Sherlock sat in his chair, his knees pulled up to his chest, thinking. John moved around the flat quietly, walking on eggshells around Sherlock who in his own way was disturbed. He couldn't find a solution to the problem that John had posed. "Make me not feel."
When Sherlock was younger, he had faced the same problem. Other children had looked at him with dislike and he had felt sad. Sometimes the feelings had almost overwhelmed him. He begged to be allowed not to go to school, but his parents did not agree. He'd have to learn to face people sooner or later. A Holmes lived in the real world, he had to find his peace however he could.
Mycroft had offered his solution. Don't trust them, don't seek their approval, don't care about them. He pretended to be like them,but somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that they weren't real. They were just pieces on a chess board. They didn't really feel. They didn't really require our concern for their welfare except on an abstract level. Sherlock never agreed with Mycroft's philosophy. He found it too cold and largely inaccurate.
The truth was that the Holmes family had never lived in the real world. They always created the world that they wanted around them, except now, Sherlock was failing dismally.
He hadn't known what he had wanted in life until he met John. Once he had divorced himself from his desire for acceptance he had pursued intellectual challenge. Science was nice, but it was just something that he did for fun. In truth Sherlock dreaded the tedious repetitive precision required to fully document and prove a hypothesis. He did quick, but thorough experiments and documented them as monographs without going through a formal review or presenting at conferences. In science, he was a dedicated dabbler.
But even as a youth, crime had fascinated him. Carl Powers murder being his first. Despite all of the trouble that it had caused, Sherlock was glad to have met Moriarty. Glad because he had given him a chance to solve the first mystery that had frustrated him so long ago. The mystery that had paved the way for his subsequent fame and fall.
In that sense, he and Moriarty had been the same. Both loved knowing. Sherlock remembered on the rooftop how upset Moriarty had been when he thought that he didn't know something, "What did I miss?" he asked worrying him like a crow seeking to retrieve a piece of bread dropped into a inaccessible grating. Neither of them could stand not knowing the answer. Sherlock had thought that this was what made him special. His drive to know, and yet what had it given Moriarty except a hopeless fatality. His need to find the answer to existence had led to his suicide. Perhaps in the end he had sought to solve the problem of what happened to the intellect after death.
But Moriarty's death had answered another question for Sherlock. It had told him what it was like to die without friends. Sherlock had traveled the world in search of people who knew Moriarty. Some of them had admired his intellect, some of them had coveted his power, some had been fascinated with his dangerous personality, but none of them had been his friend. When he was gone, they forgot him in search of their own interests, or in pursuit of others to take his place. But John had missed Sherlock, and Sherlock had known that no matter where in the world he went, no matter what he did, that he had a home to go to, and it wasn't this flat. His home was John.
Sherlock looked up realizing as he glanced at the clock that he had been thinking for hours. It had seemed only minutes since he had sat down, but his legs were stiff, so he stood and shook them out, looking around the room for him. Sherlock hadn't found an answer for John's problem, but he had clarified his own. That a life of pure intellect was a cold life without a friend to share it with.
The door opened and John came in wearing his coat and carrying a shopping bag containing milk and tea.
"Ah, you're up." John said.
Sherlock looked at John, his friend. "John," he said "I..." Then his phone rang. Sherlock ignored it. "John."
"Aren't you going to answer that?" John asked.
Sherlock clicked the button angrily, "What do you want, Lestrade?" he said.
Lestrade replied in a clipped tone. "I need you both NOW. I'm texting the address."
"Do we have a case?" John asked.
"Yes, we have a case. Let's go." Sherlock replied sighing as he walked across the room to get his coat.