Time is a bizarre thing. A notion, really. Something humans named to number their days.
People are screaming around him, employees, workers, pedestrians. Running away from the fire that humanity worked so hard to capture, yet fled from when it escaped their hands. He can't hear them. He hears the flames burning, gulping down air and belching out smoke. He hears the high silence of the pure adrenalin of the moment coursing through him.
He begins to walk through the fray, feeling like a man possessed, like a sleepwalker.
This is magnificent.
This is terrifying.
"Sherlock Holmes!"
He stills and squints through the dust and debris, holding up a hand to block the heavy light.
A shadow marks the rubble, tall and powerful like the sun has concentrated all its might into the space it occupies, as if it wants to burn it into the face of the earth, stretch it for miles, make it a giant.
Sebastian Moran, his towering shadow staining the rubble he created, stands alone in the sun.
"You want me, Holmes?" He calls over the din as he holds out his arms. "Here I stand."
Later, Lestrade will sit in his apartment and wonder exactly what the hell happened that day, and what Mycroft told his superiors to not send a search team after him. In the ensuing chaos at the Yard, he was just another bystander while the important concern was bodies. Christ. He didn't even know if there were casualties…hadn't had the time to look before he was being ushered in that toff git Mycroft's unassuming SUV, right behind Sherlock and Moran himself, handcuffed faster than you could say uncle and tossed unceremoniously into a seat across from His Highness Himself, Mycroft, and returned the stony glare Sherlock had pinned him under the whole car ride. What got to Greg most though, upon further reflection, was that the trip itself had been absolutely silent. Not a word spoken. Just that trifecta of men and their intense staring. He'd learned not to ask questions with Mycroft Holmes. They'd either be answered vaguely, or not at all.
When they had arrived at the building that Lestrade knew as both the cover to Pink Floyd's Animals (a record to which he denies to this day that he'd gotten high to at university) and the Battersea Power Station, he realised, with a clarity that was so late it was borderline embarrassing, what shite his day had yet to go through and why exactly he'd been taken from the Yard.
Mycroft was going to refute the government's long-denied stance on torture and he was here specifically to witness it.
As if he could sense the DI's revelation, Mycroft turned to him.
"There will be no file opened on this event, or incidents reported, I trust." He says calmly.
Moran is a citizen who deserves the justice of a fair trial, even with a kangaroo court.
Moran is a monster who hurt innocents, an arsonist and murderer, and he has John.
"I don't take kindly to hurting someone that wears the same uniform I do." Lestrade answers.
"Wisely said, Detective. I know that I need not remind you that Moran qualifies as a domestic terrorist and will be treated as such, but I do know how you value the law, and I will state that the price you're paying for your silence will be compensated."
"It's nothing compared to the debt that he's got to pay."
"Rest assured," Mycroft says coolly. "He will."
Lestrade is not a squeamish man.
Not until Mycroft's men dislocate Moran's shoulder, reset it, shoot him full of a concentrated caffeine solution so he'll remain awake as they smoke and chat about weekend plans, and then break his scapula, singeing the other with the butts of their cigarettes, does he turn away.
It's not so much the sound of breaking bone or the smell as Moran's skin begins to scorch or the fact that he has said absolutely nothing that gets to Lestrade. It's the nonchalance of it all, the disaffected, impersonal attitude of two men in the incredibly personal act of torture. It's their water cooler discussion as they cripple a man.
He's glad he went into peace-keeping, and not MI6.
Meanwhile, Sherlock stare mutinously at his brother, confined to the sidelines to watch but forbidden to play. Mycroft strides around Moran, sitting up straight in the seat he's tied to, like a vulture waiting for carrion to begin rotting. He signals to the two men and they cease their fun before hauling Moran, chair and all, to a solitary table lined only by the objects found in his pockets: a pocketknife, a mobile, and a wallet, empty but for a blank, business card-sized piece of paper.
"Sherlock is here." Mycroft says softly. "I understand you like to play with him."
"Is he?" Moran huffs through a bloodied face. "He's so quiet I forgot he was here. Is his timeout over? Can he stop sulking in the corner and come out to play?"
Mycroft smiles before he calls out into the darkness. "Sherlock."
Quiet footsteps, echoing in the dark room. The scrape of a chair on concrete as Sherlock sits across from Moran. His gaze shows no pity, no anger, no disgust, nothing. He stares at him, assessing him over steepled fingers, and Moran stares back.
"You didn't use sodium metal, did you?" Sherlock asks finally. "The cruet meant nothing."
"Look who's finally catching up." Moran sneers. "I had the windows rigged by a team posing as window cleaners. Tell our friend Greg over there he needs to step up his security. It's a bit pathetic, how poorly guarded the headquarters of the fucking police are."
"And your clues…they all were irrelevant. Red herrings meant to distract me, meant to keep me guessing at what your next move would be."
"You think I'm like Jim. You think every clue has to mean something. I'm not so indulgent as he was. He was obsessed with making you puzzles and watching you work through the intricacies. In a way, my work is…a loving parody. Jim overthought everything, tailored every detail and riddle to your liking. I don't plan like he did. I don't think things through."
"You had to find someone with John's name, you had to track down Kitty Riley and plan her murder in a jail cell, you had to plant bombs at the Yard, and on top of it all premeditate your arrest…that's not indicative of someone who doesn't think things through."
"Maybe. Maybe I like how Jim spun you in circles. Maybe I wanted to try. See how good I was next to him."
"You called him a coward."
"I did."
