The Ceremony of Innocence (Fourth Fic in The Cold Song series) (2/2)

[eldritchhorrors]

When John woke it was evening, and he had the slight headache he always had on the few occasions he’d gone to sleep crying. His face felt tight where the tears had dried and his eyes were puffy. He hadn’t cried for himself when he’d been injured and returned home to nothing but a bedsit and despair, yet he could cry for Sherlock and not even know the reason why. He had no idea what had happened to Sherlock, but seeing Sherlock in that much emotional pain, when Sherlock had such a hard time conveying any emotion...Sherlock’s tears had inspired John’s own. He didn’t even find that sort of thing peculiar anymore.

He turned on his side, searching with his hand, but Sherlock was already gone, the bed cold where he had curled up into John.

John tugged off the shirt he’d slept in and pulled on one of Sherlock’s few jumpers. He went to the toilet and splashed cold water on his face to make himself feel more human. He tried to avoid the mirror, but what he did catch was not reassuring. He hadn’t looked this drawn since post-Afghanistan pre-Sherlock days.

He’d told himself before that he couldn’t care too much, that this would break him if he did. He’d told himself that him and Sherlock was probably a temporary thing that he shouldn’t read much into. Stinginess with the emotional investment, he’d cautioned.

He’d thought he’d found that balance.

What rubbish.

When John exited Sherlock’s room he’d presumed he would find the flat empty. Instead, Sherlock and Mycroft were standing at polar ends of the room in a silent, icy detente. Sherlock was at the window tracing the hoarfrost with a long finger, wearing a John Cage t-shirt and a pair of plaid pajama pants. Mycroft was close to the front door, but when John entered he moved further into the room as if he was no longer unsure of his welcome.

“I brought the file.”

“Current?” Sherlock raised his eyebrow, trying for normality, but the expression on his face gave away his fragility. “Or older?”

“Current.” Mycroft frowned and looked down at the manila folder in his hand as if he was looking through it, making John realize that Sherlock was not the only one who was affected. “It has information on the two most recent victims. Ava Williamson and Olivia Smythe. Their families--”

“Don’t.” Sherlock whipped around, glaring. “I can’t--”

And John was suddenly damned tired of the secrecy. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

Mycroft and Sherlock looked at each other, sharing some silent conversation that ended when Sherlock tore his eyes away, looking angry. “You tell him.”

Mycroft stuck his nose in the air. “Can’t, or won’t?”

“Don’t start that again. That became old years ago.”

“We don’t have time for this. He could add another victim at any moment. Your inability to face--”

“Pfft!” Sherlock blew Mycroft a raspberry and stomped off, past John and into his room, slamming the door behind him. There was a quiet snick of a lock and then nothing.

John looked at Mycroft expecting him to leave, but Mycroft just sighed, then sank down into the nearest chair where he put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. It was the only time he’d ever seen Mycroft deliberately vulnerable, and if the Queen had taken a naked skinny-dip in the Thames John wouldn’t have been more shocked. Mycroft ran his hands through his hair until it stood up like a gingerish halo, then looked up at John.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Still unhappy with me?”

Mycroft huffed. “That’s the very least of our problems. Despite what my brother has implied, I’m neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. I don’t know how much he’s told you. I don’t know where to start.”

“Is this personal?”

“Is this-- he hasn’t told you anything at all?” Mycroft’s look of surprise was an uncomfortable mimicry of Moriarty’s surprise face.

The truth was that Sherlock was never forthcoming with anything personal unless asked a direct question. And John wasn’t good at asking direct questions because he learned early on that Sherlock would answer them. Sometimes in hideously unnecessary detail. “You might say that.”

Mycroft took off his suit coat, tossing it across the coffee table. He leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes, looking weary. Older. Sadder. “He didn’t stay silent because he didn’t want you to know, John.” Mycroft shook his head. “He didn’t say anything because he still hasn’t faced it. It’s been almost twenty years.”

“Then you do it.”

Mycroft nodded, but kept his eyes closed even as he brought his fingers together in the same posture John often saw Sherlock employ. Family trait, then.

