Some things are common knowledge. For example: basic maths, keeping your mouth closed when you chew, and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant man not to be argued with.

But common knowledge can be ignored, if one chooses to. So for whatever reason, I have taken it upon myself to be the person who argues with the world's only consulting detective.

I correct him on his people skills. I try to use my own logic on the subject of emotion to persuade him to see things through my eyes. I try and try again to level him out, or get him to shut up, or even put him off an idea or deduction.

It's not an easy feat. I often have to resort to cursing, shouting, spiteful hand gestures, and on occasion, physical force. I don't usually win. But sometimes I get him to reconsider, or take something back, or keep quiet. My arguments aren't always valid, and my methods aren't always pleasant, but eventually he comes around. Most of the time, all it takes is me being the one to grow quiet and leave the room for him to realize what he said or did during the argument was morally or humanly wrong.

Except there is one argument we have at least once a month (if not more), as of late, that has no winning side. We both lose this argument, no matter which (or few) words are exchanged. It's pointless to bring up, and we're at a stalemate with it.

And it's the topic of our feelings for one another.

##

I first bring it up the second I see him again.

I thought he had died. I thought Moriarty had won. I thought that, instead of Moriarty "burning Sherlock's heart (me)" as Sherlock feared, Moriarty had somehow forced Sherlock to kill himself instead. I still refuse to believe that Sherlock would willingly commit suicide. There had to be a catch; after all, he isn't the sort.

He's too vain to kill himself, to waste his mind like that. And even though it took me a long time (roughly eighteen months) to reach this conclusion, I knew it had to be true.

So I waited for the miracle.

And when it came, I think I didn't know what to do with myself. I remember seeing grey-black-white making the edges of my vision blurry, and I remember swaying on my feet, Sherlock anticipating my faint and catching me before I could actually pass out. He steadied me and, slowly, the haze lifted. I righted myself, slapped him across the face, and then brought him into my arms and repeatedly called him a foolish, reckless, cruel idiot.

But he only smiled that smile at me, the smirking half-smile he gets whenever he's proud of me. He mussed my hair, apologized, and launched into his explanation.

It's then that I opened my mouth and ruined things. "…So you were right, then. Moriarty did target me. But he's gone now, and so are his men; so why can't we, you know… try, Sherlock? Remember what we talked about before all this? About… about caring for one another? And… a-and having a trial period, like an experiment? Can't we do that? I've missed you. God, you don't know how much. I just want, now, to –"

But he had cut me off, a forlorn expression briefly flashing across his face – true heartbreak – before turning blank and unreadable, a perfectly practiced mask. A mask he only needs, it seems, when he actually feels something, when he is, more often than not, alone with me to have them. He told me quietly, "No, John. You need to let me finish. I said I spent those three years of my 'death' taking out every assassin and backup plan Moriarty had, but I'm not sure it was enough. One got away, and for all I know, he's going to report back to Moriarty. After all, if I can fake my death as perfectly as I did, it's only logical that he could do the same just as easily."

Unfortunately, this is how our little stalemate gets re-hashed. See, it's been increasingly worse, our argument, all because Moriarty could still be at large. He might try to use similar methods again. Emotional blackmail, I like to call it.

And so that's just it, isn't it? His job isn't perfectly finished, and he has all the proof he needs to remind me why it's too dangerous to go on the way we both want to, and I keep telling him it's rubbish, we're in danger anyway, and it doesn't matter because it would be better to go out being together instead of apart, and on and on.

And it's all of this, within the week since his return from the dead, which collides together to form our routine spat for the months to come. And this spat is triggered whenever we slip into any sort of scenario that is too friendly, too warm, too familiar.

##

I hand Sherlock a cup of tea, and our fingers accidentally overlap. We freeze in place for a millisecond. Then I'm the one who takes his sweet time removing my fingers, dragging the tips across Sherlock's long, smooth digits until there is no length of them left to touch, and I let my hand fall away completely.

"John," he says, swallowing. He looks away. "Don't."

"It's fine, Sherlock, it –"

"No, John," he reminds me, and then he stands and leaves the kitchen. I hear the violin, too loud, moments later.

##

The couch is being refurbished, stuffed and sewn to near-newness, and we're left with only our chairs. I take mine, turn it toward the telly, and in doing so, have it sitting beside Sherlock's. He stiffens in his chair, our forearms brushing lightly as I sit down, and he holds his book (another one about biology in general, and in specific, about the mummification process that can occur naturally in nature, such as in a bog) up closer to his nose.

