I really don't blame you for being dead, but you can't have you sweater back. Part One.

[realisaonum]

Summary: In which after the Fall, Sherlock is haunted, literally.

Pairings: Sherlock/Moriarty

Add. Tags: Post-Reichenbach. Canon compliant through the finale of season two. Part 2 of The Adventure of the Straw House Series

Content warning: this fic deals predominately with suicide and bereavement. Also, drug use and mentions of ptsd.


It had been three days before he saw him. Sherlock had used the distraction of his suicide to disguise himself and sneak on board a tanker that would take him out of England without any particular people knowing.

That’s the short version, anyway. The long version is considerably less pleasant.

Standing at the edge of the roof, while listening to John babble to try and stop him, the only thing Sherlock could think was James Moriarty was dead. He killed himself. Leaving Sherlock alone in the world. Of all the ways their Reichenbach game could have resolved, Sherlock hadn’t expected that. He’d stepped on to the ledge the first time thinking he’d come back, surprise Moriarty, and their play would resume. Then he’d caught on to what Jim was really saying, about the recall code at least, and Sherlock knew he could turn it around. But he hadn’t expected real death for either of them. He hadn’t seen Jim’s suicide coming at all.

Sherlock jumped. But Moriarty was still lying in a pool of his own blood. The detective couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the criminal’s body on that hospital roof for somebody else to find or for the birds to defile (not to mention what such a discovery would do to his plan of eradicating Moriarty’s web of crime). After John had felt for his pulse and after they had taken him inside the hospital, the detective had gone to get Moriarty. Sherlock climbed the final stairs to the top for the second time that day. There was no anticipation this time. No adrenaline or excitement rushing through his veins. He felt like he was in a daze. He had pretended to be dead and followed the plan he’d set out, but he was just going through the motions. In his mind, he was running that final meeting with Jim over and over. How didn’t he see it? How had he not understood?

He opened the door and there was Jim Moriarty still lying dead in a pool of his own blood, right where Sherlock had left him.

The detective stepped over to the criminal and crouched next to his body, before sitting down hard. Sherlock’s eyes catalogued Jim as he would any other corpse presented to him. Moriarty was dead. Remembering their time together, there were so many clues as to why.

Sherlock watched as a slight breeze barely ruffled the criminal’s hair. Most of it was sodden from the rain but the underside was glommy with blood, which had spread considerably in the half hour Sherlock had been pronounced dead on the sidewalk outside of Bart’s.

The detective knew he would have to leave London as soon as possible for this new plan to work. And no one could know Moriarty was dead. Idly, Sherlock thought that it would be nice to take Jim’s skull with him. A familiar friend to bring along with him on this new and somber adventure, despite knowing that it would ultimately take too much time to get properly sorted.

Sherlock’s phone buzzed meters away from him, still where he tossed it. He knew without looking that it is Molly telling him he needs to hurry up. The detective sighed. He told her quite clearly that once the plan was in motion, radio silence was imperative and Sherlock knew that he couldn’t sit here all day.

He could feel the still damp of the gravel seep through his coat. He had to keep to the schedule he and Molly set out. He needed to get out of England before the events that transpired came to the elder Holmes’ attention. Mycroft would want to do something foolish like clear his name or interrogate him about Moriarty’s whereabouts and thus waste Sherlock’s precious head start. The detective had to finish what he started. But he couldn’t leave Jim here.

The criminal clearly didn’t have people of his own; or rather, people who he would care got to say goodbye at his graveside. The detective, pressed for time and with a certain appreciation for the irony involved, decided he would arrange for Moriarty to be buried in Sherlock’s own coffin. As long as his funeral was a closed casket, the criminal would get some ceremony, even if it wasn’t honoring him by name.

Sherlock maneuvered Moriarty’s body to a position that would be more conducive to manhandling down a couple flights of stairs. Somehow, within the course of adjusting the corpse, Moriarty’s phone slipped out of his pocket and bounced twice before landing face up a few feet away.

