Work Text:
"Joan."
Moriarty pronounces it to rhyme with stone, enunciates it with all the heat of a controlled lumber burn from just a little too close.
No, a forest fire. Joan reminds herself, sternly, of what Jamie Moriarty is capable of doing to a woman she has managed to get alone in a room, and then runs the check on herself because when this woman is concerned, Joan must be certain: but her pulse is unremarkable. Hands dry. Her adrenal gland has nothing at all to say.
"Moriarty," she intones, refusing with the one word everything the other woman keeps holding out alongside that fanged smile.
Moriarty rolls her eyes with a lazy smirk. She's sat, languid, in the large leather armchair of noted philanthropist Devon Carruthers. She has her left knee up, her left arm braced on it, her left hand in her hair. Sinister, sinister, sinister.
She has not looked at the room once since Joan came into it. She looks at Joan instead, and her blink rate is about half what it ought to be, which in a patient would mean drug, or thyroid, or Moriarty.
The study is too warm. A boiler is running somewhere under the floor for a house with nobody in it, and the radiator under the window ticks twice, goes quiet, starts again. Cigar smoke three or four days stale. Lemon oil on the woodwork. Wet wool, which is her own coat, which is still buttoned, and there is sweat starting at the small of her back and she leaves it where it is.
"If you leave now," she purrs, "I'll wipe all traces of Mr. Carruthers' indiscretions from this room before you return."
"God, you're petty."
"Whatever works to keep you here, my dear."
"And why do you want to keep me here?"
"I want to watch you work."
Joan remains standing. It had been four seconds before she'd registered that the armchair was occupied, and she had spent them. So Moriarty has all of it now. The reading lamp left burning over a chair nobody had been sitting in. The humidor with its hygrometer at thirty-eight per cent, which is wrong, which means it has been opened and left open by someone in a hurry. A photograph that looks just like its neighbours except for the unweathered gloss on the picture frame. And the shelf where the spines run tall to short, tall to short, with one book that has been rebound in a leather that does not match. Four seconds. Three more, and she would have been on her way to check the shelf already.
The shelf is eleven feet away, past the corner of the desk. Joan's weight keeps arriving on her left foot and has to be taken off it again. There is a wastepaper basket by the desk with nothing in it, and a dish of paperclips, and a window catch that has been painted over twice.
In her coat pocket her thumbnail finds the seam and works at it. There is not enough nail there to do anything with. It goes on working at it.
"If you watch me work, you learn my limits. You become better equipped to hide your crimes from me in the future."
"That's the second time you've told me what I want." Moriarty's hand comes down out of her hair. "Second time you've been wrong."
Joan keeps her eyes where they are. She lets herself fancy that she is holding Moriarty in that chair by the force of her stare alone, and underneath it she goes looking for the part of herself that wants the answer to Devon Carruthers.
It is not hard to find. It sits between her breath and her pulse, and it is part of the appetite that has her up at two in the morning with a case file and a cold mug, and it that is the same appetite she had at twenty-nine, gowned and eleven hours into a stranger's chest and not tired yet.
She gets a margin around the part of herself that wants the answer. Blunt dissection, mostly— the plane is already there if you are willing to be slow about finding it, and she is willing, and she finds that the tissue parts along it almost obligingly.
Across the room, Moriarty stills.
She has been stationary since Joan walked in. But this is the stillness of a woman who has forgotten she is holding a pose, and Joan has spent a year and a half learning that one off her own housemate. Moriarty's lips have come open, a little, shaped around nothing.
Joan finishes. She ties off what needs tying off and lets the rest go quiet— no heat in it, no tearing, nothing that will swell afterward— and the part of her that wanted to know about Devon Carruthers is gone.
The room stays exactly where it is. The lamp, the humidor, the photograph, the one spine in the wrong leather. She can still see every piece of it. Nothing in it pulls.
