She's dreaming in the shallows of sleep. A dream she's had dozens of times in the last year, the deep blues of water, the cold, sweet silence. Gliding through it like a giant stingray. The light above her feeble and rippling. She gives into the feeling of submergence, the sleek cold, the soundless blue seeping into her body. She doesn't know if she's floating or swimming. When she sees the giant, red octopus sprawled across the top of a coral shelf yards below her, she is not intimidated. The octopus pushes herself up and away on her ballooning tentacles, squirting black ink that turns the water pitch black in every direction. She is suspended in darkness—but she isn't afraid. She looks up and sees the weak, white light beyond the surface, a distant sun transformed into a full moon.
*~*~*
Lestrade stands alone next to the covered corpse with her hands in her coat pockets, her mouth set into a grim line. Sherlock heads straight for her, stopping just before the opposite end of the body. She does a quick scan of her surroundings, looking for anything weird or shocking that would explain why Lestrade called her. She notices some of the forensics people and the uniformed coppers glaring at her from a distance, but she ignores them. Plenty of the police force openly dislikes her.
"Are you alone?" Lestrade says.
"Watson's on her way," says Sherlock. "What's the story?"
Lestrade glances at the wet, black tarp covering the body. "One victim. White female, approximately twenty years of age, obviously homeless."
"All right, and?"
"Looks like she was beaten to death."
Sherlock pauses, staring at the older woman. "Lestrade, you did not call me out here to solve a murder an idiotic police detective who just passed his exam could figure out by himself if he bothered to do the work."
Lestrade crouches down and pulls back the tarp, revealing the victim lying on her back. Her face is covered in black and purple bruises, one eye swollen shut, her peeling lips split and scabbed, flecks of blood dried around her nostrils and the skin above her mouth stained pink, dark blood dried in her dirty blonde hair. Her neck has bruises typical of strangulation victims, but it's likely she was choked only as a means of torture and died from the beating itself. Most of the damage to her body is hidden under layers of ragged clothing, but Sherlock knows her torso is purple and blue without having to strip her.
It isn't the gruesome condition of the corpse that stuns Sherlock. It's the one detail that sets this corpse apart from every other she's seen in her career as a consulting private detective: her name has been cut into the left inner forearm. SHERLOCK. The blood washed away in the rain, but the skin is still inflamed, red and angry around the dried up wounds.
Sherlock looks up at Lestrade.
"Did you know her?" says Lestrade.
"No," Sherlock replies, only a little outraged at the question.
"She wasn't one of your network?"
"No."
"You know I have to ask."
"I've never seen this woman before, and if I had, I would tell you."
Lestrade nods, then leans over to cover the corpse with the tarp again.
Sherlock would inspect the ground surrounding the victim if she wasn't so disturbed by the notion that Lestrade might suspect her of murder. She watches the other woman in disbelief, waiting for Lestrade to explain herself, but the Detective Inspector doesn't speak, looking at the tarp with her back to the other Yarders.
"What are you thinking?" Sherlock demands, her shock melting fast in the heat of her mounting indignation.
"I'm thinking whoever killed this girl has something against you," Lestrade says. "Maybe you know him, and maybe you don't. But he certainly knows who you are."
"No, you were just considering the possibility I did this or had something to do with it. In what universe does it make any sense to suspect I not only killed this woman but signed my name to the deed?"
Lestrade gives Sherlock a soft but pointed look. "I had to ask, Sherlock."
"No, you didn't, Lestrade, because you knew the answer before you asked the question."
"I had to ask."
Watson's cab arrives and lets her out on the road. She jogs up to the pair of detectives and stops between them, looking from Sherlock to Lestrade. "Hey, sorry, I didn't get here sooner," she says. "What did I miss?"
Sherlock doesn't take her eyes off Lestrade for a beat, glaring at her in a way Watson has probably never seen. Lestrade's expression remains conciliatory, almost apologetic, not defensive.
"What's going on?" Watson says.
Sherlock finally looks at her and says, "Walk with me."
She starts moving without waiting for Watson, turning her back on Lestrade and heading away from the police. Watson hurries to catch up with her and falls in step alongside her.
"The man who did this wants to punish me," Sherlock says, her mind racing but controlled.
"What?" Watson replies.
"He cut my name into the body."
Watson stops, and Sherlock stops with her, the two of them facing each other. Sherlock has her hands in her coat pockets, and she looms over Watson, five foot ten to Watson's five four. Watson looks up at her, brow creased in bewilderment. A light rain begins to drizzle onto their shoulders.
"The victim's homeless," Sherlock adds.
Watson pauses. "What are we going to do?" she says, almost whispering.
Sherlock knows Watson isn't asking for the obvious answer. She's not talking about solving the case. She's asking her question out of kneejerk fear that has more to do with past threats to Sherlock's life than this murder.
"Treat this like any other case," Sherlock says, to herself as much as Watson. "Work it. And stay level-headed."
Watson nods but doesn't look any less concerned. "Are you all right?" she says.
Sherlock glances to her left, at Lestrade and the corpse and the other coppers in the distance. "You know the answer to that better than I do, Watson."
She starts trudging back to the body, grimacing, refusing to make eye contact with Lestrade.
*~*~*
Sherlock meets him in his private study on the third floor of the Diogenes Club, bypassing the common room on the first floor where she always provokes the disapproving looks of the old, white men who sit there in silence with their newspapers and cigarettes. She doesn't knock on the study door or wait for the secretary stationed outside to announce her, just barges in and shuts the door behind her.
Mycroft is standing at the window, looking into the rain with his hands in his trouser pockets. The older Holmes doesn't turn toward Sherlock, and this, in combination with his pose, tells her he already knows about the murder. Of course he does. The man is his own branch of government, with his hand in every intelligence agency cookie jar.
Sherlock doesn't sit down, but she does move further into the room before speaking. "There's been a homeless girl murdered," she says. "In Southwark. She had my name sliced into her arm."
Mycroft doesn't respond at first or take his attention away from the view outside. "Do the police suspect you?" he says, when he finally speaks.
"Not officially. But you already know that."
"Did they interrogate you?" Mycroft looks over his shoulder at Sherlock. "Did they take you to Scotland Yard and do it by the book?"
"No," says Sherlock, annoyed with her brother's stupid questions. "Lestrade asked at the scene, if I knew the victim. She didn't ask me for an alibi."
"Do you have one?"
"Oh, sod off."
"No, really. Do you?"
Sherlock glares at her brother, who faces her now with his back to the window.
"The victim was killed after eleven o'clock last night," she says. "I was home."
"Can Watson vouch for you?" Mycroft replies.
"Yes."
Mycroft, his hands behind his back, moves toward his favorite chair in front of the fire. "Not that her support of your alibi counts for much to the police," he says and sits down.
There isn't another chair opposite of Mycroft's for Sherlock to sit in, as this study is a place where Mycroft comes to be alone. Sherlock doesn't feel like sitting down anyway. She considers stepping closer to Mycroft but decides to keep her distance, making it more difficult for him to watch and read her face. She starts to pace, slow and steady.
"What do you plan to do?" he says.
"I plan to find out who the killer is and finish him," Sherlock snaps, her raised voice jarring in the large and quiet room. "What else would I do?"
Mycroft looks into the fire without speaking for a long moment. If he's concerned, she can't tell. Her brother is an inscrutable man, even less prone to emotion and sentiment than she is. She's never doubted he cares for her—as far as she knows, she is one of the few people on earth Mycroft feels attached to—but he rarely has occasion to show it.
"What do you want from me?" he says and casts his gaze on her. "Surely, you didn't come here to be consoled."
"The body's been mined for DNA samples already, and Lestrade pulled in a favor to have the testing fast tracked at the lab. When the results come in, if there's a match, I need you to do whatever you can to locate the bastard."
"And if there isn't a match?"
Sherlock pauses, still pacing. "You can find out everything there is to know about the dead woman. That information may contribute to identifying the killer."
Mycroft considers her, with that expression he's been directing at Sherlock since she was a girl: clinical observation tinged with personal curiosity. "This bothers you," he says. "Why?"
Sherlock stops in her tracks and whips around to face her brother, yelling. "He knows who I am, Mycroft! He cut my name into her body! He wants me to work this case, which means he wants me to find him if he doesn't find me first!"
"So think about who you know," says Mycroft, unperturbed. "I don't have a running list. Despite what you may think. If the murderer is targeting you for personal reasons, then you are the best source of information you have."
Sherlock stares at him in growing disbelief. "You don't take this seriously, do you?" she says.
Mycroft blinks at her with a hint of suspicion in his eyes. "I take it as seriously as the situation warrants. You're not afraid of the murderer. You're being dramatic for some other reason. What is it?"
"Are you going to help me or not?"
"I've never denied you my help," says Mycroft.
The Holmes siblings share a look across the room, the fire crackling behind Mycroft and the rain pitter-pattering against the windowpanes. There is a tension in the look, a silent knowing, which reminds Sherlock of the unique mental connection she and Mycroft share. They have always felt they're above most of the world together, in their intellectual prowess. Mycroft's powers of deduction rival Sherlock's, a fact that both annoys her and serves her, and Mycroft seems to find his interactions with her a relief from the lesser minds that surround him. Sherlock could not verbally articulate what passes between them in this loaded eye contact they share, but she can feel it bristling in the back of her mind, confirming something intuitive that hasn't fully materialized yet.
When Mycroft looks away, the tension in the air dissolves, and Sherlock feels calmer, as if her brother let the air out of her distress. She stands still and breathes.
"I would promise to keep you informed, but you've already raised the surveillance level on me and Watson, I assume," she says, nonplussed.
"My people can't track your progress," says Mycroft. "You know I don't have your flat bugged, Sherlock."
"Right. Well, if you decide to make yourself useful, I won't complain."
Sherlock turns away from her brother and heads for the door, her pace slow compared to what it was when she entered the room.
"Sherlock," Mycroft says.
She stops and looks over her shoulder, already clutching the door handle.
"I recommend you sort out your personal affairs sooner rather than later."
She knows exactly what he means. They haven't discussed the issue, but somehow, her brother figured it out. She almost wants to ask him how, but she leaves him without another word.
*~*~*
The man goes by the nickname "Chips." Sherlock hasn't known him long and doesn't know him well, but he's helped her out a few times since she met him three years ago. She and Watson go to his daytime haunt in Peckham, under a secluded archway next to a quiet road. He's one of the few homeless there, the others lingering at a distance when Sherlock and Watson arrive and disappearing like mice in a kitchen when they reach Chips. He's standing next to a fire burning in a metal drum, feeding scraps of newspaper into the flames. He doesn't look surprised to see Sherlock—but he doesn't look pleased either.
"Chips," she says.
"Holmes," he replies. "You're here about the murder."
Sherlock nods, caught off guard by the sudden burn in her cheeks. "Yes. That."
"Do you know who did it?"
She shakes her head. "No. Not yet."
"Looking for information, then?"
"Did you know her?" says Watson. "The dead woman?"
"No," he says. "Never met her, though maybe I seen her around. Someone told me her name was Sasha."
"Do you know anything else about her?" Sherlock says. "I need any information you can give me. If I'm going to find this bastard—"
She doesn't finish her sentence, and he looks at her with that grim press of the lips. He's stopped feeding the fire, and now he stands next to it, close enough to feel the heat against his chest and belly, close enough for the light to tint his face orange.
"Did anyone see anything that night?" says Sherlock. "Before or after the murder? A strange man walking around, a parked car on the street that didn't belong there, anything?"
He sniffs and says, "Not that I've heard."
"Do you know if Sasha—do you know if she ever prostituted?" Watson says.
He looks at her. "I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, seems like most of the women out here have done it at one point or another, for food or a warm place to sleep. The people I spoke to who knew this Sasha girl didn't mention it, though."
