Small World
"Crossroads"
by Nan00k

Once upon a time, Moriarty was a boy. That ended the day he had met a crossroads demon. Part of the Small World AU series. Superlock with a bonus.

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Warnings: MASSIVE crossover, mixing of canons, alternative universe setting, dark themes
Disclaimers: Supernatural © CW/Kripke. Sherlock © Moffat/Gatiss. Merlin © BBC One, et al.

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Outside of Thatcham, Berkshire, England
March 1989

The day after his father died, all James got was a rattling box and a tiny yellow note.

He was nine. He hated being nine. It was worse than being eight and definitely worse than being ten. He hated going to school and running into the older students. He hated his overworn clothing that were from charity shops and everybody noticed. The only reason James still went to class at all was because he liked the books (even if all of his teachers were idiots, too.)

Then again, without Carl Powers around, his usual tormentors had drifted away. Mummy had thought about moving back to Dublin, but they had stayed in Thatcham. Just like da would have wanted.

Da wanted a lot of things. More than James had ever imagined, though by the end of his life, it had become clear that there were things amiss for his father. The professor had wanted things that could no longer be.

So, he passed on his job to James. James was not exactly pleased with playing errand boy for a dead man, but perhaps, it was what he owed his father.

Among the things in the box, he found instructions. He had to get a bunch of things that made little sense to him—like a picture of himself, cut out of a stiff family portrait, and dirt from the graveyard. He had to kill the neighbor's cat to get a bone from it. He threw the rest of it into the creek so mummy wouldn't find out, again. She didn't know about the job, because da had told James in the note not to tell her.

James had never been a good son, not really. He was only good for mummy when she cried. He just hated the sound of it, really. Da had never had the patience for him. Then again, his father was never home, so it didn't really matter if he was patient or not.

And now, there James was, following his father's last orders. They weren't truly orders, James considered as he walked along the empty roads that lead out of their small village. The note was a vague mess of suggestions. A dare. A challenge.

No one challenged a Moriarty and won. James would win. He always won, in the end.

He found the last thing he needed just around midnight. He had just passed a farmhouse, but it almost pitch black outside. The moon shone overhead as James dug a shallow hole in the middle of the road. It had to be in the direct center, his father's note said in his bold scrawl. James threw away the spade he had stolen from the neighbors and stood over the hole. He had buried the bone, picture, and dirt inside a tiny box.

Standing there in the chill, James hugged the larger, cardboard box his father had given him. It felt like a fool at first, when nothing happened. He was patient, however. He was always willing to wait to get what he wanted. He had had to wait days before he heard about Carl's unfortunate swim in London.

Ten minutes later, he heard the sound of footsteps on the dirt road. Turning, James saw a pretty brown-haired woman walking his way. She looked very different than most ladies around Thatcham. James liked her.

"Are you lost, little boy?" the woman asked, walking over to him with a coy smile. She reminded him of ladies on the telly.

"I'm not lost," he said immediately. He hugged the box tighter.

"It's awfully late for you to be out by yourself," the woman said, her smile brightening.

"Mummy doesn't care when I go to bed," James said, shrugging. She was never even home when he was supposed to go to sleep. She went out drinking a lot. Especially after da died yesterday. Mummy was probably passed out on the kitchen floor by now.

"I'm sure she doesn't," the woman said, though that didn't make much sense to James. She moved over to stand in front of him and the covered hole in the ground. "What's your name?"

"James," he answered. "Who are you?"

The demon smiled. "You can call me Lyra if you want."

"You're pretty," James said, after thinking about it for a moment.

Lyra laughed. "What's a cute little thing like you doing out here, James?" she asked, speaking sweetly. Adults did that a lot around children. James thought it was useful.

"I…" He shifted on his feet and hugged his box. "I thought this was how you summoned demons."

There was an odd little light in Lyra's eyes. "Oh," she said, speaking in a hushed voice. "Now, who told you a secret like that?"

How he knew was easy enough; his father had told him. James wanted to know how his father found out about it, but he knew he couldn't waste this opportunity asking that question.

"My da made a deal here," James said. He swallowed. "And now he's dead."

"I see," Lyra said, still smiling sweetly. "And now you want to make a deal, too?"

"I don't know." James squinted at her in the dark. "What is a deal?"

"Didn't your da tell you?" Lyra asked, tugging at the cheap necklace around her neck. Her nails were a shiny red color.