It is not, in fact, the end of the world to walk away, to let the Foundation keep the version of its patriarch it prefers, to stand out in the street while somebody else decides what happens to a book she could put her hand on in the dark.
"Joan."
It rhymes with Roan this time. Moriarty's hand is outstretched now, tentative, the slightest tension crinkling her eyes.
Joan considers saying something cruel, and does not, because this is Jamie Moriarty, who can profile a person from how they order their morning coffee. Information as weaponry. Cruelty as specimen.
She turns, and walks out of the room. The hall is cold, and smells of lilies going over in a vase nobody has changed, and on the landing she catches herself checking her own hands out of habit. Dry. They have been dry the entire time.
She is followed only by one more "Joan!"
She does not think about what it might rhyme with.
"It seems that she did not carry out her threat," Sherlock says quietly, a few evenings later.
He says it to the workbench rather than to her. He has four scene photographs laid out in a row and has been moving them around one another for five minutes in an order that presumably means something.
Joan doesn't know what to do with that information.
Downstairs the kitchen radio is still on, low, from whenever Ms. Hudson last had it, and nobody has been down to turn it off. The room smells like a match held too long. Clyde is out from under the bench, working his way along the skirting board, and his shell knocks on the boards every third step.
"Marcus found something?" she asks, although his telling her at all is most of the answer.
"Indeed. A false-compartment book. Third shelf, at eye height for a seated man. It was rebound quite well, more than enough to set it apart from the kind you might find at tourist shops, and it certainly would not have escaped Moriarty's notice."
Joan has it before he finishes. Tall to short, tall to short, and then the one in the wrong leather. She had been an arm's length from it.
"She didn't touch it," she says.
"She did not."
"But I left. She said she'd destroy it if I left."
Sherlock moves a photograph half an inch to the left and does not look up.
So Moriarty had had the room to herself, and the book had taken Joan four seconds without her even looking for it, and she had left it on the shelf. Joan checks her hands, out of habit.
They are not dry.
"She made a threat and didn't keep it," Joan says. "That's a card gone. So the next one is either a reward or a chokechain."
He squares the four photographs into a stack, and taps the edge of it against the bench until the corners line up, and does not put it down.
"Be careful, Watson."
She tells him she will. Upstairs, later, she writes out Devon Carruthers' study from memory— every item, in order, down to the hygrometer reading.
She uses the pen with a drug company's name down the barrel, because some of them still work even now. The third floor is cold and the radiator knocks twice and stops and does not start again. She works clockwise from the door, because that is the order the room came in: the window catch, the barometer screwed to the wall through the wallpaper, the two chairs nobody uses, the humidor. Page two runs out somewhere past the photograph and she goes on to page three without stopping to date it.
Her hand cramps at the base of the thumb. She changes her grip and it goes on cramping.
It ends up at four pages. She puts them in the drawer with the things she is not working on.
The Ardleigh Trust publishes its annual disclosure as a nine-page PDF, and Joan reads all nine standing in the hall with her coat still on.
There is a bag of groceries against her shin and the handles have gone into her fingers and she does not put it down. The hall table has three days of post on it: three different takeout menus, a padded envelope for Sherlock with a customs declaration taped to the front, and the annual letter from the state board kindly reminding her that she has not in fact been disbarred and she could renew her license and come back to work or to teach, and in a few days' time Joan will put it in the recycling unopened.
Her phone is at eleven per cent. She reads on.
Most of it is what she expected. Grants in, grants out, a page of staff costs, a page of thanks. On page six there is a table of restricted donations, and on the third line of the table there is a single payment large enough to fund one client's residential care for four years, and where the other lines say anonymous or say a family name, this one says Est. of D. Carruthers, by dir. of trustees.
Joan reads the line again. Then she goes upstairs without taking her coat off and opens the drawer.
It runs two inches deep. A photocopy of one page of a ship's manifest. A card with a date on it in Gregson's handwriting. A Chinese menu with a floor plan drawn on the back.
