Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Canon: a contrapuntal musical composition in which each successively entering voice presents the initial theme, usually transformed in a strictly consistent way. The initial melody is called the leader while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower.

The black case sat in the window of the charity shop. It was the third time John had walked past it that week, but the first time he’d stopped, hand on the glass, and really looked. Between the tacky china tea sets and the battered toys, the wood box and silk lining was odd, incongruous. It was obviously old and well-loved, the silver keys tarnished with neglect. He’d parted ways with his first clarinet aged fifteen when he had decided, in the way that only teenage boys can, that it was a girly instrument. He’d regretted it ten years later, but by then he was barely out of university and his free time was non-existent. Now, nearly twenty years after that misguided decision, there was a little nagging voice telling him it was time to fix his mistake. It couldn’t hurt, could it? The price on the tag was about a tenth of the market value, even for a second-hand instrument, and it was for a good cause, after all.

Ten minutes later, he left the shop with the case and a stack of miscellaneous dog-eared sheet music tucked under his arm. On the way home, he stopped at a music shop and bought a new set of reeds, (because God knew where the ones in the case had been). There was something deeply satisfying about the act.

The first thing he did when he got back to the mercifully Sherlock-free flat was move the distillation apparatus off the kitchen table and borrow Mrs Hudson’s silver polish. He cleaned each section in turn gently, almost reverentially, like he cleaned his pistol, checking the workings of the keys and tightening screws. He wondered vaguely what Sherlock might be able to deduce about its previous owner – were they young? Old? Male? Female? What sort of music did they like to play? Did they play on their own, or in a band? Why did they start playing? And why did they stop? He tried his best, but in the end all John was able to deduce, based on the collection of wrappers tucked inside the bell, was that they probably liked spearmint chewing gum.

He picked the lightest of the reeds to start with and held it between his lips as he put the rest of the instrument together. Asked at any other time, John would never have listed cork grease as among his favourite scents, but now he had to admit there was something wonderfully nostalgic about it; it smelled of the music room at his secondary school, of after-school orchestra rehearsals and their conductor, the ferocious if extremely effective Head of Music.

He tried a few scales first to loosen up the keys, stiff with disuse. They said it was like riding a bike, and in a way they were right. The sound was pretty dire, the texture rough and reedy, but he was surprised at how much of the fingering he remembered, although the key signatures proved a challenge that had to be solved by Google. John had always been a believer in throwing yourself in at the deep end, so eventually, feeling confident that he wasn’t going to sound like a mouse stuck in a pipe, he opened one of the scores which didn’t look too horrific; it turned out to be one of Mozart’s minuets. It felt impolite to use Sherlock’s music stand when he wasn’t around, so John propped it up on the mantelpiece instead. It wasn’t perfect, but neither was he.

Getting the breathing right was harder, but it came with time and the notes flowed off the page easily, a second language he’d never really forgotten. Slowly but steadily, with a lot of pausing to stretch out his fingers, he worked his way down the stack of scores. He’d forgotten the wonderful sense of tranquillity that came with music, how the world narrowed down to the notes, the clarinet and himself, and everything else seemed distant and unimportant. Lost in the middle of a particularly lovely piece, he had to stop to check the fingering for a high C. And that’s when it happened.

“Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D,” said a voice from behind him, and he jumped so hard he practically swallowed the instrument. There was Sherlock, leaning against the doorframe as though he’d been there for hours. In a world of his own, John hadn’t even heard the front door open.

“Jesus, Sherlock, don’t do that,” he grumbled, annoyed at the interruption. He’d hoped his friend might have been gone longer; he’d never been great at playing to audiences and Sherlock was just about the worst audience imaginable.

“Don’t stop on my account,” said Sherlock amiably, making no move to come in or sit down or do anything that wasn’t lurking in the doorway putting John off. Sod that, John thought defiantly, and turned back to the music.

“Cup of tea would be nice,” he said over his shoulder, and picked up where he left off. After a moment there were rattling sounds from behind him which astonishingly sounded a bit like Sherlock actually making tea. Still, knowing Sherlock it would probably turn out to be drugged, so John wasn’t going to get his hopes up yet. By the time he reached the end of the piece, having successfully navigated an unexpected barrage of demisemiquavers with only minor casualties, the sounds had ceased and no tea was forthcoming. He didn’t get a chance to be disappointed, however, because the instant the last note died away, Sherlock appeared at his shoulder, tucking his violin under his chin.

“It’s not right to play only one part of a canon,” he said by way of explanation. “You lose all the meaning.”

“Oh,” said John, who had a fair idea of where this was going but hadn’t yet decided if he liked it.

“I’ll take the top part if you’ll take the bottom,” said Sherlock, and if John hadn’t been feeling suddenly so out of his depth then there would have been a joke in there somewhere. As it was, he just frowned.

“It’s in B flat. Can you transpose as you go?”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, rolling his eyes as though John had asked him if he could add two and two, and somehow John couldn’t really argue with that.

“I should warn you, I haven’t played since I was at school. I’m a bit rusty.”

“I heard you just now, you were acceptable.” From anyone else, it would have sounded like an insult, but coming from Sherlock it was praise indeed.

“Go on, then,” John smiled, giving in despite his deep reservations. “You lead, I’ll follow.” Sherlock merely inclined his head in response and raised his bow.

