It was heaven. Pure, uncorrupted heaven. A needle up his arm, bliss pumping through his veins, it was all he could ask for and all he ever wanted. Some sense of respite, of silence in the storm. People viewed what he could do as a gift if they viewed it as anything other than perversity, but they were wrong on both assumptions. It was a curse, nothing more or less. He saw, everything.
While the average person could allow the unimportant to fade to nothing more than scenery, a backdrop for the play that was their lives, it took all of Sherlock's concentration to ignore the insignificant to focus upon the significant. What mattered and what didn't. He still got it wrong, would remember that a woman was having an affair but not what her name was though they'd just been introduced, or that his brother was trying a new diet but not that his mother had gotten a new haircut –six whole inches of her hair simply gone and he hadn't batted an eye.
This perfect mixture, his seven-percent solution, was truly his emsolution/em. It solved his problem, allowed him to let things fall by the wayside, if only for a little while. Unfortunately, it made him let emall/em things fall by the wayside. Important things, like eating and drinking and bathing, or the occasional message to family to assure them that he was in fact alive and not in need of a search and rescue party.
But it was worth it.
After all, to access heaven, wouldn't anyone pay hell?
It was sharp and bittersweet, and unexpected note that took him by surprise. The music would pour out of him, twisting what he saw and clouding over his vision. It let him fall away from reality, from the empty house he called home and the empty life he called his own. The rosin became his cologne, the bow his only needed accessory. All else could have been dashed to pieces, but so long as his violin remained he too would carry on.
The music was occasionally obstinate, refusing to come when he called then arriving unbidden weeks later when he was needed elsewhere. It deprived him of sleep, drove him from his bed after a crash and made him drag notes out until his fingers bled.
He was certain the blood gave the notes a different sound, one deeper and more sorrowful than the clean-cut notes that he played sober, and so he began to mix the two, his solutions both, until one could not exist without the other.
He stole his pieces of heaven and carried them with him as he traversed hell.
It was the Work, but it was really the Life. Just as good as cocaine, and with far fewer issues of legality. Not that he had any qualms about it, but it was far simpler to get a high from a puzzle than it was to answer Mycroft's dull questions after his brother posted bail.
The puzzles encouraged him, challenged him, told him it was all right to see the background in the foreground and the foreground in the back. That his way of processing the world was just as right, better even, than how everyone else did it. That emhe/em was just as good, and better, than everyone else. It was exhilarating, the adrenaline pumping through his blood to spin him higher.
But the highs from the Work didn't last as long, and were less reliable than his solution. He could go weeks, or even months, without something stimulating enough to keep his mind from spiraling off into the untethered reaches of the cosmos. During these times, he would attempt to resist the call of his sirens of choice, but he would inevitably succumb to their seduction, prepping the needle with the expert ability borne of an addiction long-denied, and sliding it in until he was floating once again, bow clasped in hand, human for a few sparse moments in time, music flowing out from his buzzing fingers.
He would never be good enough for heaven, so he may as well be deserving of hell.
His name was John Watson, and he was an enigma. A man of healing gone to war, someone never meant for the life of blood and death voluntarily walking into it. According to all evidence, an utterly ordinary man, yet one who would follow a stranger and kill for them. A man who would befriend someone despite all signs pointing to it being a terrible idea, one doomed to end in pain and blood.
But however remarkable the man, he would not stay if he knew his flatmate's many vices. The music was acceptable, the Work was exciting, but the solution, the emmain/em solution from which all others stemmed, John would abhor. Each time John would work a late shift, the genius would spring towards his things, pulling out sheet music and preparing solutions with practiced ease. The needle would go into his arm, and the bow would wait between his fingers, holding and waiting for the buzz to arrive. And then it would crash over him, each time. Not the joyful high he always anticipated, but rather the guilt-ridden crash. John would hate this, hate him, shun him if he saw this needle, these drugs.
He was so caught up in his remorseful haze that he failed to notice the changes in the background. A door opened, a man entered, his head was cupped gently and his name repeated in increasingly worried tones. Cautiously he opened his eyes, and immediately John's fear slammed into him as a blow. Pure terror, something he had never seen in the soldier's eyes before.
John finally looked at him and said bluntly, "Never again."
With two words a warrior rescued a madman from hell to forcibly deliver him to heaven.
Heaven and hell are such changeable concepts, but no matter how old Sherlock got he couldn't quite shake them from his mind. As he grew, his ideals changed, warped heaven into a twisted sort of boredom and transmuted hell into an intense insanity, and the only way to walk the line between them was by a medley of solutions.
But no amount of drug, music or Work proved to be quite as effective as one ex-army doctor, John Hamish Watson.