As a thank you for being patient, EXTRA LONG CHAPTER FOR ALL!
For a moment he was lost in the blackness. The tingling of the cold air on his face lasted for a moment, then slowly faded away, leaving him numb. He squinted, trying to pierce the darkness with his eagle eyes. He spun, wrapping the black curtains around him and losing his heading in the dark. He turned his head towards a small glimmer that he saw out of the corner of his eye. A long, lolling tongue of blue fire rolled across the floor, not one meter away from where he stood.
He reached out blindly and his fingers wrapped around another door handle, this one locked. He pushed it and it jammed, clicking stubbornly. If the door hadn't been open, that would have been the end of Sherlock's night.
But the door was open, it was propped open with a rolled up newspaper. Jim had known all along which entrance Sherlock would use and had kept it open for him. Sherlock grimaced at the merest notion that he could be, in any way, predictable.
The pool had a miraculous quality at night. The calm, lapping waters shot blue waves of light at the walls and flickered brightly in one's eyes. The curtains made great billowy shadows across the floors and creeping up the ancient, cracked stone walls. If Sherlock hadn't seen the pool during the day, he could almost have imagined he had stumbled upon some ancient bathhouse, some cold crypt for the faded cloth that lined the walls and as a cemetery for the strange signs adorning the walls, complete with macabre hieroglyphs portraying people diving in shallow water and breaking their necks.
All at once the room seemed too dark, filled with hiding places for monsters and skeletons to lie in wait, and too bright, making him stand out as though under a stark spotlight.
He felt horribly exposed, especially when he peered up to the pitch black ceiling that seemed to be walling him in, looming over the eerie space like a large hand that would suddenly drop, crushing him flat.
There was plenty of room for flight, in case a swift escape became necessary, but sadly limited places to fly to.
He supposed if all else failed he could simply flit to the other end of the pool and try to run to the clearly marked exit under the flaming sign that burned like a hot brand, but that was only if he felt it was necessary. With a bit of luck and a lot of skill he may be able to trick Moriarty into forfeiting some sort of clue; just a little unconscious hint of his plans, or indicator of his guilt that would make it that much easier to outsmart and out maneuvered him in the dangerous chess game he was playing with English laws.
Sherlock's footsteps echoed around dismally, then, as if finding nothing better to do they shot back at him and reverberated in the air around him, hovering infuriatingly where he most desired peace.
He steered himself quietly along the edge of the pool. He'd found long ago that if he extended his wings, he would extend his center of balance, much in the same way a circus acrobat uses a long pole to assist their walk across a tightrope. Now he flared his wings, still quivering excitedly with a thirst for more air, and walked along the edge of the pool. Part of his black shoes jutted over the edge of the water. One false step and he would fall in, there was no way he could flap fast enough to save himself in time. What an embarrassing meeting that would be, him soaking wet, shivering like a drenched rat. Moriarty would be delighted.
Still, he stepped slowly with infinite care. His footfalls were as cautious as a tightrope walker's. He hovered on the precipice, exquisitely nervous and incredibly aware of gravity's effects on his grounded form.
The focus he expended on his fear of falling was purposely wasted. He had to distract himself from thinking about that serpentine sneer, the stone-cold staring black eyes and the eternally rolling shoulders, lolling neck, bobbing head as supple and flexible as a reptile's. He couldn't linger on such utter trivialities like the sense that he'd met with a tormented soul, unable to find a moment of peace due to the constant flexing and stretching of his pained shoulders, the need to somehow relieve the annoying sense of carrying a superfluous bone as a constant poke in the back, coupled with the hideous scarring that would have made the already dreaded gym-class showering an unbearable embarrassment: a virtual target primed for people like the young Carl Powers to take their best shots at, and unleash all the hidden anxieties a young disfigured boy already knew and feared.
Only about half the pool was left for him to walk. Where was Moriarty?
He reached the end of the pool without slipping and cautiously turned to start another walk along the short side when he heard a door open noisily, and slowly groan shut. The alarming bang when the door latched itself shut made him flinch, but affected his balancing act not one bit.
