king of the hopeless
Jim Moriarty/Sebastian Moran
Sebastian knows a hundred ways to kill a man but none on how to love him.
Jim is the physical embodiment of sex and free spirit, has a strong jaw and good taste in clothes, a voice like aged brandy that can sometimes creep into bass drum territory, and a very expressive face. He’s always one step ahead, and it’s not that Sebastian is one step behind, it isn’t that way with the two of them, not really, more like marching in succession and the toe of Jim’s shoe is leading. Despite already putting a whole lot of his faith into the hand basket that is Sebastian, Jim still drowns in his own theorems and the swirl of dark hair that defines Sherlock clogs the drainway that lets social skills and human feeling slide through thick and heavy. And even if he weren’t preoccupied, Jim wouldn’t dare rest his palm on Sebastian’s lower back, preposterous, no way, thank you.
But still, despite the misgivings of their relationship (not many) and the way Jim seems to put people on edge (often), Sebastian is still in for the long run, all the way through the heroine headaches and the times Jim doesn’t even remember why he’s going after Sherlock except that he is that he has to Seb, please just let me-
The point remains that Jim gets a little psychotic, mixes a little too much whiskey into his morning coffee, and if his hands shake when he hands Sebastian his rifle… well Sebastian doesn’t mention it.
Sebastian is strangely still when he shoots; a knowledge of when to stop moving that is always counterbalanced by the fact that Jim never seems to cease, and if Arthur had Excalibur then Jim Moriarty has Sebastian, has a gun but not a noose, is a boy that never really matured into being a man, consumed with lust and contempt and borne on by the everlasting backbeat of murders and bared teeth.
They are sitting on the bed and “I want you to make sure you get him right between the eyes Seb-” Sebastian tunes him out, hands sure as he picks apart his rifle piece by piece, each one a little clock ticking down the moments until it is utilized. Sebastian polishes the gun until it sings, remembers when he was younger and first saw that steel glint in the eyes of a young boy, the light reflecting off of copper stains, roses dripping, and his mind rattles railwaycarfast to a hurtling tumult until Jim is crouched over the edge of the bed watching, and if he presses his curling his fingers over the back of Sebastian’s neck he might stretch up to reach him, might, and he does and he feels something unfurl in his stomach, liquid black.
He puts Jim on his knees, watches as his eyes fill slowly and knows that Jim is halfway to somewhere else by now. He lets Jim touch him, touches back when he knows there are no barriers, and if they take advantage of each other then that’s just one more thing for the closets filled with not skeletons but still warm corpses and misadventures, and they cannot breathe, they just can’t.
“Jim, James, James-” Sebastian has a good half a foot on Jim but he still is nothing in the wake of the force that is James Moriarty when hell-bent on killing someone. But that’s not right, the man is dead, has been dead now for ten minutes, died with a grin on his face and Jim’s fingers curled around his throat as Sebastian pressed the muzzle of the gun to the soft flesh of his belly. It’s a little sick, the liquid noises as Jim punches Dead Man #30, but Seb likes the hard edges of Jim’s shoulders in his dress shirt, jacket long forgotten and Seb settles back against the wall and lets him work himself up until he steps in.
It’s a lot like sex, fighting with Jim is, but then again things with Jim usually are. Jim clips his cheek and Seb’s blood sings sweet with the initial sting, and he gives as good as he gets until they’re both a little mottled with bruises more-so than usual.
Sebastian is a little worse for wear than Jim, because Jim grew up being picked on and Sebastian, while he may have been a soldier and now a gun for hire, Jim’s gun for hire, somehow never learned to take the brunt of the beating on the flatbones of his forearms, instead baring acres of malleable skin that Jim smacks, slaps, prods, works.
Jim crushes their mouths together, and if Sebastian’s arteries were a chorus before, now they’re a goddamn symphony, and Jim gets his way inside, launches his fingers into Sebastian’s hair and stretches, stretches until he decides against it and shoves Sebastian against the wall.
They’re steadily wandering into no man’s land and Jim doesn’t even give them a safety net, no drug induced hallucinations to fall back on, simply the hard edge of want from two men who have eaten together and slept in the same bed, washed blood caked like makeup on each other’s dirty skin, doubled up on more murders than they can count, let alone recall, and will continue to enjoy it every single time.
Sebastian knows a hundred ways to kill a man and none on how to love him, but he thinks if he were capable of it he would do so right there on the roof of Bart's; Sebastian’s sleeve growing dark with blood from the body, Jim's body, and the fading thump of Jim's pulse fluttering like a fledgling bird or a racehorse running straight for the finish line under his fingers.