Chapter Text
The last time Barok van Zieks graced his bed was three days before it all. Neither of them had been in a cheerful mood. Frankly, Sholmes had always chosen less cheerful days to invite him over: he took a certain pleasure in distracting Barok from his chronic worries, perhaps as much as he took in shagging him. And Sholmes was no stranger to malaise either. A bit of pleasure, earned either way, usually helped to cut through it.
“I shouldn’t be wasting my time like this,” said Barok. His fingertips nervously danced along Sholmes’s bare shoulder, where he’d rested his folded arms across the prosecutor’s hipbones.
There’d never been a time Barok had thought he should be wasting like this. Amused, Sholmes pressed a kiss below his navel. “Your unconvincing objection has been duly noted.”
“It’s not that,” muttered Barok. The usual, the self-loathing forgotten until the orgasmic haze had cleared. They’d long since stopped discussing it. “I’ve things to do.”
“Ah…” Hunt down the Professor, he meant, but as long as he refused to be clear, Sholmes would refuse to catch his drift. “Urgent business for the London season? Don’t let me keep you.”
Barok snorted.
“Dare I hope you’ve given up on your hunt for a wife?”
“I suppose I have, given how long I’ve now been absent,” he said. “It astounds me that the season is still going on at all, given the Professor’s focus.”
“Wild horses couldn’t keep the nobility from their rituals,” said Sholmes, with a short laugh. “Nor wild dogs, as it were.”
Barok tried to give him a disgusted look, but didn’t quite manage it over suppressing his laughter. Sholmes rested his chin on his arms and grinned.
“Singlehandedly fixing London’s troubles, then?” he asked.
Prosecutor Barok van Zieks had received his badge barely weeks ago, and with it he’d chosen to shoulder an immense amount of personal responsibility. He scoffed. “You believe I should leave them to your hands?”
“All of us have our part in crimesolving, my darling.” Sholmes shook his head. “Though you’ll forgive me for saying mine is somewhat more significant than yours, it’s still only a part.”
“Regardless of your opinion of its size, I have a part,” said Barok. He propped himself up on his elbows to look down disapprovingly at Sholmes in his lap. “I should be helping in any way I can.”
When their flirtation had begun it was Sholmes who did all the talking. The Barok he’d first taken to bed would never would have discussed his work, nor his worries. He’d become far chattier as of late. Since that ridiculous friend of his had left for the continent, Sholmes suspected that he was the last confidant he had.
“Have you written of this to Alfred yet?” he asked, somewhat pointedly.
“Albert.”
“Yes, of course. Have you?”
Barok looked away, sharp enough to be embarrassed. “I loathe writing,” he muttered. “To read over my words… They sound so inauthentic on paper, at a distance. I don’t want to speak to Albert like that. Especially not of things that deserve gravity.”
“If you’d rather discuss those things with a man you don’t despise, I think you may have no choice.”
He opened his mouth, as if to disagree that he did despise the man in his lap, but perhaps he felt it was too trite to say.
“I don’t want to discuss them at all. I want to solve them.” He turned back down to Sholmes, his handsome brow furrowed. “I don’t think Gregson’s slept in a month. Klint’s making himself ill over it… And I’m pushing my obligations aside to idle in bed.” With you, of all people went unsaid.
Sholmes unfolded his arms and shifted one of Barok’s thighs over his shoulder. With lingering, open-mouthed kisses to the tender inner skin, he savored the salt where the sweat had dried. “It sounds like they might do well to follow your example,” he said between them. “In my experience, a touch of passion does wonders to clear the mind.”
“I can’t speak for Gregson,” muttered Barok, “but you were at my brother’s wedding.”
“Was I?” replied Sholmes. “Ah—yes, of course… I’m afraid that deflowering the best man rather overshadowed the rest of the event, in my memory.”
Barok snorted. “You’ve never forgotten anything in your life.”
His legs had fallen further apart, his hips shifted closer. What with the tone of voice, Sholmes might have worried any other lover was uninterested. But at these early stages, making things a little easier was as close as Barok got to enthusiasm.
