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Yes, I know. I've never written Lewis fanfic before, and I haven't actually seen the show in a while either. It's just there was this prompt on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
comment_fic, and for some reason it sparked for me? *shakes head* Just ... warnings in advance, yes? Probably shaky knowledge of canon, a much heavier subject matter than usual, and I'm not at all sure this fic isn't just a mess -_-;
Title: St Michael at the North Gate
Rating: R
Fandom: Lewis (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Laura Hobson, Robbie Lewis, James Hathaway, Jean Innocent. Robbie/James, Laura & Robbie, Laura & Jean
Summary: As the result of a case gone wrong, James Hathaway is poisoned with a purification potion in order to purge him of his 'sins'. Laura and Jean have to pick up the pieces when Robbie decides James isn't going through it alone
Wordcount: 4373
Warnings/Notes: Urban Fantasy AU. Also homophobia, religious fanaticism, poisoning and the threat of death -_-;
Disclaimer: Oh, so much not mine
comment_fic, and for some reason it sparked for me? *shakes head* Just ... warnings in advance, yes? Probably shaky knowledge of canon, a much heavier subject matter than usual, and I'm not at all sure this fic isn't just a mess -_-;Title: St Michael at the North Gate
Rating: R
Fandom: Lewis (TV)
Characters/Pairings: Laura Hobson, Robbie Lewis, James Hathaway, Jean Innocent. Robbie/James, Laura & Robbie, Laura & Jean
Summary: As the result of a case gone wrong, James Hathaway is poisoned with a purification potion in order to purge him of his 'sins'. Laura and Jean have to pick up the pieces when Robbie decides James isn't going through it alone
Wordcount: 4373
Warnings/Notes: Urban Fantasy AU. Also homophobia, religious fanaticism, poisoning and the threat of death -_-;
Disclaimer: Oh, so much not mine
St Michael at the North Gate
"Look, I don't care where it came from, will someone just tell me what the bloody thing is?!"
Robbie stalked the length of the waiting room, turning on his heel to face back towards them, fists clenched and chest heaving slightly. Laura glanced swiftly at Jean, seeing in her superior the muted flinch that wanted to show in her own face. Robbie, glaring between them, saw it too. It didn't look to have improved his mood any.
Laura took a deep breath, her gaze flicking instinctively to the entrance of the isolation ward, flinching away again almost immediately. Dwelling on it wasn't going to make saying this any easier.
"We can't be completely sure," she started carefully. "It's a very, very old draught, and there's no telling what contaminants have been introduced in the years since it was brewed. What we have is only guesswork, and most of it based on psychological profiling rather than chemical or aetheric analysis. Toxicology haven't been able to give us a definitive breakdown yet, and the forensic alchemy department aren't doing much better."
"For God's sake!" Robbie interrupted, temper flaring as his patience audibly snapped. "What are they doing down there, looking at in between tea breaks! Best forensic department in the county my arse. Bunch of useless ..."
"Robbie!" Laura shouted, more than a little shocked. Only a bare second behind her came Jean's: "Detective Inspector Lewis!" Robbie abruptly deflated, the anger draining away about as rapidly as his patience had earlier. Behind it, just for a second, there was a flash of a quiet, terrified desperation, a memory and anticipation of grief. Then experience took over as Robbie managed to cobble his 'impassive detective' facade back together and stand to something approximating attention.
Laura flinched. She wasn't sure if she liked the fact that one snap from the Chief Superintendent took the wind out of his sails better than the reasoning of a friend. More importantly, though, she wasn't sure if she liked the wind being taken out of his sails at all.
"We don't have an exact analysis," she repeated gently, when he'd managed to calm down enough to look at her again. She bit her lip, keeping her voice even and professional, but after all these years he could see the sympathy beneath it, the way her heart reached out to him. "But our best guess ... It's not good, Robbie. It's ... It's really not good."
There was a hand at her arm, then, a gentle grip tugging her back a step, and Jean stepped forward between her and Robbie. Drawing together a professional mask much like Robbie's, Chief Superintendent Innocent giving information to one of her men. Robbie stiffened, but Laura thought he might be a little grateful for the facade of formality it offered for him to hide behind.
"The susp--" Jean stopped, warned by the flare in Robbie's eyes. Started again, as clearly and firmly as if she'd never stopped. "The perpetrator is a known affiliate of an organisation known as the Order of Bocardo. It was named after the prison in which the Oxford Martyrs where held in 1555. If you know the history, you know they were ..."
"Tried for heresy," Robbie finished, brow furrowing for a second with the effort of memory and then ... then it cleared as realisation dawned, and behind it came a slow build of horror. "They were condemned to death and burned at the stake for heresy."
Laura pressed her lips together, trying to keep her breathing steady as she brought the train of thought to its logical conclusion. "With the degradation we can't be a hundred percent certain, but given the history and James' symptoms ... It's probable that he was given a purification potion, Robbie. One of the old ones, designed to ... to purge a man of his sins."
"By fire and suffering," Robbie growled out, something dark and terribly bleak spreading across his expression. A cold and shaking thing that Laura hadn't seen since Valerie's death, or those black days after Morse. At the sight of it, she quivered in spite of herself.
"... Yes," Jean answered, tiredly and heavily, when Laura couldn't bring herself to. "Suffering without an antidote, or a cure." She slumped a little, less the superintendent now and more the woman, the tired friend. "What was the rationale? 'If a man has the strength of soul to shed his sins and walk through fire back to the light, he shall be spared. If not, then the fires shall carry him down to Hell, there to spend eternity'. It's a test. Sutcliff even seems to believe he's done James a favour. That he's offered him a chance to rid himself of ..."
