A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.
This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.
It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!
Disclaimer—none of this is mine!
Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.
I hope you enjoy it.
Note: This is a Prologue! I'm just setting the scene, so if John and Sherlock don't show up yet, please don't be mad. They'll be here soon.
She'd always thought that Hell would be brighter than it was there in the woods. The stern man at the church always said it would be. He always harped on about fire and brimstone, glaring right at her from the pulpit so that she shivered and huddled close to her mother's leg. Whatever brimstone was, she wasn't sure, but she knew fire. Fire was bright. Fire danced and rose nimbly into the sky, licking greedily over whatever it touched and sucking the color out of it, turning brown wood into black char so that its own flames could be fearsome reds and yellows. It burned and hurt at the touch, and it never, ever frightened her as much as the dark and cold and menace of the nighttime forest.
She wished that she were by a fire. Crouched shivering against the trunk of a large tree, she huddled with her knees tight to her chest, clasping her thin arms tightly around them. She was trying to be small, small enough that no one walking by could ever find her. The Shadowman couldn't catch her if he couldn't see her. But what if he heard her? Like a hammer slamming against the inside of her chest, her heart battled noisily to break free of her small body, which felt far too frail in the face of the night's impassive cruelty. Her pulse was a thunder in her ears, and her breathing a whistling, ragged rasp in her throat. It was too loud. He would hear her.
She tried to make herself calm down, even pleaded aloud in a desperate whisper for her panic to go away. It didn't work. Her heart only pounded faster, louder. Sobbing in dismay, she clutched at her chest, terrified by the thudding, dissonant noise originating from the hollow inside her. But the thrumming beat under her fingers didn't match up with the cacophony in her ears. Stiffening in alarm, she scrambled up into a crouch on her toes, looking around wildly for the true source of the ruckus. It was behind her, back the way she'd come. Running from the barn. The noise was running from the barn? No, that was what she was doing. What was the noise doing? What was it?
Footsteps. It was footsteps. The Shadowman's?
Running after her.
With a sob of terror, she tore away from the tree, kicking up patches of wet leaves and sticks behind her. He was too close. How could he have found her so fast? She had run so far. She went stumbling through patches of shrubbery and bracken that caught at her clothes. Their branches cut her skin like the rocks and sticks that bit into her raw, cold feet, so that she searched the shadowed surroundings with eyes that were blurred anew by tears. She had to get away. She had to find a better hiding place. If he caught her again, she would have to go back. Back to the barn.
Back to where he had killed her mother.
The thought was too much for her tired, tortured mind. A hoarse sound ripped out of her throat, one of pain and fear and anger and every other chaotic emotion that burned inside her. The tree in front of her didn't move like she'd hoped it would; she ran into its harsh, scraping bark and fell back. As she crashed into the wet debris underfoot, she was already scrabbling for a handhold to pull herself back up onto her feet. Finally, finally, a branch decided to be merciful and presented itself to her searching fingers. Latching onto it, she rolled over onto her stomach, hauled herself up with her handhold, and threw herself headlong into the gap between two trunks. Had she any breath left, she would have berated herself for her frightened stupidity. She shouldn't have screamed. He would hear her if she screamed. He would find her.
The darkness was too dangerous to run through. Branches swooped down to swat at her, rocks beat against her shins and sent her stumbling. It wouldn't stop her. Nothing could; she was driven on by something more than her terror. The last command that her tired, jumbled mind had comprehended still rang in her thoughts, spurring her on. Run. Her mother had told her to run, back when the sun had still been sinking and their small picnic had only just been interrupted by a glowing red bead of hatred. Back when she was blissfully unaware of the terrible stranger lurking in the shadows.
Suddenly, her life was full of new experiences, encounters with strange and horrifying things that she would give anything to forget. It had been a parade of never-befores for her. She had never seen her mother frightened before. She had never heard her start to pray aloud the way she had when the red bead found her leg, never heard her scream the way she screamed when its small, frightening presence suddenly exploded in a splash of red blood. Her mother had never before screamed for her daughter to run.
Run. Her mother had told her to run.
"Run, Mary!" she'd shrieked, her voice cracking in a ragged, broken cry that still tore at her insides with its raw desperation. "Hurry, baby, get away! Run!"
