Chapter Text
January is always terrible.
Sebastian is under no delusions that it'll get easier with time. Things generally don't.
But they do get different, if he makes them, and that's just about bearable. Three years past, and this time it's a cottage in Devon, in a deeper, more remote part of Dartmoor where tourists don't often venture. They move in the first day of the new year, when the moorland is at its most miserable, endlessly wet and cold, but that's fine. Seb doesn't mind driving in the snow, and there are far worse things than the chill he used to bundle so fiercely against.
The process of unpacking takes less than a day. Most of what Seb owns these days fits in a couple of suitcases; not much is held sacred when your funds are, for all practical measures, limitless, and the small stone cottage had come pre-decorated. It isn't anything extravagant, just a jumble of warm, old, mismatched furniture that reminds him neither of the manor house of his youth nor the penthouse in Mayfair he used to think of as-- he buries the thought before it can form fully. Doesn't change the truth of things, but it does keep his hands steady, and that counts for something.
This place looks like something new. Feels like it, too, which is what matters. That, and the stack of firewood out back, and the vast stretching wilderness on all sides. Seb makes his rounds, prowls the rooms, examines the attic and cellar and distance to the treeline.
The snow melts slowly over the next few days, and on the third, Seb whistles as he leaves for a daylong walk, finally familiar with all the nooks and crevices of their house for the year, and settled in enough to feel comfortable leaving. January doesn't hurt less this time around. It never does; it just hurts different. But this- hundreds of empty miles to explore, a wild geology dappled with wetlands and tors, prehistoric ruins and places of myth and legend- this is as far from the bone-deep ache of London as he's been capable of so far.
-
Three. Odd. Lucky, in Chinese. Sounds like alive. Unlucky, if one puts stock into the omen that bad luck comes in threes. The first odd prime number. Trinity, culturally significant in religions across the world.
Jim tells himself these things as he slowly clambers up the final stretch of path to the base of one of three tors, snow hidden in the shadows along one of its sides. He pauses to catch his breath. Hiking. Jim, himself. Hiking. He gazes up through his sunglasses at the top of the huge landmark. Three Barrows. The tors themselves aren’t legendarily significant, as far as Jim knows, apart from local lore, but he wanted to see them anyways.
Here, in the cold, in the wind, in the barren fields around him and these massive feats of old men, Jim feels steady. He feels like a young God again, even though those days are long past him.
He remembers so slowly sometimes. It drives him to distraction and frustration and anger that has nowhere to go. It took a year to remember the man enough to realize he was significant. Longer still to compile blips of memory and half remembered conversations to get a shape for him, a feel for what he was, who he was, how he was. Jim doesn’t have all of his answers, and he’s hoping he can get them, but he’s afraid. Afraid. Jim, himself. Afraid.
He sighs and turns to look back down the long sloping path he’d just walked, then back forwards, where the path continues, cutting around the back of the tor and circling slowly back to Didworthy, where he has a hotel for the foreseeable future. The thing is.
What if Sebastian doesn’t want to see him?
Jim can’t remember why he wasn’t there in the hospital when he woke up, just remembers a firm thought in the back of his own walled off mind: Sebastian is not important. Why is that, though, if Jim has all of these other memories that point otherwise?
Brain damage is a funny fucking thing. Regaining motor skills didn’t take long, not even fine ones. He knows complex topics and can solve all sorts of problems. He can read people like open books. He doesn’t think he’s ever been good with emotion, but he definitely isn’t now, and he has trouble remembering things. Old things. Like why Sebastian matters, and yet is unimportant. The journal constantly tucked into his coat-front pocket serves as his memory now, filled with facts about one man that lead to dead ends and question marks.
Sebastian likes hot apple spiced tea and iced breves, but not Starbucks.
I wanted Sebastian to hurt as much as I hurt and that’s why I did it. I think.
I cut on him, on his face and his chest and his hips.
He didn’t deserve me, no one did, and he was wrong to think I owed anything to him.
He’s managed to find the man, he thinks, has finally tracked Sebastian down to this area. He plans on going to several bars tonight to see if he can find him. Jim remembers what Sebastian looks like, if not where he used to live. He wakes up at night screaming with how much he hates him.
And sometimes… he reaches up and wipes a tear absently from his face as he takes another step and continues down the path around the tor.
Sometimes he feels hollowed out and empty sometimes around what feels like a Sebastian-shaped hole.
He counts his steps in threes. Three years, since Jim put a bullet in his mouth because he wanted to die and hated everything. Three years, and he’s finally found Sebastian, can finally fill in the gaps. Part of Jim hopes that seeing him will snap all of his memories back into place. The doctors said it might happen. He also knows it’s not a good idea to bank on it, that his memories have just as much chance of never returning beyond what he has now.
-
They don't set out with a destination in mind.
