Fic for hollyxu: The Queen's Guard
Title: The Queen's Guard
Recipient: hollyxu
Author: lavvyan
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Irene Adler, James Moriarty
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mention of attempted suicide
Summary: In the caves of Afghanistan, John died once already. But in a world ruled by creatures more terrible than divine, death isn't always permanent, and when a half-human stranger stumbles into his life, John has to decide what he hates more: the Royal bloodline, or that peculiar heart which won't let him die...
Notes: I love summaries that end with dot dot dot. Dearest recipient, you asked for plot, crossovers, Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald, and said that sex wasn't a big deal. Here you go then: a plotty BBC/Study in Emerald crossover/fusion-type squinty-gen story. Hope you enjoy!
(See end notes for proper credits.)
The Queen's Guard
The cat knew first. The cat always knew first. It had known to be wary of John when they'd first met, and it knew that the knock on the door didn't come from anything most people would want in their home. And John's heart, that terrible heart with its unshakeably calm triple-beat, knew when its like was near.
He'd been a man like a thousand others, once. He'd grown up in a small town in Scotia and left for New Albion to study the human medicines. He'd deferred to those of Royal blood, watched all of the Queen's speeches on the telly, and once he'd finished his studies he'd signed up for Her Majesty's army to spread Her glory through the world.
They'd sent him to Afghanistan. And John had learned that when the internet had called it a place forsaken by every god, it had either been wrong or lying. There had been gods in that land, dark gods, writhing and baying for blood in their caves. John had seen them, and nearly lost his mind.
When they killed him, it had been a relief, and nothing had ever felt so much like a betrayal as waking up again, sobbing for breath as he clutched at his chest, where something powerful and eldritch had taken the place of his heart. The man whose daughter John had saved months before had been smiling at him, and John had been unable to tell him he would rather die a thousand deaths in those caves than live another five minutes with that thing in his chest. A thing of Royal origin. A thing he couldn't remove.
He tried to kill himself, just once, before he staggered back to what remained of his unit. Picked up his gun and pressed the muzzle against his palate. His finger shook on the trigger as the blood rushed in his ears, louder and louder until all he could hear was that accursed heart drumming strong and steady, forcing the life through his veins uncaring of his disgusted fear with its mighty ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. He tried to pull the trigger but his hand was steady as a rock, unmoving until he drew his head away from the gun.
He had cried, then, for the first time in years. But the steadiness of his pulse hadn't changed.
He had finished his tour without anyone discovering his secret and returned to New Albion to take his pension. The bills bore the Queen's countenance, and seeing her reminded him sickeningly of the Afghan gods, her unacknowledged kin. There seemed to be nothing divine about either of them now.
After a few months in London, John withdrew his savings and bought a small house in the hills of Scotia. He had no car and the next village was some miles away, but the internet worked just fine between blackouts and the telly had decent reception. John didn't need much. The spiders in the tree behind the house were quiet and kept to themselves, and several weeks after he moved in, the cat showed up. It hissed and growled whenever John got too close, but it was willing to share the house with him when the rains got too bad.
It was growling now, too. The rain had been going strong the whole day and well into the evening. No one should have been wandering around outside, certainly not that close to John's house. But someone was knocking, and the cat's hair stood on end as it yowled at the door. John's heartbeat resonated oddly in his chest, the way it had done only once, when he'd passed a Royal on a London street after his return from Afghanistan.
John swallowed, and pulled his gun from its drawer.
He wasn't a Restorationist, not by a long shot. The world was as it was and one man wouldn't change it. But if something unnatural was going to invade his home, he would not stand back and let it happen. Nothing the Royals might do in retaliation could be worse than what had already happened to him.
The knock came again. The cat hissed. John opened the door.
The man outside was drenched to the bones and obviously of Royal blood, although it had been watered down over at least two generations. His pale skin had an odd, greenish tinge, as did his fingernails. His wet, black hair seemed to curl in ways that couldn't entirely be blamed on the whims of nature, and his eyes… His eyes were as colourless and iridescent as those of a fish. Not bulging or cold, but unsettling all the same. His expensive-looking suit was caked with mud; he must have stumbled and fallen more than once.
"Apologies for the intrusion," the stranger said in a deep, surprisingly pleasant voice as John still stared at him. "I seem to be in need of some assistance."
Then he collapsed on John's doorstep, the cat growling madly as around them, the rain pattered on.
~~~
John nearly let him die.
The stranger's blood - black in the dim light, and John knew it would be closer to green than red - was swirling as the rainwater carried it into the early night. John could leave the unconscious body for the spiders; no doubt they'd enjoy the meal. He could wait for cold and time to do their work and bury the stranger in the soft dirt of the nearby hills come morning.
He could commit murder through neglect and not feel bad about it. A man of Royal heritage undoubtedly wasn't a very nice one.
The light in the living room behind him went out suddenly and without a fuss, cutting the telly off mid-noise. Just another blackout, but in that moment the silent darkness felt like a gift, a cover to hide whatever John might do.
John put the safety back on and shoved the gun into his waistband at the small of his back. The cat hissed and dashed up the stairs as John leant down and reached for the stranger's arms.
The kitchen was clean and well stocked with candles. John's patient might not have been entirely human, but John was still a bloody good doctor.
He'd make do.
~~~
A day and night went by before the stranger woke again. John had put him up on the sofa - the bed would have been more chivalrous, but the bed was John's - and occasionally checked his dressings. Two gunshot wounds, clean and already healing abnormally fast, marred the man's pale torso. Apart from the colour of his blood and his inhuman eyes, the stranger seemed almost normal if John ignored the webbing between his fingers. His innards certainly all seemed to be in the proper places.
The rain had stopped some time during the night, but the cat refused to enter the living room so John let it out through the kitchen window and made himself some tea. When he turned back, the stranger's eyes were open, fixing that unsettling gaze on him. John's fingers tightened around the mug.
"Thirsty?" he asked, falling back on his professionalism for want of anything else to say.
The stranger nodded, so John filled a glass with water from the tap and then helped him sit to drink it. After a few small sips, the stranger pulled back.
"You have been to Afghanistan, I perceive." The voice was hoarse, but still pleasant.
John jerked back as if it had tried to stab him with a knife.
"There's something odd about you," the stranger went on. "A military doctor, quite decent, hating the Royal bloodline as you do? Your experiences must have been traumatic. Torture?"
"Get out of my head," John said tonelessly. His hands were clenching so tightly his fingers hurt. Should have let you die, he thought. Should have let you bleed out and the spiders have the rest.
The stranger cocked his head to one side. "Remnants of a military haircut," he said. "Your tan has almost faded, but the lines are still there if one looks closely. My continued survival makes you not only a doctor but a good one, but," he smiled briefly, "your first reaction to me wasn't any friendlier than that of your cat, if with less infernal noise. Where would a military doctor learn to despise the Royal blood? The caves of Afghanistan. I only guessed torture because you're not dead," he finished, looking pleased with himself beneath the pallor.
John opened his mouth, and closed it again when words refused to form on his tongue.
"Not in your head," the stranger said softly.
"Right." John cleared his throat. "Do you… Should I call anyone to come and fetch you?"
"Ah." The stranger reached for the glass again. "That won't be necessary."
So he was running from something. John briefly wondered if that something was human, but then he mentally shrugged. Running and hiding were familiar to him, and the rest wasn't any of his business. At the rate he was healing, the stranger would be out of his hair within the next two weeks.
