Chapter Text
(X) = […]
Error.
[…]
Let’s move on.
William sinks into the bath without ceremony. The steam curls up around him in greeting, warm and comforting as he slides against the porcelain and beneath the surface tension with a long-suffering sigh slipping past his lips. The water is warm enough to pink his pale skin nearly immediately though even still it’s nowhere near the scalding temperature William typically likes to set for himself.
A wry smile twitches at the corner of his lip with that thought. Even in something so mundane, Sherlock is still far kinder to him than William is to himself.
William’s head meets the back of the raised rim, his eyes finding and tracing the textures in the ceiling before finally slipping shut almost on instinct. It’s a calculated risk to let himself relax for a variety of reasons though it’s admittedly the danger of falling asleep that sits neatly near the top. Though rest would hardly be undeserved or unwarranted, there’s still something that deeply troubles William about taking the time for indulgences at all. Even the basic ones.
Hypocrite .
William opens his eyes.
For a moment, reality fails to track with him. Sherlock is moving and breathing and existing just beyond the boundaries of a few walls. William has been invited to stay and invited to bathe; invited to steal even more time as if he weren’t already guilty enough of such a crime for a few more moments of comfort. It’s borrowed time. He’s drawing these twilight hours thin as much as he continues to race towards the sunset because the dichotomy here is that as badly as William wants to die he can’t help but peer into the spaces between the clouds for reasons to continue living.
Will it hurt? Will it be quick? Will there be nothing but darkness in the end?
What of the others? What of Sherlock?
And then, of course, there’s…
“Why do you care so much about your death?”
But there is no easy way for a man to confess that he’s fallen in hate with himself.
There is no easy way to watch others approach with the idea in their head of serene reconciliation when the truth of it is that a sinner has nothing left they’d wish to salvage.
“In another life, perhaps…”
(Sherlock hasn’t read that letter yet.)
Sherlock thinks he’s all caught up but William knows it’s been a long while since he cut the tether. Even now, with his fingertips dancing over the condensation that’s pooled over the bath’s porcelain rim and the heat of the water lapping at his collarbone, William is drifting away. He’s absent from the present and away from the hurt always swelling beneath his skin and threatening to drown him out. He’s escaped before anything could even threaten to give chase because the waves can’t touch him if he’s severed every last cord connecting him to the earth.
Perhaps this is why it’d been so easy to let Sherlock lead him around. The last few weeks have seen William disgraced. They’ve seen him reverted . He’d escaped back to the life he used to live without innocence and honour this time to set him apart. Living in the slums wasn’t something a gutter stray could ever unlearn; how to slink away so that the shadows stick, how to listen for even the most muffled of footsteps now on the hunt for the one man to blame for destroying the civil peace.
While he’d never forgotten his roots, William had adapted to a very different one for the past decade. Returning to the cold and the exhaustion with the eternal refrains of every demon he’s ever battled crawling around within his head had been excruciating. And now here William was in 221b, soaking in the bath and giving over pieces of himself to Sherlock that he’d never meant to.
“Then why…”
William curses aloud.
A wave rolls into his chest and before he can think too much on it, William closes his eyes and slips silently beneath the water.
“Why do you do this?”
Albert is pressing a cloth to his cheek, a deliberate passiveness to his features that William knows very well to read now as a mixture of guilt, conflict, and frustration. The caretaker role isn’t one William’s very convinced he’s familiar with, just as how he himself is unused to being the cared for. So tentatively does the cloth touch his skin, not wrung enough to keep thin rivets of warm water from running down over the rounded curve of his jaw and neck. Though William can’t imagine there are very many occasions where a noble’s son would take on such a menial task, much less for a ward plucked up off of the streets.
It wasn’t Albert who’d spoken. It’s always Louis to drag up the questions that neither Albert nor William can bring themselves to voice.
