[holmes big bang] maintaining inertia part iii
Title: Maintaining Inertia, Part III: Be Human
Pairing: Developing Holmes/Watson (more than if-you-squint, but mostly developing feelings)
Word Count: 20,500(?)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, minor swearing, minor violence, minor slash, Americanisms
Notes: snicks_chan beta'ed for me and she is amazing! dwg Mixed for me and she is also amazing!
It's set in Equilibrium's Libria and acknowledges several of the movie's plot elements, but is not a direct crossover. In other words, John Preston is Sir Not Appearing in This Big Bang.
Summary: Emotion is dangerous. At the cost of their own happiness, the people embraced Prozium, a world-saving drug designed to suppress the root of all the world's problems: feeling.
The Grammaton Cleric is a juggernaut of peace-keeping, trained to eliminate the resisting “sense offenders” and destroy all remaining aspects of culture that might tempt humans into feeling again. Sherlock Holmes, praised for his unorthodox spontaneity and lighting-fast thinking, is one of the most dangerous and efficient Clerics around. But when his roommate is accused of sense offense, the train comes off its rails, and Holmes finds his world less linear, his actions less commendable, and his Prozium less and less appealing.
VII.
“What?”
Holmes knew that he had been cultivating a sense of disbelief for the past several hours. He had denied Watson's involvement with the resistance, had killed men defending this man, singular, who he now knew, undeniably, was a traitor.
It was like being slapped in the face with his betrayal. What was Watson thinking, bringing him to this place? It destroyed anything he had ever earned as a Cleric. What could Watson expect him to do, except stop at absolutely nothing to burn this place down like the den of rebellion it was? It was his duty to turn these tunnels to cinders, and all the people who came with it.
“I think this is the only place you'll find where you won't be summarily arrested and incinerated for missing your doses. And...” Though he couldn't see Watson's face, he sensed his hesitation. “And I trust you.”
He thought he might have made a noise, but Watson made no move to acknowledge it. A sense offender like Watson had no trust in Father's words, but he could trust one of the men who had been trusted with upholding them.
“You can't go back there, Holmes. They won't have you. I think if you just-”
Watson was skirting something unsaid as though it was painful. Holmes had heard such blathering so many times before, every time he managed to corner an offender in a lie, managed to drive them into lying and terror.
And he was ashamed to see that same stumbling in his flatmate, and to realize that he was beginning to stumble, off his interval for less than a day. The discomfort with the stumbling led to more stumbling and more shame - a harmful cycle.
Some sharp and piercing clatter traveled down one of the myriad branches of tunnels off of the main room. Watson, who had seemed on the verge of saying something else stumbling and uncomfortable, went snap-taut and leaned in the direction of the noise.
“Hello?” A woman's voice followed the clatter, made tiny by the surrounding metal. “Lights are on.”
Watson let out a hiss of noise and syllables that sounded less like words and more like floundering. “Down here!” he called, and the woman drifted closer, first a shadow on the light cast by the lamp and then as the noise of her heels on the floor panels. When she rounded the corner, Holmes saw that she was in the middle of dressing in prohibited clothing. She already wore a green skirt that fell, all too short, just below her knees and was pulling on a tight, shiny blouse, working around the strap of a deteriorating handbag. Holmes attempted to look away quickly from her immodesty, but she drew it back immediately with a squeal:
“John! Hi! You're alive.” The woman came forward to throw her arms around Watson's shoulders in a loose embrace. She wore her hair loose, and it seemed shiny even in the underground's dingy, lackluster glow.
“That was subtle, Irene,” Watson said, returning the embrace with one arm and talking into the side of her head. “Do you always go about yelling down halls like that? Do you have a death wish?”
The woman nestled her chin on his shoulder, her scrutinizing eyes never leaving Holmes. “I figured unsavory and tasteless individuals would smash the lamp instead of turning it on,” she said, withdrawing and thumping him tenderly on the arm. “You look terrible, by the way. Who is this?”
Holmes wondered if instant suspicion and dislike of everyone you first met was common for emotional people. It was another reason to secure a dose as soon as possible, so he could think straight, and not become so consumed in how he felt about Watson's sense offending co-conspirators, or what would happen to Watson when Holmes inevitably returned to the city.
“Ah! Holmes, I'd like you to meet Irene Adler. Irene, this is my flatmate. He...had an incident this morning.” Holmes rolled his shoulders under their combined scrutiny, feeling flushed, unwittingly, not knowing what could cause the sudden blaze of heat creeping up the nape of his neck.
Irene leaned forward to get a closer look, both hands on her hips. His eyes were drawn briefly to the immodest cut of her chosen dress, and Holmes nearly recoiled.
“We've heard a lot about you, sir,” she said, her lips a sharp, pouty line. “It's nice to meet you.” She had a glimmer in her gaze that Holmes had never seen before, in regular people and sense offenders alike, wild and unflinching and raw like some wild animal that ran loose across the Nether by the city barricade.
“Don't scare him, Irene,” Watson muttered, chastising. He was a different man here, outside of the flat. He was animated in ways Holmes had never seen, and the way his features shifted into expressions - wide responses and small smiles and little incredulous looks at Irene Adler and her cleavage - were frightening in just how unguarded they were. Outside of interrogations, he had never spent so much time interacting with a sense offender, and he had never been around one that wasn't frightened or angry.
He would never have expected such behavior of his roommate, not a few days ago when their life was passing undaunted on its rails. How he failed to read the signs, how he could have let this go so far, go on so long...
“He doesn't know what fear is.” Irene rolled her eyes until the whites flashed, hissing a puff of air between her teeth.
Watson ignored her. “Irene works for the Spectator. She's the nearest thing we have to a woman on the inside right now.”
“Working subliminal messages into your friendly government pamphlet on the daily.” Seeing how pleased the woman was with herself made Holmes automatically suspicious. “I heard you caught my moonshine bit. You're very clever, Cleric.”
As she turned to walk away, Holmes found himself calling after her until she stopped in the doorway. “Not clever enough to turn you in, Miss Adler.”
“But clever enough to stop taking your Prozium, love. Oh, John. I picked this up for you today.” After some rummaging, Irene fished a small metal rectangle from her bag and passed it over. “I knew you were looking for one. Use it wisely.”
It was a photo frame, as far as Holmes could tell. He had seen and confiscated and destroyed a few of them before, but they seemed rarer now, many of them having been broken down, picked apart for small, material details. They weren't strong enough for hinges, but they broke down into decent handles, latches. The functional casings of light fixtures. Finishing screws and nails.
Watson turned the gift over in his hands, inspecting it. It was scuffed and a little bent, the antique finish rubbed away or peeling in places, the structure weakened and cracked. He touched his finger to the glass - remarkable, Holmes thought, that it was free of cracks - and ran it down, drawing a line in the thin powdering of dust.
“Irene, where did you find this?” he asked, frowning at the small frame like he had never seen anything quite like it.
“Stole it,” she called over her shoulder, swaying her way out of the room.
“Irene...”
“What? It's not as though anyone else was going to be using it.”
Watson pressed a palm to his forehead. “Must you do that?”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “I like the way it makes me feel.” And then she was gone.
Holmes was hardly aware he was staring until Watson brushed a hand to his upper arm. The touch was brief, and Watson pulled his hand away as soon as Holmes took a step to the opposite side.
“Why don't I give you the grand tour?” Watson offered. “I can't say there's much to see. We're more organized than you would think, but...Well, I can't say I ever thought I'd be walking you around the place.”
His gaze still drawn past the threshold and after Irene's retreating back, Holmes hastily agreed.
The tour constituted little more than a walk through the underground. It was nearly devoid of life. Irene and Watson could not be the entire resistance, Holmes knew, but he reasoned that they were not as a likely to hole up in the same location. More likely than not, they hadn't been there for some time, fearing the location compromised or, too clever to be caught like a teeming sewer full of rats, found safety in separating themselves into smaller hovels.
It was stocked floor to ceiling with prohibited materials, old notebooks, file cabinets, and broken furniture. Holmes hadn't seen a wooden chair in months, and the sight of four of them stacked seat to legs was disarming.
“What is that?” Holmes asked. His hand fell, without prompt, to the sidearm at his waist.
“That's Gladstone,” Watson replied. “He's a Bulldog.”
“Dog ownership is prohibited both as an emotional temptation and to prevent the risk of infestation and disease such as rabies.” The automatic response came without prompting and Holmes could not deny the sudden urge to enforce it.
“He's not rabid,” Watson said without pause. “He's fat. Let's not wake him.”
Holmes had never considered himself much of a man for words, but he thought he might at least have something to say about this. Discovering that his roommate of two years was a sense offender. Being cornered and discontinuing his dosage. Discovering part of the resistance's underground network and unearthing a pile of contraband.
Eventually, he said, “This is all very illegal.”
Watson just laughed. “Here, come here. This is my office. Sort of. More of a store room, really, but I do have a desk.”
The desk was potentially the only uncluttered surface in the entire room. The office was filled with stashed contraband: stacks of novels filled each corner and lined the walls, towered up behind slanted canvases and covered paintings. There were instruments, colorful machines that Holmes could not place, and several bright blouses hanging on a line on the far wall. He was aware of Watson talking, pointing out the various tools and possessions littering the desk. Holmes felt his stomach flutter weirdly when he noticed the messy stack of medical texts and the sun-faded charcoal overcoat draped across the back of the chair, things that reminded him of his flatmate, who now seemed so far away from the animated, emotional stranger he now followed.
“...And this is Mary.” As he sat down at the desk, Watson pulled three old photographs from the main drawer of the writing desk. They were well-preserved, glossy-faced and shiny, save for the edges, worn down and fingerprint-faded from handling. Holmes took them with a consideration he had never paid to contraband before, suddenly aware of what value it might have to Watson - value that extended beyond monetary worth.
She was slender, soft-featured, pale. In the photographs, she was almost smaller than the average person, all narrow waist and soft, shy features and a feathering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her expression was nearly flat save for one corner of her mouth, which turned up imperceptibly and crinkled her cheek. Her blonde hair was just starting to come free from its business style, small tendrils falling from the bun and to her shoulders. She looked like anyone else in that picture, dressed in her black issue clothing, all high collars and long sleeves. He might have met her on the street or during his commute from work and never noticed a thing. He might never have known, unless she laughed or burst out with some unexpected display of emotion. If she smiled at him like that.
Mary wore black again in the second photo, but she seemed older, with longer, loose hair and tiny lines at the corners of her bright eyes. Photographs not pertaining to identification or legal purposes would have been prohibited by then, and she seemed almost gleeful in this knowledge, her easy smile caught eternally on the cusp of a laugh.
The third picture was the last one. Even without a date ascribed to it, Holmes could tell it from the others because it was so fresh, so colorful. The print paper felt crisp and new under his hand when he took it from Watson's hand; the woman in the picture was so vibrant and alive it made his throat hurt. She was smiling, a line of straight teeth just visible between her lips. She wore blue, and it was bright, like the color of the sky in hundreds of paintings he burned before.
