Fic for ficklepig: Just the Two of Us
Title: Just the Two of Us
Recipient: ficklepig
Author: musamihi
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft Holmes , Irene Adler/Sherlock Holmes
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some body modification.
Word Count: 2,100
Summary: When Sherlock refuses to come back from the dead, Mycroft has to turn to Irene Adler to help him tackle the last of Moriarty's mess.
Somewhere beneath the intricate pyramid of gardenias, below the black slab of the casket, there was - presumably - a body. In a moment of indulgence, stultified by the well-practiced words and uniformly rigid posture of the creature that was the state funeral, Mycroft entertained the thought of an empty coffin; of a wrong body; of a corpse scandalously dressed or disfigured, to be discovered some short years later with the tabloid-frenzy exhumation following the publication of the tell-all, blockbuster biography. But he had known personally this particular Secretary - and if his life had had more or less the effect of a tree falling in an empty wood, so would his death. No one would ever look on him again, and no one would lose very much.
The impeccable line of officers ranged before the dais provided an admirable example of rectitude, so stiff they might have been embalmed. The polish of their shoes rivalled the mirror-sheen of the great black box, their empty stares unfailing. And the entire attendance seemed keen to emulate them, so much so that when Mycroft turned his head, he was met with a perfect row of profiles, sweeping slowly with the curve of the church. The one in particular he sought he could barely see - she was just a sliver of skin and black wool suiting.
But she was here. She'd made sure he knew it, passing him in the aisle not-quite-hidden behind the square-jawed thing on her arm. She liked to flaunt her defiance, and it was cowardly - cowardly, these shows of rebellion in public places, among the men and women who would note every irregularity in his behaviour. He had returned her existence to her, opened the door she'd slammed shut with her faked death. She owed him her gratitude - certainly his motives hadn't been entirely altruistic, but all the same, she was in his debt. He deserved her thanks. He deserved, at the very least, her cooperation. But there she stood, flashing her face boldly among the living, as though her generous hat, her closely-gathered neckline, her broad, impenetrable glasses would protect her. As though her new face was more than another expensive, transparent piece of costuming. If he would know her anywhere, if the triumph in her walk and her eye made her an unmistakable beacon among the sea of bored mourners to him, who else might slip behind the cloth and glass and skin and shifted bone and find her out?
He couldn't afford it; she knew it. She wanted something.
He was confident, at least, that she would alert him as to what she wanted in some more private forum - or, more likely, force him through the tedium of discovering it for himself - but for a moment, when with the rest of the weary congregation he left the dim sanctuary for the blinding, sun-stained plaza, he doubted. She was there, seated on a stone bench, her companion nowhere to be seen, and while she bore every mark of being fully engrossed in her mobile, he knew she was waiting for him. He should simply have walked right past, made it perfectly clear that she would have to hunt him down at home, that this gallivanting about before the eyes of man and God was a complete waste of time.
But one of them had to play the adult, after all.
"Ghastly ceremony," he said, stopping before her. "I hope you didn't sit through the entire thing just for me."
She smiled, and the new curve of her lip - thinner, stiffer - poisoned his confidence for a split second. He knew very well to whom he was speaking, but he had yet to learn every permutation of her newest accessory. "I like funerals," she said. "I find them relaxing. I was sure you would, too - where else to do you have such unbounded license to look grim?"
"Well - you've enjoyed yourself. Marvellous." Because if she thought to get any more pleasure out of him, she would be disappointed. He needed her, it was true - Sherlock, true to form, had got side-tracked during his leave of absence from the living, and while he was off sticking his nose in some infinitely more interesting affair, Irene Adler was Mycroft's best lead into Moriarty's headless network - but he needed her on a leash, not roaming free. At present she was a legal ghost, and he the man who could banish her back to hell, and until she delivered her entire deliverable he wasn’t about to make a change.
"I have." Her voice was unchanged, rich and entirely incongruous with the uninterrupted classical nose, the narrow, bird-like face that might have been ripped directly from a Roman statue. "Will you meet me tonight?"
