"When I say run, run."

As a person who has been running all her life, those words should not have sent a chill of relief down her spine. One would expect that hearing those words would have quite the opposite effect on her. However, when your life is just about to be abruptly chopped out of you with the simple, swooshing slash of a sword to the neck, you wouldn't mind doing the same thing you've been sick of doing for most of your life one more time when instructed to do so. Especially one the instructions come from the world's only consulting detective.

Irene Adler wasn't one to stare a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the gift horse came in the form of the only man that ever beat her, yet is somehow now apparently trying to save her life. She heard a sharp, swift slicing sound very close behind her, followed by a painfully anguished yell. The sharp, very strong rusty stench of blood filled the air around her, and it was paired with more sounds of angrier, louder, and more urgent yelling. A small smile crept up on her face, and a rush of an emotion she couldn't quite make out coursed through her. Whether it was one of relief, happiness, or smug satisfaction at the affirmation of requited sentiment, not even she herself could tell.

Suddenly, she felt herself being gripped very tightly on the arm by cold, slender fingers, and was abruptly pulled up onto her bare feet and out of her trance of thought. Quickly recovering from her shock, she twisted herself around to stare into the icy blue eyes that she was just imagining when she thought she had closed her eyes for the final time, awaiting the end of her life. She was glad to see the real thing, though, because her imagination did those eyes no justice.

"Would you care to start running, Miss Adler?" Sherlock said, and his voice sent her mind into a whirlwind of memories. She turned her head to see a mass of black-clad men running as the yelling behind her kept getting closer and less pleasant by the second. She didn't say a word. Annoyance swept on to Sherlock's fine, angular features as he said, "Alright then," and became pulling her along with him.

And so they ran.

She could feel the bottoms of her feet, still sensitive even after all the running she has done throughout her life, being scarred and torn into bloody shards of skin as Sherlock pulled her away from death. And so they ran. And ran. And ran.

They ran until the bloody red of the rising sun filled the sky above them. Till she stopped feeling a sting in her feet. Till the piercing yells in the harsh foreign tongue she didn't quite understand; the language in which she was just read an intelligible sentence in right before having the phone, that she used to send her last text to bid the man who had brought her to her demise one last farewell, snatched out of her hands, became more and more muffled with every dull step she took. Till they suddenly came to a stop after making a sharp turn to enter a dark alleyway.

Her eyes took time to adjust to the sudden dullness that so differs from the brightness of the shocking daylight she was pulled into and, suddenly, out of. Just as her eyes started to adjust to the lights, so did her mind to the sudden predicament she found herself in. How could she have let her sentiment get the best of her again? She studied his expression, while he was studying hers, and the old, buried humiliation that she felt a year ago, when he unlocked the one thing that she guarded with her heart, resurface painfully. Oh how stupidly sentimental and vulnerable her heart is. Too bad that thing she protected with her vulnerable sentiment was the only thing that saved her from being vulnerable in every other aspect of her life. And now, after she let her embarrassing sentiment slip for what she thought would be the final time in her life, it turns out that she wont be dying after all. All thanks to the man that triggered her biggest fatal weakness and brought on her downfall in the first place. Oh, the bitter irony.

"It is true that disguises are always a self portrait. Even if the disguise is forced on you by someone else" Sherlock stated, mirroring what Irene told him upon their first meeting in that smug voice Irene tried very hard to forget. However, it didn't fail to make her ridiculous heart to skip a beat, just as her heart skipped when she ripped the little white strip out of his shirt collar, stripping him of his disguise. She immediately knew what he was talking about, and ripped off the burka that swallowed her entirety up which her captors forced her into. How becoming is it for the most talented dominatrix that the world has ever seen, who almost brought the planet's top men to their knees, to be covered up, to be muted, to be hidden in both fear of someone recognizing her, or in fear of how her actions of the past may infringe on their religious beliefs if they did not shield themselves from setting eyes on her oh-so dangerous body. So they simply covered up her presence, her existence, in a suffocating black cloth.

She was playing the part of the defeated, weak woman before; when she was faced with what seemed to be inevitable death. But now, she has been set free by the man who pushed her in front of death's blade in the first place.

She will not be pushed anymore.

She appraised Sherlock's appraisal of her, as his appraisal of people in this manner was custom. The little smirk that was playing across his angular lips contrasted the minuscule frown he had on the first time they came face to face, when he couldn't analyze a single aspect of her being, her composure, her thoughts or her intentions. This struck what little pride she had left that was just smothered within the darkness of the burka and the looming threat of death. Its funny how just when you feel safe, you lose all the earthly fear and humbleness that you felt crashing into you when you were faced with your end.

With a serpent like suddenness, she struck. She twisted that burka that imprisoned her around Sherlock Holmes' marble neck and pushed him back against the dusty wall of the alley he pulled her into. His ivory face started to go blue as she increased the pressure right under his jugular, completely cutting off his flow of oxygen.

"What a..stra-ange way of saying...thank...YOU" Sherlock stuttered, finally managing to push Irene off of him. As he keeled over, gasping for air, he could only hear the soft receding patter of Irene's bare feet running away from him.

"Damn it" He said, leaning on to the dusty wall she had just pushed him on to for support. He couldn't blame her for running. She is quite clever, and he knew it. But he couldn't let her. If he were to let her go, saving her life would be for naught.

With that mental statement, he took a deep breath and ran off after her into the busy streets of Karachi.