I see you lying next to me
With words I thought I'd never speak
Awake and unafraid, asleep or dead

- My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words -

It was probably on the sixth day that Jim dropped a file in her lap as he passed, completely ignoring the fact that she had to jerk her cup of coffee out of the way with a startled hiss. She looked through it with mild boredom - nothing they'd done so far had been terribly exciting or seemingly effective, and this was just another routine job. Get some information from a source so many degrees away from Mallory it hardly seemed worth it. But she did the jobs the boss gave her. He wasn't one to waste time when he had a personal vendetta. Not the 'dish of cold revenge' type of bloke.

She moseyed into the kitchen, where Sebastian looked to be making a soup that smelled spicy enough to make her cry. "I gotta go grift some bloke out in Brooklyn. D'you think the bus or the tube is the better bet? Or, subway, whatever, fuck it."

"Subway, no question," he said, not bothering to look up from where he was mincing chilis. "The buses around here are foul. Nothing like London."

"Mm. The last time I was in New York was years ago, and I didn't exactly have to resort to public transportation much," she hummed, setting the file down on the kitchen table in case he wanted to look over it later. They were low on resources at the moment, and much of the information they were getting came only in the physical form. "Alright, I'm heading out. See you tomorrow. Don't put chili seeds in my shampoo or something devilish like that, huh?"

"What time tomorrow?" he asked as he scraped the chili into the soup. "And I wasn't going to, but now that you mention such a great idea..."

"Haha, no. Don't you dare." She gave him a stern look, then relaxed. "I don't know, probably noon. This job is completely routine. Boringly so. Shouldn't be anything to slow me up."

"Alright," he said with a nod, finally glancing up as he stirred the peppers in. "See you tomorrow. Don't get dead, all that."

"Thanks for the concern," she laughed, waving briefly at him before turning and slipping back out of the kitchen and out the front door onto the street. Time to go to work.

It wasn't unusual for Harrison to be late. Things happened, marks wanted another go before she left, or she had to shake a tail. As a result, Sebastian hadn't really been annoyed until around three the next afternoon. He didn't allow concern to make its appearance until well after midnight. Finally, he got up and grabbed his jacket, shoulder holster already in place, as it had been for several hours. "That's it. This is too long without contact. I'm going out after her. I'll be back in a few hours."

Jim looked up from his phone, looking like he was still contemplating something he'd read, and nodded. Despite Moran's emotional attachment to the woman, he'd started looking up the latest reports as soon as the sniper had started pacing. Moran, like most cats, occasionally seemed to possess a sixth sense about things, and it never hurt to be proactive. Either way, Harrison was worth a considerable amount of money. "Alright. Be out two hours, at the most. This is no time to be dilly-dallying."

He tensed slightly. "Respectfully, sir, finding a valuable asset with information about our plans and strategies hardly seems like dilly-dallying," he pointed out from his place by the door.

He let out a dramatic sigh, then gave a wave towards the door. "Fine. So be it. Stay in better contact than your beau. And don't get fucking arrested. The police force here is a nightmare."

"Yes, sir," he said, walking outside and heading for the stairs.

He didn't come back until mid-morning the next day, though he did check in every few hours. The texts looked very much the same.

1:47AM- Nothing. Any information?

3:02AM- Nothing.

4:26AM- Nothing. Anything new on your end?

6:38AM- Nothing. You're no fucking help.

9:19AM- Fucking nothing. Coming in.

When he walked back in, he headed immediately for the kitchen, brewing himself a coffee and tipping a double shot of vodka in for good measure.

Jim walked in a few minutes later, his face blank. He'd gotten almost no new information. The resources he had pointed in Harrison's direction had come back completely empty-handed. After she'd left the mark's house - and she had left it, there was CCTV proof - there was no trace of her. For all intents and purposes, she'd disappeared off the face of the earth. He still didn't know if it was on purpose or if there were other forces at work, but he could accept that he'd have to replace her. There was no finding her, not with the weak, barely-there web he had in this godforsaken city. But this did present an opportunity. A fruitful looking one. If Jim didn't nip this in the bud now, Moran would look for her, aimlessly, for days. Weeks, maybe. He didn't have that much time. The longer they stayed in New York, the more likely for Mallory to happen upon them. He couldn't risk that. "She's dead, Moran."

