There was a piano in Lestrade's flat. I guess I hadn't seen it in my malaise of a few days previously, but it was quite a feature of the room, a pretty little shiny black upright. Lestrade had run out to the store to grab some spice or other and left me to watch the stove for a few minutes. It was the first time I'd been alone in a room with a piano in ages, and I found myself inching over to try it out. I'd played as a kid, all the way through upper school, but had stopped in university mainly for reasons of practicality. I'd only played once or twice in all the time since then.
The keys felt soothing and familiar under my fingers. It was all so ordered, the tidy structure of steps and half-steps, the static patterns of white and black keys. I played a simple chromatic scale up most of the keyboard and smiled. I moved on, a C-scale just with my left hand, then with both. Then I tried to play some actual music. Fur Elise- that one was widely enough played that I thought I could probably sound any of it that I didn't remember out. My piano teacher had always told me that I had an good ear.
Once I'd found the right hand position and begun, I slipped easily into playing it. My fingers seemed to know it better than my conscious, so I tried not to over think it and just let my muscle memory lead me through the piece.
The whole thing brought Sherlock forcefully to mind, like I was there in the sitting room at 221B listening to his violin, but for once the memory of him was not as much painful as pleasant. Sitting there at the piano made me feel almost connected to him, as though it was his playing, his fingers stroking music out of the smooth keys. Sherlock had nice hands, I reflected, long and slender like the rest of him, likely good for playing instruments of all sorts.
I was there playing when Lestrade got back- I was so absorbed that I didn't notice him come in at first. I finished the piece, rolling the last chord up from the lowest note to the highest, then gave a little sigh of satisfaction as I lifted my hands from the keyboard. Lestrade began to clap behind me; I jumped, turning quickly to face him.
"I didn't know you played," he said, in a tone of pleasant surprise. I smiled, slightly embarrassed.
"Yeah, I'd almost forgotten myself," I admitted. "Do you?" Lestrade shook his head.
"It was my mum's. She used to play when I was a kid. Tried to teach me once, but, well, I was more interested in football at the time," Lestrade replied ruefully. "When did you learn?" he asked me. I rubbed a hand across my cheek.
"I had lessons when I was a kid. Haven't had a piano since I lived at home, but- well, it's nice, playing," I told him.
Lestrade was looking at me strangely.
"Did Sherlock know?" he asked, and his voice was not so cautious as it usually was when he mentioned Sherlock. Somehow, hearing his name was not as painful as it usually was.
"Er- I don't know. I don't think I ever told him, but, you know." I shrugged, and Lestrade nodded.
"Yeah, you'd never really know with him, would you?" he agreed with a chuckle.
After that, the atmosphere in the room seemed to have relaxed somehow. Lestrade had made a simple, surprisingly good meal, a three part supper of white beans in vinegar, cooked greens, and creamy polenta. We managed to find enough to talk about to sustain a comfortable level of chatter through the meal, and when we were finished, we went back over to the piano, where I, feeling full and sedate, managed to pick out a few more old tunes.
Of course, emotional trauma like the one I'd experienced does not go away in a moment, but over a long period of time, and that night I dreamt of Sherlock.
I was standing in front of Bart's, staring up to the roof where he stood. My phone was pressed to my ear, and Sherlock was talking to me through it, but I couldn't speak back, my lips were too heavy to lift.
"Goodbye, John." The phone slipped from my hand- now I was trying to move my feet, but I couldn't, and all at once I realized that my eyes were closed, and I couldn't open them, and I knew that just behind them Sherlock was falling through the air, and I couldn't move, I couldn't see, I couldn't even breathe anymore.
I woke up to discover that I'd pressed my face into a pile of disheveled covers and the thick cloth covering my mouth and nose was restricting my airflow. I sat up quickly. My eyes were open now, but an image of Sherlock seemed to be emblazoned across my vision, a Sherlock bleeding and unmoving on the pavement, blue eyes open and staring blindly. I was shaking, and I could feel wetness across my cheeks.
