Sherlock Fic: The Anatomist 3/4
Title: The Anatomist
Characters: Molly Hooper, Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, others. Multiple pairings.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: Language, disturbing themes, some subtextual incest, and gratuitous cadavers.
Betas: The marvelous earlgreytea68, tricksterquinn, eponymous_rose, and lalaithlockhart.
Spoilers: All three aired episodes of the BBC's Sherlock and bits and pieces of the original stories.
Summary: "You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you - except you’re just a man. And they’re so much more than that." Jefferson Hope, A Study in Pink
chapter one chapter two
++
When they are children, Moriarty is a game. A story they tell only to each other, in whispers. In the narrowing spaces between them.
The Moriartys aren’t like other people, Jim says, murmuring in her ear as they slip through the crowded corridors of their Brighton comprehensive. The Moriartys aren’t like anyone, and there’s no one like them. Not anywhere, not in the whole wide world.
The Moriartys are clever, Molly says as she holds a tea towel full of ice to the darkening bruise high on Jim’s cheek. People call them freaks, but only because they’re frightened. Because deep in the lizard parts of their little, limited minds they know what the Moriartys can do.
The Moriartys don’t need anyone but each other, Jim says, her fingers pinched between his as they watch the machine lower Carl’s casket into open ground. The world could burn around them, and they wouldn’t care.
Not so long as they got to light the first fire, she says, and he hides his smile in the long swing of her hair.
27
It’s the tenth hour of a twelve-hour shift, and Molly slumps forward in the stiff-backed break room chair, her head in her hands, her mouth dry with exhaustion. She breathes carefully, through her nose, and ignores the harsh smell of soap and disinfectant. The cloying sweetness of the smell beneath that.
The florescent hospital lights overhead flicker once before they go dark.
“Oh, hell,” she says to the empty room, and a second later Molly Hooper’s pink-jeweled mobile starts singing, a tinny voice muffled by the thick felt of the bag at Molly’s feet. She reaches for it blindly, fingers fumbling through pockets.
You walked into the party, her mobile sings, like you were walking onto a yacht-
She finds the mobile and flicks it open. “You know you shouldn’t phone me at this number,” she says, mumbles around the sharp, sour taste in her mouth. “It isn’t secure.”
“Darling,” Jim coos, “you sound tired. Bit overworked, are we? Or are you simply pining in my absence?”
“I don’t pine,” she says, and she can hear his self-satisfied smile, oceans and satellites away. She scowls at the scuff marks on her trainers, at their white canvas turned grey in the half-light from the corridor outside. “Are you still in Tokyo, then?”
“Moscow. Ran into some old friends, decided to take a few days to catch up. I’ll be back in the loving, mildewed arms of Mother England by week’s end.”
She rubs a hand over her eyes; he’s run into trouble. “Anything I should know about?”
“It’s personal,” he says. “Not business.”
As if that makes her worry any less. “Fine,” she says. “I suppose your friends will know how to contact me if they want ransom money.”
“It wounds me, Mol, that you think so little of my social skills.”
She snorts. “And you can tell your Mr. Kozlov that I won’t take kindly to receiving your severed fingers in the post; if he wants to chop you into bits, he can dispose of them himself.”
“Oh, clever girl,” he murmurs, pleased that she’s surprised him. “Would you still love me, Molly, if I didn’t have any fingers?”
She turns to the nearest hospital security camera and makes a rude gesture; he chuckles, dry and low and deceptively pleasant. “You creeper,” she says, fighting a smile. “Stop spying on me.”
“I can’t. You’re riveting.” She hears the gentle, familiar sounds of his fingers tapping over a computer keyboard, and the camera bolted to the ceiling turns, capturing her from a new angle. “Though here’s a question: Since we went through all the trouble of crafting a new identity for you, why didn’t we give her a decent sense of style?”
She glares at the camera. “I like this jumper. It’s cheerful.”
“That had better be Molly bloody Hooper speaking. I may have to disown you, otherwise.”
“Not if I disown you first.” She slides down in her chair, hard plastic sharp against her shoulders. Her heels skid across the floor. “So. I decided to accept the Levent account.”
He groans. “Dull.”
“Not every job can be a rooftop assassination of a member of the House of Lords, Jim. We do have bills to pay.”
“It was a close range poison dart,” Jim says peevishly, “and you know it.”
“If you’re going to be a baby about it, I’ll run the job by myself. I should be able to manage it without any face-to-face.” She gives the camera a wide-eyed, openly manipulative look. “Though it is your favourite time of year in Istanbul.”
It’s always a risk, pushing him like this. As well as she knows him, Jim’s mind remains a remote, labyrinthine thing, broken in beautiful, often arbitrary ways, and she can never predict his reactions with any real certainty. She never knows what he’ll do when she pushes too far.
It may be one of her favourite things about him.
She waits in expectant silence until he sighs into her ear. The connection crackles. “I suppose I could make a small detour on my way home. If I must.”
“You’re a star. I’ll send you the details after my shift.” She reaches up and tugs at the limp length of her ponytail. Rubs the grit of exhaustion from her eyes. “I have to get back. How do I look?”
“Like the Angel of Death in pink knit.”
“Just your type, then.” She gives the security camera a little wave. “Say goodnight, dear.”
“Goodnight, dear,” Jim repeats, obedient, the edge of a smile in his voice. She’s about to snap her mobile shut when he says in a sweet, high sing-song, “You know, Molly darling, I’ve been gone for nearly a fortnight and you haven’t told me once that you miss me.”
She stills in her seat. Her fingers are clenched around the armrest; she relaxes them, deliberately. “I do miss you,” she says, her voice steady. “Of course I do.”
“You didn’t say it.”
“I didn’t know I needed to.” She closes her eyes. The camera is still fixed on her face. “Jim-”
“A man likes to hear these things. He likes to know he’s appreciated.” His voice lowers. “Do you appreciate me, Molly?”
“I’m not playing this game with you,” she says, through her teeth. “If you want to frighten someone-”
“But I don’t want someone, Molly my love. I want you.” He hums low into her ear, the sound intimate and undeniably physical, and she flinches.
It’s a small enough tell, but she knows he’s seen it. He laughs, and her fingers curl into fists.
“Seems you are playing my game after all,” he says, and the line goes dead.
The break room lights blink on a moment later; she sits alone under their glare.
11
For two weeks after Jim pushes her down the stairs, Molly flinches every time he touches her.
