Human Error ~ A BBC Sherlock Fanfiction {Book IV}

Chapter XCI - Lolita

When my hand touches her arm, her wide doll's eyes open; perfectly round, sunk deep into their sockets and glossed with a chemical confusion.

"Emily...?"

"Get up. We've got to move now."

It takes her two, long seconds to understand – and then she grips my wrist with white-knuckled ferocity.

"He'll find you."

"No he won't. Not if we get out quickly." I haul her to her feet. It is like lifting a small child. "Sherlock's here, and Molly. We've got to go." She shakes her head. "Millie please, you've got to co-operate–"

"He's coming back."

I lose my patience.

"We've come too far to let you die with him. You're not a martyr, so stop playing at one. Give me your arm." She moves it away, but I snatch it back. "I swear to god, I will knock you out and drag you if I have to. Come on."

"He's coming back."

I ignore her broken record and tug her forwards: she resists as best she can, but is overwhelmed immediately. She loses her footing. I misjudge her fall. I feel a sense of foreshadowed dread in anticipation of the crack of china bone against marble–

A familiar hand catches her elbow.

Sherlock – hair wild, face streaked with grey, tuxedo tattered – has her arm in his grip. She is hoisted back up to standing, and, after a moment's struggle, gives in: she collapses against him, face at his shoulder, too exhausted to continue her moral grapple. Sherlock adjusts his footing.

"I've got her."

"Where's Molly?"

"Following." He lifts one of Millie's rawboned arms over his shoulder; a makeshift crutch. "Where's Yakovich?"

Millie's head jerks upright at the sound of his name.

"In several places, if we're lucky." I start towards the left wing exit. "Follow me."

"You don't know where you're going–"

"Sherlock," I say. "Shut up." He opens his mouth, but I cut across with, "left wing, back entrance. If he's alive, he'll be looking, and if he's looking, he'll go for the front entrance. We go the other way."

I kick the outstretched hand of an injured man away from my ankle, push aside the remains of the table blocking our path and force a route through the debris: Sherlock follows, Millie half-conscious and feet skirting the ground as she is lifted over the worst of the damage. We round a corner, out of the ballroom and into a corridor. The paintings mounted on the white walls watch us with reproach – there's a growing sense of déjà vu about it all, a lurching familiarity as we attempt to escape the clutches of Ivan's fantasy once more. I am reminded of the exploration of his original manor; wandering the top floor with its oak doors and silenced rooms, the misplaced fear, the reassurance, the prick of the knife at my neck, the pink-lit library, where we found Millie, and the similar situation we found ourselves in afterwards: her arms around Sherlock's neck, half-carried, half-stumbling, out of the manor and into the waiting back of an ambulance.

We approach two doors, wooden and engraved with gold-leaf, and I square my shoulders, push past them, into a smaller corridor; the capillary network of the vast organ system that is Ivan Yakovich's home. I see warped reflections of us in the vases, distorted dashes of scarlet and black and grey. Our footsteps ring in the silence. All is unsettlingly quiet.

Through the wall-length windows at the end of the corridor, I see the gates outside. They're open. Beyond them is a road, and beyond that the slithers of light comprising houses. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them, beacons in the dark; London's welcoming chaos. Our personal Eden.