i really don't blame you for being dead, but you can't have you sweater back. Part Three.
Continue with part three [i really don't understand why i can't drop the whole thing in one post tbh]
“And yet he is dead,” Mycroft said, attempting nonchalance, but Sherlock could hear the question that took ahold of the elder Holmes’ sentence without permission. If it were any other subject he would smirk at the uncertainty. But it was not.
Jim was dead and if him being alive was the worst of Mycroft’s fears, Sherlock pitied his brother. Moriarty was never interested in personally destroying everything Mycroft held dear.
“Yes.”
“Then you beat him,” Mycroft stated simply, confused at the confusion over that point.
“Beat him?” Sherlock repeats, incredulous. As if that were the most important thing to latch on to from Reichenbach. “Beat him?!”
From the alarmed expression Mycroft was making, Sherlock no doubt sounded slightly hysterical.
“Do I look like I won?” The detective snarled, before seeing white. Without a second’s more deliberation, Sherlock launched himself the few feet between them to cold clock his brother. Mycroft stumbled back, balance not quite lost, but still clutching his face. Sherlock hit him again and without giving Mycroft time to recover, Sherlock shoved him hard and the elder Holmes fell over.
“Sherlock-” the elder Holmes gasped out, shocked.
Sherlock took advantage of Mycroft’s prone form and hopped on top of him, wrapping his hands around the elder Holmes’ throat. He thought he would have vaulted over the desk if Mycroft had still been behind it. Sherlock suddenly didn’t understand why, as he searched out the right points to push down on long enough to end Mycroft’s interfering life, that someone as stupid as him could still be here, when Jim, the most brilliant man, wasn’t. Sherlock turned the idea of Mycroft his stupid meddling brother, dead, over in his head. It sounded good.
In spite of the elder Holmes’ writhing beneath him, Sherlock’s hands remained around Mycroft’s neck. He was applying enough pressure that if he sat like that for six minutes, well the Holmes brothers would never be having a dispute over who was smarter again.
“I think he’s got the point,” Jim said. Sherlock glanced up to see the apparition resting on his heels a couple feet away, eyeing the detective with his certain intensity.
Mycroft was still squirming against the detective’s weight. Sherlock pushed down harder.
“And if I don’t think he has?” the detective asked, looking down at Mycroft’s now unconscious face.
“Fratricide is soooooo passé,” Jim chastised, before immediately sobering up. “It was my plan, love. I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t wanted to be.”
Sherlock blinked. Somehow that made it worse. He should have seen. He should have known.
“Sherlock,” the apparition began again when the detective’s hands actually tightened further. “He might be more useful to you alive.”
The detective wavered. Thirty-five years and they hadn’t killed each other yet. It would be a shame to waste all the effort that restraint took now.
“Sherlooooooooooooooock,” Jim complained from the languishing position he took up in Mycroft’s chair. “This is boring.”
Sherlock had no sooner pressed the down button then an elevator dinged and opened with a clatter of doors. Anthea, with her face in a file folder, nearly ran into him coming out of it.
“You weren’t supposed to be leaving yet. Has he briefed you?” the assistant asked, confused as the detective moved passed her into the lift.
“He might need your help,” Sherlock said with a gesture to the oak paneled suite as the elevator doors closed between them.
Though Moriarty’s web was basically disentangled, in those two years Sherlock still never found where the criminal had lived.
The detective had made some calls when he first left the U.K. However, the trail stopped cold on the only lead he had when he found Moriarty’s phone was traced to a PO box which was registered to some throw away fake identity.
Jim was too much of a ghost as it was, with no one knowing anything about the man behind the criminal conspiracy.
“So I’ll ask you again-”
“I told you I don’t know anything!” the last of Moriarty’s book-keepers shouted, hoarse. He was tied to a chair, face already bloody and bruised. Sherlock, who had commandeered him days earlier, didn’t even give the man’s pleading a courtesy evaluating glance.
“And yet we’re still sitting here, so it should be evident that I don’t believe you,” Sherlock said, putting a set of needle-nose pliers on the bench beside them. He pushed the pliers so they were back in line with the other tools he’d laid out, but had yet to use. “I’ll ask you again-”
“Are you really proceeding with this line of questioning still?” Jim asked bored.
Sherlock was ignoring the apparition’s wayward asides. He hadn’t said the bookkeeper didn’t know. Just that the detective’s questions weren’t going to get the right answers.
