Sanctuary fic -- Kill
This may be the darkest thing I've ever written. It's a stretch for me as a writer, and I'd like to hear what you think.
Mature -- for mature themes and violence
The Five are all killers. The first time each of the Five killed a human being.
I. 1888
The first time he doesn't think he's actually going to do it until it's done. This is going to be like the other times when he followed, when he stalked. It's going to be an exercise that sends a prickling up his spine, an uncurling sense of wrongness that transforms a beautiful summer evening. And it is a beautiful evening, an August night warm and lovely, a night for lovers to wait beneath windows, whispering through a trellis of twining roses.
It's not a night to die. John stands there looking down. Her eyes have already fixed, the blood is ceasing to flow from the slash in her neck, a homely woman of forty or so, her skirts raised to her waist, exposed in death.
His hands shake. The coldness that had embraced him has given way to a lethal kind of high, higher than James' cocaine, higher than steeples or towers. He is a phoenix rising over London. He is the angel of death.
And somewhere below it, a tiny pathetic man named John Druitt is standing on the street with a bloody knife and a corpse at three in the morning, a man who in a moment will surely be seen, will surely be stopped.
The angel of death doesn't care, but John Druitt does. He is sobbing for all he's lost, for the trial and hanging that awaits him, selfish man to care more for that than the woman dead at his feet. He is thinking of his sisters recoiling in horror, of his fiancée….
He should be thinking of his immortal soul.
He should be thinking about her, this woman he has killed, the one who still looks up with an expression of arrested horror.
And all he can do is run.
II. 1910
"You forced this action!" Her voice is loud in the stillness, sighting straight down the barrel of the Enfield at Adam, fifteen feet away, an easy shot.
"You were wrong about me, Helen," he says evenly. "You can't even admit that. What did they do? Promise you the keys to the empire?"
She'd like to deny it. She'd like to deny that there is anything in this for her, but it's not true. There is a great deal in it for them to bring Adam Worth to justice -- support from the Crown for the Sanctuary, never having to operate in the dark again. The difference it could make to hundreds, even thousands of abnormals, to be free from persecution, to never again have to fear that they will be jailed or mobbed, run out of town on rails or hunted across the lands of their homes -- the freedom of thousands, and the price is Adam Worth.
"It's over, Adam." Perhaps he will come quietly. Perhaps there will be the courtroom and the prison. She has no means to ensure that. The others are not here, for all she says, Nikola and Nigel ensnared in Adam's traps, James and John who knows where. She cannot cover him with a rifle and bind him at the same time, and she is not Nikola who could take him with bare hands, a gift of the Source Blood she does not share.
He's stalling now, trying to find an advantage. Waiting for his alter ego to surface and attack. Hand to hand she will not win. If he closes….
Everything is crystal clear, crystal bright, curiously slow and unreal. This is the moment her life is on the line, nose to nose under the blue morning sky. Hyde will kill her if she doesn't kill Adam first.
"What are you waiting for?" he taunts. "I know what your task is. Go on! Finish it!"
She is a mere woman, a weak woman. He doesn’t think she will shoot a man in cold blood. He counts upon it.
And so she does.
He reels, clutching his left shoulder, blood blossoming on his white shirt as he falls to his knees. She cocks the rifle again. "Stay down!"
He doesn't, of course. And the next shot will be easier. It is not so hard to kill. The sights line up together, right between his eyes.
He stands on the edge, falls backward like a martyr. She is looking over as he falls, as she sees the flash of brimstone above the water that is John, but she knows whatever he does is vain.
She has killed Adam. And it was not nearly as difficult as it should have been. Her hands are steady, and her voice will be by the time anyone else arrives, steady as a man and a soldier.
III. 1916
He's shot in the direction of the enemy before, thrown a grenade or two. But with the smoke and the confusion there's no knowing if he's hit anything or not. Maybe he has. Maybe he hasn't.
