26 mormor or giomis
tactile
it’s been a long ass time since i wrote for sherlock (like.. probably close to 7 years at this point, though it feels longer) but i wanted to try my hand at mormor
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sometimes - most times, in fact - sebastian forgets who he is. forgets he is Sebastian; caught up in being Moran. untraceable, unkillable, nonexistent. so when it’s time for the day to end, time for him to be Sebastian again, he has trouble switching gears.
and an even harder time registering the switch from Moriarty to Jim. Jim, always; never James, never unless it’s important, and so far there’s never been anything important enough to bring the proper names out. sebastian hopes there never is, because he hasn’t practiced. he doesn’t know how he’d manage with that big a change.
he won’t have to think of that for a long time now, he thinks. now it’s twilight, and what’s left of their daily activities can be done at an easy distance from their enemies, and an easy closeness between them.
jim always comes to him like a cat. when he’s Jim, when he’s Moriarty, the touches are always practiced. they’re precision-perfect, an act he has rehearsed into smoothed-over nonchalance. it unnerves people, how Moriarty seems to move without calculation, acting on every whim and impulse that catches him. but sebastian knows that isn’t true, as much as Moran knows it.
someone has to be there to feed Moriarty his lines. but that’s not where they are tonight; tonight, jim isn’t quite as graceful as he puts on, dropping with a little too much force next to sebastian on the sofa. he nearly topples the laptop sebastian has up, blessedly not navigated to any site of work-interest. he’s got at least a third of his weight on sebastian’s shoulder, and when he yawns his arm nicks the back of sebastian’s head. it’s the little things, like this, that should irritate him. Sebastian’s never been a pet-owner, and here’s he’s acquired a human-sized cat.
his stubble scratches against sebastian’s arm where jim rubs his face against sebastian’s skin, one of his less-subtler ways of asking for attention. sebastian even goes to run a hand through his hair, to scratch behind his ear, but jim catches the hand he moves before he has time to place it and presses the fingers full against his cheek.
“sing me a song, seb,” he says.
they’ve playlists for this mood. sarcastic ones, ironic ones, ones that house only several different covers of the same words. an entire playlist dedicated to songs with the word shiver, and one they’ll play when the world goes dark. “what would you like to hear?”
“the bee gees one,” he says, his mouth muffled against sebastian’s palm. “no, no, the other one. in the kitchen when you thought i couldn’t hear you. you sang it so well…”
a cat. right. that kind of observance, too, he guesses.
sebastian hums to himself, trying to get ready for the performance. he rarely takes center stage the way jim does, and his voice might croak when it comes time for the curtains move.
“i know your eyes in the morning sun,” he begins. “i feel you touch me in the pouring rain…”
he doesn’t get accompaniment how he expects. instead, he meets his ovation in the form of jim’s lips against the lines in his hand.
