Work Text:
It was a jigsaw. Thousands of petite pieces were strewn across the scarred surface of their kitchen table, which had been cleared of all Sherlock's lab equipment. John had no idea where it had come from, or why it was suddenly taking up a truly unreasonable amount of space in their home. There was no box lying around, not that such a thing would have been particularly enlightening. It was not even like it could offer a picture as guidance, because there was no image on the strangely glossy faces of the multitude of fragments.
Every single one was plain black.
'What are you doing?' he asked Sherlock, who sat in a chair, his legs folded up under him and his robe falling off one shoulder as he assembled an edge.
'Experiment.'
'In what, driving yourself insane?' John bit his lip, reminding himself that the alternative was probably bullet-holes in the wall. At least this way Sherlock was peaceful and, it seemed, relatively content. 'You know what, never mind. I have to go to work. Have fun.'
His only answer was a faint hum of agreement, and John shook his head before he clattered down the stairs. It was probably a phase. Sherlock would get bored or become distracted by the shiny glisten of a new case and forget all about it by the end of the week. Then John would probably be left to dispose of it somehow.
Such was life at Baker Street.
****
Perhaps it was compulsive? John had to admit there were key obsessive traits to Sherlock's personality, and the puzzle appeared to be ticking some boxes in that massive mind of his. He had fully expected Sherlock to lose interest, but now, a couple of days later, he seemed enthralled by what John could only describe as a tortuous exercise.
He had not been at it constantly, but John caught Sherlock examining the shapes of certain pieces at odd moments, occasionally slotting an anonymous noir tile into place like an expert thief pushing aside another tumbler in the world's most complicated lock. He would return from solving a case and immediately go to the table and the game on its surface while John got takeaway and made tea. Yet every time John pressed him for some kind of explanation, he received no answer.
'Is it some sort of code?' John asked one evening from where he sat in front of his laptop, supposedly writing up a blog post but actually watching Sherlock smoothly pushing the pieces together. 'A clue of some kind?'
'It's a game, John. People do them all the time.'
'They should have pictures on. That's the whole point.'
'No, that just makes it easier for visual minds to find alternative patterns that aid in the solution.' Sherlock's nimble fingers danced over the scatter all around him, plucking those he required as if he were capturing notes for a symphony. 'A jigsaw is about interlocking edges. The picture on its surface is nothing but decoration.'
John pursed his lips, forcing himself to focus on the computer screen once more. He would never have bothered with something so mind-bending in the first place. He never had much patience for the standard puzzles with cottages and things on, let alone whatever Sherlock was playing at. 'There's no point to it. When you've finished you won't even have a picture. Just a patch of black.'
'Many a philosopher would tell you that the enjoyment of any endeavour is in the journey, rather than the destination,' Sherlock murmured, but his tone was disinterested, as if he were only half-listening to what John was saying.
With a shake of his head, John gave up. Sherlock's idea of fun had always been way outside the bell-curve of the average person's enjoyment. Normally, it involved chemicals and blood, body-parts and murder. Perhaps that was why this was so off-putting. Of all Sherlock's distractions, this one seemed utterly benign, and John was growing increasingly concerned.
He never thought he would long for the days when finding a head in the fridge was a common occurrence.
******
'Plain black?'
John nodded, folding his arms over his chest and trying not to feel too validated by Greg's obvious and instinctual suspicion. 'He's nearly finished it. I'm half-expecting the Apocalypse when he puts the last piece in place.'
The two of them watched Sherlock circle the corpse in his usual stately manner. It was a depressing thought that John found Sherlock's intense examination of dead things so reassuringly normal.
'Does his brother know?'
John glanced over at Greg, watching the DI consider his own question with a pained expression. 'And how would I go about bringing that up? “By the way, Mycroft, Sherlock's started doing impossible jigsaws.” There is nothing he could say which would make me feel better. He'll either think I'm paranoid or...'
'Or what?'
John shrugged. Really, he had voiced his own worst suspicion. Sherlock was always doing weird things, and there was no reason this should stand out among the pantheon of what the fuck? that he lived with on a day-to-day basis. The whole thing made him inexplicably twitchy. 'I don't know. I'm not sure what bothers me more, the fact he's doing it in the first place or how easy he seems to find it. It would take me years to put that together.'
'I had a three-dimensional globe puzzle once,' Greg confided, scratching at the nape of his neck as Sherlock muttered something in Anderson's direction that made the weasel-faced man turn a startling shade of puce. 'I thought I'd have to be some kind of genius to finish it. It was mostly sea after all. Turned out the pieces had numbers on the back. You started at one and went from there. Maybe this is the same?'
