i. I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
He can hear the thundering of waterfalls in his ears—or is it only the rumbling of the lorry? Could the time have come already? It's too soon—where is John?
This time, Sherlock does understand that he could be wrong, that he can't expect to have gotten it all right, because there's always something, and besides, this is Jim, and Jim isn't like any—wasn't, Jim wasn't like anyone else; Jim was like him
(you're me)
but now Jim's blood is pooling around his head and so Sherlock has to face something to which he thought he had reconciled himself to the possibility of having made a mistake, big or small, but the key itself? As long as the key exists, all Sherlock will have to do is die and the data will stay secure, tucked away safe and sound, but now the dits and dahs he's meticulously recorded in his mind palace have turned out to mean nothing, to be as meaningless and random as the sins and secrets of the ants swarming mindlessly through the streets of London. Which means that Sherlock has lost the failsafe, lost the key to the bonds that hold Lestrade and Mrs Hudson and John, bonds that they will never observe, a fate against which they cannot defend themselves.
And there is only one way to undo it; the only way to go back is one small step forward, a little kick of his heels and the fervent hope that his timing is right—or if not right, at least wrong enough to kill rather than maim, because a coma, paraplegia, anything that can lock Sherlock into this life and this identity is a guarantee that John will never be safe.
He looks down and John's here now, looking up, face incredulous and wary in a way that makes Sherlock think of Coventry, and of all the men and women of other towns all over England who must have once turned their eyes to the sky in disbelief, and he wonders for a second which category this falls into.
"Keep your eyes fixed on me," he says, and he can only hope that John will follow him in this like he did through the streets the night before (like he does through everything), that Sherlock's performance will be convincing enough to break the cuffs that link them.
How funny that he'd made John his hostage then, and how cruelly inaccurate because John is his gaoler—is he not?—and John is the noose now closing around his neck. John is both the rock that anchors him to this earth and the weight dragging him toward the ground, and John will be the key to executing this plan, if only Sherlock can do this one thing, if only Sherlock can convince him.
"I'm a fake," he tells John through his mobile, and his face is wet and his eyes sting as he stares into the morning sun. I'm a fake. Is this what it feels like to have a heart? How can people stand it, how can they stand any of it?
And now John is arguing with him, of course, because John is stubborn and steadfast and John loves him, John is determined to hold tightly to him, not knowing that all Sherlock can do is drag him to his death—and if he did know, well, maybe even then. And that is precisely why, that is the force that has propelled Sherlock up here to the roof where he can look down at the street and leave his note and take that one deep breath to steel his courage for the fall.
Water rushes in his ears but he knows it's only the pounding of blood in his veins. There are tears on his face and his mobile feels cold against his cheek, and he blinks, banishing scores of memories of a warm hand on his skin, tender stitches and compresses and salves. This time, he'll have to put himself back together.
"Goodbye, John." His fingers go limp, all the strength sapped out of him, and his mobile drops from his hand and clatters to the rooftop behind him. He takes a deep breath.
ii. I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
The concrete is cold against his cheek, and his neck cramps, bent at an alarming angle to create a shocking effect when they do come back for him, and they will, they will. It might be minutes, it might be hours, but they will come and he knows it, and so he holds that position, blood pounding in his veins, moving only to scratch his fingernails against the floor and into the walls.
He's perfecting the graceful ring of an O when he hears the click of the key, and it turns so slowly, so deliberately that for one delirious moment (ears ringing, mouth dry since he overturned their offer of water in the floor beside him) he thinks he may have the time to etch out the C and maybe even part of the K as well, but then he hears the echo of the bolt and the whisper of the heavy door across the ground. He waits for a beat before turning his eyes upward and—yes, even if he hadn't recognised the gait, even if he had been unable to extrapolate this reappearance from their previous little chat, Jim knows that he has won this round too.
"The Iceman cometh," he quotes, eyes tracing up the pin-striped legs (a new cut of suit; trying to disguise a few unwanted pounds) to a crisp jacket and even crisper, cooler visage. "My, my—could it be?"
Mycroft Holmes says nothing, just turns his back on Jim, and a second later, Jim hears the sound of metal dragging across the floor. He's brought the stool again—after all, what's a king without his throne? Jim would be the last person to begrudge someone that little trapping.
Besides, Jim could have it out from under him in a second, have this posh little man lying stunned on his back on the hard concrete, soft hands shielding his face against the stool raised over Jim's head like a battleaxe. But they both know that Jim doesn't like to get his hands dirty.
"There's a library, you realise," says Mycroft—and there he goes, crossing his legs. "You could have full access to it. If you're feeling bored, that is."
But another thing they both know is that that's not what Jim wants, that there's only one subject that can make him unglass his eyes, watch Mycroft's lips; one key to make Jim's own lips move, and it's not any of the keys on the jangling ring that Mycroft's assistant carries, nor something that can be encoded onto a USB stick or (oh, yes yes yes) into Morse code. No, the only key for Jim's lock lives and breathes and even (dare he say it—all right of course he does) loves.
