She was dangerous. Dangerous and glowing in a vivid technicolor that stood bold and proud from the black and white landscape that he so easily blended in with. Yet strangely enough, he never ran.

She was the riddle he just couldn't solve, the puzzle he couldn't piece together. But then again, it wasn't as if she was a malicious criminal secretly plotting to stab him in the back.

He chuckled. What did he know. History often repeated itself, after all.

But watching as she, dressed in his robe, flicked her way through today's broadsheet, he couldn't help but think she'd never lay a finger on him again. The old lifestyle she led had all but been left behind, save for when it suited Mycroft and his merry men. Now she preferred to take the back seat, trail him along rooftops whilst he dealt with whatever it was occupying his mind below.

But on some quiet, case-less days he found himself just trying to decode her over a steaming cup of tea as the light tapping of winter rain rattled again the windows. He loved to trail her features with his eyes and soak in every last detail as she tapped away furiously on her precious cameraphone. He knew she could be planning his demise, or simply playing 'snake' as she often did, for the nostalgia she claimed, nonetheless.

In the moments when the pale blue of the British winter bathed one side of her face and the biting orange of the flames in the fireplace washed over the other, he really, against better judgement, couldn't care any less.

Domestic living had come fairly easy to him once he'd given it time to develop. However, Sherlock Holmes and domestication were only compatible for so far, and Irene still often found various 'experiments' where the breakfast supplies should be, or wake to find the left side of the bed cold and her lover still awake for the seventy second hour straight. But it suited her just fine.

Just fine indeed.