[location: Central]

[infinitelystranger]

First A. Then D, E, and G, in perfect fifths. Sooner or later, life does have to go on.

Sherlock Holmes raises the pitch pipe to his lips and blows D, E, and G, shrill and pronounced in the summer air. He prefers to tune those in relation to one another and to A, generally, not by the pipe, but it never hurts to check his strings against them.

He fusses minutely with the fine tuners, leaned against the wall. His case is at his feet. Though he expects only Extras' custom today, the look of the thing matters. To him, at least. Unlike most of the matters he deals in, there are no absolute truths in violin tuning: only the perfect fifth, one in relation to another. One may vary the tuning as much as one pleases, as long as one varies them all. Sometimes he experiments with a particular scordatura for a time; generally he tunes just a fraction brighter than G-D-A-E, though, for clarity of sound and because he doesn't expect company in harmony.

The truth is, as much as he likes to play his violin, he would rather be doing it somewhere else right now. Squirreled away indoors in the heart of one of these abandoned buildings, maybe, where he can practice in peace and pretend the city is empty until he gets tired or slinks off to Jeremy's for food, either/or. Saying hello to the other prisoners in Taxon is not his idea of fun just today.

But he generates all of his income busking. Besides, on some level he supposes he owes it to the others to make himself available, for questions or tirades or whatever else they see fit. So Sherlock keeps his odd hours, ignores his tablet (with exceptions), and keeps more than ever to himself: except on his usual odd-numbered afternoons and even-numbered evenings, where he sets up somewhere on the Taxon streets and plays his violin, to raucous and randomly-generated Extra applause.

[ooc: corresponding to dien's everybody come yell at jason post, here's my everybody come yell at sherlock post! fire away!]

Comments

[skinandbone]

Fake people wash back and forth like ocean waves, foaming in ill timed applause. One of those waves tosses up a Metody, quiet and lurking off to the side, listening peacefully.

Metody likes music as much as any monster. When the music ends, she claps politely, then uses her pad to give a tip.

[infinitelystranger]

Sherlock notices her when she joins the crowd mid-set--some things are impossible to turn off--but he finishes his song before lowering the instrument to give his shoulder a rest. He raises his wrist to check his balance, a little taken aback by her tip.

"Your request?" he prompts her without looking up.

[skinandbone]

....she can request music?

"The We-" wait, no. No, that was probably not - what about - n-

She's silent for a moment of thought, trying to think of something that isn't culturally keyed or purely obnoxious.

" - what kind of music do you know? I'm not sure how we overlap."

[infinitelystranger]

"Try me," is his answer. Is he less talkative than usual, or does he adopt a different manner when he's playing for an audience?

Both are true. Sherlock's not trying to be taciturn, but he is preoccupied and, moreover, of a sober mood. He feels tired, the sort of tired that happens when you sleep too much rather than too little: but if Metody Green wants to extend an olive branch for some inexplicable reason, he's no one to refuse it. She's an odd one, this inhuman androgyne, but--he's come to realize--a harmless one as well.

[skinandbone]

"Fol-" Even before she finishes the syllable, she hears the wistfulness in her voice. No, maybe not folk.

"Vivaldi's Summer?"

[infinitelystranger]

"You don't bother with obscurity, now, do you?" Sherlock arches a quizzical brow. He sounds less judgmental than curious, however; were Metody from his own world he might cast aspersions on her musical education, but he suspects she's as uncertain as he is of how much music their worlds have in common at all. Vivaldi is not a divergence point, at least. However else history might have conducted itself differently, it managed to spit out two Antonio Vivaldis, and with him two sets of Four Seasons concertos.

Not that history should conduct itself that way at all. Not that the physics of this make any sense. He engrosses himself wondering about that again and loses track of time for a few moments before coming to himself again; he remembers he's holding his violin and then, abruptly, that he's supposed to play it. So he raises his bow: "I presume we're thinking of the same piece," he says of this with a wry smile.

"Movement 1? Or Movement 3, the Storm?"

[skinandbone]

"It seemed prudent to start with large, obvious things, and work from there. All the Americas I've researched have a background of similar music, though more recent stuff is...well. The closer I look, the more different things are, often in the most ridiculous ways."

She smiles a little, politely ignoring his moment of absence. She can hardly throw stones at that particular glass house. "Movement 1, please. And thank you."

[infinitelystranger]

If this were a test, Metody would have passed it for the time being. (And really, it's always at least a fraction of a test with Sherlock Holmes.) He favors her with the edge of a smile, indicating that Movement 3 would have been the wrong answer, and commences his performance.

Vivaldi's Concerto no. 2 in G minor, L'estate, is written to be played allegro non molto in its first movement: fast, but not too fast. Sherlock complies; his non molto even manages not to be a little more molto than most, like one might expect from him, but there's something a bit sardonic in the way he drags out his bowing, as if he's humoring the display of formality. His tempo edges on a dragged-out allegretto.

