Hi! Gosh, it's been a while. Thanks for sticking around. I'm really glad you did =) And I want to thank each and every one of you for your faves and follows and reviews. They mean the world to me ^_^

Did y'all watch season 4? Needless to say I was so happy we got more Moriarty. I did find it rather uncanny that the show chose that particular song for that scene though lol.

Anyway, this chapter was very difficult to write and I don't know if I'm satisfied with it even now. But I did suffer months long writer's block due to being too busy, tired, sick and just plain burnt out creatively. Hope you people like it anyway.


Samantha was no stranger to searching for the elusive criminal. All it took was some ingenuity and creative thinking. Her first move was to pull footage from the hotel's security cameras to see what information she could glean. The only footage of Moriarty inside the building was on the night she met him. It was clear to her that he was there for a specific reason. She then began the tedious task of trawling through traffic cams in the surrounding area in hope to find any kind of pattern to his movements. This was boring, monotonous and time consuming but last resorts usually were. She jotted down times and locations of sightings as she worked. Apart from a couple of irregularities, she narrowed down a radius within which he popped up the most. She requested more time from Mycroft as the 48 hour window was too short for the amount of work she had to do. It would be impossible to tell where Moriarty would be at any given moment so any further contact with him would be, like back at the hotel, down to sheer luck. All she could do was put herself out there and hope her luck would return.


"You've come to see me, I assume with good news?" said Rin with an eerie mirth. She was sitting behind a desk in the small dark room where Moriarty and Nika had been led to at the back of her casino. Upon the desk were two screens. One was the monitor to a computer, the other displayed multiple security images feeding from the casino's cameras. The brother, Arata, sat to Rin's left and slightly out from the desk, whereas Rin sat dead center. This told him that this was by all accounts Rin's desk, not Arata's. Something about this plucked at the tendrils of his mind so he tacked it to the mental corkboard he had been compiling since his first encounter with the Yakuza.

Behind Moriarty was the exit which was flanked by two bouncers, one of which he recognised from the flight from New Zealand. He wondered how much of a threat Rin considered him to be.

"Well, we come with news," Moriarty retorted, "Whether it's good or bad is a matter of perspective."

Rin once again lit up, and took a long, deep drag of her cigarette. Chain smoker, he observed. Stressed, short-tempered.

"Go on," she said in a puff of smoke.

Moriarty explained what he found at the hotel, leaving out the detail about Samantha. He wanted to exercise caution before he knew all the facts. When he finished speaking, Rin frowned, running her thumb across her bottom lip.

"A safe?" she said, "So father was hiding something."

"Rin, you can't know that,"Arata interjected.

"You didn't know father like I did!" she shot back, "I knew he had his secrets. It's the reason he's dead. And it's our fault. We should have known. We could have prevented this."

Their exchange was spoken in Japanese, but Moriarty's grasp of the language had returned to him having spent enough time in the city.

"I know you're still grieving-"

"This isn't grief, brother! This is business! Whoever killed our father has started a war. Don't you understand?"

"If I may," Moriarty felt this family quarrel was wasting his time, "I need assurance that we are done now. After all I held up my end-"

"You are not done until I get what I want," Rin said.

Nika bolted up from her seat. "I'll give you something you skinny -"

"Nika!" Moriarty cut her off.

"She can't do this to us," she said to him in Russian, "We did what she asked. We are done!"

"Sit down. I'll handle this," Moriarty replied composedly.

Nika lapsed into silence and sat back down with an air of indignation. Rin shared an acidic glare with her before redirecting her attention back to Moriarty.

"I don't want her here," she said, pointedly.

With that, she gestured to the bouncers who each grabbed Nika either side and hauled her from her seat. Nika erupted with Russian expletives that faded with her departure from the room.

"Such a temper," said Rin, "I don't know how you put up with it. No wonder she was on the hit list."

Moriarty looked her dead in the eye, daring her to push him further. She met his stare with a smile.

"Don't worry," she said, with a toke of her cigarette, "No harm will come to her. Yet."

The bouncers returned and with the absence of Nika, Moriarty felt particularly vulnerable. He could die here in this room. This was more of a logical assessment than any self-pitying pessimism however. Rin had invited him to what was undoubtedly an illegal casino, and brought him to what was undoubtedly her private business room. She had very deliberately involved him just deep enough that she had a very good excuse to kill him if he should refuse to grant further service to her. And then she would likely kill Nika to tidy up any loose ends. He was in a position where dying was too easy. On that thought, a new spark lit up inside him. He had a goal and a very immediate one at that: staying alive. He had often despised the thought of it but right now staying alive was a new challenge that gave him purpose. He hadn't felt this way in a long time. He was not about to let some Yakuza brat take his blaze of glory from him.

"Why are you smiling?" asked Rin. He hadn't realised that he was.

