"Here you go, black, two sugars. Just how you like it." Molly said depositing Sherlock's coffee on the bench beside him. It had been two months since that night at the swimming pool, where Sherlock came face to face with his biggest fan, James Moriarty. Since then, none of the other cases that Sherlock had come across had given him the same high like the game did. So Sherlock started throwing himself into his experiments, desperately trying to recapture the rush of adrenaline that had been eluding him. He had yet to find anything that even compared. Sometime later, John walked into the lab after his shift had finished at the hospital and began to ask Sherlock about the experiment he was currently engaged in. As Sherlock explained that he was comparing blood seepage in different kinds of soils, he reached for his coffee and took a sip, immediately spitting it out onto John's crisp white shirt.
"Molly, my coffee is cold." Sherlock wined.
"Jesus Christ Sherlock! You couldn't have just swallowed it?" John said, rushing to the sink and grabbing a damp cloth.
"Remember when I said I was doing a tea and coffee run and if you wanted anything?" Molly said, not looking up from her microscope.
"Yes." Sherlock replied.
"That was three hours ago."
"Oh." Sherlock said, looking down at the full mug with distaste before setting it back down.
"Are you going to be much longer?" Molly asked as she scribbled her results down on a notepad and then began packing away her equipment. "I'm leaving early today and need to lock up the lab when I do." Molly said walking over to Sherlock to pick up his discarded coffee.
"Why are you leaving early?" Sherlock asked Molly's back as she stood at the sink, washing their cups.
"Sherlock, that's none of your business." John said, sending an apologetic smile to Molly.
"It's nothing." Molly smiled at John. "Just the dentist." Molly turned back to Sherlock and began to clean up his discarded samples, while Sherlock stared at her intently.
"Are you wearing a push up bra?" Sherlock asked, tilting his head to the side as he looked at her bent over the bench.
"Sherlock!" John exclaimed. "You can't ask that?"
"But John, her breasts are obviously bigger. I'm just curious as to why?" Sherlock reasoned.
"But it is none of your business." John said, glancing a look at Molly whose face had gone beet red.
"Um…no…I-" Molly said as she stood up but was then interrupted by Sherlock.
"Oh I see you've put on weight Molly, your breasts are just padding out with extra fat tissue." Sherlock said in a eureka voice. Meanwhile John and Molly were stunned into silence.
"Lock up when you leave." Molly eventually said as she stormed out the lab. Sherlock watched her leave with a confused look on her face and turned to John for clarification.
"You are an absolute arse." Was all John said before he to left Sherlock in the lab with his experiment. Sherlock went over the conversation in his head, but could not understand why they were both upset and so thought it best to delete the entire thing and finish up his experiment.
xXx
A months later, Sherlock's high from his case with the Woman had already faded and his continuous battle with boredom had led him to St. Bart's in hopes of procuring some kind of body part to experiment with. Sherlock rushed into the morgue and scanned it for Molly, who was nowhere to be found. In her place, elbows deep into a cadaver was a man that Sherlock didn't recognise.
"Can I help you?" The man asked and Sherlock immediately began deducing everything about him. 27, recently back from holiday, married but cheating, expecting a child, rebelling against future fatherhood. None of which told him why he was there and where Molly was.
"Where's Molly?" Sherlock asked.
"Who?" The man asked, removing his hands from the cadaver's chest cavity and moving round the table to stand in front of Sherlock.
"Molly, Molly Hooper, she's the head pathologist here." Sherlock said through gritted teeth, this man's insistent stupidity was beginning to annoy him.
"Oh, you must mean the person I replaced." The man said.
"What?" Sherlock said, completely taken aback.
"Well I'm the new head pathologist here. I'm sorry, I don't know where she moved to, never actually met her myself."
"Wait, she moved? Moved where?" Sherlock asked, thoroughly confused by the situation. Molly loved her job, why would she have left?
"Dunno, all I know is she doesn't work in this department anymore. Might have moved to a different department or hospital. Your best bet is to ask someone higher up than me."
"How long has she been gone?"
"I don't know. Well I started here two weeks ago, so around then I would guess, but like I said I don't know. So if that's it, do you mind if I get back to work?" The man said, holding up his blood covered gloved hands." Sherlock didn't reply and stormed out the morgue, intent on getting to the bottom of this.
xXx
"She quit?!" Sherlock shouted, slamming his fists down on Mike Stamford's desk.
"Well resigned, yes." Mike replied, startled by Sherlock's reaction.
"When?" Sherlock demanded.