Sherlock exhales and looks into the distance, her eyes narrowed. "Anybody find the knife or clothes with blood on them?"
He shakes his head. "Sorry. Wish I knew something more."
"Chips, do you know who found her?" Watson says. "The police got an anonymous tip, but there was nobody at the scene when they showed up."
He does know who found the body. Sherlock can see it in his eyes.
But he says, "Everybody I talked to heard about it secondhand. Nobody gives up their sources 'round here."
Sherlock decides not to push it. She doesn't want to risk alienating him this early in the investigation.
She and Watson stand with Chips around the fire can in silence for a minute.
"Nobody out here thinks you did it," he says, looking at Sherlock. "Nobody. We may not be your mates, but we know you aren't stupid. We at least know that. So if it seems like people on the streets are giving you the cold shoulder for a little while, looking at you funny and what not, it's just 'cause they're scared of the nutter who killed that girl seeing them with you. Not scared of you."
Sherlock believes him, but she finds no comfort in it.
He sniffs and looks back down at the fire. "Anyway, I'll keep my eyes peeled for you. Let you know if I hear anything. Unless I'm the next one to go."
He grins without any detectable fear.
"Thank you," Watson says to him.
Sherlock nods. "We'll be in touch."
*~*~*
It's raining again when she shows up at Lestrade's front door, the water one even sheet. For a long beat, she stands outside with her hands in her coat pockets, unsure about visiting. She hasn't heard from Lestrade since the crime scene a few days ago, and while that isn't an unusual amount of time for them to go without speaking, they left off on a tense note. Sherlock feels straightened out now, clear and level-headed, calm again. She didn't come here to talk about work—if there was a new development in the case, Lestrade would've notified her, and Sherlock hasn't figured anything out—but she had to wait until she quieted her mind about it before talking to Lestrade again.
She rings the doorbell and waits, the rain padding against her shoulders and wetting her hair.
Lestrade opens up and looks surprised to see her for a second.
"Bad time?" says Sherlock.
Lestrade shakes her head. "No. Do you want to come in?"
Sherlock steps inside as Lestrade moves backward into the foyer. She sheds her coat and hangs it on the rack next to the entrance, as Lestrade heads into the kitchen.
The house is a two-story brownstone terrace in Archway, Islington, the first and only property Lestrade has ever owned. She saved the money for years and finally bought the house after making Detective Inspector a few years ago. Sherlock has enjoyed learning more about Lestrade from observing the house. She still remembers the flat Lestrade used to live in, the one she was renting when they first met. It was a space that changed with the coming and going of Lestrade's lovers, men Sherlock never set eyes on but knew well enough through the flat. But this house? This house is all Lestrade. She hasn't had a lover since before she bought it.
"Shall I put the kettle on?" Lestrade says as Sherlock reaches the kitchen.
Sherlock nods, looking around the room from where she stands next to the round table as if she hasn't seen it before.
Lestrade fills the electric kettle with tap water and sets it to boil. She's wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants and an oversized pullover. She's barefoot, and Sherlock wonders how the floor doesn't make her feet cold. Sherlock watches her as she takes the tea bags from one cupboard and two mugs from another, her voluminous curls like a halo of smoke around her head.
Lestrade. First name Gayle. Forty-four years old, nine years older than Sherlock. A black woman with eyes that look like pure truth, luminous and hypnotic. Sherlock has forgotten herself before when Lestrade looks at her as if she's the only thing in the world. They met when Lestrade was still a detective sergeant, and Sherlock was a twenty-something cocaine addict, working as a government chemist and solving cold cases in her spare time.
Lestrade comes to the table with the two mugs of tea and sits down. Sherlock follows, sitting across from her. They wait for the tea to cool in silence, listening to the rain.
"I apologize," Sherlock says. "For the other day. I shouldn't have been cross with you."
"It's fine," says Lestrade. "I understand."
"I know you never suspected me."
Lestrade looks at her and takes a preliminary sip of her tea.
Sherlock touches the side of her mug to feel the heat.
"Do you think there'll be another?" Lestrade says.
Sherlock glances at her. "Yes," she replies after a pause.
"Why?"
"Because he's targeting me. He won't stop until he's caught or until he destroys me in whatever way he wants."
"Do you think he's homeless? Someone who knows about you through your network?"
"I doubt it," says Sherlock. "If he was, my contacts would know about him and want him removed from the streets for their own safety. No, he's someone who's smart enough to know the homeless are easy targets. Someone who knows about my connections to them."
"You must have ideas about who he is," Lestrade says, looking at Sherlock with her hands around the base of her mug.
Sherlock is quiet, staring into her tea. She's been mentally reviewing the criminals she's identified in the last few years, filling in the blanks with her written logs and Watson's journals. There are only so many who are no longer in prison, but even once she eliminates the men on the list who don't fit the crime, there are too many possibilities. She doesn't have enough information yet to pursue just one potential suspect, and pursuing them all would be a waste of time and energy.
"No," Sherlock says. "Not yet."
"Well," says Lestrade. "I don't either—but we'll find him."
Sherlock drinks her tea and doesn't respond. She knows the man will continue to kill until he's neutralized, and if she fails to identify and locate him in a timely manner, he may well come to her. She isn't worried about catching up with him. That part is inevitable. She's not even worried about him coming for her. She just can't stand the idea of more victims. She usually doesn't take responsibility for the crimes of serial killers she hunts, but this time, it's personal. This time, the guilty man has killed a woman to target Sherlock. Every future victim falls onto her shoulders.
"How've you been?" Lestrade says, a tinge of concern in her voice.
"Fine," says Sherlock, "considering the circumstances. I've been working."
"That goes without saying."
Sherlock finally looks at Lestrade, really looks at her. "I told Watson I was staying here tonight."
Lestrade blinks. "Good," she replies. "We can go over the case file, maybe put something together we haven't seen individually."
"I didn't come here to work," Sherlock says.
Lestrade pauses, looking at Sherlock carefully. "Okay. I was going to make dinner, but we can order take away if you like. What do you want to do besides eat?"
"The sofa was good, a couple weeks ago."
Lestrade smiles. "Yeah?"
"Yes. Didn't you think so?"
"It was nice," Lestrade says and drinks some tea.
They order Thai food from the little restaurant down the street and eat in the sitting room with the radio on. Cross-legged and barefoot on the oversized floor cushions, they sit around the coffee table and pick food from each other's cartons. They listen to LBC talk radio and drink wine, finishing off one bottle and moving onto a second. By the time they're finished eating, they're warm and woozy and don't want to move or talk. Lestrade lights one of the fat, white candles she keeps in the room and turns out the lamps.
They lie down together on the sofa, and Lestrade pulls a blanket over them. Sherlock's on her back, with Lestrade pressed to her side and her arm around the other woman. Lestrade holds onto Sherlock too, resting her head on Sherlock's shoulder. They close their eyes and listen to the rain and the crackling hush of the radio. Sherlock tilts her head toward Lestrade, feeling her weight and body heat, smelling her—that sweet, earthy smell she finds in all of Lestrade's clothes and in her bed. Whenever Sherlock is alone and thinks of the other woman, the scent is what comes to her first. Cocoa butter, vanilla lip balm, loose tobacco, Earl Grey tea.
Gayle Lestrade is many things to Sherlock: mentor, friend, colleague, someone who has saved her life on more than one occasion, her access point to the homicide cases that thrill her more than anything. They've come to know each other well after ten years, but Sherlock still doesn't feel as certain about Lestrade as she does about most people. There's an element of unpredictability to Lestrade that isn't based on her record but on Sherlock's intuition—a feeling that at any time, Lestrade will surprise her in a totally unforeseeable way. And almost nobody surprises Sherlock Holmes.
"Sherlock," Lestrade says.
Sherlock opens her eyes and looks into Lestrade's, their faces close enough that they can feel each other's breath. Sherlock doesn't know what she sees in Lestrade's eyes. She doesn't recognize the emotion. Emotions aren't her strong suit, as Watson put it so delicately. They stare at each other in silence for a long beat, Sherlock's arm still wrapped around Lestrade's back and Lestrade's hand on Sherlock's belly.
"I love you," Lestrade says.
"I know," says Sherlock, after a pause. "I love you."
Lestrade searches her eyes, her face, and Sherlock can't imagine what she's looking for. After a moment, Lestrade settles her head against Sherlock's breast and hooks her arm around Sherlock again.
This started years ago, when Sherlock was a young, precocious private investigator just starting to establish herself, addicted to cocaine and miserable beyond description. Back then, the physical affection between her and Lestrade only happened in conjunction with Sherlock's drug use: when she crashed after a high, when she was in withdrawal, when she injected the coke instead of snorting it and needed supervision for her safety. Lestrade would hold her when she had the shakes, nurse her when Sherlock lay drug sick on Lestrade's sofa in the detective's old flat, rub her back and allow Sherlock to grip her knee whenever Sherlock tried to quit using on her own and suffered the side effects.
After Sherlock got clean for good, she and Lestrade spent years barely touching. Sherlock missed the contact but she was afraid to ask for it without an excuse. She would savor the moments of spontaneous touch that happened in the heat of intense situations on the job, when one or the other's life was threatened or when one of them was harmed. About a year ago, they fell asleep together by accident, right here on the sofa, and ever since then, they cuddle whenever Sherlock comes to Lestrade's flat by herself and stays for the evening. Sometimes, Sherlock spends the night, and they sleep side by side in Lestrade's bed.
They've never had sex. As far as Sherlock knows, Lestrade still considers herself heterosexual. Sherlock has never been interested in sex or romance. She does like the physical affection and intimacy of her relationships with Lestrade and Watson, much more than she could've anticipated before experiencing it, but she doesn't have sexual thoughts about either woman. She loves Watson and Lestrade with a fierceness she has only ever felt for her work, and if there's a difference between her feelings for one versus the other, she doesn't recognize what it is. She and Lestrade haven't discussed their relationship or their physical intimacy since it increased, and Sherlock assumes, whether out of logic or misunderstanding, that Lestrade shares her attitude about keeping things simple.
They lie together in the darkened sitting room, passing in and out of a shallow sleep. The rain beats against the windows in a steady stream. After a couple hours, Lestrade stirs and leads Sherlock to her bedroom upstairs. Sherlock strips off her clothes and puts on one of Lestrade's pajama t-shirts, slipping into the bed and finding Lestrade's warm body in the dark. The other woman's scent is the last thing Sherlock senses before she goes under.
*~*~*
She's in the water again. Floating under the weak light, in the cool, darkened blue. Below her is the bottomless, black deep. She doesn't feel like she's moving or sinking, just floating somewhere in between the light and the darkness. She's alone, no sea life in sight.
She feels the water suddenly turn cold. His face—it's his face rising out of the depths, rushing up at her. Flat shark eyes and death white skin, his open mouth full of glistening teeth. He's smiling. He looks like he'll start to laugh any moment, a silent cackle.
James Moriarty.
*~*~*
Sherlock wakes up in the dark and doesn't remember where she is at first. The palest light peeps through the crack in the window curtains, still too dim to illuminate anything beyond the window. She sits up and looks over to her right, recognizes Lestrade's silhouette in the bed and feels a bit of relief. She breathes just to feel the air in her nose and her lungs, to replace the water.
She hasn't dreamed of Moriarty in a long time. Why now? She hasn't thought of him lately, and his last letter showed up two months ago. He's written her several times since he started serving his life sentence in prison, but she stopped dreaming about him in reaction to the letters after the second one she received. She's never written back to him or seen him since the trial. Mycroft monitors him closely but never mentions him to Sherlock. And she doesn't ask him about Moriarty either.
Sherlock picks her watch up from the night table and checks the time. Lestrade won't wake for another hour. Sherlock isn't going back to sleep, so she sits there for a minute and tries to decide what to do. Part of her wants to lie awake with her arms around Lestrade until the other woman gets up. She could go make coffee. She could pick up breakfast somewhere and bring it back.
