Archive of Our Own ^beta

Smoke seeps through the detective’s fingers and curls toward the sky. The phone continues to vibrate incessantly in his trouser pocket, but Sherlock ignores it.

The painting is so obviously fake; the entire assignment had been nothing more than a nasty reprimand from Mycroft. Sherlock knows that two men are standing by outside the museum’s main entrance, ready to whisk him away to some basement where his dear brother eagerly awaits. The thought alone makes him grimace. Let him wait while he enjoys a well-deserved cigarette.

One perk to being indefinitely exiled from London—he can smoke wherever he pleases. Sherlock leans against the iron railing and peers down into the courtyard. The floor is laid with plain, yellowish brick masquerading as authentic, but he doubts they even bothered to use real limestone. For a favored brainchild of one of the richest families in France, the shiny new museum strikes the detective as almost impressively cheap.

He’s still squinting at the stone, trying to decipher its composition from the floor above, when he hears voices on the opposite side of the colonnaded gallery. Two sets of footsteps echo through the courtyard—one with its heavy, unbalanced gait unmistakably the curator’s. But it’s the other’s footsteps that draw his attention: they have a weightlessness to them, as though their owner is gliding along, his feet barely touching the ground. Each measured footfall is accompanied by a squeak of leather. Recently polished ahead of the meeting, aiming to impress, Sherlock deduces, a buyer. The men are chattering away in French, and he tries to make out a few stray phrases, but the acoustics in the space are peculiar, and the sound seems to leap out at him from multiple directions.

The voices grow nearer. The detective doesn’t bother to stub out his cigarette though he is technically inside the museum. Vive la France. He smirks and takes another drag as his languid gaze moves across the vast, empty expanse of air to greet the new arrivals.

For a moment, he forgets to exhale. Nicotine tears at his lungs until his throat begin to sting and he opens his mouth in a silent gasp, allowing thick smoke to escape. The curator is still talking about a new piece he’s bringing in from Italy with next week’s shipment but his companion is not paying him any attention.

Jim Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes lock eyes. Time stretches, then screeches to a halt.

The first emotion Sherlock feels upon seeing his nemesis is overpowering relief.

Moriarty looks alien without his suit. He’s dressed down, for whatever part he’s playing, whatever life he’s chosen to inhabit. A linen short-sleeved shirt with a deep V-neck, a couple of gold necklaces where an immaculate tie should be. His hair is longer than it was the last time Sherlock saw him, tousled at the temples. He’s sporting an even, golden-brown tan—the kind you only get when you establish permanent residence somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Sherlock doesn’t catalogue these details until much later. His mind picks them up but nothing registers. All he is aware of are the eyes staring back at him with burning intensity. He can hardly make them out at this distance, but he remembers the exact shade of brown—deep, rich, thick as black treacle—and the way light seems to fold into them, consumed, not a speck filtering out. The same eyes that reached down to his very soul on the rooftop, in the final moments before Jim pulled the trigger. Before he died.

Sherlock sinks into them, quietly and all at once.

Moriarty’s face—usually so alive, buzzing with emotion, whether real or manufactured—is an unmoving mask, carved from marble. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t swallow. The cigarette burns down to the filter and bites at Sherlock’s skin. He lets the stub fall without breaking eye contact.

“Tu peux me ramener la brochure dont on a parlé avant? J’aimerais bien la consulter chez moi,” Moriarty asks in flawless French without so much as a glance at the curator. They know each other well, the detective files away, noting the informal tu. The other man lingers briefly, throwing Sherlock a curious look, then heads wordlessly back into the main gallery. A door slides shut behind him with a click. And as it does, Moriarty turns on his heels and walks briskly to the staircase on his left. There is no urgency in his movements: steady, efficient, uncompromising.

Sherlock stands rooted to his spot when the criminal re-emerges downstairs and—with impressively long strides for a man of his stature—makes for the main museum entrance. He will have to cross the length of the courtyard, with its cheap yellow brick, Sherlock knows, and pass directly underneath him to get out. That gives him thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, to dash across the gallery, down the same set of stairs, and after him.

His mind is screaming at him to stay still, to telephone Mycroft, to set his men loose upon the most dangerous criminal in the world, very much alive.

He moves. Matching the other’s pace, his body a taut line of quiet yearning, he marches across the second floor in the opposite direction, toward the stairs. His eyes never leave Moriarty, who stares straight ahead, as though Sherlock isn’t right there, as though he doesn’t crave his touch with equal desperation.

Twenty seconds, and Sherlock picks up the pace even as he calculates, with a hollow feeling in his chest, that it’s not enough time, that he’ll never catch up.

It bursts forth before he ever realizes it’s there on his lips.

“Jim!” One word, but it’s enough. Moriarty looks up, and the marble shatters.

Now Sherlock is running, his instincts utterly divorced from the frantic instructions of his mind (slow down, you have no back up, he could be dangerous). He nearly tumbles down the stairs, gripping the handrail in the nick of time to steady himself. Jim waits, unmoving, in the center of the courtyard until Sherlock emerges—and then he’s running, too.

They crash into each other, teeth clanking, more a collision than a kiss. Hands struggle against fabric, against each other, in all the wrong places. Sherlock tastes blood on his lips when Jim bites too hard.

Alive, alive, alive.

The words thrum, undulate, beat against Sherlock’s temples; they crowd out Jim’s unrestrained moan.

Alive, alive, alive.

It is all that matters.