Molly likes her job. She doesn't tell people this, if she can help it. She doesn't tell people what she does at all, if she can help it. The words 'morgue' and 'cadaver' tend to stop casual conversation in its tracks, after all.
There is a reason, Molly supposes, that she doesn't spend much time with anyone outside of work.
No one understands the simple serenity that autopsies give her. It's nice, to take people apart, see all their stories, their whole life laid out in front of her, before getting them all sorted out and sewing them shut again. That's her favorite part, sewing them back up, making them fit together again. Almost as good as new, really. They may be dead, but Molly is sure they get some sort of satisfaction from being put right again, the same way that by doing it, she gets a sense of peace she's never been able to find anywhere else. Molly likes to bring things to an end.
Predictably, Molly is the sort of person who keeps her apartment very, very neat.
Molly knows he would probably find the comparison insulting, but she thinks she and Sherlock are similar, in that way. Not the neatness, because she's been in his flat, but in the way neither of them can stand a lack of closure, the absence of finality. Sherlock can't let a case go unsolved once he's got his teeth into it, and the sight of a messy death makes Molly itch to set the corpse to rights. The closing of a case for Sherlock, and the closing of a door in the morgue for Molly, she thinks, are essentially the same.
And is it really so different, the way Sherlock can read a crime scene like a book, and the way Molly can read a whole life into a body on her table?
That was why she liked him, really. Those cheekbones and those eyes, well, they certainly hadn't hurt. But there are plenty of blokes Molly could have fancied instead, if that had been it. How many of them would want to date a girl who freely spends time in a morgue? Sherlock had never looked at her oddly for enjoying her job.
But, of course, he had looked at her oddly for changing her lipstick or trying to take him out for coffee or just wearing a nice dress so that he might give her more than a moment's look. And so maybe it's better this way, better that Molly's crush had evaporated the minute Sherlock had started treating her like an equal, had honestly asked for her help, as a friend.
She doesn't know what that says about her.
It doesn't matter much now. Molly has hardly seen Sherlock in the past three years, and the times that she has, it's become painfully clear how in love he is, and not with her. Molly isn't sure how she hadn't noticed before, all those times Sherlock and John came into the morgue. Maybe in that way, she and Sherlock are opposites. Sherlock only learns to appreciate things when they're gone, and Molly only appreciates things she cannot have.
Or maybe it's just easier for Molly not to miss Sherlock, since at least she gets to know that he's alive. It must grate on Sherlock, having only a handful of people who know the truth, and John not one of them. It grates on her, when she dwells on it too much. Sherlock's absence aches like a gaping wound, and Molly's fingers twitch to sew it up.
She can't stand seeing John, these days. He still looks so sad, after all this time, and Molly wants to tell him that Sherlock is alive, that Sherlock loves him, even if he never said, even if he hadn't even thought it, before he'd vanished from all of their lives. She wants to stitch him up, bring the story to an end.
Molly has always hated leaving a book unfinished, and she cannot abide cliffhangers.
Sometimes she still runs into Lestrade in the morgue. They exchange pleasant conversation when they get the chance, avoiding the subject of Sherlock altogether by tacit agreement. Lestrade's relationship with his wife crumbled again a year ago, all on its own, without Sherlock's stinging observations to help it along.
He looks at her sometimes, speculatively, with a hint of the way he'd looked at her at that Christmas party at 221B, the night she'd been so wrapped up in Sherlock that she had barely even noticed him.
In a way, little has changed. Because Lestrade spends half his time at crime scenes and would never think it was strange that she liked working in a morgue, and he likes the closing of a case just as much as Sherlock ever did, and for more of the right reasons. And so Molly thinks about returning his looks, sometimes, about fixing her lipstick and then asking him out for coffee, because he would never misinterpret it. But she can't, not now, not with the question of Sherlock still in the balance.
Molly likes to keep her life neat as her apartment, neat as a cadaver, everything kept separate and sealed and clean. Sherlock's secret would be messy, spilling like blood, if she had to try keeping it from Lestrade, if they were like that.
The times she does see Sherlock, when he isn't grilling her about John or sleeping on her couch, they talk. Not like they used to, when he had treated her like some particularly dull assistant. He asks her about her life, and she is startled to find that he actually cares. She tells him about work and the bits and pieces of police investigations she picks up, and she doesn't tell him about the way Lestrade looks at her, or how she'd like to look back, because it's cleaner that way. Less overlap.
Instead, she asks him about his life, if it can really be called that. She asks him when he will come back, when he will bring this all full circle and let John breathe again, and every time he shakes his head, tightlipped. Every time she asks, he leaves again soon after.
Every time, that is, until the day he appears in her flat wearing his customary coat and scarf, as opposed to some disguise or other. His hair is back to normal (it had been dyed an ugly blonde for while, and later ginger), and he is striding across the room confidently, instead of collapsing immediately upon entering.
That time, when she asks him when he is coming back, he looks her straight in the eye, and grins.
The next morning, Molly stops by 221B. She chats for a while with Mrs. Hudson, who is ecstatic and furious by turns. Before long, she can hear the clattering of footsteps coming down the stairs, and Sherlock's shout that the game is on, Mrs. Hudson, the game is on!
He stops to nod at her, as respectful as he ever gets, before barreling out the door. Molly smiles and waves. John spends half a second blinking at her, before he's bolting after Sherlock, wary of being left behind. Molly is sure that he will never be left behind again.
Sherlock solves the case, of course, and he even manages to do it without any kind of grave bodily injury. John succeeds in dragging him to a pub with everyone, Molly and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson and an assortment of others, on the pretense of celebration for apprehending the criminal, but they all know it's really a welcome back party.
Molly's pretty certain she even catches Sherlock smiling, once or twice, out of the corner of her eye.
Greg asks her out to dinner, that night, and it feels like the best kind of ending.