Wait for the Ricochet (5)
John’s knees buckled and he found himself sliding to the floor, arms flailing in a weak attempt at regaining balance. He felt a strange pressure along his back - the hard edge of a cubicle and cold, wet tiles of the floor under his bum. He opened his eyes.
The air, though laden with chlorine and a faint echo of mildew, felt like honey. John gulped in large gasps, trying to ignore the phantom cramps of his lungs. Seconds ago, he was shot in the head and drowning; now he was safe, sound, and thoroughly disoriented, crouching down against one of the cubicles. His clothes were mostly dry save for his shirt that was drenched with sweat. The only palpable wound on the throbbing left side of his head was the bruise from when he was pistol-whipped earlier in the park.
His eyes stopped welling up with tears upon every intake of breath, the cramps in his chest and sides eventually subsided. His vision slowly cleared. John looked around to find Sherlock pacing frantically alongside the pool, mumbling something under his breath and scratching the back of his head with a loaded gun for God’s sake, “Sherlock! Stop doing that!”
“What?” Sherlock’s eyes snapped back to awareness from his agitated frenzy, his expression was bewildered and disoriented, as well as John’s. “Oh, that.” He looked at the gun as if realizing for the first time that he was holding it.
“What-what happened?” John couldn’t recall anything past his obviously failed attempt at drowning. For some reason, the Navigator could implant false memories only to Sherlock. “I probably blacked out or something, went on autopilot. Where’s everyone, hmm?” John pointed to the lack of the red dots dancing over their bodies.
“Well, you threw yourself on Moriarty-” Sherlock began to summarise. Then he stopped abruptly, looking at John with eyes wide and unsure - as if he only then realised what John did. Something of an emotion passed over his face and that left him looking even more baffled.
“Actually, that was...good, the thing. I mean...it was good what you did there,” Sherlock scrambled lamely. Sentiment clearly wasn’t his area. He cleared his throat and resumed: “There were of course more snipers, then Moriarty warned me to back off or he ‘would burn the heart out of me’ - never took him for the poetic type - and then he got a phone call and left.”
Wait, what? John would scream at the absurdity of it and the stubbornness with which Sherlock refused to see it, if his throat wouldn’t still be sore from the drowning that didn’t happen.
“Just like that?” He forced his voice to calmness. “A criminal mastermind invites you out, swarms the place with snipers, practices some bomb-strapping on your flatmate, and then instead of shooting the bloody brains out of that thick skull of yours he gives you friendly warning and leaves? How logical is that?”
Sherlock lifted his hand absentmindedly to scratch at the back of his head again, then he remembered himself and tucked the gun back into his pocket. He offered a hand to John to help him get up.
“Moriarty is clearly unhinged. You can’t apply logic to him. And he likes dramatics.”
How long does it take to drown? John was a medical man and a soldier, well trained and in a good physical state. He could fight his body reflexes that tried to expel the water from his lungs and make him swim for his life, but he couldn’t do a thing about the speed of the brain’s reaction considering the lack of oxygen. He suspected he had good ten, perhaps even twenty, seconds before he would lose consciousness; three to four minutes for the cerebral activity to stop completely. The brain can live longer than the body - guillotined people have been reported to move their eye balls and blink several times after decapitation - but not for long.
Obviously, it was long enough to buy Moriarty another dream level and some more time. Taking into account that time flow slowed by several orders of magnitude for every deeper level, this could yield another couple of days. Weeks even, if John couldn’t drown fast enough.
***
“To be honest, you surprised me.”
Moriarty lifted his cup of coffee to his lips and took a careful sip. The person opposite him leaned their short frame more comfortably in the lounge chair. The weak afternoon sun filtered through the tinted cafeteria window and made the plain blonde hair look almost gold.
“It would seem that we have a common interest, you and I.”
“Definitely,” Moriarty chewed on the candy that came with the coffee, pushing it against his cheek. He found the reaction to his table manners of a schoolboy mildly amusing.
“Just that I don’t know what intentions you have with him. I say, he’s been fun and all that, and really useful Dreamer for the time being, but now he’s - he’s just got to go. If you get me.”