"Well she handed in her letter of resignation to me, ooh, just under three months ago. But her final day was on the…" Mike flipped a few pages on his day planner, "Just over two weeks ago, the 3rd." Sherlock couldn't believe what he was hearing, Molly had really left. More than that, the last time he saw her, she had already been planning on leaving and hadn't mentioned anything to him. More importantly, he hadn't noticed that anything was amiss. Sherlock desperately tried to recall everything Molly had done the last time he had seen her, but the only things he could recall were his blasted soil samples.
"Did she say why?" Sherlock eventually asked, after a few minutes of silence.
"Just that something personal had come up and she had to leave."
"Leave Bart's or leave…"
"Leave London I think, don't know for sure but the way she was acting before she left made me think that she was moving away." Mike paused, about to ask something but unsure if he should, in the end curiosity got the better of him. "Did she…did she really not tell you? I thought the two of you were… well, friends." Sherlock didn't answer and swept out the office, his coat billowing out behind him.
xXx
In the two years that Sherlock had known Molly, he had always known where she lived but had never actually visited her flat. She lived on the ground floor flat of an end Georgian Terrace house in Kensington. Her family being upper middle class, the large inheritance from her grandfather and later her father and her high salary job meant that she could afford the pricy neighbourhood. Sherlock knocked on the door, listening intently to voices on the other side of the door, two of them, one male and one female. The door then opened and Sherlock was greeted by a short, brunette woman wearing a flowing skirt, white lace shirt and a green cardigan .
"Yes?" The woman said when Sherlock just looked at her in silence.
"My friend used to live here. Sorry I wasn't aware she'd moved." Sherlock said, slightly in a daze.
"Oh honey, you must have just missed her. We only moved in four days ago. One second, David what was the name of the woman who used to live here, the one that showed us round."
"Ermm Margret? Mary? Something like that." A man said appearing from behind the door and standing behind the tall woman.
"You spoke to her?" Sherlock asked. "Did she say where she was going?"
"I don't think so." The woman replied with a pitying look on her face. "I think she said she was tired of the city but that was it."
"Who did you say you were?" The man questioned suspiciously.
"A…friend." Sherlock said.
"A friend she didn't tell was moving, can't have been that close." The man said pulling his girlfriend away from the door.
"No, I'm beginning to realise that." Sherlock said, his eyes going out of focus for a moment as he tried to recall every moment he had with Molly. Regretfully, there weren't that many as Sherlock realised he had deleted a lot of them and the ones he kept, she was mainly in the background, he couldn't even recall when he first met her. "Sorry." Sherlock said, shaking himself from his mind palace. "Thanks for your help, good day." Sherlock turned around and went to hail a taxi back to Baker street.
xXx
"That was quick." John remarked from his arm chair as Sherlock entered the room and sat on the sofa. Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers pressed together in front of his mouth, Sherlock stared pensively into the flickering flames of the fireplace. John realised he wasn't going to get an answer and returned to editing his latest blog post, A Scandal in Belgravia, he had called it. John had to admit that Sherlock's interactions with the women had both intrigued and scared him. Though he hated himself for thinking it, it was probably for the best that she was dead, who knows what other dire situations she could have lead Sherlock in to if she lived.
"Molly's gone." Sherlock said, some hours later to an empty room as John was currently in the kitchen making tea.
"What's that?" John asked, his head poking back into the living room.
"Molly. She's left Bart's."
"Oh, did she get a new job somewhere else?"
"I don't know."
"Has she moved away then?"
"Yes."
"Where did she move?"
"I don't know." During the course of this conversation, John had resumed making tea and so did not see the growing agitation on Sherlock's features.
"Why did she leave?" John asked, walking back into the living room and gently blowing on his tea.
"I don't know!" Sherlock shouted jumping to his feet, causing John to recoil slightly and spill some of his hot tea onto his jumper. The two stared at each other in silence for a moment before Sherlock cleared his throat and fiddled with his collar. "Apologies John, it has been a very frustrating day." Sherlock said before sitting back down.
"No harm done." John said quickly setting his tea on the side table and taking a seat. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"
"Nothing to tell, I arrived at Bart's to find Molly absent and a man claiming that he was her replacement. Mike Stamford confirmed that Molly had resigned for 'personal reasons' that she had not disclosed to him. And when I went to her flat, another couple were living there." Sherlock summarised.
"Blimey." John eventually replied. "And you had no inkling that she was leaving, didn't you deduce anything."
"If you recall, I have been occupied with a high profile case recently. Even I can't deduce something if I'm not there to see it." Sherlock replied.
