I had recently discovered, fell in love with, and finished the Sherlock Hound anime. So when I dusted off my Telegram and poked my head inside the Writing Challenge Group, this idea for a fanfic instantly clicked in my head. This group features weekly prompts with a goal of 1000 words, and is a place for writers to share ideas and discuss literature. If you'd be interested in joining, send me a PM! This week's prompt is: "I didn't need a critic. I needed a friend."

Disclaimer/Content warning: This story is written from the perspective of a villain at the height of late 1800s Englishman privilege. The antiquated ideas of gender roles of the time and sexism will be featured here. If you are understandably exhausted with those kinds of mores, please turn back now.

Dearly detested,

              I hope this letter finds you treasuring the Lady Hudson after the ordeals of last fortnight.

              Who am I kidding? This letter will find the incinerator as soon as I finish it. My boundless brilliance suffers this asinine indignity of writing a letter with no intentions of being delivered to the recipient. Apparently this practice is in fashion in Vienna as a means to soothe the nerves.

              Of which mine are ground into a fine powder thanks to you.

              Regardless, I don’t even know if I would hypothetically deliver this to you or to Lady Hudson. For you see, I have accumulated a litany of grievances against you, but it is Mrs. Hudson who has consumed my thoughts and time as of late.

              Yes, yes, the plan was to simply use her as a hostage in order to throw your name into disgrace. Yet, her grace and kindness were things I never thought to factor in. Tell me, Hound. Have you ever felt that if you had met a certain person earlier, your life would have taken a completely different trajectory?

              That, perhaps, psychological concepts such as love are phenomena to be experienced rather than abstracted as academic pursuits?

              I shan’t drivel on with an ingrate’s apologia about how society rejected my genius and exiled me away from my professorship. I am above pity. But Hound, I tire of being an intellectual criminal.

I so very much tire of it.

              You are a man of science (insofar as a “man” you could be considered when your eyes glaze hollow and one sees the very cogs of your clockwork machinations turn when you grasp for straws and tie them together in the bulkiest, most impractical threads of logic a mortal could ever witness). Let us speak in the language of learned gentlemen, and perhaps you can then better translate my troubles.

              Surely you have studied Professor Darwin’s body of work. I needn’t remind you of how integral the theory of evolution has become to the institution that is science. Now I ask you to examine the psychology of relationships according to the paradigm of natural selection. The relationships between men and women, men and duty, men and honor, men and men.

              Extrapolate, if you will, the struggle of survival from the climes and environs of the natural world to the artifices of the societal world. The successes of survival are measured in the simple fact that we continue to live in the good graces of what our technologies and material comforts have wrought. The traits that enable this survival spring forth from our upbringings and the very fibers of our flesh just as much as they spring forth from the variations and minute differences of our parents’ sexual reproductions.

One is born clever, and they are made even cleverer by their tutors and schools and governesses. And when that child matures into a proper adult, he must leave the nest and employ his cleverness to adapt to life processes. He may choose the career of an entrepreneur, adapting himself to the management of businesses and estates to build his own personal wealth. Or, if he is born a miner’s son, then he uses his constitution and sinew to mining for his wealth. So on and so forth.

              It is precisely how one utilizes his faculties that becomes the very strategies for survival. But what about the unsuccess in survival? He dies just as the flora and fauna die. A death in the civilized world could take the form of many fates – such as punishment within the courts and prisons, the utter disgrace of being perverse pariahs, the loss of his dignity, any such sort. Anything tantamount to the material death of one’s body. Some ancient religions believed the body and the spirit are one and the same substance. And for all intents and purposes, they’re right.

Now, we turn our attention to the fairer sex. Women are graced within their spirit-bodies a certain fiber that engenders love. You see this in a mother to her child, a wife to her husband, an artist to her craft. Nature has bestowed this awe-inspiring propensity to women in order to nurture those around her. That is precisely why Nature is a woman, and also similarly in ancient religions, the very earth is anthropomorphized as feminine serenity. It is Gaea’s love that directs the seed into the soil, warms and waters the seed into a sprout, and blooms that sprout into fruit and beauty.

At this point, you must see where I’m leading you.

A woman’s good graces are her exclusive inherent trait that is up to her to wield and shape her adaptability. Her expertise in homemaking is the very reflection of how Nature warms and waters the soil. It is her counsel to her husband and child that pushes the sapling higher and higher from the ground. It is her delicate hands and words that bring forth the blossoms into the artistry and ecology of civilization.

I would liken my own ingenuity as the method by which I adapt to survival. Just as your persistence and asceticism to my downfall is the result of your own internal faculties.

I’ll not speculate as to the veracity of the following supposition, however, I would be remiss to not bring it up for the sake of debate. It could be argued that within civilization’s ecosystem criminals could be likened to parasites. Be they at my caliber and refinement or of the common oafs capable of only hoisting heavy objects. A parasite is born with the various faculties to take food from their host – possessions, wealth, and status in society’s case. It is within their very cells to survive in this manner.

Parasites are notoriously simple in design, so few cells comprise a full organism. And, like the affairs of the rest of the flora and fauna in existence, parasites only have to live in the world of nature. Unlike us, they do not have to live in both the world of nature and the world of civilization.

That is to say they cannot benefit from the distinctly womanly advantage of embodying the ideals of love and care and charity and grace and goodness and cheer and dignity and concern for her fellow men and women and their innate desire to tend to the fragile organisms that are our flesh-spirits and usher us ever closer to the perfection of the angels and God.

So here’s a puzzle for you to divine the answer out of thin air since you’re so good at that:

If a parasite were of the same higher order as us, could the blessings of femininity transform him as they could transform men into providers of civilized society?

Regretfully yours,

Professor James Moriarty

P.S.: I hate you and I will pray for nothing more than God to strike you down with such ferocity you land six feet under and become subjected to the ministrations of the worms and maggots recycling your nutrients and blood into the food a pig eats for the inevitable dung heap you will become.