Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/860048.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      Other
  Fandom:
      Sherlock_(TV), Sherlock_Holmes_&_Related_Fandoms
  Relationship:
      Irene_Adler/Jim_Moriarty, Jim_Moriarty/Original_Character
  Character:
      Jim_Moriarty, Irene_Adler
  Additional Tags:
      Genderqueer_Character, Roman_Catholicism, Non-Chronological, BDSM, Jim's
      Irish_did_I_mention_DID_I_MENTION
  Collections:
      AO3_Fundraiser_Auction_Fics
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-06-27 Words: 6153
****** And also with you. ******
by reckonedrightly
Summary
     "And then there’s him and he’s him, he’s Jim, he’s the default and
     now when he looks in the mirror there is nothing between himself and
     himself. He’s there, he is sharp, his corners meet his corners and he
     is so damn well pressed it’s like he was never folded."
     Jim is a he like God is a he; Irene Adler is always the Woman.
Notes
     Warnings for: references to murder and torture, references to
     cissexism and misgendering, and Jim Moriarty's POV. Disturbing
     content, in short. The underage warning here refers to a brief
     interlude between two fifteen year olds.
     For Shayvaalski, with my thanks and possibly my apologies: they
     requested a Jim who has never felt like gender is all that
     applicable, and an Irene who specialises in non-gender-normative
     clients. This is that; this is also something else entirely.
See the end of the work for more notes
                              (click click click)
 
on a rooftop:
It occurs to Jim then, staring into Sherlock Holmes’ glassy dead-man-walking
eyes as they shake hands, that this moment, this beep and flicker of mutual
transmission, is what he’s been chasing. And it came so quietly, after all of
that. It came so soft, so gentle.
 
on religion:
Jim listens to his parents argue, and then quickly gets bored. They don’t know
what, or who, they’re talking about.
He is ten and passing under the radar; he is slipping in between the cracks and
breathing in the empty spaces. This is how he likes to be.
Sometimes people think he’s a girl. His parents think he’s a girl. It’s not
unheard of for a girl to wear trousers, after all, and when someone is
sabotaged at birth with a name like Jamesina then their reasons for calling
themselves Jim might be numerous. They might be completely unrelated to how
Jamesina is name which Jim thinks flicks up too effeminately at the end: ah,
ah. He has plausible deniability, which is as important now as it will be later
in life.
People mistake him for a boy almost as often as they mistake him for a girl. By
now three different old ladies on three different occasions have called him
son. He doesn’t correct them. There’s a slight thrill to it—though if he’s
honest, and he’s always honest to himself, the ones who frown down at him and
visibly try to work out what to make of him are probably funnier.
It’s fine. Jim’s already got it sorted out for himself and the fact remains
that there is no one so important as him.
He is a he like God is a he. He’s not a man; he’s not a boy; he’s just the
default. And he’s well-acquainted with God, though not in the way his father
is, his father who was almost a priest and who sees God in beads and Ireland.
Fine: Catholicism’s fine. Plenty of blood and plenty of misery. But it’s not
divine. Divine doesn’t get its hands dirty. Catholicism isn’t much to do with
God; Catholicism is to do with call and response. The Lord be with you will
always reliably provoke and also with you, belief be damned. It’s about wanting
to feel someone yelling back at you.
God is a void of humanity’s invention. Jim feels a kind of kinship with God,
while his father loves to stretch and reach and never quite come into contact.
He yearns to yearn, to doubt, to feel the strain of his faith. Jim can
understand the pull of a void, he supposes, but religion isn’t the emptiness he
wants. No, he understands God. Much like God, he’s got a lot of other things on
his plate, and he got bored with life on earth after about a week.
 
