Chapter Text
William’s hands are covered in blood. He can feel it seeping through his gloves, cool and damp. It will sink into the dry callouses of his fingers and when he gets back to the manor he will scrub his hands with a coarse brush until it’s only his own blood staining them. His fingers shake against the paper when he lifts the cigarette to his lips. His lungs fill with poison; he welcomes it. A deadly lassitude trickles into his bloodstream and slumps his shoulders. Six more. Just six more deaths, and then his own to top them off.
“Hey.”
James’ voice is quiet. The servants have most likely been locked in the cellar, and the lord of the house is quite entirely dead at William’s feet, and still James is quiet. William appreciates it. His companion gestures at the cigarette case set on the sideboard beside him, and William hands it to him, wincing when he sees the smears his fingers leave on the silver. James either does not notice or does not care. He lights a cigarette and leans back beside William, blowing showy little smoke circles that almost make a smile tug at William’s lips.
“Is everything under control?”
“Yep. This is an easy one. Overconfident. I don’t think he knew anyone had found out what he’d done. Only a couple guards. Five servants. No family. We’re ready to head out whenever you are.”
“Good. Thank you, James.”
“Mmhmm. Hey, Will?”
William drags his aching bones away from the support of the sideboard and picks up his sword from where he’d dropped it on the sofa. He cleans it with passes over the dead man’s waistcoat. Six to go. Just six to go.
“Yes?”
“You love him, don’t you?”
James’ voice is quiet, so quiet, and so is everything in William, like his breath and his heart and his blood have all stopped, quiet as the death he’s clawing towards. Silent as the grave.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s told what feels like hundreds of thousands of lies in his life. None have sounded so weak as this one does.
“Well I do.” Something in James’ voice snags at William, pulls his gaze up from the pooling blood and paling jowls and gnawing shame. There is an uncharacteristic solemnity in those eyes, blue as the sky on a sunny day and hued dark as the blackest ocean in the lightless room. Leave it to William to shadow-tint every bright thing he touches. “At a guess, I know what I’m talking about better than anyone else could. Sometimes I think we each have some little piece of you that’s just ours to understand, and that’s why we all follow you so helplessly even though we know none of us will ever be able to put the whole puzzle together. Sherly could though. Put all the pieces together, that is. Save you, if you let him. I should know.”
Some childish instinct wants to push against what James is suggesting, to protest the comparison, to defy the hint of resignation in every word. To say, “How can you compare your feelings to mine? You barely know him.” And then he wants to laugh at himself, and the laugh in his head is harsh and derisive, because really, do either of them know Sherlock Holmes? And really, who is to say they do not? Perhaps to know and to love Sherlock Holmes is a simple thing for all its rarity. Perhaps all it takes is to match wits with him, and to see the delight in his eyes at the matching, and to feel an equal delight in response.
“It doesn’t matter,” William says, and it is an answer to James’ accusation of love and to the thought of salvation and to his own ridiculous sparking jealousy all at once. “This is all but over now. The ending is already written.”
James’ lips pinch thin for a moment, as if to hold back more words. In the end, he only sighs.
“Whatever you say, Will.”
William has entirely lost track of time. He’s never been terribly good at keeping track of time. A tendency towards getting lost in his work or simply falling asleep in odd places has seen to that.
Being locked up in a pitch-black cell with no way to mark the minutes has only made things worse.
