Sherlock Holmes was in trouble. And not the fun kind either. He paced the living room of 221B Baker Street with his hands clasped behind his back, occasionally throwing dirty looks at his laptop. Normally he liked trouble, sought it out even. It thrilled him to push his luck to the last, relying on the speed of his calculations under pressure... or sometimes relying on John to intervene and shoot someone.

He smirked; it came in all sorts of handy to have an ex-soldier with lingering homicidal tendencies living with him.

Oh right.

John hadn't lived with him since his 'suicide' and he kept forgetting. Why should he use valuable storage space in his mind palace for such disagreeable information? Agitated, he raked his hand through his hair.

No, this was not the fun kind of trouble. This was the most banal sort of trouble he'd been in in a long time. He glared at his laptop screen, which glared angry red letters back at him. 'Your card has not been accepted. Please contact your bank for further information.'

He stopped pacing and looked around the flat. Things had undeniably gone downhill since John left. For one thing, there had always been space on the tables and worktops for his microscopes, or his petri dishes, or anything really. Now there was not. His laptop was balanced precariously on a stack of old newspapers and a few odd files. This was John's fault, obviously.

When John left he'd taken all of the magic with him. Now when Sherlock dropped his coat on the floor it stayed there. Now when he put dishes in the sink they were still there the next day. It was horrible. Where there had always been an assortment of food and body parts in the fridge, now there were only body parts. Sherlock's jaw clenched as he looked around at what even he considered to be a mess.

Magical John selfishly taking all of his magic with him, callously insensible to the consequences it would have on others…

It had crossed his mind some time ago that he might starve to death if Mrs. Hudson didn't regularly bring up tea and biscuits. This point seemed to have occurred to Mrs. Hudson as well, since tea and biscuits had gradually morphed into tea and roast beef sandwiches, or tea and soup, or tea and pasta. Tea and pasta. That was Mrs. Hudson for you. He rarely ate much of it, but at least he appreciated the option when he wasn't too busy being annoyed by the landlady's interruptions.

At the moment, the most pressing consequence of John having absconded with all the magic was Sherlock's bank account. He wasn't sure if his card hadn't been accepted due to lack of funds or some other problem, but it was all so tedious he was loath to be bothered with it. He hadn't logged into his bank account for years. Bank accounts were boring; keeping track of finances was insufferable. His mind was of such superior quality it could only be occupied with the most complex puzzles humankind had to offer. He couldn't be concerned with anything as dull as money.

John had taken care of their finances when they'd lived together. John had, apparently—Sherlock hadn't paid much attention—handled the payments from their clients and deposited them (presumably) fairly into their respective bank accounts. Sherlock would have assumed John had been ripping him off for years (and rightly so, if one couldn't be bothered to monitor one's accounts one perhaps deserved a bit of ripping off) if Sherlock hadn't known John to be so incorrigibly Upright and Moral. Shame about that. Inflexibility is limiting, after all.

No, this card problem more likely had to do with Sherlock's inability to recall collecting payment from any of his clients recently (he had just as much difficulty remembering trifling facts as he did unpleasant ones) and if John had done it the cheques must be somewhere in one of these piles that were taking up his worktop space. The thought of rifling through all the papers in 221B to find some old cheques was appalling enough that Sherlock shuddered.

Fortunately, this was not the first time he'd lived without John. Having met the doctor at the age of twenty-seven, he'd had a few years before John to find strategies for living independently. He knew what he had to do; he just didn't want to do it.

Flipping his dressing gown back as dramatically as one can manoeuvre a dressing gown, Sherlock sat down in front of his laptop and retried the purchase, this time using Mycroft's credit card information. It worked.

Sherlock always took the precaution of obtaining and memorizing—through fantastically furtive methods, of course— Mycroft's cards each time he got new ones.

Mycroft, Sherlock had discovered later, had known what he was up to from the start, having recognised the connection between the expiration dates on his cards and Sherlock's 'impromptu' visits. What had they always said about coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy. But for some reason, despite knowing Sherlock's motive, Mycroft continued to allow him to invent new ways to pickpocket his wallet. Perhaps Mycroft's passivity about this was a manifestation of Caring about his brother's financial situation.

Sherlock's phone buzzed against the stack of books it was balanced on.

Financial trouble, little brother? M

Or perhaps Mycroft was just delighted to maintain such a direct system for keeping tabs on him.