After a minute I swung my legs over the side of the bed and slid to my feet, taking a blanket from the bed and pulling it around me. I shuffled out into the tiny sitting room, glanced at the clock on the wall. It was two- thirty in the morning. I'd been asleep for less than four hours. I pushed open the curtains, letting the dim yellow glow of the streetlights filter through into the flat.
I curled up on the couch, knees drawn up, feet tucked under the blanket. I stared across at the blank wall, and an image of the mantle at 221B flashed across my mind, skull placed at the far left, two bookshelves flanking the fireplace, filled with a mess of books and random objects, disheveled, chaotic.
Sherlock sitting in an armchair in front of it, staring out the window, deep concentration evidenced by his expression, violin across his chest, propped against his shoulder, plucking out short, truncated chords.
A squeezing around my chest, suffocating. I sucked in a breath that shuddered through my lungs. Here in the dark, alone, the ache of missing Sherlock was agony.
"As a conductor of light, you are unbeatable."
At the time, I'd been annoyed to hear it, but like all of Sherlock's deductions, it was spot on. Without him, without the constant thrill of working by his side, the high of chasing criminals and watching him solve mysteries, I was dark and forlorn, a lantern unlit, a star that had ceased to burn.
I sat there on the couch for hours, sometimes crying, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the streetlights and thinking of painful things.
At five o'clock, I got up, made coffee, opened my computer, and began to write.
Grief is selfish. I wrote, thinking, of course, of my own.
It's overtaking, a thing to wallow in, a miasma of self-pity and egoism. I stopped, reread the sentence I'd just written. How morbid. Obviously I had some suppressed emotions there. Maybe I ought to go back to my therapist. Or maybe writing it down was just as worthwhile.
Sherlock, Oh, was I writing to Sherlock now?
I wonder sometimes, what you would have done if we were reversed, if it was me lying under a black marble gravestone instead of you. What you would be doing now. I honestly don't know, Sherlock. I've never seen you really grieve, not even for Irene Adler, though there was something there that I never really understood.
That was unclear, but it didn't matter, I wasn't writing this for anyone to read.
You said you were a sociopath. If that's true- and I don't know that that's something you would lie about- then one would assume that you wouldn't grieve, that you wouldn't care enough. But I don't think so. I don't think that was you, Sherlock, somehow.
My eyes were filling. I wiped them on the shoulder of my t-shirt and kept writing.
One of the qualities of a sociopath is the inability to feel love. And that wasn't you. That wasn't you, Sherlock, I know it wasn't, because I knew you, and you did love. Absolutely. Love cannot be wholly explained by the instinct to procreate and propagate our species. It's easy to take that and explain the love between a mother and a child. But how about the love between a grown child and their mother? How about the love that you had for Mrs. Hudson?
And here I was, gone from exploring grief to trying to convince an imaginary Sherlock that he wasn't a sociopath.
I know you loved Mrs. Hudson, that you'd have done practically anything to protect her. That's the essence of love, Sherlock, a bond strong enough that you'd put yourself in harm's way to keep the person you love safe. And that's how I know that you loved me too, and no, not necessarily romantically. That time at the pool, when I came in, wrapped in explosives, parroting Jim Moriarty through a headset. For those first few moments, when you believed I was Moriarty, you stared at me, and I could read your face, and I wanted to tell you, no, no, it's not me, Sherlock, no, because betrayal and hurt were all over your face. That's what love is, Sherlock, an odd mental state that overrides our basic psyche and changes our response to danger. You, Sherlock, you of massive intellect and inflated ego, if you didn't love me, your first reaction would have been incredulity. How could I, John Watson, ordinary idiot, have tricked you? And then when you had the chance, when we first thought we were safe, you ran over to get me out of the Semtex vest, and you were frightened. You had that thing halfway across the room almost before I realized you were pulling it off me. The way you asked me if I was alright- your voice, just then- I could tell you'd been really scared. Maybe that's why you never got close to more than a few people, because you couldn't handle that level of vulnerability, and that's okay. But damn whatever psychologist that told you you were a sociopath, Sherlock. I don't believe it.
