Work Text:
Sabrina Moran isn’t really the type to want company when she drinks, but the little dark-haired thing in the skirt suit doesn’t seem to be picking that message up. She’s been sitting at the other end of the bar, watching her and smiling. Not a particularly wide or charming smile, but with a hint of teeth anyway, which is frankly unnerving. Sabrina has been steadily ignoring her, but to no effect. Finally, just as she’s finishing her drink, the other woman gets up. Great.
“Give her another of the same,” she says, putting down a too-large note and flashing another toothy smile at Sabrina as she sits down. Her voice is quiet and weirdly flutey, and her eyes are big and dark and glint in a way even more unnerving than her smile.
“Y’know, flattered,” Sabrina says insincerely, “but I can buy my own drinks.”
“Don’t even try to tell me you don’t bat for that team,” the woman drawls, leaning on the bar. There’s a little bit of Irish in that voice somewhere. It brings Sabrina’s dad to mind.
“Nah, of course I do,” says Sabrina as the second whiskey is set in front of her. “I just don’t go in for the tiny, squeaky types.”
The woman giggles, a jarringly light, feminine noise that somehow could really stand to sound more human. “I’m Jane,” she says. “Jane Moriarty.”
“Sabrina,” she replies before she can stop herself. “Moran.”
“I know,” trills Jane. “I’m a big fan of your work.”
Now it’s Sabrina’s turn to laugh, a harsh bark. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else. My work’s not the type of thing people are a fan of.” But then as she’s picking up her glass, she catches something in Jane’s face out of the corner of her eye that makes her double take. The smaller woman is watching her steadily, eyes cold and sparkling, smirk more of a leer. Sabrina gets the feeling of looking down a very deep, black well whose bottom she cannot see. Jane is staring at her like she’s just told a joke and is waiting for the punchline to click.
“But then again,” adds Sabrina, “you don’t exactly seem to be people.”
The psychopath in front of her winks. “Sweet of you to notice.”
---
Sabrina’s always had a soft spot for the cleanness of a rifle shot, but she has to admit—with a little help from her boss—that it’s hard to dislike a good explosion. They have the perfect rooftop view to see the bus go up. Jane teases her about that, about snipers and their perches, but there’s a reason she likes rooftops; you can see a lot without exposing yourself, without risking much. Jane loves risk, but Sabrina prefers an unfair fight whenever possible. And it would probably seem suspicious if they were spotted calmly enjoying the glow of a burning bus.
There’s flaming shrapnel all over the road. There are screams. In fairly short order, there’s a fire engine and police cars. Firemen and policemen are running around trying to make sense of the commotion. Sabrina is so focused on it she doesn’t notice Jane getting a bottle of wine and two glasses out of her backpack until a glass is being pushed into her hand.
“Cheers,” says Jane.
“Was wondering what that bag was for. What are you trying to do, romance me?”
“Is it working?”
Sabrina takes a sip of her wine. “Woulda worked better with scotch.”
“Thought you could buy your own drinks.”
“Haven’t done much buying my own drinks for three months now, have I, and dammit Jane I just realized if this is my employment anniversary I’m going to hurt you.”
“Promises, promises, Bree,” sing-songs Jane.
Well, she walked right into that one, didn’t she. Sabrina ignores her boss and looks back down at the ruckus on the street below. She laughs a little, in her throat.
“What’s so funny?” asks Jane, sipping her wine. Sabrina turns to look at her, and smiles.
“It’s just that I was given to believe this was a man’s world.”
Jane looks at her too, and her returning smile is a gleeful rictus.
“Of course it is, darling. You think I’m here to tell you otherwise?” She jerks her head toward the chaos. “Look at them. They’re so busy running things, they work so hard. It’s the least a girl can do, try and take their minds off it all for a little while.”
They’re having difficulties putting the fire out, down below. Ambulances are arriving, now. None of the sirens are in sync with each other and they all blur into a buzzing wail. A few human screams can still be made out underneath the noise, thin streaks of shrill against the roar.
