A/N: This fic is super inspired by a) hobbitsdoitbetter's fabulous story The Unexpected Hunter and b) broomclosetkink's PIed Piper (non-fandom) story which she was wonderful enough to share with me. Thanks for reading!
Work with sound until you are absolutely amazed that you can produce such a sound and it seems to you that you are just the instrument to which the divine pied piper blows the whisper of the incantations of his magic spell.
- Vilayat Inayat Khan
The sound of music - soft, haunting - invaded her sleep. Molly twitched, turned on her side, and sat up, eyes blinking sleepily as the sweet notes of a distant violin called her to wakefulness.
Slipping softly from her bed, she groped for her dressing-gown and slid her feet into her slippers, making her silent way to the window. Throwing it wide, she leaned over the still and scanned the darkness - there! A half-seen form, standing on the soft lawn two stories below, tall, silent but for the music he was playing.
Music meant only for her ears.
Molly leaned further over the sill, smiling shyly as the figure tilted its - his? yes, his - head, eyes glinting quicksilver in the moonlight as he met her gaze. The notes of the violin, soft and melodic, changed suddenly to an enticing dancing tune, and the figured danced backward into the darkness as if daring her to follow, to chase after him, to join him.
Without a backwards glance at her sleeping husband, Molly Moriarty exited the bedroom, made her silent, ghostly way down the stairs and out the door of the Great Hall. Down the stone steps to the sweeping drive she went, her feet as noiseless as if they were made of shadows, of the darkling sky, uncaring of the cool air on her flesh as she followed the music, so faint on this side of the great House in which she'd been raised. The same house that mocked her now as the prison it had become upon her unhappy marriage to the man who now owned that House - and her despairing self.
A year and a day, had it truly only been that long? It seemed a lifetime.
She faltered in her steps, but the music surged as she rounded the corner to the back of the house, buoying her spirits, making her forget for a collection of happy moments the dreariness her life had become since her marriage.
The music swelled, coaxing and sweet, and she moved unhesitatingly toward it through the dew-wet grass, feeling neither the dampness nor the autumnal chill in the early morning air. Indeed, her cheeks were aglow with heat as she made her way into the gardens, and from there through the gap in the hedges leading to the ancient forests that surrounded the ancestral Hooper home on three sides.
She'd prayed for someone, anyone, to intervene to save her, but the thought that her prayers had been answered never crossed her mind. No, all she heard, all she felt, was the music thrumming through her blood, her flesh, her very soul, as all-consuming as the sea that had swallowed her father's ships and left her family destitute, at the mercy of a man who wanted nothing but the empty titles that were all Sir Howard Hooper had left behind.
She felt no fear, only anticipation as the music swelled in her ears, in her heart, in her mind; she found herself almost dancing, laughing aloud in dizzy delight as she finally reached the dark, silent figure who had lured her so charmingly from her marital bed.
"Who are you?" she asked, breathless and eager as he lowered the violin from his shoulder and smiled at her.
"Retribution," he replied, his voice a deep, thrilling baritone the curled her toes in her slippers and raised goosebumps on her arms, flushing her cheeks with warmth and sending tingles to her most private, intimate parts. "For too long James Moriarty has left the piper unpaid, and now is the time for him to lose the very thing he wants most in this world."
Molly frowned, for the first time feeling unease in the stranger's presence. "Me? Surely I'm not even near the top of his list of desired objects." She tried not to let bitterness color her words, but could tell by the stranger's crooked smile that she'd failed in that task.
"Your land, your family name, his reputation - all will be lost when you vanish, never to be seen by mortal eyes again," he intoned, but far from feeling threatened Molly felt instead an incredible rush of relief.
"Well then, my good piper - er, violinist," she corrected herself with a self-deprecating smile. "We'd best be off then, hadn't we?" And she offered him her hand.
"Indeed." He took her fingers in his, his flesh warm against her coolness, and pressed a soft kiss to her knuckles that shot like lightning through her flesh, igniting her veins, her nerves, every part of her being with the sensuous delights it seemed to promise.
He pulled back without releasing her, taking a dancing stance, the violin having vanished into some sparkling nothingness. His eyes - blue one second, green the next, with amber flecks that seemed to glean like a cat's eyes in the pale moonlight - held her mesmerized, and she willingly allowed him to sweep her into a waltz.
They danced into the deeper forest, eyes only for one another, the mistreated villain's wife and the man whom he'd murdered at the Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps seven years before. Danced and smiled and learned to love one another in the realm beyond time, beyond mortal eyes and ears,
Even if James Moriarty never knew who had lured his young bride away from him, who had caused his life to then collapse into chaos and ruin, neither Molly Hooper (no longer Moriarty, never again Moriarty, oh joyous day!) nor Sherlock Holmes cared.
He had lost, and together, they had won.