Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter LIII - The Art of Romantics

The finishing touches always require the most precision, the most attention: with deft fingers he laces the back of her bodice, pulling the slips of blue ribbon up, away from the fabric, knotting them tight against the whalebone curve. He runs his fingers – stiff with dried blood – through the snags in her hair, arranges it over her shoulders, loops it back behind her ears, and then sits her up in her chair, her eyes partially closed, her white lips parted; a crack in a wall of drying plaster.

His attention is drawn to her hands, folded stilly in her lap. He pauses, tapping the white blade against his jaw in contemplation, then shakes his head.

He doesn't like her hands.

They're too wide, their fingernails too square, not similar enough to her long fingers with their ovular tips and narrow bone structure. It's a shame, he thinks. She has the hair. The skin. It's just the hands. There's a substitute with perfect hands downstairs, with a faulty body. He'll have to do a little cut and stitch when he has the time.

Time is against him, and he knows he has a schedule to stick to. It's a strange thing, time. He muses over this as he wipes his hands down on the bloodied rag and reaches for his camera. The invisible dictator. The unseen guidelines we all follow, the twelve numbers we adhere to, blindly, numbly, like flocks of conditioned sheep.

He glances down at the face of his watch as he kneels, and brings the Polaroid camera up to his line of vision. Two hours. Two hours before he has to leave the comfort of this home, this multi-corridor mansion, and begin the preparations for tomorrow. He focuses the lens; the girl's head lolls, her eyes glazed, her neck at an unnatural angle.

The camera flashes. The red sheen seeping through the blue cotton of her waistband glitters, in that moment of luminescence.

He waits for the picture to print.

He made the mistake of keeping this one alive for his enjoyment – she'd screamed when he first touched her, when he'd pushed back the folds of fabric covering her thighs and lifted her legs and held the small of her straining back. Her hands had been tied, pinned above her head, but what she lost in motility she'd compensated for in volume, twisting and struggling and screaming, screaming until his fantasy shattered mid-development and he was forced to withdraw. He was panting when he moved away, frustrated and furious at having his carefully-reconstructed image of her dissipate in his head. There was a triumph in the girl's expression, a victory in her success; that he hadn't been able to finish what he'd started, that she'd made him stop.

That triumph faded when he took his knife and slashed the white of her stomach.

He didn't wait for her to bleed out entirely – she was still semi-conscious when he resumed his lustful mission. He liked that, the way she'd slipped away in his intimacy. The blood was hot. His skin was cold.

It made for a glorious contrast.

He looks at her now, and he sighs. She was a psychology student, an international, starting her second term at King's College London – what exactly she'd introduced herself as, he doesn't care to remember. She'd been on a celebratory bar trip with a group, and she'd stood out from her peers; they were perfectly uninspiring creatures, all ruddy-fleshed and caked-skinned, red lipsticks outlining the damp cavities of their mouths like the gashes he carves into his women.

She was intoxicated, and more than willing to talk with him at the bar itself. She'd been content enough to part from her companions, and follow him outside. Her eyes lit up when she saw the car – whatever reservations she'd held faded in her state of inebriation, because, in her benighted little mind, wealth meant sanity, and sanity guarantees safety.