Chapter Text
1.
17th July 1977
Harry is bored. Painfully, endlessly, incurably bored.
There aren't any other teenagers at Grandma Jelena's birthday party. She's finished the book she brought, and all the ones on Grandma Jelena's shelf are about boring places like New Zealand and Antarctica or long-dead people like Cleopatra and King Tut and a woman called Fanny Hill. That last one was interesting for a while, but for some reason and unlike the other girls in her class, Harry finds the idea of sex with boys – men – unappealing, so the book's back on the shelf. She's been listening to Aunt Ethel and Uncle James discussing their rheumatic pains for ten minutes now and her brain is probably about to dribble out of her ears. It's too late for cake, too early for the buffet.
There's nothing to do.
"Pa, I'm bored," she says, desperate enough not to care if she offends any of the relatives around her. She doesn't; they all smile like her boredom is just adorable.
"Go swim with your brother and the others," Pa replies distractedly. He's in the middle of telling one of his Stupid Customer stories. People laugh politely. Pa's already more than half-drunk and not very good at telling stories, even the Stupid Customer ones.
Harry sighs, and goes to check out the pool. She knows how to swim, of course, but she doesn't like it. She hates pools. They always make her feel like something bad is about to happen. It's stupid, but she tries to stay away from them unless she's really, really bored.
This pool is in the back of the garden, small and mostly ornamental, with an ugly white plaster swan spreading its stylised wings at each corner for extra tackiness. The swans are covered in multi-coloured towels of varying sizes now, which makes them look even more pathetic. Almost a dozen preschoolers and first-formers are milling about in the water. Harry can't see her brother, but he'll be in the middle of it. He always is.
It's annoying sometimes, the way everybody loves Johnny. He's a small five-year-old, blond and almost always smiling, with the world wrapped tightly around his little finger. Ma used to say Johnny is bright enough to be anything he wants to be, when he grows up. She never said anything like that about Harry. Harry is plenty smart herself, but Johnny gets all the attention.
"Johnny!" one of the kids shouts, as if on cue, and it takes Harry a moment to realise that that didn't sound quite right. There was no laughter in that voice, no breathless admiration. Instead, there was… panic?
Now the other kids chime in, a high-pitched chorus of, "Johnny! Johnny!" and Harry sees the abandoned armbands at the side of the pool, sees the floating thing the children are clustered around, remembers her brother's insistence on the way here that he was old enough to swim properly…
She's in the water before she really finishes her line of thought. Her dress clings weirdly in places it has no business clinging to as she swims – drags herself – to the small throng. "Out of the way," she shouts breathlessly, and, "Help!" because that's her brother floating there, her baby brother with his limbs splayed out and bobbing softly among the splashing kids, and Harry stops shouting, even though her mind is still screaming. She stops shouting because she's too busy getting her brother out of the pool, too busy flopping him over and pressing down hard between his shoulder blades like they always do on the telly. Water dribbles out of his mouth and she does it again while around her, most of the kids have started to cry.
"Come on, you stubborn sod," she says, turning him over again to blow air into his lungs. He's so tiny. She's always known he's small for his age, has made fun of it more than once, but now, just lying there, he looks like a toy that someone has thrown away. Miniscule. Tiny. Eyes burning, Harry bends down to breathe into him again.
And gets a mouthful of thrown-up pool water for her trouble.
"Johnny!" she cries, unable to do anything but hug him as he coughs and sputters, tears disappearing into his wet hair. "God, you're such a dolt! Don't scare me like that!"
She sniffs, blinks a few times, and then pulls away a little to glare down at him. Johnny looks back, confused.
"Harry," he says, blinking up at her dazedly, "don't eat the soup."
"What?" she asks, but he's throwing up water again and someone finally thinks to check out the commotion, and then it's all sirens and panic and old people telling each other stories about people they used to know who drowned, and by the time they get out of hospital, Harry has forgotten all about Johnny's weird advice.
Pools still make her uncomfortable. But at least now she knows why.
Four months later, she eats two bowls of soup gone bad and almost dies of the resulting food poisoning. Johnny says, "I told you." Harry ties his shoelaces together and tells him he did no such thing.
2.
