Fic - Yet Here We Are (Sherlock, 1/1)
Jan. 6th, 2022 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Title: Yet Here We Are
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: Sherlock
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, they belong to the Conan Doyle estate, this particular variant belongs to the BBC. No money being made from this.
Characters: Irene Adler
Rating: 15
Notes: Set mid-A Scandal In Belgravia. Written for the lgbtfest 2012 prompt - "BBC Sherlock, Irene Adler, her job is her job; taking on male clients does not make her any less exclusively gay. (Nor does falling in love with men who aren't her clients.)". One set of quotes direct from the episode.
Warnings: mentions of S&M and prostitution
Summary: In this great game, the opponent made it fun.
She would be lying if she said that her job wasn't a sex thing. It was very much a sex thing. That was the whole point. But it wasn't a penis in vagina sex thing, which meant that lots of people didn't think it was sex. Which was their loss really.
People didn't seem to understand that there was more to sex than genitals. There was a lot more to being a dominatrix, a very good one at that, than genitals.
This is not to say that she didn't like genitals, Irene Adler likes genitals. But the genitals she likes are vaginas, soft, beautiful, yielding. Irene Adler, the Whip Hand, happily tortures the genitals of both genders and neither. It's a divide she makes. It might be an artificial one, but everyone lies, either to themselves or to other people. Lots of people in her line of work make similar divides; there are certain acts they only perform with their partners and so on. It's everyone's right to draw their line wherever they want.
Both Irene Adler and Irene Adler, the Whip Hand, are interested in Sherlock Holmes. She works people out for a living, in her way, much the same way he does, in his way. From his inability to know where to look, she knows their ways are very different. He's a puzzle and she's always liked challenges. It would be no fun if everything were easy.
She would like, very much, to make him beg. It excites her, sexually and mentally. The two are not entirely nondisjunctive. Nor do they entirely coincide. She wouldn't have her career if she didn't enjoy dominating people, and she wouldn't be successful if she couldn't do it when she isn't the least bit sexually excited in her client. Her sadism, remunerative and recreational, is as hard-wired as her sexuality.
She finds herself imagining what different implements would sound like against his skin, how they would feel, how it would feel.
She tells Kate, because she knows it will upset Kate in a way that thrills Kate. Kate has a fascinating push-pull attitude to Irene's job, and being Irene's assistant gives her the right level of information so that she knows exactly who and what she's being jealous of. It's not Irene's preferred form of pain, but she and Kate have reached an understanding on these things. She tells her every torrid detail of her fantasies as she has Kate tied down beneath, acting some of them out, taunting Kate with all the ways she isn't Sherlock Holmes, until Kate is crying and begging and pleading - just because it's not Irene’s preferred form of pain doesn't mean she's not very good at it.
She reassures Kate afterwards that it's only idle fantasy.
Irene doesn't deny that that initial erotic spark develops into a decided fondness for Sherlock Holmes. It's the same thrill as pulling girls's pigtails, watching him twitch, bristle and stumble every time they interact. But the brilliance of the mind beneath it, it's addictive. She hadn't been joking when she said that intelligence was attractive, and there seems to be no end to Sherlock's.
But it's not just the intelligence. She doesn't doubt that Moriarty is as clever as Sherlock, but he does nothing for her, being very much the creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth that shall be an abomination. Sherlock has something else, beyond the mind, not just those curls and those shocking blue eyes, and possibly the fondness is disturbingly close to fascination.
Not close enough to stop her. She will play out this game. While she's carrying on because Jim will probably literally wear her guts for garters if she lets him down, the original reason for involving herself in international affairs rather than the more traditional ones was, laughable as it sounds now, security. Irene has expensive tastes, and no desire to make do with enough. No matter how good she is, her chosen profession is not kind to the aged, and she has the wrong personality to become a brothel-keeper. This will be her nest egg.
She holds that thought close as she moves to the next stage of this plan because, as she's standing staring at Sherlock's housemate the doctor, John who knows where to look, she has this moment where she doesn't want to go through with it. Because she can see, from John's reaction, that she has actually hurt Sherlock, and not the way that she prefers to.
And John, for all he is undoubtedly trying, can't fix this. Although his suggestion might work to solve both her immediate problems.
"For the record, if anyone out there still cares, I’m not actually gay."
"Well I am. Look at us both." John was being tiresome again, confounding a one-off experience with an overall label that is only ever a best approximation. John, she supposes, is conditioned to have to defend his sexuality from assumptions, and his own recriminations from one, no, two she thinks, crafty wanks where Sherlock popped into his head. Irene doesn't tend to bother to refuting those assumptions; if someone is ridiculous enough to assume number matters more than intent, then yes, she has had far more sex with men than women. It goes with her trade. She doesn't assume this means women aren't as interested in her infinite varieties than men, or sex in general, just that men are more likely to feel free to explore their desires. If she'd been in the industry thirty years ago, she suspects that her clientele would be almost all male, as opposed to the maybe eighty-twenty split it is now. In thirty years, some future-Irene might have a more enjoyably even split.
