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This is another M-rated chapter ;)

Love and War

With a small mental jerk, Sherlock came out of his own brief and introspective trance with the realisation that Irene hadn't yet responded in any way, and he tilted his head back to peer into her face, seeking out her eyes to gauge her thoughts. It would be incredibly ironic if his words had now unnerved her, and he'd had quite his fill of irony from all that had happened during the mission.

He suspected—based on everything that they had experienced together and all that she seemed to self-emblematically represent—that she could be receptive to his comment, and perhaps even reciprocate in some way. But still, he had to admit that his heart jolted hard in his chest, though not altogether unpleasantly, as he waited for her to answer him.

He observed that she was searching his face closely as well, as if she were (for once) unable to quite understand or digest what she'd heard, and was seeking out either corroboratory or conflicting evidence in his expression. But apparently she found whatever it was that she sought, because after a moment her eyebrows flicked minutely, and then her face softened, divesting her even more of the severe, closed-off dominatrix persona, so that she was almost literally unrecognisable from that version of herself.

Yet despite the fact that it was a side of her that he knew usually remained firmly concealed by her mask, he had also already come to understand that it was just another facet of the tremendously complex woman who was (the late) Irene Adler—no more or less authentic than any of the other elements of her personality that she had presented over the course of their time together. And he was utterly fascinated both with each disparate component, and the sum of all her parts. She repeatedly managed to surprise and impress him, and he had not yet sensed the outer limit of his capacity to be astonished and a bit awed by her.

"Yes. . . I suppose they do," Irene finally said, her eyes sparkling as she continued to watch him, and a slow smile crept onto her lips, then abruptly broadened. In answer to her correspondingly indirect affirmation Sherlock felt his look of watchfulness relax into a similar smile, and another flood of adrenaline swept through him again, sending his heartbeat into an almost painfully hard arrhythmia.

She lifted her hands upwards and slid her fingers into his hair, combing his errant curls away from his forehead and framing his face between her palms. For a long moment they stared at each other silently, although the subtext between them—expressed in the nonverbal cues they now both understood—conveyed everything that they would never actually state aloud to each other.

Then her smile faded and her eyes grew more tenderly sober, and she pulled him down. He willingly dropped his face to hers, and like the kiss they had shared right before he had last spoken, this was more than just a prologue to greater intimacy. It physically reiterated and re-enforced the words that they had spoken, as well as all the unsaid that had passed in their shared gaze, and Sherlock had never before felt so vulnerable and open, while simultaneously pumped with the type of euphoria he had never previously affiliated with anything besides brainwork.

They pulled apart in order to momentarily recover their breaths, and Sherlock unexpectedly found himself chuckling at the situation, although he didn't know why. Nothing was particularly humourous, but nonetheless the sound bubbled up from his chest, and she joined in softly a moment later, though apparently more in somewhat pleased and amused surprise than anything else. The laughter was unguarded and uncynical, and Sherlock didn't know the last time he had heard himself make such a noise. It didn't sound at all like him, but then, this situation wasn't him at all like him—or so he'd thought.

But as he regarded the open, radiant face looking up at him, the desire to laugh was quickly replaced by another, stronger and more demanding craving, and their mirth faded as they contemplated each other with increasing seriousness.

This time as they tangled up together again, Sherlock began to sense within him a building urgency and driving purpose. Whereas before he was content with their embrace and touches for the sake of themselves, he now began to find their level of contact increasingly less satisfying. No matter how much skin his hands spanned and grasped along her hips, waist, or upper arms, and no matter how deeply their mouths continued to explore each other's, or how roughly he caressed her breasts, he craved even greater intensity. And as her touches became ever more unrefined and wanton as well, he knew that she was feeling equally carried away by desire. There was no question as to what they both wanted, and Sherlock was incredibly eager and anticipatory.