It invests the piece with a thick sense of anticipation, already strung along by the lilting minor key--like it promises to slide into the adagio of the second movement, broken by furious strings, and then finally into the famous trembling presto strings of the Storm he disdains so much. But he never plays it. He leaves it unsatisfied and open-ended, still far from the consummation of the third movement: the end of Movement 1, as he promised.

"Movement 3 was my first piece," he comments as Extras break into a round of applause that he ignores. "My first proper piece. I was plucking away at it before then, composing things--drove the nanny round the bend, I'm sure. I've some remnant fondness, but it's much too often plucked out of context. Still. It's not Pachelbel." He cracks his knuckles. In some ways he's not unlike any other violinist; whenever an Extra prompts him to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, he claims he doesn't know it.

[skinandbone]

Metody knows precious little about classical music, but, as the saying goes, she knows what she likes. And, as satisfying as the fury and motion of Movement 3 is, she prefers the slow, tantalizing build of Movement 1. It feels far more alive to her, and more summery as well, with the straining twine of branch and bird.

She leans against a wall and listens with the sweet, absent smile that makes her look like a brainless little doll. When it is over, she sighs happily. And then laughs.

"Pachelbel's Canon is...I enjoyed it the first time I heard it in concert, because it was something familiar in an unfamiliar context. And then I realized I heard it over and over and over, and now I like it the same way I like holiday songs - more for the comfort of familiarity and repetition, and less because I like the piece itself."

" - gosh, I hope we're talking about the same piece of music, or that all is going to sound very strange to you."

[threelivesdown]

"Hey there, sexy," Selina comments as she makes her way over to Sherlock. She can't help but be obvious as she's still not entirely healed. The cane isn't entirely needed but she needs it from time to time, which is frustrating for someone who is used to treating buildings like jungle gyms.

As for the comment, well, it is almost certainly an attempt to tweak him but at the same time, she doesn't seem to be /lying/.

[infinitelystranger]

Sherlock glances up from resining his bow and flashes her a faint smile. A few weeks ago he might've dismissed her with a haughty shrug or gone off on some sort of preoccupied tangent. Much can change in the space of a few weeks.

"That's not going to buy you a request," he says mildly. When performing he stands as tall as ever, with a straight back: anything else would be an injustice to the piece and the instrument. When he breaks for resin or requests or anything else, though, there's a distinct weariness etched around his eyes and in the set of his shoulders. If he doesn't look sleepless, precisely, he looks like his peculiar sleep schedule is finally taking a toll on him. In fact, he looks closer to his age than usual.

He caps the resin and sets it aside. "But fortunately for you, requests are free," he says. He sounds deadpan, but he's already taken in her condition at a glance, and he says: "Two for the convalescent."

[threelivesdown]

"If only I had any idea of anything to request. I'm afraid I'm not very cultured," she says with a small smile. She has excellent taste and she's great at determining how much something is worth but she doesn't have a lot of knowledge about the more ephemeral arts. It isn't something she openly admits but she has no idea about music or dance... She's been to performances of both and those pieces she's knows well but beyond that hasn't been something she's ever focused on.

"I'll let you pick the first one. I'm sure you can deduct something that I'd like."

[infinitelystranger]

"Suit yourself," he says with a shrug, and lifts bow to strings once more.

What he settles on may be recognizable to Selina Kyle as a solo from the familiar overture from Act II of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, if she's ever been to ballet. The tuning of the instrument is ever so slightly piercing, more so with the high, uncomfortably bright notes of the overture; it is an uncomfortable rendition, deliberately so. He plays it from keen memory.

"I have never seen it performed," he remarks once he's finished. "I don't take much of an interest in ballet. I presume it concerns a swan."

Those curious gaps in his knowledge again, such as they are. To know Tchaivovsky's overture from melody but not the plot of the ballet itself. "Or a swan-maiden. The plots of most ballets I'm aware of are a bit thin--scaffolding for the music and the dancing. My brother would be scandalized, I'm sure. He's very attached to the trappings of culture."

He rarely mentions his life or family. He stretched his arms behind his head and changes the subject sharply: "All tissue, or bone?" He means her injury.

[threelivesdown]

"Swan maiden. This one I've seen," she says with a small smile. After enough times going out to high end entertainment in Gotham, well, Swan Lake is pretty high on the list of things that she's seen. There are few others that the men she escorted would find it amusing to take her to on dates. That or they all have the same boring imagination.

"The flexibility and strength of the dancers is impressive," she says, having done a small amount of dancing herself to keep limber. "The trappings of culture have always been of interest to me but more for the value placed in them than any personal attachment." Then again, she once kept stealing a diamond because she was insulted on the diamond's behalf that they weren't taking proper precautions for it.

