Author's Note: Oh look, now it's a Sherlock fanfiction as well, is it? Well, hold on. I don't normally do well with detective stories, but how I do enjoy reading them.
This is not Johnlock, just so the fandom knows. It's not Sherlene really, either (I like the ship name 'Sherlene' more than I like 'Adlock'). Maybe it is. Probably.
To be remembered: this story is a random thing on the side and will be updated when I have the time and motivation.
Chapter One.
"You're using my laptop again."
"Mine was in my bag. I had to make do with yours."
"Your bag is right next to you-"
"I could hardly waste my time pulling it out and powering it up when yours is right here, now could I?"
Exasperation tinged the voice of the doctor, John Watson, as he slumped his shoulders and shook his head with a muttered epithet. A glance out of the corner of the angled eyes of the consultant, Sherlock Holmes, told him that the good doctor had decided to relinquish his case for an argument and had decided that the man-child on the couch wasn't worth wasting his time on. Yet.
He returned to the computer screen, hardly blinking as his sea-foam eyes took in lines of information. He could hear John rummaging in the fridge. His curiosity for what the doctor was looking for was slight. There were pressing things on his mind already and he couldn't bear to waste his time eating and drinking when there was the prospect of a case on his mind. He could hear his flatmate gathering some things to make a dish out of and remembered- "Dishes are in the wash, John. Mrs Hudson put them in."
John murmured an affirmation and the audible sound of the dish washer opening, and then closing again, could be heard most audibly.
"Sherlock," John said. "Why is there a gun in the dish washer?"
"I must have forgotten it there," Sherlock responded almost automatically. Had he left the gun in the wash? He straightened the collar of his shirt and looked towards the kitchen. "Is there blood in the wash?"
"Blood... in the wash?" John repeated the question. If Sherlock had been able to see him clearly he might have seen the 'oh please don't say there is actually blood in the bloody dish washer' expression on John's face. He could hear the dish washer open again. The doctor appeared, in plain sight, suddenly.
"Sherlock, there is blood in the dish washer."
Sherlock Holmes smiled.
"Excellent," he said.
Prostitutes had little rights when it came down to the bare facts. They were there for show, or if not, for pleasure. They served their pimps, danced the lines of fate when it came to diseases and pregnancy and death and rape, but even when one fell there was another to rise in her place and continue the movement.
Prostitution had a way of stripping women of their dignity and identities and made them nothing more than walking cunts waiting for the right cock to buy them for the night. They were objectified, even by the authorities, and so often ignored in favour of hunting down something else that made more sense. It was commonly perceived that the prostitutes were there because they wanted to be, but there were those that were so heavily drugged into a stupor that they didn't even know where they were half the time, or others that bore the marks of punishment on their skin for daring to walk away when they were supposed to be attending the corners and alleys.
They were willing only so long as to get away from their habitations. The barest taste of luxury sustained them sometimes, until it was torn away and they were cast back out to the streets to do it again.
By the time they made it through a year of service to hungry men and women, they were no longer the women they were before. Girls were whores, young ladies were sluts, and their legs were always expected to be open. Ready.
She had long since lost the desire to be disgusted by the sight of women lewdly presenting their rears for the appreciation of their next client. She went through the motions dutifully, though, as she allowed herself to be fondled and caressed. Her skin crawled under warm hands that pulled at her bodice and pried away the scrap of cloth she attempted to wear as panties. She could feel fetid breath on her thighs, thick fingers exploring, and wanted to vomit.
She had been called Cassandra once by parents so in love with the work that they forgot they had a daughter until it was too late and she had disappeared into a cold London night. Now she was Cassie, the slut that pranced the corners in barely-there skirts and halter tops even on the blustery days that stripped her skin and made her miserable.
She was nothing more than their sex doll now and would be regarded as nothing else.
She felt the penetration and jerked feebly as the man that mounted her buried himself in her body. He was too hard, too deep, too fast. She had not cried out in pain since the day they stripped her of her innocence, but now as the man riding her plunged in and out, she cried for relief from the agony.
Her cry was answered when something broke and tore inside of her, releasing blood from the deepest parts of her feminity, and wailed a final cry of dissolute loss.
She had forgotten the faces of her parents long ago, but as the black of death settled over her body and stilled her rampant heart, she remembered the faces of happy families she had seen over the long years she served the men of the city.
