the king's crown | j. moriarty (18+)

forty four

MORIARTY WOKE UP as the man he always had been. He ran a comb through his hair and tucked in his shirt, he wiped down his blazer with the pads of his fingertips and straightened his tie with a tip of his chin. Elizabeth awoke in a mess of their bed sheets, her hair tussled and her eyes glassy with dreams she didn't want to leave. The sight of her, as she poked her head up from beneath the pile of cotton and silk, caught James' eye immediately, he stood in front of the mirror and he smirked, watching her in the glass.

"G'morning, Love." His mouth went a little dry as he saw her tangle herself in the white linen she wrapped around her body. She scraped her hair back with her fingertips and sighed heavily. He watched her consciously avoid exposing herself, unaware his piercing gaze was yet to capture her, and pulled the sheets tightly around her figure. Moriarty hummed, his hand loosening the grip on his tie.

"Morning." She mumbled, smiling to the back of him, searching for the sickening thickness of his gaze in the mirror. The haze of her sleep clawed at her when he turned unexpectedly and she was greeted by the black pools she thought would be less infatuating if she'd found them in his reflection. Instead, he engulfed her quickly and surprised, she made a little noise in the back of her throat that could only be placed as a moan.

Morairty couldn't help it, he'd changed with Elizabeth, he'd become soft, since the day he'd met her he had wanted her. He had wanted every life he could think of with her, whatever she may have wanted. He wasn't used to caring for people the way he did for her, in fact he wasnt used to caring for anyone but himself. Sure, Sebastian provided him with a certain amount of entertainment but on his life, he would be damned if he felt even the slightest platonic interest in a human again. He wouldn't want too. Elizabeth had become a great equal to the life he loved, a love he never knew he needed until he saw her. But now he craved it; he couldn't maintain the man he was for her in the shadows, he couldn't maintain the gentleness he adopted around her; he couldn't remove himself from the man he was, and a deep growl radiated out of his throat. Because, there was that look. The warm anticipation reaching for him from beneath a thick set of brown eyelashes. The soft parting of her lips she couldn't avoid when he neared her. He'd seen it the day they met, he'd seen it in the Old Bailey, he'd seen it every time he approached her without warning. She was like a deer. He ate in the sight of her.

She was closing in on herself, pulling the blankets higher over shoulders; she was hiding from him - a part of her still knew their life together was unnatural, but a part of her also seemed to know it drove him insane and that, along with the blood he hated to be on her hands, had mixed and become a heavy thought for him to hold. He was always high from his murders, he was always high from the crimes he committed, and his most precious thing had been poisoned by his behaviour- at first, he'd hated it. He knew how much she hated it, and so it pained him deeply. But she was intoxicating, and knowing how he'd decayed such beauty, and yet it still blossomed so certainly for him, in all that pain, he found himself pouncing on her as she lay beneath him.

"James, what are you doing?"

A soft murmur. It brushed out of her mouth and against his lips and both his hands were planted in the open space of the mattress on either side of her hips. Her legs, pulled up from his sudden movements, forcing the thin sheets to fall closer to her waist, tickling them with the brisk morning air. The sheets were still sucking at her body, taunting him in the early light.

"I don't know how I'm going to leave you, today." Elizabeth, logically, presumed he meant after the death of that man because after she'd shot a stranger in the head and established herself a murderer, after Greg Lestrade had called her and somewhat recruited her against London's newest, slippery, most dangerous nemesis: Charles Augustus Magnussen, she replied to him maintaining that logic in mind. Though she knew very well that was not at all what he had meant.