A/N: So I decided to have two "Gabriel-verse" stories going at once because apparently I'm an idiot. This story will be multi-chapter, so indulge me. It's about a year and a half after the events in "Small Boys and Sandwiches." Yes... I've succumbed to peer pressure...

Disclaimer: I own nothing except Gabriel.

Molly Hooper did not want to be at work today. Most days she strolled into the lab at St. Bartholomew's hospital like it was her own flat. Her home away from home. She greeted the test tubes, centrifuge and microscopes like old friends. But today the only place she wanted to be was curled up in the bed she shared with Sherlock at 221B Baker Street. It had begun around 5 a.m.. She was sleeping soundly, having wrapped herself in a cocoon of blankets that was wedged so tightly under Sherlock that she could barely move. At some point in the early morning hours, Gabriel had joined them and was clinging to his other side. A weird rumbling in the pit of her stomach forced her eyes open. She sat up as carefully as she could, trying not to jostle her boys. Her head spun and that rolling in her stomach only got worse as her eyes focused. A tightening in her jaw and that sensation of falling signaled that she was about to be very, very sick. She made it to the bath just in time to expel everything she'd eaten in the last twenty-four hours. As she knelt on the floor afterwards, pressing her cheek to the cool porcelain of the bowl, she could only think that she was so glad that Sherlock had not been awake to witness the ugly scene.

She hadn't thrown up anymore and there was no fever, so she'd come on to work, knowing that they were short staffed. She clutched her warm cup of tea, sipping it slowly and hoping it would calm the puny feeling. After all, she couldn't afford to be sick today. As soon as he got Gabriel out to school, Sherlock would be at the lab to help her with some tests she was running on a poison victim's stomach contents. Once that was done, assuming that the pathology intern came in, she was leaving early to do some baby shopping with Mary and then an early dinner with the men. It should have been a busy and exciting day, but right now all Molly wanted to do was sleep.

She pulled her coat off and tried to hang it on the hook by her office door, but she missed. The heavy coat fell to the floor in a heap of wool, and she considered picking it up. "Whatever," she sighed, flopping down in her desk chair and leaving the mess behind. She looked through the charts left on her desk by the overnight doctor. Two unidentified accident victims and a mysterious death in the Emergency awaited her this morning. She tried reading the charts but the notes swam together on the page until finally she closed their fronts and shoved them aside, laying her head on her desk. Immediately her mobile buzzed in her pocket. She told herself that she wasn't going to pick it up for anyone but Sherlock, but when Mary's picture appeared on the screen, she decided she'd better take it. "Hi, Mary," she sighed.

"Molly? You sound terrible."

"I'm fine. Just tired." She emphasized her statement with a yawn.

"Oooh… were we up late last night detecting?" Mary teased.

"Sadly, no. Just woke up on the wrong side of the bed I guess. Maybe I'm just not used to sharing my bed with two other people."

"Two?"

"Yeah, Gabriel apparently got into bed with us in the middle of the night last night. He does that sometimes."

"Oh, nice. And of course if he keeps growing like a weed, you'll get pushed out. That's tallest six year old I've ever seen."

"Nearly seven. And he has to get taller to balance out his feet." Molly yawned again. "So what's up? I know you must have called for a reason."

"Oh! Yeah… you know John refuses to go with me to find a cot for the baby and soon it's going to be too late because the baby will be here. Are you still planning to go shop with me tonight?"

"Of course. Sherlock and John said they'd pick up Gabriel and meet us around seven." Suddenly, that feeling of nausea she'd had earlier came rushing back. "Uhm… Mary… I have to go…" And before she could hang up, she was heaving over the bin beside her desk. She could hear Mary shouting to her through the phone.

"Molly! Are you all right?"

After several moments, Molly was able to answer. "Uhm… no… not really. I think I must have some kind of virus."

"Perhaps we should put off our shopping and you should just go home."

"Yeah…" Molly slurred. "Maybe."