“I get you all right,” his conversation partner nodded and clarified: “I want him dead, too.”
“Gor Blimey!” Moriarty made a show of spitting out the black liquid he was pretending to enjoy. “I would never have thought you so... forward. I’d think you’d keep some decency, observe the proprieties and such.”
“That’s the one thing you learn in military,” an explanation was delivered in a pleasant but dispassionate tone. “Diplomacy is a waste of time.”
“Oh yes. I forgot about your background. My fault.”
Moriarty watched the sugar cubes plopping into the otherwise untouched cup on the opposite side of the table. The silver clinking of the spoon against the cup was his only reply.
“Not that I wouldn’t love to put your abilities into some proper use - but why now? All of a sudden, after all you’ve been through, you side with me. Is there no value to loyalty these days?”
Moriarty caught the yearning looks the barista was throwing every now and then to his conversational partner. Was it the fluffy cuteness of being short, blonde, and grinning like loon on anyone who smiled their way? Moriarty wondered.
“You don’t trust me. You don’t believe that I want him to go straight down to the Limbo and that I want to see to that.”
“Well, who would trust you? My dear, you’re supposed to be at his side, to support him and all that rubbish.”
Another short shrug and immediate, almost unconscious, straightening of the shirt. Military indeed.
“You’ve met him. How many friends do you think he has?”
“Dear me, is he really that insufferable? Enough for you to offer to shoot him for me?” Moriarty liked things fair and square, when it came down to business. He earned himself a soft smile on the slightly tanned face.
“Brilliant deduction.”
“Nah, don’t make impressions of him in front of me.” Moriarty made a horrified face. “My stomach’s been a bit weak lately.”
“The only thing I ask in return is that it would be I who’d do it. You wouldn’t get to him before me.”
Moriarty wrinkled his nose. “How do I know you’re any good? You already missed once.” He tapped the left side of his chest pointedly. “Didn’t it spoil your track record? Someone of such reputation...”
His soon-to-be collaborator’s voice remained calm. “That was a miscalculation. I didn’t know who the Dreamer was at the time. Though I am aware that if I were more careful that time, this entire mess could have been avoided.”
Moriarty winced. “C’mon. Where would be the fun?”
Fun clearly wasn’t a concept much appreciated on the other side of the table right now. “So, are we agreed?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “You know, I remember your father. He worked for me a couple of times, out there in the big real world.”
“Did he?” Mary Moran-Watson stood up from her chair and smiled. “Well, I hope I’ll stand up to the tradition. Do we have a deal?”
“All right. You take down John Watson. But you’ll do it on my mark.”
“Fair enough.”
***
The very next day after the pool, the ‘Fake detective’ press and media campaign started.
The face of Richard Brook, whom John knew as the Navigator, and Sherlock as one Jim Moriarty, smiled on them with wide innocent eyes from every screen, spilt his lies from every newspaper page. The world of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, started to crumble.
John wasn’t sure what the main purpose of this newest madness was. Everything the Navigator came up with so far was intended to simply kill Sherlock - to put a poisoned pill in his mouth, to drive a bullet through his forehead. To disgrace him wouldn’t have such effect - Sherlock certainly wasn’t suicidal. Nobody with mania de grandeur is.
Sherlock didn’t care what other people thought of him.
Or, perhaps, that wasn’t strictly true.
“Can’t you see what’s going on?!” Sherlock raged, challenging John to doubt him too.
Of course John could see that. He saw it all too well. The one true point of this entire ‘Rich Brook’ affair was a message from Moriarty to John: You can’t undo what I have done.
The irony was biting. More than once, John has tried to convince Sherlock that his life wasn’t real. Now, Moriarty, the very creator of this deception, treated it like a child who builds a tower out of blocks only to hurl it around a moment later, taking a vicious glee out of the destruction. He was exposing Sherlock as a fake, denouncing his career, deconstructing his Work, compromising his identity - and Sherlock? He held onto it steadfastly with all his heart, hanging on the illusion and fighting to keep it, blind to the reality, unaware of the betrayal.