"Tissue but across the muscle."

A short pause before she offers, "I've had worse."

[infinitelystranger]

"I don't doubt it," comes his response. When not playing he shoulders his violin and rests his bow on his other shoulder, generally. He sets both down on the wall behind him for the time being, indicating his intention to break from playing for the time being. "But you've had better."

A plastic generic-brand water bottle, no doubt snagged from some sort of bodega or superette, sits on the ground next to his instrument case. He picks it up and uncaps it for a drink.

"I'm sorry," he says. It comes out so simply that it's almost easy to miss--he says it in the same quick, flip tones in which he says everything. But he doesn't often say that.

[threelivesdown]

There are sometimes that she is removed of home while stuck here. Right now it's one of them. If she weren't used to Bruce and his ways, she might have missed that comment. She wouldn't have been prepared to respond to it as she would to Bruce, either. It is impossible to know if Sherlock will give it the weight it should have, "I know."

"I don't think better is really something I'm going to see much here. Nothing is broken. If there were, I'd be upset."

[infinitelystranger]

The I know earns her a faint, brief smile: forgiveness acknowledged, if not uncomplicated forgiveness. There's only so much Sherlock expects to be forgiven for things; his business is the business of consequences, not absolution. His occupation is founded on the idea that no one can run or hide forever--what they've done will catch up to them. (So is Bruce Wayne's, but he has no way of knowing that.)

But Selina, at least, believes that he's sorry. And that's all he can really ask.

"They delight in toying with us, don't they?" he says. "The demon too. I doubt he likes to think of it that way, but there it is. Bottling us all up and shaking the bottle."

[Location]

[imperial_long]

He has been remiss, Mayland Long thinks; despite the duration of their acquaintance and many hours spent in Holmes' company (more than many others in Taxon, most likely), he has never actually heard him play.

Their playground has been language (with diversions into science, literature, the arts) in the ostensible language lessons over dinners. Music has been rarely touched upon, and not heard. Sherlock does not bring his violin to dinners.

He stands there a moment at the back of the crowd, and such is Long's quiet, slight, muted presence (at least with his eyes half-shut and downcast at the paving stones) that even Holmes may take a moment or few more to notice him.

Long listens to the Paganini piece Holmes is currently performing appreciatively, hands deep in his pockets: comparing it to a perfect score that exists in his head, weighing the reality against the ideal, and finding that Sherlock Holmes performs admirably. He can detect no flaws in the playing.

But then, he is not a musician. He never has been. Always the connoisseur of the creativity and art of others, instead.

He thinks that Holmes looks very tired.

When the piece ends, Long steps forward from the little crowd.

"You have missed a week's worth of lessons," is his sedate greeting.

[Location]

[infinitelystranger]

It's true that Mayland Long can make himself more inconspicuous than most, merely by the fact of his not trying. Someone attempting to sneak is more often than not furtive--Sherlock's mind is attuned to little motions out of place, noise in silence, silence where there ought to be ambient noise. Long, on the other hand, just insinuates himself into crowds. And Sherlock absorbs himself utterly into what he's doing, when it takes his interest, which Paganini certainly does. As capable as he is of broad and meticulous observation, when he fixes himself on a point he's also capable of massive oversight.

As recent events have borne out.

Sherlock starts a little at the greeting. It surprises him more than the others he's received today, maybe because Long has never come to see him play before. At least he approves of the music--Sherlock is fairly certain he would know if Long disapproved of the music. He's a tolerant old dragon, but he has less tolerance than most for bad taste. Something they have in common.

"Yes," he answers after a moment. "I suppose I have."

He sets his bow aside but keeps hold of the instrument by the neck for the time being. It has not failed to occur to him that, excepting exactly one set of clothing, his violin is the only tangible object that has any chance of being real and from his world. The corpus carries microscopic blemishes where others' fingers have touched it--perhaps imperceptible damage to the varnish on the waist in the shape of the pads of John Watson's fingers from the time or two he's handled it without Sherlock's permission. The dust on it is gone from routine cleaning: the accrued detritus of a London flat, wiped away the first time Sherlock took a chamois to the instrument in Taxon. The coat and scarf will wear out with time. Little by little, he loses the pieces.

"Fortunately," for ceremony's sake he checks the watch on his tablet, "I don't particularly work on a schedule. I am at your disposal, Mr. Long."

[Location]

[imperial_long]

Long smiles diffidently, his eyes wandering from Sherlock's violin to Sherlock himself. The sleepy expression so often generated by his half-lidded gaze is somewhat belied by the gleam of predatory interest in those eyes at the moment.

(Look, he gave you several days before descending on you with the full force of his curiosity (and admonishment), Sherlock.)

"That is gracious of you," he remarks. "There is a new restaurant professing Italian cuisine in the style of Campania. Shall we adjourn there?