on the honourable Irish vernacular:
Your man.
It’s a great one that one. It’s a great phrase. It means: that person, almost
always male but with the slightest bit of leeway. It means: anyone with a
defining factor to their name. Your man down the road, your man over there,
your man that died in the swimming pool. Vague, indistinct and particular all
at once. Intimate and assured. Your man, like the act of knowing is an act of
ownership, and maybe it is; community is just a communal claim, after all.
Jim can’t believe the English don’t use it, which only goes to show that their
culture’s got holes in it. They’ve got a language stretched to breaking point.
They’ve never been much good at expressing themselves; it’s the coloniser in
them, he supposes. Storm first, ask questions later. In the wrong language,
loudly and slowly.
He can get quite far lambasting the English these days, except then he
remembers the Irish are fucking idiots too. Still, they’re idiots who are
relatively far away from him, which makes them preferable.
Jim at this point is twelve, newly infiltrated into England, using for his
operational cover the guise of a tomboyish Irish girl by the name of Jamesina
(preferably Jim, but she will allow Jamie when it’s more convenient) whom the
boys at school call Paddy. He wonders if he should be pleased by this
unintentional acquisition of a new male name to add to his collection, but it
just irritates him. His name is Jim. He’s nobody’s man. Paddy is just one more
fucking Jamesina.
 
on the body and blood:
At the age of twenty, Jim goes on T for the sake of facial hair. Not because
men have facial hair, but because he does. Jim goes on T to become himself,
breathing life into the empty spaces he has been waiting for twenty years to
inhabit. He is a lot more patient than people think.
He starts shaving with a straight razor because he’s always wanted to. He likes
to tilt his chin up with the blade flashing against his cheek and watch his own
pulse jump and shudder under his skin. Nick and it thuds harder; stay still and
it beats steady. Beneath the dull patina of his skin, his veins are purple,
blue, green, peacock colours.
On impulse, he shaves his legs, too, for the first time in years, but he leaves
his underarms and the triangle of dark curls at the apex of his thighs.
What is it? ‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken’. Which is attributed to
Wilde, like most things are.

WILDE: Be yourself; everyone else is taken.
MORIARTY: And yet simultaneously vacant.
[All laugh.]

Wilde being an Irishman, of course, as Jim’s father would always remind him,
and a fine one too, with a few minor indiscretions but who hasn’t had a few of
those, and then Jim’s English mother would flutter angrily and tell him to shut
up.
(They’re dead now; for all they left behind they might never have existed,
except that their strange produce is beginning to climb like ivy, to grow out
of the cracks and reach groping green fingers into other people’s business and
bloom, bloom, bloom.)
 
in which a deflowering occurs:
At fifteen, Jim loses his virginity with a classmate called Noel who thinks
he’s losing his virginity with a girl called Jamie. Or to rephrase:
Jim takes Noel’s virginity and his own in one fell swoop.
Yeah. He likes that better.
Jim doesn’t come and doesn’t pretend to, just lies there gnawing on the pillow
and making little blank sounds for his own interest and amusement: ah, ah. He
acts. He imagines that he really is Jamie, tomboyish and nervous. Defences up.
Knickers down.
Ah. Ah.
It’s not very interesting. Luckily, it’s not very lengthy either. Noel gets his
hands up Jim’s shirt and then he’s gone at the slightest grope of Jim’s tiny
tits, little dollops of fat propping up pink nipples. Jim sighs. Noel’s skin is
slapping against his and then out of nowhere, he comes absurdly, spasming like
a dying thing trying to shudder its way home into Jim’s body.
Jim wants to laugh and also strike him dead, which is Jim’s default setting.
But he’s not a sexual murderer—he’s already gotten that fairly straight in his
head, glaring up at the ceiling and attempting a tedious wank to the thought of
organs and people suffocating and finding his hips moving only grumpily, his
cunt drying up not out of disgust but boredom. Sure, there’s a transgressive
sex thrill to ruining things, to ruining everything, an orgy of destruction,
but he’s a complex soul and he needs finesse. So there’s no stir of arousal to
accompany his vague murderous outlines.
(Outlines: strictly outlines, not fantasies. He doesn’t fantasise about killing
so much as he yearns for the click and whir of events as they lead closer to
the inevitable end. The ultimate everything. He’s not some lonely obsessive
mixing up death and sex and love and trying to crawl back inside the womb by
opening up cavities in people’s stomachs. No, no, he likes the challenge. Let
la petite mort lie. Jim likes to set up the dominos to watch them fall. Click
click click snap. The sound of a dial snickering in an empty changing room. Ah.
Ah. Did you hear about your man that died in the swimming pool?)
“Was that all?” he drawls. On the face of it it’s because he feels like giving
Noel a bit of a complex, but in truth he’s asking himself the same question.
 
