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When the door of the sickroom closed behind Mycroft, the footfalls and murmured talk of the corridor seemed to be smothered at once beneath a heavy woollen rug, leaving only that peculiar chill which belongs to hospitals alone—a cold air faintly sharp with carbolic soap and the sting of iodine. Outside the window lay the Parisian light of late afternoon, already thinning into dimness. Damp mist clung to the panes, and the street-lamps were not yet fully kindled; now and again, however, a brief flare of fire winked through the gloom—sign enough that revolutionary clashes still persisted, barricade by barricade. The rumble of carriages and the occasional shout came through layers of stone and brick, as though from another world entirely.
When, with a single sentence, Sherlock dismissed Mycroft and the lady—his mother, whose mind had long since been made fragile, yet whose bearing retained a certain unbroken dignity—Mycroft frowned first, and then gave his usual short snort, as though this were merely another instance of his brother’s wilfulness. Yet at the threshold he turned back all the same. His gaze rested upon Sherlock’s face for half a beat before he drew the door gently to; plainly, at this moment, the impulse to guard and tend outweighed any appetite he might have had for sparring.
Sherlock Holmes lay upon the bed, the bandages bound tight enough that their pressure served to check the stubborn seep of blood. Laudanum had made his lids heavy and dulled, and yet his mind seemed to have been forced to a harsher brilliance—as though the more the body wearied, the more fiercely the brain refused to relinquish its hold upon the smallest detail. His eyes followed James Moriarty.
He had noticed it earlier, when James entered the room with the “princess”: keeping close to the foot of the bed, he had wiped something upon a towel. Before the others Sherlock had asked if he was all right; for a second there had been a blankness, and then the familiar smile—so like the one he used to meet any gale or tempest, as if nothing had touched him at all. He was fine.
Sherlock announced that he must rest. He sent away his mother and brother, so full of anxious care; he bade farewell to the “princess,” dusty with travel and turmoil. Only his friend remained.
James now stood again at the foot of the bed, his posture so loose as to appear almost indifferent. He folded the towel, tucking its corners inward—not in any ordinary manner, but as though he were seeking for his hands some proper place to settle. Having folded the towel, he folded his coat; Sherlock had no doubt that, given another minute, the next thing he would fold would be the bedsheet at the foot of the bed. He looked for all the world like a confidential man of consequence abruptly demoted into the duties of a housemaid—too full of thoughts for his hands to be still.
Sherlock watched him for a time before he spoke. His voice, roughened by the drug, was nonetheless carried with that distinctness which never permitted evasion.
“Are you all right?”
James lifted his eyes and gave him a smile—that same smile he wore to meet any squall, the little lines at the corners of his eyes creasing, the curve of his mouth rising with an easy neatness, brisk and complete.
“Still good.”
“I saw you wiping your hands,” said Sherlock. “Not long after you came in.”
James’s movements paused for an instant. Lightly, as though the matter were of no account, he answered, “Don’t you think that when you were lying there bleeding in the tunnel, if I went to pick you up, I might get some on me?”
Sherlock blinked; for a moment the hurried retreating figure of his father flashed behind his eyelids. As if resisting a pain that even laudanum could not entirely press down, he considered a second, and then slowly shook his head.
“It shouldn’t have been mine. As far as I know, you’re not a germophobe. Why wipe now, and not earlier? Besides, if it were my blood on your hands, it would have dried long ago.”
James raised his head at last. His gaze settled upon Sherlock’s face, and his mouth tilted in the faintest of challenges. “Oh?”
“And,” Sherlock went on, “why didn’t you wipe before you got here? It’s a small thing—done in seconds. What you wiped then was—what you got on you after you ran out.”
It was as though he had caught hold of a loose thread which had suddenly shown itself. In his eyes, that brightness which the drug could not subdue flared up at once.
“Ah-ha.” There was almost a boyish triumph in the sound. “You got someone else’s blood on you. And not the princess's. When she came in, her clothes were clean and her posture was normal. ”
James’s smile did not vanish; only his pupils tightened by a fraction. He stepped nearer, set the towel aside, as if choosing not to hide behind it any longer.
“Getting shot won’t stop you, will it?” He looked at Sherlock and gave a sigh that was half weary amusement and half sharp mockery. “I don’t think an overactive brain does much for wound-healing.”
