A/N: I love writing Moriarty. Full disclosure.

This is the way the world will end.

You will spin it and twist it and sing lullabies to the child's fears in all of them, round and round on a carousel of nightmares, until nobody can remember who you are anymore.

Secret is? You've never been anybody you didn't want to be. Jim Moriarty is just as much a lie as Richard Brook. Names are footholds on the cliff-face of life.

You make sure they all give way.

You never make promises you can't break.

Blood is thick and hot and racing, a flood to dip your fingertips in, to paint signs and stories older than the game you're playing now. You long for it to be his blood, for the final touch, the coda of your symphony—you scratched his name on prison walls, and you long (if you are capable of longing) to trace it beside his corpse.

You shoot, he falls, the world doesn't end. Not yet, at least. But the game's not over, it never is, there's just more blood now—

Yours and his. He writes his own name in blood, and perhaps it's better that way.

He thinks he's won, for now—

But you've never been anybody you didn't want to be.