This is the first of my short Anderson Vignettes. It has a prequal to wrap up all of the uncertain points, but it'll be next instead of first. Why? I'm not sure. Enjoy!
Anderson stormed away from the body, furious. In a rage unlike one he had ever encountered before. His fevered pulse hammered away at the inside of his temples like two sledge hammers chipping away at the bone.
And who was following him but little-puppy-John-Watson?
"Wait." John said as Anderson broke out into the grateful night, gulping the cool, fresh air and trying to embrace the silence like an old friend. John's voice had broken his peace and now his anger flared up like a wildfire, eating away at him with great hot licks of flame.
"Oh just go and play nursemaid to your freaky-friend!" He screamed spinning on his heels and attacking John suddenly with great viciousness. "That's what you do isn't it? Keep him out of trouble? Feed him up?"
John froze in the midst of the onslaught. Seeing him wide eyes and startled just made Anderson want to scream more. What was he surprised about? Surely he had to know that when you test a man, eventually he's going to snap?
"Look, I don't care what you two do on your own time. But that..." He pointed at the body. His body. The one he'd been working on busily when Sherlock Holmes had stormed in.
"But that… that was mine. This is my work. This is my life." Anderson tugged on his vest, the vest he wore with pride, blazoned with the insignia of Scotland Yard.
"You can rattle on and on about 'deductive reasoning,' but I know what a blowfly is. I know how to read rigor mortis. I went to college for these things.
"Maybe I'm sometimes wrong, maybe I jump to conclusions…" Anderson felt his face, his red, flushing face become drenched in flaming sweat which poured around his eyes. The blood in his face seemed to all be trying to force its way out of his eyes.
"…But I am not incompetent!" He finished, but hurriedly thought of more while he was already in the mood to scream anyway.
"I'm not stupid, I'm not ignorant, and I'm not spineless! I know what you all say about me! Up until now I haven't cared! It hasn't affected my work! But this…is…IT!"
Anderson peeled off him protective jumpsuit and tossed it into the forensics van and stormed off into the night, ignoring the little chimes of laughter from the crime scene.
He was blind, uncertain of where the twisting unfamiliar road led, stalking into the pitch blackness without any idea of even how to catch a cab, let alone walk home. The garish buildings melted into dull, gray, block-like structures and the abandoned city roads opened into wide city thoroughfares.
He breathed deeply like a wounded bull, his pride in tatters around his legs, but his courage swelling in his breast. He had done it. He had said it. Now the only thing to do was to wait for things to fall apart around him.
His wife would be furious. Maybe this was the kick-in-the-pants they both needed to file for a damned divorce. It would feel good to let everything out in front of a judge. To let everything out of himself. He felt as though he'd been screaming, like he'd screamed at John Watson, for a long, long time and no one had ever bothered to listen.
Anderson paused and read the sign of a pub. "The Rat and Rabbit" and kept walking.
Although he was glad to have had been able to unload on someone, he felt a little bad that it had been John Watson who had borne the brunt of his anger. John had never said two words to him, and although he hung out with the freak all day, he seemed like a nice guy.
He coughed a little, and then a lot, realizing for the first time how sore his throat was, how loud he must have screamed in order to cause as much damage as he did.
Maybe he needed a drink after all.
He thought of Sally, how he'd first realized he loved her in the pub, how they'd stumbled home together that first, magical night; drunk beyond reason.
Quitting meant never seeing her again.
Anderson turned and looked at the sign, a black, wooden flag shadowed in darkness; then he looked beyond—up the road he had traveled down, up the path he had followed. Sally was up there. She would talk to him; tell him she agreed with him maybe. He could complain about his wife and she could complain about her father.
He kept walking down; down the road past the pubs and the shops, down past the houses and the fountains and the school.
Past the school, where the swing sets creaked eerily and the grass bore the depressions of hundreds of little footprints, his phone began to ring. It was Lestrade's ringtone.