4th October 1989
If twins are one soul sharing two bodies, then neither should ever be cruel enough to die before the other, for what they'd leave behind would be less than an echo. If twins are one soul sharing two bodies, then Tim Moriarty is half a person who'll never be whole again. If twins are one soul sharing two bodies, then Tim is forever damned to spend his life without… without…
He scowls at the bathroom mirror, where a pale boy of thirteen is scowling right back at him, equally lost for words. The hair is too short and the barely-visible dimples aren't quite right, mirror-wrong, so Tim doesn't even get to tell himself it's John's frown he's seeing. John, of the dramatic gestures and the quick smiles. John, of the I'm-thirty-seven-minutes-older-than-you-so-do-what-I-say flares of temper. John, of the big words and great games.
John, of the dead.
It's Carl's fault. Everyone says it was an accident, but Tim knows better. John didn't stumble and take a header out of the window – smashed his brains in, sad day for the school, so sorry – like a fumbling idiot. John never stumbled. Carl tripped him.
Carl tripped him, like he was always tripping one of them, shoving them into walls, breaking their bikes, taking their bags, just because he's taller and faster, and now he's lying about it! And Tim's supposed to just stand there, one of used-to-be-two, and let him get away with it?
Like hell, he thinks, and spits into the sink. The bathroom's a pathetic hideout, he knows, but it's one of the few places in school where he'll be alone during the classes he's skipping. He doesn't want to go to any of their old places. They might as well be in the mirror, all looking wrong without John in them. Tim's going to have to find something new, somewhere better than the bathroom, but first he needs to have his revenge.
Revenge, he's decided, is mandatory.
He'd thought that maybe Daddy would do something, when he'd been sent home for the funeral. Daddy's the one who taught them about laying low and getting even. But Daddy's more interested in getting Mummy's tears out of her or giving her something else to cry about, and he didn't listen when Tim tried to tell him what Carl had done.
"Enough, Timothy," he'd said, "Daddy's heard enough now. I know you're sad, but dying is what people do."
And Tim had shut up because he knows a warning when he hears it. It's rare enough that he gets one in the first place.
But it's not enough. It's not nearly enough. Eye for an eye, that's enough. Blood for blood. Carl for John.
"He's going to pay," Tim says, but it sounds wrong. Weak. The mirror-boy frowns.
"He'll pay," Tim drawls, cocky and menacing, in the voice he and John had called Evil Cowboy. They had a lot of voices like that: South African Diamond Smuggler. Mad German Scientist. Chinese Drug Lord. Daddy. All combined, a true supervillain. The mirror-boy nods his approval.
It was so easy. Buy some garlic, cover it in oil and wait a few weeks. Nick a microscope from the school labs and confirm the presence of c. botulinum. Mix the bacteria into Carl's eczema cream. Sit back and wait for death by botulism.
A true supervillain.
"Not so super," Tim says, but…
But he could be. It beats becoming an accountant, at any rate. He could be the mastermind in the background, see how far he gets just pulling the strings until someone stops him. He's smart. He'd probably get pretty far.
He couldn't do it as Tim, though. No, he'll have to be more than plain old Tim, half-soul and twin-left-behind. He'll be Tim-and-John, Tim and mirror-Tim, Tim squared, and he'll bring the world to its knees. John would have liked that. Tim practically owes him to wreak havoc enough for both of them. He'll be one-who-is-two. He'll be…
"Jim," he says, testing the name. Sounds alright. Not terribly menacing, but a mastermind doesn't have to be. The menacing villains always get hit the hardest. No, 'Jim' sounds just right. Like someone dependable. Someone who'll get results.
Over in London, Carl Powers is telling his trainer that he can swim alright, he's just feeling a bit under the weather, is all.
In the mirror, Jim Moriarty grins.
3.
6th January 2001
Sherlock is watching the time pass on his ceiling. It wobbles and oozes, accelerating and then slowing down in odd shifts that, so far, he's found himself unable to predict. It's fascinating. Far more interesting than anything he'd expected from this hole in the wall he's rented with his last money. He might have to find a way to stay for a while.
He drags his bow across the violin in a quick arpeggio that distends as soon as the first notes hit the ceiling. How charming, he thinks, and repeats the motion with a flourish, stac-ca-ca-ca-cato music bouncing off the walls and clinking to the floor. Most of the notes roll under the radiator by the window where they gather in dusty heaps. Interesting. A slight tilt to the floor perhaps?
