Chapter Text
The moment Moriarty was distracted, John grabbed him in a chokehold. “Run Sherlock!” he yelled, but of course, of course, Sherlock ignored him.
John put a dangerous level of pressure on Moriarty’s throat which just made the bastard laugh. “Oh good! Very good,” he cried, seemingly delighted by this turn of affairs.
John didn’t think he’d ever hated anyone as much as he did this man. “Your sniper pulls the trigger, Mr. Moriarty, and we both go up.”
The words did not have the effect he’d hoped. “He is sweet!” the maniac gushed at Sherlock, whose face looked frozen with fear, though his hand was perfectly steady as he kept the revolver trained on them. “I can see why you like having him around, but then people do get so attached to their pets, so touchingly loyal, but you’ve rather shown your hand there, Dr. Watson.”
A red dot appeared on Sherlock’s forehead. John winced but had to let go his hold of Moriarty.
Which was when he was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming exhaustion, like every drop of adrenaline had been scrubbed from his bloodstream. Sherlock and Moriarty continued to exchange insults and threats, but John couldn’t follow the words. His ears were ringing and he seemed to have come down with a severe fever.
His perverse brain then decided to latch onto the problem of identifying the etiology of such a sudden fever—clearly a more intriguing problem than figuring out how to get rid of the bomb strapped to his chest. As his body descended into shakes and cold sweats, his brain was performing a methodical review of his second-year med school textbooks, especially the unit on tropical diseases—yellow fever, malaria, Dengue, Ebola were all characterized by sudden severe fever, as was influenza.
He realized he needed to add incipient hyperventilation to his list of symptoms.
Making a huge struggle, he refocused on the problem that Sherlock was currently in a stand-off with a deranged terrorist. His friend might possess the most brilliant mind in the world, but he wasn’t a soldier. John needed to get ahold of himself—now.
Which was when he realized he was lying on the tiled floor, with both Sherlock and Moriarty standing over him.
Sherlock looked almost nauseated while Moriarty’s expression was nothing short of exultant. “Johnny-boy, you magnificent unicorn, you.”
“This,” Sherlock gulped. “This isn’t possible.”
If anything Moriarty’s smile turned more gleeful. “Oh my poor Sherlock—absolutely no clue, and this your best friend in the whole wild world. All those months running around London together, chasing down dangerous criminals—and no idea that your loyal sidekick, the man who repeatedly risked his life to protect yours, was an omega.”
A few thoughts rushed through John’s mind then. Apparently, his suppressants had failed, spectacularly, and at the worst imaginable time. And from Sherlock’s look of devastation, John was about to live through his worst nightmare, the reason he’d stayed on the suppressants far longer than was safe. Sherlock Holmes, the man he admired and considered the greatest friend he’d ever had, would never have accepted him in any capacity—friend, partner, assistant, even doctor—if he’d known the truth. The Holmes Alphas were nothing if not traditional: the protective instincts ran too deep. Sherlock would no more put John in danger than he would a small child—the exact attitude John had been fighting his entire life.
And from Moriarty’s knowing expression, he understood exactly what was happening between them.
The bastard clapped his hands. “Well, this clearly requires a change in plan. If you haven’t figured it out yet, you, Johnny-boy, are going into heat. And as luck would have it, you have two strapping Alphas ready to see you through your… little problem. So listen carefully: I will offer a permanent, unconditional truce with Sherlock, and in return all you have to do is choose. It doesn’t even have to be me—you are absolutely free to choose Sherlock here. I estimate you have two minutes of lucidity left, so you’d best make up your mind.”
Fifteen years later.
John hung up on the school, sighing. And here he’d thought this day might be somewhat tolerable. He reminded himself that nothing serious was wrong—no one was in danger, no one was hurt.
His daughter was sick and needed to be picked up immediately instead of being able to leave with her older brother two hours from now. It was the kind of thing that happened at schools all the time—and parents everywhere scrambled for cover at their place of work or to call in a favor to get someone to pick up their child. It was the most ordinary thing in the world—or would be for anyone other than the family of James Moriarty.
He looked out to the clinic waiting-room which was overflowing with patients that he’d told to come in today when the clinic offered extended hours. Most of them were young children, probably suffering from the exact same respiratory virus that Clarissa had caught. Sending these patients away untreated went against every medical instinct he possessed.
His daughter was likely lying on a private bed in the fully equipped infirmary at her obscenely expensive school, looked over by a team of fully licensed RNs, a top Doctor on call and minutes away—all information his extremely thorough husband had confirmed when they had vetted the school. Right now Clarissa had access to literally the best care money could buy—or if money couldn’t buy it, that extortion, blackmail, or terrorist threats could command.
