Holmes/Moriarty is another one of those odd ships: everybody who has been peripherally near Holmes fandom, it seems like, is aware that it's a ship and has always been a ship; everybody who has read The Final Problem understands why it's a ship. That I was fascinated by their relationship since the first time I read the books in elementary school should have been enough for me to deduce my own partiality. They are each other's perfect match! They can have full conversations, at their very first meeting, just by saying, "'All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' said he. / "'Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' I replied." They are both more than content to die, so long as it's in each others arms and together!

And yet, hardly anybody writes the ship!

I had so much trouble finding recs to list here. Of course, Sherlock BBC descended on all of Holmesiana like an atmospheric detonation - lots of light and heat and force and when it was over hardly anybody was left, wandering about dazed and wounded and changed forever; it will take at least another decade, probably, for Holmes fandom as a whole to truly recover. There is some Holmes/Moriarty in Sherlock fandom, but Sherlock's Moriarty was so changed that it's not really the same thing; and tbh I can't handle Sherlock in anything but very, very small doses. (I fled the fandom that was once home before the detonation and have hardly been back - I didn't watch the second Downey film because there was still so much ambient Sherlock around.) (I know I should watch Elementary if I want some good Holmes/Moriarty, but y'all convinced me the show was so good I wanted to watch the show and not just learn it from fic, and someday, surely, I will watch shows other than Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ask a Mortician? Not today though. Next year isn't looking good either.)

There seems to be a fair amount of Russian fic in the pairing on AO3 but that's no help for me. And apparently there's a relatively new anime out starring Moriarty? So that's a thing.

The most widely-rec'd pre-Sherlock Holmes/Moriarty fic (and the only one in my pre-AO3 bookmarks) seems to have only ever been up on the Holmesslash Yahoogroup. I'm told Holmesslash was archived before Yahoogeddon, but I don't think it's been archived anywhere public.

I always have this desperate feeling that there must be, somewhere, a hidden dispatch-box or something full of all the Holmes fic from before c. 1995, but it's so darn hard to find any!

So here, have three stories from three different continuities that are really as much about Watson and Moran - the sidekicks - as Holmes and Moriarty. Moran at least was mostly outside the blast radius (he's good at that.)

• Good For The Soul (3158 words) by HiddenLacuna
  Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Major Character Death
  Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Mary Morstan/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty
  Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Trope Subversion/Inversion, Soulmates, Community: holmestice, Johnlock Roulette
  
  A tragic soulmark AU.



• The Strange Tale of Charon's Obol (5170 words) by ColebaltBlue
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/James Moriarty
  Characters: Sherlock Holmes, James Moriarty, Sebastian Moran
  
  In a darker London, Moriarty and Moran must team up with master criminals to take down a blackmailer.



• Expectation (4294 words) by Lindentreeisle
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Sherlock (TV)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Sebastian Moran
  Additional Tags: hurt/comfort bingo
  
  Moran and Watson! Trapped together after a flood! Must learn to rely on each other!