The four pages are where she put them, under a thick folder containing a case that closed itself in April. She does not have to hunt. On the second page, between the humidor and the photograph, in her own handwriting:
Box file on the lower shelf, spine label ARDLEIGH, dust line 4mm proud of the others— moved recently.
She had written that down at eleven o'clock at night to be finished with it.
Her father is at a supported house in Elmhurst with eleven other residents and a garden that has been recently weeded.
Joan takes the 7. It runs elevated most of the way and the car fills and empties against her, everybody going the other direction from work; a man across the aisle eats mango out of a takeaway container with a plastic fork and offers her a piece at Woodside, and she says no, thank you. At Junction Boulevard the doors open on hot sugar and diesel.
Then eleven minutes on foot. Two-family houses with concrete yards; a body shop with the shutter half down and a radio going underneath it; a church hall with a flu clinic advertised in three languages and the phone number torn off the bottom of the sheet four times. Maples that somebody planted forty years ago have lifted the sidewalk into ridges the whole length of the block, and Joan's ankle turns on one of them and holds.
She does not go in. From the far side of the road she can see him through the window of the front room, and she compares him to what she remembers. He has put on weight— three kilos, she would guess, maybe four. His hair has been cut by somebody who was not in a hurry. He is wearing shoes that fit him and a cardigan she has never seen, and there is a woman beside him with a lanyard who says something and waits, and keeps waiting, and does not fill the silence.
A man comes out of the house next door with a recycling bin, and looks at Joan, and looks at her again on the way back in, and says nothing. On the sill inside the front-room window there is a spider plant in a yoghurt pot with three pups on it, and somebody has been watering it. Joan's feet have gone cold through the soles of her shoes.
Her father is well. He is the best he has been in eleven years, and Joan stands across the road for a long time doing arithmetic that won't resolve.
The gallery is on the ground floor of a converted stable off Great Jones Street, three days from opening, and the door is propped open with a fire extinguisher. A young man on a stepladder is levelling a frame. He looks at Joan and does not ask her anything at all, which tells her that she is expected.
Inside, it is colder than the street. The floor is stable brick with a concrete screed poured over most of it, and two industrial fan heaters are running at the far end with their cables taped down the middle of the room. Turpentine. Linseed. The plaster smell of walls skimmed a fortnight ago and not dry yet. There are pictures on three walls and a stack of packing blankets against the fourth, and every sound in the place— the stepladder, the young man's boot on the rung, a van reversing in the mews— comes back once off the brick and stops.
Moriarty is at the far end with her back to the room.
"You took four days," she says. "I had you at five."
"Ardleigh."
"Mm."
Joan stops at a distance she chose on the way. Moriarty is in shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned up twice, and there is cadmium under two of her nails, and she has been standing in front of the same canvas long enough that the light through the roof lights has moved off it.
"You paid for my father's care through the estate of a man you know I was investigating."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it was clean." Moriarty turns around. "The disbursement is legal, the trustees approved it, and the staff at Ardleigh are extremely good. I put them through every check and measure I have, which I will remind you is rather more than you or Sherlock have access to."
There is a file on Jamie Moriarty that runs to four hundred pages and Joan has read most of it twice. She reaches for the memory of it now, and it gives her a woman who does nothing without a price, and the woman in front of her is asking for nothing, and the two cannot exist in the same space.
"What do you want?"
"Nothing."
"That's not an answer."
"Not usually. But this time." Moriarty puts the brush down across the top of a jar, handle out, where she can pick it up again. "You want terms. If I gave you terms you could refuse them, and then you'd have refused something, and you would go home and sleep. That's not what this is."
Joan says nothing, because Moriarty has given her nothing.
"Take it apart, if you insist," Moriarty says. "But the taking it apart, that is what comes with terms. I want to watch you work."
And Joan does. She goes looking for it, and she gets as far as finding it, and then she stops.
