I really don't blame you for being dead, but you can't have you sweater back. Part Two.
Continue with Part Two...
“What’s it like? Being dead?” Sherlock couldn’t help but ask.
“Boring as fuck-all,” Jim said in a dry matter of fact tone. He slumped down further in his armchair, as if to illustrate his similar disinterest in this conversation.
“Really?”
“Do you really think I’d be following you around if I had something better to do?” Jim eyed the detective from under his eye lashes.
“...Is that supposed to be a trick question?” Sherlock asked turning back to Jim, face scrunched in a facade of mild disbelief.
“You tell me,” Jim said, teeth catching on the right side of his lip, dragging, as he continued to stare at Sherlock.
But then the detective wondered if a dead person haunting a live person was what death consisted of; if that was really death at all. Sherlock had never believed in an afterlife or any higher power. Everything about the apparition’s appearance flew in the face of the detective’s understanding of death, but Sherlock doesn’t need to tell the apparition of all people that.
The detective wanted to know how it works, this haunting thing. And he could have pried Jim open if he were still in a body, but that was really the thing about them that he always seemed to loose sight of in a panic. Sherlock never needed to lord the threat of force over Moriarty. The criminal would tell him if he really wanted to know. If he asked.
Sherlock asked and Jim told him what he could. As the apparition explained he was new to this. He didn’t really know all the kinks or how long it would last, or even why.
Of course, Sherlock only ever had more questions for him. And it wasn’t really a surprise that, even after death, Jim Moriarty was still the most fascinating puzzle the detective could find on earth.
They never talk about it; how they came to be here or what will happen when Sherlock goes back to London (if Sherlock goes back to London). Or if Jim is really just going to follow him around until Sherlock kicks the bucket and joins him on the other side. Jim’s work is dangerous, so that could be a real possibility for the near future.
The detective had given himself two missions that he would accomplish before those questions could even be considered. Sherlock refused to distract himself from the work by deliberating them over.
Sherlock didn’t ask why Jim did it. He didn’t really need to ask. He knew why. Still, the question lingered after he wakes up from nightmares consisting mainly of the distorted reverberations of a gunshot.
He couldn’t forget the feeling of Moriarty’s hand in his. Worst still, he didn’t want to. Unbeknownst to Sherlock, he had built his life around the puzzles Jim had made for him and in these quiet moments their absence was palpable.
On cases, Jim liked to distract or annoy him, with an odd joke here or the needling remark there. Surprisingly, neither of those things were as distracting as Moriarty’s presence alone.
Call it a draw. It was the same feeling as what had passed between them whenever they were in a room together while Jim was alive. This desire to be closer. To know every thing that was going on in the criminal’s mind. There was reason why Sherlock had only been able to pay attention to Jim whenever he walked into a room. Apparently, the afterlife was not an exception.
Jim liked to be an annoying bugger, but Sherlock didn’t think the apparition was aware of the effect he had following the detective. Mainly because Jim would just sit in the seat opposite like they were going for a Sunday drive; nothing a miss, not a worry. Sherlock wondered if he’s imagining the crackle of electricity between them. Well, between him and thin air. It was distracting.
Sherlock noticed that Jim never came close to touching him. Well, he would if Sherlock moved into the apparition space, but even then Moriarty took care to not make contact. Their sleeves never brushed. They never touched.
Which maybe wouldn’t be odd if Jim didn’t make a habit of walking through every other person who was in his way. When they were on a crowded sidewalk, Jim would just breeze through people regardless of what they were doing, refusing to delineate from his path with a careful ignorance on behalf of both parties. Sherlock did not want that to happen between them.
Apparently, neither did Jim because it was only with Sherlock that he maintained any sort of physical distance.
Still Sherlock wanted to know if Jim felt anything when he passed through them. Actually, the detective wanted to know if he would feel Jim. If Jim would feel anything with Sherlock. But admitting this curiosity would be too close to admitting his desire.
Sometimes to take down the bigger strands of Jim’s empire, Sherlock needed to go undercover. It could be trying, to say the least.
For example, this pompous middle level contractor, that Jim occasionally hired out for jobs in Bosnia, had been telling Sherlock off for the last five minutes, quite literally, and the detective would be impressed if he weren’t being simultaneously bored and irritated. So when the guy finally demanded if the front goon Sherlock’s pretending to be understands his exact position within the scope of his operation, the detective had it in his mind to correct him.
