"Can you tell us where you were on the fourteenth of July of this year?" Lestrade asked, pacing the room. This was the seventeenth time he'd asked the question – he was using very basic tricks to try and get Moriarty to snap – and they were both kind of tired of it.

"Can you tell me where you where, Inspector?" Moriarty replied for the seventeenth time. "You seem awfully reticent on the subject."

Lestrade just shook his head and switched to another tactic. "Are the artefacts part of a greater plan?"

Moriarty smiled. This was a new one; it had been seventeen full cycles of the same questions, and only now was he getting down to what he wanted to know. He clearly thought patience was a virtue. "No. No plan. No relics." He raised his eyebrows at the last word and gave a quick glance to Lestrade's grey and receding hair line.

The inspector didn't seem to know what to say, as if he'd expected Moriarty to tell him everything at the slightest nudging. "We can get Sherlock in here if you want."

They were desperate enough to break protocol – or rather, he was; Moriarty hadn't seen another officer all day. The amusement tamped down his anger at Sherlock as it began to rise, and he gave the logical reply, "No." Sherlock could wait. It wouldn't be long now.

Lestrade sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. "Okay. Recording stopped at three oh-two PM." He walked over to the table and pressed the stop button. "Mycroft is outside. Sherlock is with him."

Moriarty kept silent, enjoying Lestrade's frustration.

"Mycroft also brought a few friends along from Serbia. They're experts in torture." A pause. "You can either answer to me or answer to them."

The consulting criminal shook his head in amusement; Mycroft didn't have any friends in Serbia – he had made sure of that himself. "Well, I'm not talking to you. It's boring."

Lestrade hung his head. "Would you like to talk to Sherlock? Last chance."

Yes. He wanted to talk to Sherlock more than anything. He wanted to shout at him, he wanted to speak so quietly that the man could barely hear; he wanted to do something that would evoke a reaction of some sort – some interest. But not here, with handcuffs on his wrists and a tape recorder on the table. "No."

"Mycroft, then?" The Inspecotr's voice was defeated; he clearly didn't want this to end in torture any more than his suspect. Either he was a better actor than Moriarty believed, or he honestly didn't know that the men outside were neither Serbian nor torturers. Or he was telling the truth – Moriarty dismissed the idea immediately; his arrest had been too public for them to squirrel him away to one of Mycroft's barely-legal hidey-holes.

He wondered what Mycroft was thinking, threatening violence when they both knew he wasn't capable of fulfilling his threat. He had heard from his informants that Mycroft considered himself the smarter of the two Holmes brothers, but it seemed like an incredulous claim right now. "Fine."

Lestrade sighed in relief and stuck his head out of the interrogation room's door. "Get Mycroft, will you?"

"Jim," Mycroft nodded, greeting the man with an almost friendly tone in his voice – he even swung his umbrella for effect. "You'll be happy to know that I sent my friends back home."

Moriarty slouched back into his chair and chewed at the gum Lestrade had brought him out of relief of not having a torture session in his station. "Where to? Hackney, was it?"

He tilted his head. "The West End. It seems that Greg can't tell the difference between Polish builders and Serbian Mafiosos."

Moriarty smiled. "Makes you worried for the state of the country, doesn't it?"

Mycroft raised his eyebrows and sat down. "I was hoping to talk to you, Jim."

"That why you brought the Serbians? Trying to get me interested?" He licked his lips and gave the man a smouldering look.

Mycroft looked less than impressed and more than discomforted. "Something like that, yes. Jim…"

"Yes…?"

Mycroft sighed. "I want you to keep away from my brother. Do whatever you want, but don't hurt my brother."

Well that was unexpected. "Odd, coming from the big brother who sent him off to be killed in Eastern Europe."

"I had no choice. It wasn't my decision to make."

Moriarty scoffed, but didn't contradict The British Government Himself.

"Will you look after him, Jim?"

He leaned forward, even more interested. "Now, that's a whole different thing, Mike. And I don't know that I can do either."

"Don't lie to me. It wasn't coincidence that allowed my brother dearest to run about the continent for so long without a scratch. Nor is it coincidence that you revealed yourself when you did."

Moriarty set his jaw. Perhaps Mycroft was the smarter Holmes brother. "If Sherlock isn't around, I have to talk to you to keep myself from getting bored. He just happens to be more… peppy about it than you do."

Mycroft shook his head. "You are obsessed with my brother, Mr Moriarty; let's just make it an obsession that keeps him alive, shall we?"

"I can't promise that; my toys tend to get broken."

Mycroft stood up. "Well, you don't have to worry about that; my brother is already broken." He began walking towards the door.

Moriarty's heart leapt and he grabbed the other man's wrist as he walked past. "What do you mean by that?"

Mycroft looked down, disgusted, and pulled his arm away, reaching for his hand sanitiser. "Surely you're informants have told you about the drinking? The drugs? He gets in fights; most of his Homeless Network daren't speak to him any longer due to his moods. I don't know what you did to him, Jim, but you already broke him." He breezed past the criminal and slammed the door behind him.

Broken? The idea seemed ludicrous. Sherlock, broken? By what? Was it his live-in, ordinary pet getting married? Was it the two years away from his home town? It couldn't have been their respective fake suicides – that was an amusement, nothing more.

Still, Moriarty didn't doubt Mycroft's understanding of the situation – just a day or so ago, he himself had been revelling in the change that had seemed to come across his rival. He'd decided that it represented his fall from the side of the angels. But was that really it?

He smiled. Whatever the answer, this was going to be fun.