Heartbreak

In which things fall

"How do you feel about the beejees?" Jim asked, giving Lana a good jerk to pull her through the doorway.

The wave of night air was like being doused in cold water; she could feel it wash over her and seep into her core. After days in captivity, the cold air felt tight on her face. She shivered involuntarily under her thin clothing against the biting December wind and wished her kidnappers could have brought her jacket.

"No opinion. They're just another band. By the way, what are we doing up here?"

"Open air, city view, nice spot for a good murder." Jim glanced at his phone while Lana gave him a withering look. She rubbed her arms as another icy gust sent tremors through her body.

Jim regarded her with a mirthless grin and held out his own jacket. She didn't want to be near it; the idea of touching anything that belonged to Jim Moriarty was repulsive. She pulled away from him as though the sight of the jacket would give her blisters and sores, struggling against the urges to shiver again.

"Take it," Jim said his voice poison and velvet. "You should at least be warm before things get ugly."

Lana shook uncontrollably again and snatched the jacket away from him. Despite being simple, it was surprisingly warm.

The jacket smelled like blood and wine. Lana shuddered, not from the cold.

Jim circled her like a hungry panther, his eyes glinting with suppressed glee. "I must say, you do pull off the short hair surprisingly well. I wonder what Sherlock will think."

Lana ran her hands through her choppy hair. Jim had taken a pair of office scissors and a pocket knife to her waist length waterfall, leaving her with an exposed neck and the look of a barber shop mistake. Lana felt for every split end and badly hacked section. Every texture, every sight and sound and shiver was so precious. Lana knew she was running on limited time, and that she would grind to a halt whenever her demonic puppet master decided to stop pulling the strings.

Lana turned away from him and crossed to the edge of the roof. Far below, a galaxy of lights shot past, people living out their lives, fighting home to their loved ones, unaware of what was happening twenty three stories above them.

She thought of Sherlock. Where was he? Hopefully, far away. Far enough away that Jim could never reach him and her fate would never trouble him.

Then the door to the roof was thrown open, and her heart broke.

Sherlock and John rushed onto the roof, both armed and angry. John was determined and taught, ready to blast Jim off the roof at a moment's notice, but Sherlock… Sherlock was the embodiment of rage.

The shadows rising behind him cast black wings onto the walls behind him as he advanced on Jim, pinning him against the side of the roof; an angel of death seeking vengeance. He shoved his pistol against Jim's jaw and glared down in a blind fury.

"Miss me?" asked Jim, smiling seductively up into Sherlock's face.

"You wanted me. Here I am. I'll give you the fight of your life, you-"

"Sherlock, don't!" Lana broke through his angry hiss, stepping closer but not daring to get too close. "Don't kill him. You can't kill him or others will die too."

"Your girlfriend's absolutely right," Jim replied, pushing away from Sherlock and straightening his jacket. "I suggest you put the gun away, sweetheart. We've got business to discuss."

While Sherlock didn't put the gun back, he did lower it to his side, and Jim took it as surrender. He slipped his hands into pockets and viewed them all with a terrifying look of excitement. Psycho on a sugar rush.

"Well then, kiddies, let's get a move on, shall we?" Jim turned away from them and looked out across the city lights, hovering in the lightly falling snow. "So many people, all living their lives. So much idiocy flowing through these streets it's almost sickening. Everyone is trapped in their own little worlds, moving forward and ignoring all the important things. People should really be more careful. They never know when their internal clocks are going to run out."

"And you think you have control over when these internal clocks run out." Sherlock retorted, still staring at Jim's back and doing his best not to look at Lana.

He couldn't allow himself to crack. Not right now.

"People are always so naïve. They think they have power over their own lives, when really it lies in the hands of a few choice individuals. Avenging angels, passing judgment on the lower beings."

"Your think you're on the side of the angels now?" Sherlock's knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the gun.

"I think I have a higher level of control over life and death than most. Who would want to be on the side of the angels, anyway? It's so ordinary, being the hero. And besides, the hero always has too many rules; it's why they're so easy to beat.

"No, Sweetie, I'm a villain, through and through. And tonight, I'm going to show you just how much power I have. I'm going to make you like me."

"I'd like to see you try." Sherlock started forward.

"Don't," John cut him off. "What aren't you telling us. You've gotten us here, you're using us for your entertainment, now what are we supposed to do?"

"It's obvious, John," Sherlock replied without turning around. "He talked about having control over life and death, over multiple people. Therefore we can infer he's talking about a multiple homicide. Could be multiple snipers, but a bomb is much more likely. He's gambling with their lives tonight, and we know he's smart enough not to have the detonator on him tonight, so he's going to have a triggerman waiting for the cue to set the bomb off.

"I don't suppose the location of the bomb really matters, seeing as it won't go off tonight anyway, which leaves us only with the question of how we stop it from going off."

"We die."

She spoke so simply, so quietly in the atmosphere of terror and taught emotions, that at first it was as though no one had heard her. Then John turned to look at her.

"You know what he's talking about?"

"Enough to know his plan. It's not like he didn't gloat when he got the chance. In order to save everyone else, we have to die. Then he'll call of the killings."

"Right on the mark, Sweetie," Jim simpered, "a perfect explanation, it's almost as though you've been rehearsing it. But then again, I guess all the world's a stage, and-"

"Shut. Up." John shot at him, and looked back at Lana.

"Oh, I think you'll want to hear this, Dr. Watson. You wee, Miss Heart left out a very important point. Only one of you has to die tonight."