"Evening," Sherlock said unaffectedly as the 'office worker' emerged from the hallway beneath the exit sign, clad in a (new, very expensive) black suit. Sherlock smiled inwardly, realizing that insecurity had only gripped the man tighter since they'd last met.
Good, a psychological advantage.
Jim looked him over once and sneered inwardly once he realized what he'd been doing. He was not impressed, only a bit jealous, truth be told.
His hands were lost within his spacious suit pockets. Sherlock analyzed him briefly for a gun, but, not finding one he continued his walk unaffectedly.
"Nice touch this," Jim said suddenly, gazing over the entire pool minus the place where Sherlock was quietly stalking. "The pool…where little Carl died."
Sherlock nodded.
"Congratulations are in order. You stopped him. Now you've stopped Mann too." He murmured quietly, as though he were merely making an observation, as opposed to lobbing an accusation. He passed Jim slowly. He half expected the man to rush at him and attempt to push him into the pool, but no attempt came. He passed in safety.
Jim laughed, rubbing his nose modestly, "I stopped his heart,"
Sherlock rolled his eyes. The joke was in every way a stunning example of terrible taste and atrocious timing. And John said he was 'not good'.
Jim sighed in an oh-well-let's-get-down-to-business type fashion.
"How long have you known?"
"About what? Carl Powers, John Mann or your criminal empire?"
"Ehh," Jim rocked on his feet, grinning. He seemed impossibly cheerful out of the blue. His light, laughing tone was ruining Sherlock's well developed sense of suspense and killing his ominous mood. It was also making him the slightest bit nervous. "Let's start with little Carl and work our way out, shall we?"
Sherlock reached the end of the pool. He turned to look at his opponent again, a very brilliant opponent who had proven himself to be dastardly in every sense of the word, not to mention immensely clever. Sherlock would almost concede that some of his more complex plans were even a challenge for him. They were almost equals, even as mirror opposites.
"I'll admit, I felt a bit thick when you had to give me a nudge in the right direction," he said grudgingly, "The trainers were by far the best Christmas present I had gotten, and I wouldn't have soon forgotten the tragic story of little Carl, dying so suddenly like that in the water."
Jim snorted derisively.
"He had so much to live for, so much talent… so much to look forward to…" Sherlock spoke slowly, carefully easing every word out, giving Jim ample time to react.
He wanted a reaction. He wanted a cringe, or a harsh insult. He wanted something brash to prove to him, just for the moment, that the reptilian genius was human.
For some reason, it was important to him.
"For curiosity's sake, why did you need to eliminate him? Did he poke fun of your scars in gym class?" Sherlock purposefully stung directly where he knew Jim would be the tenderest. He had to keep him focused, keep him off his game. The longer he talked, the more Sherlock could learn, the more clues he'd have to work on for the future.
Jim shrugged. He wasn't going to give everything away so easily. But then, if he did where would the fun be?
"He teased me," he confirmed blithely. If he had sent Carl into the poison induced fit that had ended his life, he clearly wasn't preoccupied with it much. Sherlock betted that Jim's current endeavors were much more interesting to think about than some petty childish revenge he'd cooked up twenty some-odd years ago.
Sherlock squared his own shoulders and gritted his teeth together harshly. He was losing focus. He mentally kicked himself and forcibly steered his focus away from inciting reaction. He wasn't going to make Jim show any emotion, it was useless to try.
"And Mann?"
"That self-righteous prude?" Jim grimaced, "You should have heard him blather on and on about 'an equal tomorrow hand in hand with our fellow humans as brothers' blah-blah-blah!"
He crinkled his nose, as if remembering a particularly disgusting smell.
"You would have killed him too, I mean, what a bore!" he whined, "All this brotherhood nonsense makes me sick. At least our ancestors had the guts to call your kind what they were: Freaks."
Sherlock suppressed a grin. Now Jim was on the war path. With a little bit of effort he could probably push him into a rant, or at least a tirade, and then who knew what wonderful clues the prejudiced psychopath would give him.
"But now with this political correctness nonsense people take offense unless you say: vertically unrestricted or aviohominids. It's disgusting." He sneered.
