Fic for holyfant: All Hearts Are Broken, part 2/2

[holmesticemods]

She might actually like living here, Irene mused a few weeks later, pretending to contemplate the steady stream of traffic crawling up and down Via Etnea over the edge of her cup of cappuccino. Of course the city’s attractions were a far cry from those of London or New York – the place was in fact as shockingly provincial as every connotation of the term implied – but rather than struggling to live up to a pretence it wouldn’t be able to maintain, both the city and its inhabitants cheerfully submitted themselves to reality and chose to consider themselves blessed in their spot between Mount Etna and the Ionian Sea. And some of the Italian women were exquisite. Irene sighed when the elegant girl she’d been observing bent forward and reached over the table for the hairy paw of her companion. Such a waste. However, her station in her new life was still too insecure to start misbehaving at her customary level. Yet.

So far everyone she’d had to deal with had accepted the yarn Sherlock had concocted for her to spin, should her accent raise any eyebrows. Her Sicilian mother had passed away when she was nothing but a young girl and she hadn’t spoken the language in years. Then after her father’s recent death she’d felt the urge to find out more about half of her origins and decided to go and live for a few years in the city where her mother had spent her youth. At this part of her story her conversation partner usually broke in to enlighten her with an account of their family history and she could safely refrain from feeding them more lies.

“That’s what makes it such an ideal hiding place,” Sherlock had elucidated once she’d grasped he meant to drop her off in some obscure town on an island in the Mediterranean. “Italians have three topics of conversation: themselves, food and football. The place is big enough to ensure your anonymity, rich enough for you to earn a living for yourself, and any Italian institution is a nightmare of red tape wound so tightly it will take even my dear brother half a lifetime to unravel it. I’ve heard him lamenting their decline from their Roman heights of efficiency more times than I’ve been able to delete. You’re free to go and live wherever you want but at I advise you to stick it out there for the few weeks Mycroft will need to convince himself you’re indeed deader than the deadest dodo.”

At first Irene had assumed that moment couldn’t arrive too soon. Now, strolling down the market, selecting tomatoes and a head of lettuce for her lunch and lifting a warm white peach to her nose to savour its sun-drenched aroma and the luscious feel of the downy skin against her own, she was less certain. The city, built out of black lava blocks along a rigid street pattern, exuded a severe austerity that appealed to her just as much as the Baroque excesses of white stucco scrollwork adorning every façade. Its layout formed, she’d determined, a perfect representation of the more easily discernible aspects of her profession. Perhaps that was the reason it suited her so well.

The apartment Sherlock had arranged for her was equally perfect, its opulent décor fitting itself around her like a soft leather glove each time she let the heavy front door fall shut behind her.

Every now and then Irene wondered what kind of woman her landlady was and what she’d needed Sherlock’s services for. Her search of the flat's cabinets and cupboards had provided her with no viable information at all so she was reduced to guesswork as to why an octogenarian would wish to equip her spare bedroom with a double that would have taken pride of place in an upmarket Risorgimento bordello. It was a nightmare to make up properly but its sturdy posts came in most handy during some of the more exhausting scenes played out there.

For it seemed that apart from discussing themselves, food and football, Italian men had no qualms about tipping each other off regarding where to go for a satisfying session of thorough, recreational scolding. Irene had spent her first weeks scouting the city’s more expensive hotels and day tripping to various pleasure resorts on the volcano and down the coast to lay the groundwork for a profitable clientele. So far the return on time invested had exceeded her expectations. Obviously her talent for finding out what people liked hadn’t suffered under the humiliation she’d endured herself.

The money was once again rolling in. Her tariff was but a pittance compared to what it had been when she dominated the world but her bank balance showed a gratifying incline nonetheless. Thus, she reasoned, she was saving for the day she’d say goodbye to Mrs Norton and fly off to a future she’d graft of her own.

Just don’t try to fly too close to the sun again, she thought, but of course that was a different myth entirely, though it was closely entwined with her own.