She tries not to, she really does, but when she closes her eyes she can still feel herself falling, can hear the sickening pop of her shoulder and the sharp, sudden collision of foot-worn wood and bone. She’d be happy to forget what he did; her body won’t let her.
“Stop it,” he hisses when she recoils, when her hand jerks away from his. She can see the poorly hidden hurt in his eyes. In the petulant twist of his mouth. “If you don’t stop, Molly, I’ll make you stop.”
“You stop,” she says, though she doesn’t mean it. (No one has ever asked Jim to change; it seems absurd to pretend that he could.) So she flinches and he fumes and two weeks after the doctors send her teetering home on a pair of crutches, Jim shoves her into the linen cupboard and locks the door with a stolen key.
“Now you can’t run away from me,” he says, his cheek pressed to the other side of the door. “You have to stay right here until I decide to let you go.” His voice breaks, and if he were any other boy, she’d think he was about to cry. She knows he isn’t.
Her leg aches and their mother is out and he could keep her locked away for hours, until the sun sets and their father comes home. The cupboard smells like dead air, like old soap and mouse droppings. Her eyes sting. “Jim,” she says, “you’re going to let me out of here.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Do you want to know why?”
There’s a silence. “Why?”
She takes a deep, dust-cold breath. “Because if you don’t, I’m never going to forget it.”
“Good,” he says, and she listens as his footsteps fade down the corridor. As his heels clip the edge of each stair.
Jim keeps her locked in the cupboard for seven hours, without food or water or room enough to ease the weight off her fractured leg. Molly has survived longer stretches in close, dark places, has delighted in long days spent hiding in crawl spaces and beneath stairs, but she has never been trapped before. It’s the helplessness that she’ll remember, not the pain, and when she slips a paralytic toxin into his orange juice four months later she’ll have to fight the satisfied tilt to her smile.
Jim unlocks the door after the seventh hour, opens it wide and reaches for her hands. Laces their fingers together, ready to bear her weight as she falls.
She lets him.
28
She likes being Molly Hooper.
Jim doesn’t believe her, but it’s true - Dr. Molly Hooper has a neat, rose-coloured little life, a job and a flat and a carton of mint chocolate chip in her freezer, a panacea for all the small disappointments of a day lived quietly, alone. Her parents left her behind for Australia nine years ago, after they retired (a chemist and a bank teller, both eager bird-watchers and vicious players of bridge) and she doesn’t make friends easily. She doesn’t really try.
Her flat is small, a third floor one-bedroom swallowed by overstuffed bookshelves, but she keeps it warm, well-lit and cozy. She doesn’t have much money to spend on impractical things, but she buys cheap paintings to hang on the white walls (flowers, mostly, and one of the sea) and a few pink-tasseled pillows for the sofa.
Molly likes pink. She never really knew that about herself, before.
She wears practical, often unflattering clothes, things Dr. Hooper might have owned for years, if she’d ever existed - soft jumpers and blouses with feminine touches at the collars and sleeves, shapeless skirts that fall unfashionably below the knee. It’s another way to hide, to disappear, and she finds herself grateful. Content.
Jim Moriarty looks almost comically out of place in Molly Hooper’s cluttered little flat, like a character from a play who’s wandered onto the wrong stage. The crisp lines of his bespoke suits seem alien in her soft-hued, secondhand world, and it bothers them both, though they don’t say it aloud. Instead they sit close when he visits, heads bowed together over contracts and ledgers and long rolls of stolen blueprints, elbows sharp against the other’s side. They eat takeaway dinners from soggy cartons and wipe their mouths with each other’s sleeves.
Jim lives everywhere, and nowhere. He sleeps in hotels, in elegant, impersonal rooms all over the city, or sprawled across her sagging sofa, his hands curled under his chin like a boy’s. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, and she wakes in the middle of the night to see him sitting on the edge of her bed, silently watching the shift of shadows across the bedroom wall.
He comes and goes with little warning, though she’s never given him a key. He’d probably be insulted if she did.
On the morning of their grandmother’s funeral he appears unannounced, leaning against the frame of her bedroom door with his hands in his pockets. She’s half-dressed, the contents of her wardrobe scattered across the bed and the floor in sad, desultory piles.
“Please,” he says, “please tell me this means we’re buying you new clothes.”
“Black shirt,” she says, rummaging through the debris, the strap of her bra slipping over her shoulder. “I can’t find one.”
“Maybe you don’t own one.”
She looks up at him, frowning. “Don’t be stupid. Everyone owns a black shirt.” She tosses a pile of clothes at his feet. “Help me look. My train leaves in forty minutes.”
He steps over the clothes and sits at the end of her bed. “You’re going to miss it.”
“I’m not.” She pulls a white blouse from a twisted wire hanger and holds it up to her chest, the hem brushing the waistband of her straight black skirt. “What about this?”
“Absolutely not. You’ll look like a waitress.”
“As long as I look like someone who isn’t naked, I really don’t care.” She drops the shirt to the floor and collapses beside him on the bed, her head falling back against the duvet. He gives her knee an absent-minded pat, and she sighs. “I didn’t think I’d see you today,” she says.
“I forgot. I was going to try to drag you to lunch at Claridge’s.”
Jim’s a very good liar; if she hadn’t spent most of her life listening to him lie to everyone they’ve ever met, she’d probably never notice when he did it to her. She nudges his leg with a nylon-covered foot. “You can still come, you know. If you want to.”
“I don’t,” he says. “Why do you?”
She sits up beside him, her arms wrapped around her bare stomach, her shoulders rolled forward. “I don’t know. One of us should be there.”
“Why? To keep up appearances? To seem normal?”
“Maybe, yeah.” She shrugs, annoyed. “People might remember us. They might notice if we’re not there.”
“All her friends are dead, Molly. Dead or mindless, drooling meat bags long past their use by date. Don’t pretend this is about security.”
“I’m not pretending anything. I’m just trying to get dressed.” She stands, reaching for the nearest pile of clothes. “I have a purple shirt. Purple is sort of like black, isn’t it?”
“Molly,” he says, and she stops. Folds her arms across her chest and shivers a little, the chill in the room touching her bare skin for the first time.
