Molly's shift had finished twenty minutes ago. Sherlock still had thirty more PCRs to prep and he no longer considered it appropriate to finagle her into providing those services for him, so he stayed at his workstation in the laminar flow hood. But when she left, he stood up, and kissed her smooth cheek, and wished her a pleasant evening.
They did that sort of thing now, because they were good friends again. Surely that was enough.
"You may, in fact, be the stupidest man alive."
"Shut up, Mary," he muttered… possibly out loud, because a technician passing by gave him an alarmed glance.
"A beautiful woman, devastatingly intelligent, fancies you, finds you interesting rather than creepy-" Mary sing-songed from her seat on the benchtop next to the gas chromatograph.
"I am well aware of Doctor Hooper's numerous personal advantages, thank you."
"You two have even said you love one another. And here you're sitting on your arse doing DNA analysis on a seventy-year-old cold case that's barely a four when you could go be with her?"
Sherlock slapped his palm onto the bench and immediately regretted it, since his fingers were still splinted.
"You may not have noticed, Mary," he said precisely, "That it was under terrible circumstances, that she and I were forced into it, that I made her cry again-"
He stopped. It was ridiculous to quarrel with your own brain. Not that that had ever stopped him before.
"No, I caught that. Which is why," Mary said, "You have to put on your big boy pants and actually tell her that 'I love you' came with an implicit 'In the way that involves us living happily ever after together and making loads of brilliant, beautiful, bizarre babies."
"Molly's childfree by choice, and I'm not particularly inclined to inflict the Holmes genotype onto another generation," Sherlock informed her, loftily, pressing tubes onto the vortexer to mix them.
"Ugh," Mary rolled her eyes, "Fine. 'In the way that involves us snogging at crime scenes, dissecting things for fun, and making passionate love while never being interrupted by high-pitched psychopaths constantly requiring clean nappies.'"
Mary frowned at her last remark.
"Which is not the most flattering way you could think of my namesake, now is it?"
"Molly's got no reason to trust my intentions, I have repeatedly demonstrated that I am unfit to be an acceptable romantic partner to her-"
"Ah, misguided chivalry," Mary interrupted him, "Perfectly valid reason to spend the second half of your life making sad eyes at her whenever her back is turned and never getting your willy squeezed."
"My wi-" Sherlock slotted the vials into the centrifuge, "Could you possibly have chosen a more revolting way to describe that?"
Mary folded her arms, raised her eyebrows, and said, flatly, "Having your knob… moistened."
"Please don't."
"Riding the bone train to pound town. You do stock a surprising inventory of these euphemisms, don't you?" she laughed delightedly.
"Stop. It."
"Please. If you didn't want me to mock you about it you could have left me in charge of 'childminding,' 'cooking,' and 'murder methods, nontedious.' But no, I die and all of a sudden you want me to handle 'love' and this is what me doing that involves. Oooh, gland to gland combat."
"Did you really make fun of me this much when you were alive?" he asked, curiously.
"Less than fifty percent as much, though it's possible you didn't always notice when I did," Mary replied, after due consideration, "You may have some self image issues going on. And that's why you aren't listening to me, isn't it? You're scared. Not for her, for yourself. You think you're going to screw it up badly enough that she won't want you anymore and that the formerly efficient organ that pumps your blood will break."
Sherlock, sullenly, moved his samples into the sequencer. Eventually, grudgingly, he said, "-Maybe."
Mary shrugged.
"She might. It does happen… though for most people the first experiences with that do happen roughly twenty years earlier so it's not such a shock by this point, you great emotionally constipated lout. I loved John, and he could have broken my heart. He loves me, and I did break his."
She sighed, and swung her legs.
"It's really like jumping off a building, isn't it? Mostly you crash. But every now and then… you land safely. It helps if there's someone already down there to catch you."
Sherlock looked at her, and Mary looked straight back.
"Then when you land there's wonderful adventures to follow," she smiled down at him, "But you do have to take the leap first. And I never mistook you for a coward, Sherlock Holmes."
Sherlock looked at his battered hands, and said, "Molly takes the tube home."
"At this time of night you could easily beat her there in a taxi, especially if she stops to run errands on the way. So go. See if she's up for a bit of oscillating the unmentionables."
"I hate you."
"No, you don't," she said, and vanished.
Though on his way out the door he did hear a faint, "You've been smoking, so do have a mint beforehand."
