Abandon insanity. Scatter instinct.

[saidhe]

CHARACTERS: Holmes, Aberdeen
LOCATION: 002 » 200
WARNINGS: SOCIAL MALADJUSTS GALORE, fighting, crassness, potentially sexual stuff later? i don't even know anymore.
SUMMARY: Cryptology. Also, stress relief.
NOTES: When two weirdos collide, even their muns can't predict what's going to happen.



21 minutes, Sherlock.

He knew the importance of this, and the flirting aside, he took his job to heart. Perhaps that's why her comments had caught him so off-guard. They weren't ones that crossed his mind on a regular basis - which wasn't to say they never did, no, he was only human - but for her to brandish them so suddenly, without warning, as though they were discussing the weather. There was only one other person he knew who used sexual relations as such a weapon of sorts, and even Irene Adler had the decency to dress up her crassness in lace and ribbons.

Aberdeen was leather and spikes, bound and twine. She never dressed up anything, and he respected that about her.

That being said, he was far too focused on the business side of things to take the time to analyze the alternative, and so when he reaches the door of her room as instructed and raps impatiently, he's dressed haphazardly - jumpsuit unzipped, socks but no shoes. He's never been a fan of the clothing they provide here, but the robe just gets in the way. He has a roll of paper in hand and one of the pens, a very convenient tool he's since become well accustomed to, considering how his wall looks at the time being.

Twenty-one minutes. His jog had taken one, and he'd texted along the way. Twenty, then, bordering on nineteen.

Comments

[wiretap]

"Nineteen and a half." The door slides open.

Nineteen and two thirds, to be more specific, and even though Aberdeen is mentally splitting those hairs it's more words than she's willing to express aloud at the moment. There's stuff on her mind and has been ever since she woke up from the last jump and it's made her equal parts restless and distracted (and Megamind had used that, to everyone's disadvantage). With the silence of space looming in on her at every side, she'd grown complacent in her reclusivity and had taken to wandering through parts of the ship in search of greater, more enveloping sound. (Which meant that the network had gone unmonitored for swatches of time; a mistake in retrospect that she wouldn't repeat.) Even now, with the passenger quarters awash with noise of distant chaos and malarky, there is the nearby lurk of suffocating quietness — an emptiness that leaves the rest of the ship unilluminated. (A negative space; a hidden variable.) It makes Aberdeen uncomfortable and some of that is obvious in her expression — all darkened circles and sunken eyes. She looks like she hasn't been sleeping. Or, for that matter, eating.

"Nineteen and a half," she says as the door slides open and then there's a hand (no nails, blunt fingertips) already curled against the open collar of his jump suit, pulling him inside and against her. Even though she's small and looks the worse of wear, her body is solid and unmoving as she yanks him into her. He's not a tall man, but she's a petit woman and like this she has to incline her face up towards to meet his eyes.

"Your heart rate is accelerated," she notes matter-of-factly (Aberdeen knows because she can hear it). Her hand makes no attempt to let him go. This is apparently how she says hello. "Did you jog? Or does the prospect of—" Sex. Violence. Chaos. Distraction. "—cryptoanalysis excite you?"

[saidhe]

She's in good company, at least. With the state of this ship, unfamiliar turf, he's never allowed himself to get lazy. If he sleeps, it's in unsatisfactory patches, and he's never been particularly fantastic at keeping up with his diet. He'd always had a nanny for that, and barring Mrs. Hudson, there had been the good doctor to keep track of what he'd eaten, or the lack thereof. Lacking both, Sherlock had to have dropped another stone since he'd been on this ship, and his jumpsuit hung even more loose, he was easily manipulated straight into her hands.

Built like an ox, for sure, but a far more sickly one than usual. But more so, he had no need to fight whatever Aberdeen was planning or doing. For some strange reason, perhaps because they were so alike in several ways, he trusted her, and it wasn't something that came easily from him.

"You timed my travel, from start to finish, down to the very second - and even, I presume, rounded downwards in order to add to either the urgency or to bring light to my own failures. I wonder, is that because the prospect of," sex, violence, chaos, distraction, "cryptoanalysis excites you as much as it does me?"