"Of what?" Robbie spat, the question wrenched out of him, angry and desperate. "James isn't a bloody heretic! He's not ..."
He stopped, squeezing his eyes shut as that revelation hit home too. As he realised what James was, what Hathaway was that someone like Sutcliff and his ilk might take exception to and think needed to be 'purified'. Laura watched with desperate grief as Robbie finally recognised the shape of what had happened, and why.
"... I'm going to see him," he said at last, opening his eyes. His voice was thick and careful, but it was very calm. Distantly, almost serenely calm. Oh no. No, that wasn't good ...
Jean agreed. "Our best interrogators have already questioned him, Lewis. Sutcliff isn't going to give us anything else that will be of use, and you killing him won't help Hathaway."
Robbie blinked at her, slow and startled, then contemptuous. "Not Sutcliff," he growled, his almost normal expression of aggravation all the more alarming for knowing there was nothing 'normal' about what he was feeling right that moment. "I'm going to see James, Chief Superindendent." A dangerous narrowing of his eyes. "And before you say anything, you really don't want to try and stop me right now, ma'am."
"Robbie," Laura cut in rapidly, stepping hurriedly up beside Jean. She didn't hold out a hand to him. She knew he wouldn't react well to that. Not now. "The potion was old, and potentially extremely unstable. It has to be ingested for the initial reaction, but once the burning has started this is a risk of contact contamination." She curled her hands desperately. "If you go in there now, if you touch him, there's a strong chance that the reaction will spread to you. If you go in there, we could lose you both."
And oh. It wasn't anger that flushed through him then. Not at her. She saw it, she was looking right at it. That same expression from Valerie, from Morse. That grief and pain, that desperate, gnawing knowledge of failure. That shame. That's what she saw.
Oh, Robbie.
"... If they're killing him for the reason we think," he said heavily, "then they bloody ought to have given it to both of us in the first place. You know that, Laura." He smiled, crooked and bitter, his eyes carefully dry. "Better than anyone else, you know that."
Beside her, Laura felt Jean stiffen. Robbie held his smile, a small flag of defiance, as his superior officer registered the admission, the confession he'd just made in front of her. He tilted his chin, stubborn and defiant and everything she'd always loved about him, and Laura felt herself silently start to cry.
"I've wondered for a while," Jean said slowly. Her gaze narrow and heavy on Robbie, cutting as a laser. "I wondered, but I didn't really think ..." She stopped, frowned. "Sutcliff knew. He was hinting at it in interrogation. That Hathaway had been dragging others after him into sin, that he'd been corrupting those around him. How could he have known that? I didn't know for sure, how did the bastard ..."
But Robbie wasn't listening, Laura thought. Robbie had slammed upright like someone had shoved a rod down his spine, his expression flashing from pained defiance straight into alarm. He stepped forward, right in Jean's space, and ignored her faint flash of consternation as she fell silent.
"Did he say that?" he snapped out, grabbing at her upper arms in distress. "I don't mean in interview. Did he say that to James?"
Jean blinked, shaking her head. She stumbled back a little, letting Laura catch her. "I don't ... I don't know, Lewis. I ... He certainly had Hathaway long enough to force him to ingest the potion in the first place. I suppose it's possible ..."
"That daft bugger," Robbie growled, comprehension and grief and pity flying across his features, and then something different. An anger, not at himself but at someone else, bright and clean and vitalising. Laura blinked at him, but all his focus had turned from them. Inward, into himself. And past the door behind them, towards the man they were all thinking about. "That bloody idiot, I'm going to kill him."
He released Jean, spinning on his heel, and bolted without another word through the door to the isolation ward. Laura staggered a little at the change in weight, stumbling as she and Jean tried to stay upright, and then she stood for a moment, damp-faced and stunned, and just looked at the other woman. Her superior officer, a dim part of her brain noted, one she still had her arms around. Jean looked back at her, as alarmed and confused and, underneath it, as pained as she was. Together, they simply blinked for a moment.
And then, wordlessly and entirely in unison, they bolted after Robert.
The door to the - we'll call it a 'chamber', Laura thought, even if 'cell' seems more appropriate - the chamber they'd put James into had been thrown open, a strange golden light already spilling out of it into the hall. There was an orderly on the floor in front of it, looking more than a little stunned and also like he was trying to decide whether or not to be angry about the position he found himself in and the man who'd undoubtedly put him there. Jean, with a flash of her badge, silently warned him that that would not be a good idea.
Not that their idea was any better, possibly, but at this point they were past caring. Laura looked once more at Jean and then, silently, and instinctively side by side, they stepped through the door and looked for Robbie.
It was James they saw first, though. James that anyone would see first, on entering that room. The lanky body shining with a golden light, tendrils of alchemical flame flowing in ribbons across it, luminous and almost opalescent as they wreathed him. No-one could have looked away, not even with the agonised form of their friend standing frozen before him, a penitent before a saint.
It would have been beautiful, Laura thought distantly, around the wall of shock. The silent, shimmering play of light across pale features, the thin, ascetic face made luminous and saintlike by the fire. It might have been beautiful, had James not so visibly been in agony. His limbs contorted, twisted by spasms and shaking as he pressed himself back against the wall. Blood dripped steadily down his chin, lurid in the firelight from the lip he'd bitten through. His eyes were sunken back into their sockets, stark and staring in a face that already looked like a skull. And more than that, deeper than anything, his expression was one of terror.
