Fandom: Sherlock
Word Count: 8841
Characters/Pairings: Sebastian Moran, Jim Moriarty, Moriarty/Moran
Rating: R
Summary: "Dynamics of an Asteroid"; or, Sebastian Moran waits for the third act of James Moriarty's magic trick. There's always been one before.
Warnings: Suicide; self-harm; references to explicit sexual activity; chaos theory and determinism. Spoilers for "The Reichenbach Fall."
Author's Note: Title taken from the Nick Cave song of the same name. Utmost gratitude to
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neherenia and torsui for technical beta. Pre-emptive apologies to the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Also on AO3.When Sebastian was small his mum took him to see a magic show – no drinks then, no men, no lies, just him and Mum and the busker in Covent Garden who set up with a table and a hat and a bird and his two sleeves. Some sort of young bloke looking for bills in the hat when he was done, because Seb and his mum didn’t have enough to see a better magician. No touring acts in Brighton for them, just Mum lifting Seb up to stand on a flowerpot so he could watch the lad with the curly hair flutter a white bird around on his hand and snap it away with his fingers. Mum wanted him to be excited – Seb wanted to be excited back then for Mum, too, that was a day – but she was disappointed, he couldn’t. He was a literal-minded boy, he couldn’t.
Asked why, he said, “I knew the bird was going to come back. He was going to bring it back. I knew the bird would come back.”
“But the man took it away,” said his mum with her young head of bright hair under her hat, though he couldn’t remember what her face looked like after that. “Didn’t he, Sebbie? Things don’t just come back after they’ve gone away.”
“A magician don’t bring no bird to Covent Garden,” said Sebastian Moran, “just so he could take it away. That wouldn’t be magic at all.”
The magician accepted the applause and amused hoots and turned out his hat for donations, with one last trick – flicking his wrist so the white bird flew away over the square to oohs and aahs and a little shriek from a baby. Sebastian watched it fly until the light glinted it off its wings, a dark spot on the sun as it winged away to wherever it went home to roost.
Jim loved YouTube. Jim loved voicemail. Jim loved to write things down, maintained some sort of endless Jim fascination with the act of marking something down to record; “It’s entropy, dove,” he explained (without explaining at all) with his legs up on the sofa cushions in his polar fleece pyjamas and his back flat on the floor, watching Yo Gabba Gabba! upside-down. “The second law of thermodynamics. Sadi Carnot isolated it in 1824 – think of me as that book you never ever fucking picked up in your life! –I’d love to bore you with it, but it’d be dull. Suffice to say, everything erodes sooner or later. Crumbles. Gone.”
Had Sebastian actually never ever picked up a book in his life, which was not true, he probably still would’ve had a passing familiarity with the concept of entropy, not having a brain like a block of Swiss cheese; Jim loved theory, though, and he loved physics, and he always got that little light in his eyes when he got to explain theoretical physics. And Jim had all the constellations of mathematics in his head. Were there a Fifth Law, Sebastian was fairly certain Jim would get around to mentioning it to him sooner or later. Besides, it was Yo Gabba Gabba!. He ignored the telly and lit up again, sending another little curl of smoke up to stain the ceiling. “Yeah?”
Jim scowled, kicked his feet, hit him with a toss pillow. “I hate you,” he said. “You’re going to crumble into bits of boring. Everything is. Heat death of the universe, we’re all going to go cold – all because things don’t stay together, they fall apart, the center cannot hold, Colonel. There’s no point in writing anything down, no point in preserving things, it’s one of the stupid stupid things we do because we’re enamored with the idea of cheating death; but even if we could make all our cells spontaneously replicate themselves perfectly we’d just carry on and then all get wiped out by some fucking meteor some day, because that’s how it goes. And if we didn’t? The sun would burn out. And if we started it up again? It’d fucking go out again. Painting restoration’s a bloody wash – trust art history to come up with it. Liberal arts!”
He must’ve left out something, because he loved recording things anyway – everything on telly, for one, and Seb did mean everything on telly, and then his own face every day on the Skype cam for a year. He burned back-episodes of game shows he never watched. He collected books, and quotes from books. And most of all he made sure there was video of the things he did.
Jim didn’t set up video for the day he put a gun in his own mouth. No suicide note there, no grand finale and encore in front of the cameras – no blaze of glory – just a pool of blood on a rooftop, and the crack of a gunshot that must’ve set Sherlock Holmes’s head to ringing in the last minutes of his life.
But it turned up on YouTube two days later: two boys recording a skateboarding trick, and in the background, the bang of a gunshot. They think. Maybe it was a car backfiring. Maybe it was a balloon. (It wasn’t a balloon. Sebastian thought they’d recognize the sound of a fucking balloon.) They weren’t paying attention, but a few minutes later people were screaming. It didn’t occur to them to upload it until they watched it again and heard the bang.
“Me and Alfie by St Barts,” 10:58 – two seconds short of eleven shaky minutes long, with sound cutting in and out. At 3:32: bang. Sebastian Moran could recognize a pistol, small-caliber, in muffled report. No balloon.
He could recognize it the second time, again, and when he ripped it to his harddrive. At 3:32 every time, the second boy (Alfie?) laughed, stop it you stupid wanker – and in the background, bang. The only record.
