Three
Over My
When: 15 (Indecency)
Warnings: gruesome descriptions
The first time I visited a morgue, I knew that pathology was not for me.
To be honest I had known that particular point since I was six years old, but this little expedition merely confirmed it was something I was not cut out for in life. Never mind the headache-inducing white walls or the nauseating stench of chemicals, even without these things I was certain that I would never work down here. For one thing, it was kind of cold.
For another, corpses were not fun.
They were disgusting. They were foul. And they most definitely were not on my list of things to see before I die (no irony intended).
I had seen a body before, but that was a long time ago, and it wasn't anything gory. My grandmother died when I was nine. I was there. But so were my mother and older brother. It wasn't a horrific experience that caused me to have a fear of death and blood forever after – I hadn't liked blood before that and I've never been afraid of death.
If anything, it was far too normal for comfort. One moment, she was sitting up in the hospice bed, fitting the final piece of her puppies puzzle together, and the next, she had leaned back into the pillow and closed her eyes. I thought she was asleep. She looked it. Nothing else was wrong with her; apart from the fact that – as my brother had pointed out to me last week – she was getting decidedly thinner. Her skin was a normal wispy peach. Her hair was the usual white curls. Her hands were still lovingly warm. The only difference was that her chest no longer moved with each breath she took, and I slowly came to realise that this was because she wasn't breathing at all.
It was a corpse, I knew that, but I didn't like to think of Granny like that, even if it was true. Maybe if she had actually looked like a dead person should then that would be different. Maybe if her skin was blue and her eyes glazed over then I would be able to see that moment as the first corpse I ever saw.
Maybe if she was more like the second…
Going with Sherlock to Barts had been a bad idea. I should have let him take me back to my apartment in the first place, where I would have been safe and warm… worried sick, of course, but at least I wouldn't have had to see that thing.
That thing had almost caused me to faint.
The skin was definitely blue, but as for the eyes being glazed over, well, it was a little hard to tell. They weren't exactly in the right places.
I hadn't even looked at it for that long, only a couple of seconds really, but even so I knew I never wanted to see something like that again.
The train had certainly done its job in killing him. A scary part of my mind took in the injuries and calculated what the impact must have been like. He must have hit it from the side as the entire left hand side of him was folded disturbingly inwards on itself. A few of his ribs were sprouting forth from his skin at completely wrong angles. His arm didn't even look like an arm any more, and I wondered how it had even stayed attached to his torso. Despite this, despite the horrifying nature of his injuries, there wasn't any bruising. His skin was pale and clear in the sections where it had remained intact. In others it had been scraped away, like a graze gone seriously bad.
He must have rolled across the pebbles on the ground for several meters.
His jaw was crooked against the rest of his head, and his nose was virtually unidentifiable. The bowl of his skull itself was dented, causing the round shape to flatten unnervingly above his left temple.
Two of his fingers were missing.
Perhaps they had been sliced off by the wheels of the train, I couldn't tell, and I definitely would not be asking.
I hated the grisly image before me. I loathed it more than I had loathed anything before. I needed to look away. I needed to be somewhere else. Anywhere.
Even if that place was Sherlock Holmes' arms.
Short, I know. But it adds a certain degree of insight into Melanie's mind that I felt I couldn't put into the actual chapter.
Just FYI, I'm trying to catch this fic up to the main storyline before continuing with that, but it won't take that long as there's only a couple of chaps to go before they coincide. Sorry for anyone who wants to know whats gonna happen desperately, but to make up for it I think the next one of these will be smut again.
It's not all doom and gloom and severed fingers.
Review?