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At Sea	By : Arianawray Category: S through Z > Sherlock (BBC) > Sherlock (BBC) Views: 1566 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock and am not profiting financially from this story in any way.

Chapter List
- 1-At Sea
- 1
At Sea
He should have listened to Mycroft.
How disgusting. Would that really be one of his last thoughts on earth? That he ought to have listened to his big brother after a lifetime of rebelliously refusing to heed a scrap of his boring, pompous advice?
Mycroft's text had been sent via Anthea's secured line – which Sherlock understood to mean that his meddling elder sibling was waist-deep in something dangerous, in a place where he could not risk contacting him directly.
The message had read: "If you are after JB, and your liaison is DR, do NOT proceed. DR’s contacts compromised."
Bloody hell. How had Mycroft worked out what Sherlock was up to? He'd kept it as quiet as possible, but his brother, who had his nominally fat fingers in every pie, had ways of unearthing secrets.
His knee-jerk response was to ignore the warning. Mycroft could go hang. But as much as he detested his brother’s interference, it would only be fair to give Didier Rousseau a chance to back out. So without revealing his source, he'd warned Rousseau that his contacts might not be on his side, and they should postpone their plans to get to Jan Binder.
Rousseau, however, had thought he could work around it by telling his original contacts he would not proceed with meeting Jan Binder on the yacht of a mutual associate in Monaco as arranged. Instead, Rousseau set things up with a different group – poorer in terms of access and resources, but more trustworthy. They wouldn't go to the yacht. They would bring their schedule forward a few days by looking up Binder at the floating market where reliable sources said he would be before going to Monaco.
It was among their best chances of getting to Binder before he went off the radar for another half-year, as was his wont. Rousseau wanted to press on because he'd promised the dead girl's mother – his and Sherlock's client – that he would act swiftly in the hope of sparing another girl as protracted an ordeal as her daughter had suffered.
It turned out to be the worst choice. A yacht anchored off Monaco would have given them some small chance of making a break for it and getting out alive if their plan went awry. But a massive, floating flesh-and-weapons market sailing under a flag of convenience deep in international waters did not offer any decent hope of survival if they failed.
And things had gone very wrong barely an hour after they'd stepped off the helicopter onto the mixed cargo-and-passenger long-haul vessel with Rousseau's French contacts. The French group, who knew Binder, were to bring Rousseau and Sherlock into contact with their target so they could get him to talk shop. From there, it would be up to Sherlock to find a way to work out where he might have taken the teenage girl they believed he had snatched.
But they had all been lured into a trap, ambushed and attacked by the first group Rousseau had originally contacted, a Ukraine-based one. Evidently, they had not taken the pimp at his word that he was no longer interested in Jan Binder, and had tracked his movements.
Within minutes, all the individuals known to the Ukrainian weapon smugglers were dead – Rousseau and his French contacts, throats slit, bodies limp on the cold steel floor of the reconfigured shipping container they had been forced into. The Ukrainians didn't, however, know Sherlock on sight. So the five men remaining in the container after the rest of the gang had been dismissed had forced him to his knees, jamming the muzzle of a firearm painfully hard against his forehead as they discussed among themselves in quick-fire Ukrainian whether he was most worth torturing, keeping or killing, and trying to work out swiftly who and what he really was.
Rousseau had indicated by word and gesture, when they'd first encountered them and been herded into the container, that Sherlock was his whore, which was the cover story they'd agreed on. But it must have puzzled Rousseau's murderers, because he didn't fit the stereotype of a flesh-trader's typical toy – too old, too tall, not at all subservient, too odd-looking – and they were taking an extra sixty seconds to decide on his fate.
He could visualise a few ways in which he might have a slim chance of getting out of this, but every option would involve heavy loss of blood, perhaps the loss of a few appendages, and a highly possible unwelcome plunge into the freezing ocean the ship was in. If he survived that plunge (by no means guaranteed), it was still likely to end in a gruesome death in the jaws of some predatory sea creature that would smell the blood from miles away.
A certain death (relatively quick) at the hands of this group of traffickers? Or a high chance of death (agonising) in the open ocean?
Neither appealed to him in the least.
Sherlock's grasp of Ukrainian could barely be said to be any kind of grasp at all, but the harsh decision spat out by the group's leader needed little translation, because the two men keeping him on his knees with an iron grip on his shoulders and arms increased the downward pressure on his body, and the one keeping him still with the gun shifted to make room for the fourth bloke coming towards him, holding the hunting knife that had slit Rousseau's throat. The knife-wielder, his breath blowing smoke-like clouds over Sherlock's head in the chilly air of the container, roughly grabbed a handful of his hair (bleached and straightened as a disguise for this operation) to expose his throat for the blade. Sherlock was a second away from putting his desperate "hit the floor, twist free, kneecap them, grab the gun, sacrifice a few fingers and run for it" plan into action when that unmistakable voice floated lazily to his ears, wielding an unfamiliar language like a silken blade.
The tongue was Russian – but very cleverly, the kind of Russian in the kind of accent that someone from, say, Serbia might have. And the smooth, appreciative words that reached his ears essentially meant: "Oh, is that the traitor Didier Rousseau's fuckboy you have there? Unusual-looking, isn't he?"
With his head forced up by the one who'd been about to slice his neck open, Sherlock could see, through the puffs of condensation from his own heavy exhalations, a furred hat worn low over a supercilious face he would know anywhere, gazing half-lidded at him from the apex of a tall, slender body wrapped in a thick grey greatcoat.
He had casually strolled into the container with another man who was obviously a trusted associate of the Ukrainian weapons dealers, because the resulting conversation in a mix of Ukrainian and Russian went more or less like this, from what Sherlock could make out:
"Who's that, Volodymyr?" asked the leader of the Ukrainian group.
"This is Mico Rajovic," came the answer from the man called Volodymyr.
"The Mico Rajovic?" was the follow-up question from the Ukrainian leader, sounding interested and impressed.
"Yeah, that one."
"Heard a lot about you," the Ukrainian leader said in Russian, apparently directly to the one who went by the name of Rajovic. "And we heard you'd be on board, but never thought we'd actually get to meet you. Got anything we might be keen on trading with you for?"
"Unfortunately, the entire stock I have on hand has been promised to other buyers," said the one passing himself off as Rajovic with confident but apologetic smoothness. "Volodymyr can set something up between us on the next occasion, perhaps?"
"Why not, eh? Who knows, you might fancy some of our unique stock too, even though we know your inventory is pretty impressive."
"That's very possible. But you know, besides weapons, I also have other interests. And what you've got right there looks fascinating."
A few snickers erupted among the Ukrainian group, and suddenly, Sherlock remembered why. He knew the name Mico Rajovic. It seemed that everyone in this particularly unsavoury slice of the criminal underworld knew the name Mico Rajovic. The secretive Serb crime lord, whom very few had ever met in person or seen pictures of, but who had thousands of types of weapons to trade to war zones and a notorious taste for dabbling in the flesh trade purely for the fun of breaking people in the most sadistic ways.
He remembered the rumours about what Rajovic had done to the family of a rival weapon smuggler in Serbia who had unwisely made a murder attempt on him. Horrible shit, meant to completely break his victims psychologically before he did away with them, anyway.
In that "classic" case, using the threat of skinning the children alive to keep their mother compliant, he had forced his rival's wife to watch as his men held her husband down, and Rajovic himself proceeded to cut off all ten of the man's fingers one by one as he shrieked and bled. Then he'd picked up a couple of the severed, bloody digits and manually fucked her with them, after which he’d shoved her husband's blood-coated wedding ring into her vagina and made her give Rajovic a blowjob while keeping the ring in place. He'd told her that if he felt so much as the edge of a single one of her teeth, or if the ring fell out of her, he'd start cutting off her seven-year-old daughter's fingers too, followed by her four-year-old son's. He'd made her half-dead husband and little children watch as she knelt, naked, to work him with her mouth. After he'd come in her mouth, he'd fished out the wedding ring from inside her and made her swallow it along with his ejaculate. He'd followed that by shooting her husband in the head, stripping off his rival's blood-soaked shirt, and using it to bind her arms behind her back. He’d then raped her on her daughter's bed and passed her over to his men who took her, one after the other. And the last words he said to her before he killed her with a bullet was that he wouldn't spare her children after all. He didn't. He sold them off to a child-pornography ring. A year later, their little bodies – badly battered and with clear signs of sexual abuse visible on them – were among the ones found in a police raid on a child-porn gang in Romania.
