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The Bleeding Hours

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             Tilting his head back, Jim felt the scotch seeping through his system, slowly warming his cold blood.  One would never tell just by looking at him, but Jim was one of those quiet, early morning drinkers--the kind that spend the long hours between dawn and waking hours drinking themselves into a sort of quiet oblivion, all the while looking for a reason not to drink, but never quite finding it.

             He wasn't an alcoholic, he knew, not properly anyway.  He could stop drinking, but he didn’t really want to—was almost afraid to stop. He didn’t even get drunk properly, like most people did. He never felt the need to fall unconscious, or be riotously funny, or even god-like. He just was.

             On good days he would get up before dawn, shower, and throw on a bathrobe before mixing himself a drink—usually scotch and cola, or some similar concoction. Today was not a good day. This morning, he had gotten up, thrown on a bathrobe, and gone straight to the bar. It took him three shattered glasses slicing into his trembling hands before he gave up and began to drink straight from the bottle.

             Lying on the couch, Jim stared at the ceiling, his dark eyes gleaming feverishly in the relative darkness of the apartment. Blinking, he got up, a little unsteadily, and put the bottle back in the cabinet before stumbling into the bathroom and locking the door.

             “Who the fuck are you?” he whispered to the stranger in the mirror.

             It had been ages since he had last taken the time to really think about himself.  Usually it was too loud in his skull to do it properly, but at times the alcohol could send that part of his brain reeling and confused long enough to work things out.

             Who am I?  What am I?  With the guard dogs drunk under the porch, he was able to rummage through the filing cabinets as fast as he could move.

             Clever.  Painfully clever.  Too clever to be this old this young.  But what else?  What else am I?

             Desperate, he moved to an open cardboard box--there never was anything ordered about his mental filing system.

             Bored.

             Bored.

             Bored.

             They all said the same thing.  He kept looking.

             Bored.  Bored.  Bored. Bored.BoredBoredBoredBoredBoredBored.

             With a jolt, he pulled himself out of it, his breathing rapid and shallow.

             What am I good at?

             As he asked himself that question, his eyes trailed over a newspaper story about a botched jewel heist.

             I could have done it better.

             He paused.  Smiled.  Set his drink on the table.  For the first time in twenty-five years, Jim Moriarty knew exactly who he was.