She was brilliant, like some shining light, surrounded by those prohibited, vibrant colors, and even Holmes, who could not remember the last time he had found any person beautiful, could not deny that she was strikingly pretty. He entertained the idea, however briefly, of telling that to Watson.
“You knew she was a sense offender, didn't you?” he asked in his confession's place, and suddenly, instead of awed, he felt so very, very betrayed.
Watson looked at the ceiling, almost smiling, almost shaking. “I may not be as talented as you, Holmes, but I'm not unobservant.” He breathed in slow and even and exhaled with a shudder. “I didn't know at first. But later...The later it got, the harder it was to deny.”
He wondered how he ever could have missed it, how Watson ever could have hid all of this from him. Holmes had overlooked, somehow, this unbridled sadness and all the love that came with missing Mary. How Watson ever could have held it in, when Holmes sat here driven to trembling by a too-saturated photograph.
“She wrote me letters, you know,” Watson said, prying open the back insert of the picture frame Irene had given him. His voice was tight and unexpected, and in that moment, Holmes thought he might never get used to emotions.
“I wish I had been able to read them before.” Watson flexed his hands open and closed in a way that made his knuckles crack, filling in the spaces between his words.
The silence stretched taut between them. Holmes found himself unable to look away from the final photograph, crisp and fresh and real in his hand, Mary's smile piercing through the fine sheen of the paper.
Eventually, he had to hand it over.
It was too small to fill the whole frame, so Watson backed the photograph with another piece of paper, the dull, sterile white offsetting the brilliance of Mary's smile, of her clothing.
Placing the framed photo on his desk, Watson said, softly, “There.” Then: “Hey,” his voice wan, his thumb pressed to the corner of the frame.
Holmes had no idea how to process the unexpected heat building in his chest, at the base of his spine. It hovered in some unidentifiable grey area, something less than anger but deeper than grief. And, he thought, he might have been better off on Prozium after all, if he could throw this back in Watson's face, arrest him, and feel no guilt the next morning.
“You didn't turn her in.” It felt like an interrogation, the way he spoke, the challenge in his voice like taunting Vincent Spaulding all over again (Vincent Spauldling, who had probably been Watson's friend. Co-conspirator).
He felt Watson's knuckles go white more than saw them, felt the vibrations when he struck the desk with the base of his fist.
“Is that what I should have done?” And he had never heard that pitch before - not from Watson - the uncontrollable, wavering anger like he'd just body checked him against a wall and told him his feelings were wrong.
“I merely -” Holmes began, but Watson was there, still talking, cutting him off with a raise of his hand and the furiously increasing volume of his voice.
“- And why -”
“- was trying to inquire -”
“- because you're still up in your head -”
“ - if you didn't feel anything for her -”
“Then why did you bother saving me from custody?”
The office plummeted into icy silence almost instantly. Watson's face had gone red and his eyes pierced with a fury that Holmes could hardly recognized. The words hit him slowly; it took a while to send them through his mind and expect them to stop there.
The accusation hovering between them, heavy and bladed, Watson stood up and walked out of the office.
VIII.
Holmes was awake only a few hours later, his sleep plagued by strange jitters that kept his legs moving restlessly beneath the covers, untraceable muscle movements he hadn't seen since his training as a Cleric.
He tracked the time on the wall nearby, counting seconds into minutes. He would not sleep again, and the knowledge drove him from the comfort of his cot and into the chilly underground, through the dim lighting and the halls cluttered with contraband. So much of it was broken already, and yet he winced upon accidentally nudging over a glass vase with his foot, if only because it might draw more attention than he desired. He heard it splinter with the same, shattering crackle of glass he had heard countless times before, upon shattering countless shelves of illegal pottery. The shards cracked into smaller pieces beneath his heels, and the sound, the feeling of the breaking, had never been so pronounced. He tread with guilt on the splinters of the vase, wondering if he ought to clean them.
He avoided Watson's office, not caring to face the collection of records, the old gramophone, or Mary's picture smiling from its new frame, accusing in its pleasantness. She would taunt the years of work that were behind him now, her smile set to tear down Libria's foundations.
“Hey.” Irene's low, lilting voice rattled him. “Not trying to run away, are you?”
“If I wished to leave this charming basement, Miss Adler, I might have done it better than that.” The smile on his mouth felt foreign and slathered on.
Irene laughed, the noise startled and tinkling. “Did you just give me lip, Cleric, or are you trying to make a joke?” She laughed again, surer this time. “That's darling.”
She was feral even in the dark, perhaps more so now that the lights were dimmed and she was dressed for sleep, her dark hair a pile of curls. Everything she said to him read like a challenge, from the tone of her voice to the way she twisted the drawstring on her pants around her index finger like a tendril of her hair.
“Trouble sleeping?” She took a step forward, pulling at the drawstring as she did.
“Thinking. I am most productive in the early morning.” Holmes held his ground, though he felt compelled to step away, having never been so disarmed or intimidated by a sense offender before.
“No, you aren't.” Irene was shaking her head. “Don't they teach Clerics to lie? You're really bad at it.” She looked to one side, then the other, then cocked her head towards the other end of the hallway. “Come on. If you're not sleeping, you can join me for coffee.”
Caffeine was a disgusting substance, it turned out, and did nothing to brace the strange new overload assaulting Holmes in these wan hours of the morning, the suspended hours between midnight and dawn. Irene was on her second cup as he stared sullenly at the half-mug of liquid on the card table between them. The illegal beast slept at their feet, snoring every so often or scuffing his nails on the floor.
“So,” she chirped, “you and John had your first fight, huh?”
Holmes hoped the look he leveled at her conveyed the displeasure he felt, but his face still felt flabby and out of control.
“I could kill you, you know, and no one would know about it.”
“Gladstone would,” Irene said, nonplussed. She drained what was left of her beverage in a matter of seconds, the cords of her throat working in dainty, fluid motions. Now empty, the mug hit the table with a hollow, ceramic thud. “Are you still thirsty? I could get you some water instead, if you want. Or you could just suck it up.” When he stayed silent, she let out a small, uncomfortable laugh, rolling her eyes. “I'll get you some water,” she concluded, and did.
They kept their water in sealed, refrigerated containers (“The tap water probably isn't contaminated, but we like to be safe”) that Irene had to pull out from a cupboard behind the table. “Have you ever watched the sunrise?”
Holmes hesitated at the question, fearing he may have misunderstood. The query made no practical sense; there was no benefit to watching sunrises. It was a natural and mechanical phenomenon.
“Every morning,” he settled on finally. “The daily waking is correlated with dawn.”
Irene snorted. “So, that's a no.” Setting his cup down on the table, she reached out to grab onto his wrist, only recoiled when he slapped her hand away. “Okay, come with me.”
He followed her, swatting her hands away every time she made to grab him (until the final time, when he grabbed her wrist hard enough to leave a bruise, reminding her that he could shatter it if he so chose. She didn't grab him again afterward). The room they ended up in had a taller ceiling than the rest of the underground, and the windows - bare slats at maximum in every other room - were taller to compensate for the added height.
The overgrown downtown area of the barrens was just visible in the morning dusk, the taller business park buildings falling down and crumbling, the foundations of old houses hollowed out, burned and rotting.
Irene spread her arms wide and wiggled her eyebrows. When she glanced back at him over her shoulder, everything about her seemed playful and alive. The tall windows turned out to swing open when Irene unfastened a latch on the inside. She pushed the lower pane open with the flat of her hand until it slid out vertically, opening into a flat piece of yard where scraggly, almost-green grass was starting to grow.
“Climb out here, all right?”
“I don't think this is appropriate...”
Irene made the 'tsk'ing sound she seemed so fond of, urging him out with a roll of her eyes and a halfhearted snatch at his cup.
“Get out there.”
The dog had followed them in from the kitchen and watched them fussing with the window and started whining, his stubby tail pounding out an irregular rhythm on the floor.
The grass was damp and weak, a texture altogether unknown to him when he crawled out to sit on it. It was fighting to survive, patches of it gone dried up and shriveled where others remained a deep, sleek green.
“It's fighting,” Irene said, giving the ground a pat as she sat down beside him, handing over the half-full cup of water, which felt slick and cold against his palm. “I think sometimes it knows that all the grass in the city has died out already, and that kind of keeps it going.” She began chewing at a fingernail thoughtfully. “Of course if we come out here and take care of it then the sweeps will notice it and-” She pulled a face and left her sentence short.
He didn't want to be out there with her. He didn't want to be there, period. He wanted to tear the sky apart, fill the tunnels with earth, shake the city by the foundations until everything rumbled.
“So...” Irene glanced sidelong at him, rubbing at the back of her neck slowly. “You don't want to talk, I gather, but let me. Promise I won't be boring.” She leaned back on her hands, watching the line of white light cresting on the horizon. “I stopped dosing about three years ago. For about three weeks, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And what happens, those first few weeks, you feel guilty about some really weird things that you couldn't feel guilty about before. I reported a neighbor for laughing when I was fifteen and when I stopped dosing I cried about it for days.
“And you don't really get over that, but you learn to deal with it because otherwise, what's the point? You get really good at lying and pretending and thinking things through. But people sometimes bring that to the surface again.
“John's had less than two years to love Mary about five years' worth. It's been hard. For John. And that's rather hard to deal with, when you're not supposed to be feeling. You don't know what you're feeling and he has to deal with that, and that brings some stuff up. I don't think he wants to fight with you.”
A spiral of pink and orange was rising in the sky by then, and Holmes found it easier to look at than the woman sitting next to him.
“Why open yourself up to that? When we live in a world without sadness or rage or murder...”
Irene exhaled so heavily he felt her shoulders slumping next to him. “Because the happiness part is pretty much worth living for.”
The sun was spying on their conversation, just cresting in the distance as a sparse sliver of light, hazy and languid as those visible through oil.
“This has to stop,” Holmes said, and didn't quite know what he meant. The conversation. The feeling. This whole mess - this whole mess could stop. Confiding in a woman in the lot behind an abandoned underground. Putting an end to it was as simple as surrendering himself.
“Okay,” Irene said. “Well, if you're going to call in the cavalry you might want to do it before John wakes up. I don't think he'd let you leave as easy as I would. But here, look: this is the best part.”
There were at least eight colors bleeding together at the lowest lip of the horizon, where the sun was slowly rising unblocked by cloud or smog. It was vivid and unguarded like Mary's final picture
His cheeks felt different, spattered with something damp and hot.
Irene looked from him to the horizon and back again, starting. And then smiling, very slowly, the reaction hidden and mysterious.
“What is it?” he asked, and she just smiled. “What?”
IX.
Holmes didn't turn them in that day, or the next.
Watson was awake the time the sunset was over. The dog heard him before Holmes or Irene had the chance, letting out a tiny, gruff 'woof' that had Holmes back through the window before it could even clamber to feet and waddle off down the hall.
“Good morning, Gladstone.” Watson's voice was throaty with sleep and cheerful in a way that made Holmes all too aware of Irene's lecture. “What are you doing all the way down here?”