What scant provisions he is given come at strange intervals, and even through the slat in the door he can see no light at all. Reason dictates that he must be held underground, though he was unconscious when he was brought here and so has no memory of steps or ladders. The bruising ache of his body when he’d come to had suggested that his transport had not been a gentle one. It has been long enough now that the ache is entirely gone aside from a lingering pain in his right forearm, which he suspects had suffered a hairline fracture at some point in the scuffling and being tossed about. He attempts to mark days in the feeble ways available to him; time between hunger pangs and time between calls of nature and time between sleeping and waking and sleeping again. Time a bruise takes to heal, time a bone takes to fuse. At a guess, it has been approximately three weeks since his capture. The cell is large but mostly featureless, he cannot brush the ceiling even if he stands on the frame of the hard cot on the tips of his toes. The floor is packed dirt in some places and stone in others. The walls are unevenly shaped: he thinks the whole room may have been hewed from a naturally existing cave. There is a rough wooden commode in one loosely defined corner, and pissing into it echoes in such a way that he suspects it opens into another smaller cavern three or four feet beneath the cell. Every so often a small container of powdered lime comes in with his food, most likely intended to deter pests and disease with them, but he appreciates that dumping it down the hole keeps the cell from reeking. He’s slightly concerned with the idea of how far the lower chamber might extend and whether there is any chance of the upper chamber collapsing. He had spent a day tapping his way across and around the room with the heel of his shoe, making mental notes of spots which rang with a more hollow sound. It’s not as though he has anything better to do. There is no furniture aside from the commode box and the cot with its prickly straw-stuffed mattress and threadbare blanket. Blind in the darkness and bereft of any activity, his best bet to keep sane is to exercise, and to keep his hands and mind busy. He’d found a few loose pebbles in his exploration; nothing large enough to be of any use as a weapon, but enough that he can draw idle unseen doodles and complex equations in the dirt, wipe them away with his hands and then do it again. He brings himself off sometimes, for something to do; the palm he braces himself with against the rough-hewn wall behind the commode scraped raw, eyes closed as though it makes any difference, mind in a sunlit bed in New York City.
He does not know who has captured him. It does not matter, really. He’d known this was the risk in coming back to England. There are so many people who want him dead that trying to parse out which of them this might be with the bare sprinklings of information he has is a futile effort. He still mulls it over, if only to keep his mind working and ward off the madness the darkness and the solitude tempt towards. Careful as he has been not to reveal his survival in London, there are limitations to such caution. And honestly, he could have been more careful. He’d spent too much time at the Exports headquarters, well known now as the home of the two known-to-be-living Moriarty brothers, and on more than one occasion he’d slipped into the famous Baker Street flat at dusk and slipped back out at dawn. He had relied too much on the assumption that no one would be looking for him, and that therefore no one would see him.
It seems terribly foolish now, in retrospect. He’d been spoiled by happiness and safety.
Though for that first month or so he fights to deny the knowing, he knows something is terribly wrong, beyond the darkness and the captivity. He tastes it in the water, feels it in how his finger-nails lengthen and harden so that he can scratch his math in the dirt without pebbles for pens, without the nails breaking or snagging. Instead of dissipating, the ache in his arm begins to flare out throughout his body, different from the bruises at the start. It reminds him of the growing pains he’d experienced as an adolescent. It does not take him long to understand that that is exactly what the new ache is. His clothes grow unreasonably tight, and he cannot put his shoes on anymore. His feet dangle over the end of the bed. He sleeps more often and for longer and loses his grasp on time even more.
The poison is in the food and water, but to refuse it is death. He needs to be alive when his brothers and his lover find him. And they will find him. Whatever this is, whatever it is doing, it is not killing him. They can deal with whatever damage it is doing once he is free.
He finds the ceiling with his hands. Stops wearing clothes entirely. Discovers hunger comes less. His skin itches terribly and he scratches it off in flaking sheets. Beneath is something more like tanned leather. He gnaws at his own arms with teeth far too sharp and a tongue rough as a cat’s.
Equations escape him, blurring into nonsense in his mind. He weeps when he realizes. Then he forgets to weep. His fingers are too long. His whole body is too long. He pulls the mattress from the cot and tears it open and sleeps in the pile of straw. His mouth splits at the corners and everything tastes of blood.
In a moment of clarity, he thinks of how strange it is that he had not for a moment considered that death would be preferable to this.
By the time the cell door opens, there is so little left. Two affectionate and drawled syllables that he repeats to himself over and over, and the certainty that this will not be forever, and not much else besides. Instinct makes him screw his eyes closed against the light that begins to filter in.
“Oh.” The voice of a young man, the tone like someone discovering a small animal run over by a carriage. “That truly is grotesque. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d done it right. I should give myself more credit. It’s about time the Lord of Crime be unveiled as what he truly is. Monstrous in every way.”
There is resignation, and there is defiance, and there is this strange in-between. Helplessness and the certainty of help coming. The thing in the cell is no longer capable of any clear thought. He understands the words, but can no longer parse out deeper meanings or inquire into their sources. The man who might once have wanted to know who his captor was and what his motivations were and which of his own crimes this was vengeance for is gone. All that remains is a vague and unsettled curiosity; the dread of what comes next.