John knew that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t real and yet that he, somehow, was for real. He didn’t know the Extractor before but he grew to like the Detective. Often he wondered what would it be like to live this, instead of dreaming it, to fight crime and irritate the police and-
-to have a friend.
Extractors didn’t have friends. Get too close and people could bring in uncontrollable personifications; the associated sentiments could produce Shadows. Caring wasn’t an advantage, attachment was a plain mistake. John knew that first hand.
Once they wake, Sherlock would disappear from his life. Most likely, he wouldn’t even remember John. Targets rarely remembered their dreams, that was the point of mind heist. Such was the deal John made with the elder Holmes: bring Sherlock back, accept the new identity, clear as a forest spring and much safer than anything John would able to secure for himself, and move on with his life. Further away from mind heists, closer still to normality.
Christ, the Sherlock I know would laugh at me for wanting to be normal. I wonder, how would the real Sherlock see me?
If they would wake. John was no closer to a successful inception than on the previous two occasions. Sherlock was awfully touchy about his things. John suspected that it was Sherlock’s subconscious being on guard - he was trying to protect his totem even without knowing why or what that was. So far, John could only ruled out Sherlock’s phone - the git sometimes obviously deemed his own thumbs too important for the case and made John send his texts for him. But the rest of the things in his pockets rarely left Sherlock’s inseparable coat...
...which was now hanging on the rack in the lab corner, and Sherlock was nowhere in sight.
***
John stormed out of the lab in search of the detective. There wasn’t anything more reasonable he could do when the bastard wasn’t answering his texts.
“Have you seen Sherlock?” He nearly tripped over the little mouse-y morgue assistant, not even waiting for the end of her stammered reply. Where could the man be? Did he go back home? No, his keys were in his coat pocket.... he might have forgotten, he was genius enough.
The ceiling cracked. There is no time to go back to Baker Street. He’ll be somewhere near.
The signal inside of Bart’s was barely one bar. John ran out and paced up and down the corridor while he dismissed one option after another.
-Any idea where Sherlock is? JW
-Nope. I still need his statements from yesterday. Any more trouble? GL
“John, hey!” The morgue girl peeked through the swing door on the far end of the corridor. “I’ve seen him just now - stopped by the lab and then he went for the emergency staircase. I tried to tell him you’ve been-”
“Thank you, Molls,” John didn’t even slow down as he ran past her, but he flashed her a quick smile, at least.
Why the stairs? The lifts were in perfect order. Then John felt another shiver of the ground. It’s collapsing, not much time left. Was Sherlock afraid of an earthquake? That would be the first thing ever that would make him to take the non-lazy tour, John mused as he ran down the steps. Soon he was out on the street, looking up and down, searching amongst the passers-by for the unmistakable black curls. He couldn’t be so late...
His phone rang.
***
The daylight on the hospital roof was almost blinding for eyes that were still adjusted to the artificial light of the lab. Sun shone warmly and there was a high gale in the sky, herding solitary tufts of white clouds. Sherlock blinked several times to make out the dark figure waiting for him on the roof ledge, stark against the background like a shape cut out of a poster with a razor-sharp blade.
“What a nice day to die,” Rich Brook greeted him happily.
“Why?” Sherlock paced around him, hands clasped behind his back. “I can still prove that you created an entirely false identity.”
“It’s a lot less effort to just kill yourself,” Brook told him. Then he sighed exasperatedly. “Okay. You wouldn’t jump just for me, I can see that. So let me give you a little extra incentive. Your friend dies if you don’t.”
Sherlock’s distracted pacing faltered. Rich Brook beamed on him.
“Yes, little Johnny-boy. I’ve got a sniper on him. Off you pop, and he’s safe.”
Sherlock walked to the edge of the roof. When he leaned forward, he could see the ground below. Bart’s had four storeys, it was and old, high-ceiled building. The people looked like tin soldiers down on the streets... John.
**
“Sherlock? You okay?” Something terrible must have been happening, John thought; the man never made a call if he could text.
“Look up. I’m on the rooftop.”
John’s heart skipped a beat. “What’s going on?”
