A Picture of James Moriarty
Rating: T or light R
Charactes: Jim Moriarty and Seb Moran
Type: Angst
Warnings: gore, horror, Classical lit
Note: Sherlock ain't mine bro as always.
Word Count: 2431
Summary:
For a request of a Dorian Grey Fusion. Jim Moriarty may look inncoent but his painting can tell you otherwise.
He’s only twenty one when he gets himself painted.
It’s rather silly, the whole affair. A math genius in an art studio sitting still for hours on end just for a silly portrait. Just him and the girl who behind the portrait makes wide sweeps with her brush, not talking to him at all. It’s annoying really. Jim had always hated stillness, the silence with no payoff.
However, if he wants to be able to afford anything outside of what his full ride offers him, staying still works in his favor.
It takes at least around three hours on the last till it’s done. Jim has been wearing the same suit to the studio for the last week, the only suit he could get his hands on. It’s a fake Westwood borrowed from his roommate with the exchange of doing one of his theory assignments. Considering the hole in the left sleeve, Jim is starting to consider making sure he fails that particular assignment.
“It’s done!” The girl says at last a soft smile on her face. She’s a young art student, someone Jim befriended in one of his general education courses. Blond, from a small town, and as dedicated to her paintings as Jim is to his puzzles, he has a slight respect for her. Not enough to agree to being painted until she offered to pay him, but enough to put her above most people in this world.
“Finally,” Jim groans in his high falsetto, as he slides of the stool he had been sitting on with a regal air. “That was dull, Ruth. Nothing to play with.” He reaches for his jacket, a worn down old cloth thing. Hopefully with the pounds he earned from this job he can buy something a little more durable.
Ruth shakes her head at him. “You can’t leave me right yet, Jim. Get a good look at it first. You look stunning.”
Jim rolls his eyes, slowly swaying over to the painting to get a look. He only looks at it for a second before he looks at Ruth and gasps.
“Ruthie, it’s amazing. Fabulous!” It really is. The man in the painting is young, but not boyish, his expression serious but beautiful not like the strict man his father was. His eyes are full of life, shining out of the painting. The suit is interwoven with the picture perfectly except Ruth manages to paint out the hole.
It’s glorious. He’s glorious.
“Done looking at yourself yet?” She asks, raising an eyebrow. Jim shakes his head, moving his hand in so it’s just lingering above the wet surface. His eyes peer at the painting frozen in place, his jaw slack. It’s an expression Ruth has seen before, the one when Jim has cracked another puzzle of math theory. He’s fascinated.
“What is it?” She asks, bending so she can get a better look at Jim’s face.
“It’s just-“ Jim glides his finder of a dried surface of the painting. “I just wish I could always look like this. Eternal youth and beauty. I could control the world.” His eyes aren’t really focused anymore on the painting but off into the distance as he traces circle after circle over the place in the painting his heart would rest. It eerily reminds Ruth as if he was trying to cut it out.
“I guess, but beauty isn’t everything,” she says nervously. “It’s the mind that matters. You’ve told me how so many people are so idiotic these days.” Jim drags his eyes from the painting and taps his head with a smile.
“True, but I already have a mind. If I always looked like this I could have everything. I would give everything.”
“You mean that?” Ruth asks, her voice hushed as she stares at him wide eyes. Jim’s expression is not the innocent one she is so used to. No, this one is full of longing. There’s a pause as if a heavy weight has fallen on the conversation and Jim’s finger stops it’s tracing right over his heart.
“Even my soul,” he whispers.
The room is quiet for a few beats before Jim snaps out of his trance, pulling his gaze from the picture and back to Ruth. There’s a look in his eyes now that isn’t menacing, more of painfully hoping.
“Can I have it?” Jim asks his voice low before uttering a word that he has rarely ever said. “Please?”
She doesn’t know why she does it. Maybe it’s the fact that Jim has nothing to his name, or maybe it’s because he is rather fetching in that borrow suit. It might be that he reminds her of a boy she used to date is school or it might be that she feels like examining the picture would be too odd. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s that look in his eyes, the eyes she has found so irresistible to paint. The ones that say with or without her consent Jim will own that painting.
“You were such a good sitter,” she says with a sigh. “I already took a photo of it and if I really needed to I could always borrow back the hard copy right?”
Jim nods and it’s so earnest even the largest of skeptics would believe him.
“Alright then.”
