The only song he's ever written is lying in a box in his closet, pressed between his medical school diploma and the only love letters anyone has ever sent him. The diploma is not framed because he'd grown tired of explaining it and the mysterious lowness of it's graduating year and the letters are not really love letters but rather smutty sex letters written by a woman who'd known him for all of two weeks and are mostly about how good he is at oral sex.
He doesn't ever look at the song.
It embarrasses him. He's convinced that if he read it now and traced the notes along the keyboard while whispering the lyrics to himself, he'd be convinced it was trash. It hurts him to think that something he had worked so hard on was trash and it bothers him that, at the time that he wrote it, he was convinced no one his age would ever understand it.
The song is written for a female voice. Light alto is written across the page, so as to belay any awkward questioning if it is ever found. The lyrics concern a woman who is love with a man whom she has never met. She is not really in love with a person, he knows, but rather with the idea of a person. This all seemed very wise and esoteric to him when he wrote the song, but now, having been the basis of the idea more then one person has gone lovelorn over, it makes him sad. Instead of empathizing with the young woman's pain, he feels bad for the man she will one day decide is her lover.
Wilson finds the song.
Wilson cannot read notes but he can barely decipher the tabs scrawled across the bottom half of the second page. When he comes home one day, Wilson has it balanced on the arm of a chair and is clumsily trying to strum it's chorus.
He gets very upset and yells more then he meant.
"It's trash." He explains, returning the papers to there rightful place in his closet "Just some angsty teenager crap."
It is only then, he remembers the lyrics and the way they expound greatly on eyes of a certain color. He tells himself that, of course, it is a coincidence, but he doesn't believe it.
Eyes, he tells himself, have to be some color. Brown is just as common as any other. More so. It was just that he couldn't make them blue, as everyone was always remarking on his blue eyes and he had no desire for anyone to think he'd written the song as an ego trip. And he couldn't make them green because really, mostly girls had green eyes and…
He doesn't believe a word of it.
He has no confidence in God or fate or soul mates. But he does make his living out of noticing patterns and he has great faith in the power of the human brain.
Well, his anyway.
He also is of the belief that life is very often elegantly and poetically just merely because life is by definition, unimaginably cruel and poetic justice is the cruelest way of going about things.
The song is written for a woman to sing, but it sounded just fine in his rich low voice as he banged along on the living room piano, his parents out of the house, his eyes closed in joy.
If he takes an extra drink, it harms no one.
If he takes an extra pill, it harms no one.
If he occasionally walks into another man's office just to fill his lungs with the smell is anyone really hurt?
He can't remember how the song ends. If the woman, oh what's the point of pretending, if he finds his true love idea or if he winds up bitter and alone.
He very occasionally thinks that he might wind up dead, because that is just the sort of thing he would have thought was fresh and cold and perfect so many years ago.
He takes another drink.
He takes another pill.
He sleeps too late and uses too many stimulants to keep him up and going. His sweat smells of coffee.
Sometimes he watches Wilson sleep, staring from the kitchen for far too long.
Sometimes, in the night, he mumbles and groans and presses his face against a pillow to muffle the noise.
Sometimes his head hurts and sometimes his shoulder hurts and a lot of the time his leg aches with a sharp horrible pain that will not be rubbed away.
Sometimes it hurts in the warm mushy place between his breastbone and his abdomen. He knows this isn't real.
He has sex with a beautiful young woman just because he can. He isn't very good, but she didn't expect him to be and he leaves immediately after because her attitude about the whole exchange makes him sick to his stomach.
Maybe that's the pills.
He takes more.
He isn't normal he decides. He hears melodies in his sleep. Sees lyrics on the backs of his eyelids.
Once, and only once, he cries, after another night of whispering to no one as his hands slide in the darkness.
And life goes on in much the same way it always has.
He takes the case. He solves the case. He wins praise. He solves puzzles. He saves lives.
He makes Wilson smile.
He makes Wilson laugh.
He makes Wilson proud.
And that, compiled with television and magazines and video games, just might have been enough for him, if…
If.
If when he was seventeen, he hadn't written a song.