A sob ripped its way out of her chest before she could stop it, wrenched from her unbidden, and she clapper her hands upward over her mouth. It made no difference. The sound had already broken the tableau, shocked Robbie out of his stunned, horrified stupor, and nothing Laura might have done after that made a damn bit of difference as he stepped forward and James tried to shrink away in front of him.
"Don't," he rasped, raising a warding hand against Robbie, a flash of his own quiet, hardened determination coming to the fore. James wasn't fragile, however much he seemed it sometimes. There was a stubborn bastard in there somewhere, enough to glare right into Robbie's anger and match it all the way down. "Contagion effect, sir. I wouldn't ... I wouldn't advise touching me."
Sir, he said, glancing back at Jean for good measure. The sergeant to his inspector in front of a superior officer, and the rational scholar explaining facts to the layman. Two boundaries slammed up between them in under three words, a desperate and rather vicious gambit. James, it seemed, was fighting more than a little dirty.
Which was unfortunate, Laura thought, as a pair of shoulders tightened dangerously in front of her. James ought to know better than that. If there was one thing Robbie didn't appreciate ...
"You know something?" Robbie asked at last, in a voice that shook with suppressed anger. "There are times when for such an educated man, you come across as a blithering idiot." He snarled in frustration and stalked forward, ignoring how James tried to bully wrenched, shaking limbs into retreating away from him. "Of all the people you could bloody listen to, you pick a religious fanatic who's head is still stuck in the middle ages?!"
James blinked, fetching up into the corner of his cell, hands clawing at the wall behind him without much in the way of conscious instruction from his mind. For a moment, despite the ravaged agony clouding his eyes, there was a spark of his usual self.
"Early Modern period, technically," he murmured, a stiff, bloody grin appearing on his face at Robbie's resulting expression. "The Order of Bocardo was formed in the late 16th century, sir, making them ..."
"I don't care," Robbie snarled, effectively cutting him off, and Laura watched James falter. Watched him realise, at that uncharacteristic surge of temper, just exactly how upset Robbie was. She watched the pain flood through him in response, not the alchemical agony of the potion but something much deeper, more devastating.
There had always been an edge of guilt in James, a tangled ball of pain and shame and the desperate desire to preserve others regardless of the cost to himself. Since he and Robbie had started working together, even before they had both realised just how much they meant to each other, that general protective instinct had been changing. Laura had watched it, had watched James bend himself, entirely unwittingly, from someone with a vague and desperate desire to defend the world into someone with a much more defined and specified mission, with a much, much more specific target. Not to solve all the evils of the world, but to stand beside one man as he fought whatever evils that came within their reach, and to prevent that man from ever, ever being touched by them.
He believed it, she realised with a surge of dismay. What Sutcliff had told him, the accusation that James had lured another into sin, tainted someone else with his own weakness. James believed that. That was what Robbie had realised outside, what had sent him bolting in here like the hounds of hell were after him. James believed that Sutcliff was right. So James ... wasn't fighting. Cure or no cure, so long as James had believed there was something to fight for, he would have. All the way to the end. But he didn't. And because of that ...
Robbie held out a hand. Silently, suddenly, having fought his own temper down, having struggled through his own agony enough to think rationally again. Facing James, the burning, beautiful wreck of him, Robbie walked that final step closer, almost enough to touch, and silently held out his hand, challenge and entreaty all at once.
James shook his head, closing his eyes as a shudder wracked him, fresh blood spilling from his lip. He turned his head, curved it into the wall at his side, and made no move to reach back.
Robbie nodded to himself, strangely calm, strangely serene. As though James had done no more than he'd expected, and with that accounted for there was only one thing left to do. He didn't look back, didn't turn his head to look at Laura or Jean, standing half-petrified behind him. He simply shook his head, a sigh of exasperation slipping out of him, and then ...
Then he stepped forward, slipping one arm around James' waist and the other hand around the nape of his neck, and tugged the shaking bundle of limbs against his chest.
James flinched, full-bodied as his eyes snapped open, a wordless cry of dismay spilling out of him. The fires flooded across Robbie almost instantly, pale gold ropes lashing them together and tying James immovably against his chest, and James heaved backwards. His hands bit into Robbie's shoulders, limbs twisting desperately as he struggled like an animal caught in a trap, trying to throw himself away from his partner. Robbie only wrapped himself tighter around him, pulling him closer than even the fire could manage.
"Did you think I'd bloody well let you walk into hell alone?" he asked softly, steady and pained beside James' ear, the hand cupping James' neck tight and desperate. "For pity's sake, you idiot. There are a lot of things I'd hesitate to do for you, but walking into the fire isn't one of them."
James went still, startled and exhausted. He sagged, a slow collapse of pained limbs against the body beneath him, and Robbie bore him up, casually and completely. "You ... you don't understand. Sir ..."
"Don't." A command, cold and clipped. If James looked exhausted, Robbie sounded it. "Just don't. I'm not a bloody infant, alright? I'm not a child to be led astray, or whatever that voice in the back of your head's been telling you. I'm damn near an old man, I'm a bloody good policeman, and I'm a stubborn, suspicious bastard to boot. If I end up in Hell, it's because I decided to, not because some ... some wet behind the ears, Cambridge-educated intellectual went and tricked me into it!"
There was a pause, bright and desperate while Laura pressed her hands against her mouth, something wild and pained in her own chest. Then James lowered his head, resting his forehead slowly and carefully against Robbie's. His mouth curled faintly, wry and trembling.