But she feels a tug in the pit of her stomach—the impulse to leave. She's never done that before: make Lestrade wake up alone. It shouldn't matter, and probably wouldn't, not really. Yet Sherlock feels wrong about it anyway. As much as she wants to be alone, to shed the presence of Moriarty away from Lestrade, she doesn't want to make her think something's off between them.
Sherlock slips out of bed and out of the room and shuts herself in Lestrade's bathroom. She turns the water on in the shower and waits for it to heat up, looking at herself in the mirror. She lets the trouble surface on her face, in her cold blue eyes. Tries not to see him laughing at her.
She steps into the shower and just stands in the hot water for a little while, feeling it blast the chill from her skin, tasting it on her lips to make sure it isn't salty. She washes her body clean and ignores the lingering sense of him on her, around her. She doesn't have much hair—her head is shaved almost bald on the sides, dark hair long enough on top to run her fingers through it—but she washes it with Lestrade's shampoo.
She doesn't hear any noise on the other side of the door when she turns off the water and steps out of the shower. She rubs herself dry with a towel and slips into Lestrade's bathrobe, gathering her borrowed pajamas in one arm before exiting the bathroom.
Sherlock finds Lestrade awake in bed, slouching against the headboard in the diminishing dark. She's got a look on her face.
"What?" Sherlock says.
Lestrade hesitates, and Sherlock knows before she opens her mouth.
"There's been another one."
*~*~*
This time, the victim is a boy, no older than sixteen or seventeen by the look of him. He's skinny, his lips chapped enough to peel, his clothes and his skin dirty. His green eyes are open, glazed with death, his expression full of shock and fear. There are tear tracks down his cheeks, white lines in the thin layer of grime. The bruising on his neck and the blown blood vessels in eyes indicate strangulation, another man's hands marking the pale flesh black and purple. Had he been a boy with a home, well-fed and cared for, he might've been strong enough to fight off his attacker, but he was too weak from starvation and malnutrition to do more than squirm. He's naked from the waist up, his layers of removed clothing strewn on the ground around him, his ribs poking against his almost-translucent skin.
SHERLOCK has been cut across the boy's chest, above the nipples, the surrounding skin stained with blood. The wounds are uglier than the ones cut into the first victim's forearm, the letters bigger, the cuts deeper. They've already started to scab at the edges, still glistening wet in the middle, the flesh puckered and angry pink bordering the letters.
Sherlock squats next to the corpse and grimaces. The kid hasn't been dead long enough to give off the stench of death, but he's already stiff.
"Fuck," she whispers and looks away, her eyes landing on a cluster of uniform police several yards from her. They look at her not with the typical cynicism coppers harbor for Sherlock but with something new, something she doesn't recognize right away. Her stomach feels hollow when she realizes they think she's guilty, that she's the one who killed the boy and signed her name into his body.
"Hey," says Watson, standing on the other side of the body. "Are you okay?"
Sherlock looks up at her. "No," she says. She stands up and sighs, deciding to ignore anyone who isn't Watson or Lestrade. "What do you see?"
Watson purses her lips and for a moment, it seems like she's going to offer Sherlock reassurance. But she answers the question instead. "Likeliest cause of death is asphyxiation induced via strangulation. He wasn't beaten like the first victim. There's bruising around his neck and on the face, clearly, but not any defense injuries I can see. Our man pounced on him and got him on the ground quick. The boy didn't put up much of a fight, if any. He might've been on something, or he might've just been weak. Maybe both. There's no trace of alcohol or drugs here, but it's still possible he was intoxicated."
"And the wounds?" Sherlock says, her gaze searing but her expression impervious. Watson is avoiding comment on the wounds, and Sherlock won't let her get away with it.
Watson glances from the victim, back to her. "They're garish but non-lethal. Definitely inflicted after death. No sign of the weapon anywhere. It might be the same knife used on the first victim, but it's hard to tell. There aren't any other cuts on the body I can see that could've come from the weapon—so our man isn't one to get carried away. He isn't mutilating the bodies for mutilation's sake or out of rage toward the victim. The cutting is controlled. He only does it to—to leave your name."
Sherlock lowers her eyes to the boy again. "The violence is directed at me," she says. "He wishes he were killing me instead of these homeless. So why doesn't he come for me?"
She walks off before Watson can respond, heading for the main road, hoping she can catch a cab. She feels Lestrade watching her from where she stands with the other police detectives but doesn't look at her.
*~*~*
She waits twenty-four hours before going to the ring, letting herself stew in the juices of murder number two. She's always been able to compartmentalize her work, to keep her cases and everything they've taught her about human beings and men in particular in a mental box miles away from her heart. She is not an emotional woman. She's been accused of insensitivity more than once, of being cold and callous, remote and unfeeling. It's true she hasn't wasted any tears or even pity on any of the hundreds of victims she's helped vindicate during her career, though she has felt a cerebral kind of anger on their behalf, more and more lately. But this, these murders of the homeless, weighs on her.
When her brother Mycroft wants to decompress, he sits in his private room at the Diogenes club with the newspaper, a bottle of expensive scotch, and a cigarette. When Sherlock needs to blow off steam, she comes here, to the basement of The Black Horse, a two-hundred-year-old pub in Fitzrovia. She fights men, most of whom have no formal training, and she wins more often than anyone expects. As far as she knows, she's the only woman to set foot in the Black Horse ring, and she's been fighting long enough that the regulars know who she is, even bet on her sometimes.
Sherlock doesn't enter the pub through the main entrance on the ground floor. She goes around to the back and takes the stairs leading down to the basement door, which only the pub staff and regular fight-goers use. The hot, humid air and noise of men's voices hit her as soon as she steps inside, and she passes through the dark, heading toward the crowd obscuring the ring. She hangs her coat on the long coat rack adhered to the wall, already dressed in fight-appropriate clothes: a sports bra, exercise pants, and trainers. She takes her hand wraps and her mouth guard out of her coat pocket and goes to find the overseer who stands back behind the crowd and keeps track of the fighters, winners, and losers on a clipboard. Tonight, it's Davey. She asks him if he has anyone in her weight class coming up; she's always stuck to opponents within ten pounds of her, lighter or heavier, which limits her pool of opponents but ensures she has good odds of winning and better odds of escaping major physical harm.
"I got a few for ya," Davey says.
"Give me someone who knows what he's doing," Sherlock tells him, then slinks away to the cramped single bathroom and locks herself inside.
She sticks her mouth guard into her mouth and starts to wrap her hands, right before left. She hears the crowd of men roar on the other side of the door, as the fight reaches its climax. When she's finished wrapping her hands, she looks up at herself in the mirror, at her sharp cheekbones and cool blue eyes. She's been avoiding her reflection since the first homeless murder, as if maybe she'll see something in her own face she can't stomach. But now, staring at herself without flinching or glancing away, she doesn't see the guilt she's been feeling. She hadn't realized she felt guilty, and she's annoyed at herself for being so irrational, even if just for a few days. The guilt evaporates, and a cold, sharp rage replaces it. Rage for herself, for the two murder victims, for the inevitable third yet to fall.
Sherlock clenches her jaw in the mirror and exits the bathroom, making a beeline for the fighting ring and hoping Davey calls her up next. She bounces on her feet, anticipation already pumping through her body. She's not afraid of the pain or harm she might experience in the fight—she lost that sense of fear after her first one—but she's steeling herself for it mentally. It's been months since she was down here in this basement.
Davey's voice fills the room through his megaphone: "Next up, Black Horse's favorite underdog Sherlock Holmes goes up against Alfie Chapman in tonight's first light middleweight match!"
Sherlock pushes her way through the crowd of men and climbs into the ring. She knows without having to check that she's fielding some disbelieving looks from the male spectators, ones who have never seen her fight or aren't aware of her reputation, who heard her name and assumed she was a man. Some of them get shifty, expecting to see her beat to a pulp or else knocked out in the first five seconds. They're unsure if they supposed to enjoy watching this the way they enjoyed every other fight they've seen tonight. The room goes a bit quiet, as Sherlock and Alfie take their places in diagonally opposite corners of the square ring.
Before she met Watson, before her and Lestrade's professional relationship turned into friendship, Sherlock spent all of her free and sober time training. She divided her days between work, the boxing gym, and cocaine. After she quit drugs, boxing became a way for her to stay clean despite the boredom and loneliness that always swept over her in between cases. She doesn't train as much now because she has friends, but she remains a formidable fighter.
Sherlock looks at the man under the white light, sizing him up as he does the same to her. She feels the heat of the lamp on her bare shoulders, the heat of the men surrounding the ring, the cold void in her heart. In her rational mind, she knows Alfie Chapman has nothing to do with the homeless being murdered in Sherlock's name—but as she watches him and waits for the first bell, she feels a deepening desire to lay him out on the mat and pummel him into oblivion. He may think, like so many men before him, that he can beat her without breaking a sweat because he's a man and she's a woman. But what he doesn't know, what he doesn't have, is her rage.
*~*~*
Sherlock's in her chair next to the fireplace when Watson comes home, sitting in silence and darkness. None of the lights are on in the flat. She cracks her good eye open as Watson hangs her coat on the rack, the left one already swelling, and waits for Watson to notice her.
Watson starts toward the kitchen, then stops short when she recognizes Sherlock's shape in the chair. "Sherlock? What are you doing in the dark?" she says and goes to switch on the tall floor lamp standing behind her own empty chair opposite Sherlock's. "Are you in one of your moods?"
Sherlock squints in the light, shielding her eyes with one hand, and turns her head away enough to hide the left side of her face in shadow. She hears Watson's soft gasp when she lowers her hand and figures the bruising on the right half of her face must now look worse than it feels.
"Christ," Watson says, lowering her voice as if the other woman has a migraine. "Why didn't you call me?"
She goes to her best friend and takes Sherlock's head in both hands, tilting it back to examine Sherlock's face. Sherlock shuts her eyes again and feels the gentleness of Watson's touch, the coolness in her fingers quickly melting away. Watson has good hands. Sherlock has read them many times since they first met, and they remain one of Watson's most telling physical features. It was Watson's hands that gave her away as a lesbian within five minutes of her and Sherlock's introduction.
Watson sighs and lets go of Sherlock's face. "It's not as bad as the last time, I guess I should be thankful for that," she says. "You need to ice."
She turns around and heads for the refrigerator in the kitchen without giving Sherlock a chance to answer. She comes back with one of the ice packs she bought for Sherlock after it became clear to her the other woman had no intention of permanently quitting the fights. Sherlock takes it without protest and presses it to her black eye.
Watson sits in her own chair facing Sherlock and looks at her with a mix of disapproval and concern. "Are you concussed?" she says.
"No," says Sherlock.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"God. Why do you do this? Nobody's lucky forever, Sherlock."
"Luck. Is that it?"
"Unless you had a religious conversion you haven't told me about and want to credit God, yeah, I'd say luck is the only explanation for why you aren't dead or in a coma or worse."
"What happened to being a good boxer? Why is that not an option?" Sherlock says, still pressing the ice pack to her left eye and feeling the condensation against her skin.
Watson doesn't answer, just stares at Sherlock with her mouth in a grim line. They're quiet for a while, looking at each other. Watson has her legs folded up on the seat cushion of her chair, her shoes on the floor below her and her socks still on her feet. Sherlock takes her all in, without making any real effort to deduce where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing all evening. Her natural blonde curls are cut to a short bob. Her eyes are a different shade of blue than Sherlock's, darker and greener. She has a pretty face with a softness to it her time in Iraq failed to steal. Watson was an army medic who served two tours before receiving honorable discharge when she was wounded. After she returned to London, she completed medical school and worked as an emergency doctor until her PTSD made it impossible to do.
