Chapter 1: Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

From the moment I was born, I knew I was different: primarily because I actually remembered that first day of my life. I would learn later that ordinary people couldn't do that. I can recall all-consuming darkness followed suddenly by an onslaught of bright lights and blurred faces. It was so overwhelming for my young self I couldn't help but cry. Something soft caressed my skin and swaddled me in its warmth. Eventually, all the crying tired out my small frame, and my eyes began to droop. The last image to cross my eyes before I succumbed to sleep was the face of a woman staring down at me, teeth showing and eyes sparkling.

After that day, the first few months were incredibly dull. My mind so desperately wanted to explore everything around me, but my chubby limbs simply refused to cooperate. I tried to reach for that shiny, jangly thing in front of my face and ended up with a fistful of hair from my laughing mother. How did I know she was my mother? How does anybody know anything? The idea just feels right when they think it to themselves. I knew this woman was my mother before I completely understood what a mother even was.

Again and again I reached for the enticing object before me, missing every time. Frustration took hold, and I did one of the only things I knew how to do: I cried. I had learned pretty fast that when I did that, I would earn a comforting embrace from my mother. It was difficult to explain, but the feeling of her warm arms surrounding me was the best feeling in the world. Sometimes I would cry simply because it was something to do; the little wooden cot my mother kept putting me in offered despicably little stimulation.

Every day, almost all the time, my parents made an incredible amount of noise. Their mouths were constantly in motion, and I could only deduce that the omnipresent noise was coming from there. It appeared to be some sort of communication system. Similar to the way my mother came running to me when I cried, she'd go running to my dad whenever he shouted, "Honey!" It would be so great to be able to use that same system. I could actually tell my mother specifically why I was crying, instead of having to wait helplessly while she figured out whether I was hungry, tired, or needed a change. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to manipulate my lips in the same manner, all I managed to produce was a muffled, "Goo…Ba…Dee."

"Oh, look! He's already trying to talk," my mother exclaimed. My making those incomprehensible noises made her eyes widen and her mouth open, so I kept at it.

"Doo…Tee…Ma." I mumbled.

"That's it, keep trying sweetheart. You can do it," she encouraged. Desperate to succeed, I wracked my tiny brain for a noise I'd heard her made before that I could replicate. Then, a stroke of genius! Those shiny things she used to dangle in front of my face, what were they called?

"KEY!" I blabbered excitedly.

"He's just said his first word!" my mother cheered, running upstairs to tell my father the good news. "He said, 'key!'"

Hmm. "Key," I thought. Not bad for a first word. I knew it referred to those sparkly, jangly things, but what did it really mean? Did they do something special besides wiggle and shake? As an infant, I loved to ponder things like this. What does that do? How do you use this? What are you doing with those?

Slowly but surely, my endless stream of questions was met with a steady flow of answers. My mother was now letting me lay on the floor, where there was much more to see and explore. For example, I learned that a key was something very important. One day, I stuffed them under the couch to see what would happen. My mother looked for them for nearly an hour before I removed them and offered them to her. After that, I was never allowed to play with them again; therefore, my mother not being able to find them is bad and cannot be allowed to happen. Through many miniature experiments like that, I began to gain a real understanding of how the world worked. 'Breakfast' was when my mother and father sat at the table and ate food while it was light outside, while 'dinner' was when my mother and father sat at the table and ate food while it was dark outside. A 'bill' was a little white piece of paper that my father liked to pretend to rip up. 'Telly' was the box that was black most of the time, but turned pretty colours and talked when my father sat and stared at it.

At about four months old, I taught myself a brand new skill. I was lying on my stomach, scanning the room for anything of interest, when I saw the remote my father always used to watch telly. The only problem: it was too far away to reach. So, I decided to devise a method of moving my body around the room without crying for my mother to pick me up and do it for me. I knew my arms and legs could move, but I didn't know quite how to place them to make them carry my weight around. First, I tried grabbing the carpet in front of me and attempting to pull myself forward. However, my fingers simply couldn't hold on while dragging my entire weight. Next, I flipped onto my back and tried scooting across the floor with my feet. This worked to a certain extent; however, I couldn't see where I was going, and rubbing against the carpet irritated the skin on my back. I rolled back over and tucked my knees up under my chest; it felt surprisingly natural. Hesitantly, I picked up one knee and placed it on the ground a few inches in front of the other. Gaining momentum, I did the same with the other knee and moved my hands further forward and out of the way. Eventually, I found a perfect rhythm of moving my arms and legs to move quickly around the room. Success! I had never felt so alive! I finally had the freedom to go where I wanted whenever I so desired.

Remembering why I wanted to learn to move around in the first place, I crawled over to the remote and picked it up. It had so many colourful buttons that I couldn't decide which one to touch, so I touched all of them. None initiated anything exciting until the big red one at the top. When I pressed it, the pictures on the telly woke up and started moving. Encouraged, I pressed more buttons. One of them seemed to make the noise it was making louder, so I kept pushing it over and over again. Louder and louder it grew, until my ears started to hurt. I panicked, having no clue how to make it quieter again. My mother came running into the room and snatched the remote. She immediately pushed another button that quieted the telly, then turned it off. She scooped me up in her arms and asked, "How did you get your hands on the remote, silly? I know I didn't leave it in your reach."

I wanted to show off my new talent, so I squirmed around, hoping she would get the message and put me down. Fortunately, she understood and I crawled a victory lap around her feet.

