Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter LXVIII - Tooth and Claw

"Don't talk to me about Ivan Yakovich."

"He took Wren," she says, quickly, losing her smile. "She was like a sister. We ran away together, got in with the wrong crowd. Followed me everywhere. Last time I saw her, she was telling me about the man who came looking for Millie and gave her the high of her life. I told her to drop it – I thought he was a rival dealer – but she insisted she was in love with him. She said he'd sat down next to her and held her hand and told her she had beautiful hair. She was a kid. No-one ever told Wren she was beautiful, not even me. He'd been so nice, she said. He'll come back for me. I knew something wasn't right, but I never thought–"

"Back in your seat, Saito."

I feel the anger fade as the guards lift me to my feet. Aika moves with me, speaking rapidly and with a sense of urgency.

"They're out for him. My gang, a few others. It's not just the police. Even Carver's old girls want him dead – something about a Trisha." She grabs my wrist as I'm led away, looking at me with fierce, imploring determination. "We'll tear him apart, Schott."

The guard rounds on her. "I'm not asking you again. Back in your seat."

"I promise you we'll tear him apart."

She is forced back into her seat. I am dragged away from the watchful gaze of my audience, out of view.

The cell door slams shut.

~~~~~~

At eleven o'clock, they come for me.

I've been waiting for them, measuring out my minutes with each faint tick of the wall clock. The memories were waiting for me on my return from breakfast; no sooner had I sat down on the starched sheets of my prison bed, they uncoiled themselves rapidly and expanded, filling my mind and – when that wasn't enough – bursting through my eggshell skull and filling the room, vivid and ruthless.

I was in Moscow, in our luxurious suite with its gold and its rose and its carpets, and he was teaching me Russian.

The background was muted, the details blurred – but Ivan was very much in the foreground of my cerebral cinema; we sat either side of a small, round table, me cross-legged, him leaning forwards with both elbows on the table surface. He had a newspaper laid out. I was scowling. He circled an unfocused word with his pen and passed the paper to me: I picked it up and studied the Russian, then, after some deliberation, translated the Cyrillic into readable English. It was the first time I'd been correct in my broken attempts at bilingualism, and how we celebrated. He insisted on ordering a five-course, traditionally Russian meal comprising dishes with strange names like Borscht and Okroshka and Kissel – with enough vodka to last a sane man two months.

We gorged ourselves shamelessly.

On finishing, we were rendered comatose with overindulgence. I lay unmoving on the chaise longue; he sat next to me with both eyes closed. When I gave him a testing poke he'd groaned and swore he'd never eat again. I'd laughed and promptly regretted it, and together we suffered in companionable silence, his hand on my knee, my head on his shoulder. Quiet bliss, preserved by my wretched mind and used as a weapon against my current subconscious. I wonder if this is how it began for him, these plaguing memories. Hallucinations. A desperate want to return to the past. Perhaps I'll wake up one warm morning and smile – confident in my sudden assuredness that Ivan Yakovich loves me as much as I love him – as my spiralling obsession commences.

My hands are cuffed behind my back.

I am led out of the cell, away from such torturous speculation, and down a familiar corridor. I catch glimpses of fellow inmates as I walk, through the slatted bars of their door windows; a woman with shorn hair, a young girl clicking the hollowed plastic of her ballpoint pen, Aika, sitting with her back to the door, tossing and catching a scrunched scrap of paper in her palm.