Chapter Text
things you said when there was no space between us
Moriarty appears on an afternoon in November, when the skies are spitting cold rain and the last vestiges of autumn litter the ground in clumps of browning, yellow leaves. She’s soaked to the bone, her lips blue and her hair stringy. Her eyeliner has run on one eye, a black line down her cheek that she doesn’t even bother to wipe away.
Joan is sitting in front of the fire in, her legs curled up under her in comfortable socks and an oversized sweater appropriated from an ex back at med school. She’s alone; the knock on the door startles her. When Joan opens it to see Moriarty, sopping wet and looking like a smeary, half-drowned cat, she can’t think of anything to say.
“Hello Joan.” There’s a suitcase beside her, and, upon a further glance, a small, dark-haired figure standing under the awning in a yellow raincoat and hot pink rain boots. All the color drains from Joan’s face, as though it is washed away by weeping skies above. “May I come in?”
Words still failing her, Joan steps aside. Moriarty situates the suitcase inside the door and ushers the girl in after it. There’s nothing kind or compassionate about how she moves around the little girl. She cuts through the space as she always does: a knife, all sharp edges and rain-damp skin worn like a cloak of mystery as she shucks off her trench and drapes it, dripping, over the banister.
The girl lowers her hood, revealing dark hair and eyes that Joan would know anywhere, looking up at Moriarty with a wide, questioning gaze. Joan sucks in a shaky breath. The sick feeling in her stomach makes her sway on the spot. Moriarty has taken the girl. Moriarty has kidnapped the girl and has come here. Moriarty has—oh, fuck.
“Hello, Kayden,” Joan croaks as if underwater. “Do you need a towel?”
Kayden’s cheekbones are hollow. When she takes off her rain jacket, Joan is taken aback thin she is. There is a line of yellowing bruises on her neck. They’re deep impressions the size of an adult’s hand. Joan swallows, questions welling up in her throat, clawing for release. Kayden didn’t look half-starved and hungry before. She didn’t look like Moriarty before either, eyes wary and her body held on a razor’s edge, poised and ready to claw her way out of disaster. “Yes, please.” Kayden’s small smile is tight-lipped and betrays nothing. It is Moriarty’s smile.
Joan glances at Moriarty, hoping her tone will allow no argument. “Come upstairs, I’ll get you some clothes.”
Moriarty glances at Kayden, who nods, arms wrapped around herself and looking around with wide eyes. The girl, Joan realizes, is terrified. Moriarty seems to steady herself before following Joan upstairs, smoothing her soaking shirt and nodding at the girl. From the landing, Joan is struck by how unsure Moriarty seems, and how she, too, looks frightened.
“What did you do?” Joan passes Moriarty an armful of towels from the linen closet at the top of the stairs. When Moriarty doesn’t respond Joan throws open her bedroom door and pulls Moriarty inside. The door slams shut. They both wince. “What the hell did you do?” Joan’s voice is barely above a growl.
“Look at her,” Moriarty hisses back. Her voice is hitches, her eyes almost black with rage. “I did what I had to do.”
Joan’s fingers close around a fistful of Moriarty’s sopping blouse. She wants to be close, because Moriarty looks like she’s about to crumble. The rage dissipates, their foreheads bump. Moriarty’s breath smells like coffee. Moriarty pulls back, her expression is haunted. It speaks of a desperation that Joan’s only ever seen on her face twice, when Sherlock was playacting at his very real addiction and when Devon Gaspar was singing her secrets to the entire Eleventh Precinct. Moriarty’s gaze flicks down to her lips and Joan’s heart pounds in her chest.
“No.” Joan lets go and steps away. “You’re freezing; someone has to go be with her.”
Moriarty looks down at the water pooling at her feet. “I’m fine.” She is shivering.
A derisive snort escapes Joan before she can hold it back. “You’re practically blue. You should shower.” Joan makes an assumption that Moriarty, as nosy as Sherlock, will poke through her bedroom if left alone, so she throws open her closet door and pulls down a sweater and produces leggings and a t-shirt from a drawer. She takes them and pauses, close enough that their fingers brush when she hands over the mess of clothing. “You look like hell, Jamie,” she says before ushering her from the room.
Downstairs, Kayden has unzipped her suitcase and pulled out dry clothes. Joan gives her the towel and directs her to the bathroom before setting another log on the fire. There are questions, so many questions, that are swirling around in her head that she isn’t quite sure where to start. Kayden comes back, and upstairs, the shower runs.
“Do you want some cocoa?” Joan asks. She slides the grate into place before the fire.
Kayden’s eyes are Moriarty’s eyes, touched by violence and icy even in the warmth of the fire. She nods mutely, and Joan offers her a hand, leading her downstairs into the kitchen. She puts the kettle on for tea and heats milk in a saucepan. Kayden watches, solemn. Silent.
“Who is she?” Kayden asks after a moment. “I know that you’re a detective, you where there when Daddy died, but I don’t know who she is. She saw—” Kayden swallows and pulls her sleeve to the elbow, the pale skin exposed is livid with bruises. “She shouldn’t have seen.”
“Did it happen at school?”
“No.” Kayden answers dully.
Joan continues the motions of tea and cocoa.
The rain is coming down even harder when they get back upstairs. Joan settles Kayden on the ottoman with a book pulled at random from the bookshelf. Kayden seems happy enough to read about orchids and their identification while in front of the fire. She sips her cocoa and watches Joan.
By the time Moriarty returns, face scrubbed clean and hair gathered in a tangled mess at the top of her head, Kayden has nodded off, curled into a ball on the ottoman, her mug empty beside her. Joan pulls her glasses off and holds out the second mug of tea. She pretends that her discarded iPad doesn’t have a list of open Amber Alerts for all five boroughs scrolling across the screen. She pretends that Moriarty doesn’t let out an indignant little huff when she sees it, as if she’s offended at the thought she’d ever be caught so easily.
“What happened?”
“I—” Moriarty glances at the girl, arms wrapped around herself in Joan’s too-short leggings. She’s gone into the closet upstairs room and collected a different sweater, one that looks old enough to betray who originally bought it. She exhales. “I have people watching her.” Moriarty drains the rest of the tea. “There was an incident at her school. The bruises were seen, a concern was stated to the mother, and the mother brushed it off as a simple childhood accident. Six months ago. Again, three and a half months ago. They just removed the cast.”
“And this time?”
Moriarty stares at the fire, her jaw working. She swallows, her eyes are black. “I pulled her off a flea-ridden mattress in Queens, behind a hidden door, chained up in a basement. The mother is dead, single shot to the head, her face beat bloody and head shaved. I scarcely recognized her.” She shakes her head, her gaze sliding to Kayden.
There is a ringing in Joan’s ears. This isn’t a kidnapping, it is a rescue.
Moriarty sits down next to Joan on the couch, her legs curling up underneath her. Her right side is pressed against Joan’s left and heat radiates off her in waves, so different from how cold she’d been just an hour ago. It’s almost suffocating. “I don’t want the responsibility of a child.”
“Then why collect her yourself?” Joan doesn’t reach out and touch her properly, she doesn’t dare. Instead she turns into the warmth of Moriarty. There is no space between them. “You didn’t have to get involved. This isn’t like last time. You have—”
“I have people for this, I know. I couldn’t risk anyone discovering her. Not after Devon.” Moriarty’s gaze never leaves the girl; her chest rises and falls in time with Kayden’s steady breathing. “I never thought she’d look like me, you know? When she was born she was just a pink, wrinkled thing that wouldn’t stop screaming. I couldn’t stand looking at her, but I couldn’t let her go, not completely.” She lets out a little sigh and Joan waits. This is as close to the real story, she knows, that she is ever going to get. She scarcely dares breathe for fear that it will make Moriarty’s walls slam back into place and the truth is replaced with lies. “They thought I was an unfortunate waif of a girl, pregnant, just out of university, no man in sight. They paid for my care and my time at hospital. They had no idea. Now they’re both dead. The father too.”
Somehow, Joan isn’t surprised she killed her ex-lover. Especially after her secrets were aired so publically within her organization. What is surprising is the lack of revulsion she feels for the act. This is perhaps Moriarty’s first unselfish murder, the first where her agenda is not the only thing to weigh on her mind as she pulls the trigger of her gun and shoots her lover dead.
“What happened?”
“He’d grown fat, made content spilling my secrets. Devon paid him handsomely for his tales, pity really.” Moriarty does not confirm anything, Joan is a fool for thinking that she would. “She was locked away, Joan. They wanted to lure me there and remove both of us from the picture. They sent photos of the mother. They beat the girl—”
“Her name is Kayden, Jamie,” Joan says gently.
“It’s a ghastly name.”
“It’s what she’s called. You can’t take that away from her.”
“I have to do something.”
Joan says nothing, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She sips her tea. It’s stone cold now.
The silence stretches, Moriarty will not admit what she did to the people who took Kayden, and Joan will not ask her to spell it out. She doubts the police will find anything but trace evidence. The only loose end is sleeping before them, lips parted and drooling. Joan gets up and takes the throw blanket that Sherlock likes to sit under on cold nights when he cannot be bothered to supervise a fire and puts it over Kayden’s small form.
“There is a boarding school, in Connecticut.”
“Miss Porter’s?” Joan settles back in beside her. This feels oddly parental. She isn’t sure she likes it.
“You know it?” Moriarty’s fingers curl against Joan’s, but they are not holding hands.
“A few friends went there for high school. It’s a good school.” Joan closes her eyes. The fire and the warmth is enough to make her feel sleepy. The rain lashes against the windows, it’s bordering on freezing rain now. Maybe it will snow. Maybe Moriarty will stay. “Will she be safe there?”
“If I take away her name.” Moriarty’s fingers clutch at Joan’s wrist, vicelike, unrelenting. “If I take away her name and give her yours.”