Sentimentalism
Rating: T
Warnings: DubCon, Developmental Disability Discussed Briefly (TW)
Word Count: 567
Summary: 427 am and this pops out, I don`t even know.
They were fucked up. They were fucked, and Seb was fucked, and he damn well knew it. He damn well knew the things they did were mad and dangerous and decidedly not normal, and he couldn’t care less.
Like the first time they’d fucked and Jim’d grabbed a knife by the blade and shoved the handle up Seb’s arse using his own goddamn blood as lube, and Seb had squealed like a stuck pig with the shock of it and dug his thumbs into Jim’s windpipe and watched his face turn red and Jim had jerked and pushed the knife handle further inside Seb. Seb had come so hard it hurt, and his hands fell from Jim’s throat and stuttered a melody across their ribcages. Jim’d taken the knife out of his arse and held it to Seb’s chest and whispered “that amused me, but if you ever try it again, I will gut you and hang you with your own intestines - you’d be surprised at the weight they can take,” and Seb had just looked at Jim and laughed, leaning his head back against the wall and baring his throat to Jim to say “I trust you not to do that, don’t disappoint me -” silently, because Seb had never been as eloquent as Jim.
Jim’s neck was bruised and he buttoned his shirt to the top for weeks after that, and long silver scars broke across his palms and cut his life lines in half. Seb told himself he didn’t believe in that Roma bullshit, but he found himself tracing the scars all too often and Jim found himself researching palmistry until his eyes were dry enough to crack like Japanese teapots with the 4 o'clock ghost wind that crept in through Seb’s shitty windowpanes. Jim crawled into bed and pulled Seb’s arm around Jim’s own throat so Seb’s fingers struck the sensory memory of the bruises. They played each other like pianos or violins or saxophones and only said I love you silently in the dark, with sign language over each other’s hearts.
Seb might have been an ex-army contract killer, but he was still a sentimentalist and that meant a secret appreciation for his mother’s Roma bullshit and the sign language he’d learned for his sister when they’d found out she was deaf and disabled and his father left them. And with Jim, that meant wearing Westwood on assignment (which was stupid, stupid, sure Westwood looked great but the manouverability left a lot to be desired), and it meant ironing Jim’s goddamn shirts at four a.m. with the west wind blowing through the shitty windowpanes in his shitty apartment and crawling up underneath his collar, leaving him shivering until Jim wrapped his arms around Seb’s neck like some bloody homicidal octopus and bit train tracks of fire down to Seb’s collarbones and chest. It meant making toast at any and all hours because toast with peanut butter was all Jim would eat when he was in one of his moods, and even Seb with his not-so-hot sense of self preservation knew that his mad Irishman was far too skinny.
And Jim was the farthest thing from a sentimentalist, but when he held the gun in his mouth and darted his tongue out to taste the steel, he looked past Sherlock at the window of the empty house across the way and fancied he could see Seb. And he almost regretted it in the instant before he pulled the trigger and his world went black and his body crumpled with a wet crack onto the roof of the hospital and he sent Sherlock to his doom.
Seb stared across the way at Jim and waited for the jump, and then he packed up his rifle and left the building. He nearly felt sorry for that poor shit Watson.
Seb already missed the smell of peanut butter and ironed shirts and the four o'clock wind.