The first time John went to the grave was with Mrs. Hudson, with a plea for a miracle and a few traitorous tears. It was only the first time he went to the grave, but it was to be the last time he cried, he decided.
All the times after, it was a solemn affair. He went a few times a week, whenever the silence in Baker Street became deafening. Sometimes he'd only stay for a minute or two, just long enough to stare at the elegant black headstone with its golden scrawl and feel his leg buckle beneath him. Most times he stayed for hours. He got used to the hard ground beneath him, sat cross-legged before his late friend, and he mused whether he'd wear a groove into the ground just like on the armchair back home. He'd bring a book – he didn't read the newspaper any more, every word a poisonous lie as far as he was concerned – or maybe a sandwich, which probably wasn't very proper, but somehow he doubted Sherlock would mind.
There was a particularly difficult day where he had ran into Sarah and, rather than scorn which was par for the course with his exes usually, she had given him the warmest look he had ever seen. It had been paired with a sincere, "I hope you're alright." People were always saying that to him now, as though he'd just taken a bad tumble or had heard Harry was on the bottle again, and it had gotten to the point where every time he heard it he just wanted to scream and scream until he could not scream any more – how could I be alright, NO IT'S NOT ALRIGHT – but then. When Sarah had said it, so utterly genuine with concern despite their not particularly amicable break-up, it didn't seem like the contrived greeting it had become with everybody else. And he had felt that tightness in his throat once again.
He fled to the cemetery that day and, for reasons he couldn't fathom, he had taken Sherlock's violin from the flat with him. Sat on the dirt before the headstone, he had removed the violin from the case and just held it for a while. The wood glistened with a varnished sheen, the strings still taut and it seemed to leech the heat from his hands, growing warm in his palms.
He cried, quiet and chokingly, gripping the warm instrument with a tightness that would have made Sherlock wince.
۞
It became a habit.
He still went several times a week, just like he went to get the shopping in – only half the stuff now, only one mouth to feed – or went to the clinic for his shifts. There was no ceremony about it any more. Just one more thing forming his routine, his days and weeks and months all blurred together.
Except there would be horrible days. An odd day that broke the routine of his life with a cruel jolt. It could be anything. Seeing spray-painting scrawled on a wall, SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS A FRAUD. Glimpsing a mess of dark curls over a sweeping black coat and realising his body had turned to follow the stranger without his permission. Sometimes it was something as simple as coming across one of Sherlock's number of fake beards stuffed away in some nook or cranny. Whatever it was that triggered it, John would suddenly find himself suffocating in 221B with silence around him louder than any sound.
On those days, he'd grab the violin case and escape the flat.
He wondered if Sherlock would mind. It had never been explicitly stated – how hypocritical that would have been when all of John's belongings seemed to be fair game – but he had always regarded the violin as something off limits. Touching the violin would have been like touching Sherlock himself, the instrument an extension of the man, as much a limb as his arms and his legs. Whether he was plucking at the strings absent-mindedly, dragging the bow and creating a screech to drive Mycroft out of the flat, or those rare moments where he completely lost himself in the sound he was creating, oblivious to John and London and the world. Yes, the violin had always seemed something far too personal for him to touch, even though Sherlock would often share his music. He thought about how he would have felt if Sherlock had ever found reason to take his dogtags, and felt a little guilty as his hands ran over the lacquered wood.
He didn't put the violin away, however. He just thought of how it would be if things were reversed. If John had been the one to leave Sherlock behind.
He'd have wanted Sherlock to wear his tags to the funeral.
۞
It was about a year after the funeral that John took the bow out of the case too. It was an almost unconscious action, he couldn't remember willing himself to do it, but then he was holding the violin with one hand and the bow with another.
It had been over a year since music had last been wrought from the strings, and it was an impossibly sad sight, to see those once tended to strings now slack and out of tune. Sherlock would never have allowed the instrument to be left so neglected but then, John thought bitterly, it wasn't the only one.
