Psychomancy

by charname

Moriarty is dead, but that doesn't mean he's gone. Sherlock is dead, but that doesn't mean he can't be haunted. After an incident at the Tibetan monastery, Sherlock starts seeing Moriarty. Convinced he's having hallucinations – rather than speaking to proof of an afterlife – he tries to deal with the psychological issues that could be causing Moriarty's appearance. It doesn't work

Author's Note: Hello! I wanted to make it very clear before we begin that this story gets pretty rough on Sherlock, mentally. Things that are said during the course of the narrative aren't necessarily believed or endorsed by the author, and I want to warn readers that one character depicted encourages suicidal thoughts in another. In addition, I wrote this story without intending to imply any romance at all, but I've tried to convey in some parts how deeply characters care about each other and/or affect each other and I don't mind if people interpret that in ways that I didn't intend. It's all fine. Also, there is definitely some torture depicted here (as well as mentions of drug use) but I don't feel the violence exceeds what we've seen on the show.

If that makes this sound like the type of story you'd like to read, I very much hope you'll enjoy it!

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Psychomancy

Sherlock has a psychotic break just outside of Lhasa. He's in a little box of a room at the time, and has just taken quite a lot of drugs.

In retrospect, he will find it painfully obvious that actually ingesting the drugs he'd confiscated from one of Moriarty's few – few and ever fewer – remaining patsies was a phenomenally stupid idea. When he'd taken them, all he could think about was how much he needed – how much he deserved – the relief.

It had been powder, so it had to have been cut with something, and whatever it was cut with was the sort of thing Moriarty approved of. Apparently, whatever that was, Sherlock wasn't prepared to handle it.

All considered, Sherlock has been on the inexorable descent into some more dramatic form of breakdown for months. In the context of his life at this point, he really doesn't find it surprising. But, in the context of opening his eyes and seeing Moriarty standing over him, he really, really does.

Sherlock yells and scrambles across the thin fabric that's been passed off as a futon. He puts his back to the cold corner of the room as he stares in horror at the phantom.

"You're dead," he says, not quite the picture of eloquence he'd like to be faced with his old enemy.

"Rude!" Moriarty says with an exaggerated flinch back. He sounds alive enough. He looks alive enough. He's wearing the clothes he died in, but they're spotless.

"I saw you die."

"Yep," Moriarty responds with a roll of his shoulders. He drops down into a crouch more quickly than Sherlock's eyes can follow.

"Did you really think I'd stay dead?" He asks, at level with Sherlock. "Did you think this was going to be that easy?" Moriarty's face twists with rage at the last words, ending his question with a shout. It's the drugs that make Sherlock flinch back.

Moriarty straightens just as quickly.

Sherlock's head spins. He closes his eyes, breathes, opens them. Moriarty is still in front of him.

"No," he says.

"You shouldn't have taken the bait, you idiot." Moriarty's register moves from conversational to aggressive again. Sherlock winces as the sound pounds through his head. "Oh, please, Sherlock, this is pathetic."

"You're not real," Sherlock says, pulling himself back into coherent thought, because he can't be. Moriarty is definitely dead, and dead men don't appear in hovels in Tibet. Which means he's a figment of Sherlock's imagination, and he can't have his brain betraying him. Not now, and certainly not like this.

"I'm real enough."

Sherlock closes his eyes and breathes deep again. He is the master of his own mind, and he can control this.

"I'm so bored." Moriarty throws himself down on the cot beside Sherlock. "I'd say it makes me want to kill myself, but it's a bit late for that now. Not my finest decision."

Moriarty rolls his head back and forth at Sherlock's effort to ignore him.

"Not yours either. Your pet's half dead without you. Like one of those dogs that lies down on its master's grave and refuses to move."

Sherlock can readily, if distressedly, accept that he is hallucinating what is – he can admit – one of his worst fears. That he would hallucinate him telling Sherlock what he wants to hear – it would be flattering, it would be moving, it would prove something – least – he didn't do this for John to be left in pain – is less acceptable. Sherlock has always been selfish; he doesn't need his unconscious mind working out its various idiosyncrasies where he can hear it.

Sherlock is good at concentrating. For all that he tries to minimise distraction, he would have gone far more mad long, long ago if he couldn't focus well enough to cut his surroundings out. So he turns his back to the illusion and ignores him, or at least he makes sure to give his best impression of doing so. He waits it out and eventually passes out, expecting the phantom to be gone when he wakes.

He's not.

Sherlock wakes and rolls over to see Moriarty sitting beside him, back to the wall.

He stares, but Moriarty ignores him. He might still be high. He must still be high. It's fine; he needs to go, and he doesn't have time to make sure he's sober or deal with his unconscious mind's recriminations. Even intoxicated, he's smart enough to prevent anyone else detecting the liability.

"I didn't used to believe in hell, but even watching you sleep is only amusing for the first few hours." Moriarty throws his hands wide. "This is damnation."

"Good." Sherlock rises. He has nothing substantial to pack, just a filled travel bag and a secure phone with information about his next destination on it.

"Mmm, I knew you were paying attention."

"I always am."

"Wish you could turn it off, right?" Moriarty asks as Sherlock organises his small bag. "You think 'Oh, these stupid, oblivious morons must be so happy' but they're not. You look and you can see they're not."

Sherlock waits him out. There's no point in replying to himself.

"And of course then there are the people like me – and you – to make sure they're not."

Sherlock places his passport at the top of his bag, just under a billfold. It's safe; he's not likely to let himself be pickpocketed.

"Although, I did actually make a lot of people very happy. Simple folk who just wanted to get away from it all are out there now, enjoying the proceeds of their insurance fraud. All those couples living happily together now that some obstructive spouse is out of the way. People who have better neighbours, and don't have to deal with a nasty coworker anymore."

Sherlock can feel Moriarty's stare, even as he focusses on anything but acknowledging him.

"You're almost as oblivious as the rest of them. You discovered so very few things that I didn't guide you to myself."

Sherlock ignores the illusion of Moriarty as he waxes lyrical about just how incompetent Sherlock really is. He misses John so, so much; it's proof of his self-loathing that his intoxicated mind has forced this on him, rather than an illusion of John. He'd take the sight and sound of him any day, even berating him for his foolishness.

Sherlock moves quickly and Moriarty moves with him. He can't outrun the phantom, and isn't that just so pathetic a metaphor? The least his subconscious could do is provide complex fantasies; surely it wouldn't take so much effort.

Sherlock remembers, as he leaves the hostel and moves north, how the mere thought of Moriarty used to send him into cold terrors, used to make him shake. He remembers Baskerville. He remembers his sheer stupidity there.

He crosses the border by mid-afternoon, leaving Tibet behind him. Moriarty shakes his head at the quality of the fake papers he passes over to the border guards, but Sherlock is learning to ignore his derogatory comments.

"This one's good," Moriarty comments as they travel into New Delhi. His phone tells him there's an assassin waiting for him there; Sherlock hates them on more than principle now. He has recurrent nightmares of being the one to see John fall in front of Bart's, of waiting too long to jump and watching a bullet rip through John's skull.

"Very professional. I used to send them after each other, every once in a while, when things got too boring. This one always came out on top, obviously. Less annoying than the others too."

Sherlock has no time to waste. Danita Ortiz has been given an assignment to complete, and Sherlock has to find her before she does. If he doesn't, Geeta Rai – alleged ex-lover of the president and current political dissident – is going to be irreversibly silenced.

He starts by tracking down Rai, half intending to barge into her home, tell her of the danger, and convince her to put herself under his protection.

Everything does not go to plan.

To begin with, when he finds her home, she is not there. He enters in an unofficial capacity and checks the building for vulnerabilities, but she does not return.

Moriarty cackles as Sherlock clambers out of her window to avoid detection when her neighbour returns.

"Slow, slow Sherlock. Too slow to get it right, and now another one's dead. Don't you get tired of it, all the little failures?"

"Did you, every time I beat you?"

"Never really happened." Moriarty leans back on his heels as Sherlock scoffs at his bluff.

Sherlock can't believe that he's lost yet. He holds on to the possibility that she's been warned off by someone else and gone into hiding right up until he checks his phone. His brother updates him on his failure in no kind terms and advises him – entirely unnecessarily – to try to follow Ortiz's trail before it goes cold. He doesn't send a message in response; what does having the last word matter when he doesn't deserve it?

Sherlock turns to the police. It's probably foolish, but it's not entirely impossible that his enforced isolation is a critical factor in his persistent hallucination. He misses Lestrade, just a very, very little, and the Detective Inspector here isn't so unlike him. He's easily impressed, and after just a few deductions and a simple not-quite fabrication (that Sherlock was undercover and had been tracking this assassin for months, across countries) he lets Sherlock in on the case.

Rai had gone, as she had every Friday for the last summer month, to an ice cream parlour at the edge of a small plaza. On this occasion she had set her cone down in a table's wire holster, taken a book out of her bag, and started to seize.

The crime scene has been cleaned by the time Sherlock has access to any of the information, but the local police are only somewhat incompetent. They've taken more pictures than a snap-happy tourist, giving Sherlock a detailed panorama of the scene.

He notes the discolouration under her nails and the scuffs on her shoes, but neither her smoking habit nor her penchant for climbing down near the banks of the river provide sufficient insight.

"She'll be gone by tomorrow morning," Moriarty tells him, "and it won't be suspicious. Who wouldn't leave after seeing something like that?"

He notes the cone of ice cream, still standing in its rest, and like the worst kind of fool remembers John telling him about getting in trouble for stealing his sister's when they were children; she'd leave it to melt if he didn't. He can remember the exact smile John had worn when he'd spoken about it.

In the picture the ice cream is still firm, though pale lines have dribbled from it to congeal on the table below.

Sherlock thinks back to the day: not oppressive heat, but enough that fifteen minutes in the sun should have reduced a scoop of ice cream to something far less solid. Calling an ambulance out would have taken longer than that.

Sherlock finds the closest shot of the cone that he can. It's not enough; the certain proof will have been discarded, but he imagines he can see evidence of crystallization.

There are any number of substances that could cause that, poisons that could cause seizures with only a taste.

He's a breath away from pulling his hair out by the roots because he can't look himself to see what was in it. He actually does rip some out when Moriarty speaks.

"Was it always like this? You sitting around, holding your head like a dunce?"

Sherlock tries to imagine John, what he would say, what would impress him. He's helpless, no use without a solid conclusion, no good without more evidence to study. Ortiz is going to escape, and kill again, and it'll be his fault, every death a life lost to his incompetence.