Sherlock’s voice sounded so...strange on the line. Almost choked. “An apology. It’s all true. Everything they said about me. I’m a fake. The newspapers were right-”
“Is he there?” John cut Sherlock’s speech short. He didn’t care he was all but yelling into the phone, the people passing him stopping and staring. There was no danger of alerting anyone now.
“Is he there with you? Don’t answer. I bet he is. He’s been talking you into suicide, hasn’t he? Telling you that’s better to jump than to live in disgrace?”
“More than that,” Sherlock told him carefully. Moriarty, as close as he was, could hear only Sherlock’s part of conversation - and he immediately drew the wrong conclusion. “Of course you’re more than a pet, little Johnny-boy” John heard Moriarty’s bored murmur in the background.
“No, no, no. Sherlock, you’re not a fake.” John swallowed. Never before has it occurred to him that mere words could hurt so much. “It’s me. I am a fake. I’ve got no sister, I’ve never been to Afghanistan.”
“John, what-”
“Listen to me. Just this once. Can you get anywhere he won’t be seeing what you’re doing with your hands?” The phone was hot and burning where it was pressed against John’s ear.
Such urgency was in John’s voice that Sherlock obeyed instantly. “Would you give me a moment? A moment of privacy? Please.” John’s heart sank when he heard Sherlock begging the man whom he despised, but he couldn’t risk his only, last chance. “Boring!” he heard Moriarty’s announcement through the phone, now from greater distance.
“Take a look on your magnifying glass.” John paused, and then swore when he saw that the figure of his bewildered friend on the rooftop didn’t move in the slightest.
“Just do it, alright? Don’t tell me anything, just look at it and listen to me. It’s a toy, Sherlock. It’s not a real magnifier. Look at it, carefully. Can’t you see there’s no lens? It’s a piece of sheet glass. You can be ignorant in physics as you like, but even you must know that sheet glass couldn’t work like that? It’s your totem.”
Sherlock froze, breath caught. Something began to unfold in the recesses of his memory.
“You’re expecting that a magnifier would magnify, and in a dream, it works. But in reality, it’s impossible.”
**
Sherlock checked the magnifier against his own thumb. He observed the lines of his fingerprints, now brought into detail. When he swiped the pad of his finger against the glass, he could feel the plane. How could it be that he never noticed that before? No convex surface of a lens, just plain sheet glass. His mind still couldn’t take the jump, it was still desperately trying to hold on the dream it’s been living for so long, but somewhere deep inside him, the foundations of that dream were already shattering. If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth...
“I found out about it only a half an hour ago,” John added, sounding almost apologetically.
“So you’ve been looking for it.” Even shocked and overflowing with returned memories, Sherlock was fast in his thinking.
“Yeah. That was my job. Get to you and get you out of this. I’m an Extractor, just like you.”
My entire life is a lie. I never solved a crime; in fact, I rather committed some. And that man down there on the pavement, that’s not an ordinary man broken by war who I fixed and made unique, it’s a hired professional heisting into my mind.
Sherlock was shaking, whether with laughter or with tears he couldn’t tell.
“I thought...for real... that you were my friend.”
John sounded so distant in the line, no more than a little tin soldier on the street: “It’s just a dream, Sherlock. You have to wake up.”
Moriarty in the distance laughed mockingly “Oh, that’s pathetic. Did he just declare his unending love to you? Pets can get so sentimental.”
“Yes, he did,” Sherlock replied absentmindedly. With a cold, detached interest he watched Sherlock the Detective, a man who was willing to die for his friend, fade and dissipate as it gave way to Sherlock the Extractor, a man of perfectly clear priorities. He drew a deep breath. His hand on the phone slacked. He turned around and tossed it onto the rooftop.
“He told me exactly what he was to me.” Face set in stone; he stepped off the ledge and walked back towards Moriarty.
**
John pocketed his phone. His job was done, Sherlock knew he was dreaming and he would find the way out of here. He lifted his gaze upwards once more, scanning the rooftops and high storey windows for the faint gleam of a telescope sight. Two years ago, he did just the same, and that time, he made a mistake, he overlooked one point, one possible line of fire, just one... that day, Mary got hit with the bullet that was meant for John.
