James Moriarty had always had a flair for dramatics. What was the point in leading a boring life when you only got to have one try? James wasn't one to dwell on the problems that life threw his way. If a problem came his way, he found a way to deal with it no matter how cumbersome it at first appeared to be. That was just the type of man that James Moriarty had turned into during the course of his life. He could afford to take those risks and chances. His name was well known. His name inspired terror, and gave one a chill up their spine. It was something that James was proud of. He thought of it as his heritage of sorts, no matter how twisted that kind of thought might be. However, now he couldn't be James Moriarty. James Moriarty was dead. Now he had to be Baxter Hunt, a very ornery, bag "boy" at Fulmouth Grocers in town.

He loathed it with every fiber of his Irish being. Every day he'd go to work and bag, standing as he watched all the items come his way. When he had first got hired, he had been the trickster he always was. He'd put delicate groceries in the bag alongside boxes, crushing bread and eggs to the dissatisfaction of the customers who had paid for the purchase. After getting multiple reprimands from his superior, and realizing that he needed to keep this job if he wanted to be fed, he sucked it up and dealt with it. After two years of being a bagger, he had started to grow tired of it. He felt as if he had just become a part of the mechanics of the store. He no longer felt human. Instead of staying alive, he was just staying. Staying in one spot as if that was the last thing he'd ever do. Perhaps it would be.

If his final game with the great detective had gone the way that he had envisioned it would, he knew that he wouldn't be staying in the position that he was now. No, he'd be continuing his games. Sherlock Holmes had to throw a wrench in the works by killing himself. He should have been proud that he had tricked the great detective into offing himself. He had finally pulled one over on the man. He should have been celebrating in spite of himself, but staring down at the body sprawled on the pavement like a pretzeled snow angel, he felt himself die inside. It was over. Everything was over. Now what did he have?

Well, he had his many criminal webs that he'd established. He told himself that for several weeks after his faked death and Sherlock's actual death. However, the more that time went on, the more that James lost interest in his webs. The spider watched the webs that he had spun so meticulously to catch his prey start to fray and fall apart. Yes, he heard about the many attempts by some unknown person to take it all down, but by then, a few months had expired and the spider was done. He had moved on. His webs no longer had a purpose. Nor did he. He had packed up shop (in a manner of speaking) and now found himself following the same routines day in and day out. This was all his life had left for him. Everything had added up to this. How enthralling. James Moriarty couldn't be less impressed by it all.

James woke up on the two year anniversary of his final game in his less than comfortable bed in his less than adequate flat. Hearing the alarm give off its typical morning call, he groped a hand out from where he was buried under his blankets. He aimlessly slapped the palm of his hand about the bedside dresser, hoping to eventually smack the button to shut off the alarm. Instead, he brought the palm of his hand down on the alarm at an angle. It was enough to off set where it was seated and cause it to fall to the carpet with a dull 'thud'. James let out a muted cuss under his breath as he moved his arms to cushion the pillow about either side of his head. Now he really didn't want to get up.

Eventually he managed to internally coach himself that getting up was the best thing for him to do. Rolling over onto his back and bringing the pillow away from about his head, he sat up and stared with an unamused look at the pale blue walls of his room. It was a blue that reminded James of an iced lake. He wondered if the designer of this apartment painted the walls that color as some kind of sick joke to remind all tenants that this flat normally remained as cold as a winter's day no matter what you did. Rolling out of the bed and onto his bare feet, he quickly slipped them into the slippers before wrapping a royal blue bathrobe about his person.

Blue. Blue walls. Blue robe. Blue human being.

James frowned. He needed something to numb the dull logic going on in his head. It seemed to be his brain's way of telling him that it still existed, but James ignored it as he padded out to the kitchen. What was the point of anything anymore? He slipped across the floorboards in his slippers as he entered the small kitchen. The design of the cupboard storage was so narrow that James had to kind of slide in sideways to use the coffee machine and then slide out again. He didn't know why he bothered to brew a cup of coffee himself in the morning and go through all the hassle. After all, about an hour or so from then he went down to the coffee place on main street. He supposed that it was a practice at this point. It was just another thing that he had adopted. It was another part that was just the mechanics of how he operated nowadays.

Sliding sideways back out of the kitchen, James moved to plop down on the couch that groaned at him doing so. He reached for a remote to flick the telly on. The screen remained black. He tried the power button again to no avail. He sighed in an over dramatic fashion as he flipped the remote over in his hands and removed the back of it with such haste, he nearly snapped it into pieces.

