A/N: This chapter is rated Teen (Language/Implied Violence). Also, this fic is still open for requests! Just submit your Title, Prompt, and any Special Requests, and I'll see what I can do!


2. The Howling

Prompt: Put the 'Bad' in Bad Wolf.

Prompter: larxene_12 (on LJ)

Summary: Oh, isn't this lovely, your blood on my skin, my madness on yours?


The single fluorescent lamp swings slightly overhead, creaking with every parabolic action. The room is cast in the harsh white light it emanates, and the cracks in the walls and damp puddles on the floor are forcibly called to attention by the brightness.

There is a woman, sitting in a chair. Her fingernails beat a tap, tap, tap, tap rhythm against the metal surface of the wobbly table before her, and the chair beneath her squeaks in protest with each swing of an indolent leg. Mascara tracks are visible on her pale face, and her eyes are partially obscured by her dirty blonde hair. She taps her fingers in time to the faint clink, clink, clink her handcuffs make as she shifts and moves.

He watches her from behind the one-way mirror, arms folded, brows creased. Next to him, glossy photographs of this same woman in the room before him lie spread out across a desk. The microphone in the interrogation room is sharp; he hears the tap, tap of her nails, over and over again. It does nothing to help him think.

His head jerks up when the sound of the outer door opening is heard, and he visibly relaxes when he sees Lieutenant Harkness enter. He takes the file Jack proffers him.

Jack jerks his chin at the woman before them. "This the girl?"

He nods. Jack exhales, whistling as he does so. "They sure make serial killers different these days. You want me to start on her?"

He doesn't know why his fists are clenched, why his jaw is taut at Jack's simple offer to help him get the ball rolling. He wants to snap, back off. This case is mine. This girl is mine. But he doesn't, because he is under control. He always has things under control. And to be under control, he needs to be logical. Jack is one of the Met police force's best interrogators; it is only logical that he be given a crack at what has proven to be the most elusive serial killer for several decades.

He wants to screw logic and sock Jack in the jaw.

"Yeah, sure. You go ahead. Good luck."

X-X

He is there when she starts laughing. Her laughter is manic, high peals that echo and resonate around the spartan interrogation room. She clutches her stomach, laughing until she is heaving for breath, tears streaming down her cheeks. And still she continues laughing.

"Stop," Jack orders, furious. The interrogation has not been going well - she is too uncooperative, too far gone, too batshit crazy to tell them anything, Jack says. The Doctor thinks she makes perfect sense to him.

He watches her laugh from behind the glass, watches the way she hoots and slaps the table in her mirth. She fascinates him.

"Stop right now. Tell me, Miss Tyler, do you confess to killing thirty-seven innocent civilians in the course of the past seven months?"

She stops abruptly, tilting her head as she looks at Jack, as if contemplating his question. "Do you know," she begins, licking her lips and sending him a secret smile, "do you know that bloodstains are horribly hard to remove?" She leans back in her chair, raising her hands to study her nails. "No one told me that before. They should've. I would never have worn white." She sighs, in mock-disappointment-regret.

"Worn white? Worn white to what? Kill those thirty-seven people?" They need her to explicitly confess to her crimes, to give them definitive statements that will lead to definitive sentences. They have found no bodies, no murder weapons, no visible motives. Their evidence is entirely circumstantial. They have the actus reus*, but nothing that conclusively points it to her; they have no mens rea*. Their case is a dead end if they cannot get her to talk.

She pauses, studying Jack for several seconds. "Thirty-seven. I like that number. It has such a nice ring to it, don't you think? Thirty-seven people dead. It seems so hefty, so considerably. So notable." She grins at him, and Jack swears under his breath.

"Is that why you do it? For attention? So people will sit up and notice you? Why, Miss Tyler, are you sick of being the pampered little rich girl?"

She waves a dismissive hand. "No, no. I'm not rich," she informs him, eyebrows arched haughtily. "I'm very rich."

"And you think that your wealth gives you the right to decide who gets to live or die?"