“Don’t,” Jim interrupted before Sherlock could even open his mouth. The detective blinked. Jim was, what could only be described as, prowling. The apparition had never interfered with the way Sherlock handled the pieces of his web before. “Your assumption that you are the most knowledgable person in this room and therefor will be able to successfully manipulate these thugs is quite mistaken.”
Sherlock could barely hide his bristle at Jim’s words. But he hadn’t seen the apparition this angry for a long time.
“They will kill you without a second thought, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because they won’t be able to complete this job as precisely with a man down and they don’t have the time to find a replacement. But if you give them trouble, doing this all in a rush wouldn’t be a problem.”
The silence was dragging on too long. The contractor was turning a livid shade of mulberry.
The apparition circled up around Sherlock’s back and hissed into his ear, “Apologize. Tell him you understand. That it won’t happen again. Sir.” Jim said pointedly.
Sherlock swallowed and swallowed again, eyes darting around the warehouse at the other men watching the scene that was coming to a close and then he repeated the words Jim fed him staring at a pile of sawdust next to a stack of crates.
The contractor looked only moderately appeased with Sherlock’s debasement, but he dismissed him all the same and Sherlock went back to the task he was working before being called out for insubordination. Jim trailed along beside him, hands in his pockets. His eyes were intent on the building’s rafters, as if waiting for Sherlock’s inevitable explosion.
The detective, however, refused to give him the satisfaction.
“That could have been you’re funeral, you stupid self-ingratiating show-off,” Jim finally said, still frowning.
“Why are you so suddenly interested in if I live or die?” Sherlock said under his breath, acrid.
“You are not as important to the people in this room as you’d like to think,” Jim sighed.
“I wasn’t going to say I was the most important,” Sherlock responded testily. “I was going to say he was incompetent and how easy it would be for someone to-”
“Regardless,” Jim interrupted, eyes rolling. “You wouldn’t have made it through your second sentence before they shot you.”
“Where do you go when I sleep?”
“Who says I go anywhere?”
Sherlock doesn’t push for an answer. Moriarty was always there when he woke up, even if he wasn’t there when the detective slipped from consciousness.
“How did you manage to do this for as long as you did?” Sherlock asked absently while at the computer. He had been at the computer for hours. The way Jim set up his web had worn on the detective in more ways than one. He was bone tired. Half of the schemes he cooked up weren’t often even complex, just tedious. Sherlock was turning out to be a poor imitation of Moriarty.
“Admitting defeat so soon? It’s only been a year and a half,” Jim said feigning light amusement.
“Of course not. I am merely curious.”
“Ah, I forget that you prefer to deconstruct them. Setting them up must be especially tiring.”
“You’re evading the question.”
“I thought it was rhetorical. I think we saw what happened to me, didn’t we, dear?” Jim said, eyes drifting to the ceiling, head cocked in thought. Sherlock stifled a sigh. “Well, if you’re worried about heading my way....”
“I never said-”
“~and I would if I were you~”
“-and I certainly never meant-”
“-You did say you thought you could tie up the remaining strands by September, so really any stress from the job-”
“-that I couldn’t do it. I just wanted to know more of your methods. What you did between cases? If you had any hobbies?”
“Oh? Was that all? You should have said.”
“What are you wearing?” Jim asked, eyeing the detective with distain.
“My disguise.”
“Ha,” Jim barked a laugh. “I might as well just wait here, so you’ll know where to find me once they kill you. We can go explore the underworld together.”
“What’s wrong with it?
“As if it were only one thing,” Jim practically sung. “They’ll know you aren’t a part of their crew in a glance.”
The scheme Sherlock concocted to ensnare Maupertuis was admittedly rather elaborate. The detective’s research told him that, like most of Jim’s associates, the Baron would not be caught easily and so Sherlock’s offense against him had several stages each with several back-up plans each of which also had several stages in case something went awry.
“Only because I’m not in character yet,” Sherlock cleared his expression and adjusted his posture, all while watching the effect in the bathroom mirror.
“You should know,” Jim said after a beat of silence, aiming for aloof and adjusting his tie in the mirror. “That Maupertuis and I never always saw eye-to-eye on business matters.”
“This you telling me to be careful?” Sherlock asked, wryly. Jim deigned a sigh, locking eyes with the detective through the glass.
