Thin, spindly and foreboding, the dead men strode into the courtroom on hushed feet, making almost no noise. His head movements, developed after his days as a schoolmaster, were now almost frantic as he rested his glimmering and yet glazed eyes upon the accused.

"No…" Holmes whispered, lifting his head up although it felt as if it was filled with lead. It brought him physical pain to look into such hateful eyes, but he bore it. "No! You're dead! You can't call a dead witness!"

Mycroft tilted his head. "Worm, Your Honour?"

"I allow the witness," the beast proclaimed, creating thunder between his gavel and the wooden surface. "Professor Moriarty to the stand, please, and let us keep the delays to a minimum, lest the gallery grow restless!"

The Crown prosecutor gave a smug smirk, nodding his witness to the stand. "Your name is Professor James Moriarty. Correct?"

"Correct…" replied the blackguard. Holmes had been expecting a death rattle, or at least the gasped voice the professor had in more recent years, but his voice was strong, confident, as it had been when the foes had first met.

"Would you please show the court how you first made the acquaintance of the accused, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"

"Show the court…?" Surely he means…

The detective was sure he had closed his eyes, but they were wide open when the courtroom swirled into a blur. When it cleared, he was no longer in the courtroom at all. He was standing in front of an ancient building whose iron gate read "Hawthorne Academy".

His childhood institution. His mother had wanted him to continue being schooled at home under her own hand, but she had died the year previous and his father claimed he desperately needed socialization. It was a highly exclusive school, only accepting the brightest young men. A glowing recommendation from his elder brother had secured his future there, although he was sure Mycroft had only written it to pry him from the house he had grown up in and the last traces of his mother's affections.

"I always said he'd come to no good in the end, Your Honour," Moriaty's voice drifted through his mind, omnipresent and yet somehow not present at all, as the scene changed to settle him inside the building. Rows of boys in the slate grey blazers, possessing various degrees of alertness.

His first mathematics class. He had never been in a room with so many people, let alone so many boys his same age, before. This was not the environment he knew. This was entirely new.

"Ah, and the next version of the Holmes legacy joins us," the young professor had greeted him, striding through the aisle to stop at his desk, where a mussy-headed boy was trying his hardest to become invisible. "So, Master Holmes, are you as much of a genius as your brother?"

"My brother is not a genius," he replied softly, his mother's words ringing within his head even as her body was surrendered to the worms.

A narrow brow was arched, a twisting smile forming. "The tests all say he is. The government went to unprecedented lengths to employ him. Would you not call his talents genius?"

"No," Sherlock said, unrelenting. "He is not a genius." His young face was set in far more serious an expression than a boy should be able to achieve.

The smile remained. "Well, if you do not think him all that special, I am anxious to see what your mind holds." In truth, he was anxious to see how much his mind could handle. Moriarty had been too late to pick apart the elder brother; he would merely have to content himself with what he had.

"If they'd let me have my way," the dead professor murmured in Holmes's ear, causing him to shudder violently."I could have flayed him into shape. He did not go rouge for lack of me trying, Your Honour, you simply must know that. I wanted to see him on the straight and narrow. But my hands were tied…"

He was constantly trouble, this thin boy who denied his brother's brilliance out of pure hate and spite, who was always marking up the desk with riddles and anagrams. He was insolent, delivering answers with too much pride. The teacher's head spun every few seconds in which there was silence, always expecting him to be up to something.

He beat him once after an incident in which Master Sherlock had corrected him quite sarcastically in front of an entire class of boys, more than willing to mock one of the very few mistakes their professor had ever made. Moriarty had kept him after class and taken a thick ruler to his back.

Holmes cringed as the classroom flickered into pain. He remembered each stroke, not injuries near what he would receive later in life, but no one had ever raised a hand to him before and therefore this pain was intolerable to him. Now it took on its youthful intensity, twisting around his spine like the red around a candy cane, making him gasp and run with cold sweat.

