the_story_teller | For Jim Moriarty

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For Jim Moriarty

Richard's found himself in the bar again, which is something he seems to be doing more and more these days. It throws him off his guard a bit less each time it happens, and takes him less time to adjust to suddenly not being where he's meant to be.

And at least this time, he's himself, so the risk of getting sucker-punched and getting a second black eye to match the first is, in theory, smaller.

Today, he was on his way home from a rehearsal for a small show he's in when the bar found him. Once over the initial brief shock at walking into his flat and finding not his flat, Richard makes his way up to the Bar and orders a coffee before settling down to read one of the books he'd recently picked up. He's already finished the first one and is about halfway through the second, determined to find the story where his name comes up.

He's starting to think it's going to prove Mr Moriarty right and never come up at all.

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"Er."

He takes the band and examines it as though it's a venomous snake that could wake from its slumber at any moment and bite him in the face. For all he knows, it is.

"We're both just gonna wind up annoyed if I try to work out what you want me to do with this," Richard says, tilting the band to study the inside curve of it, finding it in no noticeable way different from the outside.

"I'm not from the future. I've not been coming here long enough to know anyone from the future, I don't think. I don't know what you want me to do. Call me boring. I don't care. You're used to being ten steps ahead of everyone. I'm not. I don't think that's a gap we can bridge very easily."

Oh, the irony.

Jim listens, solemn-faced.

When Rich has finished, he leans down to tug at a section of the stand that reveals itself to be a little drawer, from which he draws a tablet about the thickness of of two sheets of paper.

"I was just going to read the instructions," he explains, without the slightest change in expression, as he straightens back up.

"Right."

Richard should probably be embarrassed right about now. If anything, he just sounds resigned.

He can't help but wondering what went differently — what went wrong — in his world that he could be the same as Jim in as many ways as he is completely different. What coin toss came up heads when it should have been tails? What idiot had forgot to look both ways before getting flattened by a lorry?

He doesn't do anything so obvious as slink off to a nearby chair to sulk. He stays right where he is, waiting patiently for Jim to explain what is going on.

Jim doesn't do anything so obvious as smirk - no, wait, yes he does.

But only a little. He's already more interested in reading the instructions closely. It doesn't pay to be careless with alien technology, not when it's his mind he might hurt if he misses something. An ordinary injury he could live with, and he wouldn't have to live with getting killed, but his mind is something he needs to protect.

(He's only up here at all because the key came from Bar. She wouldn't send any of her patrons to use something that would harm them.)

"It's an exchange," he says after a moment or two. "Each of us concentrates on what we want to share for long enough for the machine to get hold of it, and it does the rest."

He doesn't really want anything of Rich's in his head, but - fine. If he must.

Richard thinks about this, finding it a bit too far-fetched to be true. And then he remembers where he is and who he's with, and decides that this would be a whole lot easier if he took Jim's word for it.

"So...telepathy?" he asks. "But artificial."

He leans over to read the instructions, getting a vague feeling that whatever language it's actually written in, it's not English (despite its appearance). There is also a sentient bar downstairs with which people have conversations, so again, he just accepts this.

And this time, he does go for the obvious question. "Does it hurt?"

Jim hands off the tablet. He only needed to read it the once.

Luckily for Rich, the Milliways translator is in effect; he'll find it's in English.

"It doesn't say it does," he answers with a shrug.

Richard's either reading it over very slowly, or reading it several times. Either way, he wants to make sure he doesn't miss a single nuance of it.

And eventually he does, and seems to even (finally) catch up with Jim.

"I've been bored," he says. "But I've never blown up old ladies because of it. Do you really handle boredom that badly—what am I talking about? Mr Holmes apparently shoots walls when there's nothing good on telly. Of course you do."

He shakes his head lightly as he hands the tablet back to Jim.

Jim offers a patently false smile as he takes the tablet back.

"If it helps," he says, "she'd had a good life."

If Jim expects Richard to tell him that it wasn't his place to end it, or anything so maudlin, Richard spares it. It's nothing Jim doesn't already know, or else he wouldn't have done it in the first place.

He instead nods toward some nearby chairs. "I'm sitting down for this," he says. "I don't know what this thing'll do to me."

He moves to go sit down, though not with much comfort. He's more tense now than he was when he thought Jim had brought him up here to tear his trachea out.

There's a proximity requirement, so Jim follows.

"I wouldn't mind seeing any of your meetings with Sherlock," he says, "but imprecise as this is, if you could just avoid thinking about something like the night you lost your virginity at the wrong second, I'll be happy."

For example.

Turns out Richard can pull a mean bitchface as well, and Jim gets it in full force.

"Well now it's all I can think about, so you did yourself in there."

