A.N: Hello all, here is part two. This one gave me all sorts of headaches and refused to play nice, so I hope it turned out fairly coherent :) John is singing Life On Mars by David Bowie, which DOES NOT BELONG TO ME, and I am not making anything at all by using it here. Have a listen if you can, because it really is beautiful. Enjoy!

What Sherlock really, really needs right now is silence.

The sort of silence that has John shouting all sorts of things at his flatmate when he comes home to find all the clocks stopped and absolutely everything unplugged, including the fridge.

He yearns for all those little electrical hisses and buzzes to cease, to stop clawing at the edges of his mind, where he is consumed with the problem at hand; A man who takes his girlfriend out to the cinema…spends two and a half hours with her in a shadowy, darkened room…then walks out and throttles her in broad daylight. Then kills himself not 20 yards away.

So many ideas and possibilities are colliding and twisting painfully before his inner eye, so many pictures, pictures of the bodies, the bruises, the contents of their pockets, the contents of their stomachs, whipping backwards and forwards without order and out of focus and he just can't, can't gain control, can't…

"It's a God-awful small affair…to the girl with the mousy hair…"

…can't locate the pivotal points, can't find the end of the tangle…Whyhadhe howdidhe hadshe whatifshe…

"But her Mummy is yelling 'No', and her Daddy has told her to go…"

And the biggest question, the most crucial to the investigation, the one that needed to be answered RIGHT NOW… why won't John shut up?

"But her friend is nowhere to be seen…Now she walks through her sunken dream…"

Every strum of the guitar seems to roar through the flat and join the melee of noise grating agonizingly between Sherlock's ears. Among them is John's voice. It's not that it is a bad voice…in fact, Sherlock finds himself struggling not to turn his full attention to it's raw warmth…the problem is that he needs it to not be there at all right now, because he's trying to concentrate and…

"To the seat with the clearest view, and now she's hooked to the silver screen…"

No, concentrate, CONCENTRATE. They both leave the cinema, walk 100 yards down the road, they begin to argue, he strangles her in the middle of a busy street and then commits suicide using her medication. What started the argument? Is it relevant? Why…

"But the film is a saddening bore…for she's lived it ten times or more…"

He needs silence.

He. Needs. Silence. Now.

"She could spit in the eyes of fools, as they ask her to focus on…"

Propelled by the burning frustration coursing through his veins, Sherlock launches himself wildly off his bed and out through the kitchen…

"Sailors fighting in the dancehall…"

In his red mist, he knocks one of his beakers off the kitchen table and sends it flying. It collides with the wall with a smash that rings in Sherlock's ears and makes him wince as the shattered pieces tumble earthward, and he can hear each piece as it claws down the wall, like nails on a black board, and he can hear it when they crack and splinter again when they hit the linoleum and the noise isn't stopping, it just goes on and on and on and his temples are beginning to throb and John doesn't even flinch….

"Oh man, look at those cavemen go…It's the freakiest show…"

He is suddenly rather glad John is facing away from him, since he can now feel an uncomfortable, aching burn of blood in his cheeks from the anti-climactic nature of his entrance. John is completely ignoring him, after all, and the noise hasn't stopped. And now Sherlock is going to actually have to tell John that he needs to Go And Make That Racket Somewhere Else and Don't You Have Shopping To Do? And Sherlock is really, really angry now because actually, he realises as he stands there surrounded by broken glass, now he is here, he doesn't really want John to stop.

All of a sudden something happens to him that only happens very rarely, and Sherlock hates it. He is overwhelmed. His frustration, his changes of mood, the growing pain behind his eyes, the beaker that needs replacing, the noise that is both intrusive and yet so... What is it? Just to top things off, he doesn't know. He has no idea at all why he has completely gone off the idea of ripping the guitar out of John's hands, breaking it across his knee and throwing the thing out the window, and would rather curl up on the sofa and listen to John sing for the rest of his life. He doesn't know. Today is clearly a bad day for Knowing Things, he thinks.

For a fraction of a second, he actually wants to cry.

He doesn't cry. Instead, he pads across the room – hesitantly, like a toddler who hasn't quite got the hang of walking yet – and awkwardly slides down to the floor beside John's armchair. John keeps playing.

"Take a look at the law man beating up the wrong guy, oh man, wonder if he'll ever know…"

A humourless smirk creeps onto Sherlock's lips. Will he ever know indeed? Balling his fists in his hair, he squeezes his eyes shut and allows himself to be carried away by the music for a moment, the ebb and sway of the undulating chords and the softness of John's tone actually taking away burning in the corners of his eyes, and soothing the throbbing in his skull.

"He's in the bestselling show…Is there life on Mars?"

He takes a deep breath, rubs his eyes, and steeples his fingers, long legs curled up under his chin.

But the bottle of pills wasn't on him when he died…she had it…

And it is only now, now that there is quiet in his head, and in the pit of his stomach, that everything falls into place.

Oh.

She was bored of her mediocre, uninteresting life, immersed herself in the drama of films, the isolation, the longing, the combination was dangerous, so she drugs him, bored, curious, not meaning to overdose, he feels the effects, she confesses in a fit of guilt, enraged, he kills her, staggers away, and dies.

The only explanation of all the facts.

"John," he cries, leaping to his feet and gripping his flatmate by the shoulders, "you're a genius!"

John stops playing for a moment to do his Baffled face and murmur "if you say so" as he sets his guitar down. He decides he will never understand his eccentric friend as he watches him curl up his lanky form on the floor again.

"Sherlock…should we not…call Lestrade?"

"In a minute."

"What are we waiting for?"

Sherlock doesn't answer, but John thinks he knows. It is worth a shot. He takes up his guitar and resumes his song.

As the final notes fizzle away into companionable silence, Sherlock fishes his phone from his inside pocket, and John has to strain his ears to catch what he mumbles next.

"Now we can call Lestrade."