“You think too highly of me, love.” Sholmes nuzzled further into the curls at the crook of his thigh. “Anyways, to my understanding, heavily pregnant women vary greatly in their comfort with such things.”
Barok was back amidst the pillows then, his long fingers in Sholmes’s hair, his conversational tone only barely blurred with arousal. “You’re welcome to take it up with her, then, if you’re so concerned.”
Sholmes pushed himself up, lifting Barok’s hips with his shoulder, gripping his other thigh to keep them spread. “Oh, my dear…” he murmured. “I’m far more concerned with you.”
This was the last conversation they had for many years.
It was Sholmes who first suggested Iris’s name aloud. He knew it would have occurred to his partner, but also that he would never have said it himself. Sholmes knew the pain that Mikotoba had tried to leave behind in Japan. He knew how violently the death of Amelia Baskerville van Zieks would have ripped open that slow-scarring wound. He knew Mikotoba would do all he could to suppress the urge to relate this to his own loss, even when he needn’t. Sholmes had heard countless tales of Ayame Mikotoba over the years, and he knew that while his partner raised this child, he would want her to grow up as charming and vivacious as his wife had been.
“While we raise her, I suppose,” he said. “I won’t leave you to fend for yourself while I live here too, after all.”
Mikotoba settled the baby more securely in one arm to reach out and grasp his hand with the other. They sat there like that for several slow moments—there’d been no time for slowness since Mikotoba had roused him in the early dawn.
“Perhaps in English,” said Mikotoba softly. “Iris. That’s a name, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Sholmes. “A lovely one.”
“Iris…” Mikotoba trailed off. “I’ve no idea what her surname will be.”
“I imagine that depends,” said Sholmes. “Do you intend to prioritize the truth, or her safety?”
For another pair of men there might have been more of a choice.
It had taken all morning to iron out the context of Iris’s birth. What had led Lord Van Zieks’s wife to flee her home, how Genshin Asogi had known where to find her. Some mysteries still remained: how exactly the detective’s ring had found its way to the autopsy table, the true reason behind his compliant behavior in the courtroom. What, if anything, to tell the loved ones left behind.
Mikotoba’s adventure had shed a huge amount of light upon the Professor case, compared to the pitch-black they’d been fumbling about in before. But clearly there was still a larger force lurking further in the darkness, pulling strings they had yet to see the ends of. The mania of a mystery half-unraveled had Sholmes by the throat…
But it was clear as well that the child in their care was to be distanced from all of it.
“If only…” Mikotoba hadn’t slept all night, had been wearing away at his near-boundless capacity for calm. “If only I could speak to Genshin once more… Or… Or Lady Van Zieks… She wasn’t supposed to—I don’t know what to do, Sholmes—"
“Mikotoba.” Sholmes stilled his frantic partner’s face between his hands, staring him steadily in the eye. “Breathe, please, my dear. For Miss Iris’s sake, if not your own.”
He looked back at him, and he breathed.
“If Lady Van Zieks had lived,” asked Sholmes carefully, “where would she have taken her daughter?”
“Away, it seems to me. Into hiding, even.” Mikotoba knit his brow. “Should I leave London?”
“Without a well-known society woman as her mother, the risk of recognition may be far less present,” said Sholmes. He dropped Mikotoba’s face and shook his head. “In my personal opinion, London seems an ideal place for one to blend in.”
Mikotoba’s eyes flicked down again at the sleeping girl in his arms. He paused.
“…But what of her uncle?”
The first time they’d spoken the name Van Zieks tonight, Sholmes had known they would get to this. It hadn’t made him any eagerer to. “I wasn’t aware there were Baskerville brothers.”
“Sholmes…”
He sighed.
“If Iris is to remain here with us,” said Mikotoba, “I… I worry about the romance you’ve been having with Barok van Zieks.”
