Sherlock and The Woman

Love Is Blindness

16. Love Is Blindness

John felt something slap the side of his cheek as a woman's voice called out his name, urging him to awaken from the deep bottom. He tried to pry open his heavy eyelids and finally managed to crack one eye open. Irene's impatient face stared down at him.

"…Am I dead?" he managed to croak out and slowly sat up on the forest floor. He inspected himself from a medical point of view and was relieved to find no mortal wound anywhere on his body. The bullet had thankfully grazed the outside of his right arm, due to his good reflexes of ducking out of the bullet's path. His sleeve was bloody and the wound stung like hell, but it wasn't worse than that. John raised his gaze and saw the body of the young pakistanian in the middle of the meadow. Hazaar lay on his back with a blank expression on his bloodied face amid the snow-covered leaves. He had definitely not been as fortunate.

"So much for a good assassin…" John muttered in shocked confusion.

"It was fortunate he aimed his gun at you, I'd rather say," the fair lady commented in a brusque tone of voice that didn't become her.

"Oh, yes, fortunate," the man retorted in his most sarcastic voice and turned to the injury on his arm. He tended to it carefully and hissed as he applied pressure on the sore spot. How he would explain this to his wife, he had yet to figure out.

From the corner of his eye, the doctor saw the woman lean heavily against a tree nearby. She lowered her hand and the gun fell from her grasp to rest on the forest floor by her feet, buried into the snow. She seemed almost beside herself.

Irene Adler was many things, a lot of which could be traced to less than legal attributes, but a killer she was not. She had probably seen and done more things in her line of work than John could ever imagine, but even this seemed outside her usual norm of misbehaving. Though he understood her reaction well, the man was still unsure what to do. He had never seen the woman lower any of her carefully constructed walls, and yet now she stood before him - inhaling shaky breaths as if she was slowly tipping over the edge of a great abyss.

"… It failed," she whispered at length and the man frowned.

"Sorry?"

She turned around and looked over at the injured man as if remembering he was still with her. "It failed. All I wanted was to stop Moriarty before he… Before he…"

John sadly smiled up at her and slowly stood on shaky legs. As he rose, he brushed the snow from his clothes. "I know this wasn't part of the plan. But it happens to everyone, we trust in ourselves and others in ways we shouldn't because we just hope we're right. Everyone makes mistakes. Granted, not-"

"Not everyone's mistakes involve killing a man!" Irene snapped in reply before the man could finish.

The man was somewhat taken aback. He had never seen the woman wear her heart on her sleeve in such blatant fury either. He still couldn't hold it against her, he'd been there himself during his early days in Afghanistan... He knew the toll these matters could have on the human mind, not to mention the heart.

"Irene…" the doctor spoke slowly in a gentle voice.

As if realizing her shock was visible in the cracks of her flawless facade, the woman raised her head and held it proudly. John saw her create a new, impenetrable wall between them. "I've done worse."

As if fully recovered from her shock and actions, she nonchalantly picked the gun up from the ground and wiped it clean from prints. She then tucked it into her pocket to dispose of elsewhere in the park. With a final glance at the dead man, Irene turned back to her company.