Louis is standing near the narrow window with his fists balled at his side and grief makes him look far older than he truly is. He hasn’t broken his gaze away from what William assumes is an impressively angry bruise now marring the side of his face and William can sense his anger even from across the room. There’d been a time, not so long ago, that Louis would’ve bit his tongue and not said anything at all. There was a time even more recently where he would’ve waited for Albert to leave, for the false member of their three-person family to usher himself back upstairs into the world he’d live and die a part of.
“Louis,” Albert murmurs, and William squeezes his hands tight as the older boy grazes the scrape where the Lady’s ring must’ve hit him.
“I told him not to get involved anymore.”
Something flickers over Albert’s expression and William can only imagine what he’s thinking.
I should’ve been there.
I should’ve done something.
I shouldn’t have brought you two here.
He’s far easier to read than he believes himself to be.
“I’m alright, Louis,” William assures him— both of them— serenely. He tries a small smile, trying not to get in Albert’s way with the cloth. “I promise there’s no need to be upset.”
“ I was the one who dropped the glass,” Louis hisses back. There’s no heat to his words, there’s so much eating him up from the inside that all William can hear are the unshed tears he doesn’t think Louis even knows how to cry anymore. “ I slipped, I broke it, it was my mistake and you told them it was you!”
Before William can try and soothe his brother, Albert steadies his gaze at him and asks, “Is that true?”
Louis answers. “Of course it is.”
“ William ?”
They’re both staring at him now. William averts his gaze.
Having gotten his answer all the same, Albert purses his lips. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done that.”
It isn’t the last , William knows and the two of them very likely know the same.
William tries to catch Louis’s eye, tries to convey just how needless it is for him to feel guilty for something that William’s done. “I know you’d do the same for me.”
Something twists in Louis’s expression. “Brother, we both know you would never give me that chance.”
The cloth is removed from William’s cheek and Albert glances at him with eerily similar chagrin.
“Either of us,” he says quietly.
William doesn’t enjoy lying to them. He doesn’t find pleasure in deliberately with-holding secrets and he doesn’t like, no one does, keeping things that hurt to keep close to his chest. Spines and thorns grow over secrets and lies, William can feel the brambles of them breaking the skin of his hands.
So he says nothing at all.
Albert regards him a moment before turning to Louis. “Would you mind refilling the basin?”
Seeming to understand he was being dismissed, Louis reaches out for the cloth and porcelain bowl with a nod. He stands to leave with a final long look at William before promptly exiting their room.
William reaches up to press his fingers to the bruise on his cheek. It’s not all that bad, considering some of the other methods of punishment that the Lady isn’t at all shy about employing. He’s been through worse. Both him and Louis.
Albert is watching him gingerly explore the tenderness of his new bruise, a quiet thoughtfulness furrowing his brow and a solitary finger tapping over the bed cover.
“I won’t leave you two alone again.”
“Something like that is impossible.” It is. This is a home full of critical eyes and keen ears, all of them eager to catch even the smallest perceived misstep. Their hearts are twisted up; angry and ugly and forever hungry as wild dogs for catharsis. But Albert seems to need to hear it said and that’s something that William can do for him. He smiles. ”It’s also not your responsibility to keep us from finding trouble.”
“And it’s not your responsibility to always step in.”
“I couldn’t very well just stand by and allow something to happen to Louis. Not even to mention his health is still very delicate.”
“I know that,” Albert says, “though that’s no longer the matter I was referring to.”
Caught by surprise, William very nearly falters. “Oh?”
Serene as ever, Albert continues. “I would say it’s as though misfortune has a way of finding you, but it’s more as if it’s you who seeks out misfortune.” He levels another one of his looks down the proud, straight bridge of his nose. “I know it isn’t truly the same. Louis is your brother, and I know how you care for him but…”
“‘But’…?”
“I’ve come to understand a little better what kind of person you are. Or, I suppose that I’d like to think as much. But trying to understand your motivations only serves to make me more and more curious about the boy who can be as self-sacrificial as he can be vindictive.”
He’s so clearly building to a point. “What is your question?”
Albert’s lips thin. Not a pleasant point then. “Why is it you’re doing this?”