"No."
"I wish you would." She lifted her sunglasses. Her eyes were, he supposed, very likely the same, but there was nothing about them that suggested a face beneath a mask, a truth behind a lie, a light behind a façade. There was nothing particularly internal about eyes, in the first place. Just another organ, even if one were tempted to believe in such things as souls. "I met a mutual friend of ours the other day," she continued. "He asked me to give you his regards, and I'd much rather do so in private."
"Do we have a mutual friend? You surprise me."
"He did warn me you'd be an ass."
How perfectly infuriating, to be contacted by one's errant little brother via the insolent spy with whom one had been forced to replace him. If it was a lie, it was a perfect one. "I'll meet you." Better not to give Sherlock the excuse: but I reached out to you, Mycroft, and you were too - busy, I suppose.
"Excellent. Where -"
But he turned and left her, feeling not at all obliged to tell her where he'd pick her up, or when. It was a petty move, and one he supposed she'd find amusing - he could see her half-smile and her silent laughter very clearly, a vision of the Miss Adler his mind's eye hadn't yet learned to forget. It had vanished, like a spirit, by the time he paused to glance over his shoulder and see whether she had followed.
+ + +
She wanted everything.
A name. A past. A place of birth.
It was more than practical; she was curious. With every glance in a mirror, every passing glimpse in a revolving door or a speeding train window, she wondered who it was she saw - wondered how this role would unfold itself. She had always been in the business of writing her own lines, and while waiting for someone to shout them to her from the wings was frustrating, there was a certain thrill in the anticipation. And Mycroft Holmes was a man of talent. He probably wouldn't disappoint her.
But like most men of talent, he was wont to take his own sweet time about things, and she couldn't be expected to keep to his schedule. The part he'd offered her had allowed her to retake the stage, true, but shows ran their course, lights went out, people moved on.
In any case, she was only an understudy. That, perhaps, was the primary factor in her determination to get in and get out - she, whoever she was, was never an understudy. First billing or nothing. So she'd gone and given the prima donna a little shake - Sherlock, darling, if you could do me the biggest favour and get your brother's breath off my neck - in hopes of putting things all back to rights. He was damnably stubborn; with Moriarty a dead man, Sherlock's interest in defusing the various explosives he'd left his wake was minimal to nil. Why bother? he'd asked her, pointedly ignoring her hand on his thigh in that languid, utterly unconvincing way he had. Who would even notice? If a tree falls in an empty wood -
Your brother hears it every time, she'd responded, reasonably enough. Wrong answer, though. With Sherlock, Mycroft was never the right answer. After that it had taken two weeks of hanging around playing Watson to get him back into a mood decent enough that she could suggest that really, he could not spend the rest of his days lying around the subcontinent harrying the local law enforcement when he didn't even properly speak any of the languages. Just do it for me, she'd said in his ear, get it done, and then we'll run back here to rot in the humidity for as long as you like, just the two of us. And he'd spit out the scarf he'd let her stuff in his mouth, and muttered, Fine.
So when Mycroft's car rolled up as she stepped out of her hotel, only five or six hours after they'd parted ways outside the funeral, she was only pleased she hadn't had to wait any longer. She smiled at her reflection in the darkened window as though in greeting, and opened the door as happily and as casually as if it belonged to a cab she'd hailed herself.
The face that met her inside wasn't the darkness she had expected. Mycroft sat at the opposite window, waiting with a pinched mouth and a slightly raised brow.
She slid in, shut the door, set her clutch beside her thigh, and preened in his general direction.
"You had something to say," Mycroft prompted after several silent - and unmoving - moments.
"You won't take me to dinner?"
"No."
"Yes, you will. After what I've done for you."
"If you'd let me be the judge of that, I'd be very -"
"Here." She slid across the flawless leather of the seat and pressed a card against his spotless - but, admittedly, uninspiring - lapel. "Call that number, and your brother will answer. Unless he's in the shower."