With a grunt of frustration he pulled his lips from hers and pressed them roughly beside her cheekbone. "I want you," he spontaneously growled in such a deep and breathless exhale that it was barely audible, and again he felt an illicit thrill from being so explicitly forthright. His self of even only a few days before might not have recognised the man saying such words, but with The Woman (and only her), it felt natural. Her respiration quickened in response, and he shifted back on his heels, then hooked his elbows behind her knees and drew her closer to him in one rough movement.

From flat on her back she watched him with narrow eyes and glowing cheeks, biting her lower lip and brushing her palms up and down the backs of his upper arms, and with single-minded and unhesitating intent he crawled between her legs to loom above her again. Reaching down, he pressed his hands from her knee up the interiors of her thighs, then clasped onto her innominate bones, digging his fingertips in hard, as if he wanted to leave some sort of slight mark on her.

Perhaps I do, he thought rather boorishly; something to remind her of him and what they had done, in the days immediately following their upcoming parting. Not that he would need any such physical token, himself. The change wrought within himself was so dramatic and significant that his entire mind palace could be leveled down to its foundation, and yet the sense and emotional memories of this would remain standing amidst the rubble.

"Sherlock. . ." she prompted breathlessly, and his gaze immediately focused and snapped back onto her flushed face.

One hand slid off her hip to brace against the bed beside her waist while he reached the other one down between the two of them, and then he took a deep if slightly shaky breath, before rocking forward on his knees to join their bodies.

Immediately the pleasure surged forward to meet him, and unprepared for the power of the sensations that were still so very new to him, he dropped his weight from his hands to his elbows so that he could press his face into the juncture of her neck and shoulder with a low whimper. He'd come to realise that it was the place on her body to which he was repeatedly drawn back, and the contact served to ground him somewhat.

Then, after using the same breathing technique he used to marshal his thoughts to now direct and focus his body, he turned his head to rest his cheek on her shoulder and press his mouth to the side of her throat, and he tentatively moved his hips again.

In response, she made a breathy noise and tightened one arm around his shoulders as the other lifted to rake fingers through his hair, sifting through his curls with just enough pressure to make his scalp tingle. He had come to very much enjoy that sensation in the time they had spent together—it seemed at once both erotic and tender, somehow—and he murmured a throaty grunt in approval.

He lifted his head to look down at her, her face framed by his bent arms, then noted hoarsely, "You like my hair." The breathing technique was abandoned as he started to pant.

"I like all of you," she answered solemnly, and though she then leavened the comment by tilting her pelvis upward suggestively, her simple words resonated poignantly within him. He believed her, and the consequent thrill of elation and validation that he felt had nothing to do with anything physical.

For his entire life Sherlock had felt like an outsider, set apart by his intellect early as a young child, and then further isolated by the social wariness and personal walls that he had developed as a result of that early alienation.

But as he tangled his fingers up in her increasingly perspiration-dampened hair, and covered her temple, eyelids, cheek, and jaw in urgent and possessive brushes of his lips, he realised that her returned regard and acceptance completely validated and affirmed whom he was as a man, so that he could finally—decisively—dismiss the frankly foolish self-doubt and occasional regret that he couldn't be simpler.

As it turned out, he didn't have to change his inherent identity and become ordinary in order to experience sentiment and lust as ordinary people could. It transpired that he could have it both ways; he'd simply needed to find someone as extraordinary as himself with whom to share it. Someone of his own 'genus,' as he'd thought a few minutes before, and now the concept reiterated in his mind as he looked down into her acutely intelligent, storming blue eyes.

He had experienced the feeling of personal validation with John as well, but as significant and meaningful as that relationship was, and as much as it may have primed him to be more receptive to something like this, Irene touched and thawed places in him that John had never reached, nor ever could. Aside from the critical fact that Sherlock didn't view his friend in a romantic or sexual way, John also just wasn't 'one of them'.

But now that he had met his full match, he was no longer that outsider. Now he could be the one actively partaking in an experience rather than clinically observing it from apart and afar, feeling simultaneously vastly superior, and—he could now admit it—quite lonely.

