Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter LXXIX - Puppet Lover

-Millie-

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I am a puppet lover.

Time is all but a word, now; it bears no relevance or weight in my world, not anymore, because my sense of perception is hopelessly skewed. Days and nights are not measured by clocks. They blur into shades: days are white, nights are blue or sometimes yellow, depending on whether the lamp is glowing beside me. Cocaine distorts the rest. There are blackouts, whole week blackouts, where I am dimly aware of sound and colour and nothing else. Touch, taste and smell are lost on me. I don't dwell on the lack of time – but if the grey lifts and I have the mental capacity to count the hours that have passed since the day I first arrived at that apartment, I can make an estimate. I must be approaching the two month mark. Two months. A compact eternity. 

Initially, I fought. I tried every escape option: the windows, the doors, a torn pillowcase around my throat. I came very close each time – but he was better, faster, quicker on his feet. He bolted the windows shut and locked every door, cut the ligature with his knife and blamed my suicide attempt on the drugs. I decided then that, if I couldn't escape, I'd resist; whenever he took a step near me, I backed away, each time he touched me, I cried out. He was unfazed. He thought I was being coy.

The highs themselves were delivered with some force – until eventually, mercifully, addiction welcomed me back with open arms. I began struggling less, crying less, begging less. I stopped moving. I stopped trying. Perhaps he interprets my stillness as compliance.

The apartment with the balcony is long gone. By the second week, he'd purchased a new house, a manor not dissimilar to the place that features so commonly in my tormented dream sequences. I scarcely remember the move itself – it was during a two-week period of half-consciousness – but I get the impression it was distinctly rushed; I have a fragmented memory of sirens in the distance, being carried to a car and driven away at speed. The next time I woke up, I was in a different room. It's much bigger here, much grander – which serves only to make me feel smaller in myself. The windows are kept locked, but I don't think of escape any more. I don't have the energy to move. I don't have the energy to think. All effort is reserved to obtaining the inter-high fixes.

The moments of clarity are the worst. Between spates of sleep and desensitised drifting are snatches of understanding, and it is during these I am subjected to him, to his overpowering adoration, to the nights of forced intimacy that bring tears to my eyes and make me scrub my skin until it bleeds. I'll come down from a high to find myself lying beneath him, or sitting in a dress that isn't mine, or having my hair pinned with pearls. I never move, because a disturbance might shatter this glass world. I don't think he'd like the reality. It isn't death that frightens me; it's the reaction. They'd find my butchered body, Sherlock and Emily and John. They'd see me.

I shall spare them the haunting.

He's always here, always touching, always talking, but I refuse to look at his face. It's easier to process his hands and his chest, leave his eyes and smile to the nightmares. With the exception of his warped intimacy – I fight him then, struggle, shout out against the terror and the pain and the one-sided lust – he handles me like porcelain. The tenderness is excruciating. When I don't dress, he does it for me; I'm stripped bare, swathed in satins and silks and sashes of blue. When I don't eat, he forces me to; he has to sit me down and manually coerce my lips open. If I don't move, he picks me up. If I don't talk, he makes up my answers. The only independence I exercise is in bathing – I do that myself. I won't risk rape for pride.

Cocaine stopped being enough a long time ago.

I alternate between it and heroin. He has a plentiful supply of both, and the latter is kind to me: it grants me the empty moments of unawareness I have come to treasure. It's the only time I talk to him, when I have to ask for it. He always obliges. He injects it for me; shakes the syringe, removes the cap with his teeth, lines it up with the thin, blue vein at the crook of my elbow. He flinches before he presses the little plastic plunger, as if the welcomed pinprick causes him pain. Sometimes I hear him ask me why I won't eat or smile or speak. He'll ask me what he's doing wrong, what can he do to make me understand. My response is always the same; I hold out my arm and look at the ground and wait until the prick of the next needle signifies the arrival of alleviation.