They met somewhere in the middle, between the room with the high ceiling and the one that functioned as a kitchen, where they fidgeted for thirteen seconds of silence. Holmes didn't apologize, even though he thought he might have genuinely felt sorry, however briefly.
All Watson said was, “I shouldn't have yelled,” but they seemed to understand each other. There couldn't be harm in lingering here a little longer, if only for the information he could gather. In time, he might even learn the position of the true resistance, and come to identify them on a personal level, understanding names, numbers, and the final plan for sabotaging the state.
What better way to gather information? It was simple enough to be obvious.
So Holmes never turned them in.
He knew he would never learn anything of value over the first few days. He discovered several yellowed manuscripts, translated from the original Greek, shelved on the wall of his temporary sleeping quarters. Historically relevant writings, at best, if only for their glimpse into what history should not be allowed to repeat.
Beneath the Greek, Holmes found poetry anthologies from the years before the First World War, which took him longer to get through. What good would poetry be to him, besides? There was nothing of value in the words, but he could admire it for its carefully constructed form. That structure could give otherwise innocuous phrases meaning seemed so innovative and so new, and he wondered how it could have escaped for everyday rhetorical usage.
After a while, the act of doing nothing began to drive him slowly mad. Trapped in the same network of tunnels every day slowly pushed him to explore farther and farther down to the line when he wasn't reading or otherwise occupied with Watson's company (for after the fight they had somehow reconnected and come again to a silent, fluid coexistence). He began to draw out the lay of the underground, its open and blocked passages, and slowly came to form a map of what streets might run above their heads.
Irene was there only half of the time. She was still employed with the Spectator, and, as she “didn't risk getting set on fire every time she stepped out the front door,” she still retained her normal housing. She would still arrive after the sun had set, however, sometimes still dressed in her everyday work drabs. Seeing her that way made Holmes realize what she had meant about being very good at lying. Before she left to sneak back into the city on the nights she stayed in the underground, Irene became an altogether different woman. Her face became pale and taut, her hair dull and lifeless, her mouth an immobile line. All of the wildfire was completely gone from her eyes, and she looked as if she'd never had a feeling before.
Holmes realized only four days into his stay in the underground that he absolutely hated it. There was nothing about it that suited her.
Watson outside of his government issue clothes was beginning to impress him, though. He had always known his flatmate to be an efficient and productive worker but he was truly in another element here as he darted from office to tunnel passage and back again with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, doing business that Holmes was not privy to. They engaged in more conversation over those four days than they had in the first four months of living in the same tenement building, though nothing about the conversations here seemed quite the same. Watson inquired after his reading or asked about the maps of the underground he was slowly but steadily compiling. They talked about Gladstone, who, it turned out, appreciated warmth and would spend half his nights asleep at the foot of the threadbare mattress Holmes now called a bed. He was not such a terrible beast, after all, though Holmes had still not deduced his exact purpose besides being very nosy, slobbery, overly affectionate, and warm.
On the fifth day, Holmes broke his self-imposed ban on entering the office (the most productive method of avoiding another argument about Mary he'd found) In all his time as a Cleric, he had never felt as though entering a room in which he possessed absolutely no power.
In Watson's office, he had none.
He saw the picture framed on the desk without looking for it when he tried to say his hellos, and realizing he still reacted towards it, still felt something whenever he looked at it, promptly turned to the side and pretended to be very engrossed in other contraband.
The books were more of the same - poetry and older medical texts and volumes on psychology that were tearing apart at the seam. Beyond the books he found the odds and ends and irreparably damaged things. There were dolls with tattered clothing and unrealistically beautiful smiles, too pretty and too happy in their expectations. Wallpaper swatches, calico cloth, instruments. The instruments especially had seen the wear of time and unfriendly elements. Even those that Watson had done his best to preserve looked tired and worn down, scarred by water damage, years of dust, and more years still of no one ever picking one up to play. Music provided absolutely no benefits when rebuilding a city.
Holmes lay his hand against the half-bent bow of a violin, which rested atop a pile of sheet music that had already started to dry out and disintegrate.
“I really thought we'd gotten all of these,” he admitted, unable to explain why this made him suddenly sad. “They might have been all gone, if only we had - if only we'd found them first.” He thumbed a string thoughtfully back and forth, found himself wincing when it nearly shattered at the pressure.
“We thought one day we might be able to find someone who could build new ones,” Watson offered. “So they got a chance to live a better life than this one.”
“If they were all gone, no one would even know what the were.” He didn't think he was talking to Watson anymore - but then, who else would he be talking to? What difference did it make if useless objects became extinct?
“No.” Watson was trying to smile. “But maybe somebody somewhere out there still misses them. I would like to hear one played, just once. Maybe it would make this prospect of being alive a little more bearable.”
He thought about picking up the violin, inspecting its anatomy and flaws, and then thought better of it. With the condition it was in, it was liable to split in two. Holmes swallowed and stepped away, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling the way he'd seen Irene do it and drawing his hands into the pockets of his borrowed, contraband clothes.
Grammaton Clerics did not cry at sunrises and broken violins.
“What do you know about the adrenal gland?”
He knew very little, it turned out, but the conversation that followed was enough to keep Holmes in Watson's office for hours.
By the seventh day, he had forgotten about turning them in to Father altogether.
Having Watson and Irene both gone was odder than Holmes had anticipated.
He might have left at any time without them there; he knew it and they both knew it. Either they were more foolhardy than they had ever let on, or they were honest about the trust they placed in him despite his potential danger (as though he was dangerous now, little more than a watchdog with his teeth pulled).
The dog was still there for company, but the dog...well, it was a dog, and it - he - didn't do much during the day. Gladstone slept all the time, it seemed, and Holmes could never hope to maintain such a lifestyle.
With Watsona and Irene gone for some indefinite amount of time, the underground was still and empty. There was nothing, not even phantom sounds he could hypothesize about, or strange shifts in the light he could track in some strange hybrid of paranoia and preparation.
Holmes went deeper down, into one of the tunnels where the broken furniture sat haphazard and forgotten. If each chair could be a person, each broken piece of wood an obstruction or other obstacle, perhaps he could place himself in a room with other men. Enemies. Training dummies. Breathing obstacles.
Chairs and humans were both weak in the legs. Structurally, it did a lot to undermine the functionality of either. But a crippled man could still fire a gun.
Weaponless, Holmes still went through the usual motions of a practice routine. Though the broken chairs were motionless, they provided better targets than open space, and he found he could fill in the remaining blanks with his mind. Crippling a target to eliminate its functionality, like splitting a chair in half, usually meant employing lethal force, or opening oneself up to danger in other ways.
He repeated the routine once more, and again, each time theorizing different movements for the chair-figures and their potential threats. It might be done, but there were so many volatile variables involved...Changing the kata required thinking in ways that threw away the sheer, rational mathematics that made it such a lethal force to begin with. After five hypothetical run-throughs, Holmes managed not to kill at least three of the chairs.
His body felt tired and overworked by the time he had finished a full training run. The walk back to the man underground center felt long and cramped, but helped to ease the ache out of his limbs.
Holmes came to a stop outside of Watson's office. It was dimmer than usual with most of the lights shut off, but he could still see his way inside, still trace the well-walked path around the accumulated contraband. Without much thought, he sat down in the chair parked at the desk, resting his elbows against a clear bit of writing area and looking, without much curiosity, at the books strewn about, the ones he'd glanced at only briefly while his roommate had been working.
And then there was Mary. She was just as brilliant as she had been before, Holmes found, to his dismay. He had hoped she might lose some of the shine with time, but somehow she seemed more beautiful now. Her smile looked half like a laugh in the low light.
“What did you see in him?” he asked the picture, and though he knew not to expect a response, he thought she might be listening to his query - and laughing, still, at him.
This had to be loneliness, whatever he was feeling. Only some exhausting, pointless emotion like that could compel him to speak to a photograph of a woman he'd never met, would never met, and would eternally find unidentifiable.
“Your husband -” Holmes drummed his fingers on the desk. “He's, ah, he's very difficult. But then, I suppose he wouldn't have been when you knew him. You liked him all right, though, I suppose.”
There was no sense in this, no reason. He was talking to a photograph of a dead woman. Holmes fought the urge to turn the frame face-down to the desk, so he wouldn't feel so undermined by a replicated smile.
“You were rather lucky though, weren't you?” he murmured. The photograph stayed silent, and Holmes decided there was nothing left to the conversation.
“I hope you haven't gone mad on us.” Watson was at the door. Holmes suddenly felt very guilty. “What were you doing in here?”
“Theorizing,” Holmes responded, leaning as far away from the desk as the chair would allow. “The underground is very mathematically symmetrical, did you know?”
This seemed a good enough answer and, thankfully, deflected any wonder Watson might have expressed at Holmes' presence unattended in his room, for his roommate did nothing more than tilt his head curiously to one side as though indulging in such a fascinating fact.
“I see,” he said, bemused. “May I put my things down?”
“Of course,” Holmes replied, sitting still in the chair for several seconds before it became apparent that he was in the way of this operation. “Yes. Of course,” he repeated, standing up and moving away from the desk and the damnable picture, looking elsewhere as though he might not focus on any one thing for too long a time.
This brought their paths strangely close together, so was the layout of the room and the assembly of the paths between the collected hoard. He leaned one way and Watson the other, and even then they managed to brush shirt sleeves and elbows. Watson was warm though the fabric of his shirt felt cold and stiff, and his wrist was well-defined and sharp beneath the cuff. For the first time in his life, Holmes felt the need to apologize for the collision. He cleared his throat instead, uncomfortably, and thought of the picture on the desk, and said nothing.
“Dinner should be on soon,” Watson said before the parted ways. Holmes almost thought he might have been prepared to call him back into the room for the briefest of seconds, but they separated without another word.
'I'm glad you're home,' he might have at least said. But what sort of weakness was that, to call this place home or take a separation of only a few hours with such difficulty?
It was strange, though, how happy he had been to see Watson, and how long ago the lonely afternoon felt.
He uncovered the plan entirely by accident, through no investigative attempt of his own. Watson and Irene welcomed him into it willingly, and where Holmes might have once taken the opportunity he simply fell in with them with equal willingness.
Irene returned early to the underground in a flurry of motion nearly alien to her while they were sharing lunch, throwing several rolls of paper onto the flimsy table between them.
“John,” she said, leaning over Holmes in a way that seemed to exclude them from the conversation. “Look at what a little bird dropped into my hands this morning.” When unrolled, the papers became one strange, interconnected network. There was an outline for the transportation routes across the city, with several notes and alterations filled in. Beneath that, a map of Libria's underground before the Nether was officially barred off, and a grid of the city streets above it. And finally...
“Is that the Palance of Justice?” The blueprint was brittle but perfectly preserved, white lines on blue paper. “Oh, damn,” Watson hissed, when Irene only smiled in return.
“This would have been a lot easier if you were still in good standing with your friends at the Tetragrammaton. Do you have any idea how lucky we would be if we could make this an inside job?” Irene moved to pinch Holmes in the left side, causing him to recoil into Watson's elbow. “Maybe you should have thought about it a bit before going in guns blazing.”