"I could remind you that at one time you were one of us 'freaks' too." Sherlock calmly corrected.
Jim paused turned to Sherlock and sneered, "At one time? At one time? At one time I was an infant. At one time I worked at a church. What on earth does any of that matter now? Now I am here trying to stomp out the last of a plague that soars rampant in the gene pool, a vermin disguised as humans."
Sherlock smiled ironically. "I believe I can think of a certain German you could have taken ideas from."
Jim mirrored the smile eerily, "Even he was frightfully lax in his supposed genocide of your breed," The spite attached to the last two words was meant to shove Jim further away from the winged people he loathed. "Imagine trying to hunt fleeing people by plane, like one would hunt ducks. How stupid was he?"
Sherlock froze at the end of the pool. He didn't want to risk missing a single word, just in case he was asked questions in the court case.
"And how stupid were the feathered fools who did get caught? They could have flown away whenever, but what happened? They died like canaries in a hole. Idiots." Jim muttered.
Sherlock remembered this lesson from boarding school, Hitler trying to slaughter the winged people of Germany, and eventually Poland in order to achieve equality among his perfect race. He hadn't just killed people with wings, in fact by comparison to his other projects, he barely made a dent in their population, but all that absorbed Sherlock's attention at that influential age was the massacre of people like him. He'd looked through a catalog and ordered a book on the subject just because of his macabre fascination with the entire bleak saga. It was the first book he'd ever read with blatant swear words in it.
He remembered the gruesome details with child-like innocence.
First Hitler claimed winged soldiers flew to the enemies during the first war and spilt secrets. Then he took away their right to fly, organize and leave the country. Then he separated them from society, claiming they had parasites and diseases. He cited studies done on pigeons and other fowl to justify his claim. He sent other citizens that he claimed were undesirable and sorted them into ghettos, but he sent winged people, meek as cattle, to live in deep caves where they could not fly away or escape. People at the front of the caves would shoot anyone trying to escape the deep abysmal blackness. Hundreds were felled like geese.
The book he'd read was filled with small excerpts from survivors who described being experimented on by Nazi doctors, and people who had had their wings cut off haphazardly in order to try and escape. When normal Germans had winged babies, they would travel in secret to frightening surgeons and have the child's wings amputated, often in horrible conditions. And if the scars were ever discovered, the children were sent to the caves anyway and the parents were no longer allowed to have children.
It was Hitler's way of cleansing the gene pool.
It had occurred to Sherlock while he was young that at any point in the perilous saga the persecuted avians could have simply flown away, preferably when they realized they were going to be persecuted. They could have saved themselves the pain and death if they had all flown off then at the beginning, abandoning Germany in favor of making a new colony full of winged people elsewhere, maybe in England where they would have been safe, and where Sherlock could have visited in the summer time.
But as the book rambled on, alternating between terror of capture and the triumph of escape, a pattern presented itself to the young Holmes.
Even though many people did leave their homes and families and escape to France or America, many justified their refusal to flee by claiming that they couldn't leave their families and their lives.
Even as a young boy, Sherlock felt that was a stupid reason. Clearly, no matter what they chose to do, flee or stay, their lives would never have been the same.
"Yes, well…Sentiment I suppose," Sherlock muttered noncommittally at the wall directly in front of him.
"Stupidity more like." Jim said, "How they haven't gone the way of the Dodo already is beyond me. Still… nature can sometimes use a bit of help."
"So, you've taken a page out of Hitler's book and are using the Icarus Law as a stepping stone to taking away the rights of people born with wings, is that quite right?" Sherlock made a small advance, stepping away from the water's edge and directing his sudden inexplicable fury at the nearby wall. "Whatever is next? Lies about parasites in the media?"
And then Jim did something so heart-wrenchingly unpredictable, so completely terror laden it shocked Sherlock down to his core and stirred a fearfulness in him that he'd never experienced with another human being. Sherlock's palms began to sweat and his face felt foreign and clammy, and for the first time he doubted his decision to come to the pool.
Jim laughed, and laughed, and laughed.