Seb follows muddied remains of long-dead riverbeds and shapes in the distance, only rarely referring to the small compass and map tucked into his pack. Dead golden grass rustles as it's crushed underfoot, but there's barely any noise besides the shuffle of their steps and the wind across the moor.
The landscape is lonely, starkly and terribly so. It settles in his chest, deep and empty and cathartic, and he thinks he likes it.
By the time the sun rises weakly overhead, the snow is mostly gone, and his feet are beginning to ache in thick, heavy boots. They're moving carelessly southwest, towards a hazy jutting shape in the distance Seb would call a mountain if he didn't know better.
Adiya is getting tired, so they sit to rest a while on a wide granite slab. He slings his pack beside him and opens the smallest pocket, drawing out a sleek pen and a journal whose pages rustle wildly in the wind. He has to pin it in place to write. For a long time, there's no sound but the whistle of wind through vegetation and the distant sound of crows, and barking. He whistles, long and low, and Adiya pops her head out of a nearby bush, trotting over obediently.
This is going to be the quietest year of his life, he thinks. It doesn't exactly make him want to bolt out of his own skin, for the first time he can remember, but it doesn't bring any comfort either.
The frustration is careworn enough that it's starting to fall apart, but Sebastian still reaches for it, anger burning in his throat at the thought of everything he's lost because of Jim, all of the pieces he's taken with him to the grave. All the things Sebastian can’t fucking do anymore, and no recourse to console himself.
Almost no recourse. He forces his shoulders down, looks down at his notes, a mess of ideas, well-worn history bleeding into folklore here and there, and buries his hand in the warmth of his dog's undercoat.
They make it to the top of the tor just as the wind picks up, or at least, most of the way to the top. Adiya isn't used to this much exercise, so Sebastian slows his steps to keep pace with her.
And the thing is, as far as things go these days, he's feeling fine. It doesn't get easier, no, and it doesn't go away, but Sebastian has spent a long time finding enough pieces to put himself back together- in some form or another- and as far as things go, he's fucking fine, today.
The first thing he thinks when he sees the back of the stranger's head is oh and the second is you and the third is no, fuck, stop it, and Adiya presses hard against his leg until he blinks back into reality again, finding himself with a handful of long fur and lungs that keep forgetting how to work.
The wind musses the specter's hair and gives Sebastian a glimpse of a profile before he disappears, just another lonely figure on the countryside, just a hiker, just a human being, unless it isn't. Adiya lets out a huff, nudges her skull harshly against his knee, but it's all Seb can do to stay on his feet and breathing.
Funny, seeing him here.
He talks to himself, or rather, he talks to her, murmuring low and soft about the creatures in these parts, explaining about the ghosts and the beasts that roam the land, the land and the tombs and the ancient rocks. He crouches down and feels her hot breath on his face as he talks, allows her to lick the salt from his skin until he can move without running after.
He looks for footsteps in the snow, on the way down. Just a tic, just to be sure. His hand doesn't leave her warm neck for miles, and she doesn't move from his side.
-
Jim decides to go to the three pubs closest to his bed and breakfast. He’s tired from the day’s hiking and his eyes keep leaking and the painful hole in his chest keeps opening. Consulting his journal tells him that this feeling is worse in Januaries past. Perhaps this, the third year, will bear different fruit.
It doesn’t feel like it, though, as he sits for the first hour at the first bar, watching people come and go, jotting down notes about them absently in his journal while he waits for someone that in all likelihood isn’t going to come. It was only a hunch, the note in this little local paper that said a Moran had bought the old cottage out from under several local bidders in an auction.
He moves to the second bar, settling himself with a soda, and computes sums this time while he waits. He’s tried to find Sebastian many times over the past year, once he had the shape and feel of him in his mind again, and has always failed.
Moran, especially in Britain, is a fairly common name, after all, and Jim remembers enough about his business enterprises. He has a chunk of cash sitting in the single bank account he remembered the multiple passwords to, but Sebastian probably has access to vastly larger amounts of wealth than him. He could remain unfound forever, if he wanted to.
Jim walks the short six blocks to the next and final bar, counting his steps in threes, six is two threes, that’s good, and third time’s the charm, he thinks, and he sits for the third hour in the third bar exactly 3822 paces from his bed and breakfast (divisible by three) on the third of January of the third year since he shot a bullet through the back of his head for god knew what ridiculous notion had gotten trapped in there, and watches every person that comes into the bar.
No Sebastian Moran.
After the final hour, Jim flips his journal closed from where he’s been skimming it, tucks it carefully away, and heads out. He’s disappointed, yes, but this always was a long shot, and statistically, despite the luck and aliveness of the day, it makes sense that he’d strike out again.
He walks, gaze distracted up to the stars, trying to name the constellations on the cold and clear night. Some he misses entirely, others he only has names for, and vague ideas of the shapes they’re supposed to make. Some he can recall with perfect detail.
A dog barks somewhere nearby. Someone laughs from the doorway of the second pub he visited as he passes it. A gust of wind hits his face.