“I regret asking this already. What is it, exactly, that my presence in the Tetragrammaton would ease?”
Irene and Watson looked at each other for the better half of a minute, communicating only with their eyes. Irene broke contact first, looking towards the ceiling, and Watson turned to Holmes with his eyes hard and narrowed.
“We're going to kill Father.”
X.
“Oh!” Irene exclaimed, throwing her bag across her shoulder. “Storming the castle! This is going to be so exciting.” She looked from him to Watson and back again. “You could be twins right now. Stop giving me that look, both of you.”
Watson returned to the table. He leaned forward on his forearms and spread his palms out across the maps.
“Here's what we're thinking.” He ran his hand from map to map, tracing a route that ran through the underground, along a transportation route, and to the Palace of Justice. “This room up here in the corner is where Father's Voice lives. And we have evidence that Father's Voice and Father may not be separate entities.”
“You think Brother Moran is really Father?”
“We don't know for certain, but recent actions of the Librian government are very suggestive. Whenever Brother Moran is in session with the council for more than a few hours, Father's seat goes silent. There's nothing new. A few of our men on the inside
“That isn't right,” Holmes
The area of underground in front of them was filthy and unused, scarred, barred off in places by rusting metal grates, a filthy brown in contrast to the cleaner monochromes of the city overhead. Watson was already dirty, his knees and elbows scuffed and pressed with soil.
“This...” Watson stretched the word out as he looked around the intersection. “This is where we part ways.
“Do you know the way?” he asked, clammy palm pressed to Holmes' shoulder. “Do you need a light?”
“I think I can find it, old boy.” Holmes clapped his arm in return with a solemn nod, smiling uncomfortably. It was too strong and too sudden, and he forced himself to release Watson's hand lest concern override pragmatism.
“All right.” Watson nodded. “All right. Irene's with you.” Holmes could see, from the corner of the eye, the glint of mischief in her smile, the way she nodded enthusiastically along with Watson's plan. “I'll be getting the boys and bringing them along, so you've got - what, twenty minutes?”
“I've been able to trim it to seventeen-and-five,” Holmes interjected.
Watson paused, smiling crookedly beneath his mustache. He made a breathy noise that might have been a contained laugh, shaking his head incredulously.
“Seventeen-and-five, then. We'll give you the whole twenty, just in case.” He took a dented, miraculously still-functional watch from his pocket and glanced at it. “I best be going, if I'm to make sure the right shipment goes out. Well. Then. Good luck.” He started forward, as if to shake hands with the both of them, but instead used the momentum to turn and start off down the narrow tunnel.
“Shipment?” Holmes staggered. “Watson, what have you done?” With the other man too far away to hear him, Holmes turned to Irene. “He's done something to the Prozium, hasn't he?”
“Doctor,” she offered with a shrug. “Shall we? Oh, Holmes...Do try not to shoot Lestrade while you're up there.”
Of course. Somehow, it didn't surprise him.
Very little did, nowadays.
“You two work well together, when you aren't fighting. It's good to see you two lovebirds have worked it out.”
Their detour had taken them to a much narrower area of the underground, flanked on either side with with grates, rusted and eroded over time. Irene was jittery and talkative (as opposed to her normal obtrusive and talkative), and though she kept her voice to a whisper it managed to echo out in all directions, cutting through the otherwise empty passage.
Holmes took her firmly by the upper arm. “I suggest you quiet down, Irene, unless you really want to die.”
The hatch beneath the Palace of Justice was only a few meters ahead. It was weighty and stuck on its hinges, blocked, perhaps, by something on the other side. Holmes had earned far too much experience with non-automatic technology over the past few weeks, and as he and Irene heaved their shoulders against the hath in unison, he thought he might be done with it altogether.
They came through in a basement area of the Palace of Justice, less polished than the rest of the extravagant hall. Holmes had never seen this side of the building, but the blueprint burned into his memory was enough to guide them to the stairwell where they had to split apart.
“I can't say I feel comfortable leaving you to fend for yourself,” Holmes said, checking the stairwell to make sure it was empty with both weapons at the ready.
“I think I can handle myself. Besides, I think they'll be more worried about a former Cleric shooting up the place. Be sure and a create a good diversion for us.”
“Watch out for cameras.”
“Right, right.” Irene's weapon was smaller and discreet - one could almost call it feminine - but he had seen her precision with it earlier in a walled off room of the underground, shredding wooden boxes to bits. She slid into the stairwell like an alley cat with an added “Cheers!” and vanished from his line of sight.
He knew the way from memory now. It was not his first journey into Brother Moran's office, but it would be the last, no matter the outcome.
Holmes had hoped not to kill of the guards on the floor, knowing now that a properly applied nonlethal kata could incapacitate without killing, but his aspirations soon proved futile. The hall was swarming with men as soon as the first group was alerted to his presence. They rallied and charged and he walked between them, stopping the charge with bullets. By the time he reached the next hall it was nothing but the same. Kick a door down and methodically take them down, all the while struggling to match his speed, to get in the one shot to stop the entire resistance in its tracks. Each death was necessary, defensive, but regrettable. Just once, he thought he heard a door blasting in down another hallway on another side of the building, a cheery, female “Hi, boys!” and the sound of Irene's clip unloading.
It took far less time than any of them had planned. There were only two men posted at Brother Moran's door and Holmes was instantly suspicious. The room was vast and mostly empty, with high, gilded ceilings and metal window shades that stretched from top to bottom, backing a tall, sleek, ornate desk.
“Hello, Father,” he said to the man at the desk.
He was a gaunt, older man, with thinning hair and a thinner face. He looked more haggard than Holmes expected. Sitting there at his desk, he just looked tired and old.
“You don't seem surprised to see me, Cleric.”
“I'm good at bluffing.”
Father's eyes darted carelessly to Holmes' weapons, trained unflinchingly on him. “You're here to kill me me.”
“I'm here to free Libria from her most oppressive enemy.”
Father laughed, unexpected and tight.
“You sound so rehearsed, Cleric,” he said. “Is that what you've really been planning all this time? Are you sure you don't think you're following some other order. Some scripted event? What makes you think you aren't just some actor? That this is not some very elaborate play?”
Holmes watched him trail his fingers along the desk's finely polished surface, his eyes glittering like beetles and face vibrant and flushed.
“You're sense offending,” he realized suddenly, gripped by the irrationality of it all.
“I'm wise enough to, Cleric. I'm like you. This world needed me to feel - I needed to feel - in order to save her. So I could know what you would do, and how I'd get you to do it. How you would protect this masterpiece I've built - my well-oiled machine.” Father glanced briefly at the ceiling - too short an amount of time for Holmes to take advantage of, but enough to shift his position. Father saw him move and simply smiled.
“Do you really think, in another life, that we would meet this way?” Father steepled his fingers in front of him, staring at Holmes across the crest. “That I would be your nemesis? In another life, Cleric, you would admire me. You'd admire me as you have for years. I would outmatch you, as I do here.” He was shaking his head slowly, the shadow of a smile creeping up his faded, wrinkled features. “You would follow me, as you have, without knowing, for the past many years. Why else would you bring the entire resistance to my doorstep? We are not made to be enemies, Cleric. Once we're enemies, we have no choice but to fight until we die.” His voice dropped to nothing but a murmur. “And I don't intend to.”
Holmes saw it a second too late; Father's hand moving out to press a switch on the underside of his desk, the hath that opened at the far end of the room and the shot fired from it. Ducking to the side, Holmes fired into the new opening without aiming, hit the ground and rolled, only to realize that Father had pulled his own gun and trained it on him. They sat, motionless, in one another's sights, while Holmes attempted to calculate his chances of getting a shot off before Father could return it.
“We both know you're faster than I am, Cleric. You managed to escape one of my traps, which is more than I can say for...most. You would think that longtime members of the resistance would be more prepared...Your doctor friend - you do know who I'm talking about, don't you? Yes, he made such a mess inside the front door.”
Holmes' shoulders rolled unconsciously and then sagged. “No,” he said firmly. It was a tactic to play with emotions - he had employed it enough himself, what seemed like a lifetime ago. And if Father wasn't lying... “No.”
“The woman, too. They told me she tried to be so feisty, thinking she could fight her way through a room full of trained guards. I've had you bring me the entire resistance alongside them, haven't I, then? Strange how it seems so inevitable now. Are you angry, Cleric? How do you feel now that you know you're alone? What is it if you kill a human being, driven by rage?”
He could see nothing but a swirl of fire and spots before his eyes. With a speed he'd never fully realized before, fueled entirely by anger, Holmes dived forward to attack. Father fired and he dodged, instinctively, throwing all of his weight into the older man, his hand on the back of his head and slamming his face into the desk. Father's gun went flying as Holmes' dug into his temple hard enough to bruise the skin.
“You'll be nothing but a murderer, Cleric!” Father's voice was wild and full of malicious glee.
Holmes' fingers quivered on the trigger, so close to destroying Father's smugness, and any remaining hope he had for logic. He was unbelievably hot and shaking, halfway to pulling the trigger with his tremors instead of on purpose.
“No,” he said firmly. “This country has seen enough blood spilled for her wellbeing.”
“You don't have a choice, Cleric. Your allies aren't here anymore. We're doomed to end it in this room.”
“The people of Libria will end it.” He had to get away from Father, unless he break and choose to put a bullet through his skull after all. As Holmes was backing away from him, weapon still trained, the door on the other side of the room burst open under the weight of two bodies - guards.
Watson and Irene followed them through, very much alive if not entirely unharmed. Watson was favoring his right arm, his collar stained and stiff with blood. Irene looked as though she'd taken several blows to the face. One of her eyes was swollen, almost fully shut, and the skin below her temple split open into a gash.
“Holmes!” Watson gasped, and he saw Father's face fall, trapped in his own lie.
“Good to see both of you.” Holmes was flooded with relief, which pumped cool through his veins, replacing the blind rage. Seeing them both really alive comforted him despite the tension in the room, and he felt, for the first time, what he might have described as elation.
“Moran's done. What are we going to do about him?” Irene jerked her chin towards
“We're going to let Libria decide. After they understand what has happened.”
Father darted forward again, his hand stretching for something else beneath his desk. Another door, somewhere, slamming open. Three gunshots, one after the other.
Father fell forward onto his desk, a bullet between his eyes. Irene had turned and fired into the open door, catching the trap's rig before it before it could go off.
Then the room was silent, save for their breathing.
Irene was dabbing blood away with the corner of her sleeve. She crossed the room, Watson hot on her heels, and stumbled into Holmes' shoulder, pulling him into an embrace that he slowly found the strength to return.
“John, come here,” she gasped out, opening one arm to drawn Watson into the huddle, where they hovered breathlessly for several minutes.
Holmes found a switch on the wall that triggered all the metal blinds, rolling them up and opening the room up to floor-to-ceiling light. On the horizon out behind the Nether,
“What happens now?” Irene's voice was breathy with a wondering laugh. “I never really thought about it.”
Watson's hand rested on the small of Holmes' back and did not draw away. With the entire world changing before them, he had never felt so sure or so content, or so happy to feel it.