The stranger was watching him oddly.
"I'm not going to ask," John said.
"No, you're not, are you?" The stranger smiled slightly. "You're a peculiar man, Doctor…?"
"Watson," John said, seeing no point in lying. "John Watson." He barely remembered in time not to hold out his hand to shake. The stranger might have an impressive talent for observation, if that's what it was, but being impressed by him didn't mean John wanted him to stick around.
"Sherry Vernet," the stranger said, looking as if he knew exactly what was going through John's mind. He probably did, so with another mental shrug, John decided not to censor himself.
"That's not your name," he said confidently. Pale eyes blinked at him as he got up to make himself another cuppa.
"Peculiar," the stranger muttered behind him. "Very peculiar."
John didn't smile, but it was a near thing.
~~~
Days passed. The stranger's health continued to improve, but now that John had taken on responsibility for him, he wasn't going to let the man stagger back out into the Scottish spring without being damn sure he wouldn't collapse again the next hill over.
"If someone finds you then," he said, "they're going to look for whoever did such a shoddy job of patching you up. I do have some professional pride left. Now eat the damn eggs."
The stranger looked at him, then at the breakfast congealing on the plate before him. With a put-upon sigh, he picked up his fork.
"I could be allergic to eggs," he pointed out.
"You could be," John agreed amiably. "Eat."
With a quick smile, the stranger did just that.
"You have a great gift of silence," he said later, after John had helped him shuffle back to the sofa, "but you must have questions."
John shrugged.
"Of course I do," he said, "but you gave me a false name, remember? I'm not going to ask what you were doing all the way out here if you're just going to lie."
"Ah." The stranger thought for a moment. "That's very pragmatic."
"I'm a very pragmatic bloke," John said. "Also, bored. Fancy a film?"
"Will it feature that unspeakable 'archaeologist' again?" the stranger asked with a disgusted sneer. By now, John knew him well enough to tell that half of it was pure show. The man was at least as bored as John.
"'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,'" he agreed cheerfully," where Dr. Jones fights false gods impersonating Shub-Niggurath in a diamond mine in India."
The stranger groaned theatrically. "I thought you despised the Royal bloodlines."
"These aren't gods," John said. "These are blokes in rubbish costumes. It's fun."
"If you say so." The stranger looked doubtful.
"I do."
And just to be contrary, John made him sit through the third part - 'Indiana Jones and the Last Christian' - as well. It felt oddly domestic. He tried not to let that bother him.
~~~
When the stranger - "Why will you not use my name?" "Because I don't know it." - was well enough to walk on his own without much pain, John expected him to leave. He almost regretted it a little; unless the stranger was a supremely good actor even when in pain, he was a decent, if odd, sort of fellow despite the Royal blood. John was going to miss having someone beside the cat for company.
"It will rain again in two, perhaps three days," the stranger said with a look at the cloudless sky. Night was falling, and the first stars were glowing dully under the blood-red moon. "I will leave then."
Expecting the rain to obliterate his footsteps, no doubt. John nodded. He didn't for a minute assume the stranger would leave by day, either.
"Do you need anything?" he asked.
The stranger smiled slightly. Without looking at John, he said, "Did you know that the moon used to be silver?"
John blinked.
"My mum told me when I was a kid," he said after a moment.
"So did mine. Children's tales, of course." The stranger waved a pale, webbed hand. "She said there used to be thousands of stars, in constellations called 'Sagittarius,' the archer and 'Cygnus,' the swan." He smiled again. "'The Saucepan.'"
"Bit different from 'R'lyeh's Tollhouse' and 'The Black Goat,'" John agreed, wondering where this was going.
"My mother was human," the stranger said. "You were wondering," he added when he noticed John's surprise.
"I'm wondering about a lot of things," John said. Had the man's mother stayed with his father out of her own free will? Did the stranger have any siblings? What had his father looked like?
What was he doing in remote Scotia? Who had shot him, and why?
John reminded himself that he didn't care. In another two or three days, the stranger would be gone and John would never see him again.
"What a beautiful sight that must have been," the stranger said quietly. "All those lights."
John's heart ached. He wished he knew what it meant.
"Yes," he said.
Neither of them spoke another word that night.
~~~
The stranger's promised rain had not yet come when John jerked out of a restless sleep with his heart resonating strangely in his chest. He gulped for air and pressed a hand to his ribcage, but the heart didn't settle down.
John stumbled to his feet; he'd felt an odd palpitation when he'd passed a Royal on a London street and of course the discomforting awareness of the stranger's presence, but that was like comparing an unfamiliar sound at night with someone's nearby scream of fear. Something was close, and getting closer, and John might not know exactly what it was, but he was sure that he didn't want to meet it. Dressed only in a t-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, he grabbed his gun and hurried down the stairs, only to flinch when the stranger reached for him from behind the living room door.
"Don't," he gasped, feeling the stranger's wrongness like a bleeding scratch behind his breastbone. Stars, how he hated the Royal blood. Hated it with his soul and his bones and every part of his body that was still his.
The stranger took a step back and examined John with his pale, pale eyes.
"I left no mark of my presence in this house and you pulled out the stitches two days ago. If they find my tracks and manage to follow them back here," which they won't, his voice seemed to imply, "lie. Say I must have hidden in the shed behind your house. You're a doctor who spilled his blood in the service of Her Majesty; no one's going to suspect that someone like you would harbour… well, me."
"You? What…" John felt for the gun at the small of his back. The cool metal calmed him. If a bunch of Royals were coming for the stranger, he could… He wasn't sure what he could do, but there had to be some way he could help. "Sherry, what's going on?"
Unexpectedly, the stranger smiled. "Thank you." He reached out his webbed hand and John took it. "Making your acquaintance was surprisingly pleasant."
John stared at him, confusion and his quickening heartbeat combining to a sick feeling in his stomach. He opened his mouth to ask again what was going on, to demand the answers he hadn't asked for before, but the stranger had already turned around and was striding towards the door. John stood, paralysed, aching to do something but without the slightest idea what. The door fell shut and he was alone again.
The heart didn't quiet down for another two hours. Nobody came to ask after the stranger.
~~~
John did something he never did: he watched the news. A quick internet search for 'Sherry Vernet' had unearthed nothing, but then John hadn't expected it to. What the Royals didn't censor often had little informational value left, even if one knew how to read between the lines. Besides, John had already known that the name was a fake.
However, when the telly finally did show some useful footage three days later, John nearly dropped the remote.
"Bloody stars!"
Restorationist mastermind caught in Scotia, the news ticker read, and 'Rache' apprehended at last, while the news anchor informed 'the relieved New Albion public' that Rache, whose real name was apparently Sherlock Holmes, had been sentenced by Her Majesty Victoria Gloriana to spend the rest of his undoubtedly short life in the Tower of London.
John cursed again. Unbidden, he thought of stars and a silver moon and an acquaintance that had been 'surprisingly pleasant.' He thought of the Royal bloodline and the things in the Afghan caves, and how mercy was an entirely human concept.
"Bloody toadbuggering idiot!"
He'd kept a Restorationist under his roof and not even known it. One man alone couldn't change anything. But, John thought, almost breathless from the magnitude of his realisation, what if someone's there to watch his back?
