Much in the same vein as my Molly fic. Don't take this as my gospel!
Miss Adler had been known thus since she was a child.
Her mother would call her it sarcastically, irritated at her precociousness and mischievousness. Her father, affectionately. Little Miss Adler. She came from a fairly wealthy upper middle class home, and she began to loathe it once she reached her pre-teens. After a very nearly successful attempt at running away caused everyone to start wringing their hands about her, she was sent to an extremely expensive girls' boarding school. Soon after her enrollment, her parents were killed, as if to make her even more like a fictional character.
Of course Irene mourned deeply, her emotional intelligence intensifying the pain into gritty clarity, but her bereavement process was mellowed greatly by the affections of two of her classmates, and her boarding school years were virtually idyllic, untainted by the sweaty advances of adolescent boys, a Sapphic utopia of French poetry and equestrian sports and steely, intelligent school mistresses. Irene was quiet, and absorbed knowledge silently. She was only known as Irene by her lovers, and every girl and mistress at the school was known as a 'Miss'.
And so it was that with a sad, swelling ache of nostalgia she talked herself into a place at Cambridge, to read French literature at Homerton, that spacious college of so many actors, because she had no inkling of what the real world was like, and was frightened. She hugged herself with academia and the amorous affirmations of great writers and philosophers. Miss Adler, the scholar, had sex with only one boy, who later revealed to her that he was also queer. But she understood. They were in it for the same reasons.
Her parents had not left her impoverished. With a sizable sum of money inherited, she sold the family home in the Wiltshire countryside and with the proceeds plus her inheritance, purchased herself a beautiful home and an even more beautiful wardrobe. Giddy with her financial and sexual power, she picked up and was picked up by an array of filthy minded and filthy rich ladies. One particular encounter left her gasping for more power plays. She attempted to let herself be dominated, but she couldn't bear it. She'd been kept quiet all her life, and Irene felt it was her time to be the main speaker.
First, she started frequenting the sort of places where she thought lipstick lesbians craving control would go. Word spread, and smart Miss Adler began cashing in on her favours and bending the ladies-only rule. She was known for her alarming mix of ruthlessness and tact. The first Italian ambassador to request her services made her really think. She began to see this as a viable career option. She hadn't been giving much thought to what she'd do when her money ran out, she couldn't play forever, but she was in a veritable playground of power of all kinds. She charged the Italian a ridiculous fee, just to test, but of course the Hampstead-dweller saw no problem with this, as long as his wife didn't find out, and word spread beyond the sexual deviants.
It was Jim Moriarty who first saw her potential and the benefits she could reap him. She knew all these secrets, she was smart and resourceful and getting greedy for power in any form she could get it, sex, money, secrets, she wanted it all. She accepted his proposition, and attempted to seduce him, eying up his Armani suit and Gucci shoes, just to see if she could, but he smirked in her face.
Blackmail turned out to be simpler than she could have imagined. Miss Adler, the ultimate dominatrix and the ultimate woman, was drawing out truths in the same breath as she drew out moans. She felt no attraction to these men, but they were easy to manipulate. She thought wistfully of the polyamorous garden of her adolescence, as opposed to this gluttony, but she was drawn in too far and she had to keep reasoning with herself.
She started spinning her own web, women all over the city listening and drawing in and reporting and loving, too. She chose her ladies with care, and they all shared three characteristics: class, intelligence, grace. Her web might not have been as wide or as sticky or as tough as Moriarty's, but she had spun it with true dedication, much like a mother spider.
And it was a true postmodern age, uncertainty and almost-threats and technology making everything so easy, for her, yes, but for the other sides too. She watched the new age spiral inwards, turning on itself. She never had time to read those French novels any more.
When Miss Adler was whipping, or tying, or whispering, or texting, or unbuttoning, she still had a faint shiver in her stomach, the same feeling she'd had running away as a girl, when she'd managed to take the train and she was in a new city and no one knew who she was. No one ever managed to detect her fear and masochism, twitching beneath the sadism. Sherlock Holmes was the first and she hoped he would be the last. No chances. She was upping and leaving, and it hurt in a way she hadn't come close to since her parents died.
Miss Adler, Irene Adler, the woman, the dominatrix, searched for a suitable quote that might rescue the situation, solace in words. There were some Moliere quotes that seemed to describe her well; 'I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores.' 'Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.' 'The more we love someone, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that true love shows itself.' The latter gave her a glimmer of hope for Sherlock, but no, no. She wasn't being rational. She abandoned Moliere, and headed for Camus, an existentialist, the ultimate realist.
'In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.'
Irene Adler flew to New Jersey in flat shoes and no makeup, her mouth relaxed and her hair loose.