(no subject)
"The Fall of Gods" (9/24)
Pairings: Established John/Lestrade; Sherlock/Victor Trevor
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Language, angst, mentions of suicide, implied past alcoholism, implied PTSD, religious themes, minor character death, sexual content, homicide.
Notes: Many thanks to elfbert, whose suggestion led to the first scene in this chapter. Isadora Persano is taken from the BBC’s Science of Deduction website; the details of her case belong to me.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Greg likes to work with his hands.
He finds that there is something base and reaffirming about making something from nothing. And there’s a certain amount of pride to be found in fixing something that someone else had deemed hopeless. He’s not an expert, by any means--wouldn’t even afford himself the title of amateur--but he can hold his own. He once fixed a leaky sink for Sally Donovan and has performed a number of small services for Martha Hudson, most of which were actually the result of one of Sherlock’s experiments gone awry in the flat upstairs.
And he’s seen far more of 221B than its inhabitants, he’d wager, because in the months after Sherlock and John moved in it quickly became apparent that the previous residents had been more than neglectful of the place. Greg had done some light carpentry for Sherlock when he was still living at Montague Street, and his first trip to Baker Street had told him--even though he was distracted at the time by the Pink Lady--that this new flat would need more than just a little help.
“Christ, mate, do you realise what you’ve got yourself into, here?” Greg had asked Sherlock the first weekend after the serial suicides had been solved, having popped ‘round to 221B with a cold case (though, really, he’d only been wanting to check in on Sherlock and his... intriguing new flatmate). The molding around the doorways was sagging, the windows looked about ready to fall out of the main room’s walls, and John’s room upstairs had a questionable patch of mold on the ceiling.
It had taken Greg the better part of six months to get the place into a shape that he deemed satisfactory, aided by Sherlock (who was surprisingly competent at it, when he put his mind to it). And though they’d had some minor issues over the past eighteen months--more due to Sherlock than anything else--Greg hadn’t needed to perform any maintenance on Baker Street in close to a year.
That is, until now.
Two shelves in the kitchen had given way in the night, jerking both John and Greg out of sleep and sending John reaching for his gun. But the only casualties were half a dozen mugs and various mis-matched ceramic plates John had inherited one Christmas from his mother, and John had muttered something about calling a carpenter after work that evening.
But Greg had arrived home first, and in the light of day he can see now that the damage isn’t anything insurmountable. In all honesty, it takes him longer to sweep up the shattered plates and mugs and clear the floor of any lingering shards than it does to put up the shelves once again.
He’s just finishing reinforcing the second shelf when John arrives home.
“You didn’t have to do that,” John says when he comes into the kitchen, but there’s a pleased smile on his face nonetheless. Greg rolls his eyes.
“I spent all last summer rewiring this place; I think I can handle putting up a couple of shelves.” Greg reaches for a rag. He wipes off his hands and the thin sheet of sweat on his forehead. 221B is always too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter, and has a hard time finding a delicate balance between the two during the other seasons. “What do you think?”
John drags his eyes from Greg’s toes to his sweat-damp hair, and the smile melts into a smirk. He closes the distance between them and hooks his fingers into the belt loops on Greg’s jeans, tugging him close.
“I like it,” he says, and he’s not even looking at the shelves. His smirk turns mischievous. “Remind me to break things a little more often in this flat.”
“If this is the response - unf! - that I get... Gladly.”
----
They spend several days meandering through Europe on their way to Cairo, which is where they will catch their flight to South Africa.
Sherlock is wary of air travel after Greece. It is a mode of transportation so highly scrutinized and regulated that he fears their chances of discovery are greater, even with Mycroft’s money and the identities he provided them. It is because of this--not entirely unfounded--paranoia that their route to South Africa is less than direct. They travel by bus through Switzerland; in Italy, France, and Portugal, they use primarily trains.
They pass a night on the island of Crete ahead of the final leg of their journey to Egypt. Summer on the island is glorious and warm, with the sun hanging in the sky eleven hours out of twenty-four and temperatures reaching twenty-six more often than not. Victor, who thrives in the heat, comes alive under the sun’s harsh gaze. Sherlock, who breaks a sweat the moment the temperature breaches twenty, sucks in a lungful of too-hot air and immediately suggests that they find shelter for the night.
They have strayed too close to the land where they were nearly found out, and Sherlock is wary of this. Victor is equally uneasy, which is a relief, and he is the one who suggests they spend the night somewhere off the grid.
“This is probably the best weather we’ll see for a while,” he reasons. “We may as well take advantage of it. There are worse times to be outside than mid-summer on Crete.”
Sherlock is inclined to agree, and they find an abandoned church in Chania that will afford them at least some shelter for a few hours. They bed down in the back of the sanctuary, throwing down jackets and bits of clothing in an effort to provide a cushion between them and the unforgiving floorboards.