"No. All he left me was a note and a stupid box," James said, looking down at the box in his arms with a frown. "Mummy said it wasn't fair that he died, but da said that it was fair, that he made a deal."

Lyra made a sympathetic sound. "Oh, he did, didn't he?" She moved closer, speaking lightly. "I remember your da. He was a handsome fellow. Dark hair, dark eyes… just like you."

"Mummy says I do look like him," James said, looking back up at her.

"I think so, too," Lyra said, smiling.

James froze. Her eyes were glowing red now.

"Were you the lady he made a deal with?" he asked, his heart beating a little faster. "Before I was even born?"

Lyra's smile widened. "I am."

"But he made a deal with a demon. That's what he said," James said. His hands dug into the cardboard box, squashing the one side. "You don't look like a demon. You're pretty."

"You're sweet, James," Lyra said, giggling. She tilted her head and her dark hair framed her face. "But your da was right. I'm a demon."

"So, you were the one who killed him?"

"No, no, no," Lyra said, tsking. "We crossroads demons, we don't kill anyone! We're just the ones who help people like your da get what they've always wanted. We tell them the price and they take it." Her eyebrows went up. "Your da wished for big things."

James frowned. "But he died."

"Well, all he wanted was how to find the cave," Lyra said, shrugging. "Even though I can grant a lot of things, I never promised him that he'd be able to get into it."

A cave. Right.

"Oh," James said, speaking carefully. "Well, that's not the problem. I just meant that he had to die because of it."

Lyra stopped. "…what do you mean, James?" she asked, expression frozen.

James shifted from foot to foot. "He said—he said that after ten years, he had to die. How did he die, if you weren't the one to do it?"

"James," Lyra said, interrupting him. "Tell me. Did your father get into the cave?"

"Tell me how he died," James insisted.

Lyra was suddenly closer and her eyes were blood red. "Did your father get into the cave?" she asked, voice sharper.

James stared up at her and didn't move. "You tell me first," he said, his heart going pitter-pat under his ribcage. This was exciting.

There was a distinct pause. Lyra looked ready to do something violent.

"…My bosses." Lyra smiled, though it wasn't friendly anymore. "They send dogs to escort the soul down into Hell. Didn't you hear the dogs when they came for your da?"

"He wasn't home when he died," James admitted. He looked down the southeast road. "He died out on the hills."

"He was sure it was a good cause," Lyra said. She spoke with urgency now; she probably didn't realize the show of hand she had given by acting so desperate. "Now, tell me, Jimmy."

"Don't call me that," James said, making a face. Carl had called him that and now the whole school used the nickname.

"James," Lyra snapped. She stood directly in front of him now and loomed. "Did your father get into the cave?"

There was a lot to be figured out from her question. This was about a cave, then. An important one. Interesting.

"…why does it matter?" James asked, biting his lip. He hunched his shoulders and looked down at the box, thinking of his father. "Not even the cave was worth him dying. He left mummy all alone. And me."

He heard Lyra breathing. She was still agitated, but in the few seconds of silence she let him have, she seemed to calm down.

"Why did you summon me, James?" the demon asked, eyes as red as blood when he looked back up at her. "I can't bring your father back, if that's what you want."

James shook his head. "No, I knew that. He said… he said that I shouldn't contact you at all."

"Then why did you?" Lyra asked. She looked hungry.

"I don't know," James said, hesitating. "I think…"

He pondered his reasons. He didn't have to do anything, really. His father's note only had one command, and he didn't necessarily have to summon the demon and speak with her this long to comply with it.

He just... wanted to find out why. He was immensely curious.

"I think it's because I want to continue what he started," James said aloud, looking up at the demon.

Lyra grinned. "Well, you already have a head start, little one, if your da really did get into the cave," she said. Her smile was mean. "Somehow, I doubt it."

James' brow furrowed. "Why do you doubt it? My da, he was a smart man. Even if he did die."

"If he was so smart, he wouldn't have died at all. All those years, toiling away, trying to find it in the rolling hills," Lyra replied, sneering. "Maybe if he looked just a little harder on his own, maybe he could have found it without dying."

"I think he could have," James said. His father wasn't perfect, but he was certainly smart. James was going to be smarter than him, though.

"But he didn't," Lyra said, shaking her head slowly. She wagged her shiny nail at him. "He didn't, James. He wasn't smart enough."

