Who: In order of appearance: Mycroft, Irene, Watson, & it'salive!Sherlock What:Resurrections. Reunions. Where: 221B Baker Street, London. The Sherlock Door. When: Recently. Part 2 to come. Warnings/Rating: I have no idea. Next to none.
Mycroft generally steered clear of 221B.
Watson’s presence in the flat his brother had shared with the good doctor only made that determination more firm. However, Mycroft’s sources informed him that 221B was currently devoid of either Mrs. Hudson or the existing tenant, and subsequent informants enlightened him to the fact that the pair were making the long drive to the cemetery, as they often did. Mycroft knew this gave him ample opportunity to return to the flat he’d not visited since his brother’s unexpected suicide.
It was a rainy day in London, which was quite the norm, gray and overcast and cold against the skin. Mycroft tapped the tip of his umbrella against the entry foyer, and he looked up along the familiar, steep steps that led up to the upstairs rooms.
Mycroft was not, generally, an uncertain man, but it took a few very steadying breaths to climb the first step, then the next, then the next. He was unsure, as he pushed open the door to the living area, what he expected to find within. Nothing, he supposed, but he was there all the same. His conversation with Watson had done nothing to ease his guilt, and being in the space that was a living memory to his brother did not help.
The flat was in agony, with a quiet that seeped like arthritis into wooden bones and all of the artifacts that testified to lost genius, sleeping like untouched dragons, within. It was dreary today, but even the rain didn't make a sound against the panes and the whole building had become a tomb that nothing dared to disturb. Not time, nor nature.. only Irene.
There was no point in philosophizing the hows or whys of Irene’s arrival to 221B, but it was safe to say that she'd pinpointed her anchorage to a time after the usual tenants were off the front steps, but before this current invader and his umbrella disrupted the serenity. Although she'd heard the door, it was the sound of him that pulled her from the kitchen, where she'd been perusing things shamelessly. The man's solemn steps gave into creaks of apology from the floorboards, and she knew it wasn't Watson even before she rounded the doorway. Irene was the welcoming gates of Hell, polished wrought iron beneath a bed of lilies. The courtesan macabre in a pill box hat, net of mourning drawn across her eyes, although her A-line dress was red as wine. Noting that the arrival was only Mycroft, and not somebody she had any true designs in conversation for, Irene turned wordlessly back to the kitchen. Carry on.
Mycroft knew he was not alone within moments, seconds. He was not as extravagant as his brother in his displays of brilliance, but that did not mean he was any less a genius. He noticed the small things that indicated a presence that did not belong to John Watson. The indent on the rug beneath the couch that indicated the recent presence of a woman’s heel, the smell on the air of a woman’s perfume, the rustle of a skirt, the recent scratch-pattern of steps on the wood that indicated a leisurely stroll, as opposed to Watson’s purposeful stride. In short, a woman.
There was, however, no reason for Mycroft to believe Irene Adler was in residence. She was dead, after all, despite the lie he’d perpetuated with Watson to keep Sherlock from slipping into the morass of depression yet again. He’d never understood that particular obsession on his brother’s part - Irene. He supposed as first crushes went, she was a passable one, however. Sherlock was quite the late bloomer in that department.
When she rounded the doorway, mourning and red and her carriage like she belonged there, in Sherlock’s space, as if it was her Queen-given right, he couldn’t help but smile that uncomfortable smile, the one that indicated displeasure rather than the opposite emotion. “Irene Adler. It seems I was misinformed.” Mycroft did hate being misinformed.
To be honest, playing with this one's head was far below her stroll. A bit like the Queen mother strolling into a House of Grits, but Irene did enjoy a little simplicity now and then.. note that her nails were an effortless, clear manicure. It was some kind of wordless trade off with the impossible woman on the other side of the door, but it's understated shine was beginning to grow on her, and Irene called warmly from the kitchen as she vanished around the corner again. "By that man in the towncar down the block?" One of two that she'd noticed watching the comings and goings of this particular flat. "Yes, you should fire him," her thoughtful hum was pierced by the opening and closing of a cabinet. Unless Mycroft meant much more than simply being misinformed about her presence in 221B. See, there was the whole faking of her death thing to contend with.. but that involved a fair bit of explanation, which she'd never been particularly fond of.