Evidently, the idea that a person that twisted might have some fun with Sherlock ended up seeming like the best idea of all to the Ukrainians. Because within the next minute, the man they thought was Rajovic had gestured to one of his people in attendance just outside the container, extracted a fat bundle of cash – US dollars – from the bag his lackey carried to him, and handed it to the gang in exchange for Sherlock.
"You like playing with them using personal items from their loved ones, I've heard," the gang leader smirked. "Need anything off this one?" He nudged Rousseau's body with the tip of his boot.
"How thoughtful of you," Sherlock's buyer said with a smile designed to look like that of a twisted predator who liked to pretend he was not a twisted predator. "Would you like to offer some suggestions?"
"We'll give you his bag for free," the gang leader laughed. "Checked it already – nothing of use to us in there apart from a few euros we've already taken, but the stuff inside might help you amuse yourself with your new pet. And his belt – how about that? Good for a variety of uses, I'm sure."
"Lovely," the man they took for Rajovic said, sending his man forward to receive the items before ordering another two of his employees to take Sherlock from the Ukrainians.
"Seems you're in the main interior stateroom, eh?" the Ukrainian leader chuckled. "Lots of equipment in there you can use on this one to entertain you."
"Indeed," the one called Rajovic said with a knowing smile, before leaving with his new acquisition.
Sherlock was dragged roughly up to the stateroom along quiet corridors watched by security men hired by the organiser of the floating market. Volodymyr was nowhere to be seen at the moment, but just inside the door – a screened-off area that Sherlock quickly noted was a blind spot for the security cameras – his buyer ordered his men to hold him firmly in place, and bent down to speak in an absolutely furious undertone to him: "I told you to drop the case, but you wouldn't listen, would you? We're being closely watched even here. Stay in character no matter what I do to you, or every one of us here will die."
So the men with Mycroft were his own, probably deep-cover MI6. He wasn't sure what Volodymyr's role was – whether Mycroft had also fooled him into believing he was Rajovic, or whether he'd been paid to play along – but that wasn't his concern right now. Rousseau was dead, Rousseau's allies were dead, his only hope was Mycroft, and Mycroft's only hope was Sherlock not giving them away. All he needed to do was for him to remain in character as the late Rousseau's whore.
Mycroft straightened up, walked into the well-heated, luxurious stateroom, shed his greatcoat to reveal a plain grey suit Sherlock had never seen, and sat back on the plush, built-in couch in the central area. He casually crossed his long legs, cool and elegant as could be, as if he were sitting down for a glass of wine.
"Strip him," he ordered his men coldly in Serbian.
What the hell? was the first thought that crossed Sherlock's mind as he was forced to the floor of the stateroom. His brother wasn't just going to keep him tied up and shoved to one side of the room until this was over? He was serious about their being watched, wasn't he? It would look suspicious if a man of his persona's reputation didn't have "fun" with the prey he'd just purchased, was that it?
Sherlock hardly needed to attempt to stay in character or play along, because he was struggling for real as Mycroft's hulking musclemen – four pinning him down and a fifth unfastening his clothing – began to carry out their boss' order. Did Mycroft seriously mean to have him undressed by and in front of his MI6 team and himself?
Apparently, he did. Every last scrap of clothing and footwear was none-too-gently ripped from his body despite his wholehearted attempts to wrench himself out of the men's grasp. Then he was hauled to his feet, completely naked, dragged to the area in front of the couch Mycroft was seated on, and strapped down to a heavy steel contraption whose solidity and weight became painfully obvious the moment the cold metal came into contact with his body. He was really fighting back now – no play-acting needed at all – but his brother's ridiculously strong subordinates had him in hand. Damn it, they'd done this before – they'd definitely done this before – their movements were too bloody practised for this to be the first time they'd manhandled someone into position on this execrable thing.
It was a perfectly simple contraption formed almost entirely of solid steel, lying flat along the floor like a large black capital letter "ɪ". Thick leather cuffs were attached to each end of the top and bottom crossbars. His wrists were strapped into the left and right cuffs of one crossbar, and he was forced to his knees and elbows in a doggy position, thighs spread wide, as his ankles were strapped to the left and right ends of the opposite crossbar. The central bar of the "ɪ", adjustable for length with a set of screws, was stretched slightly to accommodate him, then locked back in place – the last person to be restrained here must have been smaller than him – a woman, perhaps, or a man slighter of build. From three quarters of the way down the central bar, a single T-shaped bar rose vertically. Also adjustable for height, this T-bar was elevated so its horizontal crossbar pressed up into his abdomen and forced him to keep his hindquarters raised. And the middle of the crossbar to which his wrists were bound had a short chain affixed to it, ending in a collar that was now fastened around his neck, making it impossible for him to lift his face more than a miserable six inches above the floor.
"The machine," Mycroft was giving another terse order now in Serbian, sounding almost bored.
Sherlock growled, futilely testing the strength of the cuffs and the stability of the contraption by attempting to throw his weight against it. It didn't budge. In fact, he could barely move, and with the collar and leash keeping his head lowered, he could only look helplessly back down through the gaping space between his thighs as Mycroft's men clamped another steel contraption to the crossbar to which his ankles were bound. From what he could make out, this had a square base, two stands rising out of it that held a long metal arm with an adjustable holder at one end which was designed to grip…
Oh, shit. Mycroft wasn't going to… he wouldn't…
"Don't damage him now – I do want him to amuse me for a while, you know," his brother impassively told his subordinates as Sherlock felt something hard, cold and very slick pressing against his anal opening. "Tip it downwards a little – just like that, yes, that's the right angle."
He was one second away from breaking character, about to open his mouth and protest, and Mycroft must have anticipated that. Because one of the men was swiftly stuffing a large ball gag into his mouth and securing its strap round the back of his head, shutting him up very effectively. At the same time, the arm of the contraption behind him was adjusted precisely as Mycroft ordered, and the dildo fixed to it – very generously lubed, fortunately – was pushed slowly and surely into Sherlock's arsehole.
It was literally a fucking machine. Complete with an electrically-powered mechanism that was starting to move the device's arm back and forth so the obscene object attached to it began to thrust in and out of him. He cried out furiously around the gag but only succeeded in producing stifled howls and a thread of drool down his chin. It hurt – not unbearably, thanks to all the lubricant, but he hadn't been properly prepared for the girth of the dildo, and it bloody hurt. He wanted to think his way out of this, come up with a plan that would put a stop to it while not giving them away. Or, if all else failed, he would try to escape into his mind palace and remove himself mentally from this distasteful scene until it came to an end. But the insistent thrust, thrust, thrust of the machine was in all senses of the word screwing him in place, anchoring him to this reality he didn't want to be in. He might just be able to do a mind-bolt, though, eyes squeezed shut, turning the rhythm of his muffled cries into his own version of white noise, opening a door to a mental escape route...
"Oh, how charming," Mycroft's dangerously lazy voice – speaking in French this time – reached into his psyche and jerked him viciously away from his mental bolt-hole, hauling him painfully back into this world where he snapped his eyes open to his somewhat upside-down view of his brother lounging three feet away, complacently watching him as he was spread open on a rape contraption and penetrated by a machine, casually going through the pockets of the clothing he'd ordered stripped from his body and inspecting his forged identification documents with a cold smile. "Simon Devaux, a Paris address, hmm – is Simon really your name? You don't look like a Simon to me. A Charles, perhaps, or an Henri, eh?"