Jim wants to laugh until he throws up.
-
The world is growing dark by the time they get back to the cottage.
A soft haze of purple clouds covers the sky, but Sebastian isn't looking at the scenery anymore. His arms ache deeply from the effort of carrying a ninety pound bundle of fur the last half mile. "It's okay," he tells her seriously, though his voice is very tight with strain. "I understand. I'm not as strong as I used to be, either. We'll get there, the two of us."
She wiggles her rump at the sound of his voice and he nearly drops her, a smile flickering across mouth as he catches his balance.
The house is warm and smells like dog already, and Nim has his massive paws on Sebastian's shoulders before he's halfway through the door. It's not home, not really; the only place that could make that claim had turned out to be a fantasy- he catches the thought midway this time, reaction time worse than usual.
Sebastian sighs softly and redirects his attention to the black great dane who's trying to eat his face. It doesn't change the facts, but it keeps him present. Seb says heel and Nim does, on the third repeat, and Seb checks the bandage on his back paw carefully before letting him out to piss.
Home. It isn't that, but it's his, even if it's a poor consolation. His life, his decisions, completely and totally Sebastian's in a way that nothing has ever been before. (A memory chimes in his head, something about not wanting to make your own decisions, Moran, not really, and Sebastian pushes that down too.)
He'd rearranged the furniture to his liking earlier, set down the dog blankets and bones, and lined the shelves with the few books he'd brought with him. Seb likes the way it looks and smells, is going to like it more once the fireplace is roaring and there’s a book and glass of whiskey in hand, but there are things he needs to do first.
He runs through a mental list and whistles for Nim to come back in, watching the way he runs back then hesitates at the porch, like he still needs to burn off energy after a long day of being cooped up. Hasn't Seb just done the same thing? Adiya limps slowly to the couch and jumps up, where she's sure to leave a satisfyingly messy deposit of hair.
At some point, that really needs to stop feeling like a spot of revenge.
Seb smiles a little, says goodbye to her, then leaves to drive to the nearest village.
It takes them nearly fifty minutes to get to Didworthy, though Nim has the time of his life, keeping Seb out of his head for the most part by virtue of running back and forth all across the car and barking out the windows like a nuisance. By the time he leaves the grocery store, laden with three heavy bags and one giant beast, the sky is clear and the stars are out.
Seb keeps his eyes up as he walks, taking a longer path than he needs to back to the car.
The stars are remarkably visible, here. Once his eyes adjust, he's able to make out the faint purple sprawl of the milky way. He picks his way easily through the constellations. Auriga, Canis Minor, Carina, Eridanus, Gemini, Monoceros, Orion and Taurus.
He thinks of the stranger from earlier, of the person who taught him to read the night sky like a storybook, and waits for the chasm in his chest to scab back over as a matter of course. He points at Canis Major, informs Nim that it's a relative of his, but the dog doesn't seem to notice or care.
A gust of wind hits his back.
And when he looks down--
-
Some ephemeral feeling catches him, or maybe it’s a half remembered smell on the breeze. Oh, it was a lucky day, after all.
Jim drops his gaze as something in his peripheral catches his attention, realizing he’s on the same trajectory as another man with a dog. Part of his brain starts calculating the physics of the collision they’d make, trying to account for the dog as a wild card, when he suddenly realizes who he’s looking at.
“S-Sebastian,” he stutters, the name half a question on his lips as he examines the man’s face in front of him. Despite the rictus of shock it’s in, it’s definitely the same man from his dreams, from his half remembered life, looking more worn and sad but certainly him.
Jim straightens, triumphant and excited, “Sebastian Moran! I remembered you! You have a cologne that smells of sandalwood but more often than not you smelled like gunpowder. Your favorite movie is the Count of Monte Cristo, and there’s a scene I specifically hate but I can’t remember what it is even though I’ve watched it hundreds of times now to try and figure it out. You put blankets on me when I fall asleep in strange places because I get mad if you wake me up. You like spiced apple tea. You hate formal wear.”
He stops suddenly, brain catching up with the fact that he’s rambling.
“It’s… it’s me. Why didn’t you find me? In hospital? I was there for months. Did we have a fight?” And then, shifting completely to another question, “Are you alright?”
Threes are swirling in his head and it feels like the stars are bearing their cold dead light down on him, distant spotlights, as if to say ha! Even death couldn’t take me, here I am, now as cold and bright as the stars.
Grandstanding, part of him thinks. True, the majority agrees. His mind is alive with shreds of memories of Sebastian, holding them clutched in his fingers and waiting for them to start knitting together, mending and melding into a coherent piece again. He waits.
Nothing happens, no sudden slide of the world on its axis to click satisfyingly back into place.
Just a collision with no math to direct which way they’ll ricochet.
Terror hits his chest.