One thing John had remembered well from his school days was that playing with other people, be it one person, two, or an entire orchestra, was a tremendously intimate experience. You had to learn how to tell what they were doing without looking, learn how they sat, how they breathed or bowed. You could find out a lot about a person from how they played. For instance, John never liked to add ornamentation, or fiddle with the tempo. It felt wrong, somehow, not to mention rude—like taking a beautiful painting and adding in scenery or light sources that weren’t supposed to be there just because you didn’t like what the artist had done. So he always played exactly what was on the page. Sherlock, in contrast, had no such qualms. He added grace notes and accents, inserted pauses at the end of phrases without being told to and disregarded the dynamic markings when they didn’t suit him, which was most of the time. Sometimes John had to race to keep up as Sherlock attacked a run of notes far faster than they were written, and sometimes he found himself quite literally waiting with bated breath while Sherlock dragged a single semibreve out into an entirely unnecessary four-bar trill. Yet he couldn’t help the sense of satisfaction when against all odds they hit the last note together, with Sherlock signalling the end of the pause with a neat twirl of his wrist.

Then Sherlock took his violin down from his shoulder, gave John a smile—an honest-to-God actual smile, not the kind he used on witnesses and people he was trying to trick—and said, “Thank you, that was nice.”, and something in John’s chest did a strange little flippy thing that he really hoped wasn’t indicative of anything serious. He felt he should say something, perhaps. Seize the moment, or something like that.

But then Sherlock turned away to pack up his violin, talking about the discoveries he’d made at the lab that day and how he could revolutionise criminal pathology if only he had the time, and the moment passed as quickly as it had arrived.

Feeling suddenly tired, John put away the clarinet carefully, cleaning and drying each piece and tucking it into the box. The sheet music he gathered into a pile and stacked in a corner out of the way. The clarinet went under his bed, next to his kit bag.

He left Canon in D propped up on the mantelpiece, though. Just in case.

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Rondo: a musical form where a recurring theme or section appears interspersed with episodes, each involving a new theme.

Looking back, John still wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, but he was pretty sure Sherlock started it. A few days after the arrival of the clarinet, John came back from the pub to find the flat empty and a battered copy of Mozart’s Twelve Duets, arranged for violin and clarinet, on the table, with a note attached:

    Gone to Barts. V. promising progress re: goldfish, death of. Back late.

    SH

    P.S. I like #3.

John had planned on a nice quiet afternoon, maybe watching a bit of telly or catching up with his blog. Instead he found himself in front of the fireplace practicing runs of semiquavers, a mug of tea leaving ring marks on the mantelpiece next to the skull. Eventually, he was satisfied that he could just about play the unsubtly-requested piece without making too much of a fool of himself. Almost as soon as he’d opened the self-congratulatory bottle of beer and settled on the sofa to catch up on the news, the front door slammed open, then shut, and there was the sound of an angry consulting detective stomping up the stairs. A few seconds later Sherlock swept into the flat, hurled his coat and scarf to the floor and threw himself into the armchair, where he curled into a ball. John sighed.

“Nothing doing on the goldfish front?”

“Wasted!” Sherlock fumed through gritted teeth. “All wasted. Pointless, all of it. Irrelevant. Three days. Wasted!”

That was obviously all John was going to get, so he didn’t bother pushing. “Tea?”

Sherlock just grunted, and John had absolutely no intention of making tea that wasn’t wanted. He tried a different tack. “Had a look at the Mozart you left on the table.”

The change was immediate. Sherlock’s head shot up, some of the tension left his shoulders and, while he didn’t exactly look happy, at least he wasn’t glaring daggers at the wall. “What did you think?” he asked, sounding only passingly interested—a tone of voice John was fairly sure he cultivated deliberately.

“Number three was good,” John said. “Had a bit of a go at it, wasn’t too bad. We could play it if you’d like,” he added, feeling strangely apprehensive.

He needn’t have worried. It was like a light had been flicked on. Sherlock’s whole body relaxed and his face broke into a smile—the same rare smile John had seen when they’d finished Canon in D. More concerningly, it came with the same swooping sensation in his chest; John wasn’t at all sure if he liked it. Still, he’d have to worry about it later, because Sherlock leapt off the chair and started unpacking his violin, suddenly full of energy and not looking the slightest bit morose.

Duet no. 3 was a bright, lyrical piece full of the sort of twiddly melodic lines that Sherlock obliterated on a regular basis. It was also short, which was both a relief for John, who had been playing it with varying degrees of success all afternoon, but also almost disappointing because it didn’t leave as much space for Sherlock to mess about with the tempo and the ornamentation; while it was inarguably frustrating to play alongside someone whose idea of how a piece should go was at odds with the composer’s, at the same time it was fascinating to watch and that was the sort of paradox John had become quite used to since moving into Baker Street. Again, Sherlock thanked him after they’d finished playing, that smile still ghosting around his lips. That time, John returned with one of his own.

After that, it became a thing. The next week, John brought home a book of violin duets that he’d found in that same charity shop and Sherlock spent a happy—and surprisingly quiet—evening transposing the second part into B-flat. A couple of days later, John came down for breakfast to find Sherlock’s music stand in the middle of the living room, the full score of In The Hall Of The Mountain King open on it with the relevant parts circled. And so it went back and forth. Sometimes one of them would pick music relevant to the case they were working at the time—one memorable incident at an opera house resulted in the flat being deluged with Wagner for days. They didn’t always agree on the choice of piece; John thought Bach was almost unfailingly boring, and Sherlock objected loudly and at length to The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan. Still, most of the time the disputes were resolved, sometimes with promises of doing all the washing-up for a week (John, ineffective as he did most of the washing-up anyway) or removing the half-dissected frog from the bread bin (Sherlock, successfully exchanged for Bach’s 1^st Minuet in G).