Jane H. Watson has become a decent detective since moving in with Sherlock three years ago. She's now something of a writer, too, keeping a journal of the cases she and Sherlock solve and writing mystery fiction as a hobby. She has recovered almost completely from the PTSD, despite her ex-therapist's caution that being around the dead bodies of murder victims could trigger her the way her medical patients did. She has made Sherlock's life better than Sherlock ever imagined it could be, and if Sherlock is honest with herself, Watson has made her more human, too.
When they'd first met, Sherlock was hard, despite Lestrade's influence. She had lived alone for a decade, and she'd never had any friends during that time. Her relationship with her brother was prickly at best, and Lestrade was primarily a professional colleague, despite her affection for Sherlock. Her twenties had disappeared in a blur of cocaine addiction and escalating workaholism, followed by rehab and sobriety she'd half-assumed would be temporary. Once clean, her loneliness felt colder than it did before. It made her bitter and ornery, enough that Lestrade noticed. Sherlock got into more fights, snapped at Mycroft every time she spoke to him, saw Lestrade less because she didn't want to be mean to her.
Watson seemed oblivious to her demeanor when she'd showed up to take a look at the flat for the first time. She was kind to Sherlock, as hardly anyone is, despite Sherlock's chilly demeanor. After moving into 221B, Watson went out of her way to become Sherlock's friend, not just a roommate, and that was before they started working together. Sherlock has always assumed her friendship with Lestrade is the direct product of their professional connection, but Watson—Watson was Sherlock's friend first, working partner second. While Lestrade wasted her time with her last ex-boyfriend and socialized with friends she knew outside the police force, Watson became Sherlock's constant companion, despite the fact she clearly had other, older friends and went on the occasional date.
Watson proved to Sherlock that she is lovable, not just good at her job. More than useful, more than smart. She had an irrational faith in Sherlock's goodness from the beginning—and it made Sherlock want to prove her right, by softening and living up to Watson's voice in her conscience.
"We're going to get him, Sherlock," Watson says. "We'll find him and we'll stop him."
"When?" Sherlock replies. "After he's killed ten people? Twenty? There are plenty homeless in this city, and they're easy targets. He could murder one a day for the next two weeks straight and at the end of it, we still won't have a clue who he is unless he leaves his fucking driving license behind."
"It won't come to that."
"Why not? Is he going to stop at five and disappear?"
"Sherlock."
Sherlock exhales and drops the ice pack from her face, holding it between her knees. She must look pitiful, because it's obvious Watson feels sorry for her now.
"I keep having these dreams," she says. "I'm underwater. It's dark, mostly dark, but if I look up at the surface, I can see daylight coming through. Usually, I'm alone, and I'm never afraid. But the other night, Moriarty was there. He came up at me like some kind of deep sea monster, like the man version of an angler fish. Smiling. He was smiling at me."
Watson frowns at her, and Sherlock can see her body tense at the mention of Moriarty's name. They never talk about him, not since his trial and sentencing a year ago, but Sherlock knows he haunts Watson just as he haunts her. Even if Watson doesn't think about him specifically, she's left with the emotional memory of terror at what he almost did to Sherlock. She used to have dreams too—dreams of Moriarty pushing Sherlock off a precipice, dreams of pulling her body from the frozen Reichenbach Lake. Sherlock would find her asleep in a cold sweat, not quite whimpering, or slipping into Sherlock's bed in the middle of the night.
"Do you think he has something to do with this?" Watson says. "With the murders?"
Sherlock glances at her with one blue eye. "It's a possibility," she says. "God knows being in prison won't stop him from working. But the dreams started months ago, not after the beginning of this case."
"You didn't dream about him until this case."
"True."
They fall into silence for a long beat, Sherlock staring into space and Watson watching her. The truth is, Moriarty never crossed Sherlock's mind as a possible connection to this homeless homicide case. These murders are beneath him. Too ordinary, too crass. If he was going to go through the trouble of maneuvering past prison security and Mycroft's surveillance to orchestrate a crime for Sherlock, he would be far more elegant and subtle than this. He wouldn't make it immediately obvious to her that the crime is for her. It was always mind games and riddles between them. He never made it easy for her, or anyone else, to identify him as the brains behind a crime. Carving Sherlock's name into the bodies—that's not James. That's an act of uncontrollable rage, of which he seems incapable.
But if he's aware Sherlock understands him well enough to know this, what if he decided to act contrary to his style, just to fool her?
Sherlock doesn't put much stock in dreams or anything other than empirical evidence, but she does trust her intuition—and now, it's pointing her toward her archnemesis.
"I'm sorry this is happening to you," Watson says.
Sherlock meets her gaze.
"It's happening to you, too," she says.
"It's not my name on the victims' bodies."
Sherlock pauses. "No. It's not."
*~*~*
The following night, after Watson's gone to bed, Sherlock works in the sitting room, determined not to sleep until she has an epiphany. The crime scene photos, mostly of the victims themselves, are pinned up on the corkboard hung on the wall, along with yet another map of London marked with red pen. Sherlock's constantly buying the paper fold-out maps of London sold at tube stations, petrol stations, and tourist shops, marking them up for cases and throwing them out once she's finished. Her notes on the homeless murders are spread around the desk and the coffee table, along with a bunch of old case files she and Watson have been rifling through, looking for a connection. A face.
Sherlock sits on the back of the sofa that faces the corkboard on the wall, her feet on the seat cushions. She looks at the collage of photos, snatches of map, loose notes, and thinks about making more tea. Having a cigarette, though she quit smoking a few years ago. She's starting to wither in the void. She doesn't have a name, a suspect, a trail to follow. All she has is two dead bodies, her name cut into their flesh, and the certainty there will be a third if she doesn't figure out who the killer is and stop him in time.
Her mobile phone lights up and buzzes on the coffee table, and she hops down from the back of the sofa to get it.
A text from Lestrade: Are you awake? I'm outside your building.
Sherlock replies: I'm awake. Come up.
She listens as Lestrade lets herself in on the first floor, then comes up the stairs to 221B and pauses just outside the flat door. Sherlock wonders why Lestrade hesitates, almost goes to the door to open it, waits for another text. But after a moment, the DI comes in, shutting the door carefully behind her.
Lestrade stands just within the scope of the lamplight, hands in her coat pockets, voluminous curls fanning out around her head like a golden brown halo. She's wearing the camelhair coat, Sherlock's favorite because it brings out the luminescence of Lestrade's skin. She always looks particularly beautiful in that coat.
Lestrade doesn't usually keep her distance the way she does now, and that means something, though Sherlock doesn't know what.
"Watson's asleep," Sherlock tells her.
Lestrade nods, her eyes sliding away from Sherlock and roaming around the room, landing on Sherlock's paperwork. "You been working all night?" she says.
"More or less. You haven't."
"Nothing new since yesterday. No point in torturing myself past five o'clock." Lestrade gives Sherlock a tight, brief smile.
"So you aren't here to help me," Sherlock says, looking at the corkboard with her hands on her hips.
Lestrade huffs. "No, I'm not here after midnight to work, Sherlock."
Sherlock looks at her, sensing there's something Lestrade wants to tell her, something important enough that it couldn't wait until tomorrow or be said in a text.
"I went on a date tonight," Lestrade says.
Sherlock tenses, just for a moment. "Well, clearly, it didn't work out," she replies.
Lestrade smiles a little. "I haven't been on a date in a really long time. I've had a couple men who asked, but I turned them down because I wasn't interested. I didn't think anything of it. Women get asked out by men they aren't attracted to quite often."
She stops, and Sherlock waits for her to continue. When she doesn't, Sherlock says, "So you were attracted to the man you saw tonight. Otherwise, you wouldn't have agreed to the date."
Lestrade looks at her with a strange expression in her eyes, something Sherlock hasn't seen before and can't interpret. "Last night, I went for a drink, alone. He was sitting at the bar, next to me. He asked if I wanted to have dinner, and I said yes because—because he was nice and decent looking and I felt like shit. I guess I thought I needed a distraction. And the date went well. But when it came time to invite him up to my flat or set up a second date, I didn't. I realized I wasn't interested at all."
Sherlock feels a bit of relief but doesn't show it. Now that Lestrade has made it clear she isn't pursuing a romantic relationship with the mystery man, Sherlock doesn't understand why she told her about the date. She waits for the her to explain.
But Lestrade doesn't speak, almost as if she expects Sherlock to say something, to respond to the story in a certain way. A bout of silence passes between them, and Sherlock has no idea what Lestrade's expecting or trying to communicate.
"Sherlock, what are we?" Lestrade says.
Sherlock looks at her from across the room. "What do you mean?" she says.
"I mean, we work together and spend time together like we always have, but we also cuddle for hours and sometimes you sleep in my bed. We obviously have something we don't have with other people. Something most grown women don't have with their friends."
Sherlock wants to point out that she cuddles with Watson sometimes, which Lestrade knows, but she can tell that would be the wrong thing to say now. She looks at Lestrade's face, sees the anxious hope and confusion glittering in her eyes.
"What do you want us to be?" Sherlock says.
"I don't know," says Lestrade.
"I think you do. You're here because it bothers you that you don't want anything to do with your date, even though there's nothing about him that warrants your rejection. You've made some connection between our relationship and your disinterest in the man. So tell me what it is."
Lestrade stares at her, hesitating, and Sherlock realizes she's afraid. In the ten years they've known each other, Sherlock has only ever seen Lestrade afraid in life or death situations.
"Sherlock—" she starts. "I think I'm in love with you. I haven't wanted anything from men in months, and I think it's because I have you."
Sherlock doesn't answer. She lingers on Lestrade's face, then looks down with a sinking feeling. She's suspected this for a while, but she couldn't be sure she was right.
"You don't—you don't feel the same way," Lestrade says, her voice fragile.
Sherlock looks up at her again. "It's not that I don't feel the same way," she replies, her tone lowered. "I don't think I can give you what you want."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want sex, Lestrade. I don't imagine I ever will. You know that. You've always known that. I can't give you what you're used to getting from your boyfriends. It wouldn't be fair to you, to keep you from having sex with other people when you can't get it from me."
Lestrade breaks into an open-mouthed smile. "Are you serious?" she says. "That's what you think I'm after? You think I care more about sex than I do about you?"
Sherlock doesn't reply, feeling uncertain and probably looking it too.
"I just told you I'm in love with you. I could've shagged my date tonight, but I didn't because for the first time in my life, I don't want to shag men. No matter how nice they are or what they look like."
"You want to shag me," says Sherlock.
"No," says Lestrade. "I mean, of course, if you wanted it, I would make love to you. And I'm sure it would be lovely. But that's not at the forefront of my mind, Sherlock. That's not the point. It's not what I want most of all."
"What do you want?"
"You. Just you. The way you are, the way you've always been."
The two women stare each other, the air in the room now thick with emotion and tension.
"I don't want to lose our friendship," Sherlock says, her voice quiet and her heart pained. "I don't want to disappoint you, then see our friendship ruined because of it."
Lestrade takes a few steps toward her. "I don't want to lose our friendship either," she says, matching Sherlock's hushed volume. "And we won't. No matter what happens, I'll always be your friend. Always."
"You can't make promises like that. You can't predict the future or how you would feel if a romance between us failed. You could hate me, resent me, regret the whole experiment and want to put me in the past to move on."
Lestrade makes another step forward. "I could never hate you."
Sherlock looks at her and doesn't know what to do. Whatever she says, whatever she decides, she could lose Lestrade—whether now or later.
"Sherlock," Lestrade says, her voice soft and low, reminding Sherlock of honey dripping from a spoon. "Do you love me?"
"You know I do," says Sherlock.
"Do you trust me?"
Sherlock pauses, just for a second. "Yes. With my life."