"He was. He just…" James inhaled and exhaled sharply. He picked his words carefully, watching her reaction; he remembered where his father had always ended up working more than anywhere else. "He didn't have time to keep going east to look."

Interestingly, she just smirked. He had picked well. "Did he tell you why he came to me?" she asked. "Because he wasn't patient. He wanted to find it first, before his colleagues did. He didn't understand the power he was hunting down, but he knew more than his friends did. I told him about the Levels, but surely he could have figured it out himself. Such a pity."

James stopped. Lyra smiled nastily.

"I wonder how long it took him to realize that he could have found it on his own, if he had just tried," she said, edging closer like a beast to wounded prey. "You must have wanted to help him with excavating the cave, like a good little boy, after he made the deal. He'd take you out there, didn't he? Did he take you when he found the cave? Did you see it, James?"

Tilting his head, James stared directly into her eyes.

"Somerset," he said.

Lyra froze. "What?"

"The only place da took me to were all these tiny little towns in Somerset," James said. He smiled; of course it would be Somerset. His father had never let him go into the hills, but let him and mummy stay in those towns while he was gone. "The cave is located around the Somerset Levels, isn't it? Or the Mendip Hills?"

After making the deal, his father must have been so mad. He would have come close, surely, to finding the cave in the Hills. All of his scholarly work for naught—it had been so close. James felt bad for his poor father.

The demon in front of him looked alarmed.

"You said your da found it already," she said, moving back slightly.

"No, I didn't. You just thought that's what I meant," James told her. He shrugged. "You're very pretty, but you're not very smart for a demon. That makes a lot of sense though, that they'd be in the Hills. Da almost had it, didn't he, before he went to you?"

Lyra made an inhuman sound, like the snarl of a dog. "You little brat!" she howled, upon realizing he had tricked her.

She took three steps closer and James' heart leapt. The demon looked ready to rip into him with her hands. He wondered if she could, but he did not really want to find out.

"What if I wanted a deal?" he asked, speaking quickly. "Don't you want my soul?"

Lyra stopped dead in her tracks. Da had written a demon would never refuse a deal if they could make one. No matter how angry she was, Lyra seemed to be bound by those rules, too. Or maybe she was just greedy, like da had been.

"…and what, little boy, do you want?" the demon finally asked through gritted teeth.

"First, I have a question," James said.

Lyra looked murderous. "What?"

"What's in my box?" he asked, holding up the rectangular box still held in his hands.

Confusion flickered across her face, but Lyra sneered at the question. "Your da's ashes?" she asked, a snarl in the back of her throat.

James lowered the box in surprise. "How did you know he was cremated?"

Lyra grinned. "Because your mummy didn't want you to see where the dogs ripped your da's soul out of his chest," she said, stepping closer.

"Will dogs rip out my chest?" James asked quietly, eyes wider.

"Only if you make a deal," Lyra said. She raised her hand toward him, as if to reach inside his body and take his own soul. "And if you don't make one, I may just rip you apart myself."

"Well," James said, "you never did answer my question."

"I don't care what's in your stupid box!" Lyra screamed, her face contorting with anger and her eyes blazing like fire.

James frowned. "Oh."

He dropped the box and it landed at his feet with a heavy thud. The contents rattled wildly, especially since he had kept his grip of the lid and let the cardboard fly off into the wind out of his grasp. Lyra blinked, again confused, when she looked down at the exposed box.

A pile of whitened bones, like the plastic ones at Halloween, sat there. They were still glistening with accelerant. Lyra's eyes widened.

"What the hell is that?" she asked, hissing as she took a step backwards.

"The only thing my da gave me after he died," James said. "Bones."

He brought out a lighter from his pocket and held it up.

"Your bones, Lyra Lewis," he said, "from Swansea."

Lyra's red eyes widened into pools of blood.

"You—!" she said.

James smiled brightly and flicked the light.

"Da sends his regards," he told her, dropping it down upon the bones.

Lyra shrieked louder than the wind when the flames erupted—both across the bones and out of her own skin.

It had taken his father nine years to find what he was after—apparently this special cave—but it had only taken him that last year to find the bones of the woman who had bought his soul. James remembered that year was when his father had truly never been home, always out, always hunting down the name and grave of a long-dead woman who was now a monster.

Bequeathing it to his only son the day after his death, Thomas Moriarty would have his revenge after all. James felt as though destiny has been fulfilled.