Before, Carruthers had been a question, and a question comes out clean— you go round it, you find where it lets go, you tie off what needs tying and it folds up and stops and the room stays where it is. This is not shaped like that. What she would have to get a margin around is a man across a road in a cardigan she has never seen, with a woman beside him who waits for him to finish a sentence. A man who is scattered across her timeline as father, and hurt, and afraid, and lost, and alone. There is no plane that separates him from her.
She stands there and looks at what it would cost and finds that she is still there some minutes later, and Moriarty has been watching her the whole time.
"There it is," Moriarty says, very quietly.
Joan can feel her hands. She tenses her fists to make sure of that.
"Undo it."
"No."
"You could. One call to the trustees."
"I could." Moriarty does not move. "And a man who is doing well would be told, in a room with a laminated notice on the door, that his funding had been withdrawn at the request of his daughter."
Joan breathes. She has to put significant effort into it.
Moriarty's voice is lower now. "Ask me again and I'll do it."
The young man on the stepladder finishes his frame and moves the stepladder four feet and starts another one. Somewhere behind the wall a kettle comes to the boil and switches itself off. One of the fan heaters cycles down, and the room drops a degree, and Joan feels it arrive on the back of her neck.
"Joan."
Moriarty has not come any closer, and one of Joan's hands has gone flat against her own sternum and stayed there, and her chin and lips are in the beginnings of a structural disagreement.
"I'm not asking you for anything," Moriarty says. "Wait as long as you like. I found something that I was equipped to give you, and I gave it to you, and there are no terms."
Joan leaves. She is not followed, and Moriarty does not call her name a second time, and out on Great Jones Street the light is going and her hands are empty in a way she can feel all the way up to the elbow.
The brownstone is warm and there is a light on downstairs and there are the catastrophic muffled sounds of some experiment bleeding through— he is working on something.
Joan goes upstairs.
The house loses a degree at every turn of the stairs, and on the third floor the radiator is warm at the bottom and cold at the top and has been since February. In the bathroom there is a blue case on the shelf with the bite guard the dentist fitted her in the spring. She does not open it. Downstairs something goes over with a flat clang and Sherlock says one word to it.
Her back teeth ache on the left.
She sits on the end of her bed and takes out the four pages from where they sit four files down now, and finds the line about the box file, and reads it, and puts it back. Then she gets a pen and writes, underneath it, everything she can establish about the Ardleigh Trust— the registration number, the trustee names, the four-year figure, the date of the disbursement— and the pen keeps going long until her eyes are strained enough that she realises she never turned the light on, and what she ends up with is a dossier that she never agreed to assemble.
She puts it in the drawer, at the top, and closes it.
The Carruthers estate filed its final accounts in March. They are public, and Joan has read them eleven times.
Eleven times is Tuesday through Sunday. In that week Ms. Hudson comes and goes and leaves every pen in the house standing point-down in one jar; Sherlock takes a case in Bay Ridge and comes back at six in the morning with a cut over his eyebrow and a theory about wristwatches; the bees on the roof get fed for the winter, and Joan does not go up, and Sherlock does not say anything about her not going up. Emily texts about a Thursday. Joan reads it on the stairs, puts the phone in her pocket, and at some point the Thursday is over.
The disbursement to Ardleigh is on schedule four, and it first went to a donor-advised fund called Wexler, and Wexler passed it on eight days later with two per cent taken out for administration, which is an expected fee and also the sort of detail that stops people looking further.
Joan looks further. Wexler is small and old and files on time. In the year the estate paid it, it made nineteen other grants, and Joan puts all nineteen in a column on the back of a Con Ed envelope because the notebook is downstairs and she does not want to go and get it.
The envelope is not big enough. By the eleventh grant she is writing up the left-hand margin; by the sixteenth she has turned it over and is working around the window where the address shows through. Her handwriting gets smaller down the column, the way it did on charts. The notebook stays two flights down on the kitchen table.
Seventeen of them are hospices, a stammering clinic, a fund for the widows of transit workers.
The eighteenth is an organisation she has heard of.