Pronounced the French way, "Charles" had an opening sequence of sounds that was very similar to those of "Sherlock", and Sherlock twitched in shock for a nanosecond before wrenching his wretchedly mindfucked-through-the-shame-of-this-nightmare brain back from completely stupid territory to remind himself that whatever hell Mycroft put him through, his brother would never actually throw him to the wolves.
But relentlessly, the whole time Mycroft was speaking, the thrust-and-pull, thrust-and-pull of the machine beat Sherlock down, narrowing his entire focus to his exposed, propped-up arse, triggering a welling sense of panic and mortification as the dildo nudged his prostate again and again, forcing an arousal response from his traitorous body against all his attempts to fight it down.
"I suppose it doesn't matter what you're called," Mycroft was saying dismissively now, still in French. "It's hardly your name I'm interested in, is it? Not with that nice, tight arse of yours right there – does it feel good yet, you unusual little whore?"
Sherlock squeezed his eyes tightly shut again, but his growls of rage against himself and his useless body soon morphed helplessly into moans as the object violating him and stroking the inside of him in just the right spots sent him into an overwhelming orgasm that shot tremors through his entire frame and, humiliatingly, culminated in his spattering the floor of the stateroom with a load of cum.
As he slumped, sweaty, panting and spent, over the T-bar, half-consciously making small whining noises of distress at the machine still ploughing his hole, Mycroft's black boots appeared in his immediate field of vision. He couldn't lift his head, but he could feel his brother's penetrating gaze on his bare back as he stood near his shoulders.
"So responsive," Mycroft said approvingly in French. "Did that feel good?"
Unable to fully close his mouth because of the size of the ball gag, Sherlock weakly tried to snarl out a biting response, but it came out as an incoherent groan, and another thread of drool hit the floor alongside drops of sweat that rolled off his face and the ends of his dyed-blond hair.
Mercifully, it seemed that Mycroft now signalled for the machine to be stopped and removed, because the motor quieted, the thrusting stopped, the square base was unclamped from the ɪ-frame, and his arse was suddenly empty.
"Did you adore your boyfriend Didier, Simon?" Mycroft was asking him in a voice oozing false brightness.
Sherlock flinched as he felt a touch of something along his spine... it felt like... like the corner of a... book? Mycroft was tracing the corner of a book along his back?
"What did he see in you, I wonder?" his brother mused aloud. "You're not young enough for the usual tastes of someone like Didier Rousseau, are you? You're not a pretty little toyboy. What could it be? Don't tell me it was something like... true love?"
He heard the crease and rustle of Mycroft's heavy clothing before he saw the movements indicating that his brother was crouching beside his head, tipping his chin up with the spine of the thick, heavy, hardcover book to get a better look at his face.
"Maybe it was true love, eh?" Mycroft smiled cruelly. "It must be why he filled this notebook of his with all these lovely sketches of you, mustn't it?"
Notebook? Sketches? What sketches? Sherlock's mind whirred back into some semblance of normal activity as he searched his memory of all his interactions with Rousseau to recall if he had ever even seen the man sketch a single thing in his presence or if his fingers had ever shown traces of graphite or charcoal smears on them.
"Such pretty drawings – look," Mycroft said, removing the book from under Sherlock's chin. He ripped out a page and set it on the floor in front of Sherlock's face. It was a pencil sketch of Sherlock – with his hair straightened in his Simon Devaux guise – leaning over a bannister somewhere, looking out at something not shown in the drawing. Another page was torn out and laid on the floor, and it showed Sherlock as Simon, seated in an armchair, smiling. Yet another page ripped out by Mycroft depicted him lying on his tummy on a rumpled bed, looking back over his shoulder.
When in hell had Rousseau drawn these? And why? Was it all part of lending credence to this charade they'd planned when they'd embarked on this case?
"He enjoyed reading too, didn't he?" Mycroft was saying. "He was halfway through this murder mystery in his bag, going by the placement of the bookmark. He'll never know how it ends now, will he?"
It blindsided Sherlock – the memory suddenly coming to him of Rousseau gruffly nattering to him about the book he'd been reading, a French translation of an Ian Rankin novel – telling him how good it was, and occasionally asking him to explain some detail or other about Scottish culture (which Sherlock doubted he'd done a good job of, considering he was English and not Scottish). Rousseau would never finish the book now, never ask for another explanation about Edinburgh life or British police procedures... and as Sherlock stared down at the sketches he had apparently drawn of him, he was caught off-guard to find his vision blurring and his eyes stinging.
Rousseau was nobody to him but a passing ally who had engaged him so they could jointly provide help to a woman who'd hired Rousseau to find a kidnapped girl. That was all. He was just a flesh trader with ever-so-slightly better ethics than others of his ilk, a pimp and trafficker who would still draw a line somewhere and refuse to cross it – no underage individuals, no rape, no snuffing out the lives of girls who weren't making him any more money. It was a low bar – not much at all – but it was a standard of sorts, nonetheless. And now that he was dead, Sherlock realised it had meant something to him that he'd briefly formed an alliance with someone who had some manner of decency in this trade, someone who had just died for trying to undermine the activities of those who had no such honour.
"How touching," Mycroft remarked lightly. "Shedding tears for your lost lover. Do you miss him already, your dead boyfriend?"
Sherlock desperately tried to blink the tears away – he'd never live it down if he cried in front of Mycroft – but his eyes kept burning, and the tears beaded his lashes heavily.
"Were you afraid to come here with him, Simon?" his brother asked, starting to walk slowly around him, circling him. "Did you try to tell him that this was a dangerous place? Why did he bring you with him if he cared about you? He can't have valued you much to have brought you into such danger, can he? Maybe it wasn't true love after all. Do you blame yourself for not trying harder to convince him not to come here with his crazy ideas of betraying the people he did business with?"
Mycroft's mocking words were cutting so close to the truth that Sherlock felt and saw his tears falling to the floor, joining his mingled sweat and saliva that had already formed a small pool beneath his head.
"Shouldn't you be punished for not trying harder to stop him from carrying out his stupid plans?" Mycroft asked now. He had slowly, menacingly circled Sherlock twice and was now standing behind him, where Sherlock could feel his piercingly cold gaze on his raised, bare arse.
Then it happened so swiftly and unexpectedly that he was too shocked in the first second to vocalise a cry, until the hardcover notebook smacked smartly against his bottom again, and again, driving him sharply against the T-bar propping him up. The book was heavy, its covers unyielding, and Mycroft's arm had surprising strength in it as he swung it repeatedly against Sherlock's arse cheeks until he was howling through the gag from the sting of the blows, and the sharper sting of the shame of being spanked by his brother as if he were a recalcitrant schoolboy. Just as he worked out the rhythm, Mycroft changed the pattern, waiting until he had seen Sherlock's bottom clench in anticipation of the next strike, flinch again when it didn't come, and in the same second that Sherlock began to wonder if it had stopped, rained another cluster of no-holds-barred spanks onto his sore, burning backside. Sherlock cried out at every blow. The physical pain was one thing, but the indignity of having his derriere thrashed by Mycroft was intense, and the psychological pain of knowing that the makeshift paddle was the notebook of a dead ally filled with hitherto undiscovered sketches of himself was nearly unendurable.
Just as he thought he would go hoarse from his cries, Mycroft abruptly stopped and tossed the notebook aside as if it bored him terribly now.
"Your cheeks have turned such a pretty pink, Simon," he noted with casual interest. "Is that one of the reasons your boyfriend kept you around? Because your pale, creamy backside would blush so beautifully every time he punished you? Did he apply his belt to you too? I have his belt here. Would you like me to use it on you?"
