Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock, its characters, or BBC.
Snow billows through the air, blown by the north wind, and thunder claps and bells peal as the procession, swamped by the vast crowd, slowly marches to the church where the casket will be blessed by nine priests. All of London mourns the man who gave us such beautiful music. Sherlock Holmes has died. A man stands in the doorway of 221B on Baker Street, solemn and world-weary. Like those of many in London, his eyes are full of tears. A cab awaits him, but he waves it on. He is John Watson. My brother. And at a very hard time in his life, he came to know Sherlock Holmes well.
・・・
In the middle of the night, our flat shook with the banging of the three legless pianos as their master pounded on them unceasingly, laboring to bring the brilliant creations he had conceived entirely in the unfathomable, incomprehensible, enigmatic masterwork of his omnipotent mind into our world. For him they would forever be trapped in his cerebral cortex, for he could not hear the clamor he made nor the glory that somehow emerged months after his ravings. His sole consolations in his eternal aloneness were the earthquakes – the vibrations of pitches – the scrap of tangible evidence that his music existed in the material world.
Nearly no one understood him – in fact, no one did. I would think I did, and yet he always surprised me. He wore a façade of impenetrable stone so that he appeared to be an ice-man, a sociopath entirely devoid of emotion, but in truth his emotions were bipolar: one moment fortissimo furioso, a raging, violent storm; the next piano dolce e cantabile, full of an incredible tenderness and sensitivity. Having been evicted from 17 different flats in the year before I met him, it was a wonder that our landlady, Mrs. Hudson, allowed him to stay for so long. She was one of the few people who could truly be considered his friend – to me he once said, "I don't have any friends." Later, he repeated himself, and I walked away before he could finish what he was saying, fed up with all his chaos, but he ran after me, shouting "I only have one!" Rude, belligerent, hostile, he was not a friendly man. He stormed through the streets, humming to himself, growling out tunes, waving his arms maniacally, his pockets bulging with pencils and rumpled papers. "The freak", they called him. Once, a little girl screamed when she saw him. Some of the most powerful authorities and biggest names called his last works "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors," but we know there is something there, although we do not know what it is. We all know the truth now: his greatness was never fraud.
Must it be? he asked. It must be! No. NO. If only I could have known what he meant by those words. If only I had seen him looking sad when no one was looking.
People may not have understood, but at the same time they loved him. He was not an angel, yet he was on the side of the angels. He was not an angel, yet the impossibly intricate symphonies, juggernauts of fugues born of his mind are, as he once said, "the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend"; God and Creation in their entirety, somehow radiating from the work of a human. Yes, while sometimes I didn't even think he was human, he was the most human being that I've ever known. He was Eroica. A hero, a great man and a good man… and he is not dead. He will never be dead.