What if, despite all appearances, there was someone in whom to trust?
He posted a brief entry to his blog about life in Scotia and how many more birds he saw on any given day than he had in London. He packed his gun and some money and nothing else and left the window open for the cat to let itself in. If any burglars wanted to hike all the way from town to take their pick of John's things, they were welcome to them.
John was going to meet Irene. One way or another, he would never return.
~~~
When humanity had first reached for the sky, it had been in balloons that took their pilots into whatever direction the wind was blowing. Motors and rudders had followed, allowing those early dirigibles to forge their clumsy way across the sky. It hadn't been until a since-forgotten inventor from the Hexagon had thought to combine an engine with his glider that the Royals had put their collective foot down by burning the man and his entire town. The privilege of human flight, it was understood, would only be ¬granted if the vehicles remained comparatively slow.
Irene's airship, compared to the others which filled the sky on a busy day, was anything but slow. It was an Arjikal, a sleek creation from far-off Punjab, and Irene had named it Little Grain. If there was a pun in the name, John didn't get it, but it had been the Little Grain that carried him from Afghanistan back to New Albion and Irene had insisted that she be the one to ferry him to Scotia a few months later. With a name like Adler, she joked, she had practically been fated to become an airship pilot, and he might as well indulge her.
"Got my message?" he asked as he entered the flight deck. Its outer walls were all made of glass; the view was stupendous. Irene paid no attention to the ground falling away below as the airship rose, busy entering their destination's coordinates before she turned to John. She was older than him, and taller, with long, dark hair and even darker skin. One of her eyes was a warm brown, the other a colourless white.
John loved her.
"I'm here, aren't I?" Irene smiled, but made no move to hug him. She'd never liked touching others, and even for John, she'd made an exception only once: they'd danced at their siblings' wedding. John sometimes wondered what would have become of Harriet if she'd married Irene instead of Clara. At the very least, they'd both still be alive.
"Thanks for picking me up." John nodded at the man standing a little to the side. He was about John's height, pale and slight with thinning black hair and dark eyes, watching John as if he wasn't sure what to make of him.
"That's Daniel," Irene said. "He's also on his way to London, so I thought I'd drop off two stones from one bird."
"Daniel Davidson," the man said, stretching out a hand. John shook it.
"John Watson."
"I know." Davidson smiled briefly. "Irene's told me about you. Pretty light luggage for such a long trip."
"I won't be staying long," John said evenly.
"If you try to get into the Tower by yourself, you'll be staying a lot longer than you'd like."
John pulled in a startled breath and drew his gun. Davidson raised his hands immediately, but it was Irene's sharp, "John!" that kept his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
"Who are you?" John demanded.
"Daniel Davidson." Davidson smiled wryly. "Head of the Éireann Restorationist movement. Hello."
John hesitated.
"John, come on. You put up a message that you want to go to London four days after a high-profile Restorationist is picked up three hills away from your home? You hate that place. Besides, rumour has it that Holmes was shot. I can think of only one reason he didn't die, and that reason is going to put his gun down now."
John slowly lowered his gun until it was pointing at the floor.
"If you can figure that out, why hasn't anyone come to arrest me yet?"
"I know you, John." The circular scars around Irene's bad eye seemed to crawl with a life of their own. "They don't."
"She's right." Davidson had taken his hands down and stuffed them into his pockets. "And I'm afraid that good old New Albion is policed by a bunch of idiots. They wouldn't know a nagaae if it croaked them in the face." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "I, on the other hand, have made more than one of them croak."
"Daniel knows the layout of the Tower," Irene said. "He can get you in, my stupid, brave boy."
"More importantly," Davidson said with a bright smile, "I can get you out again."
John looked from one to the other. Then he sighed, and tucked his gun away again.
"Alright," he said. "Let's hear your plan."
~~~
Irene caught his arm on the way out. Davidson had already left the Little Grain and was sauntering down the airfield, whistling. John looked at Irene, startled by the sudden touch.
"You know that this is crazy, right?" she asked him. "I don't know what you and Holmes did while he was with you -"
"Nothing!" John protested.
"- which is even worse!" Irene looked as if she wanted to throw up her hands, but thought better of it. "You've known the man for what, ten days? If this isn't a hopeless love story, then what the stars has possessed you to run after him?"
John had no idea how to answer that. He sighed and scratched his eyebrow with a thumb.
"He trusted me not to betray him. And he tried to keep me safe."
Irene scowled at him.
"You don't owe him for that," she said. "You saved his life."
"You don't understand," John said helplessly. And how could she? He only half-understood it himself. He just knew that he couldn't sit at home and do nothing… not anymore.
"All I understand is that you're very loyal, very fast. Like always." Irene sighed. "Just… take care of yourself, alright? You're all the family I have left." She gave his arm a last squeeze and let him go. "I don't trust that Holmes fellow, and you shouldn't, either. Don't trust anyone."
"I'll be fine," John promised. They both knew that he was lying.
He had no idea if she'd ever forgive him for it.
~~~
John disliked London for a lot of reasons. It could have been a beautiful city, if not for the Royal architecture, which made his eyes water with the way walls seemed to turn in on themselves at impossible angles. Their preferred colours seemed to be black, dark purple, and a yellow so vile John half-expected it to be oozing out of something. The streets were crowded, dirty, and far from safe. More people disappeared in London each year than anywhere else in New Albion. And yet, humans were flocking to it like the Queen were calling them personally. For all John knew, perhaps she was.
He'd thought he knew the city, but Davidson led him down streets he'd never even heard of.
"Best to keep a low profile in my line of work," Davidson said, grinning a little maniacally.
John nodded, but didn't reply. The alley they were walking through, like the others before it, was narrow and damp with what John sincerely hoped was last night's rain. He'd had to step over more than one outstretched arm or leg, the owners of said limbs staring at him dully. Some of them were women with grotesquely swollen bellies. Others were men with ruined faces or emaciated bodies. An odd stench permeated the air. Here and there, a window had been wiped clean in a hopeless attempt to let in some light.
"The dark side of London," Davidson said. He didn't sound too bothered, but then John didn't know what horrors the man had seen that made him a Restorationist. They were considered the worst kind of abomination; criminals who conspired to bring about the fall of the world's beloved - feared - Monarchy.
"I wasn't aware that London had a bright side." John was trying not to stare at a man who was leaning against an overflowing rubbish bin. The red scars on his colourless face looked too much like Irene's, like something left by the suckers of an abnormally huge octopus.
"You have to know where to look," Davidson agreed, and ducked into yet another alley.
John grimaced, and followed.
~~~
The building looked like something that had screwed itself out of the earth and was now stuck aboveground in all its hideous glory. Strange cubes and rectangles stuck out of the curving walls. Long slits seemed to take the place of windows. The walls were a washed-out grey, and the looming trees surrounding them didn't make the place appear any friendlier.
To call the Tower of London a little eerie would have been like calling the night a little dark. And that was only the outside.
The door Davidson took them to was so small they both had to crouch to pass through it. No one was guarding it, and it didn't seem to have any sort of lock.
"They're not expecting anyone to be mad enough to break into the Tower," Davidson whispered. He sniffed the dank air and turned right. "And the prisoners are safely kept inside."
"Then how are we going to get out again?" John whispered back. He held his gun lightly in his left hand, feeling calmer than he had since returning from Afghanistan. This was walking behind enemy lines to rescue someone who needed him. This was something he knew.
