A/N: I hope you enjoy this extremely belated update to SaJFNE. Yes, that's what I call it in my doc manager. No, I'm not proud of myself. I don't have cookies, but reviews are always welcome.

Chapter 11 - A Captive Audience

Of course something had to happen. Of course it wasn't a nice, peaceful, relaxing good thing. Of course it was instead a quite terrible bad and negative thing. Of course they couldn't spend the night in the secured wire cages of a perfectly safe pet shop and expect everything to be all right.

Of course, thought John, he would waste his time thinking up 'of course' statements in the dead of night when there was plenty of panicking and running around blindly to do.

So he stopped thinking and started running. Running, because the moment he woke from the fitful dreams of a once-human hedgehog, he realized that he was alone in the shop.

While before, he and Sherlock had been surrounded by a menagerie of scary animals - all of which seemed to make some scary purr or hiss or growl - now it was just John, surrounded by empty cages with no cats or snakes or growly pets in sight. This was fairly troubling. John's hysterical pacing of the shop on his little hedgehog legs gave way to full-out sprints from one side of the store to the other. Each such lap took a minute or so, but still, it was impressively panicky.

And John then came to the realization that since he was alone, it meant Sherlock had to be missing too.

"Sherlock..." he squeaked slowly. After a last desperate 360-degree glance around him his suspicions were confirmed. "I'm alone," he said mournfully. "Where are you?"

But there was no answer. John investigated the cages where the pair of them had been sleeping, and saw no sign of a struggle other than the bars Sherlock had bent the previous night. His own cage was unlocked from the outside, revealing to John how he had been able to leave it easily the minute before. But Sherlock's? Its latch was firmly closed, and, upon further examination, John saw that it had been glued in place. There was no way even Sherlock could have escaped.

"They took away the animals because they were witnesses," he breathed, seeing the hastily opened cages and tanks of glass on the high shelves above.

John knew that he couldn't speak the language of real animals, only English, but surely the animals would have understood and tried to help him using gestures. The man/woman/beast/force/country responsible for their disappearance (John tried not to make assumptions) had made sure he would be very, very alone when he woke.

John sat down on the cold tile floor, feeling hopeless. He would never see his friends again. He would never be free of this haunting shop. He would never eat fish and chips again...

He had been seated for only a few minutes when a flash of light blinded his little black eyes. He blinked, then stood on his back legs to try and see over the windowsill where the light was coming from. As short as he was, John quickly identified it. Between the slats of the corded blinds he watched the sun rise.

John knew what he had to do.

Of course something had to happen to ruin his perfectly crafted plan to steal some glazed donuts and return before his friend awoke. Of course that something had to do with Moriarty.

He came to just before sunrise, jumping up from where he had been laid down. But he stumbled and fell to his paws, his head swimming with blanks instead of data. He was in a room made of concrete bricks - or was it plaster? And there were four walls - five? Plus a roof and a floor equalled... what?

For a world-renowned consulting detective, numbers were proving to be his greatest enemy. Trusting his broad-ranging experience with incapacitation, this told him that something was wrong. Something's wrong? What a brilliant deduction, said John in his head.

"Shuddup," he muttered. "Let me think."

Sherlock knew immediately what kind of drugs had been used and in what solution, but for the life of him he couldn't find the injection site, so neutralizing the poison was impossible. He would have to work on 50% brainpower for the moment. Not an uncommon task.

He was just about to brainstorm escape routes when a hidden door opened in the prison wall. Out stepped a man with a twisted grin, an oscillating head, a horrible ringtone.

Moriarty: just like he thought.

"Let's not play these games, Jim," Sherlock mumbled nonchalantly. He leaned against the walls, looking entirely too imposing for a diminutive scarf-wearing otter.

But his true enemy looked back at him, and there was no reptilian glint in his eyes, just confusion. He tugged on his shirt collar with one hand and scratched his head with the other.

"Yeah... about that..."

"What?"

"Um. I'm Andrew Scott?"