Meanwhile, the children here had no posh infirmary to turn to if John failed them. They were the children of migrants whose lack of papers would raise suspicions at the A&E, or they were the children of members of his husbands’ underworld crews, people who couldn’t risk stepping near a hospital or public clinic where they might catch the attention of law enforcement.
The easiest, most sensible course—the one any sane family would opt for—would be for John to send his driver for Clarissa. After all, most days Pavel’s most strenuous duty was fetching their lunch order from the outer door. At the moment he was extremely busy playing some noisy game on his phone. But Pavel was also technically John’s bodyguard—after extensive negotiations, he’d managed to talk James down to a single guard instead of a team—and James would most definitely not approve of Pavel’s leaving John alone.
And even if John was willing to risk the ugly fight it might cause for him to send the bodyguard to pick up Clarissa, it wasn’t like Pavel would obey John if he ordered it. Like everyone who worked in their home—from cleaners to drivers to grounds crew—Pavel obeyed James and James alone.
He almost told his patients he had to leave, but then he rebelled. This was too ridiculous. He would not simply roll over for James’ endless need to control all of them. At the very least it was worth a call to beg for some sanity. He reached for his mobile and hit James’ number.
As always his mate answered on the first ring. “Darling.”
“The school called. Clarissa has a cold and needs to be picked up, but the waiting room is jammed. Is there any way I could send Pavel—he could be at school and back here within half an hour. I promise I won’t step a foot out.”
He heard a cold bark of laughter—and suddenly John was swamped with memories of damp and terror and the burning scent of chlorine. His eyes watered as he tried to push all thoughts of the pool back into the rickety, poorly secured box they lived in. Meanwhile James was sneering, “I guess it’s something that you’d swear.”
“That’s not fair,” he murmured. He’d tried to run one time, more than seven years ago now.
“I suppose not,” James said.
Now he could scent the benzene. Next thing he’d be on the floor hyperventilating.
Unacceptable. It had been fifteen bloody years! He had a room full of patients waiting. Making a gargantuan effort, he shoved away the memories of the pool, of Moriarty the terrorist and murderer, and brought back James, the more ordinary flawed spouse in his funhouse mirror version of a normal marriage.
He closed his eyes, frantically thinking if there were any options except to ask his patients to leave and come back in an hour. “I’ll tell Pavel to bring the car around. I don’t suppose you have anyone who could triage….” He winced. The idea was sound in theory but they both knew that John had found it nearly impossible to cede control in his clinic, not trusting anyone else’s judgment—least of all the so called “doctors” his husband had access to through his channels.
Meanwhile, James was saying, “That’s not necessary. I’m less than five minutes from the school now. I’ll get her and arrange for Sebastian to pick up Baz.”
It took a moment for the full meaning of the words to filter through: The sheer astonishment that James would step foot at the school where he rarely went after an exceedingly unpleasant conversation with the director following a bullying incident with Baz two years ago. But then John registered that Moran was being sent for their son, instead of his usual bodyguard, Philip, who was supposed to take him to and from his Mixed Marshal Arts class after school.
“What?” he protested. “If this is about the boy he met there—damn it, James, that’s not fair—he barely has any friends as it is!”
“It has nothing to do with that trash boy he’s seen fit to befriend,” James said icily.
John was opening his mouth to object to his husband’s characterization of their son’s new friend, a perfectly ordinary fourteen-year-old boy, when he realized what that must mean. “Something’s happening,” he said before he could stop himself.
As a general rule, he and James had learned to maintain an absolute divide between their home life, where they strove to behave as much as possible like a happily mated couple raising two beloved children, and Moriarty’s multitude of ‘business’ interests.
And to give James credit, he’d usually succeeded—most days John could completely ignore James’ work and neither child had a clue what their ‘papa’ really did.
“Easy, darling,” James soothed.
“Don’t placate me! Is there something I need to know?” Good lord, he didn’t even have his sidearm here. Pavel always carried, but John’s gun was in the safe at home—he’d said a thousand times, guns have no place in a medical clinic, especially one specializing in treating children, but what if there was another...
“John,” James said, the Alpha tone coming through clearly even over the phone. “The truth is I don’t know yet. It’s a precaution only, but I am cancelling Baz’s after school for the time being.”
“When were you going to tell me this!”
“I am telling you now,” he replied in a tone of carefully-controlled Alpha rage. John’s only consolation was that James couldn’t see him bare his neck, but there was no universe in which his husband wasn’t aware of exactly what response he’d just provoked.
“I’m pulling into the school now. I need to get off,” James said.
John shuddered at tone of displeasure, wishing he could remain indifferent, but finding it impossible. “Of course,” he said wanly. “Thank you for fetching her.”
