AN: i don't own sherlock, or anything pink floyd ever wrote
Please read and review!
smoke weed erryday
And you run and you run
To catch up with the sun
But it's sinking
Racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same
In a relative way
But you're older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death
~Pink Floyd
The silent fog of four AM lay thick over the Thames, cut through by the silent geometry of corporate Britain. All was quiet, the rush of London muffled to a faint nocturnal snore.
The fire escape behind 221 Baker Street turned out to offer a stunning view of the city. On the uppermost landing, where it turned towards the roof, there was a little extra space on one side, room enough for two people to sit without getting unnecessarily intimate, one with his bandaged arm hanging in a ladies' scarf, the other with an acoustic Guitar across her stomach and her long red hair falling through the fence behind her.
The flash of a bic lighter threw Sherlock's sharp features into jagged chiaroscuro for a second, despite the awkwardness of his splinted hand he managed to corner the bowl perfectly.
"Academia is your Afghanistan." He announced around a mouthful of smoke rings, continuing a conversation from earlier. He coughed appreciatively and handed the little chunk if blue glass back to Mary.
"How so?" she asked with her lips against the mouth piece.
"John, is an adrenaline addict, it's why he works in Emergency Trauma Care now, it's why he went to war, why he played rugby in college and why he hangs out with… people like us." He took back the bowl.
"People like us?"
"Emotionally stunted autism spectrum geniuses with thrill seeking tendencies and Hypo manic personalities."
"Oh that." Mary watched Sherlock smoking, fingers rubbing up and down the fret board, "What did you mean? Academia is my Afghanistan."
"Exactly that, It's a horrible," he kicked the ground for emphasis, "Horrible evil place filled with, oligarchy, and explosions, and safety regulations, and pointless totalitarian dogma. But, you loved it, in the same way John, loved his time in the Army." He took a deep breath and felt Mary claw the pipe out of his hand. And the same way I Love Cocaine.
"So I should go back to a university?"
"God no! Do you want John to go back to Kabul?"
"No," she stared at the little flicker of light for a long moment.
"Find something that gives you the same dopamine rush, that's what I did."
Turns out, having everyone in London think you're clever feels a lot better than putting a needle in your groin because all the ones in your arm are blown out.
It was quiet for a long time as they both sat, enjoying the pleasant tickle of THC behind their eyes, Mary played a few sad chords from some long forgotten ballad. Sherlock stared at the stars and had no idea which one was Saturn.
"But I'll never get into the space program."
Sherlock burst out laughing; he rolled onto his side, took the grinder and refilled the bowl from what was still in the bottom.
"You really know what you're doing," Mary watched him.
"Why shouldn't I?"
"I didn't think it was your thing."
"Pot, mar-idj-wana, this, Beautiful, northern lights indica hydroponically grown, in the Netherlands and cured for three months in ideal conditions, it's a wonderful plant, opens up doors in my mind palace which I didn't even know existed. It's not my favorite, but it's nice. Good for the occasional bout of depressive ennui, good for a nice deep think." Sherlock blinked, staring out into the darkness, a humid breeze blew up through the grated steel floor, his body felt numb and distant, his eye didn't hurt nearly as much.
"What's your favorite?" Mary asked, taking the warm glass from him.
Sherlock didn't answer; his mind was suddenly absorbed by the veiled majesty of the urban stars, gleaming with ten billion unsolved mysteries in the shadowed vaults of heaven. Nuit drew up the tented sinews of her belly and the universe stood there, just as big, and just as strange as it had seemed to the first troglodyte to crawl out of his Platonic allegory of a painted cave and marvel at the stars.
This was very good marijuana.
He smiled idly, feet over four stories of open air. Head back against the fence. "Which one were you taking pictures of?"
Mary lay back to get the same angle of the sky as her companion, "Do you see the Corona Borealis constellation?"
"Which one?"
"Eight little stars in a semi circle right there."
"Yes I see it." Sherlock frowned, following the dark silhouette of Mary's arm into the pink black city sky.
"See the two stars close together? The big yellow one and the fainter blue one?"
"They're all the same color."
