Title: "Uniform"
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Pairing: Gen
Length: 452
Content notes: None.
Author notes: For fan_flashworks Challenge #26, "School".
Summary: In homeroom, Irene thinks about the collective longing of the sea of girls around her, aimed towards New York like a compass needle, as she dreams of stranger names: Regina, Pyongyang, Morocco, Phoenix.

"Tell me a secret," Jill whispers. It is Nina Baldwin's thirteenth birthday party and all of the other girls are asleep.

Irene smiles at her, uncomfortable. Her smile is pushing her cheek up against her pillow. It feels weird. "I don't have any secrets," she says.

It's not true, but it's close enough; she doesn't have any good secrets, the kind that Jill means. She's never kissed an older boy out behind the gym of the public high school or rolled her uniform skirt up twice at the waist to bare her too-knobbly and pale knees. She's never smoked a cigarette. She has things she doesn't tell anyone, but they're boring, mostly, like how she has her backpack tucked under her pillow because she doesn't like to sleep flat on the floor—it makes her bony hips push together, and it hurts—or how much she thinks about places on maps. They all think about places on maps. New York, mostly, for most of them, Irene thinks, because that's where you want to go if you grow up in Medford but don't want to stay; in homeroom, she thinks about the collective longing of the sea of girls around her, aimed towards New York like a compass needle, as she dreams of stranger names: Regina, Pyongyang, Morocco, Phoenix.

"You do," Jill whispers. "You must have."

Jill is beautiful. That is a secret, Irene thinks, because Jill has sort of horsey teeth and her hair manages to be both flat and frizzy, all at once. But Jill has wide, vast blue eyes, like the sky after it has rained and rained and just can't bring itself to rain anymore, and she looks at Irene like she is hungry, and Irene feels hungry to look at her too. She doesn't know why, exactly.

"I like our uniforms," Irene whispers back, instead.

The skin between Jill's eyes wrinkles together. "Why?" she asks.

"Because nobody can see me," Irene says, and then buries her mouth in her pillow, so no one will hear her laughing, feeling wide open and suddenly and mysteriously free.

"What do you mean?" Jill laughs, and Christine stirs, so Jill drops her voice again. "It doesn't make you invisible, you know."

"Of course it does." Irene pushes her tongue into her cheek. "They look at me and they don't think, Irene Adler; they think, Catholic schoolgirl. Could get away with murder, I think, if you had the right uniform."

"It's not a disguise," Jill says, but she's smiling.

Irene pushes her shoulder up, bumping into her ear, and bumps her knees in her sleeping bag against Jill's in hers.

"Could be," Irene says. "Could be."



Archived: 24 October 2012, at AO3.