AN:/ I wrote this for a prompt on the kinkmeme (which is more embarrassing to write than I thought it would be) and it seemed to garner a positive reaction, so I decided to share it here as well.

The prompt was:

"BBC news at midnight," said the voice from the radio. "This is Sherlock Holmes."
Maybe it's a newsreader AU, or maybe it's something darker where Sherlock is in charge and has taken over the airwaves...

Voice in the Wire

The world has gone to hell.

There's no police left on the streets, now – there's nobody left to pay them. The government and the Royal Family went into seclusion three months ago along with all their 'experts' and their families. Everybody suspects but nobody will say that they've gone into hiding and abandoned the world to its own sick self-cannibalism. One stayed, it's said, one man of the government, one man who was the government, who stayed behind to try and fix the world, but failed. There's no speculation how, but there was a corpse on London Bridge for a week that people didn't look at, didn't touch. Every night there's another fire, another lost child crying into the night, another gang war taking another ten-fifteen-twenty victims. There's no-one left to fix it, to stop it, now.

The phone networks are down, the internet is inaccessible, the world is silent but for the screaming. Planes no longer fly overhead, helicopters are nonexistent, and cars no longer run except for those belonging to the biggest and baddest of the petty criminals that have been set loose on the streets.

The televisions don't work anymore, either. No cable or satellite channels have got through for half a year, if you were getting the signal at all for the two months before that when the static started getting out of hand. But there was the BBC, that last bastion of an England full to the brim of tea and newspapers and dreams of an empire that isn't any more and wasn't even then, which lasted for four months longer before the news and dramas and talk shows stopped and it began to repeat – a month later it shut down entirely. There's still sound, sometimes, but nobody wants to listen. It's creepy, somehow, listening to Doctor Who – that's the one that gets through most often, the fans can see the irony and the rest of them don't care – as the audio tracks leak and seep out onto the airwaves. It's wrong, listening to a saviour who isn't real and isn't coming.

The radio survives, loud and repetitive as the last few broadcasters holed up in their stations hopelessly, helplessly call out to their cities and their people with music and rambling and – when they finally, inevitably break – painful sobbing prayers. For a price, it's said in hushed conversations, you can get them to call out a name for you into the air. So many of these sad, forlorn hopes have been listed plainly, baldly, boredly on the wireless and yet people listen still for a name they know, for a call from someone out there. At least, those lucky few whose homes have electricity or who own radios and batteries do.

The cause of it all is hissed in corners, the whisper of a fragment of a rumour of a nightmare, a single, solitary, meaningless name – Moriarty.

They curse by it, now. That's the first step, they say, to godhood.

The last of the autumn leaves are falling when the new voice comes on the air. It's gentle, and warm, and laughs with fondness as it talks about the past and sells hope for the future. There's no name, and nobody can figure out where the signal comes from, but people listen and every district of the city calls back by calling between in soft, hushed conversation, neighbours talking to each other without a knife in their back pocket for the first time in so very long – they answer in their non-answer, in listening and passing on the message that he brings.

We will survive.

The voice brings with it a wisp of remembered pride. This is London. The rest of the world can go to hell but this is London and it has always been its own master, even before Greater London grew and it could still kick out a king with a lunatic grin of wood and stone and steel.

If you blow up a street it bleeds history, recalls the Blitz and spits it back in your face. If you stab a woman it screams of the Ripper and calls you an amateur for thinking that that could ever give you power over anything. If you set a fire of any size it laughs and laughs and scorches your soul, for not even the Great Fire could turn it to ash. There's nothing you can do to it that hasn't been done before and done worse.

And it has its own bizarre protectors.

Snow litters the ground, thin and dirty and splotchy as the sun rises behind grey clouds when one of them talks on the air, voice ringing out in place of the kindly one they've come to love.

"Good morning, London, rest of England. This is Sherlock Holmes. Prepare for the news, and don't worry, I'll speak slowly so you can try to keep up."

And the city – their world – holds its breath.