Inspired by the final scene in Granada's version of A Scandal in Bohemia, this is my interpretation of Holmes' feelings regarding Irene Adler. Do not fear, canon purists -- I am not an advocate of a romance between the two. This is merely one of my poetic ramblings.
It had been a day since his last case. His mind, not yet driven to boredom, still lingered on the thrill of the problem, churning over its various aspects when the mood struck him, but more often wandering lazily to other things.
Outside the gaslit window, the snow had come to London — the first snow. Earlier in the evening it had been swirling madly, but now, when one looked beyond the pane of glass, one saw it drifting in its own simple serenity. There was just enough chill in the room to make the fire seem all the warmer. His Boswell sat at his desk, contentedly scribbling in one of his journals — the volume habitually dedicated to his cases, he saw — which left him alone in his chair by the fire.
And the music came again.
That was one of the things about himself that even he could not explain. He didn't understand from where the music came, or how it came, only that it did. Caught off his guard by the absence of a thought to hide behind, emotion rose within his soul without reason, not as a frontal attack but merely there, inside himself, without warning.
But this was not the normal feeling, the dismal eddy of boredom that left him swirling in his own madness. This was sharp and tangible, forever bittersweet; the tears that made one's heart sing, and the smile that made one weep.
Oh, he knew too late that he had wandered away. Recalling himself hurt more than simply sitting in his chair and aching... and why did he ache? That was the other mystery. But though cause and reason bothered him, somehow it didn't matter — he pushed aside both the mystery and his wonderings, and just sat there, unable to tear himself away.
And with the grief came music. The feeling left his veins and became its own entity, leaping into melody, until he heard it clearly.
Almost without a conscious thought, the violin was in his arms, and they were singing together — not one of the erratic improvisations that Watson hated, not this time. No. The grief was too great to simply hang in the air and haunt him. It had to be known, had to be real. And so he made it real.
He remembered now, the reason — or thought he did. Hunting for some trivial object in his desk drawer earlier that morning, he had found the photograph. The one containing The Woman, The Only Woman. He had turned away, the original object of his search forgotten. But he had not forgotten the photograph.
A low note he played, for the truth, and for his Watson who had expressed it so well. Love? No, one could not be honest and call it that. It was never that silly quickening of the blood that everyone called love. He was above that. And no, even if it had been something deeper, he had never even considered feeling for her in that way.
What then? He played a string of notes so that they curved around, like a question mark in the ear. Not love... but a contradiction. A presupposition, broken, left lying in pieces at his feet.
Because he knew that the thing everyone else called love was not real Love. Not something he admitted, but something that he knew all the same. And he had decided, even when he was still young, that real Love was, for him, impossible. He had known enough women to form an opinion of them — that they were not made for him. He knew that he could never enter into so intense and vulnerable a union with someone that could not traverse the same mental stratosphere in which he existed. So he had ruled them out, and condemned himself to a life as an eternal bachelor. And for the most part, he had been perfectly fine with that.
But no! He played a high note, and held it so that it throbbed painfully on the strings before subsiding into other, lesser notes. Not all of him had believed that conclusion, had it? Because somewhere, he had believed that not all women were like that. That there had to be one, somewhere, that would equal him — even though that notion was the most fantastic of fancies, the wildest of dreams: an impossibility. Such an impossibility that he had not bothered to waste time dwelling on it: only left it, untouched, unrealized, in the back of his mind.
She had proved him wrong. And that was what stung. Because with the breaking of that one impossibility had come another, even more impossible because it was no misconception, but reality. He had found her! He knew that she was real! But forever beyond his reach. Not that he would have reached... but he still thought about it, from time to time, on nights like tonight. And it bothered him.
"A face that a man might die for..." True, but not the face. A mind. A mind that a man might die for, if he pushed himself far enough to take that dreadful chance, and find... companionship? To no longer be left alone with genius that everyone else could not comprehend?
But even there, finding a thought coherent enough to think in words was bringing the matter down to the realm of the commonplace – for it was so much more than that. In her face was bound up every secret longing that had never been realized, everything he had lost that he had never had to begin with. The forgotten longings called his name from some distant land, crying with their thousand sirens' voices.
He closed his eyes and played the highest notes on the violin, ascending and ascending until he could ascend no higher. The last note faded into silence, and he simply stood there, motionless. For he had left his heart on the last note — left it hanging there as if on a hat peg, until another day when he might unexpectedly stumble across it once more.
And that was when he fully realized, for the first time, that he was standing – no longer in his chair, as he had been when he had started.
And his biographer had stopped his scribbling some time ago.
He looked up to see Watson leaning back in his desk chair, staring vacantly at some far corner of the ceiling. There were tears in his eyes. After a few moments he came to, saw Holmes looking at him, and reached up furtively to wipe the tears from his eyes.
"Holmes… I didn't know you could do that."
The hands that held the bow and violin fell to hang limply at his side, as he looked at his fellow-lodger and knew that he was trying not to weep over the memory of a woman with blonde curls who had once shared his last name. He, the outside observer, was at a complete loss for anything to say, any action that he could take. For in truth, in that moment, he envied his friend. He had lived more deeply, known that which pure logic alone could never know… loved, in the truest sense of the word. And that love was what wounded him now.
As he turned back slowly to his seat, the firelight glinted off an extra, unusual something in his eyes. If one could stretch imagination that far, one could almost say it was a tear that never fell.