Mycroft's hand started up to hold the card in place, but his eyes never left hers. "I didn't tell you," he began, slowly, and she did love to see the calculations shooting back and forth in the subtle wrinkles around his eyes, "to find Sherlock."
"No."
"But you've done so. And you've -"
"Convinced him not to be such a baby."
"Unlikely," Mycroft replied with an immediacy that suggested a certain inability to help himself. "At any rate, this is not the job you were hired for."
"The job I was hired for will be much better handled by the gentleman at the other end of that phone number. We both know that - and neither of us likes to waste time." What she did rather like was knowing she'd accomplished something Mycroft could never have done. "So give him a call, and buy me a great big platter of oysters."
He never once looked at the card - just peeled it out from under her fingers and slipped it into his jacket with a sniff. There was something in the way he looked at her these days, now that a different face was looking back at him, that almost made her regret what she'd designed out of existence when she'd shuffled off mortal coil number one and slipped into number two. Everyone else who looked at her looked right past again, or lingered in that innocent way eyes did when they liked what they saw but didn't know it; Mycroft always appeared as though he was trying to find something he'd lost, or trying to read glyphs in her freckles. What had she discarded with those bits of bloody cartilage? The answer, of course, was nothing at all, no matter how much Mycroft fretted over it; but it made her just a little bit sorry for losing Irene Adler. Perhaps he had valued her more than she'd known.
"I'll call him," he said at length. He dropped his eyes from hers, opened his door, and stepped out into the street. "And then, perhaps, we'll see about dinner."
And off he walked, leaving her all alone with his car and driver and a window that framed her reflection perfectly in the square cut of his retreating suit. She leaned forward to engage the driver. "Where is it Mr. Holmes generally eats, of an evening?"
The driver's eyes looked back at her from the rear view mirror, flat and sceptical. "Ladies aren't permitted."
"We'll see about that."
And then, she thought, perhaps the airport; she meant to pay Sherlock a visit, and make it count. Because she - whoever she was - wouldn't rot in the humidity forever.
Recipient: ficklepig
Author: musamihi
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft Holmes , Irene Adler/Sherlock Holmes
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some body modification.
Word Count: 2,100
Summary: When Sherlock refuses to come back from the dead, Mycroft has to turn to Irene Adler to help him tackle the last of Moriarty's mess.
Somewhere beneath the intricate pyramid of gardenias, below the black slab of the casket, there was - presumably - a body. In a moment of indulgence, stultified by the well-practiced words and uniformly rigid posture of the creature that was the state funeral, Mycroft entertained the thought of an empty coffin; of a wrong body; of a corpse scandalously dressed or disfigured, to be discovered some short years later with the tabloid-frenzy exhumation following the publication of the tell-all, blockbuster biography. But he had known personally this particular Secretary - and if his life had had more or less the effect of a tree falling in an empty wood, so would his death. No one would ever look on him again, and no one would lose very much.
The impeccable line of officers ranged before the dais provided an admirable example of rectitude, so stiff they might have been embalmed. The polish of their shoes rivalled the mirror-sheen of the great black box, their empty stares unfailing. And the entire attendance seemed keen to emulate them, so much so that when Mycroft turned his head, he was met with a perfect row of profiles, sweeping slowly with the curve of the church. The one in particular he sought he could barely see - she was just a sliver of skin and black wool suiting.
But she was here. She'd made sure he knew it, passing him in the aisle not-quite-hidden behind the square-jawed thing on her arm. She liked to flaunt her defiance, and it was cowardly - cowardly, these shows of rebellion in public places, among the men and women who would note every irregularity in his behaviour. He had returned her existence to her, opened the door she'd slammed shut with her faked death. She owed him her gratitude - certainly his motives hadn't been entirely altruistic, but all the same, she was in his debt. He deserved her thanks. He deserved, at the very least, her cooperation. But there she stood, flashing her face boldly among the living, as though her generous hat, her closely-gathered neckline, her broad, impenetrable glasses would protect her. As though her new face was more than another expensive, transparent piece of costuming. If he would know her anywhere, if the triumph in her walk and her eye made her an unmistakable beacon among the sea of bored mourners to him, who else might slip behind the cloth and glass and skin and shifted bone and find her out?
