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The storm outside was enough to be distracting, but not enough to be entertaining. Jamie wished she had a window at eye level so she could look at the view. In her mind, she could envision it, the dark sky set off only by lightning, the way the droplets would look under the light of the lampposts, leaves in the wind. Unfortunately, all she had was windows so high up, the only thing she could make out through them was rain spattered black.
Jamie turned when her door opened.
"You have a visitor," Mattoo stood above the sofa, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked better now, better than he had a few weeks ago when she'd strangled him. It had shocked her, though with the utmost pleasure, when he had chosen to return to his previous position.
Jamie glanced at him with an eyebrow raised. "I hadn't realized I was allowed visitors, let alone that someone would want to visit."
He grunted and went back out.
Curious, Jamie quickly marked her spot with a mental note of the page and paragraph and closed her book. She had taken to reading after her little stint. As interesting as the specifics of quantum immortality and the ensuing paradoxes it led to were, she much rather preferred painting. But even the slightest jolt of her wrist ached and more than once, her stitches had come undone when she had tried to lift anything heavier than only a few kilos. And besides, the new paints in cheap little plastic tubes were abhorrent to work with.
So she waited for her visitor to walk in and found herself delighted when the sound of boots in the hall outside the warehouse answered the mystery: Joan Watson. Whatever could have given her the motivation – and the ability – to make her way here? Giving the canvas plastered with Joan's face an intimate wink, Jamie turned to the entrance of her prison.
When the woman in question came into view, unaccompanied by Mattoo and indicating she had pulled some impressive strings to get here indeed, Jamie gave her a smile and said, "Now this is quite the pleasant surprise. However did you manage your way in here? Sherlock?"
Joan grimaced. "He doesn't know I'm here."
When she didn't offer any more explanation, Jamie's smile widened into a grin. "Well, I suppose a girl's got to have her secrets. I won't press. But you and I both are very aware that you wouldn't just drop by because you fancied a chat. There's a reason you're here."
They stared at each other with a peculiar tension filling the room. Jamie took the opportunity to study Joan properly, from the chewed down nubs of her nails to the sheen of chapstick on her lips, from her worn down boots to brand new wool gloves, the amount of rain gathered on the lapels of her coat to the collar turned up against wind.
"I hadn't actually thought you'd take me up on my offer. True, it hasn't been a year exactly, but I understand if you missed me and wanted to expedite the visit," Jamie continued, hoping it would elicit a response out of her, but to no avail.
Joan exhaled sharply and took a seat in the chair opposite the couch. She glanced at her own portrait and frowned, but didn't remark on it. Clever girl. Surely it was unnerving to be looked down upon by one's own likeness. Not commenting on the fact made her… rare. Jamie couldn't help but compare that if Sherlock was sitting in Joan's place, he would have already criticized her use in color, corrected the wrong amount of freckles sprinkling her cheeks, mentioned that the angle she had chosen was more than the tiniest bit unflattering.
Jamie would have snapped, "Joan Watson has no unflattering angles."
Sherlock would have sighed and launched into some inexplicable diatribe about bone structures and symmetry and lighting and –
But then, that was men. Compensating constantly.
Outside, a flash of lightning. The inevitable crash of thunder. Joan did not stir. She was, Jamie could see from her place on the sofa, complicated. Not complicated the way hadron collider's were complicated, that could be taken apart and studied, but complicated in the sense that there was nothing to study at all. She simply was. You understood or you did not, and Jamie certainly planned on being in the former category.
"I went to see your daughter," Joan admitted at last.
It was an effort not to let surprise show on her face. With calculated disaffect, Jamie answered, "Is that so? How did you find her?" Again, silence. Joan Watson had more secrets than she let on, and Jamie found herself altering her question, "Why did you find her?"
A flash of uncertainty crossed Joan's features.
Ah. She did not know herself.
The rain picked up, tapping against the steel roof in insistent drumming, and Jamie had to raise her voice to be heard. "No matter. What did you learn?"
"She has an IQ of 136 on the Stanford-Binet scale, excels on six out of eight modalities in Gardener's theory, shows a healthy amount of perfectionism, and no indication of any emotional or otherwise mental instability. She is, by all accounts, a genius."