Lyra burned, but not quietly like the bones. She shrieked louder and louder, enough that James made a face and covered his ears. She didn't burn like he had thought she would; she lit up like a candle, but from the bottom up. She melted into the sky, her ashes being torn from her blackened bones in vicious chunks.

James thought that odd, since her real bones were burning on the ground.

It took forever her to stop screaming, and even longer for the bones to stop burning. When the demon was nothing but dust and flickering flames on the road, James lowered his hands and stared at the little fire at his feet.

So much trouble over so little. James pulled out the yellow piece of paper his father had left him, along with the box of bones. He had thought his father had been funny, leaving him such a silly message and such a useless gift.

"Dear James," James said aloud, reading from the little yellow note. "Dear James? I was never your dear anything. But thanks, da."

Revenge was something that a Moriarty would never consider too tall a task to achieve. His father had wanted it more than anything in the wake of never fully achieving his dreams. Maybe that was why he had married and had James to begin with. To be that vengeance.

As it turned out, James now knew, da's dreams were for a cave. All of this, for a single cave.

"I will not tell you what I found, because I do not think you have earned it. You did not give up what I lost to find it."

James peered at the fire, watching the once-white bones burn black.

He deserved it now.

"But I will give you that chance to find it yourself. Do not ask what I asked for. Make them tell you freely."

And he had. People loved to talk. Especially the ones who thought they had power, but they really didn't.

"Summon the demon I spoke to by going to the road as I have instructed."

James dropped the note into the dying flames and watched the edges curl up upon itself.

"Burn her, James. Burn her from this Earth and beyond."

And so James did as he was told.

James smiled at the ashes.

He was a good son after all.

The bones were nothing but ash to blow in the wind, disappearing into the night, and would never matter to anyone ever again.

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Mendip Hills,Somerset, England
Three Months Later

It didn't take long to the find the right cave. It was all there in his father's notes, detailing what it was; that had never been a question for the professor. The location was the only mystery, but James had one thing his father had not possessed:

Patience.

The locals were all idiots, but they got him started. All the known caves were along the hills. The cave James was looking for wouldn't be there, because it would have been found already. He went further north, taking the paths low into valleys. He knew it would be hidden by overgrowth and what had once been forest. It had remained hidden for so long, it could not possibly look like a cave now.

He followed the whispers of people who spoke of areas that weren't safe and felt wrong. He went to the places they all told him to avoid—the places where the Earth seemed to creak and push back against visitors. It was hiding it from him. The very land itself was in on the mystery.

But it could not hope to stop James. It had not stopped his father. It would not stop James either.

He found it at the break of day three months and two weeks later. He was out of food and losing faith. But he found it, buried beneath the roots of an ancient oak tree.

James dug into the spot where the earth had collapsed inward. The only sign his father had been there were the deliberate signs of the rocks being moved and then covered back over with now-dead branches. James pushed the dirt and stones away, and then stood over the edge to look down.

What he saw made him smile and lean forward. He looked out into the cavernous opening and could feel the earth singing beneath him.

"I found your magic cave, da," James whispered, grinning into the dark abyss. He lifted his torch and let the light drift over the cave's halls.

Catching the newfound light, the walls lit up like a bursting explosion. The crystals that jetted out of the rocky floors became beacons.

James learned that he couldn't just walk in. The birds and mice he threw inside ran around in circles until they died. Later on, men couldn't last either. His father had never made it inside, it would seem, because of this unfortunate trick the cave produced.

But James was patient. James was willing to wait, because in the end, Moriarty won.

He had found his father's stupid Crystal Cave.

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End Crossroads.

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Next, London had its own sort of apocalypse before… one that included an angel, a demon, an anti-Christ, an ex-hunter, a child detective and, oh, yes, a Doctor.

A/Ns:
-This is happening three months after the Carl Powers incident, or Moriarty's first murder. I've adjusted some of the events in Sherlock, so it is a little AU.
-As a random note: Moriarty does not use "Jim" until after he meets Sebastian Moran, his right hand man, about twelve years after this incident.
-Yes, Merlin is scheduled to appear in this series.
-Completely making up Merlin geography for the present day.
-For non-Supernatural fans reading this: burning the bones of a demon (if they had been a human before going to Hell) will kill the demon permanently. There are not many other things that will, so this is all the average person has to kill one…if they're lucky enough to find the demon's human name. ;)