The thought of being flogged with Rousseau's leather belt now, when everything was sore and stinging, was too much to handle. With the sweat pouring freely down his face and body, soaking through his hair, Sherlock tried to shake his head in a gesture of no, no, no, even though he knew perfectly well that it was never a good idea to give your tormentor any indication of what you feared. But partly because he was playing Simon Devaux (who wouldn't be expected to comprehend such psychology) and partly because he knew that under the facade of the torturer, this person towering over him was ultimately still Mycroft, he gave in to the weakness of revealing what he didn't want to happen.
He almost crumbled when he felt the end of the leather belt trailing along his back, tauntingly, a foretaste of what would soon be lashing his burning arse. But Mycroft only lightly drew the belt all the way along his spine and tailbone and into the crack between his cheeks before remarking: "Hmm... it would be more of the same, wouldn't it? How dull. Perhaps I'll stripe your body with this later, when I have more leisure to leave welts over every inch of your skin, eh? For now, let's try something else, shall we? Because just look at you – you're all hard from the spanking. I think you enjoyed it, didn't you, Simon?"
Sherlock cracked his eyes open against the sting of sweat running into them and looked down at himself with a jolt of dread and disbelief. His prick, dangling rather uselessly there in front of his balls between his spread thighs, was showing distinct signs of turgidity, something he hadn't felt amid all the overwhelming sensations of the spanking.
"You did like it. Did your lover train you to get hard from a spanking? Or are you naturally masochistic like that?"
A groan escaped Sherlock, and Mycroft chuckled.
"But you're neither here nor there now, half-hard, not much fun. We can't leave it like that, can we?"
Once more, against his better judgement, Sherlock struggled against his restraints, but as before, it made not a whit of difference, and he could do nothing as Mycroft personally lubed up a fat, curved plug with a flared base and angled it into his anal opening until his body closed over the narrow neck of it and held it in place. It filled him up uncomfortably but not painfully, and just as he was thinking that he could handle this, he saw the remote control in Mycroft's hand.
Hell, no.
He waited on tenterhooks for the torment to begin, but Mycroft didn't press a thing on the remote. He simply sat back down on the couch, idly browsed through more of Rousseau's bag and Sherlock's pockets, appeared to find little else in them that was of interest, and spent a minute examining his own fingernails, brushing off what were probably entirely imaginary specks of dirt.
The anticipation was torture.
Sherlock had no idea what was going to happen, or when, and his nervousness increased when Mycroft took something out of Rousseau's bag, stepped up to him again and bent down near his head to wrap a navy-blue handkerchief of the Frenchman's over his eyes as a makeshift blindfold. Sherlock began to hyperventilate once more around the gag now that he would no longer be able to visually tell if something was about to happen. He couldn't speak, he couldn't move, he couldn't see, and he was naked with a remote-controlled plug in his arse – it was beyond distressing.
Which was why he almost went over the edge into a state of full-blown panic when one of Mycroft's men told him in Serbian: "Sir, your guest has arrived."
Oh fuck. Was Mycroft bringing someone in to torment him? To use him? To share him? He wouldn't... he wouldn't... right?
A heavy tread sounded on the floorboards just inside the room, and every fibre of Sherlock's being tensed as he heard an exchange of conversation in the doorway. As Mycroft and his guest drew nearer, Sherlock's ears made out that the language in use had switched to German.
The tail-end of what Mycroft was saying in that language sounded like: "... so your friends have dispatched Rousseau, and I've purchased his little whore. Well, not so little, but still very entertaining. Not your type, though, I believe?"
The hearty laugh that exploded from the new arrival was unexpected. Sherlock had so far encountered nothing but quiet menace, murder and sadism on this ship, but the visitor's laughter sounded so carefree that it rang a discordant note in this environment. The loud, rather coarse and stupidly cheery voice said in Austrian-accented German: "Not my type at all, pity! Wrong sex, hahaha! But that's good, that's good... you can squeeze all the amusement you like out of him until he breaks, while I have the satisfaction of knowing his worthless master won't give me any more trouble."
Rousseau had been about to give this Austrian-sounding person trouble? Didn't that mean...? Didn't that mean this person who was here as Mycroft's "guest" was Jan Binder, the very one Rousseau and Sherlock had been hoping to get hold of and obtain information from about the kidnapped girl? Shit. So he'd known they were coming, and he'd arranged with his Ukrainian associates to kill Rousseau. Rousseau and his French gang hadn't stood a chance from the moment they'd left the helicopter and set foot on this ship, had they?
"But I'm really honoured to meet you, Mr Rajovic," Binder was saying now. "I've long admired your remarkable psychological techniques with your prey. I don't have quite your skill, but I like to think I'm refining my own style – nowhere near as spectacular as yours, but nice and sick in its own way. Like my previous little slut, you know – sweetest thing, French child, good family, caught my eye when I was staying in Paris for six months. Just 14 years old, still going to school, well loved by her maman and papa, but I wanted her, you know. Just had to have her the moment I set eyes on her succulent self in the neighbourhood. So I snatched her. Locked her away in my basement dungeon – no one knows where it is..."
French schoolgirl. Fourteen at the time of abduction... damn it, Binder was talking about the girl who'd been rescued too late and who had died of pneumonia worsened by complications from a host of sexually transmitted diseases, her devastated parents spending her last moments with her by her hospital bed. The mother was Sherlock's and Rousseau's client, who'd heard from her daughter before she died that her kidnapper and rapist, whose name and whereabouts she didn't know, had mentioned to her before selling her off to a floating brothel that he would snatch another girl to replace her.
"Sweetest little cunt she had – so wet and tight, she screamed like a virgin for the first two weeks every time I tied her up and fucked her. Well, okay, she was a virgin the first time, but still stayed so tight, you know. So small, so snug. Perfect. But just fucking her wasn't all that fun after a few weeks, so I worked on her, you know? Pleasured her, taught her to use her mouth without biting, sweet-talked her while whipping the shit out of her every time she screwed up. Treated her nice and mean so she learnt to please me in every way so as not to get beaten, right? Convinced her that if she was my perfect sex slave, I'd keep her forever and love her and marry her and give her amazing sex every day. Taught her how to always spread her legs wide, wide as they'd go, every time I walked into the room where she was, no matter what she was doing, she would have to drop everything and spread herself open and open her mouth too, and she did, you know, after some initial crying and blushing and refusing. She learnt fast. Always spread wide and presented her little pink pussy to me until I either fucked her good and proper in her cunt, her mouth or her asshole, or ignored her and left the room. Then I trained her to do more than just that. Very soon, each time I was in her presence, she wouldn't only have her legs wide apart and her pussy displayed, she'd also be obediently moaning and writhing and cupping her plump little tits as if offering them to me, y'know, and she'd moan like a whore as if she'd die if I didn't fuck her hungry little cunt right there and then. Once she learnt to obediently do that without fail, I brought in the buyers, let them use her thoroughly, then I gave her a terrific rogering one last time and told her she'd been so good for me, she'd now be just as good for all the customers who'd be lining up to plough her pussy all day and all night in a whorehouse. Then I sold her, and off she went."
"Interesting," Mycroft said, in a perfectly neutral voice.
"I daresay that's all nothing to someone of your legendary reputation, Mr Rajovic, but it's just my personal way, eh? I've just got a fresh one now – another sweet tiny thing, just 13, but very nicely developed. Snatched her on her way to her grandmother's house in Amsterdam. Whole city's in an uproar looking for her, but I have my ways of moving flesh between countries that no one else can match, I daresay."
"Now, that may be useful to me," Mycroft remarked with what sounded like a razor-edged smile. "I could always do with good tips on how to move... assets... across borders."
"Hey, I'll swop pointers with you any time – but for today, you said your Russian friend had some possible... heh... assets that might interest me?"
"Oh yes, my associate has some specimens that may be a nice addition to your collection. I hope they take your fancy. You know Volodymyr, of course – he has them in the other room. He'll be ready to take you over to view them in... I believe he said ten minutes. So, why not have some wine while you're here? The organisers have given me a rather decent Riesling."
