Reasons
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for the Bad Luck Challenge at the_pottingshed Community on Livejournal.

Spoilers: Series 2, Episode Three, “Visiting Time”.

It was clear that Sylvia Hollamby loved her job. Clear that she reveled in it. And why not? She loved the sense of power, the ability to order people about. After all, she actually got paid to be a bully. What more could you ask for, really?

Not that she thought of it in those terms. No. If asked, Sylvia would tell all and sundry that she did her work, not for any honor or glory, not even for a thank you at the end of the day, but because there were certain jobs that no one wanted to do, but that had to be done, and she was simply one of those in life who did what needed doing. Plain and simple.

Unfortunately for Sylvia, she came to the job lacking. Lacking compassion, lacking kindness, lacking humanity, lacking any sense of treating others with dignity and respect. Who knows, maybe it wasn't really her fault. Perhaps she was missing some essential gene that would have made her human. Maybe it was the fact that her own mother was harridan, a cruel woman who believed that the world was populated, by and large, by worthless criminals who sucked the life out of honest, working folk.

Whatever the explanation, Old Bodybag, as she was known to the women of G-Wing, Larkhall Prison, was a horrible old bitch who got satisfaction and enjoyment out of the misery of others, going out of her way to inflict pain and humiliation whenever the opportunity afforded itself.

Which was the reason the women intentionally lured Bodybag to the landing, a landing left slick from cleaning. The reason that Sylvia Hollamby found herself tottering on the precipice of the stairs. The very reason she found herself falling, ass over teakettle, down those same stairs to land with a sickening thud at the bottom, amid catcalls and jeers from the inmates.

Bad luck, slipping and falling like that. Bad luck, that no one managed to catch her. Bad luck, really, being a nasty, old cow.