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He's missed something. He's sure of it.
He calls up the memory of their last meeting — last meetings — flicking through the scenes like he's leafing through a photo album, his fingers catching on the edges.
There. Not the two of them alone but a moment in the dining room, all five of them, Mycroft moved into Silas's place, Beatrice beside him in sharp-smiled mockery, James next to Sherlock on the opposite side and — yes, there. Mycroft telling a story, a rare thing; Beatrice laughing, rarer; and James was looking at Sherlock, instead of anyone else.
Another. His bedroom at Appleton, an old experiment made possibly useful, a chemical composition unravelled in the pursuit of some small truth. It was a case that barely filled a day, a local curiosity, but there the memory of himself stands in the silence of his mind working and there's James, watching him.
Any two points can make a straight line, of course. A third, then: to call it a fight in a back alley would imply some kind of battle of strength, or wits. This, then, is simply a demonstration of how well Sherlock takes a beating. On the other side of the melee there is James and his readiness, and the fellow who would have politely asked for their wallets is on the ground before he's got the first introductory remarks out of the way. His friends are less talkative but more ready with their fists. Sherlock steps back, watches a foolish ghost get punched in the mouth, watches James dislocate a man's arm without looking before stepping over one prone and groaning body to pull Sherlock's assailant off him and shove him bodily into the wall.
"I could have handled that," Sherlock says, in stereo with himself.
"Forgive me for stepping on your delicate feelings," James says, grinning in that loosened way he gets, with blood on his mouth and his knuckles. They are very much not alone but he's looking at Sherlock like there's no one else here but him.
The wrong Sherlock, the real Sherlock realises after a beat. The version of himself with a bloody nose is playing third wheel in his own reality, as the memory of James holds steady eye contact with someone who was not there.
"This is not how it went," Sherlock points out. "You were looking at me, and I didn't understand what I was seeing."
James fishes a handkerchief out of the ghost's pocket and starts to wipe his hands. "And it took you this long to come back and have another look?" He glances up, like he's making sure he has the full attention of every Holmes in attendance, and grins.
"I have been preoccupied. And you, by the way, are not supposed to answer me."
"Is that right?" James says, slipping his hands into his pockets, stepping over a body (frozen in inattention, not dead — Sherlock remembers the villains were all still moving before they left) to stand closer to the real Sherlock. "Can you touch anything, in here?"
"No," the real Sherlock says, as the foolish ghost says, "Yes."
Sherlock dismisses everyone but James, the alleyway emptying like a cleared stage.
"Those are the rules. I didn't make them," Sherlock reminds him. Both of them.
"And in all the time you've known me, have you noticed a predilection for rule following?"
"Only when it suits you."
That ever-ready smile deepens at the corners. "Then it doesn't suit me in here, does it?"
The memory of James steps closer, and raises a steady hand to brush across Sherlock's cheek. Sherlock almost feels it, like the longing for a breeze on an unbearably still summer's day, conjuring relief out of nothing.
James's fingertips come away bloody.
"You didn't do that," Sherlock says, wonderingly.
"But maybe I wanted to. Is that what you saw when you looked at me, Sherlock?" he asks, as lightly as though all this was a joke.
"Helpful as always, James," Sherlock says, and the sarcasm doesn't hit, not even in here.
James finally looks away, his gaze sliding to his own hand still held in the air between them like a forgotten prop. He wipes his thumb across his fingertips like he's checking his nails, a portrait of insouciance, and Sherlock grabs his wrist.
He's not — he's not holding anything, of course, but James looks at him anyway. Drops his gaze to Sherlock's mouth.
Sherlock touches his hand — his real hand — to his real face, and looks down at his own blood. His back is against the wall, cold and damp, an ache blooming in his jaw, his side, his ankle from the first stumble. Appalling, really. He thought he was getting better at this.
"In my defence, there were four of them," he says, from memory. James is standing in front of him, a hand on Sherlock's shoulder as he crouches down an inch or two to get a proper look at his face, the bruises already aching, the inevitable blood. This is what happened.
