A Study in Emptiness:
Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? Or could it be as wiser ones have seen, that the glass is somewhat full of emptiness? Without love, the Almighty's intial purpose for life, souls turn to glass,and are filled with their own shapeless reflection...
John Watson never witnessed such a malady , in all the days of his medical practice, until he'd met Sherlock Holmes. And truelly there was not such a sadness that lingered on Ha Beni Adam (the Sons of Men) as ever there did this young man, on whom rested the fate of London metropolis, and even perhaps the world, one bitter December in recent history.
John entered their was a dark night, a cold and rainy night, and the wind sighed like RaHel weeping for her scattered children,because they are no more. He draped his coat over a chair,flipped through a stack of bills, and smiled at the skull perched at the end of Sherlock's desk as they "engaged in conversation"
"Evening,Sherlock, Caroline." (by whom he meant the skull, for Mrs. Hudson had insisted a name be given it, and that it be a feminine name to add a "woman's touch to the mold that is two bachelors' joint dwelling")
"Caroline, don't gawk at John,gawking is rude. Even though you observe that he hasn't phoned his sister, and he's lost his phone, presumably why he didn't answer my last message or phone said sister, and clearly he didn't finish his lunch this afternoon, and he forgot the milk , which never mind actually I forgot it,and he is in a cynical frame of mind,because another woman has spurned him , yet another reason I maintain that romance is vanity. Hello, what have I got here? Someone phone Houston, we,ve a mistake."Sherlock spouted off all of this, never looking up from the chemical vials over which he laboured his case, sighing wistfully and examining a piece of bloody denim belonging once to one dearly demised anonymous.
"Vanity?" John challenged, irritated (but not at Sherlock) shook his head.
"Vanity, vanity all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Of the making of many murders there is no end, and much killing evidently brings great pleasure to certain of London who couldn't find better use for intelligence...How dull."
"Look who's cynical now, and it doesn't sound like me." John laughed. Sherlock did look up them, and in his eyes, for the first time, John saw it. The tragedy of the Modern Era. The ill that only love,brotherly and pure, can fix. The Emptiness.
Suddenly he was made of glass, and John could see right through him, and found that his insides were hollow. He was without form, and void, and dakness covered the face of a fathomless mind.
"So?" Sherlock scoffed, with a little sneer, and shrugged,going back to the valiant, though fruitless effort, of saving people who would turn like jackals to bones on him, at the slightest whim of the press. Living in the age that reads it in the paper, so it "must be true".
John was unsettled. Because he loved him. Because the love was real and returned. Maybe to the point of death. Enough to Fall from the Highest. He blinked ,taken aback, and silence fell with the weight of that troubled love. He sensed trouble coming, he sensed the echo of pain in the hollow ring of his words.
Before our story even begins John vows to save him. Not knowing that this Empty was a choice he'd made for John's own deliverance. And before we begin, we know already that they will save each the other, making it safe to proceed.