"I'll give you a hint, if you beg. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean they've stopped doing these things the way I told them to."

"You can find out how she did it when you find her," the echo of John's voice says, blocking Moriarty out, which makes more sense than he'd like to admit.

If the ice cream was tainted, who had had the opportunity to taint it?

Simple question, simple answer: either whoever served it to her or whoever made it.

Sherlock tells Detective Inspector Prakesh to detain the workers at the parlour.

"Look," he says, to the man's open-mouthed wonder, pointing out the cone in a picture. "You see how the chocolate shavings are resting on top? They should have been half submerged by the time this was photographed. The ice cream didn't melt. So it follows: it's not ice cream."

"Poison!" The man exclaims, as though he's come to the conclusion himself.

"Exactly. Now if you'll arrest the staff who could have tampered with her ice cream, you'll have your killer.

Detective Inspector Prakesh is less resistant than most of the officers he's worked with. Intelligent enough to recognise genius – to recognise Sherlock – and just subtle enough to avoid outright asking why a man declared dead under suspicious circumstances in London is helping the police capture a murderer in New Delhi.

He orders the arrests, and when Sherlock sees the picture of a familiar, round-faced woman – an emergency hire after the last chef's assistant had been hit by a car – he accompanies the officers who visit her home.

She's in the midst of packing when they arrive, and not at all pleased to receive them. Sherlock gets a lamp to the face but manages to avoid the knife to the armpit. One of the officers – Sherlock hasn't bothered to learn his name – tackles her to the ground and cuffs her. It's over quickly, with witnesses to her murderous inclinations, and Sherlock looks around for John, to laugh at the simplicity of it.

He doesn't find him. It's stupid to let that sour his success, but it does.

Sherlock tells Prakesh what to say at the press conference. Prakesh tells Sherlock that they treat consultants differently here.

"I don't care." Sherlock hears himself say, more sharply than may be wise considering he needs the man's silence to be able to continue his work.

"I understand." The Detective Inspector reaches out to pat his arm, then seems to reconsider. "We all love our own homes."

Sherlock waits in silence during the press conference, barely letting himself think about Moriarty long enough to hope that he won't reappear.

Afterward he extracts another vow of silence from Prakesh and receives an open invitation he'll never make use of to return if he ever wants to.

John might like the Lodi Gardens though.

He checks his phone. Mycroft has sent him another assignment, one which has him placed him on a jury in Hamburg.

"there are no juries in hamburg" he texts, decapitalizing the first letter intentionally simply to annoy his brother.

"Of course." The first in a series of responses comes quickly.

"My mistake."

"I do make so many of those."

"You'll find papers in locker #23 at Kheria Air Force Station. The keys will be slotted under a sink in the men's toilets nearest gate 5."

"Use them if you can conceive of one of Moriarty's schemes being slightly unusual."

"u sound stressed" he responds, using the throat-punch of text speak to indicate his lack of concern for Mycroft himself but interest in what overarching and potentially influential problem may be presenting itself.

"I always am." Mycroft's message arrives with a delay that could simply be due to the encryption.

"You needn't be concerned."

He'd extorted a promise from Mycroft to tell him if anything unusual had happened to the people – the friends – he'd left behind. He knows that if Mrs. Hudson is threatened, or John is approached by anyone suspicious, Mycroft is under oath to not hesitate to inform him. He also knows that his brother would absolutely lie to him if he thought it would keep Sherlock safer. He'd lose such a useful resource if Sherlock was too worried to run around the globe dismantling Moriarty's web, after all.

He also knows that Mycroft does have sources of stress in his life completely unrelated to Sherlock, however ridiculous that is.

So he lets it go.

Or, rather, "i wasnt" he responds, then he lets it go.

He takes a cab to the airport. It doesn't have a television screen in it.

He makes his way to departure gate 8. It's a simple cipher they've used, but the line is reasonably secure and if it were to be hacked then this would be too simple to be suspected of them.

There are, as he had suspected, no slots or ledges under any of the sinks. The second stall in is graffitied with a spider, simply drawn in marker on its door. He takes it as a sign and, after an only slightly disgusting search, finds that he was right to. The key is tucked behind a loosened hinge fitting the stall to the wall.

He takes it to locker #56 and grabs the dossier and tickets within, flicking quickly through to confirm his new identity.

"Horst Budjuhn," Moriarty says, reading from around his shoulder. Sherlock jumps, startling an elderly lady who shouldn't have been staring at him anyway.

Sherlock closes the file and examines the tickets, four of them, the last two rows of a very small plane. It gives him space; he needs space.

"It's a bit obvious, but what's in a name? I suppose he has to amuse himself somehow."

It had been a lovely time, not hallucinating Moriarty. That he's back – and Sherlock is undeniably sober, it's been too long – is troublesome, but not enough to mention, and certainly not enough to make him do anything that would indicate to whichever of his brother's spies is no doubt watching him now that something's amiss.

"I guess you know him better than I did." Moriarty continues as Sherlock tries to find something to eat. It's not Moriarty's continued presence that puts him off, but the best option looks to be "lump of something resembling bread," so he goes with a coffee instead.

"But it does get so intimate in those interrogation rooms. You learn as much about them as they do about you. More, if you're smart." Moriarty gives him an exaggerated wink. "I am smart."

"Not smart enough to survive," Sherlock mumbles, lips close enough to his cup that they couldn't be read. He takes a seat at a small table.

"Ooh, talking back now? You've become so demure on your brother's lead." Moriarty drops down across from him.

He drops a hand on Sherlock's thigh and leans close. "He had me on my knees, you know. In chains. You should have been jealous. He told me you never liked sharing, but he had me all to himself and you never even came to visit."

Moriarty leans back, removes his hand, and pouts. "Don't tell me I'm unfairly invested in this relationship."

Sherlock snarls.

"Oh, darling!" Moriarty laughs as Sherlock stands and throws his nearly full cup in the bin.

He'd felt it, warmth and pressure from Moriarty's hand. His hallucinations aren't... they've never persisted as indistinguishable from reality. He's been deep inside his own mind; he's lost himself in fantasies, helped along with chemical assistance, but he's never stood, fully conscious, and thought his hallucinations were physical beings.

Of course, he still hasn't. He's aware Moriarty is not real. But he's felt him. Seen, heard, touched – these are all senses he needs to trust.

What would be smart – the wise thing to do – would be to tell Mycroft. To tell him that he's had some sort of psychotic separation from reality and is, on and off, hallucinating that the spectre of Moriarty is talking to him.

He can't. He won't. He has myriad reasons, the suspicion that if he did, Mycroft would lock him up, send incompetent underlings to finish his work, and let someone fatal pass through their net foremost among them.

Sherlock will see this done, himself, properly, for John, for Mrs. Hudson, for Lestrade, and for Molly. He has let Moriarty ruin too much already.

Moriarty follows him as he makes his way to his departure gate and boards, making his own deductions about the other fliers, flight attendants, and airport staff.

"You're not impressing anyone," Sherlock says softly as he settles into his seat, though not subtly enough to avoid the glare the flight attendant sends him from the corner of her eye.

Her shoes and hands tell him she's carrying on three different affairs, but only managing to get away with it because her lovers are on different continents. Moriarty tells him she's pregnant, and Sherlock can see the early signs around her mouth. He doesn't care what she thinks of him.

"Not everything I do is meant to impress you, Sherlock. I'm bored." Moriarty takes the other seat in the row, across the aisle.

The last time someone had told Sherlock to make his own fun there was a house fire and police intervention had been deemed necessary. Sherlock restrains himself from repeating the trite phrase only because hearing it would likely annoy him more than it would Moriarty.

The spectre wriggles, and kicks his feet, and taps his fingers to a rhythm that's infuriatingly loud and just off-beat.

Thirteen seconds seem like eight hours.

"You know," Moriarty starts in a slow drawl, "when we were together, your brother told me such beautiful stories."

Sherlock freezes in the act of pulling Horst Budjuhn's file out of his bag.

"I never really liked Treasure Island. Lord of the Flies was alright; I would have had more fun in that one." Moriarty makes a show of pondering his words.

"Your brother told me," Moriarty says, extending a finger with each word before scratching his nails along his armrest, "that your mother li-"

Sherlock lifts his carry-on and dumps it on the seat that Moriarty occupies, almost too desperate to shut him up to take care not to let their bodies touch.

He sees the split second of shock on Moriarty's face before he's gone: Round mouth, wide eyes, instantaneous disappearance.

It's not quite as satisfying a look as he'd imagined it to be, so long ago, but it is satisfying.

He all but gasps with relief.

If Sherlock can provoke the disappearance of the hallucination, and it is incredibly comforting to confirm that he can, then it's very likely that there are also actions he's taking to provoke its appearance. He will simply determine what those are – through experience if necessary – and control them as well. This is not a real problem. He will force the inconvenience to pass.

Horst Bludjuhn was born in Hamburg. He'd moved along with his family at the age of two when his father had taken a promotion that sent him to work in a bank in London, but returned with his mother eleven years later after his father's death. He'd later moved back to London to complete some courses in business, eventually following his father's footsteps into banking where he now works as a non-fiduciary financial advisor. He's not pleased to have been selected as a member the twelve person jury; he has neither the time to waste nor an interest in absurdities that make light of their legal system.

There are a thousand other little details he's been given that he reads but will never have a chance to make use of. He'd be happy to throw the disguise entirely the moment he enters the decision room. Even so, he's glad for it; the flight is short enough that absorbing the information keeps his mind from wandering.

Sherlock had been expected to clean up the mess in New Delhi more quickly than he had, apparently. The plane lands and he takes a quick cab to the hotel where the jury is staying. His phone offers him information on the other jurors, but nothing that makes them particularly interesting. That's why he had to be here, rather than one of Mycroft's underlings. Sherlock is intimately familiar with how Moriarty rigs juries and he's the only man observant and quick thinking enough to unwind his plans in the short hours he'll have.

The bed in his hotel room creaks as he shuts the door behind him. He turns, poised to defend himself, but finds only Moriarty, seated on the edge.

"Nicer than your last digs, but not enough." Moriarty leans back and rolls, soundlessly now, onto the pillow. "Check under the remote. There's a gift."

Sherlock walks fully into the room. The curtains are drawn and thick; it doesn't mean he has nothing to fear from that direction, but decreases the opportunity for a sniper. The toilet and closet are empty and the bed frame sits thick on the floor.