So she did. She turned and ran, into the woods, into the growing darkness. Leaving her mother behind her. Why had she left her?
Because her mother wanted her to get away.
It hadn't made any difference. She had run, as hard and far as she could, but he had found her anyway. The red bead had marked her just as it had her mother, and then her shoulder had blossomed with blood just the way that her mother's leg had. He had taken her then, while she was curled up and crying in the ground's freezing, wet leaves. Taken her back to the barn, where her mother had waited, trapped behind cold iron bars and bleeding into the straw that lay under her. The barn, where the dark of one night had merged into the blackness of another, and the Shadowman had taken away her last ray of light.
Her mother made up for all the screaming that she had never done. Her daughter made up for all the terror and pain and grief that a warm, loving parent had sheltered her from all her life. She'd thought that she was dead when she watched the Shadowman dragging her mother's lifeless body towards the door. It felt so awful deep inside of her that she was certain that she'd died and fallen into an eternal prison made of fire in brimstone. But she hadn't. She wasn't dead. Her heart was still beating, pounding inside her, like footsteps. Like her mother's voice, reminding her, commanding her to do as she'd been told.
Run.
And so, once again, she ran.
She ran, and ran, and ran, away from the Shadowman and into the cold, dark wet. Through the forest. Through her fear. Just running.
She would never run far enough.
He was close to her now, pounding through the forest, beating through the obstacles that held her back and sent her running in a drunken dance amongst the trees. She could hear his footsteps, his heavy breathing, and the metallic sound of clicking and rattling that had first made her mother wary during their picnic. Sobbing, she bent her head and ran faster, uncaring that the forest ripped her clothes and skin, unmindful of the blood running down her arms and legs or the dark bruises blooming under the skin where ever she had fallen. Run. The Shadowman was coming. She had to run. But why? She could never escape him.
She had to.
The cold air of the night bit into her skin, freezing the water that clung to her body and sharpening all the hurt. Shivers wracked her even as she ran, clattering her teeth together and making it difficult to control her own movements. She wished it was warm. She wished there were a fire. If only she were on fire. Then maybe her light would banish the darkness and send the Shadowman far, far away. He was so close now. The footsteps were right behind her, getting nearer every second. Their rhythm faltered as he took a longer stride, and air whistled past the back of her neck as his hand came within inches of grabbing her braid. Too close.
Nearly blind with her tears and fear, she cried out and hurtled to the right, taking a new tack off to the side. The running steps behind her skidded and slid on the wet leaves, trying to turn as she had without success. Desperate to distance herself from the monster who owned them, she left them behind. It was easier than it had been before to do so. The dark trees were kinder to her, suddenly. Less and less of them loomed up to knock her down, and the few that there were guarded the bracken close to their trunks, so that there was more space in between them through which she could fit. But the Shadowman could fit, too.
Run.
It was all she could do. The speed, the burning in her muscles, the perpetual forward sprint was part of her now. She had to run. Faster and faster through the thinning, night-cloaked trees, harder and harder despite the ache in her body that made every step into agony. The cold weighed down on her, and the pain in her shoulder and legs climbed with every second more that she spent defying it, but she could not stop. She had to keep running. A final tree appeared before her, and she veered around it, stumbling haphazardly over its roots. Behind her, a thudding, heavy tread drifted out of the forest, and her already leaping heart nearly jumped out of her chest.
The Shadowman again. He had found her already.
She hadn't run fast enough. She had to push herself harder. Catching her balance, she flew ahead, out into a vast, open space, through tall plants that pulled on her legs and whipped against her battered skin, depositing ice-cold droplets of moisture on her that only served to make her task harder. She'd made it to a farm field. Out of the woods. Relief poured through her, so strong that her body nearly went limp. The plants were bigger, softer than the forest floor. It wouldn't hurt too terribly badly to fall into them and give up. But no. The footsteps. The Shadowman. He was still behind her. She was still running, running, running. She couldn't collapse, not yet.
The field was wide and mostly flat, but without a moon to guide her, its furrows and dips were just as treacherous as the trees had been. Her feet, bleeding freely from uncountable cuts, made the footing slick. A large, flat rock was her undoing. She slipped in her own blood stepping down into a furrow, unable to find a foothold on its smooth surface. With a cry, she fell, bouncing off the rise of the dirt, smacking her head on a large stone and twisting her leg. A lancing pain shot through her from her knee, and the agony in her shoulder was also jarred when she tried to catch herself. Her head was ringing, her thoughts even more disoriented than they had been.