“All I’m saying is that certain degrees of caution were never inadvisable.” Jim stated matter-a-factly.
Sherlock was struck by the sudden urge to grab Jim by the arms and hug him close. Tell him he would be fine. But the detective couldn’t.
Instead, he simply nodded.
Back-up plans did come into use.
They were not, however, the ones Sherlock arranged.
Sherlock was fuming, sitting in the passenger seat of a cargo van Mycroft had commandeered to get them out of the compound without any fuss.
Mycroft’s plan was more ostentatious than Sherlock’s and using Mycroft’s near infinite resources felt like cheating. The detective never asked for his brother’s bloody help. Jim was never going let him hear the end of this.
As if summoned by mere thought alone, the apparition wound his arms around the elder Holmes, nestling his face against the side of the driver’s head rest and holding Sherlock’s gaze with a smirk. It was a disconcerting image.
“I don’t remember this being one of your escape plans,” the apparition commented sardonically, from his bizarre coziness to the ignorant Mycroft. Sherlock ignored him. He wasn’t going to have that conversation with his brother sitting there.
“Turn in up over there.” Sherlock gestured vaguely to a sign advertising night lodgings ahead.
“Why, pray tell?” Mycroft asked, mildly perturbed. “We are nearly to the airstrip.”
“I would like to shower and change,” Sherlock said and then added in consideration, “And shave.”
“I would much prefer if you waited till we were back on English soil. Surely a couple more hours-” The elder Holmes sounded like he was speaking to a ten year old child.
“I haven’t been on English soil in almost two years. Since I prefer to do this first, I think you can wait a bit longer.”
Sherlock told Mycroft that Maupertuis was the last piece of the puzzle, and, it’s mostly true. From a large distance it could certainly look like that anyway. One of the things Sherlock had learned about Moriarty’s web over the past two years was that it had innumerable strands, which often had been used in a very limited capacity. Maupertuis was the director of a rather medium sized permanent fixture to Moriarty’s network, which after it’s conception Jim had no real hand in.
Being criminally active for over twenty years there were too many threads of Moriarty’s web which he had only used once or a handful of times. So in actuality there were many remaining loose threads to snip, but Mycroft didn’t need to know that.
Or maybe he did, but at the moment Sherlock didn’t really care, given his older brother enjoying having witnessed him being beaten to a pulp. Enjoying it.
The elder Holmes was prattling on. Sherlock didn’t recall his brother being able to speak Serbian, but he didn’t really care. Frankly, even if Mycroft pulling him out like that had taken less time than the detective’s original plan, dealing with his brother was barely worth it. So instead, Sherlock interrupted, “Why did you even bother?”
“I wanted a progress report.”
“You’ll find I don’t work for you,” Sherlock said, icily.
The exaggerated frown Mycroft made said he thought differently.
What the elder Holmes thought on the matter was of little consequence. Besides Sherlock had something he’d been meaning to ask his dear brother.
The detective waved the barber away. Mycroft stood and walked over to the suite’s door to tip the fellow.
“So, how did Moriarty know those things about my uni years?” Sherlock asked once the elder Holmes was back.
Mycroft blinks, as if caught off guard by the change in subject.
“We both know that wasn’t information he could have gotten from just anyone.”
“I thought John told you.”
“Told me what?”
But the elder Holmes was silent in thought.
“Mycroft, told me what?” Sherlock demanded again. The elder Holmes took a deep breath as he stepped around to the front of the desk and leaned against the dark wood.
“That I was sorry,” Mycroft sighs. “It was me. I told Moriarty all that. I traded-” he amended, “-those stories for information about his network.”
“In return for what?” Sherlock made no reaction to the elder Holmes’ words.
“He gave us practically all of his agents in South America. Those we picked up gave us the rest.”
Sherlock had heard rumors of a sweep taking place before his years directing and dismantling Moriarty’s web. He’d always been a bit curious how that had happened, because the structure of the criminal’s network hadn’t really allowed for the capture of one, or even a handful of agents, to tear it all down. Now that he knew exactly who gave Mycroft the information, it made sense why the entire continent had been wiped of activity. Still it was only one continent, Sherlock could have gotten more out of Jim.
“And you thought you should just trade my life story for whatever information Moriarty was willing to give up and then just let him go?”