No, decided I'd have a Christmas present. SH

It's October. M

Early Christmas present. SH

Indeed. Will be auditing your accounts shortly. M

Merry Christmas. M

Sherlock chucked his phone into the couch. He knew the price for using Mycroft's money was his brother's prying, but he needed these chemicals. London had been dismally quiet since the obscure "Did you miss me?" message almost a year ago. There had been a handful of cases interesting enough since then to keep him sane (see Blog, Dr. Watson), but that message… It had saved his life, pulling him back from what would have been a suicide mission, and initially it had been so promising. The promise of intrigue, thrill, a distraction, a challenge… "Did you miss me?" Did he? The Magnussen/Morstan case had been fascinating and nearly fatal enough hold his attention. But now… Do you miss me? The answer to that question, he imagined, was complicated enough to keep London's best psychologist busy for a year. But he could say definitively he missed the distraction. Silence hung heavily in the empty flat. He'd never needed to be distracted more than he did now.

He lived for the game. And when it was on, really on, he needed nothing else. Neither food nor rest nor any of those restraints that chain mortals to the drudgery of their daily lives. When the game was on he broke unbreakable cyphers, bent steel, stripped the universe to its chemical contents, ran as though he weren't bound to Earth…

And without the game… In the past there had been drugs. An exhilarating rotation of cocaine and heroin. Up and down, round and round, a beautifully destructive carousel: blurring sensations and blissful numbness. It had been dizzying, the risk and the rush, never enough and then suddenly too much all at once. And then the decision to stop. A grinding halt. And now there were only nicotine patches, an empty flat, and silence.

Distract me, challenge me, kill me; just don't let there be silence.

At least when John had been there… But John hadn't been there for years.

There was nothing to do but wait. Did you miss me? He knew something was coming; whatever or whoever it was was just taking a criminally long time about it. Worthless criminals. Were they trying to torture him? The problem with having accumulated so many dangerously insane enemies was that there would always be someone only too gleeful for the opportunity to torture him.

Using Mycroft's money, knowingly attracting his brother's attention, forced him to acknowledge how desperate he was. He needed the chemicals he'd just purchased. Without drugs and without anything else to distract his attention, research was all he had to keep his brain from self-destructing with boredom.

Sherlock glared to his left at the skull perched on his stack of Textile Science journals.

"Why is it all so dull?" he demanded of it. "Human bodies are wondrously complex and humans are idiots. Mindless work, mindless eating, mindless television..." He pulled his feet up onto the chair, hugging his knees to his chest. "Dull, dull... The average person is nowhere near as intelligent as his circulatory system. It's pathetic."

The skull stared at him silently.

"And dull. Excruciatingly dull."

Silence, silence.

People often assumed Sherlock liked silence just because he told them to shut up all the time. But, as usual, they were wrong. Although he despised people's insipid blathering, he didn't like silence. More often than not he needed sound to think. Sherlock did his best thinking while playing the violin, or talking to John. He liked to talk. After all, people who have remarkable things to say should talk more often than other people. (It's just as that rabbit from that children's film had said, "If you can't say anything interesting, don't say anything at all." Sherlock firmly believed the world would be a better place if more people followed this advice, even if it had been said by a talking rabbit.)

Sherlock very often had interesting and important things to say and he needed to say them out loud. He used to talk to the skull, which regarded him eyelessly now.

A memory from his and John's first case together sprang to his mind.

He'd been explaining something urgent and imperative (as usual) when John had asked, "But why are you telling all of this to me?"

"Mrs. Hudson took my skull."

"So I'm basically filling in for your skull," John had responded, incredulous.

"Relax, you're doing fine."

How things had changed. Sherlock steepled his fingers as he often did unconsciously when thinking. The skull now was not doing a fine job filling in for John.

"Life post-goldfish is even more disappointing than I'd anticipated," Sherlock grumbled to it. "There should be a warning label. Goldfish can be dangerous. Some goldfish… Maybe just one…" Sherlock was muttering incoherently. "But there's nothing to be done about it… Don't look like that." Sherlock faced the skull away from him. It never used to be so judgmental.

This wasn't working. He needed John's responses to centre his thought processes. And for some inconvenient reason, only John's. All other voices were grating to his ears: either too high or too loud or too nasally or too fast or too slow or too mumbling or too stupid. Vile people and their witless cadences, ugly and full of the ignorant sort of arrogance people effuse whenever they speak about things they don't understand, which is always. But not John.

