Chapter 8: An Illustrious Client

Sherlock gestured for her to take a seat on the couch, but she didn't move from her spot against the wall. Her eyes were running Sherlock up and down carefully, brazenly, as if she were drinking in the sight of him.

"I suppose I owe you a thank you, don't I?" Sherlock said, taking the moment to scan her as well. Expensive clothes and shoes, dark hair in a neat, graceful chignon, not a single blight on her smooth, alabaster skin. A criminal on the run she was not; whatever new interest she'd picked up, it was paying her handsomely and offering her ample protection.

She met his gaze again. "Hardly," she said, her voice just as soft and satiny as he remembered. "You saved my life, and now I've saved yours. I'd say that makes us even. Wouldn't you, Sherlock?"

Sherlock was saved from responding by the kettle starting to boil. He stood, crossing the room to the kitchen to turn it off. "Incidentally," Sherlock asked over his shoulder, "how did you do it? Broadcasting to every television in the country, I mean. I never did figure that part out."

"No, you wouldn't have, would you?" said Irene thoughtfully, picking a nonexistent piece of lint from the shoulder of her cream-white dress. She looked back up at him, an amused smile playing across her lips. "Let's just say I knew someone quite high-up at a major broadcaster's. Or…I knew what she liked, anyhow." She was turned towards the kitchen now, following his movements intently with her eyes as he filled up the teapot. "You haven't changed at all, have you?" she said, her tone almost oddly rueful.

He glanced towards her. "Should I have?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said carelessly, finally pushing herself away from the wall and tossing her purse onto John's chair. "People do change sometimes. Get older. More sentimental." She stepped closer to his mantel and began to inspect its contents, the faint ghost of a smile still on her lips as she did.

"And have you?"

"Have I what? Gotten older or gotten more sentimental?" Irene asked, picking up the skull and turning it over delicately, her blood-red, perfectly lacquered nails standing out vividly against the skull's ivory-white.

Sherlock didn't respond, pouring the tea neatly out into the two cups, adding cream to hers and sugar to his. "Well, you're in a new line of business, at least."

She set the skull down and turned back to him, crossing her arms over her chest, tilting her head challengingly. "Am I? Go on, then. Have a guess."

Sherlock picked up the two saucers and came back into the sitting room. "Tax collector?" he offered wryly. He set her saucer down on the coffee table in front of the couch, and took his back to his chair, sinking down into it once more.

She gazed down pointedly at where he'd set her tea, and then back at him. "Why do you keep trying to get me to sit on your couch?"

He took a sip of his tea, grimacing slightly. Hadn't steeped it nearly long enough. "Because that's where my clients sit." He looked up at her meaningfully, holding her gaze. "That's why you're here, isn't it? With a case?"

She held his gaze for a few seconds, a silent exchange passing between them before she finally seemed satisfied with some resolution. Giving him a prim smile, she walked over to the couch and gracefully took a seat on its edge, her elbows on her knees, her head resting in one of her hands. "God, I'd forgotten how pretty you are – those curls, those cheekbones…" she said, her voice dipping briefly into a low huskiness. She leaned forwards slightly, eyes glinting. "…or maybe," she murmured lowly to him, "it's just the sentiment talking."

Sherlock set his tea aside and crossed his legs, steepling his fingers under his chin. "Or maybe you're just stalling," he said. "Don't be tedious. The case, Irene."

Irene breathed out a short laugh, leaning back again. "Oh, poor darling. You never did understand the concept of flirting." She smiled at him mock-sympathetically. "Maybe, one day, you'll let someone teach you…" she said, trailing off suggestively. With an eyebrow still raised at him, she stood, briefly retrieving her purse from John's chair before coming back to her seat on the couch.

She clicked her purse open and pulled out a compact mirror and tube of lipstick from it – a carmine red. "You're right, of course," she said as she unclasped the compact. "I'm not really in the business of…giving out orders anymore, shall we say. But regardless," she uncapped her lipstick, "I don't think I'm flattering myself in saying that I've always had a proclivity towards a meticulous sort of discretion which the right people can greatly appreciate; and that by the same token, I also have a certain propensity towards…diplomacy, if you will." She began reapplying the shade to her lips, though by Sherlock's judgment her previous application was still fully intact. "So in that sense, I suppose I haven't changed too much. I just use my talents for the power of good now – a bit like you, I suppose."