“No, about your little excursion in the Middle East,” was Mycroft’s reply, though he saw no need to clarify beyond that. The wheels in his mind were already turning, actually. He was certain of her death, and despite her jibe about the Town Car it was harder to get one past him than she implied. He’d reports of her death from the Executioner, after all, which made him cock his head to the side in thought. His mind ran about, and he thought back to the letter, the font, the choice of words. He thought back to Sherlock’s inconsistent dropping of the subject of her relocation, of his giving up, so to speak. Very unlike his brother. He’d been so concerned with the return of Sherlock’s addiction at the time, that he’d given Watson credit for a very good lie; he’d been wrong. “Sherlock helped you escape execution, I see.” Because it had to be Sherlock. Leave it to his little brother to develop an obsession that could span continents. “Did you only just find out then?” About Sherlock being dead, of course.
"Did he?" She asked the question as if she wasn't entirely sure, no glimmer of a sycophantic or patronizing tongue. It was a mystery, really. Another cabinet sounded close with a click before Irene apparently found what she was looking for or grew bored, because she rounded back out of the doorway to view Mycroft. Cool eyes beyond a strict, black net. "Just found out about what?"
“About Sherlock,” was Mycroft’s easy reply, and he stepped forward with his hands in the pockets of his perfectly pressed trousers. “Come, there’s no point in pretending. What could there possibly be to gain now?” He asked. Her partner-in-crime was dead. Her obsession was dead. What reason was there to demure? In his suit jacket pocket, his phone buzzed, and he reached a hand up to retrieve it.
She said nothing for a moment because it was obvious that he wanted her to accept it.. but it should have been obvious by just her being here that Irene was incapable of doing so. Naturally, she'd seen the articles and reports detailing Sherlock's death, she followed him closely enough that she'd have been capable of receiving first hand accounts if he'd been in the Serengeti at the time. But that didn't mean that she should necessarily believe it. "He's not." Her reply was cool, but Mycroft might have detected something clipped on the tail end of careful syllables. A tension in the mist of lingering uncertainty. After all, Irene was a testament to the fact that just because somebody was supposed to be dead, it didn't actually mean they were. "He's not," she explained again. This time with a tone that said she clearly knew Sherlock better than he did.
Their phones could not have had better timing, as her's chimed while his buzzed. Pulling the sleek device into her hand, Irene read the text before giving Mycroft an elegant raise of brow that clearly said, I told you.
Mycroft pulled his own phone from the pocket just as she raised her brow at him. He was about to inform her that he thought he would know better than anybody if his brother was alive. It’s not as if she could simply wish Sherlock back to life; he’d tried that. And all the power of the British government hadn’t done more than quiet the scandal somewhat, but even that was ineffective. He would have said these things, but the look on her face was smugness and success (and yes, he’d caught that clipped something in the end of her words). He read his own text three times before pressing his buttons to the keys of his phone. “This is a result of this situation with the doors. Not because he did not die,” he insisted, certainty in the tight, thin line of his pursed lips.
"The doors," she sighed with exasperation while leaning with a dramatic cock of hip into the doorway. Her's was a sleek formation, one that was entirely wasted on the likes of her company, but still performed to perfection. The creature on the other side of the door was an absolute nightmare, and Irene was only momentarily relieved to be finally holding the reigns. "I think we both know you're incorrect, but.." There was a shrug, as if she'd go along with his theory to make him feel better.
“I’ve asked him to come. You are to do the same,” Mycroft said, his tone the same one he used while running the country on a daily basis. “I’m not so foolish to believe I can compete with whatever infatuation my brother has for you.” He motioned with his phone, expecting her to comply. He smiled again, the smile no kinder than the last. “Of course, neither of us can compete with John Watson, can we?” He was hoping it would be a sore subject.
