Work Text:
There is a price for everything.
Magic exists, whatever Holmes may care to believe. But there is reason those pompous fools of the order use it little, ineffectually. Magic demands a price, and they are not willing to pay it. They are not willing to shave time from their lives, as little time as they already have left.
He can hardly blame them. After all, he has no desire to burn out bright and fast, to create is empire only to breathe his last before he can enjoy it.
But unlike the order, he has no morals. Why pay with his life? There are beggars aplenty, beggars and orphans and whores and all manner of lower class scum no one will miss. The girls, those lovely young things, so fragile, so innocent – those things are better bargaining chips, to be sure, but the real purpose there is exposure. It's time to feed the fear as well, so when he rises from the grave, it is already waiting to be stirred to a fever pitch.
Coward is young. He is not fragile, nor innocent, but he is young and he burns with passion, and when he comes to Blackwood before parliament convenes, with shame in his bearing and tells him Holmes has escaped – when he comes to Blackwood, he comes with a solution as well.
His eyes are bright with a fanatic's fire, and the kiss he presses to Blackwood's lips before blood coats his mouth is sweet, sweet.
He sits his throne by Coward's blood, and cannot enjoy it.