They always returned to Canon in D, though. Usually it was between cases, when they finally returned to the calm—relatively speaking—of the flat after days of running across London after clues and suspects. The very playing became a routine; Sherlock would always say “I’ll take the top if you’ll take the bottom”, and would always thank him after each recital. John began, during cases, to look forward to the conclusion, to the return once more to Baker Street and to the familiar tune, a little bit of continuity in a fast-changing world.

After a while, they began to talk about it. Sherlock would pause in the middle of a phrase to suggest John add a grace note, or to fiddle with the dynamic markings. If John agreed, the changes were marked down in pencil on the dog-eared manuscript. At the same time, John noticed Sherlock seemed to be reining in his own tendency to embellish the written score, so that their parts were slowly converging to the same level. When John had reached the point where he barely needed to look at the score any more, he began to watch Sherlock instead and discovered that his friend played with his eyes closed, a look of serenity on his face that John had never seen before.

 After that, John worked particularly hard to memorise the pieces they played, although he found himself unable to explain why.

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Sonata: a composition for an instrumental soloist, often with a piano accompaniment.

The day something changed was the day John fell over a book of George Gershwin when he opened his door that morning. It was brand new, not a charity shop find like most of their collection, boasted ‘easy arrangements of all the classics’, and it even had the accompanying piano parts on a CD tucked into the cover. There was just one thing missing.

“Sherlock,” he said over breakfast, tapping the cover of the book. “This is for solo clarinet.”

“Really? How very observant of you,” Sherlock deadpanned.

“I mean, it hasn’t got a violin part. Or any other part, for that matter.”

“Gosh, you are on the ball today. Positively scintillating.” Sherlock smirked infuriatingly over his coffee. John resisted the urge to throw something at him.

“Why did you buy me this?” he asked, choosing bluntness over tact.

Sherlock merely shrugged, as if it was a trifling matter. “I like Gershwin.”

John was unrelenting. “But this isn’t for you to play.”

“I like listening to Gershwin.”

Sometimes it was easier getting blood from a stone than straight answers from Sherlock. John wondered why he bothered. “Then buy a CD! Or get it off iTunes!”

Sherlock put the mug of coffee down, leaned forward and fixed John with the full force of his stare. “I would like,” he said, “to listen to you play Gershwin.”

“Oh,” said John, whose heart had suddenly relocated to somewhere in the region of his throat for no good reason. And then, when he thought he could manage more than one syllable, “Why? I’m not very good.”

“Irrelevant,” said Sherlock, relaxing back into his seat and taking a sip of coffee. “I want to listen to you play something. I don’t get to hear you play on your own. “

“Okay, okay, fine,” said John, despite the parts of him screaming that this was the worst idea Sherlock had ever had. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

As it turned out, it was nearly a week of furious investigations before John was in the flat long enough to even look at the book of music. When he did, he managed to open it to the middle of Summertime and almost had a heart attack at the score, which was admittedly a lot more true to the original arrangement than the version he recalled seeing at school. Still, he had promised, so he went through the entire piece with the aid of a pencil and a beer, crossing out the grace notes and methodically boiling the melody down enough that he actually had a hope of playing it, but not so much that it became unrecognisable.

Having done that, Sherlock’s cases continued to get in the way of actually practising, especially given that he tried as much as possible to avoid practising when Sherlock was around, so that it was an evening almost a month after the initial conversation when John, having already discreetly downed a glass of left-over Christmas sherry to calm a totally irrational attack of stage fright, asked him, “You still want to hear me mangle Gershwin?”.

Sherlock looked up from behind the microscope, face unreadable as ever. “Of course.”

“Well, can your slides wait?” John waggled the clarinet at him. “I’d rather do this now, before I come to my senses.”

Sherlock smiled the smile that John was coming to associate exclusively with Pachelbel, impromptu concerts and strange twisty feelings in his chest. “Excellent!” He sprang up off his chair, practically skipped across the flat and dropped onto the sofa, where he rested his elbows on his knees, steepled his fingers and levelled a look of extreme concentration in John’s direction. John almost took a step back at the sheer force, wondering if this was how the specimens under the microscope felt.

“Bloody hell, Sherlock, I can’t do it if you’re going to stare at me like that!”

Sherlock sighed dramatically, as if it was John’s fault that Sherlock was so naturally intimidating, then flopped back and rolled over so that he was lying on the sofa instead, eyes closed and fingers still steepled under his chin. “Better?”

It still wasn’t ideal, but it was at least an improvement and probably the best John could hope for. “I guess. This is going to be rubbish, you know.”

“Nonsense.”

John shrugged as he put on the backing track. “Your funeral, mate.”

And actually, it wasn’t that bad, really. If John stood with his back to Sherlock and concentrated on the music, he could almost pretend he was alone in the flat and that it didn’t feel as if he were being judged on his performance like it was an audition piece. The first few bars were shaky from nerves, but as his confidence grew the notes became steadier and brighter, his fingers moved more easily on the keys and he finished the piece feeling really quite pleased with himself. He leaned over to turn the CD player off.

