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There aren't many things James Moriarty finds interesting. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand: expensive and tailored suits, the barely concealed panic in the eyes of those who don't know how to behave in his presence, mathematics, the decadent poetry of the last heartbeat and, of course, Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock that seems to be born just to be his equal and opposite, his reverse image, the reflection in the mirror, the king on the other side of the board. Sherlock that made him alive, that made him feel things he didn't know he could feel so violently – hope, disappointment, anger, love at its most primordial and violent form. Sherlock who is currently spending his days in a filthy dump in Eastern Europe, undercover to dismantle an empire of which he can't even imagine the greatness.
Jim crouches – careful to not touch the dirty floor with his knees – and pulls out from his coat's pocket the tools to open the lock. The stink of piss and vomit that lingers in the air makes him want to throw up, twists his face in a grimace. Jim likes Mycroft but he would rip his throat bare-handed just for having thrown Sherlock in a place like this. Sherlock deserves better, he deserves everything Jim could give him.
Inside the flat the situation is only slightly better.
The air is breathable but stale: dust covers nearly every surface in sight with the only exceptions of the couch and the small table, a gray coat on the shoulders of a king who has now lost his crown. There are dirty dishes on the floor and Jim doesn't doubt that in the kitchen there is an even bigger pile, a Pisa tower of dirt – he would have loved to bring Sherlock to Italy, he thinks, allowing himself a blink of the eye to fantasize about things that will never be.
On the table there is a small bag of white powder. It draws Jim's gaze like the biggest diamond in the world.
Disappointment runs through every fibre of his body, it sets down on the tip of his tongue, a pungent and bitter flavour he isn't able to ignore or swallow down. Disappointment then mixes with anger – towards Sherlock, towards Mycroft that didn't take enough care of his brother, towards himself that intervened too late, towards the world, towards Sherlock (again) – in closed fists and lips pulled into a straight line.
He is still staring at the bag of cocaine.
He could leave and take it with him, ignore the elephant in the room and cut every tie that still brings him to Sherlock, accept that the man who for years has been his only reason for living is nothing more than a pathetic junkie, a mundane creature that has nothing to do with the image Jim has built of him in his head.
He could go back to his car and focus on his criminal network, or he could shoot himself in the mouth – it doesn't make any difference to him.
He could (should?) do it, but the shape in the corner of his eye stops him.
Something about Sherlock breaks his heart – or whatever Jim has instead.
It's a subtle and almost imperceptible noise, a small crack in a huge sheet of ice. It's a timid sound, but somehow it still reminds Jim of his humanity. He turns slightly, stares at the man on the couch – he's facing the seatback, legs bent and hood on his head – and that image overlaps another. A man a little shorter and with eyes a little darker Jim has only seen in the mirror.
Jim understands. Jim understands it all – the void, infinite and not black but colourless, the absence of whatever people need to live – and sighs. At Sherlock, at himself, at a God he stopped believing in when he was eight.
So, he reaches out.
His fingertips just brush the hoodie, there near the shoulder, where the fabric creates pleats. It's a movement gentler than he intended, full of that care that only someone who can understand you perfectly can have. It's similar to the gesture he has interrupted years before on the rooftop, he realizes, a bitter smile curling his lips.
"Sherlock."
In response he gets a whining and the rustle of clothes on the sofa cushions, a hint of a movement that doesn't go anywhere.
"Go away."
"Sherlock."
"I'm pretty sure I'm not asleep or under the influence of drugs, so if my mind could stop haunting me it would be great."
The gentle touch on the shoulder becomes a grip and then a tug and then five fingers hit Sherlock's cheek. Hard. Now Jim's hand is red and hot.
"Stop acting like a child".
He's sure he has never used that voice – the cold and sharp hiss he reserves to his employers – with Sherlock before. Maybe that's why his expression changes. Raised eyebrows, parted lips mouthing syllables that don't come to life.
Pathetic, really.
"If you say something among the lines of 'How can you be alive? You shot yourself!' I swear Sherlock, I'm gonna leave you here in your... disgusting mediocrity. I want you to be clever, not boring. Is that clear?"
Sherlock simply nods.
"Good boy. Now stand up; you need a bath. You stink."
There is nothing of the Sherlock Holmes Jim worships in the man in front of him. There isn't the sense of superiority he has never bothered to hide, there isn't the ice in his marble-sculpted features, there aren't a chin always held upwards and soft pre-Raphaelite curls – now a dirty mess without any shape – falling on his face.
Jim has never been so harsh and rude with Sherlock, but Sherlock has never been so frustrating and unsatisfying. Jim has every right to act like he does.