Gran had slipped into senility in the last years of her life, become a mindless, drooling meat bag in a hospital built to look like a home. Molly never visited her there; she isn’t her granddaughter anymore. All records of her old life have been destroyed with the Moriartys’ usual ruthless precision, and if in a rare moment of lucidity Gran had asked for her grandchildren, had called for Jim or for Molly, a kind nurse with calloused hands would have pressed her shoulder and said no dear, you remember - your Lizzie never had little ones. You know that.
Or maybe she never thought of them at all. Maybe she wanted to forget.
“Oh, fine,” Jim says, standing and stripping off his suit coat. “Anything to get that sickeningly maudlin expression off your face.” His shirt is ash grey silk and probably cost as much as Molly Hooper earns in a month; he unbuttons it with an almost brutal efficiency, his mouth a thin line.
“Jim-”
He unbuttons the cuffs and slides the shirt off his shoulders. “Shut up. You’re going to miss your train.” He slips her arms through the sleeves, steps close and works the buttons, starting at her waist. “If you stain this, you’re buying me two to replace it.”
She grins up at him. “Literally giving me the shirt off your back. You big softie.”
He gives the skin over her collarbone a sharp pinch, and she squeaks, slapping his hand away. He stands back, watching as she buttons the shirt to her throat. When she’s done, he reaches over and slips the top button from its hole with a flick of his thumb. “The fit isn’t ideal, but it’ll do. I assume you’ve a cardigan or something equally absurd to wear over it?”
The muted silk is still warm from his skin, ever-so-slightly damp with sweat beneath the arms and at the back of her neck. It smells like his soap. “I have a cardigan; I think it landed behind the chair,” she says, and he rolls his eyes.
“Of course it did.” He ducks behind the ratty old armchair in the corner, and she watches the lean line of his back, the pale, sunless skin of his naked shoulders. He’d freckled when they were small, freckled and burned red even under cloudy skies - they both had. The lobster twins, Gran had called them, and threatened to throw them into a pot.
Jim drapes the cardigan over her shoulders. “You’re getting sentimental in your old age. Stop it.”
“It’s not sentiment.” Molly looks away, twisting her arms to slip them into the sleeves of the cardigan. “It couldn’t have been easy, taking us in, but she did. She loved us.”
“There’s a difference between love and obligation,” he says, and she turns back to him, surprised. He gives her a wry smile. “Underestimating me again, Mol?”
“I don’t,” she begins, but he steps in close again, his hands easing over her waist, under the dark wool of the cardigan, and his smile turns hard.
“You forget, dearest, how much you look like our father. Do you really think she ever looked at you without seeing him? Ever saw your face without thinking of the man who murdered her daughter?”
Her fingers curl against his chest, ready to push away. “He didn’t.”
“Gran thought he did. Forensics ruled it a suicide, but you know what he was capable of. She was the centre of his world, and she ruined him.” Cool fingers cup her cheek and he presses a kiss to her temple, hard enough that she can feel the edge of his teeth behind his lips. “I know more about love than you think,” he says, and she’s opening her mouth to answer (to breathe) when the front door buzzes.
There’s a silence.
“Taxi,” she says softly. “To take me to the station.” She pulls away, slowly, and he lets her. His arms fall to his sides. “Thank you for the shirt.”
He laughs and turns away, his hands slipping into his pockets. “Oh, anytime.”
“I think you have a spare in the wardrobe if you-” The door buzzes again, and she bites her lip. “I really have to go.”
“Of course.” He swings his suit jacket carelessly over his bare shoulder. “Give the old cow my regards. Tell her I think of her every time I cheat a pensioner out of her life savings.”
She takes a deep breath. “Jim-”
“Don’t.” He reaches out and gently straightens the collar of her shirt with one hand. “You’ll miss your train.”
The cabbie leans on the buzzer; she stumbles into her shoes, runs into the sitting room and scoops up her handbag, coat and keys. Jim watches from her bedroom door, his shoulder against the frame. She pauses at the front door and looks back at him, at the dark set of his eyes. His slowly fading smile.
And he calls me sentimental, she thinks as the door closes behind her.
32
She’s wrist-deep in a corpse when the posh boy from the pool walks into the Barts mortuary, fixes her with that cool, inescapable stare and says, “Ah. Fresh meat.”
She blinks at him, then down at the grey-faced greengrocer (sixty-two, Asian descent, suspected intracerebral hemorrhage) on her table. She looks back up, the greengrocer’s left lung still in her hands. “Sorry?”
“You’re new here. Started less than a week ago, judging by the laminate on your security badge.” He walks up to the table, slipping off his black leather gloves and tucking them into the pocket of his coat. “I need six samples of human cardiovascular tissue from six male donors over the age of forty-five. Recent deaths would be best, of course.”
They both look down at the open body cavity between them. The greengrocer’s lung drips a little onto the table.
“I can wait,” he says, and gives her a stiff, practiced smile. She thinks it’s meant to be charming; it isn’t.
He’s much the same now as he was nineteen years ago; time has deepened his voice and lent his once awkward height an enviable, almost calculated grace, but when she meets his pale eyes she still sees the boy he was, his fierce dissatisfaction and his shoes that pinch. She wonders what changes he’d see in her, if any; if he’d remembered her, she might’ve asked.
“You’re not a doctor,” she manages instead, and he raises an eyebrow.
“Obviously.”
“Right,” she says. “Obviously.” She turns away, carefully setting the greengrocer’s lung on her scale. She takes a breath. “I suppose you must be Sherlock Holmes, then,” she says, over her shoulder.
His smile turns thin. “Part of the Barts training seminar now, am I? I’m flattered.”
She laughs, and it escapes in an awful, bird-like titter that’s as self-conscious as it is inane. Embarrassment coils like a snake in her stomach, and she feels her face flush red. She looks down, stripping off her medical gloves with trembling fingers. “Right. So. You need tissue samples?”
He nods, distracted; the faint bruising between the greengrocer’s toes has caught his attention. “Six of them, yes. As soon as possible.”
She folds her hands in front of her and tries to look steady. Professional. “They told me I could give you whatever you need so long as you fill in the paperwork and don’t take anything out of the building.”
He looks up from the corpse’s feet, his strange, false smile back in place. “Dr. Hooper.”
“Molly.”
“Molly. What a lovely name.” He slips around the autopsy table, easing closer until she has to tilt back her head to meet his eyes. His smile widens. “Molly, do you know what I do?”
She nods, mesmerised. “They said you work with the police. As a sort of consultant.”
“I help them catch criminals. Murderers, mostly.” His gaze drops to her mouth, a blatant flirtation. “Would you like to help me, Molly?”