"What can I say? She takes after her mother," Jamie quipped.
Joan looked unamused, a line appearing between her eyebrows, and Jamie entertained, briefly, the image of Joan Watson lying beneath her, splayed out with exquisite delicacy to be consumed. She had to physically shake her head to get rid of the idea.
"Are you planning to ever tell her the truth?" Joan asked. "I… worry for her. I don't like thinking what a woman like you could possibly have planned for her incredibly intelligent daughter. Kayden is – she's innocent. I don't want you sinking your talons into her, like someone undoubtedly did to you."
"Is that what you think happened to me?" Jamie muttered dryly. She didn't like that idea, though it held some grain of truth. It made her seem, well, derivative. "Rest assured, I'll wait for her to grow into her own woman capable of making her own choices before I approach her with any offers to join mother dearest."
A smile appeared on Joan's face and it was sympathetic; it pitied. If it had been on any face not Joan's, Jamie would want to claw it off their lips. "Were you old enough to make your own choices when you were pushed into any unsavory lifestyle? Your daughter, even if she were not a child prodigy, would choose an estranged mother over doing the right thing every time. You really don't understand humanity very well, do you?"
She didn't. She never had. It was what she had in common with Sherlock Holmes, but not anymore. Sherlock was a changed man. She was still the same person who did not think unsavory was the right word to describe her lifestyle. She was still Jamie Moriarty. And there was no emotion that could triumph identity.
No, not even the one she could feel gnawing at her edges, that fickle love.
And she could not deny the plain fact staring her in the eyes: she was in love.
Oh, it wasn't the Sherlock Holmes kind of love, where she was equal parts fascinated and aroused, where she saw some form of potential, in molding a man with the tips of her fingers and kneading him into something she could leave baking in the oven while she took care of more menial tasks. Nor was it the kind of love she had for Kayden, that fierce maternal pride and overwhelming defensiveness she had thought only animals were capable of possessing.
No, it was an altogether different kind of love. The infatuation kind. The commitment kind. The kind that crept up on you and subtly blended itself into your fantasies: the one where you've made a home with your daughter and Joan brings you a cup of tea in your shared bed, the one where there are daggers in your hand and you're slitting down the skin of an enemy and she's standing behind you holding a blade of her own, the one where you never met Sherlock and instead there's Joan.
Realizing abruptly that Joan was waiting for an answer, Jamie told her, "Perhaps if you teach nicely, I'll learn to understand even the basest human motivations and give all this up."
"This being what? Crime? Isolation in your abandoned little warehouse? Speaking in riddles?" Joan sighed and rose to her feet. "I don't know what I expected by coming here."
Jamie knew exactly what she expected: for her to change into something recognizable, the way Sherlock had changed. Instead, she said, "As always, it was a pleasure, Joan Watson."
"For something recalled from memory, you've really done a good job," Joan nodded to the portrait, at last acknowledging the unspoken art.
"I may be willing to part with it for the right price," she goaded with a smirk.
Joan's expression was one of disbelief. "On what? The chance I'm narcissistic enough to hang my face up on a wall? No, thank you."
Disappointed she hadn't asked what the price would be, Jamie watched Joan pull up the collar of her coat even further up and knock on the door for Mattoo to open it.
She mused to herself that she would actually have given it all up if Joan asked nicely. But she didn't ask nicely; she barely even spoke without a bite at the end of her sentences, her teeth clacking almost audibly. It was really quite extraordinary, how far into Jamie's brain this woman's hooks had extended without her realizing. But of course there was something revolutionary in that, in admitting the fact itself.
She glanced around her surroundings – not quite with distaste, but something more akin to boredom. She had quite liked living here, had even appreciated Mattoo's attempts at harboring some kind of friendship, or at least a healthy mutual respect. But now it was time to get out.
Of course there was that pesky little tracker in her molar to worry about, but they always underestimated the tolerance of pain compared to one's desire for freedom.
::
Joan bought cupcakes from her favorite organic bakery the next time she went to meet Kayden. They were meeting on a weekly basis now, and the Fullers had no problem with the arrangement as long as it wasn't detrimental to Kayden's schoolwork. Really, nothing Joan imagined could possibly be detrimental to a fourth-grader whose mind worked at the level of a fully grown adult. Except perhaps Moriarty.