"Dead batteries. Of course."

Of course there had to be something dead on this two year anniversary. Instead of getting up and fixing his simple problem, James just sat slouched on the couch with the remote upside down in one palm and the dead batteries in the other. After casting his gaze back and forth between the two of them, he eventually moved both hands forward quickly to throw it against the wall. He had no patience to deal with anything that morning, no matter how simple the problem actually was.

He could hear the coffee pot clicking and hissing away in the kitchen as it made his coffee. Standing up, he walked with haste back to the kitchen. He slid sideways into the kitchen, grabbed the coffee pot with both hands, and yanked it forward. The plug came flying out of the wall, and though the semi-hot coffee pot was burning his hands, James kept sliding sideways in a determined fashion until he reached the window over his kitchen sink. He slammed the coffee pot down on the counter momentarily and reached forward to unlock the window and slide it upwards. He then turned, grabbed up the coffee pot again, and hucked it out the window.

"I'm getting dressed," he muttered after the coffee pot had vanished into the white beyond outside, spilling its guts like Sherlock Holmes.

The pretzled, scarlet snow angel.

He slid back out of the kitchen and walked back towards his bedroom. He opened the closet to stare at the neatly arranged rows of clothes staring back at him. Neat. Orderly. Before he knew it, the clothes were flying all about the room; strewn about in complete and utter disarray. When the closet was empty of its contents, he turned sideways to look behind him. The carcasses of the once neat and orderly clothes lay all about himself. Their neat and orderly world had been shattered. Now they lived in chaos.

James moved to walk among the sprawled clothing, pausing once in a while to examine his clothes with a half cocked head. He was trying to determine what the best outfit to wear for the day would be. Eventually he decided upon a beige t-shirt and a pair of faded denim jeans. It was boring, but it might as well be. His life was boring. This was his sentence for all the mischief he had caused throughout his life. His long awaited consequences had finally caught up to him. He supposed it could be worse. He paused after thinking that, before shaking his head. No. This was the worse fate that he could ever imagine for himself.

He carried the clothes with him into the bathroom, which too was small in nature. He tossed the clothes into a pile on the floor before staring at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He looked awful. Bags hung under his eyes, a result of hardly sleeping a wink for a variety of reasons. He had a five o'clock shadow haunting his jaw and cheeks, rubbing a hand along it to feel it bristle his palm. The eyes that stared back at him, the eyes that had once been wily and full of mischief, now looked completely dull and lifeless. Every day his reflection always seemed to change a bit more. He was sure that soon he wouldn't even recognize his own reflection; that the face staring back at him would be a complete stranger.

He turned away from the face in the mirror and moved towards the shower. He stood under the steady stream of warm water for a long while, letting the water wash over his body and dull all his aches and pains. If only the wash were as cleansing on the inside as it was on the outside. He could look all squeaky clean on the outside, but it wouldn't ever fix the damage the demons in his life had done on the inside. His body resembled a prison in his mind, collected on the outside but dangerous and chaotic within.

He teased his fingers through his hair again and again to try to wash the stubborn soap out, watching the water bubble and slip down the drain. If only all problems were as easily washed away as soap. He soon shut off the now cold water (he swore that nothing stayed hot in this flat for long) and groped for a towel. He ruffled it through his hair first before tying it about his waist. Once again he found himself rooted in front of the mirror, which was now kissed by fog and obscuring the reflection staring back at him; hiding the stranger that stood there.

He began to go about the rest of his preparations for the day in a mindless manner. It was all so boring to him. He hated this. He hated everything. He brushed his teeth and then, admiring the toothbrush for a moment, snapped it in half. He didn't have to, but like his clothes, his coffee pot, and his remote, if he didn't do something outside of the ordinary, he would lose his sanity. His brain would waste away. He would waste away, and though it looked as if he already had become completely empty inside, there was still a part of him that was fighting to hold on.

He threw the snapped toothbrush into the rubbish under the sink and slipped his clothes on. Walking back out of the bathroom, he walked to his coat closet and withdrew a coat that was nearly the same color beige as his t-shirt. It was a corduroy jacket with dark brown patches on both elbows. He grabbed his flat key off the hook near the door and slipped out into the stairwell. His neighbor was already up and seated in a wooden chair outside his own flat. The neighbor was seated in the chair, planting his feet firmly on the banister to tilt the chair back as he smoked a cigarette. James chose to ignore the man as he made sure that his flat was securely locked behind him.

