V

“You know it closes at five, Miss.”
“Oh, I know. Just meeting a friend close by.”
“Be careful, will you? Don’t want to see you on the news tomorrow morning. Keep your wits about you.”
“Promise I will. Keep the change, ta.”


Vin steps out of the taxi, onto the road. On her right, the boundary brick wall of Highgate Cemetery stretches out for what seems like miles, separating the territory of the living from the land of the dead. It is late evening, the sun has long set, and the night sky blankets the city in darkness. The cemetery is closed for the day; the wrought iron gate, under its majestic stone archway, locked and bolted. Complete silence: not a living soul dare approach the cemetery gate at night, not even daredevil children. Highgate is revered by the city dwellers. It is a resting place of poets and politicians, of painters, printmakers and policemen, of pioneers and philosophers, of playwrights, publishers and philanthropists. 

Vin does not fear the dead - it is irrational; one would do better to fear the living - and yet she has only been to Highgate once, when she was 16. It was Easter Sunday, April 12, 1998. Spring was still young and grey clouds hung pendulous as her mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground, threatening to rain, but seemingly impotent to the task. Not many people had turned up to the internment; they had gone on from the funeral to enjoy Easter lunch with their families, the service soon forgotten to the pleasant aroma of roast beef and fine wine. Mike had been at the burial, of course, and had placed his hand on her shoulder, as though he expected her to grieve. But she had not. She was too angry for that. Her father stared sullenly at the hole in the earth and never once offered to comfort his daughter. 

The wall presents a challenge, but it is not an impossible task. Vin does not know why she is so desperate to get on the other side, but the idea eats away at her mind and giving up or going home now is not an option. She takes her shoes off - right heel first, then left - and tucks the shoes beside the gate. Next, she finds a foothold in the wall and steps on it so her hands reach the top. Palms pressed down, she pushes herself up and over with some difficulty; it occurs to her she is out of shape. Her knee smarts as she lands on the other side, but she has made it. She feels a rush of excitement, being in the so-called City of the Dead at night time. She looks up at the waxing moon, which bathes the graves in a silvery light. From this part of London, she can see plenty more stars. 

She remembers the grave is in the cemetery’s East Side, a few blocks away from Herbert Spencer’s grave. Her mobile phone becomes a makeshift torch, shining just enough light for her to see what’s right in front of her. Any onlookers may be forgiven for mistaking her for a haunted spirit as she walks, barefoot in her black dress, dark hair straggly and hanging down past her shoulders, pale face illuminated from underneath by the blue light of the phone. She finds a large map by the side of the path and points the phone at it, tracing the lines with her finger, squinting until she finds Spencer. He is not buried too far from where she is standing. She walks towards it, swinging the phone from left to right to see where she is going. On either side of the path, gravestones line the way like regimental soldiers, the older ones decorated with overgrown wild ivy. The copses of elms and poplars which litter the grounds have begun to regain their leaves.

The wind picks up suddenly, howling through the branches. It startles her and her hand immediately reaches for the handgun in her handbag. It is only the wind, she assures herself, as she carries on her way. She reaches the gravestone eventually, then turns right, counting the blocks as she walks - one, two, three… was it four? She turns left suddenly and counts three gravestones, then stops and points her phone at two stones sitting close together, a stone angel behind them placing a grey hand on each. To the right, Albert. She is not interested in him at all. To the left:


IN MEMORY OF JEANNE SPENCER HAMPTON
LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER
SEPTEMBER 19 1958 - APRIL 10 1998


She frowns at the lettering. “Loving wife and mother. You’re a liar even now,” she says, unnecessarily loudly. A crow caws close by as though to reprimand her. She reaches into her bag and lights a cigarette, staring at the stone for a long moment before she sits down on the ground. The earth is damp and muddy. Her dress will need drycleaning. Another thing she blames her mother for. She smokes silently, defiantly, looking at the stone as if it could ever sprout her mother’s eyes and look back. In her mind, the grey clouds hang pendulous and impotent, but pregnant with rain. She is still angry. 

“You never loved me. Or if you did, it was not in a way I understood.” This is silly, she thinks. She’s never believed the dead stood by their graves. The dead don’t stand at all. They lie in the ground and rot. And yet, she finds suddenly there is a lot to say. She smiles a little maliciously and tilts her head toward her father’s grave. “You killed yourself to get away from him and now you’ll rot next to him till kingdom come.” A sudden vision of her mother smiling. That was a rare thought. “You barely ever smiled. And do you know what I realised when I found you all those years ago, swinging from that tree, you witch? I do not have any… not ONE memory of you saying you loved me.”

