Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Knowledge makes everything less horrifying. Sherlock knows this. He has been using knowledge to guard himself against the terror for years now.
It almost always works.
Almost.
Sherlock is five, a mess of thin white limbs and dark curls falling into his eyes, and he is climbing on the railing of the balcony in his family's house.
The drop below is monstrous; Mycroft says thirty-two feet. If he falls and hits the ground, he is going to die, and Sherlock knows this, he isn't stupid; Mycroft had been teaching him about physics and Newton's apples and gravitation laws and they had spent a whole afternoon dropping things from various heights. They didn't throw anything over the balcony, though; Mycroft said it would make Mummy angry.
Sherlock wants to know what happens if you drop something from this height. Maybe that gravitation law has exceptions and he won't die when he hits the ground. And Sherlock wants to jump. Falling should feel a bit like flying.
(Mycroft stops him in the end, but it's literally in the last moment, when Sherlock already has one little leg over the edge. He is a little disappointed, but when Mycroft stops breathing funny and clutching his arm too tightly, they throw a watermelon over the edge and watch it explode on the stony ground.
There are no exceptions to the laws of gravitation, Mycroft says. Promise you'll trust me with this, little brother.)
A month or two later, he learns that it's called l'appel du vide. But nobody can explain to him why exactly it happens, and knowing the name doesn't help one bit.
The knowledge is his best weapon, and that is yet another thing Mycroft taught him.
Sherlock reads and observes. He performs experiments. He develops an infatuation with Sebastian and dismisses it; he knows it's just a mixture of hormones and pheromones making him blush and dream about expanses of skin and muscle, even if Seb is an imbecille compared to Sherlock. He ignores it. Eventually, ridiculous feelings stop.
(But the itching need remains. He conducts a bit of research and proceeds to learn how to fuck; how to stay silent during the intercourse so nobody can use his weaknesses against him and how to be cold and dismissive afterwards to ensure nobody wants to repeat the performance. It isn't difficult and it definitely isn't interesting, but it's better than masturbation.)
There is so much to learn. University doesn't offer much, but there is an extensive library and he can sneak into the laboratories at night and there is a perfect little music shop in the nearby town where he can buy pieces of rosin and new strings and sheets of notes, always new notes. He can do almost whatever he wants.
Almost.
And cocaine is interesting, too, when he can get it.
One night, he is reading philosophy, because the library is closed and there was nothing else in the room, and he is strung high on too much cocaine and he knows he cannot go to the labs to play with acids when his reflexes are affected like this. He wouldn't mind a quick rough fuck, but almost everyone has gone home because of the holidays.
There is a passage about height and the urge to jump. L'appel du vide. Complete, terrifying freedom to do whatever you want.
It takes him absurdly long to pick the lock of the door that leads to the roof of the main building. It has been years since he went near any edge, looked into any depth. He always makes sure to lock his window before taking cocaine. He doesn't know why, and it terrifies him.
But now he knows. There it was, in the blasted philosophical book. He has knowledge. He finally knows why.
Sherlock goes to the edge of the roof and looks over.
And he wants to jump.
He curses and moves away; then he bites his lip, eyeing the line where the building ends and the emptiness starts. He is going to try again.
In the morning, he is hypothermic from spending all night on the roof in only his shirt. Seb finds him staggering down the halls towards his room and drags him to the ambulance.
After five hours in a tub of hot water, Sherlock packs his things and sits on the first train to London. The buildings of university stink like failure, and he had always been bored here anyway. He can do his researches and his cocaine somewhere else.
Years pass.
Sherlock learns how to hate his brother and annoy Scotland Yard. (He learns how to fuck for money, too, because it isn't very different from fucking for his own release.) He learns how to survive on toast and water and how to chase boredom away with cocaine and he learns how to hurt people before they hurt him.
Then, some annoyingly honourable detective catches him with his dealer and puts him in a cell, and he won't accept a bribe (money-drug-fuck, Sherlock really doesn't care). Then, opportunity arises, and Sherlock solves a boring double-murder case without even moving from his cell. Detective is annoyingly honourable, but he actually listens to him.
"Get clean," Lestrade says he unlocks Sherlock's cell. "Get clean, and I'll make sure you have your bloody puzzles. I won't have you sauntering around corpses while you are higher than a kite. It's my job and it's my head, and I'm not going to risk my career any more than I already did right now."
Sherlock doesn't need long to decide. After all, cocaine is only a momentary relief and never a solution, and acquiring it is always tedious.
