[fic: bbc sherlock] The Bonds of Malice
Title: The Bonds of Malice
Words: 1740+
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Moriarty loves puzzles, adores them, consumes them through the pores in his skin. The instinctual longing to find power, to hold the ability to twist and contort and disfigure in his hands. He only has to take it. Chaos is good and well, chaos is easy. It’s order that is difficult to achieve. Moriarty, he reaches for both."
Author's Note: SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 3. It can't be helped, I am obsessed, someone save me... This is really experimental and written in a jiffy with minimal editing. And the second half is really just me lifting quotes from the last episode. Hurr hurr hurr. *iz shot*
*
Jim Moriarty is an immaculate criminal.
Just ask anyone he’s ever killed. If they could, they will tell you he comes in ways both brief and terrifying, that he doesn’t bother with something so unbearably messy as physical torture. He plays with his food with other methods, with mind games and psychological warfare.
From a young age, Moriarty knew that he was never going to grow old, that he would die in his prime, and that he would die laughing. It wasn’t a prophetic vision, it was a promise. A man cannot live long the way he does, with the candle dipped in gasoline and set alight at both ends.
But it doesn’t matter.
He never did value the lives of others, why should his own be so different?
Moriarty loves puzzles, adores them, consumes them through the pores in his skin. They fill him with the instinctual longing to find power, to hold the ability to twist and contort and disfigure in his hands. He only has to take it. Chaos is good and well, chaos is easy. It’s order that is difficult to achieve. Moriarty, he reaches for both.
Perhaps this is why the aesthetic disaster of a sniper rifle appeals to him so. Such glorious destruction delivered in such a perfectly precise manner, an amalgamation of maelstrom and placidity.
But bombs… Bombs have another beauty, all their own.
It’s chemistry, you see, atoms linking together, exchanging valence electrons, latching on to each other. With chemistry, man stares through the restrictive bonds of his own flesh at the stuff of stars, elements that would kill in ways so sublime, oh, only nature could possibly have concocted them. Slow disintigration, one molecule at a time, neatly, pristinely.
Moriarty sees the faces of the world in a periodic table.
He, for instance, would be a volatile alkali metal-unpredictible, doesn’t play nice with others, oh so naughty, not so much the bully as the half-crazed loner who makes knives from plastic spoons and keeps them in his pockets on the playground, waiting for someone to get… close.
And Sherlock? Sherlock Holmes? The genius, the detective, the one man on Earth who can hold a light up to Moriarty himself? Well, Sherlock is fluorine, isn’t he? Corrosive and poisonous and oh so beautiful. All Moriarty wants to do some days is drop him in a beaker of water, just to watch him burn himself out.
He is Sherlock’s white whale, or at least, he wants to be Sherlock’s white whale, his windmills, his Big Bad Dragon. Most times he lives to run, runs to live, but with Sherlock, it’s different, somehow. Now, he seems to be running simply to be caught.
“Do you know what I think?” Moran says to him, late one night as they both watch the same CCTV footages over and over and over, Moriarty never tiring of seeing Sherlock’s lithe, active figure dart through London. “I think you’ve gotten yourself obsessed over that boy.”
Moriarty throws his head back and laughs, propping his feet up on the table and wriggling. “He is a pretty one, though, isn’t he?” he says, relishing the frown that moves onto Moran’s face. “Jealous, darling?”
With a dark shake of the head, Moran sighs and leaves without another word.
One week later and developments are afoot with Sherlock-a spat with the landlord over body parts in the freezer, a move to a new part of London, a flatmate.
Ah, now here’s where things get interesting.
John Watson is, in Moriarty’s fine and unblemished opinion, little more than an odius noble gas. Inert, loathe to move, bloated and fat. Hardly a threat. True, he can kill a man with one shot, but many people can do that, more than one might think.
The problem is, noble gases and fluorine, they bond. To form highly unstable compounds, yes, but…
A bond is a bond is a bond.
When he watches Sherlock, now, he must watch John also-staring voraciously at black and white screens while the two fly through the city, bickering, shouting, laughing. Moriarty observes their dinners, their day-to-day activities, sees the way Sherlock looks at John as if the other man is the best puzzle he’s ever gotten.
Moriarty even sees the first time Sherlock pushes John against a building at midnight and kisses him speechless.
That night, he takes at the screens with a shiny, new revolver, screaming and shrieking and laughing himself hoarse.
Moran watches him from the doorway with a smirk, says, “Jealous, darling?”
Moriarty regrets his destruction the next morning when he wakes up and finds his windows into Sherlock’s world missing, and a sensation floods him as if a part of him has gone blind. He quickly has them replaced.
Fine. Fine, Sherlock Holmes. Disappoint, let down, succumb to your desires. Moriarty broods, steams, boils, he swears that he will make Sherlock Holmes regret ever growing a heart.
Think John Watson is a puzzle, do you? Here. Here, let me give you something even better.
Moriarty giggles and giggles and picks up his phone and makes a call.
*
Now they’re by the pool, all breathing the same chlorine-tainted air, Sherlock’s long, slender arms raised and pointing a gun at Moriarty’s head. Oh, oh, oh, he couldn’t be happier.
He’s got Sherlock’s full, undivided attention now. He’s had it for days.
Moriarty speaks in a steady, unceasing flow, carefully unfolding his genius for Sherlock, showing him, just to let him see how brilliant Jim Moriarty really is.
“I’m a specialist, you see,” he says. “Like you.”
Sherlock blinks, croaks out, “Dear Jim,” in such a way that makes Moriarty’s synapses tingle. “Please, will you fix it for me? Get rid of my lover’s nasty sister? Dear Jim, please, will you fix it for me to disappear to South America?”
“Just so.” Moriarty’s even closer now, and he smiles.
“Consulting criminal,” Sherlock says, the light dawning in his eyes. “Brilliant,” he mutters. Moriarty allows himself the smallest fraction of a second to bask in such glowing praise.
“Isn’t it?” he says. “No one ever gets to me.” Now here comes the fun part. “And no one ever will.”
“I did,” Sherlock snaps, cocking the gun.
“You’ve come the closest,” Moriarty admits, his face flat and void of expression. “Now you’re in my way.”
“Thank you.”
“Didn’t mean it as a compliment.” Oh, this banter is delicious.
“Yes you did.”
“Yeah, okay, I did,” he sneers, shrugging. Sherlock is even more intriguing, more fantastic, up close. Now lacking the barrier that distance and a monitor provides, Moriarty can scrutinize every aspect of him, like a chemist breaking down an elegant molecule. “But the flirting’s over, daddy’s had enough noooow! I’ve shown you what I can do, cut loose all those people, all those problems, even thirty-million quid, just to get you to come out and play. So take this as a friendly warning… my dear,” -and Sherlock twitches at this, but that’s alright, they always do- “Back off.”
It’s all going so beautifully. Sherlock is here, he’s Moriarty’s, Moriarty’s alone… That is, until he turns and relocates his gaze, softens it even, and quietly asks John, “You alright?”
Ah. So that’s how it’s going to be.
Before he knows it, Sherlock is extending out the missile plans and Moriarty takes them, presses his lips to them as if they were an extension of the other man himself. He knows this is supposed to be some sort of trade-the flash drive for Johnny’s life, eh? But no, no, no, that’s not how it works, sweetheart, that’s not how the game is played.
He tosses the little piece of plastic into the water.
Moments later an arm is around Moriarty’s neck and he knows. Knows that the bond between fluorine and a noble gas is stronger than he’d ever believed possible.
“Pull the trigger, Mr. Moriarty, and we both go up,” John pants.
And Moriarty laughs and he laughs and he thrusts his hips and goes, “Whoops!” And Moran redirects the rifle, to set the laser point right in the middle of Sherlock’s masterful brow.
John Watson pulls back, proof of… of…
Chemistry, really.
“Do you know what happens, if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock? To you?”
“Oh, let me guess,” Sherlock gripes, “I get killed.”
“Kill you? N-no, don’t be obvious, I mean I’m gonna kill you anyways, someday. I don’t want to rush it though. I’m saving it up for something special.” And he means every single word. “No, if you don’t stop prying… I will burn you.” Something ugly begins to well up in Jim Moriarty’s chest, phlegm-like in its viscosity and refusal to leave. “I will burn the heart…out of you,” he promises.
Sherlock’s gaze is cold as tempered steel. “I’ve been reliably informed I don’t have one,” he says, evenly. And Moriarty smiles, shakes his head.
“But we both know,” he replies, quieting, “That’s not quite true.”
He leaves soon afterwards, sing-song and footloose, and he watches-from his hiding spot behind the wall, where his old friends the computer screens show him all he wants to know-watches Sherlock lunge forward, hands flying down John’s chest as he pulls the bomb from him. Watches, in brittle, staticky black and white as the explosives skid across the tiled floor. Listens to the grainy audio of Sherlock, asking, pleading, frantic, “Alright? Are you alright?” Listens to their harsh breathing, their tired, frail laughter, their jokes.
Listens. Stares. Seethes.
The anger is back now. What happens, Sherlock, when an alkaline metal is angered?
Oh, you do not wish to know. My dear.
He puts his mobile to his ear and says, “Sweethearts, put your guns back up,” and he marches back outside, arms aloft.
“Sorry boys! I’m so changeable!” He takes in the shock on their faces with a swelling, furious bubble of loathing in his gut. “It is a weakness of mine, but, to be fair… It is my only weakness.” Ah, no, now there’s a lie. Moriarty stands and smiles and watches and listens and he hates like he’s never hated before.
“You can’t be allowed to continue,” he says. “You just can’t.”
The elements slam together into a screeching pile of chaos.
What happens, Sherlock, when an alkaline metal is angered?
Boom.
Words: 1740+
Rating: PG-13
Summary: "Moriarty loves puzzles, adores them, consumes them through the pores in his skin. The instinctual longing to find power, to hold the ability to twist and contort and disfigure in his hands. He only has to take it. Chaos is good and well, chaos is easy. It’s order that is difficult to achieve. Moriarty, he reaches for both."
Author's Note: SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 3. It can't be helped, I am obsessed, someone save me... This is really experimental and written in a jiffy with minimal editing. And the second half is really just me lifting quotes from the last episode. Hurr hurr hurr. *iz shot*
*
Jim Moriarty is an immaculate criminal.
Just ask anyone he’s ever killed. If they could, they will tell you he comes in ways both brief and terrifying, that he doesn’t bother with something so unbearably messy as physical torture. He plays with his food with other methods, with mind games and psychological warfare.
From a young age, Moriarty knew that he was never going to grow old, that he would die in his prime, and that he would die laughing. It wasn’t a prophetic vision, it was a promise. A man cannot live long the way he does, with the candle dipped in gasoline and set alight at both ends.
But it doesn’t matter.
He never did value the lives of others, why should his own be so different?
Moriarty loves puzzles, adores them, consumes them through the pores in his skin. They fill him with the instinctual longing to find power, to hold the ability to twist and contort and disfigure in his hands. He only has to take it. Chaos is good and well, chaos is easy. It’s order that is difficult to achieve. Moriarty, he reaches for both.
Perhaps this is why the aesthetic disaster of a sniper rifle appeals to him so. Such glorious destruction delivered in such a perfectly precise manner, an amalgamation of maelstrom and placidity.
But bombs… Bombs have another beauty, all their own.
It’s chemistry, you see, atoms linking together, exchanging valence electrons, latching on to each other. With chemistry, man stares through the restrictive bonds of his own flesh at the stuff of stars, elements that would kill in ways so sublime, oh, only nature could possibly have concocted them. Slow disintigration, one molecule at a time, neatly, pristinely.
