Latest Posts by moirewrites-blog - Page 5

Devil John

Fandom: Sherlock

Excerpt:

When John opens his eyes, he is chained to the wall again, but now there are even more chains. Some holding his ankles. Some making an X across his chest. Some holding his neck firmly against the wall. He tries to move, and they rattle.

He hears footsteps coming from the distance. He struggles, but he cannot get free. Then he sees Moriarty enter into the circle of light.

“Oh John, my dear. Looks like you've been a BAD boy.”

Story: Devil John

Fandom: Sherlock

WARNING! - Not even a little PC

Excerpt:

Breathing in he smells familiar scents: The elegant dust which settles on the bookshelves and drapes. The odd chemical tang of one of Sherlock's forgotten experiments. The chalky taste of bone. The traitorous smell of cigarette smoke.

He catches his image in the mirror. His face is dark, shadowed, threatening. His black eyes shine like moonlight on an obsidian knife. He doesn't look human.

Black Dragon's Blood burns when it goes down, but it settles in John's bones as a warm heat that glows like anger. He feels dangerous.

He frowns, and the darkness grows deeper. John realizes then that he is controlling it. It must be one of the effects of being a supernatural creature. He is a demon, after all. Things should be different, like breathing. He doesn't need to breathe anymore. He breathes in anyway just for the silky feel of it.

When he crosses his arms, darkness closes around him like smoke, with only his eyes shining through. His very thoughts have the power to manipulate matter. He wants to investigate it. Discover all of the things that he can do, but suddenly, he realizes that he is not alone.

Sherlock is sitting in his chair. He was so still and so quiet that John didn't notice him at first. John wonders if he has seen him, but Sherlock never turns around. Has Sherlock fallen asleep? No, his eyes are open, and his hair has been freshly groomed. What is he waiting for?

He's wearing the white shirt that he wore the day he met John and Mary in the restaurant. The shirts that he buys for himself are tight, the buttons almost popping across his chest, the nipples peeking through. Mycroft bought this shirt. It looks modest in comparison. John floats closer.

Sherlock seems to wake then. He sits straighter in his chair before rolling up his sleeve. It is only when Sherlock reaches over to pick up a bit of rubber tubing that John notices, on the table beside him, a syringe. The empty bottle next to it reads. DIAMORPHINE HYDROCHLORIDE. John growls.

Continued on AO3

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Devil John

Chapter 2 - Hell

Fandom: Sherlock

Rating: Explicit

Summary: John is dead, but that’s not the end for him. Not when he has a soul left to corrupt.

Excerpt:

The room is dark, illuminated by a bare yellow incandescent light hanging down from a pale cord that has been tied in a hangman's noose. Light pools around his feet in a circle fading away into blackness. The world outside of this little circle of light is darker than a starless night, blacker than a coal mine.

Along the wall, he sees small black spiders scurrying around. They sit just outside the circle of light. Their red eyes glowing, their bodies hidden in obscurity.

“Back with us now are you, Johnny?” sings a voice with an Irish accent. “It's about time.”

John watches as Moriarty walks slowly toward him, defiling the circle of light with his very presence. He's wearing the Westwood now, under a black knee-length coat with a blood red lining. His eyes bore into John's naked flesh and he sneers.

John looks down. There are scars on his hairy chest. His bullet wound from Afghanistan is back now. He pushes to his feet, not wanting to show such vulnerability to an enemy. His back scrapes against the coarse wall and starts to bleed.

“Moriarty! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect of someone like you. I knew it had to be a trick. Where are we, and why are you holding me here?”

Moriarty rolls his head back with a sigh. Then he stomps around in a tiny circle bobbing his head from side to side in frustration as he cries, “Hell and Devils! Are we back to that again, Johnny Boy? I SO hate repeating myself.” Moriarty whips his head around to glare at John as he yells. “WHERE ARE WE?”

His voice hits John like a slap, and he falls to his knees.

“Now Johnny boy, Tell me WHERE! WE! ARE!”

“In Hell,” John says quietly.

Continued on AO3

DEVIL JOHN

Fandom: Sherlock

Rating: Explicit

Summary: John is dead, but that's not the end for him. Not when he has a soul left to corrupt.

Excerpt:

Why was it so dark here?

His wound was gone now, but there had been an awful lot of blood before.

“Are you done now?” A voice called out, a lilting voice that rose and fell like music. “Have you realized yet, or are you still in denial?”

