whatofthewarts | (no subject)

"You're blinded by sentimentality. Feeling. She beat you because you care."

He accuses, on the way down, delivering a powerful kick and not quite managing to catch himself well, but keeping rolling.

Holmes manages to deflect with a vicious forearm block. He skids it along Sherlock's shin, to make it sting, make his toes go momentarily numb.

"You speak as one who doesn't feel. But you and I know better. If you are going to pretend to be superior, you shouldn't wear your own heart out on your sleeve."

He gasps, and scrambles up, albeit unsteady on that foot, now. He knows how to fight- just not this well.

"And yet I've never lost."

"You don't seem to be winning in one regard here."

He waits for Sherlock to move, because Holmes may be more guided by emotion than his modern self, but he's not a brute. And he's not angry enough to turn this into a street fight.

"Yes, congratulations, you're an ape. How remarkable, how worthwhile."

Sneering, now with his hands up between them. Been years since he boxed.

"You truly are mediocre."

"And yet it isn't my reputation that was destroyed by Moriarty. My Watson is in no danger, because I was able to eliminate the threat. You, meanwhile, skulk around pretending to be dead so no one will shoot off his head. You failed in the only way that matters, and you can't even admit it."

His hands drop, suddenly, body going still. His heart feels like it isn't beating, and there are a few seconds of rushing hysteria so loud in his ears he thinks he'll scream, and then-

Nothing. Burnt out, exhausted, nothing.

"You're right. Now please, go."

Holmes has experienced exhaustion like that. When his own Watson had been caught in an explosion, specifically. He crouches on one knee beside Sherlock, like he's checking for clues.

"You're a disgrace. If Watson is still alive, and all you do is lie here, he is better off dead."

He does stop breathing, now, looking his age, for once, and afraid, and homesick. Or like he wants to be, for a moment, but that it burns through him too fast again, leaves his mouth full of ashes.

Go limp and they stop hitting you eventually, he learned in school.

"Get up."

Disgusted. Worried. Holmes would normally dismiss a person in Sherlock's state, but he can't. Not when it's himself.

There is a sickening twist to seeing vulnerability on your own face.

He pulls himself up to sitting, and then stands. The kicked foot gives badly when he tries to put weight on it, so he moves quickly towards the chair.

"I had a nasty childhood, as well. You know how the children can be; they're no different in this time."

He's not going to give up on these testy subjects.

"Why didn't you learn to stop them."

"Oh, please, I had hoped we were pre-Freudian. Psychoanalysis is so boring."

Sitting back down at his notes.

"Are you quite through yet? Every breath I waste on you keeps me from him."

"It's not me keeping you from him. It's Moriarty and your own inadequacies."

He picks up a slim wooden stirrer.

"And it wasn't psychoanalysis, I know everything about your mental faculties that I need. It was a legitimate question. Why didn't you stop them?"

"To whom are you referring?"

He ignores the fiddling, picks up a pen. Starts to jot down, in a spidery scrawl, what bodyparts on the bee are missing, how to better stabilize the process next time.

"Anyone. The children. Moriarty. Me."

He throws himself in there last, because he doesn't want to go down the 'Moriarty is better than you' path again. He's only just got Sherlock talking again.

"Because I'm not here for you to toy with. What happens? I fight, you subdue me, I fight, you break my bones to humble me? Thank you, but I'd rather work."

Into the pages.

"Alone."

Clarifying.

"Because you're wasting the resources you do have. And you are so disappointingly narrow-minded. Fighting is not about humility. It's not about proving a point, not when we both already know it."

"Really? You didn't throw me there to silence me?"

Challenging. Replaying the words in his own mind, he knows Holmes is too.

"I'm used to it. And please, enlighten me, what resources am I supposedly wasting?"

"Me."

Obviously.

"I know this world. You do not. I have strings to pull that you haven't got the skill to make on your own. And...no. Not precisely, no, I wasn't out just to silence you."

Although that had been the initial motivation.

"You don't like me, you aren't going to help me, and I don't believe you."

He informs him, in short order, though he's at least looking at him now, still faintly wary.

"Wrong on two of three counts. You do such shoddy work, it's a wonder you're still alive."

He smirks at him, smug and superior this time.

There it is once more, the moment where his breathing stops.

It's Mycroft, he realizes suddenly. He sounds like Mycroft, who Sherlock has resolutely not thought of since this began.

He's back in his papers with a slow turn of his body.

That wooden stirrer reaches out, slowly, slowly and begins to pull the papers away from him.

Because Holmes does get so irritatingly childish at the drop of a hat.

Fuck you, Holmes, in that case he's out of the chair and headed for the door.

If he won't leave, Sherlock can.