"Sure, why not? And there's entertainment to go with it, isn’t there?"
"Of course," Mycroft said mildly.
That was when the plug started vibrating in Sherlock's arse. Shit, Mycroft had pressed the remote.
"Terrific – you've flogged him nice and good, eh? See how pink his butt is – huh, that's some strong vibrator you've shoved in him, his whole ass is shaking from it!" Jan Binder was standing near him, staring at his tormented, throbbing flesh – Sherlock could hear the visitor's clumsy tread on the floorboards and his heavy breathing, could smell the expensive Maison Francis Kurkdjian cologne he was wearing far, far too much of... and he would ordinarily have been able to figure out plenty more about this man merely from the sound and the smell of him... if not for the disgusting thing vibrating inside him, pleasuring him against his will, pitting his will-driven sense of revulsion with it against the insistent physical urge to surrender to the feeling that every pleasure point in him was concentrated in one spot and radiating back outwards to every cell of his body.
Mycroft's much lighter tread soon joined Binder's heavier one, and Sherlock could hear from their footsteps that they had moved to stand over him, one on either side, looking down at him as he writhed within what painfully limited range of movement his restraints would permit. The scent of wine wafted to his nose – they were drinking the Riesling as they gazed at him. They began talking shop again, and Sherlock was trying to listen, trying to focus on the sick things they were saying about how to move "cargo" undetected, how to break a person, how to keep a girl compliant, but the exchange was drowned out by the roaring arousal flaring in him as the vibrator did its job. And once more, despite his disgust with the situation he was in, he ended up moaning repeatedly and loudly around the gag, then climaxing hard as his seed flowed out of him and decorated the floor again.
Behind the handkerchief-blindfold, he was almost crying because he couldn't even go limp and sink into a semi-conscious daze after this second orgasm, for Mycroft was keeping the vibrator on. It felt agonising as the device continued to stimulate his oversensitised nerves. He had no dignity and no pride left to salvage as his moans of discomfort grew pathetically long and drawn-out, and he was tearing behind the blindfold now, desperate to do anything to shut down the revolting gadget inside him. But just when he thought he might actually pass out, the vibrations halted. Mycroft had pressed stop on the remote.
Sherlock went utterly boneless over the steel frame, panting, sweating, unable to think, barely able to hear – the rush of blood in his head was momentarily swamping every other sound – and he couldn't seem to detect a single remaining ounce of strength within him.
German words that sounded like they were pronouncing it a "nice show" floated to his eardrums as if through a wall of water, but what little he could make out of the intonation told him it was probably Binder who'd spoken, not Mycroft. Someone condescendingly patted his arse just after that, as if he were a good dog who'd just obediently performed a trick, and he couldn't tell from the fleeting triple tap against his flesh if it was Binder or Mycroft who'd touched him. He couldn't make out the conversation between the two standing over him because he was nearly on the point of drifting off, but a few words here and there gave him the impression that Volodymyr had arrived to invite Binder to the other room to view the "wares" that might interest him.
When the heavier footsteps receded at the same time as Mycroft's familiar tread returned, and the door of the stateroom was closed again. Sherlock still wasn't in any condition to make out with his ears alone exactly how many of Mycroft's men were left in here with them, but he could hear at least three of them moving about, putting the wine bottle and the glasses away, while Mycroft was now beside him and bending down again. Nimble fingers made contact with the back of his head, unworked the knot of the handkerchief, and removed the blindfold. Sherlock blinked rapidly and forced his eyes to stay open to take in the sight of Mycroft's black boots near him, the mess of his body fluids on and around the ɪ-frame, and what he could make out in his peripheral vision of his brother's subordinates around the stateroom.
"I believe I'd like to show you off to one more person who is quite possibly making his way to our door, Simon," Mycroft was saying to him, in French, with the greatest condescension. "You've been very good so far. And I think you might amuse us even better now that you're a little less feisty, eh?"
One more person coming? What new hell was this?
"The leg cuffs and bar, and arm shackles, all into the recessed D-rings," Mycroft was issuing new orders to his people in Serbian, and Sherlock was starting to wonder if his brother might possibly just not care if he broke him.
Every cell of his brain and body felt wrung dry, but still, it was his nature to put up what small pathetic fight he could as he was uncuffed and uncollared from the ɪ-frame by three of Mycroft's team, who hardly appeared troubled by his resistance. They shackled his forearms in front of him and linked them by a fairly long chain to a recessed D-ring set into the floor of the stateroom near the couch. When they removed his gag, he snarled at them. And he kicked out as they lifted him clean off his feet, but it didn't do a damn bit of good as he was draped belly-down over Mycroft's lap. As his brother was now seated near one open end of the couch, Sherlock found his chest and cuffed arms stretched over the unoccupied length of the couch seat, his hips resting on Mycroft's thighs, and his legs dangling over the end of the furniture. Two men now held his legs still as a third wrapped sturdy leather cuffs just above his knees and secured these to a spreader bar to keep his thighs parted wide. Two more cuffs went round his ankles, and these were secured by two separate chains hooked into another recessed D-ring set into the floor closer to this end of the couch. The result of all these manoeuvres was that he was chained down at both ends and securely stretched out over his brother's lap, his flaccid cock trapped between his own body and Mycroft’s left thigh.
Once again, he was completely at Mycroft's mercy, with the switched-off vibrator still plugging his arse. Was he really going to be put through one more round of battery-powered humiliation for the benefit of another criminal who believed his brother was a twisted Serbian warlord and mass-murdering rapist?
Suddenly, to his near-total disbelief, Mycroft – without a word, without a taunt, without any hesitation that he could detect – began toying with Sherlock's balls, cupping them in his left hand, rolling them gently in their sack, stroking them, making Sherlock gasp and squirm. Up to this point, Mycroft had hardly touched him with his hands – he'd spanked him with the notebook, trailed the same notebook over his back and under his chin, tied and untied his blindfold, made a quick job of inserting the vibrator in him, and had possibly also (though he still wasn't sure) patted him on the bottom as if he were an animal. But now, to his shock, his brother was handling him intimately with one bare hand while the other hand rested on the nape of his neck, stroking him there like a pet he was caressing.
"Stop... don't... stop it..." Sherlock slurred in French, somehow still remembering that his life depended on continuing to pose as Rousseau's whore, but distraught enough at this latest stunning development to object, to express that this was wrong, this was going too far... he was his brother, for crying out loud...
"Be quiet," Mycroft ordered sharply.
"Just stop..."
"If you do not remain silent, slut, I will gag you again – with my cock this time, do you understand? Do you think I don't have devices with me that will keep your pretty mouth held open while I use it as I please?"
Sherlock moaned and bit back any further words he might have thought of uttering. He squirmed again and moaned some more as Mycroft drew the fingers of his left hand firmly up over Sherlock's perineum, probing, pressing, stroking, making his breath come fast and hard again.
"Yes, that's fine," Mycroft hummed approvingly. "Whores can moan as much as they like – that's a pleasing sound – but they don't talk unless given permission. Didn't your late boyfriend teach you any of that? Not much of a disciplinarian, was he? Well, I'm very different, Simon, as you will learn."
"Sir," one of Mycroft's team spoke after taking a call on his phone. "Chris Ballan is on his way here. Our observers report that he appears to be angry."
"Good," Mycroft murmured, in a neutral way that Sherlock couldn't read – not that his brain could read much right now, not when it felt like all his grey matter had been replaced with a bad mix of stress-triggered cortisol, sex-saturated endorphins and a wad of cotton wool. But still, the name Chris Ballan was known to him – an American underworld figure who was a liaison for international weapon smugglers, and whom the CIA had been trying to nab for years now. Was he the reason why Mycroft was here? Was Mycroft working with the CIA on this case?
