The Mad House

The Time We Have Been Given

Entry Ten: Something is feeding this; something is putting these ideas into my head. I see Victor and I cannot decipher what is necessary and what is merely madness. I look at Victor, and I see him suffering. God, I want to see him suffering. There is a hatred that is boiling inside of me, something that isn't accurate, or fair, or holy. I see Victor Trevor not as a host, not anymore. I see him as a prison warden, I see him as the man with the key to my lock, the man with the love of my life on his arm. I see him and I see no possible way we can coexist much longer. I know there's only one way to end this all, I know there's only one way to make him pay for what he's done to me. Yet I feel as if it's not over, not yet. Something still stirs, a twist in our lives that might amount for something much more violent. Something that...something that will be our downfall. What little sanity we have left is going to vanish; I can feel it coming on soon. Victor will go mad with power, and I will go mad with jealousy. And Sherlock, poor Sherlock...caught in it all. Surely he will have to choose; surely he will need to decide which one of us will get full rights to his heart. For he's what's driving us, isn't he? He's putting the madness into our heads. I feel as though there's no other explanation, surely this isn't our natural state? Unless Sherlock is just a pawn as well, and this Mad House is dragging us like puppets on strings. 

The silence that the house provided was much more comforting than the silence in the Watson household. The house slept as John sat by the fire, it was trading off deep breaths with him, and relaxing all the while he sank deeper into his arm chair. At the Watson house there was never a calm moment, no that modern aged structure was quiet only as it held its breath, waiting for the next outburst by one of the family members. The quiet there never lasted, whereas at the house here, it had been quiet for centuries. It had just been waiting for someone to join it in such a hush. And so John sat, his feet stretched out to the fire which he had prepared, sipping some of the nice wine that Victor had opened for his breakfast. It was relaxing, and even more so when there wasn't something preying on his mind, something which was eating at his heart. For once in his life, he could manage to be still. Now of course there was the slight hesitation of his wife in the back of his head, the thoughts he pondered when he had decided he didn't have enough things to worry about. Well of course he sat here now, with everything at stake except the thing that mattered most. His marriage, his fatherhood, even his career was at jeopardy because of the rather horrible choices he had made lately. And yet all of those things, they were second to Sherlock. They were second even to Victor! He had his real companions in check; he had his house to claim, and his happiness to enjoy. Certainly he didn't have to worry about such trifling things as his future or his family, not now while the fire was so warm, and so inviting?
"John?" asked a rather sleepy voice from the doorway. John looked over to see Victor, the man having remerged from a nap, presumably. "I didn't hear you come in." he murmured.
"Didn't want to bother you." John said with a shrug.
"You just let yourself in then, again?" Victor presumed, yawning a bit widely before draping himself across the couch, not yet awake.
"I didn't see an issue with it, it's my house." John said with a shrug. Victor merely sighed, staring at him from a very awkward position on the couch. He didn't look entirely convinced, and yet he remained too sleepy to argue.
"I suppose it is now." He agreed quietly. John nodded, sitting back in his chair and sipping at his wine. It was interesting to see Victor so lazy, surely he wouldn't be caught in such a state had Sherlock been lingering around in eyesight. And yet it made him just a little bit more human, which was a redeemable quality to say the least. Victor's slouching posture and dangling limbs made him at the very least a bit more approachable. "What are you doing here then? Don't you have a family or something tedious like that?"
"Oh well, I had a bit of a fight with my wife." John admitted with a shrug.
"A fight? So things at the Watson household aren't as smooth sailing as I thought." Victor teased.
"Yes, well I suppose after I inherited this house nothing has been the same. And I suppose nothing can go back to being the same ever again. I've discovered that she's not my destiny, I've discovered that she's only in the way of my achieving what I need to." John muttered, staring into the flames a bit intensely and recognizing that sort of fire from the whites of Mary's eyes. That woman, so angry at her husband as if any of this was even his fault. As if he had any control.
"And what is it you think you need to achieve?" Victor questioned, repositioning himself so that he could lie on his side and interrogate with more efficiency.
"I think I'm destined to be with Sherlock." John admitted finally. Victor allowed himself to chuckle, sighing heavily after a moment yet still with that smile on his face. Surely victor would have expected that, yet these days there were things that even he didn't properly understand. These days even Victor didn't know all of the details.
"That's rather bold of you, considering he married me." Victor challenged.
"Like I said before, love is only one of a million reasons to get married." John muttered with a shrug. Now Victor sat up, his curiosity having been sparked. He looked at John in an almost threatening sort of way, as if he couldn't believe he was going to have to argue about this.