“Where did he normally work?”
“Again, that is not pertinent information,” Jim sing-songed from behind him.
“Look,” Sherlock turned around to face him, angry. “If you’re so certain I’m going about this wrong, tell me what to ask and we’ll get on to more interesting things. If you aren’t going to help, kindly shut up.”
The detective turned back to the bookkeeper, “Sorry about that.”
“Who were you talking to?” the man in the chair asked warily.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes, “You were saying?”
“I don’t know where he lived. Or where he spent his time. Only where he kept a portion of the money and that’s all gone now,” the bookkeeper spit out frantically.
Sherlock stood and re-examined the tray of tools, “You said that before and, amazingly, I still don’t believe you...”
“Dear lord,” Jim practically cried in frustration. “Ask him about Klages.”
That outburst caught Sherlock’s attention. He turned to Jim again, completely ignoring the man he was interrogating.
“I thought,” Sherlock grinned, turning to where the apparition stood, “you said you weren’t going to help.”
“Yes, but you were boring me,” Jim explained, nastily.
“Well, since boring you clearly gets me ‘pertinent information,’ maybe I should do it more often.”
“I wouldn’t push your luck,” Jim said, mouth set in a decided frown. The detective finally deigned to turn back to the bookkeeper.
“Tell me about Klages.”
The man shifted only slightly, but it was enough.
He managed to get a name with a tentative attachment to the criminal via his payroll a couple years prior, and a safety deposit box which had since then found a new owner.
“You said that you could go anywhere,” Sherlock stated to the room.
The criminal hummed assent from his lazy position on the floor.
“Would you see how John is?”
The shiny shoe that had been dipping up and down over Jim’s crossed legs stilled. His eyes flicked over to the detective.
“What?”
“Well, it’s not like he’s going to see you...”
“Do you really want me to go spy on them?” Sherlock was about to enthuse yes, when he caught Jim’s phrasing.
“‘Them?’” Sherlock asked, confused.
Jim’s eyes went big, like he just realized what he said.
“You already have,” Sherlock stated. Jim sat up, looking a tad sheepish. “Why didn’t you tell me? What do you mean ‘them?’”
“Because, Sherlock, you wouldn’t have believed me,” Jim said, expression all-knowing.
“Why would you lie about that?” the detective sighed in exasperation. The apparition rolled his eyes, as if he could easily defeat that argument. He could. There were too many reasons. “Fine, when have you lied-”
“Memory problems?” Jim broke in. “Do you need a list?”
“-About things like this,” Sherlock finished, frowning. But now Jim was glaring at him and maybe Sherlock would have been getting a little antsy if Jim weren’t dead. There was nothing in his gaze that didn’t say ‘I will tear you apart.’ But because Jim could not back any threat; because Jim was dead; because Jim still needed the detective’s distraction. Sherlock stared him down, did not falter. Jim sighed.
“I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t like it. And then you wouldn’t talk to me,” the criminal swallowed and pressed his lips together. “Sherlock, it is unbearable when you don’t talk to me.”
Jim’s voice may have been steady, but his eyes were sad.
“I’d talk to you,” Sherlock reassured, despite not knowing whether he’s telling the truth or not, because Sherlock wants so badly to know what Jim knows.
All the same, Jim won’t tell him, “Go see for yourself.”
Of course, Jim was right. Sherlock didn’t like what he found back in London. Turned out John had moved from their Baker Street flat and Sherlock had to do a bit of poking around to find the doctor’s new address. It was late morning by the time Sherlock showed up on John’s stoop, knocking. John opened the door, shock evident on his face.
Sherlock hesitantly smiled and then John hit him. He hit him hard twice and Sherlock was more shocked by that than he should be. Still, the doctor brought him inside.
John said that Sherlock was lucky to catch him as he was actually running late to work, belaying the silence between them that had grown awkward in the years of separation. The doctor made tea for them both, but his eyes didn’t stray from Sherlock for more than a minute. John handed the detective his cup and demanded Sherlock’s explanation. The detective gave it, sold it, like it would prove something (Jim wrong), like it would change something (whatever it was that Jim said he wouldn’t like).
John was patient.
