A/N: Hello again! Still in the process of working through other stories, but couldn't get this out of my head. I'm thinking this won't be nearly as long as the other stories I have going right now, but it will be multi-chaptered. Anyway, I don't own the rights to Sherlock, don't own the characters either. All rights are reserved to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Arthur Conan Doyle, the BBC, and any other group that I have not mentioned.

Irene Adler walked down the long, dreary hallway towards the room at the end of the hall. She was meeting a patient of hers, a man in his late thirties who was nearing his death. Irene hadn't had much time to look over his file; the facility had contacted her, requesting her services immediately. Apparently, something with this particular case was abnormal and they needed her expertise.

She knew very little about this man, her patient, and she was only mildly enthused about this case. Irene was used to working with older people, helping older patients, usually from hospices, bridge the gap between life and death. She generally avoided cases like this, where the patient was younger than forty, simply because they were too much to handle sometimes. But the facility was desperate and she figured that maybe this one would be different.

She opened the door to a bland room, seeing her patient standing at the window. He was a tall, slender man who clearly was on the last legs of his life. Through his shirt, Irene could tell that he was little more than skin and bones. These were the patients that she dreaded seeing the most; at least with the other patients, they looked like they still had a little more life to them. This poor fellow, obviously alone in life, turned to look at her with a pained expression. "Ms. Adler, I presume?" he asked her.

"Mr. Holmes," she replied as she offered her hand to shake his.

He eyed her hand warily, but shook it with an unexpected strength. "So, what now?" he asked her as he began to visually calculate her.

Irene glanced down at her files. She knew he was reading them too, even though they were upside down from his perspective. "Mr. Holmes, you shouldn't be doing that," she murmured.

"There's nothing in those that I don't already have some awareness to."

"Even so, they aren't meant for your eyes."

He snorted. "Ms. Adler, there are many things in this world that aren't meant for my eyes. But that doesn't mean that I pay any attention to that."

"So I've gathered," she murmured.

The man had a strange glint in his eye, one that was uncommon for men in this stage of life. Irene could see that there was life still within this man, even though the time he had left was betraying him. "I happen to know for a fact that my first name is on that sheet. I would prefer that, from this point forward, you refer to me by my first name. Mr. Holmes makes me sound much older than I actually am."

Irene flipped through the paperwork until she found the first page. "Sherlock?" she murmured. "What sort of name is Sherlock?"

"Mother found it to be fitting."

"What was considered unfitting?" Irene chuckled.

"Edwin."

She glanced up at this man and saw that he was grinning at her. "Forgive me for sounding rather crass, but for a dying man, you certainly have quite the cheek."

"Dying is for lesser men. I'm not a lesser man yet."

"Certainly," Irene agreed.

"Irene, is it?" Sherlock asked as he turned back to the window.

"Yes…" she answered with uncertainty.

"Your name comes up often around here."

"I have had a great number of patients from this facility."

"Are they all as mental as they make us out to be?"

"Some of them are," she answered.

"So, how am I going to get out of here? Have you got a car around back?"

"I have to do my preliminary analysis and from there, we can figure out what our course of action will be."

"Of course. I've been here ten years… what's a few more days?"

"My thoughts exactly," Irene hummed as she sat down in the chair near the window. "So, I'd like to start out by asking whom I should be contacting. The staff says that they don't have any contacts to release you to."

"John Watson," Sherlock answered. "221B Baker Street. Contact Mrs. Hudson for more information. John has likely moved out of the flat, but Mrs. Hudson will have information about John's whereabouts."

Irene left that afternoon, armed with information that would ultimately make her job a little trickier and make Sherlock all the more interesting to work with.