Jim pointedly does not look at the word beneath his fingers, nor at any of its cousins etched into every flat surface the cell has to offer. His very own singing, dancing Iceman is equally purposeful in the way he does not let out a resigned sigh or re-cross his legs or lean forward for a better view of his audience, but still, Jim thinks, nobody could have missed that it's story time, boys and girls, gather round, and dear me, is that the Storyteller sprawled out all over the floor?
The Iceman clears his throat, clears every possible cloud of expression from his carved features, folds his hands. "Where did I leave off?"
Mycroft's voice grows louder as he speak, echoing off the walls of the empty room, but oh, Jim can still hear it, the sound of his key turning, and as data floods his ears, Jim lies still as a corpse in his web on the floor and a smile flushes over his face.
i. I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
John is about to head up for bed when he hears it. His foot has gone to sleep beneath him in his familiar armchair, and the beer on the table has gone flat. He's been sticking to just two, but often finds himself uneasy about even reaching that limit, so while the first bottle had smoothly, blissfully down his dry throat, the fizz when he opened the second was too loud, echoing off the walls of the empty room, and he had left it mostly untouched beside the reading lamp, its life fizzing busily up and away in hopeful little bubbles as John tried to ignore the silence.
He's stretching out his leg and wiggling his toes, fighting the instinct to reach out and massage it away. That's a remedy for muscle cramps and psychosomatic war wounds; pins and needles, however, it will only make worse. Once the prickling fades into a painless tingling, he will get up and
(ignoring the almost plaintive posture of his empty chair, arms still stretched toward its brother)
make his way upstairs. The beer, he will pour down the sink when he washes the breakfast dishes. He was right to stop buying the nice Belgian stuff; even if he wanted to drink for the taste, he wasn't sure he could appreciate it.
John lays his book on the table and sets one foot on the floor, but then he hears it and he goes perfectly still. His breathing stops of its own accord, and his soldier's ears tune out all the sounds of the street outside to fix in on this sudden impossibility: the sound of a key in the lock.
And John knows that key. It's an absurd thought, it doesn't even bear consideration, but he does. He knows it just as well as he does the subsequent click of the latch, the gentle thud of the door falling closed, and it's just as familiar as gloved fingers dusting talcum powder, or the smell of bow rosin clinging to black curls, and there was no mistaking it, not any of it.
But it was impossible, of course, entirely impossible. John had been there. He had stood frozen, eyes fixed on Sherlock as commanded (as if he could have looked anywhere else, as if he had ever looked anywhere else) and he had watched as each second ticked by, and he had fought the bile in his throat and the pounding, paralysing dizziness in his head, harnessing the power of his fear to carry him through the crowd and to Sherlock's side. And despite it at all, John hadn't believed... not even when he'd reached to take Sherlock's wrist in his hand, he just couldn't, because it hadn't seemed possible, had it, that just like that...
John believes now, though. He hasn't allow himself the delusion of hope because from the start he's known that if he lets himself slip into denial and bargaining, he stands little chance of ever getting out. So he rationed himself, fairly, one chance to get it out of his system, one whispered sentence with one hand cold on a headstone, and then he'd swallowed down the flat, empty way his prayer had fallen, like hailstones onto dry sand, and with it, he'd swallowed his faith, his hope, his previous life.
Since that day, he has never once lain awake at night praying that it was a mistake, persuading himself that it was all a dream and if he could just wake up somehow... Because no, John was there, he saw, and so he knows, and that is enough to quiet his heart on those still nights.
But oddly enough, John isn't praying now—why should he be? After all, it doesn't occur to a farmer to pray for rain when it's pounding down around him, or a sailor to pray for succour when the waters are calm. That one solitary click of the lock has flipped a switch inside him and all he can do is sit, stony at attention, as slow, deliberate footsteps
(not Mrs Hudson's, no, not anyone else's)
ascend the seventeen steps one at a time.
This should be a horror film, really—the darkened flat; the slow, inevitable creeping; a shot of the stone rolled away—but though John may be paralysed in his armchair, mouth dry and eyes fixed upon the door, fear is one thing he does not feel. Fear, after all, is the luxury of having something left to lose, and this, right now, is the thing that John has lost returning to him, and whether it comes with the shuffling gait and rotting flesh of a B-movie monster or the chains and shackles of Jacob Marley or somehow, miraculously, with piercing blue eyes and John's name on its lips, this is the ultimate thing, the only thing, this is what he has been waiting for, and John is ready to face it.
So he sits and he listens and he waits, steadfast and unmovable, as the footsteps reach the top of the stairs and slow, momentarily, in their progress; stop, finally, in front of the door. There is no knock—of course there is no knock—but John watches, unblinking, as the knob begins to turn, and his heart rate spikes and then dips to normal again because somehow he knows exactly what he is going to see on the other side.
NOTES:
・I've been sitting on John's part for what feels like decades, but I finally got Sherlock and Jim written the way I like. Let me know what you think!
・Like many of you (oh no can I even say this on here?), I've signed up for the AO3 Fundraising Auction. You can find more information on it here, or you can bid, and since it's for a great cause, I'd encourage you to check out the author list and bid on someone amazing because this is fandom is filled with incredibly talented people and I don't know what I'd do without AO3. And I even re-learned how to do html links for this post so you know it's important. The end.
