fic for navaan: Choice of Exit
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holmesticeTitle: Choice of Exit
Recipient:navaan
Author:trobadora
Verse: Exit Sherlock Holmes - Robert Lee Hall
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, James Moriarty, John Watson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Beta: REDACTED
Summary: My dear Watson, I have lied to you again. (Or, as Watson says, "Sherlock Holmes deceived me in many things, but in the end he told the truth.")
Note: Holmes and Moriarty as time-travelling actors - how could I resist? Happy Holmestice, Navaan!
Also on AO3: Choice of Exit
In the battered dispatch box I inherited from my late grandmother, I found thirty-two records of Sherlock Holmes' cases. One of these I published; others shall follow. But besides these manuscripts, which initially captured all my attention, the box contained other papers - numerous telegrams and postcards, and a collection of letters. One of them was the following, by far the thickest of them all, and clearly much-handled. The ink is faded and near-illegible in patches, and it was written in a hand far less clear than Watson's. It sheds additional light on the events described in the published manuscript, and some may say that I should have appended it to that book post-haste. Instead I long deliberated as to whether this text should be made available to the public at all.
I have made my decision - whether it is the right one, I leave for the reader to decide.
My dear Watson:
I have lied to you again. It is a habit of mine to which you have been subjected with unfortunate frequency, I'm afraid.
Do not fear. I have not deceived you with yesterday's revelations. I told you the truth, almost as much of it as I could, given our limited time. Yet that "almost" weighs upon me. A lie of omission is no less a lie, and I find I am loath to leave your time, and you, in such a state of affairs.
Truth is ever becoming obsolete - what we think we know one day is not what we shall know the next, and there is no end to this process save that most final stop. No one can be more aware of this than a time-traveller, and if I have subjected you to rather more of that experience than is most men's due, I assure you I have experienced it to no less a degree. As you might expect, Moriarty had rather a large rôle in this.
I have at times used your trust as a tool - in the matter of Culverton Smith, whom I convinced I lay dying by first convincing you; in the matter of Moriarty's network, the underworld that I deceived regarding my survival by deceiving you; and on many more occasions. As an actor, one who deals in illusions, such deceptions have always come naturally to me. I admit I have, on occasion, underestimated the gravity of such actions until, having seen them mirrored in your reaction, I was forced to re-evaluate. You have been good enough to tolerate all of this, accepting my methods for the sake of the purpose they served. Yet I have no such excuse of purpose now.
You must have noted the contradiction: I confessed to you, two months ago, that Moriarty and I had once been as close as two human beings can be, before I thrust him from me - yet yesterday I explained only our rivalry, and his hatred of me. Still, you did not ask.
Perhaps I was correct, then, that it was a truth that should not be conveyed all in one sitting. After all, the most basic facts about my past - that I am neither who, nor what, I had led you to believe - had already shaken you, and my true origins had already upset your understanding of the world. To burden you, in that same moment, with still more would surely have exceeded even your capacity for tolerance.
I admit: I prevaricated. But that was yesterday; this is today, and by tonight I shall be gone. I will not miss you, then. I will not miss anything. Does that sound ominous? Forgive my dramatics, Watson - I am an actor born and bred, and I cannot resist. And after all, I shall not have the chance again.
And yet, enough. Before I take that step and rid the world of Moriarty forever, I must finish my account.
I am unaccustomed to the writing of long letters, as you well know - you have often bemoaned my habit of relying on telegrams, which must of necessity be brief. You will receive this letter only after I am gone, so I shall not have the pleasure of relishing the expression on your face when you see how many pages I have filled. A shame, to be sure, but I do not wish my tale to overshadow what must be our final meeting.
My patient friend, you shall have it all now: such truth of the man you know as James Moriarty, and of myself, as I can offer. I know him better than any other, and still there are answers that elude me. Answers I shall never have, now, for tonight it must all end.
Let me begin with this: You knew us as enemies. There was more; there always is more. We were not always opposites; indeed, even now, we are not so, entirely.
With questions of good and evil, it is never so simple.
What brings an actor to become a criminal? You might as well ask what brings an actor to become a detective. The answer is the same - and for a time, it was the same for us both.
We started out identically, he and I, and all our siblings. Experience shaped us into different forms - experience, and the desire to differentiate ourselves, to have a self, to resist subsumption into a collective identity. It will not surprise you, my friend, that we are, none of us, modest men. Nor were we ever willing to hide our lights under a bushel absent dire necessity. All of us found our own ways to be other, separate from the rest.
Moriarty and I - I will continue to use that name, for simplicity's sake - found ours in rivalry. We were rivals, almost from the start, gifted children growing up on a stage, but it was not then the bitter contest of jealousy, nor any opposition in our natures, not at that time. It was a staged rivalry at first - truly, the word is doubly appropriate - jointly concocted when we were but boys, full of melodrama and excitement, a joke we played on the world. We became ourselves by being two in opposition, and therefore more than merely two more youths in their group of identical peers.
By nature and training and, indeed, the strictures of our lives, we were entertainers, defined by drama and histrionics in every sense of those words. We might have been researchers or explorers, might have put our talents to different use given the choice, but we were made for this, and we knew it from the very start. We were brilliant at our work, yes - but that same brilliance weighed upon us, for we understood the pre-determined path our lives were meant to take, and we knew we would not be permitted to step aside onto a different road.
And as you know - as you have seen, over our long acquaintance - brilliance, in itself, is little reward. We were dissatisfied, un-entertained and bored even as we studied to become the perfect entertainers. You often heard me complain, in our Baker Street days, about the commonplace dullness of crime, and of life. In those days, you could have heard Moriarty complain no less bitterly, about much the same thing.
"Look at this," he would say, sweeping a contemptuous hand towards the entertainment wall of whatever room we happened to be in. They did tend to blur together - the same walls in the same standard prefabricated housing, indistinguishable among any of the inhabited planets, with sparse individualisation due to long-distance transport restrictions, white and grey and bright. Entertainment, in our time, had much to compensate for. "The scripts are commonplace, the performance is commonplace. What surprise, in an existence that has been engineered to be entirely commonplace! No mind that is not commonplace can find any fulfilment in this world."
On other days, it was I who made the same complaints, and he who agreed. There was no question: our society had been designed, as our individual lives had been designed, to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Outliers were not a priority, and we were nothing if not that. We had been made to serve our society, and it would not serve us.
When I told you how we were raised, Moriarty and I and all the others, did you ask yourself what kind of world could have need of such exceptional performers, in such quantity as to artificially engineer them, to breed and raise children for the purpose?
