Please note, this story is now rated M. Now without any further ado...!

Known and Unknown

It felt like drowning.

It was terrifying, he couldn't breathe, and all his focus was concentrated on one single physical directive. But rather than desperately fighting for his survival, the force compelling him forward was the equally innate and powerful commandment of sexual need.

Her touch, her scent, the sounds she made. . . they were all the rip tides dragging him farther and farther out away from the shore, and the safety of his old life and understanding. Here Be Monsters, he thought incongruously, but that fragmented phrase was the most his rational mind could do to articulate its alarm, and it wasn't nearly enough to change the course now.

He tightened his grasp under her thighs before turning them on the spot and dropping them both to the surface of the bed, where he stretched out across her body and continued kissing her, trying different angles, pressures, and styles; even in the frenzy of passion, he experimented, and though his sub-operational mind was staggered by the number of variables and outcomes, he was beginning to sense relationships, correlations, and causations.

• If I (A) stroke her tongue with mine in a certain manner, she (B) arches her body;

• If she (B) arches her body, she is (C) exhibiting a pleasurable response.

• Therefore, if A, then C: She finds that style of kissing particularly pleasurable.

It worked the other way, as well. She had plunged her hands into his thick waves of hair, scratching her nails lightly against his scalp, and he was dizzied by the increased level of sensuality he was experiencing. As part of a final effort to impose order and control upon a situation firmly outside his realm of familiarity of understanding, he thought:

When she (A) pulls my hair like that, then (B) I experience a significant increase in the rate of my pulse and respiration. When B occurs, I have a markedly pleasurable response. Therefore I must find A enjoyable.

These were the most fleeting and loosely-formed of analyses, however, especially considering his usual standard. He would always remain bound by the way his brain categorised and sorted incoming stimuli and data, but he was too overwhelmed to go any further than cursory observations. There were just so many new experiences, all at once—and they weren't even undressed, yet.

That needed to change.

Without even a moment's forethought or planning, he grasped the tie of his dressing gown—a dressing gown he had untied himself a thousand times but never like this—and sharply yanked it loose.

She gasped at his assertiveness, staring up into his face with wide but approving eyes, and he was vaguely surprised at his own initiative, but his passion was too heightened and demanding to dwell on anything beyond what was going to happen from one second to the next.

He rocked back slightly onto his knees and grasped each lapel of the robe, before pulling it open in one fluid move. For the second time since they had met he was inches from her uncovered figure, but the two instances were practically incomparable. Then, she had been nude but obscured in all the ways that had mattered to either of them. This time she was naked in every sense of the word.

The intensity of the situation in combination with his tremendous attraction to the sight before him stopped his breath entirely, and he felt suddenly frozen.

A flush began to rise along her cheeks and chest from his sustained and unblinking scrutiny of her body, but after a moment she seemed to sense his paralysis, and she reached up to lace her fingers through his. Then, staring pointedly into his eyes almost in challenge, she placed his palms over her chest to cup her breasts, covering his hands with her own next. The instant he made contact with her flushed skin, a sharp exhalation huffed out of him, and the room filled with the sound of his hoarse breathing.

He moulded his long fingers against the curved shapes, and marveled at the firm but supple consistency of her flesh, and at the way the texture of the tips changed and tautened in response to his touch. He flexed his hand slightly, feeling the pliant heft, and she tightened her hands over his, and tipped her head back with a soft sigh. He stared down at her prone form and fluttering lashes, and something about the sight of her—very specifically she—looking so vulnerable and wanton provoked another heavy deluge of mind-numbing but exhilarating lust. In this moment, she appeared so contrary to the dominatrix persona that she showed to the world, and his intrigue at her ability to seamlessly vacillate between the two only added to his attraction.

He didn't doubt that she held elements of both characters in her native personality, but this was a side that he gathered she rarely, if ever, revealed, and she had decided to show it to him.

For his part, he was fully reciprocating; he had never shown this side of himself to anyone, full stop. He had been vaguely aware of sexuality as more than simply a concept to be understood in order to gain greater insights to the behaviour of others, but only insofar as the fact that he'd occasionally had sexual dreams or inconvenient erections. And he had experimented with self-pleasure, but it was incredibly rare—even more so now that he no longer used banned substances. But even during those times, he had never felt such a fundamental, all-encompassing drive as this. His experimentation had been borne of boredom and idle curiosity, and almost any distraction that came along would divert him without any sexual frustration resulting. On a base, instinctive level, he understood that this was something else entirely, and there would be no stopping it. He had indeed crossed a boundary, and it was too late to turn back. Yet not only did he find himself unconcerned with this conclusion, but he no longer even cared that he wasn't concerned.

