Chapter Text
Something very fragile at last fractured apart the evening Milverton died. It’d pulled long and taut like a fishing line cast too far from shore; it’d caught, snagged, frayed, and snapped all within a single shy instant. Sherlock could hazard his own conclusions towards the specifics of it meant. He could try and puzzle over what its name was and why its loss felt so very monumental but he knew, just as well as William knew, that the true gravity of Milverton’s death lay in something other than the obvious. In not so many words, this event had heralded the beginning of the end of the familiar patterns they had began to tread around one another. A deviation from the mirrored paths they had been so intent on keeping at a parallel pace. It changed things, yet it explained them. Sherlock had turned from the balcony window to witness the pale stone on William’s face, an expression carved so very perfectly to fit that Sherlock could only remain utterly unconvinced of the sadistic nature oft reported of his crueler acts. They’d shown each other their cards now at a critical moment, if perhaps prematurely, and even with a gun levally trained on him, Sherlock knew full well that this charade was a far, far cry from being over. William wouldn’t shoot him, just as he hadn’t shot Milverton. In turn, Sherlock wouldn’t arrest him nor would he throw the secret of the Lord of Crime into the high wind.
In chess, they would call this a stalemate. Two parties at an impasse, neither checked but neither free to move. Neither could win without the other falling, and neither was free of the blood on their hands.
Sherlock, however, would call this a win. He had finally caught up.
Perhaps William’s first mistake had been presuming to know Sherlock as he had. He’d gone forth to calculate scenarios and chance encounters down to the slimmest probable chances of their outcomes with an accuracy that had always before subverted ego and merely became fact. He'd made the mistake of presuming his opponent would dance his part, would stick to the paths William could see he was familliar with. He'd made the mistake of attempting to calculate the heart. Plugged his cold, frigid variables into places they were never meant for and then wondered how such unpredictable circumstances could arise from passion alone when William himself had always been a similar sort of outlier. He'd made the mistake of ignoring his own heart in the equation and wondered why the final answer had read Error.
No matter how it may sound to the casual observer, Sherlock had never once been a stranger to crime.
He'd always been familiar with what made a misdeed so. What worked and what didn't; what was a safe-bet route for success, and what was far more stylish, be it riskier, alternative. What the crime itself could potentially achieve and whether or not the ends well and truly justified the means.
It's precisely because he often enough found the answer to that question to be yes that as a child Sherlock had made a regular habit of running his dragon of a tutor around in circles. Not because he held a personal grudge against her or was cross with having been assigned a particularly unfair summer curriculum, but because he'd elected to dedicate his time towards matters he considered far more personally fulfilling.
So, he'd first begin by patiently waiting her out. Sherlock hadn't ever much been known for demonstrations of restraint but there were important things to gain from ducking into unused rooms filled with covered furniture or plastering himself to the hallway walls. Straining in silence for the echoing click of his tutor's heels as she searched the West wing for him only to repeatedly come up empty. The Holmes summer estate was made up of twists and turns and unnecessary architectural boasts and Sherlock had always done well to make use of the labyrinth. The grand staircase had a creaking fourth step, and the door to the spare room painted all in shades of blue groaned when it was opened even just a touch too slowly. Sherlock knew all of these quirks just the same as he knew that his tutor had begun expending less and less effort in her searches.
In the end, on one particularly memorable occasion, it'd all been enough to execute the seamless endeavor for Sherlock to finally alleviate his boredom with the challenge of picking the lock at the icebox and swiping the shiny new thermometer that'd been installed only a week prior. He'd been meticulous enough to account for his tutor's quick surrender. He'd been persistent enough to hang around until the perfect time of afternoon to see the kitchen servants distracted and busy as they worked to prepare the spread for dinner with no mind to pay towards the young master presumably wandering about for handouts. No one had immediately noticed the theft and, also as expected, Sherlock's tutor hadn't even bothered with raising a fuss for the boy who'd by now made it a habit to skip classes. Though in his earnest opinion, the woman had always seemed far more concerned with comparing his marks to how Mycroft's had been at his age rather than trying to provide any substantial education.
Above all else, Sherlock had never been the kind of child content to build imaginary worlds up around little tin soldiers.
He'd never been the boy that fashions makeshift slingshots to fire rocks at roosting birds. He’d never been the boy eager to escape outside with his friends for bouts of Cowboys & Indians with obnoxious attempts at American accents. Sherlock had never been one to advertise a sense of free carelessness that only ever accompanied children that had yet to learn the fallible nature of man.
Granted, of course, Sherlock had certainly never been a serious child, but he’d also never bothered with daydreaming about the what if ’s beyond the discernible realm of what’s possible, what works. Sherlock didn't play make-believe; he took things apart and stripped contraptions down to the minimal pieces that made them up all to understand why. He wanted to understand the application of theories, though he hadn’t called it as such. He wanted to understand how it was that careful observations and science pieced together to so well create a picture of what happened and the only way to do that was to start with the details and with the basics.