Aw, hell, Sabrina thinks, and leans over to her boss. She grabs a fistful of her long, dark hair and kisses her, hard. Jane makes a small squeaking noise and then grins against Sabrina’s mouth. They both taste like wine and the air smells like gasoline fires.
She knows for a fact she’s going to regret this someday, but she’ll put that off as long as she can.
---
It isn’t all fire and shrapnel. It isn’t even all the tidy elegance of a bullet from a rooftop or an open window. Most of Jane’s projects—Moriarty’s projects, that’s who she is to them—are simpler, less bloody. Counterfeiting. Embezzlement. Smuggling. She doesn’t seem too particular about what she does, only that it takes the knees out of somebody, somewhere.
Sabrina would have never thought that sort of thing would amuse her, but it sort of does. She doesn’t like chaos-as-art the way that Jane does. Jane worships trouble for trouble’s sake. Sabrina doesn’t really get that, but she does get the fun of taking control, of exerting pressure on the world and having it give beneath your finger. She had almost started to believe the lie that a woman couldn’t do a thing like this. Make an impression. Any impression at all. Not in this day and age anyway, not yet, maybe your daughter, or your daughter’s daughter, give society time, don’t try to rush important change.
Even in the army, she had to keep her head down a little more than the guys in her regiment. A lady has to make a little less of a fuss over things, learn to roll with all the guys’ punches so that she’s still worth keeping around. Now her boss keeps her around because she’s good to have around, because she’s good at what she does and finds the joy in it and makes Jane laugh and looks sexy with a little blood on her face, not because she’s well behaved.
Sometimes she does step a bit out of line, and Jane’ll do anything from cuff her ear to sweetly remind her how easy it would be to have her killed. Sometimes Sabrina pushes it a little farther, out of stubbornness or fun. Maybe Jane giggles like the hair-tossing, white-toothed lead in a romantic comedy or maybe she picks up a lamp and throws it across the room.
Jane insists on her wearing fancy clothes a lot these days—skirts or sharp suits, brush your hair, diamond earrings, I have an appearance to keep up, Bree—but whenever she can, she still wears her heavy boots. Jane wears stiletto heels for the same reason: because of the damage they can do.
It’s why she stayed long enough to make it impossible to leave. For the opportunity to kick holes in this man’s world.
And Jane knows all the soft spots.
---
“He’s dying, that’s the best part,” Jane is saying as she wraps spaghetti around her fork. “He’s dying and he’s got nothing to lose.”
Sometimes when they order room service in hotels they get something outrageous just for the sake of it, but usually it’s something like this, rather ridiculously modest for how much Jane’s spending. (Sabrina ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.) At least it’s a nice hotel, this time. Jane owns a few places—houses and flats—but they spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, fleabags one week, penthouses the next. The last time Jane took off for two weeks without notice and left her in a grimy little hole in the wall, Sabrina followed the default instructions—stay put until told otherwise—but shredded one of Jane’s suits with her pocketknife.
“So if he’s dying, why would he kill for pay?” she says around a mouthful of sandwich. “I don’t get it.”
“His children, his children, weren’t you listening? It’s money for his kids. Isn’t that just precious? He fancies himself a genius. I mean he’s not bad. In his way. He understands the other idiots.” She reaches over and snatches Sabrina’s pickle.
“Oi!”
“Student of human nature and all that,” Jane continues, unperturbed, taking a bite of the pickle. “I set him up with this neat little shtick of good pill and bad pill. That’ll turn heads.” She smiled, a secret smile, not for Sabrina, looking down at her supper. “He’ll notice this one.”
Sabrina catches it, of course. “He? He who?”
“Sherlock Holmes,” she says casually, cutting a meatball. “A detective. He’s been getting in my way.”
“Wait, so this whole cabbie thing is, what? A trap?”
“Yes it’s a trap, of course it’s a trap,” says Jane impatiently. “Although honestly, I’ll be a bit let down if it gets him. He almost seems like he might not be boring.”
Sabrina smiles. She might like rooftops, but she knows Jane loves this, loves a challenge, loves a game.
“Just be careful, boss,” she says.
Jane only scoffs.
