(no subject)
Discipline & Punish
Irene Adler; Sebastian Moran; Jim Moriarty. She’s got the power here, but all power is freely ceded for a man like Sebastian Moran. He’s only giving her an IOU, a cheque that’s going to bounce, for a power given long ago to a man who has the world at its knees unknowingly.
There’s something almost exaggerated in her femininity, hyperbolic - performative, Seb might have said, once, but he doesn’t say things like that now - an air of irony, powerful detachment. She sways her hips exaggeratedly, has lips painted red and eyes painted blue, black stilettoes clicking against the marble floor. Everything is white, and reeks of expense; there are lillies shedding fine orange dust on the end-table; it’s so cliched that he can’t quite decide if it’s pathetic or reassuring. He shifts slightly, and watches her eyes flicker over the movement. There’s something in her expression that reminds him of Jim, somehow: something calculating, silent, fearsome. Something knife-like that watches, but her stare is cold, paradoxically indifferent, while Jim’s stare burns. The woman has a lepidopterist’s stare. Jim has a vivisector’s.
She’s all beautifully painted sangfroid, polish, where Jim’s mercury and bared teeth. Seb’s not sure if this is going to work, which means a few deserving fingers are going to be broken, later - Christ knows, he’s going to be in enough shit with Jim, if Jim ever finds out about this (and he will, oh, he will, Seb’s not an idiot). He’ll find out, and Seb’ll be punished for this, sure enough, and he’ll enjoy it, too.
“So you want my services, Mr Moran,” the woman says, her accent clipped and proper, but there’s an emphasis on ‘services’ that makes Seb internally blanch for a second, her voice approaching familiar melismatic tones, a hint of a trill that reminds him, again, that for all her much-vaunted discretion, he’s not fooling anyone. Not really. No debts go uncollected.
“Yes,” he says, finally, trying out his rusty Etonian, the one that Jim bridles at (and more excitingly, can never quite hide that he’s bridling at it, either, their entire dynamic jarring when Seb pulls out the Queen’s English), thinking, Christ, he’s not already found me, has he. Unsure if this would be entirely a bad thing. As if Seb’s boundaries have ever been that well-constructed, to separate good and bad, as though he were not a nation composed of endless wars.
“I’ll have my secretary take care of you first,” the woman purrs, “and then we’ll put you in your place, won’t we?”
Seb Moran, for all his reversed fortunes, all the grime and gutters of Brixton and Hackney, has always had a taste for the best, the brightest; the polish of public schools and diplomatic status doesn’t rub off that quickly. “Entitled,” Jim had once hissed at him, eyes shining with malice, “an entitled little schoolboy, all cold showers and furtive gropings, how positively appalling,” his voice moving along the length of the sentence from habitual South County Dublin to country-house toff. And he’d been right - Jim was, after all, almost completely unhinged but rarely wrong - he’d seen right through to Seb’s entitled little heart and firmly hooked his little talons right in there. Because Seb’s always wanted the best, and some half-wild part of him had recognised it in Jim, and now he recognises it in Irene Adler, and he wants it.
Of course, the woman is for sale - a handful of notes and he has the best. Simple. He signs some forms, forks over some cash, and becomes a client.
Irene brings him into a well-tailored room, expensive drapes brushing the polished floor like debutantes’ dresses, shutting out the sunlight, and crosses her legs with a faint hiss of silk stockings brushing softly.
“Now,” she says, leaning forward over a steeple of her perfect red nails, a hint of a smirk, almost a solicitous civil servant but for the sharpness of her eyes, “tell me what it is you want, Seb.”
*
He’s always been stronger than the others - fullback on the rugby team, over six feet in socks, a curious inability to empathise with the pain of others which is itself more useful than any physical force. Possessing no sense of whim, or compassion: stolid, solid, a hound worrying the corpse long after the blood has all run out its neck.
He stands on fingers to hear the musical snap. He can break necks cleanly, causing no pain, but chooses not to: where’s the fun without the agonised rattle, the sound of death claiming its righful territory?