-
Sebastian's veins flood with ice. There's no moment of hesitation, no doubt or disbelief or second guessing, no fancies or thoughts of delusion. Jim is standing in front of him where he hadn't been before.
The realization comes too fast for shock to numb the blow; he's been alive this whole time.
And the world tilts around them like a starlit fisheye planetarium lens lights trailing tails as they move as the planet shifts into something different and colder and something else made up of slowly scavenged shards inside him groans around a bullethole like a building ready to give up the ghost, the ghost, the ghost in front of him is wearing a parka and with his hair ruffled, with his face surprised, with the face Sebastian's dreamed of in the daytime and through the night except he'd started to forget the shape of it, with Sebastian's name on his mouth, the mouth that had been in a half open smile just as triumphant and excited on the building bleeding blood in a puddle on the floor with his scope fixed fisheye lensed on the soft pink brain-matter floating down like a lazy river like it wasn't all that Jim was made of, like it wasn't all he cared about in the world, like Jim was glad to kill them both in one blow, like Jim is glad now to tell him all about himself like a proud dog with something small and dying in its mouth under stars as cold as Jim is his body and everything is.
Sebastian's face is grey. He starts shaking. What do you want with me, he thinks, insensible. He has the wrong animal with him tonight because Nim does nothing but pant happily, pad forward to shove his wet nose against Jim's hip. Stupid dog, Sebastian thinks, about the both of them, and feels like laying down to die.
"Didn't you kill me enough already," someone says, and Sebastian agrees, world blurring again but worse. "What do you want with me," someone says, "Why are you here," and he should really ask Jim the same thing, but it hurts too much to talk.
-
Sebastian Moran in front of him looks like he’s about to pass out, which makes Jim frown, annoyed immediately. He’s been searching for him for two years, and instead of being excited, the man looks like he’s seen a ghost. Ghost, specter, phantom, wraith, spirit, presence, apparition, spook.
Maybe that’s it, maybe he’s spooked. Jim watches as Sebastian Moran starts shivering, and not with cold, like the dog’s nose that presses against his hip and then snuffles against his hand, hanging at his side.
Surprise and indignation war inside of Jim’s chest and he shifts uncomfortably, taking half a step away from the dog only for it to follow him and lean against his legs. He ignores it, eyes locked onto Sebastian Moran’s face, watching with fascination. “You’re not dead,” he says, matter-of-factly, in response to the first almost-question, which bothers Jim.
Shouldn’t you want an answer if you ask a question?
The next few almost-questions draw an annoyed huff from him. “I’m not dead either, though I tried.” This doesn’t seem to be the right thing to say, but Jim doesn’t quite notice or understand. “I want to see you, and talk to you, and… everything else. I’m here because I’ve been looking for you for 984 days, and because there are things I don’t understand, and you can explain them, if you’d–” he cuts himself off again, a flash of something going through his head as a few things connect.
“You’re in shock,” he says suddenly, as if it’s not obvious, because it wasn’t to him, but now it is.
“Here. Sit down. You’re supposed to sit down, that’s what they made people do at the hospital. Or lie down, but the ground is disgusting.” He shuffles, unzipping his parka and pulling it off, stepping around the dog to carefully place it around Sebastian Moran’s broader shoulders, not quite touching him, and stepping back.
“You need to breathe or you’ll pass out. Sit down,” he repeats, something bubbling up in his chest. It feels… bad, and he can’t place why it’s there. This isn’t his fault. Something wiggles in the back of his mind, trying to find a way out.
-
You're not dead. You're not dead, Jim says, factually, and a hot flash of anger manages to burst through the thick layer of starlit unreality that's blurring around him. You're not dead. I am, he thinks furiously, I was, I am. You're the one who killed me. My blood is on your hands.
It gets overwhelmed by everything else, though, by Jim's face; Sebastian cannot stop looking at it, cannot look away, because Jim was annoyed before, but now he's looking back at Sebastian in a way he never did before.
Like Sebastian is absolutely fascinating.
He feels like he's swallowed glass, and it keeps tearing through his insides on the way down.
Jim is playing dumb, pretending he'd been looking all this time, because he wants Sebastian around, like he hadn't made himself explicitly clear the day he set Sebastian up with his telescopic scope to be good and sure he made out every little detail, blood and brain and bone.
"You can't play with me anymore," he shudders, and Sebastian must be out of his mind to say something like that, to turn him away, to go against everything he knows about Jim and beg for mercy, "Not this game. I can't do it. Please."
Jim puts his jacket around Sebastian's shoulders, puts his jacket, and Sebastian, to his absolute shock, feels something run down his cheeks. "I'm not in shock," he manages, because he isn't, even if the world doesn't look right.
Shock is supposed to dull things.
He sits anyway, not thinking to put the bags down first. Nim changes tracts immediately and comes to lick the salt from his cheeks with his huge flat tongue, and Sebastian pulls his knees up and presses his head between them mechanically, trying to pretend this isn't happening.