Imagine, if you will, a world vastly different from Victoria's England, or Edward's. The sun is harsh and deadly; what rain comes down is not safe, clean water, but burns the skin as London's fogs stifled the lungs in your - our - time. I told you we had not a sky or a countryside like yours. The very coastlines are changed, and much of the land is infertile. There are gardens aplenty, now - again, and at last, after a long process of regeneration - but all under cover, protected and cultivated. People live in cities where the very streets must be covered. A man may stand on the other side of the globe with a mere instant's travel, but he may not walk under the open sky.
We have reached for the stars and stood upon the surface of distant planets, but we have found no world like ours once was. Most are less hospitable by far than our Earth, and so life there is much the same as it is at home, conducted in closed cities with careful regulations meant to preserve the life and happiness of our population as best they can.
You may remember the methods of the ancient Romans, using bread and circuses to control their population. Food, for our time, was no longer a problem. But entertainment grew ever more necessary in our world of constraints and limits. That was our world, and that was our purpose, Moriarty's and mine.
We were not content.
You have seen Moriarty at his worst; you know what he became. You are familiar with the work he did, the crimes he engineered and instigated, the atrocities that served for his entertainment, the cool, calculating mind whose power could pull on a string in London and move people and events exactly as he wished, all the way across the country. The snide, cruel villain who would cause again the horrors of a future our presence in this time might have averted. And yet his deviations started small, with transgressions your time would hardly recognise as such - little more than a boy's pranks.
It began as a game of dares and challenges, of cat-and-mouse, tricks played on each other and on those around us. We both reached for any option, any entertainment to alleviate the tedium of captivity within a life we could not escape. As I did in your London, we, in that distant future, had to find our own distractions.
"Catch me if you can," he would say, throwing me a sharp, wicked grin, and I would spend days attempting to trace his actions, deduce his steps, anticipate his goals.
That is how it began, my friend: not in jealousy and anger, but in fun.
We were both of us testing the boundaries of our supervision, and getting bolder as we went. Practical jokes turned to breaches of privacy, to fraud, to theft. Once, we made a race of it to see which of us could first break the encryption of certain rather sensitive communications protocols - not to do anything with them once we had breached them, you understand. Merely to show that we could.
"We should not have done that," I said, after.
His lips curled, and his voice turned low, insinuating. "Wondering what I'll do with it?" he asked. "Or afraid we'll get caught?"
I snorted in contempt. "We won't." If we did, the results would have been singularly unpleasant, but we were far too capable to be detected.
"Afraid of me, then."
It was a challenge, and I took it. "Perhaps you should be afraid of what I'll do." If he meant to use what we had gained access to, I was ready to stop him.
"Accepted," said he, grinning, and off we went. I won that round, too, triggering a scheduled change in the encryption before he was prepared.
I'd said we should stop, and yet I hadn't truly meant it. If I was uneasy with some of what we did, it was nothing compared to what happened whenever we were separated for some time.
You know me, Watson. When my surroundings refuse to provide sufficient stimulation, I find myself drained of all energy, and the dullness of the world becomes a heavy weight indeed. So it was even then, and my remedy was the same. Not morphine or cocaine, no, but drugs of similar strength. Moriarty, as I have said, shared in that weakness, seeking to dull his impotent anger as I sought to distract an intelligence too terribly idle. So I grew lethargic; Moriarty, in turn, suffering from the same affliction, grew bitter.
I watched the recordings of his performances, of course, as he, no doubt, watched mine. Underneath the familiar brilliance I, who knew him better than anyone, saw a tension growing. Even I could only see it in glimpses - a shadow as he stepped from his rôle into the skin of the actor, taking his bow; the slightest false turn in an interview; a glittering in his eyes or a hard twist of the mouth whose edge could not be entirely ascribed to the character he was inhabiting.
It was not frustration, nor contempt, nor worry, nor any emotion for which I could have accounted. Those moods did exist, but I understood their growth only too well. No; beyond those lay something different, something I could not name, and it disconcerted me even as I was intrigued.
My own performances, meantime, had grown sloppy by the same measure that his had grown angry and frustrated, which is to say, invisible to our audience yet not to ourselves. I had overindulged in the drugs that made the tedium of our lives bearable, and had begun to grow careless.
What I saw in him, though, jolted me out of my carelessness. I admit, I was pleased.
We met again soon after that, for a shared performance once more. That night, when we were alone at last, he flopped down onto a couch and threw me his best boyish grin. He could make it look revoltingly juvenile. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"No," I declared, giving the usual reply to the usual question. "You are thinking what I'm thinking." And I smirked at the way he rolled his eyes at the old, familiar witticism, as though he had not solicited it himself.
He then proceeded into the usual complaints, all of which I would have shared, had it not been for the new edge in him that, just then, kept me from being bored. That night, he added the following accusation: "We have been made what we are strictly for the purpose of driving us insane!"
"Overly dramatic," I judged, "yet too close by far to the truth. Though I would not ascribe malice where everyday incompetence and an inability to deduce the simplest and most predictable of effects may easily suffice."
He snorted. "Actual malice," he said, pensive, "might in fact be an improvement. It would suggest some thought, some effort, behind what has been accomplished. In truth, I must agree with you that no such thing is likely." His head moved to one side, then the other, a stage performance of slow consideration. "I should like to show them malice." His eyes were burning, glittering as he fixed them on me.
"I should not," said I. "It sounds dull."
He laughed, allowing himself to be distracted, and leaned over to me. "Let us not be dull, my dear," he said with the brightness of light scattered by shattering glass, and kissed me.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that we were lovers, by then.
Does this revelation shock you, Watson? Does the thought that in a distant future, people may look with different eyes upon such congress give you pause? Yet even in my time, our relationship was not free of taboos. Our sex was no impediment; two men or two women might have made for a perfectly acceptable couple, had it not been for one thing: We were identically made, seen as more the same even than twin brothers, and so we were forced to hide the truth.
I have never inquired too deeply into your marriages, but perhaps you would understand: It is a peculiar experience, being with someone who knows you in truth, not merely the surface you present to the world. Few people have ever been capable of knowing me. For a long time, Moriarty was the only one.
In some ways, he still is, even now.
Perhaps I should not have told you this. Had I left it out, it would alter my tale not at all. Yet it was there, and I shall not deny it. I shall not deny him, or any part of what he has been to me.
