Chapter 2
“Do you want to play a game?” Moriarty asked five minutes later, after taking a few sips of his coffee and eating his complimentary biscuit.
“I want you to spontaneously combust.”
“My, who’s grumpy now? You’re so cute, I could just–” The criminal mimed pinching someone’s cheek in the same way that Mrs Hudson would sometimes do when she was in a particularly annoying mood.
“They don’t allow weapons on planes, but I could strangle you with my bare hands.” He kept a fake smile on his face and spoke softly to make sure nobody would overhear them. Next to him, the criminal only grabbed the in-board magazine and fanned himself.
“Oof, seriously… Stop giving me ideas, we’re in public it’s not appropriate! Unless you’re actually offering, in which case I suppose there is a decently sized bathroom up front.”
“Bash your head in with a fire extinguisher is what I will do.” He ignored the mental image of his fingers wrapped around Moriarty’s neck. It really shouldn’t have been as appealing as it was.
“Promises, promises… So no games? Boooriiing.” The criminal leaned away from him and stretched his neck while trying to get a look at what the cabin crew was up to.
“Do you like breakfast?” He added before Sherlock even had a chance to take a deep breath and relax.
“Is it humanly impossible for you to stay quiet for more than ten seconds?”
“Sherlock, you are the one who asked me how long I usually sleep. I have given up on taking a nap by now so it falls to you to keep me entertained.” The criminal was smiling in an almost threatening way.
“Here!” He pushed one of the little remotes into the other man’s hand and pulled it up towards the screen in front of him. “It literally says entertainment right there! And they have–” He quickly tapped one of the buttons to navigate to the menu. “American football and something called Love is Blind or you could play that Squid Game thingy–” He got interrupted by almost inappropriately loud laughter.
“Oh dear, oh dear! You have no idea what you just said and it’s amazing!” Although Sherlock did in fact not have the slightest idea what was so funny, this wasn’t exactly new territory. Whenever people realised he was unfamiliar with something, they took great joy in making fun of him for not knowing something obvious.
Only, when he looked at the criminal there was no sign of malice in his eyes and he was actually biting his lip to stop himself from grinning. Realising he was still holding the criminal’s hand with the remote in it, he quickly let go.
“All jokes aside, Sherlock. I think you might enjoy that one. But you have to watch the uncensored version, not the safe-for-plane version they have on here.” The criminal added with a motion towards the little marker on the screen that indicated this was a censored version of what seemed to be a television show at second glance.
“I don’t really care for TV series…” The preview picture did not make it look as if it was an educational documentary.
“Nooo, but you need to understand how funny that suggestion was. Play the Squid Game. Jesus.” The criminal shook his head, still visibly amused by whatever it was he had suggested. Sherlock made a mental note to look up the show once he was at his hotel.
“We can watch something, but not sports. Urgh their selection is awful, might grab my laptop and look for something online if the wifi is good enough.”
“We?!”
“Yeees, me, Jim, and you, the very ill-prepared detective who didn’t bring anything to kill time.” Hearing the criminal refer to himself as Jim was strange somehow. Until now, Sherlock had always thought of Jim from IT and James Moriarty the criminal as two different people.
“Jim.” He repeated rather flatly.
“Yes, that’s my name.” It was Moriarty’s turn to roll his eyes now.
“Isn’t it James?” Sherlock was trying to think back to every conversation he’d ever had with or about Moriarty. The criminal had always referred to himself as Jim if he remembered correctly.
“Well yes, but we can’t all have fancy names like Sherlock to make us sound so unique.”
“Ah, of course. Because Jim is such a unique name.”
“We’re on our way back to throwing-you-into-the-engine territory.”
“Jim, so exotic, never heard it before.” He said dryly in an attempt not to start another fight. They weren’t even an hour into this flight yet, many threats had already been exchanged and now Sherlock was thinking about whether he had an opinion on the name James.
“Mhm. James is just the most bland English name you could come up with.” Moriarty– or Jim– added before taking another sip of coffee. Sherlock was about to argue back that he didn’t think so, but stopped himself just in time.
“So you’re determined to make sure neither of us gets bored?” He asked instead.
“Who knows, perhaps I’ll teach you about the solar system after all. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Once again, the criminal was smiling, but this time it didn’t seem quite so performative.
“No thank you, I simply don’t see why astrology is relevant.” One look at Moriarty– Jim’s face was enough to realise that his politeness had been in vain.
“The fuck did you just say?” It was possibly the crudest way he’d ever heard the criminal talk and that probably meant something considering all the mentions of daddy and strangling each other.
“Well, not relevant for me anyway. I’m not saying you’re not allowed to care about the stars.” He thought that was relatively polite still, but the other man didn’t seem to agree since he was looking at him incredulously.
“Astrology?!”
“Yes, the… stars?” Now he was desperately trying to remember anything John may have mentioned back when they’d had the discussion about the solar system. He looked at Jim through narrowed eyes, hoping that the stars were in fact relevant in some sense.
