Um. Hi.
NO idea where this will go. For now, a one-shot. But make no mistake, this intrigues me. It's got potential for a multi-chapter. (Your thoughts, ladies?) However, I'm doing Scriptfrenzy and as such cannot make any promises.
This is dedicated to my dear, dear friend columbine-and-asphodel. She's had a long illness, and recently she had a scare that it had taken a turn for the worse. I was, quite frankly, terrified, and went in my room and just wrote in a fit of passion. Luckily, she's okay. But this is her thank you note, because it's always better to tell people in the moment. Without her, I wouldn't be here.
Written to "The Broken Ones" by Dia Frampton
Disclaimer: I own – cockiness and Celtx. Both are useful. Both are not Sherlock.
Warnings: The high rating is for a reason. True, it's not that bad for your ordinary citizen. But to a musician such as myself? This is the scene from your nightmares.

His hands were the first to go.

A musician's hands are subjected to wear and tear that a normal pair of hands, no matter the amount of hard labor they do, cannot even dream of. The musician's fingers are covered in calluses, horrible white pockets of murdered skin that peel and flake and leave ragged edges around the fingertips. Their ligaments become stretched and torn, their wrists strained and tightened. Every form of art requires an unnatural contortion of some part of the body, but playing a stringed instrument is the very worst because it ruins your hands.

Sherlock played the violin in the way that some people might sit down with a cup of tea in their bedroom after a long day. It helped him label things, sift through piles of data. It helped him to settle. Once he'd begun playing regularly, he could hardly remember his life without that violin. It was a piece of him, one of many that had been missing and one of only a few that had been found. The violin was the replacement for drugs and cigarettes, a far less destructive manner of slowing down the brain's activity. It was a way to vent, to find peace inside.

He picked up the violin one day and everything sounded wrong. He couldn't reach a high A, his vibrato was tight and frazzled, the bow sat wrong in his hand. This day had been a long time coming – after all, there had been the feeling of tightness and looseness, all at the same time, in the joints of his fingers and the bones of his wrists. It had plagued him for weeks now; it was something his mind had tried to block out because he could not bear to accept the truth. It was a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel and repetitive strain injury and anything that can ever hurt a hand that has worked too hard.

Sherlock always knew that day would come but that didn't mean he was ready for it.

The world shuddered and stopped. He felt an eerie sense of calm as he took the violin out from under his chin and looked it up and down, retuned it, checked the angle of the bridge, even tilted it to catch the light from the window and examined the soundpost. It had to be a flaw in the violin, it had to, because he had never had a problem like this before.

Then he tucked it back under his chin, tightened the bow, and quickly ran through some scales.

They didn't sound right but he ignored that, because it wasn't that off, now, was it, and maybe he was just having a bad day, maybe he wasn't warmed up yet, maybe his calluses had finally all peeled off and his fingers were unable to get traction against the strings, maybe the bridge had shifted a bit and set all the strings out of position. Every single possibility that he could think of (and there were at least 26) ran through his head in a loop until he finished the diminished seventh arpeggio and started in on the first piece that came to mind.

It was John's favorite. A chaconne written in baroque times but with elements that seemed purely romantic; keys running from G all the way to B flat and D sharp minor; a hybrid sort of piece, if you like. Originally John had refused to listen to anything but Mendelssohn, but after living with Sherlock for all those years he had become exposed to thousands of different works by different composers from different time periods, and out of all of that his very favorite had been Vitali.

Sherlock has never really known love. He still doesn't, if we get storybook and rom-com particular. But he wanted to make John happy, and he loved to see his smile, and if getting that smile meant playing one of the more complex pieces in his repetoire, then so be it. He was going to play that chaconne, goddammit, and of course since Sherlock is a stubborn man, he did.

And everything was wrong.

