multiversallogs | → sweet dreams are made of this.

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→ sweet dreams are made of this.

Who: Irene Adler and YOU YES YOU
What: Uh- work, shopping, drinking, seeing the sights, picking up chicks, going to dinner, anything you like.
Where: The Vault, various boutiques, restaurants, gay clubs, out on the street, anywhere at all. If you can think of somewhere to be, Irene is quite possibly there.
When: Here all week, baby.
Notes: Just pick where you're setting it and say when/where they are in the header. It needn't be somewhere mentioned here! If you think they could run into each other elsewhere, then go ahead- and if you think it ought to be an arranged meeting rather than a chance one, then that's probably fine too.
Warnings: Sex, drinking, kink, the Vault...and Irene.

Irene's life has changed since coming to Baedal.

Technically, superficially, her life has improved, which she doubts happens to many people once are magically transported against their will to a place where you oughtn't to look too closely at, say, shadows, because there's almost always something that's going to lurk there- but since when was back home safe, exactly?

Here, at least, she can work properly. She likes the Vault, even if she's used to being her own boss. It's enormous and extravagant, dirty and debauched and full of people she likes, whether they're her coworkers or her clients- it feels like a home away from home.

Her job, of course, doesn't stop and start with brandishing a whip. No, she'd get bored too easily that way. It's fun, but it's only what happens on the surface. What she does is single out people who interest her, who can give her something- whether that's money or influence or just fun. She knows how to spot public figures afraid of being noticed, tugging at their suits and sweating- she knows which people don't want her and which want her so much they have to pretend that she's the last thing on their minds. She knows whose CiD she wants to look through while they're distracted (panting, eyes closed, unconscious, sobbing, drugged, drunk- whatever, as long as they trust her and she trusts herself). She enjoys her time at the Vault, and watches a number of acts between working, but never forgets that she's there to do her job.

When she's free in the evenings she can go out, a strange feeling for someone who is so used to being on the run. There is, of course, Mycroft Holmes to contend with, but she really can't imagine him sampling the nightlife. She's careful not to become a regular anywhere just in case, though more often than not she's found in gay clubs. She doesn't often go home alone; in the mornings, she's polite and kind but ensures that the women in her bed aren't in her bed for too long, and doesn't make use of any CiD numbers they might leave.

And then there's money, fashion, food, exploration, a whole new world. Irene loves to travel, and it's not really travelling when you're running. Baedal changes daily and she's barely seen half of the city, or that's what it feels like. She dines out often, alone or with some of the connections (friends?) she's made, and she thanks her stars that her job pays well, because she has a whole new wardrobe to build up.

Irene Adler, therefore, is living again. And if she sometimes finds herself alone, with no distractions, and feels claustrophobic, knowing that she is in the middle of the city and there is no world outside of it, knowing that she can't hop on a plane with a faked passport and be someone else somewhere else, knowing that she is trapped-

-then that is a very minor detail.

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Not a bad habit, surely. ...Is it? Irene doesn't think so.

She does note the slightly immature pleasure in Ilde's face, and honestly, it's endearing in a strange way. Half-uncanny, just like Ilde is in general from what she's seen, but far from unpleasant. "Absolutely," Irene agrees. "It's only when people are desperate that they stop pretending- to themselves, as well as everybody else, which might be more important."

"Harder," Ilde speculates, of not lying to yourself; everyone has their illusions, mostly less literal than some of hers tend to be, the little lies they tell themselves to make it easier to be themselves. The justifications and the willful ignorance and a hundred other things-- the illusion of honesty, even, which is one reason (of several) why she doesn't tend to ask questions when she wants to know something. The things people say rarely tell her what it is she's interested in.

"I think it's sort of lovely," she adds, after a moment, poking at the fish on her plate with her fork. Nearly a year ago, her reaction to witnessing a three-headed vulture woman swallow men whole was isn't she beautiful, so there's that.

"It is," Irene replies immediately and with utter conviction, voice soft and genuine. "There's nothing more intimate."

Irene falls in love with people and then runs them ragged just to see how they work, to strip away all pretenses. Even when she's working it's emotional. People at their limits are the most beautiful people in the world.

Having attempted to murder Ivan in bed by accident once already - not an experience either of them are in a hurry to repeat - Ilde is warier of pushing her own boundaries again. Other people's, though, those are fascinating to watch and to poke at, to circle around and examine; it's not really her business, so she's quiet, but she's usually quiet, that's not unusual. It's not her business, but it's intriguing, and sometimes the idea that people aren't playthings seems so much less important than others.

