It sounded like a default ringtone. It was a default ringtone. A basic sound that came with the phone. But it belonged only to Sherlock. If anyone else rang, her phone would spring to life singing "Dead Sea Monkeys" by Lemon Demon. If that wasn't enough to know exactly who was calling her (a bit strange for him as he truly did prefer to text but not unheard of when he was in a rush or otherwise feeling particularly in need of attention right this second), she could see the name across the top of the screen as she rose up and turned. She was grateful when the phone went still. Less grateful when it sprang to life again.
It hadn't happened over night. This hurt. This heaviness. It was the sort of thing that took time.
The seeds had been planted throughout their acquaintance. On the very same breeze Sherlock Holmes swept into her life, came the seeds of hurt and heartbreak. But Molly, despite being quite alone in the world, took good care of herself. Molly allowed herself to be sad but did not allow it to eat up her life. Molly loved herself in her family's stead. Molly took pride and joy in her work. Molly was content, even if she was not always happy. And that was okay. She was okay with that.
Right until those carelessly planted seeds began to take root.
It began in earnest the night Sherlock was shot. Molly rarely left the lower levels of Bart's. The morgue and the lab were her home. Occasionally, she wandered into the cafeteria if she forgot her own lunch or found her carefully packed fair riffled through but Molly Hooper had never really had occasion to venture into the realms of the living. Until Sherlock Holmes, of course.
No one called to tell her Sherlock had been shot. No, the world was not so kind as that. Instead, the new morgue attendant who got nervously chatty when he had to deal with the dead (after first meeting him, she'd bet herself a frilly coffee that he'd transfer out by summer) had babbled on about being relieved it was only "that ol' gran from upstairs" and not the posh bloke who'd apparently died well enough on the table the doctor had been in the middle of calling it when the patient had simply kicked himself back into the world of the living. Molly had been mildly interested—not many people escaped death's first go around and while it was clearly a highly exaggerated account, peeking at the medical notes on her next break might be fun—and something about it had caught the very corner of her attention and refused to let go.
"Apparently he's famous too, my baby sister reads 'is blog." Molly was fairly certain he continued on for a bit but she couldn't hear past the wash of ice through her veins. It was silly, really. This was the 21st century. Practically everyone and their dog had a blog. She had a blog. There were thousands and thousands of people that were "internet famous." And sure, there weren't likely to be very many people in the world so completely bloody minded as to kick death in the balls and run but surely, if it were Sherlock, someone would have called her. Someone would have taken the lift down to give her word—would have even bothered to page her.
For a little while, Molly took it as a good sign that no one came, no one called, no one paged. But the feeling in her gut wouldn't leave her be. And so she'd wandered into the world of the living to find John a mess and Sherlock not yet out of the woods.
Molly was forgotten in the hubbub of needing answers and knowing nothing. Well, not nothing. John was a doctor—an army doctor at that. He'd surely seen plenty of gunshot wounds. He'd seen Sherlock's—his hands had been bloody enough from attempts to stem the bleeding. That John was so shaken to his core—that she knew but apparently the others gathering didn't, that Sherlock had actually succumbed to his injuries for a time and might very well again or return to the living not at all whole—told her just how bad things really were.
She cried in a corner for a bit. Quietly at first, unnoticed, before slipping away to find a little used stairwell as the tears got worse—deep, gut wrenching sobs echoing up and down the void of concrete and metal until she could barely breathe. When the tears finally dried, she felt as if her very soul had been scooped out of her numbed body. But this was not her first time crying in empty stairwells or pacing in waiting rooms or waiting for the people she loved to live or die. While there was a temptation to remain forever hidden exactly where she was—the man she loved unrequitedly safely frozen as some sort of Schrodinger's cat; both alive and dead so long as she stayed exactly where she was and never again heard word of the outside world—she knew better.
So she fetched coffee and patted shoulders and did all the little things no one really noticed but needed all the same. Time lost quite a lot of meaning as they waited for Sherlock to come out of surgery, then waited for him to be stable enough to be seen, then waited for him to just… just please God, wake up.