"There are ways." Davidson threw John a calculating look. His eyes were black in the dim light. "You know we can only get Holmes, right? No heroics, Doctor Watson." He emphasised the Doctor as if to remind John that neither of them were soldiers.
He didn't know John very well.
"Yes," John said shortly, and gestured with his free hand. "Lead the way."
The Tower's corridors were uneven, like tunnels in a cave. There were no stairs, only floors rising and falling in ways that made little sense to John, the only light coming from the narrow slits in the outer walls. The walls themselves were slick with dampness and seemed to pulse slowly with a malign life or their own. It had to be a trick of the light, but John wondered again if the Tower had been built, or if it was some sort of creature too unearthly and grotesque for him to grasp.
His heart was thrumming oddly, like an echo-beat. Ba-da-ba-da-dum-dum. His fingers clenched around the butt of his gun despite the peculiar lack of guards, but he still wasn't afraid. Maybe he had lost the capacity for fear in Afghanistan.
He would have lost his way immediately in the incomprehensible maze if not for Davidson. The man seemed to know exactly where he was going, pausing every now and then to turn his head this way and that, like a snake scenting the air. He led them along empty, tilting halls and past silent doors, until John was half-convinced that they were passing through the hollowed-out remains of a dead thing. Nothing could be alive in a place like this. Not for long.
After what seemed like hours, they reached a door that looked no different from all the others, but Davidson stopped.
"Here we are," he said quietly, and rooted around in his pockets for what turned out to be a small set of lock picks. Only then did John notice that this door, unlike the one leading into the tower, had been fitted with a lock that was undoubtedly human-made. "I could never tell if these were made to keep the prisoners in or to keep the guard out."
John frowned.
"What guard?" he asked, but the door was already swinging open. The room behind it was windowless and small and reeked of old blood. Sherlock Holmes was crouched on the floor, incongruously still wearing his suit, one webbed hand raised to ward off the weak light. His cheek was marred with a fading bruise; greenish blood had dried on the collar of his shirt. He blinked, then his pale eyes widened.
"You?" he asked, his expression disbelieving as he stared at John. Then his gaze fell on Davidson, and his lips pulled back in a sudden snarl.
"You!"
Davidson broke into a delighted laugh as John automatically turned and pointed the gun at him.
"Sherlock, dear! Daddy's come to bring your pet!" There was nothing sane in his voice as he added, "Isn't it nicer to die in company?"
"Shoot him!" Holmes rasped. John didn't even stop to think before he pulled the trigger. There was history between these two, bad history, that was clear. And he trusted Holmes, despite knowing that he probably shouldn't.
John was aiming for Davidson's chest, but the man was fast. Davidson howled with rage as the bullet tore through his shoulder, a sound that was echoed by an unearthly shriek from further up the corridor. John's finger froze on the trigger. He knew that sound. Stars, but he knew that sound.
And as he turned away from the fleeing Davidson, he saw death coming down the hall.
~~~
"Run!" Holmes's hand closed around John's arm, but John stood paralysed, gaping at the shapeless thing that was bearing down on them. It looked like a tar-covered blob in one moment and was covered with wandering, green-glowing eyes the next. Appendages formed and disappeared again faster than John could credit, and it seemed to be lit from within by a burning hatred for all things living.
Shoggoth. Servant of New Albion's terrible Queen. Unbeatable. Unstoppable. Guarding the Tower of London as its kin were guarding the caves of Afghanistan. John stared at it in frozen horror as he remembered agony.
Holmes pulled at him, but it was far too late for John to escape. It had been too late from the moment he'd set foot inside the Tower.
"Run," he whispered, his heartbeat rising to a deafening crescendo before it simply, suddenly, stopped.
Everything slowed. John tried to drag in a last breath, but his still chest refused to expand. Something tugged at him; Holmes had grabbed the gun, John realised. He heard the shots as if through gauze and cotton, saw the useless impacts the bullets made on the shoggoth's rippling skin. Holmes yelled something, but John was a dead man standing, helpless to do anything but watch his doom draw near.
He had an instant to hope that Holmes would at least manage to save himself. Then the shoggoth was upon him, and all he had left to do was keep his eyes open as a stringy, dripping appendage lashed out for him.
The second it touched his shoulder, a starburst blossomed in John's chest, white and hot and irresistible. He screamed as it seared through him, or perhaps the shoggoth did, the both of them locked together by a hate and fury that knew no age or origin. Reality tilted and warped, twisting in on itself like the walls of the Tower, and for a moment John felt timeless, eternal, protagonist in a struggle older than the world. Something pressed down on him, aiming to break him, but John was already broken in ways only a human could ever understand, and suddenly it was his own fury which fuelled him, his own hatred which spurred him on. He roared, pushing back against the thing that would see him beaten.
And it shattered. Had John been human, it would have crushed him. Had he been Other, it might yet have torn him apart. But he was neither, and both, and Sherlock Holmes was still standing next to him, and John Watson the soldier had killed to protect. John Watson the doctor could do nothing less. Another scream, and this time it was the shoggoth screeching out its dying call, and John laughed as it shuddered and frayed and died.
The last thing he knew before his senses left him was the steady, triumphant beat of his heart.
Ba-da-dum.
~~~
He had a vague memory of Irene's Arjika, but that might have been a fever dream. Holmes - Sherlock - must have carried him out of the Tower, but John didn't remember that, either. All he knew from the time immediately after the Tower were flashes of pale eyes and cool hands, a presence that had somehow become soothing.
The creature's mark had been burnt into John's left shoulder, indelible, and freezing with a cold ache which throbbed in counterpoint to his heartbeat whenever the moon was full. Sherlock tried to apologise, once, but John waved him away. It seemed like a small price to pay for his self-respect.
The man John had known as Davidson had disappeared. Sherlock knew that same man as Moriarty, which was a name even John recognised: the Queen's pet detective, and a greater threat to the Restorationist movement than anyone else. No wonder he'd used an alias; Irene would have thrown him off her airship from a hundred feet high. They'd managed to track him to the Hexagon, where he'd apparently rented a room in the Rue Mille-chèvres in Calais for a while, but his trace ended there. It didn't matter. The European continent, like New Albion, was full of worse evils than one deluded man. 'Rache' had their work set out for them.
One man couldn't change the world. Two of them, it turned out, could do almost anything.
~~~
Credits:
This story contains some obvious elements from Robert E. Howard's "Old Garfield's Heart" and Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" (link goes to .pdf), as well as elements from the Cthulhu Mythos, started by H. P. Lovecraft
Moriarty's alias Daniel Davidson is from "Death in a White Tie" by Ngaio Marsh, since I know Gaiman's Henry Camberley from "The Silent Passenger" and liked the idea of nicking from the classics
Picture credits:
John's house by Richard Fisher, licensed CC
Irene's dirigible by Jean-Marie Massaud, from dezeen.com
Ye Elder Sign from chaosmatrix.org
Union Jack by geishaboy500, licensed CC
Tower of London, such as it is, by Josip Broz Tito, via The Cosmicomicon
The Queen's Guard, such as it is, by Eric in SF, licensed CC
Thanks to anatsuno and mrlnpndrgn for the French bit, to houseinrlyeh for making sure I adhere to the Mythos canon, as far as that's necessary possible, and of course to kisahawklin for the marvellous and speedy beta.