“It is the same thing with the recent victims’ families. He doesn’t want to hear about them, not because he lacks empathy, but because he has too much.” Mycroft sighed. “The lies we tell ourselves are the most revealing. Sherlock tells people that he doesn’t care. What does that say about him?”

“I dunno. What does that say about you?”

Mycroft was Mr. Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth and went on as if John hadn’t spoken. “Sherlock is not very good at lying in the long term. Even to himself.” Mycroft paused, thinking, and when he spoke again the question seemed random and tangential. Much like the Holmes brothers. “Do you enjoy Sherlock’s violin?”

Stupid question. John had a soul after all. “He’s an amazing violinist. He could be a professional.” John couldn’t help the pride that bled into his voice. It was always like that. He couldn’t help but praise Sherlock’s accomplishments. It was like they belonged to John, because Sherlock was John’s.

Funny then, that it had started during that first meeting, as if John had already known who possessed whom.

“Sherlock’s an adequate violinist. He was an amazing singer, though.” Mycroft’s eyebrows twisted up for a moment before he smoothed them back into the zen mask he was trying to maintain. “Sherrinford was the violinist.”

John suddenly had an inkling of where this was going, a little churn of horror deep in his belly telling him what was what, but he had to ask all the same. “Sherrinford?”

“Our sister.”

“Oh. Shit.” John sat down hard. He had expected something bad, sinister even, but nothing of this caliber.

“Sherlock’s twin sister.”

“He’s...how did he...he’s so sensitive.”

“He didn’t. He imploded.”

“Tell me.”

“They were nine and a half. I was supposed to be watching them. But I was seventeen, and I wasn’t born in a three piece suit. I was...”

“You were typical.”

“As typical as a Holmes can be.” Mycroft’s mouth quirked up. “I was lucky. I got the brains from our father and our mother’s social grace. Sherlock was much less functional as a boy. Obsessed with truth and numbers, morbid, oversensitized, sometimes violent, major problems with food. Stand-offish with almost everyone.”

“And Sherrinford?”

“Despite being fraternal twins, they looked almost identical. She was much more like me, however.”

“So not autistic.”

“No. A prodigy, but much more aware of people and society. Still, Sherlock adored her. She was the only person he would really interact with. And she taught him how to mimic normal behavior.”

John started at a sudden thought. “He blames you, doesn’t he? That’s what that was about.”

“He blames a lot of people. Our father. The police.” Mycroft leaned back in the chair with a powerful exhale. “But me most of all. I don’t think you quite understand his obsession with lying. I’d taken responsibility for them, said I’d watch them.”

“And yet...”

“And yet.”

“When he plays the violin, you flinch.”

Mycroft managed a glare, but it was half-hearted. “I don’t go poking my fingers into your bullet wounds, do I?”

“Sorry.”

“Then quit poking at mine.” Mycroft nodded to Sherlock’s violin case. “That’s hers, you know. He took it up, after. He still sang...for a while. Bass-baritone. Sang Purcell beautifully. He could have had an amazing career. It was sudden -- shocked everyone because he could have been another Bryn Terfel.”

“He was that good?” Not that John doubted it. He couldn’t imagine Sherlock not excelling at whatever he threw himself into. He could easily imagine that voice turning into song, deep and rich and just as abrasive and challenging as Sherlock himself.

“Incredible. Which is what makes his defection such a savage waste. With hindsight there were signs, but at the time it seemed an abrupt change. As much as he seems obsessed with crime now, he had been just as invested in music. He didn’t have a plan B, so his self-destruction became much more apparent without school or a boyfriend to hide behind.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was just about to finish his degree in physics and musical performance at RCM and Imperial College.”

“I thought he was a chemist.”

“Our father was a chemist, and Sherlock did read chemistry first. But he couldn’t resist the combination of physics and opera.” Mycroft smiled. “His performance of Look Through The Port is incomparable. And he was the best Cold Genius I’ve ever witnessed. When he left he was singing Balstrode in Peter Grimes. Are you familiar with Britten?”

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream, right?” His opera knowledge had increased greatly during his tenure at 221B, but it was still patchy.

“Yes, but I meant in a more general sense.”

“Not really, no. I did clarinet- lots of Brahms and Mozart.”