It had taken approximately fifteen minutes to come to this point—a point so diametrically opposite to his original position. . . Fifteen minutes to completely dismantle and invalidate his entire attitude on ever having sexual intercourse, heretofore.

An insistent pressure to the middle of his palms made him look down from her face, and he dragged his fingertips over the front of her breasts, before rolling the pebbling flesh between his thumb and forefinger, engrossed in a way that he hadn't been even when cataloguing the many various types of tobacco ash—an endeavour which had occupied his attention for five entire days.

She emitted a light, breathy sigh under his ministrations, then pulled him down for another deep kiss, which turned aggressive, and finally only broke with her pulling away to start tearing away at the buttons of his shirt.

He looked down, panting heavily and gaping in amazement as she unfastened the entire row, then leaned forward to pull the fabric away from his shoulders and over his arms, all in six seconds.

Ah, there was that other, more familiar side. . .

"I'm good at what I do," she smirked at his expression, and she tossed the article of clothing above his head and onto the floor.

"I've no doubt," he answered seriously, and he was surprised at how dry his mouth felt, and how gravelly his voice sounded. Was this normal?

"And are you working now?" he added, almost as an afterthought. His mental processes weren't precisely operating at normal competence.

However, the subtext was clear – do you have any ulterior motives for doing this? He couldn't see how, but he had long since learned not to underestimate Irene Adler. Even though she had been facing execution today, how many other, secondary schemes might she have had in play before she was captured, and how might he have figured into those plans?

She held his eye without answering for a moment, then responded slowly and suggestively, "If I were working, I'd never do what I'm about to. . ." Then without warning she rolled them over, until he was on his back and her knees rested against the bedspread on either side of his hips.

"T-ake control?" he asked wryly, though the effect was ruined by his slight stammer. He swallowed and tried for a steadier voice when he added, "I thought that that was the entire point to your profession."

She laughed softly, her eyes sparkling. "Spoken like someone who hasn't yet had enough experience to predict what's coming, and therefore understand the innuendo. . . I suppose I'll just have to show you what I mean, then."

His eyebrows furrowed slightly over the suggestion that he'd missed something, but any ability he might have had to puzzle out what she meant was lost when she shrugged off the dressing gown and pressed her chest back against him.

How could he have found her figure itself so mundane before, when they had first met at her home in Belgravia? Her nudity had thrown him off, yes, but only because it denied him any cues that would allow him to read her. Then, it simply confounded him, but now each glance at the pale naked skin, slightly flared hips, small high-set breasts, and delicate clavicle flooded intoxicating arousal through him, and he lost himself again in the sensation of their lips moving together and their tongues dueling for that control.

His hands skimmed up and down her back as they kissed, pulled away, and reconnected, and he detected that the passcode to her broken safe was no longer accurate. She had grown thin in her incarceration, and had lost at least a half an inch to an inch at her bust, waist, and hips. Her vertebrae, too, were like ebony piano keys as he traced a finger down her spine. But while he had the transitory thought that he hoped she was able to regain her former fitness, it didn't affect his lust at all; though seeing her body incited desire in him, it was because it was her, rather than the attributes in and of themselves (admirable as they were). He was attracted to her mind and her character far more than anything physical or obvious, and she was clearly still The Woman, despite showing him more of the gentler side he had only glimpsed fleetingly before. And as he had already come to understand, the complexity of her disposition only made him find her more intriguing, and therefore more sexually appealing.

. . . An appeal that became almost unbearably overwhelming when she rolled her hips against him unexpectedly, drawing a convulsive groan from him. He briefly broke away from their kiss to stare at her, a foreign perplexed expression on his face, and she smiled like a sphinx at him in response. He growled low in his throat—a noise he had never before heard emitting from himself—and reached up again to reclaim her mouth possessively. Still smiling against his lips, she repeated the motion, and this time he instinctively raised his own hips in answer, his breathing noticeably accelerated.

Then, seeming to come to resolve over something, Irene suddenly straightened up, and without warning she reached for the waistband of his trousers. The stakes had been raised. Sherlock's breath wavered, caught, and then continued in its hurried pace, and he regarded her with that same blank, waiting, dark stare. The knowing, hyper-aware expression that Sherlock Holmes had always worn was gone; this was a different animal.