He had no idea what he was doing, of course. The only instrument he'd ever played had been the guitar. Back when he was a kid, it was the coolest thing imaginable to be able to play the guitar. Everyone and their mother asked for one for Christmas, took lessons for a few months then, John amongst them, got bored that they couldn't even play Smoke On The Water yet and quit. Still, he had seen Sherlock play enough times to know what pose to adopt.
Left arm outstretched, bent slightly at the elbow, the bottom of the instrument resting lightly on his shoulder. Head turned a fraction, the space between his chin and left cheek perched atop the chin-rest. Right hand holding the bow, clumsily trying to space his fingers into the awkward position he had seen Sherlock do so easily. Bringing the bow to hover atop the strings, and slowly pulling the hair of the bow across the G string.
He didn't even get a sound.
Of course not. The strings were too loose and the bow wasn't even rosined. There was not enough tension between the two for the strings to vibrate at all.
John gave a humourless little laugh.
Despite himself, he was almost... offended. Like the instrument had rejected him, somehow. He wasn't Sherlock. He wasn't brilliant and impossible. He couldn't translate emotions that didn't have names into music that couldn't be imitated. But he wasn't dead either, he thought, and he couldn't bear to let the only thing he had left of Sherlock just gather dust.
The next day, he went to the music shop he had passed a thousand times but never went into. He left with the violin newly tuned and a Beginner's Guide To Violins.
۞
John had always been a quick learner, so it was all the more frustrating that he was finding the entire thing so difficult. Months passed and, despite learning the theory of it, he could pull no decent sound from the instrument.
He could tune the strings on his own now. He could rosin the bow. He took care to wipe the wood after every practise session. It was cared for as tenderly as Sherlock had once done.
But the music was gone.
It didn't like him, John knew. A completely irrational thought. Inanimate objects didn't tend to have preferences. But John knew it was true. It wasn't that he was doing anything wrong. He was playing the right notes and drawing the bow across the strings with the correct pressure and angle. Yet it refused to yield even the most basic song to him.
He wasn't Sherlock, and the violin knew it.
It only made him try harder. He wasn't trying to be Sherlock at all, but he needed this little thing, needed to drive away the painful silence of 221B with the music it craved, he craved. He needed the small bit of chaos that struggling with the stubborn instrument gave him, a brief reprieve from work and home, work and home, work and home.
He needed this tiny bit of Sherlock in his life.
۞
By the second year after the funeral, the hype had all but died down.
No longer did John walk the streets with his eyes trained on the floor to avoid seeing the different spray-paint declarations – Sherlock Holmes Was A Fraud, I Believe In Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty Was Real, Richard Brooke Was Real – despite their polarizing messages, they all cut too deeply in different ways.
People didn't email him any more demanding the blog be reopened, or worse, restarted. He had once got a message asking him to write more stories. As though the story continued, as though Sherlock was some fictional lead, as though it wasn't John's life. The pleas and demands had finally dwindled down to nothing and he no longer had to brace himself before opening his AOL.
He had stopped receiving letters and even visits from Sherlock's old clients, furious and wanting to know if they had been used like ensemble members of a cast. Those had been the worst, on his frayed nerves and his poor beaten knuckles.
It had all fizzled out now. For everyone else, it had simply been a fad. Something interesting to bicker about with friends and family. Once the newspapers had exhausted every angle the story could possibly offer, it was no longer the hot topic, and the buzz faded.
That was probably why John was so honest to god shocked when he saw the state of Sherlock's headstone three years after the funeral.
It had been vandalized. The sleek black marble, which John had faithfully cleaned every visit, was cracked. A gnarling crack cut through the centre of the stone, little spiderwebbing fractures spanning out to the corners, as though someone had given the stone a blow with something heavy. The carved name was now split. Some of the marble had been chipped away, lying in splinters in the dirt. A whole corner was broken off, a few feet away like a crumbling jigsaw piece.
It knocked John sick and he almost retched. He may have given in to the urge to be sick if he hadn't instead been snatched by the sight of a someone sprinting down the far path.
There was not the merest trace of a limp as he stalked after them, running faster than he'd had need to do in years. The person sped up when they realised they were being chased but no matter how hard they forced their feet to move, it was pointless. John had them pinned to the ground before they even reached the gates.