“That's what we're going to find out.”
Fin.
Pairing: Developing Holmes/Watson (more than if-you-squint, but mostly developing feelings)
Word Count: 20,500(?)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, minor swearing, minor violence, minor slash, Americanisms
Notes: snicks_chan beta'ed for me and she is amazing! dwg Mixed for me and she is also amazing!
It's set in Equilibrium's Libria and acknowledges several of the movie's plot elements, but is not a direct crossover. In other words, John Preston is Sir Not Appearing in This Big Bang.
Summary: Emotion is dangerous. At the cost of their own happiness, the people embraced Prozium, a world-saving drug designed to suppress the root of all the world's problems: feeling.
The Grammaton Cleric is a juggernaut of peace-keeping, trained to eliminate the resisting “sense offenders” and destroy all remaining aspects of culture that might tempt humans into feeling again. Sherlock Holmes, praised for his unorthodox spontaneity and lighting-fast thinking, is one of the most dangerous and efficient Clerics around. But when his roommate is accused of sense offense, the train comes off its rails, and Holmes finds his world less linear, his actions less commendable, and his Prozium less and less appealing.
VII.
“What?”
Holmes knew that he had been cultivating a sense of disbelief for the past several hours. He had denied Watson's involvement with the resistance, had killed men defending this man, singular, who he now knew, undeniably, was a traitor.
It was like being slapped in the face with his betrayal. What was Watson thinking, bringing him to this place? It destroyed anything he had ever earned as a Cleric. What could Watson expect him to do, except stop at absolutely nothing to burn this place down like the den of rebellion it was? It was his duty to turn these tunnels to cinders, and all the people who came with it.
“I think this is the only place you'll find where you won't be summarily arrested and incinerated for missing your doses. And...” Though he couldn't see Watson's face, he sensed his hesitation. “And I trust you.”
He thought he might have made a noise, but Watson made no move to acknowledge it. A sense offender like Watson had no trust in Father's words, but he could trust one of the men who had been trusted with upholding them.
“You can't go back there, Holmes. They won't have you. I think if you just-”
Watson was skirting something unsaid as though it was painful. Holmes had heard such blathering so many times before, every time he managed to corner an offender in a lie, managed to drive them into lying and terror.
And he was ashamed to see that same stumbling in his flatmate, and to realize that he was beginning to stumble, off his interval for less than a day. The discomfort with the stumbling led to more stumbling and more shame - a harmful cycle.
Some sharp and piercing clatter traveled down one of the myriad branches of tunnels off of the main room. Watson, who had seemed on the verge of saying something else stumbling and uncomfortable, went snap-taut and leaned in the direction of the noise.
“Hello?” A woman's voice followed the clatter, made tiny by the surrounding metal. “Lights are on.”
Watson let out a hiss of noise and syllables that sounded less like words and more like floundering. “Down here!” he called, and the woman drifted closer, first a shadow on the light cast by the lamp and then as the noise of her heels on the floor panels. When she rounded the corner, Holmes saw that she was in the middle of dressing in prohibited clothing. She already wore a green skirt that fell, all too short, just below her knees and was pulling on a tight, shiny blouse, working around the strap of a deteriorating handbag. Holmes attempted to look away quickly from her immodesty, but she drew it back immediately with a squeal:
“John! Hi! You're alive.” The woman came forward to throw her arms around Watson's shoulders in a loose embrace. She wore her hair loose, and it seemed shiny even in the underground's dingy, lackluster glow.
“That was subtle, Irene,” Watson said, returning the embrace with one arm and talking into the side of her head. “Do you always go about yelling down halls like that? Do you have a death wish?”
The woman nestled her chin on his shoulder, her scrutinizing eyes never leaving Holmes. “I figured unsavory and tasteless individuals would smash the lamp instead of turning it on,” she said, withdrawing and thumping him tenderly on the arm. “You look terrible, by the way. Who is this?”
Holmes wondered if instant suspicion and dislike of everyone you first met was common for emotional people. It was another reason to secure a dose as soon as possible, so he could think straight, and not become so consumed in how he felt about Watson's sense offending co-conspirators, or what would happen to Watson when Holmes inevitably returned to the city.
“Ah! Holmes, I'd like you to meet Irene Adler. Irene, this is my flatmate. He...had an incident this morning.” Holmes rolled his shoulders under their combined scrutiny, feeling flushed, unwittingly, not knowing what could cause the sudden blaze of heat creeping up the nape of his neck.
Irene leaned forward to get a closer look, both hands on her hips. His eyes were drawn briefly to the immodest cut of her chosen dress, and Holmes nearly recoiled.
“We've heard a lot about you, sir,” she said, her lips a sharp, pouty line. “It's nice to meet you.” She had a glimmer in her gaze that Holmes had never seen before, in regular people and sense offenders alike, wild and unflinching and raw like some wild animal that ran loose across the Nether by the city barricade.
“Don't scare him, Irene,” Watson muttered, chastising. He was a different man here, outside of the flat. He was animated in ways Holmes had never seen, and the way his features shifted into expressions - wide responses and small smiles and little incredulous looks at Irene Adler and her cleavage - were frightening in just how unguarded they were. Outside of interrogations, he had never spent so much time interacting with a sense offender, and he had never been around one that wasn't frightened or angry.
He would never have expected such behavior of his roommate, not a few days ago when their life was passing undaunted on its rails. How he failed to read the signs, how he could have let this go so far, go on so long...
“He doesn't know what fear is.” Irene rolled her eyes until the whites flashed, hissing a puff of air between her teeth.
Watson ignored her. “Irene works for the Spectator. She's the nearest thing we have to a woman on the inside right now.”
“Working subliminal messages into your friendly government pamphlet on the daily.” Seeing how pleased the woman was with herself made Holmes automatically suspicious. “I heard you caught my moonshine bit. You're very clever, Cleric.”
As she turned to walk away, Holmes found himself calling after her until she stopped in the doorway. “Not clever enough to turn you in, Miss Adler.”
“But clever enough to stop taking your Prozium, love. Oh, John. I picked this up for you today.” After some rummaging, Irene fished a small metal rectangle from her bag and passed it over. “I knew you were looking for one. Use it wisely.”
It was a photo frame, as far as Holmes could tell. He had seen and confiscated and destroyed a few of them before, but they seemed rarer now, many of them having been broken down, picked apart for small, material details. They weren't strong enough for hinges, but they broke down into decent handles, latches. The functional casings of light fixtures. Finishing screws and nails.
Watson turned the gift over in his hands, inspecting it. It was scuffed and a little bent, the antique finish rubbed away or peeling in places, the structure weakened and cracked. He touched his finger to the glass - remarkable, Holmes thought, that it was free of cracks - and ran it down, drawing a line in the thin powdering of dust.
“Irene, where did you find this?” he asked, frowning at the small frame like he had never seen anything quite like it.
“Stole it,” she called over her shoulder, swaying her way out of the room.
“Irene...”
“What? It's not as though anyone else was going to be using it.”
Watson pressed a palm to his forehead. “Must you do that?”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “I like the way it makes me feel.” And then she was gone.
Holmes was hardly aware he was staring until Watson brushed a hand to his upper arm. The touch was brief, and Watson pulled his hand away as soon as Holmes took a step to the opposite side.
“Why don't I give you the grand tour?” Watson offered. “I can't say there's much to see. We're more organized than you would think, but...Well, I can't say I ever thought I'd be walking you around the place.”
His gaze still drawn past the threshold and after Irene's retreating back, Holmes hastily agreed.
The tour constituted little more than a walk through the underground. It was nearly devoid of life. Irene and Watson could not be the entire resistance, Holmes knew, but he reasoned that they were not as a likely to hole up in the same location. More likely than not, they hadn't been there for some time, fearing the location compromised or, too clever to be caught like a teeming sewer full of rats, found safety in separating themselves into smaller hovels.
It was stocked floor to ceiling with prohibited materials, old notebooks, file cabinets, and broken furniture. Holmes hadn't seen a wooden chair in months, and the sight of four of them stacked seat to legs was disarming.
“What is that?” Holmes asked. His hand fell, without prompt, to the sidearm at his waist.
“That's Gladstone,” Watson replied. “He's a Bulldog.”
“Dog ownership is prohibited both as an emotional temptation and to prevent the risk of infestation and disease such as rabies.” The automatic response came without prompting and Holmes could not deny the sudden urge to enforce it.
“He's not rabid,” Watson said without pause. “He's fat. Let's not wake him.”
Holmes had never considered himself much of a man for words, but he thought he might at least have something to say about this. Discovering that his roommate of two years was a sense offender. Being cornered and discontinuing his dosage. Discovering part of the resistance's underground network and unearthing a pile of contraband.
Eventually, he said, “This is all very illegal.”
Watson just laughed. “Here, come here. This is my office. Sort of. More of a store room, really, but I do have a desk.”
The desk was potentially the only uncluttered surface in the entire room. The office was filled with stashed contraband: stacks of novels filled each corner and lined the walls, towered up behind slanted canvases and covered paintings. There were instruments, colorful machines that Holmes could not place, and several bright blouses hanging on a line on the far wall. He was aware of Watson talking, pointing out the various tools and possessions littering the desk. Holmes felt his stomach flutter weirdly when he noticed the messy stack of medical texts and the sun-faded charcoal overcoat draped across the back of the chair, things that reminded him of his flatmate, who now seemed so far away from the animated, emotional stranger he now followed.
“...And this is Mary.” As he sat down at the desk, Watson pulled three old photographs from the main drawer of the writing desk. They were well-preserved, glossy-faced and shiny, save for the edges, worn down and fingerprint-faded from handling. Holmes took them with a consideration he had never paid to contraband before, suddenly aware of what value it might have to Watson - value that extended beyond monetary worth.
She was slender, soft-featured, pale. In the photographs, she was almost smaller than the average person, all narrow waist and soft, shy features and a feathering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her expression was nearly flat save for one corner of her mouth, which turned up imperceptibly and crinkled her cheek. Her blonde hair was just starting to come free from its business style, small tendrils falling from the bun and to her shoulders. She looked like anyone else in that picture, dressed in her black issue clothing, all high collars and long sleeves. He might have met her on the street or during his commute from work and never noticed a thing. He might never have known, unless she laughed or burst out with some unexpected display of emotion. If she smiled at him like that.
Mary wore black again in the second photo, but she seemed older, with longer, loose hair and tiny lines at the corners of her bright eyes. Photographs not pertaining to identification or legal purposes would have been prohibited by then, and she seemed almost gleeful in this knowledge, her easy smile caught eternally on the cusp of a laugh.
The third picture was the last one. Even without a date ascribed to it, Holmes could tell it from the others because it was so fresh, so colorful. The print paper felt crisp and new under his hand when he took it from Watson's hand; the woman in the picture was so vibrant and alive it made his throat hurt. She was smiling, a line of straight teeth just visible between her lips. She wore blue, and it was bright, like the color of the sky in hundreds of paintings he burned before.
