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Sherlock was about five when he learnt about latitudes and longitudes. At first, he had tried to get it on his own, but it was only when Mycroft had joined him under the library's table, with a plate of just-out-of-the-oven cakes and a bucketful of patience that he truly had understood how the series of degrees, minutes and seconds worked.
In the following weeks, armed with their dad’s leather-bound atlas, he had made endless lists of all the places he wanted to discover. It ranged from the next biggest city to faraway countries with exotic names.
To any outside observer, those lists wouldn’t have made much sense, as they only consisted of sequences of numbers. To Sherlock, they meant the world, and he quickly associated them to pictures and facts. To languages and dialects. To wild animals and old monuments.
Over time, the numbers acquired a life of their own, comforting in their stability and reassuring in their immutability. During the worst times, when he couldn’t stop thinking or was crippled by migraines, Sherlock would turn to them to reach some kind of peace. More often than not, Mycroft would join in, settling next to him in the dark and enunciating random numbers, waiting for his brother to pinpoint the location
It didn’t matter if he got it right or wrong. No one was here to care if he put Hawaii in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, or if the Great Wall of China extended to St-Petersburg. The mere fact of having to think in two dimensions, of visualising horizontal and vertical lines crossing allowed him to shut out everything else. It helped.
In the privacy of his own mind, in a somewhat unconscious way, he started to compare the numbers to a safety net, one that was here to catch him when he fell too hard. One on which he could bounce back and move on to bigger, more perilous stunts.
He grew up. Some things changed and some didn’t. He visited most of the places he had on his list. Slowly, the series of numbers, the wild animals and the monuments were replaced by airports’ names, types of murderers and blood-stained crime scenes. He never stopped to consider how he felt about that.
Mycroft’s task passed onto Greg, one dark night Sherlock spent on his sofa, shivering with withdrawal. It was done without ceremony, but the old leather-bound atlas stayed in Greg’s flat from that moment on. The weary inspector realized then that everything was maybe a bit more serious than he had firstly envisaged it.
The older he got, Sherlock’s focus gradually shifted. To the vague, imprecise coordinates of the Alps, the Amazon or the Arctic, he substituted more astute and important ones: his flat, Greg’s flat, Mycroft’s house. Scotland Yard and Bart’s. Only the minutes and seconds changed, now, the relevant series of numbers getting closer and closer, precise to a decimal. His safety net evolved. It still supported his chases and errands, but grew tighter. He was less likely to slip.
Soon enough, even the meaning of the coordinates started to shift. Degrees became associated with familiarity, minutes and seconds were used to time routes from a place to another. At first, he didn’t think much of it. And then, one evening, as he was lying in a warm embrace, cradling a mug full of soup, he realized that he was using not only Greg’s flat, but Greg himself as a point of reference for all his calculations.
His safety net had been replaced by a web, at the centre of which was the man he had learnt to respect and love.
To most people, a web seemed threatening.
To Sherlock, it meant that wherever he went, be it near or far, he’d just have to follow the lines to come back to where he belonged. Only one series of numbers mattered anymore.