Her lips tug down at the corners and a little reluctantly she raises a hand to her face and wipes away a fat tear that has rolled down her cheek. She has never cried for her mother. 

“I needed you for more than piano lessons and dresses, Mother. But you never forgave me, did you? You touched your stomach sometimes when you looked at me, you think I didn’t notice. I saw your scar once, from one side to the other. I watched from behind the bathroom door as you looked at it in the mirror. You never forgave me, did you?”

She stubs the cigarette out in the muddy earth and lights another. She reaches a hand forward to touch the tombstone. It is cold and mossy. She cannot remember what her mother smelt like. 

“But I think I understand now. Because I repeated your mistake, Mother. I don’t know if you would have felt bad for me or would have thought it served me right, but I made your mistake when I married Connor. Except I was more intelligent than you, Mother. I took my pills. I took my beatings, but I took my pills and I didn’t bring any poor children into my husband’s broken world. You should have known better. I know why you never forgave me: I ruined your chance of a way out. And I think when you took the final step off that stool under the tree you hoped I would be the one to find you.”

She sobs quietly, her chin trembling. “If it had been different, would you have loved me, Mother? Did you ever? Could you have…?” Her voice breaks. “I will not apologise for being born. That’s on you. And I know I need to stop being so angry with you, but I cannot, Mother. I will always hate you, because whenever I tried to show you love, you pushed me away. I was only a child, for fuck’s sake. I needed you. You were awful but you were my mother, my only one. So I… I can’t, you see? I will always be angry with you. I deserved better from you, from both of you. But especially from you.”

Cigarette still hanging from her lips, she stands up, reaching into her bag for a tissue and finding none. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, tears smudging mascara. “Goodbye. I won’t visit again.” A bitter sob escapes her lips. It is not grief but self-pity and she shakes her head, angry at herself. Self-pity is never productive, only indulgent. 

She walks back the way she came, the gravel hurting the soles of her feet. The trees look menacing now. This was not a good idea. She wants to go home. She walks until she reaches the gate, and after two attempts, manages to jump over the wall again. She looks for her shoes, which have of course been stolen. Defeated, she sits by the gate and waits for a taxi to drive by for what seems like hours until she gives up and pulls out her phone. 

Dear Ivan, 

I am reluctant to write you this letter. Because once I have written it, it will have been written. And somehow, that makes it real. Somehow, that means you really are no longer alive. And if you are no longer alive, then there is no conceivable way I can ever see you again. And of course I know all of this; I am under no delusion. The moment you… you know which moment… that was the moment you sealed your own fate, and mine with it. You knew I would not forgive you; you knew there was no way once you did what you did that you and I could possibly have any sort of life together. Not even if I did, by some stretch of the imagination, find it in myself to forgive you. 

I did not expect I would be the one given the assignment to have you removed. That was cruel, even for Yuri. But Yuri is a fiercely jealous man. He said if somebody else did it, I would always bear a grudge against them; I would victimise you. If I did it, then I bore complete responsibility. I would finally end the “fairytale” he had disapproved of for so long. No, that’s wrong. You ended the fairytale. My bullet was simply punctuation. I simply slammed the book shut on the Princess and her Poet. 

And it was not a suggestion; it was an order. It was the last order I would follow, and then I would be free – he would see to it I died and was reborn. “You will be like the Phoenix, Ruby,” he said. “And you will be born of fire. And that which is forged in fire lives forever.”
I am tempted to end this letter here, but then all it will have been is a justification of my actions to you. And that is not what I set out to do. I don’t want to write the rest of this, because I don’t want to remember that you were tender and funny and kind. I don’t want to remember your voice and I don’t want to remember you barefoot in our kitchen, making me poached eggs. I want to remember you with your gun aimed at me because that is the only way I can bury you. But that was only a moment. And we had three years worth of moments. And in every single one of those moments, even in the final one, I loved you. 

I do not think I love you anymore. But I think if I allowed myself, I could love the memory of you. And I feel like that would be a betrayal, on my part, of the man who loves me now. He loves me with his innocence and inexperience. I love him with my world-weariness and that world-weariness is a part of your legacy. His love is not complicated or overshadowed by expectation; my love is needy and neurotic, and that is your fault. I cannot love him in the way he deserves to be loved; instead I have to offer myself broken and glued together. And that is your fault.

