Chapter Text
The ice had melted into the amber pool of the Laphroaig twenty minutes ago, leaving a pale, watery rim at the top of the crystal tumbler. Sebastian didn’t drink it. He just sat on the edge of the leather sofa, the weight of a Sig Sauer P226 heavy and familiar against his thigh, staring at the television. The screen was off. It was just a black mirror reflecting the dark, sterile expanse of his and Jim’s penthouse… not Jim’s… just his now.
Autopilot was a quiet machine, but its gears ground down a man’s soul until there was nothing left but dust. For three long, agonizing years, that machine had kept Sebastian’s boots polished, his ledger balanced, and Jim’s empire breathing. The web hadn't collapsed when the spider fell. Sebastian had caught the broken, frayed threads in his bleeding palms and tied them back together knot by knot. He did it because letting the network die meant admitting Jim was gone. And admitting Jim was gone meant looking out the window of this penthouse and remembering exactly how many storeys it was to the pavement.
So, he worked. He became a ghost running a ghost’s business. He didn't sleep past four in the morning, waking up drenched in cold sweat from nightmares where the rooftop was covered in blood spilled brain matter. He didn't eat anything he couldn't microwave. He just existed in the hollowed-out, dust-moted shell of a life they had built together.
The flat was too quiet, yet it constantly echoed with the phantom cadence of a high, erratic tenor voice that wasn't there anymore.
A floorboard creaked.
It wasn't the building settling. Sebastian was a sniper; he mapped acoustics the way normal men mapped their commutes. He knew the specific groan of every beam in this place. This sound came from the narrow hallway leading from the private elevator. The elevator that required a biometric scan and a six-digit passcode that only two living people had ever possessed.
And one of them had a bullet hole through his soft palate.
Sebastian didn't breathe. His right hand slid down to his thigh, his calloused fingers wrapping around the checkered grip of the Sig. He didn't cock it— the click was too loud in the dead silence of the flat. He stood up in a single, fluid motion, slipping into the shadow beside the bookshelf, his back pressed against the cold wall. His heart thudded a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs, a predator's instinct overriding the dead numbness that usually consumed him.
The shadow in the hallway lengthened. A silhouette detached itself from the darkness, stepping into the weak moonlight filtering through the sheer curtains. The intruder was wearing a bespoke, three-piece Vivienne Westwood suit. Charcoal grey. The tie was a Windsor knot, mathematically perfect. He was tilting his head, hands slipped casually into his trousers pockets, looking around the room with a faint, critical twitch of his lips.
"You’ve redecorated” a voice purred. It was that voice. High, erratic, dancing with an undercurrent of manic glee. The voice Sebastian had heard in every nightmare, every panic attack, every drug-induced hallucination for thirty-six months. "The rug is tacky, Seb. Really. It looks like a dead badger."
Sebastian’s heart didn’t hammer; it stopped entirely. The world tilted violently on its axis, the edges of his vision blurring into a violent, static white. A hallucination. The lack of sleep. The scotch. Finally, finally, the snap. I've finally gone mad.
"Get out of my head” Sebastian whispered, his voice a gravelly, broken thing from days of disuse. He stepped out of the shadow, raising the gun with both hands, aligning the iron sights directly between the ghost's dark, mocking eyes. "Get out."
Jim took a step forward, completely unfazed by the barrel pointed at his skull. "Oh, darling. If I were in your head, we’d be having much more interesting conversations than this. And you’d be wearing far less clothes."
"Shut up." Sebastian’s hand— the hand that could hold a rifle steady in a freezing crosswind for six hours— was trembling. "You're dead. I saw the intelligence reports. I saw the blood. I saw what you did on that roof. I saw the aftermath, Jim!"
"You saw a masterpiece” Jim corrected softly, his tone shifting into that dangerous, intimate whisper he used when he was delighted with himself. He took another step, closing the distance until the muzzle of the Sig Sauer was less than three inches from his forehead. He didn't flinch. Instead, his eyes widened, glittering with that familiar, terrifying, manic light. "Sherlock needed a three-year holiday to clean up my European assets. I couldn't exactly sit in a cafe in Paris and text you, could I? The consulting detective has eyes everywhere. The play required a final curtain. A real one."
"A final curtain” Sebastian repeated. The words felt like broken glass in his mouth. The sheer, incomprehensible cruelty of it slammed into his chest.
"Mmm. But the sequel is always better." Jim smiled, a sharp, brilliant flash of teeth. He reached up, his gloved fingers wrapping around the barrel of the gun, gently pushing it downward. "Miss me?"
The metal left Jim’s forehead, and that was the moment reality crashed through the door like a flashbang. The smell of him— expensive cologne, ironed wool, and the faint, bitter scent of Turkish cigarettes— flooded Sebastian’s senses. This wasn't a phantom. This was meat and bone. Alive. He had been alive the whole time.