Jim walked up to Sherlock and held out his hand. "The gun, if you don't mind." He said softly.

Sherlock held his gaze and handed over the Colt Defender. Jim examined it carefully, smiling as he felt each groove and arch. "This is lovely," he commented, as he pulled out the bullet cartridge. No one responded as Jim dropped all of the bullets, save for one, onto the snow-dusted roof. They rang like tiny bells and rolled out of sight as Jim snapped the cartridge back into place, and turned back to face the three friends.

"Right, this is how this is going to work. John here is going to call the Yard. I'd say you'll have about 15 minutes before they get here, and in that time dear Sherlock is going to have to make his decision. "

"You haven't made me decide anything." Sherlock replied coolly. "There isn't anything to decide. I can hold you here easily until the Yard shows up."

"And if you do that, then you'll be killing hundreds of innocent people. Because if the Yard gets here and there isn't a corpse, then I will give the order and you'll be left with more corpses then even you can squirm your way out of. It won't matter what you do because in the end, I'll still vanish and the dear old Scotland Yard will be left with a pile of bodies, a burning city and only you to take the blame for it. Or you could do what I say," Jim turned and pointed,

"And put a bullet in her head."

Sherlock's breathing stopped.

Jim stepped up to him and pressed the almost-empty gun into the consulting detective's hand.

"Fifteen minutes, sweetheart."

He turned on his heel, walked up to Lana, slid his jacket off her shoulders and slipped away, coming to rest on the shadowed edge of the roof, his eyes gleaming with malice and success.

It was another minute or so before Sherlock spoke again.

"Lana."

He was trying to detach himself, trying to see only the problem, the facts, and what he could do to rectify the situation. But even now, as he pushed away all sound and sight from his mind, and attempted to boot up the hard drive of his brain, he something kept holding him back. His brain refused to fire as normal and he ached to slip back into his cold, hard shell so he could think through this logically.

And the worst part was not being able to understand why he couldn't.

"Sherlock."

He turned to look at her.

She was staring at him, trying not to let her emotions spill out in front of them and make the whole situation worse.

Sherlock looked at her, torn between wanting to look away and trying to focus and wanting to keep looking at her forever. He tried his best to memorize every curve and shadow of her face, the angles to her body, the light dancing in her eyes. He studied her like a crime scene; as though he could capture every detail in one look.

But even he could see there was so much more to her than the surface. He had held her close and kissed those lips and felt the skin and heard the heart that beat beneath her chest. There was so much more to this beautiful creature that he had allowed into his world, and now it was his last chance to try to understand her before she vanished for good.

Lana took another faltering step before Sherlock closed the distance between them.

The feel of her against his chest, her racing heart against his, even her smell; everything was suddenly razor sharp in his mind. And every word she spoke was a new knife in the heart.

"I didn't think we'd end like this," Lana said softly, almost in tears but still trying to smile. "Most people just break up."

"I'm not going anywhere and neither are you."

"Tell Emily the truth, will you? That I loved you and that you might have loved me. She deserves to know the truth, and she deserves to know how I died.

"I'll think of something. You're going to live."

"Sherlock, we both know that if the bullet doesn't kill me, the fall will."

"Everything's going to be fine, you're going to be fine-"

"No, I'm not. I'm going to die and you're going to save those people."

"At the cost of-"

"There's no greater cost than knowing you could have saved these people and chose not to."

"But there's-"

"It's over a thousand people-"

"But none of them are YOU!"

She stared at him as he fought to continue. "None of them are you, and I don't know why that matters so much to me when there are innocent people who could be saved."

Sherlock's shoulders fell. "I don't understand why it matters, Lana. I don't understand why you matter so much."

Lana reached up and felt his face, her touch setting his skin on fire. "I love you, too."

Her hand guided his face to hers, and she kissed him, her other hand sliding down to take his. Sherlock wound his free arm around her waist and held her in a precarious balance at the edge of the roof.

He didn't realize what she had done until the hand holding his had moved the gun to her stomach, and her fingers had pushed his against the trigger.

The bang shot across the city block like a cannon blast. Sherlock jumped back in mute horror as Lana shuddered, and her body arched backward, slipping over the edge of the roof.

Sherlock's eyes widened in horror as he reached down toward the falling body, until it fell onto a lower balcony with an ugly, sickening crack.

Everything blurred.

John was suddenly there, yelling into his cell phone. The snow was falling again, cool, soft feathers on his face. The sound of a clock striking midnight echoed in his ears.

And Jim Moriarty was nowhere to be seen.

Sherlock pushed past his friend, throwing the door open and hurtling down the steps.

It was a hallucination. It had not happened.

Fighting his way down three more flights of stairs and into the dim hallway, patrons sticking their heads out of doors to look in curiosity at the man hurtling past them in the black coat.

The data is wrong. the rules are wrong.

He grabbed a passing maid, wordlessly grabbing her keycard and shoving it into the lock. The light clicked on and he shot inside. Even in the darkness, he could see the light from outside pouring moonlight onto the carpet and illuminating a small, crumpled figure out on the balcony.

Sherlock knelt beside her. Lana looked tiny, frail, shattered. Her neck was twisted at a horrible angle, but the look on her face was so calm, she might have been sleeping. Asleep in a field of white.

Sherlock picked her up, noticing how light she was. He held her tightly to his chest, willing with all his might to hear her heart beating against his own.

There was nothing.

Next-chapter 21