Author's Note: Though I've been meaning to write another piece centered around Moriarty for a while now, I wasn't sure how to go about it. But a recent trip to the area around Doolin, Ireland, just north of the Cliffs of Moher, gave me the inspiration I needed. I thought, why not place Moriarty in this landscape? Why not bring him somewhere that seems out of place, and make it meld with his character? And so I did. It's an interesting feeling, to know that I've walked exactly where Moriarty does here. Chilling, in a sense.

This takes place somewhere between 'A Scandal In Belgravia' and 'The Hounds of Baskerville'.

As always, thank you ahead of time for taking a peek here, happy reading, and your thoughts are always appreciated. :)

Apathy

The first thing he hears, the only thing, is the wind.

It sweeps across the broad expanse before him like a living thing, wings outstretched and trailing, dropping erratic feathers in its wake that send the grass shivering in upon itself as though the blades have suddenly been electrified. But the wind doesn't care. Wide, clear. Unrelenting. The wind is master here, of earth and sky and everything in between; it waits for nothing and no one, and will cut through them all without bias, because it is a blind master. Sightless, and dangerous in its apathy.

He likes danger, though. His life is nothing without risk. He would have been dead long ago without that tiny chance of pure and total obliteration.

It envelops him suddenly, trying to take him by surprise—him and the stone wall he stands by and that bunch of tiny purple blossoms over to the right of his foot. The flowers bend, but the wall remains steady and oblivious as the wind tears through the vertical cracks between the stones.

All the same, it seems to him that the resulting sound is like the faint echo of hundreds of little screams. He closes his eyes, cranes his neck, listening. Ghost screams, of all the people that have lived and died here on the broken stone and will never have even a name to recall their memories to the world long-since changed. Pitiful. So now they're screaming, crying, pleading against the doom of the forgotten—

Ah, but he never believed in ghosts.

And suddenly it's just the sound of the wind again, and he can smile, if only a little, and let the apathy of this place take over his senses again.

His eyes flicker open. He straightens, slips his hands smoothly into his jeans pockets in a motion of instinctive ease and nonchalance. There's no tie today, no gleaming shoes, not even a well-cut suit jacket; today he's just another dark form silhouetted against the grey and blue and gold of the Irish sky. Dark jeans, dark hooded jacket, trainers. The novelty of the mundane almost displaces its inanity.

A glance at down at himself, faintly laughing. Almost.

It's probably odd, all the same, for people to think that he might just want to remain unnoticed for a time. Hell, it's odd for him to think that. He's spent his whole life waiting to be noticed, being noticed, noticing the noticing, except there were and still are only a handful of people who ever realise, in the end, what they're actually seeing. Because they don't see him, they see a thousand other faces—masks, cover-ups, little people doing big jobs—and the only thing that might warn them they'd better look a little further isn't something their eyes have the talent to spot.

Sometimes even this job seems incredibly dull.

With a soft breath of annoyance, he begins to walk, meandering his way across the limestone pavement. Pavement. That's what they call it around here. He isn't sure what idiot made that up. The rocks are worn and rounded down the sides, with huge cracks that criss-cross in a half-hearted sort of grid shape, but just because the top of the whole expanse is more or less flat, they call it pavement.

It's certainly not like walking down a street in London, or even a very badly-repaired back road in London. You have to watch your step here, every single step, and probably about half of his acquaintances would be willing to bet he couldn't do it without tripping himself up, because they see him as a slim, tailored figure in shiny shoes behind a desk, or a soft lilting voice at the end of a phone line. But he didn't spin the finest web the world has ever seen just by stepping back, oh no, as much as they want to accuse him of sitting on his arse all day in the shadows and making everything so ridiculously complicated that it takes months if not years to even get a personal interview. It's a pity none of them ever dare say it to his face (those who ever see his face). He thinks it would be worth not hurting them just to see someone actually try it.