They whisked away Jim’s body before Seb could see it. Mycroft Holmes must’ve packed it away, because it didn’t surface again; there were photos and DNA tests leaked, though, and it looked like Jim. The bloodstain was still there. Jim Moriarty was dead to the public – “Richard Brooke” was, anyway – and the only record was a sloppy 10:58 handicam clip called “Me and Alfie by St Barts.” Sebastian wondered how long he was going to be waiting this time.
Sebastian had a routine in the morning. Stretches, fifty-five pushups, sixty curls, and thirty reps on each of his barbels, for his biceps. He got up the following morning and did it in precise order. He did not drink, he did not go to the pub.
Tuesday’s cigarette burns were healing. The latest teethprint bruises were just fading from his shoulder, but Jim’s side of the bed -- the side near the window, the rumpled side -- was undisturbed because Jim wasn’t there to disturb it. There were the furrows of old, deep scratches in the tan muscles of Seb’s back, which stood out in the foggy mirror next to JAMES nicked out in light knifepoint between his shoulderblades. Newer scratches, too, shallow and red. (Once there had been a thin little line in the hollow of the small of his back. I didn’t know my arms were so long, said Jim as he washed Seb’s hair fastidiously. Your toenail, was Sebastian’s answer. Jim grinned -- Precious!)
Dental records were more individual than fingerprints, harder to falsify than DNA. The knifepoint JAMES was a whim that Jim always claimed he regretted when he was put out -- now if Seb died the coroner would think Jim gave a fuck, Jim complained. JAMES could have been anyone’s work, theoretically, but whenever Sebastian Moran fucked James Moriarty Jim bruised himself harder and harder into his skin. Sometimes he purposely used too little and went too hard so Jim would break the skin with his teeth and taste Sebastian’s blood through the thrill of his own pain. Someday he hoped it would scar. It hadn’t yet. Jim’s teeth would fade again this time.
Sebastian wasn’t mourning Jim, just missing him, so he sat down at the computer for a good hard wank this morning in lieu of the real thing. He didn’t have to use his imagination; their firewalls were perfect and like always, Jim loved the camera nearly as much as it loved him. He pulled up a video clip -- dated September 12, 2010 -- and watched himself tied to a chair, blindfolded, a tousled Jim swallowing him down with a wink to the camera and, now be good and your cock’ll be in me tonight, move one muscle and I’ll bite all the way down, which door is it going to be?, Jim’s tongue and lips on him in close-up until his hand cramped and he came all over his bare stomach.
He froze the video on Jim’s face, his wet lips. He looked young there, hair messy around his widow’s peak. Always did. His frame was wiry but didn’t carry muscle like bones that were meant to. Sebastian Moran carried it for him. He carried lots of things for him.
He had an unopened Outlook note from Jim, he noticed. Just one of those task to-do reminders. “Quit smoking you useless bastard!!” it read with at once too much and too little punctuation.
Sherlock Holmes’s death was all over his Google News page, Google having worked out the not-labyrinthine puzzle of his interests by now despite Jim’s irritable insistence that he should stop logging in and “abetting the mercantile police state.” He wondered why it was a surprise to anyone -- one way or another, the boy’d been a suicide waiting to happen, a fey little cokehead with no veins left in the pits of his arms. Sebastian had buried enough people’s sons in the SAS. He knew about suicides. Sherlock had been a walking risk factor. The paparazzi was full of idiots, Seb noted, but it was enough to crack his fragile head once and for all, as was London pavement. That was the end that Jim orchestrated for him. In the end, it just took a push.
His friend Major Watson defended him on his blog. Sebastian had taken a look at the man the first time around and dismissed him right away as Army, a medic, more interested in lager and women than preserving his aim, but he could concede now that he did, in fact, seem to love his young man. That much Seb could understand. Sherlock was another one of those commonplace manic-depressive nancy boys you could pick up at U of L and trade a hit for a fuck, and Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome would’ve gotten him sooner or later if his cocaine didn’t, but his dull little doctor loved him. If he really was sweet on him he’d have jumped after him, thought Sebastian, once his will was executed -- but their little melodrama was what it was, and Seb wasn’t ultimately interested.
Jim was interested. Jim was interested in Glee, too. Sebastian’s place was to wait. He didn’t mind. He always had a backlog of television programming to keep him occupied while he did his bicep curls.
He didn’t turn up the next day. Sebastian wasn’t surprised. Jim had been gone for longer, never provided a reason -- he was a sometimes-lodger, paid both their rent though he owned properties in Chelsea and blew in and out like tumbleweeds in a spaghetti Western, like the dust. There one day, gone the next. Sometimes just to keep Seb on his toes, Sebastian thought, remind him not to take his presence for granted. Jim didn’t love Colonel Moran, which was what he called him when he was unhappy or really wanted to be fucked or sometimes on Remembrance Day. This was so foregone that it never even came up.
Sebastian buried his unshaven face in the bedclothes and inhaled the smell, a bit ripe with sweat and the funny texture of petroleum jelly when it dried out. There were blood spots too here and there, like one of them was a woman. Jim had short little black hairs, very black, which stood out on his skin and the sheets when he shed. He was Irish. Originally. No nation could lay claim to James Moriarty.
James Moriarty was his real name, inasmuch as anyone had a real name except such as others called them, Jim would say philosophically -- he put on all sorts of guises but it was difficult to change what you had on your astronomy dissertation. Academic record, he mourned, was agonizingly cross-referenced.
For a long time Sebastian thought he was probably lying about that too, but he would catch Jim late at night on JSTOR in the glow of his laptop screen re-reading the abstract to “Dynamics of an Asteroid” with an unreadable look on his face and Sebastian knew it had belonged to him and was lost.
