying figure eight. Y/N was saying things like 'she won't hurt you' and 'get back here', and the whole experience was almost fun, Sherlock would later realise. Maybe if she was threatening to just tickle him, or something, when she eventually caught him, he would have seen that at the time.
Sherlock tired before Y/N, his anxiety causing his energy supply to drain twice as fast, and came to a reluctant, panting halt on his seventh lap of the kitchen. He had the forethought to do so whilst Y/N was on the opposite side of the dining table; unable to pester him unless she was secretly very good at jumping, flying, or throwing arachnids.
"Are you finished?" He asked, his tone almost irritated as he glared across the barrier between them, meeting Y/N's evil grin with his own hardened stare.
"Depends," Y/N goaded back. She was slightly out of breath too, mostly from being unable to take in a proper dose of oxygen between giggles. "Are you ready to face your fear and hold her?"
Sherlock's jaw feathered and he crossed his arms over his chest. Not confrontationally. Protectively, like a shield. "And why should I do that?"
Y/N shrugged, finding it amusing how Sherlock's pupils followed the spider in the glass up and then down as she did so. He's watching it as if he thinks she's going to part the lip of the cup from the paper and yeet the contents in his face. "I won't always be around to get them out of the bathroom for you."
Something else flashed over his face and he met her eyes now, for the first time in a while. "You're moving out?"
"What? No."
He released a sigh but it was shaky, his relief mixed with his previous tension that wasn't going to leave unless the spider did.
"I just meant, like, what if I'm at work or something? Are you just going to put off going to the loo or showering or something just because a spider is in the way? What if there's a spider on the biscuit tin? How will you survive?"
Sherlock didn't know whether to puff his chest out because what he was about to say next proved her point mute, or cower shamefully and run an embarrassed hand through his hair because what he was about to say was pathetic. He settled for doing neither and bit his bottom lip before admitting: "Mrs Hudson would get them out for me."
This had clearly been the wrong thing to say because Y/N threw back her head in a delighted cackle. Sherlock's eyes widened in horror at her lack of attention to what she was holding. He almost winced as he waited for the inevitable gap to appear between the cup and paper, the spider to seize its chance and make a run for it while her captor was busy laughing.
"You ask a little old lady to come and get spiders out for you?"
"Shut up."
"How am I only learning about this now?" She'd stopped laughing, at least, her giggles ebbing away but leaving a sparkling light in her eyes that was more than unsettling.
Sherlock had been proud of the arrangement (before Y/N had stripped it of its dignity and left it as the pitiful husk of a thing it was) and that's the only reason he had enough gall to say:
"You know how Mrs Hudson sometimes cleans up here? Or inspects it to make sure I haven't blown it up or something? When she'd do that, if she saw a spider she'd just get rid of it for me. I never usually needed to ask her to get them out because she'd just...do it."
Y/N gave him a long look and it made Sherlock feel like what he'd just said had not actually helped his case at all. The look was almost unreadable, a poker face mixed with slight boredom and maybe a hint of disbelief. Sherlock's confession was so utterly pitiable that backing off and ending this here and now had flittered into Y/N's mind, a merciful ghost of a thought. But then she remembered all the times he'd teased her, and the merciful ghost was flapped away with a metaphorical dismissive hand. "You're a child." She didn't mean it as in, mean it. Meanness wasn't her intent, and she wanted him to know that, so she'd made sure to say it with an amused smile
"I'm not a child!" he snapped back, the words patted together and hurled at her like a snowball.
She ducked it easily. "You are.
"May I remind you that I deal with murderers for a living---"
"And yet little fluffy arachnids have you yelping and sprinting for the streets."
"Little fluffy ones I can take in my stride. It's big, gangly, creepy ones that I don't like. Like that one. So please can you just put it outside?" The pleading edge to his voice appealed to the part of Y/N that loved him, and she sighed.
Gently: "Wouldn't you like to be able to get the spiders out on your own?"
His pale eyes rolled as he gave a harsh laugh. "Of course. No one likes being scared. But I'm not touching it and if you make me I'll---"
Y/N's lip curled. "You'll what?"
Sherlock's cheeks blossomed with a pastel pink hue. He'd seen movies, and that tone of voice sounded dangerously close to flirtatious.
He didn't mind, if he was completely honest with himself.
No, what caused those tendrils of heat to tickle the back of his neck was the fact that he actually seemed to like it.
"I'll..." What could he threaten Y/N with, really? Under no circumstances would he ever want to cause her any real kind of harm. And, as gifted as she was in the teasing department, he knew she would never actually cross the line into full-on bullying. She knows how distressing just the idea of a spider being near him is, has probably noticed his shirt slightly clinging to the beads of sweat at his back. He's in no real danger of her actually putting the spider on him so there's no real need to defend himself. He threw his mind back to childhood, trying to remember some of the things Mycroft would shout at him when they'd argue as children. "I'll lay on you."
That had been the first thing to come to mind. It had seemed smart at the time, witty, foreboding, memories of how uncomfortable it was to be pinned to the floor, trapped but not in enough pain to ask for help from Mother, persuading him he'd hit some kind of mark. However, now, upon further consideration (and judging by the, frankly, startled look on Y/N's face) Sherlock wanted to sink through the floor.
One of Y/N's eyebrows had been raised and now the other had inched up her forehead to join its counterpart. That smile hadn't disappeared, though, Sherlock realised with slight relief. If he'd made anything awkward by threatening to lay on his female best friend she didn't show any discomfort. "...You'll what?"
"That's what Mycroft used to say when we were children. I'll lay on you."
Y/N made a humming sound. "Don't tempt me."
Definitely flirtatious, Sherlock realised with elation and exhilaration. He didn't have time to explore this new activity further, though, because his eyes fell on the empty cup in Y/N hands.
Empty.
Please enjoy this fantastic piece of fanart of Sherlock hiding from the adorable little spider, sent to me by the extremely talented @7DEAFF !!!! â¤ï¸ð¤©