Chapter Text
Moriarty hangs over London. People switch off their screens and smartphones, heartily sick of the smiling face that won’t look away.
Anyone with any sense is deeply paranoid. Potential suspects are everywhere -- and potential victims. That man in the bulky jacket, standing by himself beside the zebra crossing. That woman reading in her car. Those kids, hanging around on the steps of the art gallery.
Mycroft orders phones for himself and Anthea, simple Nokias with monochrome screens. When he switches them on, he half expects to see two Moriartys looking at him in a lower resolution. He instructs Anthea to keep an eye on the video feed. Her mouth moves in a small gesture of distaste. But she understands why he’s asking. She texts one-handed, the Nokia in her right hand and the infected BlackBerry in her left.
Back at 221B, Sherlock turns on all his laptops. He knows there won’t be civilians wrapped in semtex this time; Moriarty wouldn’t tell the same joke twice. He doesn’t want to miss a clue, and so he positions the laptops so that Moriarty’s never out of his sight, even when he’s on the toilet.
Right now it would be nice to have company, he thinks, but a sense of purpose will do. Besides, John might have taken his mind off the task at hand.
He doesn’t have enough chargers for all the laptops, and the only solution is to keep checking their battery levels and switching the chargers around so that none of the screens lose power.
Eventually, Sherlock’s patience is rewarded when the video feed changes. Moriarty’s mouth, which has been twitching convulsively for 24 hours, suddenly opens wide. For a moment there is only a gaping black hole that reminds Sherlock of the mouth on a vinyl sex doll.
Then the mouth resolves into a grin, Moriarty bearing his teeth in a sign of amusement, or aggression. Sherlock stares, glued to the screen that’s balanced on the bathroom counter, his trousers round his ankles.
Moriarty's teeth begin to jump quickly up and down. Did you miss me? Sherlock watches the animated jaws champ again and again. He wonders if it’s meant to look as though Moriarty is talking, or laughing with fierce monkey-like laughter. The man looks ready to devour, to tear flesh with his teeth.
Did you miss me? Did you miss me?
Hearing noises on the stairs, Sherlock pulls up his trousers and goes back out into the sitting room. Mrs Hudson appears in the open doorway, no doubt disturbed by the sixteen laptops playing Moriarty’s voice in the flat above her.
‘What on earth are you doing, Sherlock? This is so creepy!’
Sherlock tears himself away from the screens and bends down to give her a kiss on the cheek.
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hudson. I’ll get to the bottom of this.’
‘You and whose army?’
Right on cue, the landline rings. Sherlock runs ahead of Mrs Hudson, taking the stairs two at a time. Is it John?
It’s Mycroft.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Good morning, little brother. Anthea tells me that we have a new development.’
‘The video changed, yes. It’s back on a loop again now.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s not a loop, Sherlock. It’s a long video. We’ve made some progress, while you’ve been holed up in your flat.’
Sherlock hums with frustration and waits for Mycroft to continue.
‘The video will come to an end, approximately … twelve hours from now.’
‘What happens then?’
‘I don’t know. There's nothing else to go on, not yet anyway. The video's all we have. Sherlock?'
'Yes, what?'
'If Moriarty is behind this, somehow...'
'We weren't as clever as we thought.'
Mycroft sighs gently. '13 possible scenarios, and it still wasn't enough.'
'Well, he wasn't just thinking a couple moves ahead. He was playing a much longer game.'
Mycroft makes a noise that would have been a grunt, if Mycroft was the kind of man who grunted.
'Sherlock, you've been sitting at home thinking, have you?’
‘What else?’
‘Think harder,’ says Mycroft. He hangs up.
Sherlock walks back upstairs, thinking harder. While he was on the phone, Mrs Hudson had gone up and wandered around the flat. Now he hears her gasp and groan. She must've found the laptop in the bathroom.
He calls through to her, ‘It’s perfectly safe, Mrs. Hudson.’
‘It’s not that, Sherlock. You forgot to flush!’
He smirks as she joins him in the sitting room.
‘It’s no more than I’ve come to expect, you disgusting boy.’
Moriarty’s teeth are still jumping away. Now it seems to Sherlock as though the man’s teeth are chattering. He’s deathly cold. With his teeth on show and his dark staring eyes, the dead man looks more than ever like the skull on the mantelpiece. Death’s head. Totenkopf.
‘Mrs Hudson, there are clues in this video. It’s a warning, don’t you see?’
She turns to him, eyes wild and desperate.
‘Oh my goodness, Sherlock -- what about my electricity bill?’
~
He leaned back in his car seat, exhausted and his heart beating hard. Perhaps he was ill. That would explain it.
‘Sherlock, you look awful,’ said John, and he giggled.
Sherlock opened his eyes. He was determined to muster a smile for John, who looked very happy. So did Mary. She was sitting in the front with Anthea. She smiled at him in the wing mirror.
Normally he’d have resented the way she bundled him and John into the backseat of the car, as though she had two children already. She did things like that because she knew he liked being with John. It was extremely condescending.
But he did like being with John.
‘My nerves!’ Sherlock brought one hand to his forehead and let the other one hang limp from his wrist.
John laughed hysterically. He thought Sherlock was so funny when he camped it up. He punched Sherlock in the arm.
‘OW!’ Sherlock shouted as dramatically as possible. He tried to scowl at John, and slipped into his best Edinburgh voice. ‘Dr Watson, I am black affronted. A medical man, such as yourself…’
John punched him in the arm again.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Mary. ‘You’d be tense too, if you’d just been sent to a foreign country, then called back to save Britain from terrorists.’
‘Trust me, I can empathize,’ said John, still laughing.
