When Molly Hooper was a little girl, she imagined desperately that she'd grow to become a nurse. At the time, it hadn't occurred to her that she could do better, aim higher. There was no mystery in why she'd set her cap at following the Nightingale route. Her own father was a nurse. He'd worked odd hours, filled the clothesline with pastel green uniforms, the hall with orthotically sound footwear choices and the air with a smack of bleach and overcooked carrots. Mr Hooper had frowned on Molly's choice, refused to buy her the nurse costume, dissembled the doll hospitals that she had fashioned in her bedroom... His daughter would be more than just a nurse. Wide-eyed, sweet, loving Molly would do great things. In some other profession.

It wasn't that he expected a lot from his daughter; it was that he wanted a lot for his daughter.

And really, as it turned out, Molly had done quite well for herself. Admittedly, her father still (and somewhat erroneously) liked to refer to her as a doctor and not a forensic pathologist, but Molly was all about picking her battles, and that was one best left alone. He wasn't technically wrong, she held a PhD. She just had no plans on looking at his neighbours' gout anytime in the near future.

The funny part was, sometimes - and only sometimes, mind you - Molly imagined that maybe she really had missed her calling as a nurse. It might have been nice to be with the patients while they still had a chance of surviving. Forensic pathology was, to Molly's mind, very much like watching a film after you've read the novel. There's no surprises in how it's going to end (dead is dead, after all), just variations on the theme and a morbid interest in how they get to the ending.

The first time she fell in love was pretty much the nurse thing all over again. The object of her infatuation unsuitable, the inevitable outcome heart-breaking and (from the accounts of all on-lookers) she could have done better. Much better.

Only, was it really so hard to see why she held a fondness for Sherlock? It wasn't as though she was prime pickings. The wrong side of thirty, poor eye to mouth ratio (just ask Sherlock), terrible conversational skills (Seen the new Finochietto retractors? Barley break a sweat busting open a ribcage these days. Brilliant.), the hours she kept (ghastly), the company she kept (predominantly dead, occasionally criminally insane) and, dear Lord, coffee stains on her blouse (again?).

So, no, running commentary from friends and colleagues aside - and really was she that transparent? - Sherlock Holmes had struck her as an 'elegant solution' to the mystery of her love life. If the obstinate man had just seen things her way he'd have seen how perfect it was. It wasn't as though she was a demanding sort. Nothing really would have had to change. As girlfriends went she imagined she was quite manageable, she had her own schedule to keep to, after all. How hard would it have been? Coffee, sneaky pinch on the bum here and there, eventually a sleepover.

Molly wasn't blind to Sherlock's limited emotional capacity, they could have gone slowly. It's not like she was fending off a glut of romantic interest - that disastrous thing with Jim aside - she was happy to wait. Only the knob had gone and killed himself, hadn't he? And, oh, she knew better than to speak ill of the dead, but when the bulk of the company she kept were cadavers... Well, it was tough.

Not that Sherlock was really - Well, no, he was sodding-well dead and all the 'gut feelings', midnight shivers and wishes in the world weren't going to bring him back.

He told her that she counted.

There had clearly been a miscalculation. Molly was as achingly alone as ever and Sherlock was still dead.

And if he wasn't? He'd wish he was once she got her hands on him.

John stalked into the Mortuary, mentally cataloging the places he'd rather be, even sensory overload and hounds held some appeal when faced with the alternative of stepping into Molly Hooper's little cave.

Such a docile and devoted girl. It wasn't right to reduce a person to a handful of embarrassing moments, but to him, that's all she'd ever really been. Not some wholly formed woman, not a professional, just a little girl, a collection of frenzied nerves, shoddy makeup and ripples scattering in the wake of Sherlock's unstudied - and eminently forgivable - callousness.

His watch read 23:14 and for any normal person it would have been laughable to assume that they would still be at their place of work. But Doctor Hooper wasn't normal. He wasn't sure if she owed her work hours more to a strong work ethic, a poor social life (his bet), or a mere quirk of poor rostering. At any rate, it was worth a try and if he was lucky she'd be home, in her bed, where all good little pathologists should be and he'd be free to put off this awful errand for a few more days.

Truly, it wasn't that there was anything wrong with her. It was just that something about her made him so bloody uncomfortable. As if the taint of every awkwardly unrequited sentiment that she had ever held still clung to her clothes and hair like yesterday's smoke. Sherlock may have had no heart, but Molly Hooper had been equally instrumental in her own misery by virtue of having no discernible spine.

Meek, mild and -

"Good God, Doctor Hooper! Are you defacing a corpse?"

The diminutive woman stumbled back from the body, dropping a scalpel as her eyes went wide (wider? How was that even possible?) and she dived toward the table, paper-white hands fumbling to cover the body. "I - I... It's late. You aren't meant to be here."

