Welcome, folks, and thanks for coming to Night Monkey's latest adventure. This is my first time playing with SuperLock, so here's to hoping it's not crap! Anyway, some individual chapters will come with mild to possibly moderate slash warnings (not yet, you eager beavers) and ye olde "ideologically sensitive" material may pop up, as demons are not polite. Hope that doesn't scare anyone off.
Enough of the warnings, on to the show!
Jim Moriarty opened his eyes and sat up.
Under normal circumstances, this would have impressed no one, Moriarty included. But he wasn't shaking off a nap.
Unless it was a dirt nap.
Though this surely didn't look like a coffin. Moriarty turned his head, taking in his surroundings. He had no idea where he was, but it wasn't the hospital roof where he'd confronted Sherlock Holmes. The more he looked, the less the room looked like any place Moriarty had any right to be. Though, considering about the only place he had any right to be was either a hospital or a morgue, that on its own wasn't saying much.
Thinking about being cold and stiff on a slab invariably brought Moriarty to the self-inflicted injury that should have thus laid him out. He probed at the roof of his mouth with his tongue. He could remember exactly where he'd jammed the muzzle of the gun, but he could find no hole, not even a healed depression or patch of scar tissue.
Just to make sure his tongue wasn't faulty—not that the clever organ had ever really failed him before—Moriarty ran a fingertip across the same path. The second time around, his mouth felt just as intact.
Moriarty removed the finger from his mouth and decided he wasn't quite done with the self-examination. The gun Moriarty had chosen for his self-destruction was powerful enough to punch a hole through both sides of a human skull. Moriarty knew. He'd done his research. And a few experiments.
The exit hole proved as elusive as the entrance hole. Moriarty flattened down the hair he'd ruffled in his quest for a mortal wound.
With no gaping injuries, there was no proof he'd ever eaten a bullet.
Most people, Moriarty knew, would have been so happy to find themselves alive and intact they would be happy to call it a miracle and leave it at that. Moriarty was not most people. He did not believe in a benevolent god, particularly not one that would extend a helping hand for him.
He did, however, believe in a being almost as powerful, and far, far less benign.
Sherlock Holmes' big brother Mycroft. The wizard behind the curtain of British power.
If anyone had the influence and cleverness to secret Moriarty away and keep him prisoner in an unknown location, it was Mycroft. Though why the far-less-interesting Holmes brother would save Moriarty if he was bleeding from a gunshot, especially considering Moriarty's plan to drive Sherlock to his death, the consulting criminal hadn't decided yet.
Unless this, all of it, was the only revenge Mycroft could reap. Which it was, Moriarty supposed, if his plan had gone as expected and Sherlock was bloody pulp that, like the egg of fairy stories, couldn't be put back together again. Unable to save his brother, Mycroft's only recourse was to instead save his killer and keep him locked away, punishing him with excruciating boredom.
Interesting theory.
Though not one Moriarty could embrace cleanly. For one thing, Mycroft liked locking him in plainer cells. And punching him. Despite all his painfully British composure and intellect, Mycroft would never be able to resist working Moriarty over at least once for taking away his precious, precocious little brother.
The pieces didn't fit together well enough. Maybe, Moriarty decided, it was because he still hadn't dumped them all out of the puzzle box. He needed more information before he could deduce what had happened to him between the roof and the floor of the mystery room.
There were no windows to be seen, so no hope to look out and find a street sign or landmark, but there was a door. Common sense said it would be locked, but Moriarty knew enough of humanity to know just how rare common sense really was. Not to mention, this entire situation flew in the face of common sense. When you shot yourself in the head, you died. Especially when you put as much thought and research into it as Moriarty had. If he could wake up without so much as a scar, perhaps an unlocked door wasn't outside the realm of possibility.
The only way to find out was to test the door knob.
Moriarty got to his feet and took a moment to go over the rest of his body. He already knew his arms worked, and now he knew his legs had no trouble supporting him. Everything felt natural and functional.
In examining himself, Moriarty came to a conclusion. Little time had passed from his suicide (or should he say suicide attempt, as he was decidedly not dead?) to the present. So little time that whoever had brought him here hadn't bothered to change his clothes. He was still wearing the exact same coat and suit—and a quick sniff test told him he definitely hadn't been marinating for days.
No, wait, it wasn't exactly the same suit. Something was missing.
His tie.
Someone had taken his tie.
That little act of thievery did seem to eliminate Mycroft as a suspect. He and Moriarty disagreed on fashion, just as they disagreed on Sherlock's right to continued existence and whether or not strapping bombs to people counted as good, clean fun. There was no way the vest aficionado would be interested in pilfering Moriarty's tie. Nothing in his wardrobe could possibly coordinate with it.
Motivated to find his purloined tie, Moriarty headed for the door. During the short walk, his mind built alternatives should he find the door locked. As he got closer, he canceled any of the physical alternatives. The wood was solid enough to outlast any attempt to kick or shoulder it open, no matter how expertly Moriarty placed his attack.
The moment of truth arrived and Moriarty, with no hesitation, reached for the knob. He turned it and to his surprise there was no resistance.
The door swung open noiselessly. Good, because bad horror movie sound effects would only have cheapened the mood. What lay beyond the door was eerie enough on its own.
