Welcome back, under-18s! This chapter is rated T.

This chapter features two cameos by Imaginary John in the role of Jiminy Cricket, ie a conscience :)

Pillow Talk

It took a very long time for him to regain any semblance of awareness or cognitive function, and it was even longer before he could summon enough energy to move his body. His muscles felt like agar and his bones felt as heavy as plutonium.

In his arms she felt equally heavy, a dead weight, but the sensation was not altogether unpleasant, and he sensed that he could easily slide into a deep coma-like sleep in this position. Perhaps when he awoke she'd be gone, and he'd have regained his natural sense of acuity after this temporary madness.

He briefly speculated whether or not he wanted that, but soon felt almost too overwhelmed by the very mechanics of thought, and so he abandoned the effort.

A moment later, he felt the mattress shift as Irene rolled away from him, and when he heard a familiar rustling sound, he finally became curious enough to move, even if it was only to raise his head slightly. He peered across the expanse of coverlet to see her nude form leaning over the edge of the bed, and judging by the sound, she had found the packet of Dunhills in his right trouser pocket. She straightened with a single cigarette clasped between her index and middle fingers, and his lighter enclosed in her palm.

"Gimme," he said, extending his left arm and opening his hand, and though it wasn't the most articulate thing he'd ever said, it was the pinnacle of eloquence in his mental state.

She raised one eyebrow in amusement, but passed hers along to him before reaching down to extract another for herself.

She lit them and they both inhaled deeply, and the silence stretched between them.

Finally, unable to let a quiet moment pass without putting his proverbial mark on it, he uttered, "Well, that was certainly degrading to all involved."

The moment he spoke it, he mentally cringed and rebuked himself. Why on earth had he been compelled to say such a thing? In fact, he hadn't found it degrading in the least—perhaps if anything he had developed a healthy respect for the power of sex. He pulled deeply on the cigarette in agitation, and felt his thoughts clear ever so slightly.

What would John say if he were here (as unappealing as the thought of him seeing Sherlock like this was)? That Sherlock was simply attempting to create some distance after the sudden and unanticipated, yet intense, intimacy that had just transpired? . . .Restoring 'the armour' due to fear of being vulnerable?

He stared at the glowing tip of the Dunhill, blinking furiously: at his rash, callous (and worst: inaccurate) words, the considerable irritation of knowing that he was in the wrong, and the difficulty of parsing through such ambiguous data as emotion—even his own. Strike that. Especially his own.

Yet besides a subtly deeper drag on the cigarette and a slightly cool tone, Irene didn't seem fazed.

"Well, I am a dominatrix. Degradation is my stock-in-trade." She blew the smoke out with slow deliberation. "Now you can claim to join the proud ranks of MPs, royals, captains of industry, and other assorted statesmen who have also enjoyed that particular service."

"Irene. . ." But despite the blessed Dunhill, his mind was still labouring against its post-coital stupor, and he realised wryly that like all pleasurable things, there were undesirable side effects even beyond those immediately apparent. Yet perhaps even on multiple nicotine patches he'd be speechless in such a situation.

She didn't appear to be listening, and he took another fortifying drag of smoke.

"You enjoyed it," he observed, making an (inelegant, he knew) attempt to re-emphasise the fact that she had been pleased—literally—only moments before. But even he could hear how it came off as arrogant and dismissive instead.

A beat of silence passed before she stated, "Yes," then took another long pull on the Dunhill herself. Her voice sounded smooth and uninflected, but he knew that she begrudged answering him at all. He had disappointed her. "Sometimes it can be liberating to suppress all the ever-industrious mental processes and simply. . . exist. Don't you find?"

She turned her eyes on him in detached query, but the blue was icy now, without a hint of the heat they had held only moments before.

"I wouldn't know," he said automatically, feeling strangely empty now.

"Oh I don't think that's true," she said evenly, turning back to face forward. "Maybe you haven't had sex before, but surely with a mind like yours you've at one point or another experimented with a way to slow it down, calm it?"

He didn't answer, but he knew that she correctly took his silence as admission.

