#I was struck by just how quickly he was convinced - denotes to me a level of not just logical understanding but perhaps even relating

[sysig]

The heart grows ever fonder ♥ (Patreon)

[silkpunk]

Fur and flesh to metal and fire: Native woman as embodiment of cultural tradition and anti-colonial re-configurations of steampunk in “Good Hunting”

Introductory note

I’ve seen tumblr posts and opinion pieces praising and condemning the animated adaptation of Ken Liu’s “Good Hunting” in Love, Death + Robots. Whether positive or negative, most comments are brief and reactionary, with some expressing awe towards the steampunk and Chinese folklore elements, and/or disappointment towards its depictions of sexual and racial violence. I’m writing this post as an appeal for viewers and readers to consider the centrality and depth of European colonialism to the narrative, and attempt to interpret the story’s denotations on the dynamics between the European colonizer, the colonized man, and woman in the aftermath of the Opium War. This post draws heavily on Ken Liu’s original text in addition to the Netflix adaptation.

Summary:

The gendered Chinese folklore of the Huli jing and Good Hunting’s subversion

Colonial British “progression” (in the form of steam tech) displaces Chinese folklore

The Body is Political – conquest of body and land

The Empire’s Subjects Strike Back – Re-programming steampunk for decolonial resistance

Personal evaluations on adapting text to film

The gendered Chinese folklore of the Huli jing and Good Hunting’s subversion

The text introduces the huli jing as a figure of Chinese folklore: one that, like the succubus of the West, is a predatory female that seduces and preys on men. It is a folklore that reflects male anxieties of the dangers and dirtiness of female sexuality:

[1]

“You must save him,” the merchant’s wife had said, bowing like a chicken pecking at rice. “If this gets out, the matchmakers won’t touch him at all.” [2]

The huli jing is a figure heavily entrenched in the Chinese psyche as promiscuous, immoral, and sexually devious, to the extent that it even permeates the language: “huli jing” is widely used today as an insult against sexually deviant women (usually against 小三 / 3rd party / side woman, like slut / bitch). Liu’s depiction is thus very explicitly and purposefully subversive in its attempt to give the huli jing a voice, to testify to their innocence (or at the very least, blamelessness):

“She liked her freedom and didn’t want anything to do with him. But once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying he did drove her to distraction, and she had to go see him every night just to keep him quiet.”

This was not what I learned from Father.                                                          

“She lures innocent scholars and draws on their life essence to feed her evil magic! Look how sick the merchant’s son is!”

“He’s sick because that useless doctor gave him poison that was supposed to make him forget about my mother. My mother is the one who’s kept him alive with her nightly visits. And stop using the word lure. A man can fall in love with a hulijing just like he can with any human woman.” [2]

Liu makes his intentions clear in the comment:

In writing this story, I wanted […] to turn the misogynistic huli jing legends upside down. In these legends, usually composed by male scholars, the huli jing is a dangerous feminine creature who uses her sexuality to deprive men of their vitality and essence. My huli jing questions that narrative. [3]

Following Yan’s appeal and the brutal death of her mother, the protagonist Liang and the viewer/reader alike become convinced of her innocence and the huli jing‘s victimhood – we become aligned with her. And indeed, the text seems to unite the native Chinese characters and folklore across gendered and human/demon fault lines against the greater threat of foreign colonizers.

Colonial British “progression” (in the form of steam tech) displaces Chinese folklore

The narrative is set in the aftermath of the Opium War, and the British occupation of Hong Kong (around 1841). Though Yan and Liang reside in a more rural area, the British presence is strongly felt, mainly through the steam trains and railways that come to penetrate the landscape:

I had heard rumors that the Manchu Emperor had lost a war and been forced to give up all kinds of concessions, one of which involved paying to help the foreigners build a road of iron. But it had all seemed so fantastical that I didn’t pay much attention. [2]

The train is widely presented as a symbol of modernity that the “progressive” British colonizers attempt to bring to their “backward” colonies in their civilizing mission [4]. The “advancement” of the steam train is clearly antagonistic to the “primitive” native religion – they cannot coexist, and with colonization, the occupier’s system of logic, truth and tech displaces native belief, practice and magic:

Thompson strode over to the buddha and looked at it appraisingly. […]

Then I heard a loud crash and a collective gasp from the men in the main hall.

“I’ve just broken the hands off of this god of yours with my cane,” Thompson said. “As you can see, I have not been struck by lightning or suffered any other calamity. Indeed, now we know that it is only an idol made of mud stuffed with straw and covered in cheap paint. This is why you people lost the war to Britain. You worship statues of mud when you should be thinking about building roads from iron and weapons from steel.”

