Characters: Moriarty & Sherlock

POV: Sherlock

Prompt: Sherlock is in Moriarty's clutches.

Submitted by: jink

Note: Takes place sometime during Series 2. The exact timing isn't important, just know that this is not a Series 4 prediction by any stretch of the imagination. Also, if the demand is there, I may do this prompt again sometime with sick!Sherlock or high!Sherlock - thoughts?

Sherlock doesn't remember what happened. But then, memory is a funny thing. At any given time, a person's memory centres are only functioning at about 60% accuracy. The human brain can edit, delete, or fabricate memories subconsciously - meaning that the person doesn't even know it's happening. Sometimes even the most vivid memories are fake; and sometimes even the most traumatic events are deleted. Not even Sherlock Holmes can completely overcome that kind of primal brain function. It is, unfortunately, just a fact of life.

Think, Sherlock tells himself. Assess the situation. He finds his brain is sluggish to comply, like a computer in the process of booting up. Sending and resending commands repeatedly will only slow it down, so the best course of action is to sit back and wait for it to awaken itself.

The first thing he becomes aware of is that he is somewhere in between conscious and unconscious. He knows he ought to be able to make a deduction based on that fact, but his mind draws a blank. That's not a good sign. A long string of possibilities as to why that is begins to flood his mind: brain injury, drugs, sick, drunk -

Stop.

Pain is the next thing that registers. Most people describe pain in terms of heat: searing, white-hot, red, burning. But Sherlock's pain is cold. It's cold and it's inescapable, like someone is filling his insides with ice. On the outside edges of his awareness, he can feel his body reacting, clutching reflexively at his core, guarding the wound - wound? His voice falls through the rough notes of a low-pitched groan, but it sounds faraway, as if it is someone else's.

He notices he is moving. No, not moving - being moved. Dragged backward. Then dropped, repositioned. Pain again.

"Sheeeeeeerrrlooooooooock."

Rhotic accent. Not English. Irish. Dublin. His brain is warming up, finally.

"This is no fun, Sherlock. Wake up!"

Moriarty.

Sherlock's eyes snap open. His vision is blurred and jumpy, but he gathers that he's looking at a ceiling. The pain intensifies as his senses sharpen - a nasty side effect of his brain coming around to full functionality.

"I called your bluff," Moriarty's voice floats over him, shrill and lyrical. "Only you didn't move quick enough."

There are hands on him. His hands. Moriarty's. Pulling and prodding and - oh, that hurts. Sherlock coughs dust out of his throat and lifts one of his hands into his field of vision. It's red and shining with his blood.

James Moriarty's face appears directly above him. His eyes are wide, manic. There is a cut slicing through one eyebrow. It bleeds into the inner corner of his eye, flooding it and making him look as though he is crying tears of blood. Every blink disperses blood across his cornea. His eyes are watering from the salt.

Sherlock tries to talk, but he hasn't the strength. He can feel himself beginning to shake, a slight tremor that sets into his hands and feet first. Some part of him knows that this, along with the strange perception of cold, is a sign of catastrophic blood loss.

"Shh," Jim soothes, petting his face with a dusty hand. He's smiling. He bends over Sherlock's body and starts picking debris out of his clothes. "Jim and Sherly went down to Burley to fetch a pail of water," he sings. "Sherly got mad, and Jim was sad, and then the building collapsed!"

And then the building collapsed. Now he remembers. Moriarty blew up a building. To prove a point. Stupid. They both might have been killed - what then?

"Oh, hell!"

A sudden pressure in his abdomen makes Sherlock suck in a strangled breath. His vision darkens at the edges.

"No, no," Moriarty is saying now, his voice barely audible above the rushing in Sherlock's ears. He taps Sherlock's face with a bloody hand.

More pressure. Sherlock blinks his vision clear and makes himself look down. Moriarty is tearing bits from Sherlock's clothes and using them to pack a deep wound in his abdomen. All he can see is red. His shirt, his jacket, Moriarty's hands and arms up to the elbows… red. He lets his head fall back again. "Why...?"

Jim presses a few more strips of fabric into the wound and leans close to Sherlock's face, his breath ghosting over the detective's skin in short, hot bursts. "Because you're not allowed to die. Not til I say go. Oh, eventually, maybe, but not now. C'mere." Dust and debris crunch under his feet as he moves toward Sherlock's head. He sticks his hands under the detective's arms and drags him backward toward the other side of the room.

