Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson decided to go on a camping trip. After dinner and a bottle of wine, they laid out the sleeping bags and went to sleep.
Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend.
"Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
Watson replied, "I see millions of stars."
"What does that tell you?"
Watson pondered for a minute.
"Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you, Holmes?"
Holmes was silent for a minute, then spoke: "Watson, someone has stolen our tent!"
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"RUN!" the world's only consulting detective bellowed, and his flatmate didn't waste the time pointing out he was already pelting for the car as fast as his military-trained legs could take him. He reached the Jeep only a breath after Sherlock did and dove into the passenger's seat, slamming and locking the door as the engine roared to life. A panicked moment later, unwelcome hands scrabbling wildly at the windows, they were peeling out of the car park tires squealing...and safely on the highway.
"That," John panted, glancing at the figures fading into the distance behind them, "was bloody close." He caught Sherlock's eye, fighting a grin, and in a moment both men were cackling hysterically, slapping the dashboard and congratulating each other.
"You have it, right?" Sherlock asked as continental Europe flew by their windows, and John nodded, producing a little girl's princess play set, cheap paste gems set into silvery plastic.
"Gaudy thing, isn't it. Who'd have figured?" he chuckled quietly, tossing the little clear vinyl bag up and catching it. "Hidden in a plastic tiara, the crown jewel of..."
"If you need to hide a tree, find a forest," Sherlock told him with a wry smile, checking the map across his knees and turning north. "We got it back, anyway." He paused, a pensive look on his thin face, then turned to John, his grin slowly turning manic. "You know, it is hidden in a little girl's toy. We could give it to the next family we see with children, tell Mycroft we're sending him on a scavenger hunt... Can you imagine his face?"
"What, and sic your brother on some unsuspecting family?" John asked, though he was laughing so hard at the thought he was wiping back tears. "Even you aren't that cruel, Sherlock!"
"Between this and the Geneva incident," the detective grinned, "Mycroft is probably going to be threatening knighthood again. Maybe even lordship this time, who knows. Fancy being a Lord?"
"Speaking of forests, we still plan on camping in the Muritz Park tonight, or has the case sidelined that?" John asked offhandedly, digging for his phone, and Sherlock nodded his confirmation.
"Our site reservation's under Sigerson, paid for with one of Mycroft's offshore accounts. Can't afford a credit card slip just now, and they don't take cash. We'll have to hide out there for a few days, until the jewel theft blows over and we can head back to France without drawing...unwanted attention." There had been a lot of that lately.
John nodded, and occupied with their thoughts, both men were fairly quiet until some hours later, when they pulled into the lush green campsite. Restless after being cooped up in the car for so long, Sherlock bounded out and began to unpack their gear...then froze abruptly.
"John?" he called. "Come and have a look at this."
Stretching and groaning, the doctor unfolded his stocky frame from the uncomfortable vinyl seat and shambled back to survey the boot of the car with his flatmate.
"What am I supposed to be looking for?" he asked, after a moment's consternation. The consulting detective rolled his eyes.
"What isn't there, John?"
"Is this another one of those 'Study in Pink' guess what's missing sorts of things?" John asked suspiciously, and groaned as Sherlock nodded.
"Hell. Well, let me see. There's no food or anything edible..." John noted wryly, shifting through the contents of the boot.
"There's some food."
"Your secret chocolate bar stash doesn't count. You won't share that anyway."
"There's still some jerky and a box of granola bars," Sherlock pouted, stung.
"Very little food then," John amended. "Also absent are clean clothes, we're both starting to smell pretty rank..." The two men had been camping and wandering over mainland Europe for the better part of a month, usually with some sort of armed pursuit in tow, and Dr. Watson was starting to feel like a kid at uni again, wondering just how long he could keep wearing the same pair of socks until it crossed the line into indecent, and how long he could continue living off crisps and instant noodles before his body made its protests known.
Sherlock groaned, and the doctor glanced up at him, puzzled.
"What?"
"What what?"
"You're doing the thing," John told him warily. "The thing you always do when I'm being too dense for words, when I'm missing something right in front of my nose, like a particular type of tobacco ash, or...or an apple seed shoved up a corpse's nostril, or something stupid that only you would notice..."
Sherlock just stared at him, silvery eyes wide and unblinking.
"John," he said at last, irritatingly posh voice exasperate, "someone stole our tent."
Now it was John's turn to groan. Of course, obvious, once Sherlock pointed it out...