There was no more talk about changing the path of the railroad.

After the men were gone, Yan and I stepped out from behind the statue. We gazed at the broken hands of the buddha for a while.

“The world’s changing,” Yan said. “Hong Kong, iron roads, foreigners with wires that carry speech and machines that belch smoke. More and more, storytellers in the teahouses speak of these wonders. I think that’s why the old magic is leaving. A more powerful kind of magic has come.” [2]

Note the privileging of the new and inorganic (roads of iron, weapons of steel) over the old and organic (statues of mud and straw) – the landscape (and later, Yan’s organic body) transforms in this manner. Yan details how the changes affect her: she can no longer transform at will, and barely hunts enough for survival.

Liang is likewise affected. The text explains his decision to leave for British-administered Hong Kong: colonization renders his family’s demon hunting business obsolete, and his father takes his own life:

People stopped coming to Father and me to ask for our services. They either went to the Christian missionary or the new teacher who said he’d studied in San Francisco. Young men in the village began to leave for Hong Kong or Canton, moved by rumors of bright lights and well-paying work. […] As I let his body down, my heart numb, I thought that he was not unlike those he had hunted all his life: they were all sustained by an old magic that had left and would not return, and they did not know how to survive without it. [2]

Regardless of their previous antagonism, human and demon, man and woman alike are dispossessed by colonialism. For the native woman especially, this colonial invasion is particularly intimate, as it occurs at the level of the sexual.

The Body is Political – conquest of body and land

I believe that Good Hunting illustrates how the native woman embodies the culture of the colonized, and thus her body becomes a site of political and sexual contestation. I base this belief on notions from Frantz Fanon’s essay, “Algeria Unveiled”, in which he describes the psycho-sexual antagonism arising between the white French colonizer and the veiled Muslim women of Algeria. Needless to say, real-life accounts differ from fictive re-imaginings, and the cultural configurations of French Algeria and British Hong Kong are definitely inequivalent, yet, they share common rhythms in the dynamic of sexual violence between white colonizer and the exoticized colonial subject.

Fanon explicates how the veiled Muslim woman’s body came to represent the whole culture of the colonized peoples of Algeria:

One may remain for a long time unaware of the fact that a Moslem does not eat pork or that he denies himself daily sexual relations during the month of Ramadan, but the veil worn by the women appears with such constancy that it generally suffices to characterize Arab society. We have seen that on the level of individuals the colonial strategy of destructuring Algerian society very quickly came to assign a prominent place to the Algerian woman. The colonialist’s relentlessness, his methods of struggle were bound to give rise to reactionary forms of behavior on the part of the colonized. In the face of the violence of the occupier, the colonized found himself defining a principled position with respect to a formerly inert element of the native cultural configuration. [5]

In short, the veil, a “formerly inert element” of Algerian Muslim culture, gains significance because it becomes a marker of that culture, a marker of difference, under the white colonizer’s gaze. To eliminate native culture, it is therefore imperative to eliminate the veil, and the native Algerian reacts by resisting this unveiling. In this manner, the Algerian woman’s body becomes a site for colonial conflict. This is why imperial expansion and territorial conquest is inextricably tied to rape – think of the pervasiveness of “rape and pillage”:    

The history of the French conquest in Algeria, including the overrunning of villages by the troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country, has contributed to the birth and the crystallization of the same dynamic image. At the level of the psychological strata of the occupier, the evocation of this freedom given to the sadism of the conqueror, to his eroticism, creates faults, fertile gaps through which both dreamlike forms of behaviour and, on certain occasions, criminal acts can emerge. Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil. We here witness a double deflowering. [5]

Thus, it is at this site of sexual contestation of the woman’s body that struggle and resistance takes place. To me, Fanon’s conflation of the woman’s body to the native land and culture allows us to better understand Good Hunting. Yan’s identity as a huli jing already presents her as an embodiment of Chinese “old magic”. With British industrialization and influence, Chinese magic is quelled, and Yan loses her powers, symbolizing the disempowerment of Chinese culture.

As colonial steam technology dominates the landscape, native magic weakens, as does Yan’s body. The violence exacerbates when the characters migrate to the centre of colonial administration – Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. Here, there is a gendered difference in the way Liang and Yan are brutalized. Liang’s engineering talent is discounted – the native’s labour is exploited and undervalued.

“Are you the man who came up with the idea of using a larger flywheel for the old engine?”

I nodded. I took pride in the way I could squeeze more power out of my machines than dreamed of by their designers.