Jim responds enthusiastically, throwing his arms around the shocked painter. “Thank you, Ruthie. You’re a saint.”
Ruthie just smiles weakly as Jim takes the painting later and waves goodbye to Jim Turner the best sitter she’s ever had.
A few years later when she looks up his name to try to find where he painting has gone she finds there was never a Jim Turner enrolled.
A few months after the painting is done, Jim decides that he is much too tired on university. His classes aren’t challenging, his teachers are dull, and his classmates are idiots no better than slime. He hates them all.
He came into university with an open mind. Here his intelligence would be blessed, here people would respect him, here genius could flourish.
Instead he enters a world where he still is a freak, his roommates use him as a tool for getting good marks and his genius is constantly being boxed in my so much noise.
Ruthie is a light spot in his education and she checks up on him to talk about theories of life, and other interesting subjects. Other than her however he is nothing more than another smart university student who will graduate early on top of his class and then fade into a well-paid office job.
He has never heard of a fate so dull. That is not a puzzle; that is torture.
It’s not until he takes a class on criminology when he starts to discover his talents could be used much better elsewhere. Each crime before him, each case, each heist is a puzzle waiting to be solved. He figures out most of them with ease and then starts to plan his own; hypothetically of course.
Well at least they started that way. First it’s just little things; selling plans to stealing test cheat sheets, blackmail, helping some men escape the law for spring break. It’s all for the money really. Jim needs every dime he can get and it’s not like he plans on hurting anyone.
At least that’s what he says until he starts thinking up perfect murders. How to make people die without a single investigation. It would be the greatest puzzle of all. Brilliant. He tries pushing them away but they linger in his mind, clinging, begging to be used.
He resists strongly on using any of them, at least until his roommate, Alex, calls him a faggot when he finds Jim back from a date with a man named Harris (Dull, predictable, steals silverware) and beats him to a pulp that he starts to change his mind on the matter.
Though Alex is suspended from the university, Jim can’t help but feeling like he deserves more of a punishment. Alex’s father runs an important company; this will not ruin his life in any means. Jim could rob his family but that would seem much to light. Then he remembers how Alex has a brother, a sweet, charming, star swimmer little brother. A brother who he cares about deeply.
He banishes the thought as soon as it appears even though he already has the toxin ready to go, the plan modified. Alex is guilty but his brother is innocent. He can’t kill him. Still he decides to go watch the swimming tourney anyway, just to prove that killing him really won’t do any good for the world.
He doesn’t know why when he sees the older and younger brother laugh why it leads him to the locker room. He doesn’t know what he smears the cream he had no intention to use all over the boys shoes. He doesn’t know why when he hears about the death of one Carl Powers he feels nothing.
He does know why he grins the next day when he hears Alex Powers hanged himself from the rafter after his brother’s death.
He really forgets about the painting until after he graduates. It’s not till he cleans out his university closet that he finds it.
He almost has a heart attack.
The painting is the same, the Westwood still on, still him on the canvas. But there is a change. For one he appears older, a few more lines under his face and he appears to be in his late twenties. His eyes are wicked staring at one like prey, his hands are curved up like claws, his smile is hungry. It’s horrifying.
Jim looks back to his dorm mirror to find that he looks not a day older twenty one. His brain starts to wind, to click, to make puzzles into figures and figures into theories.
Theories into facts.
He starts to do tests, kicking a dog on the street, stealing money, all sorts of petty tricks and then checking the painting afterword. Each time the portrait gets darker, leaner, and crueler.
It’s fascinating.
He goes to talk to Ruth one night, looks at her various other paintings, determined to find what she had done to make his soul an existing object. To his disappointment he finds that her paintings have all remained still and even more to his horror she would like to see his again. Jim had gone off the books after he graduated and she wanted to showcase his painting in a show.
She wanted to showcase his soul.
After that night Jim Turner is never seen again. His flat is cleared out, his records all but erased. Ruth never looks for him again; she wakes up to find one morning she has gone blind. Natural causes (wrong, chemical agent but what do the doctors know). Jim Turner is all but dead.
Jim Moriarty on the other hand is born.
Jim Moriarty has to work for many years to achieve the power he lusted after, the money he never had, and the respect that should have been given a long time ago. He watches the painting age, the paint crack, his face grow older and older, while he looks no older than twenty.
At first he just runs most crimes that are white collar. Painting heists, forgives, the normal things. Good in pay. Murder is something he is presented with but he never takes it up under the call that he doesn’t have an assassin to do it for him.
