Fic: Our Hearts Are Wrong Part IV (Sherlock/Irene, Sherlock [BBC])
Title: Our Hearts Are Wrong Part IV: The Boys Who Kiss And Bite, They Are The Brilliant Ones
Author: mad_teagirl
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Character/Pairing: Sherlock/Irene
Rating: PG-13/R-ish (for this chapter)
Summary:This is set roughly four years before the start of the series. I had been writing a Sherlock/Irene that took place during the current series time-line, but then I got completely sidetracked with their back story and so this happened. The title comes from the Jessica Lea Mayfield song of the same name
Obviously follows Part I , Part II and Part III
Beta(s): The lovely sabrinaphynn and martinius who are essentially saints for putting up with me through this thing. By the time it's over I'll probably owe them each internal organs or something. Seriously, I love them to death.
Also I need to give a special thank you suchaprince who talked me down from abandoning this story all together after the casting announcement for Irene.
Disclaimer: Pretty much everything belongs to either ACD, Gatiss, Moffat, or the BBC with the exception of my casting choice for Miss Adler (who I know has been cast at this point, but wasn't when I started writing it and I'm holding onto my grandfather clause), and my choice to take her character in the direction of psychology and criminal profiling as opposed to opera singing.
Our Hearts Are Wrong
Part IV:
The Boys Who Kiss And Bite, They Are The Brilliant Ones
The look Sally Donovan shot Irene when she arrived at the crime scene was, for lack of a better word, withering. Although Irene had to admit, it was not unwarranted. Arguing vehemently that you were not involved with someone, and then turning up almost attached to their hip did smack a bit of hypocrisy. Or at least secrets, and if there was something Irene had started to learn in this whole playing normal thing was that female friends expected you to share.
It was something she filed away to work on.
Lestrade, on the other hand, glanced at them and gave a small resigned shake of the head that made Irene almost want to grab onto his jacket and ask if he was disappointed in her. It was a thought that made her properly unhappy, more than the idea of her parents being disappointed in her ever had. So Irene lowered her gaze and trailed behind Sherlock to the where the corpse was still hanging, just beyond a mesh of caution tape. The man was hung by his ankles, with his throat cut in a single, deep gash. Otherwise the crime scene was pristine.
“Well?” Lestrade asked, and Irene relaxed slightly.
“Is this exactly how you found him? Nothing has been moved?” Sherlock called over his shoulder from where he stood next to the suspended corpse.
“Nothing, I haven’t even had the place dusted for prints.” Sherlock turned at that, eyes narrowed.
“Are you sure? Nothing has been cleaned at all? I need you to be positive, it’s important.”
“I said nothing’s been touched, so nothing’s been touched. Sherlock, what are you on about?” Lestrade all but groaned.
“This is wrong,” Irene finally said and both men looked at her with nearly identical, confused expressions.
“Well… yes, but someone has been murdered, dear, I think were fairly comfortable with the assumption that it’s wrong.” Lestrade said patiently.
“That’s not what I meant,” She told him, pointedly keeping her tone level. “We shouldn’t have found him, the body. Something must have gone wrong, because there’s no way we would have found it otherwise. The killer is … meticulous really.” Lestrade looked from her to the body and back again.
“How do you figure?”
“There’s no blood.” Irene said with a small incline of her head. “And before you say it, no I don’t mean in the body. I was paying attention to the whole drained of blood thing.”
“Exactly!” Sherlock all but shouted with a gesture at the corpse “The crime scene is completely clean. The way the killer drained the victim of the blood was by suspending him by his ankles, and then cutting his throat. It’s the most effective way really, because the heart does all the work - pumps all the blood out without you having to lift a finger. But it’s messy, killing someone that way, there really ought to be blood everywhere.”
“Like I was saying,” she barely suppressed her grin “there’s no blood.”
“Yes all right, but why is there no blood?” Lestrade sighed; Sherlock shot a glance at Irene, like he was passing it off to her, expecting her to be able to explain it.