In books, people always seemed to talk about time slowing down for bad news, but Moran experienced no such thing. The announcement was boring, undramatic, average. One life in seven billion had ended. The insignificant life of a crack whore turned alcoholic grifter. Time moved right along, and his coffee tasted no more bitter than it had before as he sipped it.

Time should have slowed down. He wanted to savor a few minutes of mystification, an eon or two of disbelief. But they passed in heartbeats, and what settled was reality, and understanding.

It was hell.

She was dead. It took a breath, maybe two. Life was insignificant. He knew that. In his trade he dealt in fractions of centimeters and seconds. People were alive, he twitched his finger, and they weren't. It was no revelation to him, no surprise

"Right. What's our next step, then?" he asked, his voice unwavering, body unflinching.

He wanted to move, to break things, to kill the man who ended lives with words as whimsically as if he was flicking the ash off a cigarette. But he was trained better than that, and his body knew to disconnect, to ignore the clawing of the beast and to motor on in the automatic patterns it knew so well.

"I want to move in on his money-laundering business. Specifically, I want to wipe out his money-laundering business. Less income will be easier for us, down the line," Jim replied without inflection, despite the fact that he wanted to smirk. Usually, he never denied himself a smirk. This moment, however, did not seem as if it would tolerate one. "I already have the plans laid out. Let's get to work."

"Of course," he said, nodding and walking into the next room to grab his computer. He returned, and while it was booting, paled his coffee with vodka.

He had no sleep, and was soon going to be pissed. Which was the only way he was going to be able to work properly. There wasn't time to react, just to press forward.

Jim wiped Harrison from his mind as he started to get back to work. Relishing the emotional pain Moran was going through would have to wait until later.

It took Lorna a month and ten days to get back. She slipped in at 1 in the morning, damp from rain outside, her clothes haggard and torn, and a rather nasty-looking cut on her hand she hadn't had the opportunity to wrap. Her hurt leg burned with every step. After the job, she'd run into some old "friends". She'd met them during her Armetti days, and they'd not parted on good terms. And after that goddamn nightmare with Mallory and Sebastian she had absolutely refused to be stuffed into a van again. So she'd fled. Fast, and in pain from her screaming leg, she'd gotten away. But Christ, if she led Armetti to Moran and the Boss...

Armetti had been the only boss that had still been alive when she left his employ, excluding DeWitt. And he'd been a ruthless son of a bitch. One that wouldn't hesitate to take out competition the likes of Jim Moriarty. The way she had left things, it was unclear if he would still leave them be simply at her word.

They hadn't given up. She'd been followed for days, always a tail on the edge of her vision. When she lost one, another found her. She fought off kidnappings three more times before killing one of them with a broken bottle in an alley. They didn't get close again after that. They just watched. Just harried her, just kept her from making a single goddamn move. She couldn't call Moran or the boss, she couldn't get to a computer, she couldn't even think about the street they were staying on.

It was at the beginning of the following month that they began to slack off. She could tell that there was something else occupying their attention, keeping them from caring about her too much. One by one, her tails started to disappear. At first, she thought it was just a reallocation of resources. Then she found one of her shadows dead, and not by her hand. Someone was picking them off. Who, she couldn't fathom. She couldn't even really bring herself to care that much. She had to worry about getting actual meals, and sneaking into gyms to take a shower, in order to better lie and steal to get those damn meals.

Now, she was just tired. Bone-deep weariness dragged at her limbs. She pushed off of the door with a muffled grunt and fumbled her way in the dark into the bedroom, not even bothering with limiting the amount of noise she was making.

He had never hunted like this before. The prey had never been so plentiful. But the streets of New York were so easy, teeming with life just begging to be tasted. He never worked the same way twice, but he remembered each one easily.

The woman with the white necklace, white like bones on dark skin... he had slit her throat. Crouched behind her so as to throw off any guesses as to the height of the killer. Her necklace had been red when he left her. So had his teeth, but that had pushed the envelope too far, and after that, after that first, feral kill, he'd taken a step back. Knives were too tempting.

The boy with the canvas hat and the mole on his left cheek, that had been a 500 foot shot. Almost too easy, with the way the mark was leaning on the fence, talking smoothly to the girl next to him. She had screamed. Moran hadn't heard it under the noise of the traffic, but he had seen it in her eyes.

The old man in the park had been a syringe to the neck. He'd fallen asleep and not woken up, and he doubted anyone would look past the frail heart and bones to see murder.

