“What was your thing? Before—?” She tilts her head toward the stairs, indicating the castle below them and the shelves of alcohol beckoning to them both.
Sherlock takes a long drag on his fag, holds the hot smoke inside his lungs, relishing the burn and the tingle of the coming high, half oxygen deprivation, half deadly chemicals. “Cocaine,” he says at last, the word floating up and out of him on a stream of white smoke. “Heroin, when I couldn’t get what I wanted. Morphine, other times. Sometimes ecstasy, just to...” He’s out of smoke, out of words, drying up in his throat, flashes of memories long since deleted bubbling to the surface again, too vivid and visceral to ever fully leave him (hands, mouths, tongues, colours, heat, connecting, even for a short while, neurons turning off and nerve endings lighting up, just for a little while, just long enough, just, for once, trying to be human—)
Harry blows out her own thin, pale cloud, nods when he falls silent. Doesn’t need him to elaborate. “And if you could get what you want – if you were sat in a whole room full to the rafters of pure, top quality coke, just sitting there, staring at you, calling you... But you knew John was right outside, just waiting for you, wanting you to make the right choice...” She sucks in, lets the smoke hiss out between her open teeth, finally looks over at him. “Would you?”
Sherlock licks his lips, looks down at the rough surface of the roof under his feet, inhales on his cigarette, the tip flaring orange in front of his face. “I still crave it—”
“Part of being an addict,” Harry says, nodding.
“—but I don’t...” He trails off, frowning.
“But you don’t want it,” Harry finishes for him after a moment. She blows smoke out in a thin column, lips puckered into a small circle. “You don’t want to want it.”
Sherlock looks across at her and Harry meets his gaze, holds it, grim and serious, the most serious he’s seen her to date. He nods, looks away out over the courtyard and the trees beyond.
A future bit from MLTYS for WIP Wednesday.