“Don’t be such a mother hen.” Sherlock frowned; he had little strength left for it, and it came out more as a thin, defiant jest. “It’s precisely because the body’s hurt that the brain’s more active. Besides, they gave me laudanum for the pain—I’ve got to fight the drowsy, drugged haze.”
James sat down on the chair by the bed and looked at him. Something complicated crossed his eyes. In so few days they—he—had been made to pass through so much: a father’s concealment and betrayal, a mother’s long victimhood, the burden of a sister’s death carried for years… Even James Moriarty, who considered himself no great hand at ordinary feeling, could perceive it. Sherlock Holmes was uncommonly strong—strong enough to take these blows and still strike outward. “I’m impressed.”
A brief silence lay between them like a skin of ice. Then, at last, he spoke; the words came dryly, as though he had to force them from a mouth that preferred neatness to confession.
“I…um, killed a man. For the first time of my life.”
Sherlock’s brow did not so much as twitch. Even his breathing did not change.
“Who?”
“When I was facing off with her in the alley,” James said, “I was on edge. A Parisian constable appeared at the mouth of the lane—he shouted something, I don’t remember what. I pulled the trigger on instinct—”
Sherlock parted his lips as if to say something; but before any comfort could be offered, James raised a hand and cut him off.
“No.” He spoke with brisk finality. “She already said the comforting part. ‘You were forced to shoot.’—I don’t need you to repeat it. I’m fine.”
Sherlock paused. He swallowed whatever soothing words had risen, and did not contend for that conclusion. Instead he let his gaze settle upon Moriarty with still greater exactness, as though his friend were a problem far harder than any cipher: the dilation of the pupils, the minute tension at the outer corner of the eye, the particular set of the smile—each point declared one fact. This man was not fine.
He tilted his head, studying from another angle. His tone softened; his meaning grew sharper.
“Then why are you uneasy?”
James’s lashes flickered.
“Your pupils are wide,” said Sherlock. “Your smile—there’s strain in it. I know how to read a face—yours. You’re uneasy. Tell me what you’re uneasy about.”
James looked away, as though to push the conversation back through the door. “Must we talk about this? You need rest.”
“Don’t evade it.” Sherlock’s voice lowered, taking on that familiar, unreasonable obstinacy. “No matter how brutal the truth is, I want it. That was your doctrine to me earlier. I think it sound.”
James looked at him. His silence, at this point, was less flight than a kind of waiting—waiting for that clever, tireless mind to arrive at the unavoidable inference.
“So far as I know,” Sherlock continued, “wiping one’s hands is indeed a common reaction in a man’s first killing. But there are usually other signs—some strain of anxiety, minute but inescapable; heavier breathing; a wandering, uncertain look… I have watched any number of murderers brought in—some voluntary, some compelled—and their bearing is often much the same. If you were uneasy only because of ‘accidental killing’, you would not be trying to avoid speaking of it—though, as it happens, we are speaking of it now—thank you for granting me the opportunity, pal. A man truly frightened by an accidental death usually carries a kind of loss of control, however slight. But you are different. You are controlling—or trying to control… something deeper.”
He lifted his chin towards the neatly folded towel.
“What you want to wipe away is not dirt, nor evidence of a crime, because in this matter you are innocent—we both know it. But you are not wiping urgently; you are wiping with regularity, as if giving yourself a rhythm to settle into. That suggests you are not afraid of blood. On the contrary—you are afraid of your own reaction to blood.”
James’s lashes trembled again. He brought his eyes back at last; they were like cut glass—edged with irritation at being cornered, and with that reluctant amusement that comes when one must admire the hunter.
“Go on,” he said softly.
“So—” Sherlock said, “what unsettles you isn’t ‘I killed a man’, but ‘I found my reaction afterwards wasn’t right’.”
James looked at him. There was some helplessness in that glance, and more of the stark honesty one shows at a precipice. He let out a breath, as though admitting something shameful and yet undeniable.
“I went to him at once and pressed on the wound,” he said. “I knew what to do. I knew how to stop the blood. I did it—very competently.” That, then, was when he had been blooded.
Sherlock listened without moving.
“And then?” he asked.
James’s throat worked.
“Then I left, because we had no time,” he said quietly. “I let go. He was behind me, bleeding out.”
