Irene always eventually comes back. She waltzes into the room and pilfers a knick-knack here, a trinket there while he pretends not to notice, swirls and twirls in a ballet of expensive dresses and concealed knives. Her grins come in bright flashes, and he catches them like an astrologist would chase falling stars; catches them then stores them carefully away, to be examined, considered, admired afterwards. He sighs with exasperation when she pulls yet another disappearing act and follows her exploits from afar, newspaper clippings accumulating in her file. This he can always be sure of: Irene will come back.
Sometimes she almost doesn't. She sneaks in through a window he will have conveniently left half-opened, dressed in cuts, bruises and men's clothes, and her eyes shine darkly in the night. She scuffs her boots against the floorboards, trades quips with him and then disappears, silver and diamonds still shining in her open hands and tinkling out of her pockets. There are nights when he pulls her down to him and she laughs into his mouth even as she twists a hand into his hair and sneaks the other under his shirt. Stay, he tells her, and she does not.
He has never expected it to be easy. He wakes to find her standing at the window, wearing nothing but his shirt. In the moonlight she is beautiful in a way entirely different from how she looks under the sun; less real, maybe, or perhaps more abstract. The marks on her skin stand out like black constellations rising above a pale horizon, and he feels jealousy roil in his mind like a restless sea. Obscurely he thinks charting those stars is a task that should be his, and his only, and on her shoulder his hands land soft, and heavy.
So he lets her leave, and does not tell her the man she has just set her sights on is a brute, or an imbecile, or that he will hurt her. When he sees her again her arms are speckled in dark bruises, and in the shadows of his room the marks shift like a panther's. He laps at them until he feels them warm under his tongue, until he has covered everything that isn't himself and made it his. It is his name that rises, whispered and shivering, to her lips, and that is good, but not good enough.
And Irene gets in trouble, and still he says nothing, though he keeps the window open. He maps the varied patterns that the world paints on her body with his lips and his fingers, presses kisses to half-healed cuts and old scars. There are shadows creeping into her eyes, that were not there before, and those also he tracks, and catalogs them in stead of the smiles, which are rare, and becoming rarer still. Be careful, he tells her as she lies by his side, but she laughs into the crook of his jaw and falls asleep, careless and unwary.
It is a slow evolution, but she comes to him more and more often. Stolen rubies glitter in her hair, unless it is amber, spinning slow and mesmerizing at her throat, a matching set of handprints fading red and yellow at her hips. She is all smoke and mirrors, all grace and danger, dancing her dangerous circles around the Yard and Holmes himself. And when still she disappears in search of yet another adventure, yet another thrill he pulls some strings, adds a few misdirections of his own and waits for her to come back to him. She always does.
One day there will be more stars than there will be skies in her eyes and on her skin. I can protect you, he tells her as a storm rages outside, and she laughs to his face but curls closer against him. You could be safe, he lies, words rising easy and smooth, and she stretches between his arms, says she doesn't care for safety. Stay, he asks, and the answer is no, no, never. He is patient, and does not mind. One day she will say yes, and the bruises she will wear then he will put there himself.
A/N: written for the shkinkmeme on LJ.