Fic: god and his priests and his kings (Sherlock BBC)

[keep_counting]

Title: god and his priests and his kings
Characters/Pairings: Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, 'Sarah' Moran, implied Moriarty/Moran
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Spoilers up to and including The Reichenbach Fall, genderswap, allusions to childhood-trauma, including beatings and alcoholism, allusions to bloody murder, kidnapping and torture.
Genre: Character-study/Friendship/Horror
Word-count: 1,099
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in relation to this
A/N: Written for fueschgast, who requested Moran as the police-woman who puts the gum in Moriarty's mouth in 2x03. Title taken from the song Cold by Aqualung and Lucy Schwartz.
Summary: Sarah Moran goes on a murdering spree and gets picked up by a madman. Funny how life turns out.

It is a bit like a hurricane. Sweeping out and around, destruction in its wake.

At least, that’s how Sarah Moran would like to think of herself.

She has less poetic notions about the bled-out corpses of her officers. She was there after all. She saw them piss themselves in fear, heard the pleas and the prayers. There is nothing more pathetic than a man about to die. Or should that be a man who doesn’t want to die?

They certainly didn’t want to die.

“Sarah,” her psychologist, her lawyer, her last high-ranking officer, her band of brothers say. “Sarah, why did you do it?”

She laughs until they leave.

She laughs for days – she’s never laughed before, never really found anything funny. It’s always been her father laughing, drunk to the bone, beating her around. It’s always been her mother laughing, even in death, that smile permanently etched upon her face. Sarah has never had much cause to laugh, until she gutted five of her superiors in the army. There’s never really been anything funny in her life before.

So she laughs and they leave her in the cell, for now. They leave her there so long that she thinks they’ve forgotten, that they mean to let her rot in here. But then she gets the note.

Inspired, Miss Moran.

oOo

His name is Jim Moriarty. And he is most definitely inspired.

“Classic, darling. Classic,” he tells her and then smiles so broadly she thinks his face is going to burst. It stretches wider than she has ever seen any smile do before and it is terrifying.

She smiles back.

oOo

“What is it you do, exactly?” she asks him one afternoon. They’re back in London, and she’s cleaning her guns, the rain hammering against the class. She’s wearing a suit because that’s what he buys for her, and he’s the boss so...

She hates it. Loathes it, in fact. Her father used to wear suits.

She puts it on anyway. He pays her. He’s her boss. Of course, so were five of the men she’s gutted (that’s only five, she’s killed many more, many, many, she’s lost count). But they hadn’t broken her out of jail either.

He’s wearing a suit too, and it fits him much nicer than it fits her. She doesn’t look at him with appraisal anymore, because when she does, he laughs until she wants to stab him in the face. Of course, he can tell when she wants to do this, when her eyes catches fire like a lightning storm. Maybe, she thinks, maybe that’s why he laughs at her in the first place.

“Crime, darling,” he tells her and Sarah Moran snorts and finishes with her weapons.

They shine in the dark and reflect the sunlight when it breaks through the clouds.

“Moran, darling,” he says when she’s done. “I have another job for you.”

She smiles.

oOo

“Look!” he’s practically jumping up and down in glee: she’s seen him in a similar state before, but never quite like this. And never over a website either.

“What is it?” she says, coming up to stand behind the chair he’s sitting in. The text on the screen reads: Sherlock Holmes. Consulting Detective.

She snorts. Moriarty only smiles wider.

“That, my dear Moran, is fun.”

oOo

“You’re obsessed,” she tells him over the phone, as she walks away from the old lady, lying in her bedroom all wrapped and wired in explosions. “You’re really, really obsessed.”

“But it’s such good fun,” he whines, sounding like a petulant five-year old and she smiles, smiles, smiles.

“You’re such a child,” she tells him. “But don’t send me away again.” She doesn’t like to be away from him. Anything could happen while she isn’t there. He could come up with anything while she isn’t there. The man is relentless.

This thought is also flying through her head several hours later, as she’s lying, tight and uncomfortable, on a balcony over a swimming-pool, rifle pressed against arms and shoulder, trained on the tall, moving target walking around underneath.

Sherlock Holmes had the audacity to pull a gun on her boss, and really, no-one does that unpunished. But her boss hasn’t given the signal.

Fuck the signal.

She’s just about to shoot as the sound of the Bee Gee’s fly through the air.

oOo

She panics when they pull him in, Jim Moriarty, her boss, her only friend in the world (and he’d laughed when she’d said that, but he’d also run his finger through her hair, and she’d rather be a treasured pet than nothing at all to him, the man who pulled her out of jail, who came when she smiled), but calms down again when she realizes what is actually happening.

Sherlock, he texts her (and she has no idea how the hell he manages to get a message to her, like she cannot comprehend how he did it in her own prison all those years ago, or why his ring-tone is still that stupid song), and she calms down, and laughs, later, when he tells her what he did to the walls and the mirror in the interrogation-room. The laughter is only half-fake.

Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock.

“I,” he tells her, hand coming up to rest on the back of her neck, a warm, solid weight. “I am going to steal the Crown Jewels.”

Her boss is insane. Of course.

oOo

It’s pathetic, to the point of ridiculous, how easy it is to forge an identity, to get a uniform, to get assigned as his guard. He looks surprised to see her there, and she relishes that, that she can actually surprise him, and after all this time too.

“Would you mind slipping your hand into my pocket?” he asks as she walks up to him, and she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling, from laughing, from giving any outward sign to the officers surrounding them.

Gum. Of course.

“Thanks,” he says and she turns around, walking past the good, kind doctor as she does. She wonders if he remembers her, remembers the woman who walked up to him in that dark and abandoned street, who knocked him unconscious and wrapped him in semtex.

He had that look like an officer in the army, like a good little soldier.

She’s killed good little soldiers. Five of them. And many more after that.

She knows, that if anything should happen to her boss, that soldier is the one she’ll come for first.

She hopes John Watson knows it too.