And mine. 

You would hate him. He is beautiful. I want to gloat about how beautiful he is, and how clever, and how achingly I love him. I want you to hate him because he is /so/ beautiful.

You were beautiful too, like an insect; esoteric and eastern. You had a way with words; you wielded them like weapons. You were my Poet. I remember our days off, our long, languid afternoons tangling limbs. I remember the way you sipped your wine as though you liked it, because I’d told you once red wine felt like a life force to me. I remember how you played me Chopin in the car and how your fingers would make their way to mine like travellers; how you held my hand while you were driving long stretches of road. I remember that day and night where we did nothing but eat caviar and talk about our childhoods (I will take your secrets to my grave). Russia was cold, but our bed was always warm and welcoming. I fed you strawberries and you made up little rhymes to make me smile. You worshipped me; I have not forgotten that. Sometimes I think you were in love with some idea of me which you had created; you helped me up onto a pedestal that at times felt far too high because I am deeply flawed, fundamentally flawed, and you chose to gloss over that fact. 
I was the woman who men desired, and they could have me, for a price. So you had to come up with other ways to /have/ me as nobody else could. You wrote poems about my freckles, about my dimples, about my breasts, about my fingers.. And you kissed them devotedly as you read to me. You deified me. I do not imagine for one second it was easy for you when I was working. I don’t know if you ever accepted it or if you pretended it wasn’t happening. We never spoke about it. When I was with you I was yours; you told me that was enough. 

In turn, what I loved was your wide-eyed view of the world. You saw it as though it were a stage. What I loved was how you smelled of clean laundry and the pages of old books. What I loved was how natural it felt to be with you, like you had always been a part of me. I do not know whether this was genuine or whether you shaped yourself to fit me. I don’t know which I would prefer. 

No, I don’t think I love you anymore. For the longest time I hated you for wrenching all of this away from me. And that has settled into vague antipathy. You are a closed book and it is too hard to open it up again. I need you buried. But you will be buried inside of me. That, I hate you for. I do not think of you now when I am in bed. But you are there like a whisper I can’t quite hear, or don’t quite want to. It would be easier if you had treated me unkindly. At least for Connor I feel nothing but loathing. But I /loved/ you, deeply, for three /happy/ years I loved you. 

I don’t want to love you anymore. 

I want to exorcise you so I can belong completely to the man I love now. I want you out of my veins, I want you out of my bones. I want to be happy. 

Goodbye. 
Vin

You have all experienced the static. It is that strange, transient period between sleep and waking, between waking and sleep, where the mind seems interested in erecting its own gates of logic and syntax is melted like ore into something so alien that you may occasionally catch the tail-end of it (a word or a sound) and find yourself struggling to make sense of it. That is the static. The auditory hallucinations; you know they are not real (or at least they should not be real) but they sound as real as your partner as he snores beside you; as real as the unceasing brag of your own heart (which, when you come to think of it, always sounds either far too fast or far too slow, but that is another panic attack for another day). 

Your eyes open. You know from the pounding in your chest that you have experienced a nightmare but it is too oily and elusive to grasp. Your mind is in flight mode, engaging hyperconsciousness as a defence mechanism. Perhaps you manage to sink a claw into one slippery image. In this case, blood staining the infinite, snow-covered plains of Siberia. You know this image well - it is one you have often encountered in your sleep. It almost amuses you for a moment. You’ve only ever been to Siberia once and the trip was of no great personal importance. Your mind, however, has clung to it as some sort of metaphor. Frankly, you are disappointed by how it lacks complexity as a literary device. Pure, Russian snow tainted with blood. How novel. 

If nothing else, it serves to confirm you have experienced a nightmare. The problem, however, begins when you go to turn around. You want to turn around to look at your lover [anchor]; you want to inhale as deeply as you can [breathe]; you want this in order to confirm you are fully conscious again [control]. But where the static should have dissipated by now, yours remains. You are not sure why this is. Perhaps it is because you are an animal devoted to patterns. Perhaps it is because you have trained your mind to function within the parameters of too many sets of syntax, too many languages, too many codes. Perhaps that is why it chooses this time to shred them all into ribbons and use the pieces to create its own. 