Barok preferred to leave by night, but Mikotoba’s hours were unpredictable—more than once they’d crossed paths as Barok slunk out of his lover’s door. Even without such evidence Sholmes was sure his partner would have pieced it together. But he was also far more sentimental than either of them, it seemed. “Why, my dear Mikotoba, I haven’t the faintest idea how it got into your head that we’re engaged in a romance.”
Mikotoba scoffed gently. “Sholmes.”
It was pointless to quibble. Normally, Sholmes was quite good at suppressing feelings, but his lips twitched regretfully under his partner’s knowing gaze.
“Regardless, you’re right,” he said. “His powers of deduction are nothing against mine, of course, but they’re nothing to scoff at either. If he takes one look at her…”
“You saw him at the trial,” said Mikotoba. “If he had any suspicion that his brother’s child had been stolen, he’d rip apart anyone who stood between them.”
“Surely you don’t consider yourself to have stolen her?”
“Won’t he?”
Barok had no one now. Nothing but rage and the empty weight of his family legacy. Were he to discover that his brother’s child not only lived, but had been kept from him knowingly… And oh, God, were he to discover why…
“He can’t know what his brother has done,” said Sholmes softly. “His depth of admiration for him… It’s all that he has left.” His last purpose. All that was keeping him alive, Sholmes couldn’t help but fear—Barok had been prone to misery even when he’d had everything.
“I don’t know that you could keep it from him,” replied Mikotoba. “if you continue to be close.”
Sholmes shook his head. “I know that I couldn’t.”
“I could leave with Iris on my own, if you’d rather preserve your—”
“Mr. Mikotoba.” He smiled as genuinely as he could. “Your partnership means far more to me than anything else in the world, romance or otherwise.”
Mikotoba breathed out slowly, and leaned against him.
“And I’m afraid Miss Iris has endeared herself already,” added Sholmes. He drew a feather-light fingertip down the baby’s button nose.
“You may come to think differently, once she starts to get cranky.”
“I’ll endure.”
The silence afterward was slow, but it was also heavy. The remains of the mystery still hung over them. Had they no one but themselves to worry for, they’d certainly have gone out to hunt down the truth. Could they truly raise Iris in a world where the truth may hunt her?
“Both men are dead,” said Mikotoba. “We can only pray all of this was buried with them.”
Sholmes nodded.
Both of them knew they were fooling themselves.
Barok had never once made a romantic advance, at least not until Sholmes had made twenty first. Even then he was silent about it. A hand guiding Sholmes’s where he wanted it, an amorous writhe as an invitation. Perhaps he felt it was all less real if he didn’t put words to it. Thought it easier then to pretend whatever he was pretending, when Herlock Sholmes took him to bed.
Sholmes couldn’t deny how much he might have liked to hear him beg. He’d learned to parse Barok’s timid fashion of begging, though: had begun to find the same thrill in the upward tilt of his chin, the roll of his hips. That subtle, screaming look in his eye across a crowded room before they’d leave it.
Barok had always been deeply incapable of hiding his feelings, especially to a man like Sholmes. But the fact remained, they were silent feelings. The man would rather die than ask to be loved.
It was easy, therefore, for Sholmes to put an end to their dalliance with no complaint.
They hadn’t met between the death and the trial anyways. Barok would wonder whether his own incommunicability in such a turbulent time had made Sholmes believe he had no interest in communicating again. He’d wonder whether the sharp edges that the grief and betrayal had honed made him unlovable. As Iris grew, someday Barok would see them around London and this grief would distract from the other. He’d wonder whether the truth was that Sholmes had found a woman, moved on from such immature distractions as handsome young prosecutors. Even if it was put most often to fairly grim use, Barok van Zieks had an excellent imagination.
He’d take comfort in something. Barok as Sholmes knew him wasn’t much for vices, but he had the temperament of someone who would be if only they were pushed. Drink, perhaps, if he found the right variety for his sweet tooth. Laudanum or barbiturates if he wanted to abuse something more medical. Not sex, certainly. With some distance he would come to consider their affair an embarrassment, a youthful indiscretion to regret in his wiser years. He regretted it enough already.