OoOoOo

"Molly!" Sherlock shouted as he bounded up the stairs and into the flat. When he got to the lab, expecting to see her and she wasn't there, he became very agitated. Nobody had told him that this sentiment thing also came with worry. A most unpleasant emotion. "Molly! Where are you?" He dashed down the hall and into the bedroom where he found her lying asleep on the bed. "Molly!" he exclaimed, sitting down on the bed and nudging her arm. "Are you okay?"

"What? Huh?" she murmured, trying desperately to awaken. "Sherlock?"

"Yes. Wake up! You aren't at the lab!"

"No shit…" she sighed. "I came home because I was sick. Why are you here?"

"Well… obviously I came to check on you." He leaned over her, pressing his lips to her forehead to gauge her temperature. "You don't seem to have any fever. They told me you were violently ill in your office."

"I'm not sure I'd call it violently, but it was pretty colors," she replied, letting him pull her into his arms and brush the stray hair off of her forehead. "And I'm so tired. It must be a virus or something."

"I think John's in the surgery today. Should I take you over?"

"No, I'm sure it's nothing. I'll be fine by the morning, I'm sure. I don't feel nauseous anymore. I guess you'll just have to analyze stomach acid on your own."

Sherlock chuckled and hugged Molly tight. "Definitely not. I'm lost without my pathologist."

"You brought it home, didn't you?"

"Of course."

OoOoOo

Mary and Mrs. Hudson were holding on to one another, laughing like drains when John came in from work. "Can you imagine?"

John stood there watching them double over with laughter. For a moment he was afraid that his impressively pregnant wife was going to actually go into labor in Mrs. Hudson's kitchen. "Did I miss something?" he asked finally.

"Mary… tell John… what you think is going on… with Molly…" Mrs. Hudson hiccupped.

"Going on with Molly? Did I miss something?"

"Well, you know how she's been so sick lately?"

"No. I hadn't noticed."

"You just tune me out, don't you?" Mary scolded. "I told you about that. How I was on the phone with her the other morning and she just hurled in the bin beside her desk?"

"Oh. Yeah, I remember now."

"Well anyway, she's also been really tired and irritable. She and another mom in the pickup line at Gabe's school had it out when she cut her off and nearly hit the car."

"Molly? Molly Hooper? She shouted at some kid's mum?"

"Told her off so good that even Sherlock would have been impressed," Mrs. Hudson said.

John nodded, then shrugged. He supposed he had noticed Molly being a little more irritated than usual. Of course, it was bound to happen. He had been more irritable when he lived with Sherlock. "Maybe she's just more stressed. Something at work?"

Mary and Mrs. Hudson looked at one another and then burst into laughter again. "We think she's pregnant!" they replied in unison. Soon John was laughing with them until they were all sitting at the kitchen table, heads down, cackling.

"Well you know," John began. "It wouldn't be unheard of. I mean, I've always said there was a lot of sex going on between those two. It's like they were saving up."

"But think about it…" Mrs. Hudson giggled. "Sherlock. With a baby!"

"Well, he's done pretty well with Gabriel."

"Yes, and Gabriel could already talk and walk and use the toilet," Mary said. "This one's going to be small. And it will be noisy and smelly."

John thought this over. "Maybe she just has the flu," he said hopefully.

OoOoOo

"Molly, can you help me with this?" Gabriel was hunched over his maths book, his nose crinkled and his lower lip poised between his teeth. Molly turned down the burner under the pasta and wiped her hands on her jeans. She knelt beside Gabriel and read the problem he'd been agonizing over. "I can't figure it out. The answer is already there. I don't get what they want me to do."

"Gabe, the problem isn't asking you for the answer. It's asking you how to solve it."

He turned and looked at Molly with an exasperated expression that was so Sherlock that Molly had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. "That's stupid. If I already know the answer…"

"But they want to know how you would arrive at the answer." Gabriel looked unimpressed but wrote down an equation that would satisfy the problem. "I don't know why I have to do all this homework. Mary used to never make me do homework," he grumbled.

"That's because you were at home all the time. Besides, it's for practice," Molly said, turning back to the stove.

"I don't think I need any practice," he replied, his tone taking on an air of superiority that he'd picked up more and more lately. "Practice is boring."

Molly chuckled to herself and began breaking up ground beef into the skillet, browning it lightly to add to the spaghetti sauce. It had never been her favorite job, sticking her hands into raw meat. When she thought about it, it was kind of unusual that she would be even slightly repulsed given her profession, but the gooey, greasy sensation of the cold, bloody goop squishing between her fingers was not pleasant. The more she worked with the meat, the more aware she became of the coppery smell of the blood, so reminiscent of the aroma that would hang in the air at St. Bart's when a not-so-fresh body would come in. It wasn't rotten, but dead. A gamey, fleshy smell that was slowly overwhelming her. She put the back of her arm over her nose, trying to block out the smell of the meat as it sizzled in the pan.

"Are you okay, Molly?" Gabriel asked, looking up from his book.

"Yeah… just uhm… give me a second." She took a glass from the dish drainer and got herself some cool water from the refrigerator. It helped a little, tamping down the nausea that kept threatening to push through the back of her throat. She leaned against the counter, pressing the edge of the cold glass against her cheek, willing herself not to be sick. She heard the door open downstairs and the familiar heavy footsteps of Sherlock, John and Mary rumbling up the stairs.

Gabriel leapt from his chair, grabbing his paper and running to his father. "Hi, Dad!" he exclaimed, throwing himself against Sherlock. "Can you check my homework? I know I did it right, but the teacher said we had to let an adult look at it." Sherlock wobbled on his feet, unprepared as Gabriel began climbing him like a tree.

"I don't suppose you could give me a minute to get into the flat," Sherlock said, taking the paper that Gabriel was waving in front of his face.

"But I want to be finished," the little boy whined, somehow managing to work himself around so that he was hanging around Sherlock's neck, piggyback style.

"They look like a set of parasitic twins," John teased.

"Cute," Sherlock grumbled, letting Gabriel down carefully onto the chair as he ran through the figures Gabriel had worked out on the page. "Your handwriting is awful, Gabe."

"So's yours."

"Watch it." Sherlock finished checking the problems and handed the paper back to Gabriel. "They look fine to me."

"Hooray!" Gabriel shouted, running off toward his bedroom with Cat barking and running up the stairs after him. Sherlock flinched at the noise and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Why does everyone have to be so loud?" he sighed. Molly didn't say a word, but placed a glass of water and two small tablets of paracetamol in front of him. No one seemed to notice that she had the collar of her jumper pulled up over her nose.

"It could be worse," Mary said. "You could have more than just Gabriel." She stole a glance at John and they began to laugh, much to the confusion of the others.

John and Sherlock chattered to Mary about the case they'd been on earlier. She listened and laughed at all the right places, being properly amazed at Sherlock's deductive skills. Molly could only pay attention to the assault on her senses as she finished up dinner. What was wrong with her? This was her favorite meal, partially because of the delightful conglomeration of spices, but tonight it was all she could do to keep from gagging over the stove. The cooking meat, the garlic, the oregano… it was awful.

After several minutes, Sherlock noticed that Molly was extremely quiet. He glanced up and saw her leaning heavily on the counter, holding her head. He rose from his place and sidled up behind her, winding his arms around her waist. "Hello," he purred against her ear. She smiled and leaned back, his strength a welcome comfort. "You're awfully domestic tonight."

"I didn't feel like going out. Besides, I am capable of taking care of us sometimes." She turned in his embrace and stretched up on her toes to press a kiss to his mouth. His grip tightened, pulling her against him and off her feet.

"You take much better care of me than I deserve, Molly Hooper."

"I know," she giggled, tucking her head into his shoulder. She loved to nuzzle into his neck and breathe him in. He smelled so clean and masculine with just a hint of tobacco. Just the whiff of his scent as she moved through the flat sometimes was enough to send her into a fevered frenzy of lust that would have her sending him urgent texts to hurry home.

But not today. Today the breathtaking scent of him seemed to sour. That earthy maleness turned putrid and before she could stop herself she was wriggling from his grasp and racing to the toilet.

"What the hell was that all about?"

John and Mary could only laugh knowingly.