If Sherlock has any doubt, he doesn't show it: without saying a word he walks to the bathroom – with relief Jim finds out is pretty clean and not as tragic as the rest of the house. He starts to undress as Jim sits on the not-so-white-but-not-so-yellow-either porcelain.
He has promised himself to not look at him and yet he turns one hundred eighty degrees, stops looking at the gradually filling bathtub and fixes his dark irises on Sherlock's naked body.
His eyes don't change when they lay on the scars and the bruises that adorn the pale skin. Jim keeps sitting there, no expression on his face and a whirlwind of feelings in his chest; they don't show because they are too complex, too contradictory, they cancel each other like equal and opposite forces.
There is a little bit of guilt. It's just a hint and yet is the first thing Jim feels: an itch he cannot scratch, an annoying background noise he cannot block. There is then the weird mix of anger and sadness Jim gets more used to every day – he is sad because he had to go that far, he is angry because Sherlock wasn't good enough to avoid it. And then there is a burning in his throat and it matches the one in his chest, the primordial fire of jealousy and lust.
If Sherlock has to carry – more or less permanently – the marks of someone, that someone has to be him. Others have stolen his place and taken with force something that doesn't belong to them and Jim's hands itch so much he has to place both his palms on the cold surface of the bathtub.
He wants to kill them and he wants to kiss every bruise and scar on Sherlock's body and he wants to reopen with teeth and nails wounds not yet healed.
"C'mon, get in."
There is a fire in his chest, but his words are soft. They don't sound like an order and maybe that's why Sherlock obeys. His words don't just do that, though.
They light up something in Sherlock's eyes, something that makes Jim sigh of relief; in his light irises he can see thoughts rapidly chasing each other, in the drumming of the index finger on the white edge he can feel his neurons work. Sherlock is thinking and even if he's completely naked, with greasy hair and knees drawn to his chest he has regained some of the dignity Jim remembers fondly.
Now it's Jim's turn to undress.
He slides off of his clothes slowly. Buttons are opened with the care of a ritual for an ancient god and the same attention is used to fold jacket, shirt and trousers before gently placing them on the toilet lid. Only then Jim immerses in the hot water.
"You can talk, if you want. As long as you have something clever to say."
Sherlock barely nods – he knows what is at stake. It's his way of showing he understood and doesn't want to disappoint him again, a metaphorical handshake to seal a tacit agreement. Sherlock looks at him straight in the eyes. It has been years since someone looked at Jim with such an intensity.
"Why are you here?"
"Here in this room or here in this world?"
"Both."
"I can't see you like this. It's..."
Heartbreaking, painful.
"Boring."
"This only answers one question. Why are you still alive? You wanted to die."
Along with dirt, water also removes the patina of mediocrity on his body, his mind, his heart. Jim can see a glimmer of the Sherlock he knows in the bluntness of the words and closes his eyes, basking for a moment in that sudden harshness. It's like a hug, just more familiar.
"You didn't think that back then."
Sherlock looks away, stares at something apparently invisible and really interesting on his left. Embarrassment looks gorgeous on him.
"I admit, it took me a while. But once I've reached that conclusion..."
Sherlock is the kind of person who always thinks they're right, that don't even consider the idea of not having understood who stands in front of him. He assumes everything with circumstantial evidences that lack true scientific nature; Sherlock looks at you and tells you everything about your life, what you feel and what you do, lips opened in the half-smile of a capricious young god. It's sexy and annoying and stupid and sexy (yes, again).
If only the situation were different – if they were in the middle of their game, if he weren't helping Sherlock, if he weren't so desperate – his attitude would bother him, perhaps even to the point of leaving.
But it is what it is and Jim just cannot be mad at him right now.
He splashes water at Sherlock and laughs when his brows furrow.
"I still want to die. You didn't want the same, though, so I had to change plans."
Jim says it with a ghost of a laugh on his mouth, with the same voice he would use to tell a joke. It's his way of saying he doesn't want to talk about it now.
"Go on, lower your head."
Sherlock looks at him for few interminable seconds – he is conflicted, he wants to ask questions and learn more, but at the same time he doesn't want to say the wrong thing and ruin everything. At the end of his (pretty visible) inner conflict he decides to do what he was said. He lowers his head, forehead on his knees.
He almost looks like Sherlock is kneeling in front of him. It's with this thought that Jim runs a hand in the tangled mess that is Sherlock's hair. He curls a few locks around his fingers and pulls – he has always wanted to do it, from the first time he has seen him, when he pretended to be Molly's boyfriend and left a clueless detective his phone number in the hope of a shag.
Jim sighs, eyes half-closed and cock half-hard.