“You did not steal the idea from an Englishman?” his tone was severe.

I blinked. A moment of confusion was followed by a rush of anger. “No,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I ducked back under the machine to continue my work.

“He is clever,” my shift supervisor said, “for a Chinaman. He can be taught.”

“I suppose we might as well try,” said the other man. “It will certainly be cheaper than hiring a real engineer from England.” [2]

This is immediately followed by a scene of British clients sexually harassing Yan, now a sex worker.

The dialogue deliberately frames their subjugation as racialized. Liang adapts to colonial Hong Kong but he is not a part of it – he becomes educated in the technical language of the colonizer, replacing his inherited knowledge of magic with that of steam, but his racial difference is constantly referenced (perhaps he’s “white but not quite” [6]). He is a “Chinaman” regardless of ability and any attempt at assimilation. This discrimination occurs in the capacity as employer-employee, master-servant, at the meeting point of the train operations room, the workplace. For the native woman, due to the colonial sexual appetite – the tradition of rape and pillage – violence occurs at the intimate meeting point of her body, on which white expectations of her race are burdened – note how the stereotype of Chinese industriousness is used to pressure her into sexual labour. The colonizers feel entitled to the servitude of both native bodies – the man’s labour, and the woman’s sexual subjugation.

The text notes that this violent encounter leading to Yan and Liang’s reunion happens on a culturally significant date:

“Don’t let the Chinese ghosts get you,” a woman with bright blond hair said in the tram, and her companions laughed.

It was the night of Yulan, I realized, the Ghost Festival. I should get something for my father, maybe pick up some paper money at Mongkok. […]

“It’s the night of the Ghost Festival,” [Yan] said. “I didn’t want to work any more. I wanted to think about my mother.”

“Why don’t we go get some offerings together?” I asked. [2]

Similar to Día de Muertos – the Mexican Day of the Dead – the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival is a time to remember and honour the deceased. It is believed that the gates of the underworld open during the seventh lunar month, and the spirits of the departed return to visit the living. We follow Liang’s thoughts as he realizes it is the night of Yulan, and immediately encounter Yan, which might suggest to us that she is a ghost of sorts coming back to haunt him – she represents an old culture, dead or dying. The story connects the violent encounter, the sexual degradation of Yan’s magic-drained body, to the death of Yan and Liang’s parents, and maybe even the death of Yan herself. Colonial violence corresponds to the death of native culture.

To further cement this idea that the colonized woman’s body is conflated to the land, Yan’s body comes to receive the ultimate abuse from the figure of the governor (or the governor’s son, in the original text). Her sexual perpetrator is not an everyman, but the political representative of the British colonist; where Yan embodies native Chinese culture, her rapist embodies the British colonial administration. He ravages and consumes her body as a colonizer takes and devours territory – I think the showrunners deliberately portrayed him as obese to evoke a grotesque image of imperialist greed and over-consumption of the colonies’ resource. (Of course, this has problematic real-life implications on public perceptions of fat people.) He takes her organic body apart and reconstructs her to his own fetish fantasy of steel and chrome – just as Britain fragments, reforms, reshapes China’s trade, opium economy, and territory (e.g. Hong Kong), to its own will.

Yan’s rape and reconstruction is thus conflated to the political conquest of China and Hong Kong. (Jameson’s notion of the national allegory comes to mind. [7])

The Empire’s Subjects Strike Back – Re-programming steampunk for decolonial resistance

In Good Hunting, the mode of S/F (= speculative fiction / science fiction / science fantasy) enables imagination of how the native can re-appropriate and re-configure the colonizer’s weapons against them. Ken Liu notes:

I think there’s a paucity of good steampunk that addresses the dark stain of colonialism in a satisfactory way. Like many of my stories, this tale has an anti-colonial theme. [Yan] says, at one point, “A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.” It is about as succinct a summary of the experience of being a member of a colonized population as I can give. [3]

A recognizable figure of Buddhism is shown before Liang and Yan move to Hong Kong, in the form of a Buddha statue. Yan is shown in the same frame bowing to it, aligning her with the natives’ religion and again, reinforcing her as a representative of native culture. The next encounter with a religious figure comes in the form of Guan Yin, and if the friend I consulted is not mistaken, it’s possibly the incarnation with 千手千眼 / “The One With A Thousand Arms and Thousand eyes”:

The buddha Amitābha, upon seeing her plight, gave her eleven heads to help her hear the cries of those who are suffering. Upon hearing these cries and comprehending them, Avalokiteśvara attempted to reach out to all those who needed aid, but found that her two arms shattered into pieces. Once more, Amitābha came to her aid and appointed her a thousand arms to let her reach out to those in need. [8]