“Of course, darling,” James said, all warmth now that he’d punished John sufficiently for asking to send away his bodyguard. “I promise I will keep any disruptions to you and the children as minimal as I can.”
Coming from his husband that was actually a considerable concession. “I’d appreciate that.”
But since it was impossible for his husband to make any concession without demanding something in return, John wasn’t surprised that James followed with a pointed, “So long as you abide by your promise to me,”—that John would start cutting back his hours now that he was entering the third trimester.
James rang off, not waiting for an answer, indeed not needing one. Again, it was not within the realm of possibility that James would forget or compromise on the agreement they’d made six months ago when John found out he was pregnant again.
Bollocks. Bollocks. Fucking shitting sodding bollocks!
He was going to have to bring in another assistant. It was the only way he could keep the clinic functioning at even a minimal capacity. In another world, another marriage, it would be a measure of his little clinic’s success. But as always his wasn’t an ordinary marriage.
It had taken years and endless negotiations with James, but the clinic was the one place John had carved out in his life which was indisputably his, where he ruled.
Their house, furniture, cars, staff, menus for most meals, the children’s toys, everyone’s bloody clothing—James decided all of it. John could have fought over some of it but what would be the point? He’d never cared about his clothing before, as James well knew. To fight over it now would just be for the sake of appearances or as a power game. But as he’d learned to his cost over the years, the moment you started a power game with James Moriarty, you found yourself engaged in a total war in which your opponent would deploy every last piece of emotional ordinance—sarcasm, coldness, anger, manipulation, Alpha dominance, and if necessary sheer terror—until John was too exhausted for anything but complete, unconditional surrender.
In the fifteen years since they mated, John’s wins in their fights had been almost laughably rare—in fact he could point to one: he’d managed to resist James’ pressure that he abandon the barber he’d used since his army days in favor of the pricy stylist who came to the house to cut James’ and the children’s hair. That was his huge victory—keeping his barber. And the fact that John had won the point almost certainly meant that James didn’t really care about it. He’d just fought about it for some arcane reason of his own.
But to win an argument where James felt a real stake? Ha. Any ground John managed to claim always came at enormous cost of time and emotional energy, and even then, any win proved to be depressingly temporary—constantly subject to relitigation and pressure until James got his way.
Which was why the clinic had become so important to him. He couldn’t escape James’s funding, but everything else he decided. John controlled the budget, refusing to let James turn it into some sort of glossy high-tech altar to bespoke medicine—which would have inevitably led to his having to treat a very different type of patient, namely James’ top lieutenants or select clients. Instead, his clinic was indistinguishable from any number of community clinics in under-resourced neighborhoods—with the sole exception that his existed entirely outside the NHS.
Instead of having to rely on someone James found, John had managed to pull on some of his old contacts from Afghanistan to recruit two young medical students, Nadiya and Abdul. He paid for their schooling here in England in return for hours at the clinic. They’d proven invaluable, but they were full-time med students who couldn’t simply step out of a class when he needed emergency coverage. And though they were excellent for triage and providing follow-up care, they couldn’t substitute for an RN or another physician for providing diagnoses.
But given the clinic’s semi-legal status, anyone with real medical training would have to come through James, and John had had experience enough for a lifetime of the kinds of medical people who fell into Moriarty’s net. In the best cases they’d fallen prey to gambling debts or drug addiction. James wouldn’t subject his omega mate to any outright predators, but there were plenty of low-life charlatans out there who’d lost their licenses and now engaged in various forms of underground medicine—facial reconstruction, illegal experiments, and worse. Just the idea of them made John’s skin crawl, but he supposed they were competent to patch up knife wounds or gun shots that might befall a member of one of Moriarty’s crews. But even if John found someone he could tolerate working next to, they’d still be loyal to James—a spy who wouldn’t even hide that they reported to their real boss.
He caught himself before he spiraled too much further. None of this would be decided today. More relevant was whatever threat had James worried. It was infuriating that some new shit of his mate’s had somehow gotten this close to their family.
He half wished that this was just one of James’ periodic attempts to tighten his control on all of them—an excuse to detach Baz from a friend he’d decided was unsuitable, up the number of John’s bodyguards, increase his monitoring of his family’s every move and conversation. That had certainly been the pattern during John’s past two pregnancies.
But not this soon—and to pull Baz out of his afterschools? The entire reason Baz was in those classes was to give him an outlet for his Alpha urges. His clashes with James had been getting worse, and there had been a few instances where Baz had tried to dominate Clarissa and even John, which could be dangerous with John pregnant and James more protective than usual.
No—there was no way that James would cancel the classes for anything other than a credible threat.
Which was just fucking great.
John stopped himself for what felt like the fiftieth time. None of this was fixable right now. He had a waiting room of immediate problems he could actually solve. Time to get to work.