It didn't seem to be a sore subject, as Irene breezed through it without even glancing up from her nails. "You don't think it will make for a better surprise if he finds me here?" She'd watched Mycroft in the midst of his texting with a sidelong, fervent level of attention. There was one fairly obvious recipient to those messages, and it kept her thus far from sending one as well. She liked having the facts before jumping into the water.
“I’ll tell him if you don’t,” was Mycroft’s reply. He suspected his brother knew this woman was alive, but that didn’t change the fact that he did not trust her, and he did not trust her impending effect on Sherlock. His brother, the perpetual virgin, Mycroft knew, was ill-equipped to deal with such a woman. “I hope you realize the role you played in his death.” He knew the role he played, but she was no innocent in this affair. “Have you visited Jim Moriarty’s flat as well?”
Her eyes lit up at that, but eventually she conceded with a wordless drop of her attention onto the phone's screen. A few mashed letters filled the intermission of conversation, and Irene didn't look up from the phone when Mycroft spoke again. She played no role. "He didn't die." Then, a swift lift of focus at the mention of James. "No," it was simple and it sufficed before her phone beeped back with a message dictating that Sherlock had already moved on to a new phone. "What number is he at now?" The waving of the white flag.
He provided the number, and he was already on the phone himself, getting a track and sending cars - plural, because he knew perfectly well the first one wouldn’t work; his brother could be stubborn. Normally, he would have called Sherlock (he hated texting when there were alternatives), but he didn’t trust his voice with her in the room, and so he made do as best he could. He didn’t argue about Sherlock’s death, because she couldn’t argue away reality. Whatever was happening here, it didn’t change what had happened there. More importantly, he didn’t believe her about Moriarty.
There was no chance for compromise with such a brat, and Irene held the fiercest of sighs between her teeth while sending the text and saying nothing in the moments that pass between the next message to arrive. Of course, after which, she only glanced at Mycroft briefly, "You both worry too much about Moriarty."
“I did not worry sufficiently about Moriarty,” was Mycroft’s surprisingly honest response. He tucked his phone away a moment later, aware Sherlock had obliged them by entering the vehicle. “He’ll be here shortly. Keep him occupied so he doesn’t exit the car in his boredom.” He walked to the window of the living room, and he sighed as he looked out.
It was only several minutes in the taxi after John’s last text from Sherlock before they pulled up in front of the flat. He had no actual idea what to expect inside, if Irene and Mycroft were there or not. He’d sent Mrs. Hudson off to her friends, not wanting her to have to deal with whatever he might find; things hadn’t been easy on her either, and he’d rather she was having a quiet cuppa instead of... this. The towncar was up the street, where it had been for quite a while now, and John ignored it. Just like he had since it had arrived. It didn’t indicate that anything was happening inside.
Part of him doubted that the text messages were even real, though with everything else that had been happening - Las Vegas, Clare, the doors - Sherlock returning from the dead seemed like a strange possibility. One that he’d frankly been hoping for. Either that, or the stress of it all had caused him to imagine things. His key slipped into the lock as easily as it always did, and his steps were familiar and heavy on the steps. He pushed into the rooms, unsurprised to find that he wasn’t alone.
Mycroft turned when the door opened, expecting his brother. But it was John Watson, and not Sherlock at all, and Mycroft’s lips pressed into a straight line of displeasure. He had been hoping to avoid any contact with this man after his petty barrage of insults on the journal, but so be it. “Doctor Watson.” A smile, but not a real one. “My brother’s fan club is now complete.” He glanced at Irene once, and then he looked out the window once more, dismissively.
Irene did not like being dismissed by eyes, and she tongued the edge of her teeth in a wordless wish for fangs before fastening all immediate attention on the good doctor. Her smile was much more believable than Mycroft's, although she likely would have smiled at her own executioner for thanks in interrupting the conversation with given company. "He warned you," she inferred with a thoughtful tilt of the head. After all, Watson did not seem at all perturbed by the current occupants in his flat.