Sherlock looked at the criminal’s phone with some distaste. The sight of it drew connections out of his brain entirely unbidden; from the first time he’d heard his ringtone, “Staying Alive,” and back to tea and Jim’s chiding reprimand of “I did tell you, but did you listen?” and ending on the roof with the song again and Jim’s gun. The one he hadn’t brought for Sherlock, but for himself.

It was just a phone. One with a taunting ringtone. It looked like any other, except it was most certainly an in to Jim’s network, as it likely held all his contacts, a datebook, his email, and who knew what else. Sherlock couldn’t pass up the opportunity, just because it would remind him of all those things whenever he looked at it. The detective shoved it in his coat pocket and lifted Moriarty’s cold body.

He got off when the tanker docked in Algeria. Sherlock had jumped on the first ship leaving London regardless of it’s destination. It hadn’t really mattered where it was headed anyway, because the thing about Moriarty was that he’d had his fingers in as many interesting pies as he could stick them in, which was indeed a global endeavor. After being on the freighter for two days, Sherlock had made some headway on Jim’s phone, which mercilessly wasn’t password protected, and was trying to make sense of the notes the criminal had left in his datebook and under the contacts.

The detective’s got himself off the tanker and was about to seek out the underground elements of Oran, when he saw him.

Forty paces behind him on the street, he caught sight of a familiar figure. No, it was not possible. Jim was dead. He took an unexpected turn left, then a odd right. Every time he turned down a different street, Sherlock could see him out of the corner of his eye. Black coat, pressed suit, blank expression: following him. It’s several other random streets taken later that Sherlock finally just turned around abruptly and caught Jim Moriarty furtively standing at the other end of the block.

He looked oddly amused. Their gazes locked but it wasn’t like any of the other times they’d held eye contact. Jim’s eyes were empty. They frequently seemed to have that effect but Sherlock could always glean something from them... but not now. They were unreadable.

They were still staring, blue on black, when Sherlock was jostled as a couple brushed past him and the moment between them was broken.

The criminal’s face twisted oddly and he half laughed, then started to turn and walk away. Sherlock was going to run after him, but then he saw the back of the criminal’s head. There was a huge gaping hole. Skin and hair were missing. Even at this distance Sherlock could see Moriarty’s brain. Then Jim was gone, around a corner and out of sight.

Sherlock had just seen a ghost.

The aftermath of the sighting was not as bad as Sherlock expected. His brain was playing tricks on him (again). Only this time, there were no drugs in fog and Jim was dead, after all, and Sherlock was taking that fact hard. Harder than anyone would have guessed, but that was because the only person who could ever really understand what it was like to be alone in their genius had killed himself while holding Sherlock’s hand and looking into Sherlock’s eyes.

The detective decided that as he was so stressed and paranoid and grieving, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he saw the criminal. Of course, Sherlock was taking it hard. Of course, he was seeing Jim. He wanted the criminal to still be playing games with him. He desperately wanted the man to not be dead. But it didn’t matter what Sherlock Holmes wanted because Jim Moriarty took himself out of the equation with a bullet to the brain and there was no way out of that.

Without Moriarty’s brain at the center, the strands of his web appeared deceptively inert. Sherlock knew those agents, not without their own ambitions, would likely seek employment elsewhere. A wide range of skilled mercenaries who were now for hire wasn’t exactly something that the detective wanted to turn his back on. There was a reason the criminal had employed them and Sherlock knew that there was always a demand for the services Moriarty’s people could offer.

His new plan, a variation on his original post-Reichenbach plan which now accounted for Moriarty’s death, was quite simple. Sherlock was going to dismantle the criminal’s empire from the inside out and then come back. He estimated it would take a year or two abroad, at most. Which in the scheme of things was not a huge loss, considering the far-reaching scope and danger Moriarty’s web still posed without its spider.

Then Sherlock would come back to Baker Street. His named cleared and everything would be as it once was.

