Joan lies alone in bed that night, staring up at the ornate crown and molding that gives way into the white expanse of the ceiling.  This house is an old federalist, tucked away deep in the heart of a city alien to Joan.  It sets her off balance, leaves her looking over her shoulder constantly.  She’s used to knowing where she is without thinking, street corners give way to subway stops and she’s never, ever lost.  Here she is confused, she has to consult the map on her phone constantly.

At first, she had been afraid to voice this concern, but the confession had tumbled from her lips effortlessly not long after the first time it had become an issue. "They want you like that."  It is said with a twisted sneer that could have been a smile on anyone else's face.  On her's though, it is a stormy mask of rage just barely hidden below a calm surface.  "It’s how they get into your head."

"Would that be how you'd do it?" Joan had asked.  They were next to each other, not touching - never touching, on the big bed that was to serve as their cover.  Even here, where they were meant to be safe, the lie pressed into Joan's subconscious and curled, a knot of anxiety at the pit of her stomach.

"My darling Joan," came the reply, "I would never make it so obvious what I was doing in the first place."

Joan had rolled over then, the pressure of the task they were set pressing down and feeling like it was suffocating her.  Her breath came easier on her side, when she didn't have to look at those mocking, cruel eyes.

Now the minutes tick by, a clock that counts down the moments until doomsday and Joan is alone.  It is by design, to keep her name away from this should things go poorly.  ("It wouldn't do to have you arrested, Joan.") The waiting is agonizing and the ceiling is boring. Joan is filled with a desperate want to do something more than this.  She's spent the better part of three weeks playing house with a serial killer and she longs (and yet dreads) for this to be over.

She cannot do anything though, the instructions she'd been given were quite clear.  Nothing until the morning.  ("Get some sleep, if you can," the hand on her shoulder had been warm, and it had taken everything Joan had not to lean into the touch. "I'll meet you at the rendezvous point at seven-thirty.")  The powerless feeling of having her hands tied is difficult to swallow.  Joan has always been the master of her own destiny, she refuses to be a victim or to sit idly by.

These past three weeks have proven that anyone can become a victim. All it takes is a twist of fate, the snipping of a red string, the knotting of another. The old crones who were put in charge of such things believed that things needed to get... interesting. Two destinies intertwined, if she were to believe the superstitious bullshit that her mother likes to preach when she feels Joan is shirking her heritage.  ("Do you know the red string of fate, Joan?"

"Doesn't everyone?" she asked in return.

There was a slight pursing of her companion's lips, the barest hint of furrowed eyebrows. "Perhaps they do, but I would have thought it would carry special significance to you."

She shook her head. "It doesn't.  Not particularly.")

Enemies are easily made, after all. People have long memories when they believe themselves slighted.  They think that is what happened.  An old case, a murderer just released with connections that they'd never dreamed could exist.  It had taken Joan three days to get her on the phone, she'd called five different government agencies and well as Sherlock's MI-6 and Interpol connections before all was said and done.

They didn't have her locked up anymore, Agent Matoo told Joan. He said it on a sigh, and Joan hated him for being so stupid as to let her walk free. He, who'd been fond of her; he, who'd nearly died by her hand.  He'd had the number, and had given it freely.  Joan had been expecting a fight.

The phone rang three times before it was picked up.  Joan sat there, listening to the pulsing tone and slight crackle of an international call, worrying at her lip.  This was the right thing to do.  This was what she needed to do. Marcus, Captain Gregson, they'd all proven useless.  The police didn't have the resources for the sort of massive manhunt Joan wanted.

("He's an ex-junkie," Marcus had said, "and it's a known fact, Joan.  They're not gonna move heaven and earth to find him because they think he's just relapsed.")

"Go."

"Sherlock is missing."  It's all she has to say.  She's seen this, she's seen it twisting deep within the ghost of Irene Adler, the woman who still pulls at the edges of Moriarty at times.  It’s a bet she has to take.

"Give me five hours."

She gambled correctly.

The mattress is plush, but it feels hard as a board underneath Joan as she tries to get comfortable.  Everything about this perpetuates the lie that she's told so easily to so many people.  People believe her when she lies, she uses that calm, reassured voice they taught her in medical school and she's sure that she could get anything she wanted.

What's alarming is how easily it's come, how acting like a consort to someone so dangerous comes as second nature.  How kisses linger when they've had no need, how they fucked and how it shouldn't have meant anything and yet Joan finds herself knowing that it does.  Three weeks of lies.  Lies upon lies upon painted red lips whispering the truth in her ear while she falls apart, desperate to forget, even for a moment, what they're doing and why they’re doing it.  Three weeks of playing house in a strange, almost haunted, city where the Spanish moss and live oak trees cloak everything in a shroud of mystery.