John's mind - just as slow as Sherlock had always sworn it was - clunked and turned, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. He'd moved quietly into the Mortuary, half lost in thought, half subdued by his presence in the silent 'den of death'. The quiet had afforded him quite some time unnoticed by Molly and in that time he'd spied... No. He was very much mistake. Surely?

Pale, thinner than he recalled, it was hard to gather much else with her gown and face-guard firmly in place, but the light tremor in her hand seemed at odds with the way she positioned herself between him and her table and puffed out her chest.

"How did you get in, Watson?" Oh, marvellous, barely even a squeak to her voice. She'd been practicing. He held up a proxy card. She damn near rolled her eyes.

"It was in his... Sherlock's effects. I suppose he lifted it from you some time ago?" He would have felt bad about brining yet another of Sherlock's betrayals to her notice had he not spotted the ghost of a blush in her cheeks. "Of course," he stuffed the card into his coat pocket, "You gave it to him."

"I'll call security."

"Excellent, then we'll be able to get to the bottom of what you've been doing this evening?" John didn't need anything more than his rudimentary mental acuity to know that neither of them wanted to involve security.

"Tell me what you want?"

"He left some things here. He always had things here. I've come for them."

Molly looked down at the scalpel by his right shoe, stooped to collect it, then lifted her eyes to his face - still obviously keen to keep herself firmly between John and the body.

"Two riding crops, a sandal, a bag of fingers - disposed of, I'm afraid to say - a collection of hair samples and a toy throwing star. Nothing of sentimental value. You may leave."

"If it's all the same, I'd like to have them." She seemed agitated in a way that he'd never seen, at least not in his limited knowledge of her. A sniff, a tick of the shoulder, she placed the scalpel carefully in a nearby kidney dish and plucked off her gloves.

"Very well, I'll be sure to have them couriered to Baker Street at the first available opportunity."

"You've moved them?" Another eye roll, God Sherlock had left this woman with some woeful ticks, as she wrapped her arms tightly around her middle and propped her hip back against her table, clearly more at ease with the dead than with him.

"After," she cleared her throat, "After. The media were so so horrid. The things they said. The things they implied. And who were we to discredit them? They had facts. The most damning of which was that he'd gone and killed himself. More surely than any admission of guilt, that sealed the ink on the pages. Everything he'd touched, everything he'd done. It all just turned to shit. His work was everything to him, I won't let anyone take it."

"Not even me?"

"I think you got enough of him while he was still alive." Both untrue and hurtful. It seemed Molly really was developing teeth. Now he just needed to find out what she'd been sinking them into.

"Molly? You're going to need to move now."

"How about we both move? I'll make you tea and we can-" It was a hollow offer, given through clenched teeth on a wavering voice as she broke out in a light sweat. John feinted left toward the feet of the body, Molly dove, giving him her back just long enough for him to plant his palm squarely between her shoulder blades and send her crashing to the floor while he whipped back the sheet covering the face of -

"Moriarty."

He expected her to scramble to her feet, to cry, to beg, to explain. Moriarty, and it truly was him, was very dead. Had been for weeks. More than a month. Well preserved, he supposed, for a man with an explosive trauma to the head.

There, just at the corner of his eyelid, was a bloodless but precise incision about five millimetres long and a little torn at the deepest point. That's where she'd been when he'd startled her. "I'm not him, Molly, and I've had bugger all sleep. Don't leave me to figure this out on my own."

Another bloody sniffle as she wiped her nose on her sleeve. Still no tears. "Bryn Glas," she supplied almost sulkily.

"I don't get it."

"He would."

"Of course he bloody well would. He'd also know the colour of your knickers, your plans for the weekend and the last thing you ate, I. Am. Not. He."

"Beige, work and coffee," her voice floated up to him.

"Boring, not a healthy way to spend the weekend and coffee is not a food."

"You are not my minder."

"Count yourself lucky. It seems I have failed dismally in that particular vocation. Though indulge me by listening to this bit of advice, and forgive me for not being able to provide an actual reference on this, but the desecration of a corpse is highly illegal. Almost certainly immoral and more than likely a little bit bent."

"Consider me informed. On all counts." She'd managed to right herself and sat cross legged, her back braced against one leg of the table.

John pressed two fingertips to his forehead and shut his eyes, "Fine. Fine. I'll bite. Bryn Glas? As in 'the battle of'?"

"Mmm. Something Sherlock mentioned once."

"Naturally."

"Welsh rebellion. They won. After a fashion. But not until they'd suffered years of punitive expeditions... Little visits where their women were raped and brutalised. Utterly destroyed and humiliated."

"Until their victory at Bryn Glas?"

