Everyone thought Jim Moriarty was untouchable.
They were wrong. He felt everything.
When Jim was ten, a boy at school pushed him down for being different, for being a freak. From then on, no one would talk to him. He spent lunch reading in a corner and wishing he was someone else.
There was no comfort at home. The house where Jim's family lived wasn't home to him. Home was not where he had to throw himself in front of his little sister to stop his drunk father from hurting her. Home was not where he was too weak to stop their father hurting her, raping her. Home was the white walls of the hospital where he'd last seen his mother, before the doctors cut her open to save the baby as his mother breathed her last.
Emily. His little sister's name was Emily, and she was a prodigy. Or she would have been, in a different family. In his family she was only a scared child, hiding from the monster in the closet - their father. He beat Jim until he was bloody and unconscious and three of his ribs were broken, and then their father held her down and did what he wanted.
She was only thirteen when he got bored of her. She looked too much like his wife, Jim's mother, so he killed her. Jim found her body, stabbed to death with a kitchen knife, and buried her in the backyard. No one came looking. In that neighborhood, children went missing all the time. From that day on, something in Jim wanted to join her.
He was seventeen the first time he spattered the bathroom tiles with his own blood. Every night, he turned on the shower to muffle his sobs and let the water blossom into red. He wore long sleeves the next day, and the day after that, and all the rest of his days.
Jim managed to get in with the local gang, a petty crew who dealt drugs and occasionally murdered people for money. He couldn't tell them his name was Jim Westing, so he told them a name he'd read in a book. Moriarty. He was James Moriarty. They accepted him.
He was nineteen when he placed the gun against his passed out father's temple and pulled the trigger. He never forgot the way the blood painted the walls, but he made sure to forget his father's name. He made sure to forget all their names, all his victims, all of his childhood. The only one he remembered was Emily. He never forgot her laughter in the days before it happened, how happy she was despite the horrors of her life.
He was twenty three when the government found him. He knew it would happen eventually, but he still wasn't ready. They knew he had information on just about everything, but James Moriarty had trained for this moment. They hurt him. They hurt him until he curled up in the corner of his cell and screamed. "No, Daddy, please, no more!" "NO! Don't hurt Emily, please, please, hurt me instead." "Please stop, Daddy. Please!" Mycroft watched the proceedings with emotionless eyes, but inside he was seeing his little brother, and wondering, if things had been different, if he might have been in that cell instead of Moriarty.
He was twenty five when he escaped. They tortured him for months, but he learned to go away inside his head and not feel. One night he had his chance. He escaped, and recovered. Physically. Mentally, he had always been broken. That was something that could not be fixed.
For five years he watched from the shadows, occasionally reaching out and plucking strings, conducting his orchestra of crime with poise and elegance, and, most of all, anonymity. For five years he stayed in hiding and quietly dissolved into madness. For five years he burned and cut tally marks into his skin, hatred burning in his veins. For five years he murdered anyone he didn't like, and orchestrated the death of several hundred others. He earned the nickname Spider, because of his complex web of crime and self hatred and blood. But then something changed.
He was thirty when he met Sherlock Holmes, the only man who could outthink him. He set up tests, murders, and Sherlock solved them all. James Moriarty grew curious, so he took a risk and met Sherlock. Sherlock was a puzzle, and puzzles fascinated Moriarty.
But, like all puzzles, it had to end sometime. James Moriarty defeated Sherlock Holmes, and he was so very, very bored. So he decided to meet Sherlock again, this time on a rooftop, and he brought a gun along just in case. He set up snipers around three of the four people Sherlock cared about. The fourth was James Moriarty, and he took care of that one himself.
"Oh, just kill yourself already." He goaded Sherlock up onto the very edge, and then pushed him over. Or so he thought. Sherlock laughed. "What? What did I miss?" James Moriarty felt panic rising within him. But then he remembered the gun, and he relaxed. "You are me. You're me! Thank you, Sherlock. Bless you. If you've got me, you've got a way out. If you've got me, you can save your friends. Well, good luck with that."
James Moriarty was thirty one when he finally pulled the trigger for the last time.