Now the tears on my cheeks were hot and angry. How dare anyone tell Sherlock he was a sociopath, I thought, suddenly indignant. How dare they.
It also felt rather odd to be using the word love in the context of the relationship Sherlock and I had shared, but friendship seemed too simple a word to describe it, to explain what it had done to me when he died.
I rested my hands back on the keyboard, but I couldn't think what else to write.
I miss you, Sherlock, I added to the bottom after a minute. Then I saved it to a file that I never looked at and closed my computer, squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath.
I got up, made another cup of coffee and got dressed. I wasn't sure what I was doing yet, I just knew I had to get out of the dingy little flat. I took my coffee and left, just walking, down the still-dark streets. I walked until the sun came up, then kept walking, just wandering, watching London come alive. It was ten o'clock when I stopped in front of 221B Baker Street. I'd barely known I was heading there until I looked up at the bronze characters on the black door in front of me. I took a deep breath and knocked.
Mrs. Hudson answered the door, looking bemused to see me standing there. "Hello, John," she said, a little guardedly. I smiled to reassure her.
"Hello, Mrs. Hudson. I was just in the area, and I thought I'd stop by and apologize about- er- Tuesday, was it?" Mrs. Hudson smiled at me, looking rather relieved.
"Oh, there's no need, my love," she said, opening the door more widely, "do come in, won't you?"
I followed her through the door and into the little kitchen. There was a kettle on the stove, almost boiling. Mrs. Hudson motioned towards a chair and I sat, thanking her.
"I was just doing tea," Mrs. Hudson explained. "Would you like a cup?"
"Yeah, please." I hadn't spent a lot of time in Mrs. Hudson's kitchen before; when I had lived at 221B with Sherlock, most of our interaction with our motherly landlady had gone on upstairs in our own flat. I found that being in Mrs. Hudson's kitchen was just about the right level of nostalgia; the constant lack of Sherlock's presence was just tolerable.
Mrs. Hudson set down a teapot full of steeping tea and two teacups, along with a homely creamer of milk and a small sugar pot. She sat down across from me and reached one hand across the table to rest atop mine.
"Oh, I have missed you," Mrs. Hudson said affectionately. "It's awfully quiet around here these days." She gave my hand a brief squeeze, then reached over to check the tea. "Would you like some biscuits?" she asked.
"Please, don't trouble yourself on my account," I replied. She waved a hand as if she was batting my answer aside.
"Oh, nonsense. I think I'd like a biscuit myself." Mrs. Hudson stood and pulled a tin from one of the cabinets, then piled a plate with an assortment of homemade goodies.
Once she'd poured the tea and prepared it appropriately, Mrs. Hudson settled back down and looked at me again. "Now," she said, "have you come for something upstairs?"
I shook my head. "No, I think I'll wait a little before I go back there. I just came by to see you."
Mrs. Hudson looked pleased. "Oh, you are a dear, John." She smiled. "You come by any time you like." She paused a moment, then added, "If you ever need a place to- well, you know the flat will always be open for you."
I inclined my head. "That's very kind of you, but... don't do that just for me. If you find a renter..."
She was smiling a little sadly. "Oh, I'm too old to have new people running about up there," she said dismissively.
I thought of coming home to gunfire, racing up the stairs to see what was going on, finding Sherlock shooting holes into Mrs. Hudson's wall. Bored! A familiar aching filled my chest. I smiled painfully. Maybe we'd given Mrs. Hudson the wrong impression of how normal tenants acted.
When the tea was finished, I stood to go. Mrs. Hudson walked me to the door and said goodbye, enjoining me to visit again soon. I left feeling good. I was moving on, just by little steps, not leaving Sherlock behind but learning how to carry him with me as I slowly let go of at least some of my grief.