Distant Minds {{Sherlock Rp with Circledude5}}

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera was about to give up when she heard the faint sound of a squeaky window opening. Bingo.





Ciera crept out of her room and down the stairs, ducking behind Sherlock's chair so that she was close enough to hear better, but she still couldn't be seen if he decided to come back out.

 

[Circledude5]

Sometimes it was a curse, sometimes it was a gift. He wanted to protect her for mainly selfish reasons, so in this case it was a gift. He heard a small thunk up above and knew Ciera had heard him. The muffled footsteps and soft sound of fabric on wood moments later further confirmed this belief. She would be hiding out of view, naturally. But in a position where she could still see him if he left the bathroom.


Which is exactly what he did.


He opened the bathroom door very quietly and snuck out into the dark kitchen. He opened one of the drawers (clenching his teeth as its contents rattled about) and positioned himself so that it would be impossible to tell what he was doing from a view inside the sitting room. Then, he pocketed one of John's many multi-purpose tools, shut the drawer again, and padded back to the bathroom.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera was completely still as Sherlock exited the bathroom only to go into the kitchen to grab something out of a drawer and close it again. He then proceeded to go back into the bathroom.


It occurred to her for a moment that he might know what she was doing, and might well just be playing her, but there wasn't much she could do about it at the moment.

 

[Circledude5]

Behind the chair then.


Hyper-Sensory Processing Disorder. Useful, but an absolute nightmare.


She was smart enough to know that he might be trying her, but there was no way she could be certain. High chances...well, yes. But no certainty. He swung a leg out the window. Besides, even if she could figure out what he was doing, she'd never be able to follow him. He'd shaken off countless numbers of Mycroft's stupid tails, and had avoided the British Government for literal years until that one fatal blunder.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera stood finally and ducked into the kitchen, her footsteps inaudible as she stepped lightly to avoid making a sound. She heard the faint scraping sound that meant he had swung a leg out the window. Now she knew he was leaving.


Creeping back upstairs with a sly smile, she ducked into the spare bedroom and pulled out her laptop, booting it up.

 

[Circledude5]

Turned around, sliding out backwards, head first. The cold air took over his senses; even if Ciera was making noise he couldn't hear. The bathroom window was smaller than the one in his bedroom which he usually used, so it was a tighter fit than he was accustomed to. After a few seconds, his body adjusted in time to hear faint footsteps in the second floor. Now that was interesting...Perhaps she would be trying to hack into the CCTV system. Or other camera systems around town, anyways. Or, maybe she was looking up the pool.


In actuality, probably both.


That wasn't a problem though, the location wasn't on John's Blog (he'd made sure of that) and it definitely wasn't on any news site - Mycroft had seen to that. And he knew the security camera systems of London inside and out. If she wasn't trying to physically follow him, she wasn't going to be able to follow him at all.


He pulled the rest of his legs through, gripping tight onto the upper sill, and balanced his feet on the lower sill. He closed the window with his left hand slowly. It made the squelching noise momentarily and then shut all the way. He stood, reaching for the sill on the window above, and hoisted himself up. With the aid of the grippy brick, he managed to scale up to the roof without too much difficulty..

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera waited for the lap top to boot up before hurriedly typing a web address in the search bar. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she typed in what was needed and waited on the page to load. Bingo.


The page loaded and her eyes settled on the center of it, waiting patiently.

 

[Circledude5]

The layout of London flashed before his eyes. Camera angles became intermittent. Suddenly, he was staring at a map with twelve different coloured lines, each for a different possible (and plausible) route. He opened his eyes and started seeing them, little bands of neon light shooting off over the rooftops on the different paths he could take. He dismissed all but the bright green one; that one wasn't the safest, but it was one of the fastest and the hardest to trace.


Taking a deep breath, he turned to the adjoining building and leapt the gap onto its rooftop. He landed in a roll, taking care to avoid the camera he knew was mounted on the gutter to spot any misdemeanors in the alleyway and set off.

 

[Shadow Cat]

"Interesting." Ciera muttered as she gazed at the screen, watching it. She took a moment to turn the brightness of the computer screen down a little bit so it wouldn't be so obvious to John that she was awake before returning her attention to it.


From what she was seeing, he hadn't noticed.

 

[Circledude5]

As Sherlcok landed on the next rooftop, it suddenly occurred to him why Ciera might have gone back up to her room.


Clever. He just needed time to figure out what it was. Hm, well, Moriarty could wait. For a little bit, at least.


When he got to the edge of the roof, he swung down and quietly landed in the alley. No cameras would see him while he was in the alley, but he'd have to keep moving. He took out his phone and shut it off. That was the most obvious one. He put it back in his pocket and jogged down the alley to where it connected with the street. That intersection had a blind spot (Mycroft had failed to gain that much more funding for CCTV) that he could exploit.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera finally became impatient with watching the screen and picked the laptop up along with a leather bag that she used to carry it in, slipping silently downstairs and out the front door with the lap top in her arms. It occurred to her how strange it must have looked to any passer-by with her carrying her open lap top down the sidewalk, but she didn't care at the moment. She had priorities. She quickly opened a new tab as she walked.