*
“I don’t care what you want,” Jim says silkily, cutting him off, teeth at his ear. Seb’s in agony right now, writhing beneath Jim, who has one hand curled in the short hair at the nape of his neck, where it hurts the most, and the other pressing him, face-first, into the floor. And the thing is that Jim is so small, physically - not fragile, exactly, but Seb could crush him in a second if he wanted, and they both know that. He moves down to Seb’s wrist, jerking it toward him, behind Seb’s back, and holds it in place in the small of his back, fingers just brushing off his arse in the course of restrain, and Seb’s getting off on this, like always.
He’d had a point to make, actually. Something about not being treated right, actually. But now his crotch is being pressed, no, ground into the floor, and Jim is breathing heavily in his ear - rage or arousal? or is there a difference, for him? for either of them? - and wonderfully present, physical. Seb’s used to considering Jim half-spirit - a sort of supra-human entity, more a being than anything else, a network of fear and power far greater than the weak grip on his wrist would suggest. And then there’s the hand on his neck, forcing him down, the discipline he never thought he’d missed from his schoolboy days, the punishment he never realised he’d craved. Jim’s dark eyes, moving from a mockery of shock to a mockery of happiness to a mockery of sadness in the blink of an eye, his hidden core, the bright heart of the panopticon, impenetrable to the prisoners.
“Sebastian,” Jim trills, “my goodness, you’re not hard, are you? God almighty, you’d lie down in the nettles for it, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”
The shameful answer, of course, is that if Jim asked him, he would. He’s broken fingers and kneecaps and teeth, he’s shot men in the head for even the hint that Jim might do this - he’d lie down in the nettles for the sheer thrill of getting stung.
“I asked you a question, darling,” Jim hisses, grinding him into the floor. Seb, with his nose pressed into the floor, can picture his face, huge dark eyes and canine teeth, something that’s almost a smile, but not quite. He bites Seb’s neck, hard, and Seb hisses, “Yes, yes,” his face burning, his cock pressing into the floor, wanting it desperately, wanting it to hurt even more, somehow.
“I thought so,” Jim says, delighted, and then all of a sudden the pressure on his back is relieved. When he turns around, still lying on the floor, Jim is standing, brushing himself off, perfectly composed.
“You’re not fucking serious,” Seb says, half out of his mind, anger now overpowering arousal.
“As a heart attack, Sebastian,” Jim says, now in front of the mirror, combing his hair, calm as a Hindu cow. “And now I have some business to attend to. I’m sure you can take care of that adorable little submissive streak by yourself.” He throws the comb onto the table, fits sunglasses over his eyes, and throws something vaguely resembling a smile at the mirror, before turning, looking down at Seb on the floor. “And if you ever ask me that question again, you’ll find yourself regretting it rather soon. Do me a favour and remember who’s running the show here. Bye now,” stepping over Seb neatly, a dapper little flick to his heel, walking out of the flat, leaving him alone and humiliated and wanting it more than ever.
*
He’s a dab-hand with a rifle, an excellent marksman. A natural talent. But he’s never quite satisfied, seeing the bodies crumpled. It’s so impersonal, so distant - no bruised knuckles, no loose teeth: just a clothed scarecrow left in a heap.
He wants to feel his skin split. He wants to see his blood, too. No pain, no gain. Sure, a bullet through the brain’s power enough for your average megalomaniac, but power’s nothing without bloody knuckles, without feeling himself as an instrument, intricate and perfect for the part, like a man fitting perfectly the pocket of air he displaces.
This is the urge that gets him a dishonourable discharge.
*
“You like being on the floor, don’t you?” Irene purrs, stalking towards him. “No, I didn’t say get up.”
Seb, with his hands cuffed his back, burning with humiliation. Seb, biting his tongue, listening to the click of Irene’s expensive heels as she paces around him, the whispery brush of a riding crop just barely tracing the nape of his neck. Irene’s feet are small, her ankles slender; Seb thinks about reaching out and crushing that talus bone with his fist, but he can’t, of course. He can’t do anything. Irene pauses, traces his shoulders with her crop. She’s sharply tailored, wasp-waisted, with leather accents. “Are you enjoying this?” she says, malicious, ridiculing, her voice rising slightly, and Seb can’t help it, wriggles a little.