"Well then it's a good thing I took on three by myself, isn't it," James says, and pats his shoulder twice before... not pulling away, like he did the first time. The real time. This false memory leans his weight into his hand and pins Sherlock against the wall like a weight in a dream, an invisible force impossible to fight against. He grins at Sherlock like he's just told him a riddle and is waiting for him to solve it.
"Are you deliberately trying my patience?"
"I'm deliberately trying something," James says, the angle of his jaw, the tilt of his mouth like —
"You're flirting with me," Sherlock deduces. He's seen it often enough, gathered enough data to — apparently — recreate an acceptable facsimile within his own mind. "But that's not the way you were looking at me earlier."
"But isn't this better?" James says, his smile just as easy, just as inviting. "This is something you understand and can therefore ignore."
"My own mind is deploying you as a distraction," Sherlock says, like the key to break a spell. This false James just raises an eyebrow.
"Or, you are ignoring the obvious that is staring you right in the face," James says, punctuating his point with four jabs to Sherlock's sternum, his fingertip tapping over his heart. "What do you see, Sherlock?"
There are four of them, now. Two memories standing alone in an alley, staring at each other, while Sherlock stands two paces away again with this false James, who his mind has apparently conjured like a helpful teacher at his side.
"What do you see?" Sherlock counters, glancing at him.
"Ah, now, you won't learn anything if I just give you the answers," James says, looking for all the world like he's enjoying himself.
"You could give me a hint," Sherlock says, sounding childish to his own ears.
His companion looks at him, dark-eyed and fully-focused for a long, slow moment. It's a remarkable impression of how he usually stares at him, like there's no one else in the world he'd rather be watching. "Two people on a stage," James says, eventually. "Which one are you looking at?"
"Whichever one is doing something interesting," Sherlock says, immediately, because he can never resist showing off.
"And miss the other one entirely? You've got to watch the assistant if you want to know how the trick is done."
Sherlock glances at himself, the other self, bloody-nosed and still standing against the wall, looking at James like —
"I was there. I don't need to study what I did."
"Don't you?" James says, and Sherlock glares at him. This false James steps away, out of sight, ghosting around behind him until he can murmur in Sherlock's other ear: "What is it that you want, Sherlock?"
A step back, a different memory. They've returned to his bedroom, golden light streaming through the windows, the proof of a forgery laid out clearly on the table, triumph in every angle of his own memory's shoulders. James is watching him, yes, but the memory plays out: the pleased inhale, the turn to his friend, the held breath as both past and present Sherlock realise just how close James is standing.
"No time to waste," that foolish ghost says, grabbing the paper blindly from the desk and spinning on his heel, leaving James to watch him go with something soft and fond and dark on his face, with all the sugar-brown shadows that golden light makes.
A reset, a breath still held. Two memories standing face to face as Sherlock steps closer. He looks at James first, of course, who is too caught up in staring at his past self to notice, his expression a symphony; the familiar motifs of delight and longing, the low bass of something unsaid.
"I think we both know what I want, by now," his companion says, quiet, close, and there's a heat low in Sherlock's stomach that snaps to life like a struck match. "Is that what you came here to see?"
No. The truth lies somewhere in his own face, but glancing at himself feels rather like trying to read his own entrails while sliced and splayed open on an operating table, every nerve and vessel and gross twisted thing laid out raw for anyone to see. Everything messy and obfuscated. It's hard to look at it long enough to pick out what's useful.
"No, that's never really been your forte, has it?" his James says, stepping into view behind his own sunlit copy. "Would you like me to tell you what I see? Or are you just afraid of your own reflection?"
"I'm not," Sherlock lies. "I'm just not a narcissist, despite what some people might say."
"Is this really how you see me?" his haunting says, studying the light falling across his own face. "Your own personal Adonis. Or Galatea, I suppose." He looks at himself like a sculptor, admiring the flaws.