Bored and curious, Sebastian sat in the empty flat, the overhead fan going, and eventually leaned over to type in: http://www.jstor.org Astrophysics was gibberish to him. Sherlock Holmes had died understanding “Dynamics” probably and Sebastian hadn’t bothered to try and crack it since the first time, imagining that Jim had him around for better things than incompetent interpretations of his astrophysics dissertation. He clicked on the abstract logged in as Jim, or rather, logged in as “Tycho Brahe.”
Dynamics of an Asteroid: An Orbital Projection for Planetoid 344 Beckett, Proxima Centauri
Sebastian had never gotten around to studying astronomy: his chiefest failing, he knew, to Jim Moriarty.
Jim was messy. There were takeaway boxes all over the bedroom floor with dirty metal forks in them. Jim was deliberate. He organized the files on his laptop with the love of a curator, which he guarded with the fierceness of a sentinel dragon behind a high-security password. His smartphone was missing with the rest of him. Sebastian took one look at the login screen for his laptop, sitting neglected on the coffee table with a fractal screensaver, and left it alone. Data was one thing Jim didn’t play games with. If the password to his life were something that Sebastian Moran could guess, it would be something that Mycroft Holmes could guess, too, and that wouldn’t do, Sebastian, that just wouldn’t do at all.
He turned his attention to the bookshelves. They were his best first guess if he was going to look for some kind of clue or message that Jim had left him. Or they’d do, at least, and sitting around wouldn’t.
Idly he Googled 344 Beckett while he looked. Some addresses came up in Dallas, Georgia. Nothing astronomical.
The only section ever left untouched in the flat, the unturned stone, was the science bookshelf: textbooks and academic journals on three shelves, pop science on two. Jim made idle threats, but Seb had a feeling he really might minus him one finger for every catalogued title he disturbed. Aside from that Jim was always reorganizing, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes according to the Dewey Decimal System. (Jim had debated aloud where The Guide To Getting It On fit in the Dewey Decimals: “what do you think? 300, Social Sciences?”
“Do you give an actual fuck what I think here or am I being the skull again?”
“Sometimes I think I should replace you with Siri,” Jim pushed him in the chest and then went to slot the book in his new miniature library. “Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see. 700? Arts and Recreation? You’re recreational. Not an artful bit in your body, though.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian couldn’t resist cracking a smile, “but these days it’s on account of it spends more time in your body.”
“Oh my God. That joke? Was banned internationally in 1949 along with mustard gas, you fucking Philistine.” Jim giggled, sat in his lap. “Siri, find me a new man.”)
Sebastian hated idleness and any book he couldn’t listen to plugged into his ears while he ran on the treadmill. Passive learning wasn’t for him. He was restless if he wasn’t handling something, one way or another, was what did him poorly in his A-levels. However, when he did a thing, he did it according to method, as they taught him in the SAS and they taught him properly.
There were no notes in the first two shelves of novels. The spines didn’t spell out words, or backwards words, or Morse, or binary. He pulled all the sticky notes and old bookmarks he found -- in Kipling a yellow note with dried adhesive, not Jim’s handwriting, a price from a book sale. In an anthology, he felt Jim’s breath in memory for the first time -- a note written in the margin, simply a numbered academic footnote that led to the bottom of the page and his bright, round handwriting. This passage is misquoted.
It occurred to Seb for the first time that Jim was missing. Not here. Gone. Not just not-here and gone -- but that there was a space without him, a draft under the door in the shape of Jim Moriarty.
Sebastian Moran was a Colonel and he did everything according to a method. These were the last words he remembered exchanging with Jim, something like 72 hours ago:
Jim: Have you ever been afraid of the dark? You know, any time?
Sebastian: You know, there are actually times of night when a bloke is actually bloody well trying to sleep?
That didn’t really tell him anything, though he remembered Jim curled up with his back against Seb’s chest and wriggled his bum against the groin of his shorts until his cock was good and hard and then left him there. If he hadn’t woken up when Jim came in their last words to each other would’ve been about milk and Jim letting it go rancid, at 1900 previously. And Jim’s handwriting was a strange substitute for his voice, but it didn’t have to be, because his face and voice were everywhere on Sebastian’s harddrive -- his face, his voice, his naked body covered in blood, his arms trussed in piano wire, his laugh, his sobs, both of them autotuned, his voicemails, his YouTube channel dedicated to layman-focused five-minute explanations of particles and waves. None of which were Jim. Sebastian waited.
The British government had fancy tricks to pull in most criminals. It didn’t need any for Sebastian -- when it wanted to talk to him, all it had to send was a summons for Colonel Moran, courtesy a superior officer, and he came. Apparently it knew it by now, too, because no one even bothered adopting a pretense or trying to pull him into a car with tinted windows. When it came down to it, if the authorities wanted to interrogate Colonel Moran, they’d only need name a time and an address to give the cab driver.
He knew who’d penned the message right off and it did not stop him from donning his pressed uniform and reporting. He had nothing else to do.
There was no Major-General waiting in the Major-General’s office, unless they’d recently made Mycroft Holmes a Major-General. Sebastian waited politely for direction with his hat under his arm.
The SIS administrator was gaunt in the eyesockets, like he hadn’t been sleeping recently. All spies tended to be after a time. “Colonel,” he addressed Sebastian with an incline of his head.