The first word that popped into Moriarty's mind was "bureaucracy." The hallway that extended from the door looked like it belonged to a government building that would have made the structures of the former USSR seem whimsical and cheery. The dim overhead lights blinked like jaundiced eyes, and the color that bled from the lights made it impossible to discern the true color of the floor and walls. They could have been white, beige, yellow, or anything in between. Whatever color they truly were, the walls were featureless. No windows, the same as in the room Moriarty had just stepped from. No artwork, helpful directional arrows, or anything else, either.
Perhaps to make up for the lack of signs and to avoid any confusion, the hallway went only left from the door. Unless the Incredible Hulk emerged from the room and smashed his way through the dead-end wall to the right, Moriarty knew what direction he was headed.
Standing at the beginning of the hallway was like standing on railroad tracks and watching them continue seemingly into infinity. From his position, Moriarty could see no end, curve, or any variation in the hall.
He decided to start walking.
It was impossible to judge distance or set goals thanks to the monotony of the walls. Moriarty had only his footsteps to use as a measuring unit, and that wasn't the most scientific or easily translatable system. Regardless of exactly how many inches or feet each step counted for, by the time Moriarty had gone 2000 paces, he figured he should have seen some change. Yes, scattered around the world there were some truly impressive bunkers. No doubt, should humanity ruin Moriarty's fun by nuking itself into oblivion, Mycroft would sequester the Queen and other British symbols inside such a bunker. However, even the longest, deepest bunker built by human hands would have some variation, signing, or at least a bloody crack in the plaster.
Moriarty stopped walking.
Wherever he was, he was going to leave a mark, his mark, on it.
The wall wasn't the best medium for creative vandalism—it was certainly no apple—and Moriarty had little in the way of tools, but little didn't mean nothing, and Moriarty was creative with what he had. He removed a cufflink and used it to dig his initials into the wall. It was a poor use for solid gold, but Moriarty felt the need for petty property damage. There was also a chance, he supposed, that attacking the wall would give him some sort of data. Maybe open resistance would summon killer robots from formerly invisible hatches in the ceiling, or some filthy foulness would ooze out of the hole.
Or maybe absolutely nothing would happen, except a bit of plaster dust settling onto the floor.
There was no point toeing the dust into any meaningful or threatening messages—it was the same color as everything else. Instead, Moriarty snapped his cufflink back onto his shirt, and then turned to continue to journey down the infinite hall.
Only now it was decidedly less infinite. Hardly twenty feet away, the hallway came to end. Moriarty could tell it opened into something, though whether that something was a room, another Hogwarts hallway, or a fully stocked supermarket, Moriarty couldn't tell.
Of the three options he'd considered, the second proved to be the most accurate. The hallway that his joined, however, had significant differences. While the atmosphere was the same, and the lighting appeared just as likely to start an electrical fire, Moriarty found he was no longer alone.
If the sign hanging from the ceiling was to be believed, Moriarty shared the hallway with over six billion souls.
For the first time in his life, Moriarty found himself stranded, without even the vestiges of a plan. He was like every little vermin he'd always looked down on, running blind, helter-skelter through a maze, the master of not even his own fate.
It was suddenly very difficult to breathe. Or think. Or remain standing.
Moriarty stumbled backwards, away from the sprawling human queue and back into the safety of his hallway. He grabbed for the wall and found himself leaning precariously against it, his legs threatening to buckle and send him to the floor. There was a tightness in his chest that was either a blooming heart or panic attack, and the sight of the impossible line only further constricted his insides.
Using the last of his strength, Moriarty turned away. He expected to see the (relative) comfort and familiarity of the hall he hadn't had to share. Instead, he again found he had company.
The new hall-mate, whoever he was, instantly set himself apart from the dreary, drab collective. While his color scheme wasn't much brighter, he possessed a liveliness and confidence that set him apart from everyone else, including, at that moment, Moriarty himself.
He also possessed Moriarty's tie.
"Hello, darling," the man purred. His voice was sandpaper on one side, velvet on the other.
It was that voice that cemented Moriarty's identification of the stranger. The less-than-impressive physical stature of the man had at first given Moriarty pause, but that was a voice that could tempt popes to brothels. Given the atmosphere, there was only one being this could be before him.
"Not quite. I'm the King. Never had wings or the honor of a Milton poem."
Moriarty blinked. So that was what it was like to have his mind read, and to still be confused with the answer.
"Name's Crowley, not Lucifer. He's occupied, and I won the civil war."
So Hell was just as prone to revolution and in-fighting as your typical third-world country and was now ruled by a Brit who sported neither pitchfork nor cloven hooves. Huh. Moriarty wondered how the religious crowd would respond to that bit of information. Or how the irreligious crowd would respond to learning Hell was real after all.
Moriarty certainly knew how he'd responded. Though he was proud that he'd straightened up and no longer felt like he might black out.
"If you're the King of Hell, I suppose you know all about me and what a bad boy I am," Moriarty said.
Crowley grinned. "You are naughty. And you know it. Unlike most of these souls, you're not whining 'I'm not bad, I only drove drunk into a group of nuns once.'"
"I do know why I'm here," Moriarty acknowledged. No matter what religious text a person followed, blowing up blind old women and kidnapping and poisoning children were one-way tickets downstairs.
"But you have a question?" Crowley inquired.
"Just one. Where is Sherlock Holmes? He owes me a handshake."
TBC!