on the void:
So, yeah, the gap between man and God is fine and a nice enough philosophical
silo in which to drown yourself like so many have drowned themselves before,
but what Jim likes more is the gap between man and man, and man and woman and
none of the above. These engulfing silences between people. They are just
specks, but they believe they’re so close because they’re touching, as if the
transmission of heat and bodily fluids were the beginning and the end. They
don’t even know themselves. They are souls suspended in cavernous bodies, if
that. They have never met a beginning in their lives. They don’t realise that
they are living a succession of endings.
No. Scratch that. They’re not even occupying fucking space. They’re walking
gaps.
And then there’s him and he’s him, he’s Jim, he’s the default and now when he
looks in the mirror there is nothing between himself and himself. He’s there,
he is sharp, his corners meet his corners and he is so damn well pressed it’s
like he was never folded.
He’s twenty one. He shaves with a straight razor, and trims with clippers now
that he’s keeping up a thin moustache and the graze of a beard . He has a new
name, and it’s Moriarty. For reasons of simplicity, he decides to let them know
him as the most dangerous man in the world.
 
an account of a meeting:
She’s only nineteen and barely into the business—but she’s been stripping for a
year, she says, lounging in the corner of the coffee shop they’ve chosen to
meet in and hugging an americano to her birdlike chest. Her hair is long and
wild and dark like clouds around her pointed, alien face. Her eyes are a little
too big, her mouth a little too thin and greedy, scribbled red. She looks
hungry all the time, even when she’s picking apart a croissant and wolfing down
the fragments, licking her fingers. He likes the look of her, and her lovely
starving mouth.
“I’m being vulgar, but since you’re paying—I never turn down free food. Or free
anything.” Her voice is croaky and callous at the edges. Even though every word
she says is chosen with precision, she talks like she’s throwing her syllables
carelessly away. She flicks crumbs off her fingers and gives him a low-lashed
look in case he’s the sort of person who falls for that kind of thing. He
isn’t, and she relents, but nonetheless looks pleased. “Can’t tell you how
exciting it is to finally meet you—Mr Moriarty, is it?”
“Moriarty. No Mr. Or Jim.”
“Jim. I like that.”
She’s actually still at drama school, she explains lazily, when he asks her
what she does when she’s not being vulgar; she likes to keep busy, and anyway,
she’s not had her fill of Shakespeare just yet. Pro-domme work is her calling,
but no one’s ever asked her to roleplay as Olivia strapping Viola to her bed.
Her name’s Irene, but she’s thinking of changing it. To what? She doesn’t know.
Does she know anything? She knows what people like.
“Men?”
“People.”
They go for a walk, careful not to touch. Not even their elbows bump. Physical
contact is a commodity in this context and neither of them wants to devalue it.
He keeps his hands in his pockets; she carries her bag and her leather jacket.
Finally he tells her he’ll call her, maybe. If it happens, it won’t be soon.
She says watch out, she might be different by then. He says that’s what he’s
hoping for. She says whatever gets him off is fine, and leaves when she spots a
girlfriend across the road, raising her hand and coo-eeing for her attention
then skipping off with her high heels all a-clatter on the pavement. A car
speeds within inches of her legs with an angry scream of the horn and she just
laughs. He watches her go and watches her fade into the gaps, the nothings, as
if she can actually feel for them—as if something in her beeps and splutters
alive and starts to pour out tickertape in a genuine response to what they
transmit.
 
a short digression on the subject of mouth to mouth five-a-days:
Fruit.
People, poets, have a habit of likening kissing people to eating fruit. Bursts
of juice in the mouth and sucking down sweetness and sticky licking lips and
the tips of tongues like the exposed, poky nubs of strawberries peeking into
secret corners.
He doesn’t kiss Irene until he’s been a client for about half a year, by which
time she’s twenty one and he’s nearly twenty three and quite a lot of things
have happened, but the fact remains that one of the things he will always like
about her is that she doesn’t kiss like a fruit salad. No, she when she kisses
him she kisses like she is trying to get something from him, striving to tug
whatever it is from between his teeth and lick it out from under his tongue.
Biting his lip in case he has cached it under his skin there.
And of course she never finds it but she appreciates that she knows it’s there,
that she is not so stupid as to believe that he is laid open for her. In
return, in her mouth, he hunts for her just the same.
 