“That’s what I mean, it’s wrong. Why would someone who is so practiced that he must have had a dozen kills before this one leave him for us to find? I’m willing to bet he’s been doing this for years but this is the first victim we’ve come across. He’s been so careful up until now. Why clean up the scene but leave the body like this? Why kill him out in public to begin with?” She made a small, hopeless, shrug. “We don’t have all the puzzle pieces, it isn’t fitting together right. That’s all I’ve got right now, sorry boss.”
“It’s all right, considering you’re still an intern it wouldn’t be great for morale if you kept catching us murders before any of the other officers even knew there’d been a crime,” Lestrade told her with an affectionate pat on her head before turning and heading back to the rest of the police on the scene.
“What, no theories then?” Sherlock asked with an arched eyebrow. Irene matched his expression, crossing her arms.
“I could ask you the same thing you know. Technically speaking, I’m just a student intern, you’re the world’s only consulting detective. You tell me the who and why.” Sherlock was silent for awhile before pressing his lips into a thin line.
“Fine, you’re right, we need more evidence. Either way we should leave before Anderson comes over here.” Irene looked over her shoulder at that, following his line of sight to where Anderson was pulling on a pair of latex gloves and glaring daggers at the pair of them. Irene made a small, irritated noise in the back of her throat.
“That would probably be for the best, I might actually hit him this time.” Sherlock chuckled at that, but all the same followed her away from the crime scene.
**
It had started to rain as they made it back into the open, and Irene instantly regretted her lack of foresight in not having brought an umbrella. The rain fell hard enough that her hair and clothing were plastered onto her like an extension of her skin, and she could hardly see through the sheets of water, but from what she was able to tell Sherlock was in much the same condition.
Trying to hail a cab proved futile, and after the third one had driven past without stopping, and splashed even more water on her in the process, Sherlock grabbed her arm and pulled her sharply away from the curb.
“Oh, what are you DOING?” She shouted over the sound of the rain, and the starting thunderclaps. “How the HELL am I supposed to get back to my flat if I can’t get a damn taxi?”
“You’re not going to get a cab in this weather. Now come on,” He said, moving his grip to her wrist and pulling her along behind him.
“Where are we even going?” Irene yelled at his back.
“Out of this damn weather,” Had been his only response; without even stopping, or turning to look at her.
She was half numb with cold by the time he yanked her into the lobby of a derelict apartment building. She automatically headed towards the elevator, despite looking less safe than a collapsing mine shaft.
“It doesn’t work.” Sherlock said shortly, holding his hand out to her. Irene had supposed, at the time, she should have found the gesture odd, he wasn’t really one for this sort of physical display.
She’d started to accept the fact that she was not going be able to understand most of the things that this beautiful lunatic was going to do, so she’d let him pull her up three flights of creaking, warped stairs. When he finally stopped in front of a dark door, twisting keys into the lock and giving it a few hard smacks before it opened. She really wasn’t surprised in the least that his flat looked like a tornado had rolled through it.
“It’s colder in here than it was in the storm,” She huffed, watching the pale cloud her breath made. He nodded; a quick, annoyed little bob of the head.
“Yes, the radiator is broken, come on, there’s a space heater in the bedroom.”
“The bedroom?” she asked with a small, incredulous snort.
“You can stay in here and freeze if you’d prefer,” Sherlock said over his shoulder as he headed into the back of his flat, pulling off his wet coat in the process and dropping it behind him. Irene stood in the living room a moment longer, shivering, before kicking her wet shoes off by the front door, squaring her shoulders, and following him.
The instant she got through the doorway there were hands in her hair and wet lips pressing against her mouth. Sherlock tasted like the storm outside and Irene twisted her fingers in the front of his shirt, pushing herself against him. The absence of her shoes made the height difference between them somewhat awkward and she had to practically stand on the tips of her toes to meet his mouth.
They were both a mess of wet hair and soaked clothing stuck to their skin, and Irene pressed herself to him just as much out of desire as it was because it was improbably cold.