A quick sweep for bugs finds nothing but inadequately cleaned corners. Moriarty had spoken true though: a sheet of paper torn from the hotel's notepad lies folded under the television remote.

He watches Moriarty from the corner of his eye as he opens it, but the other man – the hallucination – doesn't even glance at him.

It unfolds to show a simple, felt-tipped illustration of an open umbrella. Clearly they had known that Mycroft was sending someone, but not who. Clearly they'd wanted whoever it was to know that they'd known. It's the closest they'd be able to get to a personal threat.

"Not your best," Sherlock says. Moriarty twists his head to stare at him.

"Not mine, obviously." He turns back to the ceiling. "For God's sake, Sherlock, you wouldn't have come this far if I were still working on this."

"Stop saying my name," Sherlock says before he can stop himself. Moriarty has been rolling it off his tongue, ever slower, and he hates it. He hates the sound of it in his voice, the adrenaline response it still evokes, and how – every time – it reminds him that the only person he's heard it from, in months, is his own hallucination.

"Stop tearing apart my organisation."

That's a no for both then, he expects.

"No."

"Sherlock." He rolls his head back and forth on the pillow as he says it.

"Why? Why are you here? Why am I doing this to myself?" Sherlock slams the palm of his hand back against the wall, a pointless, painful temper tantrum.

Moriarty scoffs and leans up on his elbows to stare at him.

"You still don't get it. Everything I did for you, and you still don't get it. God, Sherlock," his name this time is quick and harsh. "Why did I let you do this to me?"

He shifts, just slightly, into something more like the face he'd worn on the roof. "It's disappointing. You're always so disappointing. I tried playing with big brother too, but you know how that goes; he always found a way to make everything so boring."

He exhales loudly. "You're too stupid. He's too dull. It's a wonder I didn't try to kill myself sooner."

He falls back on the bed again. "All I asked for was some entertainment."

"You asked the wrong person."

"Oh? You've been dancing prettily enough to my tune." Moriarty rolls to his side to face Sherlock. "Where do you think you'd be without me? My educated guess is a rehab centre at best. Why are you doing this? What do you think you'll have to go back to? You want to dismantle everything I've built up. Let's say you can. Let's say you and your brother work together to be slightly less dumb and slightly less dull, and you actually manage to destroy everything. So you go back to London, I know that's what you want, you're stupid enough to think there are people back there who'll be happy to see you, and then what? You retire. What is the genius detective without any brilliant mysteries to solve?"

"There are always going to be criminals. The police won't stop needing my help."

"Not like me. You've peaked." Moriarty reaches out an arm and draws it down diagonally through the air, making a high-pitched little whistle. "It's all downhill from here."

"You consulted. You took other people's plans and gave them a spit-shine. Moriarty was remarkable, but not necessary."

"No?" Moriarty asks lightly. "You obviously have no idea of how much I had my hands in. Go and ask big brother what he's not telling you. Find a newspaper and see if there's anything worth waking up for now." Moriarty starts to snarl his words. "You wouldn't be who you are without me. You wouldn't be anything."

"Your loss then. I'm in Hamburg and you're dead."

"Yes, that is how it worked out." Moriarty returns to his drawl. "Being dead's less depressing than being in Hamburg though." Moriarty gazes at Sherlock for a long moment before rolling back onto his back. "You'll understand better if you manage to get home. They'll all be happy to see you at first, having forgotten what you're really like. But then you'll remind them, and I won't be there to make you look clever enough to be worth it.

Your little pet's going to run away when you're not able to keep him entertained with my mysteries. Your detective will have no use you without my crimes. And that geriatric will probably keep you around until the next funeral, as long as you continue to pay, but that expiration date's approaching.

Everything you're hoping to achieve is going to disappoint you." Moriarty finishes in a sing-song.

Sherlock laughs, not only because he knows it's the most annoying response.

"What?" Moriarty pushes himself back up again.

"You don't get it. Still. You never did. You never could. You're lacking."

Moriarty's glare narrows.

"I don't need them to need me. They will, but that's irrelevant. They'll be safe. I could be content with that." He voices the rationale that he's tried to convince himself of – repeated to himself – for months.

"Is that what you've been telling yourself? You might be stupid enough to believe it. I'm not."

"You're missing the capacity to understand."

"It's normal," Moriarty emphasises the word like an expletive, "to think you'll be fine with that. I've had far too many interfering lovers killed to believe anyone who says 'I just want him to be happy!'"

"You're like me." Moriarty continues, "You are. More than you'd like to accept. Whatever capacities I'm missing, you are too, no matter how much you play at being normal. You'll see."

Sherlock leaves the room. When you're fighting with a hallucination, it doesn't matter whether you're the one to say it or not, you always get the last word.

He brings his bag into the toilet with him and quietly accepts how low he's sunk when he feels grateful for the cheap gratuitous toiletries. His shower is quick and perfunctory but he emerges clean and ready to face his next task.

He understands why his unconscious mind is repeatedly confronting him with Moriarty, even if he isn't quite clear yet on how the hallucinations are coming about. The man is a persistent fear, and the hallucination is giving voice to other fears, and apparently this is the way his mind has chosen to deal with trauma. It's simple, but it's practical. He can deal with it.

Moriarty is gone when he emerges. He stays absent as Sherlock makes his way to the hearing, and even as he sits through the testimonies. Sherlock is alone and in control as he listens to the eleven jury members before him give their decision. It's almost too simple; this trial is rigged just as Moriarty's was: parents with their children at risk, lovers who wish their spouses to remain ignorant, embezzlers who want much the same for their employers. It's not novel, but it's essential, and he's still the only one capable of doing this so efficiently.

If it were just a matter of the accused being found "not guilty", this would be unnecessary. The German legal system could take care of it as they prefer and the verdict would be considered sound. But this is about publicity. This is about the show, and what all the sturm und drang is distracting almost everyone from.

This is about the fact that, while the papers are reporting on this, several other little horrific miscarriages of justice have been occurring that seem far less exciting. Mycroft is taking care of those. Moriarty was consulted to distract from them; they're not his work. This, the repeat of an already successful ruse, isn't technically him either, but it's an underling who was guided by the best. It's a tendril, a strand of webbing that needs to be decidedly clipped.

Sherlock taps his fingers impatiently as he listens to the jurors rattle off their "not guilty" verdicts. None hesitate; none take any risk. It's not entirely incomprehensible, but it is more than slightly infuriating; if even one of them had the strength of will to speak out, he wouldn't need to be here.

Then again, he has no room to judge others for doing stupid things to protect the people they care about.

The first three are parents, the fourth an embezzler, the fifth an adulterer, the sixth and seventh a parent and an adulterer respectively, the eighth has been lying about her taxes, the ninth is being blackmailed over his propensity for pretending to be a baby during sexual activity, and the tenth is stealing everything she can from her ailing mother before it becomes subject to the division of her will. The eleventh, the head juror, is more complicated. He's single and has been for years – no partner to need to hide a betrayal from, no children to need to protect. His parents are dead, his friends aren't intimate. He's not embezzling; he's not a drug user; he doesn't have pressing debt. At first glance, there's nothing to threaten him with. It's more miraculous that he's ended up on this jury than it is that Sherlock has, with nothing to exploit.

Sherlock has to be decisive. He has to act quickly, to enter the room and get them to agree to a guilty verdict before anyone thinks deeply enough to waver. If one person has the wherewithal to consider that trusting their fate, or the fate of their loved ones, to the truth of his assertions might not be the safest decision, then others will follow. He's better with facts than with people, so it would be... needlessly taxing to have to deal with that.

His turn comes to speak. He hesitates, just for a moment, to let the tension grow. A beat, and another. They all focus on him.

He exhales and begins.

"Threat to your daughter." He lifts his hand from the table and points down to the first juror.

"Threat to your children. Threat to your daughter." He repeats the process. "Bad at math," he accuses, mind half on his words, half on the final juror.

"Working late," he says, in an almost unprecedented act of diplomacy. It's better to not offend them now; he desperately needs them agreeable. His target will know that he's referencing an affair with a coworker, and is the only one who needs to know.

"Threat to your son."

It has to be simple. Something simple. Something that a mind simpler than Moriarty's would come up with. Something so simple that a mind like Sherlock's would first overlook it.

"Secret second phone."

Sherlock can't find whatever the last juror is being threatened with. It would be dangerous to bluff around it, a last resort.

"Terrible at math"

Perhaps because there is nothing he's being threatened with. Then why is he here? Why did the mind that organised this allow someone like that on the jury? In that position? Every one must have a weak point.

"Manchild"

A vulnerability, not a threat necessarily, but something that makes them manipulable.

"Not something you want to come out at the funeral."

And alright then, he gains something, but what?

Sherlock can't hesitate. He doesn't have the specifics, but if he has faith in anyone's ability to sound like they know more than they do, it's his own.

He focuses his full attention on the last juror. The man is alone, but unwilling to admit to being lonesome. He's too proud. He has ambition. He's smart and skilled enough to have achieved some success, but has neither of those qualities in the amount he fancies or would need to be where he wants unassisted. He is, under a mask of layers of self-assurance, insecure. Sherlock can push the right buttons.

"Monsters don't keep their promises. Don't let yourself be taken advantage of."

The man looks down at his hands. Sherlock barely gloats. He was right – as usual – but it was simple. Obvious. Elementary. Even John wouldn't have been impressed with his deductions.

Now the hard part begins.

"You have all been lied to, which obviously wouldn't have been needed if Herr Trephoff were truly innocent of this crime. The individual who made the threats you've received is being taken care of as we speak. Your children and secrets are safe. So, reconsider your verdict.

The third juror opens his mouth.

The parents, Sherlock has anticipated, will be the worst. He moves to prevent him distracting the jury from his goal.

"I've just proven that I know what I'm talking about. You all know that what I said is true. This is bigger than any of us. Don't let them use you. You have nothing to worry about anymore."

The adulterous fifth juror speaks over the end of his statement. "How do we know this isn't some double-bluff? Who are you working for?"

"The government," he says as she continues, "How did you even know all of that if you're not working with the man who -"

She cuts herself off, apparently having decided that she's revealed too much.

Which is a shame for her, because Sherlock is going to make sure no one else feels the need to incite doubt about him.