He's never liked hellos. They're boring. They're dull. He likes her hellos. they have character.

[wiretap]

Aberdeen doesn't need to trust someone to want to have sex with them, but trust is non-negotiable (a necessity) when it comes to compromising her ability, the one that made her specifically Aberdeen. Other than the Order members amongst the crew there were only two other people aware of what she could do — both over the networks as a communications expert and through the manipulations of her own finely-tuned biology. Commander Spock had been one of them and now Sherlock — the one whose suit remained clutched tightly in her unyielding hand — was the second. At the time she'd mostly wanted to see what he would say, wanted to judge his reaction, wanted to compel him in some way. And when she did, he had not disappointed her. (Which is perhaps, at least in some part, why he's here.)

She doesn't blink when she stares up at him. Her eyes are the color of glasz and in the breath of silence between when he asks and she speaks her pupils dilate. "I consider you my intellectual equal. Not many of those exist." It's the highest compliment she knows how to pay and when Aberdeen says it there is no ego to it. The words are offered up matter-of-factly, almost as if she was stating fact. "I like watching you work." The hand on his suit tightens and then tugs forward suddenly with surprising force; it forces Sherlock to jerk forward, bending and Aberdeen cranes her chin a little forward to breathe against his chin. "I'm also sexually attracted to you."

Aberdeen's mouth does smile but rather twitches at one of its corners; in the back of her brain she is counting the minutes. Eighteen thirty, eighteen twenty five, eighteen twenty. "I look forward to emasculating a megalomaniac with you. The cryptoanalysis is incidental. The sex is not."

[saidhe]

He wasn't sure why he was expecting some legitimate need for code cracking here, in some corner of his brain. Aberdeen is forward, blunt, she says what she means, wants, or needs in a very clinical manner, and it's something he admires about her. Women are always so shrouded in mystery - everything they say means another thing, and there's none of the flat and the straight-forward that there is in dealing with a man. It's not his job to try to analyze every last metaphorical thing that might sprout out of a lady's mouth, and it's tiring, quite frankly.

Most of it means nothing. For Irene, he'd make the effort. There had been some rare anomalies on this ship, but Aberdeen the most of all. Her bluntness matched his own, and it was something he admired. She said things worth being said, and she wasn't much for the banality of idle chit chat. These were all very good reasons for why romance was never going to be something in Sherlock's repertoire, because he had little patience for catering to the pleasantries of society like his better half was so good at.

With Aberdeen, it was unnecessary. He didn't even know her real name, for goodness' sake, and until she told him, he wouldn't even bother to try to ask.

"I'd consider your intellect equivalent to my own as well, in fascinatingly different ways." He says so almost admirably - from where he's from, there's hardly a soul who comes close, or at least certainly not on his side. Moriarty was a blessing and a curse. Aberdeen is like a breath of fresh air. "I am," and he pauses, because sexual attraction isn't really something he can figure out immediately. His heart rate is elevated, and her own pupils are dilated - as are probably his. Is it because of the adrenaline? Or is it the same?

It should be more worrying to him that he honestly cannot decide if he is, but it's not. He doesn't finish his sentence, just lets it die stale in the air, and studies her features, her piercings, and when he thinks that he is in fact, curious, what it would be like to kiss someone with those, he nods his assent. "Of course, if you're counting as I am, you'll know we stand at eighteen minutes, twelve seconds, give or take a few, and so I believe a checklist of events and a plan should be negotiated, with haste."

[wiretap]

Eighteen eleven, ten, night, eight—

Aberdeen lets the moment draw out a little, lets the clock wind down to an even eighteen minutes flat before she tips her head back towards the bed, where her laptop is scrolling data up the screen and her meager handwritten notes are spread across the unmussed sheets. Before that, though, she allows one last stare, her fingers clenching one last time in an attempt to anchor herself as she pushes herself up onto tiptoe and presses her mouth against Sherlock's. It is not a quick kiss, but it does not linger either, and somehow it manages to be both heated and matter-of-fact, insistent while still close-mouthed. The metal of her lip-ring introduces a strange new pressure, at least for Sherlock, and before it can go anywhere and before he can push her away, she is dropping back down onto the flat of her feet, the ball of her tongue piercing erupting into a sharp series of clacks against the back of her front teeth.

