Moriarity returns from the grave with his magical ability to compel people to do what he wants renewed. And what he wants is to punish Sherlock, John, and Molly in all the naughtiest ways. Luckily.

Set sometime after Sherlock returns from the dead. Much as I love Mary, she's not in the picture, and poor John is quite lonely. Comments very welcome!


The day had started out ordinarily enough. Mind-numbingly ordinary, actually, and the rest of the day continued the same way with no interesting corpses being wheeled in. Molly had a few tissue analyses to do, but those were about as exciting solving algebra equations while listening to an audiobook of War and Peace.

Her lab assistant had been out all week, so she didn't even have his limited conversational skills to keep her semi-entertained. At this point she was willing to even listen to his season-by-season analysis of the original Dr. Who—perhaps even his opinion on the whether or not Batman could beat Superman in a fight, though she wasn't quite desperate enough to hear him recite Elvish poetry.

It didn't help that being left alone to her own thoughts was never a good thing. There was the stress of her mother's health, for one thing, and her noisy new upstairs neighbors, and the way that plumber who had been clanking about in her bathroom for three hours yesterday had only succeeded in tracking mud all over her carpet and making the leak worse.

A bath would be nice hot, she thought. A nice, soothing strawberry bubble bath.

No, what would be "nice" would be an opportunity to use the bone saw.

She loved the whir it made, the way it was almost like a weapon, making her feel stronger and confident even if she were only chopping up a defenseless corpse.

She also liked the vibrations it sent up her arm, the way it tickled her skin. And that one time when she had to cut through that man's femur, the body's strongest bone, stronger that concrete… The way the vibrations had buzzed through her hips as she leaned against the metal table…how those insidious vibrations had reached deep inside her core and she had cum suddenly and violently with her lab coat spattered in blood and her hand clamping down on the cold table edge.

It had been an accident, but she had felt guilty anyway. Molly had never touched herself, not even when she was a teenager, and to come without somebody else's fingers on her felt wrong, felt—dirty.

She hadn't had sex since she broke up with Tom, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd had good sex, if she ever had. If only she had an excuse to use her bone saw perhaps if she held the handle against the table accidently-on-purpose, the way she switched to the handheld showerhead when washing her nethers, just so that she'd feel the trickle of water down there without meaning too.

No, you'd feel guilty about that, too.

Maybe if she sat up on her chair with her knee bent and her heel grinding against her groin—just to raise herself up to get a better angle on the microscope, that is…

No. You're too smart for this, Molly. Are you a teenager or a doctor? There are other things in life besides sex! Music…art…literature…

She had to laugh to herself at that one. I think right now I'd swap the entire contents of the Louvre for a good handjob. She wasn't sure that term was used for women, but that she knew she wanted one. Or even just a kiss. Something!

—And then, just as she was filing her last tissue analysis and getting ready to leave for the day, Sherlock barged in with John scrambling behind him like an emotionally-guarded puppy.

"Male, fifty-two, pulled out of the Thames and brought in yesterday," Sherlock said briskly, striding past her towards the morgue without waiting for a response. He pulled open the freezer drawer in one fluid motion.

Only Sherlock Holmes could possibly make the reveal of a bloated, middle-aged, partially-rotted corpse seem elegant, she thought, as if he were removing a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket.

Sherlock whipped out his magnifying glass and started to analyze the body.

"He committed suicide, I heard," said Molly conversationally.

"You are merely parroting what the police told you, and given their astonishing ineptitude, even you should have realized that would inevitably be incorrect. Perhaps you should turn whatever limited powers of observation you have to selecting a better outfit for your date tonight."

"Sherlock…" said John warningly.

"I do determine causes of death for a living, you know," Molly said, but she spoke softly.

"A date, Molly?" said John when Sherlock ignored her and continued to examine the body. "Is it someone we know?"

"He works here at the hospital. I met him in the cafeteria."

"Not someone from IT, I hope," Sherlock interjected. His deep voice was as dry as usual, and John wanted to punch him. Poor Molly! She always seemed to receive the brunt of Sherlock's more sociopathic tendencies.

"He's—he's a nurse. Sherlock, how did you know I had a date tonight?"

Sherlock tucked away his magnifying glass and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. "You are wearing eyeliner—rather unevenly applied, I might add—and what one sees advertised as a day-to-evening dress instead of your usual frumpy trousers. Best of luck, I say. You are certain to need it, particularly if you do not wipe the lipstick stains off your front teeth."

"That's it!" John said. He had developed a platonic kind of affection for the soft-spoken doctor, even if he couldn't understand her infatuation with his madman of a flatmate. True, Sherlock had a certain something, but that certain something usually made people want to beat him over the head with a blunt instrument.

"Anything unusual about the body?" Sherlock asked Molly.

"There was a small mark on his tongue," she said. "It could have been a simple cut caused by his biting down at the time of death."

"Or not," said Sherlock in that you-are-an-idiot-voice of his.

John sighed. "Molly, it's five o'clock. Ignore him."

Sherlock turned back to the body.

Molly had already collected her things and was wiping the lipstick off her teeth (how on earth did that always happen? No wonder she rarely wore it!) when her phone beeped.

Cant make it 2nite will b in tuch sorry mayb we cn hav coffee smtime or smthng

He hadn't even bothered coming up with a fake excuse. Molly couldn't decide whether that was a sign of respect or a reason to go home and cry into her cat's fur.

"Boyfriend cancelling on you?" Sherlock said with what seemed to John like an extremely ill-time flicker of amusement. He dropped his gloves in the trash and flipped up his coat's collar. "I suppose you'll spend the rest of your night at the pub, then, as usual."

Molly didn't even ask him how he knew about the text, or respond to what would have in the olden days been called a "monstrous slur," just pressed her purse to her chest and left.

"I could go for a drink," said John, giving Sherlock a disapproving look and following Molly out.

"Aren't you going to invite me?" Sherlock said, raising an eyebrow. "Aren't you trying to socialize me by way of example, John?"

"I've given up on that, Spock. And you have your suicide to solve."

"Boring. Clearly murder. I miss Moriarity."

"Just let him come," Molly whispered. She'd had drinks with John a few times before after Sherlock had been particularly cruel to her, but she'd never been out with Sherlock. Perhaps if he were drunk he would be nicer…perhaps even…

Those long white fingers…