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Joan is being followed. Followed, to god knows where, but the sound of her heels barely cracks the pavement and the ghost of her lingers. It is easier to think of her as just that: her, not Jamie or Moritary or Irene. Attaching a name to the thing give it life, gives it power and Joan refuses. (Sherlock's eyes are red rimmed with pity; he better than anyone knows the havoc, the wrath, of this imminent destruction. Joan refuses).
When Joan turns, there is nothing but the barest apparition of a presence; a woman perhaps, a half formed thing, who endures with her haunting, her torment, to what end Joan can see clearly (more specifically, her end, come about by understanding). If only, Joan thinks, absently, dark bruises like bags hanging under her eyes. Joan could reach, into the abyss. Reach her, change her, anything would do, really. All she wants to is touch. And say, maybe, I see you for what you are and it disgusts me. I loathe you. I love you. All she wants to do is understand the enigma, see through the seemingly self-perpetuated fog she wraps herself in.
But this game they play, and they raise the stakes, higher, higher, higher, just out of reach as if, each would rather, in truth, not be caught by the other. Yes, Joan is not so deluded as to think that this isn’t just that, a game, of no turning back. This is a bloody game, to her. To them both. A game they play to hold each other’s hearts in their palms and say, with certainty, I see you. I understand you. You are mine, beyond reason, beyond doubt. This is a game with no victory, the destination never quite reached, mutual destruction wholly assured, Joan’s fingers never quite yielding to smooth skin, to pretty words and prettier lies, a mouth canted sideways, smeared with blood and darkness.
Even now, they won’t admit to each other what this is, as if that itself is a weakness. Even know, after all this time. If she could, Joan would say, “Stop running from me.”, (if the world was built of well wishes and hypotheticals then maybe she would have resolution, a night’s sleep, a warm bed with a blonde to occupy it, alas). And to that, Jamie would laugh. Bright and free, and maybe.
Maybe. She would. If she wasn’t who she was, mad and brilliant, always reaching, scrapping for the sky. (Joan thinks God would quite prefer to be left alone on his pedestal, but Jamie had only laughed at that. “I think I would fancy myself brighter than the Morningstar. Power is never enough. The game is never enough, my dear.”).
Her fingers waver. She can never quite touch the outline of the phantom at her heels. There is a veritable sea of bodies, between the two of them. Joan’s victory, that festers in Moriarty’s heart.
(And thus: Joan comes to the conclusion that they will burn, burn together, burn each other, in this. What terrifies Joan most is that the prospect doesn’t scare her like it should. What terrifies her is how open her heart is to this, what scares her is how her heart says, let it come.)
…
“Leave him. Leave him for me, my love, my darling Watson.” Her voice is breathless, delirious, as it flees her throat against her will. Her mouth, still slick from dinner’s wine, red and wanting. Because she can, Joan closes the space between them, breaks the tension and holds Moritarty in her arms.
“You should be mine.” Jamie says, again, with practiced fervor, fingers dancing over Joan’s freckles, dip to hold her throat prisoner in her pretty hands, eyes wild, as if beyond Joan, nothing else is of any consequence. Yes, the madness of this, of them, reels its ugly head. There is blood on Moriarty’s hands and her face, oozes from her pores and she smears Joan in it, this wayward corruption, and yet, the lopsided slant of her cheek is just so that if Joan closes her eyes, that shred of humanity will break through and she can pretend that there is a tender ache to her kiss that makes this somehow worth it.
(The juxtaposition of the one almost sweet, almost tender, to the cold cruel barbarism, the pitiless fiend, twists, like a knife to her gut. But not even this guilt is enough to convince Joan to let go entirely.)
“Don’t make me apologize for who I am.” Don’t make me lie to you, more than I already have.
“We shouldn’t.” Joan says, and Jamie laughs, laughs hollow, the bells ringing gaunt and toneless against Joan's ear. She pulls closer, so Joan is washed in currants and honey and allows herself to be lost, all at once, in this abyss. And it stares back.
There is a breath. A pause. A minute, where they are baked in moonlight and the strands of her blonde hair are woven between Joan’s fingers, (she’s trembling, Joan realizes, they both are), a minute where Moriarty’s name is wedged in Joan’s throat, a curse, a prayer, an absolution.
(How, Joan thinks, dully, how does it come to this? In the rise, in the fall, they meet somewhere in-between. Joan thinks, for her, Moriarty would fall to her knees and that knowledge is power itself, that power manifesting now as desire.
Moriarty thinks how she has killed men for a quarter less than the ruin Joan has wreaked. Thinks of how bleak the world would be without her, how in her absence, there is something (power, without the delightful distraction), and yet, there is also something stark, desolate, without her. This is weakness, this is madness, this is wholly inexcusable; how she has lost the game she commenced with the first stroke of Joan’s portrait, the first letter sent by post. Oh, how she is lost, at this first kiss. Her restraint is a fragile thing, mouth hot at the corner of Joan’s lips, “You need this as I, come now, darling, darling, don’t delude yourself.”
It is sickening, how much her words have a claim to rightness. This is madness. In the breathless space between it is Joan who tilts, Joan, who eats her raw, her mouth, a vengeful, ravenous thing. She hungers, hungers and wants, and Moriarty is surprised at her fury, how she opens her mouth and swallows her whole, as if she is half a hurricane.
(Oh, even now, she hasn’t learned her lesson. Even now, Joan Watson spells ruin, with her earnest heart and quick mind, her morals. “I’d kill for you, darling, the whole world, if that’s what you wanted.” Joan’s shoulders tug up in a shrug. “It isn’t.” ) The shortest distance between two points proves to be a line, from here, in Joan’s heart, to there, in the place where Moriarty fancies a moral cavity up under her ribs.
“I had to know.” Joan says when she pulls away, pricked defiance leaking into her tone as if to cover the crack she knows Moriarty will hear. She is afraid of the way Jamie keeps her close, so their foreheads touch, her eyes wide, wary and so, so blue, they might just break her heart.
“Do you want this?” And it is the single, most earnest question Joan’s ever been asked.
To which she responds, simply,
“Always.”