Even after all the years of Early Childhood Intervention, hours spent with tutors who were just trying to get through the session so they could get paid, or else taking out their frustrations with their lives on someone who didn't look capable of fighting back, or simply trying to help him in the worst way possible, mirror writing feels like the most natural thing in the world to Jim Moriarty.
Of course, it's useful to be able to pretend to be dull, and he is good at it, like he is good at everything he puts effort into, so he can read and write the usual way around as well, can do it without a second thought. He puts up with the tests given to him, answers them the way he thinks they want him to answer, and his scores skyrocket. Before he turns six, Jim Moriarty is recognized as a genius.
All that gets him is more questions, but his parents are happy when he responds to them, and while he doesn't care about his parents' emotional wellbeing, he does care about the effects thereof, because Jim Moriarty is a genius and he knows how to get what he wants of people. How to make them dance.
If only they weren't all so predictable. If they weren't all so boring.
Jim Moriarty's first murder is finished before his voice breaks. It's disappointingly easy: he takes the poison from his plastic surgeon of a mother's stash, contaminates Carl Powers' eczema medicine with it, is miles away when the boy dies.
It's boring. And that's odd, because he'd have thought that it would be less dull than everything else in his life, that's why he did it after all. Sex and success and revenge, those are the things that motivate man. Sex is simple and stupid, just neurotransmitters and sensation and closing up the mind, and as for success – well, he suppose he's gotten that, because Carl Powers is gone and he won't have to hear that bloody laugh anymore.
That leaves revenge, and he doesn't see anything much to lead him in that direction, because who would dare wrong him? Jim Moriarty, the cleverest man you'll ever meet, even if he's still a treble-voiced, pasty little thing with curious eyes and soft skin. Who could even equal him?
Then his newspaper-editor of a father shows him the missives written by some other schoolboy with an odd-sounding name, since Jim's always shared the amusement of letters-to-the-editor with him, and when Jim reads them, he understands what it's all about, why people go to such lengths.
Jim reads the letters, and his blood burns.
Jim keeps an eye on Sherlock as he continues with his own journeys. There's no more self-discovery, after Sherlock, after discovering the rush that is competition, that is not being the only thinking being in the world, that is, admittedly, attraction. Jim falls for Sherlock, falls hard and long and fast, and after that, there's never really anyone else who has quite the same effect, no one else to shake the foundations of his world.
He should be thankful for that, he thinks sometimes, but not often, because shoulds are not productive like accepting the way things are and building on them is, so instead he thinks about sharpening himself like a blade, thinks about making himself the perfect weapon to shape Sherlock's destruction, because competition means nothing without a victor, and one way or another, Jim is going to top Sherlock Holmes.
Topple him, rather, he thinks sometimes late at night when he is scratching that name onto his skin with his fingernail-tips, kept short and sharp, in mirror writing. Sherlock, he writes with his eyes closed, and on the interior of his eyelids, tightly packing every wall of his every mind-palace, it is repeated.
Sherlock, he writes, with his brain shut down and cast wide open, and that is the closest thing Jim Moriarty has ever known to bliss.
Jim Moriarty doesn't have compound eyes and definitely isn't going to bite anyone's head off after copulating with them, thank you very much, and he does only have two legs. All the same, though, he is very good at making webs.
Something he's not always so amazing at, though, is focusing on one thing at one point in time, and sure, that's what makes his webs great, what lets him know how people will act and react, but still it means that he is completely thrown by Mycroft Holmes. The Iceman.
Destruction on a scale he'd never quite knew to imagine, because not every little boy dreams of world domination, and in any case Jim Moriarty is about mirrors and details and flipping things over to see where they've gone wrong, not big damn battles fought on battlefields you can't see all at once.
So Jim wraps Sherlock up in silk and goes off instead to tend to the fly that is Mycroft Holmes, has more fun than he ever has in his lifetime, before or after the epiphany that was Sherlock, and maybe there's just something special about the Holmes boys.
Things play out with Mycroft, and at the end of it, Jim is ready to return to Sherlock, held captive in the corner of his mind like a belief.
No matter what he says, even when he's about to die, Jim Moriarty never for a second thinks that Sherlock Holmes is boring, because the world he inhabits is many things, and boring is quite a lot of them, but it's never been the kind of world that would welcome their kind, is it? Of course it isn't, and just for that, for being the person Jim himself could have been if the people around him had just paid more attention (because, yeah, the dullness that is the angelic would have been nothing against having Mycroft Holmes for a brother, and yes, Jim is more than a little jealous), Jim owes Sherlock a fall.
There's a level that Jim has worked on his whole life, a place mirrored so that it feels like home against his skin, and more than anything, even for just a transient burst of time, Jim wants to see, needs to see Sherlock joining him there, because Jim has known, from the moment he committed his first murder, that he needs some kind of stimulus that goes beyond what the world has on offer, most of the time.
Jim owes Sherlock a fall, needs to show him the shadows where he has spent his life, because without that, their lives will be filled with nothing but boredom.
A/N: Written through the delirious haze of a deeply annoying fever, so if it's incoherent, then I hope you'll forgive me.
~Mademise Morte, January 11, 2013.