AN: I ship these two so much. Except at the same time, I can't. Damn you, canon! XD I tried moving them to an alternate plotline, but I still have my struggles. Maybe someday I'll ship them properly.
Disclaimer: All of it belongs to the grand Sir Conan Doyle.
He had said, "I have lived a thousand years and seen a thousand lifetimes. What makes you think this one is any different?"
Haloed by shadows and silence, she had peered up at him from behind the curls of her hair, all bright−white smile and almost−pointed teeth. Her answer fell fast and sudden, staccato from her tongue. "I'm in this lifetime, silly Sherlock."
Many people knew about Irene Adler. They could tell you a number of things, namely of velvet masks in candlelit ballrooms, and the jewels that hung about her neck and glowed bright−hot like comets (though from who they would not say), and more than half of what the public knew was amassed behind closed doors with the bolt drawn tight in the lock and the secrets bleeding under the threshold and onto the hardwood floors.
They say she was a nymph who held the world between finger and thumb, a fairy who slid translucent from the dark and landed opaque in the center of the room with sprawling wings that flickered like crystal, so thin you could look right through them and into her glowing eyes. They say that perhaps she was never born at all, that she rose out of the meadowsweet that bloomed high in the fields and stood in the sun already an adult, body dripping with dew and the knowledge of the world.
Of course, those are only the legends. What they don't say is that there's a broken camera lying somewhere on the floor, a photographer fleeing for his life, and a black and white photo that she keeps folded into the waistline of her dress against her pale, pale skin.
But not many could tell you that Miss Adler played the piano.
It started somewhere in the middle of a pawnshop on the corner of a dusty street in a city without a name. Age thickened and rippled the window−glass so that when she peered through it she felt like she was looking through the ocean waves at a kingdom hidden by the sea.
It sat in the corner, ornate if dirty, wonderful to look at if hideously out of tune.
She stepped inside and pressed a finger to one of the keys. It shrieked like a murder victim and turned the fingertip of her white gloves brown, but she bought it anyway in exchange for some ruby earrings and a good handful of her pocket money.
She had it shipped to her apartment in London that afternoon. And there it stayed for quite some time.
He met her on the sidewalk, on the bridge that hung suspended above the Thames. Far beyond him, the horizon stretched into grays and blues and the sun danced in and out of the clouds. He held a violin in one hand and a bow in the other, and on the street his tip jar sat empty and unloved.
He played until his fingers hurt, melodies of days when he had enough money to get by. She saw him there, a ragged man, a worn−out soul waiting for the right ray of sunshine. She thought she would walk past him and never look back. Who was he but an urchin, after all?
But when she strode by she dropped something golden into his tip jar.
For a second, their eyes locked. And though their gazes parted, they never really stopped staring.
In the quiet hours of the night, she splayed her fingers across the keys. Now in tune, they thrived under her touch, soaring sounds into the midnight sky. She left the window open just for that purpose and with her feet against the pedal the notes waltzed out the window and dissolved into the blackness.
It was never a special melody, a simple old thing she managed to dredge out of a moth−eaten book she found tucked away in the piano bench.
But to her, it meant the world. And several years later when her hands flew faster than starved hawks, her world would become her piano and the king of Bohemia.
Some say she mastered the piano in four days, but that myth is so highly unlikely one wonders how it ever came to light in the first place. It took her a good five years, at the very least, to get the motions just right, and then perhaps another three to perfect it all down into something that could land her a steady job somewhere. Even if it wasn't the best of occupations.
The first time someone told her they loved her music was in the corner of a dying brothel.
The managers tucked her away in the back of the main room, where the heat and the pipe smoke gathered in a hazy cloud around her. The atmosphere lay thick and cloying on the back of her tongue and seeped down her throat to lodge in her stomach. She had just enough light to see the outlines of the keys and just enough memory to play what she needed to.
Of all the people she expected to see, she never guessed it would have been a ragged man with a violin case strapped to his back and a smile more drug−induced than not.
He sat down beside her on the bench, yanked the case over his head and started fiddling with the buckles. "You look a little lonely, my dear. Would you like some companionship?"
She had no idea what she was getting herself into, but she nodded all the same. "Always."
They walked back to his flat underneath the yellow glow of the street lamps. Mist wound itself in tendrils on the cobblestones and the air burned with the scent of rain.