"... Wet behind the ears?" he asked, leaning into Robbie in a flow of painted gold, tremors rippling through the both of them now. The question was light, admonishing. Playful, for all the bright wires of pain ripping through them. Robbie's breath hitched, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"Alright," he agreed, nodding their heads gently together. "It won't be because an annoyingly intelligent and irritatingly close-mouthed detective sergeant tricked me into it." A faint smirk. "Better?"
James mumbled something largely incoherent, his eyes slipping closed again as ... as the light intensified through him, as the witchfires flared up across the both of them. Robbie staggered a little, leaning forward and pushing James against the wall to let it help hold them up. Laura, unnoticed, bit back a cry, biting down on the web of her thumb.
"... Blast it," Robbie muttered, sighing softly as James crumpled against him, an odd look of peace on the younger man's face. "Hang on, James. Just ... hang on, alright? I'm coming too. Whatever bloody happens." His voice broke, snapped on a pain that had nothing to do with the potion and everything to do with that old bleakness inside him. "I've had to bury two people I love. I'm not bloody burying you."
They sank down to the floor, curled around each other, and Laura broke. She couldn't bear it, couldn't watch them shatter apart beside each other. Eyes blurring, she wheeled around and dove through the door, staggering in the hallway and pulling herself up against the wall beside the cell. Out of that damned golden light, into the shadow in its lee, where she could break down in something resembling peace.
After a moment, a hesitant arm wrapped itself around her waist, taking some of her weight off the wall. Laura choked down a breath, looking up to find Jean staring down at her. There was nothing stern or official left in the woman's face, nothing of the policewoman. Just sympathy, raw and pained, and the first stirrings of grief. And ... and something else, Laura thought. A glimmer of challenge, something of the iron-willed, battle-clad woman who'd fought her way to the position of Chief Superintendent.
"You know, there have been reports of people who survived purification potions," she said, holding Laura's gaze with soft intensity. "People who 'shed their sins'. I've read about some of them. About warlords who'd murdered thousands of people in their campaigns, who were poisoned with one of these potions and somehow didn't react at all. People who burned with golden fire and didn't die. People who were regarded as saints or dragons or gods. Pure, no matter how monstrous their actions had been."
Laura blinked at her, shaking her head. "I don't ... I don't understand," she murmured, struggling to re-engage her analytical mind, struggling to shove grief back far enough to understand what Jean was saying. Jean simply smiled at her. Not a nice smile, not an easy smile. Hard and fierce, instead. The kind of smile a commander would offer their troops before battle.
"Potions are just ... alchemy. Magic and raw ingredients, nothing more, right?" She pulled them up at Laura's nod, steadied them more firmly on their feet. "Well, how does a potion know what sin is? How does it know what morality is? It's just a force of nature, like any other. It's just a reaction. So how does it know?"
Laura blinked, shaking her head to clear it. Waking up, her scientist's mind jolting forward, clawing her way back from the wall of grief and light inside the room behind them.
"It ... It can't," she murmured, thinking it out. Angry at herself all of a sudden. The best forensic pathologist in Oxford, honestly. She shouldn't have needed a lecture on alchemy from a chief superintendent, for pity's sake! "But then ..."
"I think," Jean said slowly, staring at her in challenge and defiance and the slow build of something that might have been hope, "I think it must work like interrogation. It can't tell what sin is, sin's just an abstract concept. But there are things that leave a physical and aetheric signature on a body. Thoughts, emotions." She smiled, tight and grim. "An officer in interrogation mightn't be able to identify a crime sight-unseen. But he can sure as hell identify guilt."
"... Of course," Laura murmured. "Of course. Shedding your sins. Absolving yourself of guilt. Magic has always been sensitive to the emotions of those it acts through. It would register the guilt of an accused person ... the emotional change when they 'absolved' themselves ..."
"And in a person who had never felt guilt at all," Jean finished grimly. "A monster, like those pure saints, psychopaths who never saw what they'd done as crimes at all. The potion would have no effect."
Laura swallowed, wiping her hand across her mouth. She was conscious of her back pressed against the wall, of the two men in the room behind it, the light still spilling from the doorway. She closed her eyes, a small wave of despair going through her again.
"But what does that fix?" she asked quietly. A laugh bubbling up from somewhere, pained and fond. "I've never met a pair of idiots more stubbornly determined to feel guilty for things they couldn't change. If guilt is what this thing is looking for, they're in about a hundred times more trouble than if it was some blasted 'sin' someone's looking to punish them for."
Jean was silent for a second. Watching the play of light across the floor, watching as the golden fires dimmed a little in the room beyond. Laura, following her gaze, felt her breath freeze in her chest. She gasped, she must have, and Jean looked back at her.
"Maybe," Chief Superindentent Innocent, Jean, said softly. "Maybe it would only damn them faster. But ... But I think I've seen more courage and willingness to fight in those two in the past few years than I've ever seen in either of them before. I've seen them get into more trouble and drag each other out of more pits than just about any other pair under my command." She shook her head, wry and knowing. "In hindsight, I really oughtn't to have been surprised about their relationship. If anyone could get through to either of them ..."
"I know," Laura murmured, smiling softly herself and trying not to feel like the surge of humour was a memorial to them. Like a wake in celebration of their lives. "Robbie's been more alive since James than I thought I'd ever see him after Valerie's death. And there's no doubt he's probably saved James' sanity a time or two as well."
"Mmm. At the cost of a few other people's," Jean noted, but her eyes were creased in rueful humour. "But that's beside the point. The point is ..."