A polite knock on the door announces the inevitable. Sherlock scowls, the violin trilling an uninviting dissonance. As usual, the hint passes by unacknowledged and the door opens nonetheless. Naturally, the world's greatest nuisance would have obtained a key.
"Go away," Sherlock says. His words go as ignored as his music.
"Charming." It's not entirely clear whether Mycroft means the flat or Sherlock's lack of hospitality. Both, most likely. Irrelevant. "And I see you're self-medicating again. What is it this time, I wonder?"
Better living through chemistry. Sherlock allows himself a tiny smile. It always was his favourite subject to study.
"Going out of my head," he mutters.
"Doubtless." Mycroft looks around, purely for show, before he takes a careful seat on Sherlock's unmade bed. Sherlock, of course, is occupying the only chair. "When will you be returning to university?"
Sherlock sniffs. "Give the po' man a break." Uni has not a single lesson left to teach that Sherlock cares to learn.
"Not at all then." Mycroft doesn't sound surprised, but then Mycroft rarely does. "Instead you're going to settle down in this… habitat, and destroy your brain with experimental drugs."
"The weekend starts here," Sherlock agrees, allowing the violin to tut at Mycroft's habit to state the painfully obvious.
Mycroft leans forward, his unconcerned mask slipping to reveal the anger beneath. "And have you noticed, dear brother, that your musical instrument is a wine bottle?"
The violin slips suddenly in Sherlock's grip, its neck turned smooth and round and too cold. He's holding it wrong, he realises, startled enough to let it go. It hits the floor with a brittle thunk and rolls toward the radiator, where the notes have started to take on the smell of rotting grapes. A bottle, empty of meaning. Sherlock looks at the bow in his hand. It's a bread stick.
"Why must you always interfere?" he asks, disgusted enough to give up on Fatboy Slim as he tosses the breadstick away. The joke was wasted on Mycroft in any case.
"I worry about you."
"Ah, yes. You worry." Sherlock sneers. "You worry so much you take great care to keep me away from anyone who might be a bad influence."
He doesn't mention the name 'Victor,' but it hangs between them like a spectre.
"That boy simply realised that he would obtain his goals faster if he came to me," Mycroft says. He has regained his equilibrium and is looking at Sherlock with something akin to fond exasperation. Sherlock wants to rip the superior little smirk off his face and make him eat it. "He cared about his own advantage, not about you."
"And you care about me," Sherlock spits, the words almost clotting in his mouth from the way he bites at them. When Victor had announced his return to Norfolk, Sherlock had been devastated for all of the twenty seconds it had taken him to figure out that Victor's father was not, in fact, dead, and the sudden inheritance was nothing but a generous sum paid by Mycroft for reasons that, in hindsight, had been painfully obvious. Once he'd realised the implications, he'd been furious.
"You're my brother," Mycroft says simply.
Sherlock almost corrects him then. Almost says it, almost spits it out, half-brother, just to see the expression on Mycroft's face. Just to make him bleed.
He's only said it once before. Mycroft had come to his room, pale and shaken. "Father is dead," he'd said, and there had been no trace of his usual composure. Sherlock had barely paid him any attention.
"Your father, not mine," he'd said absently, focussed on his experiment. "You're not entirely my brother." His mother's husband had made no secret of his resentment toward the illegitimate son. Why would Sherlock care if he was dead? But the silence behind him had made him turn around, to find Mycroft looking at him, calm and white-faced and so terribly close to shattering it had made Sherlock's breath stop.
"Very well then," Mycroft had said. He'd turned and left the room, and Sherlock hadn't seen him again for over a year. The absence had left him adrift in ways he never had anticipated.
He can't have Mycroft walk away like that again. Sherlock is brilliant, people are idiots, and Mycroft will interfere as he sees fit. These are the Three Constants in Sherlock's life. Sherlock doesn't have to like him to need him there.
Still.
"I would hardly call you brother," Sherlock says, pretending not to notice Mycroft's sudden tension. "Enemy, perhaps."
Mycroft smiles, relaxing. "I believe the two are synonymous."
Yes, that does seem likely.
"What do you want, Mycroft?" Sherlock asks, suddenly tired of their game. The ceiling drips time in blackened drops. Sherlock suspects that coming down from his latest experiment is not going to be pleasant.
