Author: Warnings for strong language, sexual implications, violence, and Seb being...Well, Seb.

Having never gone to an interview with a crime lord before, I'm willing to admit that I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this Professor James Moriarty. Sounded like a pompous, ancient twat to me, but you know what they say about books and all that.

Well, I was right on the "pompous twat" bit. Little Jimmy (and boy was he little) hardly even looked at me the entire time. Just kept staring at my coat, and suddenly I felt a little repentful for all the times I'd eyed up a lady's breasts. At first I thought he was trying to size me up, but then I realized he was staring at the Smith and Wesson I had tucked away in my concealed pocket. Again, I hadn't done this sort of thing before and no way in hell was I meeting "The Napoleon of Crime" (a prickish nickname if I've ever heard one) without some sort of defense. Casually, I adjusted my jacket to hide the outline of the firearm a little better and arched an eyebrow at the impish looking man. "You haven't said much, boss," I prompted.

Still, he didn't talk. Just handed me a card with his contact information and muttered something about needing to go shoot some melons. At the time I assumed that was a euphemism for getting laid or murdering someone. It could've gone either way, really. After a few weeks of knowing Jim, though, I realized he wasn't the sort to employ euphemisms. Oh, he'd beat around the bush and use some complex metaphor just to say he was feeling anxious about one of his schemes, but he always spoke bluntly about carnage and the like. To him, saying, "Go carve a pound of flesh off Antonio for me," was just as natural as saying "Good morning." Probably more so. I haven't often heard him use such pleasantries unless it's for a character.

After a few months of working for Jim, I found myself in the strange position of being offered a flatshare. That is to say, Jim had demanded I come live with him. I'm still not fully aware of the circumstances surrounding the offer; I was under the impression that it had quite a bit to do with a rival somehow finding where he lived and filling his flat with poisonous spiders. Of course, when asked about it, Jim pooh-ed and pah-ed as if it were the most ridiculous notion he'd ever heard. Still, when we went to the zoo that time he refused to walk within twenty meters of the insectarium. He said it was because of the inevitable stench of decay that would surely pervade the building, but I saw him eyeing up the spider sculpture distrustfully.

The thing with living with Jim is, you're always playing a game. Some days it's chess, some days it's Monopoly. Most days for the past few months it's been Twister for us, but that's neither here nor there. What I'm saying is, you have to wake up and anticipate what game you're playing before he sinks your battleship over breakfast. The man can launch cannons faster than most can say "parlay," so it's best to go in with shields up no matter how good of a mood he was in the night before.

Now, to you, that probably sounds like common sense. I'm sure that if you're reading this then you've read some of my other works and maybe even that damnable blog of John Watson's, so you've already been introduced to the Professor's eccentricities. Well, I hadn't. The most I had seen of him was to take some orders and toddle off to shoot a bloke or skin him, as the case may be. The point is, I'm more than willing to admit that it was a bit of a shock the first morning I woke up and found him crouched at the foot of my bed with the sort of grin that makes you want to promptly close your eyes and pretend waking up the first time around was just a nightmare.

"I've done it," he said.

"Done what, boss?" I said, but I thought, "Get the fuck off my bed you bloody cretin." Those are the sorts of things you don't say to the people signing your paychecks, though. I learned that at my first job working for a butcher. Apparently you should never threaten to carve your boss' stomach open using his own equipment, either. I learned that at the butcher's, too.

"Figured it all out!" he exclaimed, jumping from the off the footboard and onto the floor. "I painted it!" He pointed at my wall and, sure enough, he had painted it. It looked like a fucking bloody mess, what with splatters of crimson sprayed over the wall, dripping gruesomely toward the carpet.

"What the fuck is that?" I yelled, because that's the sort of thing you do when you wake up with a crime scene mosaic painted on your wall.

