Work Text:
When seasons change, birds migrate.
They feels days shortening, the zenith arch lowering. Cold, shadows stretching. They start to gather, they seek each other, find each other. Not all at once: one after another, as though it was by chance – it is not, it’s biological; it’s the swelling of specific glands and the regression of others that leads to changes in social behavior. Then, they fly away. It’s codified in their genes. They know destination and route because their blood remembers, they follow mountains and rivers during the day, and the pounding call of the magnetic field.
**
Sherlock sees the seasons change in the indigo dawn dissecting the sky above London with a clear geometry of colors.
Alone; 221 Baker Street; sometime speaks just to realize he’s answered a question the echo of his violin asked hours before.
The phenomenology of isolation is the imprecise science of solitude appearing to itself for what it is, down a dialectic path of bullet-holes on the walls, empty packs of cigarettes and dialogues with old skulls.
**
John comes in without having to knock because he still has the key.
Sherlock finds it irritating, and wrong. Wrong, because John has two keys for two different houses and it surely breaks some nameless natural law. It’s a deformity, an horrible mutation; like a dog born with two hearts. [Wrong, when his owner got barely one]
Irritating, because John fills the room with a smile, as if he never left it.
“I’m back,” he says. When he should say, I’ve just dropped by and then I’ll go. He takes his awful beige jacket off and leaves it on the armchair. His armchair. A lot of stuff is his, in the flat, so that Sherlock can’t even go into the kitchen without finding shreds of John, stains of his presence stuck on the wallpaper – a cup upside-down near the sink, rubber gloves that smell like hundreds of different (cheap) dish soaps, a recycled teabag smothered by far too many layers of paper towel. On the refrigerator door, a post-it: “I’m going to buy carrots the day those kidneys in the vegetable drawer disappear”.
“I’m back,” and Sherlock replies with a smile, a smile he has carefully built for John, selecting the right muscles and highlighting them in an anatomy textbook.
John sits and sighs, satisfied. His body language is whispering, Here is Home, there is Other. It’s the way his fists loosen as he gives his balance to the armchair, and his eyes so disgustingly kind, and his shoulders bend, his shoeless feet, the fullness of their silence – it’s a lie, of course. Because then he goes away.
Sherlock imagines John embracing Mary and kissing her and every shard of him crying, You are Home, he is Other.
**
Imagines: a snap-shot of a world in which he never came back to John, after the Fall. It’s a universe with a cold-colors spectrum, pressurized wavelengths, in which Doppler effect shows horizons of blue-shifted lights.
John, bent over his tombstone, is alone, and then is a husband, and then is a father, and then is old. Sherlock would leave his exile just to watch him from afar, once every ten years. Then he would relish the peace of the dead, breathing the aurora of their winter.
If he could die as he died in John’s eyes, from that rooftop, Sherlock would become numbers and music and the vectors that move the world.
**
Injustice of the semantics.
When an organized group flies away, it’s called ‘migration’.
When a single individual does, it’s called ‘fear’.
**
Imagines: a snap-shot of a world in which the Fall never happened. Nothing. Simply as that. Nothing would have changed. It would still be before.
Sherlock feels the endless implications of nothing and its possibilities and probabilities on the fingertips of his left hand, where the violin strings hardened the skin.
**
Sherlock, sometimes, allows himself that delusion. Just a little.
He coats his mind with it, cautiously, so as to smooth the creases, like he would with a nicotine patch.
He sees John reading in his armchair and thinks that, according to the theory of relativity, an afternoon, if they were rays of light travelling through space at the speed of about 2,9 x 107 m/s, would be almost forever.
**
He can’t even get himself to hate her, and it’s a problem.
Every time he sees her, he can only think about how perfect she is for John, with her witty smiles and blond hair. She’s clever and understanding – and she is beautiful, actually; a limpid, light beauty. Her lips are pink without lipstick.
Once, Sherlock thinks he could try to seduce her, and ruin everything. An extremely stupid idea. It flashes in his eyes for just a second, when he sees them together during a spring day. Mary looks at him and it’s like she knew – she shakes her head quietly, but it’s not because of the wind, and she forgives him, just like that, with a not-quite sad smile. While she holds John’s hand.
She knows she knows she knows – everybody knows, really.
**
“Did you know?” he asks John, during a case – because there are still their cases and the blog, even though it’s not the same.
“Yes- I mean, no- what?”
Between John’s hand and his hand, both pressed on the cold concrete, are approximately 8 cm.
[According to the theory of relativity, if they were rays of light travelling through space, they would tend to never meet]
Sherlock inhales and exhales and cleans all the stupid nonsense he was about to say from his brain’s crevices. John is looking at him but he can’t.
He looks up to the sky. Seasons, he thinks. Changing.
“That constellations are just conventions humans came up with; dumb humans, or humans with too much spare time, or hopelessly romantic, or inclined to take advantage of the naïve with astrology sessions.” The neural inputs that are making his mouth move don’t really belong to him, his lips feel cold and chapped and heavy but it doesn’t concern him.
“Constellation are just absurdly distant stars that humanity has connected like children connect dots, just to find some meaning, something, myths, women, animals, God, whatever.” Sherlock would like to stop, but John doesn’t say anything.
“Just because they look close, they think they must be close – idiots.”
“Sherlock, is something wrong?”
**
He learned them, the constellations, even though they are pointless.
There are the Pleiades and the Hyades and Taurus. If one were to draw a perpendicular line in the middle of an imaginary segment linking Aldebaran with δ-Tauri, one would find Orion’s Belt.
Orion is Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, Rigel and Saiph. Orion is the hunter, he has a sword of nebulae and eyes of blue giants; beneath him, the Dog. Orion and Dog, the Dog who never leaves him. The eye of Dog is Sirius, the brightest and the whitest.
The distance between Orion and Dog is of about 1262 light-years.
Sirius is the closest to the Earth.
Orion is far, unimaginably far away.
Orion is the ever-burning, brilliant hunter, and Dog would give his life for him, Dog lives to shine under his heels – they think. They think they must be close. Whereas there is an immense section of galaxy between them, and Sirius drifts closer to Earth with the slowness of eons.
Sirius is the most human among the stars and Orion, the algid myth, could never understand him.
Stupid Dog with two hearts and two house keys.
**
Migratory birds, at night, follow the constellations. They don’t know they don’t exist.
They think Dog will never leave Orion.
Swallows have small, tiny hearts, two atria and two ventricles, hectic, almost 600 beats per minute.
Sherlock knows it would be enough.
**
[If he could die as he died in John’s eyes, from that rooftop, Sherlock would become the geometric choreography of wings and wings, following cold stars, toward the ocean]