The following morning Sherlock's immediate waking thought was that even the minutest movement caused every muscle in his legs and abdomen to shriek in protest, as if he'd gone for a hard run the day before. Without opening his eyes, his brow twitched together for an instant, but then his forehead smoothed and a small and smug smile bloomed on his lips.
His next thought was a realisation as well: that the cause of that thorough soreness, The Woman, was no longer entangled with him as she had been for the few brief hours they'd actually slept. The smile dropped off of his face, and he opened his eyes, confirming that he had the bed to himself as he did every other morning. He threw out an arm, his biceps joining in the chorus of protest, and pressed the back of his hand to the empty space beside him where the rumpled sheets had been pulled back. Based on the residual warmth he felt there, the bed hadn't been empty for long - perhaps twenty minutes. And yet that was plenty of time for her to slip out of the flat and vanish once more into the unknown, so seamlessly that not even he could find her.
Frowning, he hauled himself up to a sitting position and noticed that his wardrobe door was ajar, and that his maroon dressing gown was absent from its place between the camel and tartan gowns. Seeing the gap there gave him a small flicker of hope that she hadn't yet left, despite the empty, quiet atmosphere in the flat that had been standard since his return home. For a second he was taken aback by that, by his desire not to simply find the dressing gown discarded in the living room and cooling like his sheets, but then he recalled all that had transpired between he and The Woman the previous night. The slight discomfort about feeling that emotional vulnerability faded away.
He hoisted himself out of bed with an involuntary wince—their five-month hiatus from sex was far more apparent this morning than it had been last night, when it had been like no time had passed at all—slipped on a pair of underwear, and then pulled the camel dressing gown off its hanger.
He knotted the sash around his waist as he walked down the hall, and his heart drummed over the Schrödinger's Cat scenario in which he temporarily found himself. Either he would see The Woman in seconds, or he would have to wait for unknown months (at best), and as of yet he didn't yet know which it would be. But when he arrived at the threshold between the kitchen and the front room his eyes warmed and his lips pressed together in satisfaction, and he let out a small huff of air.
Irene was sitting at the table in a bar of midday sunlight, which made the silk satin wrapped around her frame gleam, and highlighted the corresponding red glints in her tousled hair. He didn't say anything; he didn't want to immediately call attention to his presence. Instead he simply stood there, basking in the sight of her and allowing himself to reminisce about the night before and indulge in the dual feelings of warmth and self-satisfaction the memories evoked.
Nearly a full minute had passed before he blinked and noticed what it was she was actually doing. Scattered across the table were the books and loose sheaves of paper that contained all of his own compositions, and she had one in front of her, and was marking it with the mechanical pencil he always kept on his music stand's ledge.
His face pulled into an expression of confused irritation and he drew in a breath to make a sharp comment, but then he shut his mouth again. There was fluid proficiency in the way she moved the graphite tip across the page, and her absolute absorption as she engaged with the music was something he recognised on a fundamentally personal level.
He continued to watch her for a long time, transfixed by the expressions that played out on her face, which varied from consternation to gratification to the ghost of a smile on her lips. From time to time she paused and he could tell from the distant, inward look in her eye and the unconscious movement of her fingers that she was playing back the notes in her head, and at one point she even hummed a line. They were the actions of someone who understood music, who loved music, the way he did, and he was astonished that she had never shared this with him, given how she knew about his somewhat private passion for it.
The astonishment at what she was doing and how she still remained an absolute mystery to him built within him until it threatened to exceed what he could manage, and he needed to break the spell.
"What are you doing," he asked from where he leaned against the doorframe, and he was reassured to hear that his voice sounded low and steady.
Irene looked up, but didn't react in surprise. Her eyes raked over him in a way that made his pulse leap for a beat or two, and then she looked back down again and made another notation.
"What does it look like?" she asked.
"Like you're defacing my work," he said, though he trusted Irene not to take offense.
As he expected, she only smirked. "I believe the more appropriate word would be 'improving.'"
Sherlock gave a soft grunt of amusement and appreciation and crossed the room to her. He leaned over the table, pressed splayed fingertips into the sheet of paper, then slid it out from under the pencil.
For all of his casual demeanour, he had to acknowledge that he was desperately intrigued. Before this morning he'd never had a hint from Irene that she had the slightest bit of musical aptitude, aside perhaps from a certain propensity for skillful timing and tempo...
He narrowed his eyes and gave a slight shake of his head to clear his mind of the nature of that thought, then glanced down at the paper he had picked up. What he saw sent his eyebrows shoot towards his hairline – it was the composition he had written several Boxing Days ago, when he had believed her dead and had been besieged by intense emotions he hadn't yet understood. He had reacted by venting through music, and he now grasped the product of that between his fingers: the first proof of the seriousness of his sentiment for Irene Adler.
