You're in Sherlock (Sherlock × Reader)

The Reichenbach Fall: Chapter 6

You talked to Sherlock about the virus, conversing about Moriarty being the one that had sent it to distract you for some reason. You weren't sure why and you weren't sure how he had sent it from the flat's building, but you knew deep down that it just had to have been him. Who else would have done anything like this? The answer was no one.

"He wasn't here. We were both in my flat when Molly called and he was locked up... how would he do..." You trailed off, shaking your head. It didn't make sense. You suddenly shot a look up at Sherlock. "Sherlock, was he here? Did you talk to him?"

"What? No." Sherlock told you.

"Then how did he send it from here? You think he'd hide? That's so not him. He'd come strutting in her as large as bloody life!" You found yourself raising your voice. You sighed, knowing you couldn't be mad because you'd already lied to him. "Sherlock. You can tell me the truth, I won't be upset."

Sherlock studied your eyes, he looked calmed and collected. "I didn't talk to him. Maybe it was some sort of trick? To distract us?" He thought.

"Sherlock, I've been through the code like a hundred times, the IP address leads back to here." You ran your fingers through your hair. This was all beginning to become too much for you to handle.

"Well, maybe it just needs to be seen from a new perspective. May I?" Sherlock held out his hands for your laptop and you nodded handing it over. Sherlock looked at the code then closed his eyes in thought, pressing his fingers to his lips. You watched him, hoping he could make more sense out of it than you could.

"He didn't send it from here." Sherlock told you, handing over your computer. You looked at him, confusion plastered on your face. How could Moriarty not have sent the virus from here if that's where the decoding brought it back to? You'd done everything perfectly and you knew that, there was no way your decoding was wrong. Unless you'd missed something.

"How-"

"The IP address, look at it. It's in the typical dotted-decimal notation, correct? Meaning it should be 4 bytes, this one isn't. It's faulty, look at the numbers, how they're arranged. Your decoder read them that way because that's how it was programmed, it's meant to appear as an IP address but it's not. Look at it before it was decoded, it's not binary, it's a simple number code that transcribes to letters. The dots represent spaces and each series of numbers is a word, or letter in this case. That is a cipher all wrapped up to appear as an IP address, a trick." Sherlock smiled delightedly down at the computer. You looked down at the computer to see he was right. You groaned. Sometimes you hated Sherlock for making you look dumb. Of course you should have seen that, but you were paying attention to the decoding, not the original virus' code itself. You hadn't even thought of doing that because you couldn't read it in the beginning and the decoder had originally worked.

"He wanted us to think he was here... but why make the code so easy to decipher? He's just trying to distract us at this point." You shook your head at Sherlock. Moriarty was throwing things at you left and right, he didn't want you paying attention as he planned his final game.

"I'm not sure." He looked up for a moment, his eyes glazing over before he looked back down at the computer. "You don't have to decode it, I know exactly what that says." He looked at the screen with a serious look as you studied the code, reading over it.

"It says, 'I O U' in a constant repeat. I owe you. Sherlock does that mean anything to you? If this was Moriarty, what is the significance of owing someone. Does he owe you something?" You looked up to Sherlock with many questions. He looked away from the screen, his face downcast toward the side.

"I don't know." He replied, closing your computer and standing to go back to his violin. You just watched him, thinking as your brain came up with thousands of theories of what all this meant. You thought back to what you'd said to Moriarty. "You owe me." Is that what he meant? You really didn't think it did for some odd reason. The biggest thing that kept reappearing in your mind was that Sherlock seemed to know more than he was letting on, you weren't going to pry unless you had solid evidence he wasn't telling you something.