A.N.: *WARNING! SPOILERS FOR SERIES 3 IN THIS AUTHOR'S NOTE* So, when I started writing this, I thought that it was going to be AU. By the time I finished writing it, Series 3 had already started and finished in the UK, and I realised that it wasn't quite as AU as I had thought... So... Yeah. Yay!
Warning: Spoilers for Series 3 in the second chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock
Chapter 1 – Diplomatic Disasters
To Sherlock, politics were much like his transport: he didn't need to pay attention to them until they began to fall apart. Five months after he had fallen off of the roof of St Bart's, that's exactly what seemed to be happening.
It started off small. Little stories of international disagreements that barely made the politics pages of the newspapers, things that were so infinitesimal that he didn't even let them get in the way of his hunt for the members of Moriarty's inner circle. After all, Mycroft would no doubt be sorting them all out.
As the weeks went on, however, the incidents seemed to snowball. Vicious international debates – although bitch fights might be a more accurate description – were sparking off all over the world. People were beginning to panic. Sherlock was finding it more and more difficult to ignore them.
Five months into his 'death', he was hiding in Scotland, following his second target. The first, Cook, he had arranged to be picked up by border control agents as he tried to smuggle cocaine across countries, and he was now in prison. He had not wanted to start following Fletcher, his current target, until last, for he knew that in order to catch him, he would have to return to the UK. The thought of being in his home country when he couldn't return to his own life for so long was almost unbearable. However, an opportunity to catch Fletcher had presented itself and he would have been foolish to not pursue it.
By this time, he was living in a cave in the Highlands, trying to stay as far away from civilisation as possible. He had made sure that he was always connected to the news of the world in some shape or form, and so, as he read the story of the latest diplomatic disaster in the copy of the newspaper that a local homeless boy from the nearest town had stolen for him, he had to wonder why the world had descended into such avoidable chaos in the last few weeks.
It was not immediately clear that the crises had been caused by external forces. Most of them seemed to be deteriorations of already bitter relations, the kind of which his brother was paid to deal with. A few did not make their causes clear, but when he looked deeper into them, they had similar roots in international cattiness from months, years, even decades ago. It would seem like these problems were only a matter of time in coming, but they could just as easily have erupted into the public eye and threaten to damage relations long ago. Only one person could prevent these issues becoming the monumental problems that they were now, and that person didn't seem to be doing his job properly.
He was reading the final paragraph of the article when he was interrupted.
It started with a shuffle of feet at the mouth of the cave; he always opted to sit in a part of the cave where its mouth was hidden from him, so that if anyone was to pass by unexpectedly, they would not see that it had a resident – not that he was worried about such things, as it was terribly quiet this far away from the village – but it came with the added disadvantage that if people outside couldn't see him, then neither could he see people outside. He listened intently for whether or not the source of the shuffling would make itself known to him – after all, it could quite easily be just an animal of some kind – while nonchalantly pretending to be finishing the article.
The shuffles came nearer, until he was sure that two people were entering the cave. He did not look up from the paper.
"Sir?"
The voice that spoke was that of Tim, the boy who had been bringing him his newspapers during his stay in the Highlands. His presence at this time of day was enough to make Sherlock suspicious; usually, Tim would deliver the newspaper first thing in the morning and not return until the next day. What was more, the boy sounded scared, his voice wavering slightly.
Trying not to let his unease show on his face, Sherlock looked up from the newspaper. Tim was standing just inside the entrance of the cave, but he was not alone: standing next to the boy, with a gun held to his head, was Fletcher.
"Good afternoon, Mr Holmes," Fletcher grinned, revealing two rows of blindingly white teeth. Fletcher was as thickset as any bouncer, one muscular arm clamped around Tim's shoulders and pinning him to his side. He was wearing a cheap suit that was as black as his short, spiky hair, but those clothes were considerably less looked after than his teeth. "I found him on his way back to the village," he drawled, tightening his grip on Tim, who whimpered and clamped his eyes shut, "I think he belongs to you?"