'I already checked. Plain on one side, blank white on the other. There's no defining pattern, they're just –' He shrugged, pulling a face as he repeated the word that seemed to be constantly stuck in his head. 'Black.'
'Never mind, eh?' Greg said with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. 'At least it's keeping him quiet.'
'Come on, John!'
With that, Sherlock was off, leaving Anderson gaping and John to dash off in his footsteps as always. This was Sherlock's real passion: the chase and the game, and all thoughts of strange ebony fragments fled from John's mind as he joined in the dance.
******
It was finished. John regarded the matte expanse where it took up most of surface of the kitchen table, and rubbed absently at the bruise under his eye. The chase last night had been a long, exhausting affair, and he had come home to fall into bed and nurse his aches.
Sherlock, it seemed, had not bothered with sleep. He'd been doing this instead. Only now it was complete had he bothered to get his head down, slumped where he sat with his head cushioned on his arm and one hand curled loosely on the puzzle's surface.
John sighed, noticing the scabbed gash on Sherlock's temple from the fight the night before. He probably hadn't even bothered to clean it. Easing closer for a careful look, his gaze caught on something else. There, under the warm curve of Sherlock's palm, the blankness had changed. Unremarkable sable had taken on glimmers of white and aquamarine, violet and other, icier hues.
Carefully, he reached out, curving his fingers under Sherlock's slender wrist and shifting his lax arm so he could see more. It was hard to make sense of it. Mostly, it looked like dots of light with the faintest whisper of lines connecting them together, more vapour-trails than anything solid. Even as he watched, the image began to fade away, the colours losing their intensity until they were once more eclipsed by the unremarkable darkness.
With a thoughtful frown, John reached out, splaying his hand across the middle of the jigsaw and leaving it there. Gradually, the surface grew warm, and when he pulled back there was a perfect outline of his fingers and palm. Beneath it lay the swirl of a familiar constellation: Orion. It was not a photograph, but something more artistic, with hints of nebulae and supernova, haloes of light and again, the fragile, silverish threads that joined the main stars together to make out the shape of the hunter.
'No!' John's breath of surprise hushed through the kitchen, and he glanced at the sleeping man slumped over the table before spreading his hands over other dark areas, trying to reveal the mystery within. It had to have been done with heat sensitive chemicals, ones that needed more than a fleeting touch of warmth to react, or he would have seen it while Sherlock was putting it together. John doubted it was the kind of thing you could buy in a shop, but he could easily picture Sherlock doing this: creating images with invisible paints on a shattered canvas just because he could.
'And you said you didn't know anything about the stars,' John murmured.
'I didn't.' Sherlock's voice was rough with sleep, and John looked down in surprise, realising that he was leaning over his flatmate, half-draped over his back in an effort to reveal the puzzle's hidden image. 'You seemed to think it was important.'
'Not to murders, though. Not to your work.'
'It matters to you.' Sherlock's voice sounded breathless, little more than a susurration of indrawn air, and he cleared his throat before gesturing to the puzzle with a flick of his fingers, where John's brazen touch had now revealed Ursa Major. 'Alternative methods of learning help to create more permanent connections. It makes things harder to delete.'
John blinked, his heart in his throat as he began to grasp Sherlock's implication. This wasn't just a puzzle – something to keep him occupied – it had been about cementing knowledge. Of all the things he could have selected to file away in that massive brain of his forever, he had chosen not poisons or tobacco ash, but this.
The universe, or at least the bit of it that decked the sky above their heads every night. It was a step John would never have envisioned; a gesture that, to others, may seem inconsequential, but he knew Sherlock well enough to know otherwise. They already shared a living space and every case that came along, but this was more than that – not about practicality or the Work. It seemed personal. Was this Sherlock's way of saying that, unlike everyone else of their acquaintance, John had something to teach him?
Was this really about the solar-system and the far-flung reaches of the galaxy beyond, or was it something closer to home that Sherlock was giving renewed consideration?
Sometimes, all it takes is a moment for everything to change. Darkness parts, and in the light of realisation, a whole new path opens up for those brave enough to take it. John wasn't sure what was on offer – what promises shone in the depths of Sherlock's gaze or were written in the constellations laid out across their tabletop – but now more than ever, he was willing to find out.
A frightened breath, a whisper of a kiss, and in the fragile glow of a thousand false stars, their world changed for the better.