Moriarty sees the faces of the world in a periodic table.
He, for instance, would be a volatile alkali metal-unpredictible, doesn’t play nice with others, oh so naughty, not so much the bully as the half-crazed loner who makes knives from plastic spoons and keeps them in his pockets on the playground, waiting for someone to get… close.
And Sherlock? Sherlock Holmes? The genius, the detective, the one man on Earth who can hold a light up to Moriarty himself? Well, Sherlock is fluorine, isn’t he? Corrosive and poisonous and oh so beautiful. All Moriarty wants to do some days is drop him in a beaker of water, just to watch him burn himself out.
He is Sherlock’s white whale, or at least, he wants to be Sherlock’s white whale, his windmills, his Big Bad Dragon. Most times he lives to run, runs to live, but with Sherlock, it’s different, somehow. Now, he seems to be running simply to be caught.
“Do you know what I think?” Moran says to him, late one night as they both watch the same CCTV footages over and over and over, Moriarty never tiring of seeing Sherlock’s lithe, active figure dart through London. “I think you’ve gotten yourself obsessed over that boy.”
Moriarty throws his head back and laughs, propping his feet up on the table and wriggling. “He is a pretty one, though, isn’t he?” he says, relishing the frown that moves onto Moran’s face. “Jealous, darling?”
With a dark shake of the head, Moran sighs and leaves without another word.
One week later and developments are afoot with Sherlock-a spat with the landlord over body parts in the freezer, a move to a new part of London, a flatmate.
Ah, now here’s where things get interesting.
John Watson is, in Moriarty’s fine and unblemished opinion, little more than an odius noble gas. Inert, loathe to move, bloated and fat. Hardly a threat. True, he can kill a man with one shot, but many people can do that, more than one might think.
The problem is, noble gases and fluorine, they bond. To form highly unstable compounds, yes, but…
A bond is a bond is a bond.
When he watches Sherlock, now, he must watch John also-staring voraciously at black and white screens while the two fly through the city, bickering, shouting, laughing. Moriarty observes their dinners, their day-to-day activities, sees the way Sherlock looks at John as if the other man is the best puzzle he’s ever gotten.
Moriarty even sees the first time Sherlock pushes John against a building at midnight and kisses him speechless.
That night, he takes at the screens with a shiny, new revolver, screaming and shrieking and laughing himself hoarse.
Moran watches him from the doorway with a smirk, says, “Jealous, darling?”
Moriarty regrets his destruction the next morning when he wakes up and finds his windows into Sherlock’s world missing, and a sensation floods him as if a part of him has gone blind. He quickly has them replaced.
Fine. Fine, Sherlock Holmes. Disappoint, let down, succumb to your desires. Moriarty broods, steams, boils, he swears that he will make Sherlock Holmes regret ever growing a heart.
Think John Watson is a puzzle, do you? Here. Here, let me give you something even better.
Moriarty giggles and giggles and picks up his phone and makes a call.
*
Now they’re by the pool, all breathing the same chlorine-tainted air, Sherlock’s long, slender arms raised and pointing a gun at Moriarty’s head. Oh, oh, oh, he couldn’t be happier.
He’s got Sherlock’s full, undivided attention now. He’s had it for days.
Moriarty speaks in a steady, unceasing flow, carefully unfolding his genius for Sherlock, showing him, just to let him see how brilliant Jim Moriarty really is.
“I’m a specialist, you see,” he says. “Like you.”
Sherlock blinks, croaks out, “Dear Jim,” in such a way that makes Moriarty’s synapses tingle. “Please, will you fix it for me? Get rid of my lover’s nasty sister? Dear Jim, please, will you fix it for me to disappear to South America?”
“Just so.” Moriarty’s even closer now, and he smiles.
“Consulting criminal,” Sherlock says, the light dawning in his eyes. “Brilliant,” he mutters. Moriarty allows himself the smallest fraction of a second to bask in such glowing praise.