He’d once separated the cogs and bolts from a pocket watch he’d filched from one of his father’s work associates— a disagreeable busy-body of an old man with a dry, constant cough and tinny spectacles that were always slipping down the bridge of his nose— just to see how the pieces meshed beneath its smooth crystal face. He’d once dissected back the skin of a cat he’d found lying stone dead in the back garden. Adipocere had already begun crawling along the corpse, a waxy soap-like substance that had fascinated a young mind not yet able to understand how the body can continue to transform even after the lungs stop pulling breath. Sherlock had strived to understand how anatomy led the physiology, how a single muscle could sit keystone to a body’s wellbeing.
This was his thinking: if the rules can be understood, if the theories can be discerned, then one can look at the world around them and see beyond the massive, unmappable picture so many believed it to be.
Because Sherlock liked to understand. He liked to know the how’s and the why’s and all of the gritty little secrets that explained the mysteries in life no one else liked to talk about. His father had been cross with him when the pocket watch had finally been discovered, strewn about his writing desk among the incomplete scholarly assignments but Sherlock now understood the mechanics of mainsprings and balance-wheels. The au pair had been horrified to find him crouched over the small corpse in the garden but he hadn’t at all done so to be cruel or disturbing. She’d ushered him away and banned his outside privileges for the rest of the week but Sherlock had already discovered a potent interest in the honest findings offered by a dead creature with no means to deceive him.
Material sciences and dead things would be lonely companions to any person who wasn’t Sherlock Holmes.
He pursued what he was fascinated by and he used it up until there was nothing left to learn. There were endless avenues to explore, countless inventions to tear apart, and infinite chemical reactions to test variants of. It was for all of these reasons plus one more that Sherlock had gotten it into his head to steal the thermometer from the icebox— it’d caught his eye.
He’d escaped with his gain to the quiet corner of the library he liked to sulk in. There was a large wing-backed armchair set by the window, both colour-faded and warm from its faithful place in the sun. Sherlock liked the offered privacy here, he liked that he could sit how he wanted and wear what he pleased without someone reprimanding him for something as unimportant as the knot of his tie. He liked that he could escape here to crack open the thermometer over the desk in the library and watch with rapt fascination as the liquid inside pooled onto the laminate.
Caught in a rare beam of Northern English sunshine was an ever-changing prismatic shift in colors over the silvery pale surface. It repelled from itself with jerked, abrupt motions only to creep right back into a single mass writhing in an endless array of shapes and every moment of its demonstration was a sight Sherlock knew right then that he’d never be able to forget.
Quicksilver, Sherlock rolled over within his head as he prodded at the edges of the object of his newest intrigue with the carefully removed touch of a quill. Mercury. The kind of thing that the hatters all go mad from.
When he’d been discovered he’d been scolded, but Sherlock hardly took such things to heart anymore. He’d been given lectures on the dangers of broken glass and chemicals as though he didn’t already know, as though he simply didn’t care and he’d watched as his latest endeavor was swept into a pan and discarded.
Quicksilver, he thinks about later that night as the possibilities of an ever-moving ever-changing shift in appearances and make-up existing beyond the realm of a small puddle of mercury has his fingers curling into fists in excitement. Something you can’t ever be bored of. Something you can’t ever master and know not because of impossibility but because of the lack of stagnation.
Quicksilver, he’ll continue to think about for years after the fact because it was every bit as poisonous as it was beautiful. Every bit as bound by the laws of physics as it blatantly defied them and created its own, independent limitations.
The material sciences and dead things, Sherlock will cite among the only things he ever truly loved. Music played in the tempo of the musician’s passion and practical geology. All poisons and parasitic plants named in the modern realm of botany and, above all, people who would leave him to do as he wanted, when he wanted.
That particular list remained unchanged for years.
An exception is eventually made for the one person to ever enter Sherlock's life with the ability to rewrite every theory and expectation Sherlock had ever made. An exception is made for the one person to take it upon themselves to make every sunrise something to look forward to, every chance meeting something Sherlock hoped for with every corner he rounded.
An exception is made for the one person to ever captivate him with something bright, beautiful, and every bit as untouchable as quicksilver.
“Why me?”
William, unsurprisingly, fails to answer him right away.
This, after all, is a man who is very, very good at pretending and who is very, very accustomed to lying to others. William oft chooses action over the lack of such because the first thing a liar trains themselves to do is divert attention from the things they want to keep hidden.