"You're a mediator," Sherlock supplied. "The unofficial, nameless sort. The type that do all their work behind closed doors."

Irene was examining her handiwork in her mirror, tilting her face at different angles. "Yes, I suppose you could call it that," she said offhandedly. "Now, 'behind closed doors' I was already familiar with. But these days, I don't get to bring out my riding crops nearly as much as I used to."

Sherlock studied her carefully. Of course, he knew that she was a perfectly adept liar, an even better one than him, quite possibly. There wouldn't be any tell, no chink in her armor – not if she'd come prepared, as she clearly had. And he could hardly ignore that the last time she'd appeared in his flat, pleading for his help, he had been horribly and inexcusably taken in.

But something in this seemed to hold the truth for him. Irene Adler, playing the newly reborn ingenue – he wouldn't have believed that for a second. But Irene Adler was a survivor if there ever was one – alternately gliding and clawing her way through her obstacles, navigating to safe turf, always calculating how to spin things round in her best interest. So, if she indeed thought that her best bet at the moment was to become a faceless intermediary, to ingratiate herself with powerful, influential people, influential families, all while collecting and housing their darkest secrets – well, that he might very well be willing to believe. In a sense, after all, she was in not too different a position than she'd been in before – either way, people were paying her to keep their secrets for them.

Of course, even if that part of it was true, it didn't mean there wasn't still an entirely ulterior motive for why she was here right now – and he certainly wouldn't be allowing himself to make that mistake twice.

She snapped her compact shut and dropped it in her purse, popping her lips silently with their newly refreshed coat, a glistening slash of crimson. "So, I take it you know why I'm here, then."

"Your official version, you mean? Well, you have a new job that's brought you to London, and you want my help. Either there's some part of its execution that is eluding you, or there's some present conflict of interest that prevents you from bringing it to its rightful completion. Either way, you want me to act on your behalf in some capacity."

"Mm. It's the second one, in case you were wondering."

"Doesn't matter," Sherlock said sharply, unsteepling his fingers and bringing them to the arms of his chair. "My answer is still no. You deal in bedroom politics, salacious affairs and corporate gossip. Those sorts of mundanities don't interest me. There's no puzzle in that. It's just rich people covering up their dirty laundry. I solve mysteries, not scandals."

"But I wasn't a mystery, if you recall, and you still took that case. Are you saying I'm a puzzle to you, Sherlock Holmes?"

"Sorry." Sherlock stood, straightening his suit jacket with a sharp tug. "Not interested, Irene. Good luck with your new business endeavours. I personally think this line of work suits you better than the fishnets." And grabbing his undrunk cup of tea, he strode over to the sink.

He was just setting it down when she said, "Even if I told you it involved Lord Adelbert Gruner?"

He froze, the saucer still in his hand. He was facing away from her, and he let a slow smile creep onto his face. So he'd been right after all – she hadn't disappointed him. She had brought him something even more interesting than he'd dared hope.

After a second's delay, Sherlock set the saucer down in the sink and turned back to her. "The sadistic murderer, you mean?"

"Unconvicted, of course," she said breezily, though the victorious glint in her eyes told him she'd known full well the ace she was holding. "The witness at his first wife's murder trial was rather unfortunately…incapacitated come the time of his testimony."

"And what's he done now, then?" Sherlock asked, crossing his arms behind his back as he reentered the sitting room. "Killed someone else?"

"Worse," Irene said, crossing her legs delicately. "He's gotten engaged. And obviously, the girl's family is…not exactly pleased with the connection. You'll have heard of the de Merville family. A fair amount of influence, and therefore a fair amount to lose with this sort of match. Not to mention the fair chance their daughter might be his next…plaything."

"And you can't handle it yourself because…?"

