CHAPTER 6: THE CHASTISEMENT (Part 4)
It appeared that Moriarty really wanted him alive to answer for his sins, for he relented his possessive grasp at the heat punishment and set the temperature down to below-normal again. He also let him have a whole two liters of fresh and deliciously cool water, all in one gulp. After the incident with the capfuls of false hope, he had been left to rot in his own sticky sweat which was already drying on his skin and leaving a heavy quality to his limbs, for quite a few hours; he was worried a heat stroke was approaching if the torture didn't end promptly. But was finally shown a sliver of mercy and allowed what was the most significant relief he had had at his entrapment in that cellar.
It didn't mean the situation was any better, though. It could actually be said it was verging on worse. As a reprimand for failing to take what the criminal considered "a bit of heat", Moriarty decided that sleeping was too much of a luxury for such a disobedient prisoner. He arranged for substantial luminaries to be placed all around the chamber. Bright like sunlight, and as white and blinding as hospital sterile reflectors. There was not an inch of darkness in the room, except for the shadows casted from his very body, leaving their entrapment inside of the detective and inhabiting instead at the wall behind him; not a bit of shade even within his own soul, and Sherlock suddenly felt nude. Exposed. As if his mind had been stripped bare and every squirming thought was being scrutinised, and poked, and prodded. And it could never help that Jim had decided that every time he closed his eyes for more than a second one of his mindless brutes would shock him with the criminal's favourite toy.
This had been his situation for three days, seven hours and twenty-two minutes; and it was horrible. He had gone without sleep in a case before, for just a bit less than that —shy for four hours and seventeen minutes— but adrenaline always played an important factor while on the hunt, and being left alone with his thoughts and the threat of a mildly painful electric charge was straining him more than he cared to admit. He had given up on talking with dignity hours ago, his motor skills had started failing a while back, and he was somehow sure someone had painted his eyelashes with lead when he wasn't looking; which goes to show how compromised his mental capabilities were from tiredness.
He never knew he could ever feel so exhausted. So completely drained as if moving his eyes a few degrees would cause him that much suffering. He just wished he could somehow buy his way out of this, since the hallucinations were bound to arrive at any moment now, and if there's something the detective can not bear, is not being able to trust in his own senses.
—"Run from the light, the Devil's gonna see you."—
"You have to fight it, Sherlock." Moriarty's voice boomed around the room and the detective turned his head around as quickly as the surprise would allow him. He never heard the criminal enter, and Jim being able to sneak up on him was never a comforting thought.
"And what if I refuse? What then?" He asked challengingly. His current blue gaze cutting through everything his sight could get. "What would you do? Torture me? That ship seems to have sailed, don't you think?" He raised his chin, and stared directly into Moriarty's eyes. "Kill me? But that would be too boring, wouldn't it?" Speech and cognitive process was the most difficult thing at his situation, but his fatal nemesis was there, and looking like a crumpled up paper lying on the floor was just not an option.
"You appear to have forgotten that if I had the means to get a hold of you, of all people; it wouldn't be difficult to snatch one of your petty dear friends." He smirked as he gesture for the other men in the room to leave them.
"Threatening to hurt them again? How unimaginative." He managed to choke out. His voice was clearly resenting its lack of use in the last days, and it was too much to hope for something to ease the incessant throbbing inside his skull. He was certain he could hear over the music, his hair growing slowly, painfully lazy. He was worried that if he started listening now, he would never stop again.
"Exactly how much torture would you say your old landlady could endure, hm?" At those projectiles, he felt his chest being shattered like a thousand pieces of glass.
"No." He whispered. Moriarty was not making Mrs. Hudson, the woman who has always been like a mother to him, go through everything he had just because he made a mistake. This war was between him and the criminal, and this time he would make sure nobody got caught up in the crossfire.
"Do you think she will be disappointed? Knowing you could have spared her all the pain and just chose not to? I know I would be." And for him it was not a simple bullet through his abdomen, it was a hollow-point threat that made him want to throw up blood. An actual hole in his lungs would be less painful than the implications the criminal was presenting. "Or maybe that pathologist of yours, I would surely enjoy seeing her again, for old time's sake."