Sholmes languished at Baker Street and Iris watched him from his arms, innocent and blue-eyed, inflaming his guilt. He could picture Barok with his baby niece in better times. Scared stiff but so, so gentle. A surprised smile back at her first tentative attempt at one.
But if he knew his brother’s sins, would Barok have treated his daughter so lovingly? Or would he have resented a reminder of that shattered pedestal, no matter how innocent?
Iris’s innocence was the crux of the matter. She had no way of fending for herself, and even in the best circumstances she required the help of her caretakers. Barok may have done better with a caretaker as well, with the state that he was in… But he was an adult. Theoretically he had the ability to weather pain, no matter how unlikely Sholmes believed it would be if he did.
This was best. This was best. Surely the burden of deciding what was best was one of the more favorable burdens to be crushed by.
Mikotoba was summoned home within the month. It had been clear that he would shortly be unwelcome in London law enforcement from the moment of Asogi’s arrest, but they’d been hoping it would be easier to stay in the country independently. They’d even begun talking over plans to bring his young daughter to London. From the letters he’d received, Mikotoba had felt sure that Susato would be excited to live abroad. Elated to dote upon a little sister.
Sholmes, for his part, had never been keen on children. He’d never planned to become a father. But he’d have become anything for Yujin Mikotoba.
In the end Mikotoba wasn’t banished from England, but he was called to Japan. A governmental directive he couldn’t refuse. They considered options to forge Iris papers for passage, but the risk was too great. How odd, Sholmes found himself thinking, that he could believe any risk too great! He’d always prided himself on fearlessness.
Heavy-hearted, Mikotoba asked if Iris could remain at Baker Street.
Sholmes agreed with no complaint.
The first time Herlock Sholmes crossed Barok’s path was one teenage summer, lurking in the courthouse at the trial for a case he’d looked into on his own. Though he had little crimesolving renown now, he’d had even less at eighteen. The prosecutor of the case had politely heard his theory out while his young judicial assistant disapprovingly looked on.
Even then Barok had been tall. The thought of his shyness coupled with ungainly, adolescent height had amused Sholmes once he’d gotten to know him, but then he’d had no reason to believe Barok van Zieks was anything but cool and confident. Sholmes supposed it was his birthright. The law brought out a self-assurance in him, even before his formal training.
From the gallery as the testimony went on, Sholmes watched the Van Zieks brothers come to the same conclusion he had tried to convince them of. He could see the penny drop in Barok’s eyes—he’d been furious.
They first spoke years later on the lawn of the Van Zieks estate, the morning Lord Klint van Zieks was married. There was a luncheon on the grounds after the local church ceremony. The last Baskerville heiress Lady Amelia was a beaming vision, her new husband barely even trying to cover his pride with propriety. His beguiling best man, now grown, stood by his side as seriously and dutifully as he once had at the bench.
Mikotoba had been offered an invitation, which he’d extended to his partner. Sholmes had been pleased to attend solely for the people-watching and the high-class food, though as a well-known London nuisance he was surprised he’d been allowed. He supposed that after the death of his parents, the young lord could be as foolish with his wedding invitations as he liked.
Among his flatmate’s friends Sholmes was a curiosity, despite few of them, in his opinion, being any less strange than he was. The Baker Street boys had drawn a small crowd. Mikotoba’s fellow students, a couple of friends of friends, and Lord Van Zieks’s quiet brother following on their heels.
Sholmes eyed Barok as he nervously glanced about. My, he’d grown up well—even if social events clearly weren’t one of his strong suits.
The conversation pattered on. Barok was congratulated on his brother’s fine wedding, as if he’d had any hand in it, and he accepted the compliments with polite discomfort. Additional introductions were made where needed.
“You’re the friend Yujin’s always telling us about, aren’t you?” Lord Stronghart’s bearded subordinate asked Sholmes. “I’m sorry to admit I can never remember your name.”