Irene tilted her head up towards Sherlock as he walked closer to her. "Unfortunately, I've had one or two minor encounters with him before. You see, one runs into sadists from time to time in my line of work. Suffice it to say, if I was to approach him now, in any capacity, he would be imminently suspicious of my intentions."

"What about the girl? Can't you approach her?"

"Lost cause, I've been told, and I rather believe it. They've done everything, they say – begged, cajoled, threatened to disinherit. Poor thing's still stubbornly in love with him. Adelbert does have a certain…entrancing quality to him, I'll admit. You know - the sort of thing naïve, sheltered girls tend to go for; and if I understand correctly, she's just the type."

Sherlock stopped a few steps away from her, considering the dilemma carefully. "He's clever – wouldn't have gotten away with as much as he has if he wasn't. Yes, very clever. It'll be tricky, if she's already under his thumb." He looked down at her abruptly, fiercely. "How do I know I can trust you?"

Irene laughed, picking up her purse from the couch. "Well, of course you can't trust me, Sherlock," she said blithely. "But would it really be any fun if you could?"

He stared her down, deliberating. Unaffected, she stood languidly and crossed the few steps remaining between them, so that there was only a few inches separating them, close enough that he could see with perfect clarity the whorls of her lips, the upward curve of her lashes. "I take it you accept, then?" she asked, bringing up a hand to gently brush one of his curls from his forehead. He flinched instinctively before he had a chance to smother the reaction, and felt a slight heat of embarrassment on the back of his neck, exacerbated by the mocking tint which her expression had taken on.

"I'll consider it," he said tersely. "Be in touch tomorrow."

She gave him another blatant, almost predatory once-over. "Lovely. We'll discuss it over our morning coffee, then."

Sherlock frowned. Over their morning –

"Oh, I'm sure you don't mind me staying with you for a bit, Sherlock. I've already unpacked in John's room. I'm not quite ready to be back in London officially, you see. This way, I can keep a low profile for a few more days. Don't worry –" she leaned in towards him, so that her mouth was hovering near his ear, "I'll stay in the spare. I would never dream of slipping into your bed without a formal invitation."

And she brushed a finger gently along on his jawline, with him managing not to flinch this time – but only just. "See you in the morning," she murmured, a wicked shimmer in her eyes.

And then she was stepping back from him and going back up the stairs, heels clicking with each assured step.

He let out a breath he hadn't quite known he was holding, and, with one final look towards the staircase to see she was truly gone, he flopped down unceremoniously on the couch and closed his eyes.

He had a great deal of thinking to do tonight.

"If you were brought a case – a truly fascinating case – but you didn't trust the person who'd brought it to you, what would you do?"

Molly looked up from her desk, where she'd been spending the past few hours in the mind-numbing tedium of filling out the paperwork she'd fallen behind on the past few days with the overflow of intakes. Sherlock had been fussing around the lab during that time, alternately preparing samples, examining them under the microscope, or staring off into space in deep contemplation. It had been a rather amicable evening between them, actually, Molly reflected, both of them content to keep to their own tasks, but there was also something warmly companionable about having someone there with her rather than spending her evening being buried in forms alone.

The initial unpleasantness of her conversation with Sherlock several days ago had actually worn off quite quickly, and had been replaced, to Molly's surprise, by a new, liberating sort of lightness. Finally, for the first time, she actually felt as if she and Sherlock had landed on equal footing, as if the severe misbalance that had always existed between them had finally been righted. It had been unexpectedly cathartic, laying bare the basic understandings of their friendship, scrapping all the unnecessary frippery in favor of sturdier supports, more stable foundations; and she supposed she was glad now, that he hadn't tried protesting, or pretending she'd gotten it the wrong way round, or trying to ply her with pretty phrases. He had accepted it, in his impassive, Sherlock way, and then they'd gotten on with it. And when he'd walked into the lab earlier this evening, muttering to himself about hydrogen bromide, greeting her with a simple, "Evening, Molly," it had felt like everything had been put in its rightful place.

