Chapter Text
Right after the (Reichenbach) Fall
Mycroft, as always, has missed everything
Yes, she was only allowed five precious minutes with Jim Moriarty in the same room.
But nobody said anything about phone-calls.
A bug-eyed and heavily brainwashed guard drops the phone in her cell hatch.
She knows Jim is expecting her, but he only answers on the fifth ring.
She clears her throat and starts to sing a familiar tune. A Christmas medley, if you will.
“I want to break free…” she chants hoarsely. “I want to break free…”
She can hear him breathing, rather sonorously, on the other line. This is their first conversation in three years.
She continues singing in a childlike key, the music both sweet and bloodcurdling, until she reaches the fatal lyrics.
“I’ve fallen in love…” She pauses abruptly, like a string that has been scratched by a clumsy bow. “Are you in love, Jim? Has sentiment overcome your faculties?”
She hears him pacing regularly on the other end, expensive shoes scuffing the gleaming parquet.
“Are you like all the other men? Are you flat, ordinary?”
This seems to garner a reply from him.
“News must travel slow in your dollhouse, my dear. I’ve given Sherlock a vigorous fall.” His jolly, spring-in-your-step tempo is slightly marred by his heavy breathing.
Eurus laughs heartily. The sound is grotesque and ungovernable. Her cell echoes with the jeers of a beast.
“You were supposed to provide him with the game of a lifetime. Instead, you offered him a cheap charade. A joke."
Her endless guffaws seem to freeze the air around her. Her jaw is unhinged. Her eyes shine like fireworks.
“You should really take the Valium they give you, sweetheart. It’s not just for show,” Jim taunts, unruffled by her gaiety. But she can hear him running thick, stubbed fingers through his perfectly coiffed hair.
“I thought you were brilliant,” she continued snidely, “but you are nothing but a disgrace. You let him win so easily, a riddle so simple, even Mycroft could figure it out.”
Jim has stopped pacing. He is dangerously still, head cocked to the side. “I am getting rather bored with your school-mistress act, little Holmes. In fact, I’m downright peeved. You are spoiling my good mood with your silly squawks–”
“Greg Lestrade,” she says to him then, quietly.
“Greg fucking Lestrade,” she repeats in the silence, letting the obscenity linger, fester.
“Nice chap, bit dim, what about him?” Jim quips, his pitch slightly higher than average. The tension unfurls between them, growing claws and heavy tusks.
Eurus spits more venomous laughter.
“You just couldn’t risk it, could you? Not your precious Molly. You ruined the entire game for a corpse-smelling spinster.”
She can hear the way his index finger tightens its grip on the phone.
“You practically screamed the answer at my little brother. Of course, he had absolutely no trouble faking his death; there was really no obstacle in sight, since you handed him a fucking pathologist on a silver platter."
There is silence on the other end.
“Deny it, Jim. Tell me you did not change the names. Tell me you didn’t have your snipers target a washed-up detective whose first name Sherlock can’t even recall. Tell me you did not do it all for a skirt.”
Jim blinks fast, his eyelashes making a sound only she can hear.
He’s not a man who lies; he doesn’t do it often, not if he can help it. So he brazenly blows air through his mouth and curls his lips into a mad grin.
“Jealous?”
Eurus chuckles softly, the beast has gone back to sleep. “Oh, Jim. Jim, Jim, Jim. I didn’t think you had one.”
“Had what?” he demands, his voice developing a chill.
“A weakness. It’s rather unfortunate that you do. You see, whenever I catch a bug, I simply must squash it. That’s why they locked me up in here. Bug-squashing.”
Jim is perfectly rigid now, an arrow taut to shoot straight for the heart. His expression, which has been described as "murderous" on a good day, has stretched beyond the confines of violence and plunged into pure wrath, the likes of which no man has witnessed without dying shortly after.
“Is that a threat, little loon? Have you forgotten who I am?” he grinds the words, caring little for decorum. “I don’t squash bugs. I don’t even kill them. That’d dirty my shoes. No, I boil them in their own blood, crack their shiny black shells into a million pieces, and then put them back together, so they can watch it happen again and again and again.”
Eurus is breathless for a moment, captivated by the Moriarty that lies behind the social trappings and the witty repartees. The Moriarty that was born for horror.
His final words are decisive, almost historical, as if he’s already committed the act. “I will boil Sherlock if you touch her. I will boil him and make you and the Iceman eat him, piece by piece. Until your bellies are so full you will cry, no more…”
Eurus smiles sweetly into the phone, her lips trembling.
She sings in staccato now. “I’ve fallen in love…I’ve fallen in love for the first time, and this time I know it’s for real…”
Jim hangs up on her.
Of course, this means war.
He knows it. She knows it.
A traditional game of chess; Moriarty guards his queen, she guards hers. It’s only a matter of time now.
Jim is not a fast thinker, contrary to popular belief. He’s a slow, meticulous, almost pedantic student of the mind. More like a geriatric with a home puzzle, Sebastian sometimes quips under his breath. But it’s true. Jim doesn’t like to be rushed. Yes, he’s faster than everyone else, but he’s not really rushing, never has.
So, he needs time – certainly more than five minutes - to think of all the ways he needs to protect Molly Hooper. Forever.
The little Holmes bitch will never be satisfied unless she’s stuck her claws inside his little pathologist.
He knew very well what his decision would cost him. He’d known beforehand what it would do. Keeping Molly out of the fray meant putting a target on her back. He’d done it anyway, because half of his snipers by now were under Eurus’ control.
You just couldn’t risk it, could you? Not your precious Molly, her voice taunts him wryly.
This is what happens when you collaborate with a mad harpy.
But oh, she had no idea. He was madder than all of them. He had given birth to the harpy; he could make it slither under his little toe.
He was a madman with a trinket, and no one would touch Molly Hooper. No one, but him.
Oh, Molly-Moll. Darling buttercup. Apple of my eye. How did we get here?
How indeed.
Days before the (Reichenbach) Falls
When she spots the ziplock bag on her desk, she suffers a brief spark of cognitive dissonance.
All right, I’m not fond of apples…but I must’ve brought one for lunch. Nothing's the matter.
It’s a rhyme Molly has come to recite quite often these days. Everything is fine. Nothing’s the matter. No one can hurt her. She is small and insignificant and plain, and if Sherlock’s taught her anything, is that this is her strength. Sneaking under the radar, minding her own business, staying unnoticed.
Except, the apple inside the bag has already been bitten into. It has already been carved. The skin has yellowed with time.
There’s a semblance of an O in the bite, and a slanted I and U next to it, like a pair of gilded laurels.
I O U
Her heart beats a mile a minute. She is faster than lightening. She grabs the bag and dumps it unceremoniously in the trashcan under her desk.
Molly looks around wildly, wondering if anyone’s seen her, if the cameras perhaps caught the wildness of her gesture.
She leaves the room, muttering to herself about “going down to the lab”, as if offering an excuse for her momentary lapse in judgement, pulling on the hem of her knitted sweater with a little too much energy.
That is how he used to sign his little “love” notes which he sent up from IT. Jim – the man she had known as Jim, a shadow really, a ghost – had never mastered the language of “XOXOs”. He had a vocabulary of his own, endearing enough to mask its peculiarity.
He always wrote to her, “I O U, Jim.”
“It’s very practical,” he explained, charmingly embarrassed, over coffee. “It means I owe you lunch, but also....I fancy you, quite a bit.”
Molly giggled noisily, although privately she thought it was a bit much, that things were moving too fast. But maybe she simply wasn’t used to a man paying her attention and finding her agreeable, more than agreeable. It was a nice change of pace from all those self-loathing boys who only ever asked her out because they thought she was as pitiful as they were.
No, Jim definitely liked her without regrets.
She grew reluctantly fond of his IOUs. Expected them almost with a little domestic thrill. It was their little secret. Jim's and hers.
She sinks her gloved hands inside the corpse and expels a shudder.
She is, after all, the apple of his I.