Mycroft felt that was rather obvious. “You think he only texted us? How quaint. If I had to hazard a guess, John received the first text.” He smiled. “Before either of us.” He wanted to tell her that his brother had nearly gone mad the last time she’d been in London, and that he did not desire a repetition of previous events, but he refrained. After all, John would ensure that did not happen. The man lived for nothing but protecting Sherlock, though he’d failed stupendously the last time around. Another smile. “Shall we compare timestamps, or shall I make a phone call and verify my suspicions?” He could do that, you see.
“Really Mycroft, do grow up.” Sherlock strode through the door, pulling at his scarf as if he had been gone only the last five minutes, with exactly the same expression of mild irritation on his alabaster features that he always wore when the universe did not bow to his every whim. His eyes flicked around the room once, bouncing from person to person, taking in a myriad of details that he processed so quickly there was nothing but a bland twitch of one eye to even mark their passing. Sherlock came to a swaggering stop three steps over the threshold to observe his kingdom. The scarf swung to one side in a huge, whipping arc and Sherlock spun a quickly circle to take in the room, a look of profound disapproval flashing over his face as he noticed the lack of--well--him. “It will take me weeks to replace all my equipment.” He raised an eyebrow at Mycroft’s shoes and his waistline, seemingly bypassed John entirely, and looked at the phone in Irene’s hand. “You’re not dead,” he noted, with far too much drama to really convince anyone in the room that he hadn’t known she wouldn’t be.
If John could have ignored the two in the flat when he entered, he would have. He had no particular desire to see either one of them, and the addition of the pair into rooms that had only held himself or Mrs. Hudson for the last weeks made the walls closer than normal and uncomfortably claustrophobic. Mycroft’s passing comments were met with nothing more than a contemptuous side glance as he pulled off his coat, and he might have responded at least to Irene, but Sherlock’s arrival froze him in place. He filled the room with height and personality, as if he hadn’t been in the ground for long enough that John had begun to worry about forgetting things about him, and he found it hard to balance that with the presence of the other occupants of the room. The best he could do was an awkward clearing of his throat and a gruff response to Sherlock’s annoyed comment. “Much of it is in storage.” It was nearly certain that Mycroft would call him sentimental, but he hadn’t been able to completely abandon the bits of Sherlock that the flat had retained, even those that had been painful enough to require some sort of removal.
Sherlock's eyebrows shot up with surprise and he rotated on one heel to face John with a flap of the bluebottle coat. "Is it?" he wondered aloud. "Why?" And then a split second later he appeared to lose interest in the question, eying John's shirt collar before stripping off his coat a sleeve at a time. The scarf flew through the air at the couch, and the coat followed not long after. "You still haven't found a job yet, really John, you must be misrepresenting your credentials." He oriented himself toward one of the desks. "I need a phone, immediately." He tossed the phone belonging to one of Mycroft's men at his brother. "Not that one."
Mycroft stepped back and did not catch the phone, letting it clatter to the floor and giving it a subsequently unimpressed look. “Sherlock, you must be mistaking me for your flatmate. I don’t play catch with you.” He smiled that smug, infuriating smile that said he thought himself quite witty. “Do cease these pretenses. Your items are in storage because you are dead. You flung yourself off a building in a dramatic fashion. You couldn’t even commit suicide without making a scene.” There was a hint of a childhood in those words; his brother had always been a show off. “Doctor Watson has been bereft, and Ms. Adler even returned from the death you assisted her in faking to mourn you.” But not Mycroft, of course; never him. “Now, sit down, and tell us what this is all about.”
"Or," she countered beautifully, "we're all dead now." Her chrysanthemum eyes befell Mycroft rather than Sherlock, because while morbid, the theory of them all slipping into purgatory must have seemed more feasible than two rising from beyond the grave. Unless two of them hadn't actually died, which required at least one confession on her part that she wasn't quite in the mood for. Irene glanced over Sherlock in the same way a chisel moved across an ice sculpture, but it was Watson that her attention eventually settled on. After all, he'd yet to address her.. and while she enjoyed the silent game from Sherlock's end, with the other it was just bad form. "You look well, John." The compliment managed to not be sweet.
