Chapter Text
He wasn’t sure how they’d come to exist like this.
One moment they were something else—something more, something whole—and then, in the next, it was all lost. They became whatever they were now: partial, incomplete, scrabbling after fragments of who they used to be. Always reaching for things that weren’t there any longer. Memories, feelings, names—all of it slipping through their fingers, no matter how tightly they tried to hold on.
He called it death, because what else was left?
The other—the one who was him, more than he was himself, and yet not him at all—laughed at that, a sound brittle as broken glass, cruel and bitter in the same breath. Said it wasn’t death. Said death shouldn’t come with so much consciousness, so much after. That whatever they were now was something different, something that shouldn’t be. Something never meant to last.
He agreed, and he didn’t. As always, when it came to the other’s words. No, this wasn’t death—not in any way he understood it—but Sherlock Holmes was dead, and even as he kept wearing the name, the face, it no longer fit. It sat strangely on him: skin too tight and too loose against his bones, as though his identity was trying to stretch itself around something missing, compensating for the gaps, the shattered pieces, the parts that had never been there to begin with.
He wondered if this was what happened when you died but refused to leave. Maybe you stayed, but only in fragments—present, but never entirely here.
The name didn’t matter. Maybe it had, once—William Sherlock Scott Holmes—but now even that was only noise, like the blood constantly dripping from his hair, the lingering echo of impact, the last thing he remembered. It should’ve mattered, but it didn’t. None of it did, really. Not anymore.
He was fine. It was fine. He kept telling himself that, because he wasn’t alone in this. The other was always there too: the spider, the not-quite-man. He called himself Jim, in the rare moments he existed enough to choose a name, when he got bored of being nothing but a shadow, clinging to Sherlock like a shroud. Jim. It was an ordinary name, the shape of it sharp on the tongue, tasting of apples and blood, and something old as sin.
He had another name, of course—a name for the rest of the world, a name that fit like a crown or a hangman’s noose, depending on the day. But Sherlock preferred this one. It was easier, somehow. Cleaner. One syllable, easy to swallow, impossible to spit out.
Sometimes Sherlock thought that, if he hadn’t been Sherlock, he’d have been Jim instead—jagged edges, bloodied teeth, manic smiles.
*
It took a surprisingly long time for them to leave the rooftop.
Hours, maybe. Days, possibly. Time had fractured into meaningless segments, impossible to count. All Sherlock knew was this: the bodies that had held them—had been them, once—were gone. The rain had long since washed away the blood, leaving only ghost stains on the concrete, faded reminders of something irreversible.
They never spoke of the blond man who’d left with Jim’s body, just as they never mentioned the one who’d wept over Sherlock’s ruined form before being dragged off into the dark. It felt wrong to speak about things they no longer understood—like trespassing on someone else’s grief, or echoing a language they no longer spoke.
Death had a way of making everything seem too distant to touch, too far off to matter. So they’d watched—silent, side by side on the ledge—waiting for some pattern to emerge from the chaos, listening as Jim’s humming faded and disappeared into the wind.
At that point, they weren’t Sherlock and Jim, not really. They were just there, together, and somehow that was enough. It was the only thing left that felt real.
Things began to return, eventually—at least, as much as anything could, when Jim’s skull was shattered at the back and Sherlock’s own was cracked through, jagged and leaking memory. Flashes, mostly: stayin’ alive, scraps of half-remembered conversation, a ghost of a touch, and—
Jim called it freedom, the word spat out between teeth like a sacrament or a curse. Sherlock called it loss—called it descent, collision, the aftermath of falling too far and landing wrong. Perhaps they were both right. Perhaps neither of them were. Both answers tasted the same: iron, salt, a bitter wash at the back of the throat. The horror of seeing a spider die; the terror of facing his own mortality and finding it recognisable.
Everything tasted of blood after the impact. But the thought of what had happened next—after the handshake, the instant of contact, that shattering moment of perfect understanding that tethered them together—gave the blood a different edge. One Sherlock hated, even now.
Sometimes, he was certain he didn’t belong here. Sometimes the unreality of it all pressed in—alien, cold. But then he would look at Jim, and for one breath, he couldn’t imagine a world where he was anywhere else.
*
In the end, they left the rooftop because curiosity gnawed at them.
It wasn’t boredom—not really. They weren’t present enough for that. But Sherlock wanted to see where his body had ended up, and Jim, either indifferent or simply detached from whatever he’d once been, didn’t bother to go his own way. So they drifted together, following a thread they couldn’t quite name, until they found themselves standing in a cemetery beneath a sky that felt too wide, too open for ghosts.
Sherlock Holmes, the tombstone read. Plain, unadorned. Like that was the whole story. Like there was nothing else to say.
Maybe there wasn’t.
“We missed your funeral,” Jim said, and Sherlock started—caught off guard by the sound. It was the first time Jim had spoken since they’d become this, whatever this was—something faded, something less. Sherlock had forgotten, somehow, that words were still an option.
The voice was soft, unexpectedly melodic, none of the venom he’d braced for. For a moment, Sherlock wondered if it was love twisting in his gut at the sound—or if it was dread, winding cold in his stomach. Maybe it was hatred, old and indistinct.
“Did you want to watch it?”
Jim didn’t frown, but he tilted his head, as if the answer was lost somewhere in the hole at the back of his skull. A line of fresh blood slipped down his neck, soaking slowly into the collar of his shirt, unnoticed.
