A/N: Just a little thing I happened to write after the movie, and late at night. I had writers block, and whenever that happens, I look to a piece of violin music. There is one on youtube; if you search up "Sad Violin" its listed a hundred times. Its a beautiful piece--and highly recommended to get the full picture. Not that its bad stand alone, but it kind of went with the music. Anyway...
Disclaimer: Do not own Sherlock Holmes or anything. Goes by the 2009 verse...
My---Our Mournful Game
The violin is a well known instrument to 221B Baker Street, its owner just as unwelcome in dismal hours of the morning. There is a practice; a ritual to how it is a man can be awake virtually all night long and pick away at the silence like a tease. The sound is grating, approach akin to a child's wail, each note high-strung and off by intentions unknown. Unsightly are these sounds coming forth, that all bearing witness cringe in their sleep, plagued by demons who fester in-between the living and the dead. These hell wrought shadows spawned are insistent, preferring to loom over each bedside and provoke blood-shot eyes and inconsistent hangovers wrestled in nights of fitful sleeps. Are the songs to blame? One may wonder in the deepest riches of solitude, when it became a crime to enlighten the night, and wave away daylight in reverse. Particularly bad tonight; filtering music is not at all an abomination, wrung carefully by weaved hands through threaded string. The ears planted in pillows bear through a heavy heart, when the violin, tiny as can be, sorrowfully expels its owners deepest regret. In a splash of chill the toned music engages a movement in an unseen audience, forcing each and every soul to listen. Nonetheless the windows are hung up a crack, inviting the noise that penetrates the glass in a ghostly whisper. With aid of a pale moon hanging in the sky, ever bequeathing the children of Earth with an intimate glow, light is bountiful, shimmering through purposely laid cracks when the time is right. When there is no moon, a collecting balance hangs broken by stilled breathing. A beautiful melody shows no signs of stopping, no breaks in rhythm, the same song continues; so much that it is hardly called a song than a howl in the wind, carried by its everlasting guise. Inside the lonely apartment where it peaks in intensity a man stands rigid, rotation of limbs a constant repetition; over and over and over again. There is a strain in the arm, veins bulging where force is extensively applied; emotion draining into a strength meant to entice exhaustion. Still the man prattles on without a hitch of regression, his head bogged down to rest his cheek against his shoulder. He is unkemptly dressed, ill and diseased with a surprisingly out worldly intellect, and none are given permission to see him.
None but one.
Holmes pauses in the hundredth time over; arm slacking to do one more note, because it will kill him; noted by the shaking hand that doesn't worry him. Steeled to inevitable sleep he knows is soon to plague him, he cannot help but bunch his shoulders, shooting a gaze to the moon and its unpleasant faraway reach. Eyes that are darkened to degrees bordering black lower down, seeing nothing in its fall. For it is three o'clock in the morning, with the little hand a quarter past and ticking. What it is, is not what he wants. What he wishes he knows he has lost---for now. But he will play until he returns.
But for now…
He lowers his violin and hopes the good doctor has heard and returns.
For the game they play is never over.