“Mr. Holmes,” said Sebastian.
“Sit,” said Holmes with a gesture to the only guest chair at the desk.
Holmes was a common name but Jim was always in the habit of referring to the elder brother as Holmes and the younger by his peculiar Victorian public-school moniker, Sherlock. Sebastian could never tell whether that was a concession of respect to Mycroft Holmes or of dis-, or of both, after a fashion. Things always came in halves-and-halves with Jim’s good opinion.
There was a look to the families of suicides, from Belgravia to Beirut. Seb didn’t need to have it. No matter how many times Jim was sawn in half, he always popped back out of that box in one piece -- it was Jim. And Jim was not his family, he reminded himself. Just a man he took up with after Afghanistan.
“You’ve doubtless been reading the papers,” Holmes cut straight to the heart of the matter without any mind-games, which was about how Jim had described him as a host in the interrogation chamber as well. “I’m sure you’re aware of the suicides of your employer -- associate? -- and of the private investigator Sherlock Holmes. I have not called you here to interrogate you about your involvement in either. It is my understanding that you were not involved. If I thought otherwise this conversation would be taking place down at the station at Scotland Yard, and not with me.”
He’s weak, was Jim’s pronouncement. Like his baby brother. Just like his baby brother. The Union Jack still means something to him. Plays like he’s J. Edgar Hoover, but you see I still have all my fingernails?
The Union Jack didn’t mean anything to Sebastian Moran any more, but the bars on his uniform did. He sat straight in his chair and stared at the other man.
Mycroft Holmes sat as still as a snake coiled on a rock. “I’m not here for information about Mr. Moriarty.”
“Dr. Moriarty,” said Sebastian.
Holmes smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. It never did. “Pardon me,” he said in his Eton vowels. “It was my understanding that Mr. Moriarty did not successfully complete his doctorate at Cornell.”
Sebastian stared.
Credit the man the ability to realize when a tree was the wrong one; Holmes shook off the line of conversation, having determined that it contained no fox, and pursued another. “Your employer is dead,” he said. “That does not remove the great number of charges that the British government could still bring you up on, Colonel Moran, and having been robbed of James Moriarty I assure you that it’s hungry; not being a prosecutor myself, I’m not particularly interested in that eventuality. I’ve no particular delusions that you have any information about his operations that couldn’t be easier come by elsewhere.” He steepled his fingers. There was a man in a suit with a Bluetooth outside the door, Sebastian knew, and the room had to be wired regardless. “I will offer you a deal that I expect you’ll refuse today.”
Would the pub down the street have anything special on tap today? It was Friday, after all.
“Your employer was in possession of surveillance footage of Mr. Holmes,” said the MI6 man. Mr. Holmes, not my brother. He was grieving, the wretched bastard. “I expect you know where it’s kept. If you provide us with the files I can provide you immunity from prosecution in conjunction with Operation Bond Air.”
When it came to a pint, you couldn’t beat a good London pub. There were warmer places to be stationed, but they were shite for beer.
“Colonel, James Moriarty is gone,” said Mycroft Holmes levelly. “You’re not protecting anyone.”
Maybe an IPA.
Holmes cleared his throat. “Well, thank you for your time.”
Sebastian imagined he was being watched, but it didn’t particularly concern him. If the government felt confident in breaking into his flat without a warrant, they’d have done so already, and in truth Jim hadn’t left him any work: they wouldn’t be watching anything interesting. Just his trips to go run on the treadmill or around the block, the pub he went to, which was the same pub, the store where he bought groceries, which was the same store. His civilian life, inasmuch as he had one, was entirely separate from his life with Jim. That was a lesson he learned early on; playing rough with the kinds of boys Jim ran with, it was better not to have real friends who knew about you. His mum was dead now. Gus Moran, whoever he’d been, probably was too. No younger brothers to fuss over, no older ones to fight with. Just Jim Moriarty and a trail of the dead.
Sleeping alone was worse than it ought’ve been. He’d slept longer nights in the Afghan desert with his own sniper rifle as a bedmate, but not knowing when Jim would be back made the bed a little colder. Usually he would at least send a text.
It was always a game with Jim, everything a goddamned game, and Seb was never winning. He’d be over at ten, he said time and again, but he was late.
0200 took its eventual toll. Sitting at the computer half-naked looking at photos of Jim again was frustrating, and humiliating, and he had the mental image of Jim watching this on remote-access with some sort of scorn; but here he was anyway. He tried to get off, but some sort of tension in the back of his mind meant he never quite got there, so he was left hanging and abandoned and almost-there with Jim’s pixellated body in front of him, like so many nights with him in the flesh, which was some kind of twisted karmic love-note from far away; in his frustration and loneliness Sebastian broke down enough to lean forward, still sweaty and half-hard, and type into the password bar on Jim’s computer, 344beckett.
Username or password incorrect, said the OS.
yes, he typed.
Username or password incorrect.
yesihavebeenafraidofthedark, he typed.
Username or password incorrect.
Sebastian left it alone and went back to push-ups. He was up to 130 now.
344 Beckett? What was 344 Beckett, anyway? It sounded like astronomical nomenclature, Sebastian mulled over a smoke and through the sights of his Dragunov SVU. He had Jim to credit for incorporating either of these words into his mental vocabulary. Yet Google had already told him several times over that there was no asteroid by that name in the Belt. Physics had never been his strongest subject. He’d puzzled out that the things were numbered by their orbits, though, so whatever Beckett was it wasn’t floating or hurtling about randomly in dead space.