"Oh my goodness, you're already crawling! None of my friends' kids could crawl at four months, you must be such a special little boy!" she exclaimed. Special. I'd never heard that word before, and had no idea what it meant. Hopefully, it was something good.

A few days later, my mother presented me with a 'toy.'

"This should keep you out of trouble," she said, handing it to me. I looked at it, confused as to what I was supposed to do. It had several coloured rings of different sizes, and a pole.

"Food?" I questioned. That was another word I had learned, and it referred mostly to the white stuff I sucked from a bottle that took away the weird feeling in my stomach.

"No, no, sweetheart. You play with it. Let me show you." My mother took the biggest ring, and placed it on the pole. I took another one and placed it on top of it. Then, I took the rest of the rings and stacked them all up on the pole: blue, yellow, red, green, orange. Upon seeing my creation, my mother laughed, "That's good. Now, try to put them in order. Look at the picture on the box." She pointed to a picture of the rings stacked up nicely, the biggest on the bottom and the smallest on the top. Excited to finally do it right, I dumped the rings off the pole and stacked them in decreasing size order: blue, green, yellow, orange, red. The result was a much prettier, neater stack. "Perfect, great job!" my mother congratulated. "Have fun."

With that, she left the room. What was I supposed to do now? I already finished the puzzle, what was left? Frustrated, I dumped the rings and stacked them the same way again. Then I did it again. And again. Bored, I stacked them in reverse order, with the small red one on the bottom. Then I stacked them like that again. And again. And again. I tried to challenge myself, stacking them without the pole in the middle. But I mastered this too in just three attempts. Why did this have to be so boring? I grew frustrated, and started throwing the rings across the room. When I ran out of rings, I threw the pole base. It soared across the room, and smashed into a decorative vase on the coffee table. Little pieces of porcelain scattered across the floor. I crawled over and picked one up to investigate it. I twirled it around through my chubby fingers, marvelling at its shininess and shape. Out of the blue, I felt a strange feeling—at the time I hadn't yet associated it with the word pain—in my right hand. Red liquid poured from my palm onto the shard, and the feeling grew stronger. I'd never felt something so unpleasant before, and I began to cry. My mother came running and, upon seeing the mess, grunted out loud.

"I leave you alone for ten minutes, and you get into this much trouble. That was my grandmother's favourite vase! What am I ever going to do with you?" she sighed. She picked me up, but something was off. Her embrace didn't feel as warm and inviting as it usually did. There was a distance, a coldness, to it that had never been there before. "I guess I can't be properly mad at you until we fix up that hand. Let's go get you cleaned up."

She took me to the sink and rinsed off my hand. Then, she sprayed it with this strange-smelling stuff, which caused the weird feeling to worsen for a few seconds before easing up. "I know it hurts," she chided, "but this will make it better."

"Hurts." I muttered back. I assumed that word described this odd feeling, and stored it away in my memory to use in the future. My mother wrapped some white stuff around my hand, and carried me up to my cot. She laid me down and instructed me to take a nap. All the excitement of that day had exhausted me, so I willingly obliged and was asleep in minutes.

Over the next few weeks, my mother presented me with toy after toy, all of which I grew bored of within two hours. I pushed all the buttons on the little keyboard, verified that all the coloured shapes fit perfectly into their respective holes, tracked every bead along its winding path, and stacked all the blocks in as many formations as I could conceive. Nothing could occupy my racing mind; I needed something more complex and challenging. The most fun I ever had was trying to decipher the conversations my mother had with my father.

"He's developing so fast," my mother whispered to my father one night as they ate dinner.

"I don't see what's so wrong with that," my father replied. "He's going to be a genius."

"Yes, he's smart, but he's almost too smart. Nothing can keep him distracted enough, and I've tried everything. He always ends up in trouble. He broke a vase and nearly sliced his hand open. What if he gets bored and does something even more dangerous when I'm not looking?"

"Why don't you just put him in day-care or something? They'll watch him for you."

"You don't think he's too young?"

"You said it yourself: he's way farther along than a typical kid his age. I'm sure he'd do fine."

"I guess you're right, the new experience would be good for him. Maybe being around other kids will help keep him busy."

"Yeah, it'd be good for him. Good for you, too. You're always stressing about him."

"I'll sign him up to start as soon as possible."

"Okay, you do that."

With that, my mother stood up from the table and left without cleaning up her things like she usually did.

A few days later, she took me into the car with her. We drove for about fifteen minutes before arriving at a quaint little building. I saw many other adults walking inside with children. As I watched their little legs carry them inside, I yearned to be able to support myself on just my two feet. It appeared much more efficient and much cleaner than crawling. At home, my knees ended up covered in crumbs of whatever father ate for breakfast that morning. However, since I was still unable to balance on just two feet, my mother carried me inside. The place was filled with stupid toys like the ones my mother had attempted to get me to enjoy, and some others I'd never seen. I reminded myself to explore them later. Any floor space that wasn't occupied by toys was filled with children playing like crazy, babbling and laughing.

"Who do we have here?" I heard a high-pitched voice ask my mother. I figured that the woman was asking my mother for my name, which I'd been practicing pronouncing for a while now. Eager to demonstrate my prowess, I answered the question for her: "Jim Moriarty. Hi."

Author's Note: I hope you enjoyed chapter 1! This is a novel-length fanfiction that will have 34 chapters. If you liked it enough I'd love to see you stick around until the very end. More not-so-subtle references to the actual show like that last line are yet to come, and I'm very excited to see the fandom's reaction to this story I've worked so hard on. Thanks for reading!