Their lips surged together again and involuntarily he let out a low groan. Paired with his flood of sentiment for her, the sensations were almost overwhelming, and he channeled his desperation into their escalating kiss, pressing her hard into the bed with the length of his body. She echoed the sound herself and arched upwards while tightening her legs around his waist, and his adrenaline spiked exponentially and ignited a frenzy within him.

Succumbing completely to his baser self he gathered her into his arms almost aggressively and dug his knees into the mattress, then pulled them into an upright seated position so that they pressed together from ankle to chest, with just centimetres between their avid, concentrating faces.

After a brief but intense moment of penetrating eye contact, Irene gave Sherlock another push just above his sternum, and he collapsed backwards onto the bed, their positions reversing.

A spark of triumph animated her flushed face as she leaned forward and began to move and shift with him from above, teeth glinting in the low light as she breathed heavily through curved lips. He knew that she (rightly) took credit for this extreme transformation of Sherlock Holmes from a cold, concise brain with a body incidentally attached to the passionate, unreservedly uninhibited man below her, and she was clearly enjoying the subsequent benefits.

Apparently she read his passing expression of perceptiveness, because with a teasing grin and a quick flick of her eyebrows, she braced her hands on his chest to pin him against the mattress and proceeded to swivel, rise and fall against his thighs in a complex choreography that infused his cheeks with heat and wrenched a series of shuddering groans from out of him.

Looking up into her face, he felt as if his skin couldn't possibly contain the fullness of his passion—for her body and her self—and he felt as though he might burst with the power of feelings.

It was fascinating to Sherlock to consider that only twenty-four hours previously, at this time the night before, he had been striding down a dark and crumbling corridor holding a commandeered sword, moving towards the single most critical, dangerous, and challenging manoeuvre of his life, and the culmination of months' work. Irene's life had been in severe jeopardy (and he would shortly be placing his own into even greater danger), and as he'd made his way to that cavernous chamber his heart had pounded and his respiration had quickened from a different sort of physical anticipation.

At the time, he couldn't have fathomed that it was possible to use the instrument of his body in a more satisfying way than to immediately execute all the movements his brain rapidly devised, in the context of a life-or-death situation. How things had changed in a single day.

For one thing, in this context his body knew precisely how to move, without any higher cognitive direction needed—nor necessarily even wanted. Just as Irene had told him later that same night, it could feel very "liberating to suppress all the ever-industrious mental processes and simply. . . exist."

With a small moan, he threw himself into the physical, pulling her down to him and locking his arms tightly around her waist. Irene made a muffled sound of approval into the pillow beside his head, and then turned her face and traced the shell of his ear with the tip of her tongue, before closing her teeth around his earlobe and tugging it in her mouth. For Sherlock it was a revelatory introduction to a previously unknown erogenous zone, and it had combustive results.

Shuddering convulsively, he wound her hair around his fist and drew her up towards him, crashing their mouths together in a graceless scrape of teeth and lips. The connection seemed to complete a circuit between them, and to Sherlock it felt as if currents of electricity were passing through the two points where they were joining with increasingly desperate and inelegant urgency.

Then, with his final shred of acuity and cognitive function, he pushed his other hand down between them to apply a firm, unremitting pressure on her with his thumb, just over the spot where they merged together.

"The Woman," he pulled back to exhale harshly against her lips, intoning the 'the' almost as if it were actually 'my', and with satisfaction, he saw her mouth prop open as she loudly gasped for oxygen in reaction to both his touch and his subtext. Watching her carefully, his expression an almost feral sneer, he quickly adapted, adjusting the force of the touch and focusing on the precise spot that seemed to most provoke her.

After a moment of intense, sustained eye contact (a breathless moment that seemed to stretch on without beginning or end for Sherlock), she severed the link with a breathy whimper, and leaned her weight onto her elbows in order to cradle his head in her arms and press her face into his shoulder. The movement caused her breasts to graze up Sherlock's chest, and while he vaguely registered the sensual feeling and the thundering of her heart against his, they were merely two more elements in an entire symphony of sensations now controlling and exquisitely tormenting his body. The vast majority of his physical focus and the entirety of his mental focus had shifted to the point of incredible friction between their bodies, and so when she ground her pelvis into him, bright white stars burst in his vision, and a deep groan choked from his mouth.