He shot his mechanical targets one by one, as he knew he would. Target shooting was mechanical and dead. General Zaroff was correct. The only game worth hunting would get him arrested by the people watching him the moment he indulged. The only thing that made him feel alive, he was aware, would get him killed. Waiting for Jim was a silent, stultifying waiting game.
He picked up a prostitute on his way back to London, out of boredom, out of desire to feel something, perhaps out of the knowledge that Jim never spared him the rod when he disobeyed. He found a lad with dark eyes in Sussex Gardens and fucked him on the inside of a half hour in a hotel room -- with a rubber, a part of him always had a hunger for death, but he knew if he was sick Jim would never touch him again -- and left him with a few bills.
But with no Jim there was no thrill, no jealous keeper to materialize after sundown and suss out where he’d been and what and who he’d done, and Sebastian was left alone in the flat again as a faithless lover and nothing more. He remembered coming home to find Jim and dark red everywhere in the tub and the slippery remains of the veins in his wrists. He’d taken him to Accidents and Emergency. Now Jim had been gone for the outside of a week and he’d gone and gotten a rent boy to suck his cock out of boredom. He didn’t feel like he’d committed a sin. He felt like a common arsehole.
In Jim’s name, he applied the business end of a cigarette to his skin, but it was hollow recompense. There was a space under the door in the shape of Jim Moriarty. It let in the cold.
He opened up JSTOR again, found his “Dynamics of an Asteroid” bookmark, and clicked to the actual paper. 344 Beckett showed up and he recognized Proxima Centauri and also impact event, but the dissertation might as well have been written in French for all he could glean from it: it was too opaque for him. He was too stupid for it. For Jim. His principal failing. He hit his head on the wall, hard, and again. It was no use; once the throbbing went away, he was still there, and Jim was not.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He wished for the ability to hallucinate.
“I’m sorry about the fucking rent boy,” he said again. “I’m sorry about everything. Wake up, Jim. I give up. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He saw Jim’s face in every superette, his body in any body that could remotely be his. Jim was rubbish for real disguise -- honestly, everyone was rubbish for real disguise in the 2000s, with movie magic and Photoshop sharpening senses against the old hat-tricks that might’ve worked in a darker day and age -- but a dark-haired young man with a friendly face could disappear anywhere with a haircut and an upturned coat collar and some stubble. Anyone could maintain a cover identity for a week; beyond that it was all about watchfulness and patience.
Sebastian had patience and watchfulness too. They didn’t set him up with a rifle and a scope in the SAS because they expected him to get fed up with waiting. But he was always waiting for people, and people always broke sooner or later. It wasn’t the waiting you did for the earth to turn its massive face over the landscape of stars or a comet to swing back in its gargantuan orbit.
He didn’t expect to find Jim anywhere. If Jim wanted to be found, he’d turn up. All Seb could do was broadcast his surrender. Give up. Give in. Admit if there was a puzzle, he was too stupid for it, or admit -- admit he didn’t know fuck-all of what to do without him in the first place, or. Admit he didn’t know what all he could do.
It wasn’t good enough. Seb woke up alone again and slept through his alarm, and slammed his palm down on the button when it started up again, and slammed his palm down again, and missed his morning run.
Distantly he thought of Holmes’s offer again. I expect you know where it’s kept. He knew where footage of Holmes’s brother was kept, anyway, it was hard to click around on either of their harddrives without stumbling on some corner of Jim’s personal shrine to the whey-faced wunderkind. Jim always waved it off with something about the personal and the professional and “are you jealous, Sebby?” but Seb didn’t believe in self-delusion. Of course he was jealous. There were a few tissues of Jim’s peculiar heart that had been committed to his fascination with Sherlock since boyhood, long before his path had ever crossed Sebastian’s, and Seb had about as much hope of destroying that as he had of outwitting Sherlock himself. He knew that. He lived with his moderate jealousy like he did with the joint in his back that flared up in changing seasons -- with the occasional anti-inflammatory. When Jim handed him footage and commanded he memorize the face and watch it, he set his jealousy aside and did as he was commanded.
He had more to be jealous over now. Sherlock had exchanged the last words anyone had ever heard James Moriarty say; he was the last one to see him, like they said with missing persons. Then he had to go and crack open his skull on a yard of concrete. Just like Jim not to leave witnesses.
What was the use in watching old handicam clips of him? Sherlock Holmes was dead; everything had ensured that. Seb wondered if Mycroft was after some sort of clue himself, but batted the thought away and cracked open an ale. His wasn’t to wonder.
Mycroft could look; there were things locked up tighter on Jim’s laptop than Bluebeard’s ex-wives. Seb opened up the relevant folder on his own computer and sat down to screen his own personal collection of Sherlock Holmes surveillance, expecting to loathe him all the worse. There were days that every white line on his reptilian public-school face made Seb want to smash it.
But, of course, Sherlock had pipped him at the post there. Sebastian loaded up a clip from a month previous and wondered how a man could go from smiling and laughing over a gyro at Speedy’s to leaping off St. Bart’s.
Belatedly, it occurred to him that that might be what Mycroft was after, too.
Seb closed the media player, unnerved, and went for his late run.
“Dynamics of an Asteroid” stared him in the face in the middle of the night, straining his eyes from the too-bright glow of his LCD.
Had he ever asked Jim about the contents of his dissertation? Even once?
