His Little Pill (JohnLock Fanfic)

Sugar-Coat the Pill

Meaning: (To make something that is bad, unpleasant, or dissatisfactory easier to cope with, endure, or accept)

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The game ended unfinished, with Molly taking notes of property holdings, funds, et cetera before cheerily saying goodnight to Sherlock and John. The two tidied up the room in silence, picking up stray granola wrappers and water bottles. After cleaning up, they were silent a while.

The three of them had made small talk during the game, mostly between John and Molly. They talked about their majors, they talked about their teachers, they talked about family, their lives outside of college, whatever they felt needed to be brung up, quite frankly. Sherlock had a time of it trying to act as though he was indifferent, yet picking up on the information he felt needed to be filed away for later.

Molly had noticed this and grinned to herself, she could tell when Sherlock was trying to act out of character. Although she would never dare reveal it to Sherlock, he had tics, just like any other human being.

Molly liked being the only one who knew these things, but looking at John she felt her chest swell a little. He was attractive, not her type per-se, but was far from unpleasant to look at. She knew her attraction was obvious to Sherlock, he seemed to always be able to read her mind but she didn't care. So far as she'd seen, Sherlock definitely held some kind of fascination with John that was unusual.

John called Sherlock out for things; for example, when Sherlock questioned the logic of the game-- like the game not keeping up with inflation or the pointlessness of the chance cards-- John would roll his eyes and try to explain it as if he was talking to a child as Sherlock would try to rebuke in return, clearly irritated. They bickered like children, or an old married couple, and it warmed Molly's heart to have this side showing to someone other than her (and on the rare occasions, Greg).

...

"Molly was nice." John offered, in lieu of a conversation starter after she had already gone.

"She is tolerable, unlike most people." Sherlock conceded, "You two seemed to have hit it off."

"We have similar majors, so that's definitely a part of it, at least on the medical side anyway." John looked over at the dying plants again, watching them with interest. "How long until your experiment concludes?"

"I am planning on giving it another few days at least, I have all the data I really need. At this point, I'm just padding out the spreadsheet. I found out all I needed to know in the first week, but science relies on multitudes of data reinforcement for it to be accepted."

"Okay, so I thought I could do this with a nice segue into the question but you'd probably see right through it anyhow. Besides, you seem like the type that would prefer I be direct and not beat around the bush. Tell me about this Moriarty guy." John straightened his posture after saying it, as though he had drunk liquid courage in the last 10 seconds of speaking.

"Your assumption would be correct. I hate small talk." Sherlock sighed, "Moriarty was my roommate, as I have already told you, and that he jumped to his death. What I left out was that he was a psychopath. He didn't even kill himself because he was depressed, he did it to mess with me. Everyone tells me that I'm deluded and self-absorbed to think so, but I know better.

He knew how intensely I latch onto a competition, and he hoped I would make my death grander than his to finally win against him in the stupid little game of his, or finally lose... and not give into death with him. As you can see, he won the final game."

"Wow." John muttered, taking all the information in, "That's... a lot. He ever see a therapist or anything like that?"

"According to him, a few tried to commit him over the years when they saw through him, but he was a charismatic individual." Sherlock's voice grew slack and his expression distant. "He had the ability to make others follow his every word. Had he not been so interested in me as a rival, I have no doubt he would have driven others to their death for the sport of it. He liked acting too, got a lot of lead roles, but it came second nature to him since almost everything he did was part of his nice-guy persona. Molly almost fell for it, once. He might have even killed her once he got bored with her. It's unnerving to think about all the damage he could have caused."