AN: Irene needs more love. Seriously. She's one of the greatest literary women ever, and there are only twenty−some other fics about her in this fandom! I started watching BBC's Sherlock for the first time ever yesterday, and when I finished 'A Scandal In Belgravia' at like ten o'clock last night, I was so impressed by Moffat's awesomeness that I sat there grinning for the next half an hour and then I threw down about two thousand words of Irene−related epicness. But pretty much all of it ended up being set in the novel−verse, so there you go. This is a rather weak taste of what I have coming. Expect lots of Adler love in the near future!

Disclaimers: Conan Doyle is so full of win that I can't even contemplate stealing from him. Also, this is really more of a drabble than anything productive, with all its weird and nonsensical imagery. I'm not very proud of this, but it needed a home somewhere.

Theirs is a relationship never fully formed. A half−mast, half−conscious mix of midnight chimes and violin notes, and all of it strung out taut and thin as thread, trembling like struck frets. They meet under the guise of disguise, and that is how they part. False identities and true ambitions. The corners of yellowed photographs and the edges of dust−coated drawers. Stiff gloves and stiff paper. They exist only as how the world perceives them− counter parts and semblances and glances out of the corner of your eye. Now you see them, now you don't. Watch carefully, because they hide in the crowd.

Blink, and they're seen. Blink, and they disappear. Between the maze of bodies in the throng, it's hard to tell where the fantasy of their composures start and where the reality ends.

That is their mystery. They are both flickering illusions. Their spirits dance like flames and their eyes dance like riddles never fully brought to light. They live for the thrill of the chase, and so they burn for it, bright and hot on the pyres they've built with their own cracked and bleeding hands.

They are layers of dreams wrapped loose within cautious secrets, hands to touch if only for fractured seconds, and lips never meant to meet- for he is never a man of love, and she is never a woman to depend on him, and together they are absolutely the opposite of lovers.

But what they feel is something akin to love. Not quite that needy desperation, not quite that ardent longing, not quite that bubbling passion ready to burst forth and reconstruct the world in their own twisted imagery. They have learned to hold their tongues, and so their truths remain as hidden as their secrets do.

What they show is curiosity, a pique of interest flashing in their eyes. A smile here, a laugh there, a tangle of relations not exactly their own. They are both cats believing the other is a mouse, and so they run round in crooked circles and lopsided ovals trying to catch glimpses of what doesn't actually exist. They both live for the thrill of the chase and the fire, and someday they're going to realize that they're headed in false directions and burning up on their own ambitions.

Someday. But for now, they're still disguises in a crowd. Catch them if you can, but chances are you never will.