“I’m quite aware it’s an unusual one.” He shook the man’s giant hand. “Detective Herlock Sholmes. Pleasure.”
“Detective?” interrupted Barok. It took Sholmes a moment to place the deep voice with the youngest man among them. “With Scotland Yard?”
“No, I’m afraid.” Sholmes gave one shake of his head. “Private consulting. If I must be employed, I find it suits me best to employ myself.”
“I think Scotland Yard may agree with you on that front,” said Genshin Asogi, chuckling. “I’m afraid they’re very keen on procedure.”
“Yes, yes. I’m not sure we’d see eye to eye.”
“Especially given how often the pair of you show us up.”
Barok arched his brows, but he glanced to Asogi. It seemed the other detective was too amused for him to feel he could frown.
Stronghart’s man laughed heartily. “Wherever did you find this one, Yujin?”
With practiced pacing, Mikotoba began the hospital story. It was a tale of little more than practicality, but the way Sholmes had gone about it, it still got laughs. He’d heard it too often now to bother listening once more. Instead he watched the others. The genuine friends and Barok among them, mirroring their smiles as if that would make him fit.
Sholmes had always been fond of young men who didn’t fit.
They later crossed paths outside the first-floor bathroom. Not intentionally, but fortuitously—Sholmes had little to say to him that could be said in company. “The illustrious Barok, are you?” he began, leaning against the doorframe. “I’ve been hearing a great deal about you this morning. Is university life treating you well?”
Barok forgot himself as he replied, still drying his hands. “Better than boarding school life, I suppose.”
Sholmes had understood Barok’s deepest wish within moments of meeting him: to be treated as himself. Possibly this had been less of a deduction and more of a projection. Sholmes was a younger brother himself after all, and he knew the urge to stand apart had shaped him since childhood. But he could recognize the same urge in Barok van Zieks, and in himself there was an urge to honor it.
It had taken Sholmes barely longer to understand Barok’s slightly shallower wish.
“Of course it is,” he said. “You get to spend far more time in London now. And he’s terribly handsome, isn’t he?”
“What?”
“Detective Asogi, of course.”
There was a thick silence.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” snapped Barok, “but you’re mistaken.”
“Which is it? You’ve no idea, or I’m mistaken?” Sholmes tutted facetiously. “Such unspecificity hardly befits a prosecutor.”
“Why do you know what I’m studying?”
“Your name is Barok van Zieks, yes?” replied Sholmes. “And you seem like a man who will do what he’s raised to.”
Barok sniffed. “Shouldn’t I?”
“If it suits you.” Sholmes grinned. “Many of us are more unlucky, but I’ve seen you in court. I believe your family legacy suits you magnificently.”
“When on earth have you seen me?” Barok replied. “Did the doctor bring you to… You…”
The penny dropped, and this time Barok looked more baffled than furious.
“You argued with my brother about the Grossmith case,” he said quietly. “Years ago, while I was assisting him during my holiday.”
“Did you truly spend your holidays practicing law?” asked Sholmes. “Good lord, I hate to imagine what the boys at school put you through.”
Embarrassed, Barok shook his head. “…You were right,” he said. “I still remember the feeling of realizing it. Every time I’m sure I understand a case, I think about you, and I reconsider once more.”
“That sounds paralyzing,” said Sholmes. “I do hope you’re not blaming me for your nerves.”
“Not for my nerves,” replied Barok. “For my open mind.”
The frank gratitude of this bowled Sholmes over—he hadn’t expected to be. It took him a moment to recover.
“…Well.” Unable now to resist the impulse to see him blush, he lifted Barok’s hand to his lips. “It’s an honor to be blamed by so striking a man as you.”
His impulse was rewarded splendidly.
“Mr. Sholmes…” murmured Barok after several seconds, staring down at their still-joined hands. “I’m not sure I’m correctly understanding what you want of me.”
“Of course you are,” said Sholmes. “I’m no court case to reconsider. Sometimes your instincts are to be trusted, my dear.”
