I am what you want me to be (Part 2)
Aug. 6th, 2012 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
biohazardgirl
ammorgan21Rating: Teen
Warnings: Character death, disturbing behavior towards corpses, dissection, drug usage, suicide, fire, morally grey thoughts and actions, dubious science
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Molly Hooper, Jim Moriarty
Word Count: 1700 for this chapter, 2500 overall
Spoilers: All six episodes
Disclaimer: I don’t own Sherlock, and I don’t own Frankenstein.
Summary: Frankenstein AU: James Moriarty is not a man at all.“Are you going to show me why you wanted to come in and cut up his body yourself?”
The unsteady words echoed across the silent, white room. Sherlock could see Molly in his peripheral vision, just out of sight of the corpse and mimicking a perfunctory air. Sherlock ignored her and continued to cut at the areas that concealed the sutures that held the body together. Molly took in an audible, shaky breath.
“He really is dead, Sherlock.”
Sherlock paused momentarily, flicked his eyes towards her, and raised an eyebrow.
“I know,” he said, as he resumed his work.
The room filled with unspoken questions; the hiss of breaking flesh that punctured the silence only served to heighten the tension. At last, Sherlock made his final expository cut. After placing the bloodied knife gently down upon a towel, he flicked his eyes over to Molly once more and invited her over with a small nod of his head. Molly cleared her throat, snapped on some gloves, and walked over to the body bag. She peered over its edge. When her eyes caught sight of the dark stitching, they opened wide. Hungrily, she reached her hands down to trace the sutures and stitches that crisscrossed everywhere on the body. After a moment, she came back to herself, blinked hard, and turned her head to face Sherlock.
“Sherlock. . .these go deep, and they’re everywhere. “ She fingered at a loose stitch. “It looks like he was sort of. . .pieced together.”
“Yes.”
Molly blinked again, and backed away from the corpse. She half-balanced her weight on the nearest table and covered her mouth with her hand. Her other arm lay wrapped around her stomach.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as her eyes filled with horror and awe, “Sherlock, why?”
Sherlock stroked some of the finer stitching in the corpse’s leg with his thumb. He didn’t look at Molly when he quietly answered,
“Why not?”
***
Sherlock watched the wet, grey city fly by out the cab’s window on the way back to his flat, but didn’t take in an inch of what he was seeing. His head was swimming with jittery anticipation for his experiment and immense pleasure at the fact that none of the city’s residents knew that it was about to take place right under their noses. After coming out of his reverie slightly, he opened his rucksack to check that his machine had not been adversely affected by the rain; he was rewarded with a loud, satisfying “BEEP.” The cabbie grumbled something about a freak smuggler, before he turned and stopped on the block that contained Sherlock’s flat. Sherlock paid him, stepped out onto the kerb, and looked with unbridled delight upon the block of flats that housed his own. He jangled a key into the door with shaking hands, and stepped inside.
Once inside, the wind slammed the door behind him and robbed the entrance of light; the storm had thrown the power out for several thousand people, and this portion of the city had been one that had been affected. Sherlock half- stumbled up the three flights of stairs that it took for him to reach his own rooms. He wandered down the hallway until he reached room 337, flung the door open in excitement, and let himself in. This time, he slammed the door; it echoed down the hallway with finality.
The inside of the flat was dark and full of the scent of wet, decaying meat. The windows were screened, but open to circulate the air inside the flat. Frequent rain that had got inside the flat had encouraged mould to grow on the wallpaper and floor around the large windows. As he passed by it in haste, Sherlock also noted a mouldy smell emitting from the refrigerator, and briefly wondered when his last meal had been; he couldn’t remember. Dismissing the matter quickly from his mind, he hurried over to the threshold of his bedroom, opened the door carefully, and crept inside.
Sherlock immediately began rustling about in a desk on one side of his room; he found a lighter, and lit four candles that he had previously set upon the floor on the wall opposite of the small window. The dim light cast shadows in the hollows of his face as he dropped his rucksack, bent down, and retrieved his machine from inside. He placed the blinking machine on a nightstand next to the bed, and then reverently turned towards the bed itself and the figure that lay upon it under a thin sheet. Sherlock grabbed the side of the sheet and yanked gently; the sheet fell to the floor with a soft rustle, and unveiled the clothed body of a man.
