"Why was there a fence around the graveyard?"
Molly wasn't going to fall asleep. She was not going to fall asleep. This was a nice restaurant, she was wearing a nice dress, and she had taken ages doing her makeup, so she was definitely not going to fall unconscious headfirst into her pot-au-feu.
"I don't know," She replied, with a polite smile. "Why was there?"
"Because people were dying to get in!" Her date, Tom, chuckled, and Molly giggled too, although secretly, it was more a pity laugh than anything else. God, he was so boring. The bad jokes weren't even endearing or cute, just, well – bad. And she was saying (thinking) all of this in the nicest way possible.
Then again, it seemed that whenever anyone was half interesting, the other half was disinterested in her.
But she wasn't thinking about him. About that.
This was moving on. It was healthy.
"That was abysmal." Molly decided that Tom would never know that she wasn't just talking about the joke, but also their conversations in general, the wine, and when she had shouted Sherlock's name last night instead of his.
Oops.
Tom grinned. "You know you love my jokes, Molly."
She mentally sighed.
There was a moment where nothing was said between them, and the only thing filling the warm ambiance of the restaurant was the music and chatter from other tables.
She lifted her glass and took a sip of the very expensive red wine. It tasted like piss, but anything to get the taste of lies out of her mouth was fine by her. That was a little deep for Friday night at The Bistro, wasn't it?
But now she was thinking about it, she couldn't stop.
It wasn't normal to be thinking about someone else whilst on a fancy date with someone you were supposed to love, was it? Or maybe, it was. Maybe everyone was always thinking about someone else, and no one ever said anything because they thought they were alone in the matter.
Sherlock would probably never know it, or perhaps he did but didn't let on (he did that a lot more than he let on), but Molly actually wasn't that shy. It was him. It was that terribly handsome detective with the terribly good brain and the terrible manners that transformed her into a mouse in his presence.
It was as if whenever he came into contact with her, every rational thought seemed to fly out of the window, and she was replaced with nothing more than a husk of her former self.
"I got some anatomy students in the lab today." She told him, trying to forget about anything mildly exciting and drag herself back down to earth.
"Oh? What are they like?"
"Really enthusiastic, but a bit cocky." She laughed a little. "Although, I suppose that comes with the territory, really, doesn't it?"
"Well, I remember that when I was a student,-"
Tom kept gabbling, but all she could think about was Sherlock.
What a surpris- no, no. She liked Tom.
The taxi pulled up outside Molly's flat, Tom in tow. They were probably going to end up having sex, so that was… something. Definitely something.
"We should go there again." She made light conversation as he followed her up the stairs.
"Sure." Tom said, as she opened the door to the flat.
Flicking the light switch on, it was apparent that Toby was sound asleep on the couch, and raised one eyelid to give them both a disapproving, almost disdainful look, with one green eye, before closing it again, like a parent witnessing their teenage children get in late and stumble in drunk.
She cocked her head in confusion. "What's Toby doing out of the bedroom? He hates sleeping in the living room."
Tom shrugged. "Probably a cat thing. Nomads, and all that."
She blinked, and then looked away from the cat. "You're probably right."
"Hey, there's this great place in Soho that we could go to for lunch next weekend, it does these great little bun things, if you'd be interested in that."
"Little bun things? What's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, they're sort of like – cold in here, isn't it?" Now that he had said it, she noticed the draft rolling through out of the window, billowing the curtains inside softly.
Molly's brow creased. "Can't remember opening that…" Mentally shrugging, she walked over, and closed the window, briefly looking over the back alleyway, the cobbles shrouded in darkness. Something that looked to be a cat slinked across. "Got a mind like a sieve." She turned back to him. "Anyway, what were you saying?"
"They're like loaves of bread, but, uh, smaller."
"What?" Walking across the living room, going to the kitchen.
"Um, some of them have… raisins in them. They go well with butter."
"I feel like we're playing Pictionary sans the pictures." She remarked, opening the fridge to look for the-
The milk was gone. The milk that she had bought this morning.
Frowning deeper now, she looks round the kitchen, and finds the litre plastic bottle on the counter, the lid only half screwed on. Eyes narrowing, gaze lifting to the only now closed window, then to Toby. Her mind quickly pieced the three-piece jigsaw together.
