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"Let's pretend to be normal , Sebastian..!"
It had been one of those days, the kind of day foreboded by mornings of empty words and nights of distant touches. It was questions untold and emotions lost on dulling eyes. Days quietly made hostile by frost linings tailing the arrival of dark matter.
The protecting atmosphere bubbling their existence had been thinning. Out there, in the icy hold of space, unprotected hands tended to grow colder by the hour.
The Universe had been calling him. For days, the renowned consult had been shrinking in his sharp suits and big-ticket shoes, weighed down by the severity of his own name. Earth's gravitational pull was dragging him by the ankles, holding firm when his being longed for the starry skies above.
The struggle had begun to show, concealment a growing issue. Mortality had not been an option. Not in this line of work where a name could mean the difference between ruin and success; the cheese or a cold blade biting the skin of your throat. Spill blood into the water and watch it grow dark with activity.
Therefore appearance had been kept a priority, as always. It was the pinch of ordinary in a cracking troposphere. At day Moriarty was the ghostly facade of a heathen god in tailored armor - at night a boy in too big clothes hiding in dim corners. The daily grind had been wearing him away, little by little.
Earth had noticed and acted.
He longed for space.
"Let's pretend to be someone else ! Just for one night..!"
That voice, the one on the other end of the wire, it was not his. It cracked in between sentences and withered from barely containable apprehension. His voice was a smooth lullaby slithering along your ear canal, soothing your ruffled fur and teasing your senses. A hot breath playing with the loose hair behind your ear...
This voice was alien. It was an agitated rustle gasped through the receiver.
That night had been bad, the worst in a long time, which in a sense was strange. Nothing had been broken, after all. Nothing had been damaged and nobody was hurt. Nothing that couldn't be made undone was first made done.
Nothing had been said.
Nothing.
The consulting criminal, King of London, had simply existed - he was a small shadow in large airy rooms, drifting aimlessly along the walls in waiting for his ascent. He was to become something remote, part of the aloof air and the marvels of the universe. An existence this world could not reach. Wasn't it what he always had wanted? A secret wish, whispered into sleeping ears in the dead of night.
The stars were pulling him in, determined to make him their own, while Earth was jealousy kept at bay. Without action, without hurry, he would soon have disappeared amongst debris and cosmic dust lingering behind the curve of his skull; the darkest depth of his mind where no one could follow him.
Not even the man who held his heart beneath gentle fingers.
But it's difficult to prevent what is the inevitable, especially if you never even noticed him leaving the comfort of your shared bed, a bed that had grown too big in too short a time. It was the explosion and boom that never came. The yelling, the death threats and the crash from broken porcelain that never echoed through the flat. Instead cosmos had called him, and he had calmly answered.
The half-finished glass of water, a sole entity waiting upon the kitchen counter in the morning glow, was all that was left now. It was the last sign of him; the last imprint of his existence, in this world, before London's streets had swallowed him whole. That morning he was gone.
"Ask me out, Sebastian! Like they do in all those... all those movies.", the voice gasped silently, its feeble shaking reduced to whispers now.
Jim never asked, and he never begged. But the voice at the other end of the phone call, it was not him. It was alien.
"Ask me out tonight..!"