"No, they're not, that one shouldn't even be part of the constellation, it isn't a star at all, that's Saturn."
"The blue one?"
"Oh my god he seriously wasn't exaggerating." Mary raised herself up on her elbow and scowled at him with deep disappointment, "What color is Saturn Sherlock?"
"Uh," he cleared his throat, "Not blue, so it's the yellow one then, but people always say red planet…" his eyelids felt heavy as he blinked up into the sky and drew a blank.
"That's Mars," she prompted.
"You said the yellow one was Saturn, and I still don't believe you that they have different colors at all."
"No Mars is at twelve degrees west, over there," she pointed.
"The moving one?"
"That's a satellite."
"But don't the planets move?"
"Not that fast! So you seriously don't know?"
"What?"
"What color is Saturn? And how big is it?"
Sherlock shifted uncomfortably, "I thought all planets were the same size."
Mary burst out in a cackling laugh which all of Baker Street probably heard, "Of course they aren't! Saturn, you've seen it, big, gaseous, Ammonium hydrosulfide crystal clouds, yellow, rings?" he looked at her blankly, "Jesus Christ, how can you be so spectacularly ignorant?"
"That's what John said."
Mary looked genuinely upset and took a deep drag off the bowl, "anyway, Saturn is in near perfect alignment with the star Corona Borealis Zeta, which is a binary system which can only be seen through a telescope, it's beautiful!"
"Fascinating, do you find it an esthetically satisfying experience, since you will never be able to access any part of it directly?"
"Esthetically satisfying?"
"Makes you feel good." He affected a deep drawl. He thought about his violin and mourned the current loss of dexterity in his bow hand; Mary plucked out the guitar solo from Time by pink Floyd.
"Said the workaholic to the astrophysicist."
Sherlock smiled mirthlessly.
The stars stretched on forever in silence, indifferent to the petty sins of humanity. Cold masses in the void.
"One time, before I knew John," he announced on a cannabis born whim, "I took a case in which I was forced, for the sake of justice, to spend a week doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft and snorting a eighth of heroin."
"For justice," she pushed the bowl at him.
Sherlock smirked, flame hovering an inch above the green crescent, "To dopamine."
"The heroin was compulsory?"
"Isn't it always?" he chuckled darkly, "I had to get to level eighty in less than three days, and dull my brain down to the level of the suicidal agoraphobic teenager I was impersonating, you see, he had killed himself, his family was mourning, but his guild mates, his best friends in the world didn't know, he hadn't opened up to anyone, including the police about the murder he had witnessed over Skype a week earlier. But I was convinced that he would have spoken to his guild mates, I hacked into his account, child's play, and it took me a week to weasel all the information I needed out of them. It was the worst case I've ever had, the victim's family paid me well and I rolled up the notes and switched back to coke to teach my brain how to work again."
"I'm so sorry."
Sherlock patted her hand awkwardly. Somewhere a bird squaked in the trees below them.
"I think people are trivial," Mary said to the sky, "billions of them covering the earth like maggots crawling in a wound. What do our petty disputes matter when the sun only has eight billion years till it goes supernova, were ants, microbes splitting in a petri dish, and the universe is too full of beauty to be for our eyes only."
the sky had started to grow light in the distant, murky east, another day was coming softly through the fog.
"What keeps the satellites from falling?"
"They're in space…" Mary put the pipe to her lips and looked across at his frown, "in orbit?"
"But…"
"Look, ok, imagine Superman is standing on top of Mount Everest."
"Who?"
"Never mind, how far can you throw a cricket ball?"
Sherlock shrugged. "Sixty meters."
Mary raised an eyebrow.
"Thirty meters, why?"
"Why does the ball stop?" she asked.
"Because the ground gets in the way." He smirked, thinking about gravity and rooftops and John.
"Exactly," Mary sat up in her enthusiasm, "and if you were to throw the same cricket ball, with the same force from up here, it would go much further, right."
"Right."
"Therefore?"
"Eventually you get so high up that it will go further than the distance of the Earth."
"You just keep falling, never making it to the ground, round and round the planet…"
"Like a teddy bear."