A/N: Thanks so much for everyone who added this to your alerts and favorites and especially those who reviewed! It's been a very long time since I've published anything I've written, so your feedback means a lot. I should maybe be worried at how pleased I am at making you all sad, but I've come to accept it.
I'm trying to stay a few chapters ahead so that I can update regularly, but we'll see. I'll do my best for you all!
"Awful business," Jim Moriarty shook his head for the news cameras. "It's terrible to see what a corrupted mind is capable of."
Kitty gave him a supportive squeeze. They certainly were putting on a good show, her wrapped around him and his arm draped across her shoulders in a one-armed hug. Though he supposed she wasn't acting.
"So you've been following this story closely then?" shouted out a reporter from the sea of microphones.
"A man hires you to act as a criminal mastermind, and you don't think you'd keep up on the news that he'd fled police custody and jumped off the roof of a hospital?" He smiled, and a chuckle ran through the crowd.
Strange, the consulting criminal thought, that people can laugh at the mention of a man committing suicide, but call Sherlock Holmes a sociopath.
He wished he could share in the laughter, though. In their relief that the troublesome detective with the beautiful face and the cutting tongue had been stripped of whatever it was that made him special and then exited their lives, everything explained and tied up in a neat bow.
But Sherlock Holmes had turned the tables on him. He'd planned to end it, his long and highly successful run, secure in the knowledge that he'd left Sherlock a problem that the genius could never solve.
Only one way out. Only one ending. A fall, a death, a disgrace.
It hadn't happened the way it was meant to.
"What's next for Richard Brook?" The question rose above the murmurings of the news crowd surrounding the stoop of the flat he and Kitty shared.
"Well, certainly nothing like this." He grinned broadly as the flashes of cameras went off in a flurry of light. "No more strapping people to false bombs, definitely not."
At this, the media did seem to subdue. So odd how their funny little minds worked, picking and choosing whom to empathize with, whom to deny sympathy.
None for the man who had been forced to leap to his demise. Who had literally stood looking into death and laughed.
He'd laughed.
"Off you pop," Jim had said, deliciously trivializing it, even when the moment meant so much to him, too. His triumph. His proof that no one could get to him, not even Sherlock Holmes. The man had begged for time, as if he could prepare himself, as if he could scrape together some modicum of dignity.
Jim had seen enough men die to know that there was no dignity in it. But as he'd allowed the detective the chance to make that last discovery for himself, Sherlock Holmes had laughed.
He'd laughed, even as Jim spun around and demanded to know why, and he'd plunged off the roof of St. Bart's before Jim could finish asking what he'd missed.
That laughter had been unexpected. He hadn't factored that reaction into his calculations, and now he could never be sure that he'd come up with the perfect solution. That laughter meant he was wrong.
Or that Sherlock wanted him to believe he was wrong. Maybe he'd just used it as a way to lash out, to torture Jim from beyond the grave, forever. No, but Sherlock Holmes was on the side of the angels, ordinary, he would never think to pull off something so devious.
So what had he missed?
"How do you think his flatmate, John Watson, must be reacting to all of this?"
And there was the answer.
His attention snapped back to the reporters huddled around him; his mouth curved to one side in an expression of the deepest regret.
"I'm so sorry for the role I played in all this, especially deceiving that poor, confused man. I can't imagine what he's going through right now, with everything he's learned in the just the past few hours."
If anyone would know what Sherlock had planned, if anyone would know what Sherlock would think in his last moments, if anyone would know what made Sherlock Holmes laugh, it was John Watson.
Jim gave Kitty's fingers a quick squeeze, then placed his hand over his heart.
"If I can do anything to help that man, I swear I will do all I can. John Watson will be my new project."
The flashbulbs exploded, every camera capturing his smiling promise.