“Don’t,” Sherlock interrupted him before he could. John blinked in surprise.

“Sorry, what?”

Sherlock hadn’t moved from the sofa. “Play it again,” he said. John stared.

“What?”

Sherlock turned his head and opened his eyes, fixing John with the kind of stare he usually only saved for chemistry experiments and particularly fascinating corpses. “Please,” he said, and there was definitely something wrong and yet horribly familiar about the way John’s heart leapt at that. For a moment, he couldn’t work out what to say.

“Okay,” he said eventually, still completely shocked and more than a little confused. “But just once and that’s your lot, all right?”

“Acceptable,” declared Sherlock, settling back into his customary position. And John, despite everything, started the backing track from the beginning and played Summertime all over again. When he finished, he took the clarinet from his mouth but said nothing; after that, words seemed a bit empty. For a moment, the silence stretched on, tense but almost comforting in a way, until suddenly Sherlock stood up without a word and marched across the room. On the way, he brushed past John, still holding the clarinet, mouth slightly open and feeling very lost; the contact was fleeting but it felt like an electric surge through John’s entire body. He closed his mouth and examined the floor instead. Suddenly, he found the clarinet being removed from his hands and replaced by his coat. He looked up to find Sherlock already wearing his.

“Put this on,” Sherlock said. “We’re going out for dinner. I’m paying.”

“What?” said John for the third time in as many minutes. Sherlock rolled his eyes long-sufferingly, which John thought was rather hypocritical.

“You played me Gershwin, so in return I’m taking you out for dinner,” Sherlock explained impatiently.  “Is that sufficiently clear?”

“Oh,” said John. “Okay then.” He pulled his coat on, now feeling extremely confused and increasingly out of his depth. But then he looked up and said “Italian?” and Sherlock gave him That Smile except without any of the usual musical accompaniment, and suddenly everything fell into place.

All things considered, he probably should have realised it sooner.

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Serenade: a musical composition, and/or performance, in someone's honour.

John was worried, and when he was worried, he liked to tidy things. There was something very soothing about the act of taking a mess and making it neat and orderly again. Maybe it was his military training resurfacing. Maybe it was just severely repressed OCD. Whatever it was, he always felt better when he had something in his hands to clean. Usually it was his service revolver; today, it was his clarinet. He’d started with the mouthpiece, polished the ligature and had moved on to the barrel, turning the wood over and over in his hand as he thought.

John wasn’t stupid, no matter how foolish living with Sherlock Holmes might make him feel at times. He should have recognised the strange fluttering feeling earlier, true, but now that he had it was absolutely unmistakeable. He was no stranger to what he liked to call the art of romance; over the years he’d navigated his (sometimes shaky) way through countless romantic entanglements, and he was probably qualified to dispense advice on almost every awkward and unpleasant situation you’d care to name. The problem was that he was drawing a blank on the situation where one has the sudden unexpected realisation that one is more than a little in love with one’s flatmate.

They had gone for Italian after all, in a quiet little restaurant within walking distance of the flat, with tea-lights and a single red rose in the middle of the checked tablecloth. He’d eaten all of his garlic bread and most of Sherlock’s, and sat licking butter off his fingers while Sherlock talked about Bach and rare violins and how recent research suggested that certain sequences of notes could affect the flight patterns of honey bees. He’d listened, fascinated, because Sherlock could make almost anything fascinating by sheer enthusiasm—he waxed lyrical on rates of decomposition of drowning victims like normal people talked about art or music or what they saw on telly last night. While he was talking, Sherlock had casually helped himself to John’s lasagne, an act of war which John countered by stealing Sherlock’s meatballs while he was distracted deducing that two of the waiters were having an affair with the same customer. After the meal—Sherlock had paid, despite John’s protestations—they’d walked back in the warm summer evening, the clear sky darkening and the stars just beginning to shine. It had all been really nice—a lot nicer than many dates he’d been on, in fact, and therein lay the problem. It had felt like a date, which was ridiculous because they went out for dinner together all the time and it had never felt like a date before, and besides, John knew full well that Sherlock didn’t do dates. In the past, he’d acted as though he didn’t even know what one was.

John set the barrel back down in the case and started on the upper joint, working the cleaning cloth carefully between the keys.

At first, he had thought it was just some unconscious biological thing telling him it’d been too long since he’d last gone out with a woman, but then that train of thought had led to thinking about a girlfriend he’d had years ago who had squealed and wriggled when he’d nipped at the skin just under her ear, had wobbled on the tracks when he found himself wondering if Sherlock would react similarly and had derailed entirely when he realised that he desperately wanted to find out, preferably by practical investigation. It wasn’t that John was having a crisis of sexuality, as such; to be honest, he was actually sort of glad to have uncovered the reason behind his recently declining interest in women. What he was having was a crisis of Sherlock.

Sherlock had said, when they’d first met, that he was married to his work. At the time, John had taken it as an awkward attempt at politely rejecting a come-on John hadn’t made. Later, he’d interpreted it as a declaration of disinterest in the whole idea of a relationship. Now, he was fairly sure that Sherlock was pretty much asexual and aromantic, although he did have to consult the internet to find out there was actually a word for it. Unfortunately, he was also fairly sure that he was in love with Sherlock, hence why he was sitting alone in the kitchen cleaning a clarinet that didn’t really need to be cleaned. He turned his attention to the lower joint now, where the cork backing was peeling off one of the keys. He leaned over and fished around in the kitchen drawers for the superglue to fix it back in place.