('Whenever it would inconvenience her to remember', usually; she's catlike by nature and cats are selfish little bastards.)

"I like that about the Vault. The strangest things are beautiful."

Irene likes people a lot, but she doesn't really group herself with them- which makes most of them eventually inconsequential. Exciting, interesting, but not important, apart from the favoured few which she takes an entirely opposite and equally unhealthy view of by getting rather obsessed. And even then, she always puts herself first.

It's only sensible.

"You don't have to go to the Vault to see that," Irene opines, pushing a strand of dark hair across her forehead and behind her ear, smiling. "Strange things are beautiful, everywhere. You just have to look. But then I suppose only the Vault puts it up on a stage and celebrates it publicly."

"You get different sorts depending on where you go and what you're looking for, though," which is interesting in and of itself, but in regarding variety-- the Vault caters to a great many things that still fall under a relatively specific umbrella, and so she looks there for something different to what she's satisfied with elsewhere. "I'd see something else, at Gutters, or in the library, or on the street in Raven's Gate or on the street in Mafaton or in Mog Hill."

Everything has a place and all things in their right place-- no, that's not quite it, she decides a moment after she has the thought, that implies a level of necessary separation that she doesn't think is so. Incongruity and a challenge, that can be stunning, too, the unexpected boon.

"True," Irene says, "but it all comes back down to people, doesn't it?"

She pauses, the waiter coming by to ask if she'd like to order, and she picks a full English.

What? When it comes down to it, she's an girl from England who's been out drinking all night. There are some traditions which even she follows; if she hadn't gone for the fry-up, she'd probably be bound by law to get a kebab.

"The Vault is special, though," she says as the waiter departs. "A safe haven, if you like."

"It's a bit more acceptable to be xenian there," she observes reflectively, off that last point and after declining anything further for herself from the waiter. It's also worth noting that sometimes that acceptance - the social currency of xenians in the Vault, where they're even sought after - veers further into fetishizing, but given the purpose of the place, that's not anything Ilde finds startling.

"Which is nice, I'm sure," she says thoughtfully, "but a kick in the teeth, as well." She pauses before explaining herself, glancing off into the restaurant; they are two of four patrons, neither of whom are talking. It's strange- otherworldly, again. Everything's otherwordly when you're awake at five AM.

And dining with a faery.

"'Be yourself, as long as we can fuck you.'" Hello. She doesn't swear often ~~the BBC would get in trouble for it~~. She sounds almost absent-minded, though, rather than up-in-arms. "Or perhaps I'm a cynic."

"There is that," with almost brittle wryness; it's not an inaccurate cynicism and Ilde has never been the most pollyanna of girls. (Or at home with that-- it was tiresome before captivity and it's nearly impossible in Baedal, when she has this kneejerk bitterness towards people who have anything to go home to.) "The sense of, um, novelty."

This is a conversation that Ilde couldn't have right now if Irene displayed that - that expectation of strangeness, that attitude of default vs the other, the way humans look at her like she exists to provoke them and as though she's something they need to get used to. It's not fair, sometimes, to hate the adjustment period that is in many cases natural and without malice; it's just something that tends to score deep into the scars Prometheus left when they spent five years teaching her that she isn't a person, that she's worth less than a human and that this should be taken as simple basic fact.

That she isn't humanity's biggest fan isn't really the most shocking thing about her, all things considered.

Irene expects novelty from everyone. No, a correction: Irene hopes for novelty from everyone. She's come to acknowledge that most people don't give it. They can be interesting, but rarely surprising. If Ilde is strange and new- and she is- then so much for the better, but all the humans she's liked were strange and new. Putting it down to species would reveal a lack of ingenuity. Her eyebrows quirk up to articulate that- how stupid.

"Not much fun for you, I'm sure," she remarks. She's slightly less put-together than usual; a night of drinking will do that to you. Her lipstick could do with re-application, her eyeliner is no longer the clinically perfect curve that it once was and her hair is threatening to uncoil from its rigid updo one strand at a time. Of course, considering that they've just been discussing removing people's pretenses, perhaps that's fitting. "I like novelty- I'm only human- but it's best when it's mutual, isn't it? Mutual and surprising, rather than sought out and based on assumption."