She was brilliant, like some shining light, surrounded by those prohibited, vibrant colors, and even Holmes, who could not remember the last time he had found any person beautiful, could not deny that she was strikingly pretty. He entertained the idea, however briefly, of telling that to Watson.
“You knew she was a sense offender, didn't you?” he asked in his confession's place, and suddenly, instead of awed, he felt so very, very betrayed.
Watson looked at the ceiling, almost smiling, almost shaking. “I may not be as talented as you, Holmes, but I'm not unobservant.” He breathed in slow and even and exhaled with a shudder. “I didn't know at first. But later...The later it got, the harder it was to deny.”
He wondered how he ever could have missed it, how Watson ever could have hid all of this from him. Holmes had overlooked, somehow, this unbridled sadness and all the love that came with missing Mary. How Watson ever could have held it in, when Holmes sat here driven to trembling by a too-saturated photograph.
“She wrote me letters, you know,” Watson said, prying open the back insert of the picture frame Irene had given him. His voice was tight and unexpected, and in that moment, Holmes thought he might never get used to emotions.
“I wish I had been able to read them before.” Watson flexed his hands open and closed in a way that made his knuckles crack, filling in the spaces between his words.
The silence stretched taut between them. Holmes found himself unable to look away from the final photograph, crisp and fresh and real in his hand, Mary's smile piercing through the fine sheen of the paper.
Eventually, he had to hand it over.
It was too small to fill the whole frame, so Watson backed the photograph with another piece of paper, the dull, sterile white offsetting the brilliance of Mary's smile, of her clothing.
Placing the framed photo on his desk, Watson said, softly, “There.” Then: “Hey,” his voice wan, his thumb pressed to the corner of the frame.
Holmes had no idea how to process the unexpected heat building in his chest, at the base of his spine. It hovered in some unidentifiable grey area, something less than anger but deeper than grief. And, he thought, he might have been better off on Prozium after all, if he could throw this back in Watson's face, arrest him, and feel no guilt the next morning.
“You didn't turn her in.” It felt like an interrogation, the way he spoke, the challenge in his voice like taunting Vincent Spaulding all over again (Vincent Spauldling, who had probably been Watson's friend. Co-conspirator).
He felt Watson's knuckles go white more than saw them, felt the vibrations when he struck the desk with the base of his fist.
“Is that what I should have done?” And he had never heard that pitch before - not from Watson - the uncontrollable, wavering anger like he'd just body checked him against a wall and told him his feelings were wrong.
“I merely -” Holmes began, but Watson was there, still talking, cutting him off with a raise of his hand and the furiously increasing volume of his voice.
“- And why -”
“- was trying to inquire -”
“- because you're still up in your head -”
“ - if you didn't feel anything for her -”
“Then why did you bother saving me from custody?”
The office plummeted into icy silence almost instantly. Watson's face had gone red and his eyes pierced with a fury that Holmes could hardly recognized. The words hit him slowly; it took a while to send them through his mind and expect them to stop there.
The accusation hovering between them, heavy and bladed, Watson stood up and walked out of the office.
VIII.
Holmes was awake only a few hours later, his sleep plagued by strange jitters that kept his legs moving restlessly beneath the covers, untraceable muscle movements he hadn't seen since his training as a Cleric.
He tracked the time on the wall nearby, counting seconds into minutes. He would not sleep again, and the knowledge drove him from the comfort of his cot and into the chilly underground, through the dim lighting and the halls cluttered with contraband. So much of it was broken already, and yet he winced upon accidentally nudging over a glass vase with his foot, if only because it might draw more attention than he desired. He heard it splinter with the same, shattering crackle of glass he had heard countless times before, upon shattering countless shelves of illegal pottery. The shards cracked into smaller pieces beneath his heels, and the sound, the feeling of the breaking, had never been so pronounced. He tread with guilt on the splinters of the vase, wondering if he ought to clean them.
He avoided Watson's office, not caring to face the collection of records, the old gramophone, or Mary's picture smiling from its new frame, accusing in its pleasantness. She would taunt the years of work that were behind him now, her smile set to tear down Libria's foundations.
“Hey.” Irene's low, lilting voice rattled him. “Not trying to run away, are you?”
“If I wished to leave this charming basement, Miss Adler, I might have done it better than that.” The smile on his mouth felt foreign and slathered on.
Irene laughed, the noise startled and tinkling. “Did you just give me lip, Cleric, or are you trying to make a joke?” She laughed again, surer this time. “That's darling.”
She was feral even in the dark, perhaps more so now that the lights were dimmed and she was dressed for sleep, her dark hair a pile of curls. Everything she said to him read like a challenge, from the tone of her voice to the way she twisted the drawstring on her pants around her index finger like a tendril of her hair.
“Trouble sleeping?” She took a step forward, pulling at the drawstring as she did.
“Thinking. I am most productive in the early morning.” Holmes held his ground, though he felt compelled to step away, having never been so disarmed or intimidated by a sense offender before.
“No, you aren't.” Irene was shaking her head. “Don't they teach Clerics to lie? You're really bad at it.” She looked to one side, then the other, then cocked her head towards the other end of the hallway. “Come on. If you're not sleeping, you can join me for coffee.”
Caffeine was a disgusting substance, it turned out, and did nothing to brace the strange new overload assaulting Holmes in these wan hours of the morning, the suspended hours between midnight and dawn. Irene was on her second cup as he stared sullenly at the half-mug of liquid on the card table between them. The illegal beast slept at their feet, snoring every so often or scuffing his nails on the floor.
“So,” she chirped, “you and John had your first fight, huh?”
Holmes hoped the look he leveled at her conveyed the displeasure he felt, but his face still felt flabby and out of control.
“I could kill you, you know, and no one would know about it.”
“Gladstone would,” Irene said, nonplussed. She drained what was left of her beverage in a matter of seconds, the cords of her throat working in dainty, fluid motions. Now empty, the mug hit the table with a hollow, ceramic thud. “Are you still thirsty? I could get you some water instead, if you want. Or you could just suck it up.” When he stayed silent, she let out a small, uncomfortable laugh, rolling her eyes. “I'll get you some water,” she concluded, and did.
They kept their water in sealed, refrigerated containers (“The tap water probably isn't contaminated, but we like to be safe”) that Irene had to pull out from a cupboard behind the table. “Have you ever watched the sunrise?”
Holmes hesitated at the question, fearing he may have misunderstood. The query made no practical sense; there was no benefit to watching sunrises. It was a natural and mechanical phenomenon.
“Every morning,” he settled on finally. “The daily waking is correlated with dawn.”
Irene snorted. “So, that's a no.” Setting his cup down on the table, she reached out to grab onto his wrist, only recoiled when he slapped her hand away. “Okay, come with me.”
He followed her, swatting her hands away every time she made to grab him (until the final time, when he grabbed her wrist hard enough to leave a bruise, reminding her that he could shatter it if he so chose. She didn't grab him again afterward). The room they ended up in had a taller ceiling than the rest of the underground, and the windows - bare slats at maximum in every other room - were taller to compensate for the added height.
The overgrown downtown area of the barrens was just visible in the morning dusk, the taller business park buildings falling down and crumbling, the foundations of old houses hollowed out, burned and rotting.
Irene spread her arms wide and wiggled her eyebrows. When she glanced back at him over her shoulder, everything about her seemed playful and alive. The tall windows turned out to swing open when Irene unfastened a latch on the inside. She pushed the lower pane open with the flat of her hand until it slid out vertically, opening into a flat piece of yard where scraggly, almost-green grass was starting to grow.
“Climb out here, all right?”
“I don't think this is appropriate...”
Irene made the 'tsk'ing sound she seemed so fond of, urging him out with a roll of her eyes and a halfhearted snatch at his cup.
“Get out there.”
The dog had followed them in from the kitchen and watched them fussing with the window and started whining, his stubby tail pounding out an irregular rhythm on the floor.
The grass was damp and weak, a texture altogether unknown to him when he crawled out to sit on it. It was fighting to survive, patches of it gone dried up and shriveled where others remained a deep, sleek green.
“It's fighting,” Irene said, giving the ground a pat as she sat down beside him, handing over the half-full cup of water, which felt slick and cold against his palm. “I think sometimes it knows that all the grass in the city has died out already, and that kind of keeps it going.” She began chewing at a fingernail thoughtfully. “Of course if we come out here and take care of it then the sweeps will notice it and-” She pulled a face and left her sentence short.
He didn't want to be out there with her. He didn't want to be there, period. He wanted to tear the sky apart, fill the tunnels with earth, shake the city by the foundations until everything rumbled.
“So...” Irene glanced sidelong at him, rubbing at the back of her neck slowly. “You don't want to talk, I gather, but let me. Promise I won't be boring.” She leaned back on her hands, watching the line of white light cresting on the horizon. “I stopped dosing about three years ago. For about three weeks, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And what happens, those first few weeks, you feel guilty about some really weird things that you couldn't feel guilty about before. I reported a neighbor for laughing when I was fifteen and when I stopped dosing I cried about it for days.
“And you don't really get over that, but you learn to deal with it because otherwise, what's the point? You get really good at lying and pretending and thinking things through. But people sometimes bring that to the surface again.
“John's had less than two years to love Mary about five years' worth. It's been hard. For John. And that's rather hard to deal with, when you're not supposed to be feeling. You don't know what you're feeling and he has to deal with that, and that brings some stuff up. I don't think he wants to fight with you.”
A spiral of pink and orange was rising in the sky by then, and Holmes found it easier to look at than the woman sitting next to him.
“Why open yourself up to that? When we live in a world without sadness or rage or murder...”
Irene exhaled so heavily he felt her shoulders slumping next to him. “Because the happiness part is pretty much worth living for.”
The sun was spying on their conversation, just cresting in the distance as a sparse sliver of light, hazy and languid as those visible through oil.
“This has to stop,” Holmes said, and didn't quite know what he meant. The conversation. The feeling. This whole mess - this whole mess could stop. Confiding in a woman in the lot behind an abandoned underground. Putting an end to it was as simple as surrendering himself.
“Okay,” Irene said. “Well, if you're going to call in the cavalry you might want to do it before John wakes up. I don't think he'd let you leave as easy as I would. But here, look: this is the best part.”
There were at least eight colors bleeding together at the lowest lip of the horizon, where the sun was slowly rising unblocked by cloud or smog. It was vivid and unguarded like Mary's final picture
His cheeks felt different, spattered with something damp and hot.
Irene looked from him to the horizon and back again, starting. And then smiling, very slowly, the reaction hidden and mysterious.
“What is it?” he asked, and she just smiled. “What?”
IX.
Holmes didn't turn them in that day, or the next.
Watson was awake the time the sunset was over. The dog heard him before Holmes or Irene had the chance, letting out a tiny, gruff 'woof' that had Holmes back through the window before it could even clamber to feet and waddle off down the hall.
“Good morning, Gladstone.” Watson's voice was throaty with sleep and cheerful in a way that made Holmes all too aware of Irene's lecture. “What are you doing all the way down here?”
They met somewhere in the middle, between the room with the high ceiling and the one that functioned as a kitchen, where they fidgeted for thirteen seconds of silence. Holmes didn't apologize, even though he thought he might have genuinely felt sorry, however briefly.