At the time, nothing had yet come between us, and his closeness was sweet to me. I was not settled; I did not entirely forget that new thing I had noticed in his behaviour; yet I allowed myself to interpret it merely as a frisson of excitement, some new thrill for me to enjoy. He was by my side again, and the world had grown sharper and brighter, much of its dullness polished away, just by his presence.
Performing together again was exhilarating. Other actors simply weren't the same - even our own identical brothers were not. They were brilliant enough, all of them - the ones like us had been designed to be, and the few natural-born performers had to be truly exceptional to be able to keep up. But brilliance was not enough, not for us - even brilliance could be stunningly dull, if it could be satisfied with the goals our destined rôles had assigned us.
(Now, at the distance of decades of my life, and centuries of linear time, I wonder how many of the others successfully hid their own disappointments and rebellions, how much our keen perception may have missed in these performers about whom we cared so little, whom we were predisposed to hold in contempt. But we were young then, and convinced of our own singularity.)
We rose to new heights after that, playing opposite each other as hero and villain, as brothers in competition, as lovers viciously tearing each other apart. He is excellent at the uncanny and disconcerting, at the subtle evil, and we earned much acclaim.
Our games continued, many of them still harmless. How to make you understand, Watson? Perhaps I should tell you of the time we, in the middle of a long stage run, decided to switch rôles for a day, just to see if any would suspect. It was the most fun I'd had performing in a long time, performing him as I performed his rôle. No one even looked at either of us askance.
If only that had been all.
By that time, he had already specialised in playing villains, and it entertained him to transpose this into the real world in some small way. I, in turn, was entertained by stopping him. But pranks and tricks had turned to fraud, to manipulation, to blackmail. What had started as a game had ceased to be frivolous. The stakes had become real, and grew more serious by the day.
And another difference arose between us over time. He took pleasure in the fear he could strike into the hearts of men, simply by displaying his powers, whereas I have never been pleased by reactions such as Alfred Fish's. (Did you think I would not be aware of that, Watson? Of course I saw.) He began to enjoy the part he played more and more. His challenges and transgressions grew more serious, until at last I could no longer abide them, until I entreated him to stop. He would not.
"You stop me," he said, a smile on his face that came straight from his darkest performances. "That is your part in this: If you wish me to stop, you must make it so yourself."
He did not, perhaps, perceive the irony in attempting to escape a predetermined life by allowing him to determine mine for me instead.
"I could give you away," I said coldly. "I know everything."
"You will not," said he, unconcerned. "You know what they would do."
And indeed I did. In our time, it was thought that the best method of creating happy citizens was giving thorough attention to any child's abilities and predilections - whether accidental, in natural-born children, or engineered, in those such as us - and extrapolating from them the optimal course their life might take. Deviations from that path were considered harmful to the person, and to society as a whole.
And we had gone far beyond merely deviating from our paths. Our criminal endeavours - and they were that, even the more harmless of them - and our thorough lack of regret for our deviations could mean only one sentence: the deletion of our memories.
If your time leaves much to be desired in the treatment of its criminals, so did ours, in its own way. Not that this was meant to be a punishment, you understand: it was meant to be a kindness, a fresh start for the lost soul, a second chance unburdened by previous mistakes.
It would have been a death all the same, an end to our selves as we knew them. That knowledge stayed my hand for a long time. That knowledge, and the fact that his transgressions still knew limits, then.
Yes, Watson, that is what awaits us when we return to our time.
That night, I again found something new in him.
We had never been tame or gentle in the manner of lovers, not with each other, not when we weren't performing. (Yes, Watson - at times that, too, could be part of our performance.) Everything between us had always been a challenge - who could achieve completion the fastest, or hold out the longest against caresses or teasing or sheer force; who could pin down whom; who could coax or force which reaction out of his partner. But that night he was savage, fingernails digging like claws into my hair, into my skin, teeth sharp and body unforgiving. I could not do less than respond in kind, indeed spurred on by his intensity as he had always been by mine. It was a fight as much as an act of intimacy, which was not new, but that night, there was nothing playful about it, and that was unfamiliar.
Afterwards I lay exhausted, stunned and thrilled and already grieving, having found an entirely new challenge, and half-way to pleased with it as much as I was half-way to horrified by how much and how little we understood each other still. Even today I do not know what I might have said or done, had the end not been already in sight.
Limits, I said. He exceeded them, one by one. I kept tracing his mental footsteps, discovering his deeds, until finally I found I could no longer bear the sight of him.
"Murder," said I, the word like bile on my tongue. "That was murder."
"It was not," said he, sitting up straight, offended. "I killed no one. You know perfectly well what did the deed."
What, not who: an accident, or so it looked. But every last seemingly incidental happenstance that had gone into causing it had been planned in advance. Nothing so straightforward as a shot from a gun, but the result was the same: a woman was dead, and he the one who had made her so.
It was a brilliantly executed scheme, and I stood before it with sick admiration, seeing perfectly well why such a thing might have appealed to him. Revolted that he'd gone through with it, all the same.
"Your hands pulled every string that led to this chain of events." My anger went cold and hot in turns, and it was not all directed at him. I knew I had tolerated his actions for too long; I should never have allowed it to come to this point. "If no one else can see it, I do. I recognise your mind at work."
He snorted. "I should hope so." Then he hunched over, his back bending, his head undulating from side to side, and I shuddered, for I could no longer tell whether he was slipping into a rôle, or out of it. "It was easy, do you know?" he continued, conversationally, as if he were talking about the traffic in the streets. "But perhaps I aimed too low. Perhaps my goals were too small."
I could see it clearly now: he had gone far further than I had ever surmised he would, and was not planning to stop.
"Don't," I said, though I knew even then it would do no good. "You must stop this, and stop it now. Can't you see what you're becoming? You've played so many of them - do you truly wish to make of yourself a villain in truth?"
He laughed, like a maniac. "Villain?" he scoffed. "They have made me for their entertainment. I'll give them more of it than they can swallow. But you - you would defend them? These mindless drones who would keep us confined to an empty life, just to fill their own emptiness for them?"
"I'm no more happy than you are!" I snapped at him. "But you've gone too far this time. I'll not condone this. I can't."
His eyes glittered, and suddenly there was a strange, mocking smile on his face. "Can't you? Then stop me," he said, very softly, and it sent a shiver over my skin. "We'll see if you can. I'll admit, I'd hoped you'd say that. You against me - the one challenge I shall always look forward to."
I kept my face impassive, with effort. Can you imagine that feeling, my friend? Looking at the man you have spent your entire life with, the man with whom your own self is inextricably entangled, and no longer knowing who he is? No longer knowing whether he is acting or not, how much of what you're seeing is calculated performance and how much is the truth beneath?