Which isn't to say she doesn't test people, poking at their limits and trying to get them to think in new ways- but that's different, isn't it? That's a matter of trying to make sparks fly.

"The conversation we have because I'm Ilde and you're Irene, instead of the conversation that doesn't happen when one person is human and the other one isn't." She isn't entirely sure that she's expressing herself as well as she wants to - when she writes poetry it comes naturally if not cleanly, but she falters in conversation and words trip her up, meaning one thing in her head and another when they come out to be interpreted by somebody else's experience - but this is interesting (and, yes, novel-- this is not a conversation that she's had before and she wants to follow it to see where it leads) and post-drunk at some absurd hour of the morning is the perfect time to worry less and say more.

She's always more talkative when she's been drinking, it's just what it does to her.

"When it's that, it's always 'one thing, one not', isn't it? Defined by negative space. And then it isn't a conversation, it's..." A gesture, restless; she pulls back and frowns for a moment while she finds her way through what she's trying to say. "A play script in somebody's head, and everything gets interpreted through that filter."

A moment later-- "And that's boring."

A slow smile spreads across Irene's face. It's utterly genuine. It's always nice to find someone who shares an opinion with you, of course- but more than that, she enjoys how Ilde phrases it. She certainly doesn't think she's tripped up anywhere.

And that word- boring- that word brings her back a bit. Boring. Sherlock Holmes' favourite insult. In some ways, that had irritated her a little- she had always made her way in the world, had always made her own fun, while he lounged around waiting for someone to get mysteriously murdered and called the world boring in the meantime- but she has always agreed that to be boring is a cardinal sin.

"Yes." Emphatic and husky, pleased, strangely proud- you've got it. "A script- I like that. A conversation between archetypes, not people. Tedious and impersonal."

That girlish satisfaction that Irene has already caught a glimpse of is more self-assured, here; reinforcement always does a body good, but it's the assurance that she's been clear that she needed, more than validation. She's confident here, where she'd deferred to Irene earlier on sexuality and exposure, and most of all what pleases her is that her company seems pleased-- it is so easy for her to become invested, that way, and she doesn't always notice herself doing it.

(Sometimes it's hard not to think humans where she should be thinking person, and there's something pleasantly unfettered about a conversation where the distinction barely crosses her mind outside of intellectual speculation. To sit here and not second-guess.)

"I think it doesn't matter what happens or what's said, if expectations are in the driver's seat like that." She considers, turning her fork over in her hands, before she adds, "I think if you always assume you know what you're looking at, you won't ever learn anything interesting. And you're never surprised."

"Maybe." She looks thoughtful, tipping her head back. "You're certainly never pleasantly surprised. If you've got a plan in your mind and someone deviates from it, challenges the things you believed in--" She breaks off, shrugs, lets the obvious conclusion hang in the air.

"People get angry when you prove them wrong."

She is no exception- but at least she's aware of it. Her solution, therefore, is to always try to be right. (No, no one said it was perfect). She is, however, usually too good with people to go in with assumptions, or at least she tries to acknowledge that they are assumptions rather than fact. As Ilde's said- you don't learn anything otherwise.

The investment in one's own being right is something Ilde is familiar with - she doesn't carry it as confidently or as expertly, yet, but it's so good to have goals and there are worse ones than striving to stay a step ahead. It requires a lot of examination of the world, a willingness to be always asking questions in one way or another (if not the traditional one--), and the ability to find almost anyone fascinating for at least a little while makes it very hard to get bored.

Prejudice and expectation trip her up more than she'd like (because it feels like a vulnerability, a tell where she doesn't want there to be one, this is what hurt me and now you can see where I'm damaged), but then there's a lot of growing she has still to do, emotionally even if she's never going to be taller than 5'3" in barefeet.

"People are always getting angry about something," she says, reflectively, sliding her thumb along the handle of her knife like she's thinking about something-- else that can be done in response to irritating people, or maybe just to keep her hands busy while she isn't smoking. Hard to say. "You'd think they'd at least have the decency to be more entertaining about it more often."

Irene laughs, a low, appreciative chuckle. "You'd think, but people in general are just so selfish."

She says it jokingly, but honestly the core philosophy rings true with her. The world, to her, is kill or be killed, and she isn't anyone's prey. It's as simple as that. The only way to fight back against it is to be really good at being selfish.

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→ sweet dreams are made of this.

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