Oddly so, Sherlock noted before he started to glance around John’s flat. There were things missing (naturally, nothing of Sherlock’s). There were things replaced (of course, but Sherlock wouldn’t have thought John would have bought that model blender). There were new things. And then Sherlock looked at John. There were not so many things missing as things adjusted. So much as things that weren’t there before. Like that ring on his finger.
Oh.
John, who had picked up a few things from his time with Sherlock - or perhaps had been waiting for him to notice, saw the detective’s line of sight and let the quiet drag as he sipped his tea. Then, John asked him outright: Did he really expect that after three years without word everything would be just as he left it? That their lives would have waited for him?
Sherlock didn’t want to start a fight. Sherlock won’t say yes. Because he hadn’t really thought about the actual act of coming back. Silly, really, three years and not a single thought to it. He had thought about what would happen after the reunion. But never the event itself. Never the possibility of this.
As Sherlock left, the doctor said he should meet her, his wife, now that he was back in London and, you know, alive. John said, “I think you’d like her.”
Sherlock nodded slightly harried, yet dazed, he’ll be in touch, as he went out the door and down the steps.
Jim was waiting for him in the room Sherlock was staying in under a false name in the quite possibly vain hope that Mycroft would take the hint and bugger off.
So maybe Sherlock was angry. It might have had to do with Jim knew the entire time and didn’t tell him. Or maybe the fact that the apparition wouldn’t leave him alone (or the fact that he didn’t want Jim to leave him alone).
Perhaps he should have let himself calm down, before they talked. His anger was expected. Jim expected it. But that didn’t take back the fact that Sherlock just broke their unspoken agreement to never talk about how they came to be in this situation.
Sherlock never should have said: If Jim hadn’t been so desperate to die, they might have been enjoying themselves right now, instead of here in this- How if he hadn’t killed himself they would have been happier.
Jim had stared like Sherlock had shot him. It was then that Sherlock realized exactly what he had said. The apparition just shook his head, looking sick. Sherlock had no idea ghosts could look sick. Jim’s eyes were so big and sad and amber.
Jim stepped back, out of the faint light of the hallway, before he was glaring daggers, eyes shuddered.
Sherlock broke their eye contact, looking at the garishly carpeted floor. He wanted to take it back because he did understand. Really, he did. But the minutes dragged on and when Sherlock couldn’t get the words out, Jim just poofed out of the room.
“And yet he is dead,” Mycroft said, attempting nonchalance, but Sherlock could hear the question that took ahold of the elder Holmes’ sentence without permission. If it were any other subject he would smirk at the uncertainty. But it was not.
Jim was dead and if him being alive was the worst of Mycroft’s fears, Sherlock pitied his brother. Moriarty was never interested in personally destroying everything Mycroft held dear.
“Yes.”
“Then you beat him,” Mycroft stated simply, confused at the confusion over that point.
“Beat him?” Sherlock repeats, incredulous. As if that were the most important thing to latch on to from Reichenbach. “Beat him?!”
From the alarmed expression Mycroft was making, Sherlock no doubt sounded slightly hysterical.
“Do I look like I won?” The detective snarled, before seeing white. Without a second’s more deliberation, Sherlock launched himself the few feet between them to cold clock his brother. Mycroft stumbled back, balance not quite lost, but still clutching his face. Sherlock hit him again and without giving Mycroft time to recover, Sherlock shoved him hard and the elder Holmes fell over.
“Sherlock-” the elder Holmes gasped out, shocked.
Sherlock took advantage of Mycroft’s prone form and hopped on top of him, wrapping his hands around the elder Holmes’ throat. He thought he would have vaulted over the desk if Mycroft had still been behind it. Sherlock suddenly didn’t understand why, as he searched out the right points to push down on long enough to end Mycroft’s interfering life, that someone as stupid as him could still be here, when Jim, the most brilliant man, wasn’t. Sherlock turned the idea of Mycroft his stupid meddling brother, dead, over in his head. It sounded good.
In spite of the elder Holmes’ writhing beneath him, Sherlock’s hands remained around Mycroft’s neck. He was applying enough pressure that if he sat like that for six minutes, well the Holmes brothers would never be having a dispute over who was smarter again.
“I think he’s got the point,” Jim said. Sherlock glanced up to see the apparition resting on his heels a couple feet away, eyeing the detective with his certain intensity.
Mycroft was still squirming against the detective’s weight. Sherlock pushed down harder.