The door was opened by Allison, normally with a smile on her face, in this case with a somewhat disoriented look. "Oh… Joan?" she asked as she held the door wider for her to come in.
"Are you okay?" Joan came in out of the cold and shifted the cardboard box in her hands.
Allison frowned and said slowly, "Yeah, I was just napping. I've got a splitting headache that won't go away."
"Migraine?"
Laughing, Allison shook her head, "No, thank god I don't have those."
"Then help yourself to some cupcakes!" Joan extended the box as Allison followed her up the stairs to Kayden's room. Allison, rubbing her temples, waved her in and continued walking on to her own room. Joan knocked.
From inside, came Kayden's voice in a sing-song, "Come in!" Kayden was sitting cross-legged on her mattress, playing a handheld game, which she promptly flipped shut and scooted over to make room for Joan on the bed. "Hi, Joanie!"
"Hello, Kay. What were you playing?"
"Pokemon," she grinned and it was truly extraordinary how very much her lips curved like her mother, in that manner one could not possibly replicate unless inherited. Kay's eyes fell on the box. "Cupcakes!"
"Nice guess," Joan joked and the girl reached inside the box to pull one out with chocolate frosting.
"I recognized the box. I've never been myself, but my teacher brought munchkins from there once when it was Andy Gomez's birthday," Kay replied as she dug in, frosting smearing on her small lips and cheeks. The kind of reckless abandon that came with children was truly heartwarming, and Kay was even more special. She knew instinctively and inherently that she loved Kayden, a strange notion, but Joan had gotten attached to the girl over time. Joan wondered how Sherlock would react if she adopted a child then quickly scrapped the idea. Dealing with one person throwing temper tantrums was more than enough.
"So how are you today?"
"I'm okay. Do you have any more games for me?" Kay asked eagerly. "Or any puzzles or riddles?"
Joan reached into her bag and pulled out a Rubik's Cube, still in its packaging. "Thought we could take it easy today. See how fast you can finish this."
"Six minutes the first time," Kayden replied absently as she peeled the wrapper of her second cupcake. "There's a pattern, see, and if you can figure out which colors to get to the same side first, then all you have to do is change the rest of the colors to that pattern."
Joan, who had never managed to solve her own Rubik's Cube and had given up after a few hours of frustration, nodded with her attention focused on the girl. "Then I guess we have nothing left to do but talk."
By her smile, it was apparent Kay didn't mind.
"Do you remember when we discussed the multiple intelligence theory a few weeks ago?"
"By Howard Gardener, introduced in 1983. There were eight."
Her powers of memorization and recall really were amazing. Joan never talked down to Kay, something Kay appreciated as she said she was sick of being treated like a child. "That's right. Did you know there was a ninth that was suggested but never quite assimilated into the theory?" Kay glanced at her with an intent look. "It was of morality. Do you know what morality is?"
"I've heard of it," Kay said carefully. The girl rarely admitted she didn't know something outright.
"It's difficult to explain, but what it means is doing the thing that is correct, not just what's easy. So the reason certain things are considered wrong, like stealing or hitting others, is because they cause damage to others and, though you may like it, it's unfair to hurt another for your own benefit. Does that make sense?"
Brow furrowed, Kay tried to understand a concept philosophized about for millennia and difficult to grasp even for someone twice her age. She asked, "What if the other person hurts you first for their own benefit?"
Like so much they had discussed before, Kayden managed to get to the crux of an issue within seconds. "What do you think?" Joan deflected, knowing perfectly well she was only stalling to avoid an uncomfortable answer.
"When you grow up, you'll have to make choices that'll stay with you for the rest of your life, so the only thing to do is choose wisely. And until then, don't take anyone's shit."
Biting back a laugh, though she couldn't hold back her smile, Joan asked, "Where did you learn that word?"
"That's what Miss Adler told me."
Joan's blood chilled. Her smile died. "Miss Adler?"
"Miss Irene Adler. She came to see me yesterday in school and said that to me. It sounded right so I told you now."
Moriarty was free? Oh, no. Joan realized abruptly that her visit a week ago must have spurred Moriarty into escaping. She hadn't even heard Moriarty was free. Did Sherlock know? He needed to know. He could be in danger. Other than her daughter, Sherlock was the only other person she would try to reach.
