the king's crown | j. moriarty (18+)

V. THE RETURN

3 A.M, HE was here. The neon blur of the clock pierced through the darkness as the soft scent of a familiar aftershave he wouldn't have applied in hours hopelessly floated back into the nighttime air. He was lay in this bed with the sheets crumbled and cocooned around him, soft breaths behind her, making his chest rise and fall with each and every one he took. Elizabeth could imagine his body warmth if she leant against him, sense it even as he continued to rest on what remained his side of the mattress: alive, impossibly living and most importantly, still her's.

Everyone she knew seemed to blame it on the insomnia; that the mourning over him hadn't yet passed and restless nights were obviously bound to follow. Yet his sleeping figure argues otherwise. Elizabeth believed she could reach out and touch the ghost of his skin if she really wanted too, but it would be cold. Beneath her fingertips Moriarty would disappear in the blink of an eye and she would be left alone in the dark of an apartment that didn't belong to her, for the millionth time. So she stood, unable to watch him leave her, and headed to the kitchen; right past the body resting beneath the sheets and right past the face she could no longer bare to look at and yet just like every evening, she still did.

There would be no chance of sleeping again this night, so the kettle clicked beneath her fingertip and began boiling. The same deafening sound filling the blackness hugging the entire apartment during the early morning hours since the day he left. Never once had she turned on a light when making this journey and so she stood wondering why, holding on to the red mug already prepared on the countertop, and doubted she ever would. The water hit the cup as soon as another click stabbed through the darkness and without even noticing, she had started crying again, softly.

It was all more pain than anyone was meant to endure; more than Elizabeth herself doubted he ever intended to cause. Though the longer he remained lifeless and six feet underground, the longer she battled rationalising Jim's actions. James Moriarty was reckless and obsessive. Once, Elizabeth had hoped that obsession had been her and she was sure, at least just once, there was a good chance she may well have been that obsession. Elizabeth was fairly certain sure she knew that too, at the time. But Moriarty had soon been engulfed by something much bigger and therefore so was she and being a man who never once would allow himself to even come close to loss, the Fall of the Reichenbach was created. And then, destroyed.

He left her alone, surrounded by the walls that he had lived in and that he still lives in. But even so, to this day, she could not unlove him. She can't forget his voice when he speaks to her in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night, or even in what had become her mild attempts at conversation and he interrupted. She cannot forget the way he felt, the way he dressed and the way he undressed; the way he would look as he slept or when he should have been sleeping. The way his lips felt softly or roughly against her own and most certainly, she cannot, and could never, forget him.

The sound of the front door opening echoed throughout the lifeless apartment, but the sound was overlooked. It happened so often now, imagining him walking back through that door with that same old devilish smirk that Elizabeth struggled even looking in the door's direction anymore. There was a long pause of nothing, maybe that was the end of him tonight. Maybe that was all she had the pleasure of-the last she'd hear of James until tomorrow's sleepless crusade, and she'd conjure up something else. But tonight, she was wrong.

"Oh, love."

Elizabeth supposed, he wouldn't have expected to find her like this; so incredibly shattered and to find that he broke her in to so many different little pieces, that neither of them would be able to find them all again, not even if they looked together. It became a habit that even now, over a year later and when she knew it was no longer him, just his ghost etched into a grieving and impressionable brain, that one of these days it would be still be him who'd truly returned. Undead, alive and back to her-for her. Though every time Jim spoke to her in the early hours of the endless nights since he disappeared, he'd tell her how she needed to move on. And she'd say back to him,