Disclaimer - This is my first 'Elementary' fic, and I hope you all enjoy it.
Author's note - I was inspired by 'Sky Samuelle's' 'Becoming Moriarty' one-shot - the story of how a brilliant girl became a calculating criminal genius. So my thanks for inspiring me, and my best wishes.
For everyone else please drop me a review.
Moriarty's Games.
As she sat in one of the plush chairs in the hotel room she was currently staying in after spending hours on the plane travelling from Australia to New York after spending eight months checking on her drug and smuggling business in that part of the world, Jamie Moriarty had time to think as she combed her hair slowly to ease out the knots while she ignored the open laptop computer which displayed a number of emails she'd pasted into a word document so she could read it in one go.
They were reports about Sherlock Holmes.
Jamie frowned slightly as she looked out of the window. New York was certainly an impressive city, though she had visited many cities as she had expanded her criminal empire or she had taken someone like Sebastian with her to do the dirty work while she manipulated the situation from behind the scenes.
She didn't feel guilty in the least as she thought about the quagmire she had forced Sherlock into at the supposed death of her 'Irene Adler' alias, nor was she particularly surprised Sherlock had bounced back from his drug habit which had caused him large amounts of trouble and forced him to be shipped over the Atlantic.
Sherlock had interfered directly or indirectly with many of her plans as he began to work for Scotland Yard though a part of her had thought it fairly presumptuous of a private detective to work for the police since the police had their own detectives, though none of them saw the world as Moriarty and Sherlock did.
Jamie lightly put the comb down on the small table next to her and stood up and walked gracefully over to the window to look over the city. In the next few days she would learn more about the geography of the city and the current state of the underworld organised here so she could adjust what plans she had for them, and for Sherlock because she knew a reminder of what had happened to 'Irene' would get him out of the way just like it had done before.
Irene Adler's death had proven there was a weakness in Sherlock Holmes. Even in her alias, he had been awed by her equal and definitely superior intellect, and he had fallen in love with her. In some ways she loved him as well; while her weakness was her own love for her daughter whom she had sent away, knowing how dangerous it was for her to have a child, she had still loved her. Occasionally she had come to New York to watch her little girl grow into her own person, but she had never said hello, knowing if she did it would open up a whole new can of worms, and she was trying to keep and maintain a low profile no-one should try to get under.
But as Irene, she was able to get under Sherlock's skin and she had spun all kinds of lies, using her intellect to mask the truth so he wouldn't detect anything. It was a trick she had honed over the years and she had developed her manipulative streak until it was practically second nature to her.
As a child she had preferred books over dolls, though she had liked to play with dolls, dressing them up and making up stories to go with their new appearance each time, but while she had once lamented life was not really like a book where the stories had layer upon layer covering them, and you revealed them as you gradually made your way through the book, Jamie had been disappointed by just how mundane the real world was.
What was worse was they didn't like anything different, it was almost as if they had some Nazi-like need to have preconceptions of what a normal person was like rather than accepting the fact there were different people out there.
Oh, they could hark on about how everyone was different, individual, and had different hobbies and likes and dislikes when it came to foods and drink, like one person could prefer scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast rather than someone else's love for porridge instead, and they could all have their own different ideas of how to dress, but truthfully when you got down to the truth everyone was actually the same.
How boring.
Jamie had always wanted life to be multilayered like a novel, a classic novel or even a crime novel where at least some people actually used their brains. Why was it only novelists or people who developed stories from a real-world context even if they got most of the material completely wrong were the only ones in life to develop situations where everything was multilayered?
Her parents…. Oh, she had not seen them in a long time, they didn't understand her any more than she understood anybody else. Everyone had seemed so... boring, their brains were so lazy it was a wonder the human race even managed to achieve flight, space travel, and how they'd managed to split the atom.
She had sometimes felt like an alien to them because she didn't act the same as other girls her own age. Again the trouble had been preconceptions about what ordinary people thought someone should be like, and a complete lack of comprehension that people like her were unique.
Jamie closed her eyes as remembered her childhood, though a part of her mind wondered why she was being nostalgic now of all times, she guessed the thoughts she had of her daughter had unlocked the doors she kept locked at all times on her past. If she had thought her parents and other immediate family members had been bad enough, the school was even worse. Everyone had picked on her because she hadn't been a particularly pretty child unlike some of those other girls, but Jamie hadn't been jealous; she had read enough books to discover she was above and beyond such petty emotions, but she knew the real reason they bullied her.
It was because she was smart. Honestly, why did everyone have to judge people because of their intelligence? Jamie remembered how she had decided to portray herself as apathetic, though she had pitied everyone around her for being so unintelligent. She would later come to accept the fact she was just different.