Molly waited all through the night with Sherlock, sat by his bed, monitored his vitals, prayed and prayed and prayed, begged him in whispers not to end up on her table again—not when it was for real, not when there wasn't a decoy waiting and secret plan in place.
She had barely seen him since his return from the living. He had told her in person the game was done, he had popped into the lab a few times, John had invited her to Baker Street an even fewer times, Sherlock had even taken her on that heart wrenching day out; even if it was just as a replacement for John, no matter that he denied it (he had deduced that she could not do it again but she often—too often for her own good—wondered if he had deduced why she could never again spend an entire day side-by-side with the man she loved). But instead of a greater closeness—some sort of recognition of their friendship now that she had come to his aid in his darkest hour, had broken some rather serious laws, had risked her her medical license, her career, every achievement of her life to date and her very life itself—things just… returned to how they'd been. Perhaps, even, with more distance than before.
And now, Molly thought, she might be beginning to understand why that was. It was morning, apparently (Molly was still having trouble judging time), and with it came not only John Watson, but the day nurse to kick them both out while he tended to his patient. It was in the mountains of abused periodicals and rags on the table before them that Molly found The Sun. The headlines plastered across an otherwise rather lovely shot of Sherlock smiling and holding close to Janine—Mary's maid of honor—made Molly's heart sink and shatter. She thought she might actually cry again.
"Can you believe that git?" John asked, too exhausted to be properly pissed, it seemed. Molly wasn't sure she could speak properly if she'd wanted to and John continued away, "He proposed to that woman just to break into an office." He continued on for a bit, the scolding he was clearly going to be giving Sherlock later leaking into the waiting room.
And then Mary was there and then Janine was there and Greg and she thought she'd spotted Sherlock's brother lurking about and suddenly there wasn't any more space for her—any more need for her. Sherlock was awake. His doctor reported he was miraculously devoid of obvious signs of brain trauma and all would be well with time and rest.
Molly tried to hail a cab but lacked Sherlock's frankly ridiculous cab hailing abilities and eventually gave it up to take the tube instead. And in the quiet, even rocking and steady screeching of metal on metal, tucked back into her corner with her sturdy, practical bag nested on her lap, she began to think and reflect.
She reflected on that terrible, terrible Christmas years ago, remembered the startled excitement when John had invited her. It had been so very long since she'd had a Christmas with people. As she didn't really have anyone to spend it with, she usually volunteered to work whatever was needed through Christmas and New Year. She had been so exited, so, so exited to spend it with living people—people she liked! It wasn't just Sherlock (though that had felt like some sort of fairy tale right up until Sherlock went and opened his mouth) she had been looking forward to seeing, either. It was simple delight at the prospect of warm, friendly company. She had day dreamed quite a bit about spending the Christmas party with Sherlock but she'd had many more simple (realistic) day dreams, too. She had wanted to see if she couldn't get Greg and John to sing a bit—possibly get the two goof balls a bit tipsy if she had to. She wanted to finally get to know Mrs. Hudson a bit better. They usually only saw each other when Molly was delivering or disposing of body parts and tissue samples. She had wanted to meet John's new girl, had wanted to have a casual chat with Greg, had wanted to simply… enjoy Christmas with the living again.
She'd made it barely two steps in the door before it was all torn to pieces before her very eyes as Sherlock opened his mouth and cruel, careless word after cruel, careless word spilled from him without a single thought. She knew he couldn't help it some times; it was why he had used for so long, just to try to dim the noise of the world around him, to just stop seeing every little thing. But that didn't stop the brutal hurt of his casual deductions—in front of everyone, no less. She had stood up for herself a bit. He had apologized and given her a little kiss on the cheek, a thing she would always, always cherish. But the night had been spoiled for her. Even with Sherlock retreated to his bedroom, even as she tried desperately to strike up conversation and get the mood back to light hearted, she could not chase the pity from their eyes. She left to the sound of Sherlock's violin filling the flat with seasonal cheer and beauty.