on the phone:
It’s a couple of months after meeting Irene and he wants and wants and wants.
He shaves his face and picks up a girl in a lesbian bar but he’s bored of
people fucking a woman when he wants them to fuck him. When she lifts her head
from between his legs he sighs in her face. The angry blush that crashes over
her face is quite nice but it’s not what he wants. He tries going the other way
and the novelty of being treated like a man is interesting at first but it’s
less convenient; there’s the problem of his cunt, or rather there’s the problem
of people making his cunt a problem.
No it’s not a female body. No it’s not a male body. It’s his, and he’s Jim.
“Hey. Irene. Changed your name?”
“Not recently. You?”
“I’m always Jim.”
“I’ll remember it.”
“So, your business.”
“Booming.”
“Booming? You could have said banging. You could have put some effort into it.”
“Fine. It’s strikingly busy. Just cracking. Whipping up a frenzy.” There’s a
dull thump in the background and he can just picture her throwing herself
backwards on her sofa, her hair exploding in a haze of curls around her head
and her legs going up, up, up. “It’s flogging marvellous, darling!”
“Much better!” he cheers back at her encouragingly, spinning in the middle of
his living room. “It hasn’t taken a pounding in the recent economy?”
“No, but it’s been full of suspense.”
“The joke’s boring now,” he informs her, suddenly stopping and gripping the
back of an armchair to stare coldly at nothing, even though full of suspense
was quite a good one. He hears a thoughtful rustle at the other end of the
line, a breath of static.
“Is something the matter?”
“I’m trying to talk business with you and you’re not being professional.”
“I had no idea you wanted any part of my business, Jim.” Jim. She remembers.
And he’s gone quiet, staring with narrow eyes at nothing. “Jim?”
“How much?”
“Don’t be a brute.”
“How much, Irene?”
“It depends.”
“Listen to me. Listen. If you let a whisper of this slip, to anyone, I will
hurt you. I will take out your teeth and your eyes and that’s just the start of
list and there’s another list and on that list is everything I’d do to you when
you were dead.”
“Yes. I know.”
“I hope you’re scared.”
“Of course I am. I’m a self-preserving coward,” she says. “You can always count
on that. I wouldn’t tell anyone, you know.”
“You might.” He thinks about her hungry face, her wolf face, her sharp face.
“You’re greedy. You want things.”
“Everybody wants things, Jim. Maybe not on our scale, but still.”
“Don’t you go running your mouth off and talking like we’re one and the same,
my dear. We aren’t.”
“I know that. I’m greedy, not stupid.”
Because she’s greedy, not stupid, he consents to see her. Honestly he thinks
she should pay him for the privilege but there are more ways to pay than in
money.
“Anyway,” she says before she hangs up. “No one ever got famous for keeping
secrets, did they?”
“And you want to be famous?”
“Of course, darling, but I meant people only pay attention to indiscre—”
“I’ll make you famous. Waive my fees.”
“Not a chance.”
“Clever girl. I’ll be seeing you.”
 
ruminations in a cell:
The noise of the coin against the mirror is the only thing in the room with him
and yet he is not alone. The mirror is two way. There are cameras. He is
watched.
G E
He grins for them. His hand is shaking. Pain. Always, these people go for pain.
His forehead is slippery with blood, and he’s going to have to tell them to be
careful with the face, for God’s sake, do they think he’s got time to waste
hiding these bruises? And his brain, too. Not enough braincells in the world.
No sense smacking his head off the walls and threatening an already-endangered
species.
Of course it’s her fault that she’s in here. It’s her fault Mycroft Holmes had
anything like the information necessary to pick him up and incarcerate him. She
let her phone slip, let her secrets go. Defences down. Knickers god knows
where. Perhaps that had always been her way. Or perhaps not. Whatever she had
been, she wasn’t what she was. All you could count on was that you couldn’t
count on her. Clever girl. He had liked that about her. She was predictable,
but in reverse. An interesting mental stretch. You had to watch what her mouth
didn’t do. Mind you, what her mouth did do was interesting enough. But now
she’s dead, so that’s, that’s, that’s anticlimactic, and this coin isn’t
scraping a very good S for Sherlock. Jim doesn’t think his fingernails will cut
it, though.
He laughs at his own pun.
G E T S
And then sneers at the man behind the mirror.
Scrape. Scrape.
 