Looking at it logically, there were three possibilities. The best, but also the most unlikely given that Sherlock was, well, Sherlock, was that his feelings were reciprocated in some sense and the worst that would happen would be a bit of new-relationship confusion and possibly being laughed at by Scotland Yard. At the other end of the scale was the possibility that Sherlock would find the very idea repulsive, John would find himself out on the streets if he even hinted at what he felt and this time Stamford wouldn’t turn up with a convenient potential flatmate. Of course, there was also the third possibility, that Sherlock would just laugh and they would carry on as normal, except  that John would spend every waking moment dreaming of what could have been until everything became so awkward that there was nothing for it but for John to find somewhere else to live anyway. It was, in a word, hopeless.

 “Damn it!” John slammed the clarinet case closed with rather more force than he really meant to, and there was an unpleasant scraping sound. “Oh, bloody hell...” He opened the case again to check the extent of the damage. The clarinet itself looked fine, but the lining on the lid was coming away at the corner. It was probably nothing a bit of glue wouldn’t fix, but it was just one more thing he really didn’t need right now. John sighed and retrieved a spare kitchen knife, which he slid under the edge of the lining and wiggled, trying to shift it enough to get the glue bottle in. To his surprise, the whole thing came away from the case with a pop, spilling out a considerable amount of dust, some more chewing gum wrappers and, bafflingly, a sheaf of sheet music which had been hidden behind the lining.

Intrigued and momentarily distracted, John spread the sheets out over the table, shifting the clarinet case and a wayward Bunsen burner to make room. Time to see if it was possible to absorb Sherlock’s amazing deductive powers by osmosis, he thought. There were four sheets in total, the notes handwritten on cheap manuscript paper in a mixture of ink and pencil, the paper scuffed in places from where the pencil had been rubbed out and rewritten. The handwriting was rough and rounded, probably a young person’s. It was just the one piece—even without looking at the score, that much was obvious from the way the pages were numbered. The title, a single word, was perhaps the most telling: “Amilie”. John wondered if Amilie, whoever they were, had ever heard the piece. Given that it had been hidden away, probably for some time, it was unlikely. Surely the composer would have shared their work if they’d thought it would be received well. Unrequited, then, and John felt a swell of sympathy for a stranger he’d never met.

Would it be rude to play it? It wasn’t meant for him, after all, but he wanted to know how it sounded and there was something about the message behind it that called to him. He hated keeping secrets from Sherlock, especially given how difficult it was, but spending the foreseeable future secretly yearning for something he could never have still sounded better than risking their entire relationship by telling Sherlock how he felt. After a brief but intense internal debate, he put the newly cleaned clarinet together and propped the piece up on Sherlock’s music stand. He had to try a few times before he got a feel for the tempo, and he had to look up the composer’s instruction of affettuoso, which turned out to be Italian for ‘tenderly’. He tried for tender, but the whole thing came out rather melancholic, with brief moments of happiness as the key took a turn for the major before plunging back down into minor again, leaving him with a strange ache deep in his chest. He kept going, though, because he needed to know.

It was the second time through that he realised that he was pausing on certain notes without thinking, and the third time that he realised it was because he was waiting for Sherlock to add an unmarked trill to them. He’d spent so long shaping his entire life—including his music—around Sherlock that it had reached the stage where he did it unconsciously. Well, if that was how it was going to be, he might as well do it properly. He fetched a pencil from the living room and added a neat tr. to the offending notes. Then, because he couldn’t really stop there, he went through the whole piece, adding accents and adjusting the dynamics, just like Sherlock would have done. He played with the tempo too, trying to convey with accelerandos and rallentandos even a fraction of what it was like to run through London with Sherlock Holmes. It was an hour and a bottle of Fursty Ferret later than John sat back, surveyed the four sheets of manuscript spread out before him, all sporting his heartfelt edits, and realised that he seemed to have inadvertently written Sherlock a piece of music. He wasn’t really sure what to do with it. It seemed only fitting to add and Sherlock under the title. After a moment of hesitation, he put ed. J Watson ’12 under the composer’s scribbled name, and then, because he felt a bit guilty, (sorry, mate) under that.

There was something very cathartic about pouring his soul out in music, and John was determined that if he couldn’t work up the courage to admit his feelings for Sherlock, at least he could have a proper wallow in self-pity about the whole stupid mess. So he opened another beer and spent the afternoon fiddling some more with the piece, playing it over until it sounded as Sherlock-y as he could make it. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that the sound of the door slamming heralded the return of the subject of the piece, and John had to quickly gather up the sheets and shove them back inside the case because the only thing that could possibly be worse than Sherlock discovering John was in love with him was discovering that John had composed him a bloody serenade, of all things.

“Success!” Sherlock announced, sweeping into the kitchen and dumping a stack of case files on the table just as John closed the catches on the case. “It was the valet after all, traces of cyanide on the door handle. Knew it from the start, obviously, but had to be sure.”

“That’s brilliant,” John said, because it was, and Sherlock flushed a little, like he always did when John complimented his detective skills. Of course, now it made more sense that John had always found the sudden blossoming of colour on Sherlock’s pale cheeks so fascinating, and he made a mental note to try to induce it more often.

