The silence is pressing in on him.
Silence is empty. It is devoid of motion, of energy, of life. It reaches into you and, if you aren't careful, steals away everything that made you able to keep going, to keep on. Some people, he is vaguely aware, think that silence is more peaceful than the alternative, but he knows the truth. Silence means death.
John Watson is not a man who was meant for silence.
In the tiny, tidy flat he has moved into, it is stronger than anywhere else. Eagerly he drinks up the sound of traffic outside, the clatter of his neighbor on the other side of the wall, but it is too distant to do much good. Insistently he clinks his teacup against its saucer, his spoon against the teacup, all of it against the sink. It echoes through the emptiness of the room, a small and fragile sound that bursts and fades almost before he can savor it.
It is the worst at night, laying in bed and waiting for whatever nightmares will take him. He knows he needed rest-tomorrow will be an early morning at the surgery, and an overtired doctor does little good for anyone. For a glorious half hour he drifts on the edge of sleep with the ghost of a violin playing in his ear, but it was is chased away by the distant shattering of glass that is not the result of some ill-fated experiment in his kitchen. Probably someone breaking a bottle a few streets away.
John sits up and runs a hand over his face. Sleep isn't going to come, not now that the oppressive quiet is raging against him again in full force. It is a thick blanket that muffles his every sense, suffocating him.
Dully he peers into the darkness of his room, his too few, too neat possessions looming pitch against the slate of the air. On impulse he stands and crosses to the closet, with vague thoughts of digging out his small box of outdated CDs. Instead, he comes out with a medium-sized leather case, its rectangular silhouette broken by two latches and a handle.
John sets it softly, almost reverently on his bed. He's had it so long he barely even thinks about it anymore, and certainly hasn't opened it since before he left for the service. Uncertainly he flips up the latches. It is the middle of the night-his neighbors certainly won't appreciate the disruption-and yet. Here is a worthy weapon against the silence.
He slips a sliver of wood between his lips as his hands work to assemble his chosen weapon. The resistance he meets made him wince; if he is to do this again, he will have to grease it first.
Out of practice as he is, the first note is glorious. There in the dark with his teeth digging into his lower lip he fills his prison with beautiful, reverberating sound. His fingers mostly remember where to go, though he has to fight to recall the notes of each scale as he plays it. With his mind occupied by finding each pitch and his ears filled with the skeleton of music, he doesn't have to think about anything else, about how still and empty the flat is.
He stumbles his way through four scales before his neighbor pounds on their shared wall. It is enough, though. For the first time in a long time, John falls asleep thinking about something other than the quiet.
***
When he next got the chance to pull out his instrument, it is daytime. A little rummaging produced sheet music: von Weber, one of those pieces that is compulsory for any aspiring clarinetist to learn. Brow furrowed, John sets to work refamiliarizing himself with the rhythms and turns and arpeggios.
It has been too long. He keeps stopping and going back to repeat runs at a snail's pace. Nearly every attempt to go over the break is met with a shrill squeak. The music, propped up against his open laptop, keeps sliding down where he can't read it. His cheeks ache-his buccinator muscles, his medical degree tells him-and before he's gotten through two pages air is leaking out the corners of his mouth.
John doesn't care about any of that. Those brief twenty minutes burn away the stifling fog of quiet, and for a magnificent hour afterwards it stays burned away.
That night he dreams of a duet for clarinet and violin.
***
Every day that week he works on the von Weber, managing to play a little longer each time.
He makes the mistake of mentioning it to Ella, the next time he goes in to see her. The instant he brings it up he can see her enthusiasm, though she is clearly trying to keep it contained for fear of scaring him away from what (her notes, read upside down, tell him) she sees as a healthy coping mechanism.
"That's good, John. What made you start playing again?"
He rubs at the joint of his right thumb, sore and red from the unaccustomed weight of his instrument, and shrugs. "Dunno. I found it in my closet. Seemed a waste not to use it."
He doesn't tell her about the relief from the silence, about the horrible absence of sound that had been growing too much to bear.
***
The week he finally masters the von Weber (if at a slower tempo than is traditional), Ella pointedly hands him an ad for clarinet auditions for a community orchestra. It's not at all what he had in mind when he picked up his instrument again, but somehow-like the blog-she manages to convince him to do it.
"What harm can it do?" she asks, pointing out that if he makes it in and really doesn't want to go through with it, he can always turn them down.