“I-” She hesitates. “I suppose I could fill in the forms myself, to ease things along.”
His head tilts to one side. “And?”
“And I suppose, as long as no one sees you leave-”
He turns away, and in two long steps he’s placed the autopsy table between them again. “I knew you’d understand. I’ll be upstairs in my lab, when the samples are ready.” He turns to go, but a moment later he pivots back, pointing to the greengrocer’s toes. “I don’t suppose you’ve noticed-”
“The injection site?” She laughs again, awkwardly. “I’d have to be pretty thick to miss it, wouldn’t I?”
He watches her, his pale face eerily expressionless. “Self-administered?”
She frowns; if this is his idea of a test, it’s not a very good one. “Of course not. Whoever injected him gripped his foot to hold him still. You saw the bruise pattern.”
“Yes,” he says slowly. “I did.” Then he looks at her - really looks, with a relentless, scalpel-sharp precision meant to cut her open and expose the delicate systems inside. He reads her habits in the sunless skin of her face and hands, hears the quiet of her flat in the carefully mended sleeves of her secondhand jumper. He sees her and dissects her, piece by piece and part by part, observation turning to conclusion ending in summation. She watches him, the taste of anticipation sharp at the back of her throat, and waits to be revealed for what she is. To be caught.
He looks away, and the corner of his mouth ticks upward in something like genuine pleasure. “Well done, Dr. Hooper. You may be more useful than I anticipated.” He turns and strides to the door. “Text when you’ve prepared the samples,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’m just upstairs.” Then the door swings closed behind him, and he’s gone.
“But-” She bites her lip. But I’ve an open body on the table. But I don’t know your number. But you were supposed to see.
The greengrocer lies open beside her, poisoned with the prick of a needle, murdered by his own wife. Or son, possibly - definitely someone he knew. Someone he trusted. She gives his ankle a sympathetic pat. “Families,” she sighs. “Don’t get me started.”
32
A month later Molly’s in the bath when Jim walks in and slumps bonelessly against the side of the tub. His head tips back to meet hers, crown to crown on the water-warmed porcelain. “Rachel Howells is in police custody,” he says. “They found Brunton’s body.”
She slides lower into the water, and her knees rise above the surface like pale, pruning mountains rising from the sea. Her hair curls in the heat. “Really.”
“Yes,” he says, lingering on the sibilant. “Really.”
She purses her lips, reluctant to ask the obvious question; Howells had been Jim’s account, not hers, and they’ve never lost a client to police interference before. She tries to think of a less incendiary way to say So how’d you muck it up, then? and fails. “I suppose they found the money as well?”
Jim toes off one of his shoes and kicks it at the bathroom wall. It hits with an unsatisfyingly muffled thump. “Musgrave hired a private detective - some amateur with an absurd name and a website. He found the body, the money, and Howells and handed them all over to the Yard wrapped in a neat little bow.” He looks over his shoulder and meets her eyes, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “I didn’t make any mistakes, Molly. It was perfect.”
Obviously not, Molly thinks. Her father always told her that there was no such thing as a perfect crime - only a very, very good one. Both Molly and Jim are excellent criminals; the thought that Sherlock Holmes might be better-
“Fascinating,” she says, almost to herself. “I wonder how he did it.”
Jim rips off his other shoe and chucks it into the sink. “Maybe I’ll ask him,” he says, “just before I split him open like a grape.”
Molly sinks in the water until a soap bubble brushes her chin. “I think you mean a melon.”
“What?”
“People don’t split grapes, they split melons. At least, I think they do.” She frowns. “Maybe I’m thinking of a coconut.”
He twists around until they’re face to face, his elbows resting on the edge of the bath as he looks down at her. Bath water seeps into the dark sleeves of his suit. “You don’t want me to kill him.”
“I want you to wait.” She lifts one foot from the water and curls her toes around the cool steel of the tap. “He might make things interesting. For a while.”
A slow grin chases the last of the anger from his eyes, replacing it with something glittering and cold. “Am I boring you, little mouse?”
“Not yet,” she says. She shrugs, and soapy water surges around her shoulders. “I’ll tell you if you are.”
For a long, perilous moment he says nothing at all, his face unreadable. Then he laughs. Bends down and kisses the damp hair just over her ear. “Hush, you, or I’ll split you like a coconut.”
She flicks water at his tie. “Get out of my bathroom, pervert. I’m naked.”
His eyes go ridiculously wide. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” He jumps up onto his feet, socks slipping a little on the title, and does a slow moonwalk back to the open door. “What do you think? Thai or pizza?”
“Thai, definitely.”
“Pizza it is.” He spins out the door, half-closing it behind him before he peeks around again, his expression suddenly thoughtful. “He would have to be unusual, wouldn’t he? To beat us.”
“Unusual or unlucky," she says. “Might be fun to find out which.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine. The grape-splitting is postponed.” He points a well-manicured finger at her. “Just for the moment, mind you. We’re definitely going to kill him; I’m simply saving it for a day when I need a bit of cheering up.”
She shakes her head, hair clinging damply to her neck. “You know what they say about comfort-killing, Jim. You should really find more constructive ways to cope with your emotions.”
“Like pizza?”
“With mushrooms, I think. And onions.” She ducks briefly beneath the water and then rises again, wiping her eyes. “Now bugger off. I have to wash my hair.”
He smirks. “I like it better dirty.”
“I like you better on the other side of the door.”
“Well,” he drawls, “I think we both know that’s not true.” The door closes behind him with a neat click, and she shivers.
The water’s gone cold.
42
A decade later, John Watson meets her eyes over a green kitchen table and says, “You know, there’s something I’ve always wondered.”
Molly takes a sip from her still-steaming mug; John’s sits in front of him, untouched. A little rude, she thinks - it is difficult to drink tea with one’s hands bound to a chair, but he could manage it if he tried. “You can ask me anything you like,” she says. “It’ll help pass the time.”
The muscles of his cheek twitch - anger, probably. Maybe fear. “You could’ve killed Sherlock years ago, before he ever heard the name Moriarty. Why didn’t you?”
She pauses, mug at her lips. Sets it down again and folds her hands in front of her, on the wood. “Because I liked him,” she says, “and I didn’t want him to die.”
John stares at her. “And now?”
“Now it’s just part of the game,” she says, and drops a straw into his mug of tea.