Sherlock did not avert his eyes. He allowed the words—bleeding out—to fall into the room like a feather settling. Only then did he ask, “No guilt?”
James’s mouth twitched, as though something unseen had pricked at his laugh spot, as though he tried to throttle down an expression that would not be governed.
“No,” he admitted.
Sherlock did not ask why. He pressed, like a surgeon advancing the blade one inch deeper.
“Even—”
James’s mouth made that tiny involuntary movement again.
“Even… a sort of thrill. The blood. The way that life leaving him.”
The moment the words were spoken, James Moriarty’s face grew, paradoxically, calmer—as if laying the thing out upon the table relieved him of having to wrestle it alone. But that calm could not deceive Sherlock. His fingers tightened slowly upon the sheet, as though holding down a coldness rising in him. After a long pause he asked, with a precision almost cruel, turning the question upon himself—
“Does that mean that when I was bleeding, lying there—dying… it was thrilling for you too?”
James’s head snapped up, as though struck clean through the chest.
“Of course it bloody wasn’t!” he nearly shouted; then he checked himself at once, lowering his voice until it rasped.
“You’re my friend. You frightened me, mate. I don’t want to see you die.”
“Then why can it be others?” Sherlock asked. There was no judgement in his tone—only that heart-stopping calm of a man who will have the brutal truth rather than the comfort of ignorance. He was practising, without any doubt, exactly what he preached: truth at all costs.
James’s shoulders sagged the least little way, as though conceding he did not know the answer. His voice was light, almost tired.
“How should I know? I’ve never been good at fitting in with people… not normal. That’s what they told me. Perhaps it’s part of what’s wrong with me.”
Sherlock met his gaze.
“But you seem normal enough with my family. You eat, sleep, drink—good God, you even flirt with my mother… But at least you’re a good partner—no, a good friend? Bestie.”
James’s smile returned—thinner now, and with a bitterness beneath it.
“How do you know?” he said dryly, “Perhaps it’s all an act.”
“Well.” Sherlock spoke slowly, as if stating a fact too plain to require argument. “I don’t think that in the tunnel, when you threw yourself at me, you were acting.”
The words fell like a tack pinning a sheet of paper to the wall. Whatever ailment had seized him now—or had always lain in him like a shadow—whatever coldness followed him like a faithful dog, still, at the very least—at the very least when they had run through Oxford streets together, in the dark of that tunnel, at the Holmes dining-table, here in this room—James Moriarty’s heart had undeniably been beating.
James stared for a beat. Then he smiled—less wide than before, but for the first time wholly sincere.
“Good observation,” he said softly, in simple acknowledgement.
He paused. His eyes drifted to the dark stain at the edge of Sherlock’s bandage, as though reminded of the wiping of his hands.
Outside, the street-lamps flared one by one; their light drew long golden threads across the damp glass. Inside, Sherlock’s eyelids sank at last. The warmth of the drug rose like a tide. He tried to haul his mind back to wakefulness, but the wound and the laudanum worked together against him.
James did not reach again for the towel. He stood by the bed and looked down at the young, pale face. He did not see a fragile piece of porcelain—young, pallid, easily shattered by his father’s blow. He saw, rather, a mirror: not perfectly parallel, perhaps, with small bulges and hollows that threw the reflection askew—yet a mirror nonetheless. In it James could recognise his own eyes, his own mind, burning with the same sharp light in another body as formidable as his own.
Sherlock’s voice, thick with drowsiness, came out muffled, yet still stubborn.
“Don’t go.”
James hesitated, as though those two words had taken hold of him by the coat. He answered in a low voice—the very words he had spoken in that chaos of the tunnel:
“I’m here.”
At that, the last trace of his smile vanished. In its place came something darker, deeper—an unquiet stillness—as though he had at last understood that to stare into a mirror was to come nearer than ever to one’s own heart. This mirror, with its knife-edge accuracy of observation and its soft-and-hard manipulations, had almost drawn out every secret he possessed. True, he might yet deal Sherlock Holmes blows equal to, or even heavier than, those he had received; true, the shattering of that mirror could come in an instant, and their two surfaces would never again run parallel, never again gaze so closely upon one another. Yet for this moment he could sit opposite Sherlock Holmes and truly take part in that single verdict—Good observation.
-FIN-