“He wanted to know about you. He was going to get that information anyway he could. Would you have rather he went to our parents? Our mother?” Mycroft sounded slightly scandalized. But it was such a non sequitur that Sherlock had to roll his eyes. Mycroft had always been closer to their mother, but she had been so absent from their lives by the time Sherlock came around that he wondered why the elder Holmes even bothered.
“As if they would have known half of that! Like she even cared,” Sherlock scoffed. “Why did you think he wanted to know those things anyway?”
Mycroft looked considering, clearly trying to find a tactful way out of this.
“Whatever you thought, that still doesn’t explain why you traded my information,” Sherlock said impatiently.
“He wouldn’t talk. My people tried practically everything. Six weeks and nothing,” Mycroft continued. “So I stepped in. We talked and he wanted to know more about you. I said I would only give facts about you to him if he gave me something in return. It seemed innocent enough.”
“When did these little conversations take place?”
“Just after the near Scandal with Adler.”
“You had him for six weeks,” Sherlock confirmed, as pieces fell into place in his mind. Sherlock threw himself into one of the leather armchairs that were situated in front of the desk. “So what did he do?”
“Nothing,” Mycroft stated simply.
“You just kept him locked up?” Sherlock scoffs.“You can’t really expect me to believe that.”
“No, Mycroft frowned as if that were the most obvious thing in the world, something sardonic had crept into his tone, “we let him go home at the end of the day and sent a car around in the morning to have a fresh go at it.” Sherlock thinks about how the real torture would be six weeks of no stimulation. Nothing but the boring concrete walls of the cell. “It’s not like we could have given him something real to work on for us. Not even a fraction of a project, he’d figure it out and ruin it.”
“So he just sat there, not talking, for six weeks,” Sherlock stated, dejected.
“He stared at the walls,” Mycroft said, then frowned. “If we’re being perfectly exact, he was staring at what he’d scratched into the walls.
“What?” Sherlock asked, utterly confused. He had been to some of the elder Holmes’ interrogation cells. If Mycroft had taken Jim to some secret prison to be tortured, those walls tended to be pretty thick, concrete, and not at all malleable.
“He’d gotten something and used it to etch all over every surface,” Mycroft elaborated.
Carved into them with what? There was never anything in those types of cells. And what would be strong enough to make an impact besides?
“A diamond,” Sherlock exhaled.
Jim couldn’t have nicked it off one of the guards. They would have known better then to have let him that close. Barring the fact that Mycroft’s people weren’t supposed to wear their jewelry during interrogations for obvious reasons. So he’d somehow have to have brought it in with him.
“Pardon?”
“He smuggled in a diamond,” Sherlock said. But smuggling required forethought, required a degree of complacency on Jim’s part.
“Oh,” the elder Holmes nodded.
“What was it anyway? What was it he took such pains to write? Or draw?” Sherlock asked annoyed he had to keep needling information out of his brother.
“Just your name,” Mycroft said reluctantly, “scratched over and over.”
Mycroft just kept talking like that information was tomorrow’s weather forecast, as if it would have no bigger impact on the detective then the possibility of rain. Sherlock was not listening. He was imagining Jim, with blood dripping down his nose and all the fingernails of his right hand ripped out and a definite fractured rib, taking the diamond that he had brought to scratch the detective’s name on all his cell walls as a reminder of what it was all for. Who it was all for. For a moment Sherlock could barely breathe.
Something very sickly like pride swells in his chest knowing Moriarty had endured that to get to him, but it was tempered by his interactions with the ghost. There was so much more to Jim than Moriarty and over the past two years Sherlock had slowly come to realize what that meant.
His mind was unhelpfully calling up images of the apparition. Like two months ago when Jim grinned after his line of innuendo actually made Sherlock pause. Or Jim’s sardonic quip at Maupertius’ expense just before Sherlock completed the final stage of the scheme.
But his mind had been like a ball of late and it always rolled back to Jim’s final moments on the roof. How he had pulled sherlock’s hand closer to him as he stuck the gun in his mouth. It left Sherlock with an inexplicable desire to throttle Mycroft. He had known.
Sherlock took a deep breath, “So you knew he had all that information and you didn’t think it might be important to tell me?”
“Sherlock, I never expected-” Mycroft began only to interrupt himself. “I thought you’d be able to handle him.”
“No, you thought you could protect me,” Sherlock sneered.
“Does it matter?” The elder Holmes’ lips thinned, not protesting the accusation. “You won.”
“No, I didn’t,” Sherlock countered testily.