Angry voices sounded outside the stateroom. The door was opened, and Mycroft's men were showing Ballan in. Sherlock couldn't see him, of course, as it was his exposed arse, unfortunately, that was facing the doorway. But he could hear the angry vibes coming off him, and could sense that the man was holding his temper in check only because of the considerable threat posed by Mycroft's subordinates, who were all armed while he, it seemed, had been obliged to leave his own men behind before being allowed access to the person he thought was Mico Rajovic.
Sherlock could also tell that the new arrival was momentarily thrown by the obscenely rude insouciance of Rajovic receiving him without bothering to rise or even caring to pause in his fondling of the balls and arse of a naked, panting whore in chains.
"Look here, Rajovic," Ballan finally began, angrily, after recovering from this startlingly vulgar reception. "What the hell is this I hear about your Russian associate allowing those bloody Ukrainians to kill Didier Rousseau? I had business with Rousseau. They had no fucking right to kill him without letting me at him first!"
He spoke in English, with an unmistakably Californian American accent. Sherlock noted that detail somewhere in a corner of his mind, but the rest of whatever little was working in his brain was churning the rest of what he was hearing. Was he really getting this right? Mycroft's Russian associatehad allowed the Ukrainians to kill Rousseau? Meaning that the man called Volodymyr had let the Ukrainians murder Rousseau instead of stepping in to stop them like he'd done in time to stop them from killing Sherlock? Had Mycroft just been bloody waiting outside that container until everyone in the French group was dead except Sherlock?
He made a snarling sound and was on the point of hissing at Mycroft that he was a sick murderer like everyone else when he felt Mycroft's thumb tapping against the side of his neck – the side closer to his brother's body and the back rest of the couch, and therefore hidden from the cameras and from Ballan. Morse code. L-I-S-T-E-N. Listen.
This was the very first plain communication from his brother – after those angrily hissed words in the blind spot of the stateroom doorway earlier – that straightforwardly stated to him that Mycroft was still Mycroft. Sherlock remained enraged, but even through all the years of having a terrible relationship with his brother, he had known in every one of his personal mishaps and all their joint operations that in the end, Mycroft always got him home alive. Always.
"Rousseau was a traitor to people he did business with, and no one in our line appreciates people who make the first move against their friends," Mycroft said to Ballan in convincingly Serbian-accented English. "We have very little patience with such people. Anyway, whatever Rousseau may have offered you, just get it from someone else like him – that's what we're all here at this market for, isn't that right?"
"Rousseau promised me someone I would find extremely valuable!" Ballan snapped. "Not just some regular pair of tits or a piece of ass! He promised to bring me a person I could hold as a very useful bargaining chip!"
"Whatever you wanted to use this... bargaining chip... for, surely there are alternative ways to reach your ultimate goal that someone else can get you? Who knows, perhaps I can help," Mycroft suggested breezily, outrageously giving Sherlock's very sore left arse cheek a firm squeeze, just to make it clear again to Ballan that this discussion was so unimportant to "Rajovic" that he would continue to molest his newly-purchased slut throughout it.
"N-no, you can't," Ballan stammered. "Influential as you are, you can't get me what Rousseau offered!"
"What exactly was the bastard offering you?" Mycroft asked, sounding irritated and impatient with Ballan for the first time.
"He wouldn't specify exactly who it was, but he promised to hand over to me a person who would be absolute gold, because he said that in exchange for this person's safety, I would be able to get some real serious big shot in both the British Secret Intelligence Service and the CIA to do as I wanted."
Sherlock froze. And Mycroft, apparently, thought that the tension in his body might make Ballan suspicious, because his fingers worked more devilry on Sherlock's perineum and scrotum, and his right hand pressed the remote to start the vibrator again, making Sherlock writhe and moan desperately once more even as his arousal-addled brain worked furiously: Had Rousseau truly planned to betray Sherlock to this American criminal so the latter could hold him hostage and use him to get to Mycroft? Would he have done so right away if he'd had the chance? Or would he have first used Sherlock to find out about the stolen teenager from Jan Binder, and then betrayed him to Chris Ballan?
"I see," Mycroft said flippantly. "What a shame. I suppose the person must be lying dead among his associates."
"Dammit!" Ballan snarled. "He promised me the person was of absolute real value. Fucking hell! This asset better not be dead – look, I heard you bought Rousseau's fuckboy. Is that him right there? If it's him, maybe he's the one Rousseau was talking about – maybe he's not just a whore, maybe he's related to someone important. I can do a deal with you – I'll buy him from you and find out exactly who he is, and if he turns out to be worthless, I'll just snuff him. If he's valuable, I'll give you a cut of whatever I get out of whoever the SIS and CIA mystery big shot is."
"Fine, fine, we can discuss terms," Mycroft muttered irritably. "But let the slut come first, won't you? He's very amusing."
Sherlock knew intellectually that of course Mycroft wasn't going to sell him to this bloody American, because that would be like selling Ballan a weapon to use against Mycroft himself. But it was getting really, really hard to keep faith in a brother who was sexually tormenting him right here and now, wringing another demeaning orgasm from him in front of several observers, albeit an unpleasant one in which his body was so emptied out that it was literally a very dry climax, with nothing more to spend – it didn’t even deposit anything more than a couple of easily brushed-off smears on Mycroft’s grey wool trousers.
"Let's talk in the other room with Volodymyr," Mycroft sighed, patting Sherlock's arse patronisingly (that made Sherlock more certain that it had been Mycroft who had touched his bottom earlier) and taking hold of the flared, flat base of the vibrator so he could remove the device from Sherlock – which he did very slowly. It was a tactic that had a double effect: It outwardly demonstrated to Ballan yet again that he was such a nobody to “Rajovic” that the latter would take his time unplugging his whore right in front of him; and privately, it was slow and gentle on Sherlock’s body in order not to damage him permanently.
At the same time as he signalled to his men to unhook Sherlock's ankle chains so that Mycroft could get up from the couch, he said uninterestedly to Ballan: "My men will show you the way first, I'll follow in a moment."
As Sherlock was lifted off his brother's lap and set on the floor, he saw Mycroft's men leading Ballan towards the door, from where they would ostensibly proceed to take him to Volodymyr's room. As Sherlock had noted earlier, this entryway to the stateroom was screened off so that people entering the room would have to go round a decorative panel which had obviously been put there so the aesthetic “reveal” of the large, luxurious room would be more impressive. The wooden panel, however, blocked that whole entry area off from the cameras fixed inside and outside the room.
And once Ballan reached this blind spot, developments occurred with startling rapidity. Sherlock watched in a daze from his sprawled position on the floor as three of Mycroft's men, in a split second, immobilised and incapacitated Ballan with sheer muscle power and a swift injection of tranquilisers. In less than 30 seconds, the men had stripped off Ballan's outerwear so it could be immediately donned by one of Mycroft's team members who was of a similar build and colouring to Ballan. The subordinate now dressed and posing as the guest walked out into the passageway with three of his colleagues, making it appear to the cameras in the corridor outside that Ballan was being shown to the other room. Two of Mycroft’s other men then picked Sherlock up and carried him to the doorway. There, they uncuffed and unchained him, and with his somewhat wobbly cooperation, they dressed him in the suit that had been shed by the team member now posing as Ballan. To complete the transformation, one of the team produced a wig from his suit pocket that resembled the hairstyle of the one whose suit he was wearing now, and fitted it over Sherlock's bleached hair. Someone else took the shackles and cuffs that had been on Sherlock, as well as the ball gag, and attached them all to the unconscious Ballan's body, while another team member brought a large sack to the doorway. Ballan, gagged, restrained and still out from the drugs, was put into the sack and slung over one of the musclemen's shoulders before being hauled out to the corridor. That way, it would appear to the cameras that Simon Devaux had just been put into a sack to be sold to Chris Ballan.