Between the two of us, you are the writer, Watson. I have not the words for that feeling. But perhaps if you think back to the time you first met him - the moment just before you realised it was not Sherlock Holmes you were seeing, but Professor Moriarty - perhaps then, you will understand.
After that, we were opposites in truth.
I thrust him from me; I avoided him. He knew me too well, and he would never have believed it, had I kept remonstrating with him as if I still thought he would change his mind. I could not stay close. I had to do my work from a distance.
I had decided, at last, that no matter the price, I must stop him. I alone could not counteract his work; I must alert the authorities to his actions.
But just as in your time, Watson, knowledge and proof are not the same. Had I accused him, not only would I have been seen as a slanderer, but my words would very likely have been dismissed as nothing more than a publicity stunt, our professional rivalry taken too far. I would have been the one deemed unhinged and obsessed with an enmity that existed only in my head. I needed proof.
I almost succeeded.
It would have been a bitter success, could I have submitted incontrovertible proof of his actions, knowing what would be done to both of us.
Death, then: I was prepared to meet it, for him, with him, since I had found no other method of stopping him. Yet it proved too late.
On the very day I knew I had placed myself into position to grasp the final piece of evidence, the day before I could offer it all, he trapped me, administered a drug to render me tractable, and with a stolen time machine catapulted us into your time, free of the restrictions we had chafed against, free of the retribution that was coming.
He'd found out what I'd been planning. Had I not taken that step, would he have thrown us across centuries? I cannot say.
From there, our history went much as I told you. I will not speak of the times I met him, during those years. I attempted at times to reason with him, to find a balance or indeed a limit to his actions. He always refused, even unto the end. At the Reichenbach Falls we attempted to kill each other, and even that failed.
Instead it will end tomorrow, and as it should have all those years ago.
We end here, then, like this: as enemies, he and I. Yet what once was between us, and the past we share, cannot be undone.
I still wonder. I have never been certain how much of his insistence on his chosen path was due to my own insistence on tracking him, of stopping him at all costs. Was it, in its own way, an attempt to keep me close? No doubt some of it was, but how much? A small nostalgic thread running through a larger enterprise, or a more important motivation?
In the end, all I am left with is his performance.
The sneering madman is his masterpiece, and how much of him is real and how much is an act ... very likely not even he could tell, by now. I, for my part, shall not attempt it. He was closer to me than any other, once, and I cannot forget it. And still, it must end today.
It should have ended a long time ago.
So here we are, you and I, Watson, at the end of a long story, and it must come to a close without a satisfying conclusion.
Have you wondered why this is the end I chose? To take him back to our time, rather than to end him, and remain where I have made my life?
I must act to stop him; I cannot do otherwise. I must rid your time of him, and stop his evil pursuits. Yet I attempted his death once, upon the falls of the Reichenbach, and I cannot bring myself to attempt it again. Instead, I will turn us both over to the authorities of our time. Their judgment can hardly be in doubt.
Perhaps from the destruction of both our selves, from the ashes that remain, something new may arise. Perhaps, in another lifetime, different choices may be made. It seems I am discovering, after all, the hope inherent in a fate I once considered nothing short of death. It is a small hope, in truth, yet I find myself clinging to it.
My dear Watson, have you turned from your friend now in disgust? I surely deserve it for my part in all of this. I have told you many truths today; perhaps too many, and none of them pleasant. But you have trusted me this far, and I must I ask your forbearance yet again.
Remember this, Watson, when Moriarty and I are both gone: there is no completely evil personality save one. I told you that once, and led you to believe I meant Moriarty. Yet the living never are completely anything. There can be no such thing, no matter how much one may darken one's soul. Only the fictional villain may be as black and flattened as a silhouette cut from paper.
There is indeed only one purely evil personality, and it is that of an invention. If Moriarty came the closest, it's because he styled himself that way. Whether the performance became true, or the truth revealed itself in the performance, or both, or neither, or why it came to that, I cannot tell.
You have some familiarity with his talents by now - you have seen his portrayal of evil. Did you imagine that part was more fully true than his other acts? His portrayal of me, or of the reporter and the cab-man that you witnessed? He can play it all as smoothly as you please. You have seen him, seen something of his true self, even, but still you have only seen what he allowed you to. If you saw evil, it is because he meant you to.
(No, Watson, I will not deny the corollary. What you saw of me, too, was what I meant you to see. It was no less real for that.)
Yet you have made of me a story, and perhaps it is as well that that is where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty shall remain. Perhaps it is for the best that the public shall never know the full truth about the famous detective memorialised in your chronicles. The friend you wrote of was always a better man than I. If you can stomach it, after all - if my account has not unduly changed your perception of me - let him stand in the light, as my invention and yours.
Myself, I shall disappear into the twilight with Moriarty, which is perhaps as it should be. And this is what I must leave you with, alas: the age-old question of good and evil, as ever unresolved.
As for you, Watson - live well, my friend. May the strange truths of Sherlock Holmes's life not weigh too heavily upon your soul.
Ever yours,
—S.H.
Recipient:
navaanAuthor:
trobadoraVerse: Exit Sherlock Holmes - Robert Lee Hall
Pairing: Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, James Moriarty, John Watson
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Beta: REDACTED
Summary: My dear Watson, I have lied to you again. (Or, as Watson says, "Sherlock Holmes deceived me in many things, but in the end he told the truth.")
Note: Holmes and Moriarty as time-travelling actors - how could I resist? Happy Holmestice, Navaan!
Also on AO3: Choice of Exit
In the battered dispatch box I inherited from my late grandmother, I found thirty-two records of Sherlock Holmes' cases. One of these I published; others shall follow. But besides these manuscripts, which initially captured all my attention, the box contained other papers - numerous telegrams and postcards, and a collection of letters. One of them was the following, by far the thickest of them all, and clearly much-handled. The ink is faded and near-illegible in patches, and it was written in a hand far less clear than Watson's. It sheds additional light on the events described in the published manuscript, and some may say that I should have appended it to that book post-haste. Instead I long deliberated as to whether this text should be made available to the public at all.
I have made my decision - whether it is the right one, I leave for the reader to decide.
My dear Watson:
I have lied to you again. It is a habit of mine to which you have been subjected with unfortunate frequency, I'm afraid.
Do not fear. I have not deceived you with yesterday's revelations. I told you the truth, almost as much of it as I could, given our limited time. Yet that "almost" weighs upon me. A lie of omission is no less a lie, and I find I am loath to leave your time, and you, in such a state of affairs.