The point was that if anyone was going to pull James out of the hell of his guilt, it would be Robbie. And if anyone was going to pull Robbie out of that black, bleak pit that had swallowed him after Morse and after Valerie, it was going to be James. So all in all ...
All in all, perhaps the odds weren't so bad after all.
The bar of light across the hall floor faded, dimming to nothing and vanishing beside them. Laura looked at Jean, seeing the echo of her own hope and desperation and stark terror in the other woman's eyes. She tried a smile, a shaky, terrified thing, and tilted her head towards the door in silent question. Jean straightened up, drawing that same policewoman's armour around her as she had in the face of Robbie's grief, and Laura, more shakily, pulled herself up beside her.
And then, arm in arm and side by side, they walked back towards the door and went to see how much hope and the stubbornness of policemen counted for.
A/N: The Order of Bocardo is, as far as I know, something I just made up on the spot. The Oxford Martyrs, however, were very real, as was Bocardo Prison (located near the church of St Michael at the North Gate, hence the title).
"Look, I don't care where it came from, will someone just tell me what the bloody thing is?!"
Robbie stalked the length of the waiting room, turning on his heel to face back towards them, fists clenched and chest heaving slightly. Laura glanced swiftly at Jean, seeing in her superior the muted flinch that wanted to show in her own face. Robbie, glaring between them, saw it too. It didn't look to have improved his mood any.
Laura took a deep breath, her gaze flicking instinctively to the entrance of the isolation ward, flinching away again almost immediately. Dwelling on it wasn't going to make saying this any easier.
"We can't be completely sure," she started carefully. "It's a very, very old draught, and there's no telling what contaminants have been introduced in the years since it was brewed. What we have is only guesswork, and most of it based on psychological profiling rather than chemical or aetheric analysis. Toxicology haven't been able to give us a definitive breakdown yet, and the forensic alchemy department aren't doing much better."
"For God's sake!" Robbie interrupted, temper flaring as his patience audibly snapped. "What are they doing down there, looking at in between tea breaks! Best forensic department in the county my arse. Bunch of useless ..."
"Robbie!" Laura shouted, more than a little shocked. Only a bare second behind her came Jean's: "Detective Inspector Lewis!" Robbie abruptly deflated, the anger draining away about as rapidly as his patience had earlier. Behind it, just for a second, there was a flash of a quiet, terrified desperation, a memory and anticipation of grief. Then experience took over as Robbie managed to cobble his 'impassive detective' facade back together and stand to something approximating attention.
Laura flinched. She wasn't sure if she liked the fact that one snap from the Chief Superintendent took the wind out of his sails better than the reasoning of a friend. More importantly, though, she wasn't sure if she liked the wind being taken out of his sails at all.
"We don't have an exact analysis," she repeated gently, when he'd managed to calm down enough to look at her again. She bit her lip, keeping her voice even and professional, but after all these years he could see the sympathy beneath it, the way her heart reached out to him. "But our best guess ... It's not good, Robbie. It's ... It's really not good."
There was a hand at her arm, then, a gentle grip tugging her back a step, and Jean stepped forward between her and Robbie. Drawing together a professional mask much like Robbie's, Chief Superintendent Innocent giving information to one of her men. Robbie stiffened, but Laura thought he might be a little grateful for the facade of formality it offered for him to hide behind.
"The susp--" Jean stopped, warned by the flare in Robbie's eyes. Started again, as clearly and firmly as if she'd never stopped. "The perpetrator is a known affiliate of an organisation known as the Order of Bocardo. It was named after the prison in which the Oxford Martyrs where held in 1555. If you know the history, you know they were ..."
"Tried for heresy," Robbie finished, brow furrowing for a second with the effort of memory and then ... then it cleared as realisation dawned, and behind it came a slow build of horror. "They were condemned to death and burned at the stake for heresy."
Laura pressed her lips together, trying to keep her breathing steady as she brought the train of thought to its logical conclusion. "With the degradation we can't be a hundred percent certain, but given the history and James' symptoms ... It's probable that he was given a purification potion, Robbie. One of the old ones, designed to ... to purge a man of his sins."
"By fire and suffering," Robbie growled out, something dark and terribly bleak spreading across his expression. A cold and shaking thing that Laura hadn't seen since Valerie's death, or those black days after Morse. At the sight of it, she quivered in spite of herself.
"... Yes," Jean answered, tiredly and heavily, when Laura couldn't bring herself to. "Suffering without an antidote, or a cure." She slumped a little, less the superintendent now and more the woman, the tired friend. "What was the rationale? 'If a man has the strength of soul to shed his sins and walk through fire back to the light, he shall be spared. If not, then the fires shall carry him down to Hell, there to spend eternity'. It's a test. Sutcliff even seems to believe he's done James a favour. That he's offered him a chance to rid himself of ..."
"Of what?" Robbie spat, the question wrenched out of him, angry and desperate. "James isn't a bloody heretic! He's not ..."
He stopped, squeezing his eyes shut as that revelation hit home too. As he realised what James was, what Hathaway was that someone like Sutcliff and his ilk might take exception to and think needed to be 'purified'. Laura watched with desperate grief as Robbie finally recognised the shape of what had happened, and why.
"... I'm going to see him," he said at last, opening his eyes. His voice was thick and careful, but it was very calm. Distantly, almost serenely calm. Oh no. No, that wasn't good ...
Jean agreed. "Our best interrogators have already questioned him, Lewis. Sutcliff isn't going to give us anything else that will be of use, and you killing him won't help Hathaway."