Good God, man. Have you got a curious bone in your body? Jim inquired once. Even one? Just one? Aside from the one in your trousers?
What you don’t want to fucking tell me, said Sebastian, rolling his shoulders, I don’t want to fucking know.
It was half a lie, but it was half the truth too. A man could go stark raving chasing James Moriarty around all the corners of his mind. He initiated enough catch-me-if-you-can without encouragement. He made it more than explicitly clear that Seb was too fucking dense to understand his interests in the first place, that was what he required Sherlock for, Seb just provided a steady hand and a body that didn’t look terrible in perspective from the neck down, Jim told him enough times. Sebastian didn’t entirely believe that and he didn’t entirely disbelieve it either. He didn’t ask after astrophysics because Jim had never paid him to embarrass himself -- had he?
Seb had Jim’s laptop in his lap now and his mobile on the desk. “Dynamics” still might as well have been written in fucking Hebrew and Google didn’t yield anyone who thought any different. He dialed his mailbox with one hand while he tried another password halfheartedly on the laptop with the other, 344Beckett, case-sensitive this time.
Username or password incorrect. He bloody well imagined so. He paged through his inbox.
Maybe the day would come when Irish vowels would leave him with nothing, not the brief buzz of hope and then the same dull hangover. This one was sweet and sing-song. “Sebastian. Seb. Sebby Seb Seb. Pick up your fucking phone, you lazy blighter, I’m going to have you terminated.”
Skipped. Shitfaced Jim: ”SEBBY! Sebby’s answerphone! I LOVE YOU! No, I would def-i-nite-ly say that sober. Don’t be such a Negative Naaaan-cyyy. Happy Christmas! Hugs and kisses! Don’t wait up!
Angry Jim, eleven and a half months ago: ”What the fuck do you think you’re on about, not picking up your mobile? What the bloody hell else do you have to do with your time? Ring me. Ring me or I am going to light this on fire. This. Right now, I’m holding it. (Hard to remember what ‘this’ was, so evidently he hadn’t.)
Vengeful Jim: a minute and a half of static that Jim had to know he’d listen through, and then a strange man’s unclear voice, “oh, fuck, yes. You swallow it down, you bitch, you -- fuck. Yeah, oh, yeah” at which point he skipped it and bit the inside of his cheek. That one was eleven months ago; Seb had the stomach to listen through the whole thing once. He didn’t play these games.
Twelve messages deep, he found what he was looking for:
Colonel. Cough. A dry one, the sort someone made when they had something stuck in their throat, or when it was cold. Hey, Colonel.
Sans the background noise of a club or a firefight, Jim’s voice could sound tinny and tiny over the telephone. Not like Jim at all. Normally he expanded to fill the available space, like a gas. Quiet answerphones brought out something unlike himself in him, so strange that Seb always wondered if it was real at all. I -- am here to tell you -- that the grout between the tiles by the tub -- is one hundred percent fucked now. I mean, completely useless. Unless you -- have got -- a fucking shithouse’s worth. Of peroxide. I’m thinking new grout, are you thinking new grout?
By that point the first time he’d listened to the message Seb had already been on his way back home. He didn’t have that luxury now, though; he was already there. He listened through: Don’t panic, you stupid wanker, I don’t need to go to A&E. Okay, I can take myself to A&E if I need A&E. Get a hold of yourself, Colonel, I am A&E. Six and a half seconds of silence, then, almost petulantly, Go away.
(He did take Jim to A&E. When he got home he found him perched on the edge of the tub with his legs crossed and his bone-white arms dribbling all over, yes, the grout. He had his chin stuck out imperiously. He smelled like whisky. Jim made a terrible Irishman on the best days -- always said spirits fucked up his Javascript.
He was fully dressed, sort of, since his shirt was partly unbuttoned and for Jim having his sleeves rolled up was a state of obscenity. His trouser cuffs were rolled down to expose the pallor of his ankles, the stubble since the last time he’d taken a razor to that.
His shoes were kicked off nearby; Jim unfolded his legs reluctantly. Seb got down on one knee in the bloody grout to put them on, sliding one leather shoe onto Jim’s bare foot while Jim primly extended the other. He was left kneeling there looking up at him, looking up at Jim in his rolled-up white shirt with the red tracks down from the pits of his arms like he had bloodwork gone wrong. There were messy little gauze squares pushed into his elbow pits, like he’d already had second thoughts. The cuts had to be small.
Jim looked down at him through black eyelashes, hands curled around the tub’s edge. Help me up, he said.
Seb half got up to pull one of Jim’s arms around his shoulders, mindful of his arms. Jim let his head loll against Seb’s shoulder as he was dragged up -- he was light enough, always getting manhandled this way and that.
Carry me, Jim commanded and Seb picked him up under his knees.
On the way to St. Bart’s, Jim curled up in the passenger seat, pasty, and played with Seb’s hand that wasn’t on the wheel; Talk, he said, slurring a little more. You’re so dull. Ask the stupid question, I know you’re wondering.
No, said Sebastian.
Fine, said Jim with a snort and scared him by closing his eyes the rest of the way.)
He’d provided the answer midway through the rest of the message anyway, which was mostly silence and the retroactively explicable sounds of him drinking something, but in another :40 he coughed again and said, You know how it is. IT. It’s hell. All the tickets. At ease, soldier, you know I don’t mean it.