"You have a second phone that you keep hidden from your husband. You check it mostly when you're outside. Your cheap jacket has badly made pockets. The material has warped around them, fitting to their shape even when they're not with you. The phones have different novelty-shaped cases, no chance of confusing one for the other, and each has its own pocket. Your ring is loose on your finger. Your teeth and hair are bleached, not to retain the attention of a husband that hasn't noticed the – with respect, almost well covered – hickey just under the edge of your collar, but to keep the interest of a selection of men who care most about the accuracy of profile pictures. You don't mind having lovers behind your husband's back, but you think you're too good a person to leave a dying man. You smell like a hospital."

She blinks at him, not open-mouthed, but with a growing belligerence that often indicates he's about to be punched. The second juror shoots her a look of contempt.

This is all wrong. He does not need them fighting.

"You were all selected for this jury for a reason." He hurries on. "The man who approached you, he was trying to prey on your vulnerabilities. You know what that feels like now." He inclines his head at the grouped parents near the head of the table. "You know how horrible it is to have someone you love threatened." He lets his voice waver in that statement, just enough to invoke sympathy and make them assume something empathetic. "The people I'm working with are stopping the man who did that to you. He's done it to others as well. He's been helping Herr Trephoff and people like him. We need to stop them to stop him. I need your help to make sure no one else is hurt. I need you to convict Herr Trephoff of the crimes he has committed."

"The people you're working with, they already have the man who threatened our children?" the parent who'd tried to speak earlier asks.

Sherlock nods. It's certainly true. That is Mycroft's responsibility, so it's as good as done.

"Your children are safe. All that remains is to ensure justice through the conviction of Herr Trephoff."

The tax dodger coughs.

"And no one working with me cares enough about any of your secrets to want to do anything about them."

There is a moment of silence before the head juror clears his throat and calls for a restatement of the jurors' decisions.

Sherlock stills his hands as the repeated mantra, "guilty," rolls over him until he himself repeats it.

The decision is made, the book is closed. They file out of the room and listen to the judge's ruling. Sherlock should feel the warmth of success. Sherlock should feel something, anything about it. But he doesn't. He feels almost numb in the face. All he can think about is Moriarty and his trial. Still, Moriarty doesn't appear.

Sherlock leaves. He returns to the hotel. He remembers the look on John's face when he heard Moriarty's verdict. He remembers the way his hands had moved.

He misses him. He consciously doesn't let himself miss him. It a spiral of concern and self-pity he needs to avoid. He needs... nothing.

He wants drugs, again.

He doesn't get any.

He checks his phone. They're done here.

He's so close to finished. He can all but smell London's air.

He stays the night at the hotel and, despite himself, falls asleep to fantasies of a glorious return.

He's not alone when he wakes.

He lies in the dark, listening. He doesn't want to lose the element of surprise. He opens his eyes but it does little good. He remains still and regulates his breathing to mimic sleep.

"Oh, calm down," Moriarty's ever annoying voice rings out. "It's just me."

Sherlock groans and pushes his head into the pillow.

"One step closer to home, are you?"

Sherlock doesn't respond.

"How exciting. The prodigal son returning to, well, whatever's left. They say you can never go home again for a reason, you know. Places change. People change. They move on."

Footsteps approach the bed, followed by a dip at the edge of the mattress.

"They aren't waiting for you. They think you're dead and have got over it. If you really want them to be safe, you'd be better off staying away."

Sherlock kicks out. He doesn't meet anything under the blanket, but the dip in the bed flattens out.

He lies there, awake and alone.

He very carefully does not think about Moriarty's assertions.

He doesn't want to sleep. He doesn't need to sleep.

His phone has no new information. It would be just like his brother to deny him purpose until he's had "time to rest" for the sake of his "best interests."

"what's next" he types and sends.

He stares at the phone, counting forty seconds before he gets a reply.

It decodes to "The Baron is ready."

He drops the phone onto the bed and runs his hands over his face. He's close. He's almost done. It doesn't matter if it's exactly the same; he'll be home.

The phone vibrates several times with more details. He has a place to go, an identity to take, and a contact who will guide him in deeper. This may, if all goes well, be his last mission. Or if all goes very badly.

He makes himself presentable and considers walking to the airport. He decides against it; he's not here to enjoy the scenery or himself.

The cab ride is quick, and more expensive than necessary, but he has enough money after picking up the dossier from the last airport. He digs cash out of his bag's recesses to pay for a ticket to Serbia and takes the morning flight out.

Moriarty doesn't bother him again. Sherlock barely even thinks of his target on the flight over. He is, once again, lost in fantasies of return. He images John, and how he should describe his travels to him.

He's sure John would like to know about the time he spent in Cambodia. He'll have to censor it heavily though: the terror he'd felt waking without light or freedom of movement in swiftly rising water could be twisted into an entertaining story; the fact that he had calmed himself enough to successfully slip his bonds and crawl away only by imagining John's voice telling him to "Move, now. Breathe. There's no time to waste." does not bear repeating.

All his stories need to be censored, so he plans ahead. John will be furious upon his return – he doesn't like to be left out of things – but Sherlock will make him see reason. Sherlock will entertain him enough to earn forgiveness.

His stop in Láibīn will make John laugh, and the incident in Taipei will have to impress him, but places like Tibet, well, Sherlock hardly intends to conclude with "and then I decided to take some of the mysterious drugs, and ended up having persistent hallucinations." So, he prepares.

'The monks were happy enough to see the back of me. I was off to New Delhi by morning.' He might say, or 'I couldn't stay. I had to leave that very night to lie to a border guard.'

He'll decide on his phrasing when he sees John again. He'll cultivate his options and choose one in the moment. Likely he'll come up with something better in John's presence. The man does tend to provide inspiration.

Sherlock disembarks and heads off to find his contact. The man works as a busboy in a family-owned restaurant and is far more financially stable than most.

He walks in, orders a soup, writes a note to leave under his bowl, and deals with the reappearance of Moriarty.

The spectre settles himself in the seat across the table and looks out over the other patrons.

"Boring, boring, boring people everywhere." He turns back to Sherlock as he ends his statement. Sherlock may feel included, but he's far from insulted.

"Let's talk about death," Moriarty demands as Sherlock inclines his head in an attempt to conceal his face while still being able to see out of the window. He shouldn't be sitting near a window, but there hadn't been an option. The street is neither empty nor busy; there are few opportunities for concealment. The windows of the surrounding houses won't offer clear views of his seat and the rooftops are inclined. He's very likely not courting extensive danger due to his position, but he's not about to relax.

"It's not as bad as you might think. Boring still, sometimes, but mostly when I'm with you. Everything's slower now. Calmer. You'd love it, actually. It's like the kind of high when you think you can feel your cells dividing."

"Please, God, let me live," Sherlock whispers to himself. Moriarty pulls back with a frown.

"Oh, Sherlock." He sighs extensively. "Come on. You're already a dead man. This is just one more thing you're doing wrong."

Sherlock stares across the table, careful to look contemplative for any onlookers who might find a man arguing with empty air to be noteworthy.

"I know, I know. You got attached and think you've found reason to live, but believe me, darling, it won't last. It never does. You need more." He leans forward. "People like us always do."

"Do this," Moriarty continues as Sherlock is given his soup. "Destroy everything I created. You still won't get what you want. I've seen to it."

Sherlock burns his tongue. Not that it matters. There's no one to impress with his wit; he needs to remember that he knows that.

"You'll never be free of me." Moriarty grasps the table to lean farther forward. "I have tainted everything you've touched. I have given you everything you have, and I can take it all away without even breathing."

Moriarty leans back again. "You should ask your brother what your little pets are up to. You really should."

"You'll regret ignoring me," Moriarty says as Sherlock blows on a spoonful of soup. Then he sighs again.

"You're right. He would never tell you. That Detective Inspector you're so fond of could have bled out weeks ago, tortured to death by some vigilante. You'd be the last to know."

It's not true, obviously. Sherlock knows how to use google and read social media. He would know if anything important had happened. But it has been a while since John posted anything, and if something had happened to any of them Mycroft could have kept it out of the news.

"I outsmarted you and I outsmarted your brother. I am getting what I want. Well," Moriarty rolls his eyes with his entire head, "what I wanted."

The soup is thick slime in Sherlock's mouth. A weight sliding down his throat and into his stomach while he has no choice but to listen.

"All these months, did you really think you could keep me down? You can unwind my web all you want, darling, but you've never done me any real harm. You know I wouldn't just die and leave you with a handful of threads to trim. I don't lose, Sherlock. Ever. You know my plans didn't end on that rooftop. I wasn't just going to shoot myself in the face and disappear forever."

Moriarty leans back and smiles in that way Sherlock thinks could be sincere.

"Neither of us give up that easily."

Hadn't he though? He'd come to the rooftop with a loaded gun, but had he planned to use it? Sherlock has been over and over this; Moriarty wasn't as impulsive as he'd made an effort to appear, but that didn't mean he wasn't impulsive enough. He was intelligent enough to keep Sherlock unsure.

Sherlock leaves his bowl three-quarters full. He tucks the note underneath it and exits through the front to wait around back.

Moriarty follows.

The moment the busboy receives the note, he should come out through the kitchen door. Sherlock isn't particularly concerned about anyone else finding it; it isn't the sort of establishment where people are overly eager to look into each other's business, and he'd worded it to imply that a tryst was hoped for.

The kitchen opens into something little more than an alleyway with several cars: not top-of-the-line, but new enough to indicate healthy finances.

"This must be just like home for you, skulking behind some third-rate establishment wishing someone would come talk to you."

"Wishing someone didn't want to talk to me."

"Cute." Moriarty appears to consider leaning against a wall before thinking better of it.

"I'm not the boring one."

"Well, technically-"

"You're another form of self-sabotage."

Moriarty makes a whining noise of disagreement. It's exactly how Sherlock would choose to be annoying if the tables were turned.

"Why are you here? Just tell me."

"That old chestnut: Unfinished business, like always. What's mine, Sherlock?"

"I don't know."

"Don't do this." Moriarty winces as Sherlock had hoped. "Come on."

"You're never going to see me kill myself."

"Let's agree to disagree."

Moriarty mimes shooting a gun into his head. "It's less painful than you'd think, if you do it right."

"I wish you'd suffered more."

"Ooh, feisty."

"I don't want to die."

"Not yet." Moriarty shrugs. "Not anymore."

He leans close enough that Sherlock can feel his body heat. "Neither did I, for a while. It passes."

Sherlock doesn't respond to the proximity.

"You don't understand me."

Moriarty hums something that might be "I am you."

"You never understood me," Sherlock replies, louder.

He want to push Moriarty back against the brick wall, to shake him, to punch him, to do something to shut him up. He is still, for whatever reason, afraid to touch him.