Barok breathed out shakily. Sholmes could remember this panicked adrenaline from his own youth, from when he’d first looked over the precipice where Barok stood now. Eton had been wasted on him—clearly Barok had no experience with such things at all. Perhaps even thought his madman’s mind had made up the concept himself.
Sholmes kissed Barok’s hand once more, further down between the knuckles. “What I want of you is what you’re willing to give me,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“What I want of you is your silence,” said Barok. Not simply to confirm, but with the air of a threat. “You won’t be speaking to Detective Asogi.”
“Of course I won’t,” said Sholmes, crossing his heart. Even if he weren’t certain Asogi already had an inkling, he would never. “There’d be none of us left if secrecy wasn’t our highest law.”
Barok paused.
“Us…”
“Surely you didn’t believe yourself the only pervert in the world?”
Barok had been enthralled by their similarity, but this was not a way he liked to hear it. “I’m no pervert, Mr. Sholmes,” he snapped.
“Yes you are, my darling, but there’s no need to take it as an insult.”
"There is no context in which it isn't an insult," he insisted. “Your logic is preposterous.”
“Then argue, Mr. prosecutor-to-be.” Sholmes opened Barok’s hand to kiss the palm. “Be specific.”
A couple more heartbeats echoed in the little space, then Barok ripped his hand from Sholmes’s.
But it was no refusal. Slowly, without breaking their gaze, he reached out to close the bathroom door with as quiet a click as he could.
In his brother’s absence, Barok’s deepest wish seemed to have changed somewhat.
He wore his soft waves of hair slicked straight, held his soft features with Klint van Zieks’s old intensity. He’d begun to dress with a particular military flair. He’d even replaced his gleaming new prosecutor’s badge with one more worn, though on this point Sholmes hadn’t been close enough to confirm his suspicions.
Perhaps Barok thought that if he were too weak to go on, his brother wouldn’t be.
The specter of the Professor had faded, and in its place rose the specter of the Reaper. The name Barok van Zieks crept into the public consciousness. This was something of an inconvenience. Sholmes had read the newspaper to Iris from early babyhood, but even if she couldn’t understand, he felt he ought to expose her to news of him as little as he could.
Iris’s hair had come in with a vengeance—it was thick and fluffy and even more clearly her mother’s. The color was terribly unique. Sholmes considered altering it chemically, but his test serum had made him ill for days and endangering his child was out of the question. Sooner or later he’d just have to let her live, and face what they may.
As she grew, Sholmes began to realize that secrecy was no place for Iris. She shone. And living with his fear was little better for a girl like her than living in the Reaper’s orbit would have been. Iris…
Iris deserved the world, and he would give it to her.
The first time Barok lay eyes on Iris, she was four.
Flatmateless, it had been all Sholmes could do to pay for a governess those first few years. He couldn’t take her with him to work, of course. Sometimes he’d wrap her up and bring her along as he did the shopping, in the sort of places a high-class heir would never go, but his cases had an uncanny way of dovetailing with the cases of the Reaper.
Once she began to get old enough to take care of herself, she was also getting old enough to be interested in his work. For months Sholmes had been talking her out of tagging along. Were she a usual little girl, going to crime scenes would have been easier to forbid. But Iris was well familiar with the workings of mysteries by then. Perhaps he shouldn’t have raised her on them.
Sholmes had taken her to the ice cream parlor by way of apology.
She chose the pinkest flavor and danced off as he stacked his coins on the counter. “Daddy, let’s go sit by that man,” she insisted. “There’s no one else over there. Hello, sir!”
Sholmes whipped his head around, but Iris had already approached that man with fearlessness that none of the other patrons seemed to possess. The Reaper of the Bailey sat at a corner table with his dish of strawberry ice cream, staring down at her.
His bemused, taken-aback expression shifted to dark blankness as he saw Herlock Sholmes approach.
“Ah, Lord Van Zieks,” said Sholmes, setting down his ice creams on a nearby table to lift Iris away. “My apologies if we’ve bothered you.”