ruminations in midair:
The body the body the body. The shuddering heartbeat and the prickling sweat
and the ropeburn. In contrast to the silence pressing in on him, he is a
cacophony. He’s screaming in here. A thousand biological checks and balances
are at war, clicking against each other. Click click click but there’s no snap,
not yet; nothing comes loose and nothing comes free and nothing breaks. This
both is and isn’t the point of the exercise.
The point of floating is the possibility of falling.
He is right at the edge of his skin. He is miles away. He is only a foot from
the floor. His knees are bent up, ankles tied together, wrists tied to his
ankles. The ropes are pulled tight, holding him up. He’s facing downwards but
that is entirely irrelevant.
Emptiness is breathing on his skin. Her hands brush over the blindfold,
stroking the knot behind his head. Electricity jumps from her fingers, and he’s
aware of how naked he is, and how well-hidden. “Let’s begin,” she says, “Jim.”
How far do you have to dig to find what makes the body more than a body? How
much do you have to scrape away?
 
on safety measures:
“I’m giving you a get out of jail free card,” Jim says, leaning back in his
chair and gesturing with a chocolate biscuit.
“Actually,” Irene drawls, looking at the pictures on his coffee table rather
than at him, “murder tends to land people in jail.”
“Oh, Irene. Don’t be so pedestrian. Murder’s not a blunt instrument.”
The noise she makes isn’t entirely convinced, so he leans forwards and slips a
finger under her chin, tipping her face up. She raises an eyebrow at him. “I am
giving you,” he says very slowly, “a present. Don’t be ungrateful.” She raises
her eyebrow further, mouth tightening, and he rolls his eyes and snatches his
hand away. “You’re squeamish? Seriously?”
“No,” she says after a long moment. “No, I’m wondering why you brought me two
of them.”
The pictures on Jim’s coffee table can be separated into two groups: pictures
of Girl A and pictures of Girl B. This is how they’ve been discussing them. In
the pictures—ten of each woman, rectangles of pink flesh—they are naked. Their
faces are obscured with scribbles of black pen. (“Casting call,” Jim had
explained lazily. “Auditions. Indie porn. I had to practically write the script
to make it look convincing. Be nice to me and I’ll tell you the plot.”)
Jim smiles, and shrugs. “I thought you might appreciate the choice.”
“But B doesn’t match me.” That’s the other thing. With their faces hidden, they
are both almost identical; to each other, and to one Irene Adler. Jim watches
as Irene traces the curve of Girl B’s anonymous waist with the edge of her red
fingernail. “Her nipples are—”
“Too small.”
Irene shows her teeth. “Too small. So why show her to me?”
“She’s got some interesting extenuating circumstances.”
“Go on.”
“Girl A,” Jim says, tapping a picture of her naked from the back, “is a failed
actress and reasonably successful escort who nonetheless wants a slight career
change. Supported by her loving boyfriend, who writes advertising jingles but
wants to be Bob Dylan. Nice flat, bit boho, you’d like it. No plans to get
married, no plans to have children. Her life’s nothing special, but it’s not
pure and utter misery. I’m told.”
“Girl B?”
“Is a very interesting kind of suicidal.”
“Oh,” says Irene, like she’s biting the sound right out of the air.
“Oh,” says Jim.
“You’re testing me.”
“I’m being understanding. You’ve never done this before. I’m giving you
flexibility.”
“You’re testing me.”
“Yeah, I’m testing you.”
Irene smiles pityingly and has the nerve to say, “You’ve really got the wrong
idea about me,” which makes him howl with derisive laughter. In response, Irene
just looks thoughtful.
She’s impossible to humiliate, he thinks, settling down grumpily. When it comes
to her self-worth, she has an exact figure in mind and she doesn’t stray from
it.
“So what’s a very interesting sort of suicidal?” she asks.
“Ah.” He flickers back, cheers up; he’s been waiting to break this to her.
“You’ll like this. Gorgeous Girl B urgently wants to get her face smashed in.
Had to go through her internet history to get the faintest whisper of it, and
then tracked down an ex-boyfriend in a bar who nearly sobbed onto my shoulder
to confirm. She gets off on it. Asked him to, uh, what was it. ‘Strangle and
beat her to death’. The ultimate humiliation.”
“The ultimate everything.”
“One hell of an orgasm,” Jim says, and sticks another biscuit in his mouth. The
crunching underlines how Irene lapses into silence, looking meditatively down
at the photographs.
Jim chews hard and looks at them too. His eyes track the jut of Girl B’s
Adlerish hips, and tries to be attracted to her. She’s a carbon copy, right
down to her high-arched feet and cramped toes. He thinks of drawing his tongue
along the wrinkles of her sole, his fingers wrapped around her ankle. It does