-
Sebastian Moran’s words are unfathomable to Jim, but he’s immediately attracted to them. What does that mean, ‘you can’t play with me anymore’? The next words are even more baffling, and Jim stares at him, uncomprehending as the man in front of him falls into tears. “Knock it off,” he snaps, without even thinking.
The slide of reality snaps into place, and several new memories pop into existence like non-Euclidean geometry forming a space that doesn’t make sense. Jim goes uphill towards an answer and ends up at the bottom after walking through the tunnel.
He remembers, and the feeling in his chest lines up like a sniper’s shot perfectly. He breathes in, he breathes out, a soft, “Oh,” coming out.
Sebastian Moran is sitting now, face buried in his arms as he cries on the curb. Jim leans in and tugs the dog carefully backwards to give him space, scratching under the collar of the great dane and flipping the tags around to read the dog’s name. He takes a moment to memorize the phone number attached as well.
“Nim,” he says, slowly, glancing away from the tag as the dog’s attention snaps up to him for a moment.
Jim eyes the medical tag and smiles, “Nimrod. What an apt name for a big brute like you,” he says, and lets go of the dog, who moves back to his owner's side, snuffling at the man’s head and licking his ear. Jim pulls a face but instead moves around to stand in front of the crumpled man before him. Jim wonders vaguely if he’d blow away if the gust picked up.
“I’m not trying to play with you,” he tries, licking his lips, “I’m trying to understand.” He examines the newer memories more closely. Making sure Sebastian was far enough away to keep from interfering, and making sure he would be watching him through his scope.
The thought rolls through his head again, but this time, instead of all the other times, it feels prickly and fearful. Sebastian is not important . Maybe he needs to push that through the non-Euclidean tunnel and see how it transforms when it comes out at the bottom of the hill.
Time for that later, when Orion’s three stars in his belt are overhead and Jim can imagine the birth of stars exploding into being far above him.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” he says again, after a moment, sounding genuinely confused, “From what I remember, you loved me. Did we have a fight?” He asks again, crouching down in front of Sebastian and reaching out, but hesitating to touch him. He has an irrational fear that Sebastian Moran is made of glass and could shatter at any moment, a fragile thing.
-
Of course. Of course, yeah, it figures that his body is still hardwired to Jim's orders after all this time, because Jim snaps at him to knock it off and he automatically chokes on the next silent sob that tries to wrack his chest. Jim's still-warm parka weighs his shoulders down like the pockets are full of rocks, and he feels the animal urge to bury himself in it as deep as possible, and also to tear it into pieces with his teeth.
He forces air into his lungs, throat burning with the effort, resentment flooding his chest cavity. Somewhere, Jim is talking to his dog, which is impossible, because they don't fit together. Not in the same life. He releases his death grip on the bags when Nim sticks a cold, wet nose in his ear, flinching and holding him back by the collar.
Jim keeps talking to him. Sebastian doesn't absorb much. It isn't the first time he's sat at Jim's feet in the gutter, too numb to understand or believe. Nim whines, pressing hard against his owner's hand, but Seb doesn't move for a long time, except to raise his head when Jim crouches.
Sebastian refused to resort to digging for scraps. He didn't look at the trial footage. He did not cut the faded newsink pictures out of papers. There'd been no photos, of course, besides those, and against all reason, he had forgotten most of Jim's face. Everything except his eyes.
The man's face is pale like the moon in the lowlight, the space between streetlights and thousands and thousands of miles below the stars. He's a strange, distant thing that Sebastian cannot comprehend. A god, or an atom bomb.
No. Absolutely not.
Just a man.
Only ever a man, the worst one Sebastian has ever known.
Sebastian wants, he wants… he wants something, and he doesn't know what it is, but it floods his chest like nothing has for years.
The dog, giving up on his owner, pulls back instead of pushing, and Seb lets go of his worn collar, numb hand carefully returning to his lap. He stares at the hand Jim has half-extended. He wonders-- but of course, Jim wouldn't have forgotten his face. He wonders if Jim still thinks he's handsome, at least, if he doesn't look too haggard or thin, now, still handsome enough? and the wave of self disgust that follows the stupid fucking thought is so strong his vision blurs again.
You loved me, Jim says, and he's wrong. It was never exactly love. Not then, and not in retrospect.
"Fuck you," he says, calmly, his throat burning. "Fuck you, you cunt of a liar. Fuck you into bloody pieces for this."
It aches down to the marrow, it makes his skin crawl, like sticking his head in a tiger's jaws or stepping straight into a bonfire. He says these things to Jim anyways, because he can't make himself say leave, can't manage leave me alone, because Jim already did. There's laughter in the distance, the sound of life continuing as normal for everybody else.
"You goddamn psychopath. Stop acting. It isn't convincing." He clenches his jaw, digging his nails into his thigh to keep his eyes dry. Nimrod seats himself right beside Jim, because he is a stupid, simple creature, pressing his considerable bodyweight and warmth against the man's side as he snuffles intrusively at him. Sebastian has no idea how he's going to survive this.