"Hardly," Sherlock says, pointed, but there's a small truth he can admit: it's not easy to look at James sometimes and not see how the light catches on everything that makes him sharp, the ambition and the judgement and the envy, the flaws in him flashing hard and dazzling. It's difficult to look at him when it sparks something low in his stomach, mirror-light, that burns hot and dangerous and blinding —
His companion grins anyway. "What would you have me do, Pygmalion, if you weren't being a coward?"
"Stop calling me a coward," Sherlock says.
"Make me," James says, his smile a bright and dangerous thing. "Give that mind of yours some action to consider, if the minutiae of an expression are too much of a puzzle for you. Isn't the advantage of this place that you can try every solution until you find one that fits?"
Sherlock folds his arms. "What would you suggest I try first?"
"Whatever comes to mind, I'd say," James says, his gaze sliding from himself to catch Sherlock's eye, the light catching his jaw as he lifts it. A challenge, then. Sherlock prides himself on rising to those.
A first attempt. What comes to mind is this: a memory that never happened, a puzzle abandoned as his own statue comes alive again. It's easier to watch James, the hitch of his smile, the way his gaze drops from Sherlock's eyes to his mouth, the way he draws his arm back and punches Sherlock firmly across the mouth.
"Jesus," his James says, stepping back.
"No?"
"No, Sherlock," he says, pityingly, and the scene resets.
Another: it's still James who moves but he follows the first simple truth, the line of desire. Sherlock watches as James kisses him. Both memories are standing still with their arms at their sides like two actors in a school play who don't speak outside of rehearsals but have been told they'll get detention if they don't stop mucking about and do it properly.
Sherlock says, "To be fair, I don't know how you kiss. Or how I kiss, come to that."
"Well, I don't think any practice in here would really count for real world experience, but we could give it a go?" his James says, something loping in the way he crosses the room towards him, something self-assured and coiled.
Everyone looks at him, all three of them, and James glances around. "I think you're telling on yourself, Sherlock. Is this what you want?"
Sherlock takes a deep, steadying breath, closing his eyes, and huffs it out through his nose.
"I'm sure that overactive imagination can do better," James says, a whisper beside his ear, and Sherlock doesn't waste his breath pointing out that his imagination conjured this James well enough.
Not action transposed. Not inaction. Not seduction. There's one way to make sure he doesn't have to watch himself as he stumbles through this again: Sherlock opens his eyes and he's beside the table, triumph squaring his shoulders, James backlit with gold and smiling in front of him. The silence between them is the most out-of-place thing.
If this is supposed to feel natural: "I think you should say something," Sherlock says, as an opening gambit.
"I am, as ever, enamoured with your genius," James says, gamely mocking.
"Enamoured?" Sherlock queries, tilting his head like James does when he flirts.
"Well, if we're being honest," he says, mirroring him, holding the game open, and Sherlock sees the moment the light shifts. "Although, in that self-same spirit, I'll admit I don't understand why you waste your time on trivialities. All that genius and you're using it to, what, prove one poor woman's house should belong to the other poor woman?"
"That was a very eloquent look you were giving me," Sherlock says, frowning.
"Ah, see, the man does recognise a spade when one is digging a hole with it. You should trust your instincts more. See where it leads you."
"I've seen what ambition does to a man."
"Makes him great? Makes him change the world?"
"We've had this argument before," Sherlock points out.
"And maybe this time I'll let you win, seeing as you're the one hosting."
"I think we've gotten away from the point—" he says, lifting his hands to grasp James's lapels, because this is his overactive imagination and surely he should be able to do whatever he wants.
"You set this ball rolling, Sherlock, you can't complain it starts knocking things down," James says, and grabs Sherlock's wrists. Which shouldn't be possible, but he can imagine the heat of his hands, the too-tight grip of his fingers, the way James is standing too close and looking at him too intently.
"Is this what might have happened?" Sherlock asks, mocking, holding himself still.
"This is the truth you keep shying away from. I have seen the rot at the heart of your family, do you really think I can't see the worms roiling in your guts?"