She reflected on the beautiful body with the bashed in face that came so hot on the heels of that night. And how was it that The Great Sherlock Holmes could recognize such a badly beaten corpse but not see it would be his own name on that silly card for that silly gift? And how was it that he could be so perfectly cruel without even meaning to be, with out even trying? For until that night, Molly had had some small comfort in the fact that Sherlock didn't take interest in anyone. Male, female, it didn't matter. Only The Work mattered. It was some small comfort to know that it wasn't her flaws, her small lips her small breasts, her morbid humor, her awkwardness, her anything that made her undesirable. It was simply that Sherlock did not desire. Only, he'd taken that comfort away from her, too. Because now, he might desire and—as Molly read John's blog and listened to both men complain absentmindedly at her—it seemed perhaps Sherlock had two passions in this life; The Work and The Woman.
Molly Hooper may be a bright, cheerful, generally happy sort of person—working always towards being at least content when she could not be happy—but she was not an idiot. She had eyes, she had done Adler's doppelganger's autopsy, she was quite familiar with her own living body. Molly Hooper was a woman, certainly, but she would never, by any standard, be The Woman. She had thought the pain of that Christmas would be enough salt in enough wounds to break her love of Sherlock. And to some degree, it had worked.
For years now, she had known—accepted, even—that she would never be the focus of any sincere romantic attentions from Sherlock. She had even grown into the idea that she didn't count; not really. Not to Sherlock, not to those people that pitied her at work, not to anyone really. She had been just starting to accept that, too, when Sherlock had had sudden need of her. And she had believed. She had believe completely and utterly that he honestly did need her. Not just in that moment, not just in that single plan, but for the whole of it. She had believe it enough to cling tight to the idea that when Sherlock returned—and he would return, nightmares and semi-permanent knot in her heart be damned—she and he would be friends. Real and true friends. She believed in it so much and had been so ready to set aside romantic feels that would certain spoil their friendship eventually that she set to finding someone to divert her attentions to with calculated determination. She had been ready to marry a man she did not truly love just so she might preserve a friendship with that man who would likely always hold her heart.
And then he'd come back and even though he'd been distant, even though she'd seen hardly anything of him, even though spending the entire day with him had been a blissful agony and reminded her that no matter how hard she tried or how desperately she wanted it, she would never be able to simply stop loving Sherlock Holmes; he spoke those sweet words she counted and pressed a crippling kiss to her cheek. And fool she was, she believed. She believed him wholly and without reserve.
She reflected on the wedding of John and Mary, remembered the bittersweet words that had struck a chord in both her and Greg's hearts, "I never expected to be anyone's best friend." She and Greg had known Sherlock for years before John stepped into the consulting detective's life. They had taken their lumps and their kicks in the teeth and thoroughly lost track of the number of times they had been publicly humiliated by the man. She and Greg had taken shifts watching over Sherlock the last time he'd gone off drugs. They had both seen Sherlock at his lowest lows, had stayed fast to his side, held faith in him always—even through Moriarty's madness. But he had not seen a best friend in either of them. He even refused to remember Greg's first name and shamelessly manipulated Molly with falsely kind words. Despite all they had done for him—all they would continue to do for him—Sherlock Holmes did not think of them as friends; they were still just people.
She reflected on the next time she saw him—not bursting through the lab doors or lurking in quite corners just to dramatically scare the life out of her, but dragged in by the ear looking like a long time homeless man with pupils dilated enough a urine test was hardly even necessary. She had seen him like this before—had walked by his side through the agony of his detox. She slapped him. Three times. And still, despite her fury, despite her horror and fear and grief; in short order she was left alone in her lab with nothing but the print out results of Sherlock's drug test to cry into. Both her hands had seemed to sting for hours and hours afterwards. And in the nights when she tossed and turned and wandered the streets stuck halfway between hoping she'd stumble upon him and hoping desperately that she wouldn't—that he was safe and sound and sober—in those long, long nights, her hands would sting again. Yet, she could not convince herself to regret it, even knowing it might have been the last moment they ever had together. People could not continue to put such heavy blind faith in the man and expect him to carry the weight of it all on his own without consequences—consequences she was not at all ready for Sherlock to face.
Molly reflected on the new revelation that Sherlock had faked an entire romantic entanglement for months, had even proposed (which meant, Molly realized, at some point, Sherlock must have said those three most precious of words to Janine, must have said them convincingly enough that shrewd, cunning Janine believed them)—purely to get into an office. And that was okay to Sherlock Holmes. Because Janine was not John Watson or Mary Watson (God, she adored Mary but it was hard sometimes not to be crushingly jealous of the closeness those two had)—Janine was just people.