"You really do think I'm stupid, don't you? Must've had a big hearty laugh, after, about how I fell for it."
Fuck. His cheeks are hot with humiliation, with fury, and he scrubs at them, trying to remember how to breathe.
-
Something about their poses seems familiar to Jim, even if he can’t recall why. Waiting for Sebastian to do something other than just stare at him, eyes wet, he takes comfort in that fact, if nothing else. Who is this person in front of him, that makes him wake up at night alternatively furious, deeply sad, and heartbroken? Why does he look like his world has ended?
Maybe he was right.
Perhaps coming to find Sebastian, after all these years, was a mistake. Jim knows he’s smart; it doesn’t take a genius to realize that his appearance has hurt Sebastian in a way Jim didn’t know people could hurt.
Emotions have always existed on another plane for him, like imaginary numbers from real ones. He’ll stumble across them from time to time in life, sure, but he never quite knows what to do with them, or how to fit them into the equations that make up his world.
Now everything is complicated, complex, like the complex plane, and that’s where imaginary numbers and his emotions live, how funny that he has access but no knowledge of the maths behind it.
Some part of him is deeply offended and angry by Sebastian’s words, calmly laid out. He remembers that people never used to talk to him like that, but he supposes Sebastian has more leniency here, and now, especially. So he takes in the words with an inhale and lets them back out on his exhale and lets them blow off into the chilly wind, his eyebrows knitting together a moment later. He can only watch in confused fascination as the man he looked everywhere for falls apart in front of him on the pavement of a small village, groceries in bags around him and his dog leaning against the spook that’s given him such a shock.
Anger flares up so fast he can’t even blink, frustration and irritation and other black and sticky emotions that makes Jim want to reach out and dig his fingers into the soft skin of Sebastian’s face and twist. But instead of any of that, or the response that he’d thought was on the tip of his tongue, instead, what slips out is a very firm and sudden, “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
Jim blinks twice and swallows before reaching out slowly to cup his palm over Sebastian’s knee. “Take a deep breath and hold it, Sebastian. You need to breathe.”
He shouldn’t have come here. Sebastian obviously isn’t happy he’s here, isn’t going to want to talk. He’s in shock, for fucksake, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. He pulls his hand away after a moment, uncomfortable with the feeling of touching another person.
“And I’m not lying. I don’t think I should prove it to you right now. You need a minute. Or twenty.” He stands, suddenly sure of himself, “I’ll help you back.”
-
His mind may be lagging behind, but Sebastian still knows in the core of him that nothing good will come from speaking to Jim like this. It's just that he doesn't care anymore. Jim is a force of nature, mortal as he may be (mortal, breathing, with a heartbeat and working lungs and a functioning brain, and enough blood in him to matter; the aftershocks of it feel like a bullet ricocheting around his body), and he will do what he wants.
If it involves giving Sebastian consequences, he's welcome to try .
But Sebastian's forgotten how unpredictable Jim can be. The world spins 'round and 'round, fast enough that it slips from under him. There's a hand on his knee and Jim's voice asserting, in the tone that has always meant absolute fact, that he doesn't think Sebastian is stupid.
Jim's voice comforting him, walking him through the motions of breathing, and Sebastian decides he's just going to be insane, for now, until this is over. There's no way to reconcile any of this. Jim's palm is so warm he can feel it through his jeans, and it makes him want to draw away, and it grounds him back to the earth like a ball and chain, and then it's gone, which may or may not be worse. Some strange noise leaves Sebastian's throat.
Car. Sebastian breathes in and holds it; five seconds, seven seconds, five seconds. It's not like he doesn't know his way around, by this point.
Car, going to the car.
Fighting off the blackness creeping up around his vision, the feeling of death closing in. Jim, helping him back. Why not? It makes as much sense as anything else. Sebastian numbly grabs grocery bags by the handles and Nim's leash by the worn polyester loop, takes a deep breath before pushing himself up. The world spins really fucking fast all of a sudden but he grits his jaw until it aches and closes his eyes, staying on his feet by sheer force of will.
He starts walking, jerking the leash unkindly. He is going to the car now, keeping his eyes on the ground and away from the stars and away from everything else.
-
There’s no response. Nothing. No reply, or admission or anything, except for Sebastian suddenly surging to his feet, feet planted on the ground, the ground holding him steady, because gravity is constant and ever present and it’s some small comfort to know they’ve always had the same forces acting on them even if they were apart.
Jim knows he’s a force to be reckoned with, and a stronger force than simple gravity, but he wasn’t here to act on Sebastian. It’s why all he can do is follow along, a step and a half behind Sebastian as the man of his dreams and his hell leads him… somewhere.
Nim goes along happily with his owner, as if nothing in the world is wrong. Jim likes the dog, despite not being a dog person.
