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Yujin learned long ago that ennui overtakes Sholmes whenever he solves a particularly trying case. He seems to to play violin to combat that for hours on end. Sometimes even more, this particular week.
Over the past few days, Sholmes’s music has become so omnipresent, that its sudden cessation feels as sudden as an ax splitting wood in two. Yujin’s eyes dart up from his newspaper, trying to figure out the problem. In the end it’s so simple that Sholmes doesn’t even have time to sardonically ask Yujin to help him perform a deduction.
“I think,” Yujin says, “violins have four strings instead of three.”
“Yes, yes,” Sholmes snaps. “Well-spotted.” He slowly pries the split string from the violin’s neck and scroll. His movements are as delicate as any surgeon and quite at odds with his harsh tone.
Yujin might shrink away from crankiness in any other person. Somehow, though - with his roommate of one year - it’s just another piece of data. Music wasn’t just a whim, then, and Sholmes’s violin wasn’t a toy. Sholmes could be passionate about things other than mysteries.
“Somehow my sour mood has made you grin, Mikotoba.”
Yujin resists the urge to touch his own face in order to verify this claim. “It’s simply my morning coffee, friend.”
“Morning …” Sholmes glares at the window as though it’s injured him personally. “Ah, yes, so it is.”
He then gets up, rummages around in a chest of drawers, and produces another string. Yujin tries to follow the process of Sholmes fitting it into his violin, but it all happens so quickly that he can’t quite manage it. He’s also never quite grown accustomed to Sholmes turning the tuning pegs. There’s something almost gruesome about that sound, like it belongs in a surgery theater.
“Why are you learning to dance?” Sholmes asks, a few seconds after he tucks his violin under his chin. For some reason he's trying to catch Mikotoba off-guard.
“Who said I’m learning to dance?” Yujin says, not sure why he’s denying something so benign.
Sherlock flops down in a chair, and lets the violin rest on his knee.
“Sorry, I forgot we were still pretending you weren’t going to dance lessons.”
“Is it a problem if I am? Hypothetically?”
“No, I just … dancing. It’s a bit incongruous for a doctor, don’t you think?”
Yujin strokes his chin, considering. He should have guessed that something like this would happen. During that brief period in which the violin was out of commission, Sholmes’s mind had not been at rest. His considerable energy and curiosity must have settled on Yujin. As it so often did.
He can’t quite get used to it, but he doesn’t dislike it either.
“Who says there has to be a reason for anything? There isn’t a reason for you to play violin.”
“There is when one’s mother insists on you knowing the fundamentals of music theory a scant few years after you learned to speak.”
“But now you live alone and you still keep it up.”
Sholmes points at Yujin like he might scold him. He laughs instead. “I don’t live alone, unless you are a phantom.”
As, yes. Phantoms. Yujin has some of his own. They’d followed him like a shroud during his sea voyage to London. Actually, his grief had been less like a shroud and more like a terrible fever that never quite broke. At first he’d made do with alcohol, since he had seemed immune to sea-sickness. After a few days of that, though, he’d made a point of disembarking at every stop from Japan to London and trying to drown his senses in foreign sights, sounds, and smells.
“On my journey here, I noticed that dancing was everywhere. We saw the Russian ballet in China.” On Lord van Zieks’s dime, in fact. “Much later I saw the tarantella and the flamenco. Oh, wait, and Sufi whirling several times before that.”
During Yujin’s rambling, Sholmes had returned to tuning his new string, the sound a distant, wavering drone underneath Yujin’s words. Sholmes makes a face, twists the peg a tiny amount, and suddenly it shifts rights into the correct sound.
“When people dance it’s as though … I don’t know. It’s as though they’ve transformed a tiny stage into an entire world that’s all their own,” Yujin adds.
And at some point during that journey, Yujin had tried to convince himself that he would try to approach his time in London with the fervor of a skilled dancer. He would try to act like a performer on a stage, trying to absorb all the world had to offer. Every time he tries to put this thought into speech, though, his words feel inadequate to the task.
At least Sholmes’s violin fills the silence. The tune is not his (surprisingly elegant) usual. It’s boisterous and fun and clearly meant for dancing.
“Sometimes England goes through ascetic fits and our puritanical sorts discourage dance, you know. You might have been better off disembarking anywhere else.”
“That might have been the case, once, but this age is our own.”
Sholmes gets such a dynamic - almost magnetic - look in his eyes in response to that that Yujin has to look off to the side.
“Someday, Mikotoba, I shall get you to dance for me.”
A thought occurs to Mikotoba then and he smirks. He can’t quite help it.
“Why do you have that facial expression? I think that one is new, actually.” Sholmes asks.
“You know, I never did admit to taking dance lessons. I simply admitted to a fondness for seeing it.”
The music stops, and Sholmes scowls. “Ah, yes, I’d quite forgotten I had the most obstinate roommate in all of London.”
“Remember, you never told me why you like to play violin.”
“Touché.”
Sholmes returns to his instrument, which means his melancholy hasn’t quite abated. However, for the remainder of the day he fills their apartment with lively jigs. And there’s no way Yujin’s tapping toes escape Sholmes’s notice.