In response, the arms she had wrapped around his head dropped and her hands gripped his shoulders likes vises, and he idly noted that he might bear some physical tokens as evidence of their intimacy, after all. Bizarrely, the thought was incredibly arousing, and he tightened his hold in her hair and increased his staccato tempo.

The feeling of electricity cycling through the circuit of their joined bodies was intensifying: a reaction on one side acted as a catalyst on the other, which reacted in turn and perpetuated the dynamic in an erratic yet steadily-building escalation. And though Sherlock now had some experience with the unfurling sensations and understood what was coming, their familiarity did nothing to mitigate the raw, devastatingly pleasurable power that loomed immense, yet still just out of reach.

Suddenly he felt desperate to see her face again, and re-form the emotional connection that paralleled yet also completed the physical act. Expending significant effort, he gasped almost as if asphyxiating, "Look. . .at me."

With a short, determined huff of breath, she immediately lifted her head to comply, and as he looked up into her smoldering, unguarded eyes he found everything that he had craved to see the moment before. All that he had come to know and feel about her, and all that he understood she felt about him, was re-substantiated in their blazing gazes. . . She was doing precisely the reverse of what Moriarty had threatened: she was burning (searing) the heart into him, and contrary to what he might have contended before, somehow he understood that this forged him into a much stronger adversary.

He had been determined to delay his own gratification until they could find release together, but as he became consumed by the intensity of his sentiment, he sensed that he could only resist for so much longer. After all, for him sentiment and lust were too tightly entwined. . .

He brutally bit his lower lip and further dug his fingers into her hair in dual efforts to distract himself from the rising, relentlessly-building energy that was accumulating within him (only sheer, desperate will had kept him from surrendering already) but his resolve was rapidly dissipating. But then she nodded, jerkily but emphatic, her eyes sparking embers as they stared into his, and that seemed to be the sign for which he'd been unconsciously waiting.

Suddenly and unequivocally, the entire world outside of his own body no longer seemed real and practically winked out of existence for him, and though he vaguely felt her mouth on his, rough in the passion of her own need, it barely registered against the unremitting pleasure pounding through him.

Like a supernova, his physical awareness first flared out rapidly, so that it seemed to spread across the entire expanse of his skin and make him hyper-conscious of any and all stimuli, and then contracted so that he could sense no further than that boundary. The cataclysm rocking his body was the only tangible thing in existence, but it was more real, crucial, and imperative than anything he had ever experienced, apart from the few other times he had felt this singularity.

He had no concept of how long it lasted, but it seemed as if the sweet agony pulsed on and on, blossoming until he almost couldn't bear it, then abruptly shattering, and finally releasing him, leaving him shuddering and completely spent on the mattress, still unconscious of anything besides his own chaotic internal physical processes.

It took him still another unknown period of time to surface from his fugue state and take in Irene's tense frame and determined, set face above him. And though he felt like wincing from the over-stimulation, he clenched his teeth against the sensation, resolved both to master this new skill-set, and ensure their mutual satisfaction. Cognitively he knew that the thought wasn't rational, but in his mind it was as if their shared physical gratification would seal and ratify of all the intangible sentiment that existed between them.

He lifted his hand from where it had dropped uselessly to the bed, and resumed his ministrations with even steelier determination, drilling his gaze into hers as if in personal challenge. Then, untangling the other from her hair, he propped it behind him to support himself as he heaved into a sitting position. After a long, lingering stare into her narrowed but slightly-vacant blue eyes, he pressed hard kisses down the column of her throat and over her collarbone, then bent to alternate his efforts on each breast in turn, echoing the intensity of his hand below.