The nineteenth has her brother's signature on the acknowledgement.
It is a scan, six hundred kilobytes, filed as an appendix to somebody's compliance return. Oren's signature is the one he has used since he was nineteen, the O closed like a fist, and under it in block capitals is a title Joan did not know he had.
She spends the next two hours proving it is a forgery, and then another— and it is not a forgery.
The scan has been through a fax at some point in its life: a black bar down the right-hand edge, a page counter in the corner in the font of a machine that stopped being made in the nineties. She zooms to four hundred per cent on the O and the screen gives her grey squares.
The date is right. He was in the city. The organisation is one he would say yes to, because it is exactly the kind of thing he says yes to, and he would not have asked where the money came from, because Oren didn't think like Joan or Sherlock. That is not a flaw anybody has ever held against him. He calls their mother on Sundays. He has never been arrested, or fired, or divorced, or late.
Somebody put the money in front of him and he signed for it, and it is entirely true, and it will finish him.
Joan sits back.
She could stand up in front of anyone and say: taking money from a corrupt source is not the same as knowing where it came from. The law even agrees with her, at least in a way that a courtroom would spend some time considering.
She has it half-written on the envelope before she stops.
Her father is asleep tonight in a bed that that money paid for.
So Joan finds it and gets a margin around it— the part of her that wants to know who put the paper in front of her brother— and it comes up cleanly. Blunt dissection. The plane is there. She ties off.
It does not stop.
It is nine minutes later when she notices that she has cross-referenced the Wexler trustee list against the Carruthers estate executors and found one name on both, and written it on the envelope, and underlined it.
She looks at her own handwriting.
She goes and gets the notebook.
Sherlock is on the stairs at four in the morning, which is not unusual, holding a mug in each hand, which is.
The house at four has its own set of noises: the boiler, the fridge, a bus taking the corner two streets over with nobody on it. Joan's eyes will not hold on anything nearer than the far wall. The heels of her hands press into them and it changes nothing.
"Marcus texted," he says. "He wanted to know why you requested the Wexler filings through the Eleventh."
"Because the Eleventh is faster."
"True." He comes up two more steps and puts one of the mugs on the newel post, within reach. "But, not what I asked."
Joan does not take the mug.
He looks at the envelope in her hand, and the column of nineteen, and the one name underlined, and Joan watches him read it and get most of it.
"Your brother is a careful man," he says. "Whatever this is, it will not survive contact with his actual life."
"It's already survived it."
"Then it was built to." He picks his own mug back up. "Which tells you the builder, and tells you nothing you can use right now, and I would very much like you to sleep."
"I know."
"Be careful, Watson."
He goes up. Joan stands in the hall with the envelope and the mug going cold on the newel post beside her, and after a while she goes to put the envelope in the drawer, on top of the accidental dossier, and ends up sitting on the bed with both of them spread out in front of her.
The drawer stays open. At some point the sky over the yards behind the house goes from black to the colour of dishwater, and the radiator knocks twice, and Joan is still sitting in front of the files.
On Tuesday the acknowledgement was a single page with one signature on it.
On Thursday it is two pages, and the second page has been there all along. The file has the same creation date. It has gained three hundred kilobytes. The compliance return has the same filing stamp, the same reference, the same everything, and it now contains a covering memorandum on the letterhead of the estate's administrator, dated four days before Oren signed, instructing that the grant be presented to him for signature and that the source has already been vetted.
Joan reads the memorandum on her laptop four times, and then she gets up and walks to the window and stands there.
The window is single-glazed and the putty has gone at the bottom of the sash, and the cold off the glass arrives a hand's width before the glass does. In the yard below, the neighbours' security light comes on for a cat and goes off again. Joan's arms have come together in front of her and two fingers of her right hand are on the inside of her own left wrist, sitting there, not counting.
Nobody rewrites a federal filing. It is not a thing that can be done. And yet.
Neil Petrie has administered eleven estates in the last nine years, and Joan spends the afternoon on all eleven, because she is not going to take this.