They all went to the suite where Ballan had supposedly gone to to talk business with Volodymyr. However, the real situation inside, as Sherlock saw, was that Jan Binder was now as unconscious as Ballan and slumped inside a collapsible cubicle beside a half-naked woman who had been posing as one of Volodymyr’s prostitutes, but who was in fact a CIA agent. Volodymyr, it seemed, had cleverly set up a trio of easily dismantled, curtain-fronted, changing-room-style cubicles in his suite on the pretence of offering his clients privacy with his girls. Once Jan Binder was inside one of the cubicles – and therefore out of view of the ubiquitous ship security cameras – the agent in it had tranquilised him.
Sherlock, having been blindfolded earlier, was getting his first look at Binder – an unhealthy-looking individual with sandy hair who was carrying too much weight, in all likelihood smoked and drank too much, and did too many drugs. But they had to work fast now, because Binder had been inside that cubicle for 10 minutes and counting, and if anyone from the organisers’ security team was truly paying close attention to every camera, they’d realise something was up as there was only so long that someone like Jan Binder would fuck a whore. Using the benefit of the fairly large number of men – eight – that Mycroft had brought with him, some sleight-of-body shuffling was done behind the cubicles. The most statuesque of the female CIA agents put on, along with a bunch of padding and a man’s wig, the suit worn by a subordinate of Mycroft’s who was bulky enough to pass as Binder, and who was now pulling on Binder’s clothes. Binder was bound, gagged, and tied up in a sack, then both the sacks, now holding the targets that Mycroft’s team had come for, were manoeuvred into the cages that the female “prostitutes” had been delivered in. These were wheeled out into the passageway, giving every appearance to anyone who might be watching that business was satisfactorily concluded, and that Ballan had purchased Simon Devaux from Rajovic, while Binder had bought a girl from Volodymyr.
Mycroft’s team and Volodymyr packed up, pulled on their coats, cleaned up and left the suites. Mycroft had confirmed that the choppers his team had ordered were approaching – the aircraft had taken off from a nearby CIA-chartered vessel earlier, once Mycroft’s team had gauged the timing from Ballan’s estimated moment of arrival at the stateroom. Mycroft and Sherlock, Volodymyr, the CIA agents masquerading as the latter’s two remaining chained-up whores, the third woman agent disguised as a male subordinate of Mycroft’s, and the rest of the team, including the two disguised as Ballan and Binder, strode out to the helipad on deck unmolested by all who feared Rajovic’s reputation. Two of Mycroft’s men had to walk very close to Sherlock to keep him steady on his feet, but he was feeling better by the minute.
It would get tricky only if Ballan’s subordinates who were waiting elsewhere on the ship should happen to spot them and challenge the person wearing their boss’ clothes, or get suspicious if they should hear from someone in security that their boss was apparently leaving together with Rajovic. But their entire group was swift enough in getting on deck and boarding the two Sikorskys they had ordered that no one stopped them. Mycroft, Sherlock, the one posing as Binder, the real Binder in a sack, and four of Mycroft’s other men boarded one helicopter; Volodymyr, his two “girls”, the woman posing as one of Mycroft's team, the one posing as Ballan, the real Ballan in a sack, and the final two members of Mycroft’s team boarded the other.
The moment they were in the air and bound for the CIA-chartered ship, one of the team handed Sherlock a bottle of drinking water and an energy bar. Sherlock couldn’t disguise the tremor in his arms as he lifted the water and the food to his mouth, but he didn’t care about looking weak now – he simply guzzled and ate as required to rehydrate himself and get his strength back. The roar of the whirring blades above them was too loud for anyone to bother with conversation, and this was a relief to him, because he didn’t know what he was supposed to say to Mycroft. They could have communicated wordlessly through infinitesimal gestures as they were so practised at reading each other, but right now, he couldn’t look at Mycroft, and Mycroft wasn’t looking at him either. He simply sat next to his brother, the side of his right thigh pressed flush against Mycroft’s left because of how cramped it was in the passenger compartment, and he noted the looks of disturbed awe on the faces of the team members with them. Obviously, Mycroft’s reputation as The Iceman would only be set in stone now, and his cachet would rise in British and American intelligence circles as the heartless, shadowy figure who wouldn’t hesitate to personally sexually torment even his own little brother in order to pull off a mission.
At the American-chartered vessel, Volodymyr and the CIA agents alighted with the still-unconscious Chris Ballan. Mycroft, Sherlock and his SIS team flew on to an SIS-chartered ship off France with the incapacitated Binder, then sailed close enough to the British coast for the refuelled helicopters to take them straight to Vauxhall. Sherlock wobbled a little as he stepped off onto the helipad in London, and Mycroft reached out to steady him, but he shook him off, muttering: “I’m fine.”
Mycroft wouldn’t have missed the fact that Sherlock had not only shaken him off, but had instinctively recoiled from him a second before that. While Mycroft always had debriefings as soon as possible after missions, on this occasion, he walked Sherlock immediately to the Vauxhall medical facility and insisted that he be seen by a doctor at once. The last thing Sherlock wanted was to take off his clothes and present his rear end to yet another person, but Mycroft and the doctor – as soon as she was given a rundown of the possible physical damage to Sherlock – were not taking no for an answer. Maybe it helped that Dr Booth was a woman, maybe it helped that she was very professional and calm about it, but Sherlock went through with it quietly. And it really helped that by the end of her examination, Dr Booth said that no permanent damage appeared to have been done – he had suffered some minor external abrasions in the anal region and around his wrists, ankles and neck, there were welts on his buttocks and bruising over his abdominals, and he might feel internally sore for a few days, but nothing appeared to be torn, nothing was broken, and he would heal fine if he followed her aftercare instructions strictly.
While he was undergoing the examination, Mycroft had apparently got someone – probably Anthea – to bring him one of the suits he kept in his Vauxhall office. He had changed, he was armed with his usual umbrella, and when Sherlock emerged from the doctor’s office, Mycroft had shed the aura of Mico Rajovic and was settling back into his own skin.
Without their exchanging another word, Mycroft took him straight to his car in the underground car park. Anthea was waiting beside the vehicle to receive a few instructions about starting the debrief with the team without Mycroft, and she gave Sherlock an unreadable glance when he winced upon climbing into the back seat. His brother got in after him once he had given Anthea his orders, and asked the driver to take them to the Baker Street flat. As the car began to move off, Anthea stood there in the car park for a few seconds, still gazing at Sherlock rather unreadably, though with his slowly-clearing cotton-wool brain, he thought as she receded into the distance behind them that she looked… concerned.
Once the privacy screen was up, Mycroft asked Sherlock very softly: “Are you all right?”
“I told you I’m fine,” he answered tersely.
“I’m sorry, Sherlock. We were being very closely watched.”
“There’s no need to repeat yourself. I got that the first time.”
After several minutes of tense silence, Sherlock asked sullenly: “Where’s the real Rajovic?”
“He’s been in CIA custody for 12 days, ever since he left his home base on one of his ‘business trips’, and I’ve been posing as him for ten days. Volodymyr is one of his closest associates, but what Rajovic didn’t know was that Volodmyr has been deep-cover CIA for years. We wanted Rajovic, and we wanted Ballan. So once we got Rajovic, I went in as him to get to Ballan.”
“Why you?” Sherlock queried coldly.
“Rajovic and I are of a similar age, height and build,” Mycroft said simply. “And thanks to my relatively recent mission to retrieve you from Serbia, I happen to speak Serbian too – conveniently enough for the SIS and CIA joint team working on this case.”
“How lovely for them,” Sherlock remarked sarcastically. And how bloody perfect was it that his incarceration in Serbia, which had haunted Sherlock for some time after, was now linked with this just-concluded case? Great. Two overseas missions where a Serbian-speaking Mycroft had definitely enjoyed watching him get tortured. Ah, no – make that one overseas mission where a Serbian-speaking Mycroft had definitely enjoyed watching him get tortured, and another where a Serbian-speaking Mycroft had definitely got enthusiastically into the spirit of torturing Sherlock himself.