"Yes, after the battle the men tended their wounds and the women flooded the fields looking for English bodies."

"Revenge on corpses? It's unbecoming, Molly, and - dare I say - unfulfilling."

"Well, I suppose I'll never know now, will I?" He looked down at her, mousy brown hair held back by an elastic that had been broken and retied, the severe part held in place by a clip covered with chipped black paint and then those huge bloody eyes looking up at him - hard, pained and maybe just a little more lively than he'd ever seen them.

"You were going to take his eyelids?"

"It's what they did, in the field. They robbed their tormentors of eternal sleep. Ensured that any who looked on them would know that these men - men who were always watchful - were not to be trusted."

John's first impulse was to tell Molly that Sherlock would never have wanted this violent justice - but something in him knew Sherlock may well have been delighted by the uncharacteristic display of violence. To Sherlock it would have been the equivalent to finishing a thousand piece puzzle - then finding a leftover piece. Just as he thought his work was done, there would be a shift in the light and an unexpected glint, an unimagined facet, showing his cubic zirconia for a diamond. Delightful. For a sociopath.

"We're all hurt by what happened to Sher-"

"Christ! Must everything be about that man?!" she hissed peevishly as she scrambled to her feet.

He wasn't actually sure if she was asking him, or herself. "To hear him tell it? Yes."

"Sherlock wasn't the only one that found a demon in Jim Moriarty! I was hurt too. Only I wasn't up to the task of facing off against him. He manipulated me! He used me and he fucked me and he dressed it up oh-so-prettily and wasn't I just gagging for it? Wasn't I just primed and ready for everything that sweet Jim from IT had to offer?"

"Molly, you were broken up for an age before you even had a clue. It was all past tense until..."

"... Until the man that lied to me drove Sherlock off a building? And we know that's what it was - nothing else explains him being up there. Moriarty was involved. Had to be, and he cost me the only person who never lied to me. Even when it hurt, especially then, he told the truth. That made him my friend, if nothing else."

"No, Molly, that made him a twat," John covered Moriarty and tapped the table with a fingertip. "What's going to happen to the body?"

"They're finally releasing him for burial. Moriarty had secured a plot at Brookwood. all taken care of some years ago. I'm angry. Not idiotic. The mortician bathed him today. He'll go shrouded into the box never to be seen again."

Moriarty seemed smaller in death, somehow inert. Harmless. "You'd have gotten away with the eyelid thing?" He asked, cupping one shoulder and leading her away from the table.

"Free and clear. Just maybe not unscathed."

All things considered, and by 'all things' she mostly meant that ghoulish business with the eyelids (Bad form, Molly), it was time to take a few days leave. Maybe clear out her apartment a bit. Declutter. Simplify. Wash her hair. All excellent ideas and highly achievable if she could just bring herself to get off the couch and out of her pyjamas. Flannelette, tartan, pink, clearly from some disgraced tribe, pink made for hideous tartan.

Maybe it was time to send in those few final items of Sherlock's that John had come looking for. He'd had the good grace to keep clear of her since that night in the Mortuary. Well, good grace or a healthy fear of women who do unspeakable things to the corpses of their foes. Or at least plot to. She wasn't entirely certain that she'd had gone through with it, initial incision aside, it had seemed a rather grim business and Molly was perfectly well aware that there was no satisfaction in what she'd been planning to do.

Given her professional respect for the dead, something in the back of her mind kept telling her that her retribution might have cost her more than she'd initially considered. Watson probably had the right of it. Not that she liked that one bit.

John Watson had always been a bit of a non-entity to her. Just a satellite to Sherlock's celestial body, sucked in by his pull and doomed to do little more than orbit around him. Oh, and didn't that sound familiar? What was the saying? That what you hated most about others were the traits that remind you of yourself. Bugger.

He wasn't a bad sort, she guessed. He was loyal to Sherlock to the end and was, even still. Staunchly refusing to recant any statement of fact he'd ever made about their work, soon to be held accountable as an accessory. All things she'd learned from the telly, of course. His medical license had been suspended, he'd lost his job, spent his days hounded by the press and was very likely facing a lengthy jail sentence.

Oh, and he was newly single. Molly toed an edition of The Sun. Page 37, 'Everything Was a Lie: the Former Lovers of Doctor John Watson, Alleged Accomplice to the Manipulative Sherlock Holmes'. If her top lip curled any more she'd be left with a permanent defect.

It's not like anyone had listened to her either. Except she'd had the lucky (and vastly more humiliating) distinction of being deemed 'another of Holmes' lust-addled dupes'. Lust-addled? Just because she'd wanted the man in her knickers had not made her lust-addled. As far as Molly could tell it had made her sensible.