“I don’t think so.”
Sherlock hummed, in vague understanding. It was hard to shape clear answers with a brain half-missing.
“I thought you might have wanted to see it.” That was as close to kindness as Jim ever came—could ever come. Or perhaps it was something masquerading as cruelty, a rehearsal of old habits: putting Sherlock face to face with his own ending, just to see him squirm. It was always impossible to tell with Jim—where the line fell, whether it existed at all. Sherlock found he didn’t really mind, either way.
“Do you think people came?”
He wasn’t sure why he asked. He wasn’t sure why Jim bothered to answer.
“Of course they came for Sherlock Holmes,” Jim said, so quietly Sherlock nearly mistook it for the wind. He was staring at the stone, gaze fixed on the name as if it held some private cipher. “You were loved.”
“I don’t think people loved me very much, when I died.” Not quite a statement, not quite a question. Sherlock knew Jim—Moriarty—had been the cause of it all, or maybe just the catalyst, but the details were smudged, lost. He couldn’t remember enough to know what had really mattered, at the end.
“People don’t matter.” Something flickered across Jim’s face, sharp and quick, twisting his mouth into something almost pained, almost angry—either would have been captivating. “Not the ordinary ones, anyway. But you had—” He waved a hand, the gesture vague, unfinished. He couldn’t remember, and neither could Sherlock. “—them.”
Them.
Names had weight. Names had teeth, even the ones they’d forgotten.
“Do you think someone came to your funeral?” Sherlock asked, instead of answering. He remembered the blond man with the scarred face, the rifle hidden in a battered duffel. Remembered how he hadn’t allowed himself to cry, how he’d closed Jim’s eyes with careful, trembling hands before carrying him away to wherever the dead belonged.
Jim shrugged, utterly unconcerned. Sherlock had the distinct, cold sense that if he’d died for the sake of his nameless loved ones—and because of Jim, or maybe in spite of him, he still couldn’t tell—then Jim Moriarty had managed the exact opposite. Sherlock had cared too much to stay alive. Jim simply hadn’t cared enough.
“Do you want to find him?”
“No,” Jim said, simply. Not yet, the wind seemed to murmur, but that was all there was.
*
How they ended up in Baker Street, Sherlock couldn’t quite say.
The path had drawn him along by instinct, each step both familiar and inevitable. Jim followed, or at least the ghost of him did—what little was left in this moment, trailing in silence. Talking seemed to wear him thin; now he hovered at the very edge of perception, spectral, more suggestion than presence, as he always was when the world became too loud.
221B, the plate on the wall announced as they drifted through the door. Home, whispered a part of Sherlock he tried to quiet, some obsolete echo clinging to memory and bone.
Seventeen steps—he counted them without thinking. There had always been seventeen, and the habit held even now. He remembered, dimly, a shadow in the doorway, footsteps rising: up, up, up, drawing him into the shape of a life he was only half certain he’d lived.
He found himself in the flat, surrounded by trinkets, the history of a life arranged in careless layers. The violin lay abandoned on the table, the old dressing gown tossed over a chair, stacks of notes and experiments littered wherever he’d left them. Handwritten scores, chemical stains, chaos rendered almost beautiful by familiarity.
They were his, all of them—weren’t they? All the evidence of who he’d been. Case notes in a looping, precise script, the residue of experiments, music scrawled in restless nights, every scrap of it proof that once there had been a man called Sherlock Holmes.
He wondered—fleetingly—if Jim’s flat looked the same somewhere, if someone had packed it away one afternoon, or if it stood undisturbed, gathering dust in a city that barely remembered him. If anyone had ever known him well enough to recognise what was missing.
Jim offered nothing to break the silence. He only reached out—his hand nearly invisible, the air warped strangely by the glow of the streetlamps outside—and plucked the strings of Sherlock’s violin. The sound was thin, ghostly, Pizzicato. A quiet shiver through the stillness.
Sherlock watched. Jim’s fingers were wrong for this—no calluses, no muscle memory, no patience for pain. But it didn’t seem to matter. Sherlock caught himself wondering if, with enough persistence, Jim’s hands would bleed. Would the blood soak the strings, staining them a red only they could see? Or would it remain invisible, another secret shared between the dead?
“Sherlock?” The voice—John , his thoughts supplied, John, John—pierced the fog, jagged and urgent, echoing through the ruins of Sherlock’s mind. The world seemed to hold its breath.
But Jim had never cared much about the world, or anyone in it. It wasn’t surprising when he ignored the silhouette of John standing in the doorway, his shadow cast three ways across the carpet.
What struck him as odd, what came through clearly for once, was Jim’s choice of song.
Sonata no. 1 in G minor.
The memory lingered, blurred and water-stained, but unmistakable—a shape just at the edge of recall. He could almost touch it: the last time, when Sherlock himself had played that piece, and Jim, lounging nearby, had let him end on a crooked cadence. Afterwards, Jim had called it their unfinished symphony, tapping the Partita No. 1 out on his thigh, all staccato restlessness, slicing the violin’s final note into silence with a slap of his hand against his leg.
Hadn’t their story ended the same way? A phrase unresolved, a connection abruptly cut, nothing completed as it should have been.
Now the music sounded wrong in every possible way. The piece wasn’t meant to be played like this—stripped of intention, picked out absently by a single hand, missing harmonies and stumbling through the theme in the wrong key. But the melody was still there, even if everything around it was warped beyond recognition.
