He finds Jim on the roof, eyes open and blankly staring up at the sky, hair matted with his blood but despite everything there's still a pulse.
Coma, the doctors say, brain damage but to what extent they can only tell when he wakes up.
If he wakes up, Sebastian thinks the words they won't say. If he wakes up.
Part of him wants to kill Sherlock Holmes again.
Part of him wants to kill Mycroft for torturing Jim for weeks for something that never existed in the first place (in his head Jim sneers about people wanting to believe what they're told) but he suffers more from his little brother's death than Sebastian ever could make him.
Part of him wants to kill Jim. For playing this game with Sherlock, for shooting himself in the head in the first place, for not telling Sebastian, for not dying. Who is he to deny Jim what he so obviously wanted.
He doesn't.
Instead he keeps Jim's empire running as well as he can and visits Jim when he feels like it which is rarely the case. Nothing changes anyway, it's just Jim lying in a bed while his body wastes away.
/
He's weak when he wakes up and he doesn't remember anything, not even his name. The doctors tell him that the weakness will vanish soon enough but it's still humiliating when he can't even lift a cup or sit up on his own. They make him to all sorts of tests. When he tells them that he has no idea who he is, they look concerned and do more tests. Traumatic brain injury causing severe post traumatic retrograde amnesia, is the diagnosis.
His name is Richard Brooke, he's an actor and that's all they tell him for now. One of the nurses winks at him and tells him that his good-looking friend will probably come soon and answer his questions.
The man she mentioned comes four days later. He's tall and blonde with hard blue eyes and introduces himself as Sebastian. He asks Sebastian all the questions he's had for the past week and Sebastian answers him:
He was hired by the late Sherlock Holmes to play the part of a criminal mastermind so that Holmes could establish his career as a consultant detective and become famous. When he decided to come with the truth about Holmes, Holmes shot him and killed himself
He shudders when Sebastian tells him all that with barely contained anger in his voice.
Sebastian also tells him that they live together and that he does freelance work or he would have been here earlier. It makes him take another look at Sebastian. He's beautiful, sure, and probably has a downright amazing smile but he has no memory of him.
The moment the door opens Sebastian's body language changes. His shoulders straighten and his muscles tense. He only relaxes once the nurse is gone from the room again. That Sebastian feels so protective of him unleashes something warm within him. It makes him feel a little less alone.
/
He hates the docile creature that looks at him out of Jim's dark eyes and accepts everything he tells him so eagerly. But it's too late to have regrets. The doctors told him that the brain damage is extensive but that the tests show that he will be at least able to form new memories.
It seems James Moriarty killed himself after all.
Sebastian could have told him the truth right then and there but Richard Brooke is needed to keep Sherlock Holmes' legacy tainted and Sebastian will keep Jim's legacy intact.
He remembers Jim giggling the evening he sat on the couch, laptop on his knees and created Richard Brooke "harmless, stupid Rich" Jim called him "he likes handholding and long walks along the beach."
"Not my type then, "Sebastian commented.
"How can you say such things?" Jim said dramatically, eyes big and lips drawn into a pout, "I thought you were the love of my life!"
"Fuck off," Sebastian growled. Jim buried his hand in Sebastian's hair and pulled hard.
"I will burn him," Jim promised him with a dark and manic smile before kissing him, all teeth, until Sebastian tasted blood.
He shakes the memory off instead he watches Jim give him an uncharacteristically shy smile and tries his best to smile back.
/
There are reporters wanting to speak with him. The man who told the world the truth about Sherlock Holmes nearly at the cost of his own life. But he doesn't want to speak with them, not yet when his mind is still reeling from everything that other people have told him and that he cannot remember one bit.
Sebastian takes him home, a flat too large for two people with a huge wardrobe filled with expensive suits. His CV as an actor isn't exactly impressive so most of this has to come from Sebastian. When he mentions it, Sebastian tells him the suits were for the job. The job that almost got him killed. The unhappy line around Sebastian's mouth tells him exactly what Sebastian thought about the job.
"Why aren't there any photos?" He asks instead. Not a single one, not even of him and Sebastian.
"You always said you don't need them. Photographic memory," Sebastian makes it sound like it's a joke between them but it falls flat.
"Do you have pictures?"
Sebastian looks at him for a long moment, his face unreadable, and then says, "I had you."
That he uses the past form feels like a punch to the gut. It makes him feel guilty. Why the hell did he take this job? He didn't only lose his memories. He lost Sebastian, too and in a way Sebastian lost him.