The next time it happened, it had been a week since the Fall. Sherlock woke up in a small hotel in Morocco and there Jim was sitting on the barely stable wooden dresser, legs swinging beneath him; feet clacking loudly on the drawers. Sherlock glared groggily at the apparition half in annoyance, half in horror.

“You can see me, can’t you?” Jim asked, pleased triumph tinging the edges of his voice.

Sherlock gaped.

“You can!” Jim exclaimed in genuine delight. This Jim that was not Jim could do the Irishman’s lilting accent to a T and Sherlock was in no way surprised that his brain had memorized one of the criminal’s more distinctive features and was able to spit it back up just to taunt him.

Sherlock shook his head. He didn’t need to be seeing things. Not now. Not when he had to keep his wits about him. He couldn’t mourn his losses now. But this phantom was persistent, just like his real life, now dead and gone, counter-part. The apparition didn’t leave for the rest of the day, so the detective positioned himself so Moriarty was just out of sight in a futile attempt to get something done; except Sherlock’s attention kept flicking back to the apparition of Moriarty who did not speak and just sat watching him.

During the days that followed, Sherlock threw himself into planning the destruction of the criminal’s empire. Moriarty’s phone would come heavily into play as it housed a surprising amount of information concerning his work. The detective had to decipher the coded notes, research his contacts, and, of course, recreate the files he had already assembled concerning Moriarty’s web, which were sitting useless back in 221b. The criminal’s date book was empty after the morning of May 4th.

Sherlock didn’t wonder why.

With still no official word on Moriarty’s place in ‘the Reichenbach liar’ debacle and not a single trace of Jim’s body, it would appear to all the criminal’s clients he was still alive. As Sherlock had the criminal’s phone, the detective’s new plan involved him pretending to be Moriarty. Organizing new cases and then arranging for the agents to be caught in the act. Taking the major operations of Moriarty’s web down from the inside was an infinitely better plan than what he had before, though the cost was anything but negligible.

It was not easy pretending to be Jim, or, at least, not as easy as he would have thought given their extended similarities. Planning the crimes was like reading things in a mirror. He knows the form, but doing it forwards is unnatural. Often complex and, following Jim’s form, isolating work.

According to the text logs from Moriarty’s last fifty jobs, there was not a single one indicated the criminal had put his hands near the greasy wheels and bloody wrenches. This was what made Sherlock’s plan viable, no one could say he wasn’t Jim.

“You’re the only person I can get to see me, you know?” Jim commented, as if continuing the conversation after a few days of Sherlock decidedly ignoring the apparition. The detective wondered why his mind was still trying to lure him into a fantasy world of ghosts. It unnerved him that Moriarty’s death had destabilized him to the point that he had lost control of this part of his mind. Jim’s specter roamed without confine or consent, with his odd silence and dilapidated skull, never taking off that overcoat he was wearing on the roof.

“What are you planning on doing now?”

Sherlock did not answer. His subconscious knew what he was bloody well doing now, he didn’t need to tell it.

But the eyes of the apparition Moriarty were boring into the detective. Unless, Sherlock thought, he meant without the criminal, which would be a very fitting question indeed.

He slept little, preferring to throw himself into the work. Most nights he passed out from exhaustion and couldn’t remember what he dreamed about.

It was those nights when the work has stilled and sleep eluded him that he remembered the warmth of Jim’s hand. How hesitant he was and yet the desire.

Sherlock would remember the way Moriarty had nodded. As if in that moment he had made up his mind to really do it; decided that this was the highest point his life could reach and that he should end it at the top. It was that momentary consideration that eats him up. Moriarty considered taking Sherlock up on his offer. The detective and the criminal could have been in some far away place right now, enjoying each other’s presence, if only they had taken the chance they had never allowed themselves before.

Moriarty died with Sherlock’s hand gripped tightly, their eyes locked. Sherlock was the last person Jim spoke to; the last voice he’d heard. What greater compliment could there be?

It wasn’t like they didn’t know this was going to end. Sherlock just had hoped it wouldn’t.

He wanted their game to be enough. He wanted to be enough.

