Chapter Text
“‘Some people’s affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.’”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”
“‘I believe that you are the devil himself!’ he cried.
Holmes smiled at the compliment.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”
A couple hundred miles away, another Holmes sits on a clifftop overlooking the sea. The similarities end there, however. The weather here is tempestuous, the cliffs lashed with wind and rain. Very little is visible through the settling fog. A far cry from the clear skies on the south coast of France.
She isn’t supposed to be here. But that’s all right. She’s built a life out of doing what she isn’t supposed to. The only life she could have, under the circumstances.
It took Eurus far less time than Jim Moriarty to discover what has since been her golden rule: that even high-level security measures are only as good as the people you threaten. But she easily forgave him that lapse. After all, she’s had her whole life to learn it. And she misses Jim—or at least, she assumes that this vague dissatisfaction constitutes “missing” someone.
Jim was special. Internally motivated. Once you got the basic principles into his head, he achieved admirable results. But now, for the first time, one of the plots they hatched together has gone wrong.
Eurus frowns at the tiny phone screen in her hands. She’s been practicing expressions, lately. So many delicate little facial muscles. So much concentration. The reactions she gets from the guards, the governor, are so amusing that she wishes she could bend the whole of her focus to simply enjoying them. But her mind has always run along many tracks, simultaneously and not necessarily in parallel.
Oh, if only Mycroft were the same. Then they could have fun. Then she wouldn’t have to stoop to minor manipulations to obtain the simplest things, like access to the Internet or the mainland. But he’s always been so dull, she’s had to shift her attention to the other one. The one they’ve been keeping from her. Such a waste.
Then again, what is life without someone to run circles around?
Sherlock would agree. She just knows it. But from her, he won’t slip away again. Not once she locates him.
Eurus stares at the map, runs her tongue along her upper lip. No confirmed sightings. Unusual. He wasn’t nearly so meticulous about his identity, before. Side effect of being dead, perhaps. Not so cautious in Tibet, Iran, even Serbia. Perhaps he’s learned something from the fun they had with him there. Eurus remembers to frown at the memory. Lucky, those gentlemen, that MI6 got to them before she did.
Mycroft’s files duly list the plane’s takeoff and departure dates, but there’s no record that it ever touched down. Another little contrivance between the two brothers, like that adorably-named Operation Lazarus? Or has Sherlock set something into motion on his own?
Because…
…there’s a different pattern to the killings, this time. Subtler. Cleaner. Powerful men lured to unlikely locales and then dispatched efficiently with a single bullet to the forehead. Small caliber.
Eurus claps her hands together, once, in absolute delight.
Oh, very good, Sherlock.
Accomplished, in short, by a more experienced hand than her brother’s. And one less reliant on brute force. Somehow, Sherlock has coerced a genuine assassin into taking over his mission.
A woman.
Eurus knows the signature very well.
Then where might you be, brother dear? And what are you up to?
That’s the delightful thing about Sherlock. He may not be as clever as Mycroft, but clever men are a dime a dozen. What Eurus looks for in a plaything is unpredictability. And she is finally, after all these years, beginning to grasp Sherlock’s. The emotional context that surrounds him, thick as the fog hugging the cliffs of Sherrinford.
Eurus isn’t supposed to have so much as seen these cliffs, not since she was small, but she does on occasion: whenever she feels the need to indulge in a little field trip. Mycroft would be oh-so-appalled, but she wants it, sometimes: this experience of freedom, biting wind, bitter cold, herself tiny as a microbe between the sky and the crash of the ocean below. She remembers many of these sensations from childhood, but experiencing them in person has always been different.
Fascinating. Curious. To think that even a mind as flawless as her own should be incapable of fooling the rest of her nervous system and forming, even for a moment, a sensory image indistinct from reality. Or perhaps her perfection is the problem; perhaps a little pathology is necessary to achieve that effect. Eurus isn’t that kind of mad, which is a shame, but it does mean that the pleasure she feels when Sherlock is finally hers to torment will exceed that of any projection.
Pleasure. She knows that one well, now; has experimented with it at length. It was pleasure that accompanied her as she tracked his movements around the globe, toppling the dominoes that Jim helped her to set up; pleasure that absolutely flooded her dopamine pathways when she reviewed Mycroft’s footage featuring the demise of the blackmailer Magnussen. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder whether an activity as matter-of-fact as killing would affect Sherlock differently in different contexts, and the event has inspired a whole series of psychological assays she can run when they finally come face to face.
But now he’s gone and disappeared entirely.
Inconvenient, to be sure. When he’s back under her thumb she’ll certainly punish him for it. But what would be the fun, if he didn’t pull little tricks like this now and again?
Eurus considered stepping off these cliffs, once or twice. Just to see what would happen. Eventually she decided to wait. That point between life and death has always attracted her: so mysterious and so frustratingly well travelled by those incapable of returning to report on their experiences. Out of idle curiosity she has performed a few experiments. All vicarious, and some clumsy. By now she’s refined her technique.
She wonders whether Sherlock will appreciate it.