On a whim she even visited Naxos’ remains and stood looking out over the site. In the distance the sea rolled on endlessly, its crests caressing the coastal sands as carefully as they’d done when Naxos had been a thriving city and even before, when Theseus had the black sail raised and set off for Athens and a life of magnificent adventure.

***

The day after her arrival she had sold the ring, got rid of the suitcase and its ghastly contents and invested € 7,500 in apparel that was more to her liking. It wasn’t couture – it wasn’t even the next best thing – but she was in a class of her own and just by dint of her wearing them the clothes looked better than they truly were.

The only things she kept were the socks. She was about to bin them as well when an impulse induced her to sniff them. Their scent carried the aroma of the same laundry detergent she’d smelt when she’d stretched out between the sheets of Sherlock’s bed back at Baker Street. She concluded they must be his and he must have worn them. Indeed, upon unrolling them she detected signs of wear on the fabric at the heels and toes. The knit was very fine and the yarn soft to the touch, a blend of merino and cotton. They were ridiculously large, but then, he did have big feet. One moment she’d stood trailing them through her fingers and the next second she’d buried her face in the wool, heaving deep breaths and sobbing with a despair darker than the fears she’d had to battle when locked in her lonely cell in Karachi.

“Oh god,” she moaned, “oh my god.”

It was, perhaps, the worst moment of her life. But it passed, as every moment must do.

After she’d dried off her face and restored her make-up she stashed the socks in the drawer where she kept her stockings. Every now and then her hand inadvertently brushed them as she went in search of a pair. Each time the contact would send a small shiver of bliss rippling down her spine.

***

By now she was working up a sweat, the blows of her crop raining down on his back, whose architecture, with the twin sloping domes of his shoulder blades and the long grid of vertebrae notches, had long since lost its alabaster hue and turned into the ravaged remnants of a conquered metropolis, with the blood of its inhabitants running in rivers down the streets.

And still he refused to beg though his breathing was reduced to raspy gulps of air sucked in with the desperate urgency of a drowning victim.

At last, enraged by his obstinacy, she flung the crop onto the bed, sank down on the edge as well, and twisted her fingers into the thick waves of his hair. Slick with sweat it was, but that just made her tug harder as she whipped up his head and forced him to lock eyes with her.

The blood flowing from the cuts on his cheekbones – his bloody bleeding vicar’s face –mingled with the tears he couldn’t blink back any longer, painting his cheeks a pink as soft and luminous as a rose touched by the first tentative rays of the sun at dawn.

“Hush now, Mr Holmes,” she soothed, “hush.” She bent at the waist to kiss him, first one cheek, and then the other, savouring the heady salt-coppery tang of blood and tears. He glared at her, his eyes blazing with all the pent-up fury of Satan locked in his perpetual prison of ice, his mouth opening to hurl a scornful insult at her.

“Oh, don’t,” she murmured, putting a finger against his lips and pressing ever so slightly. The skin she touched was chapped and broken, adorned with flecks of half-dried spittle, and it took every ounce of her self-control not to plunge down and start plundering his mouth.

Instead, she yanked his head back even further and licked a long stripe along his throat, all the way from the dip between his collarbones up to the tip of the chin defiantly sticking out above it, curling her tongue to collect the beads of perspiration that spiralled down like strings of translucent pearls.

Her voice when she addressed him was that of a teacher deploring the latest outrage of a beloved but obstinate pupil. “Mercy, Mr Holmes,” she said, and she sighed. “Two tiny syllables, those are all I need to hear and all your troubles will be over.” She used her grip on his mop of curls to shake his head a little. “Say them.”

He remained stubbornly silent, pursing his lips and glowering at her. After half a minute of throwing daggers at each other she sighed, weary, and let go of the strands she’d been pulling. His head snapped forward and would have crashed into the bedpost if she had not put her foot against his chest to shove him aside at the last split-second. The sharp heel of her pump pressed against his sternum, testing the resilience of the skin, and finding it lacking, punctured it. Blood started surging up immediately, vivid and red against the – as yet – unmarred surface of his torso. She reached for her crop and dipped the soft leather of the keeper into the small well.

