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keep_countingCharacters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes, Henry Baskerville, Irene Adler
Rating: PG13
Warnings: AU, selling of souls, a bit blood, dead people, temporary character-death, resurrection
Genre: Crossover/Drama/AU
Word-count: 1,499
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in relation to this.
A/N: Crossover with Supernatural, though it is not necessary to have watched the show: I am merely using the mythology to fill a plot-bunny made by
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fueschgast and me: the wonderful banner is also made by her!Summary: Henry Baskerville does not believe in the supernatural. Or at least, that's what he keeps telling himself.
Part One // Part Two // Part Three // Part Four // Part Five // Part Six // ...
Henry
No one ever gets to me. And no one ever will
~
Henry Baskerville did not believe in the supernatural.
He did not believe in spirits or demons, ghouls or witches. He did not believe that his father had once hunted these things, that a line of salt could keep out almost anything, that ghosts was vulnerable to iron, shapeshifters to silver, demons to the name of God.
He did not believe in hellfire or the huge, black dog that had torn his father to pieces right in front of his eyes.
He did not believe that the gun his father had clenched so tightly in his hand could kill any supernatural being they came across and, had he only pulled the trigger that faster, he would still be alive. He did not believe that there was anything like a demon-killing gun.
No, he didn’t believe in any of these things.
“Very good,” his therapist told him, showing teeth as she smiled. Fangs.
He blinks, and they’re regular teeth again. Of course.
Henry Baskerville does not believe in the supernatural.
That is, of course, a lie.
Humans as a whole are prone to believe what they see. And Henry Baskerville has seen enough to last him a lifetime.
“Sugar?”
There’s an undercurrent, like ripples on the surface of water even if nothing’s disturbed it, bubbles coming from something living underneath, and he blinks and the waitress in front of him is smiling sweetly, dark hair falling in curly waves and a pot of coffee held tightly in one hand.
“Um, yes please,” he weakly mutters, held in place by the hue of her eyes and the smile on her face: she hands him the pack of sweetening and accidentally knocks over his cup in the progress, furiously apologizing as she wipes off his shirt, ignoring his good-natured protest that he can do so himself.
He’s still staring even after she’s disappeared around the corner, the sway of her hips like sin written in movement. He thinks that it was weird, how he’s never seen her in this diner before. Very weird.
It isn’t until he walks back outside that he feels it – or rather, the lack of it. The gun is gone.
That’s how he met Sherlock Holmes and, for a short moment, Irene Adler.
~
“It can… it can kill anything?”
Henry has a feeling that Sherlock Holmes is not a man that is often or easily bewildered. It’s a small victory that he is so now.
“So my dad told me,” he says, his hand shaking so hard he almost drops his lit cigarette. “After my dad… well, I carried it around with me, always. As insurance, you know, in case.”
“But surely it is just a myth?” Mr Holmes huffs, palms pressed together in front of him, like he wants to wring his hands together but doesn’t want to show that kind of weakness or anxiety.
“As far as I know, it’s genuine,” Henry said. “I’ve never told anyone I had it, but I heard from some of my dad’s… well, friends and they all seemed to think, if the gun existed, it could kill anything.”
“And it was made by Samuel Colt you say?”
“Back in the day, yes.”
“And how did your father get hold of it?”
“Bought it off some girl, I think,” Henry mumbled. “A dealer in all things supernatural. Said she’d swiped it from some Americans or something. He always had it with him on hunts, he made the bullets himself, but then…”
“It didn’t work on hellhounds?” Mr Holmes asks, and he says it so casually, as if speaking of the weather, that Henry actually jumps a little in surprise: he is only used to whispering about these kinds of things, sitting in the dark with creepy half-strangers, used to saying one word in this direction and getting right back to the loony-bin, but this man…
This man doesn’t believe it. He’s sceptical and cynical, and he wants to find out. He isn’t out to prove that it’s possible or impossible, he’s not swaying in one direction, making him see things that isn’t there. He is only after the truth.
Honestly, Henry would like a bit of the truth as well.