"Tom," She hissed, beckoning him over to her.
A confused, slightly gormless expression appeared on his face as he did as was instructed. "What?"
Molly turned, tucking her curled hair behind her ears and opening the draw, producing a butcher's knife.
Tom's eyes widened. "What are you planning to do with that?"
"Someone's broken in, Tom."
"What?!"
"Stay calm. They could have left, but I think we caught them in the bedroom when we came in – they haven't taken anything. Have your phone handy, in case they are actually still in the flat."
He looked taken aback by this Molly, the one with a cool head in situations, throwing out orders and leading. "Y-yes."
Molly walked slower now, her pulse starting to quicken as she got closer to the door, the rectangular piece of wood now looking scarier than a mere door ever should.
The last few steps were taken with her heart in her mouth, grip tightening on the handle of the knife.
Three, two,-
She swung the door open quickly, and to her horror, there was the outline of a body underneath the white sheets of her bed in the dark.
Molly let out a whimper, quickly hitting the lights.
Her tongue was tied and she wasn't quite sure what to do, shouting 'get out' seemed a bit too obvious of a notion to have to actually put into words, and she had no real use for the knife, it was more for show than anything else.
Slowly, the body rose, like a vampire rising from its coffin.
She felt the blood drain from her.
"Ah, hello Molly." A sleep-roughened baritone.
A pang of shock hit her.
Tom gaped at the sight from behind her.
A topless Sherlock Holmes sat upright in her bed, hair ruffled and eyes groggy.
She had never been angrier and happier all in one simultaneous moment before.
"W-what…" She murmured, her voice suddenly lost. "What are you doing, Sherlock?"
"I was sleeping." He informs her, scratching the side of his neck and yawning.
"Why did you break in?"
"Well, what else was I supposed to do?" He got out of bed, to reveal that the only thing clothing him was his black underwear. Molly's cheeks started to burn and she averted her
gaze. "You should know better than to change the locks, Molly."
"That was so you wouldn't come in when I wasn't home."
"The flat's so much more agreeable like that, though." Sherlock comments, walking over to his trousers and pulling them on.
"Listen, mate," Tom's voice now. "You can't just break into her flat when it suits you." Molly cringed. "That's not on."
Sherlock snorted in response. "You use the word 'mate' a lot, Tom. It's a sign that you're overcompensating for your very middle-class existence." Tom's face fell.
"Sherlock!" She exclaimed, as the relaxed detective buttoned up his shirt, his fingers making light work of it even in post-sleep disorientation. "Can you just stop, please? Can you just stop being rude for one second?"
"I don't have an off-switch, Molly." His features were pulled into an annoyed expression. "It's insulting that you think I do, given my behaviour towards you over the years." He put his shoes on.
Disbelief was all she could really feel. She had had enough with worshiping him, letting him walk all over him like the floral doormat that she was, putting up with his backhanded insults.
"There's a reason I changed the locks, Sherlock. It's because I knew that you couldn't just give me back the keys I gave you without making a copy. But even that's not enough, is it? It's always your way. Always! What do you think would happen if this was reversed? If you came in to find that I had broken in and slept in your bed like some sort of twisted Goldilocks?"
"You make it seem as if I do this for anything else other than necessity." He wasn't affected by what she had said in the least, and it only made her angrier.
"For the love of God, could you, for one second of your life, think about-"
A blood-curdling scream cut her off.
Everyone's heads lifted, towards the window facing onto the back alley.
Three milliseconds, and then Sherlock sprang into action in true Consulting Detective fashion. A flash of motion he ran past the couple. Almost confused for a moment, Molly then turned and quickly followed him, only on Sherlock's heels, racing down the stairs and out the back door to the small communal garden, then out of the door of the outside wall, and they were both on the cobbles in the middle of two rows of terraced buildings. Tom followed them slower.
"Oh my God, Lucy, no, no, no, Lucy!" A woman, around forty, kneeling over a body in the darkness, just outside the diameter of the streetlight amber.
Sherlock and Molly paced over, him kneeling down to the body.
"Lucy, Lucy," The woman appeared inconsolable, rocking herself and shaking violently.
Sherlock went to turn the body over, as Molly told Tom to call the police.
His expression did not change or falter as he saw the girls face, streaks of blood running from her hairline and slipping into her open eyes, turning the whites of them red.
