Chapter Text
Their brief meeting was hollow, as transitional as he could make it. He was distant, he knew but there were far more important matters that he had to attend to in that moment. This was never about bonding with someone else, much less finding another person that would most certainly seem to show up and cause his resolve to crack. He told himself that it would be worth it in the end, but the moment he looked at them, and they saw a wall of impenetrable defense on his face, he had known without comment that this was not true. The problem with William was that he was so focused on his goal and making everything work, that taking time to consider the people he thought irreplaceable and how they would feel when he left them was awkwardly neglected. He had been left recalling what he didn’t want to hear, mainly Louis’s words that one fateful night. “My life would mean nothing if it’s in a world without you.” This had been the reason he kept his distance, his own curiosity clamped tightly down within the confines of it’s ideal prison, his own will. So that a person that he wanted to desperately keep out of this would not sacrifice their lives for him.
This was not about being saved. If he’d been crying out for help this whole time, then it would fail. The era of peace that he’d hoped for to his very depths and all that effort would come crashing down all around him.
So why, after all the sacrifices that he’d made and all the careful planning was he looking up at a man who was desperately trying to reason with him. Sherlock’s grip on his hand was like a vice, leaving him humiliatingly left to face all his failures. He was certain that if his plan had not caved in, and his purpose shattered to dust that he could have struck the man whose words made him feel all the more helpless by the minute. Despite this, he could hear their words so clearly that it managed to burst through his resolve. No one had ever had the nerve to confront him like this, to meet him where he stood because they couldn’t, except this person who he’d almost enlisted as part of his own family, and the only one who even now he couldn’t stand losing.
“I can’t be wrong,” he had given up too much to doubt himself now. All the anger that he secretly held inside him overflowed in that final moment. Here was the man that upended everything he stood for in order to prove him wrong, and all for what? He couldn’t understand why even now, they refused to let go and let him fall to death in peace. “Holmes, you are the devil himself!!”
The moment he said this, a sudden storm began, the wind having gone ghostly silent, only for lightning to strike overhead. But it was like shouting at a shadow of himself that had resolved to change the world. Often, one mistake in a calculation would send the whole answer to the test crashing down in flames, marked as a mistake and another failure. Like it or not, he was not incapable of miscalculating. It was what had lead to this moment, where Sherlock Holmes defied his own principles to take down the villain that had evaded him for so long as if a man possessed. Did he even realize that living after this would slowly destroy him?
Let me go… You have to.
It did not take a mathematician to figure out where this would go. I asked you to stay alive after this. That was my only request that I ever wanted to give you, so why?
There was no good end for the wicked. Those who were meant to die for it should not die nobly, no matter how pure their reasons were. But they could always do anything they could to ensure that the ones that they still cared for would not follow into hell after them. His gaze hardened, the glassy red eyes of his deepening in color as his free hand reached into his pocket for a dagger. If he could not make the other let go even now -- he would force him to.
Then something remarkable happened. A hitch in his plans that he had no way to get out of. As he made to attack, he realized with one look that he wouldn’t need to. The detective had been seemingly engrossed with holding onto him throughout it all, gritting his teeth even as the rain poured all around them, somehow not letting the water and gravity drag William down and away from him into oblivion, that neither of them had noticed an approaching figure.
He was shocked. Had he fallen so low that he’d have somehow allowed another person to slip past the trap that he’d set? No one should have been able to make it to where they were. One was already enough to handle, and two was just too much.
In that moment, the criminal hanging off the edge knew where this was going if he failed even that. In a move of purposeful instinct, he dropped the dagger and used his legs to push and try and force Sherlock into the dark with him. He saw the man’s eyes widen with shock, heard the sound of the pistol being readied, and mentally figured out the seconds that they had left together before it was too late. But one look at the other’s face before they both fell was enough for him to realize that this man had no regrets -- they wouldn't let go even if it meant that they would die for him.
As they both careened down the dark edge of the cliff, William held onto Sherlock tightly. He’d angled himself so that they fell down in a straight path. The impact of his would in fact stop the bottom from killing the other, but at the sacrifice of his own life. Had he not hugged the other and disoriented them at the last moment, they would not have had the chance to escape such a fate and in that last desperate moment, that was all he could think of.