“Yes, well, it was all very simple really,” said Sherlock with a small smile that was the closest thing he got to modesty.

“If you say so, but I think you’re selling yourself short.” John stood up and made a show of tidying up the silver polish. “Does that mean we can afford to go out for dinner again? I keep walking past that Lebanese place round the corner, looks nice.” As the words left his mouth, John realised that to anyone else that would sound almost like an invitation on a date, which, if John were honest with himself, it sort of was.

Fortunately, it seemed Sherlock wouldn’t recognise such an invitation if it arrived stamped, addressed and labelled, if for no other reason than because he would probably already be busy analysing the paper it was written on. “Sounds excellent,” he agreed with far less fuss than usual. “Get your coat, I need to go bother Lestrade. He’s sitting on something big that he won’t let me in on and I intend to find out what it is.”

“What do you need me for?” John asked.

“Moral support.” The corner of Sherlock’s  mouth twitched just the slightest.

“Since when do you need moral support?”

“Not for me, for Lestrade. Coming?”

“You know I can’t say no to you,” John said with a roll of his eyes, although it was mostly for show.

“I’m terribly persuasive.” Sherlock was already disappearing back down the stairs, and like a ship after the call of a siren John pulled on his coat and followed. He left the clarinet on the table; the music could wait for now.

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Finale:  the final movement of a sonata, symphony or concerto, or of another piece of non-vocal classical music; a prolonged final sequence at the end of an act of an opera or musical theatre work

Lestrade’s badly-kept secret turned out to be the murder of a diplomat and his wife, in which he’d been specifically instructed not to involve Sherlock. Naturally, this meant that Sherlock was now up to his eyeballs in it, spending hours every day either in Scotland Yard or in the labs at St Bart’s poring over the cryptic note and strange residues left at the scene. For the next week, John came down to breakfast each morning to find that his flatmate, usually a late riser, had already left, sometimes with a scribbled report of his progress on the dining table. It was admittedly often fascinating to watch Sherlock work, but at the moment that work mostly consisted of him glaring down a microscope and muttering to himself—and frankly John got quite enough of that when they weren’t working a case—so instead he filled his suddenly free time by playing Amilie and Sherlock over and over again, until he was certain he knew every note and every rest like he knew his own name. It didn’t stop the ache in his chest, but it helped a little. It was a good compromise.

Of course, like all good things it was destined to end. And, because he was John Watson and at some point (possibly around the time he moved in with a mad genius) his life had unexpectedly become a soap opera, or perhaps a BBC teatime drama, it did so in the most dramatic and unfair way possible.

On the fifth day of the case, he set the clarinet down in between repeats to take a drink and promptly snorted hot tea up his nose when a voice from the doorway said, “Haven’t heard that one before.” Coughing and dripping tea onto his clean shirt, John turned to find Sherlock leaning against the doorframe just as he had been when he’d caught him playing Canon in D and started this whole thing off.

“T-thought you were at Bart’s,” he managed to choke out through the tea burning his sinuses. Sherlock gave a one-sided shrug.

“Waiting on some cultures from the scene. Tedious. They’ll take at least another eight hours. What were you playing? Rather more melancholic than your usual style.”

“Oh, it’s—it’s nothing,” John tried to cover quickly as he patted ineffectually at his shirt with a tissue. “Something new. It’s not ready yet.”

“Nonsense,” said Sherlock. “You’ve obviously been practicing it for a while. I mean, look at the music stand.”

John paused in his mopping-up to look at Sherlock blankly. “What? What about it?”

Sherlock gave a sigh which John recognised as his my-God-John-why-are-you-so-slow sigh. “Well, it’s mine, for a start, so it’s usually set at my height. It’s also old and the screws are rusty, so adjusting it takes considerable force. When you’re learning a new piece you make the effort to lower it about two inches so it’s more comfortable for you when you’re peering at the score every few bars. You haven’t bothered to adjust it today, so we can conclude that you’re not concerned about looking at the score, most likely because you’re familiar enough with it that you only need to glance at it occasionally. Hence, practicing for a while.”

Every possible response John could find for that included the words “brilliant” or “fantastic”, so he settled for just looking appropriately embarrassed and awed.

 “So, what is it?” Sherlock straightened up and strolled across the room to peer at the music. Suddenly terrified, John grabbed the score but Sherlock was quicker, plucking it out of John’s hands. “Let’s see what we have...” His voice trailed off as he read the title. A strange expression settled on his face, and for a moment he just stood there with the score in his hands.

John tried desperately to find something to explain himself, and failed utterly. “Well,” he said with a sigh of defeat, because there wasn’t anything left to say. It’d had to happen eventually, he supposed. Might as well get it over with. “I guess that’s that cat out of the bag.”

“Play it,” Sherlock said, and that was not the response John was expecting. Sherlock must have taken his surprised look as annoyance at the blunt manner of the request because he added, “Please?”.

John realised that this was his chance. He called his flatmate a machine on a regular basis, but there was no denying that Sherlock spoke music like a second language. If John played for him, he could say all the things he wanted to say without either of them uttering a word. He nodded towards the music stand and picked up the clarinet. Sherlock obediently returned the score to the stand, but he didn’t sit down, instead leaning against the desk and gripping the edge tightly.