“We should get you out of these before you get hypothermia,” he said, lips brushing against her forehead while those ridiculously long fingers worked open the buttons on the front of her blouse.
“So it’s just my health that you’re concerned for then?” Irene whispered between kisses, unable to keep the smirk out of her voice.
“Of course, if you wind up in hospital Lestrade will never let me hear the end of it.” Sherlock told her, punctuating by pulling her shirt the rest of the way open and roughly over her shoulders to fall in an undignified pile on the floor. “I never studied medicine, but it’s my understanding that direct body contact is generally thought to be one of the best ways of treating that.”
“Oh.” She breathed before his mouth was over hers again and he was pushing her down onto the mattress, all angles and hands and mouth brushing over her neck and chest and over her arms like he needed to study her, understand her. He kept a running tally of every tiny scar or old wound he came across as he made his way down her torso. And it was all she could do to not make an utter fool of herself at the feel of it, so she squeezed her eyes shut and bit down on her bottom lip hard enough to be greeted with the slightest coppery taste.
“I could just tell you how I got them, you know,” Irene gasped as Sherlock’s teeth grated over her hip bone.
“Don’t. It’s not a game if you tell me. Now shut up. Chemical burn from when you were fourteen,” Sherlock said against the crook of her left elbow. “You had five … no… six stitches. Whoever put you back together was an artist, you can barely notice the suture marks here. They were a genius, they had to sew your whole bloody arm up and no one would ever know…” The underside of her right forearm “My… didn’t you get into your share of fights as a child… my...”
She opened her eyes enough to peer awkwardly down her own torso to where he hovered, grinning in a way that should have made her blood run cold if only it didn’t just make her heart beat even faster in her chest.
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men... you’re an absolute disaster.” He said like it was the most amazing, wonderful thing in the world, nipping at the inside of her right wrist. She knew she ought to really have been offended; but a disaster in Sherlock Holmes’ book was so much better than the boys who had told her she was beautiful or clever, or even that they loved her.
“Look, are you going to come down here or not?” Irene said after awhile. He titled his head, considering this.
“Tell me about the stitches.” He smiled crookedly, running a thumb along the inside of her arm.
“Now, if you’re going to be the way, I’d just as soon sleep in my own bed. My apartment might be awful but it’s a fair bit warmer than this,” she grumbled in mock annoyance and attempted to roll onto her side despite the madman seated between her knees. Sherlock let go of her arm to grab hard onto her thighs, blunt fingernails digging into her skin.
“You’re assuming I’d let you leave.” He all but growled.
“Try and stop me.” She whispered. A slow grin spread across his face: he made a monosyllabic sound of agreement and let Irene tug him down onto the bed with her.
**
Irene woke up to a square of gray light from the room’s only, dusty, window falling across her and the otherwise empty bed. She sat up and looked around the room, attempting to retrace the footsteps of the night before, specifically in hopes of locating her clothes. She found her bra and knickers on and beside the bedside table, respectively, and her skirt half under the bed. Her stockings had been utterly destroyed during the night’s proceedings and when she located her blouse it was still miserably damp.
She glanced at the small digital clock by the bed and sighed, she had roughly four hours before she was expected to show up to the Yard, so she wriggled into the clothing articles that were the in the closest vicinity to being dry. And she mostly hoped that she would have time to get home for a shower and a change of clothes, doing the walk of shame directly into the Yard would not improve her situation; if anything it might make Sally give up on her all together.
Irene was in the midst of weighing the pros and cons of putting on her still wet blouse when she felt something light and soft drape around her shoulders. She recognized the subtle pinstripes on the shirt instantly.
“Thanks,” she said, turning to Sherlock with a grateful smile as she did up the buttons. It was an uncharacteristically sweet gesture on his part.
“I’ll need that back,” he told her, looking at once uncomfortable and expectant.
“Of course.” She rose on the tips of her toes and placed a soft kiss against his mouth.
“You really are much too short without you shoes,” Sherlock murmured and Irene scowled up at him.