She shakes her head, slow side-to-side motions that seem oddly measured, carefully executed. "Mmm," she hums, the non-word decidedly inconclusive. "Maybe I only take out the bad seeds." Her eyes glint in the harsh light, making her seem like the wisest of men, or the most depraved of all. He cannot decide which category she falls into.

"Bad seeds," Jack picks up. "Is that why you call yourself the Bad Wolf? Is that why you trace those words onto the walls of your victims' houses?"

Her eyes are shuttered now, hooded and brooding. She falls silent for drawn-out seconds. "Oh, Officer." She leans forward on the table, her handcuffs clinking against the table surface. "Do bad seeds produce fruit?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

Her finger traces patterns on the metal under her hand, pictures and drawings and answers only she can see. "They do," she tells him.

Her eyes glance up from where they had been concentrating on her wandering fingers. "There are fruit," she continues. She taps the table twice, almost as a sort of final note to their conversation. "Just bitter."

"I don't see how -"

She cuts Jack off, as if she never heard him speak in the first place. "It's funny how they tell you that life is sweet." Her eyes are curious on Jack's. "Did you have a good life, Officer?"

She doesn't wait for his reply. The Doctor thinks that she never wanted to hear one anyway. "No one ever told me I'd reap the bitter from the sweet." She breaks her gaze with Jack, and turns to look at the whitewashed wall to her right.

Jack slams a hand down onto the table between them, frustrated and stretched to his limit. "Enough. We'll resume this again, after we take a short break so you can ruminate on your fucking depravity."

"Yes, officer!" She shouts, a mockery of the words of assent they all learn in training. She tries to salute, but her hands are cuffed together, so she fumbles and fails. She descends back into giggles, and her moment of quasi-lucidity is lost.

A chair scrapes back, and Jack stands to storm out of the room.

"Officer," she calls once his back is turned. "Why don't you ask your friend to join us?" She gestures towards the Doctor, behind the reflective glass, tongue in cheek and a mysterious smile on her lips. She is facing him now, eyes on his even through the one-way mirror.

"I always say, more is merrier!" Jack has whirled back on her, and the Doctor is almost certain he sees a flash of fear run through his eyes before he slams out the door. Her eyes are still on his, piercing-searching-knowing.

She licks her lips, and her feet tap the floor, tap, tap, tap, tap.

"Don't you just think that thirty-eight is so much better than thirty-seven?"

When his heartbeat quickens, he tries to tell himself it is entirely due to terror, and has nothing to do with the excitement that bubbles low in his gut, wrong and sick and utterly crazy.

So perfect, he thinks.

X-X

When they resume, it is his turn to interrogate her. Jack's shift has ended, and he tries to clamp down on the pleasure that surges through him at the knowledge that he will have her all to himself.

He enters the room, her dossier and case file in hand. She looks up when he enters, like she never did when Jack entered. He caresses her glossy, beautiful, perfect, face in the mugshot when he opens her file. She smiles at him, in real life.

He smiles back.

"So, Miss Tyler. Do you have anything you want to tell me?"

She leans in towards him, and gestures for him to do the same. He complies, because she is intriguing and fascinating and so, so wonderful, like broken-smiling porcelain dolls and fluttering butterflies just before they are pinned down.

"Call me Rose," she whispers into his ear, and he knows this is a complete breach of protocol - never refer to the accused by their first name; they are not your friends, never allow physical contact; they are dangerous, never show weakness; they will take it and twist it and fuck you up.

He turns his head, and his face is a hair's breadth from hers. He can feel her breath, warm and ghosting over his cheek. He leans in further, touching his lips to the shell of her ear.

"Rose," he murmurs, and is sure that he does not imagine the shiver that runs through her body.

He leans back, and her eyes follow the movement. "Rose," he begins. "Oh, Rose. Tell me. Why do you do it?"

She cocks her head to the side, her eyes weighty and measured on his. They are not mad, not depraved. They are, he believes, simply misunderstood.

"They mean nothing," she starts. "They are just there. Just going on with their lives, day after day after day after day. And they don't matter. They never will. I don't hate them, I don't like them. They are just there. So I think, what are their lives to me? Nothing. They don't mean a thing. So why not?"