“Oh, you stupid man,” she purred, dragging it down to his navel. “Now look what you made me do.”

***

Irene woke up gasping for breath. For a few dazed seconds she groped around in the dark for the switch of her bedside lamp, panic galloping through her chest like a herd of startled horses. Her stomach joined the stampede and she sat dry retching with her hands pressed against her belly.

Inflicting pain and humiliation was her profession but she never dealt it unless she was invited to. The scenes that had just played out in her head, the scenes she’d thoroughly enjoyed – for there was no denying the traces of delicious drowsiness lingering in her limbs and where she sat hugging her waist – were the stuff of nightmares, an orgy of rage and rape and revenge that was base and mean, and she resented her mind for whipping it up and finding pleasure in it.

***

One day Irene was oiling the tools of her trade, admiring their gleaming surfaces and relishing their smooth feel, BBC World News idly babbling in the background, when the shrill tones of a reporter, pitched unusually high in over-the-top excitement, broke through the velvet swathes of languid reverie Irene had wrapped herself in.

The words that first caught her attention was the declaration “ 'The Crime of the Century' has just been committed.” The phrase reminded her of Moriarty’s boast that soon he was going to astonish the world by pulling off the greatest crime ever committed, in broad daylight and right under everybody’s noses. Apparently it hadn’t been mere idle talk. Captures of the exterior of Pentonville Prison, the Bank of England and the Tower of London flashed up on the screen, to be replaced with a reporter who had positioned herself in front of the New Scotland Yard building on Broadway and was now saying the police had just declared they were consulting various experts.

That was Sherlock, obviously. Irene’s heart missed a beat and she actually rested her hand on the spot for an instant. For Jim Moriarty was obsessed with Sherlock (“And how about you then?” a mocking voice in her head asked), but, unlike her terrible dream that was nothing but a dream, Jim wished to inflict actual harm on him.

During the initial stages of their acquaintance Irene hadn’t let the idea bother her; what was Sherlock Holmes to her except a means to a very lucrative end? Later she’d lulled her unease by reasoning Sherlock was extremely clever – at least as clever as Jim Moriarty – and he could always fall back on the formidable fortress that was Mycroft Holmes.

Together the Holmes brothers formed an impenetrable bulwark between the world as Irene knew it and Jim’s vision of an empire.

Briefly, she considered warning Sherlock but dismissed the idea straightaway as being too dangerous, for herself as well as for him. She couldn’t risk revealing her continuing existence to the elder Holmes sibling and as to Sherlock, he’d have to pull out all the stops in the weeks to come and a major quarrel with his brother was the last thing he needed.

She almost cried in frustration as she realised her hands were tied. All she could do was watch and hope and pray for a good ending.

***

Outside her flat, life in the city rolled on as if nothing had happened. One of her clients, the owner of a small import-export firm that occasionally engaged in some trade with England, remarked upon the trial and she punished him for insubordination. After he’d showered and dressed he handed her double the fee they’d agreed upon. She tucked it beneath the edge of her cuff and smiled down on him.

“Addio.”

Generously, she held out two of her fingers for him to kiss. The man fell to his knees and reached for them with the zealous devotion of a worshipper visiting the early morning mass in one of the city’s many churches. His breath ghosted over her nails.

“Grazie mille. Grazie mille,” he stammered. She rewarded him with a last benevolent look before she shut the door in his face and flicked on the television to watch the courthouse proceedings with increasing apprehension.

***

The jury acquitted Moriarty and, after the initial shock and outrage – some of which even made it into the Corriere Della Sera – the stream of news concerning 'The Crime of the Century' dwindled down to a trickle that evaporated into thin air.

Irene’s unease remained and she racked her brain for a way to contact Sherlock. She wasted away a few precious days creating false ISP addresses with the aid of an online encryption network, only to delete them again as the thought of Mycroft Holmes kept leaping up in her mind like a hideous jack-in-a-box.

And then it was too late.

***

“No,” Irene lisped, staring at the screen with eyes that felt as wide as saucers. “God, no.” The raw emotion that clutched her throat was a sensation she’d never experienced before. For a terrifying second she feared she would die on the spot herself. The next insane second she almost welcomed the idea.

