Author's Note: This is literally word vomit. The biblical allusions leaped out at me after my 2nd viewing of Reichenbach, and they wouldn't let my voice go until I'd spouted them into a stream of consciousness-cum-fic!plot. There's a good chance this might be taken down, once I muster up enough shame. Sorry for the babbling, and if I misinterpreted anything... well, suffice to say I'm no theology scholar.
By no stretch of the imagination was John Watson a God-fearing man. His plea of, "Please, God, let me live," on the fields of Afghanistan was no statement of faith, nor was it meant to be a deathbed reconciliation with spirituality. It was out of desperation and—dare he think it—propriety that he called out to a higher power; it seemed the thing to do, when one was in a situation beyond their control. Or perhaps it had been the child in him, the one who sat through Sunday morning sermons all those years ago, that had coated his tongue with divine inspiration in what he had believed to be his last seconds. Then again, perhaps not. He doesn't like to think about it.
But unfortunately, he was living—had lived, remember—with a flatmate preprogrammed to make him think.
And so slowly, subliminally, John came to learn about sin. And with knowledge of sin came an awareness of religion. It wasn't the war that taught him this, no, nor the aphorisms handed down to him in the pews. His divinity teacher, defrocked and bedecked in Vivienne Westwood, was Jim.
Jim from IT, the unassuming gay man.
Jim Moriarty, consulting criminal.
Moriarty, evil incarnate, with the devil's own darkness in his eyes.
For all of Mycroft's frightfully unsubtle taunts about his bravery and stupidity, and Sherlock's careless dismissal of his intelligence, John isn't stupid. Because the height of stupidity was not knowing one's limits, and of all the things John knows, what he knows best is when to back off. John knows when he's looking at something beyond his ken. He knows when he's in over his head, and while there's adrenaline to be found when you're that far deep, he doesn't like the bitter tang of finality he gets at the back of his throat when he's aware there's no way out.
But facing Moriarty rockets him right past that warning taste in his mouth. It takes him right to that copper-scented, bloody edge of fear that John hasn't truly felt since the word "God" trip-tumbled off his bone-dry tongue.
And so, through fear, John learns about sin, and through sin he learns about belief. And the entire lesson was wrapped up inside a psychotic parcel that dressed nicely and looked about fifteen years old, even though the evil in his eyes was ageless.
John has a nebulous concept of the soul. Like many, he cannot quantify it. Unlike many, it doesn't bother him. He believes there's something inside everyone, yes, some spark of something, some kind of conduit that takes the heart—not the anatomically correct one that he's operated on before, but the symbolic one drawn by kids on Valentine's Day—and the brain—also not anatomically correct, but the one symbolic of thoughts and reasoning—and funnels them through a sieve unique to each person, so that what comes out is wholly different from one human being to another.
But while John cannot identify the existence of a soul, he can recognize the dearth of one.
Because if the soul is a tiny, sky-blue spark nestled in the ribcage, then where Moriarty's should be, there is, no doubt, a black hole.
There is a special place in some alternate, damned plane for men who mess with other's mortality for fun. John knows about death. He knows about life, too. He knows about killing, and saving, and the gray area in between.
And he knows that Moriarty's evil goes beyond homicide. If John were poetic, he'd call it soul-murder, because Jim Moriarty simply does not care. He does not care that there is a person on the other end of his henchmen's knife. He does not care that a boy-child counting down the seconds to his own death is morally wrong on innumerable levels. He does not care that wrapping an old woman in explosives to guarantee someone's attention is going too far.
Moriarty is unwitting of the humanity that he destroys. He does not see the sky-blue spark he snuffs out.
Perhaps it's blasphemy to think this, but John would like to believe that the devil is aware of his own evil. What do you call a man who is so steeped in sin he cannot even tell the depth of his own depravity?
Everything that Moriarty touches seems marked with a cross of black ash. John knows he's mixing his religious metaphors, because isn't the cross that's drawn on foreheads come Ash Wednesday a symbol of good? But for a man with teachings unraveled years prior, John allows himself the inaccurate imagery, because there is something haunting about seeing that dark mark on another person's head.
There's Mycroft, another man touched by Moriarty's evil, and while John doesn't remember much about biblical figures, he knows the name made infamous by betrayal: Judas.
Judas, who gave up his friend, mentor—spiritual brother—for coins of silver. Mycroft, who trades Sherlock's life story for computer codes.
How John kept himself from reaching out towards Mycroft's neck with both hands curled into vengeance-seeking claws, he doesn't know. He used to think Sherlock's feud with Mycroft was child's play, literally. Just two brothers who had grown up, but hadn't had that cathartic moment of mano a mano wrestling in the front yard to settle their differences. But Mycroft's willingness to hand over Sherlock's story—to put Sherlock's privacy, valued so highly by such an isolated man—into the hands of an actual maniac reeks of sin. Not God-shall-smite-you sin, no, because while John sees religion clearer now, he's not quite at that level yet, but against-your-fellow-man sin. The type of sin committed every day, by ordinary people.
But Holmes men, John tells himself, are not ordinary people. They are above these petty back-stabbings, aren't they? They're the puppeteers, the thinkers, the brains behind the operations. They stop crime. They occupy "minor" roles in British government. Lestrade calls them good men, even if they're not yet great.
So why do Mycroft's actions taste of unlit fires and brimstone?
And lastly, there's Sherlock, with Moriarty's mark on his mind, and a pair of black angel wings fluttering behind him. John saw the graffiti outside Baker Street, in the few seconds he had to look sideways while Sherlock dragged him—at gunpoint, yes, that works—down the street. Again, John is merely grasping at straws, because he doesn't know all that much about religion anymore, but even those with a passing knowledge of religious symbology know that black wings signify a fallen angel. And—although John had to look it up at this point, and fuck, it hurts not to have to delete his search history anymore, because who would snoop for it other than Sherlock?—the most famous fallen angel of them all was Lucifer.
Thanks to the bounty of Wikipedia, John knows that Lucifer comes from the Latin lucem ferre, light-bringer. Sherlock, the carrier of light. The man whose genius, whose intelligence shines so brightly it can blind people to his good and make them see only his arrogance. Sherlock, like Lucifer, the one cast out; the isolated, the one alone. Sherlock might as well have confirmed the parallel himself; he did say that John was a conductor of light, which would make Sherlock the light itself. Nothing will shake the allusion for John, not ever.
And it will always stay with him, the way Sherlock looked as he fell. Maybe John's couplets to his girlfriends are a bit not good, but there is no other way but through poetry to describe Sherlock in flight: he was an angel. His flapping coat only cemented the morbid imagery, and even his blue-gray-green eyes, with their light faded out, looked otherworldly.
Lucifer's plunge from heaven: the death of Sherlock, paradise lost.
The death of a hero, really—John won't ever think otherwise.
Moriarty—Satan himself?—gone.
Judas—by any other name, would be called Mycroft—forever burning in tongues of fire fanned by his own interminable guilt.
And John, just John, in a graveyard at a black tombstone, weeping.
It's too late to beg God to let Sherlock live. He's been buried, put under the earth.
But John asks for a miracle, even when he doesn't believe.
He asks Sherlock to live, knowing full well that his faith doesn't mean a thing.
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