Molly's flat, 10 pm.

Sometimes, Molly lies in bed with a finger up in the air, imagining that her heart was floating just above her finger. Oddly enough, she envisions it like a traditional one. It is small and made of what looks like pink glass. It floats above her fingertip, spinning slowly as she examines it. Her heart is transparent, with small cracks at the bottom. Dark red blood oozes out from the cracks, slowly coagulating. At times, Molly wishes her heart were whole, but most nights, she is satisfied with the hurt. Pain means she still loved Sherlock, and he is worth all the hurt in the world.


221B Baker Street, 10 pm

Sherlock sometimes sits in his chair, eyes closed, hands up under his chin as if in prayer and imagines his heart burning in the fire of his mind palace's hearth. The heart he envisions is an anatomically correct one, charred black like coal. Sometimes, Sherlock prods at it with a fireplace poker and to his dismay, his blackened heart gives a bit, revealing its softness. Sherlock would then close the hearth and leave. He is accustomed to the pain of its absence from his chest and always hopes that he will find only its ashes when he returns. He is disappointed every time. That is because his heart isn't actually in the fireplace of his mind palace. Instead, it is someplace all the way across the great, big city of London in a dingy little flat, firmly but gently gripped in the small palms of a little pathologist's hands.