"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal."

― Albert Pike

John realised, as he stared unblinkingly at the woman in front of him, that he had never really looked at Irene Adler – not even the first time they had met. He had always been too busy watching Sherlock watch her to really notice her himself. But now, as he lay staring up at her, he started to see similarities between her face and Sherlock's.

They both had a light in their eyes, almost as if their inner intelligence and thought process burnt so bright that it couldn't help but shine through their irises. Her eyes were blue, darker than Sherlock's, but the similarity still remained. Both were deathly pale – appearing almost corpse like in the blinding sunlight – and both held a slightly sardonic lift to their lips, almost as if they were constantly amused by the utter ineptitude of all those around them.

John watched now as her lips curled into a full blown smile,

"Are you going to say something? Or have the drugs rendered you incapable of speech?"

John blinked; bringing himself back from the brink of his ponderings. He cleared his throat, tasting the metallic tang of blood on his tongue, before he said,

"Where are we?"

"Take a look." She said as she gently turned his head away from her face to their surroundings.

The room was large but made to feel claustrophobic and small by all the low hanging wooden beams and the massive wheel type contraption that sat in the middle of the floor. The walls were made from grey, sedimentary looking stone and the floor was covered in long, dark strips of wood. There were several small windows scattered around the room, each one letting in blinding early morning light. The air was musty and smelt like the inside of a garden shed.

John turned his eyes back to the massive wheel,

"Is that… are we…" he turned his head to look at Irene, "Are we in a windmill?"

She nodded and cast an eye around the room disdainfully,

"Not a functioning one but a windmill never the less. Not the most glamorous place to be held captive."

"What would've you preferred?"

She shrugged, "A dungeon of sorts."

Yet another similarity she and Sherlock shared: a warped sense of normality.

"How long have you been here?" John asked as his eyes traced the relatively ragged and dirty state of her clothes.

"About a fortnight. I was already being imprisoned by a group of IRA members in Dublin so everything has sort of rolled into one."

"Wait," John said as he tried to sit himself up but found that his head hurt too much, "This serial killer stole you from under a group of IRA men?"

Irene shook her head, "He didn't steal me, I had just gotten myself out of there and was heading for Paris when he comes up behind me and injects me with a sedative. The next thing I'm aware of is waking up here."

"How come you haven't been able to escape yet?"

Irene nodded her head in the direction of a camera that was fastened to the wall,

"They've been watching me constantly. Every time I attempt to do anything – no matter how discreet – one of them comes in and tasers me." And, to illustrate her point, she unfastened the first few buttons on her shirt to reveal several nasty looking spherical bruises and small, circle shaped gashes.

"Jesus." John muttered as he turned his head away and looked up at one of the wooden beams, "Who has us?"

"Well obviously there's Moriarty and then there's the androgynous looking, heterochromatic sadist who likes sticking needles in people."

"Do you know who he is?"

Irene shook her head,

"I think he's just a killer who Moriarty has commissioned to do his dirty work. He's a vicious little fucker, really enjoys hitting me with that taser gun, he lets me writhe around for a few minutes, his eyes shining with excitement and then just rips the barbs right out of my skin." Irene said as she subconsciously winced in remembrance.

John's eyes traced the curve of her neck and saw yellowish bruises – about the size of finger tips – marring her delicate skin. As his eyes travelled down the side of her left shoulder he saw a faint imprint of a set of teeth.

"This isn't going to end well is it?" John asked, more of a statement of fact than a question, as he continued to stare at Irene's abused flesh, "People don't kidnap the loved ones of someone to lure them to a secluded windmill just to have a chat."

"Depends on if they have a penchant for being melodramatic."

John's eyes slid from the teeth marks on Irene's shoulder to look her in the eyes. Although she – like Sherlock – kept an intricate mask fastened almost constantly around her face to conceal her emotions, John saw a flicker of resignation in her eyes and he knew, in that moment, that there was a distinct possibility that all three of them would die here.

"Don't worry," she said as she refastened her shirt, a smirk playing on her lips, "I won't let them hurt you."