"Well," Jim began to explain, his fingers twisting excitedly around one another. "I predict that's how my brain would look if I stood precisely here," he demonstrated the position, standing a few feet away from the wall with his feet shoulder-width apart, "and angled a gun like this," suddenly his mouth was open wide and he had my Smith and Wesson shoved up in it, "and fired!" He made a little click sound with his tongue to demonstrate as if I, a bloody fucking sniper, didn't know what a gun sounded like.

"Give me that, you little shit," I barked before snatching the gun out of his mouth. Stupid bastard had taken the safety off and everything. Honestly, sometimes I think he's got a death wish. Jim just looked at me, utterly perplexed as to why I wasn't worshipping him for solving the problem of what his brain matter would look like when splattered on my wall. "What's wrong with you?" I growled irritably, because, really, saliva isn't a good thing to have on your gun. Now I'd have to spend the morning cleaning it instead of shaving. Fan-fucking-tastic.

"Nothing," Jim shrugged. "Just a little puzzle I've been working on for a while." He strolled out of the room, his steps unusually bouncy for a man that had just put a loaded gun into his mouth. I rolled my eyes and started attending to my weapon.

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding what's going on in that head of his. Though I do better than most, I think, just because I can understand him on a more, how to say, primal level. When you've spent as much time hunting big game as I have, you start to see the similarities between people and animals. For Jim, these similarities were closer to the surface than for most anyone else I've ever seen. It was as if he always felt hunted, so those characteristics which normally lie dormant in humans were viciously driven to the surface in Jim. I could see it in his eyes. How when he was angry he was a starved wolf, tearing into its prey. When he was plotting he was a ferret, his mind lithe as the animal's body. But what you really had to watch out for was when he was frightened. It doesn't happen often, but Jim is only human and is bound to have his moments. When frightened, Jim became a viper, the sort that attacks fast and viciously and kills with the first bite.

Up until now, I've only seen the viper a few times. It's awfully hard to surprise Jim, and surprise is half of what makes fear, feeling unprepared or vulnerable. Jim, being the arrogant sod he is, rarely seems to feel vulnerable, acts as if he's invincible, and he's almost always prepared for most eventualities. The man even drew up a contingency plan should a zombie apocalypse ever present itself as a true threat. Admittedly, he was on some pretty hefty painkillers for a shattered tibia at the time of the plan's conception, and the hallucinations might have been partially my fault, but still. Normal people don't train units of soldiers on how to properly blow a zombie's head from its body using nothing but a bottle of vodka, some torn fabric, and a lighter. Although, it has its benefits. Jim let me keep smoking after I pointed out that doing so would mean I would have a lighter on my person at all times and would therefore be better equipped to protect him should the undead beasts come for him. Apparently they prefer the smarter brains because there's "less fat tissue" in them. But I digress.

So, the viper. Actually, that ties into the "shattered tibia/zombie apocalypse" story pretty well. The first time I saw the viper was after we had been living together for about a year. We were thicks a thieves by then; at least, I had finally coaxed Jim into calling me by my first name and not just Moran all the time. Baby steps, I suppose. I still called him boss most of the time, when I wasn't giving him a few affectionate nicknames of my own. He seemed to like "dick," "fucker," and "little shit" the best, so I indulged him and used those as often as I could. Anyway, so we'd been living together for around a year, give or take a few months, when Little Jimmy just up and disappeared on me. Needless to say, at first I was just pissed that he had decided to take a vacation without telling me. That's the sort of bullshit that really lowers employee efficiency, you know; they're so busy wondering if the boss is off getting a tan or if he's being tanned that they stop doing their job properly. Considering he had run off like that before, I wasn't too worried about it. Well, I was a little worried, but mostly because payday was coming up and I had my eye on a slick new car parked in a dealer's lot nearby.

By the third day, I will concede that I was more than a little worried. Yes, Jim had ran off before, but he usually gave me a drunken call the first or the second night in to tell me where he was and that he loved me and wanted my cock. I suspected two of the three were lies; Jim had proven on multiple occasions that he was incapable of love, and I highly doubted that he could really have found his way to Antarctica in less than twenty four hours, much less found stable cell service there. So by the third day of not seeing the little bastard's sneer, I was justifiably concerned. I had just passed by that car dealer's lot and seen some old cow eyeing up my Porsche, and I was beginning to worry that Jim was being held somewhere without access to his checkbook. As a concerned employee and nothing more, I therefore dedicated the next forty-something hours to locating Jim. I did not like where the messy trail led me.

