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bakerstreet2012-03-14 04:02 pm
stalkingsocks) wrote in bakerstreet2012-03-14 04:02 pm
Baby, I just can't sleep.
It happens to everyone - sometimes, you have nights where you just can't fall asleep, no matter what you do. It could be for a number of reasons, or no reason at all. And this is what's happened now: you've been laying in bed for what feels like hours, just tossing and turning, and nothing seems to help. So what's left to do? Get out of bed and go wake someone else up, of course. If you're not getting any sleep, then why should they?
i n s t r u c t i o n s
• Post with your character (note the name and fandom in the subject).
• Other people reply to you by generating a number from 1 to 10.
• Have fun!
o p t i o n s
01 • FEAR. Maybe you're hearing strange, indeterminable noises; maybe there's a severe storm happening outside; maybe you watched a scary movie before bed? Whatever the reason, you're terrified and it's keeping you awake. You just want to wake someone else up so they can protect you from the monster in your closet.
02 • HUNGER. Your stomach is growling and it just won't stop. Or perhaps your throat is so dry you could cough up a tumbleweed? Well, you've gone to the kitchen to remedy this and hey, that was a pan that just dropped on the floor. It was loud enough to wake the dead! Oops.
03 • PAIN. Your body is completely worn out, be it from exercise, battle, sickness, or what have you. Either way you're in enough pain to keep you from sleeping, so maybe someone else has a home remedy or something, or can at least help you take your mind off of it.
04 • SOLITUDE. For some reason, your bed just feels so empty at the moment. You're feeling terribly lonely and really just want someone to keep you company for a while. Maybe it'd be easier to fall asleep if you're with them...
05 • DISCOMFORT. Your room is an oven. Either that or a freezer. Or maybe this bed is just really uncomfortable? Who knows why you can't get to sleep, it feels like it could be anything. Why even bother trying? Maybe someone else can preoccupy you until you feel tired enough to ignore your discomfort.
06 • PENSIVE. Something's on your mind, and no matter how hard you try to focus elsewhere, it's just not going to work. Your body may be tired, but your mind is incredibly busy and it's virtually impossible to get to sleep. Surely, talking it out with someone else will help?
07 • SADNESS. Something terrible has happened that day, perhaps; or you could just be severely depressed. Either way you're trying your hardest not to cry yourself to sleep, and it's not working at all. Better find a way to get it out of your system somehow; you need a shoulder to cry on.
08 • ANGER. You are just... fuming. Who knows why - that annoying dog is barking again, or maybe the people next door are getting busy and keeping you awake. Whatever the reason for your ire is, you'd better put an end to it so you can get some damn rest already! Go wake up a friend so you can complain to them.
09 • RESTLESS. You're far too energetic to sleep right now. Maybe you're just trying to do so out of necessity - you have to be up early tomorrow! But you just don't think you'll be able to fall asleep for a while now, so why waste the time trying to sleep when you could be doing something else? Namely bothering someone else - you're totally jealous because they're getting more sleep than you.
10 • WILDCARD. Choose one of the options above, or make up your own scenario.
wildcard; because they are;
Like blood, but she's fine and she'll just keep her coat on, or get her blouse off in the bathroom and figure something out. This is what we call rationalizing, because though Benevenuta - Mélisande, mild-mannered Parisienne history student with an unexpected wild streak that Irene had briefly enjoyed a few years ago - knows all of these things, she's sitting on the stairs in front of Irene's townhouse, talking herself into ringing the bell.
Or she could text her.
At three in the morning.
Without explaining where she got her latest address.
(Since she was passing through--)
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Which really doesn't help explain why Irene, peeking from between a crack in her closed curtains second bedroom curtains, can see her on the front steps. She'd been about to open a window for the sake of some fresh air (...haha, this is London, but sleeplessness will drive even the most rational of women to hopeless endeavours) when she'd caught sight of someone on her porch, and her first reaction had been to duck away from the window and hope to God they missed any indication that she was at home, awake. Now, having switched vantage points and commenced spying somewhat more subtly, she's sure she recognises Mélisande, which really raises more questions than it answers.