The combination was quite effective (he was an extremely adept learner); in less than a full minute he felt the telltale muscular tensing that he had experienced himself only moments before, along with a variety of other subtle signs he had come to know indicated her imminent release. Lifting his head back up so that their faces were just a hairbreadth apart, his eyes hungrily consumed every nuance and expression that articulated what she was feeling, as she was swept up by the irresistible force herself.

Without the distraction of his own physical needs to divert him now, the sentiment expanded and took over once again, almost more formidable and dizzying than before in the wake of the hormones that had been released by his climax. And so when her weight finally collapsed onto him and they sunk together into the surface of the bed, their respiration heavy and their skin shining with perspiration, he felt more innately content and fulfilled than he'd ever been before.

She lay sprawled across his chest for several moments, her nose and lips pressed against his shoulder as his hand traced random patterns along her lower back, while their breath slowed and evened and their flesh cooled. And when she finally rolled off of him but kept one arm around his waist and rested her cheek against his shoulder, he found that he didn't mind the continued contact. Far from it, in fact.

After several moments, which had a quality that Sherlock construed as rather stunned and somewhat awed silence, she lifted her cheek to prop her chin on one pectoral muscle, and lightly mapped lines over his skin as if playing connect-the-dots.

"You have freckles on your chest," Irene pointed out consideringly, and he gave a soft grunt of amusement then reached up and caught her hand in his, and held it still against his heart.

"So do you," he answered, still slightly out of breath. With her hand stilled she turned her head and kissed the spot instead, then leaned forward, and their mouths connected and slid over each other's languorously, and lengthily.

After they pulled apart the somehow meaningful silence resumed, though just when Sherlock began to sense the full-body heaviness he now associated with post-coital sleep, Irene commented wryly, "I can just picture the write-up of this whole thing on John Watson's website now: 'Sherlock Holmes and. . .The Maiden Voyage'." She smirked. "Awkward sentence structure and even more awkward euphemisms, and all."

Sherlock opened his eyes again, scrunching his nose in only half-sardonic derision and dismay at the thought of the hypothetical blog entry and her pun, but then couldn't help but add, "He did mention that people want to see me as more human. No doubt this would qualify."

"Mmm, well I always knew you had it in you," she said, propping her chin on the arm she'd rested on his chest. Then she hesitated, chuckled, and amended, "Well, perhaps not at first. . ."

He quirked an eyebrow.

"But you've almost convinced me, now," she added, mock thoughtfully.

"'Almost'. . ." he repeated deadpan, playing along.

"Yes, but I think one or two more times might be conclusively persuasive," she finished, throwing him a cheeky look.

He chuckled throatily, running his hand up and down the length of her back, although his laughter faded as he was once again reminded that this time did have an imminent expiration point. In fact, he realised that the wind had picked up outside their cabin and that the cresting and falling of the ship had become more obvious, which indicated that they had entered open sea, and meant that they were only approximately 431.6 nautical miles from the port of Muscat, Oman. If they maintained their current speed of 18 knots, they would arrive at the scheduled time in just under 24 hours, and after that, he might never see The Woman again.

This brief window of time was truly the reprieve from 'real life' that he had deluded himself into thinking it was the night before. Literally, since in every legal sense they both had fictional identities, and presently existed outside the borders of any nation or state. Such an opportunity would most likely never present itself again, so he intended to take full advantage of it, exactly as she had appealed for him to do when they had stood together on the deck below (she arguing with him, he arguing with himself).

She seemed mindful of their increasingly limited time as well, because when she pulled away and stared hard down into his face, her expression looked almost severe again, this time with the intensity of her emotion.

He reached up to trace his index finger down the line of her cheekbone, and brushed the pad off his thumb over the bow of her lower lip. He realised that he was committing her face to memory, since soon that was all that they would be to each other, for an unknown length of time—if not permanently. He wanted to hoard every facial articulation of her fascinating personality in his memory, and so, fighting off the thrall of his exhaustion, his eyes drank in her features thoroughly and voraciously, and committed them to a certain rapidly expanding chamber within his mind palace. He'd always appreciated his eidetic memory, but he couldn't recall ever having been quite so grateful for it as he was now.

