[fic: bbc sherlock] Double Cross: Prologue
Title: Double Cross
Rating: R
Warnings (for this chapter): War-related violence and gore; minor character death
Summary: There are patriots and there are traitors, and then there is Sherlock Holmes. Cold War spy AU.
Author's Notes: For help_japan and irisbleufic. Inexcusably late and incomplete. If anyone sees a glaring historical inaccuracy, please do not hesitate to point it out, but please know that I've taken a few liberties.
edit (5/28/2011): little tweaking. this is why one shouldn't post under duress, i suppose.
edit 2 (7/17/2011): links added at the end, for those who may take an interest. :)
"To betray, you first have to belong.
I never belonged."
--George Blake
Prologue
July, 1944
Somewhere in the north of France
“Ahm… Mmm… H-hk…”
“Soon now... Don’t worry, don’t worry…”
Private William Murray of Leeds has been dying, quite diligently, all night long and well into the morning. Now, he seems to finally be preparing to stop.
It is a cloudy morning. There is a thin breeze washing over everything, and the air is cool and pleasant. In the distance are storms, in the sky and on the ground, but they are moving away, a pleasant stillness in their wake.
Private Murray does not appear to notice that he is leaving on the loveliest of summer days.
The medic beside him is quiet, sitting with one hand on Murray’s shoulder and the other lying motionless on the ground. “Good lad,” he mutters, watching as the last of his morphine tugs at Murray’s eyelids, dragging them down.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom-boom.
Some minutes later, he rises, and wipes his hands on his trousers. He can hear low murmurings of speech and tense footsteps behind him; many miles in the distance, little mushroom clouds are popping up, quickly and steadily.
“How many?” he asks.
“Two.” A beat. “Oh, hell. Three.”
“Cover him up. And hurry.”
“How th’ fuck did they know we were here, how th’ fuck-”
The booms are moving closer, and they are mingling with pops and whistles and cracks. He glances down in time to see one of his men yank the tags from Murray’s neck.
“I smell a rat.” Private Robinson’s voice is rife with accusation as he turns, shooting glares at all the other men, gun clutched to his chest. “No other way they coulda tracked us down. You know what they do to rats n’ the army?” His smile is yellow. “Bang bang, aw ree-voir.”
“Can we leave the speculation for later, thanks?”
“Sorry, Captain Watson.” Robinson’s apology does not sound sincere, but he quiets down just the same.
“Let’s get a move on.”
They walk down a muddy road, a slender, disorganized column of four, heads swivelling from side to side as they watch and listen.
John Watson thinks of Murray’s body, pale and contorted and alone, and he shivers. Behind him, Bobby Wright is jingling the dog tags in his hand while trying to whistle something altogether tuneless. Dead man clashes against dead man.
John hasn’t the energy in him to tell the boy to stop.
The rain here is not like the rain in England. It tastes sickly sweet and is warm against his face, and when viewed from afar gives the impression of suffocating the fields. He can see the jagged tops of ruined houses poking over the horizon like tors. They will be safe there. He quickens his pace, for all this walking is making him uneasy. There is high grass on either side of them, thick and impossible to see through.
“Hurry up, lads,” he says, watching the blades bend and rustle.
“Ah, you worry too much, Cap’n,” Wright chirps. “Jerries moved on last night, must be three miles out by now. Naw, we’re all alone-”
There’s a sickening pop, and Wright’s head explodes like a ripe tomato.
“Aw, shit,” says Robinson, shouldering his gun.
“Into the grass!” John shouts. “Into the grass, hurry, now, hurry!”
He sees nothing of their attackers, only the flashing of their rifles; to his left, his sergeant is pulling at the others, dragging them across the wide and slippery road towards cover. There is a crack, a hiss of blood, and someone stumbles and falls, crawls towards the grass; another crack, and he is still.
John stands at the edge of the road, where mud meets the growth. Everyone is wide-eyed and running, everyone save for Robinson, who is standing in the middle of the way with his tongue between his teeth and his finger on the trigger. “Fuckin’ Jerries,” he says, firing randomly into the grass. “Taste my fuckin’ lead!”