It begins. 
[SetBooleanMind]

Which, in and of itself is flawed. Mind is not a variable to be programmed and recalled; it should be a structure within which the logic is contained. Moreover, it is certainly not a boolean, and not limited to dichotomy. 

Your logic is flawed. But it persists. 

{ResetSleep}

As if it were a program to be called. 

It continues: your mind in an endless Error loop. Sometimes, the cogs align and it moves forward to the next step. Otherwise, it is caught in a cycle for… what? Minutes? Hours? You lose track of time. Or is {Time} also a function? 

It has been over a month since you started to lose your mind. Perhaps you have been losing your mind your whole life. Nevertheless, you are used to the process by now. This doesn’t make it any easier to digest. Of some comfort is the fact that the pills you are taking are working. Your capacity for self examination, for self analysis {this} {here} {now} tells you this is something to be waited out. So you wait. 

And slowly, after minutes, or hours, the static is not so loud. You catch a string of something in French as it fades away. Somewhere in the bottom right of your head. Is that your temporal lobe? And soon you are able to move. 

You test yourself. 
Who am I? Vin Hampton.
What day is it? May 11. 
Where am I? Lena Gardens, London. Home. 

[Fiction. Warning: 18+ for violence]


Connor,

Apparently, this is entirely necessary and will help me come to terms with what happened between us and what I did to you. In my opinion, that is something I came to terms with long ago. I have no regrets about killing you. You had it coming, you piece of shit. My only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. 

If I’d have known how life with you was going to work out, I’d have avoided you that first time I met you. Remember? In that shitty apartment I shared with Rob and Smut and Marta. Rob was your dealer and you came to him to sample the goods. They told me you were a good guy but they didn’t really know you. They didn’t know how you called them scum behind their backs. How you wouldn’t let me see them after I married you. You were terribly jealous of Rob. And you were right to be; not because of me, but because he was so much more of a man than you could have ever dreamed of being. He took me in when I was helpless; not because he wanted to own me but because he was that sort of guy. Because he saw a person in need and wanted to share what little he had.

I suppose your way of life attracted me. Christ, I’d been sleeping on a grotty mattress for years. If I hadn’t married you I’d have ended up a dealer too. Or worse, possibly. Who knows. You were my ticket out of it. I didn’t marry you for love; I was under no illusion, only perhaps I thought I could learn to love you. I suppose that makes me a bad person too. But anyone who saw a way out would have taken it. You had money, you had a large house, you bought me dresses and jewellery. You promised once we were married I could go to university. I wanted to study philosophy at the time. I could never talk to you about it. You were so irrevocably stupid. All you cared about was your money and football and drink. The cocaine, when you did it, made you absolutely insufferable, by the way. You’d go on and on about how well your stocks were doing, as if anyone gave a shit. 

Of course, when I mentioned university to you after we were married, you laughed at me. I kept insisting it was what I wanted and when I wouldn’t stop you punched me. That was the first time. I remember I was so shocked, I could barely speak. You knocked me to the floor; you wanted to hurt me. Do you remember how you apologised and pretended to be horrified by what you’d done? I believed you. I thought, everybody makes mistakes. My eye was swollen for days after and when we met your mother for Sunday lunch I had to use so much makeup to hide it and she still noticed. Remember how you told her I walked into a door? “Clumsy little thing,” she called me. GOD, I hated your mother. Almost as much as I started to hate you.

You did it again when I told you I didn’t want children. This time you didn’t apologise. You poured yourself a drink afterwards and you left the room; you left me on the floor, reeling. I didn’t mention children again after that but I took the pill religiously and hid it from you. Remember, about six months later, when I still wasn’t pregnant, you told me I was probably barren and useless as a woman. I kept taking the pill. As if I’d bring a child into your world. 

Connor, close to the end, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I felt like a dog. I didn’t dare speak to you, except in company because I was obliged to, or in bed to tell you how big your cock was because it was the only way you could cum. It goes without saying I never enjoyed sleeping with you. It was another one of my chores. You never made me cum; I faked it every time and you didn’t notice, or you didn’t care, which seems more likely. I broke a plate once, accidentally; do you remember how you made me kneel on the shards so I could learn my lesson before you let me clean it up? You told me if I ever told anyone you would lock me in the attic. It would be my word against yours: you were a successful businessman; I was some girl with a previous charge for possession of cocaine. Of course they’d have believed you over me.

