Because I like to fit in my fanfics when canon when and where I can (ish), I wrote this. One where I can have my OTP and my canon too :D

I really like the idea of a truly asexual Sherlock Holmes (please note during Game of Shadows his take on horses, extrapolate as necessary), but I also am having the demi-sexual Sherlock Holmes grow on me too. I like the idea that he is generally ace unless he spends months and years cultivating a relationship and the things within that relationship would be shared only with that one person. So yeah. That's what I've got here.

Also, regular readers, please note that I updated one of my regular stories as well as this :)

Without further ado,

Enjoy!

With one moaned sigh of a text message, Sherlock felt his heart—the one everyone relentlessly told him he didn't have despite what he felt was mounting evidence to the contrary—break. He had already erased years of careful planning after he deduced Molly and her intentions with her gift. He had no idea how to actually get the girl himself, and had been planning that this coming year would be the year—he would, with John's guidance, figure out how to secure Molly's lasting affection. He always shredded the chances she had with other men, he didn't want her to leave him. Ever. Had he known, before he had cut her motives to pieces, that his wish had come wrapped in that delicious black dress…he wouldn't have done it. Or perhaps he would have, but would also have—no. There was no point in speculating how he would have reacted had he properly understood that she had come to this party for him.

Adding insult to his injury, his mysterious texting companion sent him a little Christmas cheer—which had turned to internal horror within moments. The text would be interpreted by Molly and everyone else as exactly what it wasn't. Sherlock had specific settings for everyone in his phone—Mycroft was the first note of God Save the Queen, John's was the first note of the Afghani national anthem, Lestrade's was the first three notes Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Molly's was the first note of a Scottish wedding march, his mother's was the chorus to her favorite song, and everyone else's ring had its own internal meaning to Sherlock. He cursed himself for his indulgence. Since he hadn't changed the ring, it "showed" everyone what the texter meant to him. It allowed Molly to jump to conclusions he didn't want her to make.

At least, before he picked up the box—before he opened it, before he saw what was inside—he had thought that the text was the insult to the injury. No, it was all the injury. Irene Adler was dead. There was no other explanation, and this knowledge pained him almost as much as his botched deduction of Molly had. Adler had been fascinating strictly because he couldn't make her out the first time he met her—of course later it became the usual damsel-playing-at-distress, but at first she had been a mystery. He had wanted to cultivate something there with her—as a useful contact, someone to mentally spar with who didn't want to kill him, anything but what Molly (and everyone else) now assumed of him. And now she was dead, because she had said that this phone was her life. That she would not be separated from it while she was still living.

The injury, Sherlock found, was that Molly was the only pathologist available to open the morgue that night when he went in to identify Irene's body. The injury was the fact that what had "killed" Irene had disfigured her to the extent that he had to view her entire body—which was a lovely and well-kept one to be sure, but not as wonderfully flawed and interesting as Molly's—not just her face. The injury was that Molly stood right next to him, with all of her flawed assumptions, as he took in that body.

Much later, as he stood in a darkened hallway in a warehouse, and listened to John rattle off his symptoms—that he was heartbroken and sad, if he could feel those sorts of things—he had to give John credit. He had tried, but as usual had missed all of the signs. Sherlock had moved most of his experiments to the flat, and downright avoided the morgue, Molly, and St. Bart's as though being there was physically painful. It was true, however, that he was heartbroken and sad. He didn't know how to set Molly to rights with her assumptions, because she would always doubt herself now.

The trusting, wonderful, lovely Molly that he had so wanted to love him and trust him, she was probably gone now. Or at least she was out of his reach—Molly believed herself plain, and with her terrible assumptions mixed with that lovely corpse he could only identify by the torso, she believed that he would never look at her how she wanted him to. It was infuriating, that they wanted each other but they were too socially damaged to get close—he didn't know how, and she felt unworthy. The business with Adler ran its course—he saved her life one last time and watched her go—but not before she helped him see some things. She had touched his face softly with a wise and all-seeing smile, on a private plane to Belgium from Pakistan, and told him how to set things right with Molly.

She loved him enough to give him what he wanted, what he needed because what he needed was not the constant mind-games she could play with him. That was just flirting, that wasn't the substantial interpersonal connection that Sherlock needed—John wasn't enough. The doctor had, at first, been a stand-in until Sherlock figured out how to connect with Molly. So Irene taught him how to say the things properly, how to be honest and truthful and gentle. And he felt his heart mend just a little, knowing that he could make things okay with Molly.

He could still have Molly, as he'd wanted since the day he met her.

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