"Do you mind if I turn it up a bit louder? I know you're reading, but –" and I casually nudge his forearm with my elbow to get his attention, and generally, to receive a response.

"I'm going to me room," he states suddenly, and he stands and turns sharply away.

"What? Hang on!" I holler after him, leaping to my feet and charging behind him. "What the hell, Sherlock? All I did was ask you a question –"

"And you touched me, John. And anyone with a head knows that when one person feels for another the way you do for me, they will use any excuse they can to touch that person, even if it seems casual, and it's a means of getting closer to said person," he says in a series of quick, breathless words.

I hate it when he strings together things almost too fast to follow. I scowl and throw up my hands. "That's bloody exaggerated! I wasn't doing a thing like that! Ever since you've been back, you've been nothing but tense, do you know that?"

"You're the one who suggested the impossible within the first hour of my return," Sherlock snaps back, and I feel my body jerk as if on guard for an attack.

"I was a melding pot of emotion then, Sherlock! I was hurt and angry and relieved and overjoyed and flush with worry and love and betrayal! How care you use what I said against me? I was in a fragile state, possibly in shock that you were alive. Can you really blame me for bringing it up then? Can you really use it against me all these times now? All I did was miss a friend! And I thought, before I knew, that if things were alright –"

"But they aren't. So drop it," Sherlock retorts icily. There is a flash of pain in his eyes, but aside from that, I see nothing. It's as if he's purposely torn out his heart and left it to rot. He turns again on his heel and heads for his room, door closing loudly, but not quite a slam.

I return to my chair and slump down into it. Even the telly can't calm me; I shut it off, sigh, and put my face in both my hands as I bend over, elbows on my knees.

##

It's at a crime scene on one of our first cases as a team again (no one knows we're there except for Greg, who sneaks us in under the disguise of a coroner and an evidence collector) that things turn truly sour.

I stand not three feet away from Sherlock, perhaps even more than that, and am determining the cause of death and trying to make my own little deductions (more like suggestions, though; I haven't the knack Sherlock does, obviously, even if I've been trained by him to look harder and think a bit more). When I stand and got o speak to him, prepared to mutter to him the way we used to, he suddenly backs off.

He steps away, circles the body, and begins rattling off his own theories. He ignores me. Flabbergasted and offended, I look away and refuse to speak to him the rest of the night. I do, however, throw my ideas and evaluations at Greg, who listens carefully and nods on occasion. Sherlock doesn't glance at me for a second, as far as I can tell.

And he doesn't even mind that I'm giving him the silent treatment. It used to work well for me; he would get huffy and annoyed that I was neglecting him, being unresponsive, and he would threaten to go back to speaking to the skull since I was just as inanimate as it was.

But this time, he doesn't say anything about it. In turn, he ignores me as well.

And it's that lack of even average proximity, that failure of even communication through argument or idea-tossing that I know I'm at my limit. The final straw that broke the camel's back: that night at a crime scene in which Sherlock made it seem that I no longer existed.

##

It's killing me, really. But I can't tell Sherlock that. I can't sit there and say, "By the way, Sherlock, I'm beginning to hate you more than I love you because you refuse to even touch me anymore, and all we do is fight, or, lately, hardly say anything to one another at all, unless it's to ask to pass the salt or make a cuppa."

It's ridiculous and insane and tiring.

Thus, I'm finished with it. Sherlock is being uncharacteristically cautious and overly defensive about it, and I'm being unusually slapdash and eager about it, and we're both going about it the wrong way. And yet I feel like I'm not too eager; I'm only trying to restore the friendship we once had, at the very least. He's the one who keeps taking each show of normal comfort or response as flirting, and I can't understand why. I know I said what I did when we came back into my life again, but I already gave me reasons for it. Why can't he accept them?

(And why won't he answer me about some of them?)

…It's too much.

So, now, I want to fix things. And I think it's high time I settle this stalemate once and for all in a single, bold move.

##

"Sherlock," I announce firmly as I step into the kitchen one late morning. He's at the table, examining something under that microscope of his, and jotting down brief notes in his shorthand. I wait for him to turn and face me.

"What is it, Joh–?" he begins with a measured tone, but I don't let him finish. I grab his face and tenderly rub the pad of my thumb over one of his cheekbones as I kiss him with everything I've got.