"We can make new ones, right?" He asks tentatively. The thought of braving the world without Sebastian at his side is unbearable.
"Of course." But Sebastian doesn't sound convinced. As if he's not sure he still knows who the man in front of him is. That makes two of them, Rich thinks.
/
Part of Sebastian feels guilty. When it's not disgust or anger, it's guilt. Guilt for manipulating Jim into being this. Someone so different from Jim that Sebastian still expects him to drop the act any moment now, to announce "surprise" and smile with too many teeth showing and eyes sparkling when he hits Sebastian in the face.
The moment never comes.
Instead he has this stranger walking around in Jim's body.
/
"You didn't want me to take the Job, didn't you?" Rich asks quietly.
"Doesn't matter."
"Why didn't I listen to you?" Because Sebastian seems to be angry all the time and he feels that he'd rethink any decision if Sebastian is feeling this strongly about it. Instead Sebastian snorts as if that's the funniest thing he has ever heard.
"That'd be the day," he says, rolling his eyes.
It's not the first clue that he's picking up that there was something wrong in their…relationship.
Sebastian has his own bedroom for one thing.
"You said I snore," Sebastian shrugs the question off.
"Do you?"
"I don't make a habit of watching myself sleep."
/
Sebastian kisses him to shut him up mostly. He did it with Jim, too, whenever he went off on a tangent. Especially if it involved stars or Sherlock Holmes.
Or, one memorable night, stealing the Crown Jewels.
"Oh", Rich says, surprised, "We do this then?"
When Jim played his IT disguise to fool Sherlock he sometimes reacted like this just to annoy Sebastian.
He pushes the memory away.
"Yes", he says, "usually."
/
When Sebastian kisses him for the first time in his memory, he knows it's more to shut him up than anything, but he lets him, because this is what his normal is supposed to be. And if he immerses himself in what everyone is telling him his life should be, then eventually it will be again.
Only that life led to him being shot by his employer on the roof of a hospital so maybe that's not the best idea.
He cannot, anyway. He's unable to take a single step outside the flat on his own.
Sebastian is away more often than he would like and once they forgot to get groceries before Sebastian left again, so for a week he sits in the flat, arms slung around his knees and ignores the gnawing hunger.
He's too scared to open the door as long he's alone, too, so delivery is out of question as well.
When Sebastian comes back and finds him like this, he looks like he either wants to hit something or cry. In the end he does neither. Instead he calls a takeaway and orders soup.
Rich clings to him and apologises for being broken, for being such a mess.
Sebastian lets him, stroking his back as he cries.
They stay like this until the doorbell rings.
/
When he comes home and finds out just how broken Jim's remains are, he feels bad about not paying more attention.
He hasn't felt bad about the way he treated another person in years.
But Richard Brooke isn't a person, not really. He's a job. And Sebastian prides himself on doing his work well. He watches Rich eat his soup, shoulders hunched and eyes red-rimmed.
Jim is dead. He's not coming back. But he's left Sebastian with a job to do, so he's going to do it.
/
"I'm sorry", Sebastian says suddenly and Rich almost chokes on his soup.
"What for?" Rich asks and for one terrifying moment he's convinced that Sebastian is going to leave him.
"I didn't treat you like I should've. I'm sorry. Do you think we can start over?"
To him the relief is palpable. "It's not like I remember anything anyway", Rich smiles. "I'm Richard Brooke, I'm an actor."
Sebastian smiles back and for the first time it looks genuine. "Sebastian Moran, nice to meet you."
/
Where Jim Moriarty used to sit and sneer at the sheer simple-mindedness of ordinary people and their lack of creativity while answering Sebastian's questions about security and building layouts, sits now Rich Brooke and chats happily about guest starring on some Fantasy BBC show in Wales or an American production in Ireland and his engagement for the Fringe Festival next summer.
His attempts to gauge whether Sebastian will come with him or not are laughable shadows of what Jim used to do.
But Jim Moriarty is dead and Sebastian grows to accept that more and more with each passing day even if he cannot completely shake the guilt that comes from the feeling in his gut that he was the one who killed Jim. He didn't pull the trigger but he decided against Jim and for Rich and now he has to live with that.
He even begins to gain some affection for Rich although it's not the spine-bending, fiery passion that Jim unleashed in him but something slow and protective. That's why he's slowly tracking down everyone who ever set eyes on Jim and kills them, even the ever elusive Irene Adler. He cannot risk that they ruin the fragile life he and Rich have begun to build.
Jim left him with a job to do.
And Sebastian is going to do it well.