“Hold up, bereft? I have not been bereft.” John talked over several other people, not caring about being polite or for much of anything other than anger was beginning to set in again. His attention switched to Irene at her statement, though the scowl was swiftly taking up residence on his face. “I do not look well. I look like a man who has a total of four people in his flat-” He glared at Sherlock briefly, nearly daring him to challenge ownership. “-two of whom are supposed to be merrily decaying in the ground, and the third who I sometimes wish was. I am not, in any definition of the word, ’well’.” His voice had risen in volume during his rant, and he spared a passing through to be glad that he’d sent Mrs. Hudson round to her friend’s. “So either someone starts telling me what’s going on, or we all get to see how unwell I actually am.” Another glare toward Sherlock. “And I’m not accepting ‘magical doors’ as an explanation.”
Sherlock dodged the glare by rolling his eyes away and then up at the ceiling. “Then either Miss Adler is right, and this is a twisted afterlife, or we have all suffered simultaneous psychotic breaks and mass hysteria. Unless you have something else can explain why I am in London with a disgustingly dull American in the back of my mind.” Sherlock abandoned coat and scarf and strode across the room, climbing up the black chair that barred his path to the bookshelves on one side of the mirror, leaving footprints on the leather as he casually paraded through the clutter. He started pulling books off the shelf, obviously looking for something. “I don’t know why you are all looking at me as if it’s my fault,” he added, not turning around.
Mycroft watched the exchange between Irene and John with a smile that went from tight to entertained, while hardly moving at all. He had hope that those two would tear each other apart with jealousy one day. It would serve Sherlock right, really, with his eternal insistence on pretending he didn’t see what was happening around him when convenient. Rather a farce, Mycroft knew, as his brother had noticed every single occurrence since he’d begun to speak. Mycroft remembered it quite clearly; he’d been impossible to lie to about mother’s condition, had Sherlock. Once John had finished his rather predictable tantrum, Mycroft turned to his brother and addressed his ridiculous question. “You committed suicide by jumping off a roof, dear brother. Or have you forgotten?”
“I’m possessed by an American, not senile,” Sherlock snapped, tossing London: A to Z, over his right shoulder as he crouched down to peer into the shelves. He was wearing one of the powder blue Dolce shirts that he wore as if they were not worth nearly five hundred pounds. It looked somehow even more pale than Sherlock did, more pale than it had before. “Ah!” Sherlock stood up with the Blackberry model (Bold 9700, to be precise) he had used before he had upgraded to the iPhone. The battery was dead, naturally, so he began tearing things apart looking for the cable.
Irene watched the destruction of the bookshelf with rapt, silent attention. She did not ask what Sherlock was looking for, as it eventually came quite clear. Casting up a pencil-thin, Deitrich eyebrow when he dug loose a cell phone that bordered on outdated according to her tastes, Irene extended that contemplative expression to Mycroft and John. "Are you both possessed by Americans as well?" Her own was Australian, but she saw no reason to share that.
John’s attention was split between Irene’s question and the absolute terror of a mess that Sherlock was making. Some small part of him found the mess comforting - a return to the normal insane status quo that was living with Sherlock - but another part railed at the sudden return of his presence. Absently in response to Irene, “Barely. And she’s quite a bit duller than Sherlock’s arti--” His voice cut out as his once-flatmate moved on from the books to destroy the rest of the room. “Stop tearing apart my flat!” His exasperation, frustration, and confusion had to go somewhere, and it went into his voice, filling the rooms like it hadn’t in too long.
After a few hopeful proddings that bore no fruit, the phone disappeared into Sherlock’s pocket, where it would probably be entirely forgotten until he needed it. Giving up on the bookcase, he turned around and let his eyes rove over the flat, trying to imagine where he could have left the Blackberry cord. He could remember the case he had that same day two years ago, but he didn’t keep track of such trivialities. In a frenetic burst of energy he rounded the chair again and approached the desk. He didn’t seem to have lost any of his physicality, weight just about the same and no sign of injury. (Not bad for a dead man.)