++
chapter four
Characters: Molly Hooper, Jim Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, others. Multiple pairings.
Rating: Adult.
Warnings: Language, disturbing themes, some subtextual incest, and gratuitous cadavers.
Betas: The marvelous earlgreytea68, tricksterquinn, eponymous_rose, and lalaithlockhart.
Spoilers: All three aired episodes of the BBC's Sherlock and bits and pieces of the original stories.
Summary: "You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you - except you’re just a man. And they’re so much more than that." Jefferson Hope, A Study in Pink
chapter one chapter two
++
When they are children, Moriarty is a game. A story they tell only to each other, in whispers. In the narrowing spaces between them.
The Moriartys aren’t like other people, Jim says, murmuring in her ear as they slip through the crowded corridors of their Brighton comprehensive. The Moriartys aren’t like anyone, and there’s no one like them. Not anywhere, not in the whole wide world.
The Moriartys are clever, Molly says as she holds a tea towel full of ice to the darkening bruise high on Jim’s cheek. People call them freaks, but only because they’re frightened. Because deep in the lizard parts of their little, limited minds they know what the Moriartys can do.
The Moriartys don’t need anyone but each other, Jim says, her fingers pinched between his as they watch the machine lower Carl’s casket into open ground. The world could burn around them, and they wouldn’t care.
Not so long as they got to light the first fire, she says, and he hides his smile in the long swing of her hair.
27
It’s the tenth hour of a twelve-hour shift, and Molly slumps forward in the stiff-backed break room chair, her head in her hands, her mouth dry with exhaustion. She breathes carefully, through her nose, and ignores the harsh smell of soap and disinfectant. The cloying sweetness of the smell beneath that.
The florescent hospital lights overhead flicker once before they go dark.
“Oh, hell,” she says to the empty room, and a second later Molly Hooper’s pink-jeweled mobile starts singing, a tinny voice muffled by the thick felt of the bag at Molly’s feet. She reaches for it blindly, fingers fumbling through pockets.
You walked into the party, her mobile sings, like you were walking onto a yacht-
She finds the mobile and flicks it open. “You know you shouldn’t phone me at this number,” she says, mumbles around the sharp, sour taste in her mouth. “It isn’t secure.”
“Darling,” Jim coos, “you sound tired. Bit overworked, are we? Or are you simply pining in my absence?”
“I don’t pine,” she says, and she can hear his self-satisfied smile, oceans and satellites away. She scowls at the scuff marks on her trainers, at their white canvas turned grey in the half-light from the corridor outside. “Are you still in Tokyo, then?”
“Moscow. Ran into some old friends, decided to take a few days to catch up. I’ll be back in the loving, mildewed arms of Mother England by week’s end.”
She rubs a hand over her eyes; he’s run into trouble. “Anything I should know about?”
“It’s personal,” he says. “Not business.”
As if that makes her worry any less. “Fine,” she says. “I suppose your friends will know how to contact me if they want ransom money.”
“It wounds me, Mol, that you think so little of my social skills.”
She snorts. “And you can tell your Mr. Kozlov that I won’t take kindly to receiving your severed fingers in the post; if he wants to chop you into bits, he can dispose of them himself.”
“Oh, clever girl,” he murmurs, pleased that she’s surprised him. “Would you still love me, Molly, if I didn’t have any fingers?”
She turns to the nearest hospital security camera and makes a rude gesture; he chuckles, dry and low and deceptively pleasant. “You creeper,” she says, fighting a smile. “Stop spying on me.”
“I can’t. You’re riveting.” She hears the gentle, familiar sounds of his fingers tapping over a computer keyboard, and the camera bolted to the ceiling turns, capturing her from a new angle. “Though here’s a question: Since we went through all the trouble of crafting a new identity for you, why didn’t we give her a decent sense of style?”
She glares at the camera. “I like this jumper. It’s cheerful.”
“That had better be Molly bloody Hooper speaking. I may have to disown you, otherwise.”
“Not if I disown you first.” She slides down in her chair, hard plastic sharp against her shoulders. Her heels skid across the floor. “So. I decided to accept the Levent account.”
He groans. “Dull.”
“Not every job can be a rooftop assassination of a member of the House of Lords, Jim. We do have bills to pay.”
“It was a close range poison dart,” Jim says peevishly, “and you know it.”
“If you’re going to be a baby about it, I’ll run the job by myself. I should be able to manage it without any face-to-face.” She gives the camera a wide-eyed, openly manipulative look. “Though it is your favourite time of year in Istanbul.”
It’s always a risk, pushing him like this. As well as she knows him, Jim’s mind remains a remote, labyrinthine thing, broken in beautiful, often arbitrary ways, and she can never predict his reactions with any real certainty. She never knows what he’ll do when she pushes too far.
It may be one of her favourite things about him.
She waits in expectant silence until he sighs into her ear. The connection crackles. “I suppose I could make a small detour on my way home. If I must.”
“You’re a star. I’ll send you the details after my shift.” She reaches up and tugs at the limp length of her ponytail. Rubs the grit of exhaustion from her eyes. “I have to get back. How do I look?”
“Like the Angel of Death in pink knit.”
“Just your type, then.” She gives the security camera a little wave. “Say goodnight, dear.”
“Goodnight, dear,” Jim repeats, obedient, the edge of a smile in his voice. She’s about to snap her mobile shut when he says in a sweet, high sing-song, “You know, Molly darling, I’ve been gone for nearly a fortnight and you haven’t told me once that you miss me.”
She stills in her seat. Her fingers are clenched around the armrest; she relaxes them, deliberately. “I do miss you,” she says, her voice steady. “Of course I do.”
“You didn’t say it.”
“I didn’t know I needed to.” She closes her eyes. The camera is still fixed on her face. “Jim-”
“A man likes to hear these things. He likes to know he’s appreciated.” His voice lowers. “Do you appreciate me, Molly?”
“I’m not playing this game with you,” she says, through her teeth. “If you want to frighten someone-”
“But I don’t want someone, Molly my love. I want you.” He hums low into her ear, the sound intimate and undeniably physical, and she flinches.
It’s a small enough tell, but she knows he’s seen it. He laughs, and her fingers curl into fists.
“Seems you are playing my game after all,” he says, and the line goes dead.
The break room lights blink on a moment later; she sits alone under their glare.
11
For two weeks after Jim pushes her down the stairs, Molly flinches every time he touches her.