Lestrade searches her eyes and her face. "If I ask you to be my partner and you accept, our relationship would only change as much as you want it to. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I would be happy just knowing we have each other—that we love each other. I don't expect you to be someone else. I don't want you to be."
Sherlock doesn't move or speak, as Lestrade slowly comes closer, their eyes locked. Lestrade reaches her, moves right into her space until they're face to face and close enough to lean against each other. Sherlock looks down at her shoes, and Lestrade clasps her forearm.
"It's okay," she says. "Whatever you decide, I'll be here."
Sherlock looks into her eyes again, Lestrade's hand warm on her arm, even through the sleeve of her shirt. She can tell Lestrade means it, that Sherlock could reject her and they would carry on their friendship as usual—despite her pain and disappointment. Lestrade is one of the most loyal people Sherlock has ever met. Sherlock admires her for it, even if she doesn't understand it.
"Kiss me," Sherlock says.
Lestrade smiles, leans in, and kisses her on the mouth, still holding onto Sherlock's arm. They close their eyes until Lestrade breaks the kiss, and when they look at each other again, Lestrade's eyes gleam. Sherlock's never been kissed before, and she wasn't sure how she would feel about it. She's never wanted to kiss anyone, but standing in front of Lestrade now, feeling the warmth in her chest and belly, she looks at the other woman and wonders why they didn't do this sooner.
"Kiss me again," Sherlock says.
Lestrade grins, lifts her hands to cup Sherlock's face, strokes Sherlock's cheeks with her thumbs a little, then kisses her. A tender kiss, full of love. She holds it a little longer than the first one, then pulls back and looks at Sherlock.
"Is this a yes, then?" Lestrade says.
"To being your partner?" Sherlock replies. "Yes. I think it is."
"Can we do this all the time?"
"Kissing?"
"Yeah, kissing."
"I wouldn't mind."
Lestrade smiles, her dark eyes shining with joy, and kisses Sherlock again, softer this time. Grateful. She pulls Sherlock into a hug, and Sherlock wraps her arms around her with fierce affection, shutting her eyes and burying her face in Lestrade's shoulder. Breathing in her scent. They hold onto each other for a long time, and Sherlock forgets about the murders and Moriarty and her water dreams. Just for a while.
*~*~*
Sherlock's watching the fire burn in the sitting room fireplace, alone in 221B. She's not sure where Watson is or when she'll return. Lestrade, no doubt, is at Scotland Yard, perhaps working on the homeless serial case or something else she hasn't mentioned to Sherlock. Sherlock almost hopes Lestrade isn't working on the homeless serial, because unless a miracle happens to her outside of Sherlock's presence, she won't be doing anything but banging her head against the proverbial blank wall.
Someone rings the building doorbell on the ground floor, and the buzzing reverberates into 221B. Sherlock pauses, looking at her own flat door and listening for Mrs. Hudson to answer the visitor. After a sufficient silence, she hauls herself up out of her chair and goes downstairs, hearing the doorbell a second time before she reaches the foyer.
One of her trusted homeless informants is waiting on the Baker Street doorstep.
"Eliza," Sherlock says.
"Holmes," says the girl, in her Cockney accent.
"What are you doing here?"
"I have information—about the murders."
Sherlock feels a jolt of energy zip through her body. She steps back to make room for Eliza, opening the door wider.
They go upstairs to 221B, and Eliza sits in Sherlock's chair before the fire, where she sat the first time she visited.
"Tea? Water? Food?" Sherlock says, already standing in the threshold between kitchen and sitting room.
"Can I have it all?" Eliza replies, familiar enough with Sherlock to know she doesn't have to be polite.
Sherlock nods and heads into the kitchen. There's still hot water in the kettle, because she brewed herself a cup of tea a little while ago, and she pours it into a clean mug, steeping a chamomile tea bag. Eliza likes chamomile tea best. Sherlock adds sugar and cream and takes it to Eliza, who smiles and holds the mug with both hands.
Sherlock returns to the kitchen and pokes her head into the refrigerator. "How've you been?" she says.
"Fine," says Eliza. "Were you worried?"
Sherlock takes the leftover curry from dinner two nights ago out of the fridge and dumps it onto a plate before sticking it in the microwave. She pours Eliza a glass of water as the food heats up and takes it to her with the plate.
She sits in Watson's chair and folds her legs up on the seat, watching as Eliza sets her mug on the stack of books at the foot of her chair where Sherlock deposited the glass of water and begins to eat. Sherlock sips at her own tea again, now lukewarm, and gives the girl a minute to enjoy herself.
The fire crackles beside them, and Sherlock thinks about how the warmth must feel better to Eliza than it does to her. It isn't cold outside, just cool enough for a light jacket, but living outdoors day and night, constantly exposed to the elements and without anywhere comfortable to rest or sleep, would leave any woman wanting for warmth.
"To answer your question, no," Sherlock says. "I wasn't worried about you."
Eliza just looks at her, chewing.
"I've had too much on my mind to worry about any of my street contacts in particular. Good to see you're alive and well, though."
"Do you know who's doing it?" says Eliza. "The murders."
"No," Sherlock replies, almost ashamed.
"Yeah, I didn't think so. I thought I would've heard something by now if you did." She reaches down over the arm of her chair for the glass of water and drinks a couple gulps. "What I have to tell you, I've known for two days, and I would've come sooner but...."
Sherlock stares at her, blinking, noticing the way Eliza averts her eyes and the hint of apology in her tone. "You weren't sure about me," she says.
Eliza looks up at her again, clear-eyed and almost surprised. "I wasn't sure it was safe," she says. "Because he might be watching. I didn't have any doubts about you."
Sherlock doesn't answer, feeling a strange mix of relief and disbelief. She hadn't thought about the killer watching Baker Street. Members of her homeless network rarely visit her at home, and the crime scenes have all been at a considerable distance from Sherlock's neighborhood. She wouldn't be surprised if the killer knows where she lives—it's easy enough to find her and Watson now, through their previous clientele—but she hasn't noticed any suspicious activity on the street since the first murder. Her brother has surveillance on the building and would've alerted her if she had a stalker.
Eliza scoops more food into her mouth, the smell of the curry still reaching Sherlock's nose over the smell of the fire. She washes the mouthfuls down with tea and says, "I saw him the other day. Or I think I did anyway. The bloke wasn't right. You know that feeling you get, when you run into something awful? Like skin crawling, yeah? That's what I got, when I saw him. I thought maybe he was a pimp. One of those real nasty ones. But now, I changed my mind. I think he's your man."
Sherlock leans forward, setting her elbows on her knees, laser-focused on Eliza now. "Where?" she says. "Where did you see him? What did he look like?"
"You know the HTB church on Brompton Road?" Eliza says. "In Knightsbridge?"
"Yes, of course."
"I popped 'round there Wednesday morning for the weekly breakfast and saw him. Most of the people who show up, I recognize, even if I don't know them. But I'd never seen this bloke before, and he just wasn't right."
Holy Trinity Brompton on Brompton Road is one of the oldest Anglican churches in London, the original of four sites in the HTB church group. The church runs a drop-in shelter for the homeless on Wednesdays. It's an odd location for a homeless assistance program, in the middle of wealthy Knightsbridge where rich people and tourists do their shopping. Anyone the church helps isn't staying in the district on a regular basis. The serial murderer couldn't have staked out the area randomly, looking for victims. He must've run an internet search for churches serving the homeless and chose that one for some reason, though he evidently decided not to kill anyone he saw at the shelter.
"What do you mean, he was there?" Sherlock says. "He's homeless?"
Eliza nods. "Yeah. Except, he wasn't like the rest of us. Part of me thought, oh, maybe he's new to this, you know? Recently joined. Drug addict or something. He wasn't too clean, like you, but he was still different somehow. I don't know how to explain it."
"Describe him."
Eliza continues to eat, talking out one side of her mouth. "Tall," she says. "Taller than you, by a bit. He was thick in the shoulders, like beefy. Maybe that's one reason why he stuck out. Men who've been on the streets a while are bony. They don't look like they work out, you know? Your man wasn't hungry, either. All he had was a coffee. None of us turns down free food. Who does that? Even if it's shite, it's something hot to tide you over. But all he had was a coffee. And he didn't speak to anyone, just sort of stood back and watched. He was there for thirty minutes. I checked."
"I need to know more about his appearance," Sherlock says, trying not to sound urgent. "Hair, eyes, distinctive marks, clothing. He was white, yes?"
"Yeah. I didn't get close enough to see his eye color for sure, but they weren't dark. His hair was grown out a bit, I guess? Longer than yours, on the sides. I'd say it was a dark blonde or a very light brown. He didn't have any markings that I could see. He was wearing long sleeves."
"Did you hear him speak?"
Eliza shakes her head.
Sherlock wilts a little. An accent or distinctive speech patterns could help identify the mystery man. But she moves on quick. "Did you see him talking to anyone at length? Or watching someone in particular?"
"No," Eliza says. "He was watching the room and the door, every time someone new came in, but I don't think he was focused on anybody in particular. And nobody tried talking to him, except maybe the church people. He was just weird and standoffish."
"And you haven't seen or heard of him since?" says Sherlock.
"I tried asking my mates and some of the other people I know on the streets if they'd seen him or met him, but negative. It's like he's a ghost or something. London's a big city, but it's not like us to move around a lot, over long distances. If he really is homeless, he's got to have territory, and I don't see why he would've come to Knightsbridge if he lives in East London or wherever, you know?"
"So maybe he isn't homeless." Sherlock looks away, still leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. "Maybe he's pretending to be, to gain his victims' trust. And stay invisible."
Eliza watches Sherlock, the empty plate and fork in her lap and the mug of tea in her hand. "Why would someone hate us that much?" she says, her voice quiet.
"It's not about you. He hates me." Sherlock looks at Eliza again. "And he's targeting homeless because you're easy victims. He also might know I talk to you."
Sherlock drinks her tea, even though it's almost cold. She's already scanning suspect photos in her brain, though the description Eliza gave of the man doesn't tell her enough. She stands up and sets her mug on the mantle next to the framed photo of her and Watson that Watson insisted on taking and displaying. Sherlock moves to the bookshelves on the left side of the fireplace and retrieves the pack of cigarettes she keeps hidden behind The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives. She pulls a cigarette from the pack and lights it with the metal lighter she keeps in her pocket, taking her first drag and exhaling with a sense of relief. She quit years ago but sometimes, circumstances call for a smoke.
"I'm sorry I don't know more," Eliza says, looking at her. "I almost followed him, but—"
"Don't apologize," says Sherlock, meeting her gaze. "What you've told me is valuable. And it's a good thing you didn't follow the man because he might've killed you."
Eliza pauses. "What now?"
Sherlock puffs on her cigarette. "Spread the word on the streets there may be an imposter in your midst and ask your associates to report any newcomers they meet to the rest of the regulars. If you haven't already done it. And be careful, Eliza."
Eliza continues to watch Sherlock in silence, looking worried—though maybe not for herself.
Sherlock reaches into her trouser pocket for the knife and offers it to Eliza. "Here," she says. "Make sure nobody sees it, or someone might try to steal it from you."
Eliza takes the folded up knife and looks at it in her hands. It's one of several pocket knives Sherlock owns, not her favorite or most expensive but a good, sharp, reliable knife. The stainless steel handle is carved to look like tree bark. Eliza pulls the knife open and looks at the three and a half inch blade.
"I can't take this," she says, looking up at Sherlock. "It's too nice. And I don't even know what to do with it."
"I would bet you know how to use that knife if you have to, better than any untrained housed woman," Sherlock replies. "And it's not too nice for you. Don't be ridiculous."
Eliza looks down at the knife in her hands again, with disbelief and humility on her face.
Sherlock takes a drag on her cigarette and looks away from the girl. They're both quiet for a minute, the silence broken up by the sound of the fire.