Run.
It hurt.
Run!
No, no. She couldn't. She tried to get up, but the pain sent starbursts of agony through her body. It was too much.
Her scream of torment and frustration turned into a shriek of terror when a large, dark body crashed down on top of hers. The Shadowman. Rough hands grabbed at her, taking a cruel fistful of her hair and closing with bruising force around the bloodied flesh of her upper arm. Oh, it hurt. It broke her, the pain. Her reeling mind burst into pieces under the burden of it, forgetting everything but her body's desire to get away, to be free of her fear and hurt. She struggled, lashed out at the monster holding her. His hard body was a brick wall against her tiny fists. His merciless fingers were blunted lightning where they dug into her flesh. It didn't matter. She fought him. Twisting, screaming, hitting.
She had forgotten that he was more than three times her size, impervious to her blows, and more than capable of killing her with his bare hands. Like he had killed her mother. She disregarded everything but her fear, her grief, and her rage. Trapped beneath his long, lean weight, she wriggled and hissed, biting the hand that sought to muffle her screams, digging her nails into the soft flesh of his face and neck—wherever she could reach. She hated him, hated the Shadowman with a passion that she had never before been capable of.
He'd made her stop running.
Somehow, beneath the sound of his heavy, ragged breathing and her outraged cries, her ears managed to hear something. There came another noise over the field, one that didn't belong to her or the monster she fought. A crash. A slam of wood on wood, like a door slamming shut. And then a light flooded the sky, bright and white and blinding in her dazzled eyes. With a cry of surprise, she squeezed her eyes shut and struck out once more, hoping that the light would hinder the Shadowman the way it hindered her. Praying that her blind blow could do some sort of damage to his equally blinded face.
Her fist met air. Her body shivered in the open air as the pressure that had been holding it to the Earth vanished and left it bare to the bitter night. Jerking in surprise, she snapped her eyes open. Too bright. Eyes closed. Eyes open—squinting them nearly shut. Better. Quivering with pent-up energy, she sat up, swaying as her head spun. A throbbing, heavy beat had settled in behind her right ear, but she ignored it and the sabers stabbing into her through her shoulder, staring around herself through her lashes at the empty field. She could barely see it, lit starkly in black and white as it was by the floodlights behind her. What little she could take in was wavering and uncertain, thanks to interference from the blow to her head. Only a few things truly made an impact on her whirling brain.
Light. Rows of crops. Wide open space.
And nothing.
Nothing else. No man, no monster in sight. She was alone. He was gone.
The Shadowman was gone.
No.
How? Where? Why? Trembling with confusion and adrenaline, she lurched to her feet, stumbling down the long divot in the dirt that had made her fall. He couldn't be gone. Where were his footsteps? He was chasing her. The Shadowman was chasing her. She had to run. Run. Running, she was running again. Running with painful, limping steps towards the darkness, stretching every instinct towards the blurred shadows at the edge of the brightness that had attacked her. Feeling the beat of her feet against the ground like the hammer of her pulse in her neck. Listening to the whistling, weeping roar of her breath in her lungs.
Listening to a voice, calling out behind her.
The shock that went through her was a cudgel to the backs of her knees. She fell onto them, squeaking as the one she had twisted protested, and saw the dirt rushing up to meet her face. Then it was there. Her nose hurt, and she'd hit her head again on another rock. Instead of cradling it, she lay still, tense in the dirt. Every one of her senses was on alert, stretching out behind her, searched the area for that strange, miraculous anomaly of sound. Not the light. Not the footsteps. Not the Shadowman.
The voice. It came again, loud and strident and worried.
It had gotten closer. Barely able to breath around the irrational panic closing up her throat, she rolled onto her back, pushing up onto the elbow that didn't hurt her too badly and gazing at the white and black blur of the fields behind her. After so much darkness, the light made no sense. After hearing hours of only her own sobbing and she and her mother's inarticulate screaming, words had ceased to have an effect on her brain. Only the voice gave her pause. Somehow, she knew it was a voice, journeying towards her, coming across the fields. A human voice.