Maybe the shirt looked pale because Sherlock was just a bit darker, but it was not easy to judge the difference between alabaster and ivory, was it? Sherlock didn’t tan, he probably crisped and peeled like a lizard with that transparent skintone. Or he would if he ever left London...? “He’s not my artist,” Sherlock retorted disdainfully, obviously distracted by the infuriating topic of Elias enough to pause his search. Halting in his path to give the doctor a sardonic look, he added, “Stop fussing, it can’t make that much difference, you’ll be out within the next month without a flatmate, you said it yourself.” Then, as if this was the first time he’d gotten a good look at the other man, the stop turned into a real shift of attention. “You lost weight. You’ve been ill.”
It was easy enough to ignore Irene and Mycroft in favor of giving his attention to Sherlock's movements around the room, and most especially to the throw-away casual comments about the flat’s status. There was no way he’d told that to Sherlock directly, since they hadn’t actually spoken since the moments before Sherlock had stepped off a building into air that hadn’t held him. Shaking that thought aside, he meant to reply that it mattered to him, even if it was a shouted reply, but Sherlock’s brief pause in movement brought him easily within striking range. “Fussing?” Emotion translated suddenly into action without conscious thought.
The strike of fist to face caused John’s hand to tingle with the impact after the first seconds of shock, and he shook it out absently. It had been in response to the comment about the flat, but Sherlock’s words from directly before finally filtered their way to him. “I’ve been ill? You’ve been dead!” It wasn’t presented as a reason for his appearance, but as a problem that obviously held more significance than John being down a few pounds in weight.
The punch knocked Sherlock off his feet and sideways into the desk with a chorus of smashing bric-a-brac and a thud of the desk chair going over. From the look on his face, he hadn’t seen it coming.
Mycroft, who would rather have liked to punch his brother himself, glanced over from his place at the window and merely sighed. “You deserved that,” he said, which Sherlock had. “You’ve worried us all mad, you know, and you waltz in here like you didn’t jump off a roof and splatter your brains across the concrete in front of Doctor Watson, who was already rather unhinged to begin with.” There was that matter of the war, and the cane, and the limp that had disappeared rather overnight. It was unkind, and Mycroft knew it, but he felt entitled. He didn’t mention Moriarty, but then that was intentional as well. “Mine is a rather young Brit,” he added, referring to the earlier question that had been posed, as if his brother had not fallen against a desk just then.
Irene seemed altogether unfazed by the way Sherlock went flailing into the desk amongst a cacophony of breaking artifacts and Watson's possessions. She took a step back in one of those masochistic looking heels as something shattered near her toes. She knew that the woman whose head she was sharing would be relieved that there did not seem to be any connections, or at the very least any Aussies involved. While Irene understood the comfort that came with nobody knowing who you were or where you came from, she did not understand the motives behind Vivienne's strange seclusion. "Mine too," she told Mycroft in an easy lie that she knew V would appreciate.
Sherlock rolled off the edge of the desk, stepped on one of the chair legs to awkwardly flail it upright, and slid heavily into the seat, holding the side of his face. He had a mutinous look that turned up his nose and set his mouth to a pout, and he refused to look at anyone in the room. Elias agreed with Mycroft, and while he pegged him as the man with the umbrella manipulating Noah, Sherlock dismissed such conclusions as foregone just to get his own back. “No,” he told Irene, blandly, giving her a stare that could easily have come from pressed carbon, a lance intended to pin the lie. It lasted for a split second before his eye twitched and he turned his attention lazily away.
Sherlock pressed his fingers together and gave himself a little shake to collect his hair out of his eyes and his thoughts out of their cobwebs. He directed his stare at the ceiling. “So. No Moriarty, or you would have brought it up already. Did you find the body?”
“It hardly matters. We found your body, and here you are,” was Mycroft’s non-answer. He crossed the room, his hand closing on the handle of the umbrella that leaned near the door. “It is safe to assume he’ll be here as well.” Mycroft had no intention of discussing anything of significance in front of Irene Adler. His brother might be blinded by infatuation, but he was not. She would betray everyone in the room, should her own life depend on it, even his brother, her savior. The thought made him purse his lips together unpleasantly. “As you’re not actually proving useful, dear brother, I’ll take my leave of you.” A smile, equally fake. “I leave you to your fans. I’ve a government to run.”
