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Sherlock is tearing around the flat, a tornado in his own right. He picks up a medical journal and throws it at John’s chair across the room. He picks up a postcard he assumes his brother must have sent him and pitches it like a playing card. He picks a dagger inexplicably from the clutter on his desk and hurls it by the blade, which embeds itself in the wall above the sofa with a thwack. The movement tweaks something in his shoulder and it makes him growl.
“Grow up,” he hisses to the empty room. His eyes fall on his violin, the case leaning against the dining table. He hasn’t played in weeks. Shedding his robe onto the sofa, he stalks across the room to retrieve it. He unlatches the case, and the violin's familiar smell is a balm on his nerves. As he begins impatiently to tune up, the pegs trouble him. He swears aloud, rifling through the instrument’s case, flipping open every compartment, running his fingertips across the seam in the empty external zipped pocket.
Recalling he’d left his peg drops on the mantle several weeks prior, he retrieves the tiny bottle. He uncaps the dropper and holds the violin loosely by the neck. He twists the A peg firmly, setting it looser in the scroll, the string’s tension going slack. He does the same to the D, irritated that he has to muscle the pegs at all. He applies a few drops sparingly to both, then twists them back and forth until they turn smoothly. The G is fine, the G never troubles him. Unlike his blasted A, the shite. He decides to lubricate the G and E pegs for good measure, to reward them for their good behavior.
Once satisfied—which takes too long—he attaches his shoulder rest and jams the poor instrument furiously beneath his chin. Violently, he strikes across the strings two at a time, testing the catch of his bow across open strings. It feels sluggish and he’s mortified to hear his E whistle. The seasons were changing, spring erupting into summer. Dark rosin it is. Now, where had he put it?
The freezer. An experiment he had forgotten about. Fuckshite. He instead retrieves the medium rosin in the compartment of his case; it had always been reliable. With a hand both practiced and furious, he rosins his bow. He pulls it across the A and D strings with force: the up-bowed pickups followed immediately by heavy, brutal down-bows. He mirrors the bowing across the G and D strings, then the A and E strings. He tests the open notes against their harmonics. With several more big sweeps of his arm, he determines the feeling of the violin beneath his fingertips is finally right.
He begins in D, playing the arpeggio in the natural minor, then the major. Working through every variation, he begins the D key arpeggios anew, this time slurring every other note ascending and subsequently every other note descending. Again. Finally, a D major scale, just one octave. D natural minor. The harmonic minor. The arpeggios again. E flat minor, E flat major, the harmonic minor. E minor, E major and the harmonic. And F natural. And F sharp. And up and up and up.
At the top of the octave, he sweeps into third position, the high D screaming with fourth finger vibrato that, he’ll admit, is overwrought. Bel canto, he chides himself viciously. At that moment, John enters the room, returning home from the shops with groceries, but Sherlock does not notice his entrance. From soaring E string high notes, he plummets down, down, down to the open G. John stands there and watches him, flying back up a G natural minor scale in three octaves.
Incredible.
John had never had much patience for scales. Running through them this swiftly and fluidly was far beyond him, recalling his limited experience with the clarinet in school. He begins to put the groceries away. As he watches Sherlock play, it doesn’t look like he’s breathing.
Is he holding his breath again? He’s got to blink more, the twit.
After another moment passes, Sherlock inhales sharply as he climbs up in the harmonic minor.
Must be bored out of his skull.
John notices the dagger buried halfway to the hilt in the drywall and sighs loudly. Sherlock is ironing out the shift from the F sharp in first position to the G natural in the third, over and over and over.
It sounds fine, what’s he all bent out of shape about?
Fucking idiot, sounds like shite—can’t even do this right. Every time he shifts into third, his first finger anchors somewhere different. He plays it, slurred, over and over and over until he thinks his old tutor would finally have been satisfied. The shift into sixth on the E is fine, thank Christ, but the shift back down into third needs work. Again, again, again. Why is it all so off? Nobody would be giving him any gold stars today. Not playing for several weeks didn’t explain it. There must be something wrong with him. The next time his E string whistles, he shouts.
“What on Earth are you on about!” John says from the kitchen, holding a box of breakfast cereal.
“My blasted bow needs to be rehaired. Either that, or I’ve suddenly regressed about, oh fifteen years of study?”
“You don’t sound that bad, Sherlock,” John says, turning to put away more groceries.
“Stop being so damned nice, John. I sound like a bag of shrieking cats.”
“I’ll call your brother about your bow,” John offers, coming back out to the living room.
“No! I don’t like his luthier, he ruined my leather wrap last time. I have my own contact.”
“Well, contact him, then.”
“Oh shut up, John,” Sherlock hisses. John turns sharply and storms over to Sherlock.
John jams a finger, accusatory, at Sherlock’s sternum. “Stop it. You’ve been in an entire state since I got home from the shops. What’s wrong?”
“There is nothing wrong, John. I haven’t played for several weeks and the bleeding bow plays like shite.”
“No, that’s not it. There’s something proper wrong.”
“Just leave me alone, John. Mind your own business, for once,” Sherlock dismisses.
