Sherlocked (BBC Fanfiction)

Chapter 14 - Out With Reason, In With The Season (Part 1)

September had sluggishly twisted into December.  And with them, Sherlock.  He was like the weather outside; obstinately cold and bitter, always harsh and biting at your cheeks.  It was wind-chill that seemed to have a static outcome.  With Christmas undulating around the bend, I knew something was detrimentally wrong.  Whilst meditating on the ingratitude of humanity, I ultimately bit the bullet and deduced that life had been thrown off balance.  Even more so than normal.

Nobody else, and by that I singularly mean Eva, hadn’t risen to her sharpened senses yet and there was no way in high heaven that I’d bring it up.  I didn’t want to bring about any occurrences that I wasn’t readied for.

Thanking the inauspicious stars Sherlock and I hadn’t encountered any blitz attacks, courtesy of London’s underground system of criminals, in the last couple of months.  It, however, had put me on edge.  This was like the calm before the tempest; I was waiting, expecting something to happen.  I couldn’t relax anymore.

We had solved a couple trivial cases, none too arduous; a double homicide that ensued in the cousin being the reprobate, a murder of a young woman in the basement of a warehouse that essentially turned out to be suicide; she had been involved with a meager gang and had obligations hanging over her head constantly.  She took her own life by swallowing cyanide capsules.  And the last case file was the slaughter of a journalist for the newspaper, The London Epoch.  His superintendent had strangulated him to death, reasons being the journalist new the manager had slain his wife because the wife had shot the boss’s brother.

Within these fleeting months, I had taken to making a website for the blog my therapist required me to make.  I titled it “The Science of Deduction.”  And much to my surprise, it does help.  It has opened up my eyes to the fact that I cannot rheostat every situation I am in.  Having already posted the two cases, I labeled them, “A Study in Claret,” and “The Slaughter of Three.”  I refuse to post the Augustus Warren case.

Already the website has gotten over 100,000 hits. 

“Sherlock,” I said, sitting in the large armchair in the living room with my computer.  Sherlock sat opposite me, sprawled out on his back, typing avidly on his phone.  It was twilight, 6:30 p.m., and a thick blanket of snow had whited out all of London, and continued to fall in soft flurries.  The last of the last shone through the windows, the heavy curtains pulled aside.  With the fire crackling in the fireplace, heat emanated outward, warming the flat.  Small torrents of light and shadows created by the flames had been thrown across the wall and the floor.  I had broken down and grabbed my blanket from my bed, winding is around me and my toes.  For once, I was able to enjoy the evening as it was; serene.   However, neither of us had risen to decorating the flat in commemoration of Christmas; we saw it as a defeat, a downfall is our regime.  We would not succumb to the holidays that had already infected all of Europe like an epidemic. 

“Yes?”  Sherlock asked.

Rolling my sore shoulders, I felt the knots in my muscles unwind from the recent days spent at the gym.  “What ever happened to the Augustus Warren case?”  I had been wondering for days; the uncertainty seemed to settle on my shoulders like a layer of dust.  This had been an unrequited case I felt obliged to disentangle.

“Well,” Sherlock began, “for one thing, Augustus didn’t die in the explosion of his house.”

My eyes flashed up to Sherlock, searching his face from the side.  I took out my ear-buds, pausing the music playing on my phone that rested on the arm of the chair.  “He didn’t?  I thought you surveyed his body at St. Barts?”

“I did survey a body at Barts, but it wasn’t Augustus’s,” he explained and sat up abruptly.  I watched his eyes; exhaustion was prominent.  The flames flickered in his eyes, a reflection of the only heat I’d seen in him in days.  “It was his brother’s body, a twin.  We met the brother, his name’s Noah.  We never actually confronted Augustus.  Both brothers are cannibals, thus making it more plausible that the body I examined was Augustus’s.  But they made one momentous mistake; there was no blood or flesh from Amelia in Noah’s mouth.  Or anywhere in his body, I conducted an autopsy.  Noah was the one that died in the explosion, not Augustus.”