A/N: I'm back! Did you miss me? I missed me. My lack of coherent, non Mary-Sue related work in the past far-too-long has disturbed me. But here it is; my first Sherlock fic. Darker than I'd expected, but aren't we all, deep down?
One day, I will own BBC Sherlock. Unfortunately, it pains me to have to say that day is not today.
This was inspired by Othello - obviously, considering the many references and quotes - and by Chelsea Cain's Heartsick. I always thought it should have ended like this, with Archie killing someone. I wouldn't have liked it, of course, but it would have been brilliant. Because, you know, sometimes the bad guy has to win. That's just the way it goes.
Anyway, I'd appreciate feedback. That does mean reviews. But this is a ONE-SHOT, meaning don't even bother to Alert it because I won't be continuing. You know what happens. I don't have to write it out day by day. That would be boring. I get bored easily. So please review! As always,
-for you!
The art of the killer is an easy one. Disdainfully so. Those creatures that chill the blood and slice up innocents into grotesque pieces for some crude animalistic pleasure; that they mention his name in the same breath as theirs pains him. He is not so ruled by the blood, so easily led, so predictable. He is beyond them. He knows that even the most cruel, the most bloodthirsty and feared, would be nothing faced with him. That he could look the slicers and dicers - the ones who burnt and battered and abraised their innocents until they could no longer whimper in pain - in the eyes, and laugh at their weaknesses. Because they were weak.
He is different. It is not for some ephemeral, fleshy pleasure that he operates. Not for one moment of shivery joy that he taunts and traps and liberates.
It's for the game. The parade, the pride. It's not about the ones who sit retching and sobbing with sight beams on their foreheads. It's for the brothers, the daughters, the best friends who sit and cry, too frightened and disgusted to watch, too pitifully fascinated by the torture to look away. Something like that in one's childhood can mess a person up forever.
And that's always interesting. He's tried it with adults before, but the slow process becomes tedious. He gets bored easily. But there's something about the consulting detective's pale, angular face and assured insecurity that captures him from afar and leaves him riveted, itching to leave his mark on the magnificently delicate mind. It isn't even a challenge. Holmes is half-there anyway; the assorted body parts in the fridge, the scornful disdain of the other idiots on the task force. People kill because it's easy. Holmes understands that too well.
It was a win-win situation from the start, really. He knew how to play out his game so that the detective was enthralled, fascinated, almost dependent on him until even the most obnoxious officers started to worry. The lanky genius liked games, too. They were so similar already. He knew that even if he was caught and imprisoned, Sherlock Holmes would keep coming back, clay in the artist's hands.
Everyone is predictable once you get the measure of them. And Holmes was so dangerously unstable to begin with, even that half-wit Lestrade only called him in for case after case because he couldn't solve it without him. They knew that the curly-haired detective could just as easily be on the killer's side as theirs, all for the sake of a little entertainment. They had that in common.
He hadn't realised just how much fun the game could be until he got John Watson involved. Delightfully simple, bless him, with Afghanistan hovering in the back of his consciousness like a jealous rage, but close enough to Holmes that he could see the slow tipping of the scales as Iago's magic medicine worked its spells. He would have had to take him anyway. But as he strapped the explosives around the doctor's strengthening girth, knowing that he would do or say anything, he realised what a golden opportunity he'd given himself.
Sherlock Holmes deserved something special. A greater game than he'd ever played before. And, looking at John Watson's pale, grim face, the idea splurted out of the depths of his brain like iodine from a dropper. Oh, it was brilliant. Holmes himself would be impressed by this one.
The look on the consulting detective's face in the moment before he saw the wires poking out of the ski-jacket was the most wondrous thing he'd ever seen. And wouldn't that be just delightful? The only person he'd let himself get close to in as long as he could remember. Wouldn't it be positively exquisite if it turned out that John Watson was the elusive nemesis after all? Wouldn't that just take the cake?
He'd almost given the game away then and there by laughing out loud at its brilliance. He doesn't have to manipulate Holmes at all. There's someone else who can do it for him.
In many ways the doctor is an easier target, with post-traumatic stress fighting for control of the limited space in his brain. He is only human after all, and as such dreadfully easy to push in the right direction. But at every step he dices with ruin, as his hands shake with feverish excitement and his mind buzzes distractedly. He had to be able to know exactly what the consulting detective would do. But that was his forte, and this, he knew, was his magnum opus. One day Holmes would thank him for this.
He knew his obsession with the consulting detective isn't healthy. That the blurred, tangible, almost sexual excitement he feels at watching the other man is too human, too vulnerable.
He has compared himself before to the Iago of modern London, destruction for destruction's sake. Not acting for some selfish notion of superiority and power, but for the sheer joy in knowing that someone out there is the way he is because he made them like that. It's not playing God. It's so much better than that.
But he can go one step further and more twisted, his Cassio a livid trail of destruction, his beautiful conception solidly true without a shadow of a doubt, his pestilence no poison at all. If he plants the seed in John Watson's mind, and watches it grow like a child, twisted and wrong somehow in the most delectable ways, he needs never touch anything else.
Holmes would be the perfect villain. He's always known, from the moment he first heard about him. It's always been his aim. He wonders sometimes if the detective could ever guess just how many of his cases have something to do with him; who it was that ritualistically dismembered and disembowelled the five-year-old sister of the man who killed six children along the Thames last week while he watched from the back seat of his grandmother's car fifteen years ago; who killed the mother of the woman who drowned her own baby; who paid the man to steal the diamond Lestrade and his lackeys were searching for for months on end.
Probably not. But he will, one day. When he has finally had enough and allows himself to be caught and thrown in a cell for the rest of his life, he'll be ready. He has played the final scene in his head so many times he sometimes believes it's happened already. He'll go to the prison and sit behind glass and stare at the consulting detective looking pale and sickly in the offensively orange jumpsuit, and tell him everything. Tell him he meant to turn John Watson into a killer. Tell him that everything he ever did, he did for him. Because he loved him, in a way; in the only way that could ever matter to either of them. Because he and Sherlock Holmes were made for each other.
And watch the lanky man, age lines wrecking that perfect face, realise that everything that mattered in his life, everything he threw away long ago, was a lie. Realise that he wouldn't have had to shoot John Watson in an alleyway when he finally caught up with him without even realising who he was. Realise that if he'd been a little kinder, a little less selfish, a smidgeon quicker, he'd still be in a flat in Baker street with a friend by his side. Realise, in one final blow, that the man – the one, lone man – that had done this to him reminded him, agonisingly, irrevocably, of himself.
That was the moment he lived for. And as Holmes shoots the jacket by the pool and flinches before reaching to a John Watson who already isn't there, he can see that moment, that entire life, played out in stunning clarity before him and he knows that he has already won.
It is engendered, he cannot help but whisper to himself. Hell and night / must bring this monstrous birth to th' world's light.