Sure, there had been certain distractions from the root of why Sherlock had chosen to leave Baker Street, John, Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson behind once he was settling into Preya. After all, he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep since his meeting with Sadji Samara, an event he was still trying to process fully, the small twitch that woke him when he’d started to nod off and kept him puzzling in the dark, staring at his ceiling. The noise in his head was deafening, he couldn’t hear the silence around him, closing in on him. His senses screamed, cried out, gripping for something to hold onto, for a way to return to what he thought he knew of the dreary, short trip around the garden they called life and the finality, utter senselessness of death. It was like a short circuit. Every time he tried to touch it, it shocked him, repulsed him. He could hear their voices, too. The Woman’s. Moriarty’s. Sadji’s. ‘Look at the funny little man try to cling to his books, chemistry set and the world that he once knew. If he can’t accept life here, perhaps he should simply die.’
He fought the mocking, the torment but his purpose, his reason for coming here came back to him clearly in the moments he wasn’t fighting with himself regarding what he’d experienced. A man had led him here. John had told him when they met, ‘People don’t have arch-enemies.’ How little he knew of Sherlock’s world back then and yet… Sherlock had loved him despite it in his own, private way. The soldier made so timid by the war but emboldened by the smell of blood in the water. Sure, he wasn’t anything approximating a genius. His insights were a little obvious for the most part, extremely obvious in some cases and shockingly astute occasionally. John knew him better than he knew himself sometimes, had saved his life more times than he could count and challenged him every day - not to think, but to feel. His success in that area was unfortunately limited but the effort he put into it was astounding. So why leave John? What could prompt him to do such a thing?
Rather, who?
James Moriarty. The center of the web. The consulting criminal, the king of crime, the perfect arch-enemy for the consulting detective to do battle with. Moriarty had done something to him that only Charles Augustus Magnussen had rivaled in scope, but he was dead and irrelevant now. Sherlock had put a bullet in his brain, like a mad dog. Who was the mad dog, really? The blackmailer or the murderer? It was because of James Moriarty that he was pushed to those extremes and decided to finish things for once and for it. It was because Jim had slipped through his fingers and though he couldn’t be sure whether the blood and brain tissue was a well-constructed squib or the real thing, it left him with no choice but to fall.
And that was the reason he’d killed Magnussen without qualms.
Seeing Jim’s face again on those screens, hearing his melodic voice stirred something deep in him and he could feel himself pull another trigger. This one didn’t release a bullet, though. It released him from the world he’d built. The pace he’d fallen into. It brought him back to one harrowing moment when he couldn’t save her. The old woman. He’d tried, he’d tried to stop her from speaking, he’d tried to silence her before Moriarty did but he was too late and something in his gut, hidden until then emerged. Justice… whatever that meant.. had to be done and in this case he had no doubts that it meant stopping Moriarty before he took more lives. But he wondered in retrospect, was he… resentful because Jim had check mated him there? Ripped London, Sherlock’s territory from his tight grip and seized control of what gave him a sense of purpose, what brought him back from the brink of death when he was killing himself with drugs, taken the natural high from him?