Finally, something Sherlock had said made Mycroft pause.
“What’s it like? Being dead?” Sherlock couldn’t help but ask.
“Boring as fuck-all,” Jim said in a dry matter of fact tone. He slumped down further in his armchair, as if to illustrate his similar disinterest in this conversation.
“Really?”
“Do you really think I’d be following you around if I had something better to do?” Jim eyed the detective from under his eye lashes.
“...Is that supposed to be a trick question?” Sherlock asked turning back to Jim, face scrunched in a facade of mild disbelief.
“You tell me,” Jim said, teeth catching on the right side of his lip, dragging, as he continued to stare at Sherlock.
But then the detective wondered if a dead person haunting a live person was what death consisted of; if that was really death at all. Sherlock had never believed in an afterlife or any higher power. Everything about the apparition’s appearance flew in the face of the detective’s understanding of death, but Sherlock doesn’t need to tell the apparition of all people that.
The detective wanted to know how it works, this haunting thing. And he could have pried Jim open if he were still in a body, but that was really the thing about them that he always seemed to loose sight of in a panic. Sherlock never needed to lord the threat of force over Moriarty. The criminal would tell him if he really wanted to know. If he asked.
Sherlock asked and Jim told him what he could. As the apparition explained he was new to this. He didn’t really know all the kinks or how long it would last, or even why.
Of course, Sherlock only ever had more questions for him. And it wasn’t really a surprise that, even after death, Jim Moriarty was still the most fascinating puzzle the detective could find on earth.
They never talk about it; how they came to be here or what will happen when Sherlock goes back to London (if Sherlock goes back to London). Or if Jim is really just going to follow him around until Sherlock kicks the bucket and joins him on the other side. Jim’s work is dangerous, so that could be a real possibility for the near future.
The detective had given himself two missions that he would accomplish before those questions could even be considered. Sherlock refused to distract himself from the work by deliberating them over.
Sherlock didn’t ask why Jim did it. He didn’t really need to ask. He knew why. Still, the question lingered after he wakes up from nightmares consisting mainly of the distorted reverberations of a gunshot.
He couldn’t forget the feeling of Moriarty’s hand in his. Worst still, he didn’t want to. Unbeknownst to Sherlock, he had built his life around the puzzles Jim had made for him and in these quiet moments their absence was palpable.
On cases, Jim liked to distract or annoy him, with an odd joke here or the needling remark there. Surprisingly, neither of those things were as distracting as Moriarty’s presence alone.
Call it a draw. It was the same feeling as what had passed between them whenever they were in a room together while Jim was alive. This desire to be closer. To know every thing that was going on in the criminal’s mind. There was reason why Sherlock had only been able to pay attention to Jim whenever he walked into a room. Apparently, the afterlife was not an exception.
Jim liked to be an annoying bugger, but Sherlock didn’t think the apparition was aware of the effect he had following the detective. Mainly because Jim would just sit in the seat opposite like they were going for a Sunday drive; nothing a miss, not a worry. Sherlock wondered if he’s imagining the crackle of electricity between them. Well, between him and thin air. It was distracting.
Sherlock noticed that Jim never came close to touching him. Well, he would if Sherlock moved into the apparition space, but even then Moriarty took care to not make contact. Their sleeves never brushed. They never touched.
Which maybe wouldn’t be odd if Jim didn’t make a habit of walking through every other person who was in his way. When they were on a crowded sidewalk, Jim would just breeze through people regardless of what they were doing, refusing to delineate from his path with a careful ignorance on behalf of both parties. Sherlock did not want that to happen between them.
Apparently, neither did Jim because it was only with Sherlock that he maintained any sort of physical distance.
Still Sherlock wanted to know if Jim felt anything when he passed through them. Actually, the detective wanted to know if he would feel Jim. If Jim would feel anything with Sherlock. But admitting this curiosity would be too close to admitting his desire.
Sometimes to take down the bigger strands of Jim’s empire, Sherlock needed to go undercover. It could be trying, to say the least.
For example, this pompous middle level contractor, that Jim occasionally hired out for jobs in Bosnia, had been telling Sherlock off for the last five minutes, quite literally, and the detective would be impressed if he weren’t being simultaneously bored and irritated. So when the guy finally demanded if the front goon Sherlock’s pretending to be understands his exact position within the scope of his operation, the detective had it in his mind to correct him.
