lostwithoutmyblogger | the beginning of the end

the beginning of the end

It's been a long time, since Carl Powers drowned all those years ago. Sherlock and Jim have waxed and waned, spent months inseparable, then not seen each other for half a year, fought like mad, worked together now and again to knock off a truly insane criminal.

And then, when Sherlock is twenty seven, he laughs, and remarks to the ceiling, smoking, with his hand on Jim's chest;

"When we were children, I thought for sure you'd be the head of the criminal underworld by now, and I'd be a Nobel laureate."

He goes away for a case a day or so later, leaving Jim to his thoughts.

It doesn't happen right away after that. There are a few more visits, another Christmas that sees Sherlock tied by his wrists to the ceiling fan, serenely still while Jim blows thumb tacks at him out of a drinking straw, and then in return Jim limping for a week and one very ruined crucifix and his good, high thread count sheets ripped to shreds and coated with droplets of wax besides.

Intense, distracting enough that Sherlock doesn't see it coming.

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It sits with him, that comment. It only bothers him for a second while Sherlock is there, but after the other man goes away, it comes back, sinking into the corners of his mind. I thought better of you. The idea that he wasn't everything that he thought he'd be by now... well, it ate at him. And while Sherlock was a nice distraction from that thought, the sex and the dates and the holidays helped to keep it at bay, nothing could quite push the idea entirely away. He wasn't good enough. Something was holding him back.

And, to be honest, it didn't take much brainstorming to realize what it was.

He'd always cut off pieces of his empire as necessary sacrifices to keep up Sherlock and his own game. Destroyed sections, people, incredible sums of money so that he could lead Sherlock on a chase, so that Sherlock could catch his men and feel victorious. It had always been worth it. But really, sacrificing so many resources- not to mention the time it took him to build them and come up with plots for his detective to chase like a bloodhound-

The thoughts start coming. His ambition starts clouding his heart, and Jim realizes, coldly, that if he wants to change it, he needs to be rid of Sherlock. If he wants what he'd wanted since he was old enough to speak, he had to cut off the most valuable piece of all.

But still, he holds on. He scratches deep marks into Sherlock's skin, and screams when Sherlock brands his skin with the edge of a whip. He lets it happen, but even as he does so, he can feel himself pulling away, looking at it objectively, trying to reason it. It winds up taking him two years- two long, unremarkable years before he finally takes action.

He moves. Suddenly, and without telling Sherlock, who still has the other key. One day his entire life is in his flat, and the next everything is gone- the walls are bare, the carpet is cleaned, and all the furniture is missing.

The only thing there is a note- a haphazard scrap of paper left on the floor, as if by accident. Jim's spidery scrawl spells out eight words, just barely able to fit on the paper.

do you want to solve the Final Problem?

Sherlock looks for him. He was never going to not look for him. Because despite the initial dread pang of foreboding, he loves and trusts him and is used to the games Jim plays. He hunts mercilessly, knowing that somewhere, somehow, there will be a clue that he will follow like a trail of breadcrumbs, back into his life.

He searches for one month. Drops his second doctoral program (they don't outright expel him, considering his credentials, but are more than happy to put him on a gentle leave.) He searches for two months.

He moves back to the city, and the crime rate briefly plummets for a month or two while he burns every petty operation in the city, overturning each and every stone for a fiery six months or so.

Then, nothing for four more. It isn't hard to imagine what the road block is. And perhaps part of him does it on purpose, wants to see how low he has to get before this end.

A year to the day of the empty apartment, Sherlock puts himself in the hospital.

When he wakes up, for a brief second he thinks everything will be all right, but the man at the door belongs to Mycroft. He checks himself out early, against the advice of all, and goes home to set up a blog. The first entry is tobacco ash.

It barely requires thought, and really, is the total sum of what he is prepared to face.

A small string of numbers at the bottom, their old simple chemical code;

TAKE CaRE

Though he privately doubts Jim is even watching any more.

He watches, but he doesn't reply, doesn't give Sherlock any indication of his observance. It's not his problem anymore, he tries to tell himself. Sherlock is done with, he has to be.

Except he's impacting business.

Jim hardly notices it at first, dismisses the losses as something manageable, something that he'd already written out as a pre-emptive measure. But they keep coming. They increase. And when his forger, the good one, the one from Italy, is sent to prison, Jim eats four hundred thousand pounds and has to look into who in hell is costing him so much. He knows already though, really. Sherlock is working, still hunting him down, except Jim has long since stopped playing their game.