Even the most obedient dog will turn against its master if it is beaten long enough, Connor. But you were too far up your own arsehole to realise that. 

I lay in bed that last night and I just KNEW I had to do it. I had to kill you or myself. And I didn’t want to die. You fought, you bastard, you thrashed. You wouldn’t go quietly. I knew once the pillow was over your head that there was no going back. If I’d relented - if I’d shown you mercy and let you go - you would have killed me. I have no doubt about it. I held you down; I’d never known I had so much strength. Maybe it was sheer bloody determination. I couldn’t live like that anymore. Nobody should have to live like that. 

It was so hard not to laugh at your funeral. I had to play the grieving wife, and listen to your mother give that bullshit speech about how kind and gentle you were, and about how great a father you would have been. But I knew the truth. 

The world is so much better off without you. 

-V

Dear Holmes,

Dear Sherlock? Dear Monster? I don’t know what it’s acceptable to call you anymore. Used to be I could call you anything. Except darling, of course, but that was fine. You were too special anyway. Now it feels like I’m invading your space or something. I’ve started to feel like we’re strangers sometimes. It makes me incredibly sad. You’re the one I want to share my life with. It hurts when you push me away. 

I’m writing this because my therapist says it might help to get my feelings on paper. You’ll never get to read it, of course. I could never tell you all these things. You’d run away. 

God. Even now it feels like I’m censoring myself. Or like I might write something you wouldn’t like. Dr Harold says I shouldn’t. I should come clean to you in this note. You’re not going to see this. 

When we started spending time together, you made me feel like a person. Only one other man had ever made me feel like that before, and then he shot me. I was so scared to let you in because of that. But you made me feel good about myself. I remember it was like I was addicted to you. I couldn’t wait to see you. When we didn’t meet, I felt like something was missing. You spoke to me, you listened to me, you made me laugh and you told me I was clever and you looked at me like you weren’t looking through me. 

I was in love with you long before I dared admit it. I made the decision to quit my work for you but it only seemed natural. My work wasn’t giving me the joy you were. Even then I wanted you to be proud of me. I remember the look on your face when I told you I was quitting. You tried so hard not to look elated. But you were. You held my hand and I knew I loved you. 

You trusted me too. You let me see you vulnerable, you let your guard down. I began to see you were becoming gentler with me, softer, more compassionate. I didn’t even mind that it was only in private. It felt like our secret. It felt like I had something nobody else did. Perhaps I did. I’d like to think I do. You certainly do. 

God, there are times I love you so intensely it scares me, the things I would do for you, to make you happy. I love that you are the first thing I see when I wake up. I love your hair and your face and the fact that you’re always so warm. I love your hands and your stupid skinny white arms and legs. I love it when you used to put your arms around me while I cooked. I miss that. I’m sorry I broke that. I’m sorry I did something that made you feel like you needed to pull away. I’m sorry I broke my promise. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for it, even if you ever manage to. I’m sorry I made you put me before your work. I’m sorry I’m so weak sometimes and I’m sorry I disappointed you. You couldn’t begin to imagine how small I felt when you found out what I had done. I felt like a monster. 

I still do. 

I forgive you for treating me the way you did when you found out. And I forgive you for hurting me when you hurt me because I know you didn’t know what you were doing. I want to be better for you and I want us to be happy. And sometimes I lie awake at night wondering if it’s even possible for us to be happy. And then I think I don’t even care as long as I have you, but I realise how selfish that sounds. 

Dr Harold says I can’t give myself up for you. And maybe he’s right. My instinct is always to try to make you feel better but then I just end up smothering you and that’s fucked up. I guess I just have to understand that I need to take care of me first now. I put myself first for 30 years; it’s bizarre how alien it feels now. 

I hate having to ask for permission to touch you now. And I hate that the thought of being intimate with me puts you off. It kills me. It makes me feel unclean and broken and I don’t want to feel broken. It hurts so profoundly sometimes it feels like my chest is being crushed. You said you needed time. Take all the time you need, I guess. Nothing else I can do.

When we started seeing each other and when you started to open up to me, to let me get closer to you, I confess to trying to manipulate you. I seduced you, I flirted, I made you want me. 