He couldn't afford it; she knew it. She wanted something.
He was confident, at least, that she would alert him as to what she wanted in some more private forum - or, more likely, force him through the tedium of discovering it for himself - but for a moment, when with the rest of the weary congregation he left the dim sanctuary for the blinding, sun-stained plaza, he doubted. She was there, seated on a stone bench, her companion nowhere to be seen, and while she bore every mark of being fully engrossed in her mobile, he knew she was waiting for him. He should simply have walked right past, made it perfectly clear that she would have to hunt him down at home, that this gallivanting about before the eyes of man and God was a complete waste of time.
But one of them had to play the adult, after all.
"Ghastly ceremony," he said, stopping before her. "I hope you didn't sit through the entire thing just for me."
She smiled, and the new curve of her lip - thinner, stiffer - poisoned his confidence for a split second. He knew very well to whom he was speaking, but he had yet to learn every permutation of her newest accessory. "I like funerals," she said. "I find them relaxing. I was sure you would, too - where else to do you have such unbounded license to look grim?"
"Well - you've enjoyed yourself. Marvellous." Because if she thought to get any more pleasure out of him, she would be disappointed. He needed her, it was true - Sherlock, true to form, had got side-tracked during his leave of absence from the living, and while he was off sticking his nose in some infinitely more interesting affair, Irene Adler was Mycroft's best lead into Moriarty's headless network - but he needed her on a leash, not roaming free. At present she was a legal ghost, and he the man who could banish her back to hell, and until she delivered her entire deliverable he wasn’t about to make a change.
"I have." Her voice was unchanged, rich and entirely incongruous with the uninterrupted classical nose, the narrow, bird-like face that might have been ripped directly from a Roman statue. "Will you meet me tonight?"
"No."
"I wish you would." She lifted her sunglasses. Her eyes were, he supposed, very likely the same, but there was nothing about them that suggested a face beneath a mask, a truth behind a lie, a light behind a façade. There was nothing particularly internal about eyes, in the first place. Just another organ, even if one were tempted to believe in such things as souls. "I met a mutual friend of ours the other day," she continued. "He asked me to give you his regards, and I'd much rather do so in private."
"Do we have a mutual friend? You surprise me."
"He did warn me you'd be an ass."
How perfectly infuriating, to be contacted by one's errant little brother via the insolent spy with whom one had been forced to replace him. If it was a lie, it was a perfect one. "I'll meet you." Better not to give Sherlock the excuse: but I reached out to you, Mycroft, and you were too - busy, I suppose.
"Excellent. Where -"
But he turned and left her, feeling not at all obliged to tell her where he'd pick her up, or when. It was a petty move, and one he supposed she'd find amusing - he could see her half-smile and her silent laughter very clearly, a vision of the Miss Adler his mind's eye hadn't yet learned to forget. It had vanished, like a spirit, by the time he paused to glance over his shoulder and see whether she had followed.
+ + +
She wanted everything.
A name. A past. A place of birth.
It was more than practical; she was curious. With every glance in a mirror, every passing glimpse in a revolving door or a speeding train window, she wondered who it was she saw - wondered how this role would unfold itself. She had always been in the business of writing her own lines, and while waiting for someone to shout them to her from the wings was frustrating, there was a certain thrill in the anticipation. And Mycroft Holmes was a man of talent. He probably wouldn't disappoint her.
But like most men of talent, he was wont to take his own sweet time about things, and she couldn't be expected to keep to his schedule. The part he'd offered her had allowed her to retake the stage, true, but shows ran their course, lights went out, people moved on.