"You're not touching any of them." And Sherlock meant it, if he ever meant anything on his dubious life, it was this. He would die —for real this time— before he allowed the psychopath to torture his friends just because they were loyal to him. Moriarty had worked past Molly last time, however, on this occasion she was in too deep to be overlooked. She was one of the few people in the world who accepted him for who he is, and he refused to repay her help and support with misfortune.
"Or perhaps I should pay a visit to your loyal DI. How many fingers do you think one needs to keep a job as a detective for the Yard?" As he said this, he played with his ten fingers as if visualising what it would be like to be one digit short. The detective though, was doing something completely different with his own hands: he was clutching his temples tightly, just trying to stop the swirling information for making up an imagine and keeping it printed on his memory. The last thing he needed then was a gory scenario of the important people in his life at the mercy of this maniac etched upon his mind.
"I'm telling you, Moriarty: I'm not playing this game again." He knew he had no leverage whatsoever, but if Jim planned on torturing his friends, he also had nothing left to lose.
"I should probably gather them three, and tie them up to a train-track. Like those old movies."
"Stop it!" He was obviously aware of what he was attempting. He was just trying to rile him up, but the musician couldn't deny it was extremely effective, sentiment was truly a defect found on the losing side, and somehow being proven right had never felt so miserably.
"Or maybe, I'll just be more subtle; more cunning. With the sort of occupations two of them have and the age of the other, it would be surprisingly easy for them to get infected with something. Something lethal." The grin he bore was more than a mockery for Sherlock. It was joy, complete and pure joy of causing harm to something the detective held dear; it was sick. "Would you like that? If they faded away slowly?" He asked, as if he actually needed an answer to such a ridiculous query.
When the detective didn't reply, he seemed to be truly offended. He slapped him with the back of his hand. Not strong enough to leave a mark, yet not so weak as to pass unnoticed by the curly-haired man. It was certainly enough to cause him some physical pain. "I asked you a question!" He shouted.
"I didn't know you required an answer." He retorted. Dignity, even if it was just a sliver of it, was the only thing he had left in there, he was dammed if he let Moriarty snatch this out of him too. The criminal made a feral growl and prepared to strike him again when the younger man chose to actually form a coherent response. "No, I wouldn't like that." He whispered.
"Or maybe I could bring the british government to play for a bit."
"You're not dragging anyone else into this! Do you hear me, spider? No one!" He yelled. A desperate wail, as if raising his voice would somehow make the words any truer.
"Imagine if I brought him to you, and made you watch as I slit his throat." And he could imagine it, clear as crystal. His brother knelt on the floor, with the criminal behind him holding a blade. The ginger man watching him with an stoic mask that said more than any facial expression ever would. The fear apparent on his lack of presence, and as the maniac dragged the razor through the skin on his neck, deep enough to be fatal, his big brother faced his last moments with dignity and courage. Sherlock was not sure how he would react to that. If he would loose his mind, or if shock would seize him for a moment instead. But he was sure of what would happen next: he would kill Moriarty with his bare hands.
He wanted to say this last thing. However, as a substitute, he said: "You are not touching my brother."
"Although I do wonder, whatever you will do without your First Mate My?" And it couldn't be. It was impossible for the criminal to know that. To posses that particular information. The only one who knew about his secret pet-name for his brother was the british government himself. He had given it to him when they started playing pirates once he was old enough to hold a wooden sword and Mycroft had yet to grow up to be a meddling pompous git. This wasn't among the information they had agreed on revealing to Moriarty, and Sherlock could be certain that his brother would never betray him as that. He knew the umbrella-carrying arse would considering giving away secret military plans before divulging any intimate detail about his childhood. Mycroft could be a nosy bastard, but he was his brother, and they both were really important for each other, albeit unseeingly.
"How do you know about that?" He asked, because he couldn't fathom the real track he could have follow to ever arriving at that knowledge.
"You always seem to forget: I know you. I know every little thing about you. I am you, and you are me. And without me, you're nothing." This hit the detective square in the jaw, because it was true. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, he could never find true dissimilarities between them, and it frightened him. He had thought that by never thinking about it, it would maybe make it less true, but Moriarty had hurled reality at him, and he feared he would never get rid of it.