nothing for him. His eyes drop instead to Irene’s feet. Her high heels are
lying discarded on the floor, and her toenails blush red underneath a demure
stretch of pale nylon. He wonders if he could take off her stockings with his
teeth.
“Do you think I’m particularly evil?” Irene inquires, looking down at the
photographs on the coffee table. She sounds like she’s asking for fashion
advice.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jim says, looking up from her. “You aren’t a Catholic, are you?”
“Hm? Oh.” She looks up with raised eyebrows. “If I say no...?”
“I’d ask you where the guilt comes from.”
Irene laughs. “You see? The wrong idea. Answer my question.”
“What’s evil?”
“Do you think I’m moral?”
“I think you’ve got rules.”
“I do,” Irene agrees. “One is that it isn’t kind to kill people.”
“Hello. Now it all comes out.”
“So,” she says, sprawling back and crossing her legs, giving a shrug which
makes her whole body ripple. “This isn’t a question of morality at all. What’s
more moral about offing some poor snuff fan instead of some poor escort?
Someone dies either way.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Might as well not be me. Girl A, please, Jim.”
Jim’s mouth curls upwards until he marvels that his face can contain it. “Good.
Good. Very, very good. Morals by numbers. Wow. Are you feeling okay?”
Irene thinks on that, and then says decisively, “No. I’m starving.”
While she fixes herself a sandwich in Jim’s kitchen, Jim picks up the
photographs and feasts his eyes—but there’s nothing there. He’s chewing bones.
They’re boring. They’re her but they’re not and they’re boring.
He drops the pictures, sighs. She isn’t her body. She’s in there somewhere,
though.
He gets up, comes up behind her, pressing her between his body and the counter.
She’s cutting a sandwich in two, knife flashing in her hand. He drags his
tongue against the soft shell of her left ear, his hands sliding up to her
hips, feeling her bones through silk and skin. Then he pushes his fingers
across her stomach to feel hard slabs of muscle, and steal the heat from her.
“A couple of dirty photographs,” she murmurs, dropping her head back, her
throat working as she swallows, “and you’re needy?”
“Those weren’t dirty.”
“No,” she agrees, rubbing her thumb in small circles over his wrist. He frowns.
“Is that a ketchup sandwich you’re eating?”
“Yes.”
“Ew.”
She licks her fingers, then picks up the second half, and finally pushes her
plate backwards, exaggerating the movement so that she’s practically bending at
the waist, pushing back against him. He snorts, and then in a sudden ripple of
sinew and silk she’s turning, sitting up on the counter, and clamping her knees
around his waist. In one hand, at the corner of his vision, the breadknife
flashes. In the other, of course, she’s still got her sandwich.
“Yes?” she asks, then takes a messy red bite.
“Yes,” he says, pushing a hand up her skirt to find the top of her stocking,
where slippery nylon gives in to the rough softness of skin.
“This isn’t how I do business, you know,” she says, swallowing another bite.
“Yes it is,” he says, and detaches her suspender from her stocking-top with a
snap. The elastic leaps.
“Oh,” she says, “you’ve won me round with argument.”
This is business, of course, and this is exactly how she does it, building
herself up and letting people exhaust themselves trying to get past all her
walls, until they reach something that looks genuine. Irene is a professional.
Sometimes, in the course of being a professional, she pretends to break the
rules. She goes out for dinner; she kisses; she fucks. It remains a
transaction, but it’s one people don’t realise they’re taking part in until she
hands them the bill.
Something that looks genuine, though. Looks. Looks looks looks. If it’s all in
how she looks, he really should want her doubles, faceless and frozen as they
are. He wants her, instead.
She’s raking her nails through his hair, along his scalp, and saying in her
low, crumble-in-the-mouth voice, “Keep your hands right there.” His hands are
on her thighs, spread out, leeching warmth from her. He keeps them there as she
traces his features with her index finger, knife still in her hand, more
precarious now. She chews hard, mouth moving and twisting. It’s slightly
disgusting. He doesn’t want to look away.
Her finger traces his left eyebrow, and she finishes her sandwich. “Well, I
feel much better,” she says. Her voice is a shudder in the air and he feels the
vibrations rattle through him, right down to the clench of his cunt.
“What kind of domme gets pinned to a counter?” he asks, digging his fingernails
into the soft, peachy skin of her thighs.
“The kind that knows it doesn’t matter. You haven’t moved your hands.”
This is the point at which he learns that she doesn’t kiss like she’s got a
mouthful of strawberries, and that he’s grateful for it.