It is hot here, even in October, the leaves have yet to really turn and Joan is sweaty on the sheets.  The trees cast long shadows against stark white curtains and the moon hangs high overhead.

There will be no sleep for her tonight.

She wonders if Jamie will come back smelling like gun smoke, her eyes dancing with a violence that scares Joan.  It catches her off guard, thinking about how intoxicating that violence is.  The knowing that it is for her, rather than against her, is a heady combination.  Joan had wanted it, and she'd had it.

(She'll have it again.)

Jamie has a theory about this crime, a theory that spells out why Joan hadn't been harmed.  ("They didn't know about you, he sent this killer away while he was in London, I'd wanted to use him for another job.  Pity too, he's very good.")  It's worked well for them, ingratiated them with this ex-con who had snatched Sherlock off the streets as easily as Sherlock deduces the facts a murder. Jamie had proposed that Joan come with her, since Joan was so hesitant to trust Sherlock's life and safe return to a woman who had relished the opportunity to hurt him.

Playing the villain had been easy, too easy.  Joan knows from far too much experience with them that doctors, even former ones, are as close to the sort of criminal that they're hunting as one can get in polite society.  They are creatures ruled by ego, after all, and Joan freely admits that there was a time she thought herself something of a god, holding a man's heart in her hands.

The fall to earth had been abrupt and heavy for Joan, and it had taken years for her to pick herself up from the shambles of her professional life.

Perhaps it has been the knowledge of her own failure - her own humanity - that made the act so convincing.  She could play the consort of one of the most dangerous women in the world effortlessly.  She could pull the wool over the eyes of these men who were so far below Jamie that it was almost comical, and she'd done it with the ease of one who'd been doing this for years and years.

They'd come into the city at night, flown into Charleston and rented a car to drive the final hour.  "I've a house there," Moriarty had told Joan after she'd returned three days after her arrival in a gust of cold October wind.  "And I can make overtures to be interested in their enterprise, which should allow us to get close enough to Troy Creel to determine if he has kept Sherlock with him."

"But he is alive?"

"Sherlock has many enemies, Joan.  A small-time organization like this will recognize that they are sitting on a wealth of ransom money and will keep Sherlock alive long enough for us to steal him back."

Joan's eyes had narrowed.  "What do you get out of this?"

And Moriarty had leaned in, close, too close.  She smelled of icy winter sunlight, the first small thaw when the dawn breaks the chilling grip of night.  "The pleasure of your company, I'd hope."

Jamie had confessed she'd found the city inspiring when she'd come here as a student, and when time had allowed, she'd made arrangements to purchase a home here.  Joan hadn't questioned her lack of mentioning means along with time; they'd long-established that Jamie Moriarty was old money.

The house was shabby on the outside, nestled behind two gigantic live oaks, just off a side street in the heart of the historic district.  The oaks' branches drifted so close to the windows that they scraped against the panes with the slightest breath of wind.  Inside it was plain, full of chipped mugs and stripped wooden furniture - a library of musty-smelling books and crude, almost amateurish paintings on the walls.

"I lived here while I was pregnant, for a time. Towards the end."  It was an answer that Joan hadn't wanted; an answer to a question Joan didn't know how to ask.  Kayden Fuller was born in the US then; they'd never been able to figure that out.

A branch scratches at the window and Joan starts, turning onto her side and blinking as the shadows twist and mutate.  A tall man clad all in black, a hat perched on his head.  She's dreaming, she knows, this is a dream, but the man's face is gone and Joan can't move as he leans over her.  His breath rattles in his throat, and he smells of death and decay.  There's an impossible weight pushed onto Joan's chest and she cannot move.  She wants to wake up, she can't wake up. A scream is on her lips.  She's--she's--

A shrill beeping fills the room and Joan throws off the paralysis and sits up.  It is six-thirty.  She has half an hour to gather their things and lock up.  Another half an hour to get to the rendezvous point.

Her fingers tangle in her hair as she leans over to shut off the alarm.  She cannot shake the dream.  She's had it most nights she's been here.  Jamie blames it on the windows and the interplay of shadows against the white curtains.  They leave the windows open to help cool the house.  There is no air-conditioning.  It is, Jamie assures Joan, murder in the summer.

Jamie doesn't offer comfort, Joan doesn't think she's capable of such a gesture, but as the nightmares plague Joan, she doesn't leave.  She stays next to Joan on the bed, perfectly still, fingers curled around Joan's wrist or pressing into her hip, an anchor against the sea of dreams. It's a strange sort of companionship, one born of an understanding that is as implicit as it is unexplained.

