AN: It's another little short one for this collection, and again a little bit different!
Enjoy this snapshot of Irene.
Those photos that brought Sherlock Holmes into her life were not the first. Of course they were not the first, Irene's ego was far too great and despite her phone being her life, the memory capacity was far too small. It also hadn't been around long enough to cover her extensive, lucrative history.
There was a house, under an alias she had only ever used for the purchase of this house. It was a small house in a city. It was innocuous and didn't suit her character at all. It was a suburban home that said nothing of the opulence of its owner. But that's why Irene had loved it. It was something Sherlock would never have guessed, and that not even Mycroft could have traced.
It held her secrets, more than her phone did.
If you walked into the hallway, turned left into the lounge you would be greeted with photo albums. Black bound albums that held Irene's favourite memories. She had converted one of the bedrooms into a darkroom and from her earliest days as a dominatrix she had produced the photographs that now lay in the albums.
Famous and non-famous faces sat side by side in the clean white pages, faces she'd stroke long fingers over, reminiscing in the memories of trailing her touch down their willing bodies. You would find Vice-Admirals alongside the common man, Royal Equerries next to doctors and members of many royal families rested beside plain businessmen with expensive taste. She had a whole album dedicated to Kate but that was a pleasurable memory box to dip in and out of in an entirely different way.
Occasionally, Irene would drive herself to Essex and slip into the plain little house just to revel in the albums. More often than not, she would find a set of negatives and decide to slip into her dark room for the afternoon. She didn't have to be The Woman here, which was a persona she really did enjoy, but she could go back to being the mousey 14 year old photography student, who enjoyed developing her many rolls of expensive film.
She'd sit there on a sofa and just stare up at the neatly bound albums. Her scheme with James Moriarty nearly cost her everything, everything but this small house in Essex filled with beautiful, powerful memories. So now she hunkered down in the house and waited as the Holmes' brothers decided her future.
It was a bittersweet moment.