He tries to ignore him for a few weeks longer, but the money keeps getting cut and his associates are starting to talk about how he can't catch a simple drug addict. Sebastian murmurs something to him, like 'why don't we just get rid of him?' and Jim screams obscenities at his right hand man for hours until his voice is raw and then he glowers and stews because why don't they just get rid of him.

He has to, he realizes slowly. James Moriarty is inches away from owning crime. Every petty theft in every nook and cranny of the world, every bank robbery, every murder, every rigged election, he owns it, he has it in his pocket and Sherlock, who knows him better than anyone, is systematically destroying enough to be a nuisance because he's still playing the game.

An envelope finally trickles in, left at Sherlock's doorstep by an unwitting postman. Inside is a single glass rosary bead.

John is living with him by then, and the blog tells more of a story than anything else could. One of his black moods. Stopped eating, a box of nicotine patches a day. There are a few small cases. The forger goes down messily, he trashes a racket that makes people disappear for a living.

He puts on his own blog, the one no one reads, ever;

The cabbie talked in the end. Be more careful.

The funny thing about it, is that he isn't consciously chasing him. He's giving in to the overwhelming temptation to burn everything and everyone he can right to the ground.

He ends up in Sebastian's sights more than once, throwing himself into it all with a violent recklessness that sees him choked by an assassin, battered by a swordsman, nearly poisoned by that very memorable cab driver, and black and blue from a brush with a hit man who ends up naming enough names to cost Jim approximately enough to buy Sherlock all the rosary beads and microscopes in the world.

Jim starts killing his own men. People who hurt Sherlock, people who whisper about Jim not doing his job. He becomes not only respected, but feared- hated by many. The hit man dies the next day of strange causes, but it's too late to stop the arm of the law from scooping away half of the men that he named. Hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds.

Sherlock will find another rosary bead in the mouth of a murder victim, a really strange one who was somehow killed from a scratch- a drop of pure nicotine in the needle. Another bead in another victim. Another.

The papers catch on and start calling it The Confessional Murders, even though none of them happen in a confessional. And then one does, just to fuck with people, and the papers sell out in the first five minutes the next morning.

Someone replies to Sherlock's blog, with the username rbrook (empty profile, proxied from an elementary school library), 1t'$ t1m3 t0 s01v3 t3h f1n4L pr0BL3m

You're a liar.

He answers back, stung by broken promises in particular today, the very earliest ones that they would never kill people as messages to one another.

But he shouldn't have suspected otherwise.

Mycroft knows his brother far too well to expose him to the talents of Irene Adler, but takes Jim in to custody all the same, despite that skipped little chapter in their lives. The confessional murders will have to go on hold, while Sherlock is dragged onto the moor, and Mycroft looks James dead in the eye and confronts him about some broken promises of his own.

"I take it the intention not to harm one another has fallen by the wayside?"

Jim isn't concerned at all- he knows things, things that will force Mycroft to keep him alive for queen and country, if not for his brother. Even though he's been denied bubblegum (how rude), he still looks impassive, almost bored at the interrogation thusfar.

"I'm not going to hurt him."

"You already have."

Mycroft answers, and where Jim might have been protected a year, even six months ago, he simply leaves the room and lets the rest of them have their way.

He trained them in their interrogation tactics, after all, he knows they're effective.

Meanwhile, on the moor, Sherlock winds tighter and tighter, and sees Jim's face in the dark, in the mist.

He resists, goes away in his mind, and lets them do whatever they like to him. Jim is too sane (or too crazy) to break, too sure of himself to let anything slip, no matter how much pain, pleasure, or psychological torture.

A few days later, Mycroft can't justify holding him any longer, and Jim lifts his bag to his shoulder and skips out of the top secret government facility like a kid with candy in his pocket.

Three days later, two children go missing, a rosary bead left underneath the girl's bed. The princess and the pea.

He dances for him beautifully, caught between John's furious pressure to fix it, Lestrade getting tenser and tenser, Donovan and Anderson glaring at him whenever possible, and above all, pulled by the desire to find what might be waiting at the end of the trail of bread crumbs for him.

Lestrade catches him worrying one of the beads in his mouth, like he's remembering picking them all up off the floor with his teeth and tongue, and no amount of doleful staring can make him look more sane after that one.

He predicts, too quickly, that their bodies will turn up by a park bench, out near a boys' college on the outskirts of the city.

