A/N: Hmm, not sure where this came from. Hope you like it!
...
Sherlock propped the violin beneath his jaw, wincing slightly as it rubbed the bruise there. He gently rested the bow against the violin's strings, the familiar twang of the vibration resounding through his head. He rearranged his fingers against the wires, prepping the chord, against the slight tremble in his hands. He shifted his feet apart, balancing himself against the pain and nausea rushing through him in dull waves, various bruises and cuts still painful, but not so overwhelming as they were before Lestrade had found him and his captor. Broken ribs and bleeding wounds, that's all they were.
Sherlock mastered himself over them. Pain was pain. Breathe in, let it spread, let it fill you, breathe out. His chest hurt when expanded, the still raw burns after three days of freedom tugging against his skin. He refused to breathe shallowly, though. He wouldn't give that part of himself the satisfaction. Let it hurt.
Exhaling softly through his nose, slowly, gently, he pulled the bow across the strings, letting the sweet, lilting note fill the silence, fill his mind, fill the torn and puckered skin. For a moment, the pain was gone. Sherlock's lips curled upward in something that might have been a smile. Because the pain was his, and his alone. And he could take it.
"I didn't tell him anything," Sherlock said, quietly, proudly.
"I know," John's voice answered from behind him, "Why didn't you? If he hurt you…why wouldn't you just tell him?"
Sherlock plucked a string and then played a low, prolonged note, smiling out the window as he did and saying his next words with no little sense of accomplishment, knowing John was safe and whole behind him because he had spent a week in captivity saying nothing,
"He wasn't worth it,"