Aside from his initial greeting, they'd hardly said two words to each other the whole evening; and his sudden, unprompted question had made her jump slightly, seeing how settled she'd become into the comfortable silence.

She looked up to see him still bent over the microscope, but, seeing as there was no one else in the room with him, she made the leap of presuming that he was addressing her.

"Well," she said slowly, giving his question some consideration, "I suppose I would have to ask myself why they'd brought it to me in the first place. What they're hoping to get out of it."

"Mm," he said in agreement; or at least, she assumed he was agreeing with her. It was sometimes hard to tell where his mind was at, with how quickly it often flitted from subject to subject.

"And then, I suppose," she continued, when it seemed like he wasn't going to supply anything else, "it would also depend on why I didn't trust them."

He glanced at her, and then returned his attention to the microscope. "Because they're untrustworthy," he said simply, though she had the feeling he wasn't trying to be difficult or opaque; he was just stating facts.

"Well, but there's different levels to it, isn't there? I mean, where do they land on a scale of say, John Watson to Moriarty?"

Sherlock lifted his gaze from the microscope as if in consideration of her words, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. "Quite close to Moriarty, I would say."

Well, that wasn't particularly reassuring, Molly thought, but aloud she said, carefully, "Well, then, I suppose…I suppose I would say it's not worth the risk. Taking the case. If I didn't know what their intentions with it were, I mean."

He looked at her, his ice-blue eyes strangely piercing, though for some reason, she was quite sure he wasn't seeing her at all. "Yes. My thoughts exactly," he said shortly, as he turned away from her, shutting his small notebook abruptly, which Molly knew usually signaled he was done with his analyses for the day. However, this time, he didn't make any move to stand or put on his coat as he usually would. He remained seated, staring vaguely down at the lab table before him.

Molly flexed her hand, which had grown rather cramped from writing, and took a moment to look him over. He seemed preoccupied, definitely – but it wasn't the same type of preoccupation it had been back when he'd been up against Moriarty. The sort of preoccupation he had now seemed to make him invigorated, animated – his eyes were sharp and vividly alight, and there was a restless, pent-up energy hovering around him, just waiting to be directed towards something.

"You just want me to tell you that you should take the case anyway, don't you?" Molly said shrewdly.

"Of course not," he said, placing his hand over his notebook. "I wanted your honest opinion." He paused, but this time, Molly could tell he hadn't finished speaking, and she waited patiently for him to finish the rest of his thought. "But this case is…to do with a murderer I've been following quite some time – a brutal, violent man who should have been locked up a long time ago, and this case might very well provide me with the means of doing just that."

Molly leaned her head on her hand, suppressing a smile. Sometimes Sherlock was inscrutable, but other times he was almost embarrassingly simple to read.

"Sherlock, is the case dangerous?"

His eyes were narrowed slightly in thought, a small, contemplative furrow between his brows. His thumb was running over the spine of his notebook. "Quite possibly," he said.

"And is it clever?"

"Certainly has the potential for it."

"Well, in that case, this conversation is rather pointless, isn't it?" Molly said gently. His gaze flicked back to her in evident surprise, a questioning look in his eyes.

"What I mean is," she said, "you've already made up your mind, haven't you? You're going to take the case."

He lifted an eyebrow at her, and this time, when he scanned over her face intently, she knew he was looking at her and not some distant image in his mind's eye. "Are you saying you think I'm blindly attracted to everything that's dangerous and clever?"

She laced her fingers in front of her and leaned forward, arching her own eyebrow pointedly as well. "Are you saying you don't think that?"

He blinked at her for a moment, and then his mouth crooked up briefly into a half-smile, a faint, rare amusement playing in his eyes.

She let a small smile of her own break through in return, and then picked her pen back up to continue with the final few forms. "I'd tell you to be careful, but I suppose that's not really your style," she said lightly.