There's no satisfaction in it, just a grim purpose. It's been that way since George died, since his mum got the letter and sent him a telegram. George is dead, his baby brother who adored him, killed in France like thousands more. He could stay out of it, stay in America with Tesla, a good job and a secure life, but he can't. Even Nikola doesn't expect it. When push comes to shove, he's a Briton like his mum, like George and the kids he's left behind, Nigel Griffith, who can't possibly be fifty something. They'd not take him with his real age, but no one who sees him would believe it anyhow. Nigel Griffith is George's younger brother, he says. He's thirty four, a volunteer, a dogged little man who asks for nothing, one more chemist turned soldier.
He's done his share. But he doesn't know if he's ever killed anyone.
And now it's just him and Marty in the shell hole, lying in an inch of water looking up at the smoke ridden sky, a westering moon showing by day above no man's land.
"Nigel…" Marty whispers. His back is broken, his body mangled by the explosion, but he can still speak, can still feel pain. Nigel's no doctor, but he can feel the damage even through clothes, ribs piercing vital organs, massive internal bleeding. Marty's as good as dead, even if he were somehow miraculously transported to a hospital this very moment, straight into Paris' finest.
But he's never had that gift. It wasn't his to begin with.
"Right here, mate," Nigel says. "We'll get out of this."
Marty knows better. His eyes meet Nigel's, twisted with unbearable pain. They're pinned down. The moment anyone sees movement the guns will open up. It doesn't bear saying that he's got a dodge. He always does.
Alone.
"I'm not going to make it," Marty says.
"Sure you are."
It's a lie, and Marty knows it. He's going to suffer for eight or ten hours, and then he's going to die.
He can't move his arms but he looks at the pistol that lays by, some officer's weapon lost in the shuffle. "Do it."
Nigel opens his mouth and shuts it, wipes the sweat off his face.
"I'd do the same for you," Marty says, his breath catching. One lung is probably collapsed. Nigel thinks so. He'd want it if it were him.
He swallows and reaches for the pistol. "Right, then."
Marty nods and closes his eyes. "Our Father, who art in heaven…."
A bullet ends it.
IV. 1921
It's quick. That's the thing. This isn't Chicago or some hard-bitten Continental city. This is London, or almost London, Deptford barely a squirt down the Thames. It's a Metropolitan Borough, for God's sake! James hardly expects to be set upon in the block and a half between the dockyard office of the Royal Navy and a friend's house that he's borrowing for reasons of his own.
And yet there it is, the sudden weight on his back, the arm about his throat. "Here, ye pansy!"
It's instinct to jab backwards with an elbow, to twist at the press of a knife, one hand going to the bulldog concealed as usual in his overcoat pocket. The knife barely touches him. It might have opened his hand, but it glances off one of his gold rings.
James pulls the trigger.
The report is impossibly loud in the quiet street. It seems to echo forever as the man falls, a single point blank shot to the heart with a .44 calibre.
And then it's silent again.
No one comes running. The stockyards are quiet at four in the morning. There are no cabs, as he had ascertained earlier.
The man is dead. There is no need for a doctor to tell that. The shot has destroyed the pulmonary artery and the aorta. Self defense, yes. But deadly force? And what proof of misconduct, what proof of attack?
Where were you going, Dr. Watson? He can hear the questions now. To the house of a lover, high on cocaine.
Where were you coming from, Dr. Watson? From a party of homosexuals in the offices of the Royal Navy.
Self defense. He has no moral qualms about that. But he has never killed before.
Not on purpose. Patients die. Sometimes they die despite their doctor's care and once in a great while because of their doctor's care, because of something unknown, or of something badly done, some diagnosis missed or some error made. One doesn't practice medicine for thirty years without making a mistake.
He is entirely rational, looking at the body at his feet, and for one winged moment he wonders if John were, if this is what it felt like to be the Ripper. Probably not.
He should call a constable.
But he will not.
Carefully, James puts the bulldog back in his pocket. That's the first mistake people always make -- they throw the weapon away somewhere it can be found and identified.
No footprints. No marks legible in blood. He has not gotten close enough. He has not touched the body. There are spatter marks on his coat, on his shirt front, but that's easily remedied. Water will remove it.
Mistake number two -- tossing bloody clothes somewhere. Just wash the damn things out and keep them.
He's never seen the man before. No ties to the body.
Nothing taken, no evidence.