Irene glared at the reporter, willing her to stop and crash into the pavement in front of St Bart’s herself, but the woman kept droning on, hurling words like ‘fake genius’ and ‘fraudulent detective’ into the air as if she had the right.

Naturally, that wasn’t all. Irene's nails dug deep into the century-old velvet upholstery of one of the Marchioness’s armchairs as 221 Baker Street came into view. The camera recorded some vague movement behind the right window, a flash of purple, which Irene surmised was Mrs Hudson and then all hell broke loose when a cab drew up and out came John Watson.

Irene still wasn’t entirely certain what to make of the dapper little doctor. Initially his fierce loyalty to his friend had amused her. What a dear darling pet, she’d thought, quite handy to have hanging about the place. Later, once she’d shrugged over the fact that he was just a man and thus, naturally, as despicable as any specimen of the sex, she began to actively appreciate him. Watching his stunned face she felt all her sympathy go out to him and for an insane instant she wished she could be in London to sit with the doctor in front of the fire and share their grief over the man they had lost.

The black front door opened to a crack just wide enough to let John slip through and shut again with a bang. The camera kept rolling, catching the glint struck by the sun in the sparkling bronze of the number plates. It didn't wait in vain, for suddenly the door opened wide and a livid Mrs Hudson came stalking out.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” she assaulted the nearest reporter, a man who towered above her by a head at least, yet staggered back a few steps. “This is a house in mourning. Have you no shame at all? First you’ve hunted him down with your lies and…”

To Irene’s mortification and the reporters’ and general viewing public’s delight Mrs Hudson’s face crumpled. Frantically gulping she grabbed for her handkerchief and the next moment burst into the tears she couldn’t hold back any longer.

“The fraud detective’s landlady…” a voice-over began and then the camera swerved away. “The police are arriving...” the voice said, and indeed a police car drew to a halt close to the group of reporters and film crews. The doors on both sides of the car were thrown open wide and a man in a drab raincoat and a woman with a shock of dark hair emerged.

“Are they coming to arrest John Watson?” the voice asked.

Irene scoffed at that inanity. Her mind still couldn’t grasp what had happened. Then, suddenly, they were hurled back to St Bart’s. The camera recorded Sherlock’s body being lifted onto a stretcher, his beautiful hair slick with blood and his head lolling to the side.

He was so absolutely quiet, like a puppet with the strings all cut. It was unreal.

“This isn’t real,” Irene told the television and herself. “It’s a trick, can’t you see? He’s cleverer than you are and he’s tricked you all.” That, she fathomed, must be the truth behind this charade. Sherlock must have drawn Moriarty to Bart’s, his home away from home, for the final confrontation, and he would never have done so unless he’d been absolutely certain of the outcome. Sherlock had been able to outmanoeuvre the cleverest man on the planet – the living proof of that was currently seated in front of the television in her apartment in the Via Crociferi, biting the gloss of her manicured nails – so it was inconceivable Moriarty had managed to do what no one else ever had... beaten Sherlock, once and for all.

The realisation consoled her somewhat and allowed her to watch the following proceedings with a liberating sense of detachment. Part of her wondered where Sherlock was at this particular moment and whether he would inform John Watson and Mrs Hudson, who was now clinging desperately to the chest of the plain-clothes policeman, he in turn patting her back and looking like he wanted nothing better than to join in with the crying.

Irene concluded he must be DI Lestrade, the detective with whom Sherlock enjoyed a close working relationship according to John’s blog. Moriarty had fed her some information on the man as well. Plenty of blackmail material there, but his income was too small for her to waste her talent on.

The line of thought led her back to the problem of Sherlock’s present location. On the television the door to number 221 fell shut again after having swallowed Mrs Hudson and DI Lestrade. The woman who’d accompanied him – another plain-clothes detective, Irene supposed – pivoted on her heel in disgust, fought her way back to the car, and, once safely inside, drove away at a speed that violated several traffic laws.