Sherlock hadn't noticed how she had slipped her own phone in his inside jacket pocket as she had went upstairs to pretend to sleep. Now that he had moved away fro the flat she could crossed search his trajectory with any pools in that direction. And there it was. She quickly gazed over the route to it and closed her laptop, slipping it into her bag and breaking out into a run.

 

[Circledude5]

He was back on the rooftops, setting off instead for The Pool, an obscure production company while checking his coat. He knew his coat. Inside and out. And he knew the weight of it too. That's not right...


The left side was slightly too heavy. He stopped abruptly to check, but then decided to keep moving instead. She didn't know if he'd figured it out. His hand in his pocket, he kept jogging. Nothing was in there except John's pocket knife. He tried his inside pocket. His leather-finger hand met with a rectangular object. There you are. She'd used her own phone.


She certainly was clever. And sly. But not quite clever enough.


He was about to turn it off when he thought better of it and kept it in his hand. She was still tracing him. Oasis Sports Centre was in the same direction of The Pool, so she had likely predicted that that was where he was headed. But he had the advantage; he knew London better than the back of his hand (he didn't take to just staring at the back of his hand, after all). He dropped down to clandestinely cross the street, then was back up again. He was on Charlotte Street now; running over a bunch of small restaurants. Only a block until he got to his destination.

 

[Shadow Cat]

From the short time Ciera had known Sherlock, she knew that he would do anything to accomplish an end goal. And that meant throwing everything he could at her to throw her off. She had long since closed her lap top and was continuing down the sidewalk, sometimes cutting across alleyways and what-not.


She found it unlikely-highly unlikely- that he hadn't noticed her phone in his pocket yet. She had counted on him not noticing in the first moments of the chase because his mind would have been focused on leading her astray and making sure she never made it to the right place. But as time went on, he would become more at ease and would notice. Which meant that he already knew she was following.


But she wasn't following him anymore, she had charted her destination was sticking to the route she had mapped out. And that was when she noticed. She hadn't in the first moments because her mind had been trained on following Sherlock to this pool that he was so persistent in hiding the location of. But as time went on, she had closed her lap top and become more at ease with her route and her surroundings, and that allowed her to pay attention to other things. She was being followed.

 

[Circledude5]

There were two possibilities: she was tracing him still, or she had extrapolated where he wad going. Either way she'd end up in the wrong place, and she'd have no idea where he had actually gone. He got back onto the street and ran over to the dark fronts of Percy Street. At The Pool, he took out Ciera's phone and his Molskine notebook and pen and placed the phone carefully on the sidewalk outside the door by the fence. It was invisible to passersby at this hour, and it'd also be nearly impossible to spot when morning came around. He opened his notebook and scrawled a


Good try -SH





He ripped out the page and speared it on the top of the fence. Then, he turned to go back to the alley where he could climb up to the roof again.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera struggled to keep her pace the same so that she wouldn't alert her tail. Panic threatened to overcome her as she attempted to keep it under control. Straying off of her route, she turned into the nearest alley to make sure that she was being followed, and it wasn't just her being paranoid. The man following her also turned down the alley.


She came out onto another street and continued down the sidewalk. Her best option was to stay where she could be seen by civilians. Problem was, it was dark and hardly anyone was walking at this hour.


She took a small mirror out of the bag that held her computer and held it her face, pretending to check her make up.


The man was wearing a black hoodie and a mask beneath the hood, so it was impossible to make out a face. Closing the mirror, she put it back in her bag and looked back ahead of her. She saw an option and took it, turning into an alley way and jumping up, pulling down the ladder connected to the fire escape. She climbed up quickly and began ascending as a bullet discharged behind her.

 

[Circledude5]

[sorry; school starting soon and all my summer work catching up with me. Also, I thought I posted my chapter last night BUT APPARENTLY NOT. So sorry for my inactivity]


He ran off to a convenient alley and back up to the rooftops. Now to Marshall Street Leisure Centre; that was where Moriarty had had them meet last time, and he was certainly going to be there. His mind briefly flitted to Ciera. If she was still tracking him, she'd assume that he'd stopped moving and that The Pool was, well... the pool. If she was no longer tracking him, she'd have extrapolated his destination to be Oasis and she'd turn up there. Either way, by the time she reached one of the decoy destinations, she'd have to figure out where he was again.


He leapt over a rooftop and then ducked down to crawl past the private camera placed on the ledge of a neighbouring building.