Since that day, John’s been waiting for the bullet to ricochet. He bowed his head and stood still, waiting for the hit.
**
On the roof, two enemies stared at each other, faces mere inches apart.
“Ooo-ooh, Sherlock.” Moriarty tutted. “I’m not bluffing. He’ll die, if you don’t.”
“I’m not on the side of the angels, Jim.”
Moriarty reached for his phone, face contorted in anger, and said quickly: “Finish him, sweetheart.”
Down on the street, the body of John Watson slumped to the ground. Sherlock heard the shot and refused to turn his head to spare a look. Not my business. Not my friend.
He circled his prey instead.
“I give you full marks on irony. All the time you were feeding the newspapers with the story of how I invented you, while the truth is that you invented me.”
Moriarty began to clap his hands. “Magnificent. Brilliant. Fantastic.” He assumed his best John impression, forging a warm grey-blue colour into his eyes. “Of course, that’s what he told you. Made you see the truth, heh? Pity he signed his death-warrant with it as well.”
“I’d rather discuss our little problem.” The shade of blue was all wrong. Sherlock could see with his inner eye how John’s eyes would look like now, gazing back at him from blue emptiness, reflecting the bright colour of the sky. He pushed that thought down.
“Our final problem,” Moriarty smiled. “This is the part where you tell me that you’d shake hands with me in hell to get the code that opens every door? I hate to disappoint you, but there is no key.”
Sherlock merely snorted. “I knew that from the start. Any idiot would know that a couple of lines of computer code couldn’t crash the world around our ears. Of course, my brother swallowed it hook, line and sinker. He begged me to extract it from you.”
Moriarty whipped around to stare at him.
“So, why did I accept? I simply wanted to get to know you. See for myself what all the rumours were about.” Sherlock’s mouth quirked upwards. “In the end, you were easy. I’m disappointed in you, ordinary Jim Moriarty.”
“Wrong!” Moriarty yelled. “You would never get out! You’d never made it, if the little Johnny fucking Watson hadn’t sniffed out your totem!”
The black was welling back into his eyes, glinting with rage. “Do you know how persistent the idiot was? He tried to kill me, and when it didn’t work quickly enough, he took a bullet for you and drowned himself in the pool to wake up us all! Always chasing your coat tails, always spoiling our beautiful game - oh, I’m so chuffed that you finally got rid of him! If I knew he meant so little to you I’d have him out of our way ages ago!”
Then he laughed a cruel, high-pitched sound. “But it’s nice to see that you’re no better than me. In fact, you’re worse than I expected. The little soldier would do anything for you and hey, there he lies, walking the meadows of the Limbo...used and thrown away.”
Sherlock took few steps backwards, as if involuntarily flinching from the tirade his gloating enemy was shouting in his face. Moriarty followed him closely, enjoying the stricken look on Sherlock’s face. Close to the ledge once again, Sherlock looked briefly down where John had stood earlier. A fair number of onlookers gathered there but he still could catch a glimpse of John’s unmoving body, the blood pooling under his head. First drops of rain began to mingle with the darkening red.
He looked up to the sky. Grey clouds were rising from all directions, quickly swallowing the blue of the bright afternoon. The drizzle was lukewarm like fresh blood, wind lashed in ragged blasts like the breath of a dying man. Abrupt weather changes: signs of a dream on the verge of collapsing.
He turned back to Moriarty with a wide grin.
“There’s only one solution to our problem,” he said and grabbed Moriarty by the arms, pulling him close to himself as he took the last step over the roof ledge.
For a couple of seconds, falling felt just like flying. He heard the crack of Moriarty’s skull on the pavement before his own vision was overflowed by red.
*
In the pool, the struggling body of John Watson shuddered one last time and went limp.
*
On the classroom floor, the cabbie spat out blood and his eyes rolled back in his head, the word Moriarty half-formed on the motionless lips.
*
Sherlock Holmes opened his eyes.
“About time, brother.”
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