He closes his eyes for a moment and imagines what John would do here. The image of him throttling Moriarty is ecstatically satisfying.

He opens them again at the sound of the door. Moriarty is gone, and a young man who looks too young to be any sort of contact is standing there, Sherlock's note in hand.

"Who were you talking to?" the boy asks.

"No one. Myself. I've been on the road, you get into strange habits."

"I'll bet," the boy says, then reaches out to run his hands over Sherlock's chest. He's stunned for the fraction of a second that it takes him to work out that this definitely is the contact and he's – very reasonably – checking for wires. He lets the boy run his fingers behind his ears as well, and he seems satisfied with that. At least, he doesn't demand any further invasion of personal space.

"Alright. Look, you've had this explained, yeah? I can get you into the club, but once you're in you're not my responsibility. I'm not interested in getting any more involved."

Sherlock spares a moment of pity for the boy, who's still naïve enough to think that anyone who's caught his brother's attention has any choice as to how involved they are. Still, the plan is perfect for him.

"All I need is to get in."

The club, to Sherlock's well-informed knowledge, is where the man known as Baron Maupertuis rules over several black-market businesses. They run from fighting rings to arms dealing. Sherlock's first reaction had been to question the wisdom of running multiple illegal operations out of one location, but the club has never faced a police raid, and, considering their relationships with law enforcement officers, can expect not to need to worry about any in the future.

Sherlock's plan, as it stands, is to enter the club, make a name for himself in the boxing ring, and from there ingratiate himself into Maupertuis' inner circle. It will take more time than he wants to spend, but he has faith in his ability to streamline the process.

"Yeah? Good. I get off at three."

The boy gives him the name of a street corner to meet him on, only a two minute walk away from the club.

It leaves Sherlock with more time than he needs to prepare. He finds a hotel, takes a room, and reads through the newest information that Mycroft has sent to his phone.

Baron Maupertuis has increased his focus on arms dealing and he has – to his great detriment – decided to make use of London's docks for the purpose. He'd made use of Moriarty's services several times, but only through underlings. They need something that they can connect directly to him. Mycroft suspects that this will be one of their last chances to connect him to Moriarty; that a final shipment is leaving London, and that if he can't be directly linked to it, more complex measures will have to be taken. Sherlock suspects that Maupertuis has links to the assassins who had surrounded him at Baker Street. He was linked to Moriarty, several of the assassins were from this area, and even Moriarty couldn't have been their only source of work.

Baron Maupertuis does not appear to be a very complex man. He enjoys violence and uses it liberally. He's intelligent, but not so much that he could match John in a battle of wits, let alone Sherlock. He has the cunning required to make good use of the cleverness of others. It makes him, in some ways, unpredictable: he doesn't have a way of thinking, he has several.

Sherlock is smart, and he could be very good at appearing useful if he needed to.

He arrives at the meeting place right on time and has to wait in the chill morning wind for just over four minutes. He doesn't mind waiting. He only slightly minds waiting when he has had no reason to expect to have to. He minds waiting now, when every idle second is another that John, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade are in danger.

He doesn't complain, doesn't say anything to the contact about his displeasure. He longs for the days when he'd had so many resources at hand that he didn't have to fawn over the overdeveloped egos of the pathetically underdeveloped. This alone would be enough to make Mycroft hate field work.

He briskly responds to the boy's greeting, at which the boy hums and doesn't try to start a conversation. The walk passes faster in silence.

He's introduced as Thomas Johnson, an Englishman who'd made his way here with a subtext of legal troubles. The door guard looks at him as though he couldn't give less of a shit who he is or where he's from but wants to make some display of doing his job, then lets them through.

The boy, it turns out, really does know people. He gives Sherlock an unnecessary run-down of various figures, then leads him through a door, a hallway, and another door to a fighting pit. The boy speaks to a man (married to an adulterer, one seven-year-old son, has turned to working here as his main source of income, the family relies on the mother's paycheque and this makes him emotionally unstable which has contributed to the aforementioned adultery) takes a bet, and raises a brow at Sherlock, who bets against him.

Sherlock watches the match and the men around the match. The man he'd bet against – as he'd seen at first glance – was going to lose. He favours his left side: a recent injury he hasn't yet adjusted to, likely from a previous match.

The man he'd bet on is no more skilled than the other, but will win from lack of handicap.

The men around the pit are, for the most part, productive members of society by day. This is entertainment, not how most make their living or lose it. The bets are unreasonable only insofar as the very drunk are permitted to make them; cash is the only acceptable tender.

These are not hardened criminals, they simply support them.

"It's not the big guys tonight," the boy confides, "better for you."

Sherlock spares a dismissive glance for him and doesn't show his concern over how the boy had apparently predicted his plan. That's not something Mycroft would have shared with an underling.

Sherlock recalibrates; he'd just half-listened to the man taking bets explain that "amateur night" had less restrictive conditions on payouts. That's a much more logical explanation. Still, the momentary suspicion has provided a shock to his system and sharpened his perceptions.

He takes a moment to mentally review his notes, and no, this doesn't match up with the floor-plans Mycroft had sent him. As of seventeen days ago, the fighting rings had been closer to the outside of the complex, but here they are buried in the middle. Has this been changed for a reason? Was that reason him?

There were no signs of construction when he entered, and surely Mycroft and his contact would have known to warn him about that. So that's one possibility discarded, but there are so many more.

He glances over to make quick eye contact with a bouncer. There are more of them here than there were in the rooms they've passed, but those rooms hadn't contained fighting pits, so odds are it's nothing to do with him.

Then again, the man had been staring straight at him. But he's new. He stands out.

"They know who you are. Who you really are!" Moriarty shouts at him from the side of a guard. It's distracting, but hardly meaningful. He's not about to let a hallucination that voices his fears feed his paranoia.

"They've been told to watch for a new face entering the amateur ring. They know you're alive, and what you'll do. This is what you get from being predictable." He rocks back on his heels.

Sherlock glances over at another guard, and that one is suspicious. He's watching him out of the corner of his eye, not openly as a guard paid to discourage troublemaking should.

Sherlock decides to consider, for the sake of open-mindedness, that his hallucination is speaking the truth. If the guards are aware of him, what then? He is deeper within the club's complex than he would otherwise be. How can he best make use of that?

If he's already known, he has no cover to blow. This, his immediate future, could be his best chance to make his way into Baron Maupertuis' office without his confidence and steal something incriminating.

Sherlock stares over at Moriarty. If he makes the wrong choice and the bouncers have been warned about him then he'll be captured or very probably killed. If he makes the wrong choice because his paranoia and lack of sleep are creating a storm of delusion then... at worst he is caught breaking into Baron Maupertuis' personal office. He will be captured, and most likely killed. At best he has completed his mission early, and can provide the evidence needed to incriminate Baron Maupertuis. Then he can return to London long before expected

Sherlock wavers under the bright clarity of overwork. It seems so simple but it's not, and he knows it's not.

Still, there is – well, maybe none of that matters. The purpose, really, of the plan to gain Baron Maupertuis' confidence is to gain entrance to the core of the complex and Baron Maupertuis' office. The movement of the pit has provided that. The pit is not where it had been, but the room is familiar from the blueprints. He knows his way to Maupertuis' office from here, as long as it lies where the blueprints indicated. He could cut this short. He could be on his way home by this afternoon.

"Where's the toilet?" He asks loudly of his companion. The boy glances away from the match before frowning and shouting back, "Go back to the hallway and turn left. Men's is the second door."

Sherlock makes a noise that could be interpreted as thanks and makes his way through the crowd to the door.

The man taking bets puts an arm out to him as he passes. "You know the rules, yeah? You leave the room; you forfeit your bet."

He doesn't want to appear as though he too urgently wants to be elsewhere, so he asks, "If I stay for the round and my man wins, but I leave before collecting, is it still forfeit?"

The man gives a sharp nod.

Sherlock swears and looks back to the fight. It won't last long. He could not care less about the money, but he needs to decide on an appearance to stick to. 'Man who abandons bet to piss' is a bit too impulsive. Too close to the truth perhaps.

So he waits by the bouncer for the fight to end. The man he'd bet against puts too much force into a punch that he can't control; his opponent moves under his arm and jabs his fist up – the second time in the match he's tried such a move – and the loser stumbles back. Another two hits follow in quick succession, and he's down. He's counted out and Sherlock is first in line to collect his winnings.

He asks the bouncer for directions to the bathroom again, loudly, and leaves.

He turns right. Only Moriarty follows him.

He follows the floor plan as depicted in his mind palace and soon enough makes his way to Baron Maupertuis' office.

There are fewer people in this section of the complex, and fewer guards to avoid.

The door is locked both physically and digitally. He's old hat at picking locks, and the security system is easy enough to disable.

Moriarty watches, not interfering as Sherlock had expected him to.

"No art in you," he complains as Sherlock cuts wires to disengage the door rather than hacking it, but he stays silently watchful during the tricky bits.

Sherlock is perfectly aware that in a complex like this security measures are likely to go beyond the apparent. But he also knows that Baron Maupertuis is, in some ways, a very simple man, the sort who wouldn't want to bother with disengaging a load of security systems every time he entered his office. He's the sort of man who finds that business comes more easily when his clients don't fear that they're being recorded by security cameras, and has therefore quite simply provided a path to his office without them. Sherlock performs a quick check for other measures, but when he finds nothing he proceeds with a clear mind.

The office is comfortable, but not extravagant. An imposing oak desk with leather business chairs on either side sits over a third of the floor. Sherlock moves to the larger seat and sets to digging through the drawers.

Baron Maupertuis' filing system is decently organised, but not so obviously that "arms dealing" stands out. Sherlock considers that this is a poorly secured room, and decides on searching for a poorly hidden safe.

"Kick up the carpet. There's no need for it," Moriarty says. Sherlock follows along because really, he's only taking directions from himself, and really, he's not wrong.

There is a very noticeable hatch crafted into the floor inches away from the side of the desk. It wouldn't show to anyone sitting in the guests' chairs, but it's pronounced enough that a foot in a thin-soled boot might feel it.

The passcode is not 1234, as Sherlock had condescendingly suspected. It takes three attempts for Sherlock to crack it: the Baron's wedding anniversary, which likely ensures that he never misses the event; a code well-crafted for someone with that certain kind of cunning.

The safe is full of papers and flash drives. More than enough to provide the evidence they need, he's sure of it, even if he can't be certain what information each item contains. He can fit the lot in the inner pockets of his coat and sort it out later.