"So what do you say? Will you do it? Don't make me strap the heretic's fork to your neck. It makes hell of a mess." He mused, and the brunette couldn't believe he hadn't noticed the small medieval torture device on the criminal's hands until now. Sleep deprivation surely was messing with his brain more than he had realised. It was often used so prisoners would confessed, would fess up valuable information. Sherlock pitied anyone who had been made to use it, but then again, their torture had at least had a purpose. A horrible one, of course, but a purpose nonetheless. Instead, his hellish stay was a sentence with no known resolution, nor even guarantee that there would be one, and all to entertain a murdering psychopath; so yes, he won in the misfortune scale.
He had no desire of doing it, of risking it. He just wanted to sleep, and to go home. But still, he also saw no appeal at being pierced in the chin and chest, so the former was the lesser of the two evils. With a deep breath he steeled his shoulders, straighten up his back and spoke defyingly. "I'll do it."
"Good boy." And the criminal smiled.
—"Don't make a sound, the Devil's gonna hear you."—
Agony within the soul is much more corrosive than any pain physical suffering could ever begin to bring, and as the hours flew by he could feel all his humanity, all that he once was being ruptured part by part, bit by bit; only to leave the most basic and raw form of himself there was. Where even his own name was out of reach, where darkness had consumed all possible reminiscence of old memories and he was left in utter emptiness.
His drowsy state was something to be feared, because hallucinations had come and gone long ago. He was just mindlessly drifting through a foggy daze, just another bundle of atoms trying hard to keep his body form breaking; like if they'd grown a mind of their own, knowing the detective had lost his. The reflectors casted light upon him, making everything have a paint-like quality. Colours staining a perfect black canvas he couldn't scape.
He could feel the fatigue trying to claw its way in. And he put all of his remaining energy to work on a sole purpose: not falling asleep. But destiny is not always so indulging, as each second ticked by, he was finding it harder to just not plummet to the floor defeated by exhaustion. It doesn't matter how great a mind he had, you can only deprive your body of its needs for so long, and as that thought ran through his head, he fell his eyes finally give out and turn everything to black, this was the last thing he thought.
Next thing he knew, he was being woken by the very last voice he wanted to hear. He realised he had been dreaming of being back at Baker Street, a nice cuppa being clutched in one of his hands. Of course when the criminal's lilting mockery rang through the air he felt the vision crashed into a million shattered pieces.
"Oh, look how adorable the slumbering detective looks." Sherlock scratched his eyes trying to adjust to the light, right then all he could make out was Jim's silhouette against the stark light. "Although, I do believe we had a deal." Like a bullet to the back of his head, reality struck him as if fallen from heaven itself. He may have just made the biggest mistake of his life.
"No! I didn't- I won't-" He fumbled, trying to find the right combination of words that would make his captor forget about the punishment he had threatened to deliver if he were ever found resting.
"I wonder which of them will be. Which will hit the hardest." He rambled as his paced the small chamber. He had to do something, he couldn't let this happen.
"No! I- You can't!" He yelled, and oddly enough he felt tears start to form in his eyes, he was probably delivering the show Moriarty wanted, but he couldn't be arsed to care right at the moment, because probably one of them would die if he didn't do something and it would all be his fault.
"Maybe-" The spider started but was cut off by a demanding boffin.
"Moriarty, listen to me!" Despair painted each word, and the consulting criminal will probably bask at Sherlock's begging. But this was important, he would plead on his knees if he had to.
"Oh, I'm listening Sherlock. I've been listening for a long time." And the curly haired man knew it was true, James was a shadow, following his every move.
"No! You can't! I'll do anything." He looked at the brown-eyed man's face. Searching for a mercy he was certain he would not find. Yelling like a man possessed, and he supposed he was, possessed by grief at least. But what more could he do at the moment?
"I believe you would." The cruel man replied, and there was something so final about it that made the curly-haired man's tears stream down his pace in hopeless pleading. When breath had failed him, and any other tactic had proven futile he whispered: "Please." And it sounded as exactly what is was: A surrender.
"Haul him up boys," The irish accent commanded to the three other men in the room. "And bring the water."
—"When you dig in the ground, the Devil won't catch you."—
Thank you for the reviews and follows. Your dedication to this story means a lot to me.