“Then I think you have an appointment with itunes, tonight. It would deepen your understanding of Sherlock if you examined Britten’s entire oeuvre. It shows where he was at when he chucked it all away.” Mycroft sounded bitter for a moment. “He liked baroque opera, but later on he became fascinated by modern, atonal, dissonant work. It seemed to unhealthily mirror his personal life.”

“Victor Trevor?”

“Yes.” Mycroft drummed his fingers together for a moment and frowned. “When he began to wean himself from it and became interested in the works of Britten, I thought it was his university’s influence, that he had turned a corner. I was happy for him-- at first. That was before I came to realize what it meant.”

“Which was?”

“Britten wrote about unique, excluded or misunderstood individuals-- his favorite theme was a loss of innocence.”

“That fits.”

“Sherlock tried to remove himself emotionally and he began to embrace Britten because of his themes. You should have seen him in that last production. There’s a line that I remember, burned into my brain because of the way he delivered it.” Mycroft paused to take an audible breath before adding, “When horror breaks one heart, all hearts are broken.”

“Profound.” And sad. And truer for it.

“I think I knew then, that he was going to toss it all away.” Mycroft had a far away look on his face, and John couldn’t get over how human he looked in that moment. “All hearts are broken. It’s a good summation of the past two and a half decades.”

“I’m sorry.” And he was. It was obvious that Sherrinford’s death was the catalyst for Sherlock’s downward spiral. It explained so much -- the drugs, the misanthropy, the aversion towards caring for anything and everything not within his own head. He didn’t just claim sociopathy. He hoped for it, wanted it, like it would make everything alright. Sherlock, the very genesis of fake it till you make it.

“Playing Balstrode, but so hungry when he looked at Grimes.  I could see how much he wanted that for himself. Act II, Scene II, Grimes wanting a normal life but too damaged to grasp it.”

“That’s hard for me to imagine. He seems so confident.”

“Oh, he is. That’s no act. But emotion was haunting him so he did what very few people are capable of. He excised it.”

“Instead of dealing with it.”

“In the process he didn’t just remove emotion, he removed his voice.”

“Christ. He deleted it, didn’t he?”

“He tried. He’s tried to delete a lot of things. He stopped singing, however. I haven’t heard him sing in more than a decade.”

“He shows emotion.”

“To you, perhaps. Britten once said that he portrayed the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual. And Sherlock is quite the vicious individual.”

“Don’t talk about him like that when he isn’t here.” John hated this, the fact that so many people made judgements about Sherlock’s mental and emotional health when they never had the true picture of the man. Even his own brother, the brother that seemed colder, harder and more remote than Sherlock had ever appeared. “You say you know him, but I don’t think you do. Not anymore.”

“I don’t know what you mean. He is listening.”

“You’re so sure...”

Mycroft raised his voice slightly. “He can’t declaim in the lower octave of his range.”

The door muffled his voice, but Sherlock’s exclamation of “filthy liar,” was perfectly coherent.

“Prove it.”

“Get out.”

“Wishy-washy an octave below middle C.”

“You own a Kenny G album.”

“You liked Metal Machine Music. And I do not.”

John cut in to the childish debate. “As fascinating as these revelations are, why are you telling me everything? I appreciate it and I’m honored that you shared something so personal, but this isn’t like you. You keep things close, no matter what.” John pointed at the folder that Mycroft had placed on the table next to his jacket.

Mycroft pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because they are related and the choice to keep silent has been taken away from me; because the killer wrote something profoundly disturbing.”

John reached for the file, flipping through it till he reached a photo of the bloody words and the mad strokes around it. “The notes here say that it has religious overtones, probably cult related.”

“As much as I hate to agree with my brother’s assessment of people in general, they really aren’t the sharpest tools employed by the government.”

John raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to explain.

“O amnis, axis, caulis, collis, clunis, crinis, fascis, folks, bless ye the Lord.”

“A prayer?”

“A vintage Latin lesson recitation. One with pederast overtones.”

“Not surprising. It doesn’t exclude the idea of a cult, though.”

“It’s also a line from Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.”

“Oh.” John thought about it for a moment, all of the ramifications becoming apparent, and his stomach pitched off a cliff. “Oh.”

