For tumblr user sorrowsflower.
Folie à Deux
Mary had once got ahold of Sherlock's phone - his personal one as he had dozens – and for weeks after she'd teased him about the obscure and inane apps he had, although at the time she'd seemed most delighted by the Snapchat app.
"A little old for that, aren't we?" she had crowed.
He'd had a cover story ready, had in fact already concocted one for this exact scenario.
"It was for a case," he'd said in a bored drawl. "I needed to masquerade as a teenaged girl in order to entrap a Gumtree predator last month – took an evening. I'd delete it but the persona has become useful. I didn't have an adolescent in circulation before and it's amazing how responsive and careless a certain sort of man will be with her."
John had made a disgusted face but Mary's gaze had sharpened and become sardonic, and she'd opened her mouth to call him out on the lie, but then closed it again and turned away, changing the subject. She must have seen the sudden tensing of his face and had let the matter drop; her discretion was one of the many reasons he adored John's choice in spouse.
Mary, of course, had been correct. Unlike the ever-cycling series of apps consuming memory on his phone, this one was… recreational.
He had received an invitation to download it in his inbox several weeks prior and had nearly deleted it before he'd seen IA_TW. Either 'IA' stood for I am or a name or both, but regardless, recognition was instantaneous and exhilarating.
Heart pounding, he had clicked on the invite and then immediately accepted the contact, and almost overnight the app had become a near fixation since then. It wasn't sexting, but it was something that came very close to it. He supposed that it was their version of that—his, and The Woman's.
Without explanation, instruction, or pretext she had presented him with a game, and he quickly realised that it was similar to one he'd sometimes caught on telly as a kid. In it the presenter would show an extreme close-up of something and gradually pull the camera out until it became clearer what the image depicted.
This was the adult version.
She sends him a picture, which she sets on a three second display interval so that he can't just take all the time he wanted to scrutinise it. For every correct identification of the object she removes an item of clothing and sends him another picture – but one thing guess or detail and she stops responding, and the game only resumes again at her whim. Sometimes it will be weeks, and other times it will be months, and so the sting of being wrong is always compounded by the knowledge that he will be bereft of her for a time, and he's in a position of total powerlessness to change that.
With anyone else he would consider the game silly and trite, but with her it's a kind of thrill he has never really experienced before, and its intermittent and unexpected nature enhances that.
They both know that it's giving him a chance to make the deductions that are the true seduction. Getting to see her naked form is symbolic of the real victory and the real rush, since after all he has had her form memorised—every freckle, every faint blemish, every crease at elbow and behind the knee—since the day he met her. Everything else, how that body looks in motion above him or in the grips of pleasure, has been jealously secreted away since then. And yet it isn't a straight-forward game that he might play with someone else, either. He can't deny the sexual element, especially when every autonomic physical system is broadcasting it.
It keeps them in each other's orbits, and intellectually close. Though their relationship is unconventional and intentionally without labels or constraints, it's still a long-distance affair and holds all the challenges inherent with that. And though both of them like to believe and exude the attitude that they could walk away at any time, that nothing more than a chance for diversion keeps them in touch, they also both know that it's a lie, a folie a deux.
It was late afternoon, with golden light slanting down at an angle into the front room and illuminating all the dust motes in the air, when Sherlock was scrolling through the inbox of John's blog scanning for something marginally interesting. Snapchat's alert sounded to his right, interrupting his concentration, and his head whipped up as his heart began to slam against his ribs in an automatic conditioned response. A closed-mouth grin pushing onto his face, he reached for his phone.
This time it really was like that old game-show challenge: the photo was an extreme close up of the bridge of a nose and the crease of a brow. It looked like a black and white photograph given the subject was in greyscale, but without seeing more Sherlock couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman. And yet something about it struck him as very familiar.
The image disappeared and his fingers flew over his phone's screen, replying, "Someone I know."
He quickly added as a precautionary measure, "or know of."
"Which is it?" fired back her response.
He pursed his lips, then took an educated guess that due to the greyscale of the picture it was older and therefore the latter was more likely.
"Know of."
He knew he got it right when another image popped up on his screen.
Unlike the usual protocol where she revealed more of the given scene for his perusal, this was a different image entirely, although it was another close-up. His eyes darted over the image of a bird-eye view of books, and once again he couldn't shake the sensation that he ought to understand their significance. The books appeared in muted violets and greys from being in shadows, and he couldn't discern the titles since the photo was taken from above, but in the short time allotted – no screen shots allowed, unless he wanted to forfeit – he could just barely detect by the thickness of their paper, the slight uneven finish of their bindings that they were probably early to mid-twentieth century. The uniform look of them suggested that they were part of a collection, and at that combined with their era and the fact that they were leather-bound books indicated that they were academic.
"Well?" came her prompt.
His lips compressed into a thinner line and he took a short breath through his nose before he typed, "An anthology of twentieth century academic works. Likely 1950s."
He waited, and after a moment he realised he was holding the breath he had taken and he let it out in a low, unsteady gust.
He stared at his phone, but it remained unresponsive. Had he been incorrect about the genre of the books? It was unlikely; more likely was that he had got the dates wrong since it was possible that the collection was published as late as the 1970s.
That was the danger in being too specific. In his eagerness to show off he'd list as many details as he could observe, but one incorrect element invalidated the whole.
Disappointment welled up inside him. An incomplete game was frustrating not just for the personal aspects of losing, and losing communication with her for a time, but because Irene never told him the answers that he got wrong, and it was the mental equivalent of coitus interruptus.
He heaved a low sigh, but just as he let the phone drop from his fingertips it vibrated again, and with a resurgence of excitement he brought the screen to his face.
It was a textile of some sort, and it looked rough-hewn though that could be due to the extremely close view of the shot. Unfortunately the focus wasn't sharp enough for him to determine the type of wool, and the colours were still desaturated in the dusky light, but the weave of the material struck him once again as utterly familiar. He recognised it, but from where?
He used the last second of the image's display time to burn it into his mind, and then he leaned back, letting his eyes unfocus so that he could mentally examine it.
In his mind he felt the heft of the fabric, felt the pattern of its weave with his fingertips, and it struck him as oddly sensuous.
And then suddenly he knew what the last image had captured, knew what all the images were.
How could it have taken him so long to realise? It was a combination of her usual effect on his facilities, and that the notion was so impossible as not to even occur to him.
At once his entire body went rigid and his aural awareness took primacy as he became hyper-attuned for any sounds from down the hall in his bedroom.
He couldn't hear anything, but he wasn't going to rely on that sense alone. He dropped his phone with a loud thud, then shoved away from the table and crossed the room to stride down the hall, his heartbeat pounding loud against his eardrums.
The first image hadn't been a greyscale photograph at all, but a detail of his bust of Goethe. The books, a bound anthology of worksby Robert Burns Woodward, had been a present from his parents when he'd finally graduated from Imperial, and the textile – well, there was a reason that image had evoked such sensual connootations in the context of Irene Adler, since it was of the blanket that covered his bed.
He jerked the knob to his bedroom door and thrust it open so that it knocked hard against the wall and sent minor tremors up through the floorboards. They was nothing to the tremors making their way through him.
His eyes zeroed in on the centre of his room, and on the final piece of the puzzle. The object of the game is to determine Irene's present location and though he had 'won' several times in the past, there had never been a victory quite like this.
Irene Adler was poised on the blanket, nude except for the phone she propped up under her chin, highlighting the Cheshire Cat grin on her face.