Night after night he found them. His prey. It was so, so easy, with alcohol for blood and a myriad of weapons... As long as he did his job, Jim couldn't care less, and he liked it that way. He had missed the hunting. Missed the strategy, the plans, the days of watching, waiting for just the right moment. Then in a breath they were gone, with no answers for their families, their friends.

It was familiar.

He could make those seconds last. Could get them back.

It was hell, but he'd carved himself a throne.

Something was wrong when he came in that night. Things were out of place. The end table had shifted across the floor, and the door to his room was ajar. He didn't hesitate to pull out his gun, his hands steady despite the fact that he was well past inebriated. He walked slowly forward, breaths steady, to deal with whoever was intruding.

Lorna was in the bathroom, leaning back against the wall with one foot up on the sink so she could brace her hand on her leg and try to wrap it with just her non-dominant hand and her teeth. In the dim light of the single bulb hanging overhead, it was a difficult process, though she kept her swearing to herself. Mostly out of habit, by now. Speaking was a surefire way to draw attention, and for so long now she'd been desperate not to be heard, nor seen, nor even thought of. It would take her a while to break herself of that.

He sighed in mild annoyance when he saw her, lowering his gun. He'd dealt with a few hallucinations the first few nights- absinthe again- but he'd thought he was past that. He tried to think what might have triggered this one as he reached out to swipe it away, but stopped that train of thought to turn his attention to his hand, which was pressed against a warm, solid shoulder.

Okay, interesting.

She was alive. So, either Jim had been mistaken- unlikely- or Jim had lied. Much more likely. But Jim had lied and would continue to lie for a long time. That was unimportant. He moved on. Where she had been and how she was alive were likely relevant questions, but judging from the fact that she had stopped to dress wounds rather than urgently seeking out him or Moriarty, they weren't urgent. He decided all of this in the space of a few seconds, then nodded to himself. "There's blankets for the couch in the cabinet by the kitchen. We'll talk tomorrow."

She raised her eyebrows at his entrance, then frowned slightly at his considerably less than warm welcome, and said nothing, returning her attention to getting her cut taped up to hide the hurt in her eyes. No questions, no sign of any emotion whatsoever. Had she done something wrong, somewhere? "Alright," she said finally, shutting the first aid kit a little harder than normal and moving by him quickly, jaw clenched.

He watched her go, and part of him- a tiny part now, starved for attention, called after her. He ignored it and headed for bed.

She got the blankets out of the cabinet mechanically, got undressed stiffly, and collapsed onto the sofa and into a small ball. This was too much. Surviving like that on the street, leading those assholes in circles around New York to keep them from sniffing out the two of them, and now this- this inexplicable cold shoulder. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and willed herself to go to sleep.

He fell asleep easily, alcohol knocking him out as soon as he lay down, unhindered by the ghostly presence in the next room. His dreams were dark.

She woke up after only a couple hours of light sleep - another habit from living on the street - and decided to spend the rest of the time sitting on the kitchen floor with a bottle of half-finished whiskey she found sitting in the back of the fridge. By seven, she stopped herself, sliding the bottle a little ways away on the floor, and then just sitting back with her eyes closed. She was drunk enough not to think for a little while.

He woke up when the sun hit his eyes at around 8:30, and rolled out of bed with a grunt, fumbling around for a moment before he found the flask beside his bed. A few sips later and the hangover lost its edge, and he got to his feet, heading for the kitchen. Lorna was there, sprawled out, a bottle a few feet away. He walked past her to the fridge and started making himself breakfast.

She cracked her eyes as he started to bang around, giving him a mildly resentful look through slitted eyelids. "So you gonna tell me what crawled up your ass and died while I was gone or are you going to make me play a game of fuckin' charades?"

"Just surprised to see you're alive, that's all," he said bluntly as he headed for the stove with some Canadian bacon. "That contradicts the information we had." His voice was careful. Controlled. He didn't look at her.

"That fucking bastard," she spat immediately. Of course it was fucking Jim. Of course. What else could have happened? "I work my ass off keeping goddamn Armetti off the operation, off of you assholes, and what, he writes me off? How long did it take? Did he even give me 24 hours before he declared me dead without a speck of evidence? Fucking Christ."

"He might have had conflicting information. I don't know. I looked for you, you were in the wind, and then he said he'd gotten intel." He didn't elaborate. Didn't want her to have a shred of information about the tailspin that that had sent him into.