“Exactly.” Mycroft looked tired, but determined. “He knows who Sherlock is. He knows who Sherlock was.”

Not just knew, but knew him to the core. “And he’s killing other girls as a what...taunt?”

Mycroft inclined his head. “Just like he killed Sherrinford.”

--- --- ---

Sherlock put his hand on the doorknob, but it took an act of will to turn it and face reality. He didn’t even think to exit his room until Mycroft had left, ostensibly to oversee some avenue of research, more likely because he wanted Sherlock to emerge and interact with someone, even if it was John. Mycroft might not approve of John’s relationship with him, but John was all Sherlock had at the moment.

This was intolerable.

He knew he needed to figure out how to work on this case without devolution into emotional chaos. Without some measure of distance he could not function properly. He wasn’t seeing the criminal or the crime. He was seeing the victims. Molly, Niamh, Charlotte, Ava, Olivia. He was seeing Sherrinford. And to a lesser extent he was seeing himself.

He couldn’t think.

He needed...he needed...distance. Order. Tea. A touch. Quiet. A respite from Pain. Cocaine. John.

He closed his eyes, trying to find the rationalism that defined his life. This was no longer the work. It was personal. And even when they caught the man responsible, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. The most hollow kind of triumph. He wouldn’t be crowing his brilliance, he would be mourning the loss of something infinitely brighter.

It was a trial when it had always been a joy. Did the killer know that he was ruining this as thoroughly as he had ruined almost everything else Sherlock had held dear? Was that his goal? Did he destroy two more families just to hurt Sherlock, or was Sherlock’s deconstructed state merely a bonus?

Sherlock opened the door, but taking a step into the hall was a harder thing. John was looking at him, and for the first time in recent memory Sherlock couldn’t meet someone’s eyes. John. John, who was infinitely bright as well.

“Come here.” John was sitting on the sofa. His voice was moderate and thankfully normal; Sherlock wasn’t sure what he would do if John decided to coddle him. “Please.”

He felt like going back to the safety of his bedroom, but his feet betrayed him by moving forward anyway, until he was standing in front of John.

“C’mon.” John tugged his arm, pulling Sherlock into the seat next to him, then prodding Sherlock into laying down, his head in John’s lap. They’d sat like this before, so it was familiar instead of the babying he’d feared. Sherlock closed his eyes and didn’t even fuss when John began rubbing his head. John. JohnJohnJohnJohnJohn.

When John finally spoke, it wasn’t quite what Sherlock was expecting. “So. Opera.”

Sherlock startled, then laughed despite the lack of humor. “Oh, do shut up.”

John just twisted a lock of Sherlock’s hair into a corkscrew. “It’s just that I always pictured you as a tiny detective, not a petite Pavarotti.”

“This is why I didn’t tell you. Endless snarking.” Sherlock sniffed, because that should be obvious.

“That’s not what Mycroft said.”

“Ham-fisted segue. And what does Mycroft know anyway?” Less than nothing. Mycroft, who prided himself on being the ‘normal’ one, led a life completely devoid of any richness or happiness.

John stilled his hand but didn’t pull it away, cupping Sherlock’s skull in its strong cradle. “I only know what he told me.”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“Never?”

“Ever, more like.” Therapy was the answer, in theory, but in actual practice there was most likely no therapist alive that could deal with Sherlock or the issues that needed addressing. Idiots, all.

“But you don’t have that luxury anymore.”

“I know.” Sherlock turned to his side, pressing his face into John’s stomach. “I know.” John.

“So why don’t you start with me?”

If he were going to tell anyone the secret workings of his innermost mind, the things he kept quiet, hidden, wrapped up in cotton wool and sealed away in a nameless box, the emotions kept under heavy seal, the gravity of them pulling him in no matter how much he tried to delete, it would be John.

It had to be John. He couldn’t see himself having this conversation with Lestrade, or even Mrs. Hudson.

“He lied, you know.”

“Mycroft?”

“And not just about watching us.” Sherlock took a steadying breath. “He lied just now. He always lies. Leaving us vulnerable so he could get fucked isn’t the only reason for the divide between us.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Don’t turn boring on me now.”