She works at the kitchen table, where the light is better and the food is, and does not eat. Clyde gets a strawberry top at some point and takes eleven minutes over it under her chair. The eleven estates come out as eleven browser windows and a legal pad with the top sheet folded back over the cardboard.
He has been billing them for work he did not do. Two hours here, four there, a mileage claim to Rye on a day he was demonstrably in Yonkers. It is nothing— it is forty thousand dollars across nine years, spread so thin that no single beneficiary would ever bother— and it is entirely real, and Joan finds it in four hours with a laptop.
Which means it was there to be found. Which means it was left.
She sits with that.
Oren is safe now. Oren is a man who was handed a piece of paper by his firm's administrator and told that he did not need to check, and there is a memorandum saying so, and it will hold, because it was built to, which is the second time this month somebody has built something for her to find.
The gallery door is open again, but this time there is nobody else in it. Half the walls are bare. A stack of wrapped canvases leans against the desk with brown paper and a roll of tape on the floor beside them, and Moriarty is on her knees on the concrete doing the wrapping herself.
The fan heaters are gone and the cables with them, and the tape that held the cables down has left two grey lines the length of the room. Where the pictures were, the wall is a slightly different white in fourteen rectangles. There is no turpentine in the air now. There is brown paper, and the dust of a floor that has been swept.
"You did it," Joan says.
Moriarty tears a length of tape with her teeth and lays it down along a seam.
"Petrie's been stealing for nine years and you've known for at least three, because that's how long he's been useful to you. You put my brother in front of a grant he was always going to sign, you let me find it, and then you took it back and left me Petrie instead, gift-wrapped, in Oren's place."
"That's a fair account."
"So what's the second half?"
Moriarty looks up.
"There isn't one."
"There's always a second half."
"I suppose so." She goes back to the seam. "Or at least you have every reason to be looking for one."
Out on the street a tailgate goes down, and the roller shutter next door goes up in three separate goes. Joan's jaw is set hard enough to ache and she has no idea how long it has been like that.
Joan stands in a gallery with no pictures on the walls and reaches for the four hundred pages, and the four hundred pages have a chapter on what this woman does when she is cornered and a chapter on what she does when she is winning and nothing at all on this, on a woman on her knees on cold concrete with a roll of tape, giving away the only thing she had that was worth anything.
"What did he cost you?"
Moriarty smooths the paper down with the flat of her hand, and goes on smoothing it after it is flat, and Joan cannot get a number on it.
"Petrie will go to prison," Joan says.
"For nine years of theft that he committed."
"That isn't the same as—"
"No," Moriarty says. "It isn't."
She stands up. She has been kneeling a while and it costs her something to do it, and Joan watches her put a hand on the desk to manage it.
"Joan."
Both of Joan's hands have gone still on the strap of her bag, and her breath is somewhere at the top of her chest, and she is aware of the particular sound the room has with nothing on the walls.
"Don't," Joan says.
"Alright."
And Moriarty stays where she is standing, and brings her hands back down to her sides, and watches.
Joan leaves.
She gets two blocks before she stops on the corner of Lafayette and takes out her phone and brings up Sherlock's number, and stands there with the screen lit in her hand until it goes dark.
The front door is standing six inches open and the hall is the temperature of the street.
The house has its noises and Joan knows all of them. The boiler. The fridge. The radiator on the third floor that knocks twice and stops. Tonight there is one more, from the front room, which is a person breathing in a chair.
"He's at the morgue until two. You can check that for yourself. My phone is on the table and it's off and you can take the battery out. There's nobody on the block. There's nobody on the roof. The door is open because I opened it."
Joan checks.
She goes through the kitchen with her coat still on and her keys still in her hand, and the back door is bolted top and bottom where she bolted it. The cellar smells of cold brick. She goes up and the house gives back its degree a turn, and from the landing window the fire escape is empty down to the yard, and from Sherlock's room the street is a street: a man locking a bicycle, the deli sign, a woman with a dog going the long way round.