"Eighteen even," she says, peeling away now, the front of his suit still bunched where she'd held it, even after she's let him go. With a hand she gestures at her laptop. "The native code to Megamind's throttle runtmes. Press CTRL 1 through 5 to see it streamed through alternative syntax scenarios. All are promising, but all are flawed." Aberdeen stoops to gather some of her papers, shuffling them into some sense of order. "I need at least five minutes to rewrite the code to the various choke points and repopulate the system. You have twelve and a half minutes to decrypt his data." A pause and she turns away again, the faintest inflection touching her voice. "Do it in ten, and I'll give you something."

[saidhe]

The kissing with the piercings, he decides, is an entirely new and interesting experience, and so his response is immediate and very characteristically visceral. He knows he'll only have a set amount of time, as they only have a set amount of time in TOTAL to work with, and thus relishes in each second of it, feeling the rings press into his lips, the heat of the metal, the indent of each one, so different from the otherwise softness of the flesh -

And just as immediately as it is turned on, it's turned off, as his mind reels in a complete circle at a high speed to the matter at hand. Click click click, like the barrel of a gun. His pupils are blown, and it is the adrenaline now, as he faces down the laptop in front of him, something so new and something so challenging. It's not the prize that sets him immediately to work and frantically so. It's the challenge that does. Ten minutes. He steps away as though the kiss had never happened, leaning over the laptop and reading the scrolling text within.

His fingers press the keys she signified, rapidfire, and he drinks in the code, then walks away from the laptop, gazing idly at the ceiling. To the untrained eye, it would appear he was just wandering aimlessly, slacking. But his lips move in the slightest, and his eyes are flashing back and forth as rapidly as though he's dreaming, fingers plucking maniacally at a nonexistent violin as he thinks. It's already up there. Eidetic memory. And he's so deep in the confines of his own mind right now that she could have grasped his arm and shaken him and he wouldn't have given her a moment's notice.

She gives him twelve and a half minutes at most, ten for something special.

He finishes in exactly nine minutes and twelve seconds.

[wiretap]

It takes a specific sort of person to be able to switch on and switch off like that, a special sort of maladjust whose brain operates in a very particular way. Most people aren't wired to be able to change gears so abruptly but Aberdeen knows from personal experience that the most brilliant of minds are, most often, accompanied by a certain disconnect. Whether this hinders them or liberates them is subject to debate, but Aberdeen's attraction to Sherlock is as much about his mental acumen as it is about the immediacy of his body (bone and muscle, sinew and teeth; the man is lean the way she is lean, pared down to the barest essentials everywhere save the recesses of his mind).

He finishes in exactly nine minutes and twelve seconds. The network is hers again in four minutes, twenty two. She watches Sherlock over the top of her laptop the entire time, fingertips flying over the keyboard as she implements code built off of the grammar he's reconstructed for her. (It is the first time she's ever worked with a partner in this respect. There was Ian, of course, but theirs was a partnership of a different type of order, a kind of tandem that Aberdeen knows cannot be replicated by anyone, not even another Dundee.) As she types she provides a stream of narration, mostly one word sentences stolen from conversations held elsewhere in the passengers quarters. A person hurt here, another missing there. Snippets of dialogue taken out of context which Aberdeen knows Sherlock is smart enough to understand nevertheless.

When everything's done and presses send and the datapacket streaks its way across the network, she rises from where she was seated at the end of the bed on the floor and gives her spine a pointed stretch. Inside her mouth her piercing has begun clacking again.

"It's done."

[saidhe]

The paper is mostly for show, or maybe so somebody else can fill in the blanks later. It's not that he doesn't care that there people injured out there, missing, hopefully not dead, if he can help it - he finds it hard to live it down, the ones he can't save. Injuries, at the least, can be patched, and are only a manner of great interest if they're anyone he knows. So far, so good. But he'd rather not deal with the paperwork, as it were.