Molly didn't have to be a pathologist to know that she was dead. Her t-shirt was soaked crimson and stuck to her chest, her torso… her torso appeared almost ripped open, and it could easily look like that to the untrained eye, but after having seen so much death, for so many years, she knew that it was multiple stabbings, if not in the hundreds. It was terrible to know, but no bile rose in her throat. The colour didn't drain from her face and acid didn't form in her mouth.
Molly knelt down next to the sobbing woman, putting a gentle arm around her.
"How do you know her?" She asked her, softly.
"Mother." Molly winced. Locks of hair fell off Sherlock's face as he examined the body, or, Lucy. "Her body's still warm, I'd estimate in the last hour." He looks to Molly. "Your diagnosis?"
"I wasn't asking y-" Molly decided it was better not to argue, tentatively reaching out and pressing her numb fingertips to the skin of the girl's arm, covering a dusting of freckles. "The body drops around 2 Celsius an hour after death, it's cold and she's at thirty-six. I'd say a matter of minutes."
"Which means," Sherlock jumps up, looking around the alleyway. "The murderer can't have gone far."
As if on cue, the faint sound of a pebble hitting a wall rings out from an alleyway on the other side of the road. Sherlock takes off towards it, footsteps quick and heavy on the tarmac, and after a moment of gently removing herself from the mother, Molly turns to Tom.
"Stay with her, wait for the police."
Then she's running after him, worrying about what sort of altercation could take place.
Looking at the silhouette of him, it was clear that he wasn't looking straight ahead. Frowning, she followed his gaze, and her mouth fell open at what she saw.
A figure was running along the rooftops with an inhuman grace about its almost spidery movements, taking a gap in the building's in its stride and easily leaping across. She was entranced in frightened awe, blinding running to keep up with whatever it was, stumbling once but catching herself with a hand on the ground.
Molly and Sherlock were side by side now, sprinting through the central London backstreets with such concentration that not a thought was spared for each other.
Reaching a building covered in tarpaulin kept down in the breeze by loose bricks and rickety looking scaffolding, the figure promptly dropped into a hole in the roof of it.
Sherlock wasted no time in climbing up onto the first level of scaffolding, Molly quickly following his lead. They made their way up to the third level quickly, lactic acid burning in their thighs.
Easing himself through a glass-less window, it was suddenly clear that the building had run into misuse. Shards of glass bottles littered the floor among leaves and wrappers.
Footsteps could be heard from upstairs. Sherlock followed it, tearing through the room and up the wooden stairs.
Molly went to follow, but in a muscle-memory filled excitement her foot just missed one of the steps. Her leg grazed down onto the wood, and it wouldn't have been that big of an issue if not for the nail protruding from the side, and with this she gained a substantial cut to the side of her thigh.
Not responding to the sensation of blood suddenly pulsing out onto her skin she perseveres.
Catching up with him, it was clear that the detective had turned into exactly that – the purest form of himself, as if he were on fire, feverishly scouring the dark room, circling. She could practically hear the seamless cogs whirring in his mind, and she could only wonder what he was seeing, that she couldn't.
There was nothing in the room. Only darkness. A pigeon had made a nest in one of the grotty corners, now looking from him to her with an absent twinkle in its beady eyes.
"No, no, no," He muttered through heavy breathing, voice barely above a sigh. "No!"
"Where-" She managed out of quick breathing, "Where did he go?"
"The way he came in." This only seemed to irritate him further. "Idiot!" He amplified this with two hands in his hair as he paced.
An unusual occurrence, someone tricking Sherlock. But now they would be long gone, and picking up the pursuit would be impossible, as well as futile.
He turned on his heel on a pace, and as he saw the side of her leg, stopped in his tracks.
"You're bleeding."
"It's, er, it's nothing."
Sherlock spent a moment longer lingering on the injury, before taking a sharp intake of breath and raising his gaze to meet hers. "I should walk you back."
He approached her, hands behind his back, under the hole in the roof. Moonlight spilled in and graced his features delicately; now he had shadows for eyes and a halo balancing on his curls.
"It seems that the London night has turned a darker shade of danger for lone women."
Molly would have told him that he didn't have to give her a reason, she would have let him walk her off a cliff if it meant a little bit of proximity.
Knowing better, she didn't.