Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XCIX - Demons

"What were you doing in his penthouse, Emily?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"I know what he does," she says. Her voice is cool, her words measured. She's planned this. "I don't think he feels desire, certainly not in the way you and I do, but he knows how to manipulate it. Isn't that more important? He numbs, and then he takes. He has the strings. Your strings. My strings. We become his puppets, one by one, his little collectibles, and Emily, you're gravitating towards that man like a lost dog. Think about it. Every time you've been low – before, when you were on the streets, before that, when you were pushed away, when you fought, or went too far, whose bed did you find yourself in? He capitalises off your addiction. Sherlock, me, Sebastian, we're your stand-ins. You're buying time. You're getting closer." She leans forwards. "The day you go back to James Moriarty is the day you lose what's left of your soul. It's coming soon. Your East Wind."

I do not speak. I couldn't if I tried – I can only hold on, internally, to my ribs and my throat and the fragile casing around the feeling inside my head. It doesn't last long.

I look up at Irene Adler, and I simmer.

She sits there, on the sofa, like she understands, she sits as if she knows what it feels like, to live as merchandise. A commodity. A weapon. A hard drive with a body attached. A revenge. A minor irritation. A temporary solution. A piece of bait. Lost dog. They all think it, that I'm passive and exhausted and vulnerable. My strings. She sits there with her righteousness and her awful, awful truth. She waits for my answer. I want to show her. I want to reach down her throat and take her tongue at its root and tear it like thick gum. I want to watch her bleed red from the inside out.

Instead, I take the silver scissors from their stand and I slam them into the desk surface. It gets her attention, my warning. There's a dull, reverberating thud; the metal quivers with the force of impact. It feels delicious. She stands up, newly wary, holding the dressing gown together with one fist. It takes everything I am to refrain from stopping this woman from looking at me with her venomous pity cocktail. The urge has me in a chokehold, and I have to force myself away from its magnetic appeal.

I move in a sizzling sort of haze, a red-washed dystopia, where everything offers resistance. I kick the kitchen door open when it does not give. The glass panel shatters on the rebound, and the shower of crystal brings me such an intense spike of pleasure I want to do it again. I throw a mug at the floor. It breaks in a handful of duck-egg shards, this little piece of someone else, and it is enough to light the fuse. The destruction begins: I pick up Sherlock's microscope and I hurl it at the wall, let it mark a chunk in the plaster, I take a chair and I lift the dead weight over my head and bring it down, onto the counter. My arms jar, my bones ache; the chair legs snap and splinter and the tap is wrenched down, the silver swan-neck snaps, its water-blood sprays from the open wound. It's cold on my skin – I feel it on my face, in my hair, in my eyes, but I don't need to see. There's heavy metal in my hands. I swing it at the microwave, watch the glass screen crack, swing it at the oven, the gas hob, hear the hiss and splutter of air. I spit water – or is it blood? – and toss it to one side. Tiles chip like molars. The fridge door is open, now the freezer. I kick it, kick it until my feet bruise in my boots, until the hinges give and the freezer door hits the adjacent cabinet and falls, face-down, on the Lino floor.

There's a bottle in the fridge. It catches my eye, glinting like cats' eyes in the dark, and I reach for it, pulling the cork free with my teeth. The wine is tasteless. I drink and drink without pausing for breath until my stomach cannot take the sudden swell, and I begin to choke. The retching subsides after a moment: I swallow thickly, numb with it, mad with it, and lift a bleeding arm for the second bottle–

"Emily."

The room begins to rotate. I turn around, half-slumped against the freezer door, wine on my face and blood on my hands and a battlefield in front of me. Mrs Hudson is at the back of the flat, covering her mouth. Irene stands in the broken glass. She waits, pausing to watch me, and then moves slowly to address the trauma victim behind her.

"Martha," she says, "would you do me a favour? There's a bottle of whiskey in my handbag, the black one on the stairs. Take it into the kitchen. Have a glass. Then bring it up to me. Can you do that?"

"Have a drink?"

"Make it two."

"The neighbours–"

"Two glasses, and you can keep the handcuffs in my coat. Leather-lined."

Mrs Hudson hesitates, considers, then nods shrewdly, and moves out of the door. I follow her with my eyes. Her outline shimmers.

I sink down, down to the floor, and I find myself sitting in two inches of water. Broken glass and chips of plaster and paint and wood float like bodies on the surface, and the empty bottle bobs up and down like the boat that drowned them.

Irene steps delicately over the empty door frame, her feet bare and making little ripples: she approaches with caution, and then bends down, until she's balancing on the balls of her feet in front of me and the edges of her dressing gown go black with moisture. I lift my heavy head. She raises an arm – the arm with the bangle – and I feel her palm on my cheek, jasmine-scented.

"Let's have dinner."

~~~~~~