He rushes to fill his pockets and finds that he's shaking. Why is he shaking? He's gone without food or sleep for much longer than this, and he certainly hasn't taken anything recently.

"Mmm," Moriarty hums as Sherlock stands and covers the now emptied vault. "Is that all?"

Sherlock runs his eyes over the room again, cataloguing everything. He continues his search to find three more flash drives; two tucked up under the edge of the desk, and one pressed deep between the seat and the back of a guest chair. He suspects that last one wasn't placed there purposely.

Moriarty remains unobstructive, helpful even. Sherlock can't not wonder why. Even if he accepts that the man is his own hallucination, there's little reason for him to stop taunting Sherlock now.

Moriarty doesn't say anything as Sherlock purposefully slams the door in his face. He simply appears in the hallway the moment Sherlock turns around. He watches Sherlock with inescapable dark eyes, and though Sherlock should prefer this silent version, he finds his heart racing ever more quickly.

He hurries back along his path, taking the corners that allow him to avoid the cameras. His contact – he knows the boy's name, but it's not important enough to be accessible – is the first person he sees.

He's dizzy, and he should absolutely not be dizzy.

It's not entirely unfamiliar, but still largely unexpected.

The contact could not be compromised. Mycroft would not allow it. But someone near the contact? A coworker? That could, theoretically, slip by.

Someone who had access to his soup, if he's right, and of course he is. It's been hours. He wonders whether he's supposed to be here or stumbling into his hotel's toilet. He didn't take much, less than a third of the dose. Maybe he wasn't supposed to be stumbling anywhere.

He grabs the boy by the arm. "We're switching coats."

The boy blinks at him.

"Take mine. Get out of here. Get it to the man who arranged for us to meet."

"Wha-" the boy starts, even though Sherlock has made it patently clear that he doesn't have time to waste.

He shoves the boy's collar back over his shoulder. The young man finally gets the message and takes it off himself, handing it to Sherlock with little more than a grumble and accepting his in turn.

"Get out. Move. Don't stop. Make sure our side is the one that finds you."

The boy pales and opens his mouth.

"Go," Sherlock insists. "If you're stopped, act confused."

Sherlock follows him, half a hallway behind, as he makes his way toward the exit. The guards don't bother him until he gets to the door, but the boy is stopped.

The guard is dressed like the other bouncers. To the untrained eye, he looks like the other bouncers. He is, however, concealing a far greater and more fatal range of weaponry on his person, and he moves like someone with a great deal of experience using it.

Sherlock hears Moriarty's percussive claps, the start of his statement: "Cold. I hadn't thought you'd sacrifice – Oh." He ends with amused, falsified disappointment rather than genuine surprise as Sherlock rushes toward the men.

He purposefully bumps the guard's shoulder with his own as he rushes past, showing just enough of his face to make certain he's identifiable.

The guard leaves Sherlock's contact, rushing after him instead with a "Him! You!"

One final grab is made for him by a guard just outside the door but even as world tilts under him, he's swift enough to evade.

Then he's out. He knows this city, but not as well as the men following him do. It seems most logical to make his way around the building and retreat to the woods out back. Some will be familiar with the area still, but fewer. They'll have to split up to find him, and there'll be little to help them track him.

He loses count of how long it takes him to make his way around the outside of the complex. It may be far longer than it should be or he may be experiencing time-dilation. However long it takes, his pursuers don't catch up. But he doesn't look back to see how far his lead remains. The men – only two following closely enough – have begun shooting at him, and all they need to hit their target is for him to pause long enough to turn. He doesn't run straight and he doesn't stumble. He makes it to the woods unscathed, though that must be partly his good fortune in that it's not yet dawn.

The last time he'd run intoxicated through the woods, he'd had John with him. He'd been seeing Moriarty then too, but he'd seemed so much less concrete the morning after. The Moriarty that haunts him now is far more like the one he'd met in the flesh.

He stops at a stream just long enough to tear at his contact's coat, snagged on the branch of a fallen tree. The water rushes, but not deeply or quickly enough to sweep a man away. Still, it's too cold for him to allow himself to get wet; he uses the fallen trunk as a bridge. Despite his dizziness, he rushes over it on his feet. It's like dancing while drunk; he doesn't fall.

He can hear the men behind him, but when he curves his path to the left and glances back they're almost too far away to see.

He runs for what seems like hours, but the sky doesn't lighten and the men behind him don't slow. If anything they seem to grow, both in energy and number.

He's seeing double by the time they curve around him, so he's not entirely sure how many men it took to catch him when he finally falls to his knees. They aren't all from the club, that he's certain of. The bouncers hadn't dressed like that or held guns that large.

Baron Maupertuis does make efforts, when warranted.

There's a pounding rhythm in his head reminiscent of helicopter blades, and a very good chance that he's about to pass out. But he needs to stay conscious. He needs to know where they're taking him, and how to retrace whatever path they take to get out.

He does not get to meet the Baron. The men tie his arms behind him, first by rope and then in cuffs. He's dragged along for some time, then placed in a car, then driven.

Dawn is lightening the sky when they get to their destination: another complex surrounded by dense woods, but this one has no side that faces civilization.

The men fit a balaclava the wrong way around over his head, grab him by his bonds, and pull him along into the building through labyrinthine corridors until throwing him into a room that could most accurately be described as a bare concrete cage.

The door, the only notable feature of the room, shuts behind him, and he is left in a space large enough to sit with his legs partially extended in one direction, or lie with his arms extended to the elbows in another. The ceiling is high enough that he can't reach it. There is a bucket, and something that could generously be referred to as a sleeping bag.

They've left him his clothes, and everything hidden in and under them, so – after pulling the balaclava completely off – Sherlock occupies himself with unwinding his bonds and picking the locks of the cuffs.

He holds himself ready to burst out when they next open the door, then finds himself waking to cold stone at his back. The process repeats and repeats until Sherlock wakes without dizziness, only a dry mouth and gnawing hunger.

They come for him and he does not leap at them.

Two guards: one single and angry about it, passably educated but barely employable, not an animal lover and not strong, fast, or quick-witted enough to survive in this line of work for long. The other older, married relatively happily with three girls all under the age of 10, and well enough experienced with this sort of work to be a problem.

The younger one commands him to get to his feet. When Sherlock doesn't move or reply, he grabs his already bruised arm to pull him up. The older watches carefully, gun held steady with a self-assurance that confirms Sherlock's suspicion that he has considerable experience using it.

He's pulled through two corridors only to be thrust into a new room with a large man and a single chair. He's pushed into it and a bucket full of water is poured over his face.

He spends one second recoiling, then opens his mouth to swallow as much as he can. He's hit with a third and fourth wave until the bucket is empty.

"Who do you work for?" The man asks.

Sherlock says nothing.

They wait. One minute, then two. He can only assume that his interrogator is trying to use the silence to inspire trepidation.

The man is not highly ranked amongst Baron Maupertuis' employees. He is in over his head, more suited to overseeing the movement of the products that pass through this facility than to the interrogation of a man who could outwit and outwill him even starving and freezing. Sherlock is not unafraid of him – he's seen how much damage fools can do – but he's not afraid enough to slip.

"Take him back to the cell," the man says at this elementary show of resistance. "We'll give him one more chance. If he doesn't speak, I'll send for Vlad."

He speaks directly to Sherlock, even while nominally addressing the guards. He clearly thinks it makes him intimidating. Sherlock isn't quite foolish enough to laugh aloud.

He is returned to his cell and left there until his throat becomes painfully dry again. If isolation is meant as torture, he embraces it. He spends his time in his mind palace. His experiences aren't as vivid as they are when he's intoxicated, but they're calming and entertaining. It's more pleasurable than meditation. He imagines himself at Baker Street, simply existing in the presence of John as he has so many times before. He imagines not telling John about what he's done over the last years, but living his life as it was before he left.

He immerses himself in memories of being coerced into watching banal movies by John and finding more entertainment in watching John's reactions than the actual badly-scripted, poorly continuity-controlled "cinema classics." He remembers late evenings and calm mornings. He remembers the ecstatic clarity of seeing how all the factors of a case, pinned to the wall, fell into formation after a comment from John presented a new perspective.

He remembers a time when he was content. Moriarty's spectre stays absent.

The door to the cell is occasionally opened. The guards are never alone. They throw him a bottle of water and something to eat. A bit of bread at one point, a packet of crisps at another, a bruised apple three times. They are irregular in their visits and he's not sure how much time he has passed in their capture all told, but he has put himself through worse trials for the sake of his own entertainment.

His captors do not appear to know that. They come for him again, the young one walking into the room rather than literally throwing his food at him, and expect to find him weak. He is weak, of course, continued access to nourishment has kept him in a near constant state of hunger, and his muscles ache with disuse, but he is not as weak as they expect.

He lets them drag him along without trying to fight his way to freedom. Their pushes are less forceful; he learns that they expect to corral him with less effort, and Sherlock will be sure to make use of that.

He is, once again, brought to the man who had threatened him. There is no more water.

"I do not have permission to hurt you," the man says. "You know that by now. They say you are not stupid."

"They're right."

"Ah! You do talk!" The man leans close to him. "There is a man who will come here if you do not speak to me now. Vlad will hurt you until you speak to him. Everyone does." The man leans back again. "He is very good," he confides in a tone that other people would use to describe a masseuse.

"What do you want to know?" Sherlock asks, and the man shows his hand far before he should.

"Everything about the man you work for. What he knows. Tell me what you were looking for."

Sherlock can read the truth of his blunt request in the man's eyes.

"I can't tell you anything." For amusement's sake, he tacks on, "I'm much more afraid of him than your Vlad."

The man lengthens the line of his lips and nods at him.

"I've done what I can to clear my conscience." He directs the statement at one of the guards, who steps forward to retrieve Sherlock.

Now, Sherlock decides, is probably the best time to protest. The door to his cell is devastatingly secure, and if he lets them take him back to it he probably won't be released until this torturer they're so keen on arrives.

So he lets them lead him out of the room and down the corridors, and when they come to his cell he lowers his weight, twists, and uses the one guard's grip on his arm to pull him into the other.

It's not a hard hit but is, as he'd predicted, a surprising one. The older guard regroups first, but not quickly enough. Sherlock uses their momentum to push them further, together, into the cell. If it were just the older guard he might not succeed, but the younger pulls at him to keep himself steady and tangles their legs together, bowling them over into the cell. Sherlock is released.