The echoing sound of her *special* ringtone for Sherlock shatters everything.
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: Sherlock
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, they belong to the Conan Doyle estate, this particular variant belongs to the BBC. No money being made from this.
Characters: Irene Adler
Rating: 15
Notes: Set mid-A Scandal In Belgravia. Written for the lgbtfest 2012 prompt - "BBC Sherlock, Irene Adler, her job is her job; taking on male clients does not make her any less exclusively gay. (Nor does falling in love with men who aren't her clients.)". One set of quotes direct from the episode.
Warnings: mentions of S&M and prostitution
Summary: In this great game, the opponent made it fun.
She would be lying if she said that her job wasn't a sex thing. It was very much a sex thing. That was the whole point. But it wasn't a penis in vagina sex thing, which meant that lots of people didn't think it was sex. Which was their loss really.
People didn't seem to understand that there was more to sex than genitals. There was a lot more to being a dominatrix, a very good one at that, than genitals.
This is not to say that she didn't like genitals, Irene Adler likes genitals. But the genitals she likes are vaginas, soft, beautiful, yielding. Irene Adler, the Whip Hand, happily tortures the genitals of both genders and neither. It's a divide she makes. It might be an artificial one, but everyone lies, either to themselves or to other people. Lots of people in her line of work make similar divides; there are certain acts they only perform with their partners and so on. It's everyone's right to draw their line wherever they want.
Both Irene Adler and Irene Adler, the Whip Hand, are interested in Sherlock Holmes. She works people out for a living, in her way, much the same way he does, in his way. From his inability to know where to look, she knows their ways are very different. He's a puzzle and she's always liked challenges. It would be no fun if everything were easy.
She would like, very much, to make him beg. It excites her, sexually and mentally. The two are not entirely nondisjunctive. Nor do they entirely coincide. She wouldn't have her career if she didn't enjoy dominating people, and she wouldn't be successful if she couldn't do it when she isn't the least bit sexually excited in her client. Her sadism, remunerative and recreational, is as hard-wired as her sexuality.
She finds herself imagining what different implements would sound like against his skin, how they would feel, how it would feel.
She tells Kate, because she knows it will upset Kate in a way that thrills Kate. Kate has a fascinating push-pull attitude to Irene's job, and being Irene's assistant gives her the right level of information so that she knows exactly who and what she's being jealous of. It's not Irene's preferred form of pain, but she and Kate have reached an understanding on these things. She tells her every torrid detail of her fantasies as she has Kate tied down beneath, acting some of them out, taunting Kate with all the ways she isn't Sherlock Holmes, until Kate is crying and begging and pleading - just because it's not Irene’s preferred form of pain doesn't mean she's not very good at it.
She reassures Kate afterwards that it's only idle fantasy.
Irene doesn't deny that that initial erotic spark develops into a decided fondness for Sherlock Holmes. It's the same thrill as pulling girls's pigtails, watching him twitch, bristle and stumble every time they interact. But the brilliance of the mind beneath it, it's addictive. She hadn't been joking when she said that intelligence was attractive, and there seems to be no end to Sherlock's.
But it's not just the intelligence. She doesn't doubt that Moriarty is as clever as Sherlock, but he does nothing for her, being very much the creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth that shall be an abomination. Sherlock has something else, beyond the mind, not just those curls and those shocking blue eyes, and possibly the fondness is disturbingly close to fascination.
Not close enough to stop her. She will play out this game. While she's carrying on because Jim will probably literally wear her guts for garters if she lets him down, the original reason for involving herself in international affairs rather than the more traditional ones was, laughable as it sounds now, security. Irene has expensive tastes, and no desire to make do with enough. No matter how good she is, her chosen profession is not kind to the aged, and she has the wrong personality to become a brothel-keeper. This will be her nest egg.
She holds that thought close as she moves to the next stage of this plan because, as she's standing staring at Sherlock's housemate the doctor, John who knows where to look, she has this moment where she doesn't want to go through with it. Because she can see, from John's reaction, that she has actually hurt Sherlock, and not the way that she prefers to.
And John, for all he is undoubtedly trying, can't fix this. Although his suggestion might work to solve both her immediate problems.
"For the record, if anyone out there still cares, I’m not actually gay."
"Well I am. Look at us both." John was being tiresome again, confounding a one-off experience with an overall label that is only ever a best approximation. John, she supposes, is conditioned to have to defend his sexuality from assumptions, and his own recriminations from one, no, two she thinks, crafty wanks where Sherlock popped into his head. Irene doesn't tend to bother to refuting those assumptions; if someone is ridiculous enough to assume number matters more than intent, then yes, she has had far more sex with men than women. It goes with her trade. She doesn't assume this means women aren't as interested in her infinite varieties than men, or sex in general, just that men are more likely to feel free to explore their desires. If she'd been in the industry thirty years ago, she suspects that her clientele would be almost all male, as opposed to the maybe eighty-twenty split it is now. In thirty years, some future-Irene might have a more enjoyably even split.
The echoing sound of her *special* ringtone for Sherlock shatters everything.
