A Match Made in Hell | sheriarty

➊ 𝓒𝓲𝓰𝓪𝓻𝓮𝓽𝓽𝓮 𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓮

Sherlock?

Just as Moriarty was about to reset his expression, his facial muscles started to quiver in an unnatural way, rearranging the very atoms he was chiselled from. "Because I would be surprised, Sherlock. Really I would." There was a strange echo in his words that wasn't there before, a distorted, grisly echo...

Sherlock!

Sherlock felt a stab of fear swell within him. Something wasn't right. He was witnessing Moriarty being sculpted into a gruesome artwork of death that seeped through the cracks in his subconsciousness. The chill of Moriarty's breaths was bringing the synapses of his brain to a standstill, congealing the anaesthesia of logic. "And just a teensy bit... disappointed."

He was in a dream. He had to wake up. Wake up!

"And of course, you wouldn't be able to cherish it for very long," Moriarty growled with a deep, guttural snarl. Still air vibrated around the deformed yet grandiose reincarnation of a human, even the molecules bowed to the horror he instilled. It was now the face of a monster that burned into Sherlock's mind's eye - like a long-legged spider, weaving its silky web from thousands of lives and luring unsuspecting victims into it. The quivering of the web caused the pillars of Sherlock's mind palace to collapse, now made from quicksand that pulled the fading cusps of thoughts down into it...

But he had to steady them so that...

Moriarty...

Moriarty!

MOR-

"Sherlock?" Distantly, Sherlock picked up the sound of a familiar voice that was dipped in evident concern. Firm fingers were like hooks in his flesh, giving his body a rough treatment in order to bring him back from the murky waters of the dream world. "SHERLOCK!"

Someone slapped him across the face and Sherlock's head sank deeper into the warm pillow, making him resurface and snap out of the icy slumber.

"What?" the detective groaned groggily. His eyelids peeled themselves open reluctantly, opening a passage into the world where the blue of the ocean blended into the blue of the sky. A hazy resemblance of a craggy face floated into Sherlock's field of vision that was coming in and out of focus like a camera lens.

Sherlock cleansed the fragments of the restless sleep from his glazed eyes with a series of rapid blinking and was then able to make out the outlines of John's figure hovering over him with a tight grip on his shoulders.

Out of instinct, Sherlock pulled away little tactfully to distance himself from his prying friend, tucking his nightmares away into the tangle of sweat-covered sheets. The silky-soft fabric of his striped pyjamas smooched his clammy skin and the uncombed mess of dark curls was dangling over his forehead bleached by the night of horrors he had just witnessed.

Moriarty's all-consuming presence had felt embarrassingly real, scary even. But he wasn't scared, he didn't want to be. No. Dreams weren't real. The fear wasn't real. Sherlock couldn't embrace any concept that brought about these complexities called 'emotions' - mindless and unnecessary distractions that simply cluttered and corrupted the mind, scattered the nascent rays of logic, trying to give a substance to the fog of dreamscape beyond objectivity. Emotions were an evolutionary inheritance, a short circuit that cut out the most important and evolved human ability: reason.