The church is littered with fallen bits of wood, mostly from the questionable ceiling. Other detritus is scattered across the once-pristine floor, blown in from the innumerable storms over the years that have battered the structure. Looters took care of the rest, carrying away chairs and pews until the inside of the church is nearly gutted; a shell of its former glory. It appears to have been an unspoken agreement not to touch certain sacred objects, however. A cross hangs on the opposite wall, glinting in the dim light from the fading sun, its precious metal largely untarnished.
They speak little and sleep less. At different, broken moments of his restless sleep Sherlock finds himself staring at the gaping ceiling; with his nose pressed against the gritty floor; and, at some unclear hour of the morning, gazing at Victor’s silhouette. He finds he is unable to look away.
The sex was a one-off that became a three-off, and then a five-off. By this point, Sherlock has lost count of their encounters and decides that it’s definitely become routine. Not only that, but it’s a routine they are finding difficult to break, even though they swear each time will be the last one.
Victor’s not asleep, but rather he is idly whittling a piece of wood with his pocket knife. Sherlock isn’t sure if he can even remember seeing Victor sleeping at all this night. His eyes are bright in the faint light of the moon, alert and clear while Sherlock feels muddled and uncertain with lingering sleep.
Slivers of wood have fallen onto Victor’s stomach and Sherlock, unable to help himself, reaches out to brush them off. His hand lingers for a beat longer than is considered appropriate, and he feels the taut lines of Victor’s torso even through his layers of clothing. Victor’s eyes flick to him but he says nothing. He neither responds to the touch nor reprimands Sherlock for it, and after a moment Sherlock draws away.
He stretches out once again next to Victor and folds his hands behind his head. The belt of the Milky Way is visible through the holes in the rotting roof of the church and Sherlock searches the stars for some moments, trying to pick out a familiar point of light. But all relevant information about the solar system he deleted long ago, much to Lestrade’s dismay. All that remains now is the thought that Lestrade would have very much enjoyed this view, given how often he complained about London’s light pollution blocking the stars each night.
Sherlock pushes the thought from his mind. He doesn’t want to think about Lestrade right now, nor John, nor even London.
It doesn’t hurt if he isn’t thinking about it.
“How’d that case turn out?”
Sherlock turns his head to look at Victor, who is still whittling with his knife.
“Hmm?”
“The case you were working on before I died. Isabella someone.”
“Isabella Marie. Her real name turned out to be Isadora Persano,” Sherlock says, remembering the twenty-two-year-old who had showed up at his flat one morning with no idea who she was or where she had come from. Her only earthly possessions had been the blue dress she had been wearing at the time and a silver cross around her neck. “I was able to track down a grandmother six months after you died. Isadora was her youngest grandchild, and the only family she had left. Parents, siblings... they had all been killed in an accident years before.”
“Unrelated to her amnesia?”
Sherlock nods.
“Did you ever find out what caused the memory loss, then?”
Sherlock shakes his head.
“I would have,” he says, feeling a pang of frustration even though four years have passed since that case. “But she decided against it once I uncovered her origins. She was... content with that.”
“You wouldn’t have been.”
“Neither would you.” Sherlock drapes an arm over his eyes, blocking out the moonlight that streams through the cracks in the walls. “The bullet wound.”
“Hmm?”
“You asked a question. My turn. How did you get the bullet wound?”
Victor blows out a harsh breath between his teeth.
“I was in South Ossetia,” he says finally, his voice distant as he remembers. “About... Well, it was almost exactly three years ago now.”
Sherlock lifts his arm and stares at Victor incredulously.
“Don’t tell me you were responsible for that war.”
Victor flashes him a mischievous grin and Sherlock thumps him on the shoulder.
“No, of course not, it just sounds more dramatic when I put it that way,” he says, stifling a chuckle. “No, actually, it turns out that I simply have terrible timing. I was on my way home from a mission. I was just passing through. Nearly got mugged for my troubles. The war happened in the background; I wasn’t anywhere near it.”
“Nearly got killed for your troubles,” Sherlock corrects, because that wound should have been mortal. Victor shrugs.
“You think that’s bad, you should see my attacker.” He’s quiet for a moment. “You broke the first two fingers on your right hand... two years ago?”
Sherlock nods.
“It’s almost as banal as your story,” he mutters. “I was crossing a street. Nearly got hit by a car. Someone pushed me out of the way, and I landed badly. Tell me about the meat cleaver.”
Victor pushes himself up on his elbows.
“Well, now, that’s actually a little more interesting. I was in Mexico a while back...”
They pass nearly an hour in this manner. Every mark, every scar is a story in and of itself. But nearly as much passes unsaid between them as is spoken. Sherlock can’t speak of John, nor of the indignity of the final few months of his life. Victor is equally quiet about the year following his death.
Sherlock, unsurprisingly, doesn’t have near the number of injuries that Victor does, and he runs out of stories to tell long before Victor.
“I wonder if Mycroft truly knew what he was getting into when he recruited you,” Sherlock says dryly at one point. “You must be the most accident-prone agent on his staff.”