This statue looks on, and takes up the entire frame as the rapist-governor cries out in pain offscreen while Yan attacks him with her new mechanized strength, her body no longer victimized but newly weaponized, declaring “I could also be terrible”. The Guan Yin statue frames Yan’s act as one of divine retribution – an individual woman’s rebellion that draws strength from a wider colonized peoples and their religion. Though her organic magic had been forcefully amputated and replaced with the colonizer’s inorganic steam tech, the image of Guan Yin suggests that the old culture is not dead, but reborn in a new incarnation, to deliver comeuppance.  

(Personal disclaimer: it is with bitter irony that I must admit my estrangement from these figures – so feel free to add or counter this if you’re more well-informed on the significance of Guan Yin and Buddha here.)

As I’ve mentioned before, Liang’s proficiency in the colonizer’s language of technology functions as a means of his survival, but this same distancing and Othering of him by the colonists keeps him from fully aligning himself with them, and he readily repurposes his mechanical expertise for the antagonistic cause of rebellion, thus engineering not a steam train (weapon of British imperial expansion) but a huli jing (weapon of Chinese folklore and emasculation, albeit the target of emasculation has shifted). The same technology that drove out the magic is now used to empower that folklore.

In these acts of re-configuration, I see an endeavour to visualize how a threatened culture can survive and thrive in the future. Creators like Ytasha Womack emphasize how the S/F genre of Afrofuturism (emphasis on “future”) is necessary for black persons to imagine a future with themselves in it, to provide a vision of empowerment, possibility, and survival [9]. Good Hunting’s narrative, though more of an alternate history, similarly offers a positive possibility in which Chinese culture and mythology is not smothered by colonialism and technological change, but adapted to it:

The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire. [2]

I would also tentatively speculate that perhaps this narrative of colonized man allying himself to empower colonized woman is also driven by an impulse (maybe underlying, at the level of the subconscious) to quell male anxieties of colonial domination and complicity in female subjugation – to re-imagine a history where the figure of the Chinese male is less of a passively helpless witness to sexual abuse, to his country’s subjugation, but an active agent able to empower her. In other words, it could be a case of ‘fantasy as coping mechanism for trauma’ – re-imagining the outcomes of a traumatic past such that the victim-survivor overcomes his abuser (in this case, I see it coming from a male perspective).

Finally, I think this ‘weaponizing the colonizer’s own tools against him’ works on a metafictional level as well: the English language has long been the medium and weapon of English / white supremacy. See Macaulay’s minute on education in which he basically appeals for Indian colonial subjects to be educated in Eng to transmit British ideas, modes of thinking, systems of thought [10]. English language and literature works to naturalize anglo-imperialist modes of reasoning, to colonize the imagination. I like to think that for Chinese-American Ken Liu to tell this story in English is a re-purposing of the language to bite back at the colonizer. And if we regard the steampunk trope as a playful British fantasy of Victorian-era aesthetics, Liu’s re-fashioning and appropriation of the trope – to infuse it with a tale of colonial vengeance – is akin to Liang and Yan’s appropriation of the colonizer’s own weapons. Liu’s act of writing Good Hunting may be exemplary of how “the empire writes back with a vengeance”, to quote Salman Rushdie [11].

Personal evaluations on adapting text to film

I find that the animated adaptation has a heavier “male gaze”, a term coined by film critic Laura Mulvey: mainstream cinema is a product of patriarchal institution, and most films assume the perspective of a male, while the female is configured onscreen as erotic object [12]. To borrow Linda Williams’ words, “the bodies of women figures on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain” [13]. The animated adaptation appears more explicit in its spectacles of female nudity and victimhood, evident in the shots panning up Yan’s legs as a harasser raises a cane to lift her dress; over her struggling, restrained, unclothed body; and over her face contorted in fear and disgust. I’ve wondered if this is necessitated because the showrunners need to show her ordeal whereas the writer only need tell it – in film, we do not get to hear her recount of suffering and survival as much as we see it. Yet, I’m fairly convinced the perspective has a focus that deliberately eyes the female form for sexual gratification –  exemplified by shots of her glutes, bust, and unnecessarily bared breasts.  

