Chapter 5: Deaf
The violin is heaving and sobbing, shuddering and laughing, trilling and crashing and screaming and hissing and it has been doing this for going on three hours now. It's shaking in Sherlock's hands like an overwrought lover.
Sherlock is playing in spite of John, not for him. No one plays like this for anyone but themselves, and Sherlock normally avoids an audience for these sessions. But the way he's flinging himself at the music tonight, John highly doubts anything is real to him beyond the wood under his chin and the bow in his hand.
So, as long as he sits quietly and doesn't draw attention to himself, John can listen.
Sherlock spent the first hour or so picking through his repertoire: Paganini, Bartok, Mendelssohn, Sinatra, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads. It was nothing unusual for Sherlock in a thinking mood—and "Sympathy for the Devil" turns out to be really rather spectacular on strings—but omewhere in there, they transitioned from compositions into this expressionistic thing he's doing now. The effect is like…well, if someone had their vocal chords removed and replaced with a violin, John supposes that communicating with that person would be a lot like this.
That is, if that person were also in the habit of screaming their innermost emotions at the world. It's quite…beautiful is not the word. Frightening may be closer. Transcendant? It feels like spying. Or no, it feels like surgery, like the course of duty has placed in John's hands these secret interior things meant to stay closed away and protected from the world.
He doesn't know what Sherlock is doing. He doesn't know what Sherlock is thinking, but he knows right now how he feels. It's unbearable. It feels wildly, recklessly exposed, and John wants it to stop almost as much as he suspects Sherlock needs to do this. Since Sherlock won't stop, John will sit sentry on his friend as long as he has to, until this peculiar mood ends and Sherlock resumes his own defenses.