Sherlock grabbed a candle and began to check over the suit-clad figure from the shoes up with his hands. When he reached the body’s upper torso, he began to fiddle one-handed with the buttons on the shirt and coat. Once the body’s chest was bare, Sherlock splayed his free hand and the side of his face against its chest. The close proximity of its thin, pale skin and the angle of the candlelight revealed the stitches that lay beneath. Sherlock grinned at this, and bent himself awkwardly so as to bury his face into the crook of the dead man’s neck. He inhaled deeply, revelling in the dank, gamy smell, and then emitted a low, muffled laugh. Tilting his face closer to the body’s ear, he whispered,
“Soon.”
Outside, lightning began to flash violently; Sherlock counted the seconds between the thunder and lightning and, finding it to be sufficiently close, he bent up away from the body and niggled the screen out of the window; it clattered when it hit the pavement below. Then he turned towards his machine again, opened one of its small drawers, unravelled the thin wire inside, and tossed it out the window. Another wire, the one that was plugged in in the laboratory, was also dug from the depths of the box and examined thoughtfully. Sherlock pulled away a bit of the man’s collar to reveal a port, and shoved the plug into the man’s neck; the sound when it hit was like a fist violently plunging into a steak. Then, satisfied with his work, he sat down on the floor at the end of the bed, pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and waited.
The minutes passed like years. Sherlock’s eyes flitted periodically back and forth from the window to the wires to the man; the tension in the room made Sherlock’s body ache. Sherlock checked his watch, and looked out of the window once more. At that instant, lightning cracked against the wire hanging outside; Sherlock’s machine frantically beeped and sounded alarms as the energy jolted into the dead man. Sherlock felt small amounts of electricity pass through his own body as the current also flowed through the floor; his heart skipped a beat, and he coughed and gasped for air. A deep rumble of thunder shook the flat; Sherlock felt it in his bones as he rose to his feet. He wrapped his arms around himself, shivered with damp cold and excitement and madness, and walked over to the side of the bed to peer at his creature.
The creature’s skin seemed to hum with energy; he practically glowed. Sherlock took the hand of the creature in his own and pressed his middle and index fingers into the wrist. He waited. Beneath his fingers, a faint pulse stuttered into existence, and began to beat stronger and stronger. Sherlock’s face widened into a grin, thrilled at the beautiful, momentous thing he had created. . .
The creature took a rattling gasp, contorted his face, and opened his eyes; behind them lay the vast, sad blankness of the dead. The thing smiled the cold smile of a person who had seen hell and enjoyed it.
Sherlock stumbled backwards away from the thing, awed and horrified. He was repulsed by the hideous creature before him; the beautiful creature was in his mind and in his skin. In his disorientation, Sherlock knocked over the candles on the floor. The carpet began to burn.
The creature stretched its body and got up from the bed, dragging slightly at first, but soon walking with moderate grace. Sherlock’s mind was racing. He didn’t want to kill his creation, but he didn’t want it living either. The fire began to roar around him, and Sherlock took a third option.
He ran.
As his feet hit floor and stairs and pavement he heard and saw the crackling fire that gobbled up his flat, a Schrodinger’s box for a half dead man. He ran towards the nearest bus station, and bought a ticket to London. He kept his face in his hands during the whole journey.
When he arrived to London, he sussed out a man connected to his dealer at uni, and spent the rest of the money he had on cocaine. His first night in London was spent desperately trying to forget by shooting up as much cocaine as possible in a dirty alleyway; it was nearly his last. He woke up the next morning to an I.V., a breathing tube, and Mycroft’s disappointed face.
After swearing violently and hurling insults at Mycroft, he said, “I don’t want to go to uni anymore.”
Mycroft frowned.
“What, pray tell, do you plan to do with your life then, Sherlock, besides shooting up enough cocaine to kill a horse?”
Sherlock thought a moment, and then said, “I think I’d like to be a detective.”
He didn’t see his creature again for ten years.
***
The man crunched through the room, unfeeling as the flames licked at his body. His brain was filled with language and stars and a thin, striking face that he could feel against his skin. He raised his hands, covered in burns and blood and ash and wood, and tasted them; it was marvellous; it was repulsive.
Yes, he would find this man, and he would make him pay for being a hideous, glorious human being. He would burn him, they would burn each other out like empty houses, and wouldn’t that be wonderful?
The man laughed for the first time in his half-life, and it cut across the electric air like a knife and a promise.
The most wonderful thing in creation.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-18 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-18 10:28 pm (UTC)