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One of the ceiling bulbs has already blown out. The other casts a dim sodium glow over the scant furniture, blurring everything into one vague, colorless landscape. If nothing else, it hides the worst of the carpet stains. A fan whirs lazily overhead, circulating dust and air stale with the acrid tang of cigarette smoke. In the midst of it all, Jim lounges back against the headboard of the bed with the look of a craftsman surveying his proudest achievement.
"It's very... us, don't you think? Noir, almost," he says, smile turning sly. "And just a tad cheap."
His shirtfront still bears the evidence of his suicide, drying in rusty, brown splatters. Real blood, yes, but not James Moriarty's blood. His hair must be matted and sticky with the carnage. The thought summons a peculiar feeling of distaste. Sherlock supposes he must look equally disheveled after falling to his death, but then, it had to be convincing. There could be no loose ends. No incongruent details.
"You're certain you've told no one?"
Jim works his tie loose as he kicks off his fine black brogues. "My endgame isn't exactly something I'm in the habit of telling my employees."
Sherlock slides two fingers along the dusty windowpane. There have been no other occupants here for quite some time. This, like everything else, has been carefully staged. It is not a grimy hotel room so much as an archetype designed to slot in neatly alongside the rest. In retrospect, it's hardly surprising. Jim has always been theatrically inclined.
"You're hardly what I'd call a creature of habit," Sherlock says, as an afterthought.
It's idle talk, as talk with Jim always is. He hasn't the focus for anything else when Jim's mere proximity casts a cocaine-unease on the room. His pacing is tantamount to sloppy, unprompted confession. As foolhardy as any public display of passion. It could still be a ploy, though he knows it isn't. It's too transparent. Too quietly intimate.
"Come lie down," Jim says. Sherlock doesn't know that he's ever heard Jim speak without playing a character. "Relax."
"Can't."
"Won't," Jim corrects.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sherlock catches him pulling out a packet of cigarettes. He closes his eyes at the familiar smell. Heavily mentholated. Time becomes liquid, amorphous, protean. He feels the slip of Jim's arm around his waist as music floods in, Duke Ellington made tinny by the radio.
"It doesn't seem your style," he comments.
"Everyone likes jazz." Jim's fingers knit a web over Sherlock's abdomen, his cigarette sending up pungent wafts of smoke as it dangles carelessly between the fingers of his other hand. He burrows into Sherlock's back with a murmur. "Dance with me, darling."
Sherlock plucks the cigarette from Jim's hand and inhales as they sway, the arhythmic, primitively sensual circling of one animal scenting another. A superfluous seduction. Nicotine has never tasted so sharp. The hair on his arms stands on end, drawn up by invisible electricity as Jim dips a hand under the waist of his trousers. His palm is clammy, the temperature reptilian.
"Vulgar." Sherlock sighs as Jim gathers him up greedily. His mouth leaves wet imprints on the back of Sherlock's shirt. Jim fondles him as he smokes. When he's finished with the cigarette, he tosses the butt aside to smolder out on the carpet. "But then I shouldn't be surprised. You always were."
"You can hardly blame me," Jim says, his voice betraying just a hint of breathlessness, "when I've waited so long for this. For us."
Sherlock lets himself be pulled backward to the soft strains of saxophone, a ragdoll. Primordial clay waiting to be molded. Jim presses him to the bed and crawls up on top of him, ready to wrap him in steel-strong gossamer. There's a chemical taste to Jim, like the metallic lingering of a narcotic, or the glassy bitterness of venom. The effect is similarly dulling.
He breathes it in. "How do I know you won't cut my throat when you've finished?"
"You don't," Jim says, dragging down his zip. "But I have already killed you once today. I'd say the odds were in your favor."
And what, his voice seems to say, is an encounter between us without a little risk? It is their one condition sine qua non. Without which, this is not. Without which, they are not who they are. Not that they have ever understood how to be the men they claimed to be.
Jim's thighs loom pale and smooth on either side of his head, his cock a reddened protrusion between them.
"Relax your throat," he says. "I'd hate to have you suffocate."
But Sherlock is a willing vessel. He swallows Jim down, the bitterest pill of all, and breathes through his nose. Jim swells like epoxy in his throat, a sensation that makes him light-headed. He imagines he can hear the dissipating pop of individual oxygen molecules as Jim constricts his airflow. He floats, eyes closed, and lets Jim fuck his throat, heedless of the saliva that leaks through the loose ring of his lips. His eyes tear to let out the pressure, his cheeks as wet as his throat.
He gags, a matter of reflex, as Jim withdraws his spit-slick cock and begins to jerk it clumsily. He watches through narrowed eyes. The first shot hits his cheek, dripping down to settle in the lines of his mouth. The second, his jaw. Jim gives a cry as Sherlock cranes up his head to suck the last of it out. It isn't as satisfying as it ought to be, this anti-climax.
Jim's face is flushed a brilliant scarlet as he flops back on the bed with a groan. He toys with his softening erection, shrinking back in on itself as Sherlock wipes his face clean with one bloodstained sleeve.
Jim twists and pulls and tugs carelessly, as if what he has in his hands is insensate. Perhaps it is, in some respects. "The spirit is eager," he says, "but the flesh?" He shrugs and lets his prick flop against his belly, where it drools through his shirt. "I'm afraid I wasted my best years on Russian diplomats and Argentinean hitmen. But go on, fuck me. Everyone else has."