So were they—present, but altered, echoes distorted through a glass none of the living could see through.
Sherlock caught himself wondering if he was meant to find meaning in it. If John did, with the way he stared at the violin as if it might reveal a secret, or bring someone back from the dead.
God, John.
“Sherlock,” John said again, voice trembling with hope and disbelief. It sounded like a question, but it cut straight through the noise in Sherlock’s head.
It would have been vaguely insulting to have Jim’s distracted plucking mistaken for his own playing—especially since Jim was plainly more at home with a piano than with strings, fingers bleeding red onto the wood without pause. But Sherlock was too busy stumbling, desperate to close the distance, to show John that he was here. More than a fever dream. More than a shade.
He needed John to see him. To believe he was real. More than Jim’s ghost, more than memory.
But—could he?
The question struck him silent. For a second, the ache of wanting was all there was. Then, blinking hard, Sherlock dragged his attention away from his own longing, from the faint shimmer where Jim’s hand moved in the air, and back to John’s face.
He and Jim had never really separated, not since they’d crossed whatever line it was that left them here. Maybe things had been different before, maybe there’d been boundaries, but now their existences were knotted together, impossible to untangle. It stood to reason, didn’t it, that their limits would be the same? That whatever Jim could do, Sherlock might do too?
He hadn’t tried, not properly—not until now. The thought of it was disorienting, unscientific, and faintly absurd. But then, so was the fact of his own ghosthood.
Slowly, watching John for the tiniest sign, Sherlock reached toward the skull on the mantelpiece and willed it to lift.
He tried.
Nothing.
Why wasn’t it working?
Sherlock turned back to Jim—seeking an answer, or maybe just wanting some sign of help, but received only indifference. Jim ignored him completely, dissolving further into the edges of the room, so Sherlock returned to glaring furiously at the skull on the mantelpiece, willing it to move by force of need alone.
Maybe it was the weight of the thing, or the shape, or something entirely arbitrary—something irrevocable, beyond his control. Maybe the laws that governed the dead had always been written in an alphabet he would never learn.
Jim kept playing, fingers drifting lightly over the strings—though “playing” was perhaps generous for what he was doing. He seemed to have abandoned visibility altogether, the faint distortion in the air all that was left of him, as if vanishing was the only way to keep his focus. Sherlock wondered if it even was a choice, or simply the price of holding on to anything at all.
The fact that John had heard the violin, with how faint and uneven the music was, felt almost miraculous—proof of how shallow his sleep must have been. If he’d even been sleeping at all.
John looked wretched. Not just tired, but devastated, hollowed out—like a man who’d lost the last thing holding him together.
Sherlock forced himself to breathe, to centre, and tried again. This time he aimed for the letter opener, a broken bit of metal, then for a scrap of paper—anything, even the smallest movement would have sufficed. Still nothing. The world stayed stubbornly solid, immune to the dead.
Please.
He and Jim were cut from the same cloth, surely—but perhaps not in the same shape. It would fit. Sherlock never struggled to stay tethered to reality; Jim, in contrast, slipped in and out, unable or unwilling to hold form for long. But what Jim lacked in persistence, he made up for in presence, in his ability to disturb the air, to stir the living world.
One who could not act, and one who could not remain. Together, they made a fine contradiction.
Maybe they should never have come here, Sherlock thought, and the feeling sharpened, an acute sense of displacement settling in his chest. What were they hoping to gain, scraping at the remnants of a past that wanted nothing more than to move forward? What was he clinging to, following the living into rooms where he no longer belonged?
John remained silent, the hope in his expression flickering and then guttering out, slowly replaced by something like resignation. Reality landed on him all at once, a physical blow that made his shoulders cave in.
Sherlock felt untouched by it. Maybe it was the fall, the violence of impact still echoing through him, leaving no room for anything else to register. Or maybe he’d simply run out of space to feel.
He watched John’s face—already too pale, too strained—shift and collapse through every shade of hope, grief, confusion, before settling at last on a muted sort of longing. A look that didn’t quite fit, didn’t belong in this world any more than they did.
“He’s refusing to face the truth,” Jim whispered—without a mouth, without even a face, his voice drifting through the warped sonata, so insubstantial it was nearly lost. “Poor thing.”
Poor man, Sherlock corrected inside his mind, and had they been anywhere else, had Jim been visible, Sherlock would have gone for his throat.
John didn’t seem to hear Jim—not that it mattered much. Sherlock couldn’t tell if it was because Jim had faded too far to be sensed at all, or if John was simply incapable of hearing the dead. Either way, it left Sherlock stranded, watching, caught in the gap between wanting to reach out and knowing it was impossible.
He hadn’t even tried to speak to John, had he? Not once. Not a word.
Oh.
Jim had fallen silent; the sonata trailed off, ending again on a cadence that was all wrong, the final note sour in the air. The sound—so brief, so off-key—felt like both a wound and its healing, a kiss pressed over a cut, fingers curling into pain.
“I know you’re not here,” John said suddenly, his voice splintering. “But I wish I still knew—” He stopped short, sucking in breath like a man on the verge of drowning. “Mycroft didn’t say much,” he continued, his gaze darting from the now-silent violin to the cluttered room and then back, before he squeezed his eyes shut. He must have thought he’d imagined the music. “Probably because I broke his nose after he tried to explain his actions with Moriarty.” There was no regret in his voice, not even a trace, and although he couldn’t hear it, Jim’s nearly soundless laughter shivered through the space, unsettling in its closeness. “—But he did say that you two had a plan. A way to fake your suicide, to fool Moriarty.”