I found myself standing outside some warehouse in the outskirts of the city. Why these fools insist that a hostage needs to be held in a warehouse, I have no inkling of an idea, but there you have it; should your boss and your paycheck ever get abducted, look to the nearest filthy, dilapidated building you can find and just keep leap-frogging down the line until you find them. Sometimes I'm ashamed to be a part of the criminal classes; they can be so irritatingly predictable (There, see? That proves it; I've been living with Jim for too long).

After skillfully knifing some poor bloke in his kidney and giving him anesthesia in the form of a healthy dose of chloroform, I took my position and began watching the proceedings below. I would have much preferred the guns-a'blazing approach, but even I'm not thick-headed enough to think I can shoot twenty five or so people dead on my own. I had already called in for some back up, the best shooters Jim had in the ranks, affectionately called "The Bloody Bashers," although I'm not sure why. I'm pretty sure it's a joke of some sort, but I haven't got the time to catch up on the funnies when I'm busy babysitting a psychopath that likes to use guns as lollipops and thinks getting abducted and tortured is a good time. At least that's the impression I got while watching him interacting with his captors.

"Tell us where you spirited those documents off to, or I'll have Emmett over there rearrange your face," the man I presumed was the leader growled.

"No you won't," Jim sing-songed, the arrogant sod. "A blow to the face could possibly become a blow to the head, and we all know what sorts of things that does to a man's memory." He smirked, looking as untouchable as ever despite his filthy t-shirt and rumpled hair. If it wasn't for the blood, he might have looked as if he'd just gotten laid.

The leader scowled, pulling his hand back and hitting Jim across the jaw. I could hear the impact all the way up on the second level, but fortunately there wasn't the tell-tale crack of bone breaking, just Jim giving an angry snarl and spitting blood on the man's shoes. Good for him. At least the little snot knew how to be a bit intimidating.

"Tell me now," the man said slowly with malice hanging in his words, "Or you will regret not doing so until the end of your miserable life."

"What are you going to do?" Jim laughed. "Let your men rape me? We both know that I would enjoy it too much for it to be a proper torture." He winked at one of the guards standing nearby, his leer made all the more disturbing by the coating of blood over his teeth. The man shifted uncomfortably, his fingers wrapping more tightly around his gun.

"Emmett," the leader snapped, "Get me a crowbar."

"Duuuull," Jim groaned, slouching down in his seat as much as the ropes around his wrists and ankles would allow.

While Jim was lamenting his boredom, however, the boss man was adjusting his grip on a rather vicious-looking piece of metal. For a moment I saw Jim's eyebrows arch up ever so slightly in concern, but the look vanished as quickly as it had come. He knew they wouldn't take a swing at his skull, and to Jim anything that didn't hurt his mind couldn't possibly hurt that badly. Poor sod was about to learn differently, I was afraid, but there wasn't much I could do about it at the moment. My backup still hadn't arrived and firing any bullets now would just end with me getting shot and him being relocated to another, possibly filthier warehouse. So I sat back and twitched in sympathy as the metal bar swung into his right shin. This time the sound of the blow was accompanied by the familiar crack of a bone snapping, and Jim gave a strangled noise that sounded like a subdued scream mixed with a whimper. I clenched my jaw to keep from firing my rifle as the scum proceeded to prod at the broken bone with the point of his crowbar.

"Put him on the ground," the leader laughed. "He won't be running away any time soon." His minions did as they were bidden, untying Jim from his chair and throwing him to the ground. He immediately struggled to sit up, putting himself in a slightly less vulnerable position, but the man promptly kicked him back to the ground, the heavy toe of his boot connecting hard with Jim's gut. "Now," he growled, "Are you going to tell me where you hid those documents, or do you want to see how many more bones I can break before I finally break you?"