It's a barb designed to stick. "Everyone. Really."
Jim rolls onto his side, face carefully studious as he walks his fingers up Sherlock's arm. "Mycroft told you about us, didn't he?"
Sherlock declines to answer. He studies the bubbling in the wallpaper, a sloppy job, while Jim works his trousers off. There are sock garters accenting his hairless calves. Noir indeed. And so like him to play the part.
"You're angry with me," Jim says, as if the thought of it delights him. "Don't be. I never loved him."
"Don't tell me that's what you think this is."
"Of course not. But that's what you think men like Mycroft are capable of, isn't it?"
"You seem to think me very disillusioned."
He wanders over to the bar, leaving Jim to preen and pout atop the duvet. The scotch, at least, is expensive. A painstakingly constructed seam in an otherwise perfect illusion. Sherlock pours a generous two fingers and adds a cube of ice.
"What were the circumstances? You and Mycroft," he adds. Not that it's necessary. This is, no doubt, Jim's pièce de résistance. The axis on which he intends to subvert the world he's created for them here. It won't hurt to humor him. Not irreparably.
"Business."
"Business. Of course." He leans back against the bar, grateful for the glass in his hands. "Dirty money?"
"Only if you consider paying for sex with a fourteen year old boy dirty."
It's a rare occasion that Jim proves as shocking as he thinks he is, but today has been a day for very rare occasions indeed. Sherlock finishes what's left of the scotch. What few blanks Jim has left slot easily into place on their own.
"I had hoped you wouldn't be so tedious."
"Sorry to dash your expectations, but common men like me have only so many tricks." He shrugs out of his shirt, looking more clothed in his nakedness than he had in the suit. Not a self-portrait, but a murky reflection, seen only sidelong. "Underneath my daring wit and veneer of mystery beats a truly banal heart. I'll be in the shower if you need me."
It's an invitation, albeit one couched in invective. Jim disappears into the bathroom. He leaves the door ajar. Unnecessary, but exactly the sort of cheap finishing touch Jim likes. He's not quite figured out which persona commands such touches or, indeed, if there is any persona at all behind them.
Perhaps Jim, once his chitinous exoskeleton has moulted, is as common as he claims.
Sherlock hears the shower begin to run, warm clouds of steam already escaping out the door. A gentle reminder of Jim's plan to boil them alive.
For his own part, Sherlock intends to let him.
Only obstinacy allows him to take care while removing his clothes. He leaves them folded on top of the stained duvet, neatly creased despite the hardening of his cock between his legs. It's that invisible electricity again, tugging him every which way. He is an obedient thing by nature, despite appearances. His apparent lack of a leash is one of their finest lies. One he's lived with so long, even he has believed it at times.
Jim, on the other hand, has never forgotten that he holds the leash.
He's soft and welcoming when Sherlock joins him in the shower, the dagger cast aside and buried. The water turns to wine around their ankles as the shower sluices away the remaining blood. Jim kisses his way across Sherlock's shoulders and down his breastbone, three quarters of the cross, as he sinks to his knees.
Jim's cheek, unshaven, rasps against his cock. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."
Sherlock rests his hand in Jim's hair, slicked back away from his forehead, and pets. "It doesn't matter."
"You forgive me, don't you?"
"Of course."
He is a dog playing at being master, just the way Jim loves him. Jim's tongue slips out to lick delicately at his cock. No sucking, just the movement of his tongue as he whines in his throat, pathetically penitent. If not for the shower, Sherlock suspects there would be tears.
"Turn around," Jim says.
Sherlock braces himself against the shower wall, the water beating down on his back in tandem with Jim's hands, spreading him apart. Jim is sloppy with his teeth, biting as often as he licks, fingernails leaving half-moon patterns over Sherlock's buttocks and the backs of his thighs. Jim noses up hard against his hole, tongue flicking swift and hot. His knees quake and his testicles draw up tight against his body like a catch moments away from being sprung.
He pushes back into Jim's tongue, trying to fuck himself on it. It's a poor substitute for what he really wants, which is Jim's cock, buried in him from base to bulbous, misshapen tip. Anything to squash the repulsive distance of the last thirteen years spent pretending to inhabit opposite spheres of existence. His throat recalls the taste, the texture, the sensation of being filled. The rest of his body aches. He sinks down on his knees and tucks his head against his forearms.
"Please," he says. More rote dialogue, scripted out for him long ago. The decision to present, to lower himself to Jim's level of tasteless courtship, however, is all his own. "Jim, please."
"You only had to ask."
What a picture they must make, he thinks, shadowy with steam as Jim mounts him from behind. His groans are lost in the thudding of the water, Jim fucking with ungainly, uneven strokes that tell him this is not and never will be for his pleasure. He is merely a receptacle, a thing for fucking. The immensity of the satisfaction he feels is indescribable.
This is how they are meant to fit together, something Sherlock has always known instinctively but has rarely had the opportunity to corroborate empirically. He sees the semen swirling down the drain before he realizes he's come. The aftershocks make him shake. He fights to remember how to breathe, suffocated by steam and the weight of Jim bearing down on him as he shudders to a stop.
Jim bites hard into the meat of his shoulder, provoking a hiss of pain. "God, you were fantastic."
If Sherlock could wag his tail, he would.