He remembers when he was young and the thought of an audition put a ball of sickness in his stomach, how breathing deeply enough to play in front of the judges was a struggle. Now, after bullets and bombs and madcap dashes through London and tall, thin figures standing on ledges-he stops that train of thought, backs it up. After everything he's been through, it seems a little silly to be nervous about playing a little music in front of a handful of strangers.
John doesn't expect to get in. Even in his youth, when he was in practice, he hadn't been very good. Then again, the orchestra itself isn't very good, so maybe it makes sense after all.
The first rehearsal starts off fairly well. Most of the pieces they're playing are popular, the sorts of music everyone has heard at some time or another in a film or commercial, but can't quite put a name to. He's getting used to playing in a group again, managing to joke just a little bit with the second clarinet when the director pauses to correct the strings.
Then they start on selections from Sleeping Beauty, and come to the Entr'acte. The solo violinist has a mop of dark, curly hair, and John is struck with a sudden certainty that he's woken up in the middle of the night to this very melody. Breathing suddenly becomes difficult, and the music on the stand before him blurs. This hurts almost more than the silence does-at least the silence is a dull pain. This is sharp, stabbing him right through the center of his chest. His hands are shaking too hard for him to play properly, but it doesn't matter because he misses his next entrance anyway.
He manages to snap out of it, just barely, when the second clarinet-a sweet-seeming young woman-places a hand on his shoulder and asks if he's alright. With a brief, forced smile, he brings his instrument back up, but his focus is broken.
The silence wins the next round; much as he knows he needs the practice, after rehearsal he can't bring himself to touch his instrument again for the rest of the week.
***
He ends up taking the cute second clarinet out for a pint after rehearsal one week. They both have fun. Even if they decide not to take things further than casual drinks, when she laughs she laughs loudly, and that makes it worth it.
He'd forgotten that other people could push back the silence, too.
***
John starts to notice himself humming on his way to the surgery, the pieces that they've been working on filling his mind. More than once he's been in conversation and caught his hands tapping out the fingerings to Carmen or Egmont Overture against his leg.
As the first concert approaches, the silence seems to grow more and more feeble. It only really finds a stranglehold on him these days when he thinks about it. Some days he's shocked to realize he's not thinking about it more than he is. On truly bad days he berates himself for forgetting its existence, for thinking that just because he's fought it off with new noises it means it isn't there.
But he's weakened his opponent. He can sleep at night, can lounge about his flat without constant fear of being consumed by it. Maybe he won't ever completely vanquish such a cunning foe as the insidious hush, but he does what he can, and he takes joy from picking up his weapon against it. What more can he ask for?
***
The rehearsal before the concert, the director takes him aside to talk to him about his solo in Carmen, the Intermezzo. His technique is just fine, he's assured, but it can be such a powerful movement and the director just knows that John can put more feeling into it. John nods, lips pressed together, and takes it under advisement.
At the dress rehearsal he tries, he really does, but he chokes. He's never flubbed it like this before, though, so while the director gives him a disappointed look he doesn't cut the rest of the orchestra off. John resolves to do better.
Then it's the concert. John knows he has people in the audience: Mrs. Hudson wouldn't miss it for the world, he knows; Ella, of course, wants to support his passion for music; he's got a few colleagues from the surgery who'd sounded interested, but no telling if they'd actually turn up; and he has a sneaking suspicion that Lestrade may have bought a ticket.
First half goes off without a hitch. He misses a minor entrance here and forgets the key signature for a measure there, but not really anything anyone would notice. The intermission he spends focusing and trying to keep calm, because Carmen is the first piece of the second half.
When they retake the stage, his hands are steady and his breathing even.
The Prelude and the Aragonaise aren't too challenging, even with all the accidentals. Then comes the Intermezzo. The flute and the harp that open the movement are beautiful. John closes his eyes and listens for his cue. When he opens them again, he barely sees the music. Instead, John's mind is fixed on the memory of a cacophonous whirlwind of a man, of all the chaos and noise that followed in his wake, and of all the silence that he left behind. John leans into the harmonies, his fingers caressing smooth nickel-plated keys, and he knows that he will never stop yearning for that silence to be broken.
The moment is over almost before he knows it-it's a short solo, all told. If he has to wipe his eyes before starting on the fourth movement, no one comments on it. When he stands at the end of the piece, the applause is riotous and no shred of quiet stands a chance against it.
Afterwards, before he heads out to greet his friends, he goes to put away his instrument. There's a fortune cookie sitting in his clarinet case, nestled innocently into the dip where his bell usually sits.
The fortune reads: "You are the music while the music lasts."