Directly after the beating, not severe by any means and arguably well deserved, Sherlock had run to the Headmaster's office. The man had been keeping on eye on the boy, and in his eyes he could do no wrong. How could he be as horrible as Professor Moriarty claimed when his brother had been so mannered and civil?

The young professor had been suspended for a week without pay. This lasted five short school days, but the message it sent was far more lasting. Sherlock Holmes was now the golden boy of Hawthrone; although not as apt as his brother, his talent would not be ignored, and therefore anything that occurred to him to lessen him opinion of the academy was frowned upon by the Headmaster. From that day on, he had reigns of the school, and to preserve his good graces, the only one he tormented was one Professor James Moriarty.

"We see today, however, that selfishness and such blunt rebellion are not part of the accused persona," spoke the voice of the prosecutor, the tone of his question one of a man who already knew the answer. "What changed?"

A cold, chilling chuckle. "The fire…"

His chill was engulfed in stifling, suffocating heat. There had been five boys in the chemistry laboratory performing an experiment under the eye of their teacher after missing the class due to a field trip with the English class. One moment they had been quietly at work, the next there was a hiss of the gas line and then the rocking, sudden presence of fire that would forever stay with the two boys that survived.

Sherlock Holmes was one of them, but in the twenty-four hours following the pair's hasty escape out a second story window (Holmes had broken two of his ribs, the other boy his arm and a cracked skull to boot), he began to wish he had.

The other boy, someone Holmes barely knew, had murmured something about it being Holmes's fault in his feverish and concussed state. It was not true; the boy was rebellious but not evil. In the wake of the deaths of a teacher and three students, however, there was scramble to blame anyone, and one of the older quarters for lower teachers made a handy cell.

Moriarty was the one to bring the boy food and news. He did it not out of kindness but to mock him relentlessly. His joy swelled as the brilliant Sherlock Holmes began to retreat further and further into his mind, separating himself from the world.

It took three days for the public to get the full story of what happened. Mycroft Holmes arrived at the school on the fourth day.

The staff scraped to obey him, showing him the crime scene, tutting over how a genius's brother could go so wrong. Perhaps from jealousy? The elder had rarely mentioned the younger, and the younger seemed downright resentful of the elder.

Mycroft Holmes rarely heard a word. Within three hours, he had three pages filled with the reasons why his brother could not be guilty. The main reason being that the explosion had occurred in the lab beside the one the doomed boys had been working it; a loose gas line had finally given way, and somehow in all the mess, watery grey eyes had picked out a miniscule match head someone had carelessly tossed through the window so as not to litter the ground.

The boy was released. When he was, he was bleeding and bruised. Had he been guilty, Moriarty would not have been so much as slapped on the wrist for disciplining him with physical force. Now that he was innocent, he was fired, his name tarnished in nearly every school in England. He left, still protesting Sherlock's guilt.

Sherlock watched him leave from his dorm room. When he could no longer see the hansom, he turned to face his saviour. It was the first time the Holmes brothers had ever embraced.

The scene trickled back to the courtroom, and despite the fact that he knew it was nothing more than a flimsy illusion, Holmes was mournful to leave his brother's protective arms.

Moriarty, now returned to the witness stand, wore a similar expression, likely stinging with the memory of his first tangle with Sherlock Holmes as well as his public disgrace."The bleeding hearts and artists let him get away with murder," he sighed, raising his rotting head to scan the gallery, where there were murmurs of sympathy. Then his oscillating head turned towards the shadowy judge, and a smile slithered upon his face. "Oh, Worm, Honour, make him pay! He deserved the worst! I failed then, and at the Falls, but let me hammer him today…!"

"That will be for the jury to decide, Professor," spoke Mycroft, no longer the loving older brother but once again the stone-faced prosecutor. "Thank you for your time, Professor Moriarty. The witness is dismissed."

In a mist of mustard yellow, he was gone more quickly than he had come.