John must have unknowingly made some sound of annoyance because Irene raised her eyebrow at him,

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"You tutted. People usually don't tut without provocation."

John sighed, "I'm fed up of people treating me like I'm some sort of moron. Like I don't have the ability to take care of myself or make my own decisions. I might not be a genius or be able to work out what brand of shampoo someone uses just by looking at their thumbs, but I'm not an idiot."

"I take it we're talking about Sherlock?"

"Of course I'm talking about Sherlock. Before I met him my life was a lot less complicated. I never got kidnapped by serial killers, nobody strapped bombs to my chest, I never accidently ate a human toe because someone dropped it in a yoghurt pot and couldn't be bothered to take it out."

Irene chuckled and began playing absentmindedly with his hair again. John was still too drugged up and woozy to resist and so he simply lay there staring up at one of the wooden beams.

"I know how to take care of myself, I don't need Sherlock Holmes to ride in and rescue me."

"Doesn't mean that you don't want him to."

"You don't know what I want."

"Oh I think I do – and I definitely know what Sherlock wants."

"How can you possibly?" John asked as he finally sat up, the action made his head spin and for a few brief seconds he thought that he was going to pass out. He took in a few deep breaths before focussing his eyes back on Irene,

"How can you possibly know what Sherlock wants? You may have known him for a year or so but you've only spent a collective few hours with him. You haven't lived with him, you haven't had to deal with his bipolar type mood swings, or clean up after him, or cook for him, or wander around after him to make sure that he isn't doing something dangerous or illegal, or bail him out of prison when he's gone too far and irritated the wrong person. I've been doing all those things for almost three years and even I don't know what Sherlock wants or how he thinks or why he is the way that he is. How is it possible for you to have such insight into the dark recesses of his soul?"

Irene had been watching his little rant with a growing smile on her lips – one which almost irritated John to the point of violence. Irene rested her head against the wall and just stared at him for a long moment, her expression was a mixture of condescension and slight amusement.

"I asked you once before if you were jealous about the... connection that Sherlock and I share. You said no and I honestly think that you believed that, you forced yourself to believe the lie because the truth was just a little too painful to acknowledge."

She watched him for a few more seconds before she leaned forward and said quietly,

"Do you want to know what we did together in Islamabad?"

John felt his skin grow suddenly cold. There was a glint in her eye that stirred a sickening feeling in the pit of John's stomach. He didn't think that he could deal with her telling him that they'd had sex, he wouldn't be able to handle her – no doubt gratuitously detailed – descriptions of what she had done to Sherlock and what he had done to her.

Her words in the flat swirled through his mind:

I would have you right here, right now, until you begged for mercy twice.

Had she made him beg for mercy? The idea of her hands on him, trailing down his chest, tangled in his hair, tongue in his mouth, thighs hugging the sides of his hips...

It made John feel like his brain was being rubbed raw.

"I don't want to know."

"Oh I think that you do, I think that you've wanted to find out the answer to that question since you found out that I was alive. However, you couldn't ask Sherlock because that would open up doors that I don't think you're ready to walk through just yet."

"I don't want to know." John hissed as he pushed himself as far away from her as his lethargic body could manage.

"There was a lot of running away from men with machetes," Irene said, adjusting her position so that her spine was centred more comfortably against the wall, "we stole a couple of cars, drove through the night, did some more running and then we shared a packet of Walker's salt and vinegar crisps as we waited for my boat to come in."

"Don't mock me_"

"I'm not mocking you John." She said, almost as if she were talking to a small child who was having a tantrum.

"You think that we had sex. You think that after he rescued me from that terrorist cell he took me to some hotel and fucked me with the intensity of a man possessed. Or maybe you think that he couldn't wait to get me to a hotel, maybe he just thrust me up against a wall and had his way with me."

John tried to turn away from her but she stretched out her leg and impeded his movements by trapping his thighs beneath her calf muscle.