He flipped them over. He wanted to see their face, to see the face of the person who would dare defile his friend's memory. As though he had the right. As though anybody had the right.
They were younger than John, in their late twenties, but with a weathered face. He didn't recognise the man at all. If he had ever been a client of Sherlock's, it had been before John. They didn't look too scared. In fact, there was a challenge in their eyes.
Mistake.
Skin split beneath his fists, blood bursting across his hands, hot and viscous. His or the man's, it hardly mattered. The man struggled but John was relentless, pinning him to the ground with the weight of his body and sending punch after punch across his face. Soon enough, there were whimpers and begs to stop, but it just didn't register. All John could see was Sherlock's golden name fractured. Anger surged anew.
You'll kill him if you don't stop.
That should have been enough. That should have stopped him. He was John Watson, military man and Doctor, he did not lose his calm like this. He did not abandon his control and beat a man senseless.
But oh, it felt good. He directed all his rage at this man, made him the representative of everybody who had insulted or degraded Sherlock, who had bought into Moriarty's scheme and taken the lies they were spoon-fed by the press so eagerly. He deserved it, they deserved it. He was fighting a war and he was all on his own and this felt good.
He couldn't stop. His hands were burning and the struggling had quietened to sobs but he couldn't bring himself to stop the attack. He was painted red in their blood and god, he probably looked like a living breathing crime scene – Sherlock would have liked that.
Sherlock loved a crime scene, after all. Maybe if a miracle was going to happen, he had to make it happen. If Sherlock was to come back to him, to save him once more from the tedium and return him to the battlefield he craved so much, maybe John would have to give him a crime scene. A case.
"Oh, god."
John froze, hearing himself and feeling physically sick.
The person beneath him was breathing raggedly, face indistinguishable beneath all the blood, his hands which had been scrabbling uselessly at John now dropping to the floor.
"I – Christ, I'm sorry, I don't know –" John stumbled over his words, horrified at the mess beneath him, and then he was fumbling for his mobile. It slipped from his blood-slick hands several times before he managed to shoot off a text, the first time he had used that number in a long time.
Lestrade arrived alone a little while later, dressed casually and stepping out of an unmarked Vauxhall. There was no surprise on his face, just the pity John was only too used to.
No charges were made on either side, for vandalism nor assault. John almost wished there had been. It couldn't have been worse than how understanding Lestrade had been.
۞
John's beaten hands took hold of the violin once more that night. He stood before the window, looking out on the street without really seeing it, and brought the bow up.
Music came.
Stumbling notes pulled from unwilling strings, shaking hand almost dropping the bow, clumsy fingers moving across the top of the violin.
Tears.
None of the quiet dignity he had maintained for three years. It was hysterical, the cries dragged from his throat painfully, tears streaking down his cheeks with a burn.
The music had none of the charm that Sherlock's did. There was no rhythm, barely even a tune, just mindless sound leaving him as his mind screamed and his heart seemed to fracture a little more. It was raw with an intensity he would never have believed himself capable of, and he finally understood why the instrument had never given him sound before, when he had been so self-contained and smothering.
So lost in the sound of his grief, John did not hear the tell-tale creak of the stairs that he had been waiting for. Didn't notice the door to the living room inch open. Didn't feel the stare upon him.
He only realised he wasn't alone when a warm body pressed against his back, elegant hands creeping up his arms to cover his own. John froze, the music faltering, and he didn't dare turn around. Couldn't bear to break this illusion.
Lips were at his ear.
Warm breath.
"Play for me, John."
Their hands moved together, trembling notes chasing away the silence of 221B. The warmth of Sherlock surrounded John – warm, breathing, alive – and the melancholy sounds changed into something else. Sherlock's hands covered his, steering but not controlling, and their music melded together.
Chaotic, clashing, happiness and anger and relief and resentment and welcome home, why did you leave me, oh god you're alive, how could you leave me, and the violin relented to the symphony of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.
۞
AN: Two reunion fics in the first week after the Reichenbach episode, how the hell am I going to cope until series three, dear lord. This was meant to be gen but my shipper came out so now it seems a bit S/Jish. No regrets. Hope you enjoyed!