There was no going back now. John tried to meet Sherlock’s eyes in the opening bars, but the intensity of that stare was too much and he screwed them shut; instead he tried to force out all the ache and the love and all the other strange whirling emotions, force them out into the music so Sherlock might understand.  He played like he’d never played before, desperately trying to say all the things he was too much of a coward to speak aloud. When he finished, he didn’t want to open his eyes, afraid that if he did the spell would be broken, Sherlock would leave and everything would come crashing down around him. For a long moment all he could hear was the sounds of London slipping through the cracks in the windows. Then there was the slight creak as Sherlock stood up, a rustle as he stepped forward. John opened his eyes to find Sherlock next to him, radiating warmth and wrapped in a faint smell of chemicals.

“I think you should see something,” he said, his voice sounding strangely thick. John nodded dumbly in reply and Sherlock pushed past him, heading for the bookcase. He clambered up onto a side table, all gangly arms and impossibly long legs, and retrieved a large wide book from the very top of the case, handing it to John without a word. John opened it, not knowing what to expect. To his eternal surprise, he found music. Not just a single melody, even; it was a conductor’s score for what looked like a full orchestra, including percussion. The handwriting was neat in some places and sloppy in others, but it was always familiar. John let out a shaky breath.

“Jesus, Sherlock, this is yours, isn’t it? You’ve... God, you’ve written a bloody symphony.”

“Concerto, actually,” Sherlock corrected, sounding for a moment like his normal self. “For violin and orchestra.”

Of course, John thought. Trust Sherlock to have a full orchestra to play with and still make his the most important part. “Why are you showing me this?” he asked.

 “You need to hear it,” said Sherlock. Not I’d like to play this or I think you might enjoy this. John swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat and nodded his agreement. Sherlock took the score off him and pulled a smaller booklet out of the back—the violin part, John realised. Sherlock set it on the stand and handed the conductor’s score back to him. “I’m sorry I don’t have an orchestra.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure the Philharmonic would come running if you just asked nicely,” John’s brain supplied while the rest of him was busy watching Sherlock unpack his violin; the corner of Sherlock’s mouth quirked up as he tuned the instrument.

“You can sit down if you’d like,” Sherlock offered as he took his place in front of the music. “It’s quite long.”

“I’m fine.” John didn’t sit down, but he did spread the score out flat on the desk. They might not have an orchestra, but he could at least try and imagine what it might sound like.

The first note Sherlock drew out from the violin was almost a wail which resolved into a slow, sad melody, full of accidentals and dissonant sounds, which wound itself into John’s chest and settled in a grip around his heart. The rest of the score was almost entirely blank, with only the cello playing a shuddering bass underneath the lonely violin. Then the violin dropped suddenly to a whisper and the score showed the entrance of a single trumpet playing something akin to a military march, with the drums and cello following. The violin’s original melody returned over the trumpet; it was still dissonant in places, but it sounded almost happier with a hopefulness that hadn’t been there before.

The break between sections was abrupt, with the metre doubling and the violin speeding ahead up runs of semiquavers, leaving the woodwind section trailing in its wake. John looked up from the score to find Sherlock’s face set in a mask of concentration, eyes fixed on the page as his fingers danced up the fretboard. The violas ducked in and out between the oboe and the flutes, the parts harmonising in places and clashing in others, while over their heads the violin picked out bits of each and wove them together into one tune. The music built with crescendo after crescendo until John found an X in the percussion score where Sherlock had written, in huge capitals, “CYMBALS” and suddenly all the parts came together as one, finishing in a flourish. Calm settled and the first theme returned, the gentle, sad violin, only this time the accidentals were gone, the key whole and unmarred, and John had a vague sense of returning home.

And so it went on, with each section bringing new themes and new melodies to be taken apart and put back together by the leading violin. Sometimes new instruments appeared and then disappeared just as quickly. The next section, for example, featured the brief appearance of an instrument fiddling about in the middle of the stave; Sherlock’s handwriting was atrocious at that point but the stave heading looked like it read “Erhu”, which Google would later inform John was some sort of Chinese stringed instrument. Sometimes the conflicts resolved together, sometimes most of the parts fell in line with the violin while one or two protested. At one point in the middle of what seemed, judging by the dynamic markings and the sudden slew of accents, to be a heated debate between the bass clarinet and the bassoon, John was convinced that the violin muttered a couple of bars of “Hound Dog”.

It was undeniably brilliant, and John longed to hear it with a full orchestra, but he was still baffled as to why Sherlock was so adamant that he hear it right this instant. Then suddenly the orchestra vanished, leaving just the harp and the cello in the background, and the violin took up a very familiar melody, one which by now John knew in his very bones. It was Pachelbel’s Canon in D. He followed the score enough to see the entrance of the clarinet part before he looked up at Sherlock. When he did, he found Sherlock looking back at him down the neck of the violin, eyes wide and brows knitted together, and the revelation came like a bolt out of the blue. He sat there, mouth open, the score forgotten on the desk, as Sherlock worked his way through Mozart and Bach and what was undeniably the opening of Summertime.

Then suddenly it all stopped. Sherlock took the bow from the strings and let the violin fall to his side. He didn’t move, though, didn’t stop looking at John who, for a moment, couldn’t say anything at all.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” John asked tentatively, his voice sounding loud and ungainly in the silence after the music . “You’re the violin.”

“Yes.” Sherlock’s response was barely more than a whisper.