"It never happened John." She said, slowly annunciating each word, "I like Sherlock, I find his mind and his intellect sexy and his acerbic personality incredibly attractive. If Sherlock had come alone to my house the first time we met, if I hadn't known about you, or met you or seen the two of you interact, then I would have taken great pleasure in using Sherlock Holmes in all the most depraved ways that a woman can use a man. I would have loved to test his limits, to see how far I could push him before he snapped. I would have enjoyed finding out whether he liked to take his pleasure straight up or with a little pain."

Her eyes glinted again and it made John shudder, "But he didn't come alone and I met you and saw the way that he looks at you – at the way that you look at him."

She stared at him and, for a moment, John thought that he saw the edge of the mask slip slightly from her face,

"Love is not a thing that I like to mess with John. It comes around so rarely in life – for some it doesn't come at all. Only the most evil of creatures destroy an emotion that strong and, contrary to what you might think, I am not evil."

John looked at her and saw that she was in complete earnest, she wasn't mocking him... she was trying to confide in him.

"When we were waiting for my boat to come in, we just sat on this crumbling stone wall and watched the sun rise over the ocean. I was joking with him about you and about his life back at Baker Street and I watched as his face changed. He looked sad and tired – haggard even – as if the weight of the world was waiting to crush him when he returned to England."

She smiled and eyed John with a look that almost bordered on fondness,

"I think he knows how he feels about you, I think he's known for a while and he has resigned himself to the belief that you could never feel the same way. And, just like you have been rally against your own feelings, too afraid to talk to Sherlock about them, Sherlock has been doing the same. He would be your friend John, even though he wants more, he would be contented with just being your friend. And that, to me, suggests that this potential thing that you have is worth exploring."

John's mouth had grown very dry. Seemingly, each word from her had caused his heart rate to increase to the point of pain. His face felt warm and he knew that he was blushing bright red, not from embarrassment, but rather from discomfort.

"How do you know what he wants?" John asked, this time his voice had lost the accusatory edge.

Irene smiled a delicate, almost genuine, smile,

"We're similar. The connection that we share is not based on love – it's not even based on friendship – it's merely based on the similarities that we share. That first time we met it was like someone had put a mirror in front of my face," she said as she illustrated her point by holding up her hand and spreading her fingers so that she could see pieces of John's face and he could see fragments of hers.

"It was calming and easy to be around him. We think the same, our thoughts travel at relatively the same speed, we see the world, and the people in it, as a mere puzzle for us to solve. The main difference between us is the fact that he has you and I have no one."

She said this without remorse or pain, but rather as a simple statement of fact.

"When we get out of this – and I swear to you that we will because Irene Adler does not die in a windmill." She said disdainfully "When we get out of this I suggest that you have a sit down with Sherlock and tell him what's been going on in your head. Whether you two choose to start fucking is completely up to you however..." and her eyes slid to his and she smiled salaciously, "I would really like to watch."

John's blush had grown painful and he pressed his palms to his burning cheeks to try and cool them down.

"Promise me that if you make it out of this alive then you'll tell Sherlock how you feel."

John took his palms away from his cheeks,

"And what if I die?"

Irene's lips twitched into a smirk,

"Well I think that you know the answer to that. Unless you're a strong believer in reincarnation or rebirth then if you die your secret will be taken with you to the grave and Sherlock's heart will break with, not just the loss of his friend, but also from the pain of never finding out whether you felt the same way about him."

"Is it your intention to depress me?"

"Not my deliberate one. My deliberate intention is to get you to promise me that you'll talk to Sherlock_"

"Why does it matter to you?"

Irene shrugged, "I'm a philanthropist, I like helping people."

"I_"

"Just promise me," she said exasperatedly, "If I end up sacrificing myself to save your life – as any self proclaimed philanthropist should – I would like to know that I martyred myself for a reason. So promise me."

John swallowed, unable to break eye contact. If she was telling the truth - which John believed that she was - then all he could do was gain a new part of Sherlock rather than lose him altogether. It took him a moment to form the words before he said,

"I promise."

And for one brief, illogical – completely insane – moment, John half hoped that he would die so that he wouldn't have to fulfill the promise that he had just committed himself to.