First time on FF, folks, so reviews, tips, follows, favorites, ANY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AT ALL would justify my continued existence!
Disclaimer: You would already know if I really owned these characters. . .
Kudos: Based on the fantastic short story by Max Shulman and the Reichenbach transcript episode so lovingly provided by St. Ariane on LJ
Ok, shutting up now. Enjoy?
Logical. I had to remain logical. Being logical had always saved me.
"Ah. Here we are at last," Jim Moriarty practically purred, raising his phone as though he would toss it to the pavement below. "You and me, Sherlock, and our problem – the final problem."
Logical. Collected. Keen. In my mind the words replayed themselves like a pedantic mantra, a repetition that I would find maddening in any other scenario but that in this case provided a reassuring refrain. Calculating, perspicacious, acute, and astute – I was all of these. I would survive.
"Stayin' alive!" Moriarty intoned, adding, "It's so boring, isn't it? It's just – staying."
My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. I would walk away from this, and I could barely keep an uncharacteristic grin from creeping across my face. Pace. Pace. Pacing would keep the energy pent up until it was time for the revelation.
"All my life I've been searching for distractions," the once self-proclaimed IT man moaned. "You were the best distraction and now I don't even have you."
Keep pacing. It is not a given that the superior intellect can remain calm under the plethora of options presented by pressure. Take, for example, the man seated before me in that maddening attitude of mock despair.
"I've beaten you," Moriarty concluded smugly. And, oh, yes – incorrectly.
Approximately the same age as me, judging by the ratio of height to weight and the shade of natural color at the tip of those hair roots he couldn't quite reach. Approximately the same type of intelligence and level of intellect as me, judging by the way he had anticipated the way my mind would work and accounted for every step I would take. And yet. . . overall, nothing worthwhile in that overinflated head.
"And you know what?" he continued, in a tone he probably thought was teasing. "In the end it was easy."
This farce of a set-up said emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a braggart. Boasting, I submit, is the very negation of reason. To be swept up in the emotion of doing something well, to surrender oneself to ridiculous posturing simply because the next person lacks the intellect to follow your reasoning – that, to me, is the acme of mindlessness.
"Now I've got to go back to playing with the ordinary people," he spat. "And it turns out you're ordinary just like all of them."
Though of course it does not count as boasting if the next person is one's catalyst, channel, conductor of light.