Truth is ever becoming obsolete - what we think we know one day is not what we shall know the next, and there is no end to this process save that most final stop. No one can be more aware of this than a time-traveller, and if I have subjected you to rather more of that experience than is most men's due, I assure you I have experienced it to no less a degree. As you might expect, Moriarty had rather a large rôle in this.
I have at times used your trust as a tool - in the matter of Culverton Smith, whom I convinced I lay dying by first convincing you; in the matter of Moriarty's network, the underworld that I deceived regarding my survival by deceiving you; and on many more occasions. As an actor, one who deals in illusions, such deceptions have always come naturally to me. I admit I have, on occasion, underestimated the gravity of such actions until, having seen them mirrored in your reaction, I was forced to re-evaluate. You have been good enough to tolerate all of this, accepting my methods for the sake of the purpose they served. Yet I have no such excuse of purpose now.
You must have noted the contradiction: I confessed to you, two months ago, that Moriarty and I had once been as close as two human beings can be, before I thrust him from me - yet yesterday I explained only our rivalry, and his hatred of me. Still, you did not ask.
Perhaps I was correct, then, that it was a truth that should not be conveyed all in one sitting. After all, the most basic facts about my past - that I am neither who, nor what, I had led you to believe - had already shaken you, and my true origins had already upset your understanding of the world. To burden you, in that same moment, with still more would surely have exceeded even your capacity for tolerance.
I admit: I prevaricated. But that was yesterday; this is today, and by tonight I shall be gone. I will not miss you, then. I will not miss anything. Does that sound ominous? Forgive my dramatics, Watson - I am an actor born and bred, and I cannot resist. And after all, I shall not have the chance again.
And yet, enough. Before I take that step and rid the world of Moriarty forever, I must finish my account.
I am unaccustomed to the writing of long letters, as you well know - you have often bemoaned my habit of relying on telegrams, which must of necessity be brief. You will receive this letter only after I am gone, so I shall not have the pleasure of relishing the expression on your face when you see how many pages I have filled. A shame, to be sure, but I do not wish my tale to overshadow what must be our final meeting.
My patient friend, you shall have it all now: such truth of the man you know as James Moriarty, and of myself, as I can offer. I know him better than any other, and still there are answers that elude me. Answers I shall never have, now, for tonight it must all end.
Let me begin with this: You knew us as enemies. There was more; there always is more. We were not always opposites; indeed, even now, we are not so, entirely.
With questions of good and evil, it is never so simple.
What brings an actor to become a criminal? You might as well ask what brings an actor to become a detective. The answer is the same - and for a time, it was the same for us both.
We started out identically, he and I, and all our siblings. Experience shaped us into different forms - experience, and the desire to differentiate ourselves, to have a self, to resist subsumption into a collective identity. It will not surprise you, my friend, that we are, none of us, modest men. Nor were we ever willing to hide our lights under a bushel absent dire necessity. All of us found our own ways to be other, separate from the rest.
Moriarty and I - I will continue to use that name, for simplicity's sake - found ours in rivalry. We were rivals, almost from the start, gifted children growing up on a stage, but it was not then the bitter contest of jealousy, nor any opposition in our natures, not at that time. It was a staged rivalry at first - truly, the word is doubly appropriate - jointly concocted when we were but boys, full of melodrama and excitement, a joke we played on the world. We became ourselves by being two in opposition, and therefore more than merely two more youths in their group of identical peers.
By nature and training and, indeed, the strictures of our lives, we were entertainers, defined by drama and histrionics in every sense of those words. We might have been researchers or explorers, might have put our talents to different use given the choice, but we were made for this, and we knew it from the very start. We were brilliant at our work, yes - but that same brilliance weighed upon us, for we understood the pre-determined path our lives were meant to take, and we knew we would not be permitted to step aside onto a different road.
And as you know - as you have seen, over our long acquaintance - brilliance, in itself, is little reward. We were dissatisfied, un-entertained and bored even as we studied to become the perfect entertainers. You often heard me complain, in our Baker Street days, about the commonplace dullness of crime, and of life. In those days, you could have heard Moriarty complain no less bitterly, about much the same thing.
"Look at this," he would say, sweeping a contemptuous hand towards the entertainment wall of whatever room we happened to be in. They did tend to blur together - the same walls in the same standard prefabricated housing, indistinguishable among any of the inhabited planets, with sparse individualisation due to long-distance transport restrictions, white and grey and bright. Entertainment, in our time, had much to compensate for. "The scripts are commonplace, the performance is commonplace. What surprise, in an existence that has been engineered to be entirely commonplace! No mind that is not commonplace can find any fulfilment in this world."
On other days, it was I who made the same complaints, and he who agreed. There was no question: our society had been designed, as our individual lives had been designed, to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Outliers were not a priority, and we were nothing if not that. We had been made to serve our society, and it would not serve us.
When I told you how we were raised, Moriarty and I and all the others, did you ask yourself what kind of world could have need of such exceptional performers, in such quantity as to artificially engineer them, to breed and raise children for the purpose?
Imagine, if you will, a world vastly different from Victoria's England, or Edward's. The sun is harsh and deadly; what rain comes down is not safe, clean water, but burns the skin as London's fogs stifled the lungs in your - our - time. I told you we had not a sky or a countryside like yours. The very coastlines are changed, and much of the land is infertile. There are gardens aplenty, now - again, and at last, after a long process of regeneration - but all under cover, protected and cultivated. People live in cities where the very streets must be covered. A man may stand on the other side of the globe with a mere instant's travel, but he may not walk under the open sky.
We have reached for the stars and stood upon the surface of distant planets, but we have found no world like ours once was. Most are less hospitable by far than our Earth, and so life there is much the same as it is at home, conducted in closed cities with careful regulations meant to preserve the life and happiness of our population as best they can.
You may remember the methods of the ancient Romans, using bread and circuses to control their population. Food, for our time, was no longer a problem. But entertainment grew ever more necessary in our world of constraints and limits. That was our world, and that was our purpose, Moriarty's and mine.
We were not content.
You have seen Moriarty at his worst; you know what he became. You are familiar with the work he did, the crimes he engineered and instigated, the atrocities that served for his entertainment, the cool, calculating mind whose power could pull on a string in London and move people and events exactly as he wished, all the way across the country. The snide, cruel villain who would cause again the horrors of a future our presence in this time might have averted. And yet his deviations started small, with transgressions your time would hardly recognise as such - little more than a boy's pranks.