"Robinson!”
The other man is too far gone to listen. He guffaws unnaturally loud when little spurts of blood spring up from the field, accompanied by strangled shouts and yelps.
“Robinson, that’s enough!” John has his hand at his hip, fingers folded over the grip of his revolver. “I’ll shoot you myself if I have to, you idiot-”
“S’ alright, sir, them Jerries couldn’t hit a barn!”
Pak! Pak!
John watches, rather dazed, as two bullets zip through Robinson’s belly and neck, buzzing along like little hot bees, travelling in slow motion. The man hovers for a moment, still and suspended, eyes wide and mouth open, a sheet of red pouring out from between his teeth. He looks- for the first time since John has known him- very much alone, and unsure of himself, and afraid.
He falls with a thud and a squealch.
Pak! Pak! Pak!
“Jesus!” John hisses, sidling forward across the mud, trying to hurry. He crouches beside Robinson, who is still alive and gurgling.
“S-sorry… gk… Oh, I’m s-so sorry, I d-gnk-don’t want to…”
“Stupid boy, what did you think would happen?” John is digging through Robinson’s pockets for letters, or photographs. He finds nothing but a lighter and morphine syrettes, which he palms and puts away.
A bloody hand reaches out, limply gripping his sleeve. “Don’t-” Robinson says, bug-eyed and frantic.
The arm falls, and his eyes go blank.
John snaps his tags from his neck and stuffs them into his pocket to join the morphine. There are whispers in the tall grass, soft and conspirational; surely Robinson did not kill them all.
He rises, ready to fall back and join his men. One more sweep of the area-
There! A solitary spark in the corner of his eye, quick and furtive. Miniscule. Insignificant.
He would never have paid it mind, really, were it not for the pain.
“Ah!”
His shoulder, no, not his shoulder; already his mind is flashing to amputations and limbs hanging off of bodies by a few solitary strands of sinew. How will he go home, now, how will he resume…
He drops to his knees, and thinks he must be shouting, why else would his throat be going raw? But he can’t hear a thing, only a roar in his ears. His right hand flies up, presses itself to the entrance hole, feels torn fabric and ripped open skin.
“Gnk,” he says, blinking rapidly, fumbling through his head for what to do.
In the grass there is movement, fast and horrified. He removes his hand from his shoulder and finds his gun, unable to understand himself. He is screaming now, from between his gritted teeth; there is a cloud over his head.
Somehow, his blood-slicked thumb manages to cock the revolver. He lunges forward, falling down onto his stomach, and simultaneously pulls the trigger.
Pak!
A shout.
Now nothing.
He pulls himself up onto his good elbow and begins crawling forward, pausing every few feet for breath. He can feel every bone in his body groaning and his lungs have started to clench, but he reaches the grass, all the same, and drags himself through it, until he is facing the sole of a German soldier’s boot.
The young man, who is brown haired and blue eyed, is still alive, and shot through the torso.
“English,” John pants, hoping he is intelligible. “Do you speak English?”
“Y-yes! Yes!” says the young man.
“Good, good.” He winces as he turns, and jams his hand into his pocket. “Look, look at what I have,” he grunts, pulling out the morphine syrettes, showing them to the soldier. “See? I want to help you.”
A horrified expression leaps into the young man’s face.
“No, no,” John says, beginning to sound desperate, even to himself. “It’s good. Watch.” He sits up with a moan, breaks the seal off one syrette with his teeth, then carefully slides the point beneath the skin of his injured arm. “See?” he hisses. “Safe. Good. Ah. Better.”
Horror turns to frantic desire; “Yes, yes,” says the young man, “Help me…”
“One moment, one… First, you tell me something. Yes? Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes!” There is emphatic nodding, followed by a whimper.
“How…did you find us?” John holds up the sole morphine syrette. He makes sure it is right before the young soldier’s pained eyes. “Just tell me…how you found us.”
“W-we… We were t-told… Information… Man, come to camp with map… Talk… Talk with general… Please, I know nothing, please-”
“It isn’t enough.” It is hard to see straight, now. No more pain. Just a bone-deep tiredness. He is beginning to fade. “Who… Who told you? Who was the man?”
