Author's Note:
I don't own Molly or Sherlock or any of the BBC Sherlock characters. I do lay claim to my original characters, as I think they're pretty nifty.
This fic was inspired by my feeling homesick for a town that isn't mine, but feels like home the second I put my feet on that hard concrete.
"This angel. She's my favorite angel. I like them best when they're statuary. They commemorate death but they suggest a world without dying. They are made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, they weigh tons but they're winged, they are engines and instruments of flight. This is the angel Bethesda." Tony Kushner—Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika
Sherlock Holmes sits on the rim of Bethesda Fountain on the kind of perfect October day that some would have you believe doesn't exist anymore in New York. It is remarkably quiet save for the music of the fountain behind him and, in the lower terrace, a lone busker (Julliard student, on scholarship, busks for money for food and the occasional CD, he will drop a fifty in her hat when he leaves) sings an aria from La Boheme. She has a lilting soprano that should keep her working steadily in smaller cities but will never garner her international acclaim.
He considers adding busking to his routine, imagines himself on a subway platform or park with his violin. He could kill countless hours of this blasted waiting doing that. Perhaps after he's explored Central Park in its entirety. He has explored about one fourth of it in detail, storing what is relevant and deleting what is not.
He has been in New York for two weeks, staying in the sublet apartment of a Nigerian student near 137th and Broadway. (He believes he's actually a sub sub leaser, but he doesn't care.) The neighborhood is gentrified enough that his pasty Englishness doesn't warrant a second glance among the pert blonde mums in yoga pants pushing $1500 strollers, but is still holding on tenaciously to its original character.
His progress has been halted by the news that Moriarty's network in the city has ties to the Mafia. He has been ordered to wait for more information as Mycroft explores how intricate those ties are (and if Moriarty is a just a string in the Mafioso web, or vice versa [either option complicating matters immensely, but the latter would be disastrous to the Holmes brothers' plans.]) Mycroft's progress has been painfully slow, as he has to use means that will alert neither the Mafia nor the FBI that he is interested.
So Sherlock waits, and has been advised by his brother to learn the city, to learn the people in the city, in preparation for the very real prospect that he will have to pose as a native. In service of that, he has spent the past two weeks rambling about the city day and night, via cab, subway, bus and by foot, only returning occasionally to his tiny walk up to sleep for a few hours. He has mainly kept to Manhattan, but has meandered to the other four boroughs on occasion. His unlimited monthly Metro Card is almost worn out from swiping, and he is already learning the best directions to give the cab drivers, though he sometimes lets them take him on their meandering, fare hiking routes just to see new areas of the city. He will often disappoint the cab drivers by asking to stop well before the ride is over when he spies something of interest. Sometimes it is something like a tiny artisan bagel shop, other times a landmark like the Natural History Museum (he spent an entire afternoon in the gem room.)
In one hand he holds a cup of tea, from one of two places in the city where he has found a decent cup of tea. This one is on Central Park West. He prefers the other one, run by a former Londoner, but being in the West Village it was a bit impractical.
There is another cup of tea sitting beside him, waiting for a small, steady hand to cradle it and a really not too small set of lips to sip it. Molly Hooper is in town for a conference. She is presenting a paper, in fact. It's hard to imagine her doing such a thing (and for some reason he imagines her presenting the paper in her lab coat) even after seeing firsthand how remarkably strong she really is. He has not seen her since the day of his death, and the dream like images of her calm confidence have been again eclipsed by the more numerous images of her nervousness in his presence. He wonders how she'll be today. He admits to choosing this meeting place because he thinks she'll like it, and because it is one of his favorite spots in the park so far. He is actually a bit nervous thinking about whether she'll appreciate the fountain, and has a vague idea that he'd like to take her to the zoo.
He pushes this thought aside as spots her tiny form walking through the lower terrace. She turns her head to the opera singer for just a moment before she spots him and takes off running. He sets down his cup and stands up quickly, realizing he should probably go to her lest her momentum launch them both into the fountain upon meeting.
Her momentum when she reaches him and wraps her arms around him is enough to knock a bit of the wind out of him, but he does remain standing. She squeezes him tightly and he tentatively places his hands on her shoulders. She pulls away a bit and looks up at him, beaming.
"I'm sorry. I just, I can't believe it's actually you. Until I saw you I thought it had to be some mistake or a joke. At the last second I even thought it might be a trap. But it's you." She hugs him again, throwing her arms around his neck, and this time he returns it, wrapping his arms around her and burying his nose in her hair (She'd been wearing a hat but it had fallen off while she was running) his sense memory immediately reveling in the familiar fragrance. He chuckles when it occurs to him that the entire scene has been set to music, and that to an onlooker it might seem like a bit from a romantic movie. It also occurs to him that this is the first time anyone has hugged him in months, and that she was the last one to do it, on the day he died.