---
The trap doesn’t get him, this Holmes character. He comes up now and then afterward, and at first Sabrina ignores it. It’s easy to ignore—there’s always a job to do, always some trouble to either create for her boss or to get her boss out of.
But it keeps happening. It gets harder to ignore. Jane spends forever reading and rereading his website or the blog of his flatmate. She gets surveillance on him, and manila envelopes with photographs show up with the morning paper.
And Jane has always been mercurial, but it’s even worse when it’s about him. She chatters and grins and giggles and pulls her hair and grits her teeth and howls. Sabrina is used to handling Jane’s violent moods, but it’s getting worrying. And it’s worse every day.
It’s even worse when she starts getting quiet.
One night Sabrina wakes up and Jane is not in the bed. That’s not strange; Jane isn’t a good sleeper, and by now the sound of pacing doesn’t even wake Sabrina. But she isn’t pacing this time. They’re at a hotel again, a businessmen’s place, the kind with a giant mirror hung behind the desk for no good reason. Jane is standing in front of it.
There are a pair of men’s trainers on the desk—their presence explained by the box Jane took out of storage today open on the desk next to them—and the edges of the mirror are covered with the hoarded surveillance photos of Holmes, taped up, overlapping, piled in layers until it almost looks like the mirror is fit to come off the wall with the weight. There is a small window in the center of the wreath of photos, and into this window Jane is, Sabrina guesses, staring. She can’t see Jane’s face, just her bare back facing her, and her dark hair falling over her shoulders.
“What are you doing? It’s”—she checks the clock—“three in the morning,” she grumbles. “God, come on. Come back to bed.”
Jane doesn’t move. Sabrina almost thinks she doesn’t hear her.
“I mean it. You can stare at your stalker album tomorrow.”
“The game starts tomorrow,” says Jane without turning around, without moving a bit. Not even the curtain of her hair ripples. “The real game.”
“Oh, great. I see. So you don’t have time to be creepy tomorrow, you had to fit it in now.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“How am I supposed to sleep with you standing at the end of the bed like some kind of ghoul?” Sabrina mutters. But she turns over and she does.
---
In the morning—and it’s an early morning, always is for her—Jane is gone. The men’s shoes are gone too, and the pictures, and her things. There’s nothing left of her but the shreds of cellotape still stuck to the mirror. Sabrina runs her hand over her face and curses. Taken off again. This is an all right place, but she couldn’t do this while they were at the Hyatt, could she?
Of course not. The game. Whatever that means. She stands in front of the mirror and picks at a piece of tape with a fingernail, two pensive creases between her eyebrows. She doesn’t like this, this whole thing with Sherlock Holmes.
She has a shower, cleans her best rifle, and just as she’s considering going downstairs to the bar, her phone rings.
“There’s a lady in the Brewer Street car park wearing something from my new semtex line,” comes Jane’s voice, high and musical again, roaming over the scale like a slide whistle. Nothing like the cold tones of last night. “I need you to keep an eye on her, Bree, darling.”
Keep an eye on her means keep a gun on her. Normally she’d grunt a response and hang up to go do her job, but her brain is filled with the image of Jane standing stone-still in front of the mirror, like a new moon in the dark of the hotel room, and she pauses.
“Are you being careful, boss?” she says.
“As careful as I always am,” Jane chirps, and they both know that means ‘not at all.’
“It’s all about him, isn’t it?” Sabrina asks, wearily. “Holmes. This game you’re playing today. Whatever little cogs you’ve been fitting together in your head this last week or so when you stare at the walls. It’s for him. To get his… his approval, his attention, his pity, his whatever.”
“Aw, sweetie,” she sneers, and Sabrina can imagine perfectly her face on the other end of the line. “You jealous?”
She sighs. “Nah,” Sabrina says. “It’s just that… well. It’s a man’s world.”
“It’s my world,” growls Jane. If she were here, she’d be reaching for the lamp to throw. It makes Sabrina smile a little sadly.
“Yeah, boss,” she says. “Whatever you say.”
Jane hangs up on her. She tucks her phone in her shirt pocket and grabs her coat and her rifle case on the way out the door.
She knows for a fact she’s going to lose Jane to this game someday, but she’ll put that off as long as she can.