“I am little… I am little, I cannot say… Even I… not meant… Mein Gott!” he cries towards the sky, vainly trying to lift an arm and grab the morphine. “Help!”
“Not enough!” The hand holding the syrette is beginning to tremble. Two dying men, horrified of what is coming; John does not know what else to do but murmur, “Name, a name…”
The young man looks to be on the brink of tears. He is pale now, corpse like; his lips are shaking, gasping. “M…” The syllables do not seem to fit on his tongue- he tries again. “M…!”
“C’mon, you stupid little boy, come on…”
One more effort. “Mo-riar-ty!” the lad gasps, dry lips cracking against each other, Adam’s apple violently lurching upwards.
John collapses forward, halfway to delirium. He manages to break the syrette’s seal and stick its point into the young man’s arm, even manages to hang around long enough to hear the faint and rhythmic death rattle. But the weight within his head becomes too much; he closes his eyes to the sky, wondering where they will bury him, if at all, of how French soil will feel between his bones; slowly, now, he turns the name over and over in his head; Moriarty, Moriarty, and thinks that something does not fit.
Birds. Rain. The sun, coming out.
Moriarty.
And then,
Please, God, let me live.
~
September, 1945
London
“Have you spoken with Philby?”
“Mm! Mm. Troubling news, very troubling news indeed-over two hundred names, all dangling at the tip of that traitorous little tongue.”
“And ours among them.”
“And ours among them, yes.” He slides a little lower in his seat, the ice in his glass clinking merrily. “Well, points for effort.”
It hasn’t rained much this month, and the city is croaking in the crisp, dry air. Cars move like dead leaves over the streets; shadows turn farcical, people turn desperate. It is the end of the last summer of the war, and here they are, already starting to plan the next one.
The problem, Jim decides, is that endgames aren’t ever any fun. They don’t go anywhere interesting. Nobody likes an afterword. Keep the ball rolling, that’s his philosophy-plenty of time for rest in the grave.
He tips his glass back and lets the ice cubes within fall to his face, sucks all vestiges of his gin and tonic from the slippery surfaces, before tipping forward once more. “Oh, don’t look so worried, my dear,” he tells the shadow standing across the room. “He’s been turned away-Philby made sure of that. The Soviets will have gotten to him by now. They’re probably already shipping him back to Moscow.” He licks his lips and grins. “For burial.”
“It’s not Volkov I’m worried about.”
“Who is it then? I can’t think of any other-”
“My time is a valuable commodity. Do not think I will allow you to waste it simply because I am…temporarily under your employment.”
“Cheeky.” Jim lets a purr roll through him. He sets his tumbler down on the little table at his elbow, and folds his arms over his chest. “I like that in a man. Well, the only chap who comes to mind is that pretty face you put on my desk a fortnight ago, and really, my dear, it does seem such a shame.”
The shadow sighs. “That isn’t the point.”
“Enlighten me as to what is.”
“He knows things. Important things.”
“Don’t we all?” Jim reaches out, dips his finger into his glass, swirls it around. “The difference is, he’s yet to find the right people.” The shadow nods. “Of course. Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
There emerges a low murmur, something about ‘two sides to every coin.’ Jim snorts, entirely ungentlemanlike, and uncrosses his legs, inspecting the thread of his trousers. “But that’s no fun,” he says.
“It is practical.”
“Not everyone can be bought.”
“I wasn’t talking about buying him.”
Jim’s eyes light up, hot and excited. “Oh! Oh!” he exclaims, a tremor shuddering through him. “Haven’t done that in ages. Who shall it be, then, you or I?”
“Me, I should think. You can’t risk it.”
“How touchingly loyal of you.” Jim brings his finger to his mouth, whirls his tongue around it slowly, tasting watered-down gin. “Bored of waiting, is that it?” And when the shadow fails to reply, Jim laughs and says, “Oh, alright then-I always did like to watch.
“Reel him in. No mistakes.”
Don’t let me down.
For those wondering: Kim Philby and Konstantin Volkov. Linking to Wikipedia, I shame myself. ;)
Rating: R
Warnings (for this chapter): War-related violence and gore; minor character death
Summary: There are patriots and there are traitors, and then there is Sherlock Holmes. Cold War spy AU.
Author's Notes: For help_japan and irisbleufic. Inexcusably late and incomplete. If anyone sees a glaring historical inaccuracy, please do not hesitate to point it out, but please know that I've taken a few liberties.
edit (5/28/2011): little tweaking. this is why one shouldn't post under duress, i suppose.
edit 2 (7/17/2011): links added at the end, for those who may take an interest. :)
"To betray, you first have to belong.
I never belonged."
--George Blake
Prologue
July, 1944
Somewhere in the north of France
“Ahm… Mmm… H-hk…”
“Soon now... Don’t worry, don’t worry…”
Private William Murray of Leeds has been dying, quite diligently, all night long and well into the morning. Now, he seems to finally be preparing to stop.
It is a cloudy morning. There is a thin breeze washing over everything, and the air is cool and pleasant. In the distance are storms, in the sky and on the ground, but they are moving away, a pleasant stillness in their wake.
Private Murray does not appear to notice that he is leaving on the loveliest of summer days.
The medic beside him is quiet, sitting with one hand on Murray’s shoulder and the other lying motionless on the ground. “Good lad,” he mutters, watching as the last of his morphine tugs at Murray’s eyelids, dragging them down.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom-boom.
Some minutes later, he rises, and wipes his hands on his trousers. He can hear low murmurings of speech and tense footsteps behind him; many miles in the distance, little mushroom clouds are popping up, quickly and steadily.
“How many?” he asks.
“Two.” A beat. “Oh, hell. Three.”
“Cover him up. And hurry.”
“How th’ fuck did they know we were here, how th’ fuck-”
The booms are moving closer, and they are mingling with pops and whistles and cracks. He glances down in time to see one of his men yank the tags from Murray’s neck.
“I smell a rat.” Private Robinson’s voice is rife with accusation as he turns, shooting glares at all the other men, gun clutched to his chest. “No other way they coulda tracked us down. You know what they do to rats n’ the army?” His smile is yellow. “Bang bang, aw ree-voir.”
“Can we leave the speculation for later, thanks?”
“Sorry, Captain Watson.” Robinson’s apology does not sound sincere, but he quiets down just the same.
“Let’s get a move on.”
They walk down a muddy road, a slender, disorganized column of four, heads swivelling from side to side as they watch and listen.
John Watson thinks of Murray’s body, pale and contorted and alone, and he shivers. Behind him, Bobby Wright is jingling the dog tags in his hand while trying to whistle something altogether tuneless. Dead man clashes against dead man.
John hasn’t the energy in him to tell the boy to stop.
The rain here is not like the rain in England. It tastes sickly sweet and is warm against his face, and when viewed from afar gives the impression of suffocating the fields. He can see the jagged tops of ruined houses poking over the horizon like tors. They will be safe there. He quickens his pace, for all this walking is making him uneasy. There is high grass on either side of them, thick and impossible to see through.
“Hurry up, lads,” he says, watching the blades bend and rustle.
“Ah, you worry too much, Cap’n,” Wright chirps. “Jerries moved on last night, must be three miles out by now. Naw, we’re all alone-”
There’s a sickening pop, and Wright’s head explodes like a ripe tomato.
“Aw, shit,” says Robinson, shouldering his gun.
“Into the grass!” John shouts. “Into the grass, hurry, now, hurry!”
He sees nothing of their attackers, only the flashing of their rifles; to his left, his sergeant is pulling at the others, dragging them across the wide and slippery road towards cover. There is a crack, a hiss of blood, and someone stumbles and falls, crawls towards the grass; another crack, and he is still.
John stands at the edge of the road, where mud meets the growth. Everyone is wide-eyed and running, everyone save for Robinson, who is standing in the middle of the way with his tongue between his teeth and his finger on the trigger. “Fuckin’ Jerries,” he says, firing randomly into the grass. “Taste my fuckin’ lead!”
"Robinson!”
