Hey, readers! I just got back from visiting my aunt, who lives in the Hawaiian islands (asukdfj so beautiful) and since she lives in a remote area she doesn't have internet access, so this chapter is really overdue! Disclaimer: I don't own Sherlock or any associated characters.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sherlock left the chapel halfway through hymns, under the pretense of getting a drink of water from the fountain in the hall. He did, downing mouthfuls of metallic-tasting water before ducking out through the back door.
The morning was cold and bright; there was only patchy snow on the ground, but the air was snappily frigid. Sherlock, wearing one of his short coats (he'd taken precautions to wear street clothes, instead of a school uniform), made his way down the street, towards the village. He passed no one else, and quickly found himself standing before a familiar house. Tall and sad, no less so even in the crisp sunlight. Weeds grew waist-high in the garden, shamelessly engulfing a shabby wooden swing. There were a series of pickets, as if for part of a fence, but they'd tumbled over and seemed to be slowly decomposing.
Sherlock did not pass through the front gate. He stood outside, waiting, knowing. And as if following some unheard cue, a figure darkened one of the upstairs windows. Sherlock did not move. The figure vanished, and a moment later the front door opened—only a crack, just enough for a lanky boy to slip out.
He was far from awkward or gangly, though—Sherlock watched the approaching figure: trim and athletic, but in a jagged sort of way. As though he'd built that sure, strong body on a battlefield and not a cricket pitch. His face was thin and handsome, in a severe way. Sherlock's eyes raked across a white scar that crossed the boy's upper cheek, skirting around his eye.
They stood face to face for a moment, eyes meeting. The other boy's eyes were gray, dark, like rainclouds. Like Sherlock's eyes.
"You dropped it," Sherlock said.
Silence. Sherlock forced away the dark inkling of doubt that had crept into his mind. He didn't even know this boy's name—could he be wrongly accusing him?
Then—
"Damn." A rakish, twisted smile pulled at one side of his mouth.
"You've been caught."
"And I expect you're here to arrest me, mister policeman?" He smirked coldly, put his hands up, laced his fingers behind his head. "Take me away, officer."
Sherlock refused to look away. "I'm not here to play around, alright?" He heard a new ferocity come into his voice. "I know that it was you. I've got your lighter."
"Is that so?" The hands came down, the boy folded them.
"I could turn you in."
"You wouldn't." Another smirk.
"Why?"
"I wanted to." The boy stepped closer. He smelled like mints and cigarette smoke. "Light a match, throw it in, watch the world burn."
"It was arson." Sherlock said. "A boy was hurt."
"Was he?" The boy's eyes gleamed sharply, the ends of knives. His tongue came out, ran across his lips. "Badly?"
Sherlock considered lying, inventing a death. "No."
"Oh, well. There's always next time."
"You were after someone." Sherlock had a feeling, a sick feeling, that he already knew who. "Who was it?"
The boy moved closer; his movements were jerky, threatening, and Sherlock almost stepped back, but at the last moment the boy put one arm around his shoulder, encircling him. Fingers playing with his hair.
"That's what I like to call classified information," He whispered. Sherlock felt a sudden leap in his chest; he was torn between lashing out, throwing a punch and then running, or closing the distance between them and kissing the boy hard. It wasn't so much an idea, the thought of kissing him, but more of a dark and primal urge, something vague, unclear. It frightened Sherlock in a way that he could not explain.
He thought at once of John.
"No." Sherlock backed away. "Not today."
The boy's smirk broadened.
"Going to run home to Newcastle?" And then, as Sherlock began to edge back towards the path, he crowed, "Run all the way home, Sherlock Holmes!"
And indeed, Sherlock had to fight the urge.
...
"Where the hell were you?" John asked after chapel, as they were heading to the cafeteria. "I looked everywhere for you!"
"I was...indisposed." Sherlock put his hands in his pockets. He could hardly meet John's eye.
"Oh, really?" John looked entirely unconvinced, but said no more until they had taken their food and sat at an otherwise empty table. Then he said, "Where were you? Really."
Sherlock couldn't lie to John. He wanted to but he couldn't; not after all they'd done together, all they'd seen, all they'd been through.
"I went into town."
"Oh? A nice jaunt through the marketplace, I suppose?" John picked up his sandwich and shot Sherlock a disapproving glare.
"I went to a house."
"A house."
"I've been there before—we had a fight, and you walked off, or maybe I did, I don't remember—" (He did)— "But I was sitting outside a house and I smoked a cigarette with a boy."
"That Sherlock Holmes," John said shortly, "Sneaking off to smoke with boys. Wonder what he'll be up to next."
"It wasn't like that, John."
"I'm sure."
"It wasn't!" Sherlock did not feel that this was the place or time to admit that in that moment, he'd already fallen in (love? lust?) with John. "I was smoking and he—" He paused, leaned across the table. "He was carrying a blue plastic lighter."
John raised one eyebrow. "Lots of people carry blue plastic lighters."
"I told him that I was a Newcastle student." Sherlock said quietly. "He looked at me funny, when I said it. Like he knew something that I didn't."