"It was your first time, wasn't it?"

The tenor of the room was starting to make him uncomfortable. "You know the answer to that."

"I want to hear you say it," she said, her tone completely flat.

"Why?" he demanded, his voice coming out angrier than he had expected it to. Maybe the sex itself wasn't degrading, but this line of inquiry was and, furthermore, it was meant to be. Punishment? Of course.

"Why would that give you any gratification?"

She elected not to answer, and her face was a mask carved from marble.

Once again, John's voice intruded: You're going to have to say it. Just do it, you know this awkwardness is your fault. You were an arse, so fix it: apologise.

Sherlock eyebrows creased together, and he moodily inhaled the Dunhill's rich smoke, internally struggling. As he saw it, he was in a Catch-22. If the sex had been merely a product of his combat-induced adrenaline and wounded ego, and he had exploited her availability and emotional regard for him, it would have indeed been degrading to both of them.

Inversely, to confess that it was not actually degrading, would be to therefore admit that the sex was about something intangibly "more"—something personal, and to concede that she had been correct in her claim about his regard for her.

But the fact remained that he had not found it debasing, which by his own reasoning meant. . .

At once his eyes widened, his heart gave a massive, painful jolt, and he blanched, his clammy skin suddenly feeling deeply chilled in the warm room.

His brain immediately flew into the most hyper-drive possible under the still less-than-ideal conditions of post-coitus, and he reorganised his hypotheticals into declarative statements, which fell on him like bombshells.

The fact that it was not actually degrading meant that the sex was about something intangibly more—something personal.

She had been correct in her supposition of his regard for her.

How had this happened? he racked his mind incredulously. Irene Adler had gotten the best of him, in the end. It had been the longest of long games until now, and it had had nothing to do with money, or crime, or fame, or power (except between the two of them, of course), but she had won. My God, she had won.

He gaped at her in astonishment as the twin revelations of his feelings for her, and her consequent victory resonated around him. The former was so painfully evident now, especially in light of everything that had rushed through his head as they'd consummated their relationship. As sex-addled as his mind was, how could it have taken him this many minutes to abduce the obvious?

No wonder she was angry, he marveled, taking in her profile. She knew that she had won, but he wasn't giving her the satisfaction of admitting that he knew it. In the moment, he had foolishly believed she was simply self-satisfied that she'd finally gotten him in bed. How simplistic of him; it was about so much more than that.

Plus, he acknowledged as an afterthought, perhaps part of her really had been hurt by his impetuous words.

Absurdly, the now-familiar sensation of lust stirred inside him again. He took another, even deeper pull on the cigarette, but this time it was with resolve.

"Irene." His voice sounded stronger, despite his absolute shock—good, that was good. He felt bolstered by the fact that for the first time since he had stepped into the hotel room, he fully understood what was going on.

She must have detected something promising in his tone, because she quickly turned her head and darted a gauging look into his eyes. He didn't know what she saw, but her eyebrows slightly lifted.

"I apologise. For what I said." He pursed his lips, then continued, "The truth is, it all went. . . surprisingly well."

"Not so surprising, I don't think," she immediately contradicted, but the detached mask of her face seemed to soften somewhat.

He inclined his head to her in concession. Maybe if he had been as aware of the long view himself, as she had clearly been, he would have had the privilege of sharing her foresight.

He had always known that they were equals in most ways, but in the area of understanding human emotion—his included—she had proven who was the superior mind. She 'knows' what people 'like,' Sherlock mused, and she had been able to read him as surely as all the others, and certainly better than could read himself. Yet rather than make him feel common, it only instilled more respect for her in him. How had she known?

And by that token, had she suspected all along that he would attempt a rescue in Karachi? He suddenly saw with great clarity that she had. A further realisation stunned him: he had been able to find her precisely because she had planted breadcrumbs, so skillfully that he hadn't even detected her hand in it. Astonishing. It had been a game with potentially deadly consequences, but she'd won.

"Perhaps not, no," he agreed, a slight, impressed smile playing on his lips, and her eyebrows crept up even further as she returned his smile.