All Watson said was, “I shouldn't have yelled,” but they seemed to understand each other. There couldn't be harm in lingering here a little longer, if only for the information he could gather. In time, he might even learn the position of the true resistance, and come to identify them on a personal level, understanding names, numbers, and the final plan for sabotaging the state.
What better way to gather information? It was simple enough to be obvious.
So Holmes never turned them in.
He knew he would never learn anything of value over the first few days. He discovered several yellowed manuscripts, translated from the original Greek, shelved on the wall of his temporary sleeping quarters. Historically relevant writings, at best, if only for their glimpse into what history should not be allowed to repeat.
Beneath the Greek, Holmes found poetry anthologies from the years before the First World War, which took him longer to get through. What good would poetry be to him, besides? There was nothing of value in the words, but he could admire it for its carefully constructed form. That structure could give otherwise innocuous phrases meaning seemed so innovative and so new, and he wondered how it could have escaped for everyday rhetorical usage.
After a while, the act of doing nothing began to drive him slowly mad. Trapped in the same network of tunnels every day slowly pushed him to explore farther and farther down to the line when he wasn't reading or otherwise occupied with Watson's company (for after the fight they had somehow reconnected and come again to a silent, fluid coexistence). He began to draw out the lay of the underground, its open and blocked passages, and slowly came to form a map of what streets might run above their heads.
Irene was there only half of the time. She was still employed with the Spectator, and, as she “didn't risk getting set on fire every time she stepped out the front door,” she still retained her normal housing. She would still arrive after the sun had set, however, sometimes still dressed in her everyday work drabs. Seeing her that way made Holmes realize what she had meant about being very good at lying. Before she left to sneak back into the city on the nights she stayed in the underground, Irene became an altogether different woman. Her face became pale and taut, her hair dull and lifeless, her mouth an immobile line. All of the wildfire was completely gone from her eyes, and she looked as if she'd never had a feeling before.
Holmes realized only four days into his stay in the underground that he absolutely hated it. There was nothing about it that suited her.
Watson outside of his government issue clothes was beginning to impress him, though. He had always known his flatmate to be an efficient and productive worker but he was truly in another element here as he darted from office to tunnel passage and back again with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, doing business that Holmes was not privy to. They engaged in more conversation over those four days than they had in the first four months of living in the same tenement building, though nothing about the conversations here seemed quite the same. Watson inquired after his reading or asked about the maps of the underground he was slowly but steadily compiling. They talked about Gladstone, who, it turned out, appreciated warmth and would spend half his nights asleep at the foot of the threadbare mattress Holmes now called a bed. He was not such a terrible beast, after all, though Holmes had still not deduced his exact purpose besides being very nosy, slobbery, overly affectionate, and warm.
On the fifth day, Holmes broke his self-imposed ban on entering the office (the most productive method of avoiding another argument about Mary he'd found) In all his time as a Cleric, he had never felt as though entering a room in which he possessed absolutely no power.
In Watson's office, he had none.
He saw the picture framed on the desk without looking for it when he tried to say his hellos, and realizing he still reacted towards it, still felt something whenever he looked at it, promptly turned to the side and pretended to be very engrossed in other contraband.
The books were more of the same - poetry and older medical texts and volumes on psychology that were tearing apart at the seam. Beyond the books he found the odds and ends and irreparably damaged things. There were dolls with tattered clothing and unrealistically beautiful smiles, too pretty and too happy in their expectations. Wallpaper swatches, calico cloth, instruments. The instruments especially had seen the wear of time and unfriendly elements. Even those that Watson had done his best to preserve looked tired and worn down, scarred by water damage, years of dust, and more years still of no one ever picking one up to play. Music provided absolutely no benefits when rebuilding a city.
Holmes lay his hand against the half-bent bow of a violin, which rested atop a pile of sheet music that had already started to dry out and disintegrate.
“I really thought we'd gotten all of these,” he admitted, unable to explain why this made him suddenly sad. “They might have been all gone, if only we had - if only we'd found them first.” He thumbed a string thoughtfully back and forth, found himself wincing when it nearly shattered at the pressure.
“We thought one day we might be able to find someone who could build new ones,” Watson offered. “So they got a chance to live a better life than this one.”
“If they were all gone, no one would even know what the were.” He didn't think he was talking to Watson anymore - but then, who else would he be talking to? What difference did it make if useless objects became extinct?
“No.” Watson was trying to smile. “But maybe somebody somewhere out there still misses them. I would like to hear one played, just once. Maybe it would make this prospect of being alive a little more bearable.”
He thought about picking up the violin, inspecting its anatomy and flaws, and then thought better of it. With the condition it was in, it was liable to split in two. Holmes swallowed and stepped away, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling the way he'd seen Irene do it and drawing his hands into the pockets of his borrowed, contraband clothes.
Grammaton Clerics did not cry at sunrises and broken violins.
“What do you know about the adrenal gland?”
He knew very little, it turned out, but the conversation that followed was enough to keep Holmes in Watson's office for hours.
By the seventh day, he had forgotten about turning them in to Father altogether.
Having Watson and Irene both gone was odder than Holmes had anticipated.
He might have left at any time without them there; he knew it and they both knew it. Either they were more foolhardy than they had ever let on, or they were honest about the trust they placed in him despite his potential danger (as though he was dangerous now, little more than a watchdog with his teeth pulled).
The dog was still there for company, but the dog...well, it was a dog, and it - he - didn't do much during the day. Gladstone slept all the time, it seemed, and Holmes could never hope to maintain such a lifestyle.
With Watsona and Irene gone for some indefinite amount of time, the underground was still and empty. There was nothing, not even phantom sounds he could hypothesize about, or strange shifts in the light he could track in some strange hybrid of paranoia and preparation.
Holmes went deeper down, into one of the tunnels where the broken furniture sat haphazard and forgotten. If each chair could be a person, each broken piece of wood an obstruction or other obstacle, perhaps he could place himself in a room with other men. Enemies. Training dummies. Breathing obstacles.
Chairs and humans were both weak in the legs. Structurally, it did a lot to undermine the functionality of either. But a crippled man could still fire a gun.
Weaponless, Holmes still went through the usual motions of a practice routine. Though the broken chairs were motionless, they provided better targets than open space, and he found he could fill in the remaining blanks with his mind. Crippling a target to eliminate its functionality, like splitting a chair in half, usually meant employing lethal force, or opening oneself up to danger in other ways.
He repeated the routine once more, and again, each time theorizing different movements for the chair-figures and their potential threats. It might be done, but there were so many volatile variables involved...Changing the kata required thinking in ways that threw away the sheer, rational mathematics that made it such a lethal force to begin with. After five hypothetical run-throughs, Holmes managed not to kill at least three of the chairs.
His body felt tired and overworked by the time he had finished a full training run. The walk back to the man underground center felt long and cramped, but helped to ease the ache out of his limbs.
Holmes came to a stop outside of Watson's office. It was dimmer than usual with most of the lights shut off, but he could still see his way inside, still trace the well-walked path around the accumulated contraband. Without much thought, he sat down in the chair parked at the desk, resting his elbows against a clear bit of writing area and looking, without much curiosity, at the books strewn about, the ones he'd glanced at only briefly while his roommate had been working.
And then there was Mary. She was just as brilliant as she had been before, Holmes found, to his dismay. He had hoped she might lose some of the shine with time, but somehow she seemed more beautiful now. Her smile looked half like a laugh in the low light.
“What did you see in him?” he asked the picture, and though he knew not to expect a response, he thought she might be listening to his query - and laughing, still, at him.
This had to be loneliness, whatever he was feeling. Only some exhausting, pointless emotion like that could compel him to speak to a photograph of a woman he'd never met, would never met, and would eternally find unidentifiable.
“Your husband -” Holmes drummed his fingers on the desk. “He's, ah, he's very difficult. But then, I suppose he wouldn't have been when you knew him. You liked him all right, though, I suppose.”
There was no sense in this, no reason. He was talking to a photograph of a dead woman. Holmes fought the urge to turn the frame face-down to the desk, so he wouldn't feel so undermined by a replicated smile.
“You were rather lucky though, weren't you?” he murmured. The photograph stayed silent, and Holmes decided there was nothing left to the conversation.
“I hope you haven't gone mad on us.” Watson was at the door. Holmes suddenly felt very guilty. “What were you doing in here?”
“Theorizing,” Holmes responded, leaning as far away from the desk as the chair would allow. “The underground is very mathematically symmetrical, did you know?”
This seemed a good enough answer and, thankfully, deflected any wonder Watson might have expressed at Holmes' presence unattended in his room, for his roommate did nothing more than tilt his head curiously to one side as though indulging in such a fascinating fact.
“I see,” he said, bemused. “May I put my things down?”
“Of course,” Holmes replied, sitting still in the chair for several seconds before it became apparent that he was in the way of this operation. “Yes. Of course,” he repeated, standing up and moving away from the desk and the damnable picture, looking elsewhere as though he might not focus on any one thing for too long a time.
This brought their paths strangely close together, so was the layout of the room and the assembly of the paths between the collected hoard. He leaned one way and Watson the other, and even then they managed to brush shirt sleeves and elbows. Watson was warm though the fabric of his shirt felt cold and stiff, and his wrist was well-defined and sharp beneath the cuff. For the first time in his life, Holmes felt the need to apologize for the collision. He cleared his throat instead, uncomfortably, and thought of the picture on the desk, and said nothing.
“Dinner should be on soon,” Watson said before the parted ways. Holmes almost thought he might have been prepared to call him back into the room for the briefest of seconds, but they separated without another word.
'I'm glad you're home,' he might have at least said. But what sort of weakness was that, to call this place home or take a separation of only a few hours with such difficulty?
It was strange, though, how happy he had been to see Watson, and how long ago the lonely afternoon felt.
He uncovered the plan entirely by accident, through no investigative attempt of his own. Watson and Irene welcomed him into it willingly, and where Holmes might have once taken the opportunity he simply fell in with them with equal willingness.
Irene returned early to the underground in a flurry of motion nearly alien to her while they were sharing lunch, throwing several rolls of paper onto the flimsy table between them.
“John,” she said, leaning over Holmes in a way that seemed to exclude them from the conversation. “Look at what a little bird dropped into my hands this morning.” When unrolled, the papers became one strange, interconnected network. There was an outline for the transportation routes across the city, with several notes and alterations filled in. Beneath that, a map of Libria's underground before the Nether was officially barred off, and a grid of the city streets above it. And finally...
“Is that the Palance of Justice?” The blueprint was brittle but perfectly preserved, white lines on blue paper. “Oh, damn,” Watson hissed, when Irene only smiled in return.
“This would have been a lot easier if you were still in good standing with your friends at the Tetragrammaton. Do you have any idea how lucky we would be if we could make this an inside job?” Irene moved to pinch Holmes in the left side, causing him to recoil into Watson's elbow. “Maybe you should have thought about it a bit before going in guns blazing.”
“I regret asking this already. What is it, exactly, that my presence in the Tetragrammaton would ease?”