Sherlock tries to count the seconds that go by before William answers but it's an all but impossible task. Every twitch of the clock feels infinite. Every moment stretches thin before finally pulling into the next, all at once making time impossible to define. Silence hangs heavily in the air of 221b and Sherlock has never been more hyperaware of the sound of his own voice echoing amidst it as he waits for the moment to pass. The rasp of every hard consonant, the rounded drawl of each vowel. He hears it all with the crystal clarity only afforded to those desperate to focus on anything but the things they fear hearing.
The shadows in the room darken as the moon slips behind a veil of clouds. They seem to stick to William, stitching themselves to the black of his coat and the severity in his expression. He bears so little resemblance to the playful Noahtic passenger Sherlock had once met. He's an unthinkable stranger to the gentle professor Sherlock had taken lunch with an eternity ago. Something weary has settled into the lines that make up his face, something haunted lurking in the lightless stare he wears. He appears to Sherlock much like a ghost of his former self; a wraith-like apparition crafted from the dullest threads of the man's true heart.
The devils are here, William had said. Spoken and recited as though it were a mantra inscribed upon his tongue rather than the lines of a great man’s fictitious play.
It's suffocating. Sherlock has finally, finally encouraged William into speaking candidly with him. He's gotten answers; hell, he's nearly gotten more dialogue here in the span of a few moments than William has ever before offered within the entire duration of their relationship. It's everything Sherlock has been looking forward to and every second of it tastes like ash.
Sherlock was a fool to have ever thought he'd caught up. He's still chasing William even as he stands but a few feet in front of him. He's still trying to understand, he's still trying to learn. He's still searching for something, anything to drag this conversation into a place where he can at last tell William that there's nothing he could possibly do at this stage to make Sherlock turn from him.
Unfortunately, William won't like hearing that.
Unfortunately, William will be inclined to ignore him.
I'm going to save him is what Sherlock had boldly proclaimed to the two in the carriage, and he'd meant it.
I'm going to save him is a powerful promise for someone to make when the man who needs saving wants nothing less.
Beyond simply having the gall it takes to strike up a bargain with the Queen herself on behalf of the nation's most high-profile criminal, what Sherlock has done only accounts for the after. It's too easy to jump to what should be the next step rather than linger on the possibilities of the very near future. What Sherlock needs for the now more than anything is an opening. He needs an opportunity, a window. Any small ledge where Sherlock can dig in his heels to help shoulder the weight of everything William so stubbornly refuses to share. He needs William to offer him a hand no matter how hesitant it may be. He needs William to wordlessly understand that there are a million things Sherlock has to say to him, but each one needs an invitation.
And why is that? Sherlock thinks in that moment of infinity. The shadows flickering on William’s face create so many haunting visuals that the word quicksilver balloons into the space of white noise behind Sherlock’s eyes to remind him that he’s staring down the barrel of impossibility. Is it the thought of rejection stopping me?
That's a new feeling. Sherlock has never been one for restraint. Nor has he ever felt so burdened with the fear of eclipsing someone else's affections.
'Rejection' is a very human concept of fear, Mycroft would say. Because Mycroft has always seemed to know things that Sherlock would learn only when it's very nearly too late. Mycroft has always had everything Sherlock holds fractures of, he's as different as he is a complete eclipse and Sherlock hates him for that as much as he admires him. There is no other creature alive that worries about the same silly nuances of emotion, no other creature that would stand here beneath the weight of a nation and a man’s life and still find it within themselves to worry about the possibility of ‘rejection’.
For reasons-- for the sake of upholding his promise, for the sake of not turning a blind eye from the tortured psyche of a man he would call “friend”-- Sherlock wishes to convince William not to fall victim to his own orchestrations. If ever there were a man to deserve a second chance, if ever there were a physical, tangible example of how Kant’s Kingdom may be challenged, it would be William. Sherlock’s own more selfish desires to see William with a future ahead of him remain factors in his endeavor to a secondary degree. They must remain there, after all, lest he be denied with a sad smile in the same fashion he was certain those in the syndicate were.
William wants to die. These words fail to describe the sentiment. He wishes to no longer continue living. True, without him, the sun would still rise tomorrow morning, people would still chatter over breakfast tables, there would still be music and art and political conversation and war and crying and fighting and fucking and the world would continue to turn, just as it's always done. Everything would remain in its rightful cosmic place. There would be no more fear of an elusive, highly capable criminal. There would be no more tension between the shoulder blades of every person who ventured out under moon-fall, no more fear that they would next fall victim as the Lord of Crime’s supposed morals devolved to unfettered bloodlust.
No more chance encounters with a clever young man in possession of a tongue as sharp as his wit. No more kind eyes and bleeding hearts to give for the people in circumstances William could hope to help on an individual, personal level. No more of the gossamer craftsman who wound his web to try and fill in the cracks an imperialist society has created at its very foundation— where men, women, and children slip and fall only for their cries to go unheard. No more opportunities for the people who love him to tell him so. Maybe with enough time, he'd have believed them.