“Don’t,” Jim interrupted before Sherlock could even open his mouth. The detective blinked. Jim was, what could only be described as, prowling. The apparition had never interfered with the way Sherlock handled the pieces of his web before. “Your assumption that you are the most knowledgable person in this room and therefor will be able to successfully manipulate these thugs is quite mistaken.”
Sherlock could barely hide his bristle at Jim’s words. But he hadn’t seen the apparition this angry for a long time.
“They will kill you without a second thought, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because they won’t be able to complete this job as precisely with a man down and they don’t have the time to find a replacement. But if you give them trouble, doing this all in a rush wouldn’t be a problem.”
The silence was dragging on too long. The contractor was turning a livid shade of mulberry.
The apparition circled up around Sherlock’s back and hissed into his ear, “Apologize. Tell him you understand. That it won’t happen again. Sir.” Jim said pointedly.
Sherlock swallowed and swallowed again, eyes darting around the warehouse at the other men watching the scene that was coming to a close and then he repeated the words Jim fed him staring at a pile of sawdust next to a stack of crates.
The contractor looked only moderately appeased with Sherlock’s debasement, but he dismissed him all the same and Sherlock went back to the task he was working before being called out for insubordination. Jim trailed along beside him, hands in his pockets. His eyes were intent on the building’s rafters, as if waiting for Sherlock’s inevitable explosion.
The detective, however, refused to give him the satisfaction.
“That could have been you’re funeral, you stupid self-ingratiating show-off,” Jim finally said, still frowning.
“Why are you so suddenly interested in if I live or die?” Sherlock said under his breath, acrid.
“You are not as important to the people in this room as you’d like to think,” Jim sighed.
“I wasn’t going to say I was the most important,” Sherlock responded testily. “I was going to say he was incompetent and how easy it would be for someone to-”
“Regardless,” Jim interrupted, eyes rolling. “You wouldn’t have made it through your second sentence before they shot you.”
“Where do you go when I sleep?”
“Who says I go anywhere?”
Sherlock doesn’t push for an answer. Moriarty was always there when he woke up, even if he wasn’t there when the detective slipped from consciousness.
“How did you manage to do this for as long as you did?” Sherlock asked absently while at the computer. He had been at the computer for hours. The way Jim set up his web had worn on the detective in more ways than one. He was bone tired. Half of the schemes he cooked up weren’t often even complex, just tedious. Sherlock was turning out to be a poor imitation of Moriarty.
“Admitting defeat so soon? It’s only been a year and a half,” Jim said feigning light amusement.
“Of course not. I am merely curious.”
“Ah, I forget that you prefer to deconstruct them. Setting them up must be especially tiring.”
“You’re evading the question.”
“I thought it was rhetorical. I think we saw what happened to me, didn’t we, dear?” Jim said, eyes drifting to the ceiling, head cocked in thought. Sherlock stifled a sigh. “Well, if you’re worried about heading my way....”
“I never said-”
“~and I would if I were you~”
“-and I certainly never meant-”
“-You did say you thought you could tie up the remaining strands by September, so really any stress from the job-”
“-that I couldn’t do it. I just wanted to know more of your methods. What you did between cases? If you had any hobbies?”
“Oh? Was that all? You should have said.”
“What are you wearing?” Jim asked, eyeing the detective with distain.
“My disguise.”
“Ha,” Jim barked a laugh. “I might as well just wait here, so you’ll know where to find me once they kill you. We can go explore the underworld together.”
“What’s wrong with it?
“As if it were only one thing,” Jim practically sung. “They’ll know you aren’t a part of their crew in a glance.”
The scheme Sherlock concocted to ensnare Maupertuis was admittedly rather elaborate. The detective’s research told him that, like most of Jim’s associates, the Baron would not be caught easily and so Sherlock’s offense against him had several stages each with several back-up plans each of which also had several stages in case something went awry.
“Only because I’m not in character yet,” Sherlock cleared his expression and adjusted his posture, all while watching the effect in the bathroom mirror.
“You should know,” Jim said after a beat of silence, aiming for aloof and adjusting his tie in the mirror. “That Maupertuis and I never always saw eye-to-eye on business matters.”
“This you telling me to be careful?” Sherlock asked, wryly. Jim deigned a sigh, locking eyes with the detective through the glass.
“All I’m saying is that certain degrees of caution were never inadvisable.” Jim stated matter-a-factly.