"Well, morning neighbor."

James, still facing away from the man, closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, forcing himself to release a breath. Patience. Patience would be key if he wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to be found guilty of murder. He made sure that he had taken a few deep breaths to try to calm himself down before turning to face the neighbor. The neighbor was staring at him with a smirk around his cigarette. The neighbor extracted the cigarette from his mouth, puffing smoke in the air like a dragon.

"Morning," muttered James finally as if only then remembering his manners.

He balled his hands into fists and shoved them in his jacket pocket. He made to take a step down the stairwell when the neighbor spoke again and made him pause in his steps.

"We got a new neighbor." The man pointed his cigarette down the hall a bit to flat H-26 before he replaced the cigarette in his mouth. James looked down that way as if he were interested by the news, but he was far from it. So there was another person. Yay.

"Wonderful," James moved to take another step down the staircase.

"You're always off in such a rush in the morning," said the man as his chair came down and clicked against the floor. The smell of the cigarettes was getting to James at this point. He needed out before he snapped.

He gripped the banister tightly in his hand as he removed it from the jacket to keep his balance and keep his focus on something aside from his growing irritation.

"I have places to be," he said. He wanted to gripe and be sarcastic. He could feel the sarcasm burning the tip of his tongue. It would be so easy to release that venom on the man, but he restrained himself. But then he thought...

Why was he restraining himself?

He turned back to see the man was looking at him with an amused look, as if he were some interesting oddity. James remained completely passive as he moved to walk back the step or two he had descended to walk over to the man. As he stood in front of him, he noticed that the man was still in his pajamas. This man seemed to not worry about getting anywhere or about anything in general. James pasted a fake smile on his face as he looked at the man.

"Harry, right?"

The man just quirked a brow but nodded his head.

"Harrison Atkinson" he remarked as if the name should mean something or be important to James, which it wasn't.

The Cheshire cat like grin on James' face just continued to grow as he walked closer to the man.

"It must be fun for you, relaxing even, to sit and watch the hall all day."

"Pfft. I don't watch it all day. I have a life too."

"Oh? Do you? I wouldn't ever know. The makeshift ash tray you have aside your chair would suggest otherwise."

Harry cast a sideways glance at the makeshift ash tray that James was talking about. It was a small white saucer with a blue circle around the upper lip of it, and it contained a relatively decent size pile of ash.

"I empty it every day. I like a smoke in the morning. What's wrong with a morning smoke?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. You're just trading one addiction for another."

"Meaning?"

"Come now. Are you really that dull witted in the morning? Perhaps you'd best lay off the cigarettes now before it does even more damage to your brain."

Now Harry was getting angry. He glowered at James as he leaned forward in his chair.

"What. Do. You. Mean?" He asked, making sure that he enunciated each word as if that would make James feel even more on edge by the whole confrontation.

"You're in your pajamas all day, smoking cigarettes while snubbing it out in a relatively fine china dish. You've traded your addiction to your wife to your cigarette. It dulls the pain, you think. It is a way to calm to the nerves. The wife isn't home. I can be a slob. It's my life now. Lets wreck the china. Lets be a creep and watch people all day, ask them where they are going and watching them move in." James walked forward and snatched the still lit cigarette from Harry's hands. He moved the burning tip close to the sleeve of the man's pajama, pressing it into it so it started to burn a hole. "How about you leave people well enough alone and mind your own business?"

"Hey. Hey. Hey!" Harry's voice rose higher and higher as he became more and more panicked at the site of his pajama sleeve getting burned. He reached out a hand to try to slap James' hand away, knocking the cigarette down onto the floor. "What are you doing? Are you insane?"

"Nah. I'm charitable," he remarked as he stomped Harry's cigarette underfoot in order to put it out. "I just gave you something to do. Looks like your pajama could use a bit of mending."

