Disclaimer: The characters of Sherlock are not mine, nor is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I make no monetary profit from this.
Note: Written for a prompt on the LJ kink meme asking for something written for awesomely untranslatable words on matadornetwork –dot- com. I apologize if I have, through cultural disconnection or something like that, gotten the spirit of the word wrong.
Toska
Bored says Sherlock, and that isn't the worst of it.
"Find something else to do," says Lestrade, finally answering Sherlock's twentieth call, before he turns off his mobile for the rest of the day. (He keeps another phone for days like this, and his team and his superiors have that number. Sherlock respects this and has never gone out of his way to find it out, though it is tempting, and he has been told to find other things to occupy him.)
John shakes his head, and suggests that Sherlock could do the shopping or the laundry or learn how to cook ("I already know how to cook, John." "I haven't seen any proof of that."), and hides his gun and the ammunition. (Sherlock always finds it anyway.)
They don't understand, and Sherlock fails to explain (or doesn't care to), that it isn't just boredom. It's a soul-scouring, brain-curdlingpining for activity. It's anguish, it's longing, it's a deep, desperate desire for nothing in particular, a restless, unsatisfied state that has him staying up at night, playing discordant tunes on the violin until 3 AM. (Or until John comes down and throws bedroom slippers at him.)
It happens between cases, when his mind isn't fizzing with the connections that other people can't seem to make, when the adrenaline of the chase isn't there to burn it out of his system.
So he sulks and doesn't change out of his pajamas and shoots walls, and waits for the mood, maddening in its namelessness, to go away.
Toska, Russian, according to Vladimir Nabokov "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom."