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The bloody glow of the ornate oil lamp flickers across the cracked, cloudy windows of this abandoned manor’s parlour, blotting out the crescent sliver of moonlight outside. The air is heady with the smell of camphine and gunpowder. A famously winning combination.
“What are you waiting for, Sherly?” William murmurs, freshly fallen. He crawls forward with uneven gait, dragging along his unsheathed cane-sword, palms scraped, knees bruising into the crooked floorboards. His voice is clear and sweet, betrayed by the glint of flame caught in his irises.
There’s a tear in the sleeve of his white dress shirt, painted red, courtesy of the bullet that had grazed his upper arm just moment ago.
Sherlock doesn’t remember falling as well. But he’s on his ass, back against the wall, shivering from the night draft that’s crept into the room. With only a slight tremor, he lowers his pistol, finger hovering loosely over the trigger.
He rests the forearm of his shooting hand against his raised knee, and tries to catch his laboured breath. Heartbeat, accelerando.
He watches, halfway entranced, as Liam crawls all the way up to him, until he’s kneeling between Sherlock’s legs. He leans his weight against his cane-sword to steady himself, raising his head so that his eyes meet Sherlock's, crimson and raw as a fresh wound.
“Liam–”
Sherlock cocks his head to the side just in time for William’s arm to swing, blade biting into the side of Sherlock’s neck. Though, William’s hand remains steady enough to just narrowly avoid drawing blood. If either of them so much as jostles too hard, Sherlock’s head is coming clean off.
Heartbeat, a caesura .
Liam never stops smiling. Without breaking his gaze, blade not faltering, he slowly wraps his free hand around Sherlock’s and raises it to his lips. Dips his flaxen lashes and kisses the tip of the pistol’s barrel.
“Now that you’ve caught me, you can do what you like.”
Sherlock feels very much like he’s the one who’s been caught, wrapped in the spider-silk of Liam’s game. After all, wasn’t it William who had lured him into this dark, broken manor, churchlike in its quietude, hell-bent on dying alone or together?
But if Sherlock can do what he likes, well –
He grins right back at William.
“You,” he can feel his pulse against the steel of the blade, “Won’t cut me down.”
“Won’t I?” William whispers, and it doesn’t sound like a taunt, but perhaps it is. Perhaps he believes Sherlock will gun him down instead, an even trade.
Hardly. With the slightest tilt of his head, Sherlock presses his neck into the cane-sword, just until he can feel it pierce his skin.
It’s just a fragment of a second, really. Undetectable, presumably for anyone who wasn’t trained in the art of violence. …And anyone who hasn’t spent hours and hours drinking in every one of Liam’s hidden expressions, desperate to solve him like a puzzle. But in the same moment that William’s blade draws a gossamer-thin line of blood from Sherlock’s neck, his eyes widen and lips part.
Shorter than the span of a quickened heartbeat. Just long enough for Sherlock to shift their bodies, knocking William’s back onto the ground and pinning his offending wrist to the ground. He has to strike hard and squeeze to disarm him from the cane-sword. He frees his other hand by tossing his gun to the side, as far away from both of them (and the oil lamp). He pushes his thumb into William’s shoulder, gripping him vice-like.
“See? My win.” he says with as much as smugness he can muster while breathless and bluffing. He braces himself for resistance, forcing one knee between William’s legs before he can attempt to grapple him off, or worse, strike below the belt. Sherlock’s trained in combat, and occasionally finds himself exercising his teachings while on a case, but seldom with an opponent as skilled and vicious as William.
But the body under him is slack, if not relaxed. William blinks up at Sherlock as if seeing him for the first time, mouth still very slightly open, no longer smiling. A bead of blood glistens on his lower lip, where he must have caught it on his teeth during the scuffle.
His head lolling on the floor, silky hair mussed, looking more like a lover roused from sleep than a lord of crime wrested from some combination of murder-suicide.
Sherlock sighs heavily with relief. The pulse beneath his fingertips beats in tempo with his own.
“You would gamble your own head on that chance?” William breathes, and the look of pure surprise in his eyes is almost irksome. As if Sherlock is somehow the unreasonable one for not wanting to kill him in cold blood.
Warm blood, whatever. Sherlock is becoming increasingly, acutely, painfully aware of their current position. William’s skin feels terribly feverish to the touch. Or maybe It’s Sherlock that’s burning up.
“You can court death all you want, Liam,” he mutters, dropping his head close to Liam’s face as the tension melts away from his body. “I’ll just tempt you away every time.”
Oh, Liam says, so softly it’s practically inaudible. After an unsteady pause, he twists his head and presses his lips to Sherlock’s mouth.
Bittersweet. Sherlock freezes in that moment, breath caught in his throat, as it had been when he’d been held at swordpoint.
His mind races to make sense of the action, a possibility he’d never considered before. But this is hardly the most shocking thing that’s happened tonight. After all, Liam’s tenderness and his violence stem from the same heart. It’s no wonder that the other end of his blade-edge is a kiss. And Sherlock alone is subject to both.
An overwhelming affection bruises Sherlock’s heart, and he melts in that same moment.
He kisses Liam back, gently at first. But the teeth that catch his lip and the hands that snake around his neck, pulling him closer, have other ideas.
Camphine and gunpowder.