When she didn't get any response for a few seconds, she glanced back up at him, expecting to see that he'd been distracted by something else, but instead, she found that he was still staring at her in an intent, scrutinizing way that made her feel strangely…exposed. He wasn't deducing – she could recognize it quite easily when he was deducing; but this was different somehow. The closest thing she could think of was the time right before Moriarty's death, when she'd caught him off-guard by being able to read his sadness – the look of dawning realization, the blank surprise – as if he were reevaluating her in real-time, reconfiguring her place in his mental architecture. The expression on his face now was as if there was some question before him, and he was determinedly trying to struggle his way to its answer but kept coming up short.

She wanted to ask him what he was thinking, had almost opened her mouth to do just that, in fact, but it suddenly dawned on her that, for the first time, she wasn't sure if she actually wanted to know the answer.

It felt longer, but in reality it was only a few seconds before his expression closed off once more and he stood, gathering his things and throwing his coat over his arm. It was usually pointless to ask him anything when he'd already set his mind on his next pursuit, but Molly decided to try her luck with him anyway, because she knew it was going to bother her all night otherwise. He was already at the door when she called after him. "So what ended up happening with the Emery Baines case?"

He paused at the door, and then turned back to her, giving her another careful scrutiny. "I don't recall ever mentioning that case to you," he said, frowning.

Molly felt a faint blush come up her cheeks. "Err, no… you didn't," she said sheepishly. "But one of the techs mentioned you'd swiped the file for it, and I sort of…looked over it myself. I was wondering whether you'd solved it."

To Molly's surprise, Sherlock actually let go of the door and retraced his steps back into the lab, walking over to stand in front of her desk. "I did, actually. Yesterday. Care to take a guess?"

Molly hadn't been able to make heads or tails of the situation when she'd read over the file herself. It was very much natural causes, and yet the tongue had clearly been removed postmortem, and by the careful incision of a person…possibly with medical training. "A message, maybe? About keeping quiet? Some secret he didn't keep?"

"Fair guess, but no," Sherlock said. "It was the sister. A nurse with cannibalistic tendencies. Apparently on the more ethical end of the spectrum, though. Couldn't stomach the idea of killing anyone, but when she was the one who found her brother's body, it seemed she…couldn't quite resist."

"Huh," Molly said wonderingly.

"Yes, a touch macabre," Sherlock admitted. "But still an interesting case."

Molly glanced down at the form she was filling out, and then back up at Sherlock. "So, I guess it wasn't the cat, after all, then?"

Sherlock gave her an uncomprehending look. "The cat?"

She held his gaze steadily. "Mm. It wasn't the cat that got his tongue."

Sherlock blinked down at her in consternation while she continued to stare up at him, her expression perfectly solemn. A few moments of them silently staring at each other passed, and then a few more. At one point, Sherlock opened his mouth and then closed it again.

And then the corner of his mouth twitched, and he cleared his throat sharply, but the smile escaped anyway. It was only there a moment before he'd schooled his face back into a more impassive expression, but there was still a glimmer that remained in his eyes, a begrudging, reproachful sort of amusement. In that moment, he suddenly seemed years younger. His expression was more open, unguarded; his usual gravity had slipped off of him to a certain degree, and he looked almost…boyish – puckish even, in a way she had never seen him look before.

"Good night, Molly," he said evenly, though there was a warm timbre running through his voice as he said it.

She finally allowed her mock solemnity to relax and smiled back up at him readily. "Night, Sherlock," she said. "Good luck with the new case."

He surprised her by responding with a jaunty wink. "Luck's got nothing to do with it, Molly," he said airily and, turning on his heels, he swept out of the door.

If her smile stayed on her face for the remainder of her paperwork, then she made sure not to read too much into it.

A/N: So, as it turns out, it's quite a lot of fun to write the Woman as a character. I'm also very excited about adapting this new case for her. I looked through all the ACD canon, and out of all of his stories, The Illustrious Client seemed like the most Irene Adler-esque to me - scandals and intrigue and action, very much a spiritual companion to Scandal in Bohemia.

And of course, I couldn't help myself, and just had to end the chapter with a sweet little Sherlolly scene - a bit of fluff before all the drama/intrigue to come.

Thanks so much for everyone reading and reviewing, it truly means so much to me :D Hope you enjoyed!