Sherlock Holmes has had the misfortune of listening to many a ne’er-do-well ramble on about their scheming. It’s not as common as penny dreadfuls and plays make it seem, but common enough to be annoying nonetheless. It’s a wonder he’d only just the once surrendered to the temptation to silence a monologue with a bullet or six.
He is particularly impatient with this one. It’s been three months. Three months of chasing dead ends. Three months of watching Louis grow stiller and stiller while Albert grew twitchier and twitchier, and the both of them the more terrifying for it. Three months of cold sheets. Three months of silence echoing where a warm and laughing voice should be. He’s fairly sure that Albert would have tortured their most recent lead to the edge of death if Mycroft hadn’t physically pulled him from the room. Sherlock hasn’t seen either of them in the two weeks since, and Louis had rolled his eyes at his inquiry and informed him that Albert has been quite involuntarily dragged to the Holmes estate outside Thornaby and stowed there for his own good. Louis seems to approve of this choice, so Sherlock does not concern himself with it. Once Liam is home and well, there will be plenty of time to tease Mycroft unendingly for locking the subject of what to Sherlock’s keen eye is a rather evident if thus far fruitless infatuation up in the family attic like Rochester’s wife.
As unpleasant as this whole miserable affair has been, and as marked by the fear of what Liam may be suffering as it is, it has bound the two families even more deeply. And not a single member of either household has exhibited a single flicker of doubt: they will find Liam, and bring him home, and no matter what might have been done to him, they will see him through. It’s enough to warm Sherlock’s heart right through.
He hadn’t exactly intended to be captured when he’d finally found the likely place of Liam’s imprisonment, but he’s not terribly bothered that it’s happened. He shouldn’t have come alone, but he’d been eager, and at least he had had the brains to send a message back before he went a-marching in. The others won’t be far behind, and he’s hopeful of being thrown into Liam’s prison with him. He does not want his lover alone for a second longer than necessary.
Their villain has been going on and on about the lord he’d served whom Liam had killed and how undeserved that death had apparently been and all manner of whatnot. Sherlock is barely listening, studying every detail of the little cellar he’s bound in instead, marking potential weapons and escape routes.
“He is disgusting to his core. A monster through and through. I still do not understand why you tried to save him. You did save him. Your folly broke his fall enough that he lived. And though I do not rank you at his level of wickedness, that at least is enough to deserve some punishment.” Sherlock scoffs, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. “It’s baffling, that a man as renowned for intelligence as you should be this stupid. Did those Moriartys the crown has been so foolishly forgiving of tell you what your mission was here? Did you know that he’d survived as well? What would you have done, if they’d told you honestly that you were being sent out to sacrifice yourself for the saving of the Napoleon of Crime?”
Oh, this little fucker knows nothing. How delightfully convenient. Sherlock widens his eyes somewhat, twists his mouth down.
“Albert and Louis Moriarty have renounced their brother’s crimes entirely. Far as I know, William James Moriarty drowned in the Thames when we fell. Y’telling me that ain’t so?”
The man grins in a way that is more a grimace. He’s a wispy and frail sort of fellow, and his power comes in the form of two hulking hoodlums with clubs.
“Not only is that not so, but the Lord of Crime clearly caught wind of your return, and returned to London himself as soon as he heard. Couldn’t resist following you.” The man leans close, as though to whisper a secret. His eyes are beady malicious little things. “Do you know how perverse he is? He purports to love you, as a man loves a woman. A sick little sodomite with his eyes on the Great Detective. It would almost be sad if it weren’t so disgusting.”
It is only a storied career frequently necessitating disguise and acting that keeps Sherlock’s face straight. The man’s honestly shocking level of cluelessness is a tool not to be wasted. His prejudice is water off a duck’s back, to Sherlock. He defies that sort of hatred in a simple way: he lives as he pleases, and revels in it. He’s always liked risk; liked pitting himself against puzzles, against laws and criminals alike, against power. Of course his love would be just as defiant. There is a significant question raised here, though:
“What on God’s green earth makes you think the Lord of Crime is lusting after me?”
“I heard him and one of his lackeys talking, the night they killed my master. I’d hid in a closet. I have…skills. Unusual skills. Skills that insured I was not caught, even when the whole house was searched. I heard William Moriarty kill my lord, and I heard him not deny the accusation that he loved you.”
That must have been near the end, then, in that last spree of killings.
“Right. Well. Criminal’s a criminal, I s’pose. And I’m told I’m charming, in my way.” He flashes a flirty little smile and snickers when the man reels back from him as if slapped. “So. You’ve caught the Lord of Crime. Why not just turn him over to be hanged? Or kill ‘im yourself? What’s your game here?”
“I have the misfortune of not believing in life after death. If there is no Hell, then how is something as simple as death a punishment? Death is a mercy. So instead I have stripped him of every pretension, every justification, every human goodness he might have persuaded himself he was in possession of. I have made him into everything he truly is, and now that I have lured you here I will make him act the monster that is the core of him. This will be your punishment as well, for saving him. If you survive, you will hate him, and that will be his continued suffering. You will live hating him, or die hating him, or kill yourself hating him. And I will be sure he is reminded of it every day until the day he finally dies himself, alone in the dark.”
Sherlock breathes, carefully. This man hasn’t the slightest clue of what he has entangled himself in, but Sherlock’s anger at the thought of William suffering would be far too telling. He does not need to fly off the handle: he needs information. (Mycroft would be so proud. What an irritating thought.)
“That’s all very flowery and dramatic. Doesn’t tell me what you’ve actually done to ‘im, though.”
“He is a monster. Always has been. Now he looks and acts it. I have aligned the reality of nature with that which can be seen. And that monster, bereft of all control over his true nature, will take what he wants from you without reason or mercy.”
Right. Alright. Clearly he’s not going to get clarity until the moment he’s thrown into the cell, and that’s frustrating. Whatever this man has done, via drugs or torture or what-have-you, Sherlock will not have time to scope out its limitations until he is already face to face with its results. That’s not ideal. He will have to take the man’s word for it that Liam has been reduced somehow to mindless animality. That is decidedly not ideal. But the horror the man thinks he is suggesting is a largely powerless one. The villain apparently thinks he has the ability to somehow goad Liam to horrible violations. He does not know that two and a half years of shared beds and shared bodies has built a trust so deep that fear cannot mar it. If Liam has somehow been drugged out of his mind and into violent need, it does not matter. There is nothing Liam can take from Sherlock by force, for there is nothing Sherlock would not willingly give him.
“So despite your disgust you will facilitate sodomy – and truly at that, in the way of Sodom, something cruel and uninvited and violent – and you will do it to avenge a man you loved so much that you cannot forgive his death? Funny li’l bit of irony, that.”
The squelching crunch of Sherlock’s nose breaking beneath a thrown fist rings in his ears. He spits, cursing, mouth full of blood. Goddammit, between the tooth he’d lost boxing and a now thrice-broken nose, he’s lucky Liam’s so keen on his collarbones and hair.
He has to give his captor his due for resisting the urge to talk more in service of rebuttal. Instead, Sherlock is unceremoniously dragged to his feet by the short chain between the handcuffs he’s been clapped in. The handle of a small oil lantern is pressed into his hand, and then he’s shoved down a hallway he’s been eyeing curiously and through a door into pitch blackness broken only by the little lantern’s efforts.
The door slams behind him, the sound of lock-bolts sliding into place echoing against stone walls.
He knows why he was given the light almost immediately. Their captor wants him to see. Wants him terrified. Instead, there is only a sinking ache in his stomach as he lifts the lantern high to spread its light further.
He’s going to have to do some mental reshuffling, later. Unpack a box or two in the attic, declutter. There are several scattered facts about the moon bouncing around up there that he’s quite sure he can do without. He’ll need to do something, to make room for knowing that what he sees now is possible. All that rambling that idiot had been doing, and Sherlock had not even considered that he might be talking of monstrosity literally. He had braced himself for disfigurement, scars, brutality altering William physically and drugs and agony altering him mentally.
In an alcove across the cave-room from him, something inhuman lurks. Though it – he – crouches, Sherlock can tell at a glance that he will be unnaturally tall when standing. Eight feet or so, at a guess. He has fingers as long as a whole hand should be, and claws as long again as normal fingers, scraping into the dirt as if to anchor himself. The skin of his naked body is white as snow, and even from a distance it does not look like living skin, but like treated leather, textured and thick. His mouth stretches wide, ear to ear like a horrid grin, open and panting and revealing teeth as sharp as a shark’s.