John swallowed hard; Sherlock saw the unease in the other boy's eyes.
"Maybe it's nothing," Sherlock lied. Suddenly, he regretted bringing this up. "It's probably nothing."
But John didn't seem to be listening.
"Sherlock..."
"What?"
"I didn't want to say anything." He looked down, up again, stared at the ceiling. "I didn't want to...say this before."
"Say what, John?"
John looked more than troubled; his face was pale, and he couldn't seem to meet Sherlock's eyes.
"You said something that night, the night the roof burned down."
"What?"
"The building. You were supposed to live there. This year. Weren't you?"
And then the ice cascaded down his spine, and Sherlock almost flinched, because what he had been afraid was rapidly materializing before his eyes. A ghost. A ghost that he couldn't shake off his back.
He nodded jerkily. John looked away.
"Right." Sherlock said. "Right." And then, "That doesn't mean anything. Probably a coincidence."
"I don't think so." Their eyes locked.
"I don't think so, either."
...
John walked to Maths alone. He very desperately did not want to worry about Sherlock, but not worrying was quickly proving impossible. Maybe it was John's nature to worry about the people he loved.
Someone had been trying to hurt—kill—Sherlock. The thought was horrifying, but inescapable. There were the facts, cold and brutal:
Someone had set a fire.
In a dormitory building.
Where Sherlock Holmes was supposed to live.
And someone had been hurt.
And if they hadn't left their lighter, there would be no trace of the arsonist.
Bloody hell, John thought miserably, More drama than the telly.
Maths was uneventful; he couldn't stop thinking about Sherlock. In the late afternoon the weather became windy and overcast. Someone predicted rain. John couldn't find Sherlock after classes. There was no football practice, so he went to the library. Did homework almost automatically, barely thinking.
He was walking back to the dormitories, passing under the shadows of the library's eaves when someone stepped from the shadows.
"Hello, John."
John froze.
"Hello, Moriarty."
Moriarty stepped closer. He moved like a cat, so quick and smooth.
"Out alone so late at night, Johnny?" His slide his hands into his pockets, walking with the ease of someone completely unburdened. "That's not very...safe...is it? Considering all that's...happened...lately."
John swallowed hard. "I was studying."
"Alone?"
"...yeah."
Moriarty smiled, a devil's smile. "I only figured that you'd be with Sherlock."
"Why?" John said stiffly. "We're...just roommates."
"Of course, Johnny. Roommates."
Johnny. The pet name scalded something in John's chest—unwillingly, his left hand tightened into a fist.
"It's John. Not Johnny."
Moriarty's smirk widened.
"My mistake."
John shrugged his bag higher onto his shoulder. "I'm just...going back..." He gestured vaguely towards the general area of the dormitories and made as if to walk off. As he turned, Moriarty drawled,
"Quite some fire the other night, wasn't it?"
Something in the way that he said it made John's blood run cold.
"Guess so, yeah." He walked quickly down the path, away from Moriarty, fighting the urge not to run. When he reached a crossroads, he turned and looked over his shoulder, but Moriarty was gone.
...
Sherlock was flipping through his history textbook, past chapters about the French Revolution and Spanish settlements in their New World, when his mobile phone jangled in his pocket.
He fished it out, heartbeat quickening only a little when he saw Mycroft's name on the caller ID.
"Mycroft."
"Hello, Sherlock." Mycroft sounded bored. Sherlock thought that he heard, in Mycroft's background, the sounds of a bar. "I got your package."
Sherlock had overnighted the lighter, still unmarred by anyone else's fingerprints, to Mycroft's dormitory building.
"Good. And?"
"And I ran the fingerprints."
"Yourself?"
"No, Sherlock." He could practically hear Mycroft rolling his eyes. "I've got friends who have access to all of the machines."
"And the databases?"
Mycroft let out a short, derisive laugh. "Sherlock, nobody has higher clearance than me."
"What did you find?"
"Nothing."
"What?" Sherlock nearly gasped.
"Well, not nothing, per se, but honestly—there's nothing suspicious about this whole business. The fingerprints belong to a seventeen year-old boy from Southwark."
"Southwark?" That's not possible, Sherlock thought. Southwark was dozens of miles away, in South London.
"Yes, Sherlock. Although," Mycroft paused for a moment. "Yes, he moved north several months ago. To Lerwick. There was a boy's home in London involved, some moving around."
"Criminal records?"
"Criminal...Sherlock, there are some petty thefts on record—hardly *criminal activity*. Now, look, I've got to go, alright?"
"Wait! Mycroft, what's the boy's name?"
Mycroft rolled his eyes, as if Sherlock were asking some unthinkable favor of him. Sherlock knew that Mycroft remembered the boy's name—everything he'd just had undoubtedly been off the top of his head.
"This is important, Mycroft," He said shortly.
"I'm sure it is—although I can't imagine why this would possibly interest you, at all." The sound of faint, droning music, low voices. No laughter. "His name is Sebastian Moran."
Wooooo! Thanks for reading, guys! Feel free to voice your thoughts and opinions with a review/comment! :)