Victor snorts.
“And you only saw the front.”
He sits up suddenly, shedding his jacket in one swift movement. He turns his back to Sherlock and hikes up his t-shirt to his shoulders.
Sherlock blinks in surprise at the sight that meets his eyes. Scars crisscross Victor’s back, some following the contours of his ribs while others are etched haphazardly into the skin. Sherlock reaches out a hand and pauses bare centimeters from Victor’s skin, palm hovering over the cruel lines, as though he can still feel the heat rising from the wounds.
“Go on,” Victor says, his voice hushed. “They’re ancient, Sher, they don’t hurt.”
Sherlock traces each line with his fingertips; tries to read from the jagged crests the story of how each one came to be. But he is too close to this, too close to Victor, and there are too many emotions that interfere with his attempts at observation.
“They’re all from one event,” Victor supplies quietly. His voice is passionless. “I was captured in Turkey about three years ago. I asked too many questions, and wasn’t nearly discreet enough about it.”
“They tortured you.”
“They questioned me,” Victor corrects, never one to admit that he had been a victim.
Sherlock tries to blink back images of Victor under a lash; Victor, torn and bleeding, his reserves run low and his mind at the breaking point. He’s rarely ever seen Victor as anything less than in complete control of himself, both his mind and his body. He cannot imagine, doesn’t want to imagine, a situation where that isn’t true.
“How did you get away?”
Victor snorts.
“Amateurs,” he mutters, and Sherlock does not contradict him even though the efficiency of the wounds tells him otherwise. “They made the mistake of believing their bonds were enough to hold me and turned their backs. I broke my wrist and got a hand free. It was all I needed.”
Victor shifts, as though to pull his shirt down again, but Sherlock stops him. He brushes a hand over Victor’s left shoulder blade. The bare, unmarked flesh there is alien beneath his fingertips, even though it doesn't truly feel any different.
“Except for this one,” he says quietly. “This wasn’t part of that event. When did you get rid of it?”
“Almost as soon as I got out of the hospital,” Victor answers, equally soft. There’s a wistful quality to his voice.
He’d had a tattoo on that shoulder blade since university, that of an elegant hawk captured in mid-flight. It had reminded him of his grandfather, he’d said, and never elaborated. Sherlock has always known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Victor would have needed to be rid of the tattoo in order to properly assume this new life. He could not have had any identifying mark on his body.
Still, to be faced with it in this manner... Sherlock feels a twinge of regret. He remembers idly tracing the outline of the hawk’s wings in the middle of the night, beams of silvery moonlight playing off the hard muscles of Victor’s back while he slumbered.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can think to say.
Victor pulls his shirt down and stretches out again on the floor.
“I’m not,” he says briskly. “It was necessary. So long as my identity remained unknown, I could complete my jobs and keep you safe. I don’t regret that at all.”
Sherlock doesn’t know what to say to that, and so says nothing at all. And when he next opens his eyes, morning has come.
Victor is awake and staring at the ceiling, an arm flung across his forehead while his other rests on his stomach. He has a leg bent at the knee and he’s tapping out a nonsense rhythm on his sternum. He has always been a restless sleeper, especially when bedding down in an unfamiliar place, and Sherlock would not be surprised if he has been awake this entire time.
Grey light is beginning to seep into the church, washing out the silvery moonlight and chasing away the dark as dawn approaches. Victor’s features are soft in this early-morning light. The lines on his face are nearly invisible, and his dyed hair appears dark once again.
Victor looks over, as though he could feel Sherlock’s eyes on him, and gives a gentle smile.
“Awake, are we?” he says softly. “Hello.”
Sherlock pushes himself up on his elbows, leans over, and presses his lips to Victor’s.
Victor’s lips are cool but his mouth is warm, and when he finally parts his lips in response to the probing swipes from Sherlock’s tongue, he brings a hand to rest gently on the back of Sherlock’s neck, holding him there. Sherlock rests a hand on Victor’s stomach and Victor moves to cover it with his own.
The kiss is gentle and aching all at once, and so deep it is as though they are trying to draw air from each other’s lungs. When Sherlock pulls away, it’s only because the arm supporting his weight is starting to give out. He doesn’t want this to end, not ever, and that thought is dizzying.
“I thought we weren’t getting back into this,” Victor says warily when Sherlock presses his face into Victor’s neck.
“I know what I said.”
And the look in Victor’s eyes when Sherlock draws away--a tentative, corrosive hope that dissolves the last of his reservations--tells Sherlock the truth that he’s known but not acknowledged since their first night together in Liechtenstein.
This was always going to happen, them coming together like this. It had happened before--several times, in fact, in the early and tumultuous years of their relationship. Their separations had always been temporary; they had always fallen back together again, each caught in the gravitational well of the other.
There will be no going back from this.
Sherlock leans in and kisses Victor again.
----
Part 10
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