She tries not to, she really does, but when she closes her eyes she can still feel herself falling, can hear the sickening pop of her shoulder and the sharp, sudden collision of foot-worn wood and bone. She’d be happy to forget what he did; her body won’t let her.
“Stop it,” he hisses when she recoils, when her hand jerks away from his. She can see the poorly hidden hurt in his eyes. In the petulant twist of his mouth. “If you don’t stop, Molly, I’ll make you stop.”
“You stop,” she says, though she doesn’t mean it. (No one has ever asked Jim to change; it seems absurd to pretend that he could.) So she flinches and he fumes and two weeks after the doctors send her teetering home on a pair of crutches, Jim shoves her into the linen cupboard and locks the door with a stolen key.
“Now you can’t run away from me,” he says, his cheek pressed to the other side of the door. “You have to stay right here until I decide to let you go.” His voice breaks, and if he were any other boy, she’d think he was about to cry. She knows he isn’t.
Her leg aches and their mother is out and he could keep her locked away for hours, until the sun sets and their father comes home. The cupboard smells like dead air, like old soap and mouse droppings. Her eyes sting. “Jim,” she says, “you’re going to let me out of here.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Do you want to know why?”
There’s a silence. “Why?”
She takes a deep, dust-cold breath. “Because if you don’t, I’m never going to forget it.”
“Good,” he says, and she listens as his footsteps fade down the corridor. As his heels clip the edge of each stair.
Jim keeps her locked in the cupboard for seven hours, without food or water or room enough to ease the weight off her fractured leg. Molly has survived longer stretches in close, dark places, has delighted in long days spent hiding in crawl spaces and beneath stairs, but she has never been trapped before. It’s the helplessness that she’ll remember, not the pain, and when she slips a paralytic toxin into his orange juice four months later she’ll have to fight the satisfied tilt to her smile.
Jim unlocks the door after the seventh hour, opens it wide and reaches for her hands. Laces their fingers together, ready to bear her weight as she falls.
She lets him.
28
She likes being Molly Hooper.
Jim doesn’t believe her, but it’s true - Dr. Molly Hooper has a neat, rose-coloured little life, a job and a flat and a carton of mint chocolate chip in her freezer, a panacea for all the small disappointments of a day lived quietly, alone. Her parents left her behind for Australia nine years ago, after they retired (a chemist and a bank teller, both eager bird-watchers and vicious players of bridge) and she doesn’t make friends easily. She doesn’t really try.
Her flat is small, a third floor one-bedroom swallowed by overstuffed bookshelves, but she keeps it warm, well-lit and cozy. She doesn’t have much money to spend on impractical things, but she buys cheap paintings to hang on the white walls (flowers, mostly, and one of the sea) and a few pink-tasseled pillows for the sofa.
Molly likes pink. She never really knew that about herself, before.
She wears practical, often unflattering clothes, things Dr. Hooper might have owned for years, if she’d ever existed - soft jumpers and blouses with feminine touches at the collars and sleeves, shapeless skirts that fall unfashionably below the knee. It’s another way to hide, to disappear, and she finds herself grateful. Content.
Jim Moriarty looks almost comically out of place in Molly Hooper’s cluttered little flat, like a character from a play who’s wandered onto the wrong stage. The crisp lines of his bespoke suits seem alien in her soft-hued, secondhand world, and it bothers them both, though they don’t say it aloud. Instead they sit close when he visits, heads bowed together over contracts and ledgers and long rolls of stolen blueprints, elbows sharp against the other’s side. They eat takeaway dinners from soggy cartons and wipe their mouths with each other’s sleeves.
Jim lives everywhere, and nowhere. He sleeps in hotels, in elegant, impersonal rooms all over the city, or sprawled across her sagging sofa, his hands curled under his chin like a boy’s. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, and she wakes in the middle of the night to see him sitting on the edge of her bed, silently watching the shift of shadows across the bedroom wall.
He comes and goes with little warning, though she’s never given him a key. He’d probably be insulted if she did.
On the morning of their grandmother’s funeral he appears unannounced, leaning against the frame of her bedroom door with his hands in his pockets. She’s half-dressed, the contents of her wardrobe scattered across the bed and the floor in sad, desultory piles.
“Please,” he says, “please tell me this means we’re buying you new clothes.”
“Black shirt,” she says, rummaging through the debris, the strap of her bra slipping over her shoulder. “I can’t find one.”
“Maybe you don’t own one.”
She looks up at him, frowning. “Don’t be stupid. Everyone owns a black shirt.” She tosses a pile of clothes at his feet. “Help me look. My train leaves in forty minutes.”
He steps over the clothes and sits at the end of her bed. “You’re going to miss it.”
“I’m not.” She pulls a white blouse from a twisted wire hanger and holds it up to her chest, the hem brushing the waistband of her straight black skirt. “What about this?”
“Absolutely not. You’ll look like a waitress.”
“As long as I look like someone who isn’t naked, I really don’t care.” She drops the shirt to the floor and collapses beside him on the bed, her head falling back against the duvet. He gives her knee an absent-minded pat, and she sighs. “I didn’t think I’d see you today,” she says.
“I forgot. I was going to try to drag you to lunch at Claridge’s.”
Jim’s a very good liar; if she hadn’t spent most of her life listening to him lie to everyone they’ve ever met, she’d probably never notice when he did it to her. She nudges his leg with a nylon-covered foot. “You can still come, you know. If you want to.”
“I don’t,” he says. “Why do you?”
She sits up beside him, her arms wrapped around her bare stomach, her shoulders rolled forward. “I don’t know. One of us should be there.”
“Why? To keep up appearances? To seem normal?”
“Maybe, yeah.” She shrugs, annoyed. “People might remember us. They might notice if we’re not there.”
“All her friends are dead, Molly. Dead or mindless, drooling meat bags long past their use by date. Don’t pretend this is about security.”
“I’m not pretending anything. I’m just trying to get dressed.” She stands, reaching for the nearest pile of clothes. “I have a purple shirt. Purple is sort of like black, isn’t it?”
“Molly,” he says, and she stops. Folds her arms across her chest and shivers a little, the chill in the room touching her bare skin for the first time.
Gran had slipped into senility in the last years of her life, become a mindless, drooling meat bag in a hospital built to look like a home. Molly never visited her there; she isn’t her granddaughter anymore. All records of her old life have been destroyed with the Moriartys’ usual ruthless precision, and if in a rare moment of lucidity Gran had asked for her grandchildren, had called for Jim or for Molly, a kind nurse with calloused hands would have pressed her shoulder and said no dear, you remember - your Lizzie never had little ones. You know that.
Or maybe she never thought of them at all. Maybe she wanted to forget.
“Oh, fine,” Jim says, standing and stripping off his suit coat. “Anything to get that sickeningly maudlin expression off your face.” His shirt is ash grey silk and probably cost as much as Molly Hooper earns in a month; he unbuttons it with an almost brutal efficiency, his mouth a thin line.
“Jim-”
He unbuttons the cuffs and slides the shirt off his shoulders. “Shut up. You’re going to miss your train.” He slips her arms through the sleeves, steps close and works the buttons, starting at her waist. “If you stain this, you’re buying me two to replace it.”
She grins up at him. “Literally giving me the shirt off your back. You big softie.”
He gives the skin over her collarbone a sharp pinch, and she squeaks, slapping his hand away. He stands back, watching as she buttons the shirt to her throat. When she’s done, he reaches over and slips the top button from its hole with a flick of his thumb. “The fit isn’t ideal, but it’ll do. I assume you’ve a cardigan or something equally absurd to wear over it?”
The muted silk is still warm from his skin, ever-so-slightly damp with sweat beneath the arms and at the back of her neck. It smells like his soap. “I have a cardigan; I think it landed behind the chair,” she says, and he rolls his eyes.
“Of course it did.” He ducks behind the ratty old armchair in the corner, and she watches the lean line of his back, the pale, sunless skin of his naked shoulders. He’d freckled when they were small, freckled and burned red even under cloudy skies - they both had. The lobster twins, Gran had called them, and threatened to throw them into a pot.
Jim drapes the cardigan over her shoulders. “You’re getting sentimental in your old age. Stop it.”
“It’s not sentiment.” Molly looks away, twisting her arms to slip them into the sleeves of the cardigan. “It couldn’t have been easy, taking us in, but she did. She loved us.”
“There’s a difference between love and obligation,” he says, and she turns back to him, surprised. He gives her a wry smile. “Underestimating me again, Mol?”
“I don’t,” she begins, but he steps in close again, his hands easing over her waist, under the dark wool of the cardigan, and his smile turns hard.
“You forget, dearest, how much you look like our father. Do you really think she ever looked at you without seeing him? Ever saw your face without thinking of the man who murdered her daughter?”
Her fingers curl against his chest, ready to push away. “He didn’t.”
“Gran thought he did. Forensics ruled it a suicide, but you know what he was capable of. She was the centre of his world, and she ruined him.” Cool fingers cup her cheek and he presses a kiss to her temple, hard enough that she can feel the edge of his teeth behind his lips. “I know more about love than you think,” he says, and she’s opening her mouth to answer (to breathe) when the front door buzzes.
There’s a silence.
“Taxi,” she says softly. “To take me to the station.” She pulls away, slowly, and he lets her. His arms fall to his sides. “Thank you for the shirt.”
He laughs and turns away, his hands slipping into his pockets. “Oh, anytime.”
“I think you have a spare in the wardrobe if you-” The door buzzes again, and she bites her lip. “I really have to go.”
“Of course.” He swings his suit jacket carelessly over his bare shoulder. “Give the old cow my regards. Tell her I think of her every time I cheat a pensioner out of her life savings.”
She takes a deep breath. “Jim-”
“Don’t.” He reaches out and gently straightens the collar of her shirt with one hand. “You’ll miss your train.”
The cabbie leans on the buzzer; she stumbles into her shoes, runs into the sitting room and scoops up her handbag, coat and keys. Jim watches from her bedroom door, his shoulder against the frame. She pauses at the front door and looks back at him, at the dark set of his eyes. His slowly fading smile.
And he calls me sentimental, she thinks as the door closes behind her.
32
She’s wrist-deep in a corpse when the posh boy from the pool walks into the Barts mortuary, fixes her with that cool, inescapable stare and says, “Ah. Fresh meat.”
She blinks at him, then down at the grey-faced greengrocer (sixty-two, Asian descent, suspected intracerebral hemorrhage) on her table. She looks back up, the greengrocer’s left lung still in her hands. “Sorry?”
“You’re new here. Started less than a week ago, judging by the laminate on your security badge.” He walks up to the table, slipping off his black leather gloves and tucking them into the pocket of his coat. “I need six samples of human cardiovascular tissue from six male donors over the age of forty-five. Recent deaths would be best, of course.”
They both look down at the open body cavity between them. The greengrocer’s lung drips a little onto the table.
“I can wait,” he says, and gives her a stiff, practiced smile. She thinks it’s meant to be charming; it isn’t.
He’s much the same now as he was nineteen years ago; time has deepened his voice and lent his once awkward height an enviable, almost calculated grace, but when she meets his pale eyes she still sees the boy he was, his fierce dissatisfaction and his shoes that pinch. She wonders what changes he’d see in her, if any; if he’d remembered her, she might’ve asked.
“You’re not a doctor,” she manages instead, and he raises an eyebrow.
“Obviously.”
“Right,” she says. “Obviously.” She turns away, carefully setting the greengrocer’s lung on her scale. She takes a breath. “I suppose you must be Sherlock Holmes, then,” she says, over her shoulder.
His smile turns thin. “Part of the Barts training seminar now, am I? I’m flattered.”
She laughs, and it escapes in an awful, bird-like titter that’s as self-conscious as it is inane. Embarrassment coils like a snake in her stomach, and she feels her face flush red. She looks down, stripping off her medical gloves with trembling fingers. “Right. So. You need tissue samples?”
He nods, distracted; the faint bruising between the greengrocer’s toes has caught his attention. “Six of them, yes. As soon as possible.”
She folds her hands in front of her and tries to look steady. Professional. “They told me I could give you whatever you need so long as you fill in the paperwork and don’t take anything out of the building.”
He looks up from the corpse’s feet, his strange, false smile back in place. “Dr. Hooper.”
“Molly.”
“Molly. What a lovely name.” He slips around the autopsy table, easing closer until she has to tilt back her head to meet his eyes. His smile widens. “Molly, do you know what I do?”
She nods, mesmerised. “They said you work with the police. As a sort of consultant.”
“I help them catch criminals. Murderers, mostly.” His gaze drops to her mouth, a blatant flirtation. “Would you like to help me, Molly?”