When John had walked into the lab the day they met Sherlock had immediately been struck by John's voice. Different from my day... Here use mine... Somehow it was not as horrible as the cacophony of dreadful mouth noises he had to endure whenever he was forced to interact with people. In fact, John's voice, with its soft tone and unassuming quality, his accent neither vulgar nor pretentious, words neither hurried nor drawling, was even borderlining on pleasant.

His voice was one of several factors Sherlock used in deciding, within a matter of seconds, that John would be the ideal flatmate, and then later an ideal assistant. (Sherlock had also quite liked that John was left-handed but shot a gun with his right: Interesting.) Only John would do. He remembered how off his game he'd been when he brought Molly along on a case. It hadn't worked.

And now even the skull wasn't good enough anymore.

With considerable effort Sherlock dragged his attention back to his laptop. Using Mycroft's money to buy the chemicals had solved this particular problem, but Mycroft—or more accurately Mycroft's minions—would be examining his accounts at any moment, and he expected he would be in for a lecture. Sometimes he wished Mycroft were more old-fashioned. Sherlock could tolerate most traditional forms of torture better than he could withstand a lecture about responsibility from his brother.

Sherlock also knew that Mycroft would offer him money. He wouldn't take it, because accepting money from his brother—as opposed to stealing it—would mean submission. Mycroft would use the money as a contract, requiring Sherlock to comply with his every request. Sherlock, for his part, would rather spend an evening of quiet conversation with Anderson than sell his freedom to Mycroft. And since both of these options were only slightly better than suicide—real suicide, elaborately staged fake suicides were excellent fun—he needed a better idea.

Sherlock jumped to his feet and resumed pacing the room. He took a crooked path, as the items scattered about the floor made a straight one impossible.

He kicked a pair of handcuffs aside and stepped over a teacup. He was annoyed by the flat's illogical ability to be oppressively cluttered and yet feel empty at the same time. It was too quiet. He went to the windowsill and unlatched his violin case. The beautiful Stradivarius was easily the most valuable item in the flat.

Automatic actions: Tighten and rosin bow, attach shoulder rest, tune by ear for perfect pitch.

He decided on Sibelius's violin concerto. It was a good night for the minor key.

He began to play from memory. He knew some songs so well he could put his hands on autopilot, muscle memory freeing his mind to consider any problem undistracted. The piece was complex, the bowing fast and complicated, but he'd repeated it so often in youth the notes came to him instinctively.

He walked around the living room as he played, lost in thought, only vaguely aware of the crunch of tennis racket strings underfoot now and then.

Sherlock had been… well, the way he was… for thirty-two years. Discounting a partial lobotomy, it just wasn't possible that he could become the sort of person who waited in line at the bank to deposit a cheque, or paid bills, or worried about credit card debt.

He could, of course, hire someone to take care of these things for him. But then he would probably have to pay that person. One can't pay a person to fix his financial problems if one has such financial problems that he needs to pay a person to fix them. Sherlock furrowed his brow. This was not his kind of puzzle.

What would John say? John would know what to do, and the obvious option of texting him to simply ask hadn't escaped him. But Sherlock had promised himself after John's wedding that he wasn't going to bother him with these sorts of ex-flatmate problems (e.g. where are the towels? Is it possible to fold a fitted sheet? Are there significant consequences for not doing so correctly? How does the heat work? etc.). He wasn't going to interrupt John's new married life with such trivial problems that he himself found too boring to properly consider. So asking John was out of the question.

Sherlock heard footsteps on the stairs beneath the sound of his violin. Mrs. Hudson again. Sherlock couldn't think of enough variations in the English language to tell her to go away. He'd tried using some phrases from other languages, but those proved to be even less effective.

When Sherlock calculated her to be on the top stair he stopped his bow and yelled, "MRS. HUDSON, IF YOU TRY TO BRING ONE MORE CUP OF TEA IN HERE TONIGHT I WILL THROW IT OUT THE WINDOW." The footsteps stopped, hesitating. "I'LL CONSIDER THROWING YOU OUT AFTER IT," he added for good measure.

He resumed playing. He couldn't be interrupted right now, especially not by Mrs. Hudson's prattling. He needed to think about John. He needed to focus. What would John say?

And then Sherlock knew with certainty that if John were there, he would have said, "If I promise I don't have any tea, can I come in?"

Because he was there, standing in the doorway with a duffel bag across his shoulder and a suitcase at his side, and that's what he did say.