He always thought of Jim as some sort of will-o’-the-wisp when it came to personal history, because he might as well have been for all that Seb would ever know, or so he thought, anyway. The closest he came to knowing anything about his background was seeing his real legal ID card, the one attached to James Moriarty. And there was “Dynamics,” which, of course, really meant that there wasn’t “Dynamics.”
Education, the public school sort, though he’d never entirely sort out how with a voice like his. Seb got bits and drabs out of Jim at a time, but never more: he was at the same school with Sherlock once but didn’t know him then, took up tobacco when he was eleven, sex when he was twelve, criminal enterprise when he was thirteen. Rugby he always snorted at when it was on the telly, said it never gave him anything but a black eye and a sore jaw, and Sebastian didn’t ask. Mothering Sunday he said mums never gave him anything but hot meals, and, he supposed, an X chromosome. There were bullies but he had good marks. Excelled at maths.
Questions were popping up in his head like bubbles of acid now when Seb went for a morning run -- when did he take up astronomy? When was the first time he looked through a telescope? Where did he apply for university? Did he have mates in the dormitory? (And how many of them did he fuck? was the inevitable follow-up that stabbed right through him, but Seb was dismayed to find the stab wasn’t jealousy, just pain.) It all felt a ridiculous oversight now, he thought with his heart battering his sternum while he hunched over to catch his breath at a streetcorner; where would he even begin looking for a man when he’d never even seen a photograph of his mum?
Jim only asked after Seb when he was bored: mostly he just knew. Don’t need your life story, big boy, he grinned at him once, shoving the barrel of a gun hard enough into Sebastian’s mouth that he nearly gagged, you don’t know a bloody thing about anonymizers, do you? He did after that. The memory brought him up short -- gun in the mouth. That was how they all said Jim committed suicide when he disappeared. That was how he faked his death. An ugly mental image, Seb had seen gun suicides like that, the mouth was the worst. An ugly way to go.
Sebastian caught his breath against a lamppost. His lungs gave up a little quicker than he remembered. Age took everything, sooner or later. Even in new trainers the pads of his feet were starting to hurt.
He went home, if that was possible. He took a long route, one that took him near St. Bartholomew’s, over a streetcorner where someone and Alfie had been skateboarding and caught something else on film. It’d be too risky to pick out where Sherlock Holmes had ended his final trip, much less make the climb to the roof to look where everything had happened. Not with Mycroft Holmes and the rest of the Secret Service halfway up his arse.
Alfie and his friend were long gone. Seb was only half out of breath again when he got home and he took the time to towel out his hair before he sat down with his computer and a thumb drive. While it booted, he typed into Jim’s password field again, 344.Beckett, and 344_Beckett, and Beckett344, and why, and why. are. you. doing. this. to. me. And Beckett_344.
Username or password incorrect.
His SAS uniform was both unworn and unwashed now; the stiff starched creases were still in the shoulders but he could smell his own sweat under the arms. He put it on anyway.
It felt like a fucking farce to contact Mycroft Holmes through his official e-mail address. Seb added him to his address book anyway -- smiling at the stupidity of it, realizing the muscles of his face hadn’t done that in a while.
I don’t have access to all of my employer’s files on your brother, he wrote. I’m willing to make a gentleman’s agreement for the ones that I do.
Holmes messaged him back quite immediately, with promptness one could only credit to an iPhone dictionary: I did not offer immunity under the conditions of partial compliance with my offer. Please reconsider.
Seb didn’t even bother to e-mail him back. He knew he didn’t have to. He set himself up with takeaway, and cans of IPA, and enough back-episodes of National Geographic to keep him occupied for as much time as it took. The thought of Mycroft Holmes poring over his e-mail with disdain and then setting it aside only filled him with contempt now. Let him sit back in his chair with his smugness and his arrogance and all the spoiled narcissism of a Holmes brother, so confident that he could smoke Seb out of the bush. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day -- after -- fucking -- day -- there were enough desperate men and money-hungry cunts in the world who could shoot -- but Sebastian Moran had been hired for his ability to fucking wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. His phone buzzed: Mycroft and his comb-over had folded first.
I will meet you at 2100. Expect transport.
Mycroft Holmes looked gaunter, baggier, uglier than the last time he’d seen him. Maybe enough time with the autopsy photos of his brother’s smashed skull had done that. Seb was aware he had more stubble now, himself.
“Sit,” said Mycroft through cracked lips.
Sebastian did not. He stood at attention with his hands folded behind his back.
Holmes pursed his thin mouth. There were two brothers, thought Seb: Snow White and Doughboy fucking Grey. “I’m surprised you didn’t insist upon an insurance policy. I would have assumed that Mr. Moriarty instructed his people better.”
When a house disappeared into the fog, thought Seb, what was there left to worry about burning?
Silence worked on everyone, even blokes clearly well at home with the idea that silence worked on everyone. “The files, Colonel,” said Holmes.
Sebastian reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced the black thumb drive, placing it on the desk between them. He straightened up again. For his part, Holmes was no complete bleeder; he produced a brand-new laptop computer to plug his Greek-borne gift into, ignoring the one in front of him that probably contained anything Jim might want to look at. Probably if Jim was watching this he’d have criticisms of the holes in Mycroft’s security protocols anyway, but Jim was not, in fact, watching this.
It took some time for Holmes to pre-review the files. He had the luxury of waiting and left Seb to stand the whole time, not offering the chair again. He didn’t offer or look up again just yet: a few times he licked his lips to wet them, punctuating the mouse-clicks, and his eyebrows stayed where they were.