Lazarus. Of course. Named for the man who’d lain dead four days, called forth by someone else’s voice, dragged back across the threshold. If Sherlock was Lazarus, who was meant to be his Messiah? Who had left him in his tomb, forgotten? The answer flickered in and out, the details lost in fog—like Mycroft himself, brother and architect, sharper, brighter, impossible to hold.
He remembered enough, though. He remembered that he’d been meant to live.
Jim had been surprised to see him, hadn’t he? Surprised that he was here at all.
What happened, Lazarus? What happened to Moriarty, and to the man you were meant to become? There had been plans—so many ways to escape, ways to survive. So why didn’t you?
He had no answer. He couldn’t remember, and part of him wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Jim stayed silent. Or maybe he was gone, retreated so far into the background that even Sherlock couldn’t sense him now. Except for the cold, almost imperceptible pressure of phantom fingers entwined with his own, Jim had vanished—leaving Sherlock suspended in the inevitable, unbearable quiet that always came when it was just him, alone at the end.
“Sorry,” Sherlock whispered—inaudible, untethered, unheard—before fleeing the flat, running from the silence, the absence, and the ache that would never quite leave him.
*
Without quite meaning to, he—they—ended up back on the rooftop. Their legs dangled over the edge, heels scuffing the weathered concrete, fingers almost touching, not quite. London stretched out below them, cold and endless, city lights smudged by fog.
Jim wasn’t fully there yet. Sherlock couldn’t see him, not directly, but could sense him—woven into the air, the faintest ghost of weight leaning against his shoulder, the suggestion of skin beneath his fingertips. If he focused, he might almost believe in the cold brush of hair, the almost-pressure of a presence where a body used to be.
It could have been nice, maybe, in some other universe—one where Jim was alive and his hand was warm, not ice and emptiness.
But that wasn’t this universe, and it didn’t matter. Jim was humming Stairway to Heaven under his breath—soft, tuneless, slightly mocking. Sherlock couldn’t decide if he wanted to cry, or tear out Jim’s throat just to make the sound stop.
Hate. That was what twisted in his stomach, surely. That ugly thing coiled tight whenever Jim was close—hatred, or something wearing its shape, indistinguishable from want at a distance.
He wondered, briefly, if most people leapt from buildings out of hatred. Or if he was singular—always the outlier, always the freak, still finding ways to delude himself.
“Why did I jump?”
The question drifted out into the cold London air—fragile, pointless, why did I jump—like he was missing a single, crucial piece, when really it was the whole puzzle that had been lost. The wind carried it away.
Jim’s humming cut out, the melody left unfinished, strangled right before the bridge. For a moment, only the distant blur of city traffic filled the gap between them.
“What do you think?” Jim said at last, his voice as quiet as the wind.
Sherlock knew—without looking—that if he turned his head now, he would see Jim, perched and watching the city, the darkness of his gaze following every movement below. But he didn’t look. Couldn’t. Some conversations had to happen in the quiet, with eyes averted, truth left to echo between them.
“I threatened you,” Jim said.
So what? So what? Sherlock Holmes had been threatened a hundred times over, but dying—falling—had never been part of the script.
“I don’t think I wanted to die,” Sherlock admitted, the memory sharp even through the fog, clear as a shard of glass and just as painful. “Did you?”
Jim hummed again, deep in his throat, the sound shaded with amusement. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The words sat heavy in the silence between them, unsaid but understood.
Sherlock tried again, quieter. “I don’t think I wanted you to die either.” That was true, whatever else he couldn’t recall. Jim laughed—a jagged, empty sound that barely rose above the wind—because he knew it meant nothing. Because maybe it always had.
“And here we are.”
Here they were. Hands joined by the memory of blood, sitting on a rooftop ledge, trying to hold together the splinters and scraps of what they’d been.
Jim’s laughter was never a pleasant thing. It didn’t invite warmth or even offer comfort. That was only natural; Jim himself was not a pleasant man. Everything real that spilled out of him was laced with the cutting edge of his mind, bitter and sharp, the by-product of a life lived in spite and brilliance. And yet, Sherlock found it impossible not to be captivated by it—drawn in by the very harshness that made it so unbearable.
“I don’t mind being here with you,” Sherlock breathed, filling the silence that followed when Jim’s laughter finally ran out. He lied, of course. What else was there to do, when his skin felt too tight, his thoughts threatening to turn him inside out?
“But I do.” I do , the world echoed, and for a moment, Sherlock felt that familiar drop in his stomach, like falling all over again. “You weren’t supposed to lose.”
Sherlock turned, sharply, hands curling into fists, nails pressing crescents into his palms. But there was nothing for him to confront—Jim was there, but only just, as dead and empty-eyed as ever, unmoved by any of this, as dead as ever, as dead as always. Nothing to rail against. No comfort to be found.
“What does that even mean?” Sherlock demanded, fighting to think past the constant, maddening drip of blood from his hair, the way it dotted the concrete at his feet. “You wanted me to jump.”