Recipient: hollyxu
Author: lavvyan
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Irene Adler, James Moriarty
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mention of attempted suicide
Summary: In the caves of Afghanistan, John died once already. But in a world ruled by creatures more terrible than divine, death isn't always permanent, and when a half-human stranger stumbles into his life, John has to decide what he hates more: the Royal bloodline, or that peculiar heart which won't let him die...
Notes: I love summaries that end with dot dot dot. Dearest recipient, you asked for plot, crossovers, Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald, and said that sex wasn't a big deal. Here you go then: a plotty BBC/Study in Emerald crossover/fusion-type squinty-gen story. Hope you enjoy!
(See end notes for proper credits.)
The Queen's Guard
The cat knew first. The cat always knew first. It had known to be wary of John when they'd first met, and it knew that the knock on the door didn't come from anything most people would want in their home. And John's heart, that terrible heart with its unshakeably calm triple-beat, knew when its like was near.
He'd been a man like a thousand others, once. He'd grown up in a small town in Scotia and left for New Albion to study the human medicines. He'd deferred to those of Royal blood, watched all of the Queen's speeches on the telly, and once he'd finished his studies he'd signed up for Her Majesty's army to spread Her glory through the world.
They'd sent him to Afghanistan. And John had learned that when the internet had called it a place forsaken by every god, it had either been wrong or lying. There had been gods in that land, dark gods, writhing and baying for blood in their caves. John had seen them, and nearly lost his mind.
When they killed him, it had been a relief, and nothing had ever felt so much like a betrayal as waking up again, sobbing for breath as he clutched at his chest, where something powerful and eldritch had taken the place of his heart. The man whose daughter John had saved months before had been smiling at him, and John had been unable to tell him he would rather die a thousand deaths in those caves than live another five minutes with that thing in his chest. A thing of Royal origin. A thing he couldn't remove.
He tried to kill himself, just once, before he staggered back to what remained of his unit. Picked up his gun and pressed the muzzle against his palate. His finger shook on the trigger as the blood rushed in his ears, louder and louder until all he could hear was that accursed heart drumming strong and steady, forcing the life through his veins uncaring of his disgusted fear with its mighty ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. He tried to pull the trigger but his hand was steady as a rock, unmoving until he drew his head away from the gun.
He had cried, then, for the first time in years. But the steadiness of his pulse hadn't changed.
He had finished his tour without anyone discovering his secret and returned to New Albion to take his pension. The bills bore the Queen's countenance, and seeing her reminded him sickeningly of the Afghan gods, her unacknowledged kin. There seemed to be nothing divine about either of them now.
After a few months in London, John withdrew his savings and bought a small house in the hills of Scotia. He had no car and the next village was some miles away, but the internet worked just fine between blackouts and the telly had decent reception. John didn't need much. The spiders in the tree behind the house were quiet and kept to themselves, and several weeks after he moved in, the cat showed up. It hissed and growled whenever John got too close, but it was willing to share the house with him when the rains got too bad.
It was growling now, too. The rain had been going strong the whole day and well into the evening. No one should have been wandering around outside, certainly not that close to John's house. But someone was knocking, and the cat's hair stood on end as it yowled at the door. John's heartbeat resonated oddly in his chest, the way it had done only once, when he'd passed a Royal on a London street after his return from Afghanistan.
John swallowed, and pulled his gun from its drawer.
He wasn't a Restorationist, not by a long shot. The world was as it was and one man wouldn't change it. But if something unnatural was going to invade his home, he would not stand back and let it happen. Nothing the Royals might do in retaliation could be worse than what had already happened to him.
The knock came again. The cat hissed. John opened the door.
The man outside was drenched to the bones and obviously of Royal blood, although it had been watered down over at least two generations. His pale skin had an odd, greenish tinge, as did his fingernails. His wet, black hair seemed to curl in ways that couldn't entirely be blamed on the whims of nature, and his eyes… His eyes were as colourless and iridescent as those of a fish. Not bulging or cold, but unsettling all the same. His expensive-looking suit was caked with mud; he must have stumbled and fallen more than once.
"Apologies for the intrusion," the stranger said in a deep, surprisingly pleasant voice as John still stared at him. "I seem to be in need of some assistance."
Then he collapsed on John's doorstep, the cat growling madly as around them, the rain pattered on.
~~~
John nearly let him die.
The stranger's blood - black in the dim light, and John knew it would be closer to green than red - was swirling as the rainwater carried it into the early night. John could leave the unconscious body for the spiders; no doubt they'd enjoy the meal. He could wait for cold and time to do their work and bury the stranger in the soft dirt of the nearby hills come morning.
He could commit murder through neglect and not feel bad about it. A man of Royal heritage undoubtedly wasn't a very nice one.
The light in the living room behind him went out suddenly and without a fuss, cutting the telly off mid-noise. Just another blackout, but in that moment the silent darkness felt like a gift, a cover to hide whatever John might do.
John put the safety back on and shoved the gun into his waistband at the small of his back. The cat hissed and dashed up the stairs as John leant down and reached for the stranger's arms.
The kitchen was clean and well stocked with candles. John's patient might not have been entirely human, but John was still a bloody good doctor.
He'd make do.
~~~
A day and night went by before the stranger woke again. John had put him up on the sofa - the bed would have been more chivalrous, but the bed was John's - and occasionally checked his dressings. Two gunshot wounds, clean and already healing abnormally fast, marred the man's pale torso. Apart from the colour of his blood and his inhuman eyes, the stranger seemed almost normal if John ignored the webbing between his fingers. His innards certainly all seemed to be in the proper places.
The rain had stopped some time during the night, but the cat refused to enter the living room so John let it out through the kitchen window and made himself some tea. When he turned back, the stranger's eyes were open, fixing that unsettling gaze on him. John's fingers tightened around the mug.
"Thirsty?" he asked, falling back on his professionalism for want of anything else to say.
The stranger nodded, so John filled a glass with water from the tap and then helped him sit to drink it. After a few small sips, the stranger pulled back.
"You have been to Afghanistan, I perceive." The voice was hoarse, but still pleasant.
John jerked back as if it had tried to stab him with a knife.
"There's something odd about you," the stranger went on. "A military doctor, quite decent, hating the Royal bloodline as you do? Your experiences must have been traumatic. Torture?"
"Get out of my head," John said tonelessly. His hands were clenching so tightly his fingers hurt. Should have let you die, he thought. Should have let you bleed out and the spiders have the rest.
The stranger cocked his head to one side. "Remnants of a military haircut," he said. "Your tan has almost faded, but the lines are still there if one looks closely. My continued survival makes you not only a doctor but a good one, but," he smiled briefly, "your first reaction to me wasn't any friendlier than that of your cat, if with less infernal noise. Where would a military doctor learn to despise the Royal blood? The caves of Afghanistan. I only guessed torture because you're not dead," he finished, looking pleased with himself beneath the pallor.
John opened his mouth, and closed it again when words refused to form on his tongue.
"Not in your head," the stranger said softly.
"Right." John cleared his throat. "Do you… Should I call anyone to come and fetch you?"
"Ah." The stranger reached for the glass again. "That won't be necessary."
So he was running from something. John briefly wondered if that something was human, but then he mentally shrugged. Running and hiding were familiar to him, and the rest wasn't any of his business. At the rate he was healing, the stranger would be out of his hair within the next two weeks.