It might be that despite killing Carl he still doesn’t like getting his hands in the painting dirty. They’re red enough already. Murder is only for personal gain.
Despite being one of the most powerful crime lords in London, he still feels alone as ever. Sure, he can go anywhere to get sex (which he does), or love (which he does), or even companionship (which he also does). It’s, while he hates to say it, not the same. He’s employees may follow him but that’s for pay or their own sick interests. He knows if he showed them his soul before taking them to bed none would go with him.
He may be a sick bastard, but damn he’s a sick bastard with needs.
This is his common thought until he manages to hire an assassin. An assassin that tells him that there is no right or wrong only the hunt and the capture when Jim seems bothered. That as a hunter Jim should be fine with taking what he seems fit to survive. An assassin who is loyal to Jim that it’s almost a fault.
Jim Moriarty becomes open for murders later that month.
It’s the same assassin who cares for Jim after he his hurt in a scuffle with some drug lords (he cut the throats of the offenders himself later but that’s besides the point.) It’s the same assassin who becomes his second hand man later. It’s the same man who when he walks in and sees Jim’s picture only grins and states ‘well we’re all going to hell anyway. Might as well have a blast doing it.”
It’s the same man who Jim kisses five minutes later and later goes off to his room with.
Sebastian Moran is his name and Jim has no intention of letting him go anytime soon, lacky or not.
When Jim checks his painting around a decade later when Seb is thirty and Jim still looks no more than a day over twenty one it’s impossible to see any comparison between the man and his picture. Jim’s clothes are scorched, his arm in a sling, as he stares up at a frightening looking old man with horns, flesh decaying off his cheek and a twisted bitter smile.
Closing the door so Sebastian can’t come in he fetches he lighter out of his coat pocket removes the painting from the frame and lays it on the floor. With a quick flick of his lighter he drops it on the same part of the painting he had circled years ago and walks away.
The painting catches on fire quickly as Jim saunters out, whistling an old tune. He has a new enemy to face, one who despite his protests has a heart.
If Jim wants to beat him, logic would stand that he would need to burn his own out. Without it he has a weakness.
Jim Moriarty can burn the heart out of Sherlock, but Sherlock can no longer burn the heart out of him.
Charactes: Jim Moriarty and Seb Moran
Type: Angst
Warnings: gore, horror, Classical lit
Note: Sherlock ain't mine bro as always.
Word Count: 2431
Summary:
For a request of a Dorian Grey Fusion. Jim Moriarty may look inncoent but his painting can tell you otherwise.
He’s only twenty one when he gets himself painted.
It’s rather silly, the whole affair. A math genius in an art studio sitting still for hours on end just for a silly portrait. Just him and the girl who behind the portrait makes wide sweeps with her brush, not talking to him at all. It’s annoying really. Jim had always hated stillness, the silence with no payoff.
However, if he wants to be able to afford anything outside of what his full ride offers him, staying still works in his favor.
It takes at least around three hours on the last till it’s done. Jim has been wearing the same suit to the studio for the last week, the only suit he could get his hands on. It’s a fake Westwood borrowed from his roommate with the exchange of doing one of his theory assignments. Considering the hole in the left sleeve, Jim is starting to consider making sure he fails that particular assignment.
“It’s done!” The girl says at last a soft smile on her face. She’s a young art student, someone Jim befriended in one of his general education courses. Blond, from a small town, and as dedicated to her paintings as Jim is to his puzzles, he has a slight respect for her. Not enough to agree to being painted until she offered to pay him, but enough to put her above most people in this world.
“Finally,” Jim groans in his high falsetto, as he slides of the stool he had been sitting on with a regal air. “That was dull, Ruth. Nothing to play with.” He reaches for his jacket, a worn down old cloth thing. Hopefully with the pounds he earned from this job he can buy something a little more durable.
Ruth shakes her head at him. “You can’t leave me right yet, Jim. Get a good look at it first. You look stunning.”
Jim rolls his eyes, slowly swaying over to the painting to get a look. He only looks at it for a second before he looks at Ruth and gasps.
“Ruthie, it’s amazing. Fabulous!” It really is. The man in the painting is young, but not boyish, his expression serious but beautiful not like the strict man his father was. His eyes are full of life, shining out of the painting. The suit is interwoven with the picture perfectly except Ruth manages to paint out the hole.
It’s glorious. He’s glorious.