“Empathy, not pity.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Don’t be a twat.”

“Which brings us back ‘round to Mycroft. Father liked him more.”

“Is that it? The great sibling rivalry secret?”

“Maybe I should rephrase. My father, the celebrated chemist, the man I adored and tried to emulate above all others, couldn’t stand the sight of me because I looked too much like his dear, dead baby girl. Happy?”

John sucked in air, and Sherlock could feel the muscles in his abdomen tense against his cheek. “No.”

“Mummy was fragile on her best days, and completely unable to cope with any level of grief, let alone the death of a child.”

“So you were left alone.”

Sherlock snorted. “I wish. I was left to Mycroft, who tried to make everything up to me. It was wretched.”

“You got away as soon as you could.”

Sherlock turned to look up at John. “Wouldn’t you? If I stayed at home I was a victim. At uni I could make myself into someone who wasn’t defined by...things I no longer possessed.” A sister. A heart. There were other people tonight who must have had the same dessicated reaction to a fresh wound, but his inclusion in a widening club brought no comfort.

John touched Sherlock’s face with a fingertip, tracing his cheekbone, tickling the edge of his eyelashes enough to make him blink. ”Will you tell me?”

Sherlock stared straight up at the ceiling. “We were outside. In a field. Near the road.”

“Surrey?”

“The most repellingly quotidian, boring bit of Britain. I had to make my own fun, and I had an overwhelming interest in insects at the time. Especially bees.” John had seen the plethora of books Sherlock had on the subject, had even looked over them himself. Sammataro and Avitabile’s Beekeeper’s Handbook and Root’s ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture had interested him most. As did Sherlock’s carefully pinned and framed specimens. Sherlock had heard, as a child, that Einstein had said when the bees died humanity had only two years to live. Utter rot, and not just due to the false attribution, but there had been a grain of truth that had fascinated him, and still fascinated him to this day. Besides, bees were common in Surrey. Grand opera and challenging murders were not. “I had only turned away for a moment. I was...” Researching. Experimenting. Cataloguing. “...playing.”

“Someone took her.”

“It happened quickly. I turned around and she was gone. She’d been near the hedge that flanked the road. There was the slam of a door, the boot most likely, and all I saw was the back end of a beige Vauxhall Cavalier saloon car. One of the most common cars at the time. No plates. Nothing to deduce about it. As bland and informative as rice pudding.” Sherlock’s Adam’s apple seemed to grow two sizes too large.

John, who felt for people he didn’t know on the very best of days, looked stricken. He looked like he was trying to find words, but Sherlock had heard every variation on the theme of sorrow and loss, and didn’t want to hear the same from John. “She was missing for a week and a half.”

“The...the same?”

“Similar. The same killer, certainly. My parents thought I was going to go insane, but all I knew was that I could not function without her.” An understatement. He didn’t know how to convey the horror of that time. The waiting. The hoping. Then the hopelessness when she had been found. Discarded like she had been nothing instead of everything. Just thinking about it made his brain want to eat itself like the world serpent. If he couldn’t think about it he couldn’t feel it.“They didn’t want to tell me the details.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I snuck in to the police station.”

“What?”

Sherlock didn’t know why John persisted in cultivating an air of surprise. “I’m a very good actor when I wish to be. Even then.” He’d wandered in, teary-eyed with some blubbery, trumped up tale of a missing dog. Pulling the heartstrings of the feeble-minded officers manning the front. “It was surprisingly easy for a small boy to sneak in to homicide.”

John snorted.

“I wish that I hadn’t.” Sherlock tilted his head towards the file that still sat on the table. “It was almost the same. A little less elaborate. There had been three other murders in a similar vein. The tool used for strangulation was different, but the rope to bind them was exact. As was the cutting tool he used to...” Sherlock stopped, feeling lost, running his hand over his throat.

“She was strangled with a tie, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“And they found...nothing?”

“Not a trace.” Sherlock pursed his mouth. “They found me screaming in front of the board of photos, and someone recognized me. Took me home in a cruiser-- took pity on me. But they made it very clear that I wasn’t wanted.” He scowled. “That was my first introduction to the idiocy of the police. Carl Powers was the second.”