Ah , finally, the heart of it all. A beat passes on a question long expected but still, William hasn’t quite decided what to say. “Is it because you like protecting the weak? Or is it because you think no one else can?”
“You think I enjoy playing martyr?”
“I think ,” Albert corrects firmly, “that in your incredible mind you take it upon yourself to decide who it is that needs protection and you follow through on it. I also think that must be a very heavy burden to bear.”
There’s a pause then, where Albert looks at him with a hesitance that William has now seen for the first time though it’s certainly not the last. It tells everything. This is the edge of the shade he offers in a rainstorm, it’s the last inch of rope keeping William from slipping away into the swallowing darkness. Albert won’t step any further than this.
Perhaps he was too young at the time to know what all of this would mean. Perhaps he hadn’t cared.
William smiles. “I’m fine.”
What he’d needed to hear was: “But do you know how to stop?”
Albert places both of his hands upon William’s shoulders. “I trust you.”
What he’d needed to hear was: “I think it’s important for you to know when to stop. When to care for yourself, too.”
William’s first perfect lie was that he was fine with being alone.
He’d learned through the expenses of trial and error that many of his thoughts and experiences are of a nature quite malleable enough to cork into neat bottles once the initial upset has passed.
Perhaps some people are better at slipping into certain states than others— be it a biological or psychological process, but the sciences haven’t yet evolved to answer that question. The psyche remains a mystery, emotional processes are still thought to be understandable in a medical nature. Provoked, prodded, and studied with an icepick embedded in the brain’s frontal lobe.
As a result, William had learned by a certain point that many of his thoughts and questions were had by him alone and were better left that way.
William rarely speaks candidly. He’s freer with Sherlock than he is with most and even then he’s far more suited to quiet agreements and warm smiles. Let others speak first , he reads somewhere, allow them to fill the silences . It’s how you learn to listen, it’s how you learn to understand the subtle nuances of disappointment in one’s speech, the slant of duper’s delight in one’s whispery falsehood. It’s how you keep the attention from yourself, of course, but more importantly, it’s how you become a ghost in every room and every conversation. It’s how you allow yourself the space to expand and shift into the face you need for the moment. It’s how you learn to make the rules of a game that only you can master, only you can win.
It’s an art. A dance Albert has all but mastered his own sequence of and in doing so has become everything William has tried to be for the past decade of his life. Albert is collected and rational. He is suave and confident in the most alien of circumstances and possesses a forward grace in social situations that William, try as he may, will never truly master so much as imitate. He rocks with the waves, rolls in with the tide, and washes away when the storms roll in. He experiences and embraces turmoil and hatred and misery all with a dignity that can only arise from a strict dedication to the habit. He takes all of it in until he can no longer and when the moment ends he is left empty. Everything corked, everything stacked neatly away and arranged by the first letter.
Who William is— who William truly is— is someone very different from Albert and the others in all the wrong, terribly warped ways. His anger burns hot and bright in his chest and in his hands. If he chooses, if he really wants to, he can feel it with him at all times. A faithful parasite unwilling to leave him alone lest he someday finally give in to its spines. His grudges simmer and his hatred festers alongside the rotten remains of his guilty morality. He is aware, always, of the murky pollution clouding his soul. His crimes, his sins, his violence even in those darkest moments he could have turned away if only he were stronger. His fathomless grief, his reluctance to forgive, his inability to forget.
He knows he is no hero. He knows he has been something he is not for far longer than he was the person he is.
“You asked me once,” William says softly, the night before he leaves the manor for good, “if I liked protecting the weak.”
Smoke hangs off his lips. A bitter, ashen taste clings to the backs of his teeth and corners of his cheeks. It tastes like poison, like other , and not at all does it remind him of himself. There is little left of him that does. The cigarettes aren’t even his.
Even Albert looks at him as though he’s a stranger. Their eyes of late can barely meet before one of them shifts away, scurrying back towards the cover of darkness like the night creatures they’ve been reduced to. Bloodied, warped, different from the children they’d once been with dreams and determination steadying their still lily-white hands. Tonight-- especially tonight-- is no different. Albert swirls his wine and his hands do not tremble but still he cannot look at William.