“I asked you to,” Jim corrected, as though the distinction mattered, as though he wasn’t splitting hairs on the edge of a razor. What was he implying? That Sherlock had a real choice? That all of this was only ever about what Sherlock wanted? “You had no reason to comply.” The words came out flat, factual, as if Jim were reciting a theorem, as if this—any of this—was just another logical consequence in a world that didn’t care about intentions. There was no anger in his eyes, nothing human. Only indifference and the faintest ghost of bitterness. “You had them. You had everything.”
“And you threatened them!” Sherlock shot back. He could still feel the fear—bone-deep and paralysing—the terror that the people he loved would die if he misstepped, if he hesitated. “It was my life or theirs.”
“So?” Jim asked, with a shrug so casual it had to be rehearsed, some mask he wore for his own benefit. “You had the whole fucking world as your oyster. You had a way out—” Good luck with that—and then Jim’s hand tore away from his, and he was falling again. Falling, fallen. The memory of blood and brain matter, bright and obscene, spreading like a grotesque crown around his head.“—and you threw it away.”
“A way out? A way out? ” Sherlock snarled, seizing Jim by the collar and yanking him upright, half-haunted, half-horrified. “Is that it, then? Is that why you’re so furious with me? Because I didn’t torch my heart just to survive—because I refused to become what you wanted?”
Was that what was expected? That he’d let his friends die, throw them away as the price of living? And then what? What would be left, if that was the bargain?
Jim just stared at him, utterly unmoved. He offered no resistance, no attempt to break Sherlock’s grip, no flicker of emotion at all. He let himself be held, suspended between violence and inertia, as if this—like everything else—was inconsequential.
“You should stop talking about things you don’t remember, darling.” Jim’s tone was almost bored, careless. “Let’s save that for later. No sense having a row with a wall.”
Sherlock scowled, jaw tight, but released him anyway, fingers falling away. He turned aside, the space between them suddenly thick with all the things unsaid.
“You had a way out as well,” Sherlock said, the words tumbling from somewhere deeper than thought, drawn up by pain and memory—joined hands, gunfire, a dozen endings all at once. “Even Mycroft didn’t plan for you to die, did you know that? The best case, if you really wanted me gone, was me tricking you for a few minutes—keeping you interested, long enough not to kill my friends. That’s all. It was your choice, all of it. You wanted to die.”
“And here we are,” Jim said, echoing the phrase, but the smile he wore was razor-edged, joyless. Sherlock wondered if he’d ever seen Jim smile in any other way. “Happy now?”
“Why—” The question caught in his throat, stuck, multiplying. Why did you do it? Why throw yourself away? You didn’t have to die for anyone. Why?
He remembered Jim’s words— No one ever gets to me—delivered with a half-smile that faded into that bottomless emptiness, the stillness that always hovered just beneath the surface. And no one ever will.
Sherlock had once hoped—believed, maybe, in some desperate, unguarded part of himself—that Jim had lied. That Jim had let someone in, just once, that he’d let Sherlock get close enough to matter. But it hadn’t been a lie.
You’ve come the closest.
“I was tired, Sherlock,” Jim said, as if answering a question Sherlock hadn’t dared to ask aloud. He shifted on the rooftop, moving with the casual fluidity of someone who had never truly feared gravity, and then—without warning—climbed into Sherlock’s lap. Cold hands found Sherlock’s face, gentle, almost reverent, the ghost of a comfort neither of them really understood. “Still am,” Jim added, after a beat, flashing a grin that glinted but meant nothing at all. “I told you—” Did you listen? “—staying alive is just staying. That’s all it ever is. No matter what I do, no matter how well I distract myself, I always end up back here, the same cursed starting point. Nothing ever changes.”
From this close, Jim’s eyes seemed impossibly large—devouring, unforgiving. They were the abyss beneath the ocean, the space between stars. One wrong move and Sherlock knew he’d be lost, swallowed by the void, never to return. Not as himself. Maybe not as anything.
“You really didn’t want me to die,” Sherlock realised, the thought detonating through him—clean, sudden, painful. “I wasn’t supposed to.”
And wasn’t it a shame—tragic, even—that Jim had managed to keep more of himself than Sherlock had? That even now, with a hole blown through his brain, Jim remained Jim: more spider, more Moriarty, than Sherlock could ever be Sherlock Holmes again, no matter how desperately he tried to fill the empty spaces left behind.
Even brain damage couldn’t erase the truth of Jim.
Jim hummed low in his throat, fingers curling into Sherlock’s hair—possessive, but not punishing, not cruel. Just there, a claim pressed against him. Sherlock’s hands moved instinctively, gripping Jim’s waist, anchoring him—only realising what he’d done after it was already too late. The madness thrummed between them, electric and barely contained.
“So what?” Jim murmured.
Did it matter, after all? The reasons, the motivations, the justifications—they all collapsed in the end. Sherlock’s friends had survived. Jim Moriarty was dead. The living didn’t care about the justifications of ghosts.
Except, this time, the ending wasn’t quite so neat. Was it?
“Something went wrong with your plan.” Sherlock’s voice came out thin, almost breathless. “Even you didn’t see this coming—did you?” Their eyes met and held, that bottomless darkness, the vertigo of being seen and seen through, neither of them entirely real, neither whole. “But there’s something I don’t understand—you’re dead, but you’re not gone. Why didn’t you leave?”