"There is much that bears discussing. Acquaintances catching up on events, and so forth."

[Location]

[infinitelystranger]

Curse Mayland Long's manners. They have the gentle tinge of a policeman offering a suspect the chance to go civilly so he doesn't have to go in handcuffs--they both well know what their conversation over dinner is going to be about, but here they stand making gracious pretenses. But this was Sherlock's upbringing too, after a fashion. He doesn't always heed it; he often hasn't.

"Neapolitan," he acknowledges as he bends to pack away violin and bow, closing the instrument case and buckling it shut with several clean snaps. "I'm afraid I'm not very familiar. We'd best remedy that," he says with a thin, civil smile.

He leaves the matter of catching-up unremarked upon. Long well knows that his assent to the meal doubles as his unspoken assent to a particular conversation, somewhat overdue.

[Location] A random ristorante

[imperial_long]

"A pleasant balance between the coastal ingredients and the rural inland produce," Long says, helpfully, as he waits for Sherlock to pack up, which doesn't take very long.

Dragon he may be (or more accurately, have been), but Long most often strongly resembles a cat, both in his general attitude regarding leisure and in the fact that when his curiosity is piqued the lethargy falls away to be replaced by insistent pursuit of the little red light. He wishes the truth of the events of the last week; he has his own deductions, of course, and he is not altogether shabby at piecing things together. But he wishes Sherlock's truth of the events as well.

So to the restaurant it is: a table in a corner. Long orders ziti in ragù and stuffed peppers, zucchini a scapece, red mullets and sausage-stuffed chicken. And bread, of course. Sherlock certainly does not go hungry at any of their language lessons (and indeed, probably usually has leftovers to take back to his home).

He requests a bottle of Aglianico and is told the restaurant does not carry it; but they do have a Taurasi so Long proclaims himself satisfied with that.

This time-consuming order placed, Mayland Long places his elbows upon the table (he considers himself bound by Western rules of etiquette only when it pleases him to be thus bound) and his long fingers together before his face, and regards Sherlock Holmes from bright eyes that gleam amber in the restaurant's warm lighting.

"I have some idea of Events," he says with the capital letter probably audible, "but I should be obliged for your version of them."

[Location] A random ristorante

[infinitelystranger]

Sherlock opts for an order of pizza Margherita and wolfs down the bread with impunity in the meantime, daubing it in red-pepper-flecked olive oil. Six-feet-and-change of restless energy produces a voracious appetite, when it produces an appetite at all: it's always feast or famine with Sherlock, forgetting or foregoing meals on a regular basis and then attacking food with a shameless hunger when he cares to remember to. It's not the most healthful, but his body's seen worse mistreatment.

He is also the last Westerner in the world to care whether anyone's elbows are on a table, being given to putting his own sharp elbows wherever he pleases, including on tables and in others' personal space.

"A broad question," he observes of 'Events' through a mouthful of bread. He swallows that: "Where would you like me to start?" He sounds level and detached, like he's up for performance review.

[imperial_long]

Long's lips tug into a slight, sly smile at Sherlock's wording.

"Traditionally one starts at the beginning."

One of his hands descends from his face, snatches up one piece of bread like a raptor's claw might. The dark fingers methodically tear small bits of bread from the larger piece and likewise dip them into the oil. The pieces disappear into Long's mouth at a much slower rate than Sherlock's vociferousness.

"Perhaps with how this demon fellow came to be released, or called forth, or whatever it is...?"

[infinitelystranger]

"Mr. Blood and I were--"

Sherlock trails off there, in the middle of his sentence, as he realizes that the casual reference may sound a little strange out of context. Because it is, really. But how to explain the context? Though he's spent much time analyzing and cataloguing Jason Blood in his own personal encyclopedia of lives, he's put much less thought into the trajectory of his relationship with Blood, such as it exists. He often omits himself from his own observations, as an impartial third party.

But Heisenberg knew better. And so should he.

"Jason Blood and I," he says, "were acquainted in a strange manner."

He's always considered himself articulate--given to a descriptive vocabulary, when necessary. But this explanation stymies him. He settles for: "We never got on. He and I. I suppose he found me needlessly nosy; I thought he was unproductively secretive." We weren't wrong. "But we--were acquainted, and we'd encountered one another a few times. Sometimes in the Adventure Zone. Sometimes elsewhere. We were getting to be civil."

Sherlock's brow knits in a frown of contemplation, or of frustrated expression. After a moment he goes on. "The demon was certainly conspiring against that," he says. "Not only the demon, though. I don't think it was through the demon I came to learn the words for the spell. Regardless--we were in the Adventure Zone and it looked as though his life was in danger. I suppose I panicked. I suppose I also wanted to see what would happen."

He should be candid with Mayland Long. He can be candid. Or try, anyway; somehow that easy candor always finds itself stilted in situations like this.