Prompting Part XXV
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IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
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IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
( Read more... )
She's not much, not without his and Jim's help, but at least she's funny.
&&&
John watches the footage of Adler's execution with a touch of regret. She and Sherlock really would've made spectacular children. He puts a copy of the video in the file bound for Mycroft. It had been a bit of a challenge keeping his own terrorist cell hidden from both Mycroft and Sherlock, but they'd stayed hidden until the Holmeses and their respective coteries had cleared out before catching Adler again and giving her a proper beheading. The head was on ice somewhere, tucked away for a rainy day.
He picks up his phone and texts Jim.
Ask him about Sherlock's past, would you?
There's no reply, but James figures Jim is a little busy with the MI-5 operatives that just knocked on his door.
&&&
When Jim gets out, John goes to see him in person.
Jim looks smaller, his already thin frame leached of health almost to the point of emaciation. The brilliant mind behind those endlessly black eyes is cracked even more than usual, cracked to the point that a hard blow would shatter it altogether. John looks past all that, looks into the very core of Jim to that tie of loyalty that had begun to fray, and finds it renewed and strengthened, stronger than it was when John had first placed it there.
John takes Jim in his arms and cradles him, whispers forgiveness into his ears and the promise of brotherly devotion, and knows that Jim will never betray him again.
&&&
John was the one who threw Jim and Mycroft into each others' paths, but he'd underestimated his enemy. James had expected Jim to come out stronger, his brilliant madness tempered and honed by his encounter with a superior foe the same way he'd been energized and inspired by his tête-à-tête with Sherlock. But John had miscalculated, had underestimated, and at some point what was meant to be a trial by fire became a siege by ice. Jim is ever so brittle now.
James supposes the cracks might heal with time, but he'll need to buy that time from Mycroft.
James thinks that thirty pieces of silver will suffice.
&&&
Jim rallies his strength for the last plot. Together they plant the seeds that will lead to Sherlock's fall from grace. A few strategically placed allies, a call to an unscrupulous reporter looking for her big break, a few falsified documents about a man who never existed, and they're on their way.
The morning of their big day, John sends Jim a customised iPhone with Rossini's “The Thieving Magpie”.
The robberies go off without a hitch, as does the trial. John's meeting with Mycroft is almost depressingly predictable and the kidnapping case is so easily solved it's really not worth thinking up a witty moniker for. It all goes down so easily, so easily that John wonders how Sherlock hasn't already fallen under the weight of his own ego.
John's second meeting with Mycroft is an exercise in control. It's difficult not to blow his own cover and say I warned you but the play's not over yet. Sherlock still has just a little farther to fall until he reaches that permanent destination.
When John gets the phone call about Mrs. Hudson, he leaves as obediently as a lamb. He'd like to stay and watch Jim's last confrontation with Sherlock, wants to see Sherlock's expression when Jim tells him the truth about the keycode, but it's not James' place. No, this last confrontation belongs to Jim.
John has gotten so good at making plans that he'd forgotten the golden rule: The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.
&&&
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What do you want, Moriarty?
Just to say 'I warned you'.
A rather Pyrrhic victory, don't you think? After all, you lost your brother just as surely as I lost mine.
Wrong in every particular. Jim wasn't my brother. Moriarty wasn't even his real last name. And I lost him when you broke him.
You sent him to me.
I underestimated you. Congratulations. It won't happen again.
What do you want from me?
Your word that you'll stay out of my way.
Or what? What do I have left to lose?
Everything. Everyone you know, everyone that knew the real Sherlock, everything you've ever accomplished, everything that you might still accomplish. And your life, I suppose, though I usually try not to make such pedestrian threats.
Fine. You win. I forfeit the game.
You mean that?
Very sincerely.
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It was very clever and believable, I like the way you related 'Hamish' to 'James' and John going to Afghanistan to found a crime empire is lovely and dark.
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You think it's believable? Man, whenever I think about this fic I'm terrified that John came across as having Dissociative Identity Disorder (which he kinda does, in the way that all actors do), but yeah, with Hamish as a middle name this prompt was just asking for it. Lololol, John is such an overachiever in his own little way.
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