"I'm sorry," Sherlock says.
Eliza snaps her head up to look at her. She doesn't know Sherlock half as well as Watson or Lestrade or any of the people Sherlock works with, but she's still caught off guard hearing her apologize.
Sherlock slides her eyes back onto Eliza. "For bringing this man into your streets," she finishes. "And for not having him already."
"It's not your fault," Eliza replies. "You really shouldn't blame yourself."
Sherlock just looks at her.
Eliza folds up the knife and tucks it into one of her pockets.
*~*~*
Victim number three dies two days later in East Ham. Sherlock, Watson, and Lestrade gather around the corpse at nine in the morning, under an overcast sky that threatens to wash away evidence. This one is the grisliest yet: blood matted in the victim's blonde hair where the back of her skull was bashed in, violet bruises ringing her neck, clothes ripped off from the waist up and Sherlock's name carved into her back, the letters big and jagged with anger. She's lying face down in the mud, but she was killed on her back, then flipped over for the cutting.
Sherlock knows her. She was a member of her homeless network, a paid informant and data collector. She said her name was Daisy, but that could've been a street alias. Sherlock had enlisted her help a few times, not nearly as often as some of her other homeless assistants but enough for her to feel responsible to the young woman in a way she didn't to the first two victims.
Watson and Lestrade watch Sherlock with quiet grimness, as she straightens up and steps back from the body.
"I'm sorry," Lestrade says.
Sherlock doesn't look at her or Watson, feeling too heavy to be furious. She snaps the latex gloves off her hands and makes a decision.
"I know this is bad, but I'm asking you not to do anything you'll regret," Lestrade tells her.
Sherlock knows what she means: don't go back to the Black Horse basement. Don't fall back on drugs. Don't get smashed tonight and go looking for the bastard where he can find his next victim.
Sherlock turns away from Daisy and Watson and Lestrade, crumpled gloves still in her hand, and heads for the road.
"Sherlock," Watson calls out. "Where are you going?"
Sherlock doesn't answer.
*~*~*
She goes back to the first crime scene, in Southwark, not far from the Thames. The mud has dried into a smooth, firmly packed solid ground with just enough give for Sherlock to leave light footprints. There's no trace of the murder scene from last week, but she remembers where the body lay. The sky is overcast again, but there's no rain. She can smell the river in the near distance.
This time, she searches the area properly, without a legion of police watching and standing in the way. She moves across the length of the lot, back and forth, until she's covered the entire area, eyes fixed on the ground. She squats down more than once to inspect the dirt, picking at objects and looking for something she missed. She searches the spot where the body was found, for blood dried into the earth, some indication of the struggle against death. She sees the dead woman as clearly now as she did when the body was here—but it doesn't speak to her.
A metallic glint catches her eye, makes her stop and turn around. She moves to find the source of the flash, looking down at the spot on the ground and leaning over to inspect it. The rim of a silver object juts up out of the mud, and she grabs it between her thumb and forefinger, picking the thing out and rubbing it clean.
She holds the two pound coin up to her face and looks at it in the light, standing tall. The queen's image is familiar in the dark gray center, with the gold-colored border surrounding it. When she flips the coin over, she finds an identical head, not tails. She feels the bottom drop out of her stomach, the breath rush out of her body.
James Moriarty used to carry a double-headed coin. He would flip it over and over, catching it in his palm and rolling it over his knuckles sometimes. Sherlock assumed it was an ordinary coin, until he made her catch it, the last time they met in person before Reichenbach.
Do you call bets on this, she asked him.
He smiled and said, I'm not a betting man.
Then why the two heads, she said.
Because I needed an equal, Sherlock, he said. And it's you.
She stares at the coin in her hand, the weight of it like a stone three times as heavy. Moriarty hasn't set foot outside of Belmarsh Prison in just over a year—but these two pounds belong to him. All of this belongs to him.
*~*~*
She's sitting at a steel table, under a lonely white light, in a cold room just big enough for a fistfight. She doesn't take off her walking coat or loosen her scarf, wearing them like armor. On her way to the prison, she was jittery, full of dread, but now she feels nothing. Her mind is blank, and she can't feel her heart. A second before the door opens, she realizes this is the nothingness she feels in her dreams.
A guard leads him in, another one following him. She had imagined him in his typical attire—an expensive, tailored suit, a pocket square, a silk tie, designer shoes shined—but he's wearing the same jumpsuit as every other inmate in this prison, the same white loafers. He's in handcuffs, but he smiles as he sits down across from her. The two guards recede into the shadows behind him, standing with their backs against the wall.
For a long beat, they stare at each other in silence, Sherlock and Moriarty. Him, with a smug hint of a smile, that ever-present twinkle in his flat, dead eyes. She, with a face as frigid as the black depths of the sea. Other women would tremble and cower in the presence of the man who almost killed them—but all Sherlock feels now is a frostbitten loathing. The same fearless contempt she felt that night at Reichenbach Lake, when she thought she would kill him or die trying.
"How's my poppet?" he says.
"How's prison?" Sherlock counters.
"Not bad. I finally get to take some time for myself, catch up on my hobbies. It's almost like going on holiday. And speaking of holidays, today must be Christmas, because here you are."
Sherlock glowers at him, stone-faced, her jaw set.
"Are you going to tell me why?" he says. "Do you miss me as much as I miss you?"
"I'm here because someone's been killing the homeless, and I want to know who."
"You think I know?"
"I think you're behind it," Sherlock says. "The one giving the orders."
Moriarty leans back in his chair and looks at the walls on either side of them. "You know where we are, don't you?"
"You are completely capable of operating from inside this place. I don't know how, and I don't care. But I know you can and you are, and I want to know if you're the reason for these murders."
Moriarty looks at Sherlock, cocking his head. "Why would you suspect me?"
Sherlock hesitates, unsure if she should give him the most important detail. If she's wrong and Moriarty isn't the mind behind the murders, sharing details with him about the case would be a dangerous mistake.
He's watching her like she's behind glass, on display at the aquarium. But he's the predator, he's the one in prison, he's the thing that rises out of the dark deep when she's floating in the sea.
Watson was right. Sherlock never saw him in her dreams until this case. And the killer had to get that two-headed coin from somewhere.
"My name," she says. "The victims have my name carved into their bodies."
"So the killer knows who you are, he's lashing out at you through his crimes, and you think I put him up to it," says Moriarty. He grins at Sherlock just a little, the corners of his mouth twitching. "You find it more believable I reached out to someone on the outside from in here, just to torture you, than any one of the men you've crossed in the past deciding to get revenge? Mmmm. Sounds like you wanted an excuse to see me, Holmes. And you really shouldn't need one."
Sherlock feels a desire to destroy him slither into her belly like a black snake, tongue darting in and out of its lips. She reaches into her coat pocket for the coin and throws it on the table, the metallic sound of it bouncing against the steel filling the room. "I found this at one of the crime scenes."
He looks down at the coin, then picks it up with both hands and turns it over to see the two heads, the chain attached to the cuffs rattling. He drops the coin back on Sherlock's side of the table and smiles at her. "Do you know what I knew about you as soon as I heard of you?" he says. "You're the other side of the coin I was looking for all along. It's a disappointing to see you resist your potential, Sherlock. You could be better than me, if you wanted."
"I am better than you," says Sherlock.
He half-grins, his eyes glinting. "I meant you could be better at what I do than I am."
Sherlock knew what he meant. She doesn't tell him that, just glowers at him from across the table.
"You feel wrong for wanting to see me," Moriarty says. "Like there's something twisted about it, about you. You think you should forget about me, pretend I don't exist because now I'm in here." He leans forward, rests his arms on the table between them, the handcuff chain rattling against the steel tabletop. "But see, you are twisted, Sherlock. You are. There's a part of you that isn't any different from me, and that part of you wants to see me—because I can give you what no one else can. I can give you a reason to let all that darkness out. And it feels good to let the dog off the leash, doesn't it? I saw it in your eyes that night. That pleasure, that relief. You were finally going to kill someone, to become one with the thing you've been chasing all these years. You don't just hate me because of what I do or what I did to you. You hate that you see yourself in me. You hate me because I remind you that you're not pure. In another life, I could've been you, and in this one, you could still be me."
Sherlock stands up, her chair scraping the floor as she pushes it backward. She looks down at Moriarty and says, in a voice like an icepick cracking bone, "I am nothing like you. I don't want to see you, unless it's to watch you suffer and die."
He smiles, and she heads for the door.
"Don't you want an answer?" he says.
She stops. Turns around and steps back into the light. "Am I supposed to believe you?"
"I've never lied to you, Sherlock. You know that, or you wouldn't be here."
She does know he never lied to her in the past, but now, in this situation, any answer he gives could be a lie, each one serving a purpose.
But she waits.
"What price are you willing to pay, for a name?" he says.
"The name of the killer?" she replies.
He nods.
"So you are behind this."
"I needed to get your attention somehow," he says. "You don't answer my letters."
Sherlock resists the urge to seize him by his jumpsuit collar and throttle him against the wall. "Who is he?" she says.
"I'm not going to tell you for free. Nothing's free, Sherlock. Not life or death."
"What do you want?"
"Same thing I've always wanted. You."
She stands in his bloodthirsty gaze, looks into his black shark eyes, and doesn't flinch or shrink away.
"Agree to visit me again, and I'll tell you what you need to know," he says.
She pauses, weighing her own animosity toward Moriarty against the probability she figures out who the killer is before he slays another victim.
"Fine," she says. "I'll come back. Now, tell me who he is and where I can find him."
"Spencer Gray," Moriarty says. "I think you can look up his address on your own. You or your pack of dogs at the Yard."
It takes a moment for the name to register, but Sherlock does remember the man. He was the suspect in a case she and Lestrade worked together, years ago. He went to prison for a short sentence. How the hell did he know about the connection between Moriarty and Sherlock? When Moriarty went down, the police made sure Sherlock's name never made it into the papers.
"You told him to impersonate a homeless man," she says.
"I did," says Moriarty, leaning back in his chair. "I gave him very specific instructions."
"Was cutting my name in the bodies included in those instructions?"
"No. That was his own, personal touch. If I had known he was going to do that, I would've picked someone else."
Sherlock turns to leave without another word.
"Give my regards to Watson and Lestrade," Moriarty says, stretching out in his chair. "And Sherlock—if you don't come back soon, there will be consequences."
Sherlock pauses at the door just for a second, hating him with every part of her being.
She leaves him behind the steel door and on her way down the hall, she calls her brother.
"Mycroft," she says. "We need to talk about security at Belmarsh."
*~*~*
Spencer Gray lives in a rundown building in Brixton, the kind of place that looks abandoned from the outside. Lestrade, a few other detectives from her unit, and a host of uniformed coppers quietly roll their vehicles onto the street intersecting with the one of Gray's address, staying a block north of his. They park amongst the civilian cars lining both sides of the street, and some of the uniformed officers start quietly making their way toward the apartment building, led by the detective sergeants who answer to Lestrade. She's ordered them to stand by, across the street from Gray's building, and to stay out of sight.
Lestrade, Sherlock, and Watson hang back next to Lestrade's car, their hair and the hems of their coats swaying in the wind.
"Are you ready?" Lestrade says to Sherlock.
Sherlock gives a slight nod. "Are you?"
Lestrade and Watson trade glances, and Watson nods at Sherlock.
"Remember, after we get a full confession, I'm only giving you five minutes," Lestrade tells Sherlock. "Just five—and we're going in to get him."
"Five's plenty," Sherlock says. "Once he's said all he needs to say, I'm cutting you off. You can start counting the minutes when I do."
"If you feel like you can't handle him, get out of there. Don't be proud, just get out and let us take him."
"I'm not handing him over until I've had my piece."