Sherlock was struck by the sudden urge to grab Jim by the arms and hug him close. Tell him he would be fine. But the detective couldn’t.
Instead, he simply nodded.
Back-up plans did come into use.
They were not, however, the ones Sherlock arranged.
Sherlock was fuming, sitting in the passenger seat of a cargo van Mycroft had commandeered to get them out of the compound without any fuss.
Mycroft’s plan was more ostentatious than Sherlock’s and using Mycroft’s near infinite resources felt like cheating. The detective never asked for his brother’s bloody help. Jim was never going let him hear the end of this.
As if summoned by mere thought alone, the apparition wound his arms around the elder Holmes, nestling his face against the side of the driver’s head rest and holding Sherlock’s gaze with a smirk. It was a disconcerting image.
“I don’t remember this being one of your escape plans,” the apparition commented sardonically, from his bizarre coziness to the ignorant Mycroft. Sherlock ignored him. He wasn’t going to have that conversation with his brother sitting there.
“Turn in up over there.” Sherlock gestured vaguely to a sign advertising night lodgings ahead.
“Why, pray tell?” Mycroft asked, mildly perturbed. “We are nearly to the airstrip.”
“I would like to shower and change,” Sherlock said and then added in consideration, “And shave.”
“I would much prefer if you waited till we were back on English soil. Surely a couple more hours-” The elder Holmes sounded like he was speaking to a ten year old child.
“I haven’t been on English soil in almost two years. Since I prefer to do this first, I think you can wait a bit longer.”
Sherlock told Mycroft that Maupertuis was the last piece of the puzzle, and, it’s mostly true. From a large distance it could certainly look like that anyway. One of the things Sherlock had learned about Moriarty’s web over the past two years was that it had innumerable strands, which often had been used in a very limited capacity. Maupertuis was the director of a rather medium sized permanent fixture to Moriarty’s network, which after it’s conception Jim had no real hand in.
Being criminally active for over twenty years there were too many threads of Moriarty’s web which he had only used once or a handful of times. So in actuality there were many remaining loose threads to snip, but Mycroft didn’t need to know that.
Or maybe he did, but at the moment Sherlock didn’t really care, given his older brother enjoying having witnessed him being beaten to a pulp. Enjoying it.
The elder Holmes was prattling on. Sherlock didn’t recall his brother being able to speak Serbian, but he didn’t really care. Frankly, even if Mycroft pulling him out like that had taken less time than the detective’s original plan, dealing with his brother was barely worth it. So instead, Sherlock interrupted, “Why did you even bother?”
“I wanted a progress report.”
“You’ll find I don’t work for you,” Sherlock said, icily.
The exaggerated frown Mycroft made said he thought differently.
What the elder Holmes thought on the matter was of little consequence. Besides Sherlock had something he’d been meaning to ask his dear brother.
The detective waved the barber away. Mycroft stood and walked over to the suite’s door to tip the fellow.
“So, how did Moriarty know those things about my uni years?” Sherlock asked once the elder Holmes was back.
Mycroft blinks, as if caught off guard by the change in subject.
“We both know that wasn’t information he could have gotten from just anyone.”
“I thought John told you.”
“Told me what?”
But the elder Holmes was silent in thought.
“Mycroft, told me what?” Sherlock demanded again. The elder Holmes took a deep breath as he stepped around to the front of the desk and leaned against the dark wood.
“That I was sorry,” Mycroft sighs. “It was me. I told Moriarty all that. I traded-” he amended, “-those stories for information about his network.”
“In return for what?” Sherlock made no reaction to the elder Holmes’ words.
“He gave us practically all of his agents in South America. Those we picked up gave us the rest.”
Sherlock had heard rumors of a sweep taking place before his years directing and dismantling Moriarty’s web. He’d always been a bit curious how that had happened, because the structure of the criminal’s network hadn’t really allowed for the capture of one, or even a handful of agents, to tear it all down. Now that he knew exactly who gave Mycroft the information, it made sense why the entire continent had been wiped of activity. Still it was only one continent, Sherlock could have gotten more out of Jim.
“And you thought you should just trade my life story for whatever information Moriarty was willing to give up and then just let him go?”
“He wanted to know about you. He was going to get that information anyway he could. Would you have rather he went to our parents? Our mother?” Mycroft sounded slightly scandalized. But it was such a non sequitur that Sherlock had to roll his eyes. Mycroft had always been closer to their mother, but she had been so absent from their lives by the time Sherlock came around that he wondered why the elder Holmes even bothered.