"Most of our cooking gear too, it looks like," he growled, shuffling through the rest of their hastily packed and repacked bags. "Bloody hell..."
They must've interrupted the thieves midway through their raid, the two friends decided, given how little else was missing. Sherlock did remember seeing a few people scattering from the car park as they pelted back towards the Jeep and safety, but he had just figured they were running from the gang of men waving guns and screaming like banshees. Their laptops were still safe at least, John noted sourly, shoved securely into the bag under the front seat. Small favors.
"Well, we can't go out and get a new tent yet," his partner said, surprisingly practical for once. "Every man in Sylvius's gang is going to be looking for us, it'll be a few days until we can risk going into town to buy one."
"With what money?" John asked moodily, pulling out sleeping bags and what food remained. "Bribing that street magician took most of my cash, and you said yourself we can't afford a credit card slip right now..."
"Mycroft can wire it to us," Sherlock decided, digging a box of matches under from under a crumpled, long-abandoned tuxedo and attempting to get a fire going. He succeeded only in singing the ends of his long, pale fingers. "After the jewel theft and the Geneva incident, the least he owes us is a new tent. Until then," he sighed, trying for the umpteenth time to balance kindling in a pyramid, "it appears we're sleeping rough for a few days."
Which was how Sherlock Holmes later found himself, for the first time in years, staring up at the full glory of the night sky.
Living in London, he never quite saw how the sky arced away overhead, limitless and staggering, a vaulted cathedral of shifting miasmous blues and greys and stars tumbling into infinity. You saw stars in the city, sure, but they were pale, illusory stage-set things, blinking like Christmas lights above the far more impressive constellations framed in streetlamps and skyscraper windows. They were nothing like this. Sherlock stared intently up at the shifting, wheeling patterns of color and shadow. There was meaning there, he knew, ways of gauging direction and weather and climate, of teasing out secrets of the universe's beginning and ending still only half guessed at, but that was a method and a madness he had never seen fit to educate himself in. It was frustrating, like staring at the page of what promised to be a good book, written in a language he couldn't yet read. It was not a feeling he was used to.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, gazing intently into the sky above him. Staring up like this, there was no perspective, no scale or means of focusing, nothing to stop you from falling headfirst into the trillions of miles of stars blazing and balanced in their void. The cold bone-white light (very different form of illumination than sunlight, fascinating, further study required) bleached into his skin, drawing him upward, and for a moment he felt himself tumbling, heart lurching out his chest and his body falling after it, forward into the infinitely empty space with nothing to anchor him. The detective put a hand out to steady himself, felt the wet grass clutched reassuringly in his fingers, but he didn't look away from the sky.
"John, tell me about stars."
For a moment, John thought he'd heard wrong.
"Hmm?"
"You said I ought to know a bit more about the solar system," Sherlock said levelly, white giants and swirling galaxies and drifting nebulas reflected in his quicksilver eyes. "This seems as good an opportunity as any. What can you tell me about them?"
John was silent for a moment.
Few people ever gave thought to it, in the shadow of the brilliant Sherlock Holmes, but John was by no means stupid. He'd gotten his doctorate with honors from a well-regarded university, and other than his brief and ill-conceived flirtation with playing clarinet in primary school, and his even more ill-fated stint in a teenage rock band, he'd always leaned more towards the scientific side of things, definite and precise and endlessly fascinating. Like most children, he'd been spellbound with those little twinkling lights early on. Unlike most people though, who learned the constellations and a bit of the mythology, then forgot it all in pursuit of girls and grades and important things, John had indulged his interest slowly and methodically, and remembered almost all of it even years later. Looking up at the endless expanse of sky now, all the billions and billions of stars circling the pale blue dot on which they lay, the Milky Way drifting like a scarf across the gentle glitter of the Pleiades and the aurora borealis beginning to flash and flame to the north, it all came back to him in a soft swirl of nostalgic wonder. Even knowing how it all worked, it was still incredible.
So John spoke. Sherlock silent beside him, he spoke into the darkness, explaining how red stars burned cold, only about 4000 Kelvin, and would die soon, and blue stars burned hot and long and bright, casting light that would arrive on Earth anywhere from five to thousands of years later. He spoke about how red giants had their outer layers slowly stripped away to form dense, hot white dwarf stars, which would cool to black dwarfs, and how that would someday be the fate of our sun. There was an elegance and cadence to his words, almost like poetry, as he spoke of the rise and fall of the visible constellations wheeling around fixed Polaris, and of the unseen heavenly bodies as well, neutron stars giving off electromagnetic pulses and comets regular as clockwork and the thousand or so meteorites a day, all rock and ice and scattered elements, that burn up on contact with the Earth's atmosphere. Life on Earth really was fragile, he explained, subject to asteroids and supernovas and gamma ray bursters and even the unstable nuclear reactions of our own Sun, as its hydrogen fuses into helium and the core begins to contract.