Science fiction, steampunk and machination has high visual appeal; they delight and enthrall as visual spectacles. It is unfortunate when narratives that indulge and play with such spectacular concepts remain coloured by patriarchal desires, and become so heavily infused with the sexual indulgence in disempowered women. This conventional fanboy approach to steampunk / SF – the entitlement to consuming fantastical tech and women –  almost repeats the desires of the European colonizer-rapist that Good Hunting condemns: 

In a city filled with chrome and brass and clanging and hissing, desires became confused” [2]. 

It is my personal conviction that the adaptation somewhat diminishes (but doesn’t erase!) the anti-colonial impact of the original text through its lapses into the impulse to consume the colonized woman’s body – the same impulse that the text works so hard to undo. So, as much as I enjoyed this and most other episode of LDR (because as a series, it’s not that much different from other mainstream depictions of women i.e. I’m sensitized and used to it), it would’ve benefited greatly from a purposeful questioning of, and distancing from, the mainstream male perspectives of science fiction.

Concluding Remarks

Even with these shortcomings, Good Hunting is undoubtedly rich in cultural meaning and purposefully, powerfully anti-colonial. It is vital to acknowledge its value in destabilizing colonial mindsets and tropes, instead of shallowly and reflexively dismissing its whole narrative for containing sexual and racial violence, and how it doesn’t comfortably fit into contemporary, widely-accepted, Western expectations of ‘girl power’.

Ken Liu’s text does not bemoan the victimization of Chinese culture in the post-Opium War period of colonization, but re-configures, upgrades, modernizes, adapts the old magic to its new technological environment, with the stubborn anti-colonial tenacity for continued cultural survival.

References:

1. “Good Hunting”, Love, Death & Robots, Netflix

2. Ken Liu, “Good Hunting”, 2012

3. Ken Liu, Story Notes: “Good Hunting” in Strange Horizons, 2012

4. Science and Technology: Transport: Railways - The British Empire

5. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”, A Dying Colonialism, 1965

6. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, 1984

7. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, 1986

8. Wikipedia, “Guanyin and the Thousand Arms”

9. Steven W Thrasher, “Afrofuturism: reimagining science and the future from a black perspective”, 2015

10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Education”, 1835

11. Salman Rushdie, “The empire writes back with a vengeance”, 1982

12. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 1975

13. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, 1991

[ao3porcelainstorm]

poison ivy & stinging nettles 10

On Ao3

Pairing: Sherlock/OFC

Rated: M

Warnings: eventual violence, torture, swears, adult themes (no explicit smut)

Chapter 9 - Chapter 11

Chapter 10- The

~~~

The dinner went well, all things considered.

~~~

Before anyone knew it, Sunday had arrived.

Greg and Molly had enthusiastically accepted Amelia’s invitation to dinner. Molly brought a plate of chocolate cookies, and Greg pulled a bottle of bourbon out of his jacket that Amelia hadn’t seen in the stores since moving to the UK.

Her uncle Max had spent the night with Mrs. Hudson, and helped set up the apartment for the dinner, dutifully setting out plates and making sure that Amelia and John didn’t burn the place down before guests arrived.

Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock had been ushered out of the way, with the former having broken into a bottle of champagne a little early and the latter just hovering and commenting on the chemistry of cooked meat- correcting Amelia and John every few minutes.

Ruthie and Frank arrived shortly after with little Tommy holding a plate of crudely decorated fall sugar cookies. He handed them to Sherlock, who stared perplexed at the little boy until Tommy proudly declared;

“I made biscuits,” before sprinting into Amelia’s arms with an excited squeal.

Mycroft was the last to arrive, passing Mrs. Hudson a bottle of pinot noir and taking a quiet seat in the living room to avoid that chaos of the kitchen.

“You need to tell me where you found this,” Amelia demanded of Lestrade, taking a long pull from the dark liquor with a satisfied sigh. “I can’t do gin anymore. I’m losing my mind.”

He laughed, promising to text her the address of the shop he’d found, while John turned his attention Tommy who was asking a million questions about the meal the doctor was struggling to prepare.

Molly asked Amelia how the case was coming, and the women soon fell into an intense conversation regarding some questionable toxicology reports the medical professional had come across on a recent murder.

With no one watching the lamb in the oven, the place quickly filled with smoke.

John, thankfully, caught the disaster before the place caught alight, and fortunately, the meat wasn’t too overdone (though Mycroft would have begged to differ).

The meal went well, and with drinks flowing and conversation bubbling, Mrs. Hudson convinced Sherlock to play a few songs on the violin. Ruthie, red faced and grinning over a hot toddy, demanded some drinking songs and wore the detective down until he started playing.

The upbeat music got the whole place singing along (even Mycroft muttered along to the familiar tunes).