“Done looking at yourself yet?” She asks, raising an eyebrow. Jim shakes his head, moving his hand in so it’s just lingering above the wet surface. His eyes peer at the painting frozen in place, his jaw slack. It’s an expression Ruth has seen before, the one when Jim has cracked another puzzle of math theory. He’s fascinated.
“What is it?” She asks, bending so she can get a better look at Jim’s face.
“It’s just-“ Jim glides his finder of a dried surface of the painting. “I just wish I could always look like this. Eternal youth and beauty. I could control the world.” His eyes aren’t really focused anymore on the painting but off into the distance as he traces circle after circle over the place in the painting his heart would rest. It eerily reminds Ruth as if he was trying to cut it out.
“I guess, but beauty isn’t everything,” she says nervously. “It’s the mind that matters. You’ve told me how so many people are so idiotic these days.” Jim drags his eyes from the painting and taps his head with a smile.
“True, but I already have a mind. If I always looked like this I could have everything. I would give everything.”
“You mean that?” Ruth asks, her voice hushed as she stares at him wide eyes. Jim’s expression is not the innocent one she is so used to. No, this one is full of longing. There’s a pause as if a heavy weight has fallen on the conversation and Jim’s finger stops it’s tracing right over his heart.
“Even my soul,” he whispers.
The room is quiet for a few beats before Jim snaps out of his trance, pulling his gaze from the picture and back to Ruth. There’s a look in his eyes now that isn’t menacing, more of painfully hoping.
“Can I have it?” Jim asks his voice low before uttering a word that he has rarely ever said. “Please?”
She doesn’t know why she does it. Maybe it’s the fact that Jim has nothing to his name, or maybe it’s because he is rather fetching in that borrow suit. It might be that he reminds her of a boy she used to date is school or it might be that she feels like examining the picture would be too odd. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s that look in his eyes, the eyes she has found so irresistible to paint. The ones that say with or without her consent Jim will own that painting.
“You were such a good sitter,” she says with a sigh. “I already took a photo of it and if I really needed to I could always borrow back the hard copy right?”
Jim nods and it’s so earnest even the largest of skeptics would believe him.
“Alright then.”
Jim responds enthusiastically, throwing his arms around the shocked painter. “Thank you, Ruthie. You’re a saint.”
Ruthie just smiles weakly as Jim takes the painting later and waves goodbye to Jim Turner the best sitter she’s ever had.
A few years later when she looks up his name to try to find where he painting has gone she finds there was never a Jim Turner enrolled.
A few months after the painting is done, Jim decides that he is much too tired on university. His classes aren’t challenging, his teachers are dull, and his classmates are idiots no better than slime. He hates them all.
He came into university with an open mind. Here his intelligence would be blessed, here people would respect him, here genius could flourish.
Instead he enters a world where he still is a freak, his roommates use him as a tool for getting good marks and his genius is constantly being boxed in my so much noise.
Ruthie is a light spot in his education and she checks up on him to talk about theories of life, and other interesting subjects. Other than her however he is nothing more than another smart university student who will graduate early on top of his class and then fade into a well-paid office job.
He has never heard of a fate so dull. That is not a puzzle; that is torture.
It’s not until he takes a class on criminology when he starts to discover his talents could be used much better elsewhere. Each crime before him, each case, each heist is a puzzle waiting to be solved. He figures out most of them with ease and then starts to plan his own; hypothetically of course.
Well at least they started that way. First it’s just little things; selling plans to stealing test cheat sheets, blackmail, helping some men escape the law for spring break. It’s all for the money really. Jim needs every dime he can get and it’s not like he plans on hurting anyone.
At least that’s what he says until he starts thinking up perfect murders. How to make people die without a single investigation. It would be the greatest puzzle of all. Brilliant. He tries pushing them away but they linger in his mind, clinging, begging to be used.
He resists strongly on using any of them, at least until his roommate, Alex, calls him a faggot when he finds Jim back from a date with a man named Harris (Dull, predictable, steals silverware) and beats him to a pulp that he starts to change his mind on the matter.
Though Alex is suspended from the university, Jim can’t help but feeling like he deserves more of a punishment. Alex’s father runs an important company; this will not ruin his life in any means. Jim could rob his family but that would seem much to light. Then he remembers how Alex has a brother, a sweet, charming, star swimmer little brother. A brother who he cares about deeply.