After few seconds, he grabs the showerhead. Water slides on Sherlock's hair, flows down and deposits in small drops on broad shoulders, muscular arms, back bent that highlights the vertebrae. It almost looks like he's wearing hundreds of little diamonds. Jim doesn't know if he wants to lick them away or preserve them there forever.
The shampoo he uses comes from an anonymous white bottle. Bright red words written in Cyrillic promise soft and perfect curls, but the mediocrity of the product is clear: while squeezing out a small amount, Jim twists his lips in a grimace.
He doesn't like cheap things, not even when they smell good. Not that it matters now, he doesn't really have any other choice.
He washes Sherlock's hair like it were the most important task in the world, as if his own life depended on it. He must be doing a good job, because when the circular movements of his thumbs move to the neck, Sherlock sighs. It's an almost sexual sound and it sparks like electricity along Jim's spine. He is probably more desperate than he likes to believe.
"The last time someone washed my hair I was six."
Sherlock's voice is low and somehow distant, as if it came from a parallel reality. Maybe it really belongs to a parallel world, because the Sherlock Jim knows doesn't share personal thoughts and memories with him, because his lips are always curled in a predator's grin and they never let out sounds so soft and real and genuine.
Jim knows everything about Sherlock's past, yet he doesn't say anything. He stays still and silent, his eyes the ones of a disciple in front of his God.
It disappears the dirty flat, disappears the bag of white powder in the adjacent room, disappear anger and disappointment and it's something so unusual, being free of those feelings, that Jim is honestly surprised.
"I liked pretending I was a pirate." Smile is evident in Sherlock's voice. "Don't laugh." He adds immediately after, rushed voice tainted by a drop of childish embarrassment.
Jim could never do it. Sure he may or may not have let go a little chuckle when Mycroft told him about Sherlock's love for pirates and he may or may not have found the whole thing even more amusing when, few months after, Euros confirmed it and added more details. But in front of a Sherlock that shows himself for who he is, true and human like he has never been in the past, he could never do it.
"I was young. I played in the backyard, with rubber boots too big for me and I liked to sneak in places that left grass stains and mud on my posh clothes. I didn't really like bathing at the time. You never see a pirate stainless and with perfect hair, after all."
Hearing Sherlock talk about his childhood feels warm. Even if the water isn't hot anymore. It opens dozens of now impossible scenarios, alternative universes full of constellations and adventures to live, alternative universes in which there is no space for Carl Powers or the smell of alcohol on his father's skin. If only they met earlier. If only...
"I didn't have friends, but I didn't care. I had Redbeard. I don't remember much about him, actually. Just that he had curly red hair and he was the best dog in the world and he had to die."
A pause. Jim thinks about Eurus' words, about Victor Trevor. He doesn't say anything.
"It was hard, but... Everyone dies, soon or later." Sherlock shakes his head, then lifts it up just enough to look at Jim. "Have you ever had a pet?"
Jim giggles. He rinses Sherlock's hair then applies shampoo once again.
"My parents didn't want one, even if they would have probably agreed if the request came from my brother. Years later I have thought of getting a spider, but it would have been too cliché, even for me. However..."
His voice trails off, lost in a much smaller house than the one he currently lives in, in a London huge and unknown and gray, in a past so far away he can only look at it in third person. They had just moved.
Jim looks at the large and empty eyes of a child with second-hand clothes and a funny accent, sees frustration in the cuticles tortured by his teeth; even back then he had expectations a little too high and thoughts a little too fast. The only difference was the object of his disappointment. Not Sherlock, but a city that wasn't able to meet his needs. Huge, innovative, fast-paced, but full of people Jim had already met: teachers unable to understanding him and classmates that held his head until water filled his lungs. Chlorine wasn't a smell he liked, back then. It didn't remind him of Sherlock.
He must have stopped washing Sherlock's hair, because Sherlock leans his head toward his fingers, a gesture natural and spontaneous like the blink of the eyes. Sherlock probably didn't even notice. Jim smiles; it reminds him of a dog wanting to be petted.
Before continuing his story he gives Sherlock the attention he needs.
"I found this magpie. It had a broken wing and scratches probably caused by one of the many cats that lived in that area. It was young and small and that made its desperate squirm even more unnatural and disturbing. I had never seen anything more alive."
A pause. He rinses Sherlock's hair once again and then passes him the shower gel. Jim stares at him while Sherlock soaps himself.
"I know what you are thinking. 'When you see something so defenceless, your first impulse is to destroy it, just because you can'. I didn't feel that way: there is nothing extraordinary in killing something already in pain. It would have been boring."