But she's safe, isn't she? She's not one of the (perhaps too many) ex-lovers who became ex-lovers- some more literally than others- when Irene found them to have links to MI5 or to American intelligence, to the police or to any organisation which amounts to men with guns.
She's safe, or she was, and yet she's on the steps after years of absence, hesitant, and what does that suggest?
Nothing boring.
In retrospect, the reason Irene has such a problem with women who turn out to be working against her might be her appreciation for people and things which are nothing boring, but a long life is no substitute for an enjoyable one.
Benevenuta might hear the sudden, decisive clicks of locks as Irene undoes her extensive security measures in what seems like a rush, as if doing it quickly to stop herself having second thoughts. She cracks open the door- her hair's down, her make-up off, she's wearing a sheer robe over a sheer negligee over nothing, it's cold and so-
"Do you think I don't have windows?" she inquires quietly, sounding rather arch and a little astonished, but not annoyed.
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Irene, after all, is precisely as stunning as she remembers. The lack of irritation is unexpectedly satisfying, if only because getting her out of bed is conceptually almost as satisfying as she remembers it was to get her into it - Irene Adler doesn't get up for just anything. It means she smiles, a little, as she pulls her coat tighter around herself in reaction to the chill that Irene's lack of an outfit has just reminded her of.
“I was thinking,” she says, warmly unapologetic, and then: “Am I invited in?”
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These are the sort of thoughts that occur to Irene when an ex-lover turns up out of the blue on her doorstep at three in the morning.
"Always," Irene tells her, stepping back to allow her entry. In that low, musical, off-duty tone she has, the one she employs when she's out of her make up and trying to give the impression that walls have been broken down, she adds, "Come in. God knows I'll freeze before you do; I might as well interrogate you in the warm."
...not a joke, just wearing the clothes of one.
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--she's here, wholly and entirely and all of those other lovely words that mean yes, right now. It has its benefits.
“There's not much to tell,” she says, deprecating and quiet-eyed as she steps inside, sliding her free hand into a pocket and resting the other on her clutch - she makes no immediate move to remove her coat, once the door is closed behind her. “I was going to call first, but, ah...I was walking already.”
So why not just see? For all that she has that curious distance, she's always been refreshingly direct as well; what she says always seems to be what she means. It's honest.
(It can be very misleading.)
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"Three years," Irene murmurs, very quietly- it seems right to be quiet, considering the situation and the setting; she hasn't turned on any lights, and the hall they're in is dark but for the faint glow of streelights through windows and the passing beams of cars which travel in slow stripes across the room. "What a terribly long walk."
The archness in her tone is rather steely, wielded as a weapon, but more to point out that she could lash out if she wanted to than for the sake of actually harming. She's just making it very clear that this- the entire situation- is unusual. Perfectly fine, of course; come in, sit down, tell her everything whether true or false, share her house, her bed- but be very aware that she's not an idiot.
And that she's curious, of course.
"I didn't give you this address, did I?" she adds- and that could sound demanding or suspicious, but she's smiling. Her expression is shrewd, wry, and admiring, as if Benevenuta's just performed some particularly fascinating magic trick- though what Irene likes about magicians is working out where the lie is.
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Even then she suspects she's walking a very fine line with Irene Adler. Which is thrilling, now and then, but dangerous as well and so the cards she lay down on the table between them had never had things like please stay and she had accepted, with good grace, that it wasn't something Irene asked of her, either. Inviting Irene into her world had seemed like something that would swiftly become more complicated than she could control, and if that was tempting, sometimes, Benevenuta still likes to be in control.
Which is why she found out where Irene was living and sought her out on her own terms. This is how she frames it to herself, because I wanted to see her and it feels like something restless under my skin that I didn't choose to put there isn't an option. Even though London is a big city and she hasn't planned on a long stay and even if Irene did find out she were in town, there's no reason to assume that she would've sought her out on her terms, either, and she reminds herself not to assume it even now as she's allowed (invited) in, aware of the sharp edges even in Irene's pleasure.
She always liked that about her.
