The Art Of Corruption ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book III}

Chapter 62- Six Strikes

Millie's POV

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"Mikey? Really?"

"Really."

"She wasn't joking?"

"I don't think so."

"And he called her what?"

I smile at the memory. "Mummy."

Emily snorts, and Sherlock closes his eyes in irritation, resting back against Emily's sofa, his chin on his fingertips. It's early evening, and her flat is dark with November shadow; the lamp on the table is the only source of light in a place where I suspect electricity bills have been conveniently forgotten. John and Mary are both back at work, after receiving the all-clear concerning Mary's pregnancy, whilst Sherlock and myself sit in Emily's living room, invited to view the compromising data she's managed to extract on Magnussen.

Emily - currently sat next to me, legs curled underneath her and laptop perched precariously on her knees - looks up from the screen. "One question, Sherlock."

"Given your lack of educational training outside the world of fraud, coding and digital crime, I encourage you to ask as many questions as you need."

Emily ignores his barbed comment, and continues: "What I don't understand-"

"You don't understand a lot."

"What I don't understand," she repeats, the keys clicking in strain as her typing becomes more forceful. "Is how you ended up like you."

"Like me?"

"Well," she says, scrolling rapidly through lines of small, hyphenated numbers. "You were brought up in a country house, with the kind of mother who likes to bake bread in floral aprons and the type of father who enjoys painting the Kentish countryside - and yet you and Mycroft somehow came out of it all unnaturally intelligent, obnoxiously arrogant, and with a spectacular lack of social grace." She pauses in her typing, and smiles at Sherlock, falsely innocent. "What happened?"

"Upbringing is a contributing factor, not a definitive one. Besides, my mother was a mathematician." His tone takes on a sharply patronising edge. "Tell me Emily, what was your mother?"

"A cold-hearted, manipulative whore," she says, matter-of-factly. "And not someone I particularly want to remember in conversation."

I turn my attention to the raw skin on my wrists, and examine the spattering of raised, round scars; family has never been a topic I enjoy breaching in a public setting. It's not that I am overly sensitive - in fact, I'm quite the opposite, having only translucent mental images regarding my father, and a few words describing the person who has been dubbed my mother to act as a skeletal frame for my childhood memories. I just don't feel that my situation is one that needs to be verbalised.

I am curious, however, about Emily's upbringing. I am not tactless enough to ask her for the details, but it doesn't stop me from speculating about her history. As far as I am aware, she lived with her mother and sister for the first ten years of her life, before enrolling herself into an intensive, militaristic combat regime that prepared her for a career in the police force. I presume she remained in training for the best part of a decade, before stepping tentatively into a fragile new occupation as a private detective, with every intention to use her freshly acquired skillset to benefit society rather than sully it. She lasted six months on the legal side of law and order before spiralling into a new, darkly enticing world of self-taught, computerised crime.

There is something wrong with this picture, though; her clipped recollection of events does not explain the arguably schizophrenic bouts of uncontrolled anger and violence that have proven to be both her defining feature and her downfall, or how she managed to sign up for a lethally aggressive programme at such a young age, without hindrance.