Tommy danced around in circles until he practically collapsed from exhaustion.

It’d been a few hours, night falling outside, when Ruthie and Frank announced that it was time for them to catch the train back to Kent. Max offered to walk them to the tube, taking Tommy out of Ruthie’s hesitant hands and carrying him over his shoulder.

Mrs. Hudson dropped into John’s chair, taking a deep breath and sharing an embarrassing story of Sherlock with the remaining group.

Molly and Amelia were playing a drinking game involving plastic cups and coins, trying to explain its rules to Lestrade.

“Then you drink-,” Amelia took a swig of beer.

“Amelia-, Mycroft needs some of your drugs,” Sherlock called across the space, sending Amelia  and Molly into a conspiratorial fit of giggles. She stood up, crossing the room, her mood bubbly and light from the good company and drinks.

“I’ll be honest Mycroft, you never struck me as the psychedelic type,” she hummed, sitting on the arm of Sherlock’s chair. “Maybe a big bag of weed.”

“I’m finding it difficult to track down the samples you tested in your report,” he reported dryly. “Apparently, most reputable drug dealers aren’t interested in meeting with government representatives, no matter the price.”

“I’m trying to picture you buying some mushrooms in Lambeth,” Amelia closed her eyes and grinned. “Yep. Phenomenal. Thank you for that.”

“Do you have extra samples?” he ignored her commentary and she hopped up.

“I do, but I’ll need some help moving the bins around,” she held her hand up above her head to indicate the height of the cultivation shelf she’d crafted in her closet.

“I need to pick up some more crisps,” John dusted off his pants, standing up. “I’ll help you before I step out.”

“Don’t drop them on yourselves,” Sherlock called after the pair. “If you need someone over 5’8’’, give me a ring.”

He returned to his brisk conversation on where Mycroft had tracked Lydia Brenner when there was a distinct crack of a gun from the lower level.

“Gunshot,” he stated, looking between Lesterade and Mycroft, leaping to his feet.

Taking two steps at a time, he could hear the sound of al altercation, some more thuds, before he kicked open the door to Amelia’s flat.

The room was in disarray. Someone had been tossing drawers and throwing things off of Amelia’s bookshelves, searching for something.

Near the fireplace, there were signs of a more traditional confrontation, Amelia’s reading chair had been overturned, clothes kicked up and on the ground…

Amelia was kneeling next to John, pressing a towel into his abdomen. Nearby, Maxwell Brenner lay unconscious with a broken porcelain pot next to him, dirt and flower petals scattered about.

Between them, a single pistol. The source, Sherlock surmised, of the gunshot.

“I don’t know what to do,” Amelia pressed down as hard as she could where the bleeding was coming out with a towel she must have grabbed from one of the overturned drawers.

“Oh,” Mycroft appeared in the doorway, Lestrade over his shoulder. The inspector whirled around, pulling out a radio and calling for medics and officer backup to Baker Street,

“Get Molly!” Sherlock ordered his brother, dropping next to John’s head, checking his pulse in the neck. “John, John can you hear me?”

“Unfortunately,” the doctor grunted through pained breaths. Even though Amelia was pressing with all of her strength, the blood from the wound was blossoming out, staining John’s sweater.

“I went for the gun,” Amelia explained, her voice cracking in panic. “I’d almost gotten it, but he panicked and fired.”

“Is he awake?” Molly entered the room, taking over from Amelia. She leaned into John’s wound, earning a low hiss of pain from the doctor.

Amelia just stood aside, her hands coated in blood, her eyes widened in horror, trying to keep up while Molly worked.

“If someone else bloody asks that-,” John started, wincing when Molly reached under his torso to check if the bullet had gone through.

“Didn’t pass,” she informed Sherlock, her brows knitted in complete focus. She was asking about the type of gun, which John did his best to choke out between deep, breaths.

“Medics are three minutes out,” Lestrade called into the room.

“John, I’m so sorry,” Amelia had his hand in hers, drawing circles with her thumb over his knuckles. She looked up at Sherlock, shaking her head. “It was him the whole time. You were right about Moriarty being an investor. They were working together. Not my mom.”

“Don’t act like I’m dying,” he huffed, eyes squeezed shut in pain. Molly leaned into the wound again to try and stop the bleeding. “Not the first time I’ve been shot.”

“I think that’s the problem,” Sherlock supplied with a snort.

“I just assumed it would have been your fault,” John shot back. “You know, the final gunshot wound."

“Are you two seriously bickering right now?” Amelia swallowed back the start of a small sob.