An involuntary cry rips from Sherlock's throat at the sudden movement. He can feel himself breaking out in a sweat, but all he feels is cold.

"The cavalry'll be on their way," Moriarty is saying now, as he props Sherlock up against the wall. "Not long, now. What d'you think John would pay for you, mm?" He grins an animal grin and pushes Sherlock's legs apart so that he can sit cross-legged in the space between them. The cut on his face is bleeding freely, and he seems to be favouring his left side, but it's as if he hardly notices. "Would John lay down his life for you, Sherlock?"

John. His heart speeds up at the mention of his flatmate, panic exploding across his chest like lightning, and he tries to move but finds he can't. He thinks of John sitting in his chair reading a book, which is where he left him this morning. He wonders if he's still there, or if some military sixth sense of danger has awakened in his brain. Probably not. John is terribly slow.

"So, is that a yes?"

"What… do you… want?" Sherlock pants. The icy pain in his abdomen seems to be radiating outward - down into his legs, up into his lungs. Breathing requires concentration.

"You," that lilting voice replies. He places the index finger of his right hand beside the outer corner of Sherlock's eye and drags gently downward, tracing the shape of his face. "All of you. Every last inch." That touch, too hot, slides over Sherlock's throat now, over his collarbone, down the front of his tattered shirt. "Even the bits that John Watson claimed for himself. You're mine, Sherlock, you just don't know it yet. I own you." Moriarty's hand stops at the wound, dances around the edge of it for a moment. He presses his finger into the makeshift bandage, making Sherlock squirm in discomfort. "You can't stop it. I collapsed a building on you to make sure you wouldn't get away," he points out.

"Collapsed a building - on both of us," Sherlock corrects, his voice made ragged and sharp by agony. He closes his hand around Jim's wrist and pries him away from the wound. "I-Ineffective as it was. You have at least… two fractured ribs. Could have been killed… by that support beam."

Jim glances down at himself. "Fared better than you." He clucks his tongue disapprovingly.

Darkness edges into Sherlock's vision again. He is light-headed and tired, so tired. He can hear his respiration speeding up, his body desperately trying to reroute oxygen to his brain, but the problem is his blood, not his breathing. His eyes slide shut, and Moriarty's voice fades to a low murmur beneath the sound of running water.

Blackness.

Then, exactly fifty-seven seconds later, he wakes with a start and finds himself lying on the crumbling floor again, with Jim hovering over top of him, his hands poised on Sherlock's chest. Those dark eyes stare fiercely down at him, angry and insulted that he would have the audacity to try and die before he was given permission.

"I said no, Sherlock," Jim reminds him. He's winded from the set of compressions he's just delivered with two broken ribs protesting. "I said not yet." He moves one hand and puts pressure on the bleeding in the detective's abdomen.

Sherlock arches his back against this new wave of pain, strangling the sound his body tries to make. He tosses his head in protest, notices his phone lying on the ground to his right. Call connected: 999. "How kind of you," he hisses.

"Shush."

It's ridiculous, Sherlock has the presence of mind to realise. The Napoleon of crime, he calls himself, and he's sitting on his knees giving his nemesis CPR. Sherlock swallows painfully and tries to roll his eyes, but the lids just flutter shut. For the best, probably. If he has to look at Moriarty's annoying face for another instant, he might just spit. Normally, he could appreciate a good paradox, but right now he's consumed by pain.

Moriarty hums to himself. "Lot of blood."

"Astute observation."

All of a sudden, his voice is much to close to Sherlock's ear. "Lighten up, Sure-Luck. I didn't kill you, did I? Listen, I - oh." He stops short, possibly cut off by the sirens that are approaching. His eyes go wide and his eyebrows lift comically as he nods his approval. "Very nice, very prompt. That's my cue, Sherlock. Hey." He taps the detective's face.

With a great amount of effort, Sherlock pries his eyes open. Moriarty is grasping one of his hands, pressing it into the wound.

"Do tell that nice policeman not to bother, eh? He won't find anything here, 'cept the expired charges. And a whole lotta your blood, o' course. And listen, try not to die, okay?"

"Do my best," Sherlock says, his voice dripping with evident sarcasm. "For you."

Moriarty laughs heartily, though it's cut off abruptly as his injuries protest. "Be seeing you," he promises, patting Sherlock's cheek. He stands and walks away, straightening his ruined suit as he disappears behind a fallen pillar.

Distantly, Sherlock can hear the crunch of tyres as a rescue team pulls up outside.

Catch you later.