“As if they would have known half of that! Like she even cared,” Sherlock scoffed. “Why did you think he wanted to know those things anyway?”
Mycroft looked considering, clearly trying to find a tactful way out of this.
“Whatever you thought, that still doesn’t explain why you traded my information,” Sherlock said impatiently.
“He wouldn’t talk. My people tried practically everything. Six weeks and nothing,” Mycroft continued. “So I stepped in. We talked and he wanted to know more about you. I said I would only give facts about you to him if he gave me something in return. It seemed innocent enough.”
“When did these little conversations take place?”
“Just after the near Scandal with Adler.”
“You had him for six weeks,” Sherlock confirmed, as pieces fell into place in his mind. Sherlock threw himself into one of the leather armchairs that were situated in front of the desk. “So what did he do?”
“Nothing,” Mycroft stated simply.
“You just kept him locked up?” Sherlock scoffs.“You can’t really expect me to believe that.”
“No, Mycroft frowned as if that were the most obvious thing in the world, something sardonic had crept into his tone, “we let him go home at the end of the day and sent a car around in the morning to have a fresh go at it.” Sherlock thinks about how the real torture would be six weeks of no stimulation. Nothing but the boring concrete walls of the cell. “It’s not like we could have given him something real to work on for us. Not even a fraction of a project, he’d figure it out and ruin it.”
“So he just sat there, not talking, for six weeks,” Sherlock stated, dejected.
“He stared at the walls,” Mycroft said, then frowned. “If we’re being perfectly exact, he was staring at what he’d scratched into the walls.
“What?” Sherlock asked, utterly confused. He had been to some of the elder Holmes’ interrogation cells. If Mycroft had taken Jim to some secret prison to be tortured, those walls tended to be pretty thick, concrete, and not at all malleable.
“He’d gotten something and used it to etch all over every surface,” Mycroft elaborated.
Carved into them with what? There was never anything in those types of cells. And what would be strong enough to make an impact besides?
“A diamond,” Sherlock exhaled.
Jim couldn’t have nicked it off one of the guards. They would have known better then to have let him that close. Barring the fact that Mycroft’s people weren’t supposed to wear their jewelry during interrogations for obvious reasons. So he’d somehow have to have brought it in with him.
“Pardon?”
“He smuggled in a diamond,” Sherlock said. But smuggling required forethought, required a degree of complacency on Jim’s part.
“Oh,” the elder Holmes nodded.
“What was it anyway? What was it he took such pains to write? Or draw?” Sherlock asked annoyed he had to keep needling information out of his brother.
“Just your name,” Mycroft said reluctantly, “scratched over and over.”
Mycroft just kept talking like that information was tomorrow’s weather forecast, as if it would have no bigger impact on the detective then the possibility of rain. Sherlock was not listening. He was imagining Jim, with blood dripping down his nose and all the fingernails of his right hand ripped out and a definite fractured rib, taking the diamond that he had brought to scratch the detective’s name on all his cell walls as a reminder of what it was all for. Who it was all for. For a moment Sherlock could barely breathe.
Something very sickly like pride swells in his chest knowing Moriarty had endured that to get to him, but it was tempered by his interactions with the ghost. There was so much more to Jim than Moriarty and over the past two years Sherlock had slowly come to realize what that meant.
His mind was unhelpfully calling up images of the apparition. Like two months ago when Jim grinned after his line of innuendo actually made Sherlock pause. Or Jim’s sardonic quip at Maupertius’ expense just before Sherlock completed the final stage of the scheme.
But his mind had been like a ball of late and it always rolled back to Jim’s final moments on the roof. How he had pulled sherlock’s hand closer to him as he stuck the gun in his mouth. It left Sherlock with an inexplicable desire to throttle Mycroft. He had known.
Sherlock took a deep breath, “So you knew he had all that information and you didn’t think it might be important to tell me?”
“Sherlock, I never expected-” Mycroft began only to interrupt himself. “I thought you’d be able to handle him.”
“No, you thought you could protect me,” Sherlock sneered.
“Does it matter?” The elder Holmes’ lips thinned, not protesting the accusation. “You won.”
“No, I didn’t,” Sherlock countered testily.
Finally, something Sherlock had said made Mycroft pause.