Disclaimer: I am not Moffat (not nearly so sadistic) nor Gatiss (not making nearly as frequent appearances on British television), so therefore I don't own Sherlock. Anything you recognize goes to them.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - Oscar Wilde
Sherlock spends most of his time thinking, when he is alone. It's what he does. He rarely thinks about himself, though; he likes to believe that he has himself all figured out, self-diagnosed high-functioning sociopath, all he needs to know. But this A Lie and he knows it, and sometimes thoughts of himself leak through his supposedly watertight persona. This happens, one night, when John is out with Jane, or Jennifer, or Jan, or whoever he's picked up this time. He feels oddly alone. Operative word being oddly. Being alone is good. He likes alone. But he feels wrong-footed and off and something is not right.
The alone train of thought shows promise, but he knows it's cheating, like a slant rhyme in the strictly ABAB rhyme scheme he prefers all his emotional analysis to take. He tries it on for size, though, for the sake of due process. I wish I had some company. No, that's definitely A Lie, too. So, he has a further idea of what the wrongness isn't, but he isn't very much closer to knowing what it is, exactly. He likes being able to name what is going on inside him. It makes him feel like he has some sort of control, and he welcomes the delusion.
This unnamed emotion makes him restless, though, pressing at his corners and urging him to take action. Of course, this is absurd - he can hardly take action if he doesn't know what the purpose of that action would be. Still, the insistent move, move, move makes his fingers twitch and so he gets up and grabs his violin from the coffee table. The nagging subsides, at least, as he begins the careful process of tuning, and he lets his thoughts roam freely through the newly vacated space, paying them little mind. One stray, though, catches his interest: The alliteration is horribly cloying. This is nothing remarkable, just true with a lowercase t. John and Jane, John and Jan, it sounds like something out of a book for infants. But once he thinks it, he feels a small jolt of satisfaction that briefly eclipses the not-aloneness, which is odd. But it returns as suddenly as it set in, and, shrugging, he begins to play.
He plays bits and pieces of songs, from Swan Lake to Peter and the Wolf to Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 to the Bach Double Concerto in D minor, never lingering for more than a few phrases. He is unsettled, and so is his music, flitting from composer to composer, piece to piece, searching blindly for something to express the hollow, insistent feeling that refuses to be leave him in peace. Tchaikovsky is too dramatic, Prokofiev too whimsical, Vaughan Williams too . . . sweeping, and Bach, well. The Bach had been a long shot. What is in him is dull and blunted, wavering on the edge of his consciousness like an old memory. Mendelssohn's Opus 30 No. 6, the Venetian Boat Song, almost fits. He can only play the melody - he hates the violin, sometimes, for being so limited - but the first two notes, the major dominant fifth surrounding them in his head, the E-sharp and the G-sharp in sequence strike almost the same note of pain in him. He knew there was a reason F-sharp minor was his favorite minor key. It has all the signs of something lacking, he realizes, but he can't think what. Everything he needs is right here at home with him.
Home. It's odd to think of the flat as such. He supposes the term had snuck up on him. John certainly used it enough. Home. He is done with the Mendelssohn, now. It failed to provide what he was looking for. On a whim, he switches to Mozart's third violin concerto. It doesn't suit, but it'll keep his hands busy, at least. Yes, somewhere in between cases and experiments and laughing and sulking and John and Mrs. Hudson and tea and milk "my flat" had become safesanctuaryharborrefugewarmminehome. This means something, he thinks. The last place he had called home must have been . . . No. Don't be ridiculous, he thinks. But the Truth can't be denied. The last place he had called home had been the country estate where he and Mycroft had grown up. Then, home had meant bright sunshine and manicured lawns and solitude and experiments and a world to explore and a brother who knew everything and he had been safe there, he thinks, and even happy a respectable portion of the time. He knew very few of the idiots in this world, after all. Then had come uni and its horrid dormitories, followed by a series of flats from which eviction was inevitable. Which had eventually brought him here, to 221B Baker Street, playing the wistful waltz from Dvorak's 8th Symphony.