Jim had managed to catch his breath and was sitting up once again, but I could see the change. He wasn't playing anymore; this wasn't a game for him. This was war, and I have yet to see Jim start a battle he can't win. The viper was out, his head oscillating ever so slightly on his neck as he glared up at his captor. Very rarely am I ever intimidated by Jim; he can make you feel like scum that's hardly evolved enough to be capable of sucking slime off the seafloor, yes, but that's different. The way he was looking up at the crime lord could've been enough to freeze hell and catch the poles on fire, I think. And just like that he had his good leg up, heel digging into the man's crotch as his arm flew up and yanked the crowbar out of his hands. Before the leader had enough time to comprehend that he had been robbed of his weapon, the curved end of the metal rod had found its way into his gut.

I cursed under my breath as the leader's men rushed Jim. Without a second thought, I had my gun out and was shooting as many of them as quickly as I could. Luckily, I had the element of surprise on my side. I managed to pick off quite a few of them before more gunshots filled the warehouse. At first I panicked, my pulse quickening as I thought for sure someone had decided to cut their losses and rid the world of one James Moriarty, but then I realized that the calvary had arrived; it was my men firing down onto enemy fray. The gangsters hardly stood a chance; I had trained my recruits to be the best, after all. I stowed away my rifle and, with a nod to the nearest gunman, jogged down to Jim.

Up close, he looked far worse than he had from the second level. I realized how much of a show he had been putting on, then. Now that the immediate danger was gone, he was slipping into himself, curled pathetically on the floor with his leg twisted out strangely. It looked like he was doll that had been made improperly, the sort that goes straight to the clearance bins. He was sweating and trembling, his eyes hooded and barely able to focus. I cursed and knelt down next to him, examining him for more damage. Other than some pretty rough looking bruises and quite a few burns, he looked alright. Of course, there was still the possibility of internal bleeding, but I didn't think that posed too much of a threat at the moment.

"You're late," he slurred, his dark brown eyes barely flicking up to acknowledge me.

"Yeah, well, you didn't send me a memo saying that you were planning on getting abducted," I replied while carefully scooping him up off the ground. Fortunately, he seemed to be going into shock and wasn't too aware of the pain of being moved.

"Silly me," he chuckled, his head rolling against my shirt. "I'll have to remember to pen it into my diary next time."

"It would be helpful." I carried him out to the car and got one of our gunmen to drive us back to the flat. Well, I say gunman, but a woman with knockers as fine as hers can hardly be mistaken for a man. It's a shame military language is so gender biased, these days. Anyway, I had ample time to eye up her rack in the rearview mirror as she drove us home. Jim seemed happy just to lay quietly with his head in my lap, which was a nice change of pace. Normally he was wriggling all over the car. Damned fool doesn't seem to understand that safety belts provide a very valuable service should your driver get sick of listening to you prattling on about astrophysics and then plow the car into the nearest brick wall just to end their suffering. I hold firm that having Jim as a passenger would turn any pilot into a kamikaze bomber.

Getting Jim home was easier than I had anticipated. He was out like a light and didn't seem to give a damn about what was going on around him. I even accidentally knocked his leg against the wall while carrying him into his room and he hardly flinched at all. That kind of scared me. For a second I thought that maybe they'd damaged the nerves. That sort of thing can keep a man from walking properly ever again, you know. Fortunately, my fears were alleviated when the doctor arrived and snapped the leg back in place. Jim sat straight up then, screaming and kicking at the doctor with his good leg. Knocked him a few good ones in the jaw and chest, too. I figured him kicking around like that would be counterproductive to his healing process, though, so I dumped some of my chloroform out of my hip flask and onto my hankerchief and gave him a healthy dose of it. He was sleeping like a kitten again within minutes. He really is adorable when he's unconscious.