“I am no such thing, you’re too tall,” Irene quipped with a light slap on his arm “See you at the station?”
“We have a serial killer who is running about exsanguinating people, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” He told her.
**
It wasn’t too far into her walk from Sherlock Holmes’ flat that Irene gave up on her ridiculous stilettos, which were even less comfortable without the barrier of her stockings. She was keenly aware of how she looked, walking down the street, shoes in hand, wearing a man’s shirt, with her hair half pulled up and a dozen incriminating looking bruises beginning to form along the visible areas of her neck and chest. Irene was, needless to say, grateful that it was still early enough in the morning that there wouldn’t be many witnesses to her in that state.
The last thing she had been expecting was the dark car that pulled to a stop behind her with a soft humming sound. The man who unfolded from the driver’s side of the car looked like he had been pulled from every cliché secret agent film Irene had ever watched, all dark suit and glasses, fingers pressed to his ear piece.
“Irene Adler?” the man asked after a moment of nodding thoughtfully to whatever words were streaming in through his earpiece.
“Yes…?” she said slowly trying to gauge the man’s intentions, which was not easy with his eyes obscured by the dark glasses.
“I’ve been sent to collect you, please get in the car.”
“Collect me?” Irene repeated and the man gave a small curt nod. “And what if I, I don’t know, don’t just get in the car? What if I say no? What if I run?”
“If you run, Miss Adler, then I will chase you. And I can assure you that if you do that it will not end well for anyone. I am fast, and I am armed. I’ve been told to avoid using brute force, but I will all the same. So it’s really in everyone’s best interest if you just get in the car. Now.”
He punctuated the last sentence by opening the back door and inclining his head towards the car’s interior. Irene’s glance flickered up to the CCTV camera mounted on the lamp post nearest to her, sincerely hoping that it was on and documenting everything, and hoping even more that someone at the yard would think to go looking for her if she didn’t show up for a few days. The man drummed his fingers impatiently against the top of the car’s door frame and Irene took a long, assessing look at the firearm strapped to his hip before she took a deep breath and climbed into the back seat.
Author: mad_teagirl
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Character/Pairing: Sherlock/Irene
Rating: PG-13/R-ish (for this chapter)
Summary:This is set roughly four years before the start of the series. I had been writing a Sherlock/Irene that took place during the current series time-line, but then I got completely sidetracked with their back story and so this happened. The title comes from the Jessica Lea Mayfield song of the same name
Obviously follows Part I , Part II and Part III
Beta(s): The lovely sabrinaphynn and martinius who are essentially saints for putting up with me through this thing. By the time it's over I'll probably owe them each internal organs or something. Seriously, I love them to death.
Also I need to give a special thank you suchaprince who talked me down from abandoning this story all together after the casting announcement for Irene.
Disclaimer: Pretty much everything belongs to either ACD, Gatiss, Moffat, or the BBC with the exception of my casting choice for Miss Adler (who I know has been cast at this point, but wasn't when I started writing it and I'm holding onto my grandfather clause), and my choice to take her character in the direction of psychology and criminal profiling as opposed to opera singing.
Our Hearts Are Wrong
Part IV:
The Boys Who Kiss And Bite, They Are The Brilliant Ones
The look Sally Donovan shot Irene when she arrived at the crime scene was, for lack of a better word, withering. Although Irene had to admit, it was not unwarranted. Arguing vehemently that you were not involved with someone, and then turning up almost attached to their hip did smack a bit of hypocrisy. Or at least secrets, and if there was something Irene had started to learn in this whole playing normal thing was that female friends expected you to share.
It was something she filed away to work on.
Lestrade, on the other hand, glanced at them and gave a small resigned shake of the head that made Irene almost want to grab onto his jacket and ask if he was disappointed in her. It was a thought that made her properly unhappy, more than the idea of her parents being disappointed in her ever had. So Irene lowered her gaze and trailed behind Sherlock to the where the corpse was still hanging, just beyond a mesh of caution tape. The man was hung by his ankles, with his throat cut in a single, deep gash. Otherwise the crime scene was pristine.