“Thank God you’re pretty!” The criminal said, still seemingly dumbfounded about what he had just heard. “Sherlock, honey. Sweetheart. Darling–”
“Yes, just tell me!” Somehow every time it seemed that they were able to have a normal conversation, the criminal would manage to get on his nerves again and bring them back to where they’d started. With a dramatically exaggerated sigh, Jim finally grabbed his hand and made a mournful face, almost as if he was about to inform Sherlock about the death of a family member.
“Astronomy is a branch of science interested in the study of the universe– broadly speaking. Astrology is a pseudo-science that claims the movement of the stars and their positions at the time of your birth will have an effect on your personality.” A simple mix-up of words then. Certainly embarrassing, but not the end of the world.
“Well, I don’t care about either then I suppose.” He shrugged, hoping that this little mishap wasn’t going to cause yet another scene.
“Urgh, that is such a capricorn thing to say.” Jim rolled his eyes again and slumped back into his seat, letting go of his hand and leaving it feeling cold.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Sherlock leaned back against his seat, head turned to the right and stayed quiet in an attempt not to say anything ignorant. There was a seat divider between them now that they were both leaning back properly but it wasn’t at maximum height so he could still see half of the criminal’s face. For a minute they were awkwardly looking at each other, anything below the eyes out of each other’s view. Sherlock narrowed his eyes. Jim lifted an eyebrow. It ended when Sherlock pressed the button that fully retracted the divider until it was essentially gone from view.
“Why do you care?” He hadn’t meant for it to sound like an accusation, but it did.
“About?” The criminal looked a bit tired again. Definitely not enough sleep.
“The universe.”
“Oh wow, there goes an easy question.” For a second, Jim almost looked annoyed, but then he shifted in his seat to stretch his back and sighed.
“Alright, think about it. We’re about ten or eleven kilometres away from the ground right now and if things go really wrong we can be back down on Earth within less than five minutes, given that the plane doesn’t break up in thousands of pieces in which case it would take a bit longer because terminal velocity depends on the mass of the falling object– I do assume that you know that much at least.” A woman who had been on her way to the bathroom sped up, eyes wide in shock when she heard Jim’s theory. “So we’re only a few minutes– or ten kilometres– away from the planet. You can see what it looks like if you shove that guy aside and look through his window.” He nodded towards a man behind him at the other side of the aisle who was busy reading a newspaper. “But that’s just Earth. Boring old planet we live on and know lots about already. Mercury, the closest planet to Earth, is about 77 million kilometres away from us on average. 7.7 million times further away from Earth than we are right now. And Sherlock, that’s only the nearest one. For Neptune we’re talking about a distance of over 4 billion kilometres– and that’s still only the furthest planet in our solar system. A solar system that is part of a galaxy, the Milky Way, which is essentially part of a group of galaxies that are contained in the Virgo Supercluster, which in turn is part of the Laniakea Supercluster and that is part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, that is a galaxy filament. Galaxy filaments are the largest known structures in the universe– that we know of right now, I should add. So… Well you can imagine that if Neptune is already 4 billion kilometres away, anything outside of our Supercluster or even just the Milky Way itself is absolutely– Well it’s very far, to say it very simply. The fact that we know of planets and stars that are so far away, you couldn’t travel there within a lifetime if you left as a baby and lived until you were 120 years old…”
“I get it.” He blinked and suddenly realised he was in a plane surrounded by people. For a minute he’d been exclusively staring at Jim, whose eyes were filled with excitement, and it had almost felt as if they were travelling through the universe as he’d been explaining how it was structured.
“You do?” The criminal asked with some doubt in his voice.
“Yes, well it sounds like something that wouldn’t get boring, right? It’s so enormous that there is always more to explore– more questions to answer, never running out of new material as technology gets better.” He hoped that was at least part of what made astronomy interesting, otherwise Jim would have yet another reason to laugh at him.
“I could kiss you right now.” The criminal smiled again. So he hadn’t been wrong at least.
“I’d advise against that. Wait– Isn’t Pluto the furthest planet from us? Or… From the Sun? I don’t actually remember but John did bring it up when he tried to lecture me about the solar system.”
“Oh dear, here we go. Long story short: It was classified as a planet, yes, the one furthest away from us in the solar system, but then it was re-classified and is officially not a planet.”
“Why?” Sherlock wasn’t going to argue with Jim, but he wouldn’t mind hearing some more explanations about superclusters or whatnot.
“Alright, essentially there are three requirements for a celestial body to be classified as a planet: First of all it needs to orbit around the Sun. Pluto does that, so that’s not the issue. Secondly, it needs sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium– basically it needs to be spherical. That’s not the issue either. The third point however is where Pluto loses its eligibility as a planet: It hasn’t cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. There are other objects of considerable size near its orbit, so it doesn’t fulfill the criteria. It is considered to be a dwarf planet though if that makes you feel any better. It’s part of the Kuiper belt which is essentially similar to the Main Asteroid Belt that’s between Mars and Jupiter– though I suppose you haven’t heard of that either.” Jim almost sounded a bit disappointed about that realisation.
“No, can’t say that I have but–” He’d been about to ask Jim to tell him all about that belt when a member of the cabin crew showed up with a stack of menus and handed them over with some explanation about breakfast. It was 10 am.