While they walk quietly together, Jim tries to draw any memories. A quiet walk at night; groceries being lugged home; the two of them sharing a silence. He comes up blank, just with the knowledge that nothing feels quite normal. Instead, he studies the back of Sebastian’s head, neck, shoulders, posture, gait of walk, stride length. He measures and he takes careful note and observation and repeats the number on Nim’s collar over and over in his mind until it feels as infinite as pi but not nearly as irrational. What could be irrational about Sebastian Moran? Nothing.
He was the irrational one, his brain offers up. Sebastian was the one to ground him.
They arrive at a car, and Jim frowns at it, watching as a dog and groceries are mechanically loaded into the backseat and then trunk, respectively. Jim holds out his hand for the keys, finally trying to address Sebastian again. The parka he placed around his shoulders is still there, managed to balance on his shoulders the entire walk.
Jim wants to tuck it more firmly around him, wants, irrationally as pi, to reach up and brush some of Sebastian’s hair back from his face and to tell him everything is okay. Or that it will be.
“Let me drive. You just need to tell me where to go. You shouldn’t drive like this.” He keeps his fingers outstretched, waiting. Memory tells him in inferred pieces that Sebastian usually reacted well to direct commands, but other bits rebelled against that and implied the exact opposite. Time to learn some about Sebastian Moran. Any conversation or time around him is better than the absolute nothing he’d had before.
He gazes at the man’s face, drinks in his features, memorizes them as well as he can. The man he half remembers is beautiful, he thinks, abstractly, irrationally.
-
Sebastian is good at walking, and at surviving. They both require roughly the same skillset; taking one stubborn step after another, and moving too fast for whatever's chasing you to catch up. His legs ache from their long journey over the moors this morning, though, several hundred years ago, and to be honest, he's never been able to leave Jim behind.
He moves faster anyways, loads a dog and three bags into his car and avoids looking at the supernova in the middle of the village shop's parking lot for as long as he can.
But then there's nothing left to do. Seb presses the trunk shut with a soft click and forces his head up slowly to face Jim. He's holding out a hand for something, and Sebastian blinks slowly, looking at it. Pale and unremarkable, with fingers much stronger than they appear. The pressure around his throat is either a memory of the first time Jim nearly strangled him to death, or panic creeping in again, but either way he swallows it back and tightens his grip around the keys in his coat pocket.
Jim is looking at him like that, again. Like he's interesting, the only thing in the world that's worthy of his time. Sebastian grips the metal harder. He'd prefer near-strangulation.
"You don't know how to drive," he rasps automatically, and then closes his eyes for a moment. "Unless you do, now." He wonders what Jim has filled his years with. Certainly not any of the shit Sebastian has. The taller man takes a long, slow breath, and lets it out just as slowly before opening them again. The world isn't much more focused. He hates that he wants to press his fingers against Jim's throat to feel his pulse and keep them there forever, resting on the leylines of blood and heat that keep him alive and breathing.
He hates that he'd fallen for it. He hates that he doesn't hate Jim, and that he never has, not even once.
"You know where to go. Dunno what your game is. Nothing new, I guess."
Seb fingers the keys in his pocket and feels his eyebrows pull together as he traces his eyes over Jim's face, taking in every detail and hating himself, again, for the way he tries to memorize the sight, so he never forgets again.
And then he turns and pulls the driver's side door open, halfway through climbing in before all at once, something occurs to him.
Sebastian pauses, straightens, looks back, just for a moment. "I saw you. Today, on the moor. Just your hair, but I knew. I looked for--" footprints in the snow, we're in a land of ghosts here, y’know, spirits, but Sebastian's been delving too deep into his folklore and myth lately for a thing of logic like Jim. He presses himself into the car. "Never mind."
And he shuts the door.
-
Again, Sebastian simultaneously looks spun from glass and like he’s swallowed the stuff, and Jim just wants to understand how he can be two things at once and why he’s suddenly shaped that way. The reality of everything is this: Sebastian is a mystery that he needs to solve, one that will put himself the rest of the way together and that will explain . The reality is that he’d known Sebastian, and he still does, a bit; he knows his favorite food to eat after a long day versus a quiet day, he knows exactly how he likes to get off, he knows the secret things Sebastian once whispered against his temple when he thought he’d been asleep.
It’s why the reality of Sebastian having that same knowledge of him makes him flinch back suddenly.
That’s the thing, is that he hadn’t considered the duality of things, the fact that Sebastian knew him, too, that Sebastian had been privy to his ups and downs and preferences and amusements and frustrations and everything else that made up a person.
It’s why he flinches back from Sebastian’s words, even as he realizes they must be correct. If he’d lived in London, driving wasn’t as necessary. Jim and his doctors assumed he’d forgotten. He’d had to take multiple tests to be able to do so again, to prove his motor function was high enough. He hadn’t thought that he simply didn’t have the knowledge to begin with.