“Oh, you are,” Irene says, her voice even meaner now, malicious and sing-song (she’s a professional, after all: find out what the client wants and deliver it). She stands at his head, lifts her foot, and presses her foot against his cheek, caressing his face, the knife-edge sharpness of her heel stinging. Then she presses it into his neck, right over the healing mark, and Christ, it hurts, but he’s getting off on it even more, the double-brand marked in bruises and bite-marks. She grinds her heel for a second, then releases him. “You’re disgusting, did you know that? You can clean my shoes for me as punishment.”
“What--” Seb chokes out, and Irene bends over, slapping the riding crop across his bare shoulders.
“Did I say you could talk?” she snaps. “I told you to clean my shoes. With your tongue.”
Seb hesitates, again, thinks I could snap your ankles, I could snap your neck, I could kill you in an instant, if I wanted to -- and then the lash descends and he arches his back, hissing.
“Now!”
And then he’s doing it, actually doing it, forcing himself onto his knees and then bending over to lick the black leather of her shoes while she traces the back of his head with the crop, her pale legs immobile, her expression - Seb imagines - a kind of vicious satisfaction, as though she were outlined in sunshine, gunfire, flickering flame, as though her brown eyes glinted standing smilling at her own handiwork. Pale and enraged.
*
Jim has months where Seb’s not allowed to touch him, with no discernible trigger or motive, moments when Seb’ll touch his shoulder and he’ll whirl around wide-eyed, or ignore him and stride ahead, or, on one memorable occasion, threaten him with a boxcutter. It’s not as though it’s a relationship, anyway; neither of them want a relationship (honestly, whatever about Seb, Jim’s barely capable of putting his claws away as it is). It’s just - there’s something about seeing Jim out of his immaculate tailoring, the cutaway collars and the silk ties and the perfectly-combed hair, something about his harsh breathing, something about leaving bruises dug into his white chest, something about him that Seb wants without quite being able to articulate what it is. And sometimes Jim will consent to being caressed, and sometimes he’ll brush Seb off, and once he flicked someone else’s blood into Seb’s eyes and laughed hysterically while Seb rubbed at his face frantically and shouted something about diseases.
And sometimes, then, Jim will turn to him, in a car on a stakeout, in an abandoned building, in any of the myriad ratholes or palaces they find themselves, and rake his nails down Seb’s arm, pull his head down, bruise his mouth purple and red, the look in his eyes something close to lust but not quite, something entirely more dangerous.
When they come together it’s a meeting of currents, a riptide.
Right now, Jim is stalking up and down the living room, his suit jacket thrown on a chair, tie loose. He’s on the phone, sounding cowed, in his Jim-From-IT accent. Seb wonders if it’s that ‘kingpin’ mobster; he’d seemed a bit dodgy, yesterday, a little more nervous than someone of his supposed pull had any right to be. He hangs up, sheds the face of the sheepish lad he assumes for people who want to assume he’s a sheepish lad. Cracks his neck. Rolls his eyes at the phone, and then the dark glint is back, and he looks over at Seb, grinning ear-to-ear.
“Seb, dear, pick out your favourite rifle,” says Jim. “We’ve been robbed, apparently,” covering the phone with his hand, pulling an exaggerated whaddaya gonna do face, contorted in a full-body shrug.
“Why’re you even bothering with them twats,” he says. “We knew they was gonna scarper. You even said so.”
“Well, come on, Seb,” Jim says, drawing it out like a petulant teenager. “Don’t be obvious. Tragedies require five acts.”
“And that’s what we’re doing is it?”
"My aim is to ensure that the bad end unhappily, and the good unluckily," Jim says, grinning, mock-serious. "And that, dear, that is what tragedy means."