Jim smiled, and for a moment he looked unbearably young—lost in a way that made Sherlock ache, the way he had been right before he’d said thank you, just before the end. Sherlock almost preferred the other smiles, the ones that cut—those sharp, wicked things that left wounds. This softness felt wrong, dangerous in a way nothing else could touch.
“Because of you,” Jim murmured, closing the distance, pressing their foreheads together. It was always the two of them, circling this truth. Always had been. Always would be. “Did you really think I’d just leave you behind?”
But it didn’t make sense—couldn’t, not with the way everything had happened. The only reason Sherlock was still clinging to this half-existence was because of Jim. The only reason he hadn’t moved on.
Sherlock’s mouth opened—closed—searching for something to say, something to bridge the impossible space between question and answer. The words wouldn’t come. His mind felt flooded, blank, caught in a loop.
But Jim just took his hand, not moving from his place straddled across Sherlock’s lap, and tugged him forward. The world distorted, shimmered, and in the next breath they were somewhere else entirely—somewhere achingly familiar.
“Where—” Sherlock started, the word unfinished as he took in the room: the old leather chairs, the rich mahogany desk, the endless bookshelves. Like the ones that had burned at Musgrave, once upon a time. A room conjured from memory, nostalgia, or guilt.
But this wasn’t Musgrave. This wasn’t childhood, wasn’t the past, Redbeard was long gone, and Sherlock was no longer a boy. He wasn’t really anything, these days.
He noticed, suddenly, that Jim wasn’t touching him anymore. Not even the brush of a fingertip. He hadn’t realised until now how much he’d relied on that slight contact—how it anchored him to whatever present they could still inhabit. Now Jim was only a few feet away, a ghost blending perfectly into the stained glass and portraits of Mycroft’s office, elegant and perfectly dead.
“Why did you bring us here?” Sherlock asked, the question tangled with annoyance and dread—anticipation, sorrow. He hadn’t wanted to face his brother, not yet, not like this. But Jim didn’t answer, didn’t even turn. His gaze was fixed on the figure seated across the desk.
On—
“You look rather out of it, brother mine,” Mycroft observed, leaning back in his chair as if this was the most ordinary of conversations. As if he could see Sherlock. As if Sherlock wasn’t dead, as if nothing had changed.
Sherlock went utterly still—a deer in headlights, breath caught and bones locked, waiting for the collision. The words filtered into his mind, slow and surreal, one by one, fighting to be understood.
Mycroft was seeing him. Speaking to him. Commenting on his appearance and—
Wasn’t he? Mycroft’s gaze seemed to slide just past him, fixing somewhere over Sherlock’s shoulder. The unease grew, sharp and impossible to ignore. Something was wrong. Off-balance. The world seemed misaligned—out of kilter, like Sherlock was submerged underwater, drowning and already drowned, and Mycroft’s words were reaching him only after crossing some impossible, fathomless depth. Was he really here at all? Was any of this real?
Sherlock felt—did he?—his mouth opening, words spilling out. Or was it just memory, or dream, or someone else’s voice altogether? He heard himself echoing, but it wasn’t quite in sync with his own mouth.
“I feel—” Strange. Scattered. Wrong, acutely so. “—uneasy about staying in London for so long. I’m sure you can at least understand that.”
Mycroft answered—words about Moriarty’s men, about safety and the necessity of hiding, about destroying the web. Sherlock barely registered any of it. The words blurred, meaningless. He couldn’t listen, not with his own reality splintering, not with the world suddenly and violently rearranged around him.
Because there—sitting across from Mycroft—was himself.
Alive, breathing. Looking far too much like him, but not dead, not ruined. He wore Sherlock’s exhaustion in the press of his lips, his pallor an honest record of days spent in hiding, but there he was, lounging as though he belonged to the world. Breathing. Owning the space.
His eyes—his own eyes—fixed, glassy, looking straight through, as if he could see Sherlock’s soul, or see nothing at all.
Sherlock was never meant to see his own face again. It felt obscene—aberrant—like a violation of every unspoken rule. Ghosts didn’t get mirrors. Ghosts didn’t have to reckon with the magnitude of their own absence. Ghosts were meant to be what was left behind, not this. Not someone lost between being and nothing.
Who was he, if not Sherlock Holmes? Who was he, wearing the blood of the dead, skull split and memories drifting, forced to watch his own existence carried on without him?
The world buckled around him—shuddered, unmoored—at the sound of Jim’s voice, sharp and raw: “—lock? Sherlock!” Reality shrieked, walls trembling, the room threatening to tear itself apart before everything snapped back into place.
“What?” asked the living Sherlock—the wrong Sherlock—startled, something in his voice snapping him out of whatever trance he’d fallen into. What had he seen? What had crossed his mind, in that sliver of a moment when the world fractured and someone else was watching from the other side?
“You know what,” Mycroft said, voice measured, eyes tight with worry, the mildness a thin cover. “You were staring into nothing again. This is important.”
Sherlock—the real one, not the version speaking across the desk, not the impostor living and breathing in Mycroft’s office, but the one Jim had dragged back with the force of his voice and the grip of his hand, the one who knew exactly how dead he was—scowled. He wondered how anything could possibly matter, now. What was important to a ghost?
“Sorry.” Mycroft’s frown only deepened, the apology plainly achieving the opposite of reassurance. Maybe because, between them, apologies were rare currency—usually extracted only by maternal threat. “It just felt like someone was calling me.”