Irene and Watson looked at each other for the better half of a minute, communicating only with their eyes. Irene broke contact first, looking towards the ceiling, and Watson turned to Holmes with his eyes hard and narrowed.
“We're going to kill Father.”
X.
“Oh!” Irene exclaimed, throwing her bag across her shoulder. “Storming the castle! This is going to be so exciting.” She looked from him to Watson and back again. “You could be twins right now. Stop giving me that look, both of you.”
Watson returned to the table. He leaned forward on his forearms and spread his palms out across the maps.
“Here's what we're thinking.” He ran his hand from map to map, tracing a route that ran through the underground, along a transportation route, and to the Palace of Justice. “This room up here in the corner is where Father's Voice lives. And we have evidence that Father's Voice and Father may not be separate entities.”
“You think Brother Moran is really Father?”
“We don't know for certain, but recent actions of the Librian government are very suggestive. Whenever Brother Moran is in session with the council for more than a few hours, Father's seat goes silent. There's nothing new. A few of our men on the inside
“That isn't right,” Holmes
The area of underground in front of them was filthy and unused, scarred, barred off in places by rusting metal grates, a filthy brown in contrast to the cleaner monochromes of the city overhead. Watson was already dirty, his knees and elbows scuffed and pressed with soil.
“This...” Watson stretched the word out as he looked around the intersection. “This is where we part ways.
“Do you know the way?” he asked, clammy palm pressed to Holmes' shoulder. “Do you need a light?”
“I think I can find it, old boy.” Holmes clapped his arm in return with a solemn nod, smiling uncomfortably. It was too strong and too sudden, and he forced himself to release Watson's hand lest concern override pragmatism.
“All right.” Watson nodded. “All right. Irene's with you.” Holmes could see, from the corner of the eye, the glint of mischief in her smile, the way she nodded enthusiastically along with Watson's plan. “I'll be getting the boys and bringing them along, so you've got - what, twenty minutes?”
“I've been able to trim it to seventeen-and-five,” Holmes interjected.
Watson paused, smiling crookedly beneath his mustache. He made a breathy noise that might have been a contained laugh, shaking his head incredulously.
“Seventeen-and-five, then. We'll give you the whole twenty, just in case.” He took a dented, miraculously still-functional watch from his pocket and glanced at it. “I best be going, if I'm to make sure the right shipment goes out. Well. Then. Good luck.” He started forward, as if to shake hands with the both of them, but instead used the momentum to turn and start off down the narrow tunnel.
“Shipment?” Holmes staggered. “Watson, what have you done?” With the other man too far away to hear him, Holmes turned to Irene. “He's done something to the Prozium, hasn't he?”
“Doctor,” she offered with a shrug. “Shall we? Oh, Holmes...Do try not to shoot Lestrade while you're up there.”
Of course. Somehow, it didn't surprise him.
Very little did, nowadays.
“You two work well together, when you aren't fighting. It's good to see you two lovebirds have worked it out.”
Their detour had taken them to a much narrower area of the underground, flanked on either side with with grates, rusted and eroded over time. Irene was jittery and talkative (as opposed to her normal obtrusive and talkative), and though she kept her voice to a whisper it managed to echo out in all directions, cutting through the otherwise empty passage.
Holmes took her firmly by the upper arm. “I suggest you quiet down, Irene, unless you really want to die.”
The hatch beneath the Palace of Justice was only a few meters ahead. It was weighty and stuck on its hinges, blocked, perhaps, by something on the other side. Holmes had earned far too much experience with non-automatic technology over the past few weeks, and as he and Irene heaved their shoulders against the hath in unison, he thought he might be done with it altogether.
They came through in a basement area of the Palace of Justice, less polished than the rest of the extravagant hall. Holmes had never seen this side of the building, but the blueprint burned into his memory was enough to guide them to the stairwell where they had to split apart.
“I can't say I feel comfortable leaving you to fend for yourself,” Holmes said, checking the stairwell to make sure it was empty with both weapons at the ready.
“I think I can handle myself. Besides, I think they'll be more worried about a former Cleric shooting up the place. Be sure and a create a good diversion for us.”
“Watch out for cameras.”
“Right, right.” Irene's weapon was smaller and discreet - one could almost call it feminine - but he had seen her precision with it earlier in a walled off room of the underground, shredding wooden boxes to bits. She slid into the stairwell like an alley cat with an added “Cheers!” and vanished from his line of sight.
He knew the way from memory now. It was not his first journey into Brother Moran's office, but it would be the last, no matter the outcome.
Holmes had hoped not to kill of the guards on the floor, knowing now that a properly applied nonlethal kata could incapacitate without killing, but his aspirations soon proved futile. The hall was swarming with men as soon as the first group was alerted to his presence. They rallied and charged and he walked between them, stopping the charge with bullets. By the time he reached the next hall it was nothing but the same. Kick a door down and methodically take them down, all the while struggling to match his speed, to get in the one shot to stop the entire resistance in its tracks. Each death was necessary, defensive, but regrettable. Just once, he thought he heard a door blasting in down another hallway on another side of the building, a cheery, female “Hi, boys!” and the sound of Irene's clip unloading.
It took far less time than any of them had planned. There were only two men posted at Brother Moran's door and Holmes was instantly suspicious. The room was vast and mostly empty, with high, gilded ceilings and metal window shades that stretched from top to bottom, backing a tall, sleek, ornate desk.
“Hello, Father,” he said to the man at the desk.
He was a gaunt, older man, with thinning hair and a thinner face. He looked more haggard than Holmes expected. Sitting there at his desk, he just looked tired and old.
“You don't seem surprised to see me, Cleric.”
“I'm good at bluffing.”
Father's eyes darted carelessly to Holmes' weapons, trained unflinchingly on him. “You're here to kill me me.”
“I'm here to free Libria from her most oppressive enemy.”
Father laughed, unexpected and tight.
“You sound so rehearsed, Cleric,” he said. “Is that what you've really been planning all this time? Are you sure you don't think you're following some other order. Some scripted event? What makes you think you aren't just some actor? That this is not some very elaborate play?”
Holmes watched him trail his fingers along the desk's finely polished surface, his eyes glittering like beetles and face vibrant and flushed.
“You're sense offending,” he realized suddenly, gripped by the irrationality of it all.
“I'm wise enough to, Cleric. I'm like you. This world needed me to feel - I needed to feel - in order to save her. So I could know what you would do, and how I'd get you to do it. How you would protect this masterpiece I've built - my well-oiled machine.” Father glanced briefly at the ceiling - too short an amount of time for Holmes to take advantage of, but enough to shift his position. Father saw him move and simply smiled.
“Do you really think, in another life, that we would meet this way?” Father steepled his fingers in front of him, staring at Holmes across the crest. “That I would be your nemesis? In another life, Cleric, you would admire me. You'd admire me as you have for years. I would outmatch you, as I do here.” He was shaking his head slowly, the shadow of a smile creeping up his faded, wrinkled features. “You would follow me, as you have, without knowing, for the past many years. Why else would you bring the entire resistance to my doorstep? We are not made to be enemies, Cleric. Once we're enemies, we have no choice but to fight until we die.” His voice dropped to nothing but a murmur. “And I don't intend to.”
Holmes saw it a second too late; Father's hand moving out to press a switch on the underside of his desk, the hath that opened at the far end of the room and the shot fired from it. Ducking to the side, Holmes fired into the new opening without aiming, hit the ground and rolled, only to realize that Father had pulled his own gun and trained it on him. They sat, motionless, in one another's sights, while Holmes attempted to calculate his chances of getting a shot off before Father could return it.
“We both know you're faster than I am, Cleric. You managed to escape one of my traps, which is more than I can say for...most. You would think that longtime members of the resistance would be more prepared...Your doctor friend - you do know who I'm talking about, don't you? Yes, he made such a mess inside the front door.”
Holmes' shoulders rolled unconsciously and then sagged. “No,” he said firmly. It was a tactic to play with emotions - he had employed it enough himself, what seemed like a lifetime ago. And if Father wasn't lying... “No.”
“The woman, too. They told me she tried to be so feisty, thinking she could fight her way through a room full of trained guards. I've had you bring me the entire resistance alongside them, haven't I, then? Strange how it seems so inevitable now. Are you angry, Cleric? How do you feel now that you know you're alone? What is it if you kill a human being, driven by rage?”
He could see nothing but a swirl of fire and spots before his eyes. With a speed he'd never fully realized before, fueled entirely by anger, Holmes dived forward to attack. Father fired and he dodged, instinctively, throwing all of his weight into the older man, his hand on the back of his head and slamming his face into the desk. Father's gun went flying as Holmes' dug into his temple hard enough to bruise the skin.
“You'll be nothing but a murderer, Cleric!” Father's voice was wild and full of malicious glee.
Holmes' fingers quivered on the trigger, so close to destroying Father's smugness, and any remaining hope he had for logic. He was unbelievably hot and shaking, halfway to pulling the trigger with his tremors instead of on purpose.
“No,” he said firmly. “This country has seen enough blood spilled for her wellbeing.”
“You don't have a choice, Cleric. Your allies aren't here anymore. We're doomed to end it in this room.”
“The people of Libria will end it.” He had to get away from Father, unless he break and choose to put a bullet through his skull after all. As Holmes was backing away from him, weapon still trained, the door on the other side of the room burst open under the weight of two bodies - guards.
Watson and Irene followed them through, very much alive if not entirely unharmed. Watson was favoring his right arm, his collar stained and stiff with blood. Irene looked as though she'd taken several blows to the face. One of her eyes was swollen, almost fully shut, and the skin below her temple split open into a gash.
“Holmes!” Watson gasped, and he saw Father's face fall, trapped in his own lie.
“Good to see both of you.” Holmes was flooded with relief, which pumped cool through his veins, replacing the blind rage. Seeing them both really alive comforted him despite the tension in the room, and he felt, for the first time, what he might have described as elation.
“Moran's done. What are we going to do about him?” Irene jerked her chin towards
“We're going to let Libria decide. After they understand what has happened.”
Father darted forward again, his hand stretching for something else beneath his desk. Another door, somewhere, slamming open. Three gunshots, one after the other.
Father fell forward onto his desk, a bullet between his eyes. Irene had turned and fired into the open door, catching the trap's rig before it before it could go off.
Then the room was silent, save for their breathing.
Irene was dabbing blood away with the corner of her sleeve. She crossed the room, Watson hot on her heels, and stumbled into Holmes' shoulder, pulling him into an embrace that he slowly found the strength to return.
“John, come here,” she gasped out, opening one arm to drawn Watson into the huddle, where they hovered breathlessly for several minutes.
Holmes found a switch on the wall that triggered all the metal blinds, rolling them up and opening the room up to floor-to-ceiling light. On the horizon out behind the Nether,
“What happens now?” Irene's voice was breathy with a wondering laugh. “I never really thought about it.”
Watson's hand rested on the small of Holmes' back and did not draw away. With the entire world changing before them, he had never felt so sure or so content, or so happy to feel it.
“That's what we're going to find out.”
Fin.