Sherlock flicked his eyes imperceptibly to Tim, then black to Fletcher; the boy was scared, but he had no reason to believe that he was in any immediate danger – Fletcher would not harm Tim before he had told the detective what he wanted.
"Tim belongs to no one, and your quarrel is with me, not him. So you can let him go."
Fletcher's grin widened. "Oh, I will. When you agree to come with us."
Confused as he was at that statement, Sherlock did not let that show on his face. "'Us'?"
"Yeah," Fletcher nodded, straightening himself up to his full five foot eleven – one inch shorter than the detective, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in brawn. Sherlock wasn't going to try and get in a fight with him, especially not while he had a gun and definitely not in front of Tim. "The boss and I have something we think you ought to see."
"Your boss?" Sherlock asked. "You no longer have a boss. In case the news hasn't reached you this far north yet, James Moriarty is dead."
Then, from just out of sight of the detective, came a sing-song voice that sent shivers down Sherlock's spine.
"But we both know that's not quite true!"
Moriarty stepped into the cave, obviously having been waiting just out of sight for the right moment to appear, his hands buried in the pockets of his dark grey Westwood suit – which was impeccable despite the rough terrain he would have had to cross to reach the cave.
Sherlock felt like he was dreaming; Moriarty was dead, he had shot himself right before his eyes. If throwing yourself off of a building and surviving was difficult – and it most assuredly was – then faking shooting yourself in the face must have been near impossible.
Yet, it would seem, that it was possible indeed.
Sherlock slowly lowered the newspaper to the floor and stood, regarding Moriarty's grinning face. It infuriated him to see the criminal alive, not to mention looking so bloody cocky.
"And call me Jim, please, Sherlock; James was my father."
"How are you alive?" Sherlock growled, taking a step closer to Moriarty, for the most part forgetting about Fletcher and Tim.
"I could ask you the same thing. Maybe I'll have to call my snipers back into action."
"You dare-"
Moriarty cut him off with an annoying laugh, throwing his head back. When he looked back at Sherlock, the grin had faded into a small smile.
"Don't worry, I've already done that once, and repetition is so boring. No, I have something new going on, and I know you'll love to see how I did it."
Sherlock exhaled slowly, letting the rage go before adopting a more nonchalant pose. "You're behind all of the breakdowns in diplomacy over the past few weeks."
Moriarty chuckled. "Oh, I'd love to take credit for those, but they were all ready to go anyway. All I had to do was push 'play'."
"And you found the button."
"Yes." Moriarty took his hands out of his pockets and clasped them behind his back. He leaned forward and whispered, in a tone mocking the one you would use to speak to a child, "Guessed what it is yet?"
Off the top of his head, Sherlock could think of three buttons that Moriarty could have pressed to set off the worldwide bitch fights, but he had no way of knowing which one had been used.
"No?" he asked teasingly. "Oh dear, Sherlock, you're slipping. Is this what living in a cave does to you?" He laughed again, and the sound grated on Sherlock's nerves. "Well, I suppose I'll have to show you," Moriarty sighed exasperatedly, as though taking the time out to explain what he had done was an irritating waste of his time. He looked over at Fletcher. "Let him go."
Fletcher let go of Tim, who backed three feet away from the man as he retrained his gun on Sherlock. The boy stood looking from Fletcher to Sherlock with a terrified expression.
"Go, Tim," Sherlock ordered, his eyes still on Moriarty.
"But-" Tim squeaked.
"Go!"
Tim whimpered and scampered out of the cave, with any sense heading back to the village – where he would tell no one of what he had seen.
When Tim's footsteps had faded away into the distance, Moriarty turned his back on Sherlock and began to walk away. Fletcher stood still, his gun still raised.
"Come now, Sherlock!" Moriarty called back when he was already out of sight.