“Hello? Where am I? I can't see you.”

“It's hard for you, I know, but I would have expected that as a doctor you would realize the truth sooner rather than later.”

The voice sounded familiar, male, a bit high pitched, sing-song. No, it couldn't be. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am. You just don't...want...to believe it. You don't want to see it either. I haven't seen this much smoke since the first time I burned down my orphanage.”

“Moriarty? But you're dead!”

“Yes, I am...Ah! You almost see it, but your mind is fighting it. You have such a titanic skill at denial, don't you John?”

“Denying what!”John barked. The light became darker. “What are you doing with the lights?”

“Nothing Johnny boy. It's you who is doing it.”

“I'm not dead!”

“You are, that's why you won't see me. When you realize the truth, it will all become clear.”

Continue on AO3

The Final Problem - 1

Summary:

Moriarty, damaged but not dead due to a self-inflicted bullet wound, kidnaps Sherlock and his three friends and threatens to kill them unless they can help him find the meaning of life.

Chapter 1 - Not Awake                           

Sherlock Holmes awoke one morning to find that he was not yet awake.

He was sitting in his flat at 221B Baker Street. The fireplace was lit. The noises of cars drifted in through the window. A gentle light was shining in through though the curtains. And something was horribly wrong.

Being disoriented was not a new occurrence for Sherlock Holmes, not with his reawakened interest in drugs, but Sherlock felt none of the hallmarks of waking after a high. Nothing except the hopefully temporary loss of memory of how he had got here.

He rose to his feet and placed a hand on the mantle as he tried to zero in on what exactly it was that was wrong. Everything appeared to be in its proper place: His framed bat. His skull. His letters. The knife was gone from the mantle, but he could see it in the wall, pierced through the Cleudo board. He remembered doing that in a fit of pique after John had refused to play with him simply because he insisted that the victim must have killed himself. All in all it looked like a perfectly normal day, except....

John had removed the board from the wall at Mrs Hudson's request, years ago, and at another time, through no fault of his own, it had been thrown into the fire. John had fished it out, but the board had been damaged beyond repair, and Mrs Hudson had thrown it away. But if that was so, how was it on the wall now?

Sherlock had heard of drug reactions where a person was thrown violently into a memory of the past. He discounted this quickly enough. John's mug was not in the kitchen rack, and his coat was not on the hook. His absence, along with the presence of the purple scarf that Molly had knit him after his return, were enough to show Sherlock that this was not a memory. This was home, but not home. Real, but not real. Perfectly familiar, but alien as another planet.

It wasn't until Sherlock knelt down and stared into the fire, that he understood that he was in a fantasy not of his own devising, for although the fire was burning brightly, the wood was not being consumed. Perhaps the laws of time could be bent so that one wall of the flat existed at a different time from the other wall, but Sherlock was not so foolish as to believe that the laws of entropy could be changed. Wood that burned must be consumed. If it was not consumed then the laws of physics did not apply.

Despite the fact that everything felt real to him, he realized that he was in a dream or a fantasy. It was obvious that the fantasy world was not of his own devising, because there was no John.

Sherlock walked into the hall and looked down over the railing. Despite the fact that his flat was on the first floor, the stairwell seemed to go on forever. He returned to the fireplace and frowned down at the fire before saying to the air. "Alright, I know that you are here. Come out, come out whoever you are."

He looked toward the sound of footsteps.

His eyes widened, but he shouldn't have been surprised, not really. Who else would think to trap him in an artificial world? Who else but James Moriarty?

He was dressed in a black floor length robe and a priest's collar. A picture of austerity somewhat undone by the sight of his Gucci shoes.

"Jim Moriarty. Hi!" he said as he strolled slowly into the room, hands clasped behind his back. He cast a lazy glance around before boring into Sherlock with the black malevolence of his eyes.

Sherlock gestured toward a seat. "Please."

"I'd rather stand," Moriarty said.

"No matter." Sherlock glanced at his own chair before deciding to sit in John's. He crossed his legs and interlaced his fingers setting them atop his knee. "I'm sorry that I have no tea to offer you this time, but it wouldn't be real tea anyway, would it? Where are we by the way?"

"As you can see, we are in your flat."

"No we're not."

"You looked down the stairwell. You tell me where we are."

"We appear to be in my mind palace, or a part of it at least. But I'm not doing this, so I must be dreaming."

"You are, and you aren't."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that this is real, in as much as you and I are really talking."