She wasn't blind to Sherlock's ways. She'd wanted him on an as-is basis. It would have worked. Perfectly, actually. She lacked social graces and he lacked the ability to notice. He'd have liked her well enough, eventually. She was getting better at the makeup, running every other day. She wasn't unattractive.

God, was Monday too early in the week for wine?

Was 10 am too early in the day?

One thing she knew for certain: it was far too early for someone to be at her front door.

Her eyes searched for a gown, but really she was covered. Just not decent. God, pink tartan. Nothing to be done for it. Reporters had long stopped knocking and her father had taken to sending her 'treasures' from his caravan trip around Australia. Most likely it was just another parcel to be signed for.

She genuinely believed that right up until the moment she edged open her front door and spied John Watson.

"Oh."

"You should warn people before inflicting those pyjamas upon them." Molly blushed, but let her door swing open.

It seemed in Sherlock's absence they'd both become just a little bit meaner. Maybe the universe had a way of allotting his abrasive manner so that there was still enough to go around. Molly led the way up the narrow and well-worn, but study staircase, into her two bedroom flat. Her wage was decent, she made a killing in overtime (how could she not?) and this was her one indulgence. Old, certainly, but the sort of old that real estate referred to as 'warm' and 'charming' and charged through the nose for. Luckily, she'd bought at the right time.

The flat was big enough for her to make a distinction between lounge room and kitchen, there was even something she might call a dining room in the space up against her large bay window. From the kitchen a narrow hall (well, narrow once she'd had the bookshelves installed) led to the bedrooms and her newly overhauled bathroom. Molly was proud of her home, with its parquetry floors, big windows and comfortable furniture. It suited her well and each time a new person saw it, complemented it, she felt as though the complement extended to her as a person.

John stopped at the top of the stairs, and surveyed the flat. He rocked back on his heels a whistled, "Unexpected, Molly. I was expecting more... I don't know, pink? Unicorns?" She snorted. Note to self, remove stuffed unicorn from bed. Or, y'know, never let him in there.

"So I haven't been arrested," she passed into her kitchen and propped herself against her small wine fridge, "Thanks for that."

He pressed his lips together and nodded, "Well, yeah, police don't really put much stock in what I say these days."

"Their loss," she pushed away from the fridge with a bracing smile, "Tea? Or shall I just box up Sherlock's things for you?"

"That's not really why I - erm... I feel as though I may be about to trespass on your grief, Molly. So stop me at any time," he moved toward the kitchen and she backed up to the stove, trying for casual as she reached behind herself and switched on the kettle, "I think that last Thursday you might have, I don't know, made a breakthrough? And here I am ready to muck it all up for you. I'm a bit of a selfish git, I suppose."

"I was preparing to pluck off a man's eyelids. There's only so far one can progress from that in four days."

His gaze on her face seemed almost too intense. She turned to begin assembling their tea. "Say what you need to. Sugar?"

"None. Is he alive?" The tea canister cluttered to the floor, tea leaves scattering wildly.

"Loose leaf, more trouble than it's worth, sometimes," she muttered as they dropped to their knees and began forming small piles out of the tea.

"Molly..."

Her hands stilled and she tilted her head up, looking at him through a curtain of hair, all eyes and teeth gnawing at her bottom lip. "I'd be the last to know, John."

"But?"

"I swore - I'd tell no one."

"He asked for secrecy?" "No, but I gave it anyway. He was so... Sad, so bereft. I'd have offered him anything." She retrieved a dustpan from beneath her sink and began collecting the tea.

His hand, calloused but nimble, reached out and firmly grabbed at her wrist, stilling her. "What did he want?"

Me. "Nothing. Nothing more than usual. He was always after something. Always weird things. He just seemed, I don't know, edgier? He wanted me to take blood. Keep it here, store it. I don't know why."

John sat back on his heels, eyes firing with possibility, with potential. She shook her head softly. "Don't get excited. He never used it. It's still in the veggie drawer, John. See for yourself. I look every day, sometimes twice. Always hoping it'll vanish. It doesn't."

"How long will you keep it?"

"Until he pops out from behind a curtain, just like some clever child whose been playing hide and seek and found some marvellous hiding spot? Until I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's dead?"

"I saw it. I saw him fall."

"I read your blog. You also saw a hellhound."

He eased the dustpan from her hand and continued the clean up, while she stood and finished the tea. With tea bags this time.

"You really know nothing?"

"No. But I wouldn't be overly disheartened. That's ops normal for me. I'm just one little cog in a bigger wheel. How could I even begin to think there's a destination, much less fathom what it is?"

"Christ, my head hurts. Even from the grave he gives me headaches."

"One of his many talents, I'm sure," Molly handed him his tea and picked up her own as they starred at her muted telly.

"I'll likely be in prison this time next week," he blew across his tea.

"Should probably have you over for dinner before you go."