She calls Gregson and asks him something about a warrant she does not need to know and listens underneath his voice to the Eleventh at nine in the evening, phones and a printer and somebody laughing.
She comes down and takes the battery out of the phone on the table and stands in her own hall with it in her hand.
There is nothing else to check. Joan runs out of checks a long time before she runs out of whatever it is that has been running them.
In the front room Moriarty has not moved. She is in Joan's chair with her hands on her knees, palms down, in a house that is nine degrees colder than she has dressed for.
"You're in my chair."
"There's a version of this where I stand in the middle of the room and neither of us knows what to do with our hands." She turns the palms up briefly and puts them back. "This is simpler."
Joan sits down across from her in Sherlock's chair and looks at Moriarty.
Two fingers of her right hand have gone to the inside of her left wrist.
And this time they count. Eighty-six, ninety, somewhere in there, in a warm-enough room with the doors locked and nothing in it that can hurt her, and it has been going like that since the hall.
"I wanted to see you work," Moriarty says. "That was all it ever was. But at Carruthers', you looked at me and you took the question out of yourself. I watched it happen. You wanted to check the book, and the picture frame, and then you looked at me and I saw the wanting go. Nobody's ever done that to me before."
"So I got curious," Moriarty says. "I left everything where it was, and you didn't respond. So then I escalated. A corrupt funding stream on one side, and your father's wellbeing on the other. And I saw you try, in the gallery. So I attached your brother's name. Where was the line? Where was the midpoint? The threshold beyond which you could no longer fight the need to know? And you kept digging. So I knew that the threshold... was me. So I gave you Petrie in place of your brother and I called the whole experiment done."
A large truck drives by. It rumbles through the open door, and resonates in the room, and fades.
"I wanted to understand you better," Moriarty says, "And I could not keep myself from setting up transactions to do it. But you wouldn't engage the way I wanted you to. And... I do not like to watch you damage yourself."
She stops there for a moment.
"So here I am," Moriarty says. "No transactions. No safeguards. No other boot to drop. I am keeping my hands where you can see them and I am in your home, because you know that I can turn any public place to my advantage if I put my mind to it."
The radiator knocks twice, upstairs, and stops.
Joan looks at her. Everything that Moriarty has just said is true.
"Stand," Joan says, and Moriarty stands slow. She puts her feet apart, shoulder-width, and holds out her arms, and Joan is extremely aware that Moriarty has barely allowed herself to be touched by anyone for any reason in all the time she's known her, and Joan makes herself go through every motion of a security pat-down anyway, and she doesn't find anything.
"Alright," Joan says, and goes back to Sherlock's chair. "Sorry."
"I understand," Moriarty says, and sits back down.
Joan looks at her again.
Moriarty has nothing planned— at least, nothing in here, nothing that points at Joan.
Moriarty has just spent ten minutes speaking like she was at confession, and as far as Joan can tell, every word of it is true.
Moriarty has gone out of her way to make that space— as far as Joan can tell— as big as possible.
Moriarty has, in the last month, provided for Joan's father, toyed with Joan's brother, and then stopped toying with Joan's brother and spent one of her own assets to close that window permanently.
Moriarty's chin comes up half an inch. She can see whatever it is that's changing within Joan. She's curious. She might even be hopeful.
Shirt cuffs rolled up twice, Joan thinks, rather than languid.
Cadmium under two of her nails, rather than smirking.
A hand placed on a desk to help her stand, and a spot of lipstick on a roll of masking tape that said she tore it with her teeth, and the way she sat in the chair at Carruthers'— attentive, and all of it no longer sinister, sinister, sinister.
Joan stands.
Moriarty is still, and she is holding that stillness deliberately this time, with both hands.
Joan steps closer, and where Moriarty's hands press down on her knees the nail beds have gone white.
And Jamie's lips taste of orange zest and cadmium.