The stranger was watching him oddly.
"I'm not going to ask," John said.
"No, you're not, are you?" The stranger smiled slightly. "You're a peculiar man, Doctor…?"
"Watson," John said, seeing no point in lying. "John Watson." He barely remembered in time not to hold out his hand to shake. The stranger might have an impressive talent for observation, if that's what it was, but being impressed by him didn't mean John wanted him to stick around.
"Sherry Vernet," the stranger said, looking as if he knew exactly what was going through John's mind. He probably did, so with another mental shrug, John decided not to censor himself.
"That's not your name," he said confidently. Pale eyes blinked at him as he got up to make himself another cuppa.
"Peculiar," the stranger muttered behind him. "Very peculiar."
John didn't smile, but it was a near thing.
~~~
Days passed. The stranger's health continued to improve, but now that John had taken on responsibility for him, he wasn't going to let the man stagger back out into the Scottish spring without being damn sure he wouldn't collapse again the next hill over.
"If someone finds you then," he said, "they're going to look for whoever did such a shoddy job of patching you up. I do have some professional pride left. Now eat the damn eggs."
The stranger looked at him, then at the breakfast congealing on the plate before him. With a put-upon sigh, he picked up his fork.
"I could be allergic to eggs," he pointed out.
"You could be," John agreed amiably. "Eat."
With a quick smile, the stranger did just that.
"You have a great gift of silence," he said later, after John had helped him shuffle back to the sofa, "but you must have questions."
John shrugged.
"Of course I do," he said, "but you gave me a false name, remember? I'm not going to ask what you were doing all the way out here if you're just going to lie."
"Ah." The stranger thought for a moment. "That's very pragmatic."
"I'm a very pragmatic bloke," John said. "Also, bored. Fancy a film?"
"Will it feature that unspeakable 'archaeologist' again?" the stranger asked with a disgusted sneer. By now, John knew him well enough to tell that half of it was pure show. The man was at least as bored as John.
"'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,'" he agreed cheerfully," where Dr. Jones fights false gods impersonating Shub-Niggurath in a diamond mine in India."
The stranger groaned theatrically. "I thought you despised the Royal bloodlines."
"These aren't gods," John said. "These are blokes in rubbish costumes. It's fun."
"If you say so." The stranger looked doubtful.
"I do."
And just to be contrary, John made him sit through the third part - 'Indiana Jones and the Last Christian' - as well. It felt oddly domestic. He tried not to let that bother him.
~~~
When the stranger - "Why will you not use my name?" "Because I don't know it." - was well enough to walk on his own without much pain, John expected him to leave. He almost regretted it a little; unless the stranger was a supremely good actor even when in pain, he was a decent, if odd, sort of fellow despite the Royal blood. John was going to miss having someone beside the cat for company.
"It will rain again in two, perhaps three days," the stranger said with a look at the cloudless sky. Night was falling, and the first stars were glowing dully under the blood-red moon. "I will leave then."
Expecting the rain to obliterate his footsteps, no doubt. John nodded. He didn't for a minute assume the stranger would leave by day, either.
"Do you need anything?" he asked.
The stranger smiled slightly. Without looking at John, he said, "Did you know that the moon used to be silver?"
John blinked.
"My mum told me when I was a kid," he said after a moment.
"So did mine. Children's tales, of course." The stranger waved a pale, webbed hand. "She said there used to be thousands of stars, in constellations called 'Sagittarius,' the archer and 'Cygnus,' the swan." He smiled again. "'The Saucepan.'"
"Bit different from 'R'lyeh's Tollhouse' and 'The Black Goat,'" John agreed, wondering where this was going.
"My mother was human," the stranger said. "You were wondering," he added when he noticed John's surprise.
"I'm wondering about a lot of things," John said. Had the man's mother stayed with his father out of her own free will? Did the stranger have any siblings? What had his father looked like?
What was he doing in remote Scotia? Who had shot him, and why?
John reminded himself that he didn't care. In another two or three days, the stranger would be gone and John would never see him again.
"What a beautiful sight that must have been," the stranger said quietly. "All those lights."
John's heart ached. He wished he knew what it meant.
"Yes," he said.
Neither of them spoke another word that night.
~~~
The stranger's promised rain had not yet come when John jerked out of a restless sleep with his heart resonating strangely in his chest. He gulped for air and pressed a hand to his ribcage, but the heart didn't settle down.
John stumbled to his feet; he'd felt an odd palpitation when he'd passed a Royal on a London street and of course the discomforting awareness of the stranger's presence, but that was like comparing an unfamiliar sound at night with someone's nearby scream of fear. Something was close, and getting closer, and John might not know exactly what it was, but he was sure that he didn't want to meet it. Dressed only in a t-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, he grabbed his gun and hurried down the stairs, only to flinch when the stranger reached for him from behind the living room door.
"Don't," he gasped, feeling the stranger's wrongness like a bleeding scratch behind his breastbone. Stars, how he hated the Royal blood. Hated it with his soul and his bones and every part of his body that was still his.
The stranger took a step back and examined John with his pale, pale eyes.
"I left no mark of my presence in this house and you pulled out the stitches two days ago. If they find my tracks and manage to follow them back here," which they won't, his voice seemed to imply, "lie. Say I must have hidden in the shed behind your house. You're a doctor who spilled his blood in the service of Her Majesty; no one's going to suspect that someone like you would harbour… well, me."
"You? What…" John felt for the gun at the small of his back. The cool metal calmed him. If a bunch of Royals were coming for the stranger, he could… He wasn't sure what he could do, but there had to be some way he could help. "Sherry, what's going on?"
Unexpectedly, the stranger smiled. "Thank you." He reached out his webbed hand and John took it. "Making your acquaintance was surprisingly pleasant."
John stared at him, confusion and his quickening heartbeat combining to a sick feeling in his stomach. He opened his mouth to ask again what was going on, to demand the answers he hadn't asked for before, but the stranger had already turned around and was striding towards the door. John stood, paralysed, aching to do something but without the slightest idea what. The door fell shut and he was alone again.
The heart didn't quiet down for another two hours. Nobody came to ask after the stranger.
~~~
John did something he never did: he watched the news. A quick internet search for 'Sherry Vernet' had unearthed nothing, but then John hadn't expected it to. What the Royals didn't censor often had little informational value left, even if one knew how to read between the lines. Besides, John had already known that the name was a fake.
However, when the telly finally did show some useful footage three days later, John nearly dropped the remote.
"Bloody stars!"
Restorationist mastermind caught in Scotia, the news ticker read, and 'Rache' apprehended at last, while the news anchor informed 'the relieved New Albion public' that Rache, whose real name was apparently Sherlock Holmes, had been sentenced by Her Majesty Victoria Gloriana to spend the rest of his undoubtedly short life in the Tower of London.
John cursed again. Unbidden, he thought of stars and a silver moon and an acquaintance that had been 'surprisingly pleasant.' He thought of the Royal bloodline and the things in the Afghan caves, and how mercy was an entirely human concept.
"Bloody toadbuggering idiot!"
He'd kept a Restorationist under his roof and not even known it. One man alone couldn't change anything. But, John thought, almost breathless from the magnitude of his realisation, what if someone's there to watch his back?
What if, despite all appearances, there was someone in whom to trust?