He introduced himself as Sherlock Holmes, part−time violinist and full−time private investigator, at her service any time it was required. She hid a grin behind her hand and introduced herself as Irene. Just Irene, no more and no less.
They walked back to his flat arm in arm, the echoes of their duets still ringing in their ears. They had played various sonatas and arias and all the Bach pieces they could name in unison. Sometimes people would even stop to drop money in their tip jar and the managers sent them away with applause, if a small one. There were even moments where people would pause in the middle of love to look up and wonder, what in God's name is Heaven doing in the middle of this place? like a golden light of warmth and truth had enveloped them before they sunk back down into the darkness of the sheets.
That night they became Adler & Holmes, musicians extraordinaire.
Like partners in crime, only a bit more conspicuous.
They landed gigs in low places where satin was replaced with cotton and most people had dirt smudged in their faces and under their fingernails. They played for hours, sometimes until their fingers ached so badly they wouldn't bend the next day, and they shared a flat on a homey street named after a patisserie, her in one room and he in another.
They only kissed once.
He tasted like piano keys: black and white, hot and cold, glorious regardless. Sometimes he would lean into it, take it in, all of it. But for the most part he trembled like a deer just before the gunshot, and even if she couldn't see it in his eyes, she knew, perhaps, that he was afraid. Or insecure. Or at the very least unable to love the way normal people do− without anything to hold them back.
He pushed himself away, gasping, shuddering. "I can't. I won't."
She slumped forward, against him. She felt the way he froze when his back hit the wall, like he couldn't quite believe he was here with her.
She drew breath and grinned into his ear. "Can't what, dear?"
He shook his head. One hand rested on her waist and the other balled into a fist so tight his nails cut crescent moons into his skin. "I cannot love anyone. I gave that up ages ago."
She pressed her face into the crook of his shoulder. His heart fluttered warmly in his chest and she reveled in the way the life beat through his veins. She had thought him a companion once, instead of a lover as she did, but now trapped like a child in a thunderstorm she realized that he would never be anything more than a companion.
And for once in her life, she knew real pain.
"You would leave me by myself, cold and lonely?" she whispered, her voice too small to do anything else.
His lips brushed against her temple. "You'll find someone, I promise. You're too charming to spend your life alone. You have but to snap your fingers and all the men in the world will fall at your feet."
She laughed a shaky laugh and held up a hand, one finger poised in the air. He flinched and covered her hand in his with an apologetic grin. "It won't work on me," he breathed into the silence of the flat. "I'm more machine than man."
She left that night. She took all her belongings from her room and stripped it bare of anything that had once resembled life. She didn't even write him a note goodbye.
Maybe as she walked through the streets with her umbrella in tow, her face was damp because of the way the wind blew the rain in her face. Or maybe it was because she was crying.
Some people say it was coincidence the way she rose out of the mist like a spirit of a corpse long forgotten. She showed up on the palace floor like a strike of lightning− an absence one minute, a hurtling ball of electricity the next. They say she was a goddess whose magic made any man fall head over heels for her fanged grin. They say her fingers dripped with mysticism and she had but to breathe and all the world would spin around her like planets in orbit: she was their sun, their light, and their reason to keep circling with the stars.
They say the king of Bohemia fell for her the hardest.
He was prince then, of course, his father still the keeper of the throne. But he was old enough to grow the beginnings of a beard and know that the woman borrowing his father's piano was beautiful. Not just her music, but her smile, her whole countenance glowing like a rose bush, soft and thorny all the same.
She played songs of sadness, songs that never sounded quite complete. Her melodies lacked something substantial, but as no one in the court could identify it, they took no time to find it. All except for him.
The soon−to−be king of Bohemia leaned against the piano with a wine glass dangling out of one hand. The many jewels of the royal line adorned his shoulders, and when she first caught sight of them she wondered how they would look draped around her neck. It was the first time her fingers itched for something other than piano keys.
His voice trilled up and down like out−of−tune octaves, his accent something guttural but dignified, and while she didn't particularly enjoy the way it sounded, she supposed she could get used to it.
"Your music is wonderful, but you look a little lonely, Miss Adler. Have you need of a friend?"
She smiled in spite of herself. "Of course."
They walked to his bedroom arm in arm, but her heart was still lost somewhere amidst violin strings.