“A mutual friend mentioned you to me,” she says, and in part it's his fantasy that's playing out now; he'd been intrigued by the idea of being a shared point of connection between his current lover and his current dominatrix and their mutual past, he'd wanted to know more about the relationship (she hadn't told him) and he'd enjoyed what she suspects he perceived as power in giving her the details that he had, in choosing to give them to her. (In his fantasy, of course, he was invited; as much as she can enjoy voyeurism, this is not for anyone else.) “I thought-- perhaps I will look you up.”
She'd had to find the address on her own, but it hadn't been hard. (For her.)
...and she really hadn't been planning to do it at 3AM.
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Well, if Mélisande refuses to age a day besides her hair, she can just live with the consequences, can't she?
"I can't fault you for atmosphere, my darling, but I can't give you any points for practicality considering the time," she tells her, relenting slightly, the endearment dropping naturally from her tongue. "But I'm being a terrible hostess. Come in properly-" she's leading the way out of the hall and into an expansive sitting room instead "-and let me look after you, for heaven's sake."
She's faux-joking again, trusting Mélisande to pick up on the hints of genuine concern. Turning up on a former lover's doorstep at three AM is rarely a good sign, after all.
What she doesn't try to broadcast too much is suspicion.
Is she, Irene wonders, a last resort for no-questions-asked shelter? It isn't a pleasant theory. She prefers the idea of her ex-lover needing to be here, specifically, not just anywhere she can find...but she's pulled that particular trick too many times herself to be anything but wary of it in other people. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I had to see you- please, just let me in and for heaven's sake lock the door behind us...
Which isn't exactly what Mélisande is even doing, but there are subtle hints, and Irene takes everything with a pinch of salt. She doesn't think of her as manipulative, but she does think of her as intelligent. Everybody likes to be liked; clever people have to know what to do with other people's affections.
So many unanswered questions. And yet that's what Irene likes. In the back of her mind, she wonders who it was who accidentally connected them this time- Michael or William or Ernest perhaps- but it hardly matters.
"Why now? And I do mean now, three AM."
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That coming to Irene was a choice. That she could have gone to a hotel. That she chose to come to Irene and not (William, who loves the way she pronounces his name). That there is an interesting reason why she was trying to decide where to spend the night with most of it already gone, her fingers curling and uncurling in her coat in a way that seems almost anxious.
(Benevenuta never tried competing with the force of nature that her mother is; the role she has perfected, though never truly inhabited, is closer to that of the ingenue. A young woman on the cusp, confident but perhaps unaware of the power she could wield-- and it is the perfect disguise until the second she doesn't need it any more. She knows exactly what she's wielding.)
“I was so awake-- I wanted to see you before I go.”
Her plans in London have apparently been cut short.
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It's too good. Is it? Or is she just so jaded from her own layers of artifice that she doesn't believe anyone to be genuine? She balances the two possibilities as objectively as she can, and tries not to be distracted by the image Mélisande presents; gripping at her coat, playing the distant dream girl, far from weak but perhaps in need of a helping hand, her hand in particular... Irene almost wishes she'd never played the same role. It would make this so much easier to enjoy.
But she joins in, just for the moment, allows herself to get at least half swept up in the act while her mind still reels with theories and considerations. Her eyes soften.
"Come here." Her voice is calm and unquestioningly authoritative. She sits, beckoning Benevenuta down beside her with motions that are flowing but still distinctly commanding; she expects, as usual, to be obeyed. "Where were you before?" she asks, her voice heavy with the unasked question; what happened?
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Irene is less dramatic about it than some of her former lovers, but the principle - at least so far as it concerns Benevenuta - remains the same. The difference is how, and why, and that it's always going to be on her terms. Benevenuta doesn't do 'in hand', either, not unless the hand is her own. On her terms.
(She sits down just like Irene tells her to; the weight of the holstered gun tethers this dream girl to reality. When she says the blood isn't mine, because it seems increasingly likely she's going to have to, it will be true, for once.)
“I had a meeting, this evening,” she says, after a few moments; she still speaks so carefully (four hundred and fifty years and she's never spent any significant part of that time in an English-speaking area), choosing her words, but as ever it seems deliberate more than hesitant. The words she chooses, she's sure of. “A...research thing, a nothing thing. The arrangements are all very last minute. I was not in a hurry to be in bed...I think that he followed me.”