"Keep going," Sherlock demanded, when John paused. It was the closest he was likely to come to admitting he was interested in what John had to say about worlds beyond their own.
So, as instructed, the doctor kept speaking into the night. He told Sherlock about how Jupiter, with its massive gravity well, picked up most of the asteroids that came close enough to threaten the planet they lay on...but also kept them close enough to splinter off, to careen into Earth in a disaster similar to the one that might've killed the dinosaurs. He talked about how most of the elements found in human bodies were formed in the heart of exploding stars, and how hydrogen and helium combusted in a vicious, powerful self-sustaining nuclear reaction to form most of those pretty twinkling lights that people love to wish on. Growing hoarse, he explained the Fermi paradox - that mathematically, the universe ought to be seething with life, but we had found no traces of it anywhere but our own little planet, and no one was quite sure why. He was about to talk about interferometry and the use of parallel mirrors to focus light down to a hundredth of an inch and view distant worlds when he became aware of a particular, peaceful sort of silence from the stretch of darkness beside him.
"Sherlock?"
There was no reply, though whether Sherlock was asleep or wandering somewhere in his own thoughts, John couldn't say. Regardless, the forest was still, in the peculiar, benevolently watchful way you only got out in the wilderness, miles from any true human habitation. Drinking in the unexpected quiet, the doctor settled back to stargaze just a little more, arms tucked behind his head.
If nothing went wrong, they'd be meeting Mycroft's agents in Issoire in six days to hand off the diamond, and most of Sylvius's gang should go down in the sting two days after. Assuming nothing went wrong. Riiiight. After that, Sherlock had promised they'd head to the Holmes family chateau off Tarnos for a few days of showers and real beds. John bit back a snort. Leave it to Sherlock to have a bloody chateau and forget to mention it till now! A few days of sun and sand and regular meals, and they'd head west to Rome, Sherlock had heard a rumor of Oskar Dzundza turning up, and wanted to investigate. And after that...anyone's guess.
Lying out in the cold grass, with no money, no food, no tent, a diamond worth millions of pounds hidden in a kiddie playset in the car, a murderous gang of jewel thieves after him, and the Milky Way shivering and shimmering overhead, John Watson smiled. Life with Sherlock Holmes was obscenely hazardous; he'd lost track of the number of times he'd been shot at, kidnapped, threatened, almost burned to death, or thrown off buildings. Having Sherlock as a friend and a flatmate and partner in crime played bloody hell with his professional life, and it meant that he'd never yet had a girlfriend make it past the third date. Sherlock himself was gruff and inconsiderate and arrogant as all get-out, and if he did ever stop to think that John might have a life outside of their cases and their time together, it was a thought he aborted as soon as it was conceived. Theirs was a life of scorpions in the silverware drawer and corpses on every street corner, of stealing enough supplies from the clinic to patch Sherlock up, of casual death threats and ashtrays stolen from the crowned heads of Europe - they had quite a collection going with the latest one Sherlock had filched from Versailles - and cases that ranged from lost pets and silly college pranks got out of hand to international scandal and celebrity murder, all handled alike with Sherlock's usual wide-eyed intensity and call to arms, come hell or high water, no matter what danger lay at the end of the path. It was a life that chewed you up and spit you out and consumed you, body and soul. John leaned back on his arms, night air ghosting his face, and smiled. He'd have it no other way.
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A/N: Written because I always thought it was a bit of a shame Sherlock Holmes never got into astronomy; he's such a brilliant chemist, I could see astrophysics interesting him. And then I remembered that old joke, and I just couldn't resist. And of course the thought of the Baker St. boys camping was just too cute...
I'm giving John more or less my own knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics, that of an interested amateur. If anything he was discussing sounded interesting to you, I'd recommend The Science of Discworld; it's a pretty solid beginner's breakdown of life, the universe, and everything.
Sylvius was borrowed from The Mazarin Stone, I own nothing.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed! As always, reviews are tremendously appreciated. =)