Now, this next bit you're not allowed to tell Jim. I don't think he remembers it, which is for the better, really. Once in a while he'll question what made him think up the Zombie Contingency, but I always just feed him some lie about him watching Dawn of the Dead after smoking some of London's finest marijuana, and he seems to buy it. Really, it was my fault, but that's the sort of thing you don't tell your employer when you're anticipating a fat bonus for saving their arse from some pissed gangsters. That old cow had bought my Porsche after all, but with that bonus I could buy a better one off the lot that had heating units in the leather seats. Always optimistic, that's me.

Frankly, by the third day of laying on that bed and sweating his way through a fever caused by a mild infection, Jim looked disgusting. The poor bloke was in no condition to bathe himself, though, and no way in hell was I going to try to sponge bathe him while he was awake. For one, he's ticklish and tends to hit if you accidentally stroke his sides the wrong way. For another, the last time I tried doing that he ended up accusing me of molesting him for the next week. I honestly was in no mood to hear it, so I slipped something extra into his soup after giving him the vicodin for his leg. Now I'm sure that you as enlightened audience members know that sleeping pills mixed with heavy narcotics is a big no-no, but, let's face it, I'm not particularly well-known for reading warning labels. Oh sure, I did it after Jim was shrieking about his mattress trying to eat him, but never once did it cross my mind to do so beforehand. Lessons learned, I suppose.

The good news is that I managed to get him cleaned up before the hallucinations began. I got a little nervous because he woke up once, but he didn't seem too bothered by being manhandled in a jacuzzi tub. I suppose that should've been my first clue that a storm was building, but I was just grateful that he hadn't tried clawing my eyes out. Him doing so was a distinct possibility because I hadn't gotten around to trimming his fingernails yet. Anyway, he just looked up at me, his eyes wide and glassy, and I couldn't help but smile at him. Sometimes he's so damn cuddly looking. It's very misleading. He's like one of those feral kittens that lures you in with its big, soft eyes and over-sized head, only to claw your hand to bits when you try petting it. And that, my friends, is why you never trust anyone with disproportionately large eyes.

He slipped back off to sleep almost immediately, which was a relief, and I got him all bundled up in his favorite towels and carried him back to bed. Even with that little pudge around his middle Jim is amazingly light. He's only a bit taller than that Watson bloke, but he weighs so much less. I suppose it's because Watson's got some muscle on his frame, but it still astounded me how heavy he was to carry around when Jim had me take him to the pool that one time. Jim's not like that at all. He's all air and fat and brain. Mostly brain, but there's quite a bit of the other things in him, too. The doctor assures me he's got all the proper organs in their proper places, but I don't think a man as light as him could have those sorts of things. I wouldn't be surprised if, after he dies and they cut him open, all they find is a brain, a pair of lungs, and a shriveled up, blackened heart. I suppose he would have to have a liver, too. Otherwise he would have been dead years ago from all the chemicals he puts in his body.

I finally got him clothed, slipping him into the thin little cashmere things he's always trying to make me wear. Me, my philosophy is that a man shouldn't have to wear clothes in his own bed. I've started wearing boxer shorts to sleep, though, just because Jim's gotten into the habit of crawling in bed with me some nights. It's a little awkward to wake up cuddled next to your boss with nothing to cover your morning wood. Selfish prick is ruining my sleep habits, too, as well as my waking moments, but at least I'm getting paid well. Soon, I'll have enough to go off and spend my days in peace, poaching my way across the continents. That was always the plan, at least. I may stay a little longer, though. Jim's got all this business with that Holmes fellow going on, and I think he needs me around.

By now you're probably itching to hear about the zombies. Well, too damn bad. This is my story and I'll tell it at whatever pace I want. If you're so bloody impatient, go watch the movie. I'm sure they've made one of that blog of Watson's already. I'm sure Jim will be in there somewhere. Maybe they'll even talk about the zombie thing just for laughs. Probably not. Other than me, Jim, and the trainees, nobody knows about it. Jim wanted to make sure that he would be the one in power should that sort of thing happen, so no one's getting their hands on his plans.