Jim frowns, watching Sebastian watch him, memorizing each other as if they’re both terrified this is a sudden, penultimate and final goodbye. Jim doesn’t want that. He suspects Sebastian doesn’t either. “I don’t…” he trails off, as Sebastian turns and climbs into his car, into the driver’s seat instead of giving him the keys, and Jim shifts forwards, freezing again as Sebastian turns back again.
The flood of ozone and possibility and ancient words and modern slang rush through Jim in a sudden fleeting moment.
Sebastian had seen him earlier today, up on Three Barrows. It had been lucky, he had been close. It drives Jim to shove his hands into his pockets for his wallet, for a slip of paper he’s kept tucked and updated since he began his search for Sebastian.
“Here,” he offers, reaching out and pressing the card against the glass. It’s the size of an index card, with his name shakily written on it, then a phone number, and then subsequent addresses crossed out and new ones rewritten, about half a dozen of them, in steadier and steadier handwriting until it looks reasonably ‘normal’.
“I… Please call me, or find me, tomorrow. There’s a cafe here. I’ll be there all day.”
Even as he says it, he knows it’s true. He’ll be there from open to close, and probably a little further on either end - they have outdoor seating.
“Sebastian Moran,” he says again, breath puffing out in a cloud around him as he stares at Sebastian through a thin glass window. His heart aches and it makes his throat feel tight and he’s not sure why, “I’ll prove it to you. I’m not playing. I’m not acting.” His eyes narrow frostily, suddenly hostile, as if Sebastian, in saying no, will ruin him (and he will), “I need answers.” He presses his hand harder against the glass, then carefully tucks it against the rubber and the glass.
He walks steadily away from the man he’s constantly searched for, and even though it goes against every nerve in his body to not just turn and slam his fists into the window until it shatters and he can bodily drag Sebastian to him, the hot wetness on his face makes some part of him feel it was the right decision. His sobs don’t start until he’s around the corner.
-
The car door closes, and Sebastian sits there motionless, not even blinking. Looking at Jim hurts but not looking at him hurts more, and Sebastian may not be able to see or breathe correctly, but the ache in his bones repeats that old, innate law of reality; if James Moriarty exists in the world, Sebastian must exist in his orbit. And Jim does exist, he does, he's alive and breathing, blinking, thinking.
He can still look up at the stars above him and name the constellations and imagine the arc of their movement through the universe, and maybe Jim had ended up ruining his entire life, but at least Sebastian didn't fail him, not really, Sebastian didn't fucking fail him after all. A breath leaves his mouth with a curl of steam in the cold, and he thinks it to himself again and again and again, and he wants it to be comforting, or to make him feel anything . Jim is alive.
Alive and on the other side of his window.
Seb traces the shapes of words and numbers with his eyes, unable to piece together the progression of kindergarten scrawl to handwriting that doesn't belong to Jim, the please, the look in his eye or the earnest set to his face. It's all a giant fucking riddle in a language he doesn't speak. He doesn't even realize that Jim doesn't look like himself, not really, until his face morphs into a perfect vision of the man he knew, arctic and dangerous.
It straightens Sebastian's spine and sparks to life the same instinct that'd had him choking back his tears on the asphalt.
And then he leaves. And Seb stares after him now, instead of the steering wheel, watches him walk in triple vision into the dark. Walking to his death, and back from it, and away from Sebastian, a specter on the tor. He doesn't stop seeing Jim until long after he's gone.
Later, the three of them curl in strange warm shapes around each other, heads shoved in the crook of a knee or the curve of a spine. Their cottage is comfortable and dry, but it creaks gently with the wind at times, old wood shifting and settling.
Even with the soft noise of the house and the dogs' breathing, it's quiet here, enough that Sebastian has been jolting awake with it through the nights. No traffic, no rush of waves against the shore. Not that Sebastian has come anywhere close to sleep tonight. He can't afford to dull his racing thoughts with pills.
They don't end up coherent anyways, turning like the sea in a storm, rolling and crashing and folding back into themselves in a nonsense pattern. No matter how much he tries to focus them, the thing he keeps returning to, exhausted and disbelieving and half insane, is this, over and over and over; right now, in real life, Jim is breathing the same air as he is. Jim is breathing. Jim is.
He can feel it now, with the world steadier around him; horrible, aching relief slams into him, again and again and again.
He rolls onto his back, dislodging something large and furry that settles back onto his hip with a sigh, and pulls a rough wool blanket up to his shoulders. His phone has been on hand for long hours by this point, intermittently lighting the bedroom via a blank white screen, a new message typed out and deleted every few minutes until Sebastian finally finds his right words.
Something other than I’m so fucking glad you’re alive.
Jim already knows that. That's. The. Whole. Point.
[1:20 AM, 4 January] I'm not doing this in a cafe. SM
Meet me at Stalldown Row instead. SM