In any case, she was only an understudy. That, perhaps, was the primary factor in her determination to get in and get out - she, whoever she was, was never an understudy. First billing or nothing. So she'd gone and given the prima donna a little shake - Sherlock, darling, if you could do me the biggest favour and get your brother's breath off my neck - in hopes of putting things all back to rights. He was damnably stubborn; with Moriarty a dead man, Sherlock's interest in defusing the various explosives he'd left his wake was minimal to nil. Why bother? he'd asked her, pointedly ignoring her hand on his thigh in that languid, utterly unconvincing way he had. Who would even notice? If a tree falls in an empty wood -
Your brother hears it every time, she'd responded, reasonably enough. Wrong answer, though. With Sherlock, Mycroft was never the right answer. After that it had taken two weeks of hanging around playing Watson to get him back into a mood decent enough that she could suggest that really, he could not spend the rest of his days lying around the subcontinent harrying the local law enforcement when he didn't even properly speak any of the languages. Just do it for me, she'd said in his ear, get it done, and then we'll run back here to rot in the humidity for as long as you like, just the two of us. And he'd spit out the scarf he'd let her stuff in his mouth, and muttered, Fine.
So when Mycroft's car rolled up as she stepped out of her hotel, only five or six hours after they'd parted ways outside the funeral, she was only pleased she hadn't had to wait any longer. She smiled at her reflection in the darkened window as though in greeting, and opened the door as happily and as casually as if it belonged to a cab she'd hailed herself.
The face that met her inside wasn't the darkness she had expected. Mycroft sat at the opposite window, waiting with a pinched mouth and a slightly raised brow.
She slid in, shut the door, set her clutch beside her thigh, and preened in his general direction.
"You had something to say," Mycroft prompted after several silent - and unmoving - moments.
"You won't take me to dinner?"
"No."
"Yes, you will. After what I've done for you."
"If you'd let me be the judge of that, I'd be very -"
"Here." She slid across the flawless leather of the seat and pressed a card against his spotless - but, admittedly, uninspiring - lapel. "Call that number, and your brother will answer. Unless he's in the shower."
Mycroft's hand started up to hold the card in place, but his eyes never left hers. "I didn't tell you," he began, slowly, and she did love to see the calculations shooting back and forth in the subtle wrinkles around his eyes, "to find Sherlock."
"No."
"But you've done so. And you've -"
"Convinced him not to be such a baby."
"Unlikely," Mycroft replied with an immediacy that suggested a certain inability to help himself. "At any rate, this is not the job you were hired for."
"The job I was hired for will be much better handled by the gentleman at the other end of that phone number. We both know that - and neither of us likes to waste time." What she did rather like was knowing she'd accomplished something Mycroft could never have done. "So give him a call, and buy me a great big platter of oysters."
He never once looked at the card - just peeled it out from under her fingers and slipped it into his jacket with a sniff. There was something in the way he looked at her these days, now that a different face was looking back at him, that almost made her regret what she'd designed out of existence when she'd shuffled off mortal coil number one and slipped into number two. Everyone else who looked at her looked right past again, or lingered in that innocent way eyes did when they liked what they saw but didn't know it; Mycroft always appeared as though he was trying to find something he'd lost, or trying to read glyphs in her freckles. What had she discarded with those bits of bloody cartilage? The answer, of course, was nothing at all, no matter how much Mycroft fretted over it; but it made her just a little bit sorry for losing Irene Adler. Perhaps he had valued her more than she'd known.
"I'll call him," he said at length. He dropped his eyes from hers, opened his door, and stepped out into the street. "And then, perhaps, we'll see about dinner."
And off he walked, leaving her all alone with his car and driver and a window that framed her reflection perfectly in the square cut of his retreating suit. She leaned forward to engage the driver. "Where is it Mr. Holmes generally eats, of an evening?"
The driver's eyes looked back at her from the rear view mirror, flat and sceptical. "Ladies aren't permitted."
"We'll see about that."
And then, she thought, perhaps the airport; she meant to pay Sherlock a visit, and make it count. Because she - whoever she was - wouldn't rot in the humidity forever.