She watched him with a steady gaze as his eyes swept across the page, and he heard the notes unfurl into the sophisticated line of accompaniment she had written. It managed to transform what had been an elegy into something entirely different.
The conversion of his original piece into a two-part harmony was a relevant update, and perhaps he could even concede to her that it was an improvement, if only because it represented their changed circumstances. When he had written the single violin line he had felt alone and distressed in a way he had never experienced and he had attempted to subvert that emotion into his piece. The Woman had been the cause of that angst, but now she was his complement. Even more apt, she was the one who had added that second, harmonising line.
An additional realisation occurred to him as he looked over the bars, and it broke him from his introspective, self-indulgent thoughts.
'Voice,' he said, looking down at her. 'That's your instrument.'
"I suppose," she said in a warm, mellifluous tone that did more to confirm his statement than her words.
He eyed the notes again, even though their melody was already a refrain in his head. "You're a contralto," he deduced. "Well. That certainly is fitting."
"Why, because they're always cast as witches, bitches, or britches? Yes. Quite," she said, her eyes sparkling in challenge as she looked up at him.
"Because it's exceedingly rare and distinctive," he answered, and at her pleased smile he realised she had successfully baited him into some earnestness, by employing his own trick of tempting people to contradict a statement.
He added with his own ironic half-smile, "But yes - that, too," and her own smile grew.
"Why this one?" he asked, holding it up and then placing it back on the table.
"What do you mean?" she asked, playing unconcerned and oblivious.
He drew even closer so that he towered above her. "I mean that I've written scores of pieces—" She raised a patronising eyebrow at his unintended pun and he shot her an unamused look before he went on, "Composing helps me to think and I have books full of them. So out of all my works - what made you single out this one?"
"It's my favourite," she said airily. "And not only because you've obviously written it about me, though of course that doesn't hurt."
His did a double take (he hadn't titled it, how could she know that), but gleaned nothing from her self-satisfied, watchful expression, which turned cocky before she seemed to take pity on him.
"That day in Battersea," she said, and she didn't need to specify which, "John Watson told me that you'd been writing sad music."
He felt a flash of annoyance at John's past self for that bit of indiscretion, but dismissed it with impatience.
"Fine, but how did you kn—oh." He gave a curt nod to himself. "The date, I always date my work.'"
"And a girl never forgets the day she dies," Irene said with mock solemnity.
"Apparently you've an excellent capacity for memory. All those dates to keep track of..."
Irene rewarded him with a look of approval, but Sherlock's expression turned thoughtful.
"You never said."
Her face became more genuinely serious as well, and she didn't reply at once.
"No," she finally answered, "It's from another life."
Neither of them had discussed their pasts; they both opted to occupy their immediate present in every way possible, from the way they both always returned to one another in spite of the danger and potential folly of their meetings, to the way they avoided discussing any notion of a shared future, and he could tell that she felt uncomfortable delving into this uncharted territory.
Still, he felt the desire to know about her past more keenly than he had for years. This was a major revelation, and yet it only prompted an avalanche of additional questions about this woman he knew so intimately in every other way. It served to remind him that even if he could spend as much time with her as he wanted, which he never would, she would be the one mystery he'd never solve. (Because if he had missed this, this major common interest, what else didn't he know?)
There was one thing that it did make more certain: she was his reflection, his counterpart, his one and only match.
"Just how many back?" he asked. He made his voice sardonic, both to compensate for the entirely too sentimental tone of his thoughts, and to show he wouldn't press her on the matter.
She replied in kind at once, "Oh, loads. Hard to even say at this point."
But apparently she didn't think this was enough to dissuade him from the subject, because she suddenly reached up to pull him down to her level, and when she pressed firm but pliant lips to his, kissing his mouth open with hers, he could taste his toothpaste on her tongue.
He followed her lead, and lifted his hand to push down one side of her dressing gown to bare a shoulder, before he ducked his head to trail his mouth along the skin there.
She tugged at one end of his sash, causing his dressing gown to fall open. As she rested her fingertips on the band of his pants so that her nails brushed enticingly into the skin just below his navel, he raised his head and pressed his mouth hard to hers again.
Still, though he began to lose himself to the kiss, he sensed his curiosity over this hitherto unknown aspect of her past niggling in the back of his mind, and he knew that this wasn't over for him. This was a puzzle of hers that he did want to solve, and as uncomfortable not just she but also he had always found the concept, it might precipitate a more open dialogue.
Perhaps because of the new and more secure territory they had come to occupy within the previous day, the idea wasn't nearly as alarming as it once might've been.