He can't pinpoint when the metamorphosis from a series of numbers and letters to a safe feeling in his gut (an irritating organ to have feeling things, he thinks), so he's stuck without a distinct cause. He hates when that happens on a case, when he can't find a motive, something to make the crime make sense. There's this need in him to impose meaning on this meaningless world, order upon the chaos, but he is known to fail (well, he knows), even when applying that insistence upon significance to himself. John's advice would be to take it in stride. Accept it. He can't, though; he's not wired that way. He'll just wait for other avenues of data, a lost recollection, perhaps, and abandon vain speculation in the meantime. No use wasting brainpower.
John's always been good at that, taking things in stride. (The Bach Double comes back - this time he plays the secondo part, not the primo.) He'd accepted Sherlock's deduction skills instead of running screaming from him. He'd accepted the skull and severed head and eyeballs, to Sherlock's continued surprise. He'd even killed a man for him, that night, and he had accepted that role, too. That, and the role of sacrifice, that night at the pool.
Sherlock has yet to fathom these events, and, now that he thinks about it, the other times that someone has died by John's hand. Of course, someone's always been saved by John's hand - he's quite happy to be alive, thanks very much - but there's a weight to it. John killed a man, the day we met, so that I might live. John killed a man so that Sarah wouldn't die. John would've burned with me so that we could take down Moriarty. John would've sacrificed himself so that I could escape with my life.
He doesn't know if he could do what John had done, thinking about , he knows that he would've blown the three of them to kingdom come, naturally, but he hardly could've let Moriarty walk away, could he have? Their inevitable death couldn't have been in vain. It had had very little to do with emotion or sentiment and everything to do with the fact that it was the only possible solution. What John had done, had offered to do, it meant something more. Sherlock knew that it must.
Idle wondering morphed quickly into morbid curiosity, arresting all his attention as he switched to some theme from a Doctor Who episode John had been watching last night. Horrible show, far too many plot holes and liberties taken with science, not to mention the inconsistency of the soundtrack, but he likes the lilting feel of what he'd heard. What would he do, if he and John were switched? This was too big of a question, so he broke it down into two discrete parts for further investigation.
Would he kill a man to save John's life? He doesn't know. He would definitely maim a man to save John. He wouldn't hesitate. But kill? Bach is better for this, so he reverts back. In the situation with the cabbie, he would have shot him in the leg, or maybe the arm, something that would have incapacitated him and given John enough time to get out of there. He decided not to think about what that said about John. In every real-life scenario he could come up with, he always found a way to save John without killing anyone. But that wasn't helpful. In a perfect experiment, where he could either kill a man, a bad one for the sake of believability, or John would die, he doesn't know if he could do it. The scientist in him tells him that it would depend on the means of the killing - checking a box, pressing a button, pulling a trigger. The rest of him knows that it hardly matters - it's a simple enough question. But he doesn't know. Deep down, a little voice whispers that he couldn't do it, and he likes that answer even less than not knowing.
So he moves on to the second part. Would he kill himself to save John's life? Yes, he thinks, in a heartbeat, yes. John is important and good and everything that is right in this awful world where crimes are committed for no reason and people are forced to make impossible decisions. It is so much more important that John lives than that he lives. This doesn't make sense, logically, given, well, his intellect, but it is A Truth. The same little voice returns, telling him that he's not so sure he'd like to live in a world without a John in it. He acknowledges this, then moves on. It doesn't matter. John matters. Would he kill himself to save John's life? Yes. He has never been more sure of any Truth in his life.
A/N: Hey all. This is my first foray into the Sherlock fandom (for writing, that is) and the first story I've written in a long time. If you liked it, thank The Book Sniffer. She and I made a blood oath to write 50,000 words of fanfiction over the next year. So check her work out! It's pretty good. I fixed her grammar.
As for this story, I hope you liked it. If you didn't, that's cool, too. Review both ways - I'd love to hear what you thought, especially if it means that my writing improves. There'll be Johnlock eventually, in a vague sort of way, so if that's not your thing, consider yourself warned. ALSO. I went on about music a lot up there. For those of you who had no idea what I was talking about, I have made a YouTube playlist (ooh, multimedia!): channel/UCUtpVmwACfkz43FbN-avrFg/videos?view=1&feature=guide. Hopefully it works fine, I'll make it completely public if it doesn't. Please don't stalk me.
Thanks for reading!