Sherlock swallows. Lifts his chin. "You think I'm weak. That I don't have the stomach for this."
"I think you're a rare diamond with a crack running straight through the heart of you, but I still want you. That's the thing you can't look too closely at, isn't it, because then you'd have to admit you feel exactly the same way about me." The line of his smile is a blinding flash, a plunge into darkness. Sherlock tries to pull away; James's hands grip him like a jeweller's vice.
"Jesus, it's like someone's holding up a mirror between us sometimes," James says, throwing his head back to laugh, mad and loosening, and then he's crowding close like there isn't a breath between them.
"You can't admit you want me, even in here," he says, tapping Sherlock's temple. And Sherlock, just to prove him wrong, lunges forward to kiss him like a punch.
It's messy, blurred, an unfocused rush of sensation; teeth, heat, grasping hands. They grapple against whatever surface Sherlock's imagination proves. He's seen enough to know how they would fit together, jagged edges and yielding spines, matching cogs misaligned and grinding out sparks with every grip.
"You're right. That's how we'd kiss," James says, breathless and laughing, blood on his mouth. Sherlock tries to kiss him again, to shut him up, to stoke the heat that's banking in his stomach, but James presses a hot hand to his jaw and holds him back.
"Where's the fun in making things easy?" he murmurs, and laughs like a severed artery as Sherlock strains against him.
"I could make you yield," Sherlock says, and doesn't believe it for a moment.
"Not even in here," his James says, knowing, grinning. "It's hard to build a world you can't imagine."
"Third time's a charm," Sherlock says, and steps back.
A previous scene: the dining room, a family dinner which somehow always includes James without question. Sherlock only calls the principle actors to the stage, the two of them alone, smiling at a story that hangs silent in the air.
"What a rare treat it is to have your full attention," James says, and it's not the memory sitting there beside him, smiling with blood still on his teeth. "It's a shame it only happens when I'm not actually in the room with you."
The rest is how Sherlock remembers it; warmth and wine, no urgency or anywhere else to be, a glimpse of how things could be if everyone held themselves to their best behaviour. His elbows resting inelegantly on the table. James's knee pressed against his own.
"Go stand over there," Sherlock says to his new personal haunting. "I want to look at this moment properly."
"I'll save you the trouble," James says, his hand dropping down to grip Sherlock's thigh. "You're wondering how long we can keep playing happy families before I get bored."
"Is that what I saw? Boredom?"
"No," James says, laughing already. "Your family, Jesus, the seas will empty and skies will boil before you run out of ways to entertain me. But you still wonder."
"If this is what you want," Sherlock says, studying him. It's not easy to tell which James this is; his face is clean, his eyes are dark. He looks at Sherlock's mouth like he knows what it's like to kiss it.
"Of course it is," James says, holding his gaze steady, but Sherlock has learnt that home is something unstable and transient and liable to collapse in a dramatic fashion. There will always be a rot at the heart of his family. There's a space on the other side of the table that James is pointedly not looking at.
They've had this fight once tonight already.
"Do you want to go over the minutes?" his James says, sitting back in his chair. "I believe you called me a shameless user of women, an ambitious nihilist, a harlot —"
"You called me blind, idiotic, narcissistic, lackadaisical —"
"I was quite pleased with that one."
"I could tell," Sherlock says, and the hook of James's smile still twists something in his chest.
James prompts, "and then I said —"
Sherlock heaves a sigh, and repeats: "Not every fuck has to tilt the axis on which the world turns."
"We're just business partners," James says, again, the memory of him fresh and painted bold in Sherlock's bedroom.
"A horrifying thought even without the fringe considerations," Sherlock says, standing in for himself, an unwilling understudy. He rests his weight against the table as James sits by the window: still comfortable, here, in Sherlock's space.
"An operation like your father's does not simply vanish in a puff of smoke. We're dismantling it safely."
"Without my input. Or Mycroft's. Or my mother's."
"It's better if you don't know the details."