He knows too much. The seed had been planted by Sherlock himself, years and years ago when he first started working with the force. He knows too much and it's impossible to figure out exactly how. The others are starting to look at him with suspicion, everyone except John, and Jim lets the final curtain fall when the papers come out the next day.

Jim met with a reporter and told her everything. How they were childhood friends, they grew up together, and Sherlock slowly started moving away from him, isolating himself, hurting things.

The story goes on to detail Sherlock's descent into madness, his desire to play both sides of the coin- to be the villain and the hero. Jim told her how Sherlock used to set everything up so he could make his perfect deductions through deliberate planning and how he used to subject Jim to all of these puzzles that only he could solve.

It sells Sherlock as a man who played the hero to spite his own villainy and Jim as the well-meaning friend who'd fallen away, who finally couldn't take it anymore and realized that he had to come forward and tell the 'truth'. And when the rosary is found in Sherlock's flat, and the money is laundered through his own bank account, and his school records indicate that the two of them were friends, the pieces start coming together in a very bad way.

There's an attempted arrest, a bad fall down a fire escape, and then he vanishes off police radar. John is arrested for assaulting some local plod who was running his mouth about weirdos, and everyone starts to close in.

There isn't actually a number for him to text to say to come find him on the rooftop, but perhaps it's obvious that he'd come here.

It's one of the only places high enough to get away from the CCTV cameras, after all.

He doesn't expect to be followed. Well, except by the police, they won't be far behind now.

Jim is waiting, dressed impeccably in a well-fitting suit, his eyes closed. He can hear the door open and close, he can feel the breeze, the warmth of the sun. The gun is heavy in his jacket, but he leaves it, for now at least.

He doesn't turn when Sherlock shows up, doesn't move to look at him. He knows he's there.

He sees him, freezes, and then steps up behind him, mind catching up at a speed that feels embarrassingly slow to him. Really, it's faster than anyone in the world might do, but to them-

Well, he'd distracted by him. By the way he's changed, by the suit, by everything that's just the same.

He has crows feet. Sherlock's heart tries to burst in his chest.

"What happens now?"

He finally asks.

Jim looks up at the words finally, finally, and his eyes are cold, impassive. There's something in there that Sherlock had loved once, but it had been eclipsed by ambition, determination, spite. Slowly, he moves to stand.

"Genius detective, revealed to be a fraud." He hums, and his voice is the same. "What would you do?"

He shrugs. He'd carry on- Sherlock has never been one to care about what others think of him.

He'd end up arrested, and killed before he could stand trial. Jail isn't a safe place for him, even with Mycroft trying to manipulate things.

He'd go back to Baker Street and work with a new identity, or not work at all, solve little problems for free and overdose, maybe from boredom.

"Anything. But from the sounds of things, you're looking for a suicide, yes?"

Jim's eyes bore into Sherlock's own- and they finally do look dead, soulless, utterly gone.

"I promised I'd never hurt you."

Didn't say anything about making Sherlock hurt himself.

"Liar."

A faint smile. The light is long gone out in him too.

"It's all right. I don't mind. Off the building, or did you bring that gun for me?"

A pause. Jim closes his eyes for a moment. This is what it's all built up to.

"You'd just pop off, just because I told you to." Slowly, with a crushing realization, before he shakes his head with a smirk. "That has got to be the worst thing I've ever heard."

"Are you trying to goad me?"

Asking, curiously, like Jim is a caterpillar that has just squirmed in a particularly interesting way. He can't seem to muster anything for him right now.

He pauses a moment, before shaking his head and turning away from Sherlock, looking out cautiously over the ledge.

"If I was trying to goad you, I'd bring up all the little things I know about you. No, that really is the worst thing I've ever heard. With all your talk of how useless sentimentality is, and you'd end your own life, just because I asked you to."

"It's always the little things, James. But this time, you're missing a big one."

Coming up to stand close to him. Peering down without fear.

He's approaching this the wrong way.

"I'm not sure that you have time to get there before the police arrive."

"I wonder."

He takes a step back from the ledge, letting his eyes slip shut.

"It's taken me years without you to get this far. If I were operating alone, I'd have had it ten years ago."

"But you're there now?"

He checks, sitting down on the ledge, unafraid. What is he going to do, fall? He won't walk away from this conversation alive.

"You have everything? I see traces of you everywhere, in every crime wave, in every policy decision." Little letters scattering in his mind like fireworks.

"Everything and more."

He takes in a deep breath and lets out a longsuffering sigh.

"Save for a little bug, ruining my plans. It kills the reputation, you know, when a single, lone drug addict costs you millions.

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