For dietplainlite
Ragged Beginner
Once he is sure she is asleep, before he rises to begin his nightly searches that would certainly make her angry if she found out about them, he stares at her back, listening to her measured breaths. Never one to think in metaphors, he rolls his eyes at his sudden propensity for poetic observation.
She wants to leave. But even here, across the bed from him, she's like a huddled mountain rising from the snowy expanse of duvet plains and he's not sure he could reach her if he tried.
He once asked her why she faces away from him when she sleeps, passing his curiosity off as condemnation for snoring. He expected and hoped that she'd say it's just her natural sleep position.
Instead, she shrugged and looked uncomfortable. "I figured you don't want me looking at you."
The tip of his tongue began to shape a denial but he then realized that the only reason he noticed the way she sleeps with her back to him was because he felt free to study her without consequence.
The best way to describe the way they navigate each other would be 'tip-toeing'. They haven't discussed their conversation the preceded their flight from London. The conversation they had when he thought he was about to die, and of course—of course—Molly knew his thoughts. The conversation that ended with any number of confessions of want and need and (most damningly) love.
Sometimes, he does catch her watching him, and usually deflects her concern with a swotty deduction. It is rarely satisfying, and not just because she only rolls her eyes at him before she goes back to reading some scholarly journal or other or clattering away on her laptop.
They don't pretend to be happy, living out of seedy hotel rooms and creeping across stained carpets with tired feet. Tip-toeing does nothing to relieve the pressure. When he stares at the altitude of her waist, ribs, and shoulder at night, he sometimes feels like stomping, instead. Other times, he wants to manage their rooms like a nightingale floor: no sound, and none of Molly's notice.
Not because he doesn't wish her there. He does with an ache that might suggest that she's already gone. He just can't stand the thought that she might blame him.
Perhaps even worse is the fact that she doesn't.
He made someone angry and now they're both facing the consequences. He certainly has a way with people.
While she remained unobtrusive, he dragged her down like a counterweight. Down until she was looking up from the dark bottom of the shaft to the light up above, cast by a telly screen's flickering leer across an empty hospital break room.
Skidding through the morgue doors that day, he found her quietly conducting a post-mortem, holding up a gloved, bloody finger to him when he opened his mouth to ask if she was alright and whole. She took the time to recite an observation about the kidney in her other hand before pedaling off the microphone hanging above the sprawled corpse and setting the organ back into the body's chest cavity. Somberly, her eyes met his.
He tried again to ask after her, but the words wouldn't—couldn't—come, so he shook his head and nodded for her to continue with her work. And though she was the picture of calm in her sure handling of rotting tissue, his lips tightened as she paused to grip the steel edge of the body slab; heard the shaky whiffle of air being pulled carefully in through her nose behind her mask.
He moved, suddenly aching like an old man, to a stool by the counter. Waiting, he half-listened to her murmurs as she moved around her patient. If it weren't for that one show of stress, he'd have thought her unaware of their new reality.
As soon as she finished her work and scrubbed away the possibility of blood and body detritus, she moved over to him, watchfully. He stood, straightening to his full height as he frowned down at her. Without ever speaking a word, he held out his hand and her small fingers laced through his. Leading her out the door, she went with him into three weeks of running from a specter that might or might not have even been giving chase.
So there they are, in a self-imposed exile that's nowhere near graceful enough to be anyone's plan but their own.
They have a loud fight, the kind that he used to associate with the tacky other. Shouting, chucking books at the walls in frustration, words slung like trebuchet. Soon, a fidgeting desk clerk will knock on their door, asking them to "please stop, you're bothering the other guests." Already, the phone that rests on the table by her side of the bed rings shrilly.
It makes no matter to them.
"It's not him," she insists mulishly from the far side of the bed.
"It is likely not he," he agrees (and corrects, to her annoyance), "but the unknown element only makes it more dangerous. We need more data before we do anything so reckless as returning to London."