He posted a brief entry to his blog about life in Scotia and how many more birds he saw on any given day than he had in London. He packed his gun and some money and nothing else and left the window open for the cat to let itself in. If any burglars wanted to hike all the way from town to take their pick of John's things, they were welcome to them.
John was going to meet Irene. One way or another, he would never return.
~~~
When humanity had first reached for the sky, it had been in balloons that took their pilots into whatever direction the wind was blowing. Motors and rudders had followed, allowing those early dirigibles to forge their clumsy way across the sky. It hadn't been until a since-forgotten inventor from the Hexagon had thought to combine an engine with his glider that the Royals had put their collective foot down by burning the man and his entire town. The privilege of human flight, it was understood, would only be ¬granted if the vehicles remained comparatively slow.
Irene's airship, compared to the others which filled the sky on a busy day, was anything but slow. It was an Arjikal, a sleek creation from far-off Punjab, and Irene had named it Little Grain. If there was a pun in the name, John didn't get it, but it had been the Little Grain that carried him from Afghanistan back to New Albion and Irene had insisted that she be the one to ferry him to Scotia a few months later. With a name like Adler, she joked, she had practically been fated to become an airship pilot, and he might as well indulge her.
"Got my message?" he asked as he entered the flight deck. Its outer walls were all made of glass; the view was stupendous. Irene paid no attention to the ground falling away below as the airship rose, busy entering their destination's coordinates before she turned to John. She was older than him, and taller, with long, dark hair and even darker skin. One of her eyes was a warm brown, the other a colourless white.
John loved her.
"I'm here, aren't I?" Irene smiled, but made no move to hug him. She'd never liked touching others, and even for John, she'd made an exception only once: they'd danced at their siblings' wedding. John sometimes wondered what would have become of Harriet if she'd married Irene instead of Clara. At the very least, they'd both still be alive.
"Thanks for picking me up." John nodded at the man standing a little to the side. He was about John's height, pale and slight with thinning black hair and dark eyes, watching John as if he wasn't sure what to make of him.
"That's Daniel," Irene said. "He's also on his way to London, so I thought I'd drop off two stones from one bird."
"Daniel Davidson," the man said, stretching out a hand. John shook it.
"John Watson."
"I know." Davidson smiled briefly. "Irene's told me about you. Pretty light luggage for such a long trip."
"I won't be staying long," John said evenly.
"If you try to get into the Tower by yourself, you'll be staying a lot longer than you'd like."
John pulled in a startled breath and drew his gun. Davidson raised his hands immediately, but it was Irene's sharp, "John!" that kept his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
"Who are you?" John demanded.
"Daniel Davidson." Davidson smiled wryly. "Head of the Éireann Restorationist movement. Hello."
John hesitated.
"John, come on. You put up a message that you want to go to London four days after a high-profile Restorationist is picked up three hills away from your home? You hate that place. Besides, rumour has it that Holmes was shot. I can think of only one reason he didn't die, and that reason is going to put his gun down now."
John slowly lowered his gun until it was pointing at the floor.
"If you can figure that out, why hasn't anyone come to arrest me yet?"
"I know you, John." The circular scars around Irene's bad eye seemed to crawl with a life of their own. "They don't."
"She's right." Davidson had taken his hands down and stuffed them into his pockets. "And I'm afraid that good old New Albion is policed by a bunch of idiots. They wouldn't know a nagaae if it croaked them in the face." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "I, on the other hand, have made more than one of them croak."
"Daniel knows the layout of the Tower," Irene said. "He can get you in, my stupid, brave boy."
"More importantly," Davidson said with a bright smile, "I can get you out again."
John looked from one to the other. Then he sighed, and tucked his gun away again.
"Alright," he said. "Let's hear your plan."
~~~
Irene caught his arm on the way out. Davidson had already left the Little Grain and was sauntering down the airfield, whistling. John looked at Irene, startled by the sudden touch.
"You know that this is crazy, right?" she asked him. "I don't know what you and Holmes did while he was with you -"
"Nothing!" John protested.
"- which is even worse!" Irene looked as if she wanted to throw up her hands, but thought better of it. "You've known the man for what, ten days? If this isn't a hopeless love story, then what the stars has possessed you to run after him?"
John had no idea how to answer that. He sighed and scratched his eyebrow with a thumb.
"He trusted me not to betray him. And he tried to keep me safe."
Irene scowled at him.
"You don't owe him for that," she said. "You saved his life."
"You don't understand," John said helplessly. And how could she? He only half-understood it himself. He just knew that he couldn't sit at home and do nothing… not anymore.
"All I understand is that you're very loyal, very fast. Like always." Irene sighed. "Just… take care of yourself, alright? You're all the family I have left." She gave his arm a last squeeze and let him go. "I don't trust that Holmes fellow, and you shouldn't, either. Don't trust anyone."
"I'll be fine," John promised. They both knew that he was lying.
He had no idea if she'd ever forgive him for it.
~~~
John disliked London for a lot of reasons. It could have been a beautiful city, if not for the Royal architecture, which made his eyes water with the way walls seemed to turn in on themselves at impossible angles. Their preferred colours seemed to be black, dark purple, and a yellow so vile John half-expected it to be oozing out of something. The streets were crowded, dirty, and far from safe. More people disappeared in London each year than anywhere else in New Albion. And yet, humans were flocking to it like the Queen were calling them personally. For all John knew, perhaps she was.
He'd thought he knew the city, but Davidson led him down streets he'd never even heard of.
"Best to keep a low profile in my line of work," Davidson said, grinning a little maniacally.
John nodded, but didn't reply. The alley they were walking through, like the others before it, was narrow and damp with what John sincerely hoped was last night's rain. He'd had to step over more than one outstretched arm or leg, the owners of said limbs staring at him dully. Some of them were women with grotesquely swollen bellies. Others were men with ruined faces or emaciated bodies. An odd stench permeated the air. Here and there, a window had been wiped clean in a hopeless attempt to let in some light.
"The dark side of London," Davidson said. He didn't sound too bothered, but then John didn't know what horrors the man had seen that made him a Restorationist. They were considered the worst kind of abomination; criminals who conspired to bring about the fall of the world's beloved - feared - Monarchy.
"I wasn't aware that London had a bright side." John was trying not to stare at a man who was leaning against an overflowing rubbish bin. The red scars on his colourless face looked too much like Irene's, like something left by the suckers of an abnormally huge octopus.
"You have to know where to look," Davidson agreed, and ducked into yet another alley.
John grimaced, and followed.
~~~
The building looked like something that had screwed itself out of the earth and was now stuck aboveground in all its hideous glory. Strange cubes and rectangles stuck out of the curving walls. Long slits seemed to take the place of windows. The walls were a washed-out grey, and the looming trees surrounding them didn't make the place appear any friendlier.
To call the Tower of London a little eerie would have been like calling the night a little dark. And that was only the outside.
The door Davidson took them to was so small they both had to crouch to pass through it. No one was guarding it, and it didn't seem to have any sort of lock.
"They're not expecting anyone to be mad enough to break into the Tower," Davidson whispered. He sniffed the dank air and turned right. "And the prisoners are safely kept inside."
"Then how are we going to get out again?" John whispered back. He held his gun lightly in his left hand, feeling calmer than he had since returning from Afghanistan. This was walking behind enemy lines to rescue someone who needed him. This was something he knew.