"Whatever," she snapped, leaning over to snag the bottle again, taking a long swig before standing and slamming it down on the counter, too strung out to be bothered with control. "Can I go get some fucking fresh clothes to wear or am I just completely barred from that room now?"

"Go ahead," he said mildly, nodding. "Make sure you change that bandage too."

"It's fine, fuck off," she snarled, only getting angrier the longer he remained so fucking passive, so lifeless, leaving the room as fast as her various ailments would allow. Her leg was still a wreck, and she'd gotten almost used to the feeling of infection, though every step was agony and there had been a few nights where the fever had gotten so bad she hadn't been sure she would make it to sunrise. She'd done her best to keep it clean, but living in the same filthy clothes and sleeping in rank alleys undid all the work she put into cleaning it. There was a reason she'd just stripped out of her jeans in the living room, and now that she was in front of the dresser, she got a pair of shorts cut high enough to let the disgusting thing breathe. After she threw on a shirt she grabbed a bottle of vodka off the dresser and locked herself in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the yellowing porcelain tub and trying not to scream as she doused the wound in alcohol.

He waited until he heard the door close, and shut his eyes, taking a slow breath. That was a mistake. Even that tiny bit of relaxation started the foundations he'd been holding solid crumbling, and the next breath hitched hard. He forced the next one to be steady, no matter how much his chest burned, eyes now shut tight, hands gripping the counter hard as he fought savagely for his blessed control.

When she judged it was as clean as it was going to get (or, more likely, she couldn't take one more goddamn second of that torture) she just sat in the tub, rubbing at the tears on her cheeks tiredly, the now mostly-empty bottle left by the hand she dangled over the edge of the tub. She didn't know why she'd come back. She wouldn't have, if she'd known Sebastian would be like that. He'd never been that way. Even when they'd first met, and she'd been nothing more than an employee to him, he still had fucking inflections to his voice, had some kind of personality beneath the hard exterior. But she'd wasted it, that one golden opportunity to get out. To run away to some far corner of Canada or some shit, to have them think she was dead. Then again, how far would she have made it, with an infection this severe? She sighed, sagged further into the tub. Thank god this bathroom had a lock. It meant she'd be undisturbed for a good long while.

He finally got a hold of himself, made breakfast, and forced himself to eat as if nothing was wrong. He had no appetite. Eventually he headed for his room to get dressed, glancing at the closed bathroom door before sighing slightly and going to clean up in the bathroom in the hall. Once he was shaved, he headed for Jim's door, knocking quietly on the off chance that his employer was asleep.

"Come in," Jim sighed, not looking up from his laptop when Moran stepped in. "I heard talking. She's alive, then?"

"If I had to guess, sir, you never thought otherwise," he said as he stepped inside. There was no bitterness or anger in his tone. He was just stating fact.

"Bingo. Do you want a cookie? You would have insisted upon looking. We don't have time for that nonsense. Plus, it was just a liiiittle fun watching you turn into a serial killer over a slutty girl," he snorted.

"I don't particularly care, sir. I'm glad you were entertained. Do you have any more information on our progress with the money laundering?" He held Jim's gaze. That was the best revenge he had. Being as uninteresting as possible.

Jim gave him a mildly disgusted look, rolling his eyes. "No. Go away, you're being boring. I hate being bored."

"Of course, sir," he said, voice inflectionless as he headed back out the door, shutting it behind him quietly, keeping any tension out of his arm. He wouldn't be able to keep this up for long, but for the time being...

Jim returned to work feeling a little more irritated than before Moran had entered. Oh well. Harrison might not last long, anyway. He had no doubt that she was likely very unhealthy.

He headed back to his room and lay down, figuring if there was nothing to do he might as well catch a nap. He glanced at the closed bathroom door after a few minutes, however, and frowned, mentally calculating how long she'd been in there.

He stood, walking over, and knocked on the door. "Harrison?"

There was no answer. She hadn't heard him. She'd been out cold for eight minutes, and she'd been relieved to feel herself slipping into unconsciousness.

If I can get my shit together, I'm gonna run away and never see
Any of you again, never see any of you again

I hope the roof flies off and we get blown out into space
I always make such expensive mistakes

- Fall Out Boy - Wilson (Expensive Mistakes) -

You, yeah, you break me down
Yeah, you shut me out
But it's all about you
I know what you're about
But I need you now
'Cause it's all about you

- MARINA - You -