The other man is too far gone to listen. He guffaws unnaturally loud when little spurts of blood spring up from the field, accompanied by strangled shouts and yelps.
“Robinson, that’s enough!” John has his hand at his hip, fingers folded over the grip of his revolver. “I’ll shoot you myself if I have to, you idiot-”
“S’ alright, sir, them Jerries couldn’t hit a barn!”
Pak! Pak!
John watches, rather dazed, as two bullets zip through Robinson’s belly and neck, buzzing along like little hot bees, travelling in slow motion. The man hovers for a moment, still and suspended, eyes wide and mouth open, a sheet of red pouring out from between his teeth. He looks- for the first time since John has known him- very much alone, and unsure of himself, and afraid.
He falls with a thud and a squealch.
Pak! Pak! Pak!
“Jesus!” John hisses, sidling forward across the mud, trying to hurry. He crouches beside Robinson, who is still alive and gurgling.
“S-sorry… gk… Oh, I’m s-so sorry, I d-gnk-don’t want to…”
“Stupid boy, what did you think would happen?” John is digging through Robinson’s pockets for letters, or photographs. He finds nothing but a lighter and morphine syrettes, which he palms and puts away.
A bloody hand reaches out, limply gripping his sleeve. “Don’t-” Robinson says, bug-eyed and frantic.
The arm falls, and his eyes go blank.
John snaps his tags from his neck and stuffs them into his pocket to join the morphine. There are whispers in the tall grass, soft and conspirational; surely Robinson did not kill them all.
He rises, ready to fall back and join his men. One more sweep of the area-
There! A solitary spark in the corner of his eye, quick and furtive. Miniscule. Insignificant.
He would never have paid it mind, really, were it not for the pain.
“Ah!”
His shoulder, no, not his shoulder; already his mind is flashing to amputations and limbs hanging off of bodies by a few solitary strands of sinew. How will he go home, now, how will he resume…
He drops to his knees, and thinks he must be shouting, why else would his throat be going raw? But he can’t hear a thing, only a roar in his ears. His right hand flies up, presses itself to the entrance hole, feels torn fabric and ripped open skin.
“Gnk,” he says, blinking rapidly, fumbling through his head for what to do.
In the grass there is movement, fast and horrified. He removes his hand from his shoulder and finds his gun, unable to understand himself. He is screaming now, from between his gritted teeth; there is a cloud over his head.
Somehow, his blood-slicked thumb manages to cock the revolver. He lunges forward, falling down onto his stomach, and simultaneously pulls the trigger.
Pak!
A shout.
Now nothing.
He pulls himself up onto his good elbow and begins crawling forward, pausing every few feet for breath. He can feel every bone in his body groaning and his lungs have started to clench, but he reaches the grass, all the same, and drags himself through it, until he is facing the sole of a German soldier’s boot.
The young man, who is brown haired and blue eyed, is still alive, and shot through the torso.
“English,” John pants, hoping he is intelligible. “Do you speak English?”
“Y-yes! Yes!” says the young man.
“Good, good.” He winces as he turns, and jams his hand into his pocket. “Look, look at what I have,” he grunts, pulling out the morphine syrettes, showing them to the soldier. “See? I want to help you.”
A horrified expression leaps into the young man’s face.
“No, no,” John says, beginning to sound desperate, even to himself. “It’s good. Watch.” He sits up with a moan, breaks the seal off one syrette with his teeth, then carefully slides the point beneath the skin of his injured arm. “See?” he hisses. “Safe. Good. Ah. Better.”
Horror turns to frantic desire; “Yes, yes,” says the young man, “Help me…”
“One moment, one… First, you tell me something. Yes? Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes!” There is emphatic nodding, followed by a whimper.
“How…did you find us?” John holds up the sole morphine syrette. He makes sure it is right before the young soldier’s pained eyes. “Just tell me…how you found us.”
“W-we… We were t-told… Information… Man, come to camp with map… Talk… Talk with general… Please, I know nothing, please-”
“It isn’t enough.” It is hard to see straight, now. No more pain. Just a bone-deep tiredness. He is beginning to fade. “Who… Who told you? Who was the man?”
