"...I'm going to spend the evening...in the company of a masterpiece."
"Seriously? You've never seen a falling star?"
They were up on the roof an hour past sunset, looking out over the unlikely spectacle of an unlit New York City skyline.
"Watson, you know full well that I avoid cluttering my brain with useless information. There's very little need for me to know anything about astronomy. I collect facts that have bearing on my work. Full stop."
"Do I want to know the relevance to your work of how long a pig's orgasm lasts?" She stuck out her arm to interrupt him as he started to reply. "That was a rhetorical question."
"Phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset times, being able to identify direction using the Pole Star. These are useful facts. I could very well rely on them in the course of an investigation. The probability of any other astronomical knowledge proving crucial to a case is extremely low."
"Didn't stop it from being relevant in that serial killer case."
"The exception that proves the rule. Consistency is the hob—"
"Hobgoblin hogwash. You do like to repeat yourself a lot for someone who claims nonverbal communication is more efficient."
He responded haptically with a rude gesture.
"Well, what about enjoying the night sky in a purely aesthetic sense? You seemed to have plenty of inclination to admire The Pieta that time you stole it. What value did it have as knowledge?"
"I am quite capable of appreciating the sublime in nature and in art without having to attribute superfluous detail to it. You tell me there's going to be a meteor shower tonight that will be visible in the city because of the power outage; I have no other pressing activity and no electricity to mitigate boredom, so I am out here to see it. Whether the event will be worthy of admiration remains to be determined."
He lay down on the blanket she'd spread out behind the bees, hands locked behind his head, looking up.
"And I did not steal The Pieta," he muttered under his breath.
"What?"
He pointed up to the sky where a faint streak was fading overhead. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and scrambled over his legs in the darkness to lie down on the blanket beside him.
-end-