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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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."

"Oh, no," Jim smiles. "I'm not even close to done with Mr Holmes. It's just a bit more long-term right now. I need smaller projects to fill in the time while I wait."

He can't afford to rush. Everything has to be in exactly the right place first or it will all fall apart.

Richard nods distantly, though not necessarily at what Jim says. After a few moments, he finally looks back at Jim.

"If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right," he says. "What aren't you telling me that I need to know? I can't expect you not to talk down to me, but don't talk to me like I'm a child. I'd hate to get your character across poorly because I was mislead on something important."

Really, that would only wind up being insulting to Jim.

Edited 2012-02-12 05:01 (UTC)

Jim sits back in his chair and starts twirling his band around his finger, just fast enough to keep it moving.

"Matilda is a child," he points out. "Age doesn't make a difference to someone's intelligence.

"You must have specific questions. Ask them. Don't worry, I won't take your head off."

At least, not in the literal sense.

"What smaller projects?" Richard asks simply. "I have next to nothing between the pool and the thing with the crown jewels, and that's over a year's gap. Just some tiny little bit about an aeroplane."

He's no idea if Sherlock is going to elaborate on this gap, or play it by ear, but knowing what happens in between would definitely colour his performance.

"There is that massive international criminal network I run," he says, almost off-handed. "It isn't always interesting, but it is time-consuming. Logistics, politics, money, favors . . . there's a balance that needs to be maintained. It isn't all shoot-outs and drama like in the movies.

"And killing off your employees to suit your ego is highly inadvisable," he adds, his expression darkening briefly. "Whatever you do, don't take any inspiration from that idiot."

"He wasn't written very well," Richard says. "I thought it was just adaptation decay, but he's the same in the books. Well, the one story he showed up in. He wouldn't have been half the challenge as, well, you."

What he doesn't mention is that the Victorian Moriarty also would not have been half as fun, either.

"I don't know what was going on when...what's his name wrote those books, but it reeked of attempted Franchise Zombie. I don't think the character was anything more than a convenient foil to end the series."

He shrugs, clearly unimpressed.

By contrast, Jim looks genuinely surprised and quite pleased because of it. Perhaps he should have expected that kind of clear analysis from an actor who has studied his trade, but - well.

His opinion of Rich's intelligence is not the highest it's ever been right now.

"No," he says, "the name Moriarty didn't become synonymous with supervillain until the adaptations started pouring in."

"Can't say I'm surprised. He did nothing even remotely villain-ish in the one story I've seen him in. He just buggered off to Switzerland to chase after Holmes. Which, also, anyone who's seen even one episode of Criminal Law knows that no body means no actual murder took place. And even I could have told him not to put the key to his little book cipher right there on his blackboard."

Oh, right. Jim hasn't seen that one yet.

"Which, if he even needed the key in the first place, he can't have been much of a genius at all. That's something people who can't remember their email passwords do."

Richard may be one of them, but he's not running a supposed criminal empire. He shakes his head as though trying to shake loose the memories to keep them from infecting his performance.

Jim listens to his rant with amusement.

"Quite the cautionary tale," he observes, once Rich appears to have run out of steam.

Richard rolls his eyes.

"You're going to hate those movies," he warns. "Maybe they're better if you watch them when you're pissed. I don't know."

Something else seems to occur to him.

"Do I have a Moran?"

He already hates them.

"Of course you do," he says, "though I'm told he hasn't turned up onscreen in any meaningful way by the end of series two."

He cocks his head slightly.

"That must create an odd little narrative blank spot for you," he says musingly.

"He's not anywhere in my notes. I figured there was a second series, but the Bar wouldn't give it to me. She gave me those other ones instead."

His notes end at the Final Problem, rather predictably. Only Sherlock survives.

Naturally.

"Make one up, then," he says. "You can't have me without him. How does Sherlock think the short Irish guy took over the criminal world within a decade? I needed someone who could loom to scare the exceptionally stupid ones."

And who was a crack shot, to kill them when their stupidity proved permanent.

He shrugs. "Maybe it's just a built-in blind spot?" suggests Richard, having begun to get a hang for the way These Things work now that he's seen bits and pieces of his (well, not really his — he still has no idea how he actually fits into all this) canon.

"He didn't seem to ever take Moran into account until Moran nearly took his head off."

"Narratively speaking," Jim says, "unless he's planning to really go the distance and drop off the face of the Earth for three years, he doesn't need Sebastian at all. And of course he's not giving enough thought to what the other characters in his little psychodrama might need."

He tuts. This is what you get when actors have free rein to write their own scripts.

Edited 2012-02-12 18:50 (UTC)

"No, it doesn't look like it," Richard says. "Looks like he pretty much wins. That far off though, things start to look pretty rough. Probably because he can't really account for what Dr Watson might do?"

He doesn't vocalise it, but he's a bit wary that if left alone with Watson for too long, he'll wind up a bit dead.

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