Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XXXIII - Rapunzel

The argument was a vicious one.

She screamed until her throat was raw with it, her head was sore with it; the words that left her mouth were weighted, heavy, falling like the discarded cartridges of bronze bullets. Her mother watched her, her father made no attempt to rebuke her, both of them listening to their daughter's violent soliloquy with white lips and shaken senses of identity.

She'd gathered her belongings, stuffed packets and clothes and wads of her father's money into a little leather rucksack, a pearl-studded hem here, an expensive cuff there. Anger fuels efficiency. She didn't think – she didn't have to – as she took the flight of stairs to the entrance, past the marble vases mounted on their pedestals and the paintings of her ancestors, all of them stiff-necked and frowning at her reckless behaviour.

It all seems so distant, now.

The girl smiles to herself as she makes her unsteady way along the concrete edge of the pavement, arms held out; a balancing act.

There is a curious freedom in rebellion, she thinks. A liberty in the unknown. No more restriction.

She turns heads as she walks, for she stands out. Everything about her is anomalous – out of place, even; she's plain-faced, heavily built, but with hair so blonde it appears near white in the dimming light, loose and scented and brushing her tailbone as she tilts from side to side on the curb. She's blatantly wealthy, the money evident in the form of an embroidered skirt, knee-length, a slim pendant on a gold chain and a finely-knit angora jumper. She's young. Very young. Sixteen, only just.

Too young to be dressed in the way she is, walking this part of London in the fading light.

She sways, off-balance, and drops to the road. Her soft humming cuts off as she looks around. She didn't think she'd get this far – finding somewhere to sleep was not part of her spontaneous plan.

Eventually, and with some luck, she stumbles across a backstreet, just off the main road. There is a tarpaulin here, stretched over two abandoned rubbish crates, with a threadbare rug and empty cans stacked up against the brickwork. It looks like someone was here before her. The girl pauses, her face flushed, and then swallows.

It will have to do.

She lowers herself under the tarpaulin and onto the rug, trying not to recoil at the sight of so much filth, everywhere, caking the walls and the makeshift roof and her legs and palms and skirt. It smells like alcohol, here. Stale urine. She feels her confidence begin to ebb; perhaps she shouldn't have been so rash, after all. Was she too harsh? Too extreme?

Doubt burrows its way into her psyche like a cancer.

She sniffs – attempting unsuccessfully to stop the tears pricking the inner corners of her eyes – as night defeats the last throes of day, replacing the weak sunlight with a darkness that coats the surrounding area in navy silk.

Sleep is not so kind as to grant her escapism tonight.

She has to stifle the sobs with the back of her hand. It goes on for some time, this cycle of desperation and fear and anger and hurt and regret and desperation again.

The footsteps break the monotony of silence.

They are shuffled footsteps, laboured footsteps, and they are coming towards her. Her breath catches and becomes a pant; short, quick inhalations of air that push her towards the unforgiving grip of hyperventilation. She tugs the rug over her legs. The footsteps stop. She bites down on her hand.

The tarpaulin is lifted.

The rightful owner of the cheap construction looks down, startled by the sight of this girl with her doe eyes and white-blonde hair looking back at him. She regards him in utmost terror, because, in her world, he is fear personified; homeless in every sense of the word, dirty to an extreme and currently leering at her with a toothless smile that tells her if she does not move, and move quickly, she is going to regret it bitterly. Her legs kick out at the floor, the rug bunching at her heels, all adrenaline as she scrambles to her feet. The homeless man extends a gloved hand and she yelps, pushing him away and running, running full pelt, in the opposite direction.