“Well?” Lestrade asked, and Irene relaxed slightly.
“Is this exactly how you found him? Nothing has been moved?” Sherlock called over his shoulder from where he stood next to the suspended corpse.
“Nothing, I haven’t even had the place dusted for prints.” Sherlock turned at that, eyes narrowed.
“Are you sure? Nothing has been cleaned at all? I need you to be positive, it’s important.”
“I said nothing’s been touched, so nothing’s been touched. Sherlock, what are you on about?” Lestrade all but groaned.
“This is wrong,” Irene finally said and both men looked at her with nearly identical, confused expressions.
“Well… yes, but someone has been murdered, dear, I think were fairly comfortable with the assumption that it’s wrong.” Lestrade said patiently.
“That’s not what I meant,” She told him, pointedly keeping her tone level. “We shouldn’t have found him, the body. Something must have gone wrong, because there’s no way we would have found it otherwise. The killer is … meticulous really.” Lestrade looked from her to the body and back again.
“How do you figure?”
“There’s no blood.” Irene said with a small incline of her head. “And before you say it, no I don’t mean in the body. I was paying attention to the whole drained of blood thing.”
“Exactly!” Sherlock all but shouted with a gesture at the corpse “The crime scene is completely clean. The way the killer drained the victim of the blood was by suspending him by his ankles, and then cutting his throat. It’s the most effective way really, because the heart does all the work - pumps all the blood out without you having to lift a finger. But it’s messy, killing someone that way, there really ought to be blood everywhere.”
“Like I was saying,” she barely suppressed her grin “there’s no blood.”
“Yes all right, but why is there no blood?” Lestrade sighed; Sherlock shot a glance at Irene, like he was passing it off to her, expecting her to be able to explain it.
“That’s what I mean, it’s wrong. Why would someone who is so practiced that he must have had a dozen kills before this one leave him for us to find? I’m willing to bet he’s been doing this for years but this is the first victim we’ve come across. He’s been so careful up until now. Why clean up the scene but leave the body like this? Why kill him out in public to begin with?” She made a small, hopeless, shrug. “We don’t have all the puzzle pieces, it isn’t fitting together right. That’s all I’ve got right now, sorry boss.”
“It’s all right, considering you’re still an intern it wouldn’t be great for morale if you kept catching us murders before any of the other officers even knew there’d been a crime,” Lestrade told her with an affectionate pat on her head before turning and heading back to the rest of the police on the scene.
“What, no theories then?” Sherlock asked with an arched eyebrow. Irene matched his expression, crossing her arms.
“I could ask you the same thing you know. Technically speaking, I’m just a student intern, you’re the world’s only consulting detective. You tell me the who and why.” Sherlock was silent for awhile before pressing his lips into a thin line.
“Fine, you’re right, we need more evidence. Either way we should leave before Anderson comes over here.” Irene looked over her shoulder at that, following his line of sight to where Anderson was pulling on a pair of latex gloves and glaring daggers at the pair of them. Irene made a small, irritated noise in the back of her throat.
“That would probably be for the best, I might actually hit him this time.” Sherlock chuckled at that, but all the same followed her away from the crime scene.
**
It had started to rain as they made it back into the open, and Irene instantly regretted her lack of foresight in not having brought an umbrella. The rain fell hard enough that her hair and clothing were plastered onto her like an extension of her skin, and she could hardly see through the sheets of water, but from what she was able to tell Sherlock was in much the same condition.
Trying to hail a cab proved futile, and after the third one had driven past without stopping, and splashed even more water on her in the process, Sherlock grabbed her arm and pulled her sharply away from the curb.
“Oh, what are you DOING?” She shouted over the sound of the rain, and the starting thunderclaps. “How the HELL am I supposed to get back to my flat if I can’t get a damn taxi?”