“And if I don’t think he has?” the detective asked, looking down at Mycroft’s now unconscious face.
“Fratricide is soooooo passé,” Jim chastised, before immediately sobering up. “It was my plan, love. I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t wanted to be.”
Sherlock blinked. Somehow that made it worse. He should have seen. He should have known.
“Sherlock,” the apparition began again when the detective’s hands actually tightened further. “He might be more useful to you alive.”
The detective wavered. Thirty-five years and they hadn’t killed each other yet. It would be a shame to waste all the effort that restraint took now.
“Sherlooooooooooooooock,” Jim complained from the languishing position he took up in Mycroft’s chair. “This is boring.”
Sherlock had no sooner pressed the down button then an elevator dinged and opened with a clatter of doors. Anthea, with her face in a file folder, nearly ran into him coming out of it.
“You weren’t supposed to be leaving yet. Has he briefed you?” the assistant asked, confused as the detective moved passed her into the lift.
“He might need your help,” Sherlock said with a gesture to the oak paneled suite as the elevator doors closed between them.
Though Moriarty’s web was basically disentangled, in those two years Sherlock still never found where the criminal had lived.
The detective had made some calls when he first left the U.K. However, the trail stopped cold on the only lead he had when he found Moriarty’s phone was traced to a PO box which was registered to some throw away fake identity.
Jim was too much of a ghost as it was, with no one knowing anything about the man behind the criminal conspiracy.
“So I’ll ask you again-”
“I told you I don’t know anything!” the last of Moriarty’s book-keepers shouted, hoarse. He was tied to a chair, face already bloody and bruised. Sherlock, who had commandeered him days earlier, didn’t even give the man’s pleading a courtesy evaluating glance.
“And yet we’re still sitting here, so it should be evident that I don’t believe you,” Sherlock said, putting a set of needle-nose pliers on the bench beside them. He pushed the pliers so they were back in line with the other tools he’d laid out, but had yet to use. “I’ll ask you again-”
“Are you really proceeding with this line of questioning still?” Jim asked bored.
Sherlock was ignoring the apparition’s wayward asides. He hadn’t said the bookkeeper didn’t know. Just that the detective’s questions weren’t going to get the right answers.
“Where did he normally work?”
“Again, that is not pertinent information,” Jim sing-songed from behind him.
“Look,” Sherlock turned around to face him, angry. “If you’re so certain I’m going about this wrong, tell me what to ask and we’ll get on to more interesting things. If you aren’t going to help, kindly shut up.”
The detective turned back to the bookkeeper, “Sorry about that.”
“Who were you talking to?” the man in the chair asked warily.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes, “You were saying?”
“I don’t know where he lived. Or where he spent his time. Only where he kept a portion of the money and that’s all gone now,” the bookkeeper spit out frantically.
Sherlock stood and re-examined the tray of tools, “You said that before and, amazingly, I still don’t believe you...”
“Dear lord,” Jim practically cried in frustration. “Ask him about Klages.”
That outburst caught Sherlock’s attention. He turned to Jim again, completely ignoring the man he was interrogating.
“I thought,” Sherlock grinned, turning to where the apparition stood, “you said you weren’t going to help.”
“Yes, but you were boring me,” Jim explained, nastily.
“Well, since boring you clearly gets me ‘pertinent information,’ maybe I should do it more often.”
“I wouldn’t push your luck,” Jim said, mouth set in a decided frown. The detective finally deigned to turn back to the bookkeeper.
“Tell me about Klages.”
The man shifted only slightly, but it was enough.
He managed to get a name with a tentative attachment to the criminal via his payroll a couple years prior, and a safety deposit box which had since then found a new owner.
“You said that you could go anywhere,” Sherlock stated to the room.
The criminal hummed assent from his lazy position on the floor.
“Would you see how John is?”
The shiny shoe that had been dipping up and down over Jim’s crossed legs stilled. His eyes flicked over to the detective.
“What?”
“Well, it’s not like he’s going to see you...”
“Do you really want me to go spy on them?” Sherlock was about to enthuse yes, when he caught Jim’s phrasing.
“‘Them?’” Sherlock asked, confused.
Jim’s eyes went big, like he just realized what he said.
“You already have,” Sherlock stated. Jim sat up, looking a tad sheepish. “Why didn’t you tell me? What do you mean ‘them?’”
