Despite his practice, Sherlock still wasn’t quite used to waking up of his own volition, but the curtains that the flat was naturally furnished with let in quite a lot of light and so he turned with a groan, burying his face back into his pillow at around 8 AM and couldn’t relax himself again until about 9:30. He’d always said that the daylight didn’t agree with him, but few people knew that wasn’t just an excuse. Sherlock really did function better by night, he felt more energized by the curtain of night around him and in his opinion, though much more clearly in the late hours. Yes, it was the opposite of how most people operated, but he wouldn’t let that stop him, he knew whom he was, what he wanted and what he needed. It was really other people who seemed to have qualms with that.
Sherlock enjoyed sleeping into the late afternoon, in fact, so when his alarm on his phone started to ring, he moaned a piteous, “Nooo…” and reached for it to press ‘snooze’ but just managed to knock it off his bedside table and it slid out of reach. He couldn’t sleep.. Hadn’t been able to since he met Sadji, but it didn’t mean he stopped trying. With this, he stretched out a long arm, which tapered into long, grasping fingers, but no matter how he contorted himself, attempted to reach it, it appeared he would have to actually get out from under the covers and stand up. It was 1:36PM by the time he was on his feet and he displayed his flexibility to an empty room by folding at the waist and effortlessly swiping the obnoxiously vibrating and chiming device and disabling the alarm with a petulant expression. He supposed he should get ready to hear some police intel and speak about things Natasha dare not express in a thread online, but that was common in his line of work. People didn’t actually trust technology much when it contained secrets their lives held personally or professionally, thus the spoken word won out over the history of the written one when it came to the details of the life of a man or woman and they found themselves passing down history verbally as they once did thousands of years ago.
With that rude interruption, he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes in the shower, shaved and opted to slip into his purple shirt that was shockingly tight across his slender torso but betrayed nothing of an attempt at sex-appeal or an eye towards seduction. He simply liked the shirt and ignored that sometimes women and men of a certain persuasion stared at him more intently but that was easy to ignore. Sex, the concept of it, was quite boring to him and really wasn’t up his alley in any way, shape or form. Sure, Mycroft had assumed it was because he was afraid of it but Mycroft was a prat who tended to assume everything and see nothing. Perhaps he wasn’t giving his brother enough credit, but other people had certainly given him past his due, so he didn’t see a reason to become another starry-eyed moron over his staunchly bureaucratic and nationalistic kin. Sherlock wore simple black trousers with it and his normal dress-shoes, a little beat up from the running through filthy places and pounding the pavement as he did but in surprisingly good condition, nevertheless.
When he heard the knock, he got up from playing Air on the G String by Bach, imitating the fingering on the arm of his couch and answered the door, a barely-traceable little smile on his lips as he opened the door. His flat looked like a biohazard, boxes here and there, the skull on the mantle, the knife stuck into the wood, keeping his relevant papers in order, there were beakers, test tubes, a bunsen burner, a high powered microscope and coils of tubing spread out on the table with a box containing countless antiseptic wipes, q-tips, gloves and slides nearly hanging off the corner of it.
“Please come it. It’s a little, ah- cluttered. So the chair or sofa, if you don’t mind. I’ll be right back.” With that, he retreated into the kitchen and brought out two steaming mugs of coffee. “I figured this would be more suited to your tastes than tea, Ms. Romanoff.” So it was already clear, he knew she preferred coffee and she was definitely no ‘Mrs’. He caught a whiff of coffee on her as he leaned forward to hand her the mug and tried to disguise a smirk.