“You must be my lucky star; ‘cause you shine on me wherever you are. I just think of you and I start to glow. And I need your light and, baby, you know!

“Starlight, Starbright!”

Sherlock was on the road out of Beirut. A little more than a month of rooting out Jim’s contacts, the detective found Moriarty’s web wasn’t what he had expected. The true scope of the criminal’s empire was becoming clearer in his mind and it certainly was not the supposed thousand strands. It was more like a couple of hundred, if that. There were so many people that he’d questioned that the name Moriarty meant nothing to, but just the same there were those he had asked not expecting a reaction who clammed up immediately. From the ones who could be persuaded to talk, Moriarty ran through his human agents quickly or they kept their heads down.

“You must be my lucky star; Cause you make the darkness seem so far and when I'm lost you'll be my guide, I just turn around and you're by my side-”

Sorting through all of this would certainly be easier if this apparition of Moriarty didn’t keep accosting him.

Objectively, the apparition isn’t bad, considering he was hitting most of the high notes. The song choice, though, certainly brought the performance down somewhat. Sherlock lowered the volume on the car’s radio. But the apparition kept belting out the chorus at top volume.

“Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight, starlight, starbright, make everything alright-”

It’s all in his mind, it’s all in his mind, Moriarty was singing some obnoxious pop love song in his mind, and really he couldn’t think like this.

“Come and shine your heavenly body tonight, ‘cause I know you’re going to make everything alright”

Jim continued to sing with some exaggerated feeling. Sherlock’s eyebrows climbed even higher.

“Must you do that?”

“Oh, so you're talking to me now?” the apparition preened.

Sherlock exhaled and said nothing. Jim responded in kind, gloating victory gone as soon as it came. Minutes passed and the apparition didn’t move. Finally, Sherlock alone in a ‘borrowed’ car and with an empty road stretching out before him, gave in, turned, and asked.

“Why are you here?”

Jim’s visage switched from congenial to a dead glare.

“I know you can be a bit slow sometimes, darling, but really, do you think I’d want to be just hanging around you?”

No, he wouldn’t, Jim wanted to be dead. He wanted Sherlock to be dead. He wanted to solve their problem. Living was boring. How could haunting the detective be any better than just being dead? To Jim, it wouldn’t.

This wasn’t Jim’s choice.

“I’ve willed you out of your nonexistence?” Sherlock hazarded.

“Shockingly, not everything revolves around you,” Moriarty’s lips twist in sardonic irony.

“Prove it.”

The apparition smirked. Challenge accepted.

Moriarty’s proof didn’t come in a form Sherlock would have thought, but then it was Jim and when had the criminal ever been obvious?

“Did you know you have a Wikipedia page?” Moriarty asked, the idleness in his tone belaying the significance of his question.

“Seems like the sort of thing John would have mentioned to me,” Sherlock paused in thought, as he toweled his hair dry.

“No,” Jim continued, watching the detective with a particular interest. “He wouldn’t have been able to. It was filled in hours before the Fall.”

So John wouldn’t have had time to find out about it and there was no way that Sherlock would have heard of it without the doctor’s mentioning. The detective wasn’t interested in the media maelstrom that followed his disgrace and never clicked on articles bearing his name, internet encyclopedias included. This was Jim’s proof. His evidence that Sherlock was really being haunted by him and not loosing his mind. Sherlock thought he would have chosen something a little flashier.

“Of course, you would know the hour someone filled it in,” Sherlock scoffed. Jim looked at him like he was missing something obvious, then he sighed, and before Sherlock could ask anything about it, he grinned.

“Don’t you know? I have Sherlock-senses,” Jim explained in a joking tone, that Sherlock thought he probably should take seriously. Then the apparition sobered up, “It mentions me.”

“Ah, it would now, wouldn’t it?” Sherlock allowed, suddenly unsure if he wanted to continue down this line of conversation.