A smirk crossed her face, seen reflected back at her through the dark glass of the window separating the warmth of her hotel room with the cold outside, as she remembered that as soon as she had reached that conclusion that if she was different and wanted life to be like a book, where there was intrigue and mystery, then only she should be the one to make it so. After that she began to manipulate situations; one of the first things she had done was to spin a rumour how a couple who were dating had problems that were invisible to the naked eye, how he was secretly seeing someone else. Little things like that until she eventually became a manipulative game player because when she looked at people, she could see ways of working on their lives until they played her game. It was a skill which would help her later in life, because when she became a teenager herself two things happened; the first was her growing criminality. She started small at first. She would begin shoplifting, going into busy shops where it was virtually impossible for anyone to see what she was doing before she graduated into going into smaller shops with other teenagers, and shoplifted here and there while everyone was distracted.
After shoplifting she began committing small burglaries, developing a thrill of breaking into a house and taking anything that wasn't hers, feeling delighted whenever she took an ornament because it was there or stealing money or jewellery which she sold for money later.
The second was how she had developed, and she remembered the story about the ugly duckling which blossomed out into a beautiful swan. Suddenly she was beautiful, and everyone wanted to be her friend. It was so fake, so pathetic…. Jamie had been taken by surprise, but she had used the change to her advantage, twisting boys around her finger and making girls jealous until she found her stories easier to spin.
Like books, art had long since been her passion, and as her repertoire with literature grew, Jamie had learnt about femme fatales from some of the net-noir novels she had acquired over the years. She had already come to grips with the notion of using her beauty as a weapon, but the books gave her a whole new dimension of possibilities. With art, however, she discovered she could visualise and draw her stories and games for real, but she was amazed by how forgers were able to take a canvas and create a copy of a famous painting. Art, like fiction, was a creative outlet for her, and she enjoyed them both, though art was more complex, though she mentally prepared herself for what she had in mind.
It wasn't until she went to college she realised she could bring her criminal nature and her love for art into the mix. All she had to do was look for opportunities. Setting up her organisation had not been difficult, especially when she discovered someone she had seduced after discovering he just happened to make synthetic drugs at home. He had been easy to convert, all she had needed to do was shower him with the attention of the popular, artsy, gorgeous babe, and he was putty.
He made the drugs, she handled the business, and soon the dealers were doing everything she wanted them to do while she used her sex and her appearance to her advantage. She was intelligent, but no-one had expected her to use her brains in that manner.
She shook her head out of her memories - they were getting too close to the time when she had been indiscreet and she'd gotten pregnant (she would not think about those memories, they were uncomfortable for her), and she focused on Sherlock again.
Out of all the men in her life, Sherlock Holmes was unique. Like her, he had a brilliant mind, but Jamie had been disappointed when they had met and began to spend time with each other. Why hadn't he seen the signs? Was he that lonely he had lost sight of his senses or were his so-called 'legendary powers of deduction' that limited he couldn't see through her mask? But she had wondered if it had been her own fault, that her disguise was too good and she wasn't giving anything away. It was possible. She had worked for years to hone her disguise so she could go out into the streets with the rest of the mundanes, but she hadn't imagined it would have worked on someone like Holmes.
To her surprise, Sherlock, despite her expectations had done more than express interest in her. He had gone and put her on a pedestal, something he could look at because truthfully he didn't want an equal, he just wanted a companion, someone who would have sex with him without having to look at her to see what her true nature was.
She had hated him for that, but she had also been hurt because she had wondered, if only for a brief moment, what could have been. She had never believed in the fairy tale wedding; that type of thing was a myth told by those gooey brained mundane girls who had nothing better to do, but the thought of having someone like her around…. It had been compelling. After a while, she realised it wasn't going to happen.
Jamie had felt nothing when Irene Adler was declared dead, her art studio smashed up by the mysterious serial killer known as "M" which was done by Sebastian in her name, with a pool of blood you could float the Titanic and the Lusitania on, and still have enough space for the Bismarck.
She had heard about Sherlock's fall from grace, and she hadn't known whether to laugh or not when she'd heard that he had become a drug addict, but she had felt no pity for the man. And yet, Jamie Moriarty had been surprised when she had heard the news Sherlock Holmes was back on his feet, this time investigating seemingly impossible crimes in New York, some of which she herself had organised as tests to evaluate for herself whether Sherlock had indeed regained his intelligence.
She had wanted to be informed so when she decided to operate in New York, she would base her strategy around the basic notion Sherlock would discover her plans.
As she looked out over the city, Jamie Moriarty mentally prepared herself for the games she was going to play.
Until the next time, readers...