And so James Watson walks away, swiftly but without hurrying. He will go take care of what needs to be taken care of methodically and rationally.
He is, after all, the world's greatest detective.
V. 1943
He can smell the mass graves even from the distant treeline. That is, of course, a by-product of his vampiric senses. Quicklime doesn't kill the stench, not for him.
He came to Jasenovac thinking he could rescue people. He can't. Nikola can see for himself how impossible that is -- towers and barbed wire, lights and fences and machine guns, soldiers by the dozens. Yes, there are lights and he can work with that. But machine guns? One bullet won't stop him. A hundred surely will.
He is a vampire. He is nearly a century old. He is the master of electricity. But now, crouching in the underbrush looking at the lights of Stara Gradiska concentration camp spreading out beneath him, he is a thing he has not been in more than fifty years -- one more Serbian man, helpless to save his kin. He is nothing to this machine.
To get in, to find anyone, to get out with weakened women or children in tow, if they even live…it is implausible. It cannot be done.
They will kill and kill again, this machine that feeds on Serbs and Roma and Jews alike, chewing them up and spitting them out, assembly line death.
And he will watch, helpless as any mere human.
"I am not," Nikola says under his breath. His heart is not an organ. It is steel. He is not human, fallible and prone to despair. He is a vampire. He is a spirit of night. He is the most deadly creature that has ever walked the earth, the stuff of nightmares.
These credulous German boys are afraid of the forest. Don't you know the forests of the Balkans are filled with primitive monsters?
"They are now," Nikola says quietly.
He will hunt. He will at long last let his instincts take flight, leave off the medication that has kept him harmless and be what his blood sings out to him to be -- vampire.
He will stalk. Whenever one is alone, whenever lamps suddenly fail, when cars passing through the forest at night suddenly die with the final sputter of the alternator…. He is there. Monsters are real.
When he feeds for the first time it is good. He feels the boy grow taut in his arms, limbs twitching in one last feeble gesture, Nikola's claws in his chest and his teeth in his carotid artery. He feels his pulse falter against his lips, and the vampire smiles.
There is nothing like the kill. And whatever the price is later, this is worth it.
Mature -- for mature themes and violence
The Five are all killers. The first time each of the Five killed a human being.
I. 1888
The first time he doesn't think he's actually going to do it until it's done. This is going to be like the other times when he followed, when he stalked. It's going to be an exercise that sends a prickling up his spine, an uncurling sense of wrongness that transforms a beautiful summer evening. And it is a beautiful evening, an August night warm and lovely, a night for lovers to wait beneath windows, whispering through a trellis of twining roses.
It's not a night to die. John stands there looking down. Her eyes have already fixed, the blood is ceasing to flow from the slash in her neck, a homely woman of forty or so, her skirts raised to her waist, exposed in death.
His hands shake. The coldness that had embraced him has given way to a lethal kind of high, higher than James' cocaine, higher than steeples or towers. He is a phoenix rising over London. He is the angel of death.
And somewhere below it, a tiny pathetic man named John Druitt is standing on the street with a bloody knife and a corpse at three in the morning, a man who in a moment will surely be seen, will surely be stopped.
The angel of death doesn't care, but John Druitt does. He is sobbing for all he's lost, for the trial and hanging that awaits him, selfish man to care more for that than the woman dead at his feet. He is thinking of his sisters recoiling in horror, of his fiancée….
He should be thinking of his immortal soul.
He should be thinking about her, this woman he has killed, the one who still looks up with an expression of arrested horror.
And all he can do is run.
II. 1910
"You forced this action!" Her voice is loud in the stillness, sighting straight down the barrel of the Enfield at Adam, fifteen feet away, an easy shot.
"You were wrong about me, Helen," he says evenly. "You can't even admit that. What did they do? Promise you the keys to the empire?"
She'd like to deny it. She'd like to deny that there is anything in this for her, but it's not true. There is a great deal in it for them to bring Adam Worth to justice -- support from the Crown for the Sanctuary, never having to operate in the dark again. The difference it could make to hundreds, even thousands of abnormals, to be free from persecution, to never again have to fear that they will be jailed or mobbed, run out of town on rails or hunted across the lands of their homes -- the freedom of thousands, and the price is Adam Worth.