Knowing that he didn't really have a choice, Sherlock scowled and headed for the mouth of the cave. Fletcher followed him with the gun, keeping it trained at his head, until he had passed and he could follow behind.
When Sherlock reached the mouth of the cave, he saw a van sitting about twenty feet into the field beyond. As he already had a head start on them, Moriarty was the first to reach it. The criminal opened the back doors of the van and pulled a piece of cloth and a glass bottle that looked like it was from a 19th Century chemist's laboratory from the inside, complete with parchment label written on with ink applied with a quill. He took out the glass cork from the neck of the bottle and tipped some of the clear contents onto the cloth, before replacing the cork, pocketing the bottle and standing back.
When Sherlock reached the back of the van, Moriarty gestured for him to sit down.
"Have a seat, Sherlock."
Sherlock looked from the van to Moriarty. "I prefer to stand."
Behind him, Fletcher took the safety off of the gun.
Scowling at Moriarty, Sherlock turned and sat on the edge of the van, his legs dangling off of the edge, his back perfectly straight.
Moriarty offered him the cloth with a smile. "We can't have you knowing where we're going, can we? Don't worry, I've given you a higher dose; after all, it takes slightly more to knock out a vampire, doesn't it?"
His scowl became a glare. How did Moriarty know what he was? To his knowledge, the criminal himself was not a vampire – but then again, he hadn't known that Irene was a vampire. He had to have answers, and, no matter how much it irked him that this was the case, the only way that he was going to get them was to do exactly as Moriarty told him to.
He took the cloth and grimaced slightly at the sickly smell that reached his nose. With one last look at Fletcher, who still had his gun raised at him, he lifted the cloth to his face and inhaled.
It was merely a split second before a wave of drowsiness washed over him, the world became blurry and his thoughts disjointed. He was vaguely aware of falling back against the floor of the van, as the whole world went black…
~{G}~
He was brought back to consciousness with a wave of nausea. He bit back a groan as he squeezed his eyes shut tighter to fight against the feeling, counting slowly in his head until it passed.
He had expected to awaken to find himself tied to a chair, but he could not feel that he was sitting on anything other than the floor. His back was pressed up against something solid and much taller than he; he guessed that he had been propped up against a wall. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and his hands were lying limp at his sides.
Being unconscious, his head had lolled onto his chest. He lifted it, wincing slightly as the stiffness of his neck protested. While he had not seemed to have been restrained in any way – not even his legs felt as though they had been tied together – his entire body had locked itself into position while he was asleep, and was violently making him aware of the fact that it did not wish to be moved. He moved each of his limbs in turn, bending his legs at the knees, and his arms at the elbows.
With his limbs aching but beginning to forgive him, he slowly cracked his eyes open to see where he had been taken.
He was in a dank, dark room that he assumed was a basement. There was harsh artificial light overhead that made no resemblance to natural light; while the walls and the floor looked a murky brown, he found himself doubting whether or not they actually were that colour.
Apart from the lights, the room appeared to be completely empty. There were no chairs, or tables, or any single piece of furniture. There were, however, two doors. One, on the wall to the left of him, was plain and had a boring, standard handle protruding from the middle of the left hand side. Sherlock assumed that this was the door that he had been brought through. The other, on the wall to his right and directly opposite the first, appeared to be more heavy duty. From where he was sat, the door appeared to have been made out of rusted metal, and while it had a window – unlike the first had – the glass was covered with a thick set of metal mesh.
Turning his head to his right – and ignoring his neck's pain – he saw that there was one other thing in the room: a large freezer that was plugged into the wall, humming quietly to itself.
He had only been awake for about five minutes when the door to his left opened, and his captors entered the room.
"Ah, you're awake!" Moriarty grinned. Fletcher followed in behind him and stood perfectly still and silent, his hands behind his back. "You hungry?"
Moriarty crossed the room to the freezer and opened it, taking out a handful of blood bags before closing the lid. He had not had to reach down to take them, so the freezer must have been full to the brim. Just how long was he planning on keeping him here?