People were pieces on a board; part of a delightful game to be played between "sociopath" and psychopath. People were tools to be used to stave off the boredom. People were a means to an end.
And she was people. Just people.
When she returned to Bart's the next day, she returned to second hand news of Sherlock's escape after being asked if she knew where the critically injured man might be. He nearly bleeds out internally on the way back to the hospital. Then he's allegedly clean again but he's filled with a manic sort of energy on the few occasions she sees him that she's put on edge. If he isn't still using, he's planning something; the sort of something that had him dead for two years last time. But she doesn't know who to voice her concerns to, or if she should voice anything at all, and every time she tries to offer her help to Sherlock himself, he brushes her off, barely hearing a word.
And then Mary gets shot (Molly's beginning to wonder how it is there are suddenly so many guns floating about London—this was hardly America! She really shouldn't know so many people who regularly carried illegal fire arms and other weaponry on their persons) and slips into a coma and John is devastated and furious and Molly's genuinely concerned John might actually not forgive Sherlock for whatever it is that actually happened at that aquarium. After a bit of lashing out at Sherlock, John becomes barely functional. Molly puts in some of her saved up leave to take care of her goddaughter and somehow taking care of Rosie turns into taking care of Rosie and John and Mary and tending Mrs. Hudson and worrying constantly over Sherlock and trying hard to find enough time to do more than just set her own grief and fear over Mary's condition on the back burner and she feels like she's aging a decade every week and her leave is running out and she just doesn't know what to do and she's caught herself one to many times calling Mary for advice or to vent only to realize Mary's not around when her cheerful voicemail taunts Molly.
It's not fair. Not an ounce of it. But it is what it is, so Molly finds stop gaps to keep things running until Mary wakes up or dies. She manages to convince John to go back to counseling. He's been limping again—though he doesn't seem to notice it fully—and he simply can't continue on as he's been going; not now that he's got a child to look after as well. Molly finds a few sitters through Mrs. Hudson's friends (with enemies like the three of them have, she doesn't trust herself to find a non-assassin child minder off the internet). It almost feels like things are starting to maybe be getting a bit better when Sherlock calls her from out of the blue and makes the strangest request; apparently he's ordering his ambulance in advance—well, well in advance. Molly isn't sure what to make of it. Most definitely, it's nothing good. And if she weren't getting zero to four hours of sleep a day, she might have the energy to toss and turn and fret over the giant idiot but as it stands, she decides it's best to simply be there when he needs her.
She wished she hadn't. She wished she'd left it alone. She wished she hadn't seen the signs and symptoms Sherlock bore so prominently on so very many corpses throughout her career. She wished Sherlock Holmes had never picked up a god forsaken needle in his life. But it didn't matter what she wished because Sherlock had shown her exactly what he'd been up to while she was struggling to hold the rest of his world together single handedly and she could never unsee that. She could never unknow exactly how willing Sherlock was to die for John Watson—even when the soldier seemed like he might actually murder his best friend if given half an excuse. No one told her what happened after that. She hadn't seen Sherlock since and John had gone quiet again. And now, in her own kitchen for the first time in she wasn't even sure how long any more, Molly Hooper stood hurt and heavy—from the center of her soul to the tips of her fingers.
And Sherlock bloody Holmes was once again ringing her up. He would stop, eventually. She knew that. She could let it ring out another time or two and he'd huff and puff about it but he'd text or bother someone else for whatever it was he needed. And yet, she couldn't make herself ignore his call—even now, even through all this mess, she still wouldn't risk not being there for him in an hour of need.
Only it wasn't a moment of weakness where he thought he might use and needed a friendly voice to bicker with. It wasn't some genius idea he needed to test our right this minute. It wasn't anything but a vicious, cruel joke.
It cut her so deeply—it cut her more than his deductions about Jim from IT, it cut her more than Christmas, it cut her more than any remark he'd ever made about her body. It cut her so deeply she couldn't even hear his panicked commanding when she nearly hung up on him over the sound of the ripping of her heart.
