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How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me.
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour
i.
The most exerting activity she’s allowed as a child is painting. She doesn’t mind until she begins to suspect her parents simply don’t know what else to do with her. They divorce when she’s seven, and she never sees her mother again. Her father’s rich and well-connected and soon marries again. Irene doesn’t tell him that his wife’s got another lover somewhere.
Irene’s stepmother doesn’t care that she’s too sharp or that her paintings are mostly red: she only cares about Irene’s talent. It’s the first praise she’s ever received for her work, and it leaves her hungry instead of happy.
When her stepmother unexpectedly dies five years later, Irene already knows there’s no place for girls like her unless she carves it out herself. And she’s no wife, no mother, no artist. She has no idea what she is except unique.
It becomes her favourite word. She learns to run by chasing it, just like she learned to want by receiving.
ii.
All the doctors her father sends her to try to diagnose her on the antisocial spectrum. She wants to pay attention after she notices their condescension or incompetence or roving eyes, but it’s a dull game and it makes her mean. By the time she’s twenty-five, she takes pen and paper into sessions and writes down her observations. Leaves the notes on their desks, winks at them on the way out.
No one ever thought she was funny before he came along.
Sherlock takes one look at her and pronounces her interesting. He sounds like he means it, and she’s gone, just like that. He’s beautiful and admits to theft just to play along with her. He’s not put off by her attention, he’s not commenting on her eyes or her legs; he just stands there with his violin, smile stretched wider every time she gets something right.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited to meet someone like you?” he asks her when they’re done and she can claim her prize. “Twenty-eight years, three hundred and seventy-one days, twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes.”
“Happy birthday.”
She fucks him on his sofa, his bed, the shower, and finally in the hallway on the way out, then doesn’t hear from him for weeks. She wants to show him everything when he comes back, so she does, starting with how loudly he can scream her name.
iii.
The first clue should’ve been the way he encouraged her to experiment with drugs, but never joined her. She took it for understanding.
Later, in New York, he told her she was right all along. He understood her like the pieces to a puzzle, and he didn’t care if she was put together right as long as there was nothing about her that he couldn’t take apart and study.
The drugs were too good, but so was he. So was having him there without a safety net.
“It’s not your fault,” Watson tells her sympathetically. “He was manipulating you.”
Irene doesn’t know how to tell Watson that she loves him all the more for it, that she knows how he hates being bored and how he meant to kill her but can’t bear to let her die even now; how she noticed the minute he stopped acting even when she didn’t know what the act was. How he put together an act so perfect that she can’t regret falling for it, because she never expected to be as happy as she was with him, even if he lied about everything except his music.
She’s hurting, but he just killed someone to save her life while she was working to have him arrested. He lost a billion euros because of her and rushed to her side when she faked an overdose.
He’s her perfect match, regardless of the role he’s playing. Watson wouldn’t understand. It’s Irene’s fault that she can’t settle for anything less than that.
iv.
She visits him in prison and tells him about her and Watson’s cases.
“Am I your captive audience?” he asks, same smile in a brand new expression. He doesn’t look like a man who’s been caught. Not quite the opposite, either.
“Would you prefer I told you about the twins I brought home last night?”
“I would, actually. Were they very American? Did they giggle when you removed their shirts?”
“Actually, they had very large cocks,” she says, rubbing at a spot of paint on her sleeve. “One of them could only speak Russian, the other had a Jersey accent.”
“So you only spoke to the Russian. You didn’t care about their large cocks, you thought they were an interesting study in contrasts, and you only told me about it to - what, make me jealous?”
Irene smiles the sweet smile she learned from Watson and practiced at the bathroom mirror. “I told you because I liked them. Don’t you want me to have nice things anymore?”
His jaw tightens. “I don’t care if you have nice things, in your bed or elsewhere. I don’t want you dead, but I don’t particularly care how you live.”
“That’s a lie,” Irene says, surprised that she caught it. “You have the same tells.”
“Yes, well, you go flat when you try to be charming and manic when you’re bored.”
“Don’t be petulant,” Irene says, getting up to leave because she timed it perfectly. “It’s unattractive.”
