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There was nothing poetic about Sebastian. Even his artiforg was just a liver, making him one more in the statistics of alcoholics who had to get a replacement, which by extension made him a statistic in the pool of repo men who drank on a more-than-regular bases. No, Sebastian Moran was never cut out for much more than drinking and slicing, grateful that repo didn’t exactly require a surgeon’s steady hand; not really any dissatisfied customers to worry about when it came to this job.
Or rather, that job. Past tense. Because while Sebastian wasn’t exactly a great work of literature, he did have a weakness for words, and Sherlock Holmes was pure poetry. He was the kind of man you don’t expect to be real, a work of unbelievable fiction that turns out to be surprisingly true. But there he went again, getting ahead of himself. He should probably explain what the big deal about the prat was, shouldn’t he?
The first time Sebastian had come across Holmes was a dreary February afternoon, bumping into him on the crowded street. He had learned to live with the wide berth most civilians gave him while he walked down the street; they saw the five lines and logo tattooed onto his neck and instantly wilted away from him, like some sort of plant in the face of weed killer. And yet Sherlock Holmes had pushed right into him, completely unconcerned. Of course, he didn’t know who he was just yet; that came later.
The next time was in April, and Sebastian had been sent to repossess the man’s lungs, replaced at a relatively young age in the face of cancer. Sherlock, however, had decided that he wasn’t ready to give them up and is, to this day, the only target to ever escape from Sebastian Moran.
It was May when he had his liver surgery, the new organ feeling like a lead weight in his abdomen at first. It only took a month for him to get back in the game. But July was the next time he and Sherlock crossed paths, and the beginning of the end for them both.
What stopped him initially was the repetitive pinging of the scanner, picking up ten artiforgs needing repossession in an alleyway. He turned down it and thought he would find a handful of junkies hiding from the police, but was met with the sight of one unconscious man, the man who had gotten away all those months ago. Maybe he was being sentimental, and maybe it was stupid. Okay, it was really stupid, Sebastian knew that. But he was fascinated; no one else had ever evaded him the way Sherlock had, and damn if that didn’t make him worth trying to save.
So the repo man brought him back to his flat, set him up in bed and watched over him as he made his way through the steps of withdrawal. Even the way he thrashed and arched as he fought through it was beautiful to Sebastian, and he did what he could to make the process as easy as possible. In the moments when the addict was sleeping, Sebastian traced the track marks on his arms and tried to guess how he had ended up needing each of the artiforgs, the lungs being the only ones he knew the story behind.
Two lungs, two eyes, one knee, one hip, one elbow, liver, pancreas, and his heart. Christ, he was almost more machine than man. He told Sherlock that once; he just agreed with Sebastian and didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Do you see what he meant about the poetry though? Perfectly sculpted face with cheekbones alone that could slice you, porcelain skin, dark curls, bright blue-green eyes, tall, slender. And don’t even get him started on the artificial heart; that alone could fill a few pages of a notebook with philosophical musings on the man’s misanthropic view of the world.
But the one organ that Sebastian loved the most about Sherlock was the one that was all natural: his brain. All that harsh beauty and cold demeanor housed the most stunning mind Sebastian had ever encountered. He supposed that this, more than Sherlock’s outward appearance, had been their downfall in the end. After Sherlock made it through the withdrawal, Sebastian insisted that he stay. Hiding out in a repo man’s house was an excellent cover, after all, and every one of Sherlock’s organs were either overdue or illegally acquired. He was lucky he was still alive as it was.
Sebastian’s nights were spent butchering the poor, but his days belonged to Sherlock, to talking and learning about his world, about how he had been disowned by his wealthy family for the drug habits and ended up on the streets, taken back in just long enough to pay the past-due balance on his lungs and finance a new heart after an overdose. One by one, he acquired organs and addictions like most people acquired friends. Nicotine, cocaine, sex, alcohol, always cycling through until he hit rock bottom and needed one or another organ replaced, beginning again as soon as he recovered from the surgery. Sherlock said his mind was a curse, all these ideas and no way to execute them, no degree to get a job with and put himself to work.
Things could have gone on just fine, until the night he came home and found Sherlock with another needle. He had tried so damned hard to get the brilliant man clean, had bought him cigarettes to at least indulge that addiction and had sat with him through all the physical trauma of withdrawal. They shouted at each other, screaming until the moment when the screaming stopped, the needle dropping from Sherlock’s hand as Sebastian kissed him silent. Their first night together wasn’t anything like flowery prose, but rather choppy modern verse, hard and fast and impulsive on the floor of the living room.
It wasn’t until after that night that Sebastian started having problems. Repossessing a pair of lungs? He could only think of the lazy rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest when they laid in bed together. Dark hair on the intended victim? He recalled his own hand tangled in Sherlock’s curls as he kissed up his neck. And god forbid he go anywhere near a heart repossession; it made him sick when he remembered the way Sherlock’s heart sounded, beating strongly despite the fact that it should have been repossessed. All of these resulted in incomplete jobs, walking away, passing it off to the next person.
This would have been alright, but without repo jobs, Sebastian had no money. Without money, Sebastian had no way to pay for his liver, and it didn’t take someone as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes to predict where that would lead them both.