Please, God, Sherlock, just leave it be. Just leave me this! She could barely think through the pain of it. How could he make fun of her for this? She kept it to herself—had for years now! She didn't ask him to return her feelings, didn't try to show him her heart anymore. She was good, she was so good about keeping it out of his way, about keeping it buried inside herself so he'd never have to see it. She and her heart kept themselves from getting under foot. Why, God why, was he now mocking her for something she couldn't even control!
"It's a sort of experiment." He said in almost stilted words.
"I'm not an experiment, Sherlock." She answered back. And she wasn't. She was herself. She was a living, breathing, feeling person. But.. but she wasn't always certain that to Sherlock, she wasn't some sort of experiment; a petri dish he would one day throw out when he'd learned all he thought he could from whatever it was he was studying. To hear him nearly admit that her worst fear was true cracked something inside her.
And still, she begged him for mercy. She begged him to simply stop. Whatever game, whatever experiment, whatever case, "Just don't do it." she could barely get the words past the growing agony in her throat, her breathing already beginning to come short. She wouldn't survive this. Couldn't he see that?
She would not survive this.
And yet, he pulled it from her. Slowly, a torture in and of itself. To not only have to speak the words but to admit to them before hand, to be reminded vividly that Sherlock did not see her—not enough to know how she felt for him, though it was plain as day. Or perhaps he saw perfectly but simply deleted the useless data every time. For he never factored in her affections for him. Never took her feelings into consideration. Maybe he deleted nearly all of her. Maybe he saw nothing of her because there was nothing to see. Maybe the mercy she had seen first hand he could display to his clients was not worthy of her. She was not a client or a case; she was an experiment. You did not show mercy to an experiment. You exposed it to variables, recorded the data, and moved on. And so three little words would be the variable that finally broke her.
But she would not give up so easily. She still had some hope—the most pervasive, unrelenting force in all the universe—that she could stop this, stop it before it was to late.
"You say it." She countered, "Go on, you say it first."
If he was her friend—as he claimed to be on occasion, when he needed something—he wouldn't say it. He would not lie so grandly, so completely to her if she was a friend. He had told that lie to Janine. He had told lies like it to villains and clients and people. So now the question was simple: Was she a friend—certainly not like John Watson, never even close, but as close to Sherlock as she would ever be—or was she still and always people.
There was a beat of silence and Molly prayed that would be the end of it, and then, stilted and forced through the quiet, "I-I…" She held her breath, cradled the phone close to her ear because as much as she prayed he did not lie to her, her heart was still desperate to hear those words from his lips, just once, just once in her life, "I love you." She gave a little sigh, her lips twisting for a moment into an almost smile because despite everything, the sound of those words were a piece of heaven when strung together by that voice. And there was that small hope again, that hope that clung to his hesitance, clung to the uneasy way it sounded from him, like trying to pronounce in a newly learned foreign language. And there was hope in that. Because that wasn't what a sincere I love you sounded like. And if he could not lie completely to her, if he still wanted to play these games but could not lie completely to her, then there was hope. Perhaps she was not a friend but perhaps she was not completely people, either.
It was a hope that died so completely in the next breath.
"I love you." He said again and she could see now why Janine wouldn't have batted an eye at Sherlock's whirlwind proposal. He spoke with such sincerity she felt her heart pull like a physical thing, trying to leap from her chest into his arms before it crumpled in on itself, breaking along the way. She pulled the phone away from her ear, thought for a brief moment about simply hanging up on him. If he was going to so completely destroy her, perhaps she could keep those words to herself, ruin his experiment, his game, have some petty vengeance of her own.
But those precious words were stuck in her tightening throat now, and even knowing it was a lie, even knowing this was the end of them—had to be the end of them—she knew also that she would say them. Not for Sherlock but for herself. Vengeance had never made anyone happy, had never really been her style. But she could love with all her heart, even when it hurt. And when this was over, she could pick up the pieces all by herself and continue on.
Loving Sherlock Holmes would not end her. She would shut this long, long chapter of her life and she would survive.
"I love you." She murmured softly, gently into the phone. In answer, there was only silence. In this love, there was only her.