“I don’t need to attract you, I already have you,” he calls after her. It echoes off the walls and reminds her of the tunnels under London, of prayers on clay tablets that outlast the wish. It must be killing him to linger like this, even while he plots his escape.
(He’s not wrong, but if he’s an addiction, he’s about as bad as the heroin she stopped using. Always on her mind, never to be touched.)
v.
The great Irene Adler: you were broken and you got better. You give me hope.
She can’t die. They need each other as counterweights so their worlds don’t overbalance, and there’s no place safer for her than one of his snipers’ crosshairs.
vi.
Moriarty has the same tells he did when he was calling himself Sherlock and compromising her. It takes her a month to confirm it. There’s a twitch in his jaw and his fingers, a slight frown that looked less like the prelude to violence before he revealed himself. She’s relearning him, bit by bit.
When he finds out that she tortured Moran, he lights up like child.
“You thought he’d killed Sherlock and you wanted information about Moriarty, so you tortured a man and then plotted with him. Irene, you’re spectacular.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“Of course you didn’t. You did it for yourself. How did it feel?”
“You don’t have the monopoly on sangfroid.” She has plenty to spare, sitting here with him, telling him about Moran like a cat leaving a gored bird on the doormat.
“It’s easy, isn’t it? You wish I’d had to fake more to get you to love me. You like to pretend you’re one of them. We’re too alike for your comfort.”
Irene remembers him kneeling next to her, playing his violin as she painted what she heard, how it was always red, red, red. How familiar it felt, how he looked up at her like he’d only knelt to see her from a new angle.
“I bet you wish you’d faked more,” she says, and then they’re quiet, staring at opposite walls until a guard calls the end of the visit.
vi.
Moriarty is transferred to England to stand trial. Somewhere along the way, he escapes.
Irene just shrugs and carries on with her work. If they expected to hold him forever, they should’ve built robots instead of hiring agents.
vii.
The lowest point wasn’t what everyone assumes when they hear she’s an addict. It doesn’t even have anything to do with him, either as Sherlock or as Moriarty.
She has an uncle somewhere who killed his wife and disappeared, and her mother’s suicide letter was about the freaks in her family. The little girl she left in England who painted all her cocktail dresses to match her insides and the brother who strangled his wife with one of his ties when he heard she got the promotion he wanted.
Irene was seventeen when she finally got a copy of the letter and understood what her father saw every time a doctor told him she wasn’t normal.
The low point was the first time she stopped trying to solve a riddle, and it was herself she gave up on. Or maybe it was some shred of naive hope that she wouldn’t be judged for what she could do just because she chooses not to do it.
Her lowest point, the one she never tells Watson about, was becoming herself. Losing Sherlock and getting Moriarty instead, like a changeling, is a close second. Detox is a distant third. It was never about the drugs and it was never about love.
It was about Irene’s ability to be quiet with herself, inside her own head.
viii.
When she was still using - slightly under her limit, just in case, though she never knew in case of what before all this - she used to dream.
(Sherlock’s been a key to her locks, a lake to drown in, her horse to ride into battle, a soft bed when she passed out on the floor. He’s been every tombstone in a graveyard and every building in a city. He’s been a canvas that she painted blindfolded and never got to see finished. He was never a body, never had a face, because she pictured it covered in blood too many times and that’s what the drugs were for, anyway.)
After she meets Watson and admits that they need each other, Irene stops dreaming. They make a good team; real life suddenly holds some appeal again. Sometimes it’s so very trivial, so tiresome, but she minds it less than she thought she would. Extraordinary things come to extraordinarily messy endings, and she wants to keep her best friend even if it means a chores list and learning to be cautious.
Sherlock-as-Moriarty is everything she dreamed about, every nightmare all at once. He doesn’t smell like a morgue, but that’s what the air around him tasted like when she was sleep-deprived in an interrogation room.
He looked at her sometimes like he wanted nothing more than to eat her. Those were the good days. On bad days, he looked frightened of whatever was showing on her face. Greater hunger, maybe.
The monster under every bed is scared. What does that make her?
ix.
He sends her a postcard a few weeks after he vanishes back into the world. It’s a picture of the London Eye, and on the back he wrote, I want people to tell their children terrifying stories about the things we did for love.
She goes to London to catch him again. She doesn’t.