Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XLI - O, Death

She watches in cold-blooded horror as he works the blade free from the stomach of the man on the ground, moving the knife through layers of skin and tissue and arterial walls and taut strips of sinew – he pauses, to catch his breath, and then he brings the knife down again, and again, and again, each time less controlled than the last, his white teeth bared and spattered with blood that does not belong to him. There is a frenzy about his movements, a lack of co-ordination, because this murder is tainted, hot with hatred for the individual who tried to take away the one thing in his life he values above all and everything else.

The man on the floor is still here, though. Still alive.

Suffering is an understatement.

She lets the syringe of paralytic roll from her palm to the ground, as he lashes out one, final time, putting everything he is into the action; the blade meets its mark with a dull, wet, thud, and his shoulders sag, his head falls forwards, both hands tight around the hilt of his knife. The man on the floor sighs – a warm exhalation of blood and fading consciousness, and the tension in his frozen body slacks.

The tears on her face are cold; chilled by the sharp, summer night.

It's her fault. She knows it is. She also knows that the monster kneeling over the dead man with the bloodied reverence of a priest in prayer forced her hand in every sense of the word, and that if she did not do as he asked – wait for the pale man with the black, curly hair to exit the building, call for help, lure him, a sailor to darker waters, press the tip of the needle into the back of his neck and tie the white strip of fabric over his eyes like an executioner's slip – he would have carved his smile into the flesh of her sister's throat, and done to her what he did to the lifeless women strung from hooks: meat in a carnal butcher's display.

He made her watch, watch him do terrible, terrible things to those poor dead people – things she thought were inhuman; morally impossible.

The sight of him beside her, with his shadowed jaw and artist's fingers makes her sick, because she knows what he does, and what he did to her, last night, when she was tied by her wrists and stripped bare, laid out like white gold on the cold floor next to the dead woman with the curly hair. When he'd finished, and she was crying, he'd dabbed the tears from her cheek and held her hand and told her he had something for her to do. Something important. She wouldn't end up like the woman next to her, if she did it for him.

When she shook her head at the prospect of killing a man, his smile became a little less genuine; he pressed their entwined hands to her cheek, and told her in his lilting voice that he would bring her sister down to his cold room full of women called Millie if she continued being so stubborn. Her sister is nine years old.

She saw younger girls in there.

It was enough to coerce her to stand in the alleyway, syringe loaded with a chemical designed to stop the man from getting to his feet again, and wait for his signal.

She recognised his victim as the detective from the news.

The shock in his eyes brought tears to her own, as she lowered him spasmodically to the ground; he tried to speak, but the drug caught the fledgling words in his throat and pushed them back down into his lungs. She'd watched his chest flutter as the chords and tendons of his heart strained at the muscle, and held onto his arm as she apologised like a stuck, sobbing record: "I'm so sorry," she said. "He's making me do this. He has my sister. I'm so sorry. So, so sorry."

Back in the street, he wrenches the knife free of its human sheath and overbalances, falling back and catching himself, palms flat on the slicked flagstones, knees dark and dripping with the same russet liquid that pools beneath the detective. He lifts a cautious finger, watching the blood roll down his skin, and then presses it to his mouth, eyes closed, letting the life of the man he loathes seep into the fine lines of his lips.