“You’re not going to get a cab in this weather. Now come on,” He said, moving his grip to her wrist and pulling her along behind him.
“Where are we even going?” Irene yelled at his back.
“Out of this damn weather,” Had been his only response; without even stopping, or turning to look at her.
She was half numb with cold by the time he yanked her into the lobby of a derelict apartment building. She automatically headed towards the elevator, despite looking less safe than a collapsing mine shaft.
“It doesn’t work.” Sherlock said shortly, holding his hand out to her. Irene had supposed, at the time, she should have found the gesture odd, he wasn’t really one for this sort of physical display.
She’d started to accept the fact that she was not going be able to understand most of the things that this beautiful lunatic was going to do, so she’d let him pull her up three flights of creaking, warped stairs. When he finally stopped in front of a dark door, twisting keys into the lock and giving it a few hard smacks before it opened. She really wasn’t surprised in the least that his flat looked like a tornado had rolled through it.
“It’s colder in here than it was in the storm,” She huffed, watching the pale cloud her breath made. He nodded; a quick, annoyed little bob of the head.
“Yes, the radiator is broken, come on, there’s a space heater in the bedroom.”
“The bedroom?” she asked with a small, incredulous snort.
“You can stay in here and freeze if you’d prefer,” Sherlock said over his shoulder as he headed into the back of his flat, pulling off his wet coat in the process and dropping it behind him. Irene stood in the living room a moment longer, shivering, before kicking her wet shoes off by the front door, squaring her shoulders, and following him.
The instant she got through the doorway there were hands in her hair and wet lips pressing against her mouth. Sherlock tasted like the storm outside and Irene twisted her fingers in the front of his shirt, pushing herself against him. The absence of her shoes made the height difference between them somewhat awkward and she had to practically stand on the tips of her toes to meet his mouth.
They were both a mess of wet hair and soaked clothing stuck to their skin, and Irene pressed herself to him just as much out of desire as it was because it was improbably cold.
“We should get you out of these before you get hypothermia,” he said, lips brushing against her forehead while those ridiculously long fingers worked open the buttons on the front of her blouse.
“So it’s just my health that you’re concerned for then?” Irene whispered between kisses, unable to keep the smirk out of her voice.
“Of course, if you wind up in hospital Lestrade will never let me hear the end of it.” Sherlock told her, punctuating by pulling her shirt the rest of the way open and roughly over her shoulders to fall in an undignified pile on the floor. “I never studied medicine, but it’s my understanding that direct body contact is generally thought to be one of the best ways of treating that.”
“Oh.” She breathed before his mouth was over hers again and he was pushing her down onto the mattress, all angles and hands and mouth brushing over her neck and chest and over her arms like he needed to study her, understand her. He kept a running tally of every tiny scar or old wound he came across as he made his way down her torso. And it was all she could do to not make an utter fool of herself at the feel of it, so she squeezed her eyes shut and bit down on her bottom lip hard enough to be greeted with the slightest coppery taste.
“I could just tell you how I got them, you know,” Irene gasped as Sherlock’s teeth grated over her hip bone.
“Don’t. It’s not a game if you tell me. Now shut up. Chemical burn from when you were fourteen,” Sherlock said against the crook of her left elbow. “You had five … no… six stitches. Whoever put you back together was an artist, you can barely notice the suture marks here. They were a genius, they had to sew your whole bloody arm up and no one would ever know…” The underside of her right forearm “My… didn’t you get into your share of fights as a child… my...”
She opened her eyes enough to peer awkwardly down her own torso to where he hovered, grinning in a way that should have made her blood run cold if only it didn’t just make her heart beat even faster in her chest.
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men... you’re an absolute disaster.” He said like it was the most amazing, wonderful thing in the world, nipping at the inside of her right wrist. She knew she ought to really have been offended; but a disaster in Sherlock Holmes’ book was so much better than the boys who had told her she was beautiful or clever, or even that they loved her.
“Look, are you going to come down here or not?” Irene said after awhile. He titled his head, considering this.