As the man pulled out of her and waved in front of her some strange phallic object, as though in mockery of her dying moments, a tear escaped the corner of her eye. Blood sprinkled her face, scented with arousal and pain, and she closed her eyes. It felt like hot rain. Even as she died, it felt like hot rain.
"You expect me to clean this mess?" Andy was a young woman, slender and graceful and demure, but the green eyes sparked with fury beneath her tangle of black hair. She stood next to the man as he wiped off the murderous dildo in the pleated skirt the girl laying on the bed had so wrongfully donned. He enjoyed his girls in skirts. "You've gotten blood on the fucking ceiling. How the fuck am I supposed to deal with that?"
"You'll manage," he said.
She nodded and began to circle the room as the man jerked down his pants, his briefs, and joined with the woman he had killed. The sounds of sex were disgusting as Andy circled the bed, trying her best to not watch him as he fucked the corpse. She tried to not hear the moans and the creaking and the slapping of flesh against flesh as she faced the window overlooking the street and stared down.
"Do you think they will bite?" Andy asked quietly as she stared out the window. Her breath fogged the glass. She could hear the moans increasing in volume as he neared his climax. The jolting of the bed against the wall was audible and Andy hoped, most fervently, that the neighbours were too busy to hear. She did not look forward to being arrested for her presence in a room while a fucking murderer had his way with a corpse. It was bad enough that she had to clean the body and the room without getting caught or else she would serve the same purpose as the prostitute.
His climax was surprisingly quiet compared to the sounds he had been making previously. She had been present enough times that she had grown accustom to the many nuances he suffered. She was there to help him pick his prey, to doll them up, to drug them until they had lost their minds, and then she was there to clean up after him. As others had before her, she served this man as his personal manservant. She was guilty by association and when she turned to look at him and his dead whore, she wondered if it would be her on that bed one day when she was past her time as his assistant.
"Does it matter at this point?" The man said as he slipped off the woman. Andy's disgust was masked behind a careful facade as she saw the semen and blood on his dick. There were many things she would like to do to this man but for his disgusting habit alone she would be sure he suffered the most heinous of punishments.
If she ever lived long enough.
"It does if you do want to go through with it," she responded. He redressed himself, not even bothering to clean himself off, and she approached the bed as he stepped away to observe the body. Unslinging her bag from her arm, she donned a pair of rubber gloves as she began to work on the corpse. "Can you send in Nathaniel?"
Soon enough, a hulking man had joined Andy and her employer. He was quiet, as most large men seemed to be, but Andy considered him something of her only actual friend. He did the lifting and she did the cleaning.
"Move her to the bathroom. I suspect the curtain is still down from earlier today. Put her in the tub and start the wash. The bleach is here."
She tossed an unlabeled water bottle to the man and he caught it neatly before doing as she requested. She removed a second bottle, and a couple other mysterious chemicals, from her bag before beginning to strip the bed.
"Let me know when you are done," the man said.
"As always," Andy replied.
She didn't know when it was that she had come to be under the care of Lindsay and Marcus Prince. Once, she knew she had belonged to others, was a daughter to another family, and a sister to two young boys that were always too busy to play her games.
She didn't know when it was that she had lost her first name and had been given the name Andromeda so she could cope with life without need to be concerned for not knowing who she was. Her new brothers and sisters were similarly named. Capricorn and Aquarius and Chameleon and Eridanus and Leo.
She was the one that was chosen by the man.
Small and sharp, all angles and planes, she had suited the man's need for female assistance while also maintaining a casually androgynous appearance so as to not bring rise to his lust.
She came to him at a young age, still not done with her rebellious teens, and he molded her into what she was today.
His personal cleaning lady. His assistant and accomplice. His dealer.
She was given the best, but he always held the threat over her head that if she should refuse him or fail him, he would make her die in a way that she had never seen.
It was why, as she performed miracles to clean the room, she was without feeling. It was why, as she assisted Nathaniel in cleaning the corpse of semen and blood, she was not actually seeing.
And when they wrapped the small girl that was no older than fourteen in the opaque shower curtain before taking her down the fire escape and dumping her into the garbage, she did not have the desire to run or report the crime.
The police wouldn't be able to protect her, she had always been told this. It was ingrained now, her compliance.
As she coped later with a joint, she knew she was as fucked as that girl she had dumped.
Author's Footnote: So, stuff comes later. Other stuff will be explained eventually. Where does Sherlock and Watson come in? I don't know.