Lestrade looks at Sherlock with the authority of her police rank, tempered by the hint of tenderness she can never hide in her eyes when she's focused on Sherlock. Sherlock looks back at her with the stony, stubborn expression she so often wears, none of her usual excitement for action and victory, just a dark determination. Watson's expression is openly worried as she watches Sherlock. She put up a good fight when Sherlock insisted on going in for Gray alone, but in the end, she capitulated to Sherlock's insistence that this is personal to her. Lestrade folded in a similar argument with Sherlock beforehand, persuaded by Sherlock's strategy more than her right to vengeance.
"Don't get yourself hurt," Lestrade says. "He's not worth it."
Sherlock hears what the older woman really means: don't get yourself killed, it would devastate me.
"I'll be fine," Sherlock says, looking at Lestrade and Watson. "He's the one you should worry about."
She steps out into the open sidewalk and starts heading toward Gray's street, her hands in her coat pockets and her collar turned up against the wind.
Last night, she stayed up until after three in the morning, too wired with anticipation to sleep. When she finally managed to pass out in her bed, she dreamed of the ocean again. She was floating closer to the surface than she had ever been before, like a corpse in the muted white light somewhere above her. There was no Moriarty, no one and nothing except herself in the deep blue silence, the shadows of unseen wildlife passing beneath her. She was no more than a silhouette herself.
Sherlock climbs the steps leading to the apartment building's front door and goes inside without looking back. She pauses in the foyer, listening to the silence and looking up through the stairwell. There's a skylight in the roof directly above it, and it's too much like the sun in her dream, shining on the other side of water.
She takes the stairs to the third floor, wondering if Gray can hear her coming. There's no sign of anyone in the building, no noise. She reaches the third floor and pauses again on the landing, looking down the corridor to where Gray's door waits. There's a large rectangular window at the end of the corridor, letting in that same anemic light.
Sherlock stops to check her wire in front of Gray's door, peeking at it where she pinned it to the inside of her blazer. Lestrade and Watson are listening in Lestrade's car—but Sherlock has no intention of censoring herself.
She knocks on Gray's door and waits.
He opens up after several seconds and just looks at her. For a moment, she suspects he doesn't recognize her, though her appearance hasn't changed since she testified at his trial six years ago. Prison shows itself in his face, though he has the same bald head peppered with silver fuzz. He's aged but also hardened.
"Spencer Gray," she says.
"Sherlock Holmes," he replies. "Are you really this cocky or just suicidal?"
"Aren't you going to let me in?"
Gray steps aside, pulling the door open wider, and Sherlock enters the flat.
The sitting room is a mess, littered with empty bottles, newspapers, and other debris. There's a dirty ashtray and magazines on the long coffee table standing on short legs in front of the sofa. The wallpaper is old and dated, a brown and white pattern that makes the carpet look worse than it is even while matching it. An assortment of paper and photographs decorate a section of wall to the right of the sofa, and Sherlock quickly realizes it's a collection of information on her, not unlike the corkboards she assembles in her own sitting room when she's working cases.
"You don't seem that surprised to see me," she says, staring at the wall with her hands on her hips and her coat peeled back behind them.
"Should I be?" says Gray. "You're Sherlock Holmes, detective genius, aren't you?"
"Yes, but miraculously, you didn't leave any identifying evidence behind at your crime scenes. I'm only here now because Moriarty gave you up."
"I guess I should've seen that coming." Gray passes Sherlock on his way into the sitting room. As far as she can tell, he's unarmed.
"Take it from someone who knows: bad men don't do loyalty," she says, watching him as he sits on the sofa across from her.
"Why are you here?" he says. "Why aren't there a bunch of coppers kicking my door down instead?"
"You owe me an explanation. And I don't mean whatever bollocks you're going to say when you're interrogated at Scotland Yard. You did this to me—and I want you to look me in the eye and confess."
Gray looks at Sherlock with the hint of a smirk in his mouth, looks at her like she's some kind of fascinating animal on display. "You know I want to kill you, Holmes. Aren't you afraid?"
Sherlock smiles. "Afraid of you? No. I've met men worth fearing. You aren't one of them."
She's telling the truth. Standing here, alone in the flat with this murderer who hates her down to her blood, she is fearless. She feels the same cool stillness that possesses her in the boxing ring, just before a fight starts, when everything in her and around her goes quiet. She's floating in the sea, awake in the void.
Sherlock starts to pace the length of the sitting room on her side of the coffee table. "So I have you convicted of kidnapping and abusing your girlfriend, help her disappear, and once you're done serving your prison sentence, you decide to get back at me. I know I've probably told you this before, Mr. Gray, but you're as stupid as they come. I already caught you once. Did you think you were going to get away with these murders? After calling me the way you did?"
"No," he says. "I knew you'd find me sooner or later. I wanted you to. It doesn't matter what they do to me after today. Whatever happens, fucking with you was worth it. Killing you is going to be worth it."
Sherlock stands still at the front of the room, arms crossed against her chest now, and smiles. She starts to pace again. "How did you end up in Moriarty's web?"
"He called me. Right after I got out of prison. He wanted to talk to me about you."
Sherlock knows what Moriarty has done, immediately: he ordered his operatives to identify every convict currently serving a sentence, whose case Sherlock worked, and he keeps the list, complete with projected release dates, so he can use whoever leaves prison against Sherlock if he wants to. He probably has the list narrowed down to the men most likely to want revenge against her or to reoffend. Men like Spencer Gray.
"Did he tell you who he is?" Sherlock says. "Why he's got a life sentence?"
"No," says Gray. "And I don't care. All I needed from him was inspiration, a plan."
"You needed him to do your thinking for you? That doesn't surprise me."
Gray ignores the barb. "He told me all about your little homeless network, how you use the poor sods to do your legwork and spy for you. I guess the great Sherlock Holmes isn't as impressive as she appears."
"What else did he tell you?" Sherlock says.
"About you? Nothing," Gray replies. "He said if I killed you, he would come after me, but I think I'll take my chances."
Sherlock smirks. "You go ahead and do that. At least I know if you do kill me, he'll destroy you. But I really don't think you're up to it."
"I've just killed three people, and you don't think I'm up to doing you?"
Sherlock stops and turns toward him, uncrossing her arms. She looks at him with a flash of danger in her eyes, her face sharp and predatory. "You killed three homeless people who were hungry, probably malnourished and underweight, probably dehydrated, none of whom had any training in self-defense or martial arts. One of them was little more than a boy. But you're not on the streets now. You're in here with me. And unlike your victims, Mr. Gray, I am not weak."
Gray pauses, looking at her with narrowed eyes like he's trying to figure her out. He doesn't look intimidated—must assume she's an easy target, like every other woman he's attacked.
She relaxes, the intensity dissipating from her demeanor. "I'm not in a rush," she says. "Why don't we have a drink?"
Sherlock takes off her coat, hanging it on the wall-mounted coat rack before she steps into the kitchen adjacent to the sitting room. She peers into the refrigerator, looking for beer.
Gray gets up from the sofa and comes around to the kitchen, hovering in the entrance. Sherlock looks over at him and straightens up, shutting the refrigerator. For a long beat, they eye each other like two feral cats crossing paths in an alley, enemies destined to fight. Sherlock can feel the tension in the air, like an electrical charge.
Gray swipes a big knife off the countertop and lunges at her. Sherlock pounces on him, grabbing him around the middle and throttling him to the ground like a linebacker. She seizes his wrist as he tries to stab her, holding his arm up above them, the knife glinting in the light. He tries hard to bring the blade down on her, and she uses most of her strength to resist him, attempting to wrench his arm and force him to drop the weapon. They're on the kitchen floor, Spencer on his back and Sherlock on top of him. He reaches for her with his free hand just as she punches him in the face with hers, and his stabbing arm lets up enough for her to twist it down and away. She kicks and tries to step on his inner elbow, and he drops the knife with a yelp, immediately moving to sit up and push her off.
They struggle in the narrow kitchen, both of them wanting to reach the knife and both of them hitting and shoving the other into the cabinets below the countertops. Sherlock has no idea if she's lost the wire, if it's still recording, or if the police are storming the building, heading straight for her. She doesn't hear anything outside the flat, as she punches Gray in the face and scrambles to her feet on the kitchen linoleum. She picks up the knife where it landed in one of the corners below the window and shuts it in a drawer as Gray stands up, facing her.
Sherlock raises her fists in front of her face and eyes him. "We're going to fight fair," she tells him, her breathing quick. "Think you can do that?"
He glares at her, his skin still pink where she hit his right cheek. "You want me to kill you with my bare hands?" he says. "Beat you to a pulp, choke the life out of you? Have it your way."
Sherlock smirks with one corner of her mouth. Gray has no idea who he's up against.
He charges at her like a bull, the smallness of the kitchen making him look bigger than he is, and throws himself at her as if he means to crush her with his body weight. She ducks and rotates out of his way, and he collides with the wall next to the window. Sherlock jumps onto the countertop and leaps into the sitting room like a cat, waiting for him to come to her.
He follows her into the sitting room looking disgruntled and dangerous, chest rising and falling as he pants.
"Where's the knife, Gray?" Sherlock says. "The one you used to cut your victims?"
"Why?" he says. "You want to skip the fight and get right to dying?"
She attacks him in a burst of rage, catching him off guard as she shoves him backward with both hands, pinning him against the wall behind him. He's surprised at her physical strength—she can see it in his face, just before she punches him. She grips his throat with her other hand, knees him in the groin, punches him in the face again. Everything around her disappears, the edges of her vision soften and grow hazy, and all she sees is the man, his every detail sharpened and ultra-clear. His blood is the brightest color about him, the sight of it piquing her lust for more.
She squeezes his throat, watches his face turn red, but before she can land her next blow, he blocks her punch and grabs her arm, pushing her hard away from him. She staggers back, losing her grip on him, and he pauses only long enough to breathe. He advances on her, starts swinging, and she blocks him, hits him, blocks him again. He slaps her hard across the face, almost knocking her off balance, and it shocks her. She blinks at him, her cheek stinging, and he grins at her, the bastard.
Sherlock hops onto the coffee table with one foot to push off from it and body slams him, wrenching him to the floor where they wrestle around in a flurry of limbs. Trading jabs with elbows and knees, wrapping legs around each other and rolling. Sherlock gets on top of him, straddles his waist, and knocks his head into the floor, before punching him. He flips her off of him and grabs her in a headlock, holding her there while she claws at his arm and writhes until she thinks she's about to pass out. In a flash of reason that cuts through her primitive panic, she decides to play dead, going limp against him. He lets go of her after a while and she lays on the floor with her eyes closed, waiting for him to get up. Hoping he leaves to go fetch the murder weapon.
She listens to Gray get on his feet, breathing hard and labored. He's slow, hopefully due to injuries she inflicted and not just because the fight tired him out. He pauses, and for a tense moment, Sherlock waits for him to move away or to assault her again.
She relaxes when she hears him step toward the kitchen and the bedroom corridor, but only for a moment. She opens her eyes, grabs the jump rope lying under the coffee table, springs to her feet, comes up behind him and hooks the rope around his neck, yanking him backward until she has him right up against her. She pulls the jump rope tight against his throat, and he leans into her forearms, unsteady on his heels as he tries to pry the rope loose. She chokes him for a minute, listening to the hoarse sounds of his aborted gasps, watching his hands flail before him.
She lets him go before he can lose consciousness, and he slumps to the floor, knees crumpling beneath him, upper body landing on the coffee table. She throws the jump rope aside and drags him coughing onto the sofa, sitting him down and straddling his lap. His head lolls and his half-lidded eyes don't focus. She returns the slap he gave her, backhanding him across the face with chilling wrath, her skin stinging from the blow. She balls up her battered hands and starts punching him, already cool with sweat.