Jerkily, she rolls a pair of socks and throws it into her suitcase. "Not if the unknown element is just some idiot with hacking skills. I need to be at work. I've missed sixteen shifts already, and if you think that doesn't look suspicious or draw attention, then you're an idiot."
Though someone calling him an idiot leaves him momentarily tongue-tied, he shoves it away with a roll of his shoulders as he lunges to retrieve the trousers she's just placed in the bag, moving back to the chest of drawers so recently emptied. He isn't sure, but the sound she emits as she chases after him might be a growl.
"Hacking skills, Molly. Don't be dense. If they can access the entirety of the British broadcast networks, including encrypted government channels, they can access the files on a poorly protected device like your computer." Her lips tighten, and she's probably going to correct his unspoken assumption about the quality of her password, but he barrels on. "It doesn't matter what we've deleted from its hard drive. There are ways to retrieve that data, and then we're back where we began: explicit detail of your involvement in my faked death."
She dodges around him and reaches for the cheap plaster drawer knob (mermaid shaped, a remnant of a prior "renovation's" attempt at a nautical theme). He leans back against the dresser, refusing to budge as she tries and fails to retrieve her trousers from the drawer. Her sharp elbow digs into his side, but still, he leans.
"Move."
"Not until you see reason."
"Reason? This isn't a bout of hysteria, Sherlock. This is my measured response to the fact that nothing has happened since the New Years telly incident. Night after night, you've crept out of these hotel rooms. You go searching. But you've found nothing else to suggest I'm in danger, and it's time for us to take a new tack in London."
He starts to object to her casual revelation that she knows exactly how he spends her sleeping hours, but she raises her brows in silent refute to whatever lie he can concoct. So instead, he stubbornly leans harder against the drawer she's been trying to wrestle open.
He feels a flash of triumph when she suddenly stops, dropping back away from him, but it is quickly replaced with alarm as she turns and instead shoves her feet into her shoes and yanks on her coat.
"Fine," she says. "I hope the hotel donates left luggage to Oxfam. I'm leaving." And she makes to do just that, her hair swinging with its own indignation as she strides to the door. She opens it with enough force that he's surprised there isn't any splintering wood.
With graceless hands, he fumbles for her before he even realizes that he's followed her. His fingers clasp hers and then he's yanking her back into the room and into his arms. He swears he can feel each divot his ribs press into his heart as it batters against them. Vaguely, he hears the door snick gently closed once more, but it is muffled by the deafening, soft gasp of air he sucks in as he presses of his lips to hers.
It is a blur to him: he kisses her by the door and then some seconds or minutes or hours pass and suddenly they're on the bed and he's above her, inside her, feeling the sweat trickle down his forehead. His lungs fight to pull in air as she curls around him, her brow pressed to his shoulder and her hot breath panting against his chest.
Everything in and around him burns. The slick, hot pleasure of Molly and the bubbling of his blood that makes his muscles tighten and his voice moan in time with the thrust and parry of their hips. The bite of her nails fuels him on as his own hands work their way under her until he can hold her to him as tightly as possible without inhibiting the way he moves in her.
In a strange dichotomy to their fever pitch, she tilts her head back to look up at him (hooded eyes, flushed cheeks, swollen lips) and her right hand reaches up to gently brush the pads of her fingers across his cheek. Overcome, his eyes slip shut as she swamps him and pulls him under.
It's not so much a détente as resignation that has her agreeing to stay with him just a little longer.
He promises to himself that he'll have answers before she says she has to leave again. He promises to himself that he wants her there for her safety and nothing remotely selfish. Nothing to do with that ache that he feels when he thinks of her being far out of reach.
In spite of her grudging acquiescence, she gives him a sweet, warm kiss before she rolls over, tugging the covers up over her shoulder until she is a huddled mountain, rising from the snowy duvet plains.
He could reach her if he tried.
So instead of creeping across another expanse of stained, hotel carpet, he creeps across the field of bed and blanket and presses himself to her back and presses his face between her shoulder blades.