Constellations Strung With a Shooting Star | Sherliam

Chapter Twenty-Six

[bit of a shorter chapter this time around! felt that it would be better to put the rest of the final problem in a separate chapter than this. also, i posted a new sherliam oneshot (pursuing poison, it's nsfw <3) so if you're interested then please check it out!! thank you :3]

Panicked would be an understatement when describing William at the moment. He's far beyond so, actually. Not only did he spend this afternoon writing an intensely difficult letter to Sherlock, as well as transporting it to where he wants him to discover it; and not only did the short-lived meeting with the detective grandly backfire, but he also had to find that Sherlock knows just as well as he does. And now his mind feels scrambled around and more disorganized than he can ever recall it being. Which, with the other numerous recent events, says quite a lot.

But the most pressing one is the very fact that somehow, some way, Sherlock fully knows that the two of them share the same mark.

How that could be, he doesn't know. He could hardly even begin to start guessing, which is even more frustrating on top of it all. There should be no logistical way that the detective knows that, unless his intuition brought him to that answer. Which isn't impossible, but Holmes sounded as though he knew that it was far more than a measly guess or structure of deduction. If it was, then the sincerity and seriousness that clouded the ravenet's eyes would not have been there as clearly as it was.

Ugh. If William didn't already have enough to worry about on his hands, this is the final blow that tears it all down. He could take suspicions from Sherlock just fine; he shut him down a few times before and the issues were minimal, but a pasty problem appears when the end of the final problem comes to light and dawns on the stage. If anything goes wrong once that time comes, the plan could crumble drastically.

However... He does trust that Sherlock sees the aim of the Moriarty plan, and doesn't plan to destroy it in any way that dramatically shifts what William had been going for. But even so, there's a doubt nagging at him like an endless itch that he just can't reach; a doubt that Holmes will want to shift the tide because of their soulmate similarity.

Or, rather.. Because he may have truly fallen in love with William throughout all of this.

That. That was truly a thought that William longed to ignore, and he adamantly did so for most of the time between now and meeting the detective that night on the Noahtic. The very idea that Sherlock would still aimlessly fall for him, in spite of the ex-professor's efforts to steer him in the complete opposite direction.

And if that's really so, then William has failed miserably. The last thing that he wants is to drag Sherlock down with him, to forbid his internalized promise of never giving in to this unfortunate reality of being soulmates with another person. Maybe unfortunate isn't the right word; pitiful sounds more correct, considering his situation as a whole.

What;s even worse is that it's strikingly likely, the more that he thinks through it — there's little to no way that Sherlock could have found a moment to discover what William's soulmate mark looks like. The last time that he had it publicly exposed in some way was during that Jack the Ripper night, but there was nobody around at the time; especially not Sherlock, as there certainly would have been something more far sooner if he were present in that moment.

But whatever the means, Moriarty supposes that the most that matters is the very factor that he knows, and how much of a mess that brings in to what he's trying to complete here. And all that he can hope for is that Sherlock won't attempt to diverge anything into the soulmates topic when they meet again — and for the final time — but he knows that isn't a realistic expectation to have of Sherlock Holmes.