It was when for the third day in a row she found herself desperately trying to avoid throwing up until she got to her room and could be assured of privacy as she did it that she realised something needed to change.
She'd killed how many over the years, surely she should be over it by now? It wasn't even as if it was the first time she'd got innocents killed.
Then she thought about that for a moment, and realised.
No, it wasn't the first time she'd killed innocents. But it was the first time she'd seen them die, and the first time it had been completely deliberate. And some of them had been children. She wasn't sure whether that was a first, but it was the first time she'd known.
Before she'd always been able to hide from herself behind the fact that it had been possible for the plan to work without any innocents dying, that she'd been desperately hoping for that to happen as she was carrying said plan out.
Not this time.
Before she'd never had to watch them die, screaming in agony as they burned.
Now she had.
And she could never forgive herself.
All the people in the office (and, when she thought about it, that seemed disturbing enough in and of itself, that there was an office full of people who did ... oh, now she was being honest with herself, she might as well admit it. People who were assassins.) seemed to think she'd done alright. Pity it had to happen, but she'd get over it.
No. Not happening. She'd seen the deaths and agony she'd caused, and she didn't want to get over the fact she was a murderer.
There, she'd said it. She'd admitted it. That was probably a start.
She was a serial murderer. She worked in an office full of them. And they thought it was nothing to get worked up over.
Well, fuck that and fuck them.
oo0oo
So, six months later, she found herself working in a hospital in Britain. She'd done nurse's training back home before she was signed up (what the hell had made her change from wanting to heal people to wanting to kill them ?) and somehow, she'd managed to fast-talk certain people into helping her leave, even if they didn't understand why. They'd set her up a new identity, with roughly the same qualifications as hers, and a similar life story into her 20s. Only British.
She had a decent job. An honest job. Sure, things could be tough, but she enjoyed getting to work without having to worry about people dying because of her actions – well, actually, no she didn't of course, but her job was to stop it for as many people as possible now, not to ensure it for some and not care about others. She got to have a life outside work again (if not necessarily as much of one as she'd once have wanted). Friends. Real, proper friends. Even one or two boyfriends.
She voted in a UK general election (her excellent false paperwork made her a citizen, after all) for the Liberal Democrats, partly out of a vague feeling she wouldn't have had to do some of her dirtier jobs if people had listened to people like them, partly because in that mode she'd liked the idea of greater honesty in politic, and their policies all seemed interesting and costed.
Then mere days after that it turned out one of her old coworkers had blabbed something about her to a newspaperman to get him not to reveal certain of his own less unsavoury acts, and everything got more complicated again.
oo0oo
In some ways, that had been how she'd first found out about Sherlock Holmes. Reading his papers cover to cover religiously, to see if she'd been outed yet. Or if any of the people she'd given up the goods on had been. Most weren't, one or two were; she tried to console herself with the fact she'd given up the worst people possible, only to remind herself that they'd likely think the same of her.
Anyway, here and there she encountered stories of the private (or as he preferred "consulting") detective - mostly doing things for clients, like finding a stolen painting pf the Reichenbach Falls, but occasionally apparently having helped the police (just a little bit, obviously, no way would a private eye be allowed much access to cases beyond having reported tips) - but she didn't pay much attention to them at the time. Not really her affair, after all, though she did vaguely wonder if she'd have been identified by him as an assassin given his supposed skills (the answer, as it turned out, was of course no), and noted his assistant and blogger seemed quite attractive (maybe he'd be even more so with a moustache).
She didn't pay much more attention to the reports of his death, and apparent status as a fake, just shrugged and moved on, though it didn't take that long for major doubts about that to get aired, which she thought made things rather more interesting. It occurred to her that he must have been pretty clever to fake that sort of skill for years on end, and to be honest that did seem more difficult (the idealistic phase that had seen her leave her job had had another swing of the pendulum back to a more reasonable mixture after she'd found herself getting blackmailed and Clegg had turned out not to have as much of a "new politics" as he'd suggested).
Then she got a new job at a surgery run by a Dr Sawyer, and actually met Dr John Watson. And things got even more complicated.