"You felt loyalty to him, outside of his money? For his personal qualities and ideology?"
"I did."
"You loved him."
"I do."
"Why?"
"We military men like a bit of crazy. Keeps us sane." He taps his forehead. "Always felt like the most balanced man in the room when Jim was around. Maybe that's why he tolerated me. Maybe that's why Watson's got it bad for you. You both needed a sound board, someone to feed your ideas through until you got to the final draft. But you know what the funny thing is? Despite Jim leaving the reserves for you to track down—my thanks to you for that, by the way, saved me a lot of work—and despite you thinking he gave me some blueprint plan on how to dismember you bit by bit if you returned, he never actually gave me orders to go after you, or Watson. That bit at St. Bart's was the last job he gave me. All this, this is me, winging it."
Sherlock says nothing and stares at him, eyes darting around his mangled face.
Sebastian smiles.
"You hate this, don't you? Am I lying or am I not? It's like making sense between a cookbook and the ocean."
"Why?"
"It's quite fun, making you dance." Moran drawls. "You have such a wonderful jeté, leaping around from point to point with those bow legs of yours. Like a colt that's learning to walk—"
"Why?"
Moran cocks his head to the side, as if he hadn't heard him properly.
"Why? Why all this? All the little secrets and riddles and dead-end clues? Jim wanted to learn you. He wanted to know you so completely, turn you inside out and back, scan that big, sexy brain of yours for all your secrets and ticks and mannerisms, that you would be solved. I don't want that. I want to destroy you. I want you to eat yourself alive like a body killing itself through fever. Why, you ask me? Why, Seb, why? Why the trick with the Johnson-Haits, why kill Kitty, why John?" His face drops, carved with lines of disgust and cold anger. "Because I know what will get you in the end, and it's not the drugs and it won't be on some run-of-the-mill crime bust gone bad. It will be madness. Madness, because the great Sherlock Holmes tried to solve an unanswerable question."
"What question?"
"You already know. You're just too much of a coward to admit it."
Sherlock stares at him for a long moment.
"Why John?" He murmurs finally.
"No," Moran smiles. "You're overthinking it."
"Why?"
"Bingo. And the answer, the one that you don't want to think about it because it makes no sense in that intricate mass of cogs in your skull, the one that will drive you mad, in the end, is why you've allowed me to get as far as I have, and make no mistake Holmes, I understand the difference between being clever enough to beat you and being ruthless enough to destroy you. That answer is why Watson went on that swim in the Thames and it's why you took yourself and your DI buddy on a chase after some fucking junkie blueblood, a mediocre reporter, and a saltshaker when we both know that deep down, you knew it was all a dead-end but went on anyways because it was a distraction from that empty space in your bed and the idea of a man who loved you that could have filled it.
The question that you never want answered is 'Why?'. And the answer that you never want to hear is the simplest one, the one that Jim overlooked because he wanted this game to mean something to you, God rest his thoughtful, sentimental soul. It's because I can. It's because you repeated yourself, something you never do, but when Watson's involved, you'll bend over backwards to keep him safe and alive. And when I give you the clues that finally make sense, the ones that lead you to the hall with that one door that you'll be so afraid to open, when you're holding the dead body of John Watson and are tortured at night with those miserable dreams of what might have been, you'll know that I destroyed you if only for the sake of doing it. If only for the reason that I could."
Sherlock moves so fast that for one moment after it happens, Lestrade is sure he imagines it.
The hammer that was used to break Moran's fingers is in Sherlock's gloved palm, arcing through the air with all of the force Sherlock can muster behind it, and it smashes into Moran's face with the crunch of bone and the squelch of pulpy flesh being flayed apart. Moran's head kicks back in reaction, blood pouring from a large gash on his cheek, edging towards the mottled purple and yellow shoreline of a bruise from earlier. Sherlock sets down the hammer as Moran howls in pain and carefully examines the tips of his glove.
It's clean and sharp and the efficiency of it nearly stings Lestrade's sympathy.
"You fucking cunt son of a bitch—!"
"Yes, yes, get it all out." Sherlock sighs. "No one can hear you here except the ghosts."
Moran moans in pain, the sound echoing off the walls, before his incoherent utterances begin to form something that chills the blood in Lestrade's veins.
He starts to laugh. A stream of giggles that runs into full blown gut-clenching laughter, complete with his eyes tearing up.
"You just fucking broke my face." He pants through mangled skin. "Well done, you. I think you're finally coming out to play."
"Zygomatic fracture." Sherlock growls. "You should feel lucky I felt lenient today. Be comforted by the fact that you have a reprieve today, for once I find him, I will do to you tenfold of what you've done to John Watson."
Lestrade is torn between being grateful that he is on Sherlock's good side and being absolutely terrified of what life would be like if he was not.
"Speak of the devil." Moran mutters.
His mobile, on the table beside his wallet and pocketknife, begins to ring.
Moran smiles.
"Answer that for me, love, would you?"
Sherlock reaches out in front of him to pick up the phone, the motion smooth in execution but hesitant in nature. Lestrade understands that he is bearing witness to a rare event: Sherlock Holmes has been caught off-guard.
"You've reached Sebastian Moran, Sherlock Holmes speaking."
Someone answers him, and Lestrade watches as Sherlock's face drains of colour, all his defences singularly knocked down in one blow. His grip tightens around the phone as if it were a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Mycroft has already come to attention, straightening in the edge of Lestrade's line of sight. Sherlock looks like he might be sick.
Not good. Not good not good not good—
"John."