“I-” She hesitates. “I suppose I could fill in the forms myself, to ease things along.”
His head tilts to one side. “And?”
“And I suppose, as long as no one sees you leave-”
He turns away, and in two long steps he’s placed the autopsy table between them again. “I knew you’d understand. I’ll be upstairs in my lab, when the samples are ready.” He turns to go, but a moment later he pivots back, pointing to the greengrocer’s toes. “I don’t suppose you’ve noticed-”
“The injection site?” She laughs again, awkwardly. “I’d have to be pretty thick to miss it, wouldn’t I?”
He watches her, his pale face eerily expressionless. “Self-administered?”
She frowns; if this is his idea of a test, it’s not a very good one. “Of course not. Whoever injected him gripped his foot to hold him still. You saw the bruise pattern.”
“Yes,” he says slowly. “I did.” Then he looks at her - really looks, with a relentless, scalpel-sharp precision meant to cut her open and expose the delicate systems inside. He reads her habits in the sunless skin of her face and hands, hears the quiet of her flat in the carefully mended sleeves of her secondhand jumper. He sees her and dissects her, piece by piece and part by part, observation turning to conclusion ending in summation. She watches him, the taste of anticipation sharp at the back of her throat, and waits to be revealed for what she is. To be caught.
He looks away, and the corner of his mouth ticks upward in something like genuine pleasure. “Well done, Dr. Hooper. You may be more useful than I anticipated.” He turns and strides to the door. “Text when you’ve prepared the samples,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’m just upstairs.” Then the door swings closed behind him, and he’s gone.
“But-” She bites her lip. But I’ve an open body on the table. But I don’t know your number. But you were supposed to see.
The greengrocer lies open beside her, poisoned with the prick of a needle, murdered by his own wife. Or son, possibly - definitely someone he knew. Someone he trusted. She gives his ankle a sympathetic pat. “Families,” she sighs. “Don’t get me started.”
32
A month later Molly’s in the bath when Jim walks in and slumps bonelessly against the side of the tub. His head tips back to meet hers, crown to crown on the water-warmed porcelain. “Rachel Howells is in police custody,” he says. “They found Brunton’s body.”
She slides lower into the water, and her knees rise above the surface like pale, pruning mountains rising from the sea. Her hair curls in the heat. “Really.”
“Yes,” he says, lingering on the sibilant. “Really.”
She purses her lips, reluctant to ask the obvious question; Howells had been Jim’s account, not hers, and they’ve never lost a client to police interference before. She tries to think of a less incendiary way to say So how’d you muck it up, then? and fails. “I suppose they found the money as well?”
Jim toes off one of his shoes and kicks it at the bathroom wall. It hits with an unsatisfyingly muffled thump. “Musgrave hired a private detective - some amateur with an absurd name and a website. He found the body, the money, and Howells and handed them all over to the Yard wrapped in a neat little bow.” He looks over his shoulder and meets her eyes, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “I didn’t make any mistakes, Molly. It was perfect.”
Obviously not, Molly thinks. Her father always told her that there was no such thing as a perfect crime - only a very, very good one. Both Molly and Jim are excellent criminals; the thought that Sherlock Holmes might be better-
“Fascinating,” she says, almost to herself. “I wonder how he did it.”
Jim rips off his other shoe and chucks it into the sink. “Maybe I’ll ask him,” he says, “just before I split him open like a grape.”
Molly sinks in the water until a soap bubble brushes her chin. “I think you mean a melon.”
“What?”
“People don’t split grapes, they split melons. At least, I think they do.” She frowns. “Maybe I’m thinking of a coconut.”
He twists around until they’re face to face, his elbows resting on the edge of the bath as he looks down at her. Bath water seeps into the dark sleeves of his suit. “You don’t want me to kill him.”
“I want you to wait.” She lifts one foot from the water and curls her toes around the cool steel of the tap. “He might make things interesting. For a while.”
A slow grin chases the last of the anger from his eyes, replacing it with something glittering and cold. “Am I boring you, little mouse?”
“Not yet,” she says. She shrugs, and soapy water surges around her shoulders. “I’ll tell you if you are.”
For a long, perilous moment he says nothing at all, his face unreadable. Then he laughs. Bends down and kisses the damp hair just over her ear. “Hush, you, or I’ll split you like a coconut.”
She flicks water at his tie. “Get out of my bathroom, pervert. I’m naked.”
His eyes go ridiculously wide. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” He jumps up onto his feet, socks slipping a little on the title, and does a slow moonwalk back to the open door. “What do you think? Thai or pizza?”
“Thai, definitely.”
“Pizza it is.” He spins out the door, half-closing it behind him before he peeks around again, his expression suddenly thoughtful. “He would have to be unusual, wouldn’t he? To beat us.”
“Unusual or unlucky," she says. “Might be fun to find out which.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine. The grape-splitting is postponed.” He points a well-manicured finger at her. “Just for the moment, mind you. We’re definitely going to kill him; I’m simply saving it for a day when I need a bit of cheering up.”
She shakes her head, hair clinging damply to her neck. “You know what they say about comfort-killing, Jim. You should really find more constructive ways to cope with your emotions.”
“Like pizza?”
“With mushrooms, I think. And onions.” She ducks briefly beneath the water and then rises again, wiping her eyes. “Now bugger off. I have to wash my hair.”
He smirks. “I like it better dirty.”
“I like you better on the other side of the door.”
“Well,” he drawls, “I think we both know that’s not true.” The door closes behind him with a neat click, and she shivers.
The water’s gone cold.
42
A decade later, John Watson meets her eyes over a green kitchen table and says, “You know, there’s something I’ve always wondered.”
Molly takes a sip from her still-steaming mug; John’s sits in front of him, untouched. A little rude, she thinks - it is difficult to drink tea with one’s hands bound to a chair, but he could manage it if he tried. “You can ask me anything you like,” she says. “It’ll help pass the time.”
The muscles of his cheek twitch - anger, probably. Maybe fear. “You could’ve killed Sherlock years ago, before he ever heard the name Moriarty. Why didn’t you?”
She pauses, mug at her lips. Sets it down again and folds her hands in front of her, on the wood. “Because I liked him,” she says, “and I didn’t want him to die.”
John stares at her. “And now?”
“Now it’s just part of the game,” she says, and drops a straw into his mug of tea.
++
chapter four