Robbie blinked at her, slow and startled, then contemptuous. "Not Sutcliff," he growled, his almost normal expression of aggravation all the more alarming for knowing there was nothing 'normal' about what he was feeling right that moment. "I'm going to see James, Chief Superindendent." A dangerous narrowing of his eyes. "And before you say anything, you really don't want to try and stop me right now, ma'am."
"Robbie," Laura cut in rapidly, stepping hurriedly up beside Jean. She didn't hold out a hand to him. She knew he wouldn't react well to that. Not now. "The potion was old, and potentially extremely unstable. It has to be ingested for the initial reaction, but once the burning has started this is a risk of contact contamination." She curled her hands desperately. "If you go in there now, if you touch him, there's a strong chance that the reaction will spread to you. If you go in there, we could lose you both."
And oh. It wasn't anger that flushed through him then. Not at her. She saw it, she was looking right at it. That same expression from Valerie, from Morse. That grief and pain, that desperate, gnawing knowledge of failure. That shame. That's what she saw.
Oh, Robbie.
"... If they're killing him for the reason we think," he said heavily, "then they bloody ought to have given it to both of us in the first place. You know that, Laura." He smiled, crooked and bitter, his eyes carefully dry. "Better than anyone else, you know that."
Beside her, Laura felt Jean stiffen. Robbie held his smile, a small flag of defiance, as his superior officer registered the admission, the confession he'd just made in front of her. He tilted his chin, stubborn and defiant and everything she'd always loved about him, and Laura felt herself silently start to cry.
"I've wondered for a while," Jean said slowly. Her gaze narrow and heavy on Robbie, cutting as a laser. "I wondered, but I didn't really think ..." She stopped, frowned. "Sutcliff knew. He was hinting at it in interrogation. That Hathaway had been dragging others after him into sin, that he'd been corrupting those around him. How could he have known that? I didn't know for sure, how did the bastard ..."
But Robbie wasn't listening, Laura thought. Robbie had slammed upright like someone had shoved a rod down his spine, his expression flashing from pained defiance straight into alarm. He stepped forward, right in Jean's space, and ignored her faint flash of consternation as she fell silent.
"Did he say that?" he snapped out, grabbing at her upper arms in distress. "I don't mean in interview. Did he say that to James?"
Jean blinked, shaking her head. She stumbled back a little, letting Laura catch her. "I don't ... I don't know, Lewis. I ... He certainly had Hathaway long enough to force him to ingest the potion in the first place. I suppose it's possible ..."
"That daft bugger," Robbie growled, comprehension and grief and pity flying across his features, and then something different. An anger, not at himself but at someone else, bright and clean and vitalising. Laura blinked at him, but all his focus had turned from them. Inward, into himself. And past the door behind them, towards the man they were all thinking about. "That bloody idiot, I'm going to kill him."
He released Jean, spinning on his heel, and bolted without another word through the door to the isolation ward. Laura staggered a little at the change in weight, stumbling as she and Jean tried to stay upright, and then she stood for a moment, damp-faced and stunned, and just looked at the other woman. Her superior officer, a dim part of her brain noted, one she still had her arms around. Jean looked back at her, as alarmed and confused and, underneath it, as pained as she was. Together, they simply blinked for a moment.
And then, wordlessly and entirely in unison, they bolted after Robert.
The door to the - we'll call it a 'chamber', Laura thought, even if 'cell' seems more appropriate - the chamber they'd put James into had been thrown open, a strange golden light already spilling out of it into the hall. There was an orderly on the floor in front of it, looking more than a little stunned and also like he was trying to decide whether or not to be angry about the position he found himself in and the man who'd undoubtedly put him there. Jean, with a flash of her badge, silently warned him that that would not be a good idea.
Not that their idea was any better, possibly, but at this point they were past caring. Laura looked once more at Jean and then, silently, and instinctively side by side, they stepped through the door and looked for Robbie.
It was James they saw first, though. James that anyone would see first, on entering that room. The lanky body shining with a golden light, tendrils of alchemical flame flowing in ribbons across it, luminous and almost opalescent as they wreathed him. No-one could have looked away, not even with the agonised form of their friend standing frozen before him, a penitent before a saint.
It would have been beautiful, Laura thought distantly, around the wall of shock. The silent, shimmering play of light across pale features, the thin, ascetic face made luminous and saintlike by the fire. It might have been beautiful, had James not so visibly been in agony. His limbs contorted, twisted by spasms and shaking as he pressed himself back against the wall. Blood dripped steadily down his chin, lurid in the firelight from the lip he'd bitten through. His eyes were sunken back into their sockets, stark and staring in a face that already looked like a skull. And more than that, deeper than anything, his expression was one of terror.
A sob ripped its way out of her chest before she could stop it, wrenched from her unbidden, and she clapper her hands upward over her mouth. It made no difference. The sound had already broken the tableau, shocked Robbie out of his stunned, horrified stupor, and nothing Laura might have done after that made a damn bit of difference as he stepped forward and James tried to shrink away in front of him.
"Don't," he rasped, raising a warding hand against Robbie, a flash of his own quiet, hardened determination coming to the fore. James wasn't fragile, however much he seemed it sometimes. There was a stubborn bastard in there somewhere, enough to glare right into Robbie's anger and match it all the way down. "Contagion effect, sir. I wouldn't ... I wouldn't advise touching me."
Sir, he said, glancing back at Jean for good measure. The sergeant to his inspector in front of a superior officer, and the rational scholar explaining facts to the layman. Two boundaries slammed up between them in under three words, a desperate and rather vicious gambit. James, it seemed, was fighting more than a little dirty.