"There are ways." Davidson threw John a calculating look. His eyes were black in the dim light. "You know we can only get Holmes, right? No heroics, Doctor Watson." He emphasised the Doctor as if to remind John that neither of them were soldiers.
He didn't know John very well.
"Yes," John said shortly, and gestured with his free hand. "Lead the way."
The Tower's corridors were uneven, like tunnels in a cave. There were no stairs, only floors rising and falling in ways that made little sense to John, the only light coming from the narrow slits in the outer walls. The walls themselves were slick with dampness and seemed to pulse slowly with a malign life or their own. It had to be a trick of the light, but John wondered again if the Tower had been built, or if it was some sort of creature too unearthly and grotesque for him to grasp.
His heart was thrumming oddly, like an echo-beat. Ba-da-ba-da-dum-dum. His fingers clenched around the butt of his gun despite the peculiar lack of guards, but he still wasn't afraid. Maybe he had lost the capacity for fear in Afghanistan.
He would have lost his way immediately in the incomprehensible maze if not for Davidson. The man seemed to know exactly where he was going, pausing every now and then to turn his head this way and that, like a snake scenting the air. He led them along empty, tilting halls and past silent doors, until John was half-convinced that they were passing through the hollowed-out remains of a dead thing. Nothing could be alive in a place like this. Not for long.
After what seemed like hours, they reached a door that looked no different from all the others, but Davidson stopped.
"Here we are," he said quietly, and rooted around in his pockets for what turned out to be a small set of lock picks. Only then did John notice that this door, unlike the one leading into the tower, had been fitted with a lock that was undoubtedly human-made. "I could never tell if these were made to keep the prisoners in or to keep the guard out."
John frowned.
"What guard?" he asked, but the door was already swinging open. The room behind it was windowless and small and reeked of old blood. Sherlock Holmes was crouched on the floor, incongruously still wearing his suit, one webbed hand raised to ward off the weak light. His cheek was marred with a fading bruise; greenish blood had dried on the collar of his shirt. He blinked, then his pale eyes widened.
"You?" he asked, his expression disbelieving as he stared at John. Then his gaze fell on Davidson, and his lips pulled back in a sudden snarl.
"You!"
Davidson broke into a delighted laugh as John automatically turned and pointed the gun at him.
"Sherlock, dear! Daddy's come to bring your pet!" There was nothing sane in his voice as he added, "Isn't it nicer to die in company?"
"Shoot him!" Holmes rasped. John didn't even stop to think before he pulled the trigger. There was history between these two, bad history, that was clear. And he trusted Holmes, despite knowing that he probably shouldn't.
John was aiming for Davidson's chest, but the man was fast. Davidson howled with rage as the bullet tore through his shoulder, a sound that was echoed by an unearthly shriek from further up the corridor. John's finger froze on the trigger. He knew that sound. Stars, but he knew that sound.
And as he turned away from the fleeing Davidson, he saw death coming down the hall.
~~~
"Run!" Holmes's hand closed around John's arm, but John stood paralysed, gaping at the shapeless thing that was bearing down on them. It looked like a tar-covered blob in one moment and was covered with wandering, green-glowing eyes the next. Appendages formed and disappeared again faster than John could credit, and it seemed to be lit from within by a burning hatred for all things living.
Shoggoth. Servant of New Albion's terrible Queen. Unbeatable. Unstoppable. Guarding the Tower of London as its kin were guarding the caves of Afghanistan. John stared at it in frozen horror as he remembered agony.
Holmes pulled at him, but it was far too late for John to escape. It had been too late from the moment he'd set foot inside the Tower.
"Run," he whispered, his heartbeat rising to a deafening crescendo before it simply, suddenly, stopped.
Everything slowed. John tried to drag in a last breath, but his still chest refused to expand. Something tugged at him; Holmes had grabbed the gun, John realised. He heard the shots as if through gauze and cotton, saw the useless impacts the bullets made on the shoggoth's rippling skin. Holmes yelled something, but John was a dead man standing, helpless to do anything but watch his doom draw near.
He had an instant to hope that Holmes would at least manage to save himself. Then the shoggoth was upon him, and all he had left to do was keep his eyes open as a stringy, dripping appendage lashed out for him.
The second it touched his shoulder, a starburst blossomed in John's chest, white and hot and irresistible. He screamed as it seared through him, or perhaps the shoggoth did, the both of them locked together by a hate and fury that knew no age or origin. Reality tilted and warped, twisting in on itself like the walls of the Tower, and for a moment John felt timeless, eternal, protagonist in a struggle older than the world. Something pressed down on him, aiming to break him, but John was already broken in ways only a human could ever understand, and suddenly it was his own fury which fuelled him, his own hatred which spurred him on. He roared, pushing back against the thing that would see him beaten.
And it shattered. Had John been human, it would have crushed him. Had he been Other, it might yet have torn him apart. But he was neither, and both, and Sherlock Holmes was still standing next to him, and John Watson the soldier had killed to protect. John Watson the doctor could do nothing less. Another scream, and this time it was the shoggoth screeching out its dying call, and John laughed as it shuddered and frayed and died.
The last thing he knew before his senses left him was the steady, triumphant beat of his heart.
Ba-da-dum.
~~~
He had a vague memory of Irene's Arjika, but that might have been a fever dream. Holmes - Sherlock - must have carried him out of the Tower, but John didn't remember that, either. All he knew from the time immediately after the Tower were flashes of pale eyes and cool hands, a presence that had somehow become soothing.
The creature's mark had been burnt into John's left shoulder, indelible, and freezing with a cold ache which throbbed in counterpoint to his heartbeat whenever the moon was full. Sherlock tried to apologise, once, but John waved him away. It seemed like a small price to pay for his self-respect.
The man John had known as Davidson had disappeared. Sherlock knew that same man as Moriarty, which was a name even John recognised: the Queen's pet detective, and a greater threat to the Restorationist movement than anyone else. No wonder he'd used an alias; Irene would have thrown him off her airship from a hundred feet high. They'd managed to track him to the Hexagon, where he'd apparently rented a room in the Rue Mille-chèvres in Calais for a while, but his trace ended there. It didn't matter. The European continent, like New Albion, was full of worse evils than one deluded man. 'Rache' had their work set out for them.
One man couldn't change the world. Two of them, it turned out, could do almost anything.
~~~
Credits:
This story contains some obvious elements from Robert E. Howard's "Old Garfield's Heart" and Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" (link goes to .pdf), as well as elements from the Cthulhu Mythos, started by H. P. Lovecraft
Moriarty's alias Daniel Davidson is from "Death in a White Tie" by Ngaio Marsh, since I know Gaiman's Henry Camberley from "The Silent Passenger" and liked the idea of nicking from the classics
Picture credits:
John's house by Richard Fisher, licensed CC
Irene's dirigible by Jean-Marie Massaud, from dezeen.com
Ye Elder Sign from chaosmatrix.org
Union Jack by geishaboy500, licensed CC
Tower of London, such as it is, by Josip Broz Tito, via The Cosmicomicon
The Queen's Guard, such as it is, by Eric in SF, licensed CC
Thanks to anatsuno and mrlnpndrgn for the French bit, to houseinrlyeh for making sure I adhere to the Mythos canon, as far as that's necessary possible, and of course to kisahawklin for the marvellous and speedy beta.