mynameisgrey:

iggymarauder:

nadzo3:

пересматривала сегодня наш “Приключения Шерлока Холмса и Доктора Ватсона”. Момент где, Ватсон играл на скрипке.

It took a while. It really did.

But John wouldn’t, refused, physically could not just leave Baker Street.

So he spent a few nights with Harry, of all people, and then returned to the flat.

Mrs. Hudson wasn’t in; it was just as well, because John really didn’t feel like talking to her, or anyone really. Not now.

He carefully, slowly, made his way up the stairs - seventeen, exactly - and into the flat.

Everything was as it had been when they had been arrested.

All of Sherlock’s possessions sat, untouched. His computer was still open, but John didn’t feel like snooping around. He had the nagging thought that he never would.

His throat was closing, tears stinging in the back of his eyes and the tip of his nose getting that peculiar tingly feeling it had whenever he began to cry.

Blinking and taking deep breaths, he surveyed the room again, unsure of what to do.

His eyes fell upon Sherlock’s violin.

It sat, leaning to one side, in Sherlock’s chair. The bow sat with it. Together, placed as such, it looked like Sherlock as a violin, one hand under his chin as he scowled into the nothingness, lost in his own mind. A small, hysterical laugh bubbled in his throat and died in his mouth.

John fancied it decomposed on his tongue. Or perhaps that was the faint taste of bile as he tried not to vomit from all of this emotional and mental upheaval.

Without thinking about it, he stepped forward and gently picked up the instrument. It was light, making John feel as if it were fragile, made of thin, brittle glass - which was completely untrue, considering the number of times Sherlock would throw it down in frustration onto his chair and whip the bow about as if it were a sword he was threatening his brother someone with.

John stared at it. It didn’t bite him, it didn’t make some snarky, deep-voiced remark, and it certainly didn’t bring the owner of the snarky and deep voice back. But it did, however strangely, make him feel better. Comforted.

He gingerly settled it between his left shoulder and chin, as he had seen Sherlock do so many times. His scar gave a dull twinge at the unfamiliar position, but John ignored it.

He picked up the bow, placed it on the strings, and then thought better of it and, in a flurry of fiery determination, searched for the rosin. Once found, he carefully stroked the horse hair over it, mimicking Sherlock. He refused to break this by being idiotic.

Once he had put what he felt was a sufficient, and then some, amount of rosin on the hairs, he returned to his previous position.

He took a breath, and then gave a slow, sweeping stroke across the violin.

It didn’t sound half bad, but he knew the instant he tried to press the strings for other notes, he would sound horrendous.

But that didn’t deter him.

And so, he spent his hours, long into the night, playing the violin - violating it, making atrocious noises, but refusing to give up. Or even stop. Mrs. Hudson gave up after fifteen minutes of trying to get his attention, and eventually came back with a small meal that went unnoticed.

It took two days of almost non-stop playing to sound somewhat decent.

It took five months to sound like an amateur.

And it took three years to compose his first, and only, piece, simply titled, To Love.

/SCREAMS

THIS IS WONDERFUL

bittergrapes:

afrogeekgoddess:

Ever since I learned that John would be returning to his therapy in FALL, I have often wondered what that first meeting would be like for John. It’s been said many times that John After Sherlock is frighteningly similar to John Before Sherlock, from his reverting to his soldier mode, to his lapses into silence, to his utter loneliness.

What captures John’s emotional state most profoundly for me: his eyes. We have beheld these slate blue creatures in every light, filled with every emotion, from fear and longing to delight and frustration. If John is the conductor of light for Sherlock, then it is his eyes that are the conduit and the transmitter.

And so, in PINK, we have John, invalided home from the war, trapped in the beige nothingness of his flat, living alone with his cane and his computer and his L9A1, trying to survive in the horridness of ordinary life. He can’t walk properly and his hand shakes and he has a tiny pension and has almost no one in his life on whom he can depend.

In this first meeting with Ella, his eyes are flat, hard stones at the bottom of a river. Murky. Tight. Lonely. There is a longing behind them that is not quite touchable yet, a longing for Something New, for danger, for another battlefield on which to run. These are the eyes of a man who is waiting, surviving, who doesn’t want to accept the fact that this might be the rest of his life. It is a pain strapped in so tight that it is barely visible. The pain of Nothingness. 

And then.

The first meeting with Ella after Sherlock’s downfall and death in FALL. The change is heart-shatteringly, breathtakingly profound. If eyes could be on fire from grief, they would be John’s eyes here. If eyes could be made from tiny shards of broken glass pieced together, they would be these. If these small organs, made mostly of water, could hold the entirety of every terrible storm, every awful hurricane, every tsunami that ever pelted the earth, they would be his.

These are the eyes of a man who is completely and undeniably broken. Of a man who has lost everything he ever loved, whose entire world came crashing down around him in a horrendous, unstoppable instant. His best friend, his livelihood, his home, his inspiration for existing. And all of this seething, razor-sharp pain is just underneath the surface of his eyes. The pain of Everything.

These are not the eyes of a dead man, as they were in PINK. These are the eyes of a man who is very much alive, and very much in agony, and wants nothing more in life than for this pain to stop. And the agony we see in his eyes is the fear that it never, ever will.

(thanks to bittergrapes and spuzz for the screencaps of FALL!John)

Don’t mind me just sobbing