Which was unfortunate, Laura thought, as a pair of shoulders tightened dangerously in front of her. James ought to know better than that. If there was one thing Robbie didn't appreciate ...
"You know something?" Robbie asked at last, in a voice that shook with suppressed anger. "There are times when for such an educated man, you come across as a blithering idiot." He snarled in frustration and stalked forward, ignoring how James tried to bully wrenched, shaking limbs into retreating away from him. "Of all the people you could bloody listen to, you pick a religious fanatic who's head is still stuck in the middle ages?!"
James blinked, fetching up into the corner of his cell, hands clawing at the wall behind him without much in the way of conscious instruction from his mind. For a moment, despite the ravaged agony clouding his eyes, there was a spark of his usual self.
"Early Modern period, technically," he murmured, a stiff, bloody grin appearing on his face at Robbie's resulting expression. "The Order of Bocardo was formed in the late 16th century, sir, making them ..."
"I don't care," Robbie snarled, effectively cutting him off, and Laura watched James falter. Watched him realise, at that uncharacteristic surge of temper, just exactly how upset Robbie was. She watched the pain flood through him in response, not the alchemical agony of the potion but something much deeper, more devastating.
There had always been an edge of guilt in James, a tangled ball of pain and shame and the desperate desire to preserve others regardless of the cost to himself. Since he and Robbie had started working together, even before they had both realised just how much they meant to each other, that general protective instinct had been changing. Laura had watched it, had watched James bend himself, entirely unwittingly, from someone with a vague and desperate desire to defend the world into someone with a much more defined and specified mission, with a much, much more specific target. Not to solve all the evils of the world, but to stand beside one man as he fought whatever evils that came within their reach, and to prevent that man from ever, ever being touched by them.
He believed it, she realised with a surge of dismay. What Sutcliff had told him, the accusation that James had lured another into sin, tainted someone else with his own weakness. James believed that. That was what Robbie had realised outside, what had sent him bolting in here like the hounds of hell were after him. James believed that Sutcliff was right. So James ... wasn't fighting. Cure or no cure, so long as James had believed there was something to fight for, he would have. All the way to the end. But he didn't. And because of that ...
Robbie held out a hand. Silently, suddenly, having fought his own temper down, having struggled through his own agony enough to think rationally again. Facing James, the burning, beautiful wreck of him, Robbie walked that final step closer, almost enough to touch, and silently held out his hand, challenge and entreaty all at once.
James shook his head, closing his eyes as a shudder wracked him, fresh blood spilling from his lip. He turned his head, curved it into the wall at his side, and made no move to reach back.
Robbie nodded to himself, strangely calm, strangely serene. As though James had done no more than he'd expected, and with that accounted for there was only one thing left to do. He didn't look back, didn't turn his head to look at Laura or Jean, standing half-petrified behind him. He simply shook his head, a sigh of exasperation slipping out of him, and then ...
Then he stepped forward, slipping one arm around James' waist and the other hand around the nape of his neck, and tugged the shaking bundle of limbs against his chest.
James flinched, full-bodied as his eyes snapped open, a wordless cry of dismay spilling out of him. The fires flooded across Robbie almost instantly, pale gold ropes lashing them together and tying James immovably against his chest, and James heaved backwards. His hands bit into Robbie's shoulders, limbs twisting desperately as he struggled like an animal caught in a trap, trying to throw himself away from his partner. Robbie only wrapped himself tighter around him, pulling him closer than even the fire could manage.
"Did you think I'd bloody well let you walk into hell alone?" he asked softly, steady and pained beside James' ear, the hand cupping James' neck tight and desperate. "For pity's sake, you idiot. There are a lot of things I'd hesitate to do for you, but walking into the fire isn't one of them."
James went still, startled and exhausted. He sagged, a slow collapse of pained limbs against the body beneath him, and Robbie bore him up, casually and completely. "You ... you don't understand. Sir ..."
"Don't." A command, cold and clipped. If James looked exhausted, Robbie sounded it. "Just don't. I'm not a bloody infant, alright? I'm not a child to be led astray, or whatever that voice in the back of your head's been telling you. I'm damn near an old man, I'm a bloody good policeman, and I'm a stubborn, suspicious bastard to boot. If I end up in Hell, it's because I decided to, not because some ... some wet behind the ears, Cambridge-educated intellectual went and tricked me into it!"
There was a pause, bright and desperate while Laura pressed her hands against her mouth, something wild and pained in her own chest. Then James lowered his head, resting his forehead slowly and carefully against Robbie's. His mouth curled faintly, wry and trembling.
"... Wet behind the ears?" he asked, leaning into Robbie in a flow of painted gold, tremors rippling through the both of them now. The question was light, admonishing. Playful, for all the bright wires of pain ripping through them. Robbie's breath hitched, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"Alright," he agreed, nodding their heads gently together. "It won't be because an annoyingly intelligent and irritatingly close-mouthed detective sergeant tricked me into it." A faint smirk. "Better?"
James mumbled something largely incoherent, his eyes slipping closed again as ... as the light intensified through him, as the witchfires flared up across the both of them. Robbie staggered a little, leaning forward and pushing James against the wall to let it help hold them up. Laura, unnoticed, bit back a cry, biting down on the web of her thumb.
"... Blast it," Robbie muttered, sighing softly as James crumpled against him, an odd look of peace on the younger man's face. "Hang on, James. Just ... hang on, alright? I'm coming too. Whatever bloody happens." His voice broke, snapped on a pain that had nothing to do with the potion and everything to do with that old bleakness inside him. "I've had to bury two people I love. I'm not bloody burying you."