The relief was instantaneous, a blinding, white-hot rush that nearly dropped Sebastian to his knees. But right behind it, riding the coattails of that relief, came a tidal wave of pure, unadulterated fury. Three years of mourning. Three years of wanting to pull his own trigger. Three years of agony, while Jim was breathing the air of some foreign city, completely fine.
With a guttural roar, Sebastian dropped the gun. It hit the hardwood with a dull, heavy thud. In the next heartbeat, Sebastian’s fist shot out. He threw a heavy, brutal right hook that caught Jim squarely in the jaw. The impact cracked through the quiet room. Jim staggered backward, his head snapping to the side, his hands flying out of his pockets to catch his balance. He gasped, a look of genuine, shocked surprise crossing his face as he wiped a smear of blood from his split lip.
"Sebastian—" Jim started, his voice dropping into a warning register. But Sebastian wasn't finished. He closed the distance, his vision tunneling into a red haze. He drove his fist into Jim’s stomach, a sickening, breath-stealing punch that doubled the smaller man over. Before Jim could recover, Sebastian grabbed the lapels of his pristine Westwood coat, lifting him slightly off his feet, and violently slammed him backward into the wall. A framed print shattered against the floorboards, glass raining down around their shoes.
"You bastard!" Sebastian growled, his face inches from Jim’s. His breath was hot, smelling of stale alcohol. He hit him again, an open-handed, bruising strike across the cheek that left a violent red mark. "You miserable, psychotic, selfish bastard! You let me rot! You let me think you were dead!"
Jim let out a sharp, breathless laugh, even as he coughed, his chest heaving from the blow to his stomach. Blood was trickling down his chin from his lip, but his eyes were wide, dark, and utterly consumed by the violence of the interaction. He didn't fight back. He liked the intensity; he thrived on the high stakes of Sebastian's raw emotion. "Oh, Tiger" Jim choked out, his hands coming up, not to defend himself, but to fist into Sebastian’s hair, his fingers digging into the short, blonde strands. "There he is. There’s my soldier. I knew you were still in there."
The touch was a spark to a powder keg. The anger, rather than dissipating, mutated into something else— a desperate, frantic, primal need. Sebastian had been starved of this man for over a thousand days. The sheer sensory overload of Jim’s warmth, his skin, his voice, and the copper taste of the blood on his lips overrode every grain of sanity Sebastian possessed. The co-dependency, the toxic, magnetic pull they shared, snapped shut like a steel trap.
Sebastian leaned down and bit Jim’s wounded lower lip, a punishing, bruising claim. Jim groaned into the kiss, his mouth opening instantly, meeting Sebastian’s aggression with a frantic, clawing hunger of his own. It was a violent collision of teeth and tongues. Sebastian pinned Jim against the wall with the weight of his entire body, his hands tearing at the charcoal grey suit jacket, ripping the expensive fabric at the seams just to feel the skin beneath it. They stumbled blindly toward the bedroom, never breaking the kiss, a clumsy, desperate mess of limbs. Jim was laughing against Sebastian’s mouth, a breathless, manic sound, completely thrilled by the chaos he had re-entered. They hit the edge of the mattress and went down together.
Sebastian didn't undress him so much as he stripped him by force, tearing away the tie, the waistcoat, the shirt, until Jim lay pale and flushed against the sheets. Sebastian’s hands were rough, leaving red marks on Jim’s hips, his shoulders, his thighs. He needed to mark him. He needed to prove to his fractured brain that this wasn't a dream, that the skin beneath his fingers wouldn't dissolve into smoke.
When Sebastian drove into him, it wasn't an act of love; it was an act of exorcism. He poured every ounce of his three years of grief, his suicidal depression, his sleepless nights, and his furious resentment into the physical act. He was rough, unyielding. Jim arched off the mattress, his head tossing back, his eyes rolled back as a high, shattered cry tore from his throat. Jim’s fingers clawed at Sebastian’s bare back, leaving long, bloody scratches down his spine, his hips jerking upward, begging for the friction, begging for the familiar, toxic oblivion that only Sebastian could provide.
They moved together in the dark, a frantic, rhythmic friction of two broken things trying to fuse themselves back together. Sebastian buried his face in the crook of Jim’s neck, inhaling the scent of him, his teeth sinking into the soft skin over Jim's collarbone until Jim shrieked, a sound of pure, twisted ecstasy. The climax was violent, a sudden, blinding release that left them both breathless, sweating, and trembling in the tangled sheets.
Afterward, Jim immediately curled into Sebastian’s side, his head resting on the sniper’s chest, his breathing slowing as he drifted off to sleep, entirely content. The world was right again. He was back.
But as Sebastian lay there in the dark, the sweat cooling on his skin, the frantic rush of adrenaline began to recede. And in its place, a cold, sickening dread began to pool in the pit of his stomach.