Not here, though. She's edgy, but not the sort of edgy that suggests she thinks she was followed here.
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Maybe that's not how empathy is meant to be viewed, though.
Irrelevant. The facts of the matter are that Irene has spent quite a lot of time being followed, hunted, threatened by men- for things she's done, things she didn't do, no matter. Who chooses The Woman as a name to convey power unless they've got a point to make, a standard to subvert, inside the bedroom and out? And so she can't help but feel very...human about things like, oh, for instance, a former lover, a clever, implacable girl-slash-woman forever on the cusp of something, managing to make distinctly learned English sound like modernist poetry (a nothing thing- Irene thinks distantly that she'd very much like to kiss her again), getting followed.
She puts the brakes on that thought in the privacy of her own mind, reminding herself again- the damsel in distress, oldest trick in the book, one of your own favourites, too good to be real.
She's frowning slightly- not an expression many people get to see. "For how long, where to? I assume you aren't hurt." Her voice is soft, and she has mastered the art of sounding concerned without exactly seeming worried- worry, after all, implies a lack of control over the situation, and Irene sounds very much in charge. It's subtle, but there.
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(And after this perhaps there won't be any Mélisande any more, she'll get pulled back into whatever dream she came from and this will have only been a goodbye she shouldn't have needed, not with three years and no promises between them. She must be careful not to give Irene anything that can be traced to her later, when she's someone else.)
Then she says, “I only wounded him.”
This is and is not true. She makes it sound-- like it should sound, like she's almost shocky with it. Like she'd been afraid and she'd reacted and she shot somebody when she'd thought it was just a precaution that she'd never have to make use of.
She's never been good at goodbyes.
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She's surprised because she isn't surprised; because had the suggestion that Mélisande could only wound somebody arisen in hypothesis she'd have thought it slightly absurd, but now that it's happened it seems perfectly sensible. The dream girl, slightly off-kilter, threatened and reacting- yes. It makes sense. And Irene knows for a fact that there's no more potent motivator than fear- the desire to lash out and run and never stop.
"Alright," she murmurs- it might be it's alright or you're alright now or just I understand. She's speaking with the voice of experience, slipping into a familiar role- older, experienced, in control in a way which is more reassuring than domineering, let me deal with it.
Funny, really, considering what she doesn't know.
"Any witnesses?" she asks. Practicalities.
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(He's probably woken up by now, with a splitting headache that won't last long.)
This isn't poetry-- this is a love letter, a last hurrah, putting the dream to bed before she has to wake up. In a short while Mélisande-and-Irene will only be that dream that Benevenuta had once, and it's not the way she planned (when she looked up the address she'd thought let's get coffee and she practised saying it, not in the mirror because she was going to call her, going to listen to that voice and close her eyes and--), but it's nighttime, still, so she can have this. She writes her own history, just the way she wants to remember it, just the way she wants them to remember her.
Dear Irene, I was a fantasy you had in a dream I wanted to be...
When she stands to open her coat, though, the blood splatter tells a story that isn't damsel; upward from a low angle. One shot.
(Ruined that beautiful sheer blouse. At least the leather underneath - and she always did like her overwrought lingerie, but that's why I like it, under the sweater, it's incongruous; don't you love that word, Irene? - was mostly protected.)
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"My God."
The blood spatter shocks her into an artless, raw response. My God. She's standing up now, before she even thinks about it, half worried- worried, this time, events slipping from beyond her grasping fingers (that's an illusion, of course, everything was always beyond her control really)- and half astonished, for want of a better word. Admiring? Proud? Maybe. And she's angry. Oh dear. She just can't get the image of Mélisande firing off that one shot out of her head, for a moment can't see anything but the scene playing in her mind's eye, juxtaposed with vague background memories of a few months in Paris when Mélisande had been blonde.
Must this sort of thing happen to everyone she touches? Must it happen to girls- women- like Mélisande?
If there are other women like Mélisande. If even Mélisande is like Mélisande.
That's a lot of blood to be only wounded. Irene's taking her coat, putting it over the back of a chair, hand finding Benevenuta's upper arm, moving suddenly on an instinct, either not acting or so deep in her role that it's second nature- "Who was he?"