Somewhere between the agony of cocaine withdrawal and starting to solve cases for Lestrade, Sherlock gets back his old enthusiasm for knowledge. He worms his way into St. Bart's lab and morgue, he performs experiments all night long, he plays Beethoven sonatas on his violin and insults people with relish.
One day, he picks the lock on the door that leads to the roof of St. Bart's and walks to the edge. He lays down on his stomach, so that his head is hanging over the edge, and he stays this way until night falls. He imagines his body shattering on the pavement far far below until he stops being afraid of it.
The dizziness of freedom. Doing exactly what you want.
"What are you doing?" John walks into their living room. "No, don't tell me. It's probably something horrifying, like calculating the angle your cranium should hit the pavement to make the largest possible mess."
Sherlock is leaning far over the edge of the window, almost doubled in half, and he is dizzy with the blood flowing into his brains and the call of the void. He has his feet jammed under the radiator below the window, because he may not be afraid of falling anymore, but he has no intention whatsoever of accidentally doing it. It doesn't matter that the drop from the first floor is barely thirteen and a half feet; it's still a height, and the siren's song of the emptiness is weak, but it's there, and Sherlock has been listening to it for the past half of an hour. He wonders if he could play it on his violin. He doesn't know when did not-being-afraid-anymore change into his childhood longing, but now he can't help himself anymore.
Now he straightens up and looks at John, because John is a bit crazy, just like Sherlock, and he should understand this. Sherlock wants him, needs him to understand, but isn't sure John can understand. It is one thing to simply hear the call of the void, and another thing to be afraid of it, and yet another thing entirely to be attracted to it beyond all reason.
John takes one look at his flushed face and his glassy, yearning eyes. Then he smiles. "L'appel du vide," he says. "Cannot say that I'm surprised, really."
Sherlock stares at him. "What - you, too?" Impossible. People know about this, but they don't like it. It's insane.
"Well, yes. Andrenaline-addict, remember?" His smile turns a little wistful. "Broke my leg once climbing on the roof when I was little."
"I knew that," Sherlock says automatically. John. Unremarkable, oatmeal-coloured John. Except that John's probably the most remarkable person Sherlock has ever encountered in all his life.
John's eyes are sharp and shining now. "Harry once bought me a bungee jump for a birthday. She said I would enjoy the height; that I would be able to jump but not actually die." His smile is getting wider. "Wasn't the same, though. The void isn't a void if you are safely tied to an elastic rope."
Sherlock sits down on their couch, gazing at John with wonder. "I used to be afraid of it," he confesses in a rush. "Now I have a hard time not just leaning over the edge and letting my weight tip me over."
Shattered bones, skull cracked open like a watermelon thousand years ago. His brilliant brains painting the ground, split skin, face flattened on one side. Mummy's cheekbones, broken. The dizziness of absolute freedom.
John stuffs his hands in his pockets; small, unassuming, with a gun down his trousers, remarkable. "There was this bloke in Afganistan," he says. "Colonel Wallace. Completely daft, but he was a real warrior. Boys used to joke that he was William Wallace reincarnated. What do we say to the god of death? he used to roar. Not today!" John nods towards the window. "Not never, Sherlock. Just not today. Tell you what, when we are old, eighty years or more, we'll go to the highest place in the world. And we are going to jump."
Sherlock is suddenly afraid he is going to cry, because this is far too brilliant to be happening to him. "What makes you think we are going to get old together?" he croaks, because he can't think of anything else to say.
John grins, hard and fast and reckless. "You got a better idea?"
No. No, he doesn't. Sherlock stands up and suddenly he is grinning as well, grinning so hard his face hurts. "John," he says. "John, you are a genius."
John shakes his head. "Nope. That's you, remember?" His grin turns into something softer, his eyes crinkling gently around the edges, and Sherlock suddenly feels it.
Except that he's been feeling it for months without making the connection. He should be ashamed of himself, really, but he doesn't have time for it. "This is a void as well," he breathes, closing his eyes against the brightness of it. It is a height, greater than anything he's ever imagined. And it's high enough to bring back the ghosts of the old fear, crippling and cold.
Sherlock doesn't dare to open his eyes when John's warm hand clutches around the lapel of his dressing gown. "Yes," John says. "But if you jump, you are not going to die when you hit the ground. I promise."
Sherlock shakes his head, eyes still closed. "There are no exceptions to the laws of gravitation," he whispers. Mycroft breathing funny and clutching his arm too tightly, hypothermia and cocaine in the darkness.
"Sometimes they are." John's hand tugs on the silk, his voice gone low with longing. "Sherlock."
And Sherlock lets his weight tip him forward.
fin