"You enjoyed it too," she recalled, and he felt his face heat at the memories, both cognitive and sensory.

"Yes—" he admitted after a moment. It was pointless to lie; it was obvious that he had relished the experience immensely.

"Sherlock—" she started, her voice breathless.

But he had not finished. Almost immediately after he'd finally grasped that he felt some sort of emotional response to her, a response that meant that he desired sexual intimacy for the first time ever, he had also realised that it truly was the liability and handicap to his work he'd long suspected it could be. He had always known sentiment was incompatible with his lifestyle, and the fact that he was now actually experiencing it made that no less of a reality. And so:

"—But it won't happen again. It robs me of all perspective and judgment. It's dangerous."

He had meant his words very gravely, but to his dismay, they seemed to have the opposite effect on Irene. Rather than dishearten her, they caused her eyes to sparkle, and he realised a fraction of a second too late that he had just revealed his new and now greatest, it seemed, vulnerability. She had penetrated his defences once already, and that had been before he knew how intoxicatingly addictive the experience was; he would be even more susceptible to her in the future, and she was all too aware of it.

Even more dangerously, she clearly took his solemn pronouncement as a challenge.

He tried to appeal to her rationally, though he knew with dread (although a sort of titillated dread, he acknowledged) that it was too late.

"Irene, the only thing that separates us from, from animals is our capacity for rational thought. I won't sacrifice the efficacy of such an ability for a few moments of physical pleasure." He could tell that she wasn't finding his argument the least persuasive, so he escalated with a contemptuous ad-hominem attack: "I don't so readily relinquish that as you seem to."

Immediately her playful smile faded. "You presume, now," she said softly, and surprisingly introspectively, which hadn't been at all what he'd expected. He'd been waiting for an impassioned argument in favour of being animalistic, but his own words echoed back to him made a much more fascinating response. How was she able to so constantly surprise him?

His mind raced, trying to understand her meaning, but he couldn't make any sense of it. He presumed, what, exactly? She was clearly a very sexual person, who immensely enjoyed that element of her character and occupied it fully. And she had already admitted that she found sensory-only experiences liberating. What had he presumed? His forehead creased and he cast her a questioning glare, but she took no notice; she was stubbing out the butt of her cigarette.

"Regrets?" she asked when she turned back to him, interrupting his unsuccessful analysis.

He looked up in quickly and opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again when he found that he sincerely did not know how to respond to the question. It was a deceptively complex matter. But overall. . .

"No," he decided, pressing his own finished Dunhill in the ashtray on his bedside table. Then he declared, "I don't do regrets."

"Not even in this case?" she suggested, picking up on his subtext.

His lips twisted to the side, and he pondered the issue again.

"Even if I were to regret other things in my life—in my past, I would not regret this," he finally stated, and the proclamation resonated truthfully within him.

"Why?" she asked, in a tentative tone that sounded strange on her lips. She clearly knew she was delving into the emotional equivalent of a great untamed wilderness.

He debated even considering what she asked, let alone answering, and decided against it. He had already completed more personal introspection in the past ten minutes than he had in perhaps his entire post-adolescent life, and he couldn't put his conflicted and complicated reasoning behind the "no" into words. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

Instead, he met her question with a query of his own. One that would hopefully be so different and diverting that it would completely deflect from the fact that he couldn't answer hers.

He turned to her with feline-like speed and grace, and he was gratified to see that her expression was startled.

"How did you find me?" he asked, his each word like rapid-fire gun report. "And so quickly, with no resources like money or a phone."

She blinked then assessed him calculatingly, and he knew that she too was debating whether she should answer him, or if she should hold him accountable for his last question.

Then, suddenly, she smiled. It was her coy, entertained smile, and Sherlock felt as if he'd been reprieved. This was familiar territory; the matter of how she'd managed to beat him back to his own hotel room without any advance intelligence was a purely cerebral matter, with no potential shades of emotional ambiguity that he could discern. Definitely his area.

"Mm, shall I tell you?" she grinned. "A woman likes to have some secrets, after all."