Chapter Text
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.