"To alleviate your boredom," Mycroft says promptly. "You have always had an eye for detail. US authorities have arrested a British citizen for a series of murders. She claims that her husband is the real culprit. He says she has lost her mind. The available evidence is a mess, to say the least."
Sherlock peers at him. "And why do you care?"
"Having an elderly lady sentenced to death for crimes she did not commit is terrible publicity for any government." Mycroft sighs. "And perhaps you will benefit from spending a small period of time away from your… equipment."
"They do have chemicals in the States," Sherlock says mildly. He's interested despite himself, and he knows that Mycroft can see it. However, London has been so very tedious of late and the benefits of a short trip abroad might outweigh the embarrassment of having done Mycroft a favour.
True to form, Mycroft smiles. "I will have my assistant forward you the itinerary," he says, and rises. Putting on weight again, Sherlock deduces from the slight huff. Brilliant.
Mycroft pauses briefly on his way out. "Happy birthday, Sherlock."
Sherlock ignores him, already planning his investigations. He will need access to the crime scenes, of course, interview the suspect, her husband, potential witnesses… the police are bound to have missed almost anything important, incompetent as their breed usually are… have all the victims been found? Has a single murder weapon been used? Did the killer prefer variety?
Behind him, the door snicks shut. Sherlock pays it no mind.
4.
28th June 2008
For some bizarre reason, John was always convinced that if he ended up getting shot, it would be his leg.
It's nonsense, of course, but he'd known, in the way he sometimes knew what song would play next on BFBS or if Patrick really held that winning hand at poker, that a bullet would shatter the distal end of his femur and make him a cripple for life. He's even dreamed of it. So when he's finally hit, trying to extract the wounded from a pointless roadside skirmish, he feels the bullet rip into his thigh, feels his leg give way, helpless to carry his weight any longer.
Then he hits the ground, and the only reason he doesn't scream at the pain exploding in his shoulder is that he simply doesn't have the breath. For a horrible, endless moment, he thinks he'll never have the breath again. His lungs stutter back to work and he lets out a whine, a high-pitched, shaky thing that would be embarrassing if he didn't hurt so much.
"John!" Bill's suddenly beside him, fumbling at his clothes. John turns his head, and wet sand sticks to his cheek. "Shit, mate, I think it's the artery."
John huffs out a weak laugh. He's as good as dead, then. Harry's going to throw a fit. Dear God, please let me live. But he isn't religious, and even if he were, he doubts God would care for one shot-up army medic.
"Take… cover," he manages. Someone's still shooting. John doesn't know who.
"Like hell," Bill snaps. He presses down on John's shoulder. John's vision dims alarmingly.
He'd never thought anything could hurt that much.
"Your… girl… friend," he grits out, because if John dies here, he'll leave a pissed-off sister and an aging dog. If Bill dies, people are going to be heart-broken. His fingers grope slowly across the dirt beside him. He lost his gun when he fell, but it can't be far away. It can't be. For Bill's sake. As long as John can move his trigger finger, he will have Bill's back.
It hits him the moment his fingertips touch the butt of his gun. It's cold, like black ice exploding in his ribcage. He tries to suck in a breath, but everything's frozen now: his lungs, his heart, even Bill kneeling above him. A bank. A taxi. A pool, he thinks nonsensically, snapshot images slicing through his mind like a razorblade kaleidoscope, and then, I'm going to kill three men. He doesn't know why or when, but there's no doubt that he will do it, bone-deep knowledge soaking the sand along with his blood, as much part of him as his heartbeat. But there's something else, something he'll need, something… something…
"My gun," he gasps through the spreading cold, "I'll need –"
"You bloody need to lie still," Bill snaps because he doesn't understand, he doesn't –
John has no idea where he finds the strength, but the collar of Bill's uniform shirt is clutched in his right hand before he realises he's moving.
"I'll need my gun." It's not his voice, that horrid thing that comes out of his mouth. It's the voice of a madman, of someone who's looked beyond reality and refused to blink. John can barely stand it.
Bill stares at him, wide-eyed and shaken. "You'll have it." His fingers tug uselessly at John's hand. "John. You'll have it, I promise."
He means it. John lets out a short, insane little giggle.
And lets himself drop into oblivion.