“And the different sections... they’re cases. They’re all cases. You’ve written a bloody concerto about yourself!” John couldn’t help the hysterical laugh that bubbled up out of him. He immediately regretted it when Sherlock’s face fell.

“It’s not about me,” he said, sounding just a little bit hurt. “It’s about us.”

“Oh,” said John. And then, “Oh.” Was Sherlock seriously... no, that was ridiculous, this was Sherlock, he didn’t—he wouldn’t... John looked down at where the score petered out, the page blank after it. He barely registered the sound of Sherlock putting down the violin. What are you trying to tell me, he wanted to say. What he said instead was, “How does it end?”.

“I hope it doesn’t.”

 “Me too,” said John before he could stop himself, before he really realised what Sherlock had said. He opened his mouth to ask what Sherlock meant and got a mouthful of silk shirt instead as Sherlock’s arms wrapped around him and squeezed. Sherlock might have looked wraithlike but there was a wiry strength to him, a strength which was currently threatening to crack John’s ribs. “Jesus, you’re crushing me,” he managed to wheeze, and Sherlock let go as though he’d been burned. He would have stepped back if John hadn’t reflexively caught him around the waist and pulled him in, resting his cheek on Sherlock’s collarbone as Sherlock’s arms settled gingerly around his shoulders. John sighed into Sherlock’s chest, closing his eyes as he waiting for a rejection which didn’t come.

“You weren’t talking about the music.” It wasn’t a question, and John felt the rumble of Sherlock’s voice through his entire body.

“No,” John admitted. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Neither was I.”

They stood like that for some time as London turned around them. John’s brain raced to catalogue all the tiny sensations:  the warmth of Sherlock’s body, the sound of his heartbeat, the soft silk of his shirt under John’s fingers, the way the muscles in his back shifted as he breathed. He wondered if this was how Sherlock saw the world all the time, with all the smallest details brought forward in sharp relief.

 “I’m not psychic, you know,” he said eventually, because someone had to. “You’ve got to give me something, at least.”

Sherlock said nothing but pulled back, still with his hands on John’s shoulders. He looked an awful lot like John felt, which was confused, disoriented and a little scared. Then his hand drifted up to John’s cheek and it was like the world outside faded into silence. John’s heart beat a timpani rhythm against his ribcage, an accompaniment to the bass thrum of the blood rushing under his skin. There were a thousand things he wanted to say: You’re brilliant. You’re fantastic. You make me feel alive. I love you. I’m in love with you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But he didn’t get the chance to say any of them, because that was when Sherlock kissed him.

Sherlock kissed like he hugged, which was as though he’d seen people do it and had theorised how it should work in principle, but had never put the theory into practise. To be honest, John wouldn’t have minded the awkwardness, or the fact that Sherlock tasted distinctly of medical disinfectant because it was impossible to come back from Bart’s without the stuff soaked into your skin, if it wasn’t for the fact that Sherlock also attempted to compensate for lack of experience with excessive force, made all the worse when coupled with the extra leverage his height gave. So he caught Sherlock’s face and pulled them apart just a couple of inches. Sherlock’s brow furrowed.

“Not good?” There was a trace of panic in his voice that didn’t suit him, and John’s throat constricted. He searched frantically for something to say, a way to communicate in a language Sherlock would understand, before everything fell apart like a badly-conducted symph–

Of course.

“Less sforzando,” he murmured. “More legato. Okay?”

Slowly but surely, Sherlock smiled, the smile John had fallen in love with—or perhaps John had always been in love and only just realised. He inclined his head in acknowledgement: “Maestro.”

Thankfully John didn’t have time to worry about the tingling feeling that single word sent through his body because Sherlock was kissing him again, slowly and softly this time, and he could almost hear the swell of the brass section as he buried his fingers in Sherlock’s hair and tugged him closer.

“I love you,” John said against Sherlock’s lips, which pulled up into a smirk

“Obviously. You said already.”

John frowned. “I did?”

“When you played.” Sherlock said this as though it were the plainest thing in the world. “It was beautiful,” he added as an afterthought.

“And you...”

“Surely I don’t have to say it?”

John considered this. “No, you don’t,” he concluded. “But it would be quite nice if you did.”

Sherlock slid his arms around John and leant down to whisper in his ear. “Then I love you too.” He pressed a kiss just under John’s ear, and John, to his eternal shame, let out a whimper. “Satisfied?”

“Definitely,” John grinned. “Shall we take it from the top, then?”

 “Maestro...” Sherlock practically purred the word in John’s ear; it was just as well Sherlock was stronger than he looked because John’s knees went distinctly wobbly at that.

“Git,” John laughed and kissed him again and again, because not all good things have to end.

Da capo al coda.

Chapter Text

Coda: a term used in music primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end.

“Got something for you,” Sherlock said the next day, and John, pouring his third cup of coffee, would hardly have noticed that anything had changed if it wasn’t for the hand that trailed across his lower back as Sherlock passed by on the way to the desk. “Think you’ll like it.” He set a book of music on the stand, and John’s heart leapt as he caught sight of the cover.

 It was a brand new copy of Canon in D with—John opened it reverently—yes, all their annotations copied over meticulously.

John said, carefully, cautiously and unreasonably worriedly, “Would it be okay if I tried the top part this time?”

Sherlock turned to him, looked him straight in the eye and said, “You lead, and I’ll follow,” and John knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that they weren’t talking about the music.

FINE