Moriarty, Moriarty. That man. He hated him. But he felt that the man understood his mind. For the first time, someone really actually understood. And for that, he also hated himself.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera climbed faster as another bullet discharged, sailing just past her. It hit her that they might be missing on purpose, but she elected not to stop and find out. She made it to the roof top and ran to the edge, staring over as she gazed at the next building.


She took and deep breath as she heard the clang of feet pounding on the fire escape, quickly coming closer. She took a few steps back and then ran forward, jumping across the gap.

 

[Circledude5]

When he had passed the camera's view, he was back up on his feet, running through the night. It was exhilarating, the feeling, Sherlock thought. He guessed half an hour since Moriarty's text, so he'd be getting impatient. In all actuality, the consulting criminal was probably observing both him and Ciera at this very moment. If not for certain, it was very very likely.


He was so busy lost in thought that he nearly missed his drop down spot. In fact, he actually ran straight over Marshall Street Leisure Centre before realising what he'd done and whipping back around.

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera had jumped across the gap between the two buildings, landing on her feet on the next building before slipping and falling onto her backside. Standing up and quickly brushing herself off, she realized that she had no idea to find out. At the sound of another gunshot, she took off again, quickly making it to the edge of her current building and jumping again.


It occurred to her that she might be able to use her phone to figure out where she was at before she remembered she had slipped it into Sherlock's pocket. Fat lot of good that had done her.

 

[Circledude5]

He got down and cautiously made his way to the pool. What did Moriarty want? Would he even still be there? Well, of course he'd still be there, He knew Sherlock would come no matter what (unless, of course, he was dead). He entered the open-air pool and looked around.


There he was.


Calm as ever.


Sitting on the edge of one of the lounge chairs, staring at him.


"Well, well, Sherlock. Took you a while." The Irishman said, mockingly disappointed, "You know how hate waiting, my dear."

 

[Shadow Cat]

A few more shots. They- whoever was shooting at her- had been aiming closer and closer to her. It had only confirmed her suspicion that they had previously been missing on purpose. Another shot. This one sailed just past her arm, ripping the fabric of her coat with how close it was. She jumped another gap and kept running before stopping just short of the ledge of the next building.


This gap was much to big for her to jump, so she was going to have to find another way. Maybe there was a fire escape somewhere. Turning around to look for it, she saw that they weren't that far back, maybe two buildings away at the most. And they were getting closer. She quickly began looking for a way down that wouldn't involve backtracking and running into her assailant.

 

[Circledude5]

Sherlock forcibly cleared his face, and then regarded Moriarty with a mixture of irritation and wariness.


"Oh," the Consulting Criminal stood up and brushed off his shoulders, "No reply, I see. Sizing me up again, Sherlock? Even though I could have killed you?"


Sherlock forced a nonchalant shrug. "Well, you didn't."


"No, no I didn't." Moriarty agreed. "Maybe I should have. But watching you and your Watson running about...solving those crimes of yours...much more fun."

 

[Shadow Cat]

Ciera spun and looked back, watching the person coming closer and closer then turning to the the edge of the rooftop as she found no way down, no way back, and no way out.


"Your presence is requested." Came a gruff voice behind her.


"Where?"


"The pool."


Fair enough. She had been going there anyway. Better to be escorted by someone who knew where they were going, she supposed. The man prodded the back of her head with a gun, saying, "Come on, then." She watched as he turned and jumped back onto the last roof and then turned to face her, the gun pointed in her direction.


She dutifully ran and then climbed down this building's fire escape as she was prodded repeatedly with the barrel of the gun. Then, they were on their way.

 

[Circledude5]

Sherlock thought back to the tiny camera he'd removed from the jaw of his skull. At the time, he'd assumed it had been Mycroft, but this made much more sense.


"You caught my little bug, Sherlock," Moriarty said, advancing, "And I've got to admit: I'm impressed. The man who set it up for me guaranteed its concealment. And you can imagine how disappointed I was." He shook his head in mock regret. "Didn't like him too much. Begged too much; it was ever so boring."


"Yes, well, I have a bit of a knack for that." Sherlock said standing up straighter. "Now, what do you want?"

 

[Shadow Cat]

It didn't take very long for them to get there, and she stopped just outside to observe it. Her eyes took in any possible entrance, exit, and everything in between. The man behind her fired off a warning shot that skimmed the flesh on her arm as he told her to keep moving.


"Quiet, people are sleeping." Ciera said sarcastically as she continued to walk. She was actually more annoyed at this point than anything. He obviously was one of the smarter criminals that roamed around, though clearly he could aim.


She gingerly put a two fingers to the spot the bullet had skimmed and then looked at the rather small amount a blood that covered them. Now, she was getting mad. She looked around as they made it to the pool and then back at the way they had came in before shifting her gaze forward. Sherlock was there already, and she supposed the other man was 'M'.