Joan showers and dresses, mind caught up on Troy Creel and how easily Jamie had charmed him.  How she'd touched Joan, gotten too close, all because she knew that the digesting man who'd taken Sherlock would like it.  He'd gone so far as to ask if he could watch. Jamie's face had gone all cold then, the playful aspect of her touch tightening into something terrifyingly possessive.  Joan had let it slide, because she didn't want to have to fake something so intimate with Jamie.

Three of Troy Creel's brothers died that night.  They were murdered neatly with all fingers pointed to an enemy of the gang; an enemy that had absolutely nothing to do with Jamie Moriarty and her simple request to be the highest bidder in the current bidding war for Sherlock's life.  She came home smelling of gun smoke for the first time that night and Joan vomited into the ancient toilet as Jamie washed the blood from her knuckles and scrubbed out underneath her nails.

"I know this is hard," she said. Her eyes were the color of the sea of a still day, dead and flat, lifeless.  It was as though she shut off her very humanity to commit the acts that Joan knew she relished.  She was always wild after she murdered, now was no different.  Joan could get lost in the energy that oozed from Jamie in those moments. "The first one always is."

(Joan vomited again three days later, after Jamie came home with a cut on her upper arm and kissed Joan like she was salvation.)

They did not bring much to this place.  Jamie has already packed her bags, left them stacked neatly by the door.  The key is on the mantle.  Joan will lock up, hide the key in a decided upon place, and drive to the rendezvous point. Hopefully they'll get out of town before anyone notices the steady stream of bodies all connected to Troy Creel's gang and the pretty blonde woman he was entertaining.

Joan's hands are shaking as she gathers her things from the dresser and throws them, unfolded, into her suitcase.  She doesn't care, they're all dirty anyway.  They'd been to the coin-op laundry up the street twice since they'd arrived.  Neither of them had anticipated it taking this long.  Troy Creel had proven more difficult than even Jamie's best laid plans could have predicted.

At ten of seven Joan locks up and lets her palm rest on the peeling white paint of the door for a moment.  She's caught up in controlling her breathing, in making sure that she stays calm long enough to see this through.

The rendezvous point is the park and ride beside the bridge that cuts over the Savannah River and into South Carolina.  It's twenty minutes away with traffic, but Joan knows that at this hour on a Sunday morning, very few people will be about.  She is tempted to go back inside, to take the chipped mugs down from the shelf beside the sink and make coffee for everyone, but there isn't time for that.

She ends up at a coffee shop with a low, sloped ceiling after tucking the key underneath the predetermined flowerpot and walking away from the house had filled her nights with terror.  She buys three cups of coffee, hesitating only for a moment before requesting Sherlock's order.  She has to hold out hope.  Jamie would have called if something had gone wrong; Joan has to believe that lie.

"Anything else?" the girl behind the counter asks.  She has tattoos and her nose is pierced.  She probably goes to the art school here. Joan suspects that was the other draw for Jamie, even if she would never admit it.  To be surrounded by creative people is something every artist needs, even if their art is not, necessarily, the sort that can be put up on the walls of a gallery or displayed in the middle of a park.

Joan shakes her head no, and slips a dollar into the tip jar, taking the cups of coffee back to the rental and fiddling with the cup holders until she has all three held stationary.  It is five after seven.

The narrow streets of the city twist and turn.  Overhead Spanish moss droops low onto streets slick with the night's rain and fog.  Joan follows the GPS, not trusting her mind's map of the city that she'd been too worried to explore, turning three times before she pulls into the park and ride.

It is deserted, the bridge arching high up above her and Joan feels utterly alone.  Mist rolls in off of the river and cuts across the parking lot like the ghosts that Joan swears this place is full of.  She shivers, pulling her sweater more closely around her body, angry that her hair is still wet from her shower; it'll be colder as they travel north.

Steam rises from her coffee cup as Joan sits with the window rolled down, inhaling the harsh and biting morning air.  The days here have not registered that it is autumn, but the nights here certainly have.  She drinks her coffee because it is all that she can do to quell the knot of anxiety that has settled at her navel and will not relent.

A car drives up the on-ramp to the bridge.  Another.

A black SUV pulls into the lot.  A tall man gets out with two small children carrying backpacks.  Three minutes go by.  A silver Lexus slides in beside them, a woman dressed in her Sunday best gets out. Her hair is shining and obviously freshly braided.  She hugs the children and makes them hug the tall man, and then ushers them into the car and drives away, never saying a word to the man - Joan can only assume he's her ex.  He pulls away after staring after the car for a moment, Joan sips her coffee.

A grey sedan with chipping paint and a rattling muffler pulls in, swings around to park next to Joan.  She tenses, hand reaching into her purse, where the insurance policy Jamie insisted she carry for this meeting is kept.  Her fingers twist around the grip, her coffee forgotten on the dash as she exhales, counts to five, sucks in air.