“They’re here,” Lestrade was leading an EMT and a gurney into the room. Molly started listing off what she knew, with Sherlock peppering in any details, and John slurring out his blood type.

The doctor was unconscious by the time he was loaded into the back of the ambulance.

Amelia was clutching onto Sherlock’s arm, staining the material with their friend’s blood, though neither paid it any mind. They were both too focused on John. Sherlock felt a lump in his chest. How had he missed Max being the true villain of the Chemo scheme? Certainly there had to have been some clue?

When they returned to the flat to grab clean shirts, an officer was helping Maxwell into the hall of Baker Street, the old man complaining of a cut in his head. Amelia spotted him immediately, her grasp on Sherlock dropping.

Before Sherlock could stop her, she bee-lined for her uncle, her expression wild.

“Do you know what you’ve done!?” she caught him by the front of his jacket and threw him back against the wall, a loud thud denoting the strength with which she hit him. “You sorry excuse for a human, if anything happens to him-!”

Mycroft, surprisingly, was the one who pulled her back, her arms struggling against the older Holmes. She looked ready to rip Max’s spine clean from his body, her eyes filled with pure rage.

“You’re a piece of shit! I fucking hate you!” she screeched, clawing at the air.

“Try to better contain your feral little beast, Holmes,” Maxwell snorted. “Lord knows I couldn’t.”

Sherlock, who’d moved to intercept Amelia whirled around, and planted a fist in the center of Maxwell Brenner’s face. The was definitive crack as a result, and a policeman cut in, shoving Sherlock aside and hustling Brenner out of the place.

He stood back, hands up, while her uncle sputtered through blood and bemoaned that the detective had broken his nose.

“Too bad it didn’t go into his brain,” Amelia tutted under her breath

Sherlock smirked, grabbing a pair of shirts from his room (as Amelia’s was now a crime scene).

When he returned, she’d washed her hands and gratefully took the clean dress shirt from him.

“Bastard ruined my favorite cardigan with my friend’s blood,” she hissed, angrily buttoning down the shirt.

“He has to spend hours with Mycroft interrogating him,” Sherlock tried to reassure her, though he too was seething under the surface. It did little to calm the fuming woman, who just slammed her way outside, flagging down a taxi to the hospital.

~~~

John was in surgery when they arrived. Molly Hooper met them in the waiting area, looking none too optimistic about what little news she had to share.

“He lost a lot of blood,” she explained softly, her fingers nervously intertwined in front of her. “They think there’s internal damage. He was still unconscious when we arrived.”

Amelia chewed on her bottom lip, her eyes cast down, a strange mix of anger, fear, and sorrow. It should have been her in the OR, not him. John Watson didn’t deserve this. He was too good.

Sherlock stood still, though Amelia was certain he was trying to walk through every step of their case, trying to catch what he’d missed. Looking between them, Molly cleared her throat.

“I’m going to head home,” she gestured to her bloodied clothes. “I didn’t have anything in my locker. I’ll call?”

“Thank you, Molly,” Amelia took her hands gratefully. Sherlock just nodded, barely registering the interaction, so Amelia took it upon herself to walk the exhausted Molly Hooper to a taxi.

“Where’s your head?” Amelia asked when she returned, guiding him to one of the chairs in the waiting area.

“Where did we miss it?” He asked in frustration.

Amelia had been asking herself the same question since Max pulled the gun on her and John. He was one of the few people she’d trusted completely, and when she found out he’d been the one to betray her. That he’d been the one to call for her death.

Her heart had crumbled.

“He slipped under the radar,” Amelia muttered bitterly. “Played the game with Moriarty whispering in his ear.”

~~~

“I feel like someone shot me,” John mumbled, his eyes cloudy from the pain medicine.

It’d been hours since he’d been released from surgery, groggy and barely conscious.

But he was awake and alive.

Outside, the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon.

“We’re just glad you’re okay,” Amelia replied, holding his hand to her chest. “You had us worried.”

“Mmm,” John chuckled softly. “I don’t see why. You two would have convinced God himself to give me back.”

“The Reaper wouldn’t have been able to leave the room, who are we kidding?” Amelia chided back. “I’d be yelling at him, and Sherlock would pull some deeply buried secret up to use it against him.”

John smiled, giving her hand a final squeeze before sliding it back under the covers with a shiver.

“I’m gonna try and sleep a little more...” he said, his eyes already shutting and his body falling limp. He was breathing steadily moments later, sound asleep.

“He’s really the best out of us,” she commented, watching him breath peacefully.

“I know,” Sherlock agreed in a low rumble.