For every reason there is to convince someone of living there resides an equal one encouraging surrender. For every argument Sherlock attempts to make, William will have already mulled it over until it’s little more than a murky slur of generic senseless optimism. People who wish to die truly make tragic, terribly talented disputants.
That’s the thick of it, after all. There are no reasons to live other than for yourself. For what you can achieve, see, hear, smell, atone for, hope for. You cannot rely upon others for your happiness.
To surmise: William needs a reason. Without one, he falls.
There's a need, right now, for vulnerability above all else. Which is something neither of them can seem to convince themselves to give. There's too much to lose, there's too much uncertainty. There's too large a gap between them now borne of misunderstandings and the fear of shoveling this trench deeper and Sherlock refuses to take the first step because he can’t. He's more human in the end than he’d realised. He’s frozen into the theories of what could happen, after all. Running variables through his head in his own way of computation. The logic is failing. Nothing William is doing is making sense anymore, even as precisely as he explains everything. William seems to think that if he repeats things enough, if he recites them coolly enough, this will eventually speak them into truth.
And Sherlock is the same. Stuck fast beneath the way William’s gaze on him goes blank because all William ever does is slip away and hide under circumstantial excuses and that increasingly paper-thin reasoning.
We are very different, Sherlock has begun to realise the more he came to know the man standing across from him. All along it’d been their differences that drew them closer rather than their similarities; what it is that’s missing.
William was the one who felt and imagined and dreamed while Sherlock observed and doubted and reasoned.
Sherlock refuses to take the first step forward because he can't stand the thought of giving too much away. William refuses to take the first step forward because he won't accept that there's anything left to try for.
“I—” William finally starts and Sherlock tries not to stare. He tries not to notice the streams of blue moonlight highlighting the troubles clouding William’s eyes. He tries not to think about how long it takes for William to pull his composure back up this time around, how his smile at the beginning of this encounter had all but failed to convince either of them that William was alright.
Something had happened. Something was happening. Something was crawling around in William’s head intent on destroying that last lovely piece of patient kindness as the curtain hesitated on the last rope to drop.
Sherlock needs an opening, an opportunity, a window.
He's the very last line of defense. He holds the final page of the script.
William knows this.
“…I need to be leaving,” William says instead. Hollow, quiet. He tears his gaze away from Sherlock’s and the connection is immediately missed. It’s harder to force the truth out of him this way, it’s harder to catch it.
William slips and falls and falls and nobody is going to be there at the bottom to catch him.
Almost mechanically, William reaches a gloved hand into his jacket pocket. He retrieves two envelopes to pass over to Sherlock as the top hat he’d been holding politely behind his back makes its reappearance.
Just like that.
No dramatics, no fighting. He was leaving nothing behind but the reminiscent cold of a pinched flame. Devoid of warmth, devoid of humour. As though everything they’d been through together totaled up in the end to deserve nothing more than a neutral farewell and a final insistence of dishonesty.
William is still avoiding Sherlock’s eyes.
He’s pursing his lips, he’s hiding his expression beneath the shadow of the brim of his hat, there’s something he’s leaving unsaid.
There’s something that tells Sherlock in a sudden bubble of near-anxiety that this right here is going to be the last chance he has to claw into the truth and wrest it free.
“Liam,” he hears himself say. It goes ignored.
“In the white envelope, you’ll find the final place and time—”
He isn’t going to give me an opportunity. He’s allowing for nothing.
“—and in the black...” William pauses, his fingers already curled around the door handle. “…Well, don’t feel as though you need to even bother.”
He’s leaving.
William isn’t just a person attempting the transition into a catalyst, he’s a person who’s just as unpracticed at the science of human connection as Sherlock is. He’s better at pretending he isn’t, he’s even better at convincing himself he’s not as alone as he is but there has never been a moment that William’s allowed himself the simple relief of honesty and Sherlock damn well knows it.
The door opens. There’s the familiar slow, heaving groan of the unoiled hinges sliding into one another as it goes, the quiet swish of William’s coat swinging around his legs.
There’s the same feeling, stronger this time, that this is Sherlock’s last chance.
Sherlock had been too young to really know why quicksilver was how it was when he'd broken that thermometer. The world of natural sciences had similarly been naïve. They both fell short in both experience and learning though not for a lack of effort.
(Quicksilver retains and it absorbs. It reflects and it stubbornly clings to itself. Beautiful, untouchable, unchangeable. Quicksilver is the way it is because it refuses to share.)
Quite unlike the world and the boy in the wing-backed armchair, however, Sherlock did know that he'd never once backed down from a challenge.