“What… What are you doing with a child?” Barok asked, too confused to even hint at any other emotion.
There was no excuse Sholmes could give, not in front of Iris.
“Parenting,” he said. “This is my daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
Iris confirmed for him, fist proudly on her hip. “Yes sir! Iris Sholmes.”
The penny dropped, but this time it was an entirely incorrect penny that Sholmes would have preferred stay in the air. Barok sat up straighter in stiff, heartbroken understanding. They stared at each other.
Iris had no concern for the intricacies of former intimacy. “Do you know him, Daddy?”
Sholmes settled her more securely on his hip. “Iris, this is Lord Van Zieks. We’ve worked together in the past—”
“Hardly,” muttered Barok.
“—during some of my cases. He’s a prosecutor.”
She turned the word over on her little tongue. “Posse-cutor.”
“Prosecutor,” Sholmes repeated. “It’s his job to convince the court that the suspect did the crime.”
“How mean!”
“Not if he’s correct,” said Sholmes, “which he very often is.”
Barok had either been practicing his poker face, or was immune now to Sholmes's flattery.
“I think detecting is more interesting than court,” said Iris. “you’ve already solved it all by then, haven’t you?”
“You’d think so,” said Sholmes, “But quite often, the telling of the story reveals more than you knew was there before.” He glanced back to where Barok sat, stony still and ashen-faced. “Don’t you agree, Prosecutor?”
Barok cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Iris hummed thoughtfully.
“Well, come along Iris,” said Sholmes. “All three of us will lose our ices if we chat much longer.”
“Oh, yes! I’m sorry!”
Sholmes let her down to collect her dish, and she pointed at Barok’s. “Yours is the same as mine! Is it good?”
Clearing his throat had done nothing for the rasp in Barok’s deep voice. “It is.”
He stood, and pushed the half-finished ice toward Iris.
“You’re welcome to the rest of it,” he said. “I’m afraid I must be going.”
“Oh, I can’t—” Iris tried to say. But he’d turned already with a sweep of his cloak and left the dish to her.
Sholmes gave her permission with a small nod, lost in his own thoughts. Bemused, Iris took a huge spoonful.
“You know such odd people, Daddy,” she said with her mouth full.
The gunshot wound had been a matter of course, but when Barok van Zieks turned in his prosecutor’s badge, for the first time Sholmes’s worry became too strong to restrain. He left Iris with his landlady and broke into the Van Zieks townhouse. Finding no one, he hailed a hansom out of town.
The last time he visited the Van Zieks estate was shortly after the late lord’s death, for purposes of investigation. Gregson had shouted at him. As if his presence was disrespectful to the deceased somehow, despite being there to solve his murder. He’d stayed long enough to ascertain that there was no evidence: as if the killer were a ghost—or an experienced police detective. But Scotland Yard had no interest in his opinions then. He hadn’t had the nerve that time to bring them to the prosecutor of the case.
The sky had darkened by the time Sholmes arrived. He banged on the imposing front doors, and, receiving no answer, the servant entrance. It was a large house, surely too large for a man huddled pathetically in an upstairs bedroom to hear or respond, but the silence made his blood run cold. Sholmes knelt to inspect the lock.
He had no idea where Barok slept. Aside from that first afternoon in the little guest bathroom, they’d never spent time here together. What awful luck he had, to love such a foolish man with such a sprawling house! It would have taken five seconds to find an average Londoner.
In the west library, his frantic eyes nearly passed over the long legs dangling over the arm of the sofa.
Barok lay flat across the cushions, pale and clammy. Half-dressed as he was, his sword wasn’t within reach, but his hand darted to his hip for it anyways as Sholmes stood over him.
He clenched his fist instead. “Get out,” he said, as threateningly as he could in such a state.
“No.”
“Sholmes.”
“You look horrid,” said Sholmes, nudging aside Barok’s legs to sit on the cushion beside them. “If I’d been here to kill you, you’d have made it far too easy to be satisfying.”