But no such luck. Even his name has become so threatening, so unquestionable, that the notion of walking up to him and saying "Oh, by the way, you're completely insane, you conceited bastard" has reached roughly the equivalent of sauntering unarmed into one of those Taliban-controlled compounds somewhere in Afghanistan and proclaiming your allegiance to the Brits and the Americans at the top of your lungs—and out of the two, he suspects that most of his clients would prefer a boarding pass to the Middle East.

Of course, it's fun to be underestimated, because then you have the chance to turn the tables and prove just how wrong that really is. That's the good part. Overestimation is safe. It's boring. If you're going to play the game, then you'd better step up with the stakes in your hand and ready to show.

His steps are quick and sure along the uneven surface of the limestone (flat, he thinks again, and even in thought his tone is contemptuous) and he compensates with ease for every dip and crevice, however unexpected. It's just like dancing, only you're moving in a straight line instead of a circle or a square.

He's always been good at dancing.

And now, as he makes his way forward, he begins to hear something else. Something that could be the wind, only he knows it's not. A crashing, echoing, whooshing sound mingling with sharp, clean air. It's the sea. The edge of everything, the beginning of nothing. And though he can't see it yet, he knows it's there.

He feels it, and not in that terribly predictable, spiritual sense. His spirit, his soul, if he has one (and let's face it, he might not at this point), doesn't give half a damn about the meditative qualities of this place. Doesn't even give a quarter of a damn, now that he thinks about it.

People come here for a glimpse of the ethereal, to cleanse their hearts and minds, to reconnect with the beauty and the raw power of the natural landscape. That's what they say. But he's seen people, and he's pretty sure that most of their tedious little souls are so covered in dust and dirt and preoccupations with meaningless numbers that it would take a lifetime of sojourns, not a one-week retreat to a B&B in the middle of nowhere, to make even the slightest difference in their mental state. God knows he's not even going to try. What's the point?

But he still comes here. Not often, almost not willingly, but he does.

And it's not the beauty of the place that attracts him, nor the wildness, nor the solitude.

It's the apathy.

It's the fact that this place just doesn't care, and he can appreciate that.

For years now he's sought to rise above the rest of the world, to distance himself from all that is common and ordinary and mundane. He has styled himself king in a field of pawns, claimed his lands and his subjects in the very faces of those who sit complacent in their power, and doesn't even the usurper in his own mind have a claim to the throne?

Oddly refreshing, to find himself levelled flat again when he's put up against this place.

A wall of tumbled rock rises suddenly ahead of him, obstructing what would have been an abrupt, clear view of the waves below. He picks his way unhurriedly towards it, and as he comes closer and closer to the brink, he begins to feel the water vibrating up from beneath the stone—probably some underground cave that extends deep into the heart of the land. The sensation is an odd one, tense and threatening, trying to convince him that the entire dark outcropping will disintegrate in a rush of movement beneath his feet before he has time to even turn.

He pauses, savouring the idea as it comes to him. Now that would be interesting. To imagine what might happen to the state of the entire world if he should suddenly disappear overnight, without warning and without evidence. Just… gone.

Oh.

Oh, that is good.

The notion has caught hold of his mind. It toys with and seduces him, and tries to pull him in three different directions at once, and each one might be impossible but for his own knowledge that he could, in fact, pursue all of them given enough time.

That's the problem with him, and he's terribly aware of it: he's ever so vulnerable to ideas. They intrigue him, intoxicate him, send his thoughts spiraling upward and upward in a high that's so much better than any drug. And this one, oh, this is a good one. This is a stroke of brilliance.

Don't be obvious.

He's still thinking it over as he makes his way down the rocks, to the very edge. The stone is wet here, dark and gleaming, and his trainers slip for a moment on a particularly slick patch, but by now he's too caught up in this absolutely fascinating possibility to notice.

I'm saving it up for something special.