“I remember,” he answers.
“I couldn’t answer you then.” A piece clicks into its place just then and Albert shifts, turning fully to face him. The hallway feels too wide and too tall, the wing around them too quiet and the meagre duffel at William’s side too impossible to ignore. This is a confession. “I’d like to now.”
Not very long ago Albert had sat on the other side of a confessional window. He’d kept his hands folded, his posture straight and sure. He’d played the role of an arbitrator. The buffer, the decider, the decoy.
“Tell me,” He says. His voice has gone hoarse, an utter betrayal of the confidence William needed from him now.
William swallows around the knives in his throat. He feels the blades of them going down, sinking into and through his heart like the fortune’s tarot he’d once drawn at the behest of a career mystic.
“I do,” he croaks out in answer, the admission pulled from him as though it’d once been hooked with barbs, “Perhaps that makes me a petty humanist— some terrible narcissist with wild delusions of grandeur.”
Albert regards him. “Is that how you think of yourself?”
Is that how you want to be remembered?
What William wants doesn’t matter.
Immortalised forever within the pages of a novel as a villain who cared for no-one other than himself?
He feels sick.
“It’s close enough.”
Pursing his lips, Albert says nothing. Words are swimming in his eyes, waiting on his lips and on his tongue but he’ll never say them. He’d made his decisions just as William had.
What William needed to hear was: “You need to know when to stop.”
“I can’t say anything you haven’t already heard or considered,” Albert says finally. “You must consider what you are, what you have chosen to become, and only then the significance of what you are doing.”
“I know.” William answers.
“Are you able to still separate those lines? Would you be able to turn away now if you could?”
To that, William says nothing. Albert looks as though he’s expected this. He must know this is a formality of sorts, a final farewell in not so many words.
“Your cause is hardly just you anymore,” He continues when William remains silent. They stare at one another, looking for familiarity in one another’s faces and finding only the drawn expression men wear when they’ve aged too quickly too young. “You’ve started a war that needs its conclusion."
William had decided for himself that the world needed changing and the ranks of aristocrats needed purging. He’s enforced his judgment over them for himself, for his rage, and for his ego.
Is there truly such a thing as an unselfish act?
To a child, to whom the world is bleakly set within the bounds of black and white, the answer is ‘yes’. Heroes and villains are the people that make up life itself. Light and darkness. There are no men in the world of gods and monsters
To a man who has learned differently through excruciating trial and error, those who kill the demons are already worse than the demons themselves. Murder is never right. William may not be able to cite the specific differences between right and wrong or truth and falsehood, but he knows one thing very well.
He isn’t a good person.
William emerges from under the water for air just as there’s a tentative set of knocks sounding at the door.
Something sick in him wishes to plunge his head beneath the water. Wait until the air runs out in his lungs and the water rushes in to fill the empty spaces. Wait until his vision goes black and he can no longer wake up. End it all here. End it all now. No theatrics, no dramatic suicide performed for the masses. A quiet death for him and him alone, a relief from all the play-pretending.
But the world needs its show from him and leaving Sherlock to pick up even more evidence of his selfishness hurts to think about.
William slips out of the tub and wraps himself with the towel Sherlock had left.
Stories litter the pale expanse of his body in the guises of scars; the long, whip-thin lines trailing up his wrists and forearms, the reminders of punctures had at the hands of enemies and the spars he’d fought before he’d mastered his unique art of combat. He’d hardly be who he was without them yet every day is a charade of acting as though his young joints haven’t been shot from a lifetime of intensive training and fights for survival, as though he can’t still feel the shrapnel lodged in his thigh from a shattered bullet even Von Herder couldn’t quite manage to get entirely out.
He smooths a hand over the clothes Sherlock had left. A worn button-up and linen trousers, a warm robe that looked nearly new. William smiles and slips them on. The shoulders of the shirt hang over his own and without shoulder pads they fail to lend much of a profile.
William pushes his bangs back from his forehead and leaves the bathroom.