She's sitting at the window with her knees drawn up against her chest, her hands wrapped around the mug of tea he made for her. Earl Grey, one sugar, a splash of milk. The room smells of rain and bergamot oil.
She stares down into the street, exactly where she'd been for the last hour. Pale light—reflected blue from the clouds and orange from the street lamps—warms her face, outlining the contours and spilling over the faint laugh lines at her eyes and the corners of her mouth. She looks tired but alert, her brown eyes sparkling as she seems to focus on and follow drop after drop, each forging a path down the window pane. She's wearing grey slacks, an orange cardigan over a yellow blouse, and the matching hair tie that once fixed her hair now sits fastened around her wrist; her hair falls in waves over her shoulders, kinked by hours in the elastic and haloed with the humidity-borne frizz she's so prone to.
Every so often she smiles a little and sips her tea, and he notices the warm wetness bleed against her lips as she pulls away, the delicate line of her throat bobbing up and down as she swallows. As much as he wants to ask her what seems to have amused her so, he doesn't. He watches her from the threshold of the room, content to give her the space she needs without disruption because in that moment he is certain she has never looked more beautiful, and he wants to fix her in his memory exactly like this.
But he momentarily forgets the knot in the third board from the door jamb to his right, and it squeals in protest as his foot makes contact, and the spell is broken. She startles, catches her mug without spilling anything, and mutters a blushing "Oh!" as she drops a leg to the floor.
"I didn't see you standing there."
"Sorry," he tells her. "I was just…thinking."
She smiles. "Me too."
No reason left to creep at the doorway, he steps into the room and awkwardly finds his chair.
"What were you thinking about?" she asks him.
He considers for a moment before deflecting. "How's your tea?"
She laughs. "That's what you—" she shakes her head. "It's fine. More than fine. It's lovely." She grins and looks down at the mug, still clutched in her hands, then cocks her head out the window. "I was just looking at the rain. Thinking about it," she says, her voice downgraded to a reverent whisper.
"Why?"
She shrugs, her narrow shoulders hunching up to her ears as she takes another sip from the mug. "Don't know, really. I just love the rain." She turns back to the window with a bigger smile. "When I was a girl, I used to imagine that I could watch a single raindrop fall from the sky and follow it until it dropped out of sight in the storm drain on the corner. Sometimes I'd pretend I was the raindrop, and other times like I was a BBC reporter just telling the rest of the Britain about the goings on in the gutter…" she chuckles, returning her gaze to his, and he thinks his heart might be thudding so hard within his chest that she can hear it from across the room.
"You have an…active imagination," he says, feeling his lips curl in a lopsided grin.
Again, she shrugs, turning back to the window. "A lot of Londoners hate the rain, but not me. Rain is for being cozy and warm and drinking tea," she says, tapping the mug in her hand with an outstretched index finger. "It makes you appreciate the sun more," she says, more seriously. "I figure it's what we have, it's what's here, right in front of us. And it's not so bad. Embrace it, you know?"
He feels there might be a deeper meaning to what she's saying, but before he can dig to find it, she's moved on.
"You don't like the rain?"
He shrugs, honestly. "Six of one, really." Who really thinks about this? How can one have such a definite opinion of a weather phenomenon?
She can, he thinks, feeling his soul smile. Of course she can…
But when he looks at her again, she's wearing a dangerous smirk on her face. She gestures for him to follow her. "Come on then."
"Excuse me?"
She sets her tea down on the table and straightens up. "I'm gonna teach you."
"Teach me what?"
"How to love it."
He followed her with his eyes as she marched out into the hallway, and when she realized he hadn't leapt to his feet to chase her, she marched right back in and grabbed his hand.
"C'mon!" she says, hauling him to his feet.
She is all the way down the stairs and pulling on her boots by the time he'a made it to the landing.
"What on earth—?"
But she's barrelling headlong out the door into Baker Street. He hears her laugh echoing off the stone buildings across the road, and he panics, dashing out after her. His house shoes are thoroughly soaked by the time he reaches the curb.
She's standing, arms outstretched, head to the sky. Rainwater collected in her hands drips from her knuckles. She doesn't seem to notice how cold it is.
"Are you insane?"
She tips her head forward and smiles at him, and then she laughs. "Oh this is a bit ridiculous, isn't it?"
"Yes."
She stomps her feet into a puddle. He feels splashes of water against his trouser leg. He's not angry; not annoyed. Mesmerized. The rain slicks down her flyaways and dampens her forehead. Her cardigan is darkening with raindrops, turning pumpkin orange to something closer to brown, and thin rivulets run from her hair down her neck and begin to saturate her blouse, and he can see the lacy outline of the cup of her bra where the material has soaked through. But she's standing in a puddle and her smile is genuine and he thinks, No…she's never looked more beautiful than she does right now…
"We never did dance at John and Mary's wedding, did we?"
He shakes his head.
She opens and closes her hands three times in quick succession, calling him towards her.
"Dance with me."
He's frozen and his suit is wet—it will almost certainly be ruined—and his hair has flopped over into his eyes, but he steps over in squishy-wet shoes, confident that the rapid-fire beat-beat-beat of his heart will be effectively drowned out by the torrent of rain against the pavement. He doesn't think twice—maybe it's the cold or the rain or how alive he suddenly feels—before slipping his chilled fingers along her jaw. She tilts her face up towards his. And when he leans forward to press his lips to hers he is surprised/not surprised that she meets him halfway. Her arms are around his neck in a New York minute, and the hand that isn't against her face finds the small of her back and hauls her up against his body. He finds that she smells like rain and bergamot oil, and he likes that very very much…
When he pulls away and sets her back on her heels, her fingers push his hair off his forehead and his do the same for her.
"Is that what you call dancing?" she asks. "Because if it is I've been doing it wrong all these years…"
He looks up to the rainclouds above his head, not caring that the drops are getting into his eyes. He feels like a child and yet he's never felt more grown up in his life. "I never knew I liked it."
"What? Dancing?"
"No," he replies, looking back at her. "You've turned me into a pluviophile, Molly Hooper."
She narrows her eyes and he can see her returning to her university Latin textbook for the definition of the word, which she finds with ease because of course, you idiot, she's brilliant!
When she smiles at him, he forgets about his soggy toes and ruined suit and cold fingers.
"My pleasure, Sherlock," she says.
They stand there, staring, soaking, until a car drives by and someone jeers out the window—something about someone stealing their umbrella—and Sherlock clears his throat and adjusts his stance.
"Can we go in now?" he asks.
She nods. Her teeth are chattering; her eyes are spritely.
"I'll light the fire…" she tells him, and they hurry to the door.