It was as if he was looking at one of those toys – those etched pictures that changed shape when tilted a certain way. When one looked straight on, the picture was clear – but tilt to the side, and the edges blurred into another image.

He was a medical examiner, an old man. He was hardly a threat. Even if he had the will to make any attempts to change the status quo, it would be a simple enough matter to stop him and punish him for his uncooperativeness. Harsh, perhaps, to the bystander – but life was never vaunted as 'fair'.

He should have simply been observed and then discounted as 'not a threat', but something about him drew his attention back each time. He looked away, and there was an air of cold danger about the doctor – a hard edge that disappeared into the furious old medical examiner when he fully turned his attention back. He could feel the anger and hate that radiated off of the man, but it seemed...nebulous. Too vague to be pointed at any one person.

It was in the way he moved, the way he talked. A careful frugality and coiled tension that appeared to be completely relaxed. It was something he would expect in his sister or the mirror or even in the leading Agent upstairs – not in this man now in his power. It was something he was intimately familiar with daily, and something he glimpsed in the man before him – but he could find no proof and could not pin it down.

The man was changing. He was switching between masks of some sort, too quickly to be noticed – but enough to draw his attention and scrutiny. His answers were very plausible; and without an opposing option, he had no choice but to accept his words.

He wished that he could prove that the man was deceiving him, in any way. He wanted to pull him apart – to see what was going on beneath the anger. He wanted to know why his hands twitched by his side, and why his gaze darted around the room. He wanted to know how far he could go before the man would break, and what would happen when he did break.

One would think that the Agent was the danger in the room, that she would be the one to try something to stop him. One would have thought that the young, strong assistant would have been a threat – that he would have tried to be the hero. But he couldn't help thinking that the elderly man was the deadliest of them all.

Perhaps there was more in Holmes' observances on doctors than first appeared. Certainly, one's medical training could be applied to many deadly and nefarious ends – but what of when a deadly man becomes a doctor? When all of that knowledge he used to survive and kill is applied to the art of healing? Perhaps it was not so surprising that one would work among the corpses.

"I think not, Doctor – you would kill me without hesitation."

AN: Title means ''horrible dream'. I've not been able to continue learning Russian, so this was done by research. But the Russian fits. The name fits in my mind also because dreams are often said to be a reflection of one's own self, and the episode was titled Beta Noire – I'm in the spirit of things. And I am intruiged by Ari, but he seems so cold and heartless. So...Again, working from fanfiction and memory and trying not to be obvious in that Ducky is Illya because Ari can't know. 1-21-2016