John had found himself ready to shout at Mycroft that he wasn’t “unhinged”, but after a moment of calming breath and thought, figured that shouting more wouldn’t much help his argument. Instead, he’d turned away and taken himself into the kitchen, digging in the cupboards for either tea or alcohol. The doors opened and closed with little regard to the conversation continuing in the other room, sometimes louder than was entirely necessary. He knew there was tea somewhere, and was almost positive that there was a small bottle of something harder hidden away, but his quick, distracted perusal of normally-familiar cupboards revealed neither. He stopped, bracing both hands on the counter-top (one that was free of microscopes and thumbs, but not of dirty dishes), and let his head hang down loose, trying to breathe through the emotion that caused his entire body to shake in reaction. He heard Mycroft’s catty remarks about uselessness and fans, but instead of calling out a snide reply (as had been so common for him recently in regards to Mycroft), he simply let the words pass by in the other room, keeping his own thoughts to himself as he continued to breathe.
Again with all this talk of Moriarty, Irene wondered how they didn't have more convivial subjects to discuss. Having just resurrected and all. Stormcloud eyes followed Mycroft, who was thankfully taking his leave, and her ghost of a smile was stitched in a carmine lining of something amused, although she made no arguments in regard to being part of any fan club. Soon John was rustling around in the kitchen and Irene's eyes resettled on Sherlock with an arch of eyebrows and a more charmed smile. "No what?" As if no increment of time had passed between now and that clipped syllable he'd addressed her with. Irene glowed with interest, like it was possible that she didn't know what he'd meant, although it was much more likely that she wanted to know what her tells were.
Sherlock showed no visible emotional reaction at Mycroft’s announcement he was leaving, just a shift of his eyes in that direction and a clear look of disdain just to show how little Sherlock valued “being useful” to his brother. He noticed that Mycroft’s reply could have been intentionally manipulated to mean Sherlock’s own body, or Moriarty’s. Typical. Sherlock redirected his gaze at the ceiling. His cheek was starting to redden and he hadn’t bothered to switch sides so that it wasn’t facing the room. John’s departure only got a puzzled stare at the kitchen door. Bizarre man. At least with Irene he knew what to say. “No, you do not have a British citizen in Las Vegas. Statistically unlikely, and too easy to track down for you to offer the information so easily.” The ice blue eyes redirected at her. “You should have stayed dead. It’s not safe for you to be here.”
Irene smiled and gave a half-formed kind of shrug, the movement was something surprisingly girlish and more definitive of the girl in Vegas than any couture-sculpted dominatrix. His theories were sound, because of course she wouldn't offer up that kind of information to anyone, even a room of people that bordered on companions in the sense that they didn't immediately want her head on a spike. As for the danger in her being here, she knew that better than anyone. Irene could have told him that he worried too much, but it would have been a bit reminiscent of her conversation with Mycroft. So instead she moved for the front door in a quick strided twostep. "But Sherlock, I am dead," she assured him so easily. "Don't you believe in angels?" Of course he wouldn't, and that made her smile for a whole separate reason before she gestured toward the kitchen with a gloved hand. "I'll leave you two to make up." After all, there were plenty of people to evade and catch up with now that she was back in London.
Now alone in the living room of 221B, Sherlock found himself at the mercy of his own observations. There was such a kaleidoscope of changes in the room that it was absolutely impossible to concentrate on the Moriarty problem without being distracted. Bits and bobs that used to be over here were now over there. The state of the laptop said he hadn’t been blogging, though Sherlock already knew that, because he’d been watching his website for signs of activity. The number of dishes implied Mrs. Hudson hadn’t been up for her usual tidying in some time. Signs that John hardly ever left the flat were thick on the floor and furniture. Sherlock recognized the wet soil of the cemetery on the floor just after the stairway, and even in looking away he closed his eyes against all the details that hammered in for attention.
He pushed open the door to the kitchen a minute later. “...John?”