Barok snorted weakly.
“That’s a comfort, I s’pose,” he slurred. “I’d hate to satisfy whoever does it, in the end.”
Sholmes looked at him for a long time, drinking in the sight of what he’d made of him. The crystal on the floor still half-full of fragrant wine, the dark stain at the spot in the middle of his chest where the papers had described his injury. The utter hopelessness in his eyes.
He softly sighed. “Up you get, darling.”
Barok was far heavier than Sholmes remembered. Muscle, it seemed—his chest had nearly broadened twice across since he’d last held him. If the scent of him hadn’t been lost beneath the wine and the blood, the sheer virility might have made Sholmes’s head spin.
“Don’t call me your darling,” mumbled Barok as he was propped up against the back of of the couch. “I hate to remember it.”
“I don’t,” said Sholmes. He peeled aside Barok’s dressing gown to the bandage beneath. “If it bothers you, forget me yourself. Though I’d focus on this if I were you.”
Barok lowered his head to look down at his chest, where Sholmes had uncovered his inflamed wound.
“You’ve reopened it,” muttered Sholmes. “I’d like to speak with the doctor who left you to your own devices.”
Barok blearily shook his head. “Forced him.”
“An unstable man with a hole in his torso could force him?”
He smiled mirthlessly. “Even doctors fear the Reaper.”
Viciously, Sholmes scoffed.
“If there were ever a profession that ought not to be led by superstition..." he hissed. “You need your stitches fixed. You’re going back to hospital—a different one.”
“…I loathe the hospital.”
“Everyone does,” snapped Sholmes. “Yet few others flee it before they’re allowed.” He hooked Barok’s arm over his shoulders and heaved him onto his feet. “There are far easier methods of suicide.”
“No," said Barok. "There aren’t.”
Sickened, Sholmes took this to mean he’d tested their difficulty. Barok wouldn’t look back at him. But at least he was willing to walk.
They slowly trudged through the old estate hallways. Sholmes’s guilt had become impossible to suppress, no matter how fervently he assured himself that he’d made the right decision all those years ago. Iris could not have lived in this man’s care. Barok couldn’t even live in his own. How many times had he narrowly skirted death, both at others’ hands and at his? There was nothing Sholmes could have done to fix it, but he couldn’t help believing that there should have been.
Perhaps parenthood had softened his heart. Perhaps it had opened his mind.
Though it took longer than he’d have liked, he and his alarmed driver were able to settle Barok into the cab. Sholmes climbed in beside him and directed their hasty return to London. Barok had leaned his head back over the seat and closed his eyes, but it took him until the edge of the village to be clear that he hadn’t yet fallen asleep.
He leaned closer to Sholmes to speak quietly. “Why did you stop?”
Loving me, he meant, or whatever Barok’s words for what he’d done had been. For several moments of dreadful speechlessness, Sholmes looked back at him.
And then he found the only words he could. “Why didn’t you start?”
Were Barok in finer form, Sholmes knew he could have fought this. As he was, he took his fault in the matter with quiet, self-loathing grace. The easiest thing Sholmes could do was let him. In truth… He had no idea what he would have done if Barok had refused to let him go. It was a possibility he hadn’t needed to plan for.
“Your daughter… She was born while we were… Wasn’t she…?”
Sholmes saw no reason to get into the details. “Yes.”
“Her mother…?”
“Lost.”
Barok’s hand wrapped around Sholmes’s beneath the cab cover. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
The sympathy was misguided, but what else could Sholmes do but squeeze back?
“I know I’ve…no right to begrudge a man a life,” Barok murmured. “I… I apologize for my behavior when we last met.”
Sholmes tightened his jaw. If either of them had begrudged the other a life…
“I apologize for my behavior every time we’ve met for years,” he said.
Half-asleep, Barok shook his head.
“Settle down,” whispered Sholmes. “Just rest until we get there.”
He slipped his hand from Barok’s and kissed his furrowed brow. And then he drew back to let him fold the feeling into his dream.