Not your name, Sherlock almost screamed. Not you. But Jim’s grip tightened on his hand, cool and anchoring, dragging him back into their half-lit, unsettled state of being.
“Do you miss him?”
Both Sherlocks froze—one visibly, the other on the inside, pulse gone electric. The air seemed to thin.
“John will—” Alive Sherlock started, automatic, defensive.
“Don’t insult your own intellect, brother dear.” Mycroft cut him off, voice soft but razor-edged. “We both know I wasn’t talking about John.” Because that pain was obvious—so obvious it didn’t bear stating. “Do you miss him?”
Yes, the silence howled, yes, always—yes, from the empty places and the bruised corners, before Sherlock even managed to draw breath.
“There’s nothing to miss.” The words landed heavy, forced, a lie even as he turned away, eyes fixed anywhere but on his brother. He pressed his lips together, biting down on what wanted to escape. Sherlock, the ghost, nearly screamed at the hollowness of it, the futility—he would have, if not for Jim’s hand and the prickle of blood running from their joined fingers. “And even if there was—” Another pause, the control visible in every line of his face. “Moriarty is dead. I don’t see the point of talking about a ghost.”
Jim lurched sideways, almost collapsing into Sherlock’s arms before Sherlock could steady himself. His weight felt insubstantial yet electric—trembling, riddled with a laughter that rippled through his frame. Of course Jim was laughing; he always laughed when the moment turned unbearable.
“Don’t you?” Mycroft persisted, voice level. “He haunts your every waking moment, lives inside your thoughts. Refusing to speak of him won’t exorcise him.” Sherlock heard the precise word—exorcise—and finally understood Jim’s mirth; Mycroft’s choice of vocabulary struck dead-centre.
The living Sherlock scowled like a reprimanded child, arms folding tight across his chest. He sank deeper into the leather chair as though the extra inches might deflect Mycroft’s words.
“Whether or not I think about him is irrelevant—”
“It isn’t,” Mycroft replied, almost gentle—save for the iron in his tone. “At present you can justify it: you’re dismantling his network, so keeping him in mind feels strategic. But what then? When every trace of James Moriarty is wiped away—except the grooves he’s carved in your thoughts—what will you do with the vacancy he leaves behind?”
“That won’t happen.” Sherlock shot to his feet—too fast—nearly overbalancing before jerking himself upright. “I’ll finish the work, return to John, and have no reason to remember a dead man. Are we finished?”
“No,” Mycroft said smoothly, “but you need rest.”
Jim didn’t wait for the rest. He seized Sherlock’s hand—alive, dead, it hardly mattered—and pulled him away, wrenching them out of Mycroft’s office, out of that suffocating normality, back to the rooftop and the impossible twilight they never truly left.
“Jim?” Sherlock’s voice was sharp, his grip on Jim’s fingers tightening before the other could slip away. Maybe it was too tight, crushing bone and bruising dead skin, but what did it matter? They were both dead, weren’t they? Or were they? The question snagged in his chest, raw and unresolved. Why was he still here, still alive enough to feel?
“What’s going on—who is he?” he demanded, the rooftop’s chill biting deep, uncertainty sharpening everything.
“Sherlock Holmes,” Jim answered, far too easily, like it was obvious, like it settled the matter completely. “Just as much as you are.”
“Sherlock Holmes is dead,” Sherlock snapped, almost pleading.
But Jim only shook his head, slow and undeniable, and Sherlock was surprised by how much it hurt—how something so ordinary could cut so deep.
“You are,” Jim corrected, his tone cool, matter-of-fact. He made no real attempt to reclaim his hand, just let it hang there in Sherlock’s grip. There was a flicker of discomfort in his eyes, quickly smoothed away; perhaps the pain was faint, or perhaps he simply didn’t care anymore.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Sherlock said, quietly furious. Nothing made sense, and he had never learned to love riddles. “He was alive, Mycroft could see him, talk to him—I can’t be both Sherlock Holmes and—” He gestured at his own half-transparent body, a bitter, hopeless motion.
Jim hummed, a useless, non-committal sound. It did nothing to soothe Sherlock’s nerves. He wanted to lash out, to hit Jim just to feel something solid beneath his knuckles, but he knew it would only amuse the other man—would only feed the monstrous delight Jim took in their pain. Still, he didn’t let go. If anything, his grip grew tighter, almost daring Jim to complain.
“You’re part of him, to be more exact,” Jim said at last.
Was this it, then? Sherlock Holmes, split and scattered, dead and alive, a twisted Schrodinger’s cat locked in an unending box, neither rotting nor thriving—simply waiting.
“And he’s the part of me that followed your plan,” Sherlock realised, the words coming out like a confession. “The part that survived.”
“Just so,” Jim replied, his smile sharp, vicious, and almost proud.
Oh.
“You knew about him already, didn’t you?” It settled into place: Jim’s refusal to visit Mycroft, his odd patience, his careful presence at Sherlock’s side. Even his own patchwork memories—of course he felt incomplete; he wasn’t whole. “From the very beginning.”
Maybe that was why Jim had been gentle, why the fights were muted, the edges blunted. Was it pity, or disappointment? Did Jim no longer see him as Sherlock Holmes at all—not enough of him left to make a worthy adversary? Not even enough to hate?
“After my death, I was trying to pull myself back together—trying to make sense of things—” Jim’s words trailed off, unfinished. Sherlock heard the rest anyway: make sense of himself. He didn’t say it aloud. There was a politeness to their mutual silence, to the way neither of them commented on the blood tangled in Sherlock’s curls.“—and I saw you fall.”
