"When angels can no longer fly, they fall to their deaths..."
Four months after their first confrontation in the swimming hall, bored Sherlock Holmes is recontacted by none other than Jim Moriarty and forced into offering his consultations on a rath...
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Monday 23/08/2010, 08:30 a.m.
St Bartholomew's Hospital's white lab was frequented by none other than Sherlock Holmes himself who had a liking to playing with its chemistry sets with childlike zeal. The consulting detective could spend hours upon hours there trying to solve puzzles and dissect cases to distract himself. It was the place where he assessed any substance found in the crime scene and conducted risky experiments whenever Baker Street became too limited - or well, when the shrewish Mrs Hudson routed him out of there with a broom to prevent Sherlock from blowing up another one of her varnished kitchen tables. That woman was truly crazy despite her sympathetic exterior.
But there was no way out of the new game Moriarty had started. Duty rested on Sherlock's shoulders like a sack of potatoes tons in weight, yet he had taken it upon himself to carry out this investigation. Huddled at the long white table full of pipettes, watch glasses, screens, vials, papers, and plastic boxes, Sherlock was analysing the cigarette case he had stolen from Moriarty yesterday through a microscope. His weary eyes were shadowed by dark crescents, dried up by the unslept hours of last night. It was because of the bloody nightmares he couldn't control. He hated them because they unlocked doors he would've rather kept under lock and key. But as usual, his wishes were for nought.
This time, the dream had felt more real than ever before, the desolation of the swimming hall now blending with the colourful carnival of spices, people and traffic, seeping into his pores and dowsing him in the thick toxicity of cold sweat. And Moriarty... Jim Moriarty was always in the centre of everything. A distraction. An obstacle. A problem. He was always there when Sherlock was absorbed into the dark blanket of night and drugged by the tumultuous, fear-fuelled shut-eye.
Behind Sherlock's closed lids, Moriarty sank his vampire-like teeth into his bare neck, ripping the flesh from his bones and squeezing out his lifeblood while stroking his cooling skin with only-too-gentle hands. A stray, unwanted tear wedged in Sherlock's eyes and slowly trailed its way down his white skin as his colours bled into a rusty pool of blood under his trembling form. Moriarty drained him of liquid light and filled him with dark seeds of death. But the worst thing in the dream wasn't even the fact that Moriarty killed him - it was the fact that Sherlock let him.
I know you missed me.
As Moriarty's gelid lips sent Sherlock's sleep-drunk mind into a sensual state of intoxication, the blade of his words fluttering underneath the skies of lust-filled hatred cut through him and that's when he was more awake than if a gunshot was fired by his ears - usually long before the sky was even radiant with the first kiss of the new day. Did you miss me? Miss me? MISS ME?
Focus, Sherlock! he told himself, stopped the confusing carousel of voices and centred himself back to the task at hand. He couldn't let his whole mind churn on like a runaway motor, stuck with the apparition of a man, made of see-through skin and glowing eyes, in the nightmarish limbo during the waking hours that were supposed to be safe and strictly controlled. Get out of my head, Moriarty.