"But not real in any physical sense. How exactly is that possible? I saw you die."

"John Watson saw you die, and yet, here you are. Do you think that you could accomplish something that I could not? Oh Sherlock, don't be so naive. Death isn't enough to stop men like us from doing what we really want."

"And what do you want to do?"

"I'm doing it."

"Doing what? Talking to me in a dream?"

"Not so much a dream as a simulation."

"A simulation... Oh, of course. This world is artificial. A construct of my mind and yours combined. The traumatic limb therapy experiment!"

"Good, Good."

"A military funded experiment designed to reduce the shock of catastrophic limb loss injuries by allowing the patient to view themselves as still having their limbs, but it didn't work."

"They liked the world too much. Hated that when they left it, they still had no working limbs. The project was a failure. But the technology was a success, so I appropriated it."

"You tapped into their system. Made a simulated image of yourself in the computer which you flashed all over the country. A simulated image of a simulated body. That's why it looked so strange, but how is it that you look so much more real now?"

"That's because you are in the machine with me. The device allows us to create worlds from our memories and to interact with others in our created world. Most people can't tell this from the real world. Only people like you and I, who have trained our minds to a razor point, only we can consciously shape the world to our will."

"But if, as you say, this is just a simulated image, how do I know if you are the real Moriarty or not?"

"Oh, Sherlock," he said in a sing-song voice, "You know that, like Johann Sebastian Bach, I could never leave a song unfinished. Our melody is incomplete. The song ended, but you kept on playing past the end of the piece. That was VERY NAUGHTY of you."

"It's been nearly three years. Why haven't you shown yourself before now?"

"Well, a shot to the head is not without some side effects. I may not be quite as ... attractive as I once was, but I assure you, the brain is as agile as ever, and that's what matters in the end. Isn't that what you used to say, Sherlock? 'All the rest is transport.' "

"Alright. I'll assume that you're Moriarty. What do you want?"

"I already told you! I want the answer to the final question. You found the answer without telling me."

"What didn't I tell you?"

"You survived, Sherlock. You survived! How can you stand it? Living day in and day out. Dealing with ordinary people and their stupidity. We both cheated death, but somehow you've found the answer that has alluded me. How can you go on living in a world full of such pointless ignorance?"

"But... you obviously found a way not to die."

"There's a difference between existence and survival. I'm not dead, but I haven't found a way to survive. "

"Are you asking me? 'What is the meaning of life?' "

"In so many words, Yes!"

"That's not a scientific question. You should ask a priest."

"Oh, I did, I did! I talked to Father George at great length. It's in his honor that I am wearing these robes today. He tried to sell me some fairy story about God and Devils. He made a good case, but in the end, I rejected his answer as too simplistic. I know that you will come up with something better."

"Philosophy is not my area. If you were to talk to him again, perhaps...."

Moriarty stretched his neck one way and then the other, and his face went completely, horrifyingly blank. "Unfortunately, he's unavailable. You see, I sent him ahead to talk to his God. I asked him to put in a good word, but I'm not sure that he did."

"You're mad!"

"You already knew that."

"I can't help you find the answer to your question."

"It that your final answer? Because if so, your friends will die, but I'll make sure that they suffer first."

"My friends? Where are you keeping them?"

"They're here, with us in the simulation, all of them... except Molly Hooper. She was able to help you escape last time, so she wasn't invited to this little dream of ours."

"I don't understand why you're asking me this? There are billions of people in the world. There must be someone more suited to give you spiritual guidance than me."

"No. I tried that route. Who cares what stupid thoughts console an amoeba, because that's what ordinary people are compared to you and me, amoebas. It's like sitting alone in your room and playing with dolls. But I need to know, Is there anything at all worth living for?"

"Men have been asking that question for millennia."

"You, however, have considerably less time to figure it out."

"How long?"

"Eight hours."

"Eight hours?"

"Yes, or you all will die."

"But... I still don't understand. Why ask me?"

"Because, you're alive! And you told me yourself that you ARE me. I know that you've got the answer inside you somewhere, so off you pop!" Moriarty walked toward the open door. He turned back as he reached the hallway and said, "Find our answer, and don't fail me! Your friends escaped harm before, but there will be no mistakes this time. Ciao, Sherlock Holmes."

Moriarty smiled then, a smile that could freeze a man solid, then he left down the hall. Sherlock rose to his feet, and rushed after him, but he had vanished.

TBC