James smirked widely at Harry's very shocked and bewildered face as he turned to walk back towards the stairwell. Before he could begin walking down the steps though, he felt as if someone aside from the now angry Harry was looking at him. Turning to look behind him, he saw that the door to flat H-26 was open. A man stood in the door looking straight at him and Harry. The man, if he had been standing to his full height instead of slouching in the manner he was, would have probably filled out most of the doorway. Even though he was slouched, James could tell this man was muscular. His muscles were straining against the white t-shirt he was currently wearing. The white t-shirt and gray sweatpants was all the man was wearing. It had probably, in all likelihood, been what he had worn to bed. James just stared back at the new neighbor staring back at him for a minute or two before turning to leave. He could still feel the man's eyes boring into his head as he walked down the stairs to the sound of Harry cussing up a storm. Another curious neighbor that he might have to deal with at some point, but not right now. Right now he had a hot date with a cup of coffee at his favorite coffee diner. It was time for him to fall back into his normal patterns for the day. As he reached out a hand to open the door, the cold morning air came in to attack his cheeks with kisses. Now he had to put James Moriarty away and be Baxter Hunt again. He sighed heavily at that prospect, moving to walk down the street towards his coffee cafe.

James arrived at the coffee place to see the normal clientele already there. The normal clientele were a few elder people who spent a majority of their day here sipping coffee and watching news off the telly that hung suspended by a metal rack of sorts from the wall behind the bar. He moved to take a seat at his normal booth at the back of the cafe so that he could remain completely free of questions or prying eyes. He just wanted a cup of coffee and to be left in peace for a little bit. That was an odd desire for James to have, but it was there all the same. He used to pride himself on disturbing the peace and now he was here wanting peace.

The world was certainly an odd place.

A waitress came over to him. It was the same waitress that normally came to take his order. She seemed to have a motherly feeling about her. She reminded James a lot of his mother. It was a painfully sore subject for him, so he didn't dwell on it long. He afforded her a quick smile as she asked him what he'd like to order this morning.

"The usual," remarked James, tapping his hands on the menu that he hadn't even bothered to flip open.

His eyes flicked briefly from her face to look at the crooked name tag that displayed the name 'Anna'. The name was partly hidden under a variety of 'things'. It was hard for James to narrow in on what was exactly messing up her name tag, but it certainly did go to prove that she had worked there for a long time. James wouldn't have been able to imagine staying put for so long before these last two years. Now he understood. At some point in her life, she must have realized that the best thing for her to do was to stay put; that there wasn't anything left that life had to offer her.

"I'll have that order right out for you," Anna said with a smile James' way before disappearing.

James sighed as he sank back in the booth, staring about the drab interior of the place. The teal and brown wallpaper that was suppose to make the interior of the cafe seem cozy only seemed to clash with the white tiles on the floor. Warmth and cold couldn't coexist for long. This attempt at making that do so just made it all clash. James felt like the whole cafe could use a bit of redecorating, but he didn't bother saying anything. After all, what was the point?

He flicked his eyes to look at the telly that hung suspended off the wall in the corner. It was displaying some sort of muted news program. He could see the reporter's lips moving, but no words coming out. Instead, there were lines of subtitles appearing on the screen to tell those watching what they were saying. James smirked as his eyes caught sight of, what had to be, mistranslated words. Things could definitely be lost in translation, even if you were speaking the same language. Look at him and Sherlock. He had wanted to play a game with him. He'd given him all the clues, and it had gotten completely fudged up in translation. Sherlock really thought killing himself was the way to win. That or Sherlock had been like him. Sherlock could have thought James dead and offed himself because there wasn't any point in existing anymore.

The coffee and bagel were brought over, momentarily snapping James back into reality. With a quiet 'thank you' to Anna, he began to tuck into his breakfast. He kept half an eye on the news playing while he ate; the other half of his mind occupied on what he would do with the rest of his day. He'd go to work, work for several hours with the same types of boring people buying the same normal things, then he'd go home to his cold flat and lie freezing, staring up at the ceiling as he waited for sleep to grace him. How sad that, that was what his life had come to.

The mute reporter caught James' eye then and his concentration went back to the screen. The reporter was now standing outside Scotland Yard in London. James wondered what crime was going on now that concerned the whole of Scotland Yard and Detective Inspector Lestrade and his crew. It couldn't nearly be as fascinating as his crimes had been for them to solve. They must all be as bored as he was nowadays. Not his problem anymore though. Sherlock had started this domino effect of boredom by killing himself.

The banner under the reporter almost made James choke on the bite of bagel that he currently had housed in his mouth. That couldn't be right. Surely this was also something that got lost in translation or screwed up at their headquarters. This couldn't be real. Perhaps he was still asleep in his flat even. He had to be constructing the whole thing up in his imagination. However, even after dragging a hand over his face to "wake himself up", the image on the screen remained the same. James' face turned white as he stood up from the table, forgetting his normal breakfast.