I won’t do that now. Because I can’t. I feel the opposite of beautiful. I feel like nothing. I feel like even if you do manage to bring yourself to sleep with me it’ll be out of pity. Or it’ll just be fucking. It makes me sad because you were the one who made me understand what people meant when they talked about making love. I used to think it was all sappy bullshit. People fucked, and that’s what they did. But with you I had tenderness. I never felt like I deserved tenderness before. 

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I don’t deserve it. 

And now I’m angry with you because you of all people shouldn’t make me feel this way. 

Arsehole. Maybe you’ll end up shooting me too. 

I don’t mean that. 

I’m sorry, this is a really fucking stupid exercise.

//All parts of Vin’s kill, serialised on Twitter as part of the Vinlock storyline, have been collected here.//

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Note from the writer: I love this zombie AU that’s happening and I’ve been so tempted to write for it but I don’t have time to follow the story closely enough to be able to keep up with it, because of work, so I decided to write a one-off as a contribution. This is AU so will not affect the Vinlock storyline in any way. Still, I hope you enjoy it. 

——————————-

The good thing about being Sherlock Holmes’ partner when the zombie apocalypse inevitably began was that as soon as shit hit the fan, Mycroft had come in handy. After the infection started to spread across the capital, instead of fleeing to the country, as people had done in their thousands, Vin and Sherlock had moved into two rooms beneath the Tower of London. It was dark, dank and cold. They used candles and oil lamps for light, huddled together under blanket after blanket to keep warm at night. But it was impenetrable. They knew those going to the country would eventually be knocked off. It was unavoidable. And so the plan was for Mycroft’s men to find a secure, quarantined location outside of Britain where they could be flown to once it was reasonably safe to do so. They were the elite. They had a way out. They would be among the ones to begin in the New World.

The days were long. Sherlock had grown quieter. He had asked for infected tissue and was trying to understand the rapidly denaturing virus, which changed structure so quickly, the cure eluded him and hundreds of other scientists around the world who were trying so desperately for it. There were beakers and pipettes strewn about the place, and pipes with strangely coloured liquids littered the large mahogany table they’d manage to nab from upstairs. In the candle-light, reflected through glass, it almost looked magical. 

The days were long, but they had what they needed. Once a week, Vin ventured out, not too far, and scavenged for food. The crows that circled the Tower were fair game. Vin left them to last, as the report from her shotgun attracted the Bitten. Sometimes, she’d capture pigeons; their meat was sweet and tasty. She cooked them over the fire in a small wrought-iron stove in the corner of one of their rooms. Fresh produce was impossible by now, but she made runs to abandoned corner stores and supermarkets in the out-of-commission Black Cab Mycroft had given them. Gun in hand, she trawled the aisles for remaining food. Sometimes, one of the Bitten stumbled into the shop. Vin would get creative if she thought she could get away with it. A broomstick through the eye. A coke bottle wedged into the soft palate. The silencer on her gun came in handy when she found herself outnumbered. 

They ate lots of baked beans, beetroot, tinned potato salads, rice, pasta with sauce from the can. Invariably, she would come back to the safe-house with her haul and a few bottles of hard liquor. They had what they needed. Each night, they made sure the gate was closed, the locks bolted shut. Huddled up on their mattress by the dying embers in the stove, bellies full of tinned food, Sherlock and Vin would drink until the world was a haze, stroke each others’ skin and tell each other stories of Before. They had never known each other as intimately as they did then. They hung on to every word. Hung on to each other for sanity, for warmth, for love, as they always had. But even making love was a lot more profound when the world was ending on the other side of the wall. The apocalypse, they found, was an aphrodisiac. At the end of the world, Vin and Sherlock felt like Adam and Eve. There was a small part of Vin that hoped there’d never be a New World. As long as they could sustain this life, she would be happy to. 

“Maybe we could find ourselves on a remote island somewhere,” she said once, absentmindedly looping his curls around her finger. “You could finally get to raise your bees. I’d hunt for food. The water would keep us safe. You could study the indigenous flora. We’d have everything.” They fell asleep to shared dreams of lush greenery and sun-drenched days. 

The thought of turning didn’t cross their minds very often. They imagined their death would be different. If they did die, it would be of hypothermia, wrapped up so tightly against each other that when they were rotting, nature would not know where her body ended and where his began. “If you turn,” he said, “I want to go with you. You are not allowed to leave me like that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

—

Weeks passed. Outside, winter turned into spring, the seasons marching on despite the death of a species. The city was dead, moss began to grow around cars and buildings. Vin had never seen so many stars in the London sky in her life. 