The hallucinations started mildly enough. He woke up, looked directly at me, and said, "Since when have you had feelers?" Given his loathing of all things creepy and/or crawly, I assumed that this was quite frightening to him, so I did my best to hide my feelers by pressing my hands over my head.

"Feelers?" I said innocently. "What feelers?"

Apparently, the feelers were in a more southward direction, and me moving my hands to my head allowed them to roam more freely because soon Jim was screaming and hitting me with his pillow. Now, I don't want to sound whiney, but quite frankly, even getting hit by a pillow in the place where he was hitting is fairly painful, especially when a certain member is still a little excited following a certain bathing of a certain crime lord. I'm not gay, let me tell you that now, but you try having sensual little Jim unconscious in a tub full of warm water and see how stoic you stay.

"Jim!" I yelled while wrestling the pillow away from him. "What in bloody hell is wrong with you?"

He simply rolled over and tucked his head underneath another pillow, muttering something about "don't let them probe me." I had no intentions of probing anything that day, thank you very much, so I decided the best course of action was to get up and let him sort things out himself. That's what usually works best, at least. If he's suddenly claiming that he can taste purple, you hand him a box of crayons and let him figure it out on his own. No point in trying to argue with him when he's in one of his less-than-rational moods.

I hadn't been sitting in front of the telly for long before the screaming started all over again. I wasn't terribly concerned about our neighbors hearing because we had long ago sound-proofed the flat, but I could hardly hear my programme over him. With a huff, I got up to go see what was bothering him now. When I got to the room, he was all tangled up in the sheets, flailing wildly as he tried to free himself from their confines.

"Seb, help!" he gasped, his face red and sweaty from his struggles. "It's tongue has got me!"

I sighed and carefully disentangled him, making sure to check that he hadn't twisted his injured leg around too much. He had a cast up to above his knee, but he had still managed to wriggle himself into all sorts of strange contortions. His flexibility has been a main contributor to our playing many games of Twister. I dragged him up then and looked at his eyes, and it wasn't until I saw how wild and dilated they looked that I realized maybe I had made a mistake in selecting my drug cocktail. Oh well. You live and you learn and you die a slightly more educated man. Not that it does you any good in the end, but that's neither here nor there.

Deciding I should probably keep a closer eye on him, I bundled Jim up in a blanket and propped him up in the recliner while I flopped back down on the sofa to finish watching the rugby match I had started. He seemed content for a while, and then all hell broke loose. Suddenly, anything that stood over three feet tall was a member of the zombie forces and needed to be vanquished. Even with his cast on, Jim somehow managed to climb on top of the kitchen counters to hurl all our bottles of alcohol at the bar stools and lamps. Fortunately his "lighter" was actually a pack of gum so no real damage was done; although a fine bottle of scotch did become a casualty of war. I haven't been that upset by an inanimate object's demise since Castaway.

After about an hour of alternating between playing along with Jim's hallucinations, trying to convince him that they weren't real, and getting "attacked" and "eaten" by the zombies a few times, Jim finally started to settle down. He didn't seem to be seeing the zombies anymore, but he wasn't quite back to normal. Oh no, while they were gathering their forces he had to draw up his plan of war, which eventually became the Contingency. He even drafted up documents and made me call up all the members of our organization whom he had deemed good soldiers to start their training right away. Since he insisted on being on the other line to listen as I called them, there really wasn't any way of lying my way through it. Even whacked off his tits on narcotics Jim can smell deception a mile away. And thus the Contingency was put into action. Apparently though, Jim forgot about it, and he didn't remember it until one of his selected soldiers sent him a text saying that his first shipment 500,000 bottles of vodka had arrived. Deciding it was easier to just pretend the whole thing was intentional than it was to have to tell everyone he had thought the whole thing up while drugged, Jim just played along, and now millions of pounds have gone into funding the most useless army in the history of mankind. The upshot is, Jim lets me drink vodka anytime I want now.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did get my Porsche. I know you were all terribly concerned about the fate of that fine Italian piece of machinery. Don't you worry; it's in good hands.