“No, it did. It does,” he says, shaking harder as his mind flashes back to that day, the fog hanging in the moor, the green grass turning grey in the shadows, the baying and howling. “He got one of them, right in the neck and it fell over, but there were two more and he didn’t have time to pull the trigger.”
He says the words fast, rushed out, wanting to get them out, to be believed and to have it over with. He doesn’t want to stay in that memory longer than he has to, but it is also a relief to visit there, and speak the words, and know that the person in front of him isn’t analysing his mental state for his own health, but rather to figure out what really happened.
But now the detective is staring at him with wide eyes, as if he’d just claimed the Earth goes around the moon instead of the sun.
“You… you mean you saw the Hellhounds?”
Henry closes his eyes and sees. And feels the cold.
“Yes.”
He has nightmares. Every day, every night, every minute that it’s dark, every time his eyes are closed. When he blinks, when he’s alone, in the morning and in the evening, when he’s smiling and when he’s breathing.
There’s a reason he flinches every time he hears a dog bark. There’s a reason he always walked with that blasted gun on him.
Mr Holmes is muttering away, fingers grasping at a violin, eyes narrowed as he stares at the floor, bewildered and bothered by what he can’t find.
“But how?”
Henry frowns. “I don’t know. I’ve just always been able to… ‘s why I was out with my dad that night even, because I could see them. He’d think some of the demons were regular people, but I could always see, like with the vampires or if the ghost was cloaked, or the ghouls were wandering around. The ghouls smell dead you know, because they’ve taken on the form of someone dead, so they…”
“You what?” The detective is back to staring at him again, intensely, wonderingly, taking him apart like a lab-rat under his dissecting blade and Henry fidgets and frowns and thinks that he really doesn’t have any other option but this man. He needs the gun back.
“My dad used to joke about it, said I had ‘The Shining’ like in that stupid movie… but I could see them yeah.”
“Fascinating,” Mr Holmes says, and Henry might’ve thought that he was listening before, but it is nothing compared to this, this intensity and fascination, like Henry was the most complex puzzle ever known to man.
“So?”
He blinks. “So?”
“Can you help me?”
“Yes. In fact, I already know who stole the gun, and where she is now.”
Henry could imagine that his whole face was lighting up like it was Christmas come early.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Mr Holmes sets his violin to the side. “Her name is Irene Adler, and she is currently in Sussex, six feet under.”
Henry frowns. “Six feet…”
“Dead and rotting in the ground yes.”
He gapes. “And the gun?”
Sherlock sighs. “Now, why would anyone steal a gun like that? Self-preservation perhaps, and if there was anything she was ever good at, it was that. Now, shooting the demon might not have worked. But bargaining with it – after all, wouldn’t it be a powerful weapon in the hands of someone like that? Wouldn’t it be a threat out of the world, a way to gain more power on its own grounds?”
“Um,” Henry mumbles, aware that his shaking is becoming uncontrollable now, that the temperature in the room is freezing. “I’m not certain, sir, what you mean.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? She gave it to the demon.”
The clock on the mantelpiece stops ticking, and Henry is sure he can hear someone laughing.
~
It is raining, but then again, it sometimes seems to be constantly raining in London. Or England, for that matter. In fact, on this day it is raining in many places. It is raining on Molly’s father’s grave, the fresh flowers that she has only put there a few hours ago getting drenched. It’s raining on Harriet Watson’s abandoned grave, the head-stone still there because no-one has really had the time to get rid of it. It’s raining on Irene Adler’s grave, and it’s raining on Henry Baskerville’s house, the man curled up on his couch, fingers twitching for a gun that isn’t there.
It is raining on the corner of St. Bart’s as well, the droplets hitting an unfolded umbrella harshly, like small bombs against the dark material.
The man under the umbrella is smoking. And waiting.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-10 10:03 pm (UTC)Heh, I wondered: Bela? But no, it was Irene.
And Henry can see dead peopleal kinds of supernatural things, ooh!
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Date: 2012-03-11 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-10 10:08 pm (UTC)I love how in your story Henry really IS the only one that can see the hounds. Or any other supernatural things. That's a really neat twist. :-)
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Date: 2012-03-11 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-10 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 10:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 09:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 03:46 pm (UTC)