“Whatever, fine,” John says, and storms off to the toilet, slamming the door. As Sherlock resumes his scales, he begins to notice he feels a bit sick. He keeps playing. It’ll go away if he ignores it—it usually does. For god’s sake, he drank some tea earlier, why did his stomach still need to ache?
After returning from the toilet, John retrieves a mug from the cabinet and puts on the kettle for himself. Sherlock is still working himself through his scales dizzyingly. Abruptly, he cuts himself off and clutches his abdomen.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me, John.”
“Why are you holding your stomach like a fourteen year old with menstrual cramps, then?” Sherlock doesn’t reply. “How about I make you a cuppa, you drink it, and we see how you feel?”
“Fine. The caffeine might help.”
“The caffeine might be the problem. How much have you had today, anyhow?”
“Three.”
“Three cups? That isn’t very many. I expected more, to be honest.”
“Three pots.”
“Three pots of tea by yourself? Blimey, Sherlock, no wonder you feel off, you’re probably vibrating out of your skull. Have you at least had anything to eat today?”
“I had the chicken.”
“You had the chicken yesterday, and one meal yesterday is not enough to prevent you from feeling hungry at oh—” John checks his watch “almost four o’clock the next day. I’ll make you another cuppa to make you happy, but you’re going to drink it with some toast. With jam.”
“I’m not hungry. And my stomach is full enough already as it is,” Sherlock says, inexplicably, as John starts the kettle and slots bread into the toaster.
“How on Earth do you mean?” John leaves the kitchen and steps around the table closer to his flatmate, his friend. He takes in Sherlock’s pallor, the clammy sweat accumulated above his brow. “Something’s wrong. Do you feel sick?”
“I think I should know if I were sick, John,” Sherlock spits, but his words lack the venom he’d intended.
“What do you mean by ‘my stomach is full enough already’? You haven’t eaten, and all you’ve had today is tea. How can you be full?”
“I feel full.”
“Are you constipated?”
“I will not dignify that question with an answer.”
“Well have you had a piss in the last five hours since I was out?” John shouts.
Sherlock is silent. The ridiculous question hangs in the air.
“Is that it? You’ve been holding in three pots of tea for five hours? Maybe you feel sick because you’ve not had a piss all day, mate!”
“That is not why I feel off!”
“So you do feel sick!”
“I didn’t say I felt sick.”
“And how the hell are you supposed to know! You can’t even tell when you need a bleeding leak! Why don’t you go have a piss and come back here and talk to me.”
Sherlock feigns reluctance and says, “I don’t need to talk to you about my leak.”
John takes the bow and violin out of Sherlock’s hands and says, “You can have these back after you’ve gone to the toilet.”
“Fine.” John replaces the violin and shoulder rest and loosens the bow before carefully putting it back in Sherlock’s case.
Sherlock returns shortly. “Better now? You look less clammy already.” Sherlock says nothing. John sighs. “Come here, Sherlock.”
Sherlock comes up to John silently, and an image of Sherlock as a boy flashes briefly in John’s mind. His manner makes him look so small and young. John stands before him and tries to look into both of his eyes at the same time, his gaze flickering between them. Sherlock’s stomach chooses that moment to grumble fiercely. “You’re hungry,” John says, eyes holding Sherlock hostage.
“I’m not,” Sherlock says, all the contra evidence stacked against him.
“Then what’s all this about, then,” John says, the knuckles of his index finger making feather-soft contact with Sherlock’s abdomen, just beneath his sternum. Sherlock huffs and steps away.
“You’re going to eat some toast.”
“I don’t like toast.”
“Yes, you do. I’ll even put on your favorite jam.”
“I don’t have a favorite jam.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Whatever, John.” He paces the flat, seeming to forget he’d been distracting himself with the violin mere minutes earlier. John is already in the kitchen as the kettle boils, gathering butter and raspberry jam. He hopes Sherlock won’t notice that he’d pulled a packet of decaf breakfast tea from his secret stash in the cabinet. Sherlock is pacing, pacing, pacing. In a moment, John has Sherlock’s tea and toast ready for him at the dining table.
“Come sit,” John invites. Sherlock obliges, and John sits down across from him, expectant. “Eat. Now. Drink this—slowly,” he says.
“Don’t look at me,” Sherlock grumbles, blowing on his tea.
“Why not? I haven’t seen you all day,” John says.
“I can’t eat with you looking at me like that.” Does John realize how intense his gaze is?
John sighs. “Alright, Sherlock, fine. I’m going to put the rest of the groceries away now and do some tidying up. When I’m finished, I want to see that plate empty and the tea, drunk.” He makes a show of standing and turning his back to Sherlock.
Sherlock, mildly repulsed at the thought of eating at that moment, takes a minute bite of toast. He’s utterly appalled to find the jam and butter delicious. He soon finds the whole slice eaten, as if he’d blacked out. He sips the tea slowly; it tastes a bit odd. He’d assume John had over steeped it if John hadn’t made the comment earlier about how much tea he’d already had. It’s decaf…the wanker!