The eye of the camera travelled up to record DI Lestrade pulling the curtains across one of the first-floor windows. Had Sherlock been inside all along? Irene almost brought up her hand to hide her smile. That would be just like him, wouldn’t it? She imagined him peeking around the curtain to sneer down on the crowd assembled in the street.

On the other side of Baker Street a sleek black Bentley halted next to the kerb. Irene willed the camera to show her the number plate but its focus clung with frustrating stubbornness to the side of the car. The driver’s head appeared above the hood and disappeared again as he bent forward to open the back door.

Mycroft Holmes rose from the car with his usual cold sedateness. An excited murmur swept through the throng of reporters.

“The deceased’s brother, Mycroft Holmes…” the detached voice narrating the proceedings said.

The elder Holmes sibling waited until his chauffeur handed him his – meticulously rolled – umbrella before making his way towards the house where his brother had lived. His face wore its familiar terrifying bland smile. In the background the murmuring increased. Irene felt the fabric of the chair arms strain under the force with which she was digging in her nails.

“No comment,” Mycroft was saying into the microphones thrust aggressively into his face. He kept pushing his way through the horde with the indifference of a practised beekeeper suffering an attack from an incensed population of bees. His expression, even while addressing no one in particular, never wavered from one of mild weariness.

“No film, please,” he said, his tone excessively polite. In answer the camera zoomed in on his features. The fabric beneath Irene’s fingers tore with a screech that ricocheted off the high walls of the apartment.

For the grief the camera recorded in Mycroft’s Holmes eyes confirmed what she wished more than anything to deny.

***

He’s gone. I’ve lost him, and now I’ll never, never have him.

The same words repeated themselves over and over in her head. They were stupid, she was all too aware of their stupidity, for even if he had lived she would never have him; she’d lost him long before that.

But the idea of a world without Sherlock Holmes was such a dismal one. The sun might still rise every morning from the sea shrouded in glorious robes of pink and orange and red to light up the mountain that throned over the city in imperial majesty. Irene might walk its streets and admire a new set of lingerie, contemplate adding a finely worked knife to her assortment, indulge in an ice cream at the Pasticceria Savia, but the place where her heart had been was empty. It still beat: if she held her hand there she could feel its rhythm, but each beat of the organ, each breath her lungs drew into her body felt like a betrayal.

Why mourn? she asked herself. What was he to you? He helped you once but only after he toppled the foundations you were standing on, everything you’d fought so hard to attain. You’re alive, he’s dead. You were never going to see him again and good riddance. Remember what you were and you lost it all. He beat you, but you’re the one who laughs in the end….

Then she would cry again. Because Sherlock Holmes was no longer of this world. Because she’d lost him and she’d never, ever have him.

***

Life went on, wasn’t that the pat phrase? It might be dismal and dull but unless she chose to follow in Sherlock’s steps – and she shuddered at the idea – it had to go on. Down the eternal sun went and up it came again the next morning to find Irene preparing for another session. She yawned loudly. The man was even more boring than most of her clients, apt to beg for mercy before she’d even properly flexed her muscles. The money he paid her was good, however.

By now she was considering leaving the city and this remote island. Mycroft Holmes’ eye would still be as clouded as hers regularly were, so this would be a good time to move and set up base in America. She thought of going to New York. That city held attractions more likely to disperse memories she’d rather forget.

The doorbell rang and Irene sighed. Dull, and way too early. Oh, the stupid little fool couldn’t wait to be scolded. She snorted and pressed the intercom button.

“Sei troppo presto,” she purred in the artificial sing-song voice that always seemed to affect this client most particularly.

She almost let go of the button when the speaker didn’t blurt out the expected plea for admission but barked, “Irene!” in a bidding baritone. No one dared address her like this, except perhaps two people in the world of which but one remained, and the voice’s pitch was too low for Mycroft Holmes.

Inside her chest her heart sped up but this wasn’t betrayal, it was triumph, jubilant and loud.

Her phone was lying on the hall table and she swept it up to cancel her appointment with a punishing text. Its composition gave her the time she needed to contemplate her answer.

She pressed the intercom button again.

“Say please.”