Sooner or later, he spoke up, still bathed in the LCD light: “Would you like to know the astrophysical significance of ‘Dynamics of an Asteroid,’ Colonel Moran?”
“That was the agreement,” said Sebastian.
If there was honor among spooks, Seb had yet to see it, but maybe Eton types like Mycroft Holmes believed in something after all. He clicked to a different screen, something that cast a whiter glow on his face, before he abruptly reached to put his palm flat on the back of the screen of the laptop he’d dedicated to this purpose and click it shut. He faced Seb over his desk with fingers steepled.
“‘Dynamics’ was published not long before Mr. Moriarty’s -- incident -- at his university and his departure from his field of study. It was a minor phenomenon in the field, soured only minorly by his actions. Ah, academics do love a good scandal. No, the main prohibition against Mr. Moriarty’s thesis gaining a wider readership or scholarly notice was that the presentation of its research was so utterly chaotic and opaque as to defy peer review; whatever mathematical talent Mr. Moriarty happened to possess, it seemed he did not apply similar rigor to his compositional studies. Or perhaps he intended something avant-garde. It’s never been entirely certain. There was always something a little bit wrong with James Moriarty’s career; who knows what distant butterfly set that in motion? I’m barely a layman in the field.” He shrugged with crocodile humility and went on.
“I did have the chance to download and peruse his thesis, and while I agree that it was dense and, ah, not optimally presented for his audience, the mathematics appear to be sound -- if radically theoretical. Are you following me, Colonel?” Seb didn’t dignify that with an answer. “Very well. It was something of a surprise to his peers and advisors; though he did choose to attend an American university for its theoretical research, given his particular giftedness with mathematics and programming I’m sure they were expecting something a bit more... technically applicable from their child prodigy? In any case, ‘Dynamics’ was nearly science fiction to them.
“You’re familiar, of course, with the potential of a cataclysmic impact event, of the speculation in the wake of Shoemaker-Levy?”
He was not, but he remembered: he was going to crumble into bits of boring. Everything was.
“Mr. Moriarty was a bit of a determinist himself. He claimed to have identified a planet or planetoid in the Proxima Centauri system which, as he substantiated with a complex system of calculations, was likely to eventually cause through its orbital projection an impact event of extinction-level proportions. He rejected the supposition that deterministic chaos made it impossible to project such an outcome in the astronomical long term, citing some sources which, in short, called into question quantum mechanics, and advancing his hypothesis that all astronomical events were calculable with a very small margin of error given proper mathematical data and a comprehensive understanding of the system. His answer was that his own observation as an astronomer made and could make no difference in the probable outcome; the orbits of Earth and of 344 Beckett, as he dubbed his hypothetical planet, were unchangeable significantly by the actions of sentient humanity.”
Mycroft coughed into a handkerchief. The dark circles under his eyes were settling deeper into his face, like a sinkhole. The skin under his chin was coming loose. He was getting old.
“A very strange thing,” he said, “that a promising young physicist would stake the beginning of his career to argue that the demise of humanity as we know it was certain, and calculable, without any element of randomness, and already in motion.”
You know. The heat death of the universe. We’re all going to go cold.
“Does that suffice to answer your question, Colonel Moran?”
It was the middle of the night when Seb came home. He was beyond dull surprise that Mycroft Holmes let him go after that, unsure that his new immunity to prosecution would hold any practical merit, disinclined to care. The skin of his face was pushing out hard prickles of hair that itched the back of his hand when he rubbed his face. He remembered shaving not so long ago. Whatever, he thought, had happened to that.
The LCD of his own computer hurt his eyes, but his eyes had taken enough of a beating over the last days not to care any more. To his surprise, “Me and Alfie by St Barts” was still available on the web. YouTube had taken it down, but Vimeo and Google Video and no end of other sites had carried that banner on. He wound up watching on Metafilter, leaned back in his chair.
The video was still 10:58 in duration. He remembered all of it, now fairly certain that he could identify not only Alfie and ‘me’ but all their immediate relations on the street if he had to. He sat back.
Who knows, echoed Mycroft Holmes in bone-dry eternity, what distant butterfly might have set that in motion?
The desk chair smelled like Jim. Or he thought so. It smelled like the bed, and the bed smelled like Jim, or it smelled like cologne and sex, at least. Seb had the recent reference point of the bed to remind himself. The last time he’d smelled Jim at all was sifting away out of the recesses of his memory, like sand.
What the hell are you even doing, said Alfie’s friend amiably at 2:01.
Shut it, you cunt, we’re on video -- Alfie laughed, at 3:11. At 3:25 he added, Fuck, I should’ve worn trainers! At 3:32, a muffled explosion as Jim shot himself on the rooftop of St. Barts.
Sebastian choked on a convulsion that crunched through the middle of his chest like he was heavering, but nothing came up other than air and other spasms of dryness. He’d clicked the video paused at 3:35 without realizing. He dragged it back. 3:30 somewhere Jim was pushing the barrel down his throat; 3:32 again, the report of a small arm as, weeks ago, Jim pulled the trigger and was gone.
Have you ever been afraid of the dark?
He dug his fingernails of one hand into the surface of the desk and clawed for purchase, for a grip.
You know, any time?
He reached for the power button on Jim’s modified red ATX chassis and pushed it until the computer powered off with a strangled click, unhealthy for the remaining data, and the plasma monitor winked out.
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