"Where are you?" he demanded.
"I don't know." Anderson answered truthfully.
"What is wrong with you?" This was, apparently a rhetorical question, because Lestrade paused only just long enough to take a breath before continuing. "I have half a mind to write you up for this—what were you thinking? You can't just leave before the scene is cleared!"
"Yes sir." Anderson replied. There was no error in Lestrade's argument.
"Are you in some kind of trouble?"
Anderson paused before answering. This was not the question he was expecting. Good ole Lestrade, everybody's friend, the father around the homicide division. He smiled.
"Not in the classic sense sir."
"Don't be fresh with me Anderson, is something wrong?"
Anderson paused again. There was a lot wrong. He couldn't remember his father, his only friend had decided last year that a bullet to the head was a better alternative than financial ruin, his wife was cheating on him with a man that was far more desirable than he, with no obvious guilt while he was eaten alive with torment every few months when Sally came to visit, he was bullied at his job by an amateur sleuth and his medical sidekick and, beyond all else, he had lost every sense of credibility in the job he had loved so much, worked so hard for, believed in with all of his fervor. He was the laughing stock of Scotland Yard, the persecuted scapegoat that everyone could swing at, the man without nerves, without a spine and without a brain.
"No sir."
"Good then we'll be needing you up here—" Anderson hung up the phone miserably. He walked on into the night, away from the busy streets and into silence's fold once more.
He stumbled onto a lake, which twinkled welcomingly in the absence of a moon. He strolled out to a great black bridge that cut the lake in half and stood in the center listening to the occasional 'plop' of lake fish leaping out of the water in search of mosquitos and flies.
With the economy as poor as it was, Anderson was doubtful he could find another job as fitting to his skills as the one in London. He hated to think of handing Lestrade that piece of paper with his two weeks' notice and watching the wizened detective's face wrench in disbelief, or worse still, delight.
But as he leaned out over the lake, he couldn't imagine going back to work in the morning. Going back to the whispers and chuckles, the dinosaur jokes, the furtive glances whenever he and Sally passed each other in the hall, the eyes that rolled whenever he presented a DI with his preliminary report.
He realized for the first time, it didn't really matter whether he worked or not. If he quit, they would find some new kid to replace him, whose inexperience would be an even match for his stupidity. If he found a new job, he would work just as hard.
If his wife left him…well, there were other women. She had another man. They would be happier apart, he was sure of it.
Sally…He would miss Sally. She would be the ache that made quitting hard. He would miss her, but was uncertain as to what extent she would miss him.
No Holmes. That alone would make quitting worth it. The slights against his person would stop; he wouldn't be anyone's personal insult-bag. Maybe he could; dare he even think it, gather up some confidence.
A new life, a fresh start, a clean slate; all of those magical things he'd heard about in books or on television that happen to wonderful people. Could he really hope that he could turn his life around just like that? With a few broken strands?
His phone chimed. He absently reached down to answer it. It was a photo of a new ipod, shiny with chrome and gleaming with apps and pixels.
He pushed a button to send a reply and carefully began constructing the full accumulation of his heart's desire, when he noticed something bobbing on the surface of the lake. He flashed the light of his phone over it, and discovered a moist, soggy fluff of cotton floating on the rippling waves like a cloud.
He saw another, and another, and followed the trail of cotton until he found the drifting carcass of what appeared to be a hallowed stuffed bear. It was too far away to reach, but even in the dim light by his phone Anderson could make out a smear of blood around the thing's one black eye.
He smiled, sighed, and began to laugh. It was a strained, wretched sound; his chest heaved from the misuse of the muscles.
He placed his phone on the wooden floor of the bridge and let the lights grow dim on the message: "We should get a divorce."
He peeled off his shirt, shoes and socks and placed them on his phone, and without further ceremony dove into the rigid waters of the lake, pausing only long enough to pull the latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on his slippery hands, so he couldn't further contaminate evidence.