“Didn’t he jump as well?” Sherlock asked, meaning the living version—the one who was allowed to stay. “To save them?”
Because this Sherlock Holmes had lived after Jim’s death, but he wouldn’t have sacrificed John and the others. The ghost Sherlock knew that, no matter how much he resented his counterpart, no matter how incomplete he felt.
“He did,” Jim confirmed. “But we both know it wasn’t the fall that killed you.” He paused, almost wistful. “Falling’s just like flying, Sherlock. The only difference is the destination. You didn’t land the same way. I thought I was still half-gone when I saw you lying on the concrete, and your very much alive body being carried away by Mycroft’s men.”
Sherlock tried to remember it. The memory was clouded, fragmented, but he could summon flashes: tossing his phone aside, gazing up at the bruised sky, closing his eyes against the coming dark—
Impact.
Death hadn’t hurt. Not really. It hadn’t felt like anything, except perhaps an abrupt quietness, an end to motion. One moment he was falling—wind tearing at his coat, air roaring past his ears—and then, stillness. Silence.
Afterwards: the gritty bite of concrete against his back, clouds drifting overhead, the sun hidden. Jim’s face above him, stunned, almost disbelieving.
“Do you know—” Sherlock started, meaning: Do you know why I’m here? What happened to me? Am I just a shadow, a lingering echo of someone who wanted to die but didn’t?
“I don’t,” Jim said, and it was the first time Sherlock heard that note in his voice—threadbare, on the edge of hysteria, as if he were the one unraveling now. “I fucking don’t. We’re ghosts, Sherlock. Did you think I planned for this? Did you think this was part of the plan?” Beneath the wildness, Sherlock saw it—the exhaustion etched deep, the kind that settles in the bones and never leaves. “I was supposed to be done.”
“You could still leave.” Sherlock’s voice was quiet, steady. Jim had always had that choice. He wasn’t bound here by unfinished business, not really; that would have required a sort of hope, a kind of tether to life that Jim had severed long ago. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Don’t I?” Jim’s eyes glittered with something like despair, something like need. Don’t I? “We need each other, Sherlock, or we’re nothing.”
“Wasn’t that your plan, though?” Sherlock asked quietly. “To leave Sherlock Holmes behind—without his name, his friends, or his fairy tale villain? To leave him—” Me, he couldn’t bring himself to say, the word stuck behind his teeth, unspoken. “—completely and truly alone?”
Jim regarded him for a moment, and for the barest second, something almost gentle flickered across his face. But there was always ice in Jim’s eyes, always a blade sheathed beneath the glimmer of his smile. The sharpness never really left, only hid itself behind shimmering, seductive words.
“Not alone. Never alone,” Jim said, voice soft and deadly. “You’re the hero, Sherlock—the dragon-slaying knight. You don’t get to be alone. You would’ve gone back to your little friends, eventually. You didn’t need me. You managed just fine without me, for years.”
That was it, wasn’t it? The heart of the wound. For what is a knight without his dragon? What is a story without its villain?
“I didn’t know of you before,” Sherlock admitted, slowly, as if testing the truth of it. A confession, almost.
“I did.” Jim’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. Know you. Know what I was missing. He tilted his head, the shadow of exhaustion and resignation in his voice. “I survived.”
And yet.
“Then you killed yourself,” Sherlock said, the words almost gentle.
And here they were—again, as always, on the edge of the same question, circling back to the beginning.
“And then I killed myself,” Jim echoed, tone light and empty, watching Sherlock with a kind of idle curiosity. Blood stained his mouth, a brutal smear of colour. “Back to the starting point, love,” he added, voice a dead thing, mouth twisting around the word with a cruelty that almost sounded like affection.
Staying alive. So boring, isn’t it?
Sherlock could feel the conversation grinding to an end—unfinished, incomplete, the way everything between them always was. The ache of it pressed into his bones, settled in the cracked hollows of his skull, burned in the cold cavity where his heart used to be.
“Why do you have to make things so complicated?” Jim asked suddenly, stepping forward, steps slow and deliberate. He lifted his hands—cold, unyielding—and cupped Sherlock’s face, eyes colder still as he searched for something in Sherlock’s expression. “Why do you have to make things so hard?”
Sherlock had no answer. He doubted Jim wanted one. So he held still, silent, frozen beneath Jim’s gaze.
From this close, Sherlock could see everything—the flecks of gold hidden in the darkness of Jim’s eyes, details he’d never noticed before. Jim pressed their foreheads together, eyes fluttering closed. Sherlock bit his tongue, mouth filling with blood, the taste sharp and comforting, familiar as ever. Copper and crimson and memory. The only proof that he was still here.
The taste of his own fall lingered, the echo of impact pressed into his tongue.
Maybe he wanted to hurt Jim. Maybe he wanted Jim to feel it, to understand, down to the bone, exactly what he’d done. To know the ache, the emptiness—a wound burned clean through his chest, hollowed and echoing. More than anything, Sherlock wanted Jim to fix it. To fill the space he’d left behind, to repair what he’d broken.
Dear Jim, please—will you fix it for me?
Tragic, really, the thought. The way they both kept circling the same fire, loving the heat too much to ever step away, always letting the flames consume them before they could even consider escape.