This is what a breakdown sounds like.
His violin is straddled across his lap, the aching fingers of his right hand still clutching at the bow. His wrists feel wrong, and every time he picks up the instrument, that sounds wrong too. The notes are sour when they need to be sweet, screeching where they should be rich, and thin where they should be full. His fingers seem to have disconnected from his mind, and when you can't trust your own hands, what can you?
He is babbling, only peripherally aware of what he's saying. Something about violins, their makes and their peculiarities and their tendencies towards the fickle, as if they are living things. As if they are anything like him. He rambles on about Cremona fiddles and the distinctions between a Stradivarius and an Amati. His tone is agitated, and if John were near enough to hear, he might have had cause to worry, or at least wondered if he did. As it is, he isn't even in the country.
It doesn't matter. Sherlock doesn't care who's listening at the moment, just as long as he isn't one of those that are. He strikes a tritone, what is meant to be a tritone, col legno. Even that doesn't sound quite right.
Despite his best efforts, the music has broken.
This is what exhaustion sounds like.
His eyes are closed, and beyond the slight whispering of breath and the evenly sliding trails of sweat against his skin, there is no sign that he is, at this moment, a living being. It's terrifying to watch if you know him at all, know the way he's always in motion regardless of what he's engaged in. If you have ever been witness to the endless vitality he takes out of death. John has, far too many times for this to feel even remotely close to comfortable.
He doesn't thank John when John moves him to the bed and covers him with a blanket. It seems doubtful that he would have, had he been aware of the world around him. John's become used to that, has almost come to expect it; his flatmate is predictable, after his own fashion. No, not predictable. Consistent.
Over the years, John has seen so much more of this man than any other he has known, has seen him struggling and fighting and living in a way that he envies, sometimes, in his darker moments. His life really would be boring, to a man with a mind like that, a mind that is constantly ticking towards detonation.
For such a man, this kind of stillness is not at all becoming.
This is what torment sounds like.
They are surrounded by blood, in John's opinion, entirely too much of the stuff, but Sherlock doesn't care. His eyes are closed and his hands move convulsively at his sides as he runs through his memory palace, finds entire wings of it locked, yet more of them useless.
He can't remember the last time he cleared out all this trash, and he's regretting it now, as much as he ever does second-guess himself, because this means he's getting sloppy, means he deserves the thorough thrashing he's going to get because he hasn't prepared properly, has sacrificed his knife-edge precision, and to what end? What could possibly have justified this?
He is trapped in a corner of his own mind, and as he breaks down the walls with his shoulders, his feet and his faltering hands, his worn hands, his musician's hands, he can't help but to be amused. He brought this on himself, and now he's going to escape. It won't be elegant, but by the Gods, it will work. It will have to.
His confidence deserts him when he is back to reality, even though John is there, though there are enough points of reference for him to know what his next move, his next twelve moves, should be.
There is too much blood.
This is what regret sounds like.
He'd quietly made his apologies to John after the question was asked, feeling terrible all the while because of the look in John's eyes, the look of acceptance, the look that said that he'd been expecting it, somehow, and when he'd tried to explain himself, John's eyes told him that he'd been expecting that too. So he isn't there at the wedding.
Instead, he is in the flat, glaring at the clock like he could make time stop, go backwards and stay forever at that point when John was his, as much as one human being be another's, because even though he knows that friendship isn't that easy to break, it feels a whole lot like it is.
His violin is wrapped in his fingers, and he's moderating them so as not to snap its neck and his smile is sardonic as he plays the wedding march in quick, jerky time, like it's something to get over with, like this is something he can get over.
He makes it last, eyes still intent on the clock, until the moment he has calculated as being the moment that John is a married man, and completely out of his reach, and then he puts his violin away and thinks savagely about the neck of John's wife, broken.
This is what love sounds like.
They are back in Baker Street, and it's almost as if no time has passed, as if they are still the same people, as if they could ever be the same people again, and something inside them is breaking. The walls of the years shatter, and when their eyes meet, they know that those years mean nothing. Not now.
The violin's in his case, and their voices have been placed away, tucked into a safe space for retrieval at some later point, but for this moment, sound is not needed, words are not needed, nothing is needed but the other and the fact of their togetherness. They don't know what the other is thinking, exactly, but they have broad-picture ideas, and those are more than enough.
They've been waiting for this instant, for this meeting, for this day, for what has seemed like so much forever. They've waited like they've awaited nothing else in their lives, in their textured, their busy, their colorful lives, and they've thought, for varying amounts of time, that it would be impossible for it to be anything like they hope, in the end, like so many things are.
It isn't an impossibility, though, and though they know that it will end, they are happy, for the moment, simply to be.
A/N: Since discovering this format, I've been quite looking forward to using it. Now that I have, I must say, it is incredibly fun.
~Mademise Morte, August 8, 2012.