Hello all. I used to be Witch isit, quite a while ago. I've recently been inspired by a friend to try my hand at fanfiction again. This is a Molly-centric oneshot, with mentions of Sherlock and Jim. Post-Reichenbach. Molliarty if you squint and tilt your head just so *grins*
She can't stop staring at it.
She's only up here to get away from the looks of pity and patronising words, all eyes expecting her to fall like the man she apparently just autopsied. Molly was raised so devoutly catholic that her skin itches with left over guilt at every lie her lips have uttered today, even if the root of them is centred in good. Were her mother here, she'd be tutting while walking Molly to the nearest confessional; although the voices in her head have her mother's tone down pat, so maybe she isn't actually needed. Molly rubs at her temple, the skin still ashen with stress. No doubt a migraine will be her companion for the long night ahead. And Toby, of course.
She tries to turn her head, but then it's towards the ledge that Sherlock... That ledge, and that's not much better.
And it's not like the colour is new to her. She knows how rich it can be, whether coating organs being weighed for her ever-growing mound of paperwork or from the first incision from her scalpel, the colour just is for her now. Squeamishness of the (at times) gooey, viscous red was lost once upon a time among the early days of finding her feet and nerves
It's just... the fact it's there is so very... not wrong, logically speaking, but not right either. The fact it means an end. An end to something (someone) she never saw ending, always there, whispers on the edge of a thought, eyes in the dark laughing, footsteps behind on a light-lacking night after a long, lonely shift.
Her eyes betray her and glance sideways once more, lingering on that small pool, now dried, embedded in the cracks on the surface. It's so small... She knows how much blood a body can produce, of course she does, but it's always the lack of it that shocks her. Such an anti-climax, in a way. All that life, gone so fast with barely a lingering mark left. Although, she normally gets to see only the bodies, not the crime scenes.
Maybe it's the lack of not blood but a body, that's why her thoughts are skitter-scattering out of her control faster than Toby after a yarn ball (she doesn't knit now for a reason). The police searched, naturally, but just like with everything else leading up to this, they failed.
Like the guilt she can't quite shift from her shoulders, this... betrayal of Sherlock, just after he's trusted her implicitly, doesn't ease the knot forming in her gut (making up for the hole in her heart).
Part of her, a quite loud part, can't stop the reminder that before Sherlock looked to her and at her (finally, after so long and so much longing), she was noticed before. Maybe as just part of the bigger picture, a way in, but still noticed.
And still, she stares. At the marks left by a man she both didn't really know at all and knew all too much.
It's not the red mark that gets to her. She just wonders, after so much burning heartache, why it's not scorched black.