They sank down to the floor, curled around each other, and Laura broke. She couldn't bear it, couldn't watch them shatter apart beside each other. Eyes blurring, she wheeled around and dove through the door, staggering in the hallway and pulling herself up against the wall beside the cell. Out of that damned golden light, into the shadow in its lee, where she could break down in something resembling peace.
After a moment, a hesitant arm wrapped itself around her waist, taking some of her weight off the wall. Laura choked down a breath, looking up to find Jean staring down at her. There was nothing stern or official left in the woman's face, nothing of the policewoman. Just sympathy, raw and pained, and the first stirrings of grief. And ... and something else, Laura thought. A glimmer of challenge, something of the iron-willed, battle-clad woman who'd fought her way to the position of Chief Superintendent.
"You know, there have been reports of people who survived purification potions," she said, holding Laura's gaze with soft intensity. "People who 'shed their sins'. I've read about some of them. About warlords who'd murdered thousands of people in their campaigns, who were poisoned with one of these potions and somehow didn't react at all. People who burned with golden fire and didn't die. People who were regarded as saints or dragons or gods. Pure, no matter how monstrous their actions had been."
Laura blinked at her, shaking her head. "I don't ... I don't understand," she murmured, struggling to re-engage her analytical mind, struggling to shove grief back far enough to understand what Jean was saying. Jean simply smiled at her. Not a nice smile, not an easy smile. Hard and fierce, instead. The kind of smile a commander would offer their troops before battle.
"Potions are just ... alchemy. Magic and raw ingredients, nothing more, right?" She pulled them up at Laura's nod, steadied them more firmly on their feet. "Well, how does a potion know what sin is? How does it know what morality is? It's just a force of nature, like any other. It's just a reaction. So how does it know?"
Laura blinked, shaking her head to clear it. Waking up, her scientist's mind jolting forward, clawing her way back from the wall of grief and light inside the room behind them.
"It ... It can't," she murmured, thinking it out. Angry at herself all of a sudden. The best forensic pathologist in Oxford, honestly. She shouldn't have needed a lecture on alchemy from a chief superintendent, for pity's sake! "But then ..."
"I think," Jean said slowly, staring at her in challenge and defiance and the slow build of something that might have been hope, "I think it must work like interrogation. It can't tell what sin is, sin's just an abstract concept. But there are things that leave a physical and aetheric signature on a body. Thoughts, emotions." She smiled, tight and grim. "An officer in interrogation mightn't be able to identify a crime sight-unseen. But he can sure as hell identify guilt."
"... Of course," Laura murmured. "Of course. Shedding your sins. Absolving yourself of guilt. Magic has always been sensitive to the emotions of those it acts through. It would register the guilt of an accused person ... the emotional change when they 'absolved' themselves ..."
"And in a person who had never felt guilt at all," Jean finished grimly. "A monster, like those pure saints, psychopaths who never saw what they'd done as crimes at all. The potion would have no effect."
Laura swallowed, wiping her hand across her mouth. She was conscious of her back pressed against the wall, of the two men in the room behind it, the light still spilling from the doorway. She closed her eyes, a small wave of despair going through her again.
"But what does that fix?" she asked quietly. A laugh bubbling up from somewhere, pained and fond. "I've never met a pair of idiots more stubbornly determined to feel guilty for things they couldn't change. If guilt is what this thing is looking for, they're in about a hundred times more trouble than if it was some blasted 'sin' someone's looking to punish them for."
Jean was silent for a second. Watching the play of light across the floor, watching as the golden fires dimmed a little in the room beyond. Laura, following her gaze, felt her breath freeze in her chest. She gasped, she must have, and Jean looked back at her.
"Maybe," Chief Superindentent Innocent, Jean, said softly. "Maybe it would only damn them faster. But ... But I think I've seen more courage and willingness to fight in those two in the past few years than I've ever seen in either of them before. I've seen them get into more trouble and drag each other out of more pits than just about any other pair under my command." She shook her head, wry and knowing. "In hindsight, I really oughtn't to have been surprised about their relationship. If anyone could get through to either of them ..."
"I know," Laura murmured, smiling softly herself and trying not to feel like the surge of humour was a memorial to them. Like a wake in celebration of their lives. "Robbie's been more alive since James than I thought I'd ever see him after Valerie's death. And there's no doubt he's probably saved James' sanity a time or two as well."
"Mmm. At the cost of a few other people's," Jean noted, but her eyes were creased in rueful humour. "But that's beside the point. The point is ..."
The point was that if anyone was going to pull James out of the hell of his guilt, it would be Robbie. And if anyone was going to pull Robbie out of that black, bleak pit that had swallowed him after Morse and after Valerie, it was going to be James. So all in all ...
All in all, perhaps the odds weren't so bad after all.
The bar of light across the hall floor faded, dimming to nothing and vanishing beside them. Laura looked at Jean, seeing the echo of her own hope and desperation and stark terror in the other woman's eyes. She tried a smile, a shaky, terrified thing, and tilted her head towards the door in silent question. Jean straightened up, drawing that same policewoman's armour around her as she had in the face of Robbie's grief, and Laura, more shakily, pulled herself up beside her.
And then, arm in arm and side by side, they walked back towards the door and went to see how much hope and the stubbornness of policemen counted for.
A/N: The Order of Bocardo is, as far as I know, something I just made up on the spot. The Oxford Martyrs, however, were very real, as was Bocardo Prison (located near the church of St Michael at the North Gate, hence the title).