He moves before the guards can stand and slams the door. He has no key to lock it with but there is no keyhole or knob on the other side, so he doesn't fear them escaping quickly enough to stop him leaving the building.

He sprints through the corridors, reversing the path they'd taken to bring him here without the unnecessary prevarication and re-crossed paths. He runs, almost literally, into another guard and presses his fingers into the man's neck until he passes out. He takes his coat, gun, and hat, which could be enough to disguise him from a distance to a particularly unobservant onlooker, but doesn't bother with more. In a hallway dotted with locked doors, there's nowhere to hide him.

He can tell when they find the body. They shout the alert loud enough to carry through the corridors.

Their footsteps are heavier than his own; they bear down inexorably upon him. He almost makes it, he thinks, but almost is worthless.

He's cornered by men at either end of the corridor, three guns to his one and one guard who would very, very much like to have an excuse to shoot someone. He could take any one of them individually, but facing all three in his weakened state might tax his abilities.

Moriarty appears from around the corner to laugh at him.

"Oh, sweetheart, if you could see yourself. You can't even stand straight."

He ignores the spectre and lowers his gun, hoping for the guards to do the same. The man had said that they weren't allowed to damage him – yet – but Sherlock suspects they'd consider a dead prisoner better than an escaped one.

They return him to his cell. He considers it functionally even smaller now that one of the guards has upset his bucket.

Sherlock focuses on Moriarty, rather than listening to the guards berate him as they lock him in. He feels too much disappointment to even gain a spark of pleasure from the phantom's wince.

"Nice place you have here," Moriarty says as he all but levitates faced with the prospect of touching anything in the room. Considering Sherlock hasn't bathed in... he doesn't know how long, he's probably just as appealing as the rest of it. "Undoubtedly something to tell the folks back home about."

"I will," Sherlock responds, because yes, this is terrible right now, but he will survive it. He will return to tell of it if he wants.

Moriarty groans and rolls his eyes. "You're not going to escape on your own. We've just seen how that works out. And if you think anyone's coming to save you after the mess you've made... you're getting even stupider with age."

Sherlock wants – intends – to save himself, but he is, undeniably, foolish enough to hope that someone is coming to save him. Mycroft will know what has happened, and may want to retrieve him simply because he'll consider Sherlock's capture a slight to his own honour.

The idea twists through Sherlock's mind. He is, in part, still that small boy who believes that his brother is the smartest, most competent person on Earth, and can do anything he puts his mind to. But he is also, in part, still that angry teen who thinks that if Mycroft can't control him, Mycroft might like him better dead. He is, in greatest part, an adult man who realises that neither of those conceptions are accurate, but isn't at all interested in delving into what is.

"The guards didn't know the person they were looking for was you before you ran off so suspiciously. Obviously." Moriarty practically sings the last word.

"I'd already been drugged. They knew me."

"Yeah, someone knew you," Moriarty mocks. "Not those knuckleheads. Not until you confirmed your face was the one to look out for. I said they'd know when you entered the fight, not to run out and get yourself captured. Twice." Disgust hangs heavy in his tone.

"It must be so nice for you, having a brother who's always riding in to clean up your messes. Where would you be without him?"

"Dull," Sherlock responds to the building attack.

"Not here, that's for sure." Moriarty swivels his head to look around the room. "You wouldn't have even made it to our first date. You're helpless. You think you feel alone now? When he's been in constant contact with you? When you grew up with someone who could think like you? You've never known what it's like to be alone." He sounds sincerely angry. Sherlock looks up to find his face relaxed, only eyes showing emotion with a hateful glare. "I thought you, at least, could be my equal. Can you imagine how disappointed I was?" He shows an ironic tightening of the lips, back to another façade. "You were never going to live up to what I needed. That's my problem: I dream too big."

"Your problem is that you're a sociopath."

"I was never officially diagnosed with anything." Moriarty leans slightly toward Sherlock. "Can you imagine outliving him? If he doesn't decide to cut his losses and leave you to rot here." He pulls back with a wrinkled nose. "You won't last a year before you're dead or behind bars. Again."

Sherlock closes his eyes just for a moment to remember watching John at his grave. A singular experience; not one he should ever have the chance to repeat.

He opens his eyes; Moriarty is gone. Even he, failed escapee and all-'round tosser, can recognise simple patterns.

They don't starve him, not any more than they have. At first they don't change anything but the guards who throw his food at him.

Then there is a change.

It starts with a percussive thumping from outside the door. Then come the lyrics. He realises what's happening immediately. Psychological torture: sleep deprivation. He's not sure whether it's punishment for his escape attempt or preparation for something more.

Time passes. He remains unsure of how much and he tells himself that he is refraining from caring. They play the same song over and over and over again, but sometimes it seems to have more verses and sometimes fewer. If he ever is able to sleep he will hear it in his dreams, he's certain. Perhaps he does. It goes on for hours, days. It goes on for eternity. His eyes hurt, his ears hurt, his body goes numb, though not so much that he can't feel the cold. In what might be delirium he takes his shirt and wraps it around his head, over his ears. When that provides no relief, he throws it aside in impotent rage.

Eventually the door is opened again and, instead of taking a plastic bottle to the sternum, he is commanded to his feet. They don't want to touch him, he notes, which is, on balance, perfectly understandable.

He rises under his own power, legs slightly shaky despite having tried to keep them in working order by pacing his slight cell and exercising as much as the room would allow.

"Follow," a man commands, then turns and walks down the corridor. Two remain with guns trained on him. He follows, as do they in turn.

Vlad, it would appear, has brought his own posse. Sherlock is led into a room he has not seen before and paraded in front of guards he cannot remember encountering.

Neither stand out as a professional torturer.

One lounges, feet up on a stool, saying nothing. The other also remains silent; he has stripped out of his coat and hat. He looks at Sherlock with an anticipatory gleam in his eyes. The sort of man who likes hurting people, and isn't particularly concerned about doing so with finesse.

"You're not Vlad," Sherlock says, not having anything better to say but not wanting to remain silent.

The lounger huffs. It's a familiar sound of condescending amusement. No one acknowledges it.

The tattooed man grins, sharp and pleased. "No. I've been sent ahead to soften you up for him. He's a busy man these days."

He's grabbed by one of the guards with gloved hands and pulled over to a set of shackles. He doesn't resist being locked in. The guards interact with each other, and with the tattooed man, but ignore the lounging man entirely.

He blames Moriarty. He blames himself. Clearly he's hounded by another hallucination now.

"Hmm," Moriarty hums. "This should be interesting."

The image of his brother doesn't react to the comment. Perhaps hallucinations can't hear one another. Almost certainly, the observation is meaningless.

The tattooed man grabs a pipe as the others file out. Not a creative thinker, but effectively traditional. Sherlock looks him over.

The man had been in the navy before this, but not for as long as he would have liked and not with a discharge that would serve him well in finding future work. He'd fallen in love and been left, and never completely forgiven either party. He'd come home and married his girlfriend, who has been as faithful to him in marriage as he had been to her in engagement. His penchant for pub fights had apparently impressed the right person and he'd ended up here. He hasn't been doing this professionally for long, not long enough to have saved the money to move into a better neighbourhood, one where water mains don't frequently burst and electricity and internet lines go down. Sherlock sees him well enough to work him.

Still, he doesn't resist being hit. He's too hungry. He's too thirsty. He's exhausted. Surrounded by hallucinations, it's proof of reality.

"I don't actually want you to give up and die here," Moriarty says. "You need to understand, that's not how the story goes."

The man brings the pipe down on Sherlock's ribs, not quite hard enough to break them, but hard enough to bruise the bone. "Who do you work for?"

He doesn't really want an answer, and Sherlock doesn't want to give one. They're getting along famously in their own way.

He feels the skin of his back split under the next blow. It excites the man hitting him, not sexually but so that the following hits are less restrained.

"You're not going to die to one of these idiots," Moriarty tells him as he almost sprains his wrist in the chains from the pressure of a slam of the pipe into the meat of his shoulder.

"You're going to be carted off back home, and I am going to get what I want."

They weather the next few blows in relative silence, the slap of the pipe on flesh and Sherlock's pained grunts echoing through the room.

"Do you understand what I want yet? Have you been able to think about anything but yourself for long enough to wonder?

"What were you doing here?" the man demands. Sherlock isn't even half listening to him anymore.

"I want you to make good on our agreement. That's my unfinished business. With interest. Before you kill yourself, you're going to kill someone else. Maybe multiple people, I haven't decided yet. And I'm going to watch. You're going to be beautiful."

Moriarty walks up to him and leans in close enough that Sherlock can feel the warmth of his breath against his cheek even as his senses should be consumed by the pipe coming down on his back. "I am going to see you immolate yourself. Literally or metaphorically, though I can promise the former will hurt less."

He backs off, sauntering over to stand beside Mycroft's feet.

"So come on, sweetheart, whenever you're ready."

He takes several more hits, not even listening to the man's questions, and gathers his deductions to make an impact.

The man stops beating him. He leans close. Sherlock imagines his brother asking a question. The man repeats Sherlock's deductions, and he's left to wonder whether that's real or an additional hallucination dreamt up by his no longer reliable mind. The man runs out at his suggestion – taking his pipe with him to seek his retribution – and Sherlock, for however long this will last, receives a respite.

The hallucination of his brother speaks, approaches, grabs him painfully by the hair, and whispers words Sherlock has spent far too long yearning to hear.

Unlike Moriarty, Mycroft's breath provides more than heat. He smells like stale coffee and the contents of an ashtray. Sherlock lets his brother's words flow over him and smiles.

No, he's not going significantly more mad. His brother was – is – real, the question asked was real, and the responses from the man tenderising him had been real. He cannot say that he is not hallucinating at this moment, but he is not hallucinating this. He must not be hallucinating this.

Mycroft unlocks his wrists.

"You're angry with me," Sherlock slurs in English, staring at Mycroft's hard grip on his bruised wrist as he releases it from the steel clasp.

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

Sherlock stands on his own, gently rubbing at his bruised flesh. Then his leg gives out. He expects to hit the cement of the floor but his brother – despite having just clearly enjoyed Sherlock's pain – catches him under the arm and steadies him. Without asking his leave, Mycroft hoists Sherlock's arm over his shoulder and brings his own around his back, low enough to miss most of the split skin.

"We don't have time to dawdle," he says, and steps forward pulling Sherlock along with him.

The steps up out of the room take longer than they should, but he makes them without much difficulty. The young guard he'd once attacked stands by the top of the stairs, but a barked sentence from Mycroft seems to make the boy think that whatever's happening is none of his business.