He is transfixed, watching her mouth as it moves and shapes and forms words and syllables and sounds. "Why not?" he acquiesces, and they both fall silent.

She sighs after a while, a motion that stretches out into long, dusty lines in time. "I'm crazy," she tells him, and her eyes are sad-mirthful-shattered-whole on his, things he cannot comprehend, things he will never be able to. She is an enigma, as deliciously bad as the Bad in Bad Wolf, and wonderfully complicated; the greatest temptation for him, the world's most avid puzzle-solver and problem-fixer.

"Sometimes," he says, tracing his fingers on her open palm, "sometimes, that's the best way to live."

She watches him, eyes curious, interest piqued. "You think so?"

He draws an X on her palm, a symbol that carries no meaning, not really, yet says it all. "I know so."

They return to the comfort of silence.

She is the one who breaks it again, with the tap, tap, tap of her feet against the floor. Her eyes are on him, but he gets the distinct feeling that she sees through him. They are more than a detective and his suspect, more than a priest and a confessor, more than a man and a woman at this point.

"Do you want to know how I kill them?" she asks, and the question is hollow, though it is a victory. A pyrrhic one, he thinks, though he doesn't quite know why.

"Tell me," he says, and finds that he is more curious than he should professionally be. He cannot bring himself to care, or to worry, or to wonder what this might mean, because she is so utterly fantastic, and beyond-this-world, so haphazardly-cobbled, so fluid-solid.

She spreads her hands on the table, palms down, stretching her fingers as wide as they can go. She looks as if she is about to begin a sweeping sonata, or an epic symphony-in-staccato. She meets his eyes head on.

"First," she says, and draws a number one on the table surface, "I slice them up. Little cuts, you see. Nothing too deep or long - just enough to get it nice and bloody. Not too many too - maybe fourteen or fifteen? I don't know. If they make me angry, I cut them more." She shrugs, like they are discussing the weather, or the price of a kilo of fish in the market, like they are not discussing death, not talking about cold murder and destruction.

He nods anyway, as if he understands. Maybe, he thinks, he really does. He is sure he does.

"Then," she continues, and strokes a curling two onto the shiny metal of the table. "then, I stab them through the heart." She giggles. "A shot through the heart, you know? Like that song. I love that song." He clears his throat, and she pauses, blinking rapidly. "Do you like that song?"

"I guess," he replies, and his grin is boyish. "And you're to blame."

She beams back at him, this girl-woman-killer, and he thinks the wisdom-madness that flashes in her eyes are like winking stars, probably already burnt out but still shining here, light-years away.

She blows a raspberry, and her fingers dance on the table, like a pianist in the throes of a soul-consuming movement. "I collect the blood, too," she tells him, and her voice is admonishing, like he is a schoolboy who has forgotten something important. "You didn't ask me that."

"Ah," he says, and his fingers tap a distinct four-four beat, keeping metronomic rhythm for her soundless sonata. "So I didn't."

"It's not nice to forget," she sniffs at him, almost disdainfully. "It's blood on walls, after all. Very morbid stuff. Very dramatic."

"Mmm," he tells her. "Like red markers of fate, no?"

She grants him a beatific smile.

"Exactly."

X-X

There are many things that happen in between. Things that matter and don't, and are really the same thing. But this is the end, and what do all those things matter now? This is the finale, the brightest blaze to exit in. This is the madness in lucidity, the understanding in confusion.

"You helped me," she tells him, whispering the words close to his ear. Her breath is warm on his cheek, and she yanks him up by the lapels of his coat to kiss him full on the mouth. It is searing, branding and consuming, a veritable inferno in the frozen winter.

He tastes blood on her tongue, metal-sweet and bitter-salty. He tastes life, and folies a deux, and twisted fairytales. He tastes her. When she breaks away, there are tears in her eyes.

"I love you," she says, and the first cut she makes on his skin is the sweetest.


*Every crime consists of two parts: an actus reus (the action of the crime itself), and a mens rea (the intention/premeditation to commit that crime). For a criminal case to be solid, prosecutors need to prove both.