Coppers break through the door and come flooding into the flat. Sherlock hears them before she sees them, her back turned to them as she hits Gray over and over. She doesn't stop, slow down, or pause, even once she feels the room fill with men in uniform. She doesn't even look up.
"Sherlock, stop! Stop!"
It's Lestrade's voice, Lestrade's hands pulling her off of Gray. When Sherlock finally sees her, Lestrade has a look on her face: a mix of fear, bewilderment, concern, and surprise. Watson appears beside her, anxious only for a moment, then relieved. Sherlock comes back into her body, into the room, and realizes she's panting for breath. Her heart's racing, adrenaline rushing through her brain and her body. She looks down at her hands, finds her knuckles red and raw. Her fingers throb and tingle, fists now unclenched.
She turns around and looks at Spencer Gray. He's sprawled on the sofa, dazed and motionless, with a bunch of coppers hovering around him. His face looks worse than Sherlock's hands. Much worse.
Lestrade sidesteps Sherlock and Watson and advances toward Gray, looking down at him from the other side of the coffee table. "Spencer Gray," she says, her voice firm and somber. "You're under arrest for the murders of three unidentified persons, conspiracy to commit murder, and the assault and attempted murder of Sherlock Holmes. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
One of the uniformed officers plucks Gray off the sofa and shoves him facedown onto the coffee table to cuff his hands behind his back.
"Take him to the Yard," Lestrade says.
"Yes, ma'am," says the officer.
Sherlock, Watson, and Lestrade watch as Spencer Gray is herded out of the flat, and the crowd of coppers follow him, leaving the three women alone.
*~*~*
As soon as Sherlock walks into 221B, she collapses on the rug next to the fireplace chairs, sprawling on her back and exhaling. She scrubs her face with both hands and looks at the ceiling, all the tension she's been holding in her body for the last two weeks now gone. She feels like she could sleep for a week, even though she knows she'll be itching for a new case in a few days.
The flat door creaks when Watson pushes it open and comes in. She stands at Sherlock's feet and smiles down at her. Sherlock meets her gaze.
"I told you we'd get him," Watson says.
Sherlock doesn't answer, feeling like jelly on the floor, basking in relief.
"I'll put the kettle on," Watson tells her and turns to enter the kitchen.
Sherlock sits up and watches her fill the electric kettle with water, set it on the boiler, and switch it on. She's been waiting to talk to Watson, and she can't wait anymore.
"Lestrade's in love with me," she says.
Watson stops and looks over at her. When Sherlock doesn't speak again, she comes back into the sitting room. "Really?" she says.
Sherlock nods.
"Our Lestrade?"
"Our Lestrade."
"But—but she's only ever been with men. Right?"
"As far as I know," says Sherlock.
Watson looks away from her. "Wow," she says. She looks back at Sherlock as the next logical question hits. "Are you in love with her?"
Sherlock pauses, her shoulders hunched around her neck and her hands flat on the rug. "She asked me to be her partner, and I said yes because it felt right. Am I in love with her? I don't know. I've never been in love before. I know that I love her and need her, and when she kissed me, I felt—happy."
A slow smile spreads across Watson's face. "She kissed you."
Sherlock pauses, dropping her gaze into her lap. "The truth is, I was confused about my feelings for her long before she made this confession to me. I've loved her for years as my friend, but something new started to creep in months ago. It made the smallest difference, but I couldn't explain what it was. And that frustrated me. I didn't tell you because I didn't know what to say. And perhaps I was afraid of wanting something from her she would never give. All the evidence left me with no choice but to conclude she was firmly heterosexual." Sherlock looks at Watson again. "You've been in love before," she says. "Tell me if I am."
Watson folds her arms against her chest. "I don't feel your feelings, Sherlock. I can't tell you what they are. You're not like anyone I've ever known. I never imagined you involved with anybody. But the sound in your voice when you talk about her is love if I've ever heard it."
Sherlock lowers her eyes from Watson's face, a pensive expression on her face.
"You're overthinking this, aren't you?" Watson says. She sighs and sits on the arm of her easy chair. "Of course you are."
"Too many things can go wrong," Sherlock says. "I'm afraid, Watson. I'm never afraid. But this—" She looks up at Watson again. "I don't want to lose her. Or you."
"Me? Why on earth would you be worried about losing me?"
"I don't want our relationship to change. I don't want to leave Baker Street or see you less, work with you less. I don't want you withdrawing from me because you think I don't need you anymore."
Watson tilts her head to one side, unfolding her arms and resting her hands on her thighs. "You're serious?"
Sherlock just stares at her, a crease in her brow.
"Sherlock," Watson says and sits on the floor in front of her best friend. "You don't have to worry about any of that, least of all now. Lestrade didn't ask you to marry her and move to a house in the country, she just told you she's in love with you. Stop thinking it to death and be happy. I'm not going anywhere. I promise."
Sherlock looks at her as the kettle's hissing peaks. She leans forward and takes Watson's hands in hers. "Neither am I," she says. "I love you, Watson. You're my best friend. Lestrade makes me happy, but so do you. I don't know what I would do without you."
Watson smiles with a glowing warmth and squeezes Sherlock's hands. "I love you, too, Sherlock," she says.
Sherlock bows her head for a moment, then looks up at Watson again. "Lestrade said it's okay that I don't want sex. I don't know if I believe her. She's never had a nonsexual romance before."
"She's also never been in love with a woman before."
Sherlock sighs. "I don't want to be unfair to her."
"I'm pretty sure Lestrade is old enough to know what she wants and what she can live with," says Watson. "If she says she's okay with a nonsexual relationship, then believe her. She loves you, Sherlock. And she's known exactly who you are for a decade. She knew before she told you how she feels. I don't think she would've asked you to be her partner if she wasn't willing to accept you."
Sherlock looks at Watson uncertainly but feels a little bit less skeptical.
Watson smiles and gets up to make the tea. Sherlock stays on the floor and thinks.
*~*~*
Later that night, after dinner, Sherlock finds herself outside Lestrade's door. For a minute or two, she just stands there, uncertain in a way she so rarely is. She knocks with hesitation, and she doesn't wait long for Lestrade to open up.
"Hi," Lestrade says, a happy light in her eyes.
"Hi," says Sherlock. "Can I come in?"
"Of course." Lestrade steps back and opens the door wider to let Sherlock inside.
Sherlock hasn't been in Lestrade's house since before Lestrade confessed her feelings, and it feels different somehow. She looks around half-expecting to see physical changes but doesn't find them.
"Can I get you anything?" Lestrade says, crossing into the kitchen. She's barefoot.
Sherlock shakes her head.
Lestrade pours herself a glass of water and takes it into the sitting room, passing by Sherlock who stands at the edge of the foyer. She sits in one of the easy chairs and looks at Sherlock expectantly, her bare legs curled up on the seat cushion.
"Are you going to sit?" she says, when Sherlock doesn't move.
"Maybe," says Sherlock. She pauses, hesitant to speak her mind.
"Is everything all right?" Lestrade says.
Sherlock nods. "I talked to Watson, about us."
Lestrade pauses, holding her glass in her lap with both hands. "How did it go?"
"Well," says Sherlock, stepping down from the raised wood floor onto the sitting room carpet. "She's pleased. She wasn't as surprised as I thought she would be. She helped put my mind at ease. Told me to stop overthinking this."
Lestrade grins. "Somebody should give you that advice on at least a weekly basis," she says and sips on her water.
"The other night, when we—talked, about being partners, we left some details out of the conversation. And they're important. That's why I'm here. We need to discuss those details."
"Okay," Lestrade says. "Details, like what?"
Sherlock hesitates, still on her feet at the other end of the coffee table. "I don't want to leave Baker Street," she says. "As long as Watson wants to live there, I'm staying."
Lestrade blinks. "Sherlock, I didn't ask you to move in with me."
"I know you didn't. But it's better I tell you this now, in case it's a problem."
"It's not a problem. Never even crossed my mind, living arrangements. I only just realized I want to be with you, Sherlock. We haven't even told anyone we're together, except Watson. I'm still processing the fact that I'm in love with you. I'm definitely not expecting you to move in with me right now."
"Not now, no. But if you do someday—"
"Then we'll talk about it on that day," says Lestrade. "Right now, I'm just happy you said yes to me."
Sherlock looks at her, still uncertain.
Lestrade gets up from her chair, sets her glass on the coffee table, and moves to stand in front of Sherlock. She clasps Sherlock by the shoulders and says, "I know how much you love Watson, how important she is to you. How important the work you do together is. I would never want that to change. I don't want you doing things you don't like, just for me. I want everything between us to feel right and natural. I want us to be in harmony. I want you to be happy."
Lestrade looks at her with those big, brown eyes.
Sherlock looks back at her. "I want you to be happy," she says.
Lestrade smiles. "I am." She lets go of Sherlock's shoulders and reaches for Sherlock's hand, holding it in hers.
"I don't deserve you, Lestrade," Sherlock says.
"My ex-boyfriends didn't deserve me," Lestrade replies. "You do. Trust me."
Their fingers lace together, palms pressed, and they drift closer and closer like two toy boats in a pond, Sherlock looking down into Lestrade's eyes and Lestrade looking up into Sherlock's. Sherlock rests her forehead against Lestrade's, and Lestrade shuts her eyes. Sherlock admires her long lashes flush against her warm, dark skin. She reaches up with her free hand, cups the back of Lestrade's skull, and kisses her.
She can feel Lestrade smiling into her lips.
*~*~*
In the low light of dusk, Sherlock brings a newspaper and a can of petrol to a quiet spot along the Thames, where the homeless sometimes linger. She finds the place deserted, as she'd hoped. A tall metal trash bin waits for her, the interior blackened from the fires the homeless have lit for warmth. Sherlock takes the newspaper apart page by page and dumps it into the bin, then douses the pages in petrol. She sets the can on the ground and takes a matchbox out of her pocket, strikes a match and drops it in the bin. Flames spring up, the smell of them and the burning newspaper, old ash, and soot wafting into the air around her.
She watches the fire for a while, hands in her coat pockets. She feels the heat of it on her face, the cold at her back. For a moment, she wishes she had a cigarette, but the craving passes, more of a mood than a physical urge.
Sherlock reaches into her coat and pulls a wad of letters from the interior breast pocket—Moriarty's letters, her name and address in his neat handwriting on the envelopes. She collected them in a locked box all these months, unbeknownst to Watson. Moriarty addressed them to flat 221C, instead of 221B, to give Sherlock the option of keeping the letters a secret. How he knew 221C is empty and that Sherlock would want to hide his letters from Watson, she can only guess.
She looks at the stack of letters in her hand, the firelight casting its orange glow on the envelope at the top of the stack. She's read all of them several times, torn between curiosity and contempt, the urge to destroy them and the urge to decode them as if they were pages and pages of cyphers or riddles concealing some important truth about Sherlock, Moriarty, and the world. After the second letter arrived and she decided to read it and whatever followed, she told herself it would be irresponsible to throw the letters away unopened; Moriarty could confide in her about his crimes, past, present, or future. Eventually, she admitted to herself she read them and re-read them for the sole reason that she's still drawn to him. She hates him—not just who he is and what he's done but what he represents—and on some level, she fears him. But since their first meeting, she's been drawn to him the way she used to be drawn to cocaine, knowing he could kill her and loving the adrenaline rush of cheating death.
Someone like you can't be the hero without someone like me.
She read that line of his at least a dozen times. She wants him to be wrong about her, wants to prove she isn't who he says she is. Maybe that's why she studied these letters—to know exactly what to look for in herself, in her life. She doesn't deny her own darkness. She just wants Moriarty's analysis of it to be wrong. She is not like him. She can't be. She wouldn't love and be loved by Watson and Lestrade if she was made of the same stuff as Moriarty.
Sherlock drops the letters into the fire and pauses only for a minute, before turning away and leaving for home.