"Better for who, exactly?"
"Do you really want to do this all over again?" James says, a presence warm and real at his side. "It doesn't end prettily."
Sherlock ignores him. "You keep insisting everything you do is for us and yet I have yet to see any evidence of anything other than your selfish, dangerous ambition!"
"Perhaps a little reciprocity would be a good start," the echo of James says, his voice dropping dangerously low. "But perhaps it's the word us you're having trouble with. You know what I want. You've seen it a thousand times. What is it that you want, Sherlock?" he says, surging to his feet, fists clenched at his sides.
Sherlock sways back like a punch was thrown across the silence. "Come talk to me when you figure it out," James says, and storms out of the room.
"Well, that could have gone better," his companion says, picking through the whiskey bottles that have slowly migrated to his room since he — the real James — started staying over.
"You're not helping," Sherlock says, pressing both hands to his face.
"I should hope not. I'm on his side, obviously."
"Obviously," Sherlock echoes. He could let the memory roll on, watch himself go strange and still as he retreats inwards, keep playing it over and over until he figures out the point where he should have done something differently —
"Do you want another go on the merry-go-round?"
"Not especially," Sherlock says, and drags his palms down.
"Would you like to know what I think?" James asks.
"I don't feel like I have much choice. Go on."
"I think there's no point in hiding the truth from yourself. From everyone else, sure, if that suits your fancy. But the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, those are what hold us together, and unless you build them around something strong and true then you're likely to come crumbling down at the first test of who you actually are."
"You think I need to be more forthcoming with the truth?"
James grins. "I've heard it'll set you free."
"Fine," Sherlock says, folding his arms. He looks at this James, sharper than a memory, standing in Sherlock's space like he belongs here. He says, "I trust you with my life. I would trust you with my family's life. But I do not trust that you have the world's best interests at heart."
"The world's best interests? Jesus, suddenly he's a patriot." James slips into a mockery of Mycroft's accent like he's slipping on a coat — "to be an Englishman is to have the honour of uploading the order of the world" — and out of it again, rolling his shoulders like he didn't like the fit. "Is that right? You think we should be building a kinder, better world together?"
"Brick by brick, small victory by small victory, I think we could," Sherlock says, lifting his chin.
James looks at him, the moment stretching, and then he huffs the smallest laugh. "You have to admire the man's optimism," he says, almost to himself, and then looks at Sherlock properly. "You should know by now, anything that can be given can be taken away just as easily," he says, suddenly close, his hands on the table either side of Sherlock's hips. "It's far better to steal what you want," he says, and crushes a kiss to Sherlock's mouth.
Sherlock tries to chase it, but James holds him back with a warm hand over his heart. "What is it that you want, Sherlock?" he murmurs, quiet as a breath, close enough that Sherlock can see every flaw in his expression; the uncertainty in the depths of his eyes, the jump in his cheek as he swallows.
"I'm afraid I haven't been entirely fair to you," Sherlock says, and taps his own temple. "In here."
"Do I sense an apology coming on?" this James — the real James, of course, because third time is the charm — says, that easy smile hooking itself into his mouth. "No, don't embarrass me with the elaborate grovelling, I couldn't possibly stand for it —"
Sherlock wraps his fingers around the lapels of James's waistcoat, the wool warm from his body heat, rough under his skin, and kisses him properly.
The ghost in his head was wrong: they move together like they were made for it, heat catching in every way they align. James shudders a gasp against his mouth and opens completely, kissing Sherlock the same way he looks at him, like he wants to devour him whole but he's going to take his sweet time doing it, savour every taste, every new fascination. It's slow, pointed, imprecise. Sherlock already knows he is going to turn this memory over so many times that one day it will gleam like a jewel.
"Finally, the man sees what's right in front of his face," James says, a soft laugh against his mouth.
"This is not a shortcut to winning an argument," Sherlock says, already seeing how every disagreement in the near future is going to go —
"Are you sure about that?" James says, and kisses him quick and light like something sparkling, radiant.