“As for Rousseau, I’m sorry we didn’t get the intel in time that he was planning to betray you to Chris Ballan. Initially, all we knew was that the Ukrainians he had originally contacted were planning to kill him and everyone with him, so I had Anthea send you that text to warn you off. But it was only literally minutes before you landed on the ship that Volodymyr’s contacts got word of what Rousseau had promised Ballan. That was when I realised that Rousseau was going to betray you so that Ballan could use you to get to me – though at that point, of course, Ballan didn’t know who you would be, who I was, or that I was posing as Rajovic. Volodymyr and I had to take urgent steps to ensure that Rousseau said nothing – not a word – about your real identity,” Mycroft continued in a quiet, steady tone.”
“Maybe so, but he didn’t have to die,” Sherlock snapped, feeling the anger and the regret rising in him.
“Don’t waste any more tears on him,” Mycroft said imperturbably. “Volodymyr, the Ukrainians and I were not the only ones who had it in for Rousseau. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve gathered that Rousseau did in fact plan to get you to Jan Binder first so that you might be able to deduce where his secret base was, although he would have handed you over to Chris Ballan after that. From everything we’ve found out, it appears that he and his French group really did plan to rescue the kidnapped girl and return her to her family. And people in those circles had uncovered their plans – but nothing about you, thankfully. I don’t think he was as good as he’d thought he was at keeping things quiet. Many were displeased with what they regarded as an unprovoked betrayal of his fellow flesh traders. Retaliation is one thing, but initiating an act of betrayal is another. Even the organisers of the market closed both eyes to what was done to Rousseau and his friends. So, Sherlock, that French group were all dead men walking the moment they decided to turn against their associates.”
“You and Volodymyr were waiting outside the container when they were slaughtered,” Sherlock murmured, as much to himself as to Mycroft.
“We were. Volodymyr had managed to just hint to his friend wielding the knife that he knew someone who would be interested in purchasing Rousseau’s boyfriend, so we knew he would leave you to last to give us a chance to make an offer. In any case, we had visuals on what was transpiring inside, and I would have stepped in at any point at which it seemed that you were about to be killed. Having got you away from them, the Rajovic character I was playing could not in any way after that appear to be going easy on you, or it would have been extremely suspicious.”
Sherlock turned his face to the window and shuddered. He didn’t speak again for the rest of the ride, and Mycroft didn’t try to talk to him either.
It was with conflicted feelings that Sherlock realised, once they arrived at his flat, that Mycroft was going in with him. Although Mycroft's men had packed up his clothes and the contents of his pockets on the ship and left them for him at the Vauxhall clinic, Sherlock hadn’t taken his keys along with him on this case for security reasons, so he had to ring the bell. Mrs Hudson opened the street door for them and was about to gush happily at him, but one look at his pale-as-death face and Mycroft’s grim expression, and she quickly snapped her mouth shut and retreated.
Sherlock’s feelings became further conflicted upon noting that Mycroft, respecting his wish to not be touched by him, was nonetheless hovering a step behind him all the way up the stairs, clearly with the aim of catching him if he should fall. He was disturbed by how hyper-aware he was now of Mycroft’s physical proximity. And he felt a disharmonious mingling of contradictory feelings: instinctively knowing he could trust Mycroft completely and finding security in the familiarity of his presence, but at the same time reeling from the all-too-recent experience that was now screaming at his defence mechanisms to get as far away as he could from this fathomless man who had violated him.
The feeling of tension between them got slightly worse in some ways but was slightly eased in other ways when they made it up to the flat, where John, just coming out of the bathroom, greeted them in surprise and relief.
“Sherlock! I thought you wouldn’t be back until the day after tomorrow… my god, you look awful. Are you all right?”
Sherlock lowered himself into his armchair and flinched. He’d done his best not to, yet he found himself wincing in exactly the same way he had upon climbing into the car, and John grimaced in sympathy at the pain he was indisputably in. He had forbidden John to join him on this case because it had needed absolute discretion, boldfaced lies, audacious acting skills and plenty of shadiness, and the doctor would have stuck out like a beacon. However, John clearly regretted being talked out of going with him now that he saw the state Sherlock was in.
“Okay, how badly hurt are you?” his friend asked worriedly. “Would you like me to have a look…?”
“I’ve seen the Vauxhall doctor,” Sherlock interrupted. “Since I was already there, I was examined, and I’m fine… I’ll be back to normal in a few days.”
“All right…” John said cautiously. “… then, did you find the girl?”
“We have the man who took her,” Sherlock said. “Mycroft’s interrogators are working him over. He will talk.”
“Hang on,” John said. “I thought you said you didn’t want Mycroft to know a thing about this case, yet here your brother is now, and his interrogators have the man?”
“It turned out that Sherlock and I were working on closely related cases,” Mycroft stated.
“And your French liaison?” John asked Sherlock. “Is he back in Paris?”
“Didier Rousseau is dead,” Sherlock said flatly.
“Good god,” John gasped. “How… why…”
“Suffice to say that Rousseau had ideas of his own about what would happen, and did not share those details with Sherlock,” Mycroft interjected firmly and coolly. “He came to an unpleasant end for his duplicity – and a good measure of stupidity.”
“He was double-crossing Sherlock?” John asked Mycroft, a tense edge to his voice.
“You could say that,” Mycroft replied neutrally. “Well, I have to return to Vauxhall now for the debriefing. Sherlock, please take care of your… injuries. I’ll inform you when we get details out of Jan Binder about the girl. We will work fast, I assure you. We’re aware that if he’s left her locked up alone, she may soon run out of water and food.”
Sherlock didn’t care to respond to Mycroft. He sensed reluctance and hesitation on his brother’s part to leave him like this, but he didn’t care about Mycroft’s bloody feelings at present. The expression of contempt and dismissal that reflexively crossed his mind to convey just how he felt about his brother right now was “Fuck you”, but that hit so close to the bone that he had to consciously swat the thought away as another shudder ran through him.
He was, once again, hyper-aware of the sound of every step Mycroft took down the stairs, the opening and closing of the street door, and the estimated time needed for the car to pull away from the pavement and depart.
He was gone.
Sherlock was now left to give John an idea of how things had gone down – without telling him a single thing about exactly what Mycroft had had to do to him to keep up the charade on the ship. He was vague about what injuries he’d sustained, describing events in such a way that led John to believe he had been hurt when the Ukrainian gang had attacked him and the French group and almost killed him.
“So Mycroft did save your life – again,” John let out a breath of relief when Sherlock had told him the sanitised version of all he was prepared to tell.
Sherlock looked at his friend in silence, couldn’t find a single word that seemed safe to utter, and apparently looked so out of it that John immediately ordered him to take a quick shower and go straight to bed, because “you honestly look awful, Sherlock”.
In the bathroom, he washed himself as efficiently and clinically as he could, trying not to linger on the sore spots all around his body or allow his mind to drift to speculating on the mystifying reasons why Rousseau would sketch so many drawings of him when he’d planned to sell him to Chris Ballan – remorse? Contrition? No, don’t go there. Stop thinking.
He avoided looking at himself in the bathroom mirror as he applied the antiseptics and the anti-inflammatory cream Dr Booth had prescribed. Then he wrapped himself in the softest sleepwear he had that wouldn’t chafe his skin and returned to his room. He paused and leaned against the door frame of his bedroom long enough to patiently listen to John telling him he would prepare some soup so Sherlock could have something easy on his stomach when he woke up, then he thanked John, closed and locked the door (because he needed to be behind a locked door right now), and pulled the covers right up to his chin as he curled up into a ball in his bed.
But as he attempted to drift off into sleep, he found that foremost in his mind of everything he had seen and heard and smelt and felt in the recent hours of his life were those minutes he had spent chained down over Mycroft’s lap on the stateroom couch as his brother had fondled him intimately in front of everyone there, and how Sherlock had felt – pressed against his right hip – the raging, rock-hard erection Mycroft had sported by the end of it.
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