"It's over, Adam." Perhaps he will come quietly. Perhaps there will be the courtroom and the prison. She has no means to ensure that. The others are not here, for all she says, Nikola and Nigel ensnared in Adam's traps, James and John who knows where. She cannot cover him with a rifle and bind him at the same time, and she is not Nikola who could take him with bare hands, a gift of the Source Blood she does not share.
He's stalling now, trying to find an advantage. Waiting for his alter ego to surface and attack. Hand to hand she will not win. If he closes….
Everything is crystal clear, crystal bright, curiously slow and unreal. This is the moment her life is on the line, nose to nose under the blue morning sky. Hyde will kill her if she doesn't kill Adam first.
"What are you waiting for?" he taunts. "I know what your task is. Go on! Finish it!"
She is a mere woman, a weak woman. He doesn’t think she will shoot a man in cold blood. He counts upon it.
And so she does.
He reels, clutching his left shoulder, blood blossoming on his white shirt as he falls to his knees. She cocks the rifle again. "Stay down!"
He doesn't, of course. And the next shot will be easier. It is not so hard to kill. The sights line up together, right between his eyes.
He stands on the edge, falls backward like a martyr. She is looking over as he falls, as she sees the flash of brimstone above the water that is John, but she knows whatever he does is vain.
She has killed Adam. And it was not nearly as difficult as it should have been. Her hands are steady, and her voice will be by the time anyone else arrives, steady as a man and a soldier.
III. 1916
He's shot in the direction of the enemy before, thrown a grenade or two. But with the smoke and the confusion there's no knowing if he's hit anything or not. Maybe he has. Maybe he hasn't.
There's no satisfaction in it, just a grim purpose. It's been that way since George died, since his mum got the letter and sent him a telegram. George is dead, his baby brother who adored him, killed in France like thousands more. He could stay out of it, stay in America with Tesla, a good job and a secure life, but he can't. Even Nikola doesn't expect it. When push comes to shove, he's a Briton like his mum, like George and the kids he's left behind, Nigel Griffith, who can't possibly be fifty something. They'd not take him with his real age, but no one who sees him would believe it anyhow. Nigel Griffith is George's younger brother, he says. He's thirty four, a volunteer, a dogged little man who asks for nothing, one more chemist turned soldier.
He's done his share. But he doesn't know if he's ever killed anyone.
And now it's just him and Marty in the shell hole, lying in an inch of water looking up at the smoke ridden sky, a westering moon showing by day above no man's land.
"Nigel…" Marty whispers. His back is broken, his body mangled by the explosion, but he can still speak, can still feel pain. Nigel's no doctor, but he can feel the damage even through clothes, ribs piercing vital organs, massive internal bleeding. Marty's as good as dead, even if he were somehow miraculously transported to a hospital this very moment, straight into Paris' finest.
But he's never had that gift. It wasn't his to begin with.
"Right here, mate," Nigel says. "We'll get out of this."
Marty knows better. His eyes meet Nigel's, twisted with unbearable pain. They're pinned down. The moment anyone sees movement the guns will open up. It doesn't bear saying that he's got a dodge. He always does.
Alone.
"I'm not going to make it," Marty says.
"Sure you are."
It's a lie, and Marty knows it. He's going to suffer for eight or ten hours, and then he's going to die.
He can't move his arms but he looks at the pistol that lays by, some officer's weapon lost in the shuffle. "Do it."
Nigel opens his mouth and shuts it, wipes the sweat off his face.
"I'd do the same for you," Marty says, his breath catching. One lung is probably collapsed. Nigel thinks so. He'd want it if it were him.
He swallows and reaches for the pistol. "Right, then."
Marty nods and closes his eyes. "Our Father, who art in heaven…."
A bullet ends it.
IV. 1921
It's quick. That's the thing. This isn't Chicago or some hard-bitten Continental city. This is London, or almost London, Deptford barely a squirt down the Thames. It's a Metropolitan Borough, for God's sake! James hardly expects to be set upon in the block and a half between the dockyard office of the Royal Navy and a friend's house that he's borrowing for reasons of his own.