He banishes the thought as soon as it appears even though he already has the toxin ready to go, the plan modified. Alex is guilty but his brother is innocent. He can’t kill him. Still he decides to go watch the swimming tourney anyway, just to prove that killing him really won’t do any good for the world.
He doesn’t know why when he sees the older and younger brother laugh why it leads him to the locker room. He doesn’t know what he smears the cream he had no intention to use all over the boys shoes. He doesn’t know why when he hears about the death of one Carl Powers he feels nothing.
He does know why he grins the next day when he hears Alex Powers hanged himself from the rafter after his brother’s death.
He really forgets about the painting until after he graduates. It’s not till he cleans out his university closet that he finds it.
He almost has a heart attack.
The painting is the same, the Westwood still on, still him on the canvas. But there is a change. For one he appears older, a few more lines under his face and he appears to be in his late twenties. His eyes are wicked staring at one like prey, his hands are curved up like claws, his smile is hungry. It’s horrifying.
Jim looks back to his dorm mirror to find that he looks not a day older twenty one. His brain starts to wind, to click, to make puzzles into figures and figures into theories.
Theories into facts.
He starts to do tests, kicking a dog on the street, stealing money, all sorts of petty tricks and then checking the painting afterword. Each time the portrait gets darker, leaner, and crueler.
It’s fascinating.
He goes to talk to Ruth one night, looks at her various other paintings, determined to find what she had done to make his soul an existing object. To his disappointment he finds that her paintings have all remained still and even more to his horror she would like to see his again. Jim had gone off the books after he graduated and she wanted to showcase his painting in a show.
She wanted to showcase his soul.
After that night Jim Turner is never seen again. His flat is cleared out, his records all but erased. Ruth never looks for him again; she wakes up to find one morning she has gone blind. Natural causes (wrong, chemical agent but what do the doctors know). Jim Turner is all but dead.
Jim Moriarty on the other hand is born.
Jim Moriarty has to work for many years to achieve the power he lusted after, the money he never had, and the respect that should have been given a long time ago. He watches the painting age, the paint crack, his face grow older and older, while he looks no older than twenty.
At first he just runs most crimes that are white collar. Painting heists, forgives, the normal things. Good in pay. Murder is something he is presented with but he never takes it up under the call that he doesn’t have an assassin to do it for him.
It might be that despite killing Carl he still doesn’t like getting his hands in the painting dirty. They’re red enough already. Murder is only for personal gain.
Despite being one of the most powerful crime lords in London, he still feels alone as ever. Sure, he can go anywhere to get sex (which he does), or love (which he does), or even companionship (which he also does). It’s, while he hates to say it, not the same. He’s employees may follow him but that’s for pay or their own sick interests. He knows if he showed them his soul before taking them to bed none would go with him.
He may be a sick bastard, but damn he’s a sick bastard with needs.
This is his common thought until he manages to hire an assassin. An assassin that tells him that there is no right or wrong only the hunt and the capture when Jim seems bothered. That as a hunter Jim should be fine with taking what he seems fit to survive. An assassin who is loyal to Jim that it’s almost a fault.
Jim Moriarty becomes open for murders later that month.
It’s the same assassin who cares for Jim after he his hurt in a scuffle with some drug lords (he cut the throats of the offenders himself later but that’s besides the point.) It’s the same assassin who becomes his second hand man later. It’s the same man who when he walks in and sees Jim’s picture only grins and states ‘well we’re all going to hell anyway. Might as well have a blast doing it.”
It’s the same man who Jim kisses five minutes later and later goes off to his room with.
Sebastian Moran is his name and Jim has no intention of letting him go anytime soon, lacky or not.
When Jim checks his painting around a decade later when Seb is thirty and Jim still looks no more than a day over twenty one it’s impossible to see any comparison between the man and his picture. Jim’s clothes are scorched, his arm in a sling, as he stares up at a frightening looking old man with horns, flesh decaying off his cheek and a twisted bitter smile.
Closing the door so Sebastian can’t come in he fetches he lighter out of his coat pocket removes the painting from the frame and lays it on the floor. With a quick flick of his lighter he drops it on the same part of the painting he had circled years ago and walks away.
The painting catches on fire quickly as Jim saunters out, whistling an old tune. He has a new enemy to face, one who despite his protests has a heart.
If Jim wants to beat him, logic would stand that he would need to burn his own out. Without it he has a weakness.
Jim Moriarty can burn the heart out of Sherlock, but Sherlock can no longer burn the heart out of him.