"Fair enough. That is weird though, to just up and leave. I would have thought she'd at least let you know. I mean you've known each other a long time, worked together a lot. Do you think she's ok?" Whilst John had only known Molly for a few months, he had immediately liked her, after all she was a very likeable person. Not at all the type you'd think would have a job working with dead people. And while it was sometimes painful to watch her obvious crush on Sherlock, she always made time to chat with him when he visited her at Bart's with Sherlock.
"Do you remember the last time we were at Bart's?" Sherlock asked, ignoring John's question.
"Vaguely." John replied. "You spat coffee over me and called Molly fat."
"I didn't call her fat! I merely pointed out that she had gained weight, I didn't say it was a bad thing." Sherlock pouted.
"For most women, putting on weight is a bad thing." John said.
"Irrelevant!" Sherlock announced. "Do you remember anything odd about her behaviour that day? According to Mike, she had already handed in her letter of resignation when we last saw her." John's forehead furrowed for a moment as he tried to think back.
"Nope, sorry mate, she seemed normal to me. Up until you called her fat and she stormed off."
"I did not call her fat!" Sherlock shouted, standing up and stomping into the kitchen to find something to fiddle with.
"What about you? You spent pretty much the entire day with her in the lab, didn't you notice anything?" John inquired, leaning against the door frame.
"It's not like we sat around talking about our feelings. She did her work, I did mine. I asked her opinion of some results, she offered to get coffee, that was pretty much the extent of our interactions that day." Sherlock huffed, clearly annoyed with himself.
"If it bothers you so much, why don't you just find her? You can find people. Or get Mycroft or Lestrade to track her down, she's not exactly a criminal master mind, she'll pop up somewhere."
"Why should I?" Sherlock countered, spinning around to face John. "She clearly didn't deem me important enough to inform me of her departure and doesn't want anyone, especially me it seems, to know where she's gone."
"Sherlock, that's a bit harsh. You know she cares for you, you're friends." John said.
"Molly apparently doesn't think so. And as she is not a friend or a client or someone a client wishes me to locate, I am under no obligation nor inclination to find her." Sherlock said sweeping past John to pick up his violin.
"But what is she's in some kind of trouble?" John asked.
"Then she at least, knows where to find me." Sherlock huffed before turning to the window and the beginnings notes of Paganini Caprice No. 1 drowned out anything else John could say.
xXx
Molly stood at the end of the garden and watched the sun set over the rolling hills that stretched out for miles in front of her. The sky was bathed in pink and orange and a soft breeze carried the noise of baaing sheep from a couple fields over.
"Molly dear, come inside and lay the table, dinner will be ready in a moment." An elderly woman called out from the back door of the cottage behind Molly.
"Coming Nana." Molly called back, breathing in one more breath of fresh air before walking back into the cottage. Molly saw her grandmother pull something out the aga and quickly rushed to lay out mats and cutlery on the kitchen table. The cottage had a more formal dining room, but for just the two of them, Molly preferred to eat in the kitchen. When Molly sat down, her grandmother set a heaping plate of lasagne down in front of her.
"Nana, you know I won't eat all this." Molly said, pouring both her and her grandmother some water.
"Nonsense, you need to get used to bigger portions if you're going to be staying. I won't have any guests of mine going hungry. Now eat up." Molly's grandmother said in a no-nonsense tone.
"Thank you again for letting me stay. I really didn't want to ask mum to give up her traveling for me." Molly said, toying with her food until she received a soft slap on her hand for doing so and a pointed look from her grandmother.
"You know as well as I that your mother would have come home in a heartbeat with absolutely no regrets if she needed to, after all, she can write anywhere, she just likes being abroad." Molly's grandmother said in disapproving tone. Molly's mother, Diana Hooper, was a reasonably successful novelist. Before her husband, David Hooper, passed away she only wrote as a hobby. But after giving up work her as a psychiatrist to take care of her husband when he was diagnosed with cancer, she decided not to go back and devoted herself entirely to her hobby. Now she's spends most of her time abroad searching for inspiration. Molly and her mother were still very close, despite the often significant distance between them, skyping at least once a week and sending each other odd texts and emails when they saw something they thought the other might enjoy. "But as I have plenty of room here and, if I do say so myself, am quite fit and able for my age, there's no point in calling your mother home yet. Now eat up, your foods getting cold." Molly and her grandmother passed the rest of the meal talking about their new living arrangement and Molly surprised herself by eating over half of the giant meal she had received. Her grandmother was less impressed and wrapped up the remainder increase Molly felt like a snack later.
"Ooh I just remembered I wanted to get a box of your father's old things out the loft for you, I best do that now."
"No Nana, I'll do it." Molly said, putting the last plate in the dishwasher and drying her hands.