“Your brother has Max in custody, right?” she moved to sit down next to him, her arms crossed, and body rigid.

“He had to have his nose treated,” he shared a sly grin with her. “But, they should begin the interrogation soon.”

“What a fucking asshole,” she muttered under her breath, her fists squeezed at her sides. “I trusted him.”

“Apparently not enough to give him a hard drive,” Sherlock mused.

“I didn’t want to bring him in too deep,” she sighed, distorting her face in disgust. “I was worried he might get hurt.”

“Did you tell him about the hard drive you sent to Ruth?”

“Of course not,” she frowned. “Less he knew and all that. Why?”

“She didn’t seem close with him at dinner,” he replied, leaning back. “I thought it was strange, given how often he visited. I chalked it up to a recent quarrel.”

Amelia hummed, trying to recall the dinner that had only happened a few hours before.

“He walked them out,” she reasoned. “Though, that was probably so he could get into my apartment without anyone noticing.”

“Exactly,” Sherlock nodded. “Ruth and Frank both seemed perplexed by it.”

He closed his eyes, his fingers steepled under his chin. He didn’t speak again.

Mind Palace, Amelia thought to herself, left a little uneasy by the sudden loneliness that swept the room with her two friends. It was the first time she’d truly been alone in weeks.

She didn’t like the silence. It meant she had time to think, and that’s when she was able to take an introspective look into her life. It was awful.

Now that Chemco had been stopped, the true villain revealed, what could she do next? There was of course helping John recover, and whatever Moriarty was up to.

But eventually John would be fine, and frankly, Moriarty would always linger above them, so planning around that was impossible.

Was it time to consider going back home to New York?

She’d thought about it once or twice. Going back to a normal life.

A friend of hers from college had reached out about an amateur art exhibition in the Village she was running. She’d wanted to see if Amelia had anything she wanted to contribute.

It’d been almost a week and Amelia still hadn’t replied, unsure of what exactly to say.

How could she even begin to explain the chaos that her life had been for the last year?

Certainly, the papers and the news would reach New York once Chemco stock started to plummet. It was too big a company to just brush aside. Her friend would probably piece it together given enough time. There was really no point in hiding it, but Amelia wasn’t ready to pull off that bandaid.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to start a contingency plan. She did have an idea for a portrait she could send a picture of… just for some input at the very least. At the most? Having a painting up didn’t mean she had to live in New York.

She could visit during the exhibition.

Maybe Sherlock and John would go with her? It could be a fun trip, a little vacation after this whole hellish ordeal.

She tried to picture her friends in the streets she grew up on. The parks she frequented or the coffee shop she’d typed her thesis in.

Her friends would be jealous that she’d found such handsome Brits to settle in with, she smiled to herself.

It’d be hilarious until Sherlock started picking away at them. She could almost hear John reminding him not to be rude. That they were her friends.

“Idiots,” she was confident Sherlock would mutter. And he’d be right. The majority of her friends from New York were from old money like she was.

They weren’t very interesting or were very well-read.

They had their money, and their trusts, and their wildly popular social media accounts. Amelia was pretty sure one of her ex-boyfriends was on a reality show now.

Maybe she wasn’t as homesick as she’d thought.

“Canterbury,” Sherlock’s eyes slowly opened and he looked to Amelia. “You told Monty not to say anything to your cousin because you had to get home to London.”

“Yeah,” she pulled herself from her daydream in Central Park, back to the hospital room.

Back to London. Back to home.

“But, when we got back, Mrs. Hudson mentioned that Ruthie had told her father that she was disappointed we hadn’t stopped over,” he continued. “But if Monty never mentioned it...”

“Max was trailing us,” Amelia finished the thought, scowling. It made so much sense. How else would Max have been able to report so confidently back to Mrs. Hudson. Amelia certainly hadn’t told him about their excursion.

“It also explains how Moriarty knew exactly where to find you,” he added.

“They sent the arsonist as a decoy,” she realized. “To distract you.”

“Moriarty would have wanted to see you fall,” he nodded. “He must have realized that Maxwell hadn’t been totally honest when he saw John and I.”

“The decoy was Max’s idea,” Amelia surmised.

“To keep Moriarty on track,” Sherlock nodded. “He tried to play the most dangerous man of all.”

“Moriarty gets mad, brings me back, demands something he knows Max won’t be able to find,” Amelia was sitting up. “But had he accounted for this?”

They both looked to where John was still sleeping soundly in bed.

“We’ll have to find out,” Sherlock’s expression brightened considerably for the first time that day. “The game is on.”

Chapter 11