"And yet it's why we were married, in the end. He loved me, you see?" Victor insisted, grabbing cigarette from the carton on the coffee table and lighting it up almost nervously. "He loved me." He repeated again, once his cigarette was smoking appropriately.
"Then why would he sleep with me?" John challenged.
"Because he's a troubled boy, unsure of who to trust, and who to love." Victor offered finally.
"In which timeline?" John added with a bit of a snap. Victor looked over at him in boredom, not nearly as fazed as John expected him to be. Either he didn't understand the question, or he knew much more than John accredited him to.
"In all of them." he admitted finally, puffing an ominous cloud of smoke into the air. John watched as it faded away, and then turned his eyes back to where Victor was sitting so calmly, now that the conversation had turned to his favor.
"Do you remember them all?" John questioned quietly. Victor nodded his head a bit gravely, his eyes glassing over for a moment as he stared into the fire. His hand trembled, not enough to be concerning, yet still enough for John to take notice.
"Yes." He said simply.
"And how many does he end up with me?" John asked again. Victor smiled very briefly, just curling his lips up for a half of a second before settling his cigarette back into his teeth.
"None of them." he admitted finally. John blinked, yet he understood that was what would break the chain. The ghost had told him enough this morning, well of course none of those realities had ended up working in his favor. That was what was going to set this one apart! This was what would break the chain.
"So maybe that's why we keep coming back?" John offered. "Maybe he's supposed to end up with me; maybe that's what's missing."
"His ending up with you would solve one large problem." Victor agreed with a shrug.
"So why do you not just let me have him, why do you not stay out of it?" John challenged finally. Victor smiled once more, this time much longer than the first. He looked over at John with something of a challenging glance, as if he was wondering just how long it would take until John was able to see the big picture, just how long it would take for John to truly understand what was going on.
"Who said I didn't want to come back?" Victor asked finally. John blinked, staring at him as if that was an enormous conflict of interest.
"What, you like this?" John challenged. "You like being dragged into a different century, growing up again and again, having to go down all of these different paths, just to get thrown again with the same couple of people, to destroy your entire lively hood for the sake of...for the sake of some house's entertainment?"
"I enjoy life, John. It is as simple as that. This is not quite immortality, and yet it is so much more rewarding in the end. How many lifetimes we have dictates how many lives we touch, how many family members we love, how many friends we make. Different lifetimes allow us to go different places, see advances that we would not have seen otherwise, see differences being made in the name of our particular breed." Victor said proudly. "When you first stumbled in here, John Watson, you came by carriage. You lit your way with a candle, and wrote letters. You would not accept your sexuality because it was punishable by death. And now here we sit, able to marry one another, able to text one another, to drive...how many more lifetimes will it take until we can make a trip to the moon? How long will it take until the three of us are born again on a distant planet, to ride in hovercrafts, to be served by robots?"
"You talk as if living in an eternal loop is just some sort of long term science project." John growled.
"I like to see the problems of the world get fixed. The only way to do that is time." Victor admitted finally. "Thankfully we've all three of us been blessed with enough time."
"You sound like a madman." John decided finally.
"And you sound afraid." Victor commented. "Afraid of living on forever, and never getting what you want."
"I have what I want." John said with a growl. "So I'm sorry to say, but this may very well be your last lifetime."
"Oh is it? I'm sorry John, hadn't realized that you've gone to such desperate measures." Victor said with a chuckle. "I suppose then, I'll just have to put some effort in. I mean, with the way Sherlock was swooning over me even before I was flirting...I can't imagine how quickly I'll get him in my bed. It took you about ten lifetimes; surely it'll only take me a couple of hours."
"Don't talk about him as if he's just some prize to be won." John demanded. "He's more than that, he's a human being."
"Look me in the eyes, John Watson. And tell me that we're all just human beings." Victor challenged, snuffing out his cigarette into the ash tray on the side table and staring John straight into the eyes. Those electric blues, how difficult it was to stare into them and not submit! John wanted to find purpose behind his own argument; he wanted to find a reason to prove Victor wrong! And yet the more he pondered it, the more he found that Victor was correct. There was no logical way he could call them humans, for they were so much more than humans. They may live in a human body, yet the being that made them up was something far more powerful than a regular human soul. It was something much more indestructible. And so John stayed quiet, and Victor's smile returned.
"I thought not." Victor said finally, and with that he got to his feet and grabbed John's glass of wine, draining it in a long gulp and disappearing into the kitchen for some more.