John found the picture in a dusty chest in the back of Sherlock's closet while searching for a corkscrew. Sherlock had broken their current one boring holes in a mastiff's femur, and when John had complained that they had no way to drink the excellent wine that their client had given them after solving the hotel theft, he had told him where to find this one. The corkscrew was stuck in an old cork with a picture of grapes burned into the side. Behind the cork, in a frame of pale pine wood, sat the faded photo. John brushed away the dust with the back of his hand and stared.
It was a picture of two young men standing beside a tree. John had never seen the first man, a dapper round-faced, dark-haired youth with a warm smile, large black eyes, and a white hat slightly aslant, but the second man was familiar. It was Sherlock. A younger Sherlock, with the same curly head of hair, but somehow even thinner. His shoulders were narrow and boyish, but he had all of his present height. John found the picture shocking. Not because of his youth, Sherlock still had those youthful qualities that sometimes made him appear to be twelve, but because of his posture and expression. Sherlock was leaning against the other man who held an arm around his shoulder, and on Sherlock's face was the slightest of smiles.
The smile was honest and genuine, and so unlike the present Sherlock whose face often resembled a porcelain mask. Seeing that smile on Sherlock was like looking into the blue sky and suddenly noticing the crescent moon. You thought that you had seen all there was, and then something new and miraculous appeared that somehow you had never noticed before.
Sherlock had told John, "I don't have friends. I only have one," and in John's mind he had projected this statement back in time to mean that he had never had a friend before, but this picture put a lie to that thought. That man, standing with his arm draped so warmly over Sherlock's shoulder, was no mere acquaintance. That man was something more.
They stood in a wooded grove next to a sleepy elm. John could imagine the two of them walking down a country road side by side. Sherlock bending down to pick up a fallen branch only to toss the stick aside as he sauntered down the path. John wanted to see that Sherlock. The casual, lazy, smiling one who slouched against his friend as he did sometimes against the sofa, all loose and relaxed. John wondered if they laughed together. If Sherlock's eyes would brighten like they did at the start of a new case when he saw him. In the picture Sherlock's eyes were downcast, almost lidded as if the side of this tall young man was the most comfortable place in the world.
A shadow covered the image, and John turned to look up into Sherlock's face. He didn't have to ask. The question must have been there in the way that he held his shoulders, or in the stillness of his left hand as he grasped the wooden frame, because Sherlock looked down into John's blue, questioning eyes and said, "You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?"