Jamie gets out, a pluming stain of blood on her shoulder, bound with a white bandage that's already starting to soak through.  She glances towards Joan, nodding just once.  Joan sets the gun down and turns the car over.  She watches as Jamie moves to the back door and yanks it open.

Sherlock gets out, his face is bruised and there's a cut at his lip that looks painful.  His clothes hang loose off of his frame.  Jamie pushes him towards the backseat of the car, handing him black trash bag she's produced from somewhere.  He sits on it, careful not to touch the upholstery. She gathers another one, and Joan shoves her purse to the floor as she helps Jamie to put it over the car seat.  Leave no traces.

"Watson," Sherlock's voice sounds like he hasn't used it the entire time he's been gone.

"You can talk later," Jamie says.  She reaches into Joan's purse and produces a lighter before wincing, stain on her shoulder blossoming anew.  Joan sucks her lower lip into her mouth and watches as Jamie opens the doors and douses the car with gasoline from a container she'd had in the trunk.

"Are you alright?" Joan asks Sherlock, eyes still on Jamie.

Sherlock has found his coffee.  "I've been better.”

He looks at her then, eye bruised and swollen almost black almost shut.  He looks terrified, defeated.  "She killed ten men back there."

"More."  Joan's eyes are fixed straight ahead.

"Creel's men were talking - I'd..." he winces, sipping at his coffee with his split lip.  "I had wondered if there was something else going on."

Jamie tosses the lighter into the backseat of the car and climbs inside.  "Drive."  Her voice bars no argument.  The car beside them bursts into flames.

Joan drives.

It is nearly twenty minutes of sullen silence before they pass a Walgreens and Joan pulls over without asking if she can stop.  She calmly meets Jamie's accusatory gaze and takes a twenty from her wallet, going inside and buying bandages and antiseptic cream.  She picks up a banana and a bag of peanuts for Sherlock, as well as two bottles of water.  They can eat a real meal later.

She gets 18 cents in change and takes it and the receipt, careful not to touch anything else.

Jamie doesn't say anything at all when Joan comes back and passes Sherlock the peanuts and banana.  She peels off her jacket and lets Joan look at her shoulder without a word.  It's another graze, nothing that they really need to worry about.  Joan cleans it and dresses it, gentle fingers and nervous glances around.  It is eight o'clock on a Sunday morning.

It is only when they're in Charleston, when Jamie's blood soiled clothing is wrapped in a black trash bag and shoved into a dumpster behind a Hardees that the conversation begins to flow.  Sherlock wants to know, between mouthfuls of peanuts and banana, what took them so long.  He wants to know how Joan found Jamie, and why they're working together.  He has a million questions that Joan doesn't want to answer.

"Is it so difficult to stomach, Sherlock, that I have an investment in your future?" Jamie asks, turning to look at him while Joan programs the airport in Columbia's address into the GPS.  Jamie had bought the tickets the day before. Joan is grateful that she'd thought to bring Sherlock's passport with her. 

"Not really," Sherlock replies, stubbornly turning to the window.  Joan has makeup in her purse that should cover up the worst of the bruising.  She hopes that the TSA won't give him a hard time boarding the plane back home.  "I just find it difficult that Joan would go along with any scheme of yours."

Jamie tilts her head to one side and Joan wants to reach out, to touch her thigh and to warn her that she could not say anything.  Sherlock's been through an ordeal, he doesn’t need to know.  He never needs to know; he'll know before long.  Reactions are telling and he observes things for a living.

"I did it to get you back." Joan seers the car onto the bumpy, ill-maintained highway that points west; Summerville, the sign reads, Columbia.  "I think you would have done the same."

They lapse into a silence that permeates the car.  There is nothing more that can be said.  They did what they had to do to keep each other safe.  It is all that they could have done, really.

And later, much later, when they're back in New York and blinking into the crisp October night, Jamie leans over and touches Joan's arm with her good hand.  "I had a lovely time, Joan."  She smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners in the way that Joan has always taken to know as genuine affection.  "I'd love to do it again sometime."

"With less murder."

"Darling, I would have thought that was a given."

She doesn't kiss Joan to say good-bye, or even hug her.  She merely squeezes Joan's hand once before vanishing, a tall man in a suit falling into step beside her, her bags slung over his shoulder, into the busy terminal.

Joan turns to Sherlock.  "We should tell Marcus you're okay."

Humming at the back of his throat, Sherlock nods.  His face looks worse, and Joan wants to get him to a hospital. "We should."

She leads him towards a cab and gives them the address of a hospital where she still has friends.  She doesn't want to have to answer too many questions.  It's not worth it.  All she wants is to know that he’ll be okay, that was all she ever wanted out of this: what she got was so much more.