“Because, Sherlock, you wouldn’t have believed me,” Jim said, expression all-knowing.
“Why would you lie about that?” the detective sighed in exasperation. The apparition rolled his eyes, as if he could easily defeat that argument. He could. There were too many reasons. “Fine, when have you lied-”
“Memory problems?” Jim broke in. “Do you need a list?”
“-About things like this,” Sherlock finished, frowning. But now Jim was glaring at him and maybe Sherlock would have been getting a little antsy if Jim weren’t dead. There was nothing in his gaze that didn’t say ‘I will tear you apart.’ But because Jim could not back any threat; because Jim was dead; because Jim still needed the detective’s distraction. Sherlock stared him down, did not falter. Jim sighed.
“I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t like it. And then you wouldn’t talk to me,” the criminal swallowed and pressed his lips together. “Sherlock, it is unbearable when you don’t talk to me.”
Jim’s voice may have been steady, but his eyes were sad.
“I’d talk to you,” Sherlock reassured, despite not knowing whether he’s telling the truth or not, because Sherlock wants so badly to know what Jim knows.
All the same, Jim won’t tell him, “Go see for yourself.”
Of course, Jim was right. Sherlock didn’t like what he found back in London. Turned out John had moved from their Baker Street flat and Sherlock had to do a bit of poking around to find the doctor’s new address. It was late morning by the time Sherlock showed up on John’s stoop, knocking. John opened the door, shock evident on his face.
Sherlock hesitantly smiled and then John hit him. He hit him hard twice and Sherlock was more shocked by that than he should be. Still, the doctor brought him inside.
John said that Sherlock was lucky to catch him as he was actually running late to work, belaying the silence between them that had grown awkward in the years of separation. The doctor made tea for them both, but his eyes didn’t stray from Sherlock for more than a minute. John handed the detective his cup and demanded Sherlock’s explanation. The detective gave it, sold it, like it would prove something (Jim wrong), like it would change something (whatever it was that Jim said he wouldn’t like).
John was patient.
Oddly so, Sherlock noted before he started to glance around John’s flat. There were things missing (naturally, nothing of Sherlock’s). There were things replaced (of course, but Sherlock wouldn’t have thought John would have bought that model blender). There were new things. And then Sherlock looked at John. There were not so many things missing as things adjusted. So much as things that weren’t there before. Like that ring on his finger.
Oh.
John, who had picked up a few things from his time with Sherlock - or perhaps had been waiting for him to notice, saw the detective’s line of sight and let the quiet drag as he sipped his tea. Then, John asked him outright: Did he really expect that after three years without word everything would be just as he left it? That their lives would have waited for him?
Sherlock didn’t want to start a fight. Sherlock won’t say yes. Because he hadn’t really thought about the actual act of coming back. Silly, really, three years and not a single thought to it. He had thought about what would happen after the reunion. But never the event itself. Never the possibility of this.
As Sherlock left, the doctor said he should meet her, his wife, now that he was back in London and, you know, alive. John said, “I think you’d like her.”
Sherlock nodded slightly harried, yet dazed, he’ll be in touch, as he went out the door and down the steps.
Jim was waiting for him in the room Sherlock was staying in under a false name in the quite possibly vain hope that Mycroft would take the hint and bugger off.
So maybe Sherlock was angry. It might have had to do with Jim knew the entire time and didn’t tell him. Or maybe the fact that the apparition wouldn’t leave him alone (or the fact that he didn’t want Jim to leave him alone).
Perhaps he should have let himself calm down, before they talked. His anger was expected. Jim expected it. But that didn’t take back the fact that Sherlock just broke their unspoken agreement to never talk about how they came to be in this situation.
Sherlock never should have said: If Jim hadn’t been so desperate to die, they might have been enjoying themselves right now, instead of here in this- How if he hadn’t killed himself they would have been happier.
Jim had stared like Sherlock had shot him. It was then that Sherlock realized exactly what he had said. The apparition just shook his head, looking sick. Sherlock had no idea ghosts could look sick. Jim’s eyes were so big and sad and amber.
Jim stepped back, out of the faint light of the hallway, before he was glaring daggers, eyes shuddered.
Sherlock broke their eye contact, looking at the garishly carpeted floor. He wanted to take it back because he did understand. Really, he did. But the minutes dragged on and when Sherlock couldn’t get the words out, Jim just poofed out of the room.