"Turn that off mute," he remarked as he walked towards the coffee bar.

"Excuse me?" asked a waitress who had just finished setting another pot of coffee to brew.

"I said turn that off mute," said James with a bit more acidity to his tone then. The one man that was seated at the coffee bar instead of a booth turned to give him an odd look, but he didn't care.

"Do as he asks," remarked Anna as she came back out of the kitchen then.

She always seemed to be in James' corner like his mother had been.

The waitress shrugged her shoulders and went to press the volume button to take it off mute. James moved to lean against the coffee bar as his eyes watch the reporter get his voice back.

"We are waiting on the Yard to give a statement about the case, or what's even more baffling to us all, Sherlock Holmes' apparent resurrection from the dead. Sherlock Holmes had passed away about two years ago, or so we have all thought. Sherlock Holmes is alive, which may be more important than the case."

Sherlock Holmes. Alive. Breathing air. Not a pretzled snow angel, but alive and living among the angels.

James shoved away from the coffee bar and went back to his booth where his coffee was. He quickly rifled through his pocket for change to pay for it, slamming it down onto the table before moving to leave. He rushed through the cold air; his mind running full speed trying to make sense of it. The great detective had fooled him. He was alive. All this time he spent wallowing and feeling bad for himself was for nothing. He'd been torturing himself all this time for nothing. He slipped a hand into his pocket and dug out his mobile.

"Tell me who the man was," remarked James as he turned off into an alley to lean his back up against the cold bricks.

"I told you, sir, we don't know," stated a voice in a thick accent.

James chuckled, looking up at the gray sky above him. He should have known this before. He should have been sharper than this. He used to be.

"Don't tell me you don't know. This man has been going after my webs for the last year or so, and I've let him. What does he look like? Surely one of you numbskulls has at least seen this man to know he exists."

"Well...he had long black hair the time I saw him. Took a rough beatin', but was gone when I went to check on him."

"And why was that?"

"Said something to the man beatin' him. Said something that made him leave because he thought his wife was cheating..."

Well how about that. It was really him. All this time he had thought the man dead, and he had been stripping away the last of the dignity that he had, had behind his back. Instead of answering who he had on the line, he chucked his cell phone at the brick wall to shatter it. So Sherlock thought he could one up him all this time. Be a greater mastermind, a better 'showman', than he was. Well, he'd see about that. Or would he? He had let himself rot internally for the last two years. Perhaps he didn't have it in him anymore. But no. The longer that James stood in the cold, staring at the carcass of his mobile, the more he knew that he still did have it in him, and he was going to come back and make Sherlock pay for what he'd done; for the torture that he had made James endure this whole time.

James moved to walk back towards his flat with a renewed vigor. He just had to start formulating a plan, but it had to be brilliant. It had to surpass any plan that he had ever made in the past. It had to be completely genius and something that no one, the Yard or Sherlock, saw coming. He pushed open the door and took the steps up the staircase two at a time. Harry was no longer where he'd been sitting that morning, but his chair remained along with his makeshift ash tray. James smirked. Oh glorious day. This was a day of redemption for him. He moved to pick up Harry's chair and ashtray, chucking them down the stairs. The ash floated through the air as it tumbled down into a heap at the base of the stairs like delicate black snow. It blanketed the steps in a thin layer of snowy ash, causing James to grin.

The door to H-26 was open again, and the new neighbor was once again staring down the hall at James. He was still wearing what he'd been wearing an hour or so ago, having his arms crossed across his chest.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" He heard the neighbor ask in a relatively baritone tone of voice.

In the sunlight coming through the window in the stairwell now, he could see that this neighbor wore a worse haunted look than James ever had. His face conveyed loud and clear that he too had given up on something. Was this complex where all people with lost hopes and dreams came to die?

Well, that'd no longer be the case with him.

"I am quite enjoying myself, thank you very much," said James with a grand smile before unlocking his flat and slamming the door shut behind him.

James stopped caring then about how cold his flat was, or the fact that he had broken several things in his flat before leaving. All he could think about was how Sherlock was alive. He threw himself down onto his bed, eyes looking up at the ceiling. His world had finally been shaken up again when he had last expected it. Before he knew it, the ceiling was black and he was asleep. The rush of adrenaline had left him at last.