What she wants to say, incomprehensibly, is tell me the truth, because for once in her life she is yearning for it- and she hates the fact that she cannot simply trust that she already has it.
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Dear Irene, if I wrote to you a confession it would be one never repented--
Dear Irene, you are too dangerous for my world.
Her hands comes up to Irene's - there's the gun, now she's not wearing her coat, easily visible in that translucent blouse and those close-fitting pants - and she leans forward into her and the instinctive sway of it is as honest as the way her arm is being clasped right now. Shooting him didn't matter, she shot him because she doesn't want him dead, she wants the two of them far apart again; it matters because it's the end of this life and there's not going to be any coffee. There won't be any hopeful phonecall. A hand on her shoulder, her foot on his throat, a gunshot-- and everything Mélisande Bellerose loved is...something that she loved, once.
“It's family,” she says, and for a heartbeat she is so much older. It's always been there in her distance, but she's good, and she's always been good, and this lifetime she'd let herself be less tethered, and it was like camouflage. (The Belleroses are dead, the adoption records for her sealed; her birth father owns a security firm in Germany, nothing of her mother to find.) “I have to-- I have to go home.”
But not yet.
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But not now, she wants to gabble, artless and unrehearsed, you don't have to go home right this second, so let's not think--
That sentence actually gets halfway to her mouth before her common sense shuts it down. It's a bit too absurd and desperate, and they haven't seen each other in three years, and while she's thought about her she hasn't thought about seeing her again, she's just picked up blondes and enjoyed fond memories and there is absolutely no reason to feel so very much about this.
But--
"I understand," she says, and she does.
She herself is always on the run, always second guessing the people who come to her door, always ready to jump on a plane and reinvent herself should trouble arise, and all of a sudden her focus has shifted and she can half see that reflected in Mélisande. So perhaps that explains how hard it is to pin her down, the sensation that she might be gone any minute. Because she might have to be.
Irene's fine. They never made any promises. Whatever she's feeling, it's just the novelty of seeing her again, the shock of the blood, how suddenly tired she seems. And then it's the sudden realisation she has that Mélisande is doing something Irene has often wanted to do and never actually tried- saying goodbye before she vanishes.
Oh.
"Oh, darling, you shouldn't even be here, should you?"
Her other hand comes to Benevenuta's face, cupping her cheek, remembering Paris. Perhaps she won't ask more questions. Perhaps it would be unnecessarily cruel. The hand on her arm moves to take Benevenuta's and Irene tangles their fingers together.
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“I couldn't sleep,” she murmurs; I needed to see you before I left. Then, sweetly and incongruously apologetic in just that note-perfect way of hers, the afterthought of respectable interaction, the way she used to almost fluster when she realized she'd shown more of her fascination than she intended (and she could be so intense, sometimes, so watchful and there and it was like being wanted by someone who'd peel away layers at leisure)-- “I'm sorry I woke you.”
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"You didn't," she tells her quietly, a slight smile on her lips as if to say of course you didn't, her hand on Benevenuta-Mélisande's cheek moving to brush a strand of newly-dark (new to her, at least) hair away from her face. "I couldn't sleep either."
She remembers and likes the half-flustered apologetic afterthoughts, the was I acting not-quite-properly again embarrassment. It's wonderful- pretty and sweet- but what Irene likes most about it is that it suggests she just saw something so real it has to be apologised for.
"At least my night's been more interesting than expected," she murmurs, something dry in her voice covering up something still distinctly shaken- and oh, when did quickly pushing a lock of hair from Mélisande's face become letting her fingers linger and stroke briefly over her cheek?
And why's she using the past tense, anyway? It's not over. Benevenuta is still here.
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It isn't that she wants to be something she isn't; it's that she wants to love something in its own whole truth. A world, a place-- a person.
When she kisses Irene, it doesn't break the spell because it is the spell, the inevitability laid out by her arrival, because this is the only part of a goodbye that she ever quite mastered and it's some sweet not-farewell, the way it feels like it could mean maybe or until or hello, again. And it doesn't, but-- oh, it could. It could. It would be lovely.