With a gesture, Jim tells Sherlock to turn over so he can wash his back.
"So, I brought it home. I hid it in my jacket and I carried it to my bedroom. I used the little medical knowledge I got from books to take care of it. I took the bread that was left on the table after dinner and brought it back to my room without letting anyone notice. Not that it was difficult, my family liked to pretend I didn't exist. Sometimes I even went hunting for worms and my father always smiled when I came back home with mud stains on my knees, because that's how boys are supposed to have fun."
Jim's thumbs find their place on the bruises and, for a moment, Jim can pretend to be the person who caused them. The illusion doesn't last long. His fingertips cannot cover completely the purplish halo – it will take days to become yellow and it will take even more days to disappear completely and leave a black canvas ready to be painted again – and Jim's jaw line hardens, he applies a certain pressure on the hematomas.
Sherlock lets out a moan. Jim can't tell if it comes from pain or something else.
"The plan was to make it depend on me. Treat it with love only to later end that life I thought I owned. I wanted to see conflict and betrayal in its shiny eyes."
Jim's hands run on the entire length of the back, then rise again to the shoulders. They wrap around Sherlock's neck. He can feel his pulse in his fingertips and, for just a moment, he could swear their heartbeats were in synchrony.
"As you can imagine, things didn't go like I expected. I had just moved to London, I was alone and... It was more clever than anyone I had met. I liked having it around: I always left the window open for it to come and go and it liked landing on my astronomy book. It closed its eyes when I stroked its feathers. Sometimes it even brought me shiny objects. Mostly garbage, except for a ring that I was able to sell for almost hundred pounds."
Jim stops to lick his lips.
"One day, it stopped visiting me. It died somewhere – maybe a cat ate it or something."
The bathtub is small – smaller than the one in which Jim slides after a day of hard work, smaller than the one with colourful bubbles and fantasies always different but that always include Sherlock and end up with Jim's hand around his cock.
It's also smaller than average and Jim feels a principle of tingling in his legs.
He scratches his palate with the tip of his tongue, as if it could remove the unpleasant feeling. Before knowing its physiological causes, he associated it with television static or the frolicking of dozens of ants. He wonders what Sherlock would think of it – Jim can see him roll his eyes, snort and answer dramatically, in that same tone people use to address children that are too young and stupid to understand.
It's an image that, in its domesticity, makes Jim smile. Before he has the time to ask the question, however, Sherlock turns. The movement is anything but graceful. Water overflows onto the floor, soaking the clothes lying on the ground – they aren't his, so Jim doesn't mind.
Sherlock almost slips, like a puppy with long legs who hasn't learned how to walk yet. Jim's lips let out a soft and gentle sound, a laugh that takes Sherlock by surprise. Surprise doesn't last long; it's immediately replaced by the expression Sherlock has when he tries to be intimidating (and fails miserably).
"What did you feel when it die?"
They are looking at each other, now. The intensity of Sherlock's gaze is out of place and somehow awkward and embarrassing, however is the reason why Jim decides to answer in complete seriousness. They seem to have the tendency to speak too gravely about silly things and not take seriously death and life matters, after all.
"I didn't cry, but… I missed it. I was angry, at least at first. I saved his life and…" Jim tilts his head to the side. "He owned me. I wanted it do die because of me, not because of whatever got the best of it at the end."
Silence between them is never awkward. It's heavy though; they could never be in the same room together and just mind their own business, they could never not acknowledge each other's presence. Too much talking without moving their lips.
Jim doesn't mind this kind of silence. He stretches, showing off and curling his lips in a grin. Sherlock's eyes don't follow the movement, but somehow holding his gaze is more erotic than anything else.
"I don't understand."
"It's not that difficult. Okay, you aren't at your best, but..."
He cuts Jim off without letting him finish.
Sherlock is a spring. There is tension in the hard line of the jaw, there is tension in clenched fists with white knuckles, there is tension in the slow and continuous way he reduces the distance between their naked bodies. Jim knows that, without the physical limitations imposed by the bathtub, Sherlock would be just millimetres away from his nose, breathing hot words with a voice lower and more seductive than necessary. Maybe, if he were particularly lucky, he would even manhandle him.
"You don't want to kill me. You want me dead, six feet under with you, but you don't want to kill me."
Sherlock has changed over the years. To deny it is pointless and only someone as delusional as the man himself could do it: Sherlock has people who love him now, people that are crying because of his death, people he can call friends.
Jim hates it. Friends make Sherlock boring and sloppy, they taint him with their ordinariness, the most lethal and dangerous virus in the world. Jim hates it but what he hates even more is that Sherlock likes them back.