Sherlock’s work seemed to have taken a turn for the better. Often, he’d jump up, fists in the air, muttering his approval at a chemical reaction, then frantically take down notes in his scrawl. It always made her laugh, how a man of his intellectual prowess could never have mastered cursive. She loved it anyway, the inked letters wedged against each other, vying for space. It was completely illegible, of course. Sometimes he startled her. It seemed he only cursed when he was happy or successful. Often, he jittered excitedly about RNA genomes. It was gibberish to her but she listened attentively. 

As for herself, she felt she had purpose. She provided them with food and nourishment and, she couldn’t lie, using the Bitten as target practice was the best form of therapy she could think of. She was in a constant state of buzz - adrenaline from shooting or endorphins from fucking. 

Holmes fucked better when he was happy or successful. 

—

April 9. 

Vin had found another shop to scour. She sang softly to herself as she filled the trolley up. Paper napkins. Tea. Sugar. Soups. Corned beef. She’d hit upon a proper goldmine here, she thought, as she continued to fill the trolley. If she managed to catch a pigeon they could have a big dinner tonight. She put a bottle of wine in too. For some reason, she felt like today would be a good day. Holmes would finally get it completely right. They would eat and celebrate together. 

At the Tower, Mycroft was paying his brother a visit. “Prepare your things, little brother,” he said. “We’ve found an island off the coast of Mexico. It’s small and there isn’t much, but it’s clean. We leave tomorrow.” 
Sherlock, despite the cold, disapproving look on his face, reserved only for Mycroft, felt a flutter of happiness in his chest. 


Vin heard a grunt from behind the shop counter. She was used to this now. Could do it in her sleep. Breaking a broomstick in two, she twirled one half around as she went over to investigate. The Bitten held a hand out toward her face. It was a man in his 40s, dressed in a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Vin drove her makeshift stake into his skull. 

She didn’t hear the soft shuffling of slippers behind her. Not until the sharp, burning pain seared across her back did she notice anything was amiss. She turned around to see a little girl, pink rabbit slippers, her black tongue licking at her hands to catch the strips of Vin’s skin beneath her nails. Without a second thought, Vin shoved her away. She fell to the floor and cracked her skull open. 

Vin reached to touch her own back, then looked at her hand. Ruby red blood stained her skin. She blinked once, then pushed the trolley back to the Black Cab, loading her loot into the back. She pain became sharper now. It hurt like a bitch. The scratches cut across her old scars, tore through the violin tattoo. She sat in the driver’s seat, not quite believing it. 

Starting the car, she began to drive back to their hideout. He would know what to do. Surely, he would. He always. did. God, her back ached. She shifted and looked back at the seat. It was a shock to see black. Like tar, not blood. Was that really gushing out of her? She realised she was crying, but not out of sadness. Out of frustration. Out of understanding she couldn’t really go back to him and burden him with this. She tried to think about the last night they’d spent together, as she drove through the familiar streets, through her city. She thought about his lips on her lips. And she thought about his arm around her. Flesh. No. She thought about his hair and his stupid handwriting. She was so hungry. She felt cold. Clammy. Sweaty. 

She reached her destination and sat in the car, thinking about him. Of course she couldn’t go back. Of course he couldn’t turn - he would possibly be the one to finally solve the puzzle of the virus. His ultimate case. His magnum opus. Nor could she make him have to be the one to put her out of her misery. He was so close, she knew, she could see the door. It took all the willpower she could muster not to go and see him a last time. She smoked a cigarette instead, doing her best to enjoy it, the smoke hitting the back of her throat, the nicotine rushing through her veins to bind with whatever sickness was now also coursing through her blood. He had to live. Even she was not that selfish. 

She pulled her Glock out of her pocket, felt the weight of it in her hands. It had always served her well, had often saved her. It was almost an extension of her hand. The barrel felt cold and hard between her teeth, tongue pressed against it. She knew it would be better this way. It would be over quickly. She was so hungry. 

She pulled the trigger.

study-in-punk:

Some things just don’t work for me.

-SH

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study-in-punk:

Hampton had been taken by a man from her past. I will never forget it.

-SH

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study-in-punk:

I should probably take John’s advice and try to make my titles more attractive.

-SH

(Please note this was written in collaboration with my dearest Vin Hampton. Her passages were bolded to avoid any confusion.)

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