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It would be neither accurate nor inaccurate to say that when in London, Holmes met a woman. It feels more as though he met London herself, Sherlock thinks in quiet moments afterwards, when he's staring at his violin and can almost feel the wood under his fingers from the single time he'd played to her. Yes, he'd met London, all beautiful veneer and sharp smile with filth one layer under her skin and blood under her nails, if only the metaphorical kind.
So. When in London, he met a woman, and the woman was London: he met her in a lecture hall, full to bursting. Back row. She's a smudge against a bright projector, hair wound up tight and hands restrained while she talks. What she talks about, he doesn't much pay attention to- when he wants to know he'll read her book. What he pays attention to is the way she moves, tightly wound, full of the type of precision that says everything you need to know about a person, every footstep a performance. It isn't that she's not careful. It's that people don't look. He thinks she has a sense of humour about the fact, maybe.
When her voice trails off and the applause follows example, he stands up and trots down the steps to the front. People stream past him in the other direction, an endless sea of data he pushes out of his awareness by focusing on the figure below. Closer, he can gather more of it. Her dark hair tied up, her plain and unadorned face, her bright, bright eyes.
"Did you enjoy the presentation, Mr. Holmes?" she says in a polite way, voice brisk, oozing the kind of busyness that comes easily to a dedicated academic. He does not act surprised. She does not act surprised he does not act surprised. In general, it's as though they had rehearsed this, or to a passer-by, perhaps as though they've met before.
"Certainly, professor," he says.
*
They don't conduct a love affair. What they do is take all the worst parts of one, the infatuation, the obsession, the passion put to work in all the wrong places, and then they let it loose upon each other in the quietest and sharpest ways they can manage. They meet in small cafes and make vicious small talk about everything but the people Sherlock knows she's killed- has had killed, for all the difference it makes. She does not mention her disappointment that he is still using drugs, presumably because she doesn't care what he does to his body. But she puts on an air of wanting to say it anyway, just for him, when he shows up demonstrating the signs.
The topic of mathematics comes up; she sets him exercises, like she's his teacher, and he completes them and rips them apart and tries to put them back together, looking for hidden meanings and clues. His chosen field comes up about as often but there's nothing to teach her about it. "I've five years experience on you, dear," she tells him, in a don't you worry, you'll catch up tone. He feels chided against all rationality and wants to sink into his chair.
While he's working on catching up, she keeps on weaving her web. Every strand added, every deal made and life taken, they're all an incentive to keep going. He has no idea what will happen when he succeeds. Perhaps she'll grade his performance. Perhaps he'll kill her, or vice versa. Who knows?
*
One day he gets high in his flat and loses track of time, rolls over on the sofa and she's there, sat on his ratty armchair and looking into the middle distance. She doesn't have a hair out of place, shoes aggressively high and tie unfairly straight while he lies there, breathing heavily and trying to make his brain choose: hallucination or housebreaker? It might well be hallucination, he's been using for long enough that it's a perfectly likely side effect, but it might well be housebreaker because she would, just to make him guess and tear his mind apart and second guess and have to pick the pieces back up.
He passes out before he can decide and when he wakes up she's gone. That doesn't mean anything. There aren't any marks of forced entry he can find and he knows better than to think any real version of her would leave a trace. He could ask, but that would be both admitting defeat and cheating, neither of which is acceptable. The latter especially. If he breaks the rules, she hasn't any use for him. He's not going to become a loose end before he reaches her.
He's getting closer. He still doesn't know what he'll do.
*
This goes on for quite some time. Longer, perhaps, than he had hoped.
He grows impatient, angry. Every time she kills someone- sorry, has someone killed, she takes such offence to the mix-up- he has a full-body shudder of guilt that sticks to the inside of his skull and just doesn't know when to quit.
She sets him exercises. He does them, rips them apart, then turns in on himself. None of it works very well, but it does pass the time marvellously, and when she pats his cheek with hands pointedly not stained red and says you'll get there eventually darling, don't fret he flinches quite convincingly. It's almost like he wasn't waiting for it.
They meet up more, then less, then more again. Supposedly he sets the times and dates, but he's a nagging feeling that really it's all on her. He has that nagging feeling a lot.
*
When his end comes it's slow, not a break so much as a slow stretch and distortion. Those drugs, his father says, face impassive and voice just barely restrained. And of course it's the drugs. He knows that better than anyone, doesn't need to be told and certainly not by his father. His shaking hands and red eyes- those aren't the work of any woman. They're chemical side effects, and nothing about her could be called a mere side effect.
(Perhaps he'd taken more once he started to think, late at night, about all those times he could have foregone verbal sparring and instead gathered evidence. But it's still the drugs, and it's still his personality driving him to take them, and it's still not her work, it's his. She never even mentioned the topic aloud- she never started the sniping. If he's falling to pieces, he's not being pushed; that's important somehow.)
So to rehab he goes. She sends a note just before: I'll see you later. -M.
*
London lies behind him in every sense. Both the city and the woman, her fingers playing London's streets like violin strings and London's streets unrolling beneath her as she conquers it inch by inch.
It's not retreat, it's regrouping. Neither London nor the woman are addictions, so they can't be beaten. But he can change the rules, he can change the base of operations, and perhaps distance will make things easier to manage. Perhaps.
He moves to New York.
When in New York, he meets a woman.