Posted a bit ago over on tumblr, but here it is for the people here :) It is an AU-divergent based around the middle part of ASiB, from Molly's POV and in present tense. If those things bother you, I only apologize if you choose to read it. My Sherlolly shipping cannot be curbed! And wow, this particular little thing should have only been around 1,000 words and instead is weighing in at nearly 3k on the wordprocessor. Wowzahs.
Um. Not much else to say other than cocaine addictions are some nasty shit. I did a bit of research over on wikipedia (oh yes, the bastion of good info, I know) and man. The best thing they've found that seems to help people away from their cocaine addiction is finding another addiction. True fucking facts, people.
Enjoy?
It's just after Sherlock identifies the woman in Molly's mortuary by…not her face…that Sherlock's scary brother escorts her back to 221B. As if a second dose of pain so shocking it left chills in its wake hasn't been enough, the brother—Mycroft?—feels a third is necessary. The large black man who sits in front of her stares ahead, answering her questions occasionally but most of the time ignoring them. Mycroft—she decides that that really is his name—sits next to her and she wishes that he wouldn't. He looks nothing like his brother, his awful, awful brother, but the air crackles without a sound or feeling like it does around Sherlock.
The flat is warm with strained false cheer as Mycroft allows her up the stairs first. Mrs. Hudson is smiling, arranging and rearranging her tea set. John is scowling, arms crossed, out the window. Mycroft settles himself into one of the chairs and helps himself to some of Mrs. Hudson's tea. Molly wishes she weren't so keyed up and upset, because the tea does smell delicious.
Molly imitates John's posture, her hands instead curling around her arms to protect herself from the room. This is where Sherlock lives, where he plays his violin, where he takes the things she gives him on occasion—which isn't as often as one might think—where he sits for hours and thinks. He had been trying, she knows. His frame had been tense, the lines of his muscles strained with whatever stress he was under. But just like she ought not make jokes when she's uncomfortable, he ought not try to deduce when he's feeling that way either.
"Molly, thank you." She twitches and looks up at John who is scrubbing at his eyes now with one hand. The other arm is still wrapped around his body, the hand tucked in his armpit. His girlfriend isn't here anymore, she realizes. Mycroft doesn't react, but Mrs. Hudson smiles a little and nods her head at John's words.
"My-Mycroft asked me to."
John nods, his raised arm settling back to join the other. He turns back to the window, ignoring them for another few minutes. Molly knows what this is about, though she's never been on this side of things. She knew Sherlock before he lived here. She knew him before John met him. She's known him for nearly as long as Greg Lestrade—when he'd asked for access to a morgue, to labs, Greg had called her up.
She remembers that conversation clearly.
"Molls, I'd ask next week at lunch, but this can't really wait."
"What do you need, Greg?" At the time there had been exactly two people she would ever say that to—her father, and her old mate Greg Lestrade.
"I've got this man…he…he's been helping with cases occasionally. He's just saved a man from being put away for murder and…Well, Molls, he wants access to a proper forensic lab and to a morgue."
Greg had neglected to mention that Sherlock was an addict. It hadn't taken Molly long to figure out, though. The tall man who introduced himself as Sherlock Holmes with a strong handshake was gaunt, and his nose showed evidence of a strong cocaine habit. She'd never seen his bare forearms let alone elbows, but the story his skin and hair spoke was louder than any tracklines.
She had read Dracula once and he looked like what she'd imagined Jonathon Harker to look like after his escape from the castle in Transylvania. A man within sight of death, but still too far from it.
He hadn't been beautiful back then. He had, in fact, been a mess of ugly wreckage. She hopes, now, that the Sherlock who will soon pound his way upstairs will look like he did earlier this evening. That he won't look like that ghost of a man she'd met years ago. She knows she should be mad at him, stand up for herself against his earlier cruelty, but the memories of his hollow face are too strong. Molly will give anything to never see him look that way again.
When he finally makes his way up the stairs—slowly and calmly and Molly fears for him in his deliberateness—Sherlock glances around the room once. His eyes do not flick from item to item but instead slide between them in the preternatural way they once did. The fluid, hyper-information gathering tells her that his brain is stuffed full of coke. Pain shoots through Molly as she realizes that they've failed him.
Sherlock has connections with London's irregulars—the night crews of restaurants, the homeless, the security guards, the night owls, as well as people who know people—and that probably made it incredibly easy for him to score. Molly forgets her pain though as anger pushes through it. She crosses the room after his eyes pass over her without seeing her and slaps him so hard that his head not only snaps away with the force but he stumbles to the side.
"You great stupid git, Sherlock!" she shouts as he regains his balance. The side of his face colors slowly where her palm met his cheek, and his eyes are nearly focused on her as he turns his head forward. Her hand stings. For a single moment Molly thinks she has perhaps overreacted and is stuck between relief and horror—but then the relief flees to leave only horror as Sherlock seizes her.
The sounds of John trying to get across the room to them are mute, filtering through water almost. Mycroft stands up as well as Mrs. Hudson, hesitant to move towards them but still driven to it.
Sherlock's eyes bore into hers, and his hands on her arms are painful where his fingers dig into her flesh.
"No one denied you the comfort of half a bottle of wine, Molly, do not deny me what I choose for myself." His voice is a growling hiss. The hint of a cigarette is on his breath.
Molly remembