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He’s ready, the first time he dies.
Foolishly unprepared, perhaps. But ready all the same.
William has always lived through steamed breath, buildings torn down in flames, shaky, charred cigarette burns on his gloves, but watching London smoulder into nothing when it was once everything? His tongue never forgets the taste.
Smoke is cold, sometimes, when you breathe through tired lungs.
A cough echoes next to him. Sherlock buries them into the folds of his jacket, soot forming a grey film along the waterline of his piercing gaze, hovering just over his sleeve.
He’s poised to brawl, though he knows-- they both do-- there’s little purpose in throwing punches beyond cosmetics. So very Shakespearean, Liam almost hums, as his sanity slithers and dances along the veins of absurdity, to go out in a mock fight with the man you’ve deemed as your equal.
“Do you think you’re accomplishing something?” Drawled through gritted teeth and steel-coated eyes.
What is this?
“Not particularly.”
What game are they playing?
Sherlock scoffs (with all the cheek a man could have; he laughs in the face of suicide. Liam wants so badly for him to laugh at him ) and with precision aimed cool emotion, “I thought you a man of logic.”
Liam resists his own scoff. “Mathematicians are rather prone to believing in one universal answer, you know.”
Does he even deserve that? Logic when he should be burning? To fancy himself as a martyr, when he is instead put at the stake for his sins, not his ideas?
“That’s a simple way to say you’re a coward.” Sherlock’s stopped fighting-- he jumps back a few slabs, agile, squatted like a perched cat, rubbing mildly at his cheek.
And he’s correct, like always.
If William wasn’t scared, he would’ve burnt out years before he lit a flame. Years before he threw himself on his knees, hard ground, sharp prayers, sins engraved like knives into tree bark. Years before silent scars that were not silent when they bled, and house fires sparked by candlelight and the pudgy hands of a child who was not a man, even if he regarded himself as one. There would be no William James Moriarty had he not been a coward.
Fire licks colour into his periphery; vivids he hasn’t seen since faded pictures in storybooks with crumpled pages and rain-drenched ink. Buildings submerged in sunburst crimson and gold wrath, navy-blue splendour, broken only by white pinpricks to high heavens, blood-vessel broken purple in pomp at the horizon.
Truly a sight to go out to.
“What’s the endgame here?” Always with the rhetorics. Why is it that Sherlock Holmes knows everything, questions nothing, until it comes to him? “Build it with me. Please, Liam.”
There’s a tempting lifesaver in the extension of his hand. A “you vs. them” type. Isolation threatened by the call of vertigo over the edge of the bridge. It is either him, Sherlock Holmes, with his star-bright smile, or drowning alone in a crucifix of his own design.
He can spit fallacies with a snaked tongue like he always has, but he cannot lie his way into finding merit in the former.
Ironic, that he is Satan, but always meant to die like Christ.
“I can’t,” he responds simply.
“Why?”
How can he tell him everything? How can he get someone as selfless as Sherlock Holmes to understand selfish wishes?
That William wasted his time pulling him in, only to break ties at the whim of death, and leave him with scars of the puppet he once was?
He never was a very obedient puppet, something in him insists. Hardly a loyal dog.
“Am I just supposed to accept that as an answer?” Sherlock demands, haughty and furious and losing everything he’s ever wanted all at once. “Stand here and watch you go?”
He’s not supposed to have a say in it at all.
“I can give you it all, Liam. I’ve killed a man too, don’t forget,” he takes a tentative step; freezes when Liam backs up. “Let’s write another ending to this-”
“No.” He responds, simpler still, edged in fire. Fear. It all wilts under his hands, he’s accepted. Nothing that is his stays clean. Sherlock cannot be his. He deserves more.
His hands are trembling. Viscera trails through the crevices of his fingers. Gored remains that can’t be scrubbed from him. Ill-defined dolour springs up somewhere between the wrath and the pain in his eyes.
It is his most selfish moment.
Time moves in snapshots: of colour and light, the sky tilts below their feet and warmth blossoms in frigid ribs.
Two doves.
One heart.
One hand on his neck, one in his palm, spinning rather than plummeting. It's slow, the climb down, gravity a sharpened, angular knife onto a fragile jugular.
It's fleeting, the way he whispers eggshell nothings into Sherlock’s chest.
Twists once. Kinetic.
Shards crumble into their feet; remnants of steel and wood chips, leftover sparks, bullet shells, whatever dreams Liam scattered around in inane hope.
Clutch to strings they severed, break boundaries in freefall.
It hurts, when he tears from lukewarm hands, smashes hard into bile-ridden waters.
Blurs his vision into stars.
And then.
The world is abruptly beautiful; halfway underwater, halfway intangible above, everywhere hazy, an indistinct kaleidoscope drifting along his cognition. The surface of the Thames is breathing gold, practically beaming at him, with enveloping hands ginger down his throat, and it all makes sense. Everything does.
Death feels as if he’s slipping into a fever dream. It’s fuzzy. Warm. He just fades, and stumbles, somewhere in a floaty gradient down, until he’s insubstantial. And it all bleeds out at once.
He feels everything. He feels nothing.
He feels suicide-- a slip under his feet, bullets in an unloaded gun, blood in his wrists, but never on them. A rift in his psyche, draining himself of morality and immorality, of life and of death, corporeal ichor, drunk by an opponent he cannot see. Is this a fight? Is this-- a tangle with something that is nothing, with no floor underfoot-- a battle to be won? He breathes without lungs; impalpable greyness in a heart he never had, sighs in undeserving fury at the inanity of it all.
Why is there no glory in death, when there is so much glory in dying?
When mortal discarnate stabs thumbs into his eyes, like forks into the palms of hands, he gags with a body that has been ripped from himself, cruel even until the end.
This isn’t drowning.
It’s nothing like drowning.
He is struggling in a one-sided war that he has never wanted to win. Hands chained into ragged fists that are so very tired of cracking knuckles, dripping red that is neither his nor theirs, blinded and blackened and sinking into depths with no bottom and crashing into walls that are not walls and he just wants to die. It can hurt. He doesn’t care.
Liam.
He wants it to hurt.
Liam.
Deserves it.
Liam.
He falls once more. Stumbles and pitches from murky depths to the hold he can still feel tepid-scarred into his midriff.
A hand pulls tightly. Holds fast.
And:
“Hey, you.”
The room they’re in is uncomfortably balmy. Just tall enough for the both of them to stand, nose tips barely brushing, so white it would give a sane man a migraine. No form to it, just an illusion of substance packed into tight walls, stifling quiet and smothering heat.
“You with me?” Sherlock’s voice sounds odd when it comes out of a body that isn’t his. Or is? The light seems to obtrude from the ground, so dim that he can hardly see his hands. “Liam?”
Speaking comes about as easily as breathing does in this state-- that is to say, ragged and hitching for little reason beyond annoyance. “I’m.. here.” It's rather hard to announce his presence in a place that he’s not sure is anywhere. “Where exactly.. is here?”
“Not a clue,” Sherlock quips, vexingly adjusted to it all already. “Hell, maybe?”
“Ah.” He feels blurry around his edges. Still trapped in transition; some of his mind caught in the veil between death and-- whatever this place is. “Makes sense.” Slurred.
Sherlock’s sharp eyes narrow in concern and he scoops a hand around his neck before he collapses. “Almost didn’t grab ya in time. You were pretty far gone.”
“I can… t’ll.”
His legs are gossamer. All floaty and euphoric, melted as if he was left out to bake in the sun for too long. Is that the leftovers of death on him? Is this not death?
He’s on his knees, he realizes. Face held tightly by Sherlock, who feels like nothing, but is so much of everything that William (there’s his name) needs more. He drizzles out onto angular knuckles, too tired to keep his face looking up. Slipping through this liminal space.
“You.. came.” His mind is spinning in a deadened whir, monotonous buzzing that suffocates all but one question. This one, he knows there must be an answer to. “Why’d you-?”
“Hell of a thing to waste a word on, Liam,” the room is tapering thin around Sherlock, and sweat beads clearly on his wettened hairline. “It’s obvious. ‘Cause I love you.”
Love.
He loves Liam. Of all the absurd things.
And so, he supposes, that answers it. Is Sherlock Holmes a fool enough to still love a man he died at the hand of?
He still smiles like they’re back on a train, crumb-speckled plates scattered on a table, cocky and assured, rife with sardonic banter, laughing so loud that he draws the grumbles of aristocracy.
Smiles at Liam like a day hasn’t passed since they first met, keen and eager and passionate for a man who he cannot ever keep.
A man that killed him.
Tears sear, licking flames down soft cheeks, hiccuping out a broken apology when he solidifies at the realization of what he’s done. Of this man who he has doomed to hell.
“It ain’t your fault, you know,” Sherlock soothes, every bit as earnest as he is lying. “I chose this path. Free will and all that.”
The light strengthens, corrosive and acrid as it writhes in its path of destruction. William can feel his stomach nosedive, gravity behind his eyes and tasting of unspoken promises.
“Sherlock?” His voice falls, shattered windows upon the cold ground, draining light out of the already darkened room—a dead, hollow, tapering thing that bites like the inside of an empty tomb.
Light eats the floor steadily, Sherlock drops his grip on Liam, unable to grab anything when he comes back. Cutting through the blankets of air, he coughs. “Have you ever wanted to die for someone that you’d kill for?”
“Yes,” Liam’s answer is waspish, razor-edged to make up for the space between them. “I’m here now, am I not?”
He’s not there, not anymore. And he falls. Again.
Almost cracks his head open when he hits a surface. He isn’t a sane man, but there’s a migraine bleeding behind his temples and he can no longer stand without vertigo. Clutching his damaged ribs, he stumbles to an unsteady gait, precariously balanced on nothing.
There’s something he needs Sherlock to hear, first. Goodbyes he won’t let go.
Challenges to pose to an unfaltering man, in the face of death.
Extends a hand only to miss by inches, passing by, crawling through moments in time.
Half-glasses of red wine sloshes small oceans, extinguished cigarettes below patent leather heels, smushed into overflowing ashtrays, discarded on grass overlooks above an awakening city. Crimson eyes in a stained mirror, imprints of bullets on green wallpaper, steaming omelettes, newspaper scraps pinned to the wall, crows sitting in trees, a clock, chiming twelve. Gasoline-doused furniture and matches pinched in guilty hands, porcelain cut into the flesh of palms, sun-stained mattresses beneath windows without drapes, weeds growing through the cracks of a floor--
They meet in front of unsuspecting smiles and the golden gleam of grapefruit, gooey in a pie. Sherlock’s worn eyes crinkle, well beyond the years of Mr Holmes and Liam.
“Found you," he beams like they haven't been grasping at the air for an eternity.
“I was never lost.”
“Yes, well.” Sherlock holds Liam’s wrist, pressing softly on a pulse that he doesn't have. “If you were. I’m glad to be the one to find you.”
William's stomach is sinking again. Pitiful to believe this was a moment more than ephemeral. “Can you do it again?”
“I don’t know,” he whispers in some sort of childish secret, discreet across margins, “But the mystery makes it fun.”
Time makes haste before it stops to sink in.
It’s unfair, their little game, that it never has a proper conclusion. Sherly will keep chasing Liam until they tumble into a bed, sometime, somewhere. It’ll be dark outside, and the window will be open, and Liam’ll ask if he can stay, but he never will. It’s how it works.
A chase that ends a night with no finale.
They’ll run eternally, though, if it means chasing even the wake of one another.
Sherlock settles back, chuckles wide on his lips, “That was a good one, Liam. Care to tell it again?” He grins unrefined, with a tilted smile and a crooked laugh and there’s never been a sight more beautiful. He drifts, suspended like fog, settles like petals into murky puddles and his hands are warm and Liam thinks he’s met him before.
Gilded specks and marble floors and he always smelled like nicotine.
He still does; stirring his amber-clear drink with a listless bony finger, and little intention. Cocks his head so slightly that his hair hardly shifts. Slumps down in his seat. “Have you ever died?”
And suppose he has? Would it change anything?
“Would you like to?” A rhetoric. It has never mattered what William James Moriarty wants.
“I don’t-”
And he lands.