All Jim would like to do is rip those insignificant human beings apart. Cut their chests. Stick his hand in the hole he created. Looking for what makes them so special in Sherlock's eyes.
Sherlock has changed over the years, but there are times when not even a second seems to have passed. In those moments he goes back to being once again the self-centred man willing to put lives at risk just for a good challenge.
Now it's one of those moments.
Ordinary people – the very people that surround(ed) Sherlock and claim to love him even if they clearly can't understand him – called him cold, a machine.
There is nothing cold in the way Sherlock is looking at him. Sherlock isn't a piece of ice, he's an uncontrolled fire – a long time ago Jim has said he was gonna burn his heart out, but that has never been possible; Sherlock is gonna burn himself, he will be the maker of his own death.
Sherlock isn't a machine because his line of reasoning isn't even half logic as he claims. He dissects every element in its smallest parts and loses sight of the whole thing, he analyzes only what suits him and he applies a confirmation bias – he may consider himself a scientist at heart, but he fails to apply the fundament of critical thinking.
Jim knows the truth. Sherlock is painfully human. It's what, at the end of the day, makes him so interesting.
When Jim parts his lips to answer the question, centuries seem to have passed.
"It's not like I didn't carry out my original plan on someone else. She was a sweet girl."
The memories are vivid but distant, like the scenes of a movie. Cliché dates – flowers, boring sex followed by cuddling and a cheesy declaration of love – a glimmer of domestic life, his hands wrapped around her pale throat.
"It was interesting. Not enough to repeat the experiment twice, but still interesting. A good Monday morn-"
"Then why tell the story?"
"You asked me about my past and I replied. Not everything is a code or a symbol or whatever your pretty mind craves right now."
Sherlock stays silent for a moment, weighing up the truth. He looks like a child who has just found out about sex and has to decide whatever something so disgusting can be real.
"So was it real?" He stops, still unsure, before continuing. "I mean I wanted to know the truth, but when you started talking about magpies I just thought about our game." Another pause. "Yes, I know the magpie is your symbol, but I am you and…"
"God, you really need a distraction."
He's desperate. Jim looks at him and wonders if he was the same during his junkie days, if this is the same desperation that made him snort lines of cocaine off another man's crotch.
"Hopefully, I'm here."
He touches him and Sherlock doesn't move. He doesn't move the same way he didn't move when Jim closed his fingers around his neck, just few minutes before. This time the touch is gentler, though.
Fingertips just brush Sherlock's skin, tracing an invisible pattern they rise to the jaw, brushing so softly to make both the men uncomfortable, because that's not how it's supposed to be with the two of them.
"I have a big heart and I love solving other people's problems."
His voice is and low and tender. It doesn't belong to that bathroom, to that flat, to that world. It belongs to the stars.
Jim places his free hand on the other side of Sherlock's face, cupping it gently. He leans toward him – just a little and the position he is in now is even more uncomfortable, but is a price he's willing to pay for Sherlock – until he can feel his hot breath on his lips.
Kissing him would be so easily now. Jim feels it in his bones, in is nerves, in his veins. It's the right thing to do, the right timing and the right place and Sherlock must feel it as well, because his lashes flutter down and when they rise again Sherlock is staring at his lips.
He doesn't kiss him. Jim never liked easy.
"Sex won't help me."
Sherlock's voice isn't quite there either. Jim leans back, breaking contact.
He doesn't know where to place his hands now. Something is lacking, something invisible and huge that reminds him of the hole between his ribs that has painfully followed him for all his life. He wonders if Sherlock feels the same. Jim doesn't like that feeling though, so he rubs his hands on his knees and steps out of the bathtub.
The floor is cold under his bare feet.
"I wasn't thinking about sex. Were you?"
He winks, flirtatious and shallow and he isn't anymore the man that has bared his heart in front of his (ex?) nemesis. That doesn't stop Sherlock's gaze from running on his naked body. Whatever was holding him now isn't there anymore, gone with the filth.
"I was thinking more about something among the lines of you, dressed nicely, at my place, helping me organize some international crimes that could annoying you brother."
He reaches out for the towel. He doesn't tie it around his waist and he simply uses it to dry off his wet skin. It's not soft. He doesn't like rough fabric and clothing – they remind him of the past.
"Sex can follow, if you want. I'm not gonna turn that down."
Sherlock rolls his eyes but a small smile is creeping at the corners of his mouth.
It's the electric discharge that led Sherlock to follow him to every corner of London with a grin and not regard for human life. It's the darkest part of his personality, the part Sherlock has chained up because he isn't (yet) capable to accept – the chains loosen more every second they spend together.
It's a smile that looks like hope.