“Tell me about the stitches.” He smiled crookedly, running a thumb along the inside of her arm.
“Now, if you’re going to be the way, I’d just as soon sleep in my own bed. My apartment might be awful but it’s a fair bit warmer than this,” she grumbled in mock annoyance and attempted to roll onto her side despite the madman seated between her knees. Sherlock let go of her arm to grab hard onto her thighs, blunt fingernails digging into her skin.
“You’re assuming I’d let you leave.” He all but growled.
“Try and stop me.” She whispered. A slow grin spread across his face: he made a monosyllabic sound of agreement and let Irene tug him down onto the bed with her.
**
Irene woke up to a square of gray light from the room’s only, dusty, window falling across her and the otherwise empty bed. She sat up and looked around the room, attempting to retrace the footsteps of the night before, specifically in hopes of locating her clothes. She found her bra and knickers on and beside the bedside table, respectively, and her skirt half under the bed. Her stockings had been utterly destroyed during the night’s proceedings and when she located her blouse it was still miserably damp.
She glanced at the small digital clock by the bed and sighed, she had roughly four hours before she was expected to show up to the Yard, so she wriggled into the clothing articles that were the in the closest vicinity to being dry. And she mostly hoped that she would have time to get home for a shower and a change of clothes, doing the walk of shame directly into the Yard would not improve her situation; if anything it might make Sally give up on her all together.
Irene was in the midst of weighing the pros and cons of putting on her still wet blouse when she felt something light and soft drape around her shoulders. She recognized the subtle pinstripes on the shirt instantly.
“Thanks,” she said, turning to Sherlock with a grateful smile as she did up the buttons. It was an uncharacteristically sweet gesture on his part.
“I’ll need that back,” he told her, looking at once uncomfortable and expectant.
“Of course.” She rose on the tips of her toes and placed a soft kiss against his mouth.
“You really are much too short without you shoes,” Sherlock murmured and Irene scowled up at him.
“I am no such thing, you’re too tall,” Irene quipped with a light slap on his arm “See you at the station?”
“We have a serial killer who is running about exsanguinating people, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” He told her.
**
It wasn’t too far into her walk from Sherlock Holmes’ flat that Irene gave up on her ridiculous stilettos, which were even less comfortable without the barrier of her stockings. She was keenly aware of how she looked, walking down the street, shoes in hand, wearing a man’s shirt, with her hair half pulled up and a dozen incriminating looking bruises beginning to form along the visible areas of her neck and chest. Irene was, needless to say, grateful that it was still early enough in the morning that there wouldn’t be many witnesses to her in that state.
The last thing she had been expecting was the dark car that pulled to a stop behind her with a soft humming sound. The man who unfolded from the driver’s side of the car looked like he had been pulled from every cliché secret agent film Irene had ever watched, all dark suit and glasses, fingers pressed to his ear piece.
“Irene Adler?” the man asked after a moment of nodding thoughtfully to whatever words were streaming in through his earpiece.
“Yes…?” she said slowly trying to gauge the man’s intentions, which was not easy with his eyes obscured by the dark glasses.
“I’ve been sent to collect you, please get in the car.”
“Collect me?” Irene repeated and the man gave a small curt nod. “And what if I, I don’t know, don’t just get in the car? What if I say no? What if I run?”
“If you run, Miss Adler, then I will chase you. And I can assure you that if you do that it will not end well for anyone. I am fast, and I am armed. I’ve been told to avoid using brute force, but I will all the same. So it’s really in everyone’s best interest if you just get in the car. Now.”
He punctuated the last sentence by opening the back door and inclining his head towards the car’s interior. Irene’s glance flickered up to the CCTV camera mounted on the lamp post nearest to her, sincerely hoping that it was on and documenting everything, and hoping even more that someone at the yard would think to go looking for her if she didn’t show up for a few days. The man drummed his fingers impatiently against the top of the car’s door frame and Irene took a long, assessing look at the firearm strapped to his hip before she took a deep breath and climbed into the back seat.