"I was just thinking that if I were to be stripped down any further I'd be sitting here bollock naked in front of you right now," he mused.

"Your point?"

"I have nothing to lose." Moriarty stood which provoked the bouncers to reach for their concealed weapons.

"Relax boys, I'm just stretching my legs," he said.

They hesitated but stood down on Rin's prompt.

"I have nothing to lose!" he repeated swinging his arms wide, "You could kill Nika, you could kill me and I wouldn't be a whole lot worse off than I already am. I have nothing to lose but I have..." A broad grin spread across his face, "everything to gain... And you're going to help me."

Rin cocked her head to the side, her expression telling him she was not impressed.

"Oh but hear me out," he insisted, suddenly animated, "You want your daddy's murderer? I can hand him to you gift-wrapped. You want to start a war? Honey, I can make you general. All I need is a teensy bit of support from your… organisation."

"He's trying to manipulate you, Rin," Arata piped, "Don't trust anything he says."

Moriarty glared at him. He knew the brother would be a problem.

"Why would he manipulate me, brother?" Rin replied, though the question was directed at Moriarty, "What do I have to lose?"

"Well nothing," Moriarty replied with a shrug. "You get to avenge your father's death and I get to back to my glory days. We could even do business together once I'm back on form."

"You want a truce?"

"An alliance! A truce would imply we never liked each other to begin with and that's just not true, is it?"

"And how can I trust you, Moriarty-san?"

"Ah! Good question! Your boss is so smart," he said directing that last part to one of the guards. "I've just told you that you can so easily destroy me right now. You have me utterly at my ropes end. My life is literally in your hands.

And if that's not enough, I'll tell you about the woman that was at your daddy's hotel suite the night I was there. She's an old friend of mine - kind of an ex, actually. You can also use her as leverage against me. Pretty good leverage too or so I'm told.

So there you go. All my cards are on the table. Heh, get it? We're in a casino!" He chuckled at his own pun. "Do you understand what I'm giving you right now? See, I like you Rin Tatsumi. You're a cool girl and I would really like that we be friends."

Rin hadn't taken a smoke in several minutes and a column of ash burnt almost down to the butt of her cigarette. Her soft features were hardened in a taut frown.

"What woman?" she questioned, concern in her tone. Her ignorance was genuine, much to Moriarty's interest. He tacked that note to the corkboard. In one movement, he swung his chair around and straddled it, draping his arms across the back and resting his chin there.

"Oh honey," he said with a placid smile, "We have much to discuss."


Nika was bristling. What on earth was taking Moriarty so long? Was she going to die tonight? Had they already killed Moriarty? The waiting was driving her insane. And the nerve of that Yakuza girl. In her line of work Nika had come across many people she had learned to hate, but Tatsumi had quickly earned her way to the top of the list. She fantasized about all the different ways she could kill her if she were given the choice. It cheered her up, if only slightly.

Sighing she eventually abandoned her post and followed the signs to the bathroom. She was caught off guard when she opened one of the stall doors to find Jirou crouched beside the toilet. He had arrived with them to the casino earlier but was not permitted entry to Tatsumi's office. She then noticed that he had been arranging lines of white powder across the toilet lid. Jirou glanced up guiltily as if he were a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. There was a moment of awkward silence before he pointed to the powder by way of offering. Ordinarily Nika would decline most drugs while on a job she needed to stay sharp for, but those thoughts didn't even have the chance to form before her apathy took over the driver's seat. From her boot she produced her pen knife - something the bouncer's missed when they frisked her earlier- and held it out to Jirou. He obligingly poured a line of the drug along the blade with a tap-tap-tap of his finger against the clear plastic bag. She snorted the line in one breath and sat on the floor next to Jirou. She sniffed and rubbed her nose for a few moments while the chemical smell dominated her nasal passage. She then rested her head back against the stall and said "Fuck everything."


Moriarty was led out through a back entrance of the building so that he found himself in an alleyway. He was satisfied with the negotiations he had made with Rin tonight. Now he felt like he could really move forward and get out of the rut he had been in. His mind was already teeming ideas, solutions and probabilities. He was still on the international most wanted list, but the Yakuza's resources were just enough to help him build back his empire to the way it was and that would have to do for now.

He was about to make his way out to the street when a thought occurred to him. Where's Nika? It was then he noticed someone on the ground only a few yards away. His curiosity getting the better of him, he approached, circling around the figure to get a better look.

"Huh," he said as the person glanced up at him.

"Ah, Mr. Moriarty," said Samantha, her syllables broken with apparent pain, "Just the man I was looking for." She was on her knees and doubled over, clutching her abdomen. Moriarty noticed the blood on the pavement. It was a lot of blood.

"Samantha, dear," he said, as if appealing to a child, "Do you need medical assistance?"

Samantha seemed to think on it a moment before she replied, "If it's not too much trouble."