Footsteps came with it. She tensed, ready to leap up and flee, but her body simply couldn't. The footsteps were methodical, steady. Not the Shadowman's panther-like tread. The voice was deep and lilting, like a hug from a warm, tall friend. The Shadowman had no voice. He had only his breathing, his low, deep breathing, the mysterious metallic clicking, and the awful, grating laugh that had haunted all the shadows of the barn. She was afraid of him. She was afraid of the noises that he made. She wasn't afraid of the voice and its footsteps. It wasn't the Shadowman. Not his footsteps, not his sounds. It wasn't him.
The Shadowman was gone.
With those words came a creeping, wilting sensation, like her insides were draining out of her back and into the dirt that she lay in. The voice was there. The Shadowman was not. He was gone. Gone, gone, gone.
She'd gotten away.
At the thought, the relief that had been sneaking up inside her rose up and hit her so hard that it felt like a bodily assault. Weakening to a point of boneless abandon, she slumped to the ground, her ringing head falling back to crush the stalks of a dew-covered plant. The water fell off its leaves, onto her face. It was cold. She hated the cold. It made her shiver, sapped her strength. Being cold was part of the darkness, part of the frosted knives that pierced her face under the dewdrops and under her tattered shirt where it was pressed against the hard, frozen ground. The furrow was greedy beneath her back, radiating its frozen poison into her body. Her whole world shook as the cold infected her muscles, overtaking them with spasms.
She wanted a fire.
The voice was nearer, more insistent than it had been. She heard the footsteps come closer with it, almost upon her, and felt a rise of some blazing, irrational feeling in her chest that pushed fresh tears out over her lashes. They trickled down tracks made previously in fear and pain, cleansing her cheeks and purging her crippled emotional state. Then the footsteps turned away, began to distance themselves from her. The blaze died, despair welled up, and fear reared its head inside her one last, desperate time. She parted her cracked lips, tasting saltwater and dirt. Her chest tightened, her throat worked to bypass the soreness that it had accumulated during her god-awful ordeal.
"H-h-h…H-h-hel…"
The voice rang out again. The footsteps returned.
Running.
Running towards her.
Lying there in the dirt, she shed tears of joy. They'd heard her; the footsteps and the voice had heard her. They came, tearing through the plants, revealing a pair of sturdy, large boots that turned into knees when their owner crashed down beside her. Then came the voice again, low, hurried, urgent. She didn't bother trying to understand. It wasn't the Shadowman. That was all she cared about. The cold was her main worry, the inexorable, festering cold. It ate at her, gnawing the way a great bit dog gnawed on a bone. Inescapable, that frozen feeling. She wished that it would stop.
Fingers.
The sudden touch on her arm surprised her, jolting her out of her miserable reverie. It wasn't cold. The hands that ran over her—brushing her hair back so tenderly from her dirtied face, touching the ragged edges of the hole in her upper sleeve so carefully—they weren't hard and mephitic like the nighttime Earth. They were far different. They countered her affliction, fought back the harsh tide dragging at her bones and jittering in her muscles. They were like fire. The voice was soft and reassuring. The arms that encircled her were strong, but eloquently gentle. Seeking to understand the miracle, her eyelids flickered, useless to ward off the overexposure that burned her retinas and haloed her shadowed savior in a pristine white glow.
She felt herself lifted up, cradled like a baby against a large, flat chest that was at once unyielding and supple. A sense of motion imposed upon her spinning head, and she let her forehead loll against one corded shoulder as she was carried off, deeper into the light. Weariness, bone-deep and leaden, settled into her. Her exhaustion was so great that it deadened her pain. Numb, her brain still twirled dizzily, so that she imagined seeing a bright red flash of flame when she glanced up at her rescuer's head. Flame and fire. Fire and flame. They had found her after all. The thought made her cautiously building contentment complete.
She was free. It was over. She was safe.
The fire had come for her.
No more running. Her fear ebbed entirely, and for that brief moment, her mind was too sluggish to even process where or who she was. She only knew that she could finally rest. Sleep pulled her eyelids down, and even the dull-but-still-present pain couldn't keep it at bay. Closing her eyes, she snuggled closer to the solidness and security that had wrapped itself around her. She had found her fire. Fire was free, fire was light. Fire burned in a body that was alive and vital, clad in clothes that smelled of soap, pine, and something intimately welcoming.
Fire was warm.