"There are two people Sherlock Holmes needs," Jim says. "If he - or she - can't find them, he makes them. One of them is John Watson, of course, stalwart and true, et cetera, et cetera. Those seem to be in plentiful supply. If they're not, substitutes can be arranged easily enough."

(He was wrong, he knows now, to have thought of Tony Stark as being analogous to Mycroft when he is so clearly a Watsonian figure in those Sherlocks' lives.)

"James Moriarty, on the other hand, seems a bit harder to come by, but no less important. A Holmes without a Moriarty . . . you might as well have a mirror without a reflection."