It began as a game of dares and challenges, of cat-and-mouse, tricks played on each other and on those around us. We both reached for any option, any entertainment to alleviate the tedium of captivity within a life we could not escape. As I did in your London, we, in that distant future, had to find our own distractions.
"Catch me if you can," he would say, throwing me a sharp, wicked grin, and I would spend days attempting to trace his actions, deduce his steps, anticipate his goals.
That is how it began, my friend: not in jealousy and anger, but in fun.
We were both of us testing the boundaries of our supervision, and getting bolder as we went. Practical jokes turned to breaches of privacy, to fraud, to theft. Once, we made a race of it to see which of us could first break the encryption of certain rather sensitive communications protocols - not to do anything with them once we had breached them, you understand. Merely to show that we could.
"We should not have done that," I said, after.
His lips curled, and his voice turned low, insinuating. "Wondering what I'll do with it?" he asked. "Or afraid we'll get caught?"
I snorted in contempt. "We won't." If we did, the results would have been singularly unpleasant, but we were far too capable to be detected.
"Afraid of me, then."
It was a challenge, and I took it. "Perhaps you should be afraid of what I'll do." If he meant to use what we had gained access to, I was ready to stop him.
"Accepted," said he, grinning, and off we went. I won that round, too, triggering a scheduled change in the encryption before he was prepared.
I'd said we should stop, and yet I hadn't truly meant it. If I was uneasy with some of what we did, it was nothing compared to what happened whenever we were separated for some time.
You know me, Watson. When my surroundings refuse to provide sufficient stimulation, I find myself drained of all energy, and the dullness of the world becomes a heavy weight indeed. So it was even then, and my remedy was the same. Not morphine or cocaine, no, but drugs of similar strength. Moriarty, as I have said, shared in that weakness, seeking to dull his impotent anger as I sought to distract an intelligence too terribly idle. So I grew lethargic; Moriarty, in turn, suffering from the same affliction, grew bitter.
I watched the recordings of his performances, of course, as he, no doubt, watched mine. Underneath the familiar brilliance I, who knew him better than anyone, saw a tension growing. Even I could only see it in glimpses - a shadow as he stepped from his rôle into the skin of the actor, taking his bow; the slightest false turn in an interview; a glittering in his eyes or a hard twist of the mouth whose edge could not be entirely ascribed to the character he was inhabiting.
It was not frustration, nor contempt, nor worry, nor any emotion for which I could have accounted. Those moods did exist, but I understood their growth only too well. No; beyond those lay something different, something I could not name, and it disconcerted me even as I was intrigued.
My own performances, meantime, had grown sloppy by the same measure that his had grown angry and frustrated, which is to say, invisible to our audience yet not to ourselves. I had overindulged in the drugs that made the tedium of our lives bearable, and had begun to grow careless.
What I saw in him, though, jolted me out of my carelessness. I admit, I was pleased.
We met again soon after that, for a shared performance once more. That night, when we were alone at last, he flopped down onto a couch and threw me his best boyish grin. He could make it look revoltingly juvenile. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"No," I declared, giving the usual reply to the usual question. "You are thinking what I'm thinking." And I smirked at the way he rolled his eyes at the old, familiar witticism, as though he had not solicited it himself.
He then proceeded into the usual complaints, all of which I would have shared, had it not been for the new edge in him that, just then, kept me from being bored. That night, he added the following accusation: "We have been made what we are strictly for the purpose of driving us insane!"
"Overly dramatic," I judged, "yet too close by far to the truth. Though I would not ascribe malice where everyday incompetence and an inability to deduce the simplest and most predictable of effects may easily suffice."
He snorted. "Actual malice," he said, pensive, "might in fact be an improvement. It would suggest some thought, some effort, behind what has been accomplished. In truth, I must agree with you that no such thing is likely." His head moved to one side, then the other, a stage performance of slow consideration. "I should like to show them malice." His eyes were burning, glittering as he fixed them on me.
"I should not," said I. "It sounds dull."
He laughed, allowing himself to be distracted, and leaned over to me. "Let us not be dull, my dear," he said with the brightness of light scattered by shattering glass, and kissed me.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that we were lovers, by then.
Does this revelation shock you, Watson? Does the thought that in a distant future, people may look with different eyes upon such congress give you pause? Yet even in my time, our relationship was not free of taboos. Our sex was no impediment; two men or two women might have made for a perfectly acceptable couple, had it not been for one thing: We were identically made, seen as more the same even than twin brothers, and so we were forced to hide the truth.
I have never inquired too deeply into your marriages, but perhaps you would understand: It is a peculiar experience, being with someone who knows you in truth, not merely the surface you present to the world. Few people have ever been capable of knowing me. For a long time, Moriarty was the only one.
In some ways, he still is, even now.
Perhaps I should not have told you this. Had I left it out, it would alter my tale not at all. Yet it was there, and I shall not deny it. I shall not deny him, or any part of what he has been to me.
At the time, nothing had yet come between us, and his closeness was sweet to me. I was not settled; I did not entirely forget that new thing I had noticed in his behaviour; yet I allowed myself to interpret it merely as a frisson of excitement, some new thrill for me to enjoy. He was by my side again, and the world had grown sharper and brighter, much of its dullness polished away, just by his presence.
Performing together again was exhilarating. Other actors simply weren't the same - even our own identical brothers were not. They were brilliant enough, all of them - the ones like us had been designed to be, and the few natural-born performers had to be truly exceptional to be able to keep up. But brilliance was not enough, not for us - even brilliance could be stunningly dull, if it could be satisfied with the goals our destined rôles had assigned us.
(Now, at the distance of decades of my life, and centuries of linear time, I wonder how many of the others successfully hid their own disappointments and rebellions, how much our keen perception may have missed in these performers about whom we cared so little, whom we were predisposed to hold in contempt. But we were young then, and convinced of our own singularity.)
We rose to new heights after that, playing opposite each other as hero and villain, as brothers in competition, as lovers viciously tearing each other apart. He is excellent at the uncanny and disconcerting, at the subtle evil, and we earned much acclaim.
Our games continued, many of them still harmless. How to make you understand, Watson? Perhaps I should tell you of the time we, in the middle of a long stage run, decided to switch rôles for a day, just to see if any would suspect. It was the most fun I'd had performing in a long time, performing him as I performed his rôle. No one even looked at either of us askance.
If only that had been all.
By that time, he had already specialised in playing villains, and it entertained him to transpose this into the real world in some small way. I, in turn, was entertained by stopping him. But pranks and tricks had turned to fraud, to manipulation, to blackmail. What had started as a game had ceased to be frivolous. The stakes had become real, and grew more serious by the day.
