221B Drabbles

by tsukinoblossom

My attempt at writing short stories in the 221-B format 221 words, last word starting with B . I'm really enjoying writing and I think these will encourage me to to do it more often and present an interesting challenge. Note: These stories are not sequential, or even necessarily in the same universe. Unless otherwise specified, each drabble is a unique, complete entity.

161. Bowels

This one's quite gory and graphic. Particularly icky case. Proceed with caution.

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John was an Army doctor. He'd seen more than his fair share of horrors - children caught in the crossfire, mates who'd driven over IEDs and lost limbs. When Sherlock had first asked him to come along, he'd expected to have to deal with the occasional bloated corpse, the rare disfiguring murder.

However, he soon learned that the Met didn't generally bother calling Sherlock for the simple things. Cases that got weird in theory also tended to get weird in practice. So when Lestrade called and informed Sherlock that they had "a really strange one", John was on alert.

They climbed under the police tape, ignoring Sally's irritated glare, and headed straight over to the DI. John had been expecting something gory, but he could tell this was extreme. The body had quite obviously been mutilated. They'd found a man's hands, both severed, greeting them at the door of the flat. His legs had been cut off too, and posed as though walking towards the bedroom. Getting the hint, Sherlock followed them without a word.

The picture in the bedroom shook John to his very core. Nothing he'd seen either in the army or with Sherlock could have prepared him for this. Gently swinging from the ceiling fan was the limbless torso, hanging from what appeared to be his own bowels.

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I'd like to take a moment to alert you, dear readers, to the fact that I am increasingly displeased with the way this site is being run. There are mass-deletions of content that's been acceptable for years, without warning, and a fair number of my stories could potentially be subject to them. Because of that, I am going to be migrating over to AO3, where my username is Moonblossom. I am going to continue posting these drabbles here on ffnet until I reach all 221, but most new content (explicit stories in particular) will be over there. I would like to remind you that you do not need an account to read, subscribe, or even post comments on AO3, so if that's the only thing that's been deterring you from reading over there, please do check it out.