“Isn’t it?” he says. “No one ever gets to me.” Now here comes the fun part. “And no one ever will.”
“I did,” Sherlock snaps, cocking the gun.
“You’ve come the closest,” Moriarty admits, his face flat and void of expression. “Now you’re in my way.”
“Thank you.”
“Didn’t mean it as a compliment.” Oh, this banter is delicious.
“Yes you did.”
“Yeah, okay, I did,” he sneers, shrugging. Sherlock is even more intriguing, more fantastic, up close. Now lacking the barrier that distance and a monitor provides, Moriarty can scrutinize every aspect of him, like a chemist breaking down an elegant molecule. “But the flirting’s over, daddy’s had enough noooow! I’ve shown you what I can do, cut loose all those people, all those problems, even thirty-million quid, just to get you to come out and play. So take this as a friendly warning… my dear,” -and Sherlock twitches at this, but that’s alright, they always do- “Back off.”
It’s all going so beautifully. Sherlock is here, he’s Moriarty’s, Moriarty’s alone… That is, until he turns and relocates his gaze, softens it even, and quietly asks John, “You alright?”
Ah. So that’s how it’s going to be.
Before he knows it, Sherlock is extending out the missile plans and Moriarty takes them, presses his lips to them as if they were an extension of the other man himself. He knows this is supposed to be some sort of trade-the flash drive for Johnny’s life, eh? But no, no, no, that’s not how it works, sweetheart, that’s not how the game is played.
He tosses the little piece of plastic into the water.
Moments later an arm is around Moriarty’s neck and he knows. Knows that the bond between fluorine and a noble gas is stronger than he’d ever believed possible.
“Pull the trigger, Mr. Moriarty, and we both go up,” John pants.
And Moriarty laughs and he laughs and he thrusts his hips and goes, “Whoops!” And Moran redirects the rifle, to set the laser point right in the middle of Sherlock’s masterful brow.
John Watson pulls back, proof of… of…
Chemistry, really.
“Do you know what happens, if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock? To you?”
“Oh, let me guess,” Sherlock gripes, “I get killed.”
“Kill you? N-no, don’t be obvious, I mean I’m gonna kill you anyways, someday. I don’t want to rush it though. I’m saving it up for something special.” And he means every single word. “No, if you don’t stop prying… I will burn you.” Something ugly begins to well up in Jim Moriarty’s chest, phlegm-like in its viscosity and refusal to leave. “I will burn the heart…out of you,” he promises.
Sherlock’s gaze is cold as tempered steel. “I’ve been reliably informed I don’t have one,” he says, evenly. And Moriarty smiles, shakes his head.
“But we both know,” he replies, quieting, “That’s not quite true.”
He leaves soon afterwards, sing-song and footloose, and he watches-from his hiding spot behind the wall, where his old friends the computer screens show him all he wants to know-watches Sherlock lunge forward, hands flying down John’s chest as he pulls the bomb from him. Watches, in brittle, staticky black and white as the explosives skid across the tiled floor. Listens to the grainy audio of Sherlock, asking, pleading, frantic, “Alright? Are you alright?” Listens to their harsh breathing, their tired, frail laughter, their jokes.
Listens. Stares. Seethes.
The anger is back now. What happens, Sherlock, when an alkaline metal is angered?
Oh, you do not wish to know. My dear.
He puts his mobile to his ear and says, “Sweethearts, put your guns back up,” and he marches back outside, arms aloft.
“Sorry boys! I’m so changeable!” He takes in the shock on their faces with a swelling, furious bubble of loathing in his gut. “It is a weakness of mine, but, to be fair… It is my only weakness.” Ah, no, now there’s a lie. Moriarty stands and smiles and watches and listens and he hates like he’s never hated before.
“You can’t be allowed to continue,” he says. “You just can’t.”
The elements slam together into a screeching pile of chaos.
What happens, Sherlock, when an alkaline metal is angered?
Boom.