WILDE: A kiss may ruin a human life.
MORIARTY: So might anything, done well enough.
ADLER: paying little attention to the conversation; the audience must squint to
see what she is doing with her hands.

“Oh, honey,” Jim says, half against her mouth, as Irene’s fingers rub him
slippery-wet inside his trousers, fast and rough. She tastes of artificial
tomatoes, bursting thick and red and sweet against his tongue. She’s dropped
the knife, and on the floor it reflects a serrated, garbled stripe of them. The
heaving muscle of their shoulders, half of Irene’s grasping hand as she claws
at his neck. “Hey, idea—”
“My ideas first. You can veto if you don’t like them.”
“Good. Nice.”
“What was yours? Out of interest?” she asks, pushing their cheeks together and
mouthing at his ear. He thinks with a burst of violence that he wants her to
rub herself raw against him, end up with stubble rash striped across all her
duplicitous white skin. His nails dig in, and she leans back, tilts up his
face. He grins, warbles, “Nothing, nothing, well, you could hit me,” and she
slaps him hard.
In the silence that rings out between them, they both breathe. Irene’s hand is
still inside Jim’s trousers, and her fingers are circling with a slowness that
belies the hammer and scream of both their hearts. He’s wet. He’s soaking.
“Oh,” he says, laughing, “good morning. Whoo. I’m awake.”
“Welcome to your day.”
He tips his head back. “More of that,” he says.
She pushes him backwards and they stagger and stumble to the kitchen table and
then to the floor, body-speaking, her hands and his hands and hers and his. Her
knees knock off the floor, and he nearly breaks a tooth on her collarbone: he
sucks and gnaws and pants against her, wanting to leave selfish marks so she
can’t work for a week. She slaps him away. He wants that too. He ends up
sitting up with his legs spread, trousers down one hand wrapped around each
table leg, because she says, again, “Keep your hands right there.”
Following orders is like letting her inhabit his body for a few seconds. The
space between them, the good old void, his best friend and his nemesis, spasms
and stutters.
The kitchen floor is cold against his arse; his chest is heaving, his tie half-
undone, thrown over his shoulder. His cheek still stings from her slaps, his
skin tingling, alive and bright and oh, burning. Burning.
She pushes her nails along his thighs and her mouth is hot as she kisses his
cunt.
And Jim can feel her tongue exploring him, lapping and shoving between his
legs, her nose skimming his clit and then the hungry suck of her starving mouth
as she all but tries to swallow him, sucking him hard, messy, hungry. He’s
writhing, digging his nails into the table legs, pushing up, up against her
mouth, she is, her sticky lipstick is, is smeared plasticky and bright along
his inner thighs, oh she’s close, oh she’s good. Oh she’s squirming between his
legs and lapping, licking, at his slit, at his swollen clit. And her fingers,
now, are slipping down into him and pushing in and opening him up and up and
oh.
And she’s saying Jim, Jim against him without ever saying a word. It’s in the
ripple of her shoulders and the tangle of her hair. It’s in her mouth.
And he comes once—
—and twice—
—loses count there—
“Fuck,” he says, giving a strangled laugh as he comes to. Laughing along with
him, she says, “Rather.” She unpeels his fingers from the table legs and
together they push and pull until they both get their way and are tangled on
the floor, half under the kitchen table. His fingers are tucked up her skirt,
tucked up her lacy, flimsy knickers, feeling the rough and rub of them, rolling
the fabric under his fingertips.
“You little devil,” he purrs, “you secret good girl, you’re going to feel bad
about this,” and nuzzles her mouth to taste himself.
 
