Chapter Text
“As long as I’m alive, you can save your friends, you’ve got a way out.” The man smiles, and he looks almost happy, almost delighted, his hand around Sherlock’s surprisingly soft, surprisingly warm. He had always thought that someone with eyes so dead must have freezing cold hands. “Well good luck with that.”
And then the man’s other hand, the dominant one, is coming out of his pocket, too fast for Sherlock to react, too fast for Sherlock to stop it, too fast for time to catch up, and—
BANG.
Sherlock gasps awake, a gunshot still echoing inside his mind and reverberating inside his skull, he shoots upright, trying to—get back, get closer, trying to pull the gun away—do something, anything, until the reality of his bedroom catches up to his sleep-addled brain.
A dream.
It was just a dream.
It’s nineteen eighty seven and Sherlock Holmes is sitting in his bed, safe inside his bedroom with the remnants of his night still clinging to his mind, he lies back down, looks at his ceiling for a few seconds—
Something feels wrong, he can’t quite place it but it feels like something is out of place, like not everything is right, for a second, he knows that his dream was important, he’s certain of it like he had never been certain of anything else in his life, but then it slips away and Sherlock blinks, wondering what was troubling him.
He forgets.
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A few minutes later, Sherlock is carelessly throwing his school books inside his bag when he sees it.
His notebook, the one where he had decided to jot down everything he found out about Powers’ case to give it to the police afterwards, to show them that he wasn’t just a weird kid with delusions, the one they had barely skimmed through, ignoring all of the hard work he had put in it, before throwing it back at his face without giving its content a second thought.
His notebook, lying innocently on his desk.
On any different day, he wouldn’t be very surprised to see it there, not when he had poured as much time as he could researching everything related to the Carl Powers case and writing what he found into it, but today?
No, no, Sherlock clearly remembers how yesterday ended, the way he had been dismissed, the long train ride back home, how he had angrily shoved his notebook in the back of his bookcase and sworn that he would never, never, take it out again.
It shouldn’t be there.
Nothing else is out of place in his room, nothing else has done as much as shift, but his notebook is on his desk.
Slowly, as if he’s waiting for it to spring open and bite him, Sherlock reaches out for the cover, tentatively grabbing it. When nothing happens, he observes it from all angles, notes it’s just as he left it, and is about to put it back down, bemused, when a piece of paper slips out from between the pages.
Sherlock kneels, picks it up, and reads, his eyes lighting up with excitement.
You are right about Powers, it says, with each letter written in a different font in a strange mimicry of the notes made with newspaper clippings that blackmailers send in movies. I’m the one you’re looking for, it adds, followed by strings of numbers separated every now and then by dots.
Sherlock can’t stop grinning.
You are right, and of course he is, of course, but it’s the first time someone actually realises it, I’m the one you’re looking for, his murderer, his killer, his crafty spider, his, and then that code, that cipher, that mystery.
It’s an invitation if he has ever seen one.
Sherlock abandons his half-made school bag and immediately gets to work, shoving books off his desk to make more space for his attempts to decipher the note.
His parents are on a trip for his mother’s work so he doesn’t have to worry about missing meals or classes for the day- the school will probably alert them at some point, but Sherlock doesn’t care, it’s not important right now, nothing other than his case is- he just shuts himself inside his bedroom, writes the numbers, rewrites them, and dissects every single one of them, trying to give the sequences a meaning.
At the end of the day, he has it.
A place, a date, a time, simple, efficient, elegant.
Locus delicti—the crime scene, the pool—two weeks—two weeks after the murder, in five days—quarter to three.
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Sherlock can barely function past the excitement for the first few days, he skips school completely, leaves his parents’ messages unanswered and stays shut inside his bedroom, rereading the note again and again as if the meaning will change if he looks hard enough. It doesn’t.
Time passes by sluggishly and frightfully fast at the time and Sherlock feels nowhere near ready when the week finally comes to an end, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because he’s still taking the last train to London, he’s still breaking inside the pool in the middle of the night, because he’s still standing there, waiting and awaited.
Because he still comes like he said he would.
“Hello.”
The voice is soft, controlled, Sherlock deconstructs the two syllables in the time it takes him to swirl on his feet, he turns the lone word around inside his mind, hellohellohello, and finally, fatally, he sees him.
Jim.
For an instant, Sherlock freezes, stills, he stares at the youthful face of a boy that looks barely his age, at the shadows that blend with his hair and swallow most of his features, at his dark, dark eyes, that still somehow manages to trap light in their depths, and then his brain catches up to the reality, to the greeting, to the name it suddenly decided to give the stranger.
He doesn’t know why, but it fits him.
“Hi,” Sherlock answers, sounding a little more breathless than he would have liked. “I didn’t actually think that you would come.”
Which meant that he had feared that his latest obsession would get cold feet and leave him to wait in that pool alone, but he isn’t about to admit that.
“It would have been rude not to when I’m the one who invited you, don’t you think? I had more reasons to think that you would be the one to leave me waiting.”
He’s not wrong, Sherlock knows that anyone with common sense wouldn’t have showed up, but then people like that tended to be incredibly boring, didn’t they? He had received an invitation, the polite thing was to show up at the very least, especially when the one inviting him is taking all of the risks—
Well, maybe not all, Sherlock could still get murdered after all, but he’s pretty sure that his killer doesn’t want him dead either.
“I guess so, I could have given the police your note,” Sherlock remarks idly, and the other hums in answer, twirls on his feet before flashing him a bright, giddy smile.
His white teeth seem to catch just a little bit too much of the light.
“You could have but you didn’t.” The comment is smooth, its absoluteness almost blasphemous when followed by that careless shrug, that easy grin. “It wouldn’t have done much anyway.”
“It wouldn’t have,” Sherlock easily admits easily. “Not when you were so vague, it could have meant anything and even if anyone had trusted me and come, I doubt that they would have believed you to be the killer.”
Who would? Who would look at him, with his fluffy hair and his big, innocent eyes, with his oversized sweater and his small hands peaking out from his sleeves, who would look at him and think him able to commit a crime, much less a murder?
Who would look at this child and believe him to be a killer?
No one.
The boy is still smiling, still ever so slightly rocking back and forth the balls of his feet, still staring at him from beneath his dark lashes.
“But you do.” It’s not a question, it never was, and they both know that. Sherlock had believed him the moment he had read that note, had needed to. “You can tell, can’t you? That we’re the same, you and I, that if we hadn’t met now, we would have met around another body and that either of us could have put it here.”
Sherlock blinks and nothing is quite right, he sees dark eyes in a sharper face, lips twisting upwards—
We’re just alike you and I—
But it’s not quite right, not quite time—
I am you, prepared to do anything—
The boy is looking at him with a smile that’s too familiar but that he can’t place, eyes boring into his soul—
You’re me, Sherlock Holmes, thank you, bless you—
Sherlock feels like he’s underwater, like he jumped into the pool and he’s floating in it, only perceiving the world through the water and trying to interpret the garbled mess, then he blinks and the universe is centred once more on the boy standing there, waiting for his answer, centred on nineteen eighty seven.
“Powers was always supposed to be the first,” Sherlock says, Sherlock knows. “The first problem you solve, the first mystery I unravel.” But he frowns then, trying to chase the overpowering smell of chlorine and the strange image of red dots that it brings. “And I think that you were always supposed to give yourself away for me to notice you.”
He’s not sure where that knowledge comes from exactly, why intrinsically, the possibility of him solving that one case on his own, without a hint, seems impossible, but he can’t think of a universe where their meeting isn’t brought forth by him.
Jim.
“My name is Sherlock,” he says suddenly, abruptly, aware that the other boy is now staring at him with a bemused look on his face. “Sherlock Holmes. We haven’t introduced ourselves yet,” he adds, feeling the strange need to explain himself when scrutinized by those too black eyes. “You probably already know my name since it was on my notebook, but still.”
Still, I don’t know yours.
“Oh yes, I guess I did forget to introduce myself.” This time, Sherlock’s brain adds afterwards, without him knowing why, and the pool around him seems to duplicate, splinter, until he’s standing there and not there at all, until different images are so superimposed that nothing quite makes sense. Office romance, his mind supplies, and it sounds so incongruent that he almost misses the other’ next words. “Sorry about that,” the killer grins, holds out his hand, offers him hell and paradise at the same time, and Sherlock knows that he will take it, he knows just like he somehow knows his name. “Jim Moriarty, hi.”