He remained silently watchful as she unfastened the top button, although his irregular breathing was loud around them, as was hers. Then, as she reached for the tab of his zipper, he reached out to catch her wrist, and she hesitated with her hand poised above his waist. He saw that she was wondering if he was having eleventh-hour reconsiderations, but a smile curled up on either side of his mouth, and he assessed her with a very well-used expression—a calculating one.

"Sherlock?" she murmured in question as he continued to smile at her enigmatically, motionless.

"One forty-three," he said.

She nodded once, understanding instantly, and without hesitation she grasped his other wrist with her free hand and counted to thirty herself.

"You're one fifty-two," she reported, with a hard smile of victory. "I win. And I think I have something in mind that might send it even higher. . ."

Without further hesitation and with a look of focused determination, she tugged the zipper down, and he could first feel cool air through the fabric of his underwear, and then the hot breath of her mouth as she leaned over the undone trousers, and proceeded to peel them down his legs and over his ankles, pausing only to slip off his shoes and socks as well.

This left now left him the most naked he had ever been in front of any woman besides his mother and nannies, who also hadn't seen him like this since pre-adolescence, although any thoughts pertaining to his childhood caretakers were emphatically banished when a moment later she reached up to hook her thumbs under the band of his pants. Instead, he focused on the feeling of her fingers tracing the wisp of cotton fabric down his legs, the fast-paced gusts of air puffing against his skin in syncopation with her breathing, and the nearly-painful thudding of his own heart, both in chest. . . and elsewhere.

He was now fully disrobed, and while he had never been particularly modest or concerned with his own nudity, he had never been naked in a sexual context; it was just that he happened not to be wearing clothes at a given time. But now, as she took in the view of his body appraisingly from where she was lounged at his feet, he found his simple lack of attire incredibly erotic, and also somewhat dangerous-feeling. Even her gaze looked predatory as she raked her eyes from his chest to his thighs and back up to his face to drill him with eye contact that promised illicit acts in his future. He had never been sexually appraised like this—so openly and by someone whose opinion actually mattered to him—and it triggered a surge of adrenaline as if he were having a flight-or-flight response. And yet, he noted with satisfaction, her pupils were considerably darker than the levels of light in the hotel room necessitated, and her throat jumped slightly as she swallowed the additional saliva that had formed in her mouth. He didn't understand what she saw in his appearance that warranted such a response, but maybe she too just envisioned his (admittedly) brilliant mind when she looked at his body.

She maintained that thrillingly foreboding eye contact as she dragged herself back up to straddle his thighs, and he struggled to keep his own eyes fixed on her. He forced himself to through sheer strength of will, although frankly he was surprised he had any self-control left at all. He had thought it had been lost the moment he took that last step towards her.

In part, he had difficulty meeting her eye due to the fact that he was actually somewhat intimidated by her experience and certainty; he rarely had to engage in something that he hadn't first thoroughly tested on his own terms, and he deeply struggled with elements that were out of his control. He liked being an expert on all things, it was intrinsic in his identity, but being such a, well, virgin, put him at a distinct disadvantage—especially up against someone so knowledgeable as The Woman. He had no personal experience on which to base expectations or evaluate his performance, and it made him feel vulnerable, at her mercy.

And yet, another part of him wanted to shut out her penetrating gaze simply because he wanted to fully absorb every new and different sensation. New was different, and different was fascinating. It was also innate to his personality to pursue 'new', and subsequently investigate such an item or experience as extensively and thoroughly as possible so as to fully classify and understand it.

The 'unknown', and the 'new' – two sides of the same coin, and yet one was vexing and one was irresistible to him.

Not that it mattered, not really. This outcome was a foregone conclusion, and it had been since. . . since he had gotten on the plane, if he were honest with himself. Perhaps before that, even.

She was leaning above him now, her hands braced on either side of his waist, watching his face, and he wondered what she could read from his expression. The tension from their sustained eye contact was exquisitely unbearable, and his adrenaline was now so ramped up that he could feel his pulse in every muscle pressed against the mattress, throbbing rhythmically through his body. Immediately he forgot what he had been thinking just a moment before—his last, ephemeral instance of any clarity. How had he had any to begin with, with her hungry stare fixed on him? All that he could see was cornflower blue ringed with navy blue, all he could feel was heated and dewy skin on skin. There was nothing else.

"Sherlock," she said, her voice was low and husky, and he could only swallow to acknowledge she'd spoken. "This is what I'd never do if this were just work," she said, referring to her previous innuendo, and he watched as her face dipped, and then was obscured by rivulets of dark hair, which brushed against his stomach and thighs. And as he finally gave into the temptation to squeeze his eyes shut, she proceeded to show him - just as she'd promised.