She appeared to be doing the same, collecting every nuance she could before their inevitable separation.

Then her brow creased even further, and her hand tightened its hold on him. "When you go back—" she blurted out in an uncharacteristically low and urgent voice, and he raised his eyebrows in question, slightly startled out of his focus.

"Don't underestimate Jim Moriarty," she said in a tone that was half commanding, half beseeching. "It's not over."

He studied her atypically troubled face, then murmured, "I know." He knew that as content and secure as he may feel for the timebeing, he was always and inexorably moving towards the moment of his and Moriary's inevitable, potentially deadly confrontation. Every passing second brought him closer to that war.

"I don't know what he has planned, but he's obsessed with you—psychotically obsessed, Sherlock." Her fingertips pressed harder into the skin of his hand, seeming to tighten their hold around him of their own accord.

"You're concerned," he stated. It was obvious, but rather than scoffing at or dismissing her feelings, as was his wont when most people expressed such concern for him, he felt oddly touched.

"He's capable of absolutely anything," she stated in tacit agreement. "He has the intellect to imagine it and absolutely no conscience to hold him back from carrying it out. He would destroy anything and anyone around you, in order to get to you."

Sherlock went quiet for a moment, and then said gravely, "Yes, I realised that the moment I saw John wrapped in semtex."

"You can't approach him with your usual presumption of superiority. I know you were able to solve his introductory teasers last year, but he is your equal in every way, except for the fact that he will literally do anything to win. There is no line he won't cross, and it's not just your side he'll betray. You saw how casually he sold out his clients—that's nothing to him. He would sacrifice absolutely anything in a heartbeat, even his closest associates, if it meant proving his supremacy and getting what he wants."

"You're saying that his lack of caring gives him an edge," Sherlock said, and though she looked tense, she didn't contradict his words.

How ironic, Sherlock noted wryly to himself. If he had encountered Moriarty at any time prior to the previous year, he would've argued that such a trait was no obstacle for him, either. And yet he'd recently come to understand that there were people in his life for whom he cared, and for whom he cared deeply, and he wouldn't sacrifice that now-acknowledged part of himself so that he could play by Moriarty's rulebook. Perhaps he could find a way to turn his caring into strength, he considered calculatingly. It certainly felt like strength, right now—how could something that felt so empowering and truthful act as a limitation?

He pursed his lips, tabling that line of thinking for the moment, and turned his gaze back to her. "You spent time with the man," he stated, then asked, "What can I do?"

"Start by understanding how dangerous he is," she said, her eye contact unwavering and determined, and he could only nod solemnly in response.

"I do."

"Promise that," she pressed, her tone now ringing in what he considered her 'professional' voice. And though he could name and catalog it, that didn't make him any more immune to it, and Sherlock pressed his lips to her shoulder.

"Yes."

Seeming at least temporarily appeased, she tilted her head up, coaxing his mouth open with hers, and the tenderness of the moment was almost heartbreaking in its bittersweetness.

"I do have him to credit for one thing, though," he murmured thoughtfully a moment later, and she pulled back, looking at him in surprised curiosity, her eyes still slightly unfocused.

"He keeps things interesting. . .?" she guessed, her brow creasing.

"Mm, not what I was going to say, but in a matter of speaking, yes," he said, watching his fingers as they traced back and forth over the contoured line of her waist and hip. Then, flicking his gaze up to hers, he elaborated, "If not for him, we wouldn't have crossed paths. I'd say that having to go up against Jim Moriarty is a satisfactory trade for that, on the balance."

Except for a slight tightening of her arm around his waist, it didn't seem as though she would make any type of response. But several moments later, just before he sunk into a heavy and dreamless sleep, he heard her answer softly, "As long as you stay alive. . ."

Mark Gatiss: "They [Sherlock and Irene] are clearly, absolutely made for each other. So that's a fascinating thing to play with!"

I agree, Mark :)