Prompting Part XXXII

[sherlockbbc_fic]

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Actualité

[mademise_morte]

The media flocks to Sherlock Holmes. It's hardly anything new. As money flows to the writer, so do the writers flow to money, and Sherlock, as much as he'd like to deny it, definitely has money.

John's grown used to it, has become accustomed to the sound and the clamor and the sudden flashes of light. He's gone from one battlefield to the next, is wrapped up in a living legend, has no care for things that are happening that he didn't expect, because he didn't expect anything.

He was ready to die when he came back, and all this is just extra. An afterlife on earth.

Sherlock, though, is wary, because Sherlock is wary of everything. He can catalogue their conditions and dismiss them as boring but it's impossible to delete something that's camped out on your doorstep, leering at you from every streetcorner, something that's as pervasive and as difficult to stave off as rot.

He is asked for interviews and brushes them all away, taking the moments instead to analyze the lives of the askers as well as he can in the brief instance of their contact, and then he moves on, because all this publicity is just ballast, and he has John now anyway, and that's quite enough. Still, he is wary.

So when he is running through Jim Moriarty's existence, once he digs up the criminal mastermind that is Sebastian Moran, he falls quiet and then begins to walk away, refusing to acknowledge Jim's existence any longer.

Jim's fairly good about it in the beginning, volatile Jim, Jim the artist of blood spatter and destruction in well-kerned sentences and strategically employed serifs. But after a few weeks in which Sherlock seems to be retreating from him, him in particular, he gets curious.

So he stalks up to Sherlock and asks again, brazen, and Sherlock meets his eyes for a forever moment before he denies the audience once more. And Jim smiles when he's turned three streetcorners, hands shoved deep in his pockets, because he knows. He has something on Sherlock Holmes. He just doesn't know what it is.

So he goes back to the flat and he searches, searches properly, because he knows now that what he was doing before just won't cut it. When he doesn't find his answer, he doesn't stop, because that would just not be right.

Sebastian laughs when he finds Jim so engrossed, and grows quiet when he finds out what's happening, and they are distanced for a few days, while Jim scavenges for truth wherever he thinks to find it and Sebastian plans his next moves. The time ends, and Sebastian tells Jim what he knows.

Jim's eyes go bright and a shiver goes through Sebastian because this is the man he fell for and it takes only a few short, bated-breath weeks for Jim to destroy Sherlock Holmes, to burn him and scatter the ashes. Him and his brother.

Jim has owed Sherlock a fall from the first.