And another difference arose between us over time. He took pleasure in the fear he could strike into the hearts of men, simply by displaying his powers, whereas I have never been pleased by reactions such as Alfred Fish's. (Did you think I would not be aware of that, Watson? Of course I saw.) He began to enjoy the part he played more and more. His challenges and transgressions grew more serious, until at last I could no longer abide them, until I entreated him to stop. He would not.
"You stop me," he said, a smile on his face that came straight from his darkest performances. "That is your part in this: If you wish me to stop, you must make it so yourself."
He did not, perhaps, perceive the irony in attempting to escape a predetermined life by allowing him to determine mine for me instead.
"I could give you away," I said coldly. "I know everything."
"You will not," said he, unconcerned. "You know what they would do."
And indeed I did. In our time, it was thought that the best method of creating happy citizens was giving thorough attention to any child's abilities and predilections - whether accidental, in natural-born children, or engineered, in those such as us - and extrapolating from them the optimal course their life might take. Deviations from that path were considered harmful to the person, and to society as a whole.
And we had gone far beyond merely deviating from our paths. Our criminal endeavours - and they were that, even the more harmless of them - and our thorough lack of regret for our deviations could mean only one sentence: the deletion of our memories.
If your time leaves much to be desired in the treatment of its criminals, so did ours, in its own way. Not that this was meant to be a punishment, you understand: it was meant to be a kindness, a fresh start for the lost soul, a second chance unburdened by previous mistakes.
It would have been a death all the same, an end to our selves as we knew them. That knowledge stayed my hand for a long time. That knowledge, and the fact that his transgressions still knew limits, then.
Yes, Watson, that is what awaits us when we return to our time.
That night, I again found something new in him.
We had never been tame or gentle in the manner of lovers, not with each other, not when we weren't performing. (Yes, Watson - at times that, too, could be part of our performance.) Everything between us had always been a challenge - who could achieve completion the fastest, or hold out the longest against caresses or teasing or sheer force; who could pin down whom; who could coax or force which reaction out of his partner. But that night he was savage, fingernails digging like claws into my hair, into my skin, teeth sharp and body unforgiving. I could not do less than respond in kind, indeed spurred on by his intensity as he had always been by mine. It was a fight as much as an act of intimacy, which was not new, but that night, there was nothing playful about it, and that was unfamiliar.
Afterwards I lay exhausted, stunned and thrilled and already grieving, having found an entirely new challenge, and half-way to pleased with it as much as I was half-way to horrified by how much and how little we understood each other still. Even today I do not know what I might have said or done, had the end not been already in sight.
Limits, I said. He exceeded them, one by one. I kept tracing his mental footsteps, discovering his deeds, until finally I found I could no longer bear the sight of him.
"Murder," said I, the word like bile on my tongue. "That was murder."
"It was not," said he, sitting up straight, offended. "I killed no one. You know perfectly well what did the deed."
What, not who: an accident, or so it looked. But every last seemingly incidental happenstance that had gone into causing it had been planned in advance. Nothing so straightforward as a shot from a gun, but the result was the same: a woman was dead, and he the one who had made her so.
It was a brilliantly executed scheme, and I stood before it with sick admiration, seeing perfectly well why such a thing might have appealed to him. Revolted that he'd gone through with it, all the same.
"Your hands pulled every string that led to this chain of events." My anger went cold and hot in turns, and it was not all directed at him. I knew I had tolerated his actions for too long; I should never have allowed it to come to this point. "If no one else can see it, I do. I recognise your mind at work."
He snorted. "I should hope so." Then he hunched over, his back bending, his head undulating from side to side, and I shuddered, for I could no longer tell whether he was slipping into a rôle, or out of it. "It was easy, do you know?" he continued, conversationally, as if he were talking about the traffic in the streets. "But perhaps I aimed too low. Perhaps my goals were too small."
I could see it clearly now: he had gone far further than I had ever surmised he would, and was not planning to stop.
"Don't," I said, though I knew even then it would do no good. "You must stop this, and stop it now. Can't you see what you're becoming? You've played so many of them - do you truly wish to make of yourself a villain in truth?"
He laughed, like a maniac. "Villain?" he scoffed. "They have made me for their entertainment. I'll give them more of it than they can swallow. But you - you would defend them? These mindless drones who would keep us confined to an empty life, just to fill their own emptiness for them?"
"I'm no more happy than you are!" I snapped at him. "But you've gone too far this time. I'll not condone this. I can't."
His eyes glittered, and suddenly there was a strange, mocking smile on his face. "Can't you? Then stop me," he said, very softly, and it sent a shiver over my skin. "We'll see if you can. I'll admit, I'd hoped you'd say that. You against me - the one challenge I shall always look forward to."
I kept my face impassive, with effort. Can you imagine that feeling, my friend? Looking at the man you have spent your entire life with, the man with whom your own self is inextricably entangled, and no longer knowing who he is? No longer knowing whether he is acting or not, how much of what you're seeing is calculated performance and how much is the truth beneath?
Between the two of us, you are the writer, Watson. I have not the words for that feeling. But perhaps if you think back to the time you first met him - the moment just before you realised it was not Sherlock Holmes you were seeing, but Professor Moriarty - perhaps then, you will understand.
After that, we were opposites in truth.
I thrust him from me; I avoided him. He knew me too well, and he would never have believed it, had I kept remonstrating with him as if I still thought he would change his mind. I could not stay close. I had to do my work from a distance.
I had decided, at last, that no matter the price, I must stop him. I alone could not counteract his work; I must alert the authorities to his actions.
But just as in your time, Watson, knowledge and proof are not the same. Had I accused him, not only would I have been seen as a slanderer, but my words would very likely have been dismissed as nothing more than a publicity stunt, our professional rivalry taken too far. I would have been the one deemed unhinged and obsessed with an enmity that existed only in my head. I needed proof.
I almost succeeded.
It would have been a bitter success, could I have submitted incontrovertible proof of his actions, knowing what would be done to both of us.
Death, then: I was prepared to meet it, for him, with him, since I had found no other method of stopping him. Yet it proved too late.
On the very day I knew I had placed myself into position to grasp the final piece of evidence, the day before I could offer it all, he trapped me, administered a drug to render me tractable, and with a stolen time machine catapulted us into your time, free of the restrictions we had chafed against, free of the retribution that was coming.
He'd found out what I'd been planning. Had I not taken that step, would he have thrown us across centuries? I cannot say.