He musters the concentration and will to begin work on the second slice. The stupid decaf is still a welcome accomplice, washing his mouth of the errant tastes and textures foisted upon him by John. Once he’s finished the blasted toast and sipped on more of the tea, he is loath to admit he feels almost entirely better—normal, even. John, as if psychic, chooses that moment to reappear. He leans down over Sherlock, bracing one hand on the back of Sherlock’s chair and the other on the table next to Sherlock’s empty plate.
“Already looking better, miles better. Color’s normal again, and you don’t look as if your scale book makes you want to vomit,” John says, eyes sweeping across Sherlock’s curls, brow, and face.
“It’s a bad book, the editor is an idiot.”
“Oh I’m sure. And it certainly wasn’t that not eating all day and holding in your piss for hours at a time was making you nauseous and sick—no, couldn’t have been that. You always have meticulous control over your”—his gaze flickers down to Sherlock’s half-unbuttoned silk pajamas “transport.”
“I do have meticulous control, John. Most people would’ve keeled over well before I even noticed there was anything wrong,” Sherlock says, haughty.
“Most people eat when they feel hungry, and piss when they need to take a leak, you blockhead.”
“Well, most people aren’t me. They’re weak.”
“Maybe your own senses are weaker than you think they are.” John stands, releasing Sherlock’s chair. “You realize it’s normal to be able to tell whether you need the toilet? You shouldn’t need me to ask you if you’d loo’d yet today to tell.”
“I don’t need you to mother me, John!”
“No, you just expect Mrs. Hudson and your brother to do all the mothering you clearly need.”
“I don’t need mothering at all, John!”
“Sherlock, if you didn’t need mothering, you would be able to eat three meals a day without someone putting a gun to your head.”
Sherlock says nothing, beholding John with fury in his watery blue eyes. He storms away from the kitchen, back into the living room. John makes himself some toast and eats it.
Sherlock remembers his violin exists, retrieving it from the case, where John had so carefully stowed it. He looks over at John, who had finished his toast and was now washing the plates he and Sherlock had used.
He makes it look so easy.
He takes out his bow, reattaches the shoulder rest. With a brush of his left little finger across the fingerboard, he knows the tuning has not faltered. He plays an A minor scale.
John always makes it look so easy. The next scale, in B natural minor. Why is it that he can never tell he needs the toilet?
His fingers fly between strings. What starts out as arpeggio variations morphs into a brooding melody. The violin beneath his fingers seems to ask more questions as measures climb, then fall. Why is it always so hard? He has to admit that eating nearly always does make him feel better, and that his worst days are the ones where he doesn’t eat at all. Yes, the case, the chase, and the caffeine can sustain him. For a time. But inevitably, he hits a wall—is unable to solve the latest and last blasted problem in front of him.
The melody he improvises stutters. His fingers desire a melody in threes, no longer in twos or fours. He yields to their demand, and the melody emerges anew in ¾, becoming a waltz. His arm swings as he plays, and he lets himself dissolve into his own song. Some of the arpeggios he’d been practicing bleed into the improvisation, their ascent again asking questions the melody cannot answer. Why does he need someone to tell him to eat, force him to eat? Why can’t he just be some normal fucking bloke who eats and fucks, and smiles when spoken to? Why did he have to be some pseudo-genius arsehole sociopath whose only fleeting joys are crime puzzles, hard drugs, and the violin? Why can’t he just be normal? His hands, as if locked on an invisible conductor, conclude the melody in a way befitting the end of a movement. He draws a constricted breath.
John, whom Sherlock had not noticed, sitting there, in his chair, says, “You did a good job just now, Sherlock.”
“What, playing? I sound little better than I did before.”
“I always think you sound excellent, Sherlock. But I meant about that business with the toast. You ate it all, both pieces. And had the tea.”
Sherlock does not know what to say. He also does not know what to play. John’s statement hangs in the air like dust particles on the late-afternoon sunbeams coming through the window.
“I do mean it, Sherlock. I know you didn’t want to. I know that you would rather eat like a damn reptile: one big meal to keep you going every few weeks. But you did it when I asked you to. And you did a good job.”
Sherlock is absolutely still.
“I’m proud of you. And really, you should be proud of yourself.” Sherlock inhales sharply, as if he’d been holding his breath. “Would you play something for me? Sherlock?”
Sherlock feels hot. He can’t look at him, he can’t. But he replaces his bow across his strings, a motif emerging counter to the one he’d established before John had spoken. Before John had…commended him. This refrain starts high, descending carefully down onto open strings. A waltz, it remains. As it develops, it references the pattern of ascending arpeggios from before. Soon, melody and countermelody dance across strings.
John feels like he’s swimming in it. It threatens to drown him. Sherlock had not played something this lovely in a long time. Sherlock was oft enamored with dissonant, rageful sound. Compelling, yes. Technically demanding, of course. They were impressive feats, but one would not immediately call them beautiful. But this? This was outright gorgeous. Maybe the ticket really is fattening and flattery. John closes his eyes to listen better, hoping Sherlock doesn’t take it for drowsiness or disinterest. How could I ever be uninterested in you? As the tide of afternoon recedes into evening, John resolves to try again tomorrow.
In the morning, we’ll try blueberry jam and coffee.