“I would hate nothing more,” she murmurs, close and intimate, “than to ever bore you.”
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It feels like longer.
"Oh, don't worry," Irene breathes, voice low and private like she's talking in a church, whispering for Benevenuta's ears only when they shouldn't be talking at all. She's got that same soft, sceptical amusement, as if, in her voice. "You won't. I trust you not to."
And what else?
She starts the second kiss, eyes closed so that for a moment she can almost pretend she's in Paris and no one's covered in blood- but that's not real, that's not them anymore, that's not them really, if either of them are ever them, really. Whoever they are, this is here and now- and in the here and now they're in London at three in the morning, barely touching because of the blood and the years between them and kissing in defiance of it, and tomorrow will not be the same, the next minute may not be the same, so Irene refuses to waste time remembering when she could be spending it feeling.
Because that's what this is, isn't it? The making of a memory. Perhaps Benevenuta isn't planning on stealing a keepsake- but she's doing it anyway, writing out the perfect, poignant ending.
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They are, they always have been, somebody else's other people. It doesn't matter-- there isn't anyone else here. (No witnesses.) There's only this warm regret; there's only how she'd wanted to spend years falling in love with Irene Adler and how it was never a good idea but she's so angry to have the option taken away.
(My name is-- but no, it's still a terrible idea, but if she'd been different then maybe Benevenuta would have held the knife for her like Ayse wielded it centuries before and maybe it wouldn't have come apart the way she's always known such a relationship must have to, and maybe it wouldn't have been a mistake, but the years will keep playing out in Irene's face and not hers and it is a fucking fantasy.)
She presses her cheek to Irene's, then to the side of her throat, then rests her head at her shoulder and closes her eyes, breathes her in. “I should-- I should clean up.” Maybe take off the blood-stained clothes. Stare into the bathroom mirror and wonder what she's doing to herself.
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It's not that she's in love or anything like that, just that she could have been. Just that Mélisande is so watchful and quiet and clever, sweet and soft, uncatchable and indefinable, and capable of shooting a man because of family. Just that she's warm and close and is holding onto her like she needs her and Irene needs to be needed. Just that Irene hates to be alone no matter what. Just that brunette suits her, really, she'll have to tell her, though it does make her look older.
And it's just that suddenly she'd quite like to go back to the nonsense of Paris, the coffee shops and the silly text messages and Irene's dreadful French and all the inconsequential things far away from the inevitable end.
One more safe place ransacked. Bloody typical, she thinks, some sudden surge of anger rising in her. She almost wishes Mélisande hadn't come at all- I barely thought about you I'll have you know, I only said your name once with a blonde and I was exceedingly drunk when I did it, so there- but that isn't fair, isn't it?
Neither of their lives is predictable, and they both strive and struggle to take charge of it- or she does, at least, and she assumes everyone else must do the same. You try and you try and take your respite where you can and then you cut ties- and it always ends up with trying not to get blood everywhere, doesn't it? Wonderful. Typical. Well, not this time. Irene holds on tight to Benevenuta. Her robe can go to hell for all she cares.
She rests her cheek against Mélisande's hair, closes her eyes, one hand at the back of her neck now, keeping her close, supporting her, we're both still here, think about now. "Would you like help?"
With anything, Irene pointedly doesn't say, letting the huge, absurd offer hang in the air even as she realises that she's probably only making things worse by showing Mélisande what she can't have, not if she's practical- and Irene thinks she is. Irene thinks they're both very, very practical, which is sometimes an absolute curse.
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No one else was supposed to touch the moment in time that contained the two of them. She has to rewrite it into something else, something better, something-- that still comes down to something final, because her pragmatism is sometimes brutal, and her idealism is never overwhelming. Even if she remembers working on the notes for her next novel (romances, under a penname) in bed next to Irene in that tiny little flat she used to have, and how wonderfully silly it had felt, the romance novelist and the dominatrix. Peddlers of fantasy. Different kinds. Here they are with the truth, finally, and maybe that's the poignancy of their ending; this artlessness that still isn't, quite.
“I'll take a shower,” she says, in a tone that means if that's all right, “and-- can I stay? Tonight?”
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