His own job has been done, and he takes each small piece Aberdeen offers him quickly and quietly. She gives just enough for him to know what each means - short, concise, the longwinded and emotional retellings were always trying, always got on his last nerve - and though every mental note is stored immediately at the forefront of his mind, he scrawls each one down regardless, so the word can get out later.

She makes good time. Five minutes, she'd said earlier. Four minutes and twenty two seconds now. He'd smiled when she'd risen, when he'd known she was done before she'd even had to tell him - it was a small thing, that curved surreptitiously at the corner of his mouth. Apparently his own quick pace had made for a bit of a challenge, and she'd tested her own pace as well. He writes the last name, his scrawling a neat and concise cursive that shows his schooling and his lack of urgency - anything more dire would have turned this into illegible chicken scratch that only he could decipher, but that wasn't the point of this.

Finally, he looks up, and the smile fills his mouth instead, where he's sat on her bed and let her work.

"I suppose it could be said that, together, we make an impeccable team."

He likes when she clacks her piercing. It's a sharp reminder that it's there, that she's something different, carved from something new that he hasn't yet seen in society. But there's a corner of him that's sad, that knows she does it because she can't hear the things she could normally hear - like a shell shock, a muted sound like cotton in one's ears, he imagines it must feel like. From across the room now, he asks her pointedly, "Can you hear my heart beat?"

[wiretap]

"I don't play well with others. But all things have exceptions."

Unlike so many of the geniuses aboard the Tranquility, Aberdeen is not a creature of ego. She understands her brilliance, the nature of it, and the way that it compares and contrasts to the brilliance (or lack thereof) belonging to the people around her. Which means that exercises of vanity, of intellectual preening are more or less beyond her. But five minutes whittled down to four minutes, twenty two is less about having an intellectual pissing contest and more about sparring, like a quick back and forth. The way other people might have banter or flirting, Aberdeen has this. Efficiency, expediency and success.

She's hunched over herself when Sherlock asks, a bend working up Aberdeen's spine towards her shoulders like the way a wave rolls inwards to the shore. It makes her shirt ride up in the back and then likewise in the front and by the time she turns, it's already being peeled further up to reveal a lacework of circles and mathematical beauty and Aberdeen's breasts — modest and pert and very much bare, light catching on the metal of both of her piercings.

"I can," she says matter-of-factly, as if this were any other conversation they were having. The shirt finds its way to the floor with an unceremonial huff. From her side of the room, Aberdeen meets Sherlock's gaze with her own — steady and otherwise unfazed by her sudden nakedness. "Are you attracted to me?"

[saidhe]

"Yes, I suppose both of us have our own."

He studies her as she moves, her body language, the sharp angles of her body, with a manner of interest. When she works, it's a thing of beauty, technology well beyond his years that he has only begun to fathom.

Unlike Aberdeen, Holmes' ego isn't a manner of question. He knows he's smart, he's fully aware of that intelligence, and there are times when he'll uncertainly hold that over whoever he can. He's amazing. He's completely sure of how amazing he is. But if he's not amazing, constantly, then he's merely a strange man, a sociopath who's old, washed up, and alone, isn't he? There's a reason he's so proud of his intelligence. He doesn't have much else going for him, as has been pointed out to him on several an occasion.

I can, and he doesn't move from his spot, he hardly even reacts to her shirt off, though his eyes do start their journey. It's what he caught a glimpse of on their first meeting, her tattoos, and now that he can see them up close and can study them, they're a matter of interest. Two small piercings, in each nipple, as well. The sight in itself isn't arousing - it's merely a female, naked, and something he's seen before, though it's certainly game-changing.

Holmes' hands fold in his lap as he lets his eyes etch over her tattoos, memorizing every last line, an account to keep for later. He then looks up, and does meet her gaze, steadily and unbothered. "You're an attractive individual," he states clinically, but, no, that's not right, and he tilts his head, reevaluating his decision. "You're unlike anyone I've ever seen," he decides on instead, which he decides is a much greater compliment coming from him. He raises a hand, tracing at the air in front of him with a thumb, the circles of one of her tattoos. "Entirely original, and worth studying."