We must remember that this is Sherlock Holmes we speak of. The piece still sounded perfectly fine. Obviously, the man could tear the most horrendous sounds out of that poor instrument, but he also had the ability to make it sing so sweetly that you wouldn't even notice the tears running down your face until he raised an eyebrow and remarked while running octaves in the middle of a cadenza, "Sentiment". As he played, there were no major flaws in intonation, or rhythm, or musicality. It was still good to a trained ear, and to the untrained ear it was majestic, but it all felt wrong to Sherlock. His hands were not responding properly and when he tried to reach for the harmonics it felt like someone had grabbed his wrist with red-hot fingers and twisted it all the way around. He felt clumsy and inept and that was not a feeling he was used to. Or liked. He played a few lines, but everything worsened and then he got to the sixteenth note passage full of slurs that flew across strings and he knew he couldn't go on.

There came then an overwhelming sense of panic, choking him, threatening to engulf him, and he gently laid the violin and bow back down on the sofa and then picked up an empty mug from the coffee table and threw it against the wall as hard as he could. In all the world there are only two things more terrifying than an artist who can no longer do their chosen work, and one of them is a distraught mother and the other is a Republican.

But throwing the mug was not enough, could not express how useless and crippled and censored he felt, and before he really knew what he was doing, he had reached over and snapped the bow in two. Now there was a technical flaw, a reason for the violin's silence that was beyond his control, and a small twisted part inside of him felt a little better but mostly he just felt worse.

John must have heard the mug crash against the wall, and he had to have heard Sherlock's attempts at playing, but it didn't matter why he came downstairs because all that mattered was that he was there, and he grabbed Sherlock's wrists and pulled him away from the fragments of bow and the abandoned violin and upstairs into their bedroom. And then the realization of what had happened, what he had done, finally hit Sherlock harder than any blow any human could ever deliver and he fell down on his knees in front of John, who was now seated on the bed, and laid his head in John's lap and cried.

Sherlock Holmes does not cry. He has really, properly, consciously cried only three times since he turned sixteen (and two of those times were not his fault, for the record) and he hated every second he spent crying. It seemed so useless and pointless and it achieved an incredible amount of nothing and he felt so wrung out afterwards that he vowed each time he would never do it again. But, of course, vows like that are meant to be broken.

That day he cried so hard for so many reasons. He was angry and scared and he didn't know what he would do, indeed, what was left for him, and then he became hysterical and his mind began dreaming up wild, embarrassing possibilities that he deleted as soon as they were born because they were so irrational and so reminiscent of a teenage girl 'angsting'; before those possibilities were deleted, they tore him to shreds. But all those little emotions and fears combined into one reason. He cried because he felt hopeless, trapped inside that body. He cried because he did not know how he would be able to speak, to express himself any more. His only porthole outwards had just been lost.

John let him cry. He gently stroked the wild curls and rubbed the trembling shoulders and just let him cry. He sensed that this was what Sherlock needed, because although the detective liked to play God and the devil, he was just another human. John was the only one who was allowed to see this side of Sherlock, the vulnerable side, and that terrified him. He had been given this brilliant, beautiful mind to look after and he had no idea if he was doing a good job or not. It was an instrument of spun glass, so very fragile, and John had to be there to catch it if it fell.

The world got larger and larger and Sherlock felt smaller and smaller and more and more got packed inside him and then he couldn't breathe. He had felt like this before and he knew how it ended. There was nothing he could do to stop himself from spiraling out and over the edge. And it hurt.

Hours, days, years, any length of time could have passed. Sherlock couldn't remember. He knew for sure that he had lost control, and deep inside a voice told him he had been screaming. But his body and his traitorous mind were finally exhausted and he completely collapsed, fell asleep kneeling there on the floor with his fingers gripping John's thighs and tears on his cheeks and the only sensation in the world John's fingers in his hair.

By the way, if the few classical music hints scattered throughout the fic just made you squint harder – the piece Sherlock tried to play is the Chaconne in G Minor by Vitali. As a cellist, this is the only violin piece I will voluntarily listen to. I adore it. No idea bout John, but I think he might, too.