Exorcising the Bow
Rating: PG-13 for imagery
Word Count: 569
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
A/N: For the prompt “Timeless Requiem” from the thegameison_sh challenge
It was almost music to him.
Highs and lows; fast and slow.
He could play what he saw when he looked at them with his violin. Perpetuate the violence they met at their ends with a hard pluck of a string when it was abrupt and messy or a mournful slow screech as they slowly lost their lives painfully to poison or bleeding out.
He could tell their life stories from a glance at their wardrobes and how they kept their hair, tell about their relationships by the state of their jewelry.
He could see how they lived their lives, visualize how the interacted with faceless people day after day.
The only way to exorcise these ghosts, the phantoms of the people whose murders he's solved, is to play.
So he plays.
He plays with his eyes closed and he watches them as they spin past his mind's eye, living out day to, watching as all of the clues fit together in a steam-lined life of monotony until it stutters to an unfortunate or sometimes earned death. Sometimes the deaths are deserved. Sometimes they were desired.
He watches as multitudes of scenarios play out in his head, sees the assailant as he stalks his pray.
Watches as sharp blades push through soft tissue and catch on bone, hears the trapped, strangled screams that try to make their way from throats only to die prematurely as blood fills the lungs and drips from the mouth in a signature of death.
His brain creates the phantom scents of cordite filling his nose and the spatter pattern left from the shot painting the inside of his eyelids with a morbid red and grey, shards of bone mixed within and sticking from what was once a white wall.
He plays, for hours and hours on end, putting all of the lives he's pieced together and pulled apart to rest. He ignores everything.
Even his family, those he could call friends.
John watches him as he sits and sketches, the scenes leaving his mind through charcoal and graphite.
Lestrade drinks and goes home to hold onto the memory of his late wife, fingering her wedding ring and remembering her laugh.
Mycroft is thankful for the disappearance of the drugs and the appearance of John, John who keeps his brother healthy and away from that poison his brother had once used to exorcise the ghosts. Mycroft watches his brother, aware he cannot get so close to the tragedies his brother does without losing himself to the ghosts, he listens to his brother exercise them through starvation and riddles and his violin; a violin that is soundlessly replaced and repaired when it's needed without question.
Mycroft thinks of their Father, so strong and stolid, wonder and imagines how he would react to his youngest son's coping mechanisms, to his oldest son's position and how he wields his power. He likes to think he would at least be proud of him, though he knows he would have wanted to berate Sherlock for his weakness, for having to exorcise them the way he does.
Still, Mycroft records them, each requiem, at the end of each case. He has a flash drive filled with the painful songs his brother plays after each death is investigated, each criminal incarcerated.
That violin continues to play its violent mournful tune, a timeless requiem that only Sherlock can hear and give voice to.