"You'll do no such thing, you are a guest and you need to be taking care of yourself."
"And what kind of guest, let alone granddaughter, would I be if I let my 73 year old grandmother go rummaging round in the loft?" Molly countered, mirroring her grandmothers determined expression, she did after all learn it from her. However, before the two of them got lost in a battle of wills that would probably last all evening, there was a knock at the door.
"Oh, that'll be Violet." Molly's grandmother said, turning away from Molly.
"Violet?" Molly queried following her grandmother.
"Yes, my next-door neighbour. Her and her husband moved in a few years ago after they both retired. Lovely people, Violet comes round every Sunday evening to watch our detective show together." When Molly's grandmother said next-door neighbour she was not being literal as her grandmother's cottage was a single building surrounded by fields. As far as Molly knew, her grandmother's closet neighbour lived three miles away.
"Violet." Molly's grandmother greeted as she opened the door.
"Debbie, lovely to see you, as always." Violet said as she hugged Molly's grandmother and kissed both her cheeks, before making her way inside and immediately spotting Molly.
"Oh Debbie, you should have told me you had company, I wouldn't have come if I'd known."
"Nonsense. This is my granddaughter Molly. Molly this is Violet."
"Pleasure to meet you Mrs?" Molly asked.
"Oh please call me Violet, I do detest formalities." Violet said hugging Molly and kissing her cheeks. Molly immediately liked Violet, she had an air about her that made likeable, but Molly couldn't put her finger on what it was.
"Make your way into the Living room, I'll be right there with the drinks." Molly's grandmother said before heading back to the kitchen. Molly and Violet headed into the living room and Molly sat in the arm chair, tucking her feet under her while Violet took her seat on the sofa.
"Debbie mentioned when I saw her last week that you moved here from London. Personally, I don't blame you, never liked living in the city, too many people, too much dirt. How anyone can stomach it is beyond me?" Violet said and Molly laughed at her obvious displeasure of city living.
"I agree, cities can be busy, London even more so. But I am going to miss it, I had this lovely flat just a stone's throw of Kensington Gardens, a great job, although most people couldn't understand what I loved about it, and friends, great friends." Molly said, trailing off.
"But they can come and visit you, can't they?" Violet said.
"Perhaps." Molly said before shaking herself out of her daze. Molly put a smile on her face and asked, "So what are we watching?"
"Death in Paradise my dear, I absolutely adore it but I can't watch it at home as my darling Thomas always figures out who the murderer is before me and spoils it. He's driven me to imposing on your dear grandmother every Sunday evening" Violet said.
"It is no imposition at all Violet." Molly's grandmother said carrying in a tray of drinks and setting it down on the coffee table. She passed a sizable glass of white wine to Violet and another one for herself and then passed Molly a glass of orange juice.
"But honestly, my Thomas." Violet said shaking her head in loving frustration. "It wouldn't be so bad if he could keep it to himself, but no, the moment the murderer appears on the screen he simply has to announce that 'it was them who done it.'" Violet said in what Molly assumed was an impression of her husband's voice. "And that's not even the half of it. God forbid that if my sons should visit, they can read the episode synopsis and announce who the murderer was. It's enough to drive a woman mad." Violet finished in an exasperated voice. Molly just laughed before her grandmother shushed her when the programme started.
As Molly watched the detective run around the beautiful Caribbean island, she tried not to think of another detective she knew. Molly felt so guilty for not saying goodbye to Sherlock and John but she just couldn't stand to face them. Suddenly Molly felt herself trembling and on the verge of tears, so she excused herself from Violet and her grandmother, feigning tiredness and made her way to her room. When Molly's grandfather began having trouble getting up and down the steep, narrow cottage staircase, her grandmother decided to extend part of the downstairs and create a master suite for the two of them. Even after her grandfather passed, her grandmother decided to stay in the downstairs bedroom, which left Molly with the old master bedroom as well as the other two bedrooms on the first floor. One of which Molly was going to turn into an office so she could write some academic papers while she was currently out of work. The other would remain empty for the moment. In her room, Molly opened the French doors onto a small balcony, just big enough for two people to stand on, and breathed in the crisp night air. For the millionth time, Molly questioned if she had made the right choice moving away and not telling Sherlock. He could have helped her. Unlikely Molly thought to herself. It wasn't like she was important enough to need protection. And she could only imagine what he would think of her if he found out.
"What do you think?" Molly said looking down, her hands drifting to press against her slightly round belly. "What am I asking you for, your brain's the size a peanut." Molly replied to herself, smiling as she rubbed her belly one last time before closing the doors.