Chapter Text
John was only eighteen years old when he first met a man that called himself Caspar Moran. It was a completely mundane morning: he had a perfectly normal breakfast and was on his way to the library to study for a test the next day. The sun had even been shining. He was about to grab a coffee when he was inexplicably drawn to an entirely nondescript man sitting on a park bench. It made him uneasy, the almost-compulsion, and the oily taste in his mouth gave him the impression of magic. He suspected the man was some kind of sorcerer experimenting with dark spells he didn’t want to think about – summoning at best, necromancy at worst. He was tempted to leave then and there: the tug at his mind was still light, more a lure than a snare.
Still, tainted by demonic magic or not, the offer was too good to refuse. To a mundane like John, a man without magic living in a world of enchantments, Moran’s gift was water in the desert. A set of magically-cast bullets to pair with the handgun he’d inherited from his father. Bullets that would tear through any ward, any protection, bullets that could even kill those beings of pure magic. The mage assured him that they would be utterly subservient to his will, promised him that they would always fire clear and true – John need only concentrate on his target. When asked why he, of all people, was to receive this blessing, Moran answered in a cryptic tone that he was a Seer and that he knew John would make good use of it.
John returned to the park the night of the next new moon to find Caspar Moran exactly where he said he would be, in the middle of a small clearing with an odd – the only word for it was cauldron – set up over a flame that burnt green. Moran grabbed at his hand without preamble and sliced across his palm with a frankly disgusting rusty knife, holding it over the bubbling concoction. His blood dripped into the pot and created a billowing cloud of dark smoke. He’d warily recited a simple incantation: “blood without magic I offer to bind.” The Seer repeated the process for himself, his blood a strange orange-tinged liquid that made the mixture hiss and spit. John stumbled back as the fire roared, doubled, tripled in size and a terrific howling filled the air. An amorphous shadowy figure rose out of the smoke, two yellow, piercing eyes making John’s breath freeze in his throat. Four blurry shapes that were perhaps legs once upon a time were reaching out to him, and he barely registered Moran shouting something that sounded vaguely German. There was a flash of light and when John opened his eyes the fire and everything with it was gone. Only Moran remained now, holding a rough-hewn box of blackthorn wood; dark velvet cradled seven identical bullets, giving off a faintly golden sheen.
John reached out to touch them, bullets forged by blood and iron and ritual. He had only got close enough to feel the heat they were still giving off from the casting before they and the box winked out of existence. John was sure he’d been duped, tricked into some plot and now in a binding contract with a malevolent force, but Moran convinced him otherwise. Cast by magic, they existed on a different plane when not in use. The bullets would burst back into the physical realm, ready and waiting in the chamber of the gun whenever he had need for them. Then the man himself simply disappeared and John was left wondering if the entire experience had been an elaborate hallucination. But when he returned home he found the box sitting innocently on his bedside table, empty bar a faint, acrid odor.
The first bullet had been used less than a year later, flying straight between the eyes of his mother’s murderer.
Bullets two and three met their targets under the Afghanistan sun, but only after John had a matching wound in his shoulder and a fatally injured comrade.
Bullet four crashed through two windows before lodging itself into the body of a deceptively-simple London cabbie. And that is when John Watson’s troubles began.