Jim was six years old when he attended his father's funeral. Even at this point in his life, funerals had begun to bore him. They were always the same. Someone was dead and in a box. People sang, raising the same voices, arias to their own selfish grief. People cried. Jim was never sure why, they just did. They made a whole big ceremony of it, renting a church, catering, digging a hole in the ground. What for?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Wakes were boring, too, the same emotions expressed no matter who it was that had died. Jim found himself forcing a semblance of grief, though he never actually cared, not even now when it was his father who'd died. Some people assumed that because he was so young, he didn't understand what death was, that the only reason he wasn't in tears was because he secretly expected Daddy to come home tomorrow evening. While it was true that he didn't know what words like "pulmonary embolism" meant, he was more than perfectly aware that he'd never see his father again. He just didn't care.
He didn't hate his father. He didn't love him, either. He had no feelings one way or another for him or for anyone. They were all just things, like the rat Mummy found in the trap or the ants he'd set on fire. Things that eventually died.
Everything died.
Even Jim Moriarty.
And so Jim found himself on a rooftop, facing his arch-rival, the closest thing to a friend Jim was capable of having and the only man granting Jim some clemency in the endless nightmarish boredom. And for the last few minutes of his life, Jim wasn't bored. Sherlock Holmes was entertaining him completely. But even that had to end, and just to spite Sherlock, Jim put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The last thing in his mind, the last snatch of phrase before the bullet ripped through his brain, were the closing bars of the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber.