AN: Goodness, it's been a while hasn't it? I have a couple new things to put up soon, hopefully, but until then I thought I'd cross post some things from AO3. Enjoy!
John walks back from the bar, and the broad shouldered man sitting at it, with a satisfied smile on his face.
"I was right," he says simply, and Sherlock scowls.
"He has all the hallmarks of a career criminal," Sherlock grumbles, as John sits back down at their table.
"But he isn't," he says. "He's a footballer, like I said, so I win."
"I bet he has a criminal history too, though. I could have Lestrade look it up—"
"Don't be a sore loser."
"Fine," says Sherlock sulkily. "What's my 'penalty?' I suppose you've got some juvenile stunt in mind."
"I would never," says John a little too gravely. "I know juvenile stunts are beneath you." Sherlock says nothing so John smirks for him and pulls a pen out of his pocket, reaching for a clean napkin. "Here. I'm going out of town to visit Harry—" Sherlock groans and John pins him with a brief glare before he looks back down at the napkin and starts writing. "I'm going out of town to visit Harry this weekend," he says again, "and for your penalty you are going to follow these exact instructions. No creativity."
The exact instructions take longer than expected to write, and Sherlock leans over to frown at them.
"These exactly," emphasizes John as he continues to write, as though he can hear Sherlock thinking about subverting them.
"I'm not stupid," says Sherlock.
"Yes you are," says John. "You are an idiot. That is why I'm writing this down. An idiot and a hopeless case."
He continues writing and there's nothing Sherlock can do but frown at him.
There is a case that weekend, and Sherlock is extremely put out that John will be gone.
"I'm sure you can handle it on your own," says John. Sherlock is only fairly certain he's talking about the case.
John leaves Saturday morning and Sherlock says goodbye with a grunt over his recreation of the crime scene on the floor of the sitting room with throw pillows and spoons and an empty hobnobs carton.
"Don't forget. And clean that up before I get back," says John, and Sherlock grunts again at the closing door.
He stares at the diorama for a few hours, nudging spoons around the floor with his toe and standing the hobnobs carton up on end and knocking it down again from different angles with the tip of a finger. Suddenly, at around one, he jumps up, gathers up the spoons and carton, and strides into the kitchen. He grabs a plastic container from the fridge and then, as he's closing it, he sees the napkin, stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet.
He looks at it. He almost doesn't. And then he does. He pulls the napkin off the refrigerator, stuffs it into his trouser pocket, and walks out the door, grabbing his coat on the way.
Sherlock blusters in just as Molly is coming back from her break, and immediately begins unpacking a box full of various weirdnesses, including a hobnobs carton, a selection of toes in a Tupperware and a bouquet of flowers.
"These will keep better in the refrigerator for now," he says, thrusting half the things into Molly's arms, and she's not sure whether he means the toes or the flowers, so she puts both in a refrigerated corpse drawer and shuts it.
"Where's John?" she says.
"Out of town visiting Harry," Sherlock says, distracted with arranging a handful of spoons out on a metal gurney. "He's going because he thinks she's backsliding but in reality she's fine and trying things again with Clara, though she hasn't told him."
Molly smiles sunnily. "Oh, that's so nice! Is that why you didn't stop him leaving?"
Sherlock stops in the middle of arranging his miscellany to look at Molly.
"I mean, because it's going to be such a lovely surprise," she says uncertainly.
"John can go where he likes," Sherlock says. Molly coughs.
"Right, yes," she says. There is a pause. Sherlock goes back to his spoons. "I suppose this is for the Michaelson case?" she says after a moment. "They brought the body in last night."
"Yes, if you could get it out," Sherlock says absently. "I need to examine the wound pattern."
She obliges, and it's a few hours of strange, studious madness, going between the setup of carton and spoons and the cadaver, and something about taking samples from the cadaver's fingertips and analyzing the chemical findings against something Sherlock is doing to the bag of toes that she only understands well enough to process data on.
On the one hand, Sherlock is insufferable when John is out of town, but on the other, it's nice having Sherlock's attention like this. Well, not attention really—that's reserved for his case. But it's nice when she gets to be the assistant, the sounding wall he bounces all his brilliance off, rather than just the help.
Finally he looks up from a sheet of lab results and at Molly as though he's just noticed she was in the room.
"When do you get off?" he demands. Molly blinks and looks at the clock on the wall.
"In about forty five minutes." The time has passed faster than you'd think it would, watching Sherlock do his incomprehensible work. "Why?" She has the sudden sinking feeling that he's going to enlist her for overtime. No matter how quickly the afternoon might have gone, she's still tired, and after a rough morning had promised herself a night of Netflix and chocolate cereal.
Sherlock starts gathering up the things he brought in, as well as the lab report printouts Molly has provided him with.
"We're going to a restaurant," he says, piling the things back in their box.
"To… eat?" She asks hesitantly.
"You can eat," Sherlock says. "I never eat when I'm on a case."
"Okay," says Molly faintly, feeling a little lost.
"Also, you can leave early. Your supervisor did."
Molly looks over her shoulder and gestures to the door, as if expecting to see her supervisor coming it at that moment. "No, no, she… she went upstairs to do some lab work."
"She's been gone much too long already for most lab procedures, and the documents she took with her weren't even lab pertinent, they were just the first ones she saw and meant to make her look busy. Also, she took her handbag."
Molly looks needlessly at the coat pegs. Marge's handbag is gone, of course. And it isn't as though she doesn't have a history of this. Molly sighs.
"Coming?" says Sherlock, tugging his scarf around his neck. Having her supervisor gone should make Molly more insistent about staying, but the repeated offense frustrates her, especially since Molly herself is always so conscientious. Anyway, Christopher is the next shift and he always comes in early.
"Let me get my coat," she says.
"Excellent," says Sherlock, and if his smile is surprisingly wide and pleased, Molly, already heading toward the coat pegs, doesn't see.
They end up at an Indian place Molly's never been to. Sherlock picks out a table for two in the corner, and sits down facing out to the rest of the room. Molly figures he's scouting the restaurant out for somebody, and doesn't want to look suspicious, which would be why he needs someone with him. But as he sits down, for one moment he seems stiff, uncertain of something. Then it settles out and he's Sherlock-as-always. She probably imagined it.
He clearly knows the owner because when Molly is handed her menu (Sherlock refuses his) he waves dismissively at it.
"Order what you like," he says. "I eat for free here." Molly wonders how many such restaurants there are in the city.
She orders a chicken curry and once the waitress takes her menu she sits and fiddles with a napkin. Sherlock is, as she expected, looking over her shoulder. He seems to be thinking deeply more than watching for something, though.
After a minute or so, just as Molly is starting to relax, he blinks and looks at her. "You have a… cat, correct?"
"Yes," she says, startled into a simple answer by the unexpectedness of the question. After a moment she adds, "His name is Toby." Sherlock nods, as if this is important information that needs to be properly filed for future reference.
"How… is he?" he asks, haltingly, the words careful in his mouth like they're difficult to pronounce but important to communicate.
Molly frowns at him in faint bewilderment.
"He's… fine," she says. "Why?"
Sherlock sighs, and scrubs a hand through his hair.
"Because I want to know," he says with the patience of someone not expecting to be believed. Molly eyes him. Sherlock leans across the table on his elbows and looks her in the eye. "Molly Hooper," he says with enormous solemnity, "please tell me about your cat."
The waitress comes and places Molly's curry in front of her, and Molly picks at it as Sherlock watches her and waits.
"He's a tortoiseshell," she says slowly.
"Is that… a kind of cat?" Sherlock asks.
"Yes," she says. "It means a cat that's… you know, brown and black, sort of dappled. He's very pretty, he's a lovely cat."
Sherlock waits. She licks her lips and takes a sip of her glass of water.
"He's a good cat, generally," she says. "Well, I mean, he's not really. He has moods. He shreds the back of the couch if he thinks I've done him wrong, like if I stay out too late. And he disappears at the oddest times and he cries if I've taken a moment too long to feed him. But he's a good cuddler when I need him to be. He doesn't always like my friends though."
"Like who?" says Sherlock.
"Well, Meena, from work," she says. "Meena just can't make friends with him no matter what she does. I've even had her give him a tin of tuna but he wouldn't touch it. I don't know."
"They say animals can be great judges of character," Sherlock says. "Meena's nice!" objects Molly. "Meena's stealing money from her mother," Sherlock says. Molly balks but Sherlock shrugs one shoulder, in a "believe what you like" gesture.
"How's your research going?" he asks, reaching over and picking a piece of chicken out of Molly's curry and popping it in his mouth.
"What?" says Molly.
"Your research," says Sherlock. "The independent research that you do in the lab when there's no other work."