There's every chance he's not being entirely truthful right now. But if Jim does get a full dose of that awkward night when Richard was in sixth form, then he only has himself to blame.

Jim just laughs as he slides his band onto his head.

Richard very cautiously follows Jim's example. At first, he's not really sure what's supposed to happen, so he just sits there, side-eyeing Jim suspiciously.

Eventually, he realises he should probably focus on something beyond his lingering distrust of Jim and this thing they're doing, because Richard has apparently lost his goddamn mind. What surfaces is the recent memory of being seriously schooled by Matilda. There's a bit of embarrassment present, perhaps unsurprisingly, but foremost is the mental equivalent of trying to breathe through wet cotton at just trying to remember the sort of maths they were doing, let alone the exact numbers and steps taken. And just under that is a very deep frustration at not getting it, no matter how hard he tried, which only seems to build on the horrible wet cotton feeling. It's more or less mental suffocation.

Jim has a range of relevant memories to choose from; the memory of boredom stays with him as clearly as anything else. Too clearly, sometimes, especially when the next round is coming.

(There is always a next round.)

He picks the most recent one to have lasted for days, after he came down from the high of the pool and realized how long it would be before the next phase of the plan, or even before Irene's would be ready to go. That was especially bad, the worst it's been in a long time.

It's a whirl of useless information, no filter, everything given equal weight and filed and sorted and crossreferenced and irrelevant, nothing new, nothing ever ever new.

It's banging at the bars of a cage with no key.

(He used to try to start calm, to wait it out, but he gave up on that long ago.)

It's nothing that can be appeased by picking up a book or putting in a movie. They only call it boredom because there's no other word in existence that even begins to describe it, because so very few people ever know what it's like to sit helplessly and listen to your mind devour itself from the inside out.

It's the only thing that can make him feel despair, and it happens all too often, and it will be what kills him, because someday there will be nothing left worth enduring it for another second.

The only thing that frightens him is the thought of an entire lifetime of it. Anything, anything that can feed it and quiet it for even a moment - he'll do anything.

It's not long before Richard's own mental processes are, for lack of a better word, replaced with Jim's, and it's a vaguely frightening experience. Unfamiliar thoughts and emotions, and no reference point to use as an anchor.

He actually changes his mind. If this is what it's like to be a genius, to be constantly suffocated by your own brain, Richard doesn't want it. He already wants to turn everything off and go back to the muffled silence of contentment, but he can't. It doesn't stop. If anything, it gets louder.

No wonder Mr Holmes shoots walls. It's enough to make anyone go mad.

. . . almost anything, he amends, somewhere underneath the layer of Rich's memory. Anything except this, smothered and blind and deaf inside his own head, unaware that there even is something so much more, never mind being able even to conceive of getting to it.

The boredom isn't better than this, but at least it can be escaped. At least it isn't all there is until he's dead.

(He's doing them a favor when he kills them.)

Rich breaks first and pushes the band from his head. It's all too much, and he doesn't know what to do with it.

He goes back to avoiding eye contact. Eventually, he'll be able to separate himself from the experience and use it when playing Jim, but right now, he's a bit too frightened at everything that was just in his head — that continues to be in Jim's head — to concern himself with anything else.

Jim's eyes open.

"How do you breathe?" he asks, after he's taken a moment to clear Rich's cobwebs away and push them into the back of his head where they belong.

"I mean, literally, how do you know what the process entails and how to perform it correctly? How do you get it right every time? Do you get it right every time?"

If he didn't, that might explain a few things.

"I could ask you the same thing," says Richard. "How do you remember anything with all...that buzzing about up there?"

He's got one hell of a headache coming on, and tries to push it away before it has a chance to really set in.

"I'm not the right person for this role. I don't know why he even offered it to me." He says it more with an honest conviction than any sort of self-pity. The way a person might say that they can't jump to the moon.

"Don't be even more stupid," Jim says impatiently. "I wouldn't have wasted my time if you weren't."

He certainly wouldn't have put himself through this.

"I didn't say I was gonna turn it down," says Richard, for the first time sounding indignant.

Jim snorts. Typical actor.

"Good boy."

"Is that what it's like for you all the time?" asks Richard, completely ignoring Jim's remark.

He shrugs, casual in a way he doesn't feel, and reaches up to slip the band off his head.

"Whenever there's nothing to occupy myself with." He gestures toward the contents of the room with his free hand. "This lot should keep me busy for a while."

Richard may recall the way he lit up when they first walked in.

"Then I'll need something else."

"So, what? You're...done with Mr Holmes, then?"

There are so many implications right there that Richard doesn't even want to begin to consider them.

"I see what you meant when you said he must be lost without having someone like you around. If that's what it's like for him too."

He shakes his head.

"I wouldn't want it. I wouldn't know what to do with it."

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