“Says we were the best of mates,” Jim explained. Then in a hushed stage whisper reserved for bad gossip, he said “Possibly more!” Jim grinned something nasty, before continuing blithely, “It does you no favors, of course. Cites speculation that you found out about Brook going to the papers and murdered him in a fit of rage. Threw the body in the Thames or sommat. Then wrecked with guilt, jumped off of Bart’s.”

Sherlock had a hard time biting out a retort to those speculations. His mind was off racing what it would have been like being friends with Moriarty (and more?) He brushed it off by making himself busy checking the apparition’s assertions, opening his laptop and typing “Sherlock Holmes Wikipedia” in the internet search bar.

Brook and Holmes had been close since the boy’s early teens, but their friendship took a sour turn when Holmes paid his friend to pretend to be a criminal mastermind, in order to ingratiate his purported ‘deduction’ abilities.

All the details Sherlock had seen in Riley’s mock up Brook interview were in the article. The author had cited their sources with a ruthless pendacity that set Sherlock’s mouth in a grim line. But there was no way the detective figured he could have known about the page before the apparition had mentioned it.

“If you want me to commend your plan, you’ll have to try harder.”

“Oh, I already know my plan was brilliant,” Jim stated, solemnly. “Everyone thinks you’re dead and you’re reputation will never fully recover.”

The detective was glad he had his back to the apparition, because his face just twitched without his approval. But then maybe Jim wouldn’t have said anything about it, given the grave tone of his voice.

“And you’re haunting me.”

Sherlock could have seen Jim’s exasperation if he were in space. Well, annoyance was better than him loosing his mind.

“Since you’re really here, you no doubt realize what I’m doing.”

“Yes. Foolishly not taking my advice, obviously.”

“Oh please, who would you be haunting if I were dead.”

“Probably no one,” Jim stated flatly, holding Sherlock’s eyes. The detective frowned and turned back to the papers he has spread around him.

“I can’t yet,” he said resolutely. “I need to finish what I started.”

“Ah yes, untangling my web.”

“Do you want to help?”

Jim barked a laugh. “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

“Well, will you at least-”

“No.”

“Why not?” Sherlock asked slowly, turning back to Jim; his distrust at Moriarty’s true presence resurfacing again despite their conversation.

“Think about it.”

“It’s understandable you don’t want to destroy your life’s work, but-”

“No,” Jim interrupted sharply. “Think about it.”

“You don’t want me to go back to London.”

“No,” Jim dismissed. “I really don’t care where you are and the truth is neither will you when you finish, so.”

“I don’t understand.”

Moriarty narrowed his eyes in evaluation before sitting back, then with an odd twist of his mouth he said: “You’ll see eventually then.”

Regardless of Moriarty’s proof, Sherlock was never quite sure he wasn’t just talking to himself.

Most often these moments of self-doubt took to him when they were talking on the street. They’d step out of his room, in the middle of some discussion, and it would just continue as Sherlock went about his daily business.

Except the thing was that only Sherlock could see Jim. To everyone they passed, it seemed that Sherlock was talking to himself and, if they noticed, they tended to stare.

It wasn’t like he’d ever really cared about their opinions. He still didn’t now.

Despite saying he didn’t want Sherlock to be bored, the apparition had a near universal ban on discussing Sherlock’s new casework, which was something the detective would really appreciate Moriarty’s insight on. Jim relegated himself to making a quip or, more rarely drop a fact, about whoever Sherlock was working to take down that week.

Without Jim’s ability to orchestrate crimes, they talked about other things. Things that Sherlock had imagined they might talk about in those dull moments waiting for an interesting case to be brought to him.

Sometimes Sherlock couldn’t believe his luck. He didn’t know what he would have done if he had to quit Moriarty cold turkey. The web was one thing, but Moriarty’s ghost was something else entirely.

Sherlock had all the criminal’s brilliant attention focused on him now. The fact that he could not set up puzzles for Sherlock was frustrating but it wasn’t really a problem when they could talk about anything they wanted.

So maybe he was talking to himself. So he was talking to Jim Moriarty and people were staring. So people had always stared and it didn’t matter.