“I am little… I am little, I cannot say… Even I… not meant… Mein Gott!” he cries towards the sky, vainly trying to lift an arm and grab the morphine. “Help!”
“Not enough!” The hand holding the syrette is beginning to tremble. Two dying men, horrified of what is coming; John does not know what else to do but murmur, “Name, a name…”
The young man looks to be on the brink of tears. He is pale now, corpse like; his lips are shaking, gasping. “M…” The syllables do not seem to fit on his tongue- he tries again. “M…!”
“C’mon, you stupid little boy, come on…”
One more effort. “Mo-riar-ty!” the lad gasps, dry lips cracking against each other, Adam’s apple violently lurching upwards.
John collapses forward, halfway to delirium. He manages to break the syrette’s seal and stick its point into the young man’s arm, even manages to hang around long enough to hear the faint and rhythmic death rattle. But the weight within his head becomes too much; he closes his eyes to the sky, wondering where they will bury him, if at all, of how French soil will feel between his bones; slowly, now, he turns the name over and over in his head; Moriarty, Moriarty, and thinks that something does not fit.
Birds. Rain. The sun, coming out.
Moriarty.
And then,
Please, God, let me live.
~
September, 1945
London
“Have you spoken with Philby?”
“Mm! Mm. Troubling news, very troubling news indeed-over two hundred names, all dangling at the tip of that traitorous little tongue.”
“And ours among them.”
“And ours among them, yes.” He slides a little lower in his seat, the ice in his glass clinking merrily. “Well, points for effort.”
It hasn’t rained much this month, and the city is croaking in the crisp, dry air. Cars move like dead leaves over the streets; shadows turn farcical, people turn desperate. It is the end of the last summer of the war, and here they are, already starting to plan the next one.
The problem, Jim decides, is that endgames aren’t ever any fun. They don’t go anywhere interesting. Nobody likes an afterword. Keep the ball rolling, that’s his philosophy-plenty of time for rest in the grave.
He tips his glass back and lets the ice cubes within fall to his face, sucks all vestiges of his gin and tonic from the slippery surfaces, before tipping forward once more. “Oh, don’t look so worried, my dear,” he tells the shadow standing across the room. “He’s been turned away-Philby made sure of that. The Soviets will have gotten to him by now. They’re probably already shipping him back to Moscow.” He licks his lips and grins. “For burial.”
“It’s not Volkov I’m worried about.”
“Who is it then? I can’t think of any other-”
“My time is a valuable commodity. Do not think I will allow you to waste it simply because I am…temporarily under your employment.”
“Cheeky.” Jim lets a purr roll through him. He sets his tumbler down on the little table at his elbow, and folds his arms over his chest. “I like that in a man. Well, the only chap who comes to mind is that pretty face you put on my desk a fortnight ago, and really, my dear, it does seem such a shame.”
The shadow sighs. “That isn’t the point.”
“Enlighten me as to what is.”
“He knows things. Important things.”
“Don’t we all?” Jim reaches out, dips his finger into his glass, swirls it around. “The difference is, he’s yet to find the right people.” The shadow nods. “Of course. Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
There emerges a low murmur, something about ‘two sides to every coin.’ Jim snorts, entirely ungentlemanlike, and uncrosses his legs, inspecting the thread of his trousers. “But that’s no fun,” he says.
“It is practical.”
“Not everyone can be bought.”
“I wasn’t talking about buying him.”
Jim’s eyes light up, hot and excited. “Oh! Oh!” he exclaims, a tremor shuddering through him. “Haven’t done that in ages. Who shall it be, then, you or I?”
“Me, I should think. You can’t risk it.”
“How touchingly loyal of you.” Jim brings his finger to his mouth, whirls his tongue around it slowly, tasting watered-down gin. “Bored of waiting, is that it?” And when the shadow fails to reply, Jim laughs and says, “Oh, alright then-I always did like to watch.
“Reel him in. No mistakes.”
Don’t let me down.
For those wondering: Kim Philby and Konstantin Volkov. Linking to Wikipedia, I shame myself. ;)