The criminal dropped the blood bags on the floor by Sherlock's side; the detective looked up at him from the floor, still glaring.
"What?" Moriarty asked, in a mock tone of indignation, ruined by the wide grin on his face. "They're perfectly safe. Do you really think that if I was going to kill you, I would use something as mundane as poison?"
Sherlock eyed the blood bags with suspicion, but he had to admit that, if Moriarty was going to kill him, this isn't how he would do it – it wasn't his style. Besides, he hadn't eaten for a week – blood bags were not that easy to come by when you were living in a cave in the Highlands, and he found that he had not been as partial to hunting since he had acquired a volens – and he was in desperate need of sustenance. He reached forward to the blood bags and opened one. The metallic smell rose to his nostrils and made him begin to salivate; his fangs nipped at his bottom lip and he drank the entire pint in one go, before moving on to the other three.
When he had lowered the final blood bag to the floor, empty, the haze that had taken over all of his senses since the delicious crimson had first touched his tongue dissipated; he heard Moriarty chuckling in the background.
"Wow!" the criminal breathed, sounding genuinely enthralled.
Now feeling stronger than he had since he had fallen, Sherlock pushed himself to his feet.
"How do you know what I am?" he growled.
Moriarty giggled. "Now, now, I'll explain everything in time…"
"No," Sherlock said, taking a step closer to the criminal. "How do you know about vampires?"
The criminal didn't answer right away; he smiled sickeningly, the kind of smile that he wore when he felt superior. "Well, that's a different question," he purred. "Did you know that Irene is a vampire?"
The memory of that night in the morgue flashed into his head, and he scowled to himself. "I did."
"Ah, but not until recently! I worked it out before you, long before you. And it was most fascinating news."
Moriarty began pacing the space before Sherlock, settling into his story-telling mode.
"When we first started working together, she managed to overpower me and sink her teeth into my neck," he explained, raising his hand to brush his fingertips over the skin of his throat, seemingly absentmindedly. "Once I knew that vampires existed, I decided to do some research, and I found myself… disappointed. I mean, real-life vampires are hardly as interesting as the ones in books and movies, are they? I mean, you're not even immortal. You don't even sparkle!" He giggled again.
"I wouldn't find out that you and your dear brother are vampires until I was let go from my imprisonment, but by the time I was put in that cell, I had already begun to find out as much as I can about vampires.
"When I found out about volens…" He turned to look at Sherlock, an expression of glee on his face. "Oh, how wonderful that was! I begged Miss Adler to let me be hers, but she wouldn't agree… I had planned to get my revenge on her by having her beheaded, but you ruined that for me, so, never mind.
"When I was set free, I continued my research, but eventually, I got bored. Now, usually, when I get bored, I kill someone, but I'm dead, and dead men can't kill people – at least not without raising some suspicion. So I decided to take a leaf out of your book! Do you see where this is going?"
Sherlock said nothing.
"I experimented!" Moriarty exclaimed, holding his arms wide and leaning forward slightly. "Still am, actually. You see, I wanted to see just how long it would take a vampire to starve to death." He began to back away from Sherlock, heading for the heavy duty door on the far side of the basement. With a sinking feeling, Sherlock thought he knew what was beyond that door…
"All I needed was a guinea pig. And if I could cause some extra mayhem in the world, then that was just wonderful." Moriarty waved his hand at Sherlock when he reached the far wall, beckoning the detective to the door.
Sherlock walked forwards, not looking at Moriarty as he reached the metal mesh over the window on the door. When he was close enough, he reached up to curl his fingers around the metal.
Looking through the mesh, he saw that the room beyond the door was not truly a room at all – it was a cell. The floor was dusty and dirty, and the only real feature was a trapezoidal protrusion on the left wall.
And, chained to the vertical part of the trapezium with his head tilted back against its slope, was Mycroft.