Sherlock felt awful. He realized now that a small suppressed part of him had been glad to put distance between himself and the Watsons. He asked Anthea to drop off John and Mary at their home, before taking him back to Baker Street.
He hated the back-and-forth of his life with them. John would sometimes spend a whole night at the flat because they’d been working late on a case, then go back to Mary in the morning.
He saw John so rarely that when they did meet up, he was anxious to look his best, in a way he’d never been before. John saw Mary every day, and every day he loved her more, so Sherlock had to be special and different.
He’d found himself digging out the little boxes and tubes he occasionally used for disguises, working on himself with a hand as steady as a professional makeup artist’s, until the face he saw reflected in the mirror was the picture of health. The foundation he would have used in the past only to cover the ghost of a bruise, was now for making his skin look bright and even.
He wanted John to see a Sherlock thriving on three cases a week and a fortnightly visit from John. Very occasionally, John got involved in a case, but only when Sherlock called him. Sherlock rationed his texts to John. He left his phone on the other side of the flat so that he’d be less tempted to read and respond to John’s texts immediately.
~
Underneath the makeup, Sherlock is fading away. His eating habits are worse than ever, and his weight has dropped so low that he’s begun to look gaunt, rather than attractively slim. He’s bought the same clothing in larger sizes -- an obvious way of hiding his weight loss, but not obvious enough for John.
He doesn’t bother with makeup when he’s not going to see John. He spends a lot of time lying on the couch in the flat, conserving energy since he doesn’t have the will power to get something to eat. When he finds himself a case, he eats what he must on the way to the crime scene, and powers through on sheer adrenaline. After a while, he stops calling John.
Sherlock has become a mechanical toy. When he has something new to work on, he’s wound tight and restless and ready. Afterwards, he winds down, hands trembling, eyes closing, limbs failing. His mouth is dry, and he knows he must smell bad, his breath like something left in the fridge for too long.
Moriarty's return comes as a relief.
~
11 hours remaining. Mrs Hudson brings Sherlock a cup of tea, shaking her head. She’s convinced him to turn off all but three of the laptops. One of them seems to have crashed -- instead of showing Moriarty’s face, the screen is a hotchpotch of black and white pixels.
‘Call John! He wants to help.’
‘If John wanted to help, he’d be here.’
She tuts.
‘You’ve pushed him away, silly.’
‘Mrs Hudson, for God’s sake, sit down. I can’t concentrate with you running around and breathing down my neck.’
She sighs, ‘Oh all right,’ and sits in John’s chair. There’s a long silence.
‘Mrs Hudson,’ says Sherlock suddenly, ‘What do we know? What are the facts?’
She’s startled. ‘Er, aren’t you going to make one of your scrapbook things on the wall?’
‘Please.’
She relents, and relates everything he’s told her over the past hour. There’s not much.
‘The video’s just over 36 hours long, it changed from smiling to laughing after 24 hours, it’s counting down…’
Mrs Hudson waves helplessly at the laptops, perched on chairs next to her and Sherlock, where John and Sherlock’s clients would usually sit.
‘It must mean something. If Moriarty’s behind it, the numbers must mean something.’
'But Moriarty can't be behind it, Sherlock.'
Sherlock rolls his eyes. John never contradicted him when he was explaining things.
‘It’s all too familiar. Moriarty's voice in your ear. And the countdown. Like a bomb -- tick, tick, tick! He’s a bomber, Mrs Hudson, that’s what he does. That's what he likes. The video’s timed to go off -- what else has Moriarty set to go off, when he stops laughing? But I don’t understand! Why would he do the same thing twice? Why another bomb? OK, maybe it’s a bigger explosion, but it’s essentially the same thing.’
Mrs Hudson shrugged.
‘Boring? Well, say it is Moriarty. I don't think it can be, but for a minute I'll play along with you. Moriarty seemed to enjoy exploding things the first time. And, well, the times after that.’ She coughs. ‘Maybe this hasn’t occurred to you, Sherlock -- and maybe I’m wrong. But don’t you think Moriarty’s very fond of…. well, of repeating himself?’
Sherlock’s mouth falls open, because Mrs Hudson is absolutely right. They both fall silent. He doesn’t need to turn the laptops’ speakers back on to know what he’ll hear.
Did you miss me? Did you miss me?
Sherlock bolts upright.
‘Yes, Mrs Hudson, oh yes! He’s repeating himself. And he's escalating. That’s why he gave us a more dramatic warning this time. It might not be a bomb, not the kind he used before. But there will be similar rules. An explosion. He likes that, doesn’t he, destruction breaking out from a single epicentre….’
She beams. ‘Are you onto something, Sherlock?’
‘Oh, definitely. This will be very, very useful. Thank you. And now we must locate the epicentre. There’s a style, a poetry to everything Moriarty does. And he’ll have set this up with me in mind.’
‘That’s a big arrogant, Sherlock. Not everything’s about you. You're such a narcissist.’
Sherlock rolls his eyes. ‘The man’s obsessed. Was obsessed. We’ll start with the place he died.’
‘St. Barts? All right, call me on the landline and tell me when you’ll be home. I’ll make you something to eat, just this once.’
Sherlock pauses in the doorway, eyes bright and smiling madly as he pulls his scarf around his neck.
‘Oh, you must be joking. You’re coming with me. When was the last time you saw Molly? Get your hat, and a waterproof jacket. The game, Mrs Hudson, is on!’
By the time she’s ready to go, a taxi is waiting outside the flat. Sherlock opens the door for her. ‘You’re very quiet.’
She makes herself comfortable and raises her eyebrows at him.
‘I know exactly what he means by that remark,’ she says to the taxi driver. ‘Shut up and get in, Sherlock. We don’t want to miss the action, do we?’
‘No, Mrs Hudson.’