From there, our history went much as I told you. I will not speak of the times I met him, during those years. I attempted at times to reason with him, to find a balance or indeed a limit to his actions. He always refused, even unto the end. At the Reichenbach Falls we attempted to kill each other, and even that failed.
Instead it will end tomorrow, and as it should have all those years ago.
We end here, then, like this: as enemies, he and I. Yet what once was between us, and the past we share, cannot be undone.
I still wonder. I have never been certain how much of his insistence on his chosen path was due to my own insistence on tracking him, of stopping him at all costs. Was it, in its own way, an attempt to keep me close? No doubt some of it was, but how much? A small nostalgic thread running through a larger enterprise, or a more important motivation?
In the end, all I am left with is his performance.
The sneering madman is his masterpiece, and how much of him is real and how much is an act ... very likely not even he could tell, by now. I, for my part, shall not attempt it. He was closer to me than any other, once, and I cannot forget it. And still, it must end today.
It should have ended a long time ago.
So here we are, you and I, Watson, at the end of a long story, and it must come to a close without a satisfying conclusion.
Have you wondered why this is the end I chose? To take him back to our time, rather than to end him, and remain where I have made my life?
I must act to stop him; I cannot do otherwise. I must rid your time of him, and stop his evil pursuits. Yet I attempted his death once, upon the falls of the Reichenbach, and I cannot bring myself to attempt it again. Instead, I will turn us both over to the authorities of our time. Their judgment can hardly be in doubt.
Perhaps from the destruction of both our selves, from the ashes that remain, something new may arise. Perhaps, in another lifetime, different choices may be made. It seems I am discovering, after all, the hope inherent in a fate I once considered nothing short of death. It is a small hope, in truth, yet I find myself clinging to it.
My dear Watson, have you turned from your friend now in disgust? I surely deserve it for my part in all of this. I have told you many truths today; perhaps too many, and none of them pleasant. But you have trusted me this far, and I must I ask your forbearance yet again.
Remember this, Watson, when Moriarty and I are both gone: there is no completely evil personality save one. I told you that once, and led you to believe I meant Moriarty. Yet the living never are completely anything. There can be no such thing, no matter how much one may darken one's soul. Only the fictional villain may be as black and flattened as a silhouette cut from paper.
There is indeed only one purely evil personality, and it is that of an invention. If Moriarty came the closest, it's because he styled himself that way. Whether the performance became true, or the truth revealed itself in the performance, or both, or neither, or why it came to that, I cannot tell.
You have some familiarity with his talents by now - you have seen his portrayal of evil. Did you imagine that part was more fully true than his other acts? His portrayal of me, or of the reporter and the cab-man that you witnessed? He can play it all as smoothly as you please. You have seen him, seen something of his true self, even, but still you have only seen what he allowed you to. If you saw evil, it is because he meant you to.
(No, Watson, I will not deny the corollary. What you saw of me, too, was what I meant you to see. It was no less real for that.)
Yet you have made of me a story, and perhaps it is as well that that is where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty shall remain. Perhaps it is for the best that the public shall never know the full truth about the famous detective memorialised in your chronicles. The friend you wrote of was always a better man than I. If you can stomach it, after all - if my account has not unduly changed your perception of me - let him stand in the light, as my invention and yours.
Myself, I shall disappear into the twilight with Moriarty, which is perhaps as it should be. And this is what I must leave you with, alas: the age-old question of good and evil, as ever unresolved.
As for you, Watson - live well, my friend. May the strange truths of Sherlock Holmes's life not weigh too heavily upon your soul.
Ever yours,
—S.H.
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Date: 2017-12-13 12:36 pm (UTC)The ending lines are just so perfect and I love how the "vanishing into the twilight" bit is such a mirror for the end that Reichenbach could have been - and how it's Watson's stories that keep the idea and memory of Sherlock Holmes firmly out of said twilight.
Thank you so much for the exploration of backstory that we never got from the book. That was such a missed opportunity and I loved what you did with the world building for the dystopian future/present that they both rebel against.
It was a staged rivalry at first - truly, the word is doubly appropriate - jointly concocted when we were but boys, full of melodrama and excitement, a joke we played on the world. We became ourselves by being two in opposition, and therefore more than merely two more youths in their group of identical peers.
I loved this part and what it says about their beginnings and about where they ended up.
He laughed, allowing himself to be distracted, and leaned over to me. "Let us not be dull, my dear," he said with the brightness of light scattered by shattering glass, and kissed me.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that we were lovers, by then.
There is so much perfection in the way that this gets revealed so casually to Watson and how in their world being with a man is accepted - but being with one like you is not. That adds such a nice little layer of conflict and more secrets and acting and it'S just nice world-building.
And this:
There is indeed only one purely evil personality, and it is that of an invention. If Moriarty came the closest, it's because he styled himself that way. Whether the performance became true, or the truth revealed itself in the performance, or both, or neither, or why it came to that, I cannot tell.
I simply adore that part.
There's such tragedy in Holmes' final choices there and it's so sad to know how he and his great love and adversary will end, but it's such a perfectly told arc about two men who both complement and challenge each other, playing cat and mouse and getting to that final point.
Thank you so much for this perfect git. I really love what you did with this and I'm sure this won't be the last time I read it! :D
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Date: 2017-12-22 12:26 am (UTC)I know I was the least anonymous "anonymous author" ever, for a variety of reasons, but I just couldn't resist writing Exit Sherlock Holmes for you, and I'm so happy you enjoyed it. :D
The book is basically structured as a series of revelations about Holmes that Watson gradually discovers, and I thought adding another layer, with another bit of manuscript fiction, would make perfect sense. After all, everything we know of the "truth" is told to us second- or third-hand - and the contradiction I pointed out about how the Holmes/Moriarty relationship is described does exist in the book.
I love how the "vanishing into the twilight" bit is such a mirror for the end that Reichenbach could have been
YES! I wasn't thinking about it like that, but now that you say it, that's exactly how it functions, yes. Reichenbach must have been at the back of my mind. (Not that it isn't always, with this pairing!)
The book really falls down a bit with the simplified backstory and the whole good-and-evil contrast, but it's all so incredibly theatrical, you can almost believe that's deliberate. And it's very easy to twist it just a little into something less simplistic. :)
and how in their world being with a man is accepted - but being with one like you is not
And they can play lovers on stage/screen, sex scenes included, but they can't be together in real life. Poor boys. *g*
Anyway, thank you for such a lovely comment! ♥ ♥ ♥