“But you looked into it later.”

It was Sherlock’s turn to snort. “Of course. But they were right for once. Not a trace. An intelligent monster.”

“Then why are you so surprised that this has happened again?”

“Because she was the last. The killings stopped and the conclusion was that the murderer had either died, moved, or was incarcerated for an unrelated crime.”

“That was what? 1986? ‘87?”

“Yes.”

“And this new one, this was the second one that Lestrade had been called in on?”

Sherlock and John both looked at each other, each coming to the same realization. Sherlock sat up suddenly, grabbing John by his ears and pulling him so close he could feel John’s breath. “How is it that Lestrade somehow missed the fact that a similar string of killings happened a quarter of a century ago?”

“He...didn’t?”

“Very good, John. Even Lestrade isn’t that much of a blunderer.”

“But he didn’t know you were connected.”

“Because someone didn’t want him to know. They didn’t want me to go in forewarned. Everything was staged-- not just the setting.”

“They wanted your reaction.”

“They got my reaction.” Sherlock furrowed his brow,, because these new deaths might have been engineered just to get his attention.

“He was watching you.” Understanding bloomed on John’s face. “He was there. Someone was on the inside.

“Yes.” A chance. The killer couldn’t hide forever.

“He’ll be long gone by now, but there’s a thread there for you to follow.” John’s face was suddenly incandescent with hope and faith. John, who knew that Sherlock could, would, find the sick bastard who had torn so many people apart.

John. JohnJohnJohnJohnJohn.

Sherlock had been in such upheaval lately, mental turmoil where there had been only-- no. Call it what it was. He’d been in emotional turmoil, and putting away his feelings until they were forgotten was no longer a valid, working solution.

John was at the center of the maelstrom, a simple, ordinary figure at the eye of a hurricane. He had blithely entered Sherlock’s life and proceeded to take it over centimeter by centimeter, until Sherlock was grasping only tatters of his independence (loneliness.)

Sherlock pulled John in to a kiss, putting everything he couldn’t articulate into it though he kept the connection soft and non-aggressive. He wanted to take all of his heartbreak and sorrow, all of his time alone and bereft, and let John transmute it. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was the only vivid point of color in a world gone to ash. John’s brightness wasn’t like Sherrinford’s. Hers had been the warm gold of the sun. It nurtured, it warmed. John’s was the hot, dense dot before the big bang. Powerful. Explosive. All-consuming in the aftermath. Too much to be contained, like Sherlock’s head.

He buried his face in John’s shoulder and breathed him in, wanting to say so much, for once not knowing how to say it, just that it needed to be said. He didn’t know if it was simply alexithemia, or if it was the overload of feeling that he was working through. Everything felt foreign; the pain, the dark undertow of emotion, even this burgeoning longing for John. Everything that he had kept bottled tight had become pressurized enough to burst at once, the new murders creating an open valve.

There were things that demanded a voice, independent of Sherlock’s brain, but he kept them swaddled tight. He knew this was not the time to talk about his (their?) inchoate love. And anything but comfort John would react to with horror, as if this personal nadir negated any informed consent.

Still, he had to try. John had to understand because Sherlock didn’t know what would come next. He was stumbling blind in this.

John needed to know. John. JohnJohnJohnJohnJohn.

“John...you...” Sherlock rested his forehead against John’s cheek. Poor John, who looked unsure and worried, solid and dependable.

How do you tell someone that they are everything?

“Maria Callas’ voice was far from perfect. Flawed.” Sherlock spoke softly in John’s ear. “It deteriorated rapidly.”

“Yes?” John looked befuddled at the sudden change in subject, the tangent Sherlock’s thoughts had taken, but he remained patient, used to it, and having it explained to him.

“Everyone knows who Maria Callas is. Everyone. She will be a star forever.”

“You’re being opaque.”

“And you are being obtuse. But that is the point entirely. You are far from perfect. Flawed.” Sherlock hugged him close as if he were about to be snatched away . “But there will never be another like you.”

--- --- ---

The next fic is A Drawing-down of Blinds.

If you are interested in any of the music used in this series, I have a post with all of it HERE.