the last supper:
Irene is dead. Beaten up in an alley by thugs who left her face unrecognisable.
Just her perfect blank body remains, cooling on a mortuary slab.
While Holmeses crane over it, that pre-prepared mute packet of flesh, Irene
lets herself into Jim’s new flat. He doesn’t look up from his laptop, just
says, “There’s turkey left over.”
“You had Christmas dinner?”
“Why not?” he asks, and grimaces at his screen. She moves about, dark and
unfocused as a ghost in his peripheral vision, inspecting her surroundings. He
keeps his eyes off her.
This is the first time she’s been in his latest flat, and for some reason Jim
had expected her to be out of place. He had seen her sprawling there, wilfully
vulgar, her sardonic, biting mouth sticky with cheap red lipstick—but of course
Irene has grown up too, and she navigates the stylish, minimalist shapes of his
expensive furniture with a smooth ease.
Finally, he glances up at her back as she slips into the kitchen. She’s wearing
a dark suit, flat shoes, expensive tie, gold cufflinks. All of it could have
come out of Jim’s out wardrobe. Her hair is twisted up into a glossy coronet.
For reasons of poetry, he should say her fingernails are the colour of blood,
but they’re actually the colour of ketchup. He can’t help the facts.
He closes down his laptop soundlessly, and tracks her into the kitchen, where
she is standing making a turkey sandwich with her usual ferocity, knife
flashing and glinting.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, not kindly. “Now that you’ve survived the
storm.”
“Hungry,” she says.
“Regretful?”
“No. Where’s Seb? Chained up in the basement?”
“Meow. Put your claws away. I’m always so sad that my girls don’t get on.”
“We used to get on. She likes being chained up in the basement.”
“Seb’s out.”
For a while, there’s nothing but the sound of chewing, as they stand perfectly
separate and perfectly similar in his kitchen.
“Men who are dandies and women who are darlings rule the world,” he says
finally, boredly.
“What’s that?”
“Something Wilde was wrong about. What are you going to do?” he asks. She looks
up from her food, her eyebrows perfectly arched. Dollish and living dead. Her
skin looks cold. “I mean,” he continues, “what are you going to do now there’s
only me to run from?”
She smiles. “Run faster,” she says, and takes a bite. Offers him the last half
of the sandwich. He shrugs, takes it, does it in memory.
 
on the floor beneath the kitchen table:
“What’s it like?” he asks her, leaning away from her mouth but keeping his
fingers tracing the lacy edge of her knickerline. It’s the coast where it meets
the sea, the land and the ocean sweeping backwards and forwards and balancing
each other out. It’s Tower Bay Beach in Portrane on a choppy day, Jim getting
called son by a stranger and the wee lass by his father.
Irene smiles lazily, as if she’s just come rather than him. His arm is bent up,
so that he’s using his open hand for a pillow and she’s using his elbow,
leaving faint blushes of powdery foundation on his suit jacket. “What’s what
like, darling?”
“Coming into contact.”
She blows a curl of hair out of her face to consider. His fingers slip up,
pushing aside the wet gusset of her knickers and finding her cunt slick and
open. “Never mind,” he says. “Let’s play Viola and Olivia. I would you were as
I would have you be…”
                                    (snap)
End Notes
     "and also with you" - IT ISN'T ANYMORE. The response is now 'and with
     your spirit'. This is a recent change, however, so Jim is definitely
     of the generation attached to 'and also with you'. (Also it's just
     better, come on).
     "Viola and Olivia" - From Twelfth Night. Viola is disguised as a boy;
     Olivia falls in love with her not realising she's a woman. Made even
     more fun when you remember that in Shakespeare's time, women were
     played by men, so Viola would be played by a boy pretending to be a
     girl pretending to be a boy. Jim's last line is one of Olivia's. And
     'she wasn't what she was' is a vague reference to 'I am not what I
     am', an earlier line of Viola's.
     ...in conclusion, I am HEARTILY SORRY, and yet I had an indecent
     amount of fun with this. My thanks, again, to Teddy/Shayvaalski,
     because I would never have had the idea of writing anything like this
     without their wonderful prompt and generosity towards the AO3 Auction
     fundraiser. <3
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