Joan reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, telling Kayden, "I need to make a call, I'll be right back."
She pushed open the door, Sherlock's number already dialing, trying to figure out how she would admit to him that she'd gone behind his back to meet Moriarty, that she was meeting Moriarty's daughter on a regular basis. Bringing the ringing phone up to her ear, Joan turned around the corner to the stairs and came face to face with Jamie Moriarty.
Her breath hitched.
In her ear: "Hello, Watson."
Moriarty smiled. She raised an eyebrow at the phone and nodded.
"Sherlock?" Joan's mind spun, but she kept her voice steady as she lied, "I was wondering if you wanted anything from the convenience store."
"How kind of you to ask," Sherlock answered before hanging up.
There was a long silence. Joan continued to hold the phone up to her ear, staring straight ahead without blinking. A minute passed.
"Aren't you going to ask me how I got out?" Moriarty asked.
Joan dropped her hand and let it hang limply at her side. Blood pounded in her ears. "Are you here to hurt Kayden? Or Allison?"
"No, I'm not. And I slipped Allison a little something to help her sleep is all." Moriarty reached out a long pale hand with a bandaged wrist and Joan flinched, but all she did was take the phone from her fingers. "Maybe I'm here to hurt you instead. Did you consider that?"
"I considered it," Joan's voice was stronger now. "And then I dismissed it. You're not here to hurt me."
"And why not?"
"You would have done it by now. So what, then? Are you here to warn me? Threaten me? Gloat?" Joan stepped forward and snatched her phone back. "Or are you here to send me a not-so-subtle message? That you're going to turn your daughter into you?"
Moriarty's smile disappeared. "Contrary, my dear Watson. I'm going to turn her into you."
Joan blinked. "Excuse me?"
Laughing, the blonde turned her back on Joan and made her way down the steps in careful measured paces, her body moving fluidly like a feline. She didn't have to turn back to ensure Joan was following, already knew perhaps that curiosity would have gotten the better of her. At the bottom step, she stopped, even as Joan continued down to the same step.
"Will you do me a favor?" Moriarty asked.
Joan crossed her arms over her chest and didn't reply. To hear the word favor coming from her was unexpected, but Joan wasn't willing to overlook that it could be a trick, something to trap her. She stood warily, waiting.
When Joan took up her defensive stance, Moriarty only sighed and continued, "I've decided to make some changes. There's someone out there who owes me a favor, will help me disappear rather thoroughly, and I've decided to take them up on the offer. But it means I cannot come back for quite some time. In my absence, will you look after my daughter?"
Surprised by the question, Joan studied Moriarty. She seemed genuine, no hint of trickery in her expression, in the tight muscles around her eyes and her lips pressed together. She frowned and said, "What do you really want?"
"I want Kayden safe," Moriarty snapped. "I want to make sure no one touches a single hair on her head, that she never endures to anything even close to pain again, whether it be by mob bosses looking to hurt me or teenage boys breaking her heart. Is that clear?"
Unsure when a simple request had turned into a hard order, Joan replied back with just as much fervor, "You think I don't care about her? You think I want that little girl subject to kidnapping? You think I want politics played with her life? I wasn't the one who put her life in danger the first time."
Moriarty's smile returned, her mouth curving up the slightest bit, her outburst completely forgotten. "Good. Then I know I can trust you. Once I leave, you can call Sherlock again, or Marcus Bell, if you'd like. He is the one who got you access to me, after all."
"How'd you find out?" Joan demanded.
"Doesn't matter now," Moriarty shrugged. "Oh, and one more thing."
Jamie touched one hand to Joan's cheek, then leaned forward and kissed her. She was all soft lips and warm skin, yielding where Joan had only ever seen hard edges, compliant where there had only been sarcasm and anger earlier, and Joan found herself kissing back. The blonde pulled away far too soon, a smirk alight on her small pink lips.
"Goodbye, Joan Watson. Thank you," Moriarty said.
She stepped off the final stair and headed out the door, leaving Joan silenced and awed and just the slightest bit turned on.
And even though the other woman could no longer hear, Joan murmured to the empty hall, "You're welcome," before she returned upstairs to Kayden Moriarty.