*
When she’s satisfied that he’s finished, she crouches, cupping his head before forcing it back by his hair. “That wasn’t quite good enough,” she says, “rather too slow, I think; you shall have to be punished for this,” and Seb notices, with a jolt, that her eyes aren’t brown at all.
*
Jim Moriarty smiles at him and says, "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
And just like that he's sold. In all senses of the word.
*
One hit on an incompetent dealer in Shoreditch ends with rioting across Los Angeles and a plane going down over the Indian Ocean, bringing three hundred people with it. Seb’s given up on guessing just how Jim pulls the rabbit out of the hat, swallows swords with a wide smile, produces the right card every time. Of ever seeing what’s behind Door #2.
“How’re they even connected,” he says, watching the news, and Jim sprawls luxuriantly, hand heavy on his thigh.
“Linear A or Linear B, Sebastian,” Jim says, his thumb tapping rhythmically, incessantly. “Keep your eyes only on me; I’m the one in charge here.”
Later, the same rhythm on his spine, the same manic glow, the hideous spit and snarl. Three short, three long, three short. And a laugh that might be a howl, that might scare even Seb - if Seb were the kind of man to be scared.
*
“It’s always the public schoolboys,” Irene sneers. “Rugby on the pitch, playing at war together, and all the time, it’s just tiny little power-struggles, hmm? Who can piss the furthest. You’re not so powerful now, are you? That was a question.”
Waist tightly bound. Beautiful and unloveable. Something more than a woman: an idea, the most powerful contagion in the world.
“No.”
“No, what?”
*
And sometimes, Seb catches Jim watching him with an odd expression on his face. Not odd in the usual way - there’s usually something a little off about his face anyway, when he’s not being someone else. Something about all those exaggerated facial movements, the death’s head grin and the pantomime of shock, disgust, disdain, whatever. When he’s Jim Moriarty he’s a bad actor hamming it up, camp impersonation, a feral child exposed only to diagrams or runes - mouth turned down and scrunchy forehead means sad, mouth open and wide eyes means surprised, mouth shattered and bleeding means hurt - and told to impersonate them. The mockery a kind of self-reflexive mirroring, chilling because after long enough you start wondering if there’s anything back there, if the man at the centre of the panopticon is even vaguely human. If there’s true emotion at all, or just a thousand variations on deception. Power in the cards held tight to his chest.
But then there’s that expression, unguarded; Seb’s only caught it once or twice, and for a few seconds at a time. Something between wistfulness and disdain, hatred and curiosity. Jim absently works the tendons and bone of Seb’s hands, tracing the scars, flexing the fingers: not quite clinical, but nowhere near the tender pawings of a lover. Curious, as though there’s something he’s not quite getting here, as though there’s a pane of glass left between him and the world that he can’t quite figure out how to shatter. Presses harder and harder on a knuckle, until Seb wrenches his hand back, snaps, “Jesus Christ, Jim.”
And Jim looks at him with the expression of a god before the weakest of his creatures: disgust and power, mingled with something close to pity, something that vaguely approximates whatever passes for pity with Jim Moriarty.
*
"No, mistress."
“A boy, that’s what you are,” Irene says. “Just a little boy,” and then the crop comes down across his back with a swish and a smack. He thinks: I could break these cuffs in a second, snap her neck in the next, I could show her who’s really in charge here.
He knows he won’t. Because yeah, she’s got the power here, but all power is freely ceded for a man like him. He’s only giving her an IOU, a cheque that’s going to bounce, for a power given long ago to a man who has the world at its knees unknowingly. Trading himself for something greater, or at least something stronger; Linear A or Linear B.
*
And Jim presses forward until his nose just brushes Seb’s, and says, entirely too hungry, “Did that hurt, Seb? Did it?”
Looking for something: maybe, like Seb, waiting for the blood to start. Like a magician before the crowd, waiting for the applause that is rightfully his. Or maybe just discipline.
And then: “Did you like it?”
*
A/N: The ‘that is what tragedy means’ line is from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The cuckoo-clock mini-speech Jim gives is from The Third Man.