They move down the halls, at first toward his cell and then past it. Mycroft takes a route unfamiliar to Sherlock who – having at various times been brought into, paraded through, and navigated in his attempt to escape these corridors – feels a proprietary knowledge of the layout of the building.

"You're going the wrong way," Sherlock hisses, pulling back and trying to take another turn. He ignores Moriarty's incredulous chuckle from behind them.

"I assure you, I'm not."

"You are. That isn't the way out."

"This is the quickest way out."

"No. This way."

"You're not eight anymore. Stop acting like a child. We don't have time for this." Mycroft speaks in tandem with Moriarty's "So, this is what the famous Holmes brothers look like in action."

"It's astounding," Moriarty adds as Sherlock rips himself from Mycroft's grip and continues down the correct corridor, leaning on the wall to support himself, "I used to know people who feared the possibility of you two working together."

It takes a good seven seconds for him to hear Mycroft follow him, during which Moriarty comments, "But this! I could sell tickets."

"I'm only putting up with this," Mycroft says, voice low and furious, "because I'll enjoy watching you feel stupid once you've had enough rest to let your little brain start working again and remember this."

"And he doesn't want to waste time on you throwing a fit."

Sherlock studiously ignores his brother and his hallucination to plow on.

"The other way would have been faster, if I could trust you to follow," Mycroft grumbles, tucking his shoulder underneath Sherlock's arm and forcing him to walk more quickly than is comfortable.

"Wrong," he replies, which seems perfectly dignified at the time. Moriarty barks a quick, mocking laugh.

He leads them through the hallways, pulling Mycroft in the right direction when he seems inclined to try to take another.

"Quickly," Mycroft whispers as they pass a red door, so low that it might be meant only for his own ears, and speeds his step.

Apparently, if guard rotations were what Mycroft was timing, they have taken too long – the fault of Mycroft's argument. Sherlock hears a quick, precise tread coming from around a corner. There is no avoiding the man hurrying toward them.

The corner is turned, and Sherlock gets a glimpse of him.

The man must be the Vlad he's heard so much about. He has surgeon's hands and a fighter's bearing. He moves with military precision, and his eyes focus, immediately, on Sherlock's deepest bruises and cuts with professional assessment.

"Ah, there you are. Are you an idiot? Why have you taken the prisoner out of–"

Sherlock feels Mycroft's hand slip from his waist, retreating into his coat.

Sherlock startles at the noise, and the back of Vlad's head hits the wall, cerebellum first.

"Don't trip," Mycroft cautions, pushing him toward the body and stepping cleanly over it.

Moriarty is delighted. "Oh!" He says, breathless in a way that must be put on, "Not so dull after all."

"It's so easy, do you see? Everyone else can do it. Just the twitch of a finger."

Sherlock is shaking. It's hunger and exhaustion and the pain catching up to him. He lets Mycroft hurry him along.

The sound of the gunshot must have echoed through the halls, but it will take a moment for them to determine that it's something to worry about and slightly longer to mobilise a response. Sherlock uses the time to his advantage, letting Mycroft pull him along just fast enough that he doesn't stumble.

Mycroft presses a code into a keypad, and Sherlock sees the sun for the first time in... he really doesn't know how long. The wind chills his bare skin, but Mycroft pushes him out and onward then helps him up into a Range Rover that has seen better days.

Sherlock blinks his way out of shock. He tries to calculate how quickly they're driving but keeps getting distracted. He thinks he might be sleeping in second-long naps, falling unconscious and waking again curled up on the heated seat.

The car stops, and through closing eyes Sherlock can see Mycroft climb out. In the next instant Sherlock is being pulled out as well. He struggles before realising it's only Mycroft, then lets the shame at how feeble his struggle had been sink in.

There is a waiting helicopter, black in a clearing surrounded by woods, that they take a moment to climb into. With a word from Mycroft to the pilot, the blades start to spin, and Sherlock wonders again whether any of this is real. Is he going home, to John, to Mrs. Hudson, to Molly and Lestrade? Or will he wake, if he lets himself fall fully asleep, back in the cell?

"We'll get you to bathe first," Mycroft tells him, "then a haircut and... hmm, definitely another shower."

"You're real," Sherlock hears himself say.

"Yes." Mycroft's voice is dry. He brings a hand up to hold Sherlock's chin, just for a moment. "I'm real. You're going home."

Moriarty hasn't followed him from the facility. Sherlock feels the weight of his presence lifted.

He tries to sit straight, hits the tender wounds on his back against the back of the seat, and all but leaps forward.

"Go to sleep," Mycroft commands, as though he expects Sherlock to obey him.

"You don't control me," Sherlock declares.

"My god; I'm aware."

Sherlock nods decisively at the acquiescence and allows himself to shift onto his side. The blades are loud, but it's an enclosed aircraft; it's more relaxing than his cell has been over the last few days.

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again the propellers are still; they've landed. There's a woman whose bearing screams doctor with them and he doesn't end up remembering much after that.

He has been bathed and dressed by the next time he's fully cognizant, but he has flashes of memory: standing in the shower by himself, being far too amused by the prospect of shampoo. The sensation of stepping from tile to carpet, damp but finally, finally clean. Sitting on a hard wooden stool as soft hands wound gauze around his torso, staring at a ficus that seemed miraculously beautiful and ignoring the pull of a needle in his hand.

He raises his head. He's on a jet, sitting at a table with his brother reading a file across from him. It's likely some horrific misuse of government funds.

He tries to speak, chokes, grabs for a bottle of water, and pours half of it down his throat before breathing.

"W-" he starts.

"We're about to land in London. Yes, Bojan was able to bring us the information you dumped on him before getting yourself captured, as I'm sure you were desperate to know. You will come to my office. There will be a debriefing. Something will be done to correct your errors of personal grooming. You will then be given the information you need to return to Baker Street and start investigating this underground terrorist cell," his monster of a brother interrupts.

"Why did you stop wearing the hat? It hid your receding hairline."

Mycroft glances up at him and smiles, tight-lipped. "It's genetic."

"Liar," Sherlock replies, with more fondness than he means to.

"Of course." Mycroft closes the file and looks down through the window.

"London hasn't been the same without you."

'The unsolved case rate has skyrocketed, no doubt."

"Mmm. Your Detective Inspector retained his job after the inquiries."

"Obviously. He didn't do anything wrong."

"Of course. Only what he was accused of."

"They all knew I was consulting before it became a problem."

"Mmm," Mycroft responds, a politician's mumble, not agreement or disagreement. He knows from experience that Mycroft is slippery enough to avoid or create an argument built on that one sound. Siblings, of course, are capable of arguing about anything, and Sherlock with more finesse than most. But he doesn't feel like arguing right now. He's coming home, and none of his carefully planned reintroductions feel adequate.

It's almost too quick. They land, they are picked up by a government car and taken to Mycroft's office. The usual, tedious business of debriefing is completed with the rather unusual addition of a barber afterward, and Sherlock prepares to return to 221B Baker Street, just as he left it.

His surprise at learning that John has moved out is sincere, if slightly exaggerated. He's not concerned. He won't be concerned. He won't let himself be concerned. He knows what John needs, and he's the only person who can provide him with that lifestyle. No one else will be banging on his door for his company in dragging literal skeletons out of people's closets. Sherlock is irreplaceable.

The facial hair is clearly a self-destructive act, a cry for help that Sherlock is more than willing to answer.

Mycroft sends him off to Marylebone Road for the collection of John, making a poor attempt of a subtle warning that John may be too angry to react rationally. Of course John will be angry, but he'll get over it. He'll come back.

He closes his eyes for a moment too long in the cab, and opens them to Moriarty sitting beside him.

"You're not supposed to be here now," he observes.

"Rules change." Moriarty shrugs and stares out the window. "Everything changes."

Sherlock knows, from experience, that cabbies don't particularly tend to care whether you carry on a conversation with yourself as long as you pay. Still, he keeps his voice soft; the tabloids will start up again far too quickly.

"He won't."

Moriarty sneers. "The Steadfast Tin Soldier. You do remember how that one ends?"

He does, and he's rather surprised by the twist of fear in his gut.

But then, there are so many ways to interpret immolation.

It takes a moment for everything to slot together in his mind, but he achieves clarity.

Moriarty is dead; Moriarty is over. His fear of Moriarty is over; it too is dead. He has burnt his web and emerged from the ashes victorious. Moriarty can't hurt him. He can't hurt anyone he cares about. Moriarty can't hurt anyone anymore.

"You've already done the worst to me," Sherlock says aloud, turning his head to the hallucination. It's foolish to fear old demons, and Sherlock Holmes is no fool. Face them, defeat them, and they disappear, just like in the fairy tales.

Moriarty smiles at him, more slowly than he ever had in life. The expression looks too sincere to belong on his face.

"No, I haven't."

Sherlock stares. What good is this mental deficit if he can't cure it with a psychological breakthrough when it has long outlived its purpose? The silence following Moriarty's words brings his attention to the numbness in his face, his pounding heart, and the weight in his chest. He can't run from a product of his own mind, and he no longer knows how to drown it out.

He closes his eyes, thinks of his impending meeting, and opens them again.

Moriarty is still smiling beside him.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and tosses it onto the seat beside him. Moriarty disappears as it passes through him but then, in a blink, returns.

"You're stuck with me, Sherlock. I am going to get what I want from you." Moriarty shifts back into his sing-song cadence. "I told you so."

He turns away. He can, as he had intended to from the beginning, ignore it. If it becomes a greater problem he can – well, he is in London now, everyone is safe, he can – self-medicate if necessary. He could even seek professional help. If necessary. It won't be necessary.

His heart pounds as they arrive at his destination. He pays the cabbie more than he's owed and exits. His palms sweat, which is stupid. He knows what he's doing; forget the plans, he can improvise. John loves it when he improvises.

He enters, and it feels like his chest is going to explode. John is visible from the door, dressed appropriately for this occasion. He's slightly greyer, slightly more lined, but he looks well. Sherlock observes that the moustache looks even worse in person, but finds it only an intellectual observation. Sherlock sees him like an oasis in the desert. He wants to never let him out of sight again.

He's accompanied by a woman, getting up to leave the table like she'll soon leave the relationship. Her body language shows a possessive streak under a permissive veneer; she won't tolerate interrupted dates and missed meetings for long.

"She won't be a problem," Sherlock says to himself, dismissing her with a glance. Moriarty stands by his side and laughs and laughs and laughs.