if_inconvenient | (no subject)

"Indeed it is."

"In the city?"

Cal had vaguely pictured some suburban road somewhere.

"Near the city. Well, near enough."

"Oh."

Cal nods, as he tends to do during phone conversations.

"How long do you think you'll be there?"

"Not long. I don't expect to take more than a few days. Shall I call you again before I come home?"

Cal snorts a little.

"If you want," he says, but the annoyance of before doesn't resurface.

"I seem to have a perverse urge not to report my movements until after the fact. I will, however, certainly let you know if anything interesting happens."

"You are perverse," Cal says.

Surely Sherlock wasn't expecting any other response.

"Granted."

"Just try to resist."

Being perverse.

Or disappearing without warning.

Whichever.

"Only where necessary."

Not making Cal worry is, of course, necessary.

"I dunno if I trust your definition of necessary."

Sometimes Sherlock defines things differently from the way other people do. Cal has noticed this. Frequently.

"It is necessary to keep one's promises."

The serious reply catches Cal off-guard. Sherlock has a talent for that.

"- yeah," he says. "That's true."

"One day," he says cheerfully, "you are going to stop being surprised when I do that, and I will lose a prime source of entertainment. But, in all seriousness, I told you I would let you know before I go haring off in future and so I shall."

"Okay," Cal says after a second or two. "Well. Good."

(Prime source of entertainment.

Whatever, if that's what Sherlock wants.)

He closes his eyes and tips his head back, cradling the phone against his shoulder.

"There really is something about this place," he muses. "I can't think what."

"You said something about - dinge?"

What? If something is dingy, it's because it has dinge on it, right?

"I did, yes. Joking aside, however, I have never been here before."

Ah. Yes.

Of course.

"Really?" Cal asks. "You guys lived in New York and you never went to the city?"

Weird. Not impossible, but weird.

"Indeed we did, and indeed I didn't."

Cal files that away as yet another piece of information about Sherlock's past that doesn't quite fit.

"Well, check it out a little while you're there. I've never really gotten to much, but I hear there's a lot going on."

"I believe the effect may be attributed to the fact that when I lived in New York I was not Sherlock Holmes."

- which, as far as Cal can remember, is the most direct Sherlock has been with him on that subject. He is, again, taken aback.

(He really, really should have brought his cigarettes with him.)

". . . Yeah, I kinda figured that," he says carefully.

He chuckles.

"I'll save that story for another time, I think. Perhaps when I return to California."