He smells of coffee and grapefruit with brown sugar, and his lips are still slightly sticky with the sugar from either one. I lick the seam of his lips to capture the taste, and he gasps into my mouth just as I'm beginning to pull away.

When I look at him, I'm slightly breathless. I can practically feel the dilation in my eyes, and I can see it in his, the pupils blown wide and his lips parted. He shakes it off and turns back to his microscope. His voice is low, seemingly threatening, but in fact sounding husky, aroused. "John," he says slowly, "I thought we agreed we weren't going to –"

"And I decided: 'fuck that,'" I tell him quickly. I yank out another seat from the table and sit down, staring at him. He keeps his eyes fixed on his microscope, but he isn't looking into it. "Sherlock, I get where you're coming from, all right? But just this once, can you put aside your stubbornness and realize that I'm right? We're stronger as a team, as friends or more, and you know it. I can't even work with you anymore, because you won't even let me get close enough to speak to you properly."

"Even if you were correct," he replies at length and around a clearing of his throat, his eyes lifting to meet mine, "Aren't you the one who originally was all against being with me? I've sat there and listened, you know, to every time you denied that we were dating or together. Just because you decided a few years ago that you were tired of women and wanted me doesn't mean it still stands, not after what I put you through, and not after all the times we've fought over this these past few months."

"…Sherlock, honestly," I say with a roll of my eyes. I put my face in my hand and run it down the length of my skin. I look back at him and give him one of my dead serious stares. "I was the one to ask for a trial period at the least. I was the one who confessed first. Do you really think I still care what anyone else thinks of us? And for another thing," I go on, gaining speed now, "I'm past all that about the fall you took and leaving me in the shadows. You're back and we're mostly in our same routine, but you're holding back too much. You don't even look at me. It's like I'm not even here."

He sucks in air and looks like he's torn between saying three to five separate things. In the end, he tells me, "I do look at you, John, more often than I should, and with more longing than I can bear. Just listening to your voice pains me sometimes, and I know you're correct. I have been behaving poorly, and very unlike myself. I suppose I didn't think the collective –" and I assume he means Moriarty and his suicide and the hunting of assassins and coming back to me all as a whole "– would affect me as much as it has, could even claw at me as much as it has. But, at one point, John, you must understand that I got tired of fighting, of the arguments of my doing through my own hesitancy and confliction to protect you and remain married to my work like I had always planned for myself."

Hearing this sends a startling ache through me, a rip in my lungs, heart, and ribs that twists everything into crumpled, shredded paper. I feel my breath hitch, and I have to glance away to stop myself from falling too deeply into Sherlock's gaze.

I nod my head slightly. "Yeah, we fight a bit, but we always have. It's just that, this time, it's about us and not about the petty things we used to fight about." I sigh and shake my head. "So level with me, Sherlock: are you the one who's lost interest in me, and this is your way of 'letting me down easy'? Because you're not very good at it. You sound more like an insecure teenager. I can tell you still care, but how much? It seems like all we're doing is causing each other pain by avoiding the issues that need the most attention."

Sherlock smirks bitterly at that, but only for a split second. Then he's sighing as well, a pale hand carding through his dark hair. "I don't think I will ever lose interest in you, John," he says so quietly that it's nearly a whisper. He shakes his head a bit, peers sideways at me, and then stands from his chair. He kneels before me, where I sit staring and hopeful, and he places a hand on mine where it rests on the table. "I shouldn't have taken your determination for granted. You are as hard-headed as I am, in your own way."

"Got that right," I say with a grin, and then all thoughts yield when Sherlock leans up and presses his lips to mine again. When he breaks the long kiss, I have to ask: "So can we, then? Try being more-than-flatmates for a spell?"

"I think I've resisted long enough," Sherlock concedes with a smirk. "You've convinced me."

"Glad I could use my wits, then," I say with a grin of my own, and soon I'm bringing him back toward me, because I need to memorize how those lips feel before we're fully agreed. I need to know if I truly like them as much as I think I do.

And I find that I do, and Sherlock seems just as pleased.

And that, quite simply, is how one goes about resolving a stalemate with their flatmate.

If only I had known direct confrontation could be so easy; I would have tried it long ago. – But then again, I think I had to keep pushing, remaining patient, until everything was broken. Only then was it able to be put back together properly.

How tragically poetic.