They always tell you not to go down this far. Stay on the higher rocks, they say, stay away from the edge. The waves come crashing in without notice, sending a sting of spray into the air and then splattering onto the brown stone, and once in a while there's a stray one, a freak, that will soar fifty feet into the air before it comes back down, and if you're standing there with your wits in pieces all around you, the water will retreat back over the edge and take you right along with it, and God knows you aren't coming back after that.

It's not malevolence, it's just apathy. The wave comes, and you're in the way. Not even in the way, just there. Now, whose fault is that, really?

Even now, with the whirring of new possibilities spinning throughout his head, he takes the risk. He wants to remind himself, every once in a while, what the extent of existence really is—nothing. At the very least, it puts things in perspective. People. They're born, they fumble their way through a tedious state of being, and then they die. The end. Finished. Game over.

He's been called insane. Maybe that's what his particular brand of insanity is all about. Maybe he's insane simply because he knows that he'll end up like all the ordinary people, in the end, but he'll still do anything, and he means absolutely anything, to avoid the in-between state, that blundering through life without a clue. Funny. He even intrigues himself. For someone who's hurtling toward the inevitable conclusion of nonbeing, he certainly goes out of his way to throw boredom a loop.

Standing here, for instance. Standing at the very edge of Ireland, in the face of oncoming clouds and incoming waves, and just not caring that with each second he may or may not be one more second away from the end of it all.

It's not defiance; there's something utterly absurd in the concept of defying a force that doesn't even notice. It's just risk. A challenge to no one but himself.

With a quirk of his neck that's become more like a quirk of temperament, he turns his head. In front of him—grey. Waves and wind and cloud, and they're all the same colour now. Just grey. To the south, he can see the distant, looming outlines of the Cliffs of Moher, marching like tall, shadowed silhouettes down the coastline. They don't care, either. Why should they? They've been there for, what, about three hundred million years? No wonder they look so complacent. God, he'd hate to live an existence like that.

The good thing is, he doesn't have to. There's a game afoot, the very best kind of game, and oh, he's about to take it to the next level entirely. Oh, but this will be fun.

But can he pull it off?

Hardly a question. Of course he can. Carefully, oh so carefully, but he can do it, because he's just that good. No use fooling himself on that score. He has everything at his fingertips except a reprieve from the monotony, and all that's about to change, too.

Dear me, Mr Holmes, dear me.

He closes his eyes, and for a few moments' time he can visualise the entire board. It's a vast thing, a network of networks, and it stretches not only across but up and down, building level upon level, and the only direction you can't move is the step that will take you off the field. There are shortcuts and back roads and long passages that lead to nowhere, but if you're careful, there's always a way out, and a way to get exactly where you need to go; you just have to be clever enough to remember how to make it work. Slowly, he lifts a hand, reaches out, spreads his fingers in a grasping movement, and he can see exactly which pieces he needs to move, and where they'll have to go. A pleased smile begins to creep its way across his features.

There and there and there, and then he'll have sit back for a time and watch the countermoves play out in front of him, and there will be quite a lot of them, he thinks. He almost always plays against more than one opponent—much more interesting that way.

The cold wind snaps at his feet and then at his shoulders, bringing with it another spray of chilled water and seafoam. He's not even faintly alarmed; the surging rush of the ocean is only music, deep and subtle and filled with intricacies that neither he nor anyone else will ever know. He could lose himself here, if he wanted to.

He doesn't, though. Not now. Not when he suddenly has so many plays he can put into motion that it's almost dizzying to think of the damage he's eventually going to do, but oh, it's that giddy feeling of utter control that he lives for. And the very best bit is when someone can make him pause, and wonder, and actually look, and he realises how much higher he can push the stakes before watching them free-fall back into darkness.

Fall.

He glances over the edge of the rocks, down to where the waves are crashing white and harsh and still wonderfully apathetic against the beginning of nothing.

Fall, he thinks again.

And God knows you aren't coming back after that.

Many thanks for reading! Any comments/suggestions/thoughts you have are always appreciated. Reviews really do make my day. :)