Molly flushes, both because she isn't actually supposed to be doing any independent research on work time and because she's never told anyone about it.
"I didn't know you'd… It's going fine," she demurs, picking at her food.
"I believe according to the last printout I saw—"
"Those were with my private things!"
"—you were trying to decide on a protein to pursue."
Molly looks for a moment like she's going to resist again, then sighs. "I've decided to try the haptoglobin since then," she says.
"That's not the easiest one to track," says Sherlock, resting his face in his hand.
"It'll be more distinctly identifiable, however," she says, raising her chin defiantly. "Once I determine a good compound there will be much less margin of error."
It's science and cases they talk of for the rest of the meal, both hers and his. Molly offers some suggestions on a project of Sherlock's involving cartilage decomposition while submerged in various fluids that make him yank a notepad and a pen out of his coat pocket and scribble something illegible down, and Molly figures something out aborut her blood proteins study that makes him offer her the pen and a page from his pad.
Sherlock is animated and intent and very Sherlock. Molly forgets that he is supposed to be looking over her shoulder and acting casual.
When Molly is finished with her meal (with some help from Sherlock's thieving fingers), Sherlock pays for it with a nod to the owner and they leave and he flags them a taxi.
When the cab stops in front of Molly's flat, Molly smiles over at Sherlock and says goodnight. But when she gets out and closes the cab door, there's the sound of two doors shutting. She looks behind her, surprised, and sees Sherlock smiling over the roof of the cab.
"I thought I'd see you to your door," he explains.
Molly blinks rapidly at Sherlock, but Sherlock only watches her in return.
"All right," Molly gulps.
She walks slowly to the front door of her building, mind whirring and Sherlock following. When at last she reaches the door, Molly turns around to face Sherlock.
"I had a nice time," says Sherlock, pleasantly enough but a little like he's reading from a script, like he was at the start of supper.
Molly stares at Sherlock.
"Did… you have a nice time?" he says, somewhat less certainly.
"Was this a date?" Molly blurts.
"Yes," says Sherlock.
Molly opens her mouth. Shuts it. Several questions go through her head, including "Were you going to tell me?" but the one that comes out instead is: "Why?"
She thinks he hunches up in his coat just a little, almost like he's embarrassed. "I lost a bet to John."
Molly takes an involuntary step back. Tears spring to her eyes before she can stop them. "Oh," she says, and she wouldn't have really expected this of Sherlock, maybe that's stupid of her, but she certainly wouldn't have expected this of John, she'd never have thought he could be so—
Sherlock's eyes widen in an instant. "No, not like that," he says quickly. "I don't mean like that. Just that John was apparently convinced I would botch it, or not get around to it quickly enough for his tastes," he says rolling his eyes contemptuously. "Which is ridiculous."
"Ridiculous," she repeats, slowly, testingly. "Yes. I'd have done it eventually. And I felt it went fine, didn't you? You haven't actually said." He frowns.
Molly feels a little dizzy. "You never actually asked me out," she points out. Sherlock's frown deepens.
"Yes I did," he insists. "I asked you out to dinner."
Molly doesn't think that's exactly what happened, but she's too dazed to remember the conversation properly right now. "But you didn't tell me it was—" she starts, and then she gives it up. "Yes," she says. "I had a nice time."
Sherlock's frown is replaced by a smile broader and more pleased than she's used to seeing on his face.
"Good," he says. "Friday night, then?"
"Sure," she says faintly.
She thinks he's going to leave then, but instead he stands there, his hands back in his pockets again, looking at her very hard. She blushes under his scrutiny.
"What is it?" she asks.
"Well," he says, "I'm supposed to kiss you if you want me to, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to tell."
She starts to smile at that, as the blush on her cheeks deepens. "You can kiss me," she says shyly.
He takes a step closer, careful and matter of fact, reaches up and touches her cheek, then tilts his head down and kisses her, softly, like he thinks he's going to break her. His lips are warm. She thinks he keeps his eyes open but she's not sure.
"Friday," she says, still smiling.
"Friday," he agrees, having lost perhaps a touch of his composure. He turns and walks back to the car without saying goodnight. Molly turns around and pushes her door open, grinning at the ground, and reminds herself to get the flowers out of the refrigerated drawer tomorrow.
AN: John's napkin can be found on my tumblr, thehumantrampoline, at post/61568649133/for-my-sherlolly-fanfic-the-blind-dater-johns