And yet there it is, the sudden weight on his back, the arm about his throat. "Here, ye pansy!"
It's instinct to jab backwards with an elbow, to twist at the press of a knife, one hand going to the bulldog concealed as usual in his overcoat pocket. The knife barely touches him. It might have opened his hand, but it glances off one of his gold rings.
James pulls the trigger.
The report is impossibly loud in the quiet street. It seems to echo forever as the man falls, a single point blank shot to the heart with a .44 calibre.
And then it's silent again.
No one comes running. The stockyards are quiet at four in the morning. There are no cabs, as he had ascertained earlier.
The man is dead. There is no need for a doctor to tell that. The shot has destroyed the pulmonary artery and the aorta. Self defense, yes. But deadly force? And what proof of misconduct, what proof of attack?
Where were you going, Dr. Watson? He can hear the questions now. To the house of a lover, high on cocaine.
Where were you coming from, Dr. Watson? From a party of homosexuals in the offices of the Royal Navy.
Self defense. He has no moral qualms about that. But he has never killed before.
Not on purpose. Patients die. Sometimes they die despite their doctor's care and once in a great while because of their doctor's care, because of something unknown, or of something badly done, some diagnosis missed or some error made. One doesn't practice medicine for thirty years without making a mistake.
He is entirely rational, looking at the body at his feet, and for one winged moment he wonders if John were, if this is what it felt like to be the Ripper. Probably not.
He should call a constable.
But he will not.
Carefully, James puts the bulldog back in his pocket. That's the first mistake people always make -- they throw the weapon away somewhere it can be found and identified.
No footprints. No marks legible in blood. He has not gotten close enough. He has not touched the body. There are spatter marks on his coat, on his shirt front, but that's easily remedied. Water will remove it.
Mistake number two -- tossing bloody clothes somewhere. Just wash the damn things out and keep them.
He's never seen the man before. No ties to the body.
Nothing taken, no evidence.
And so James Watson walks away, swiftly but without hurrying. He will go take care of what needs to be taken care of methodically and rationally.
He is, after all, the world's greatest detective.
V. 1943
He can smell the mass graves even from the distant treeline. That is, of course, a by-product of his vampiric senses. Quicklime doesn't kill the stench, not for him.
He came to Jasenovac thinking he could rescue people. He can't. Nikola can see for himself how impossible that is -- towers and barbed wire, lights and fences and machine guns, soldiers by the dozens. Yes, there are lights and he can work with that. But machine guns? One bullet won't stop him. A hundred surely will.
He is a vampire. He is nearly a century old. He is the master of electricity. But now, crouching in the underbrush looking at the lights of Stara Gradiska concentration camp spreading out beneath him, he is a thing he has not been in more than fifty years -- one more Serbian man, helpless to save his kin. He is nothing to this machine.
To get in, to find anyone, to get out with weakened women or children in tow, if they even live…it is implausible. It cannot be done.
They will kill and kill again, this machine that feeds on Serbs and Roma and Jews alike, chewing them up and spitting them out, assembly line death.
And he will watch, helpless as any mere human.
"I am not," Nikola says under his breath. His heart is not an organ. It is steel. He is not human, fallible and prone to despair. He is a vampire. He is a spirit of night. He is the most deadly creature that has ever walked the earth, the stuff of nightmares.
These credulous German boys are afraid of the forest. Don't you know the forests of the Balkans are filled with primitive monsters?
"They are now," Nikola says quietly.
He will hunt. He will at long last let his instincts take flight, leave off the medication that has kept him harmless and be what his blood sings out to him to be -- vampire.
He will stalk. Whenever one is alone, whenever lamps suddenly fail, when cars passing through the forest at night suddenly die with the final sputter of the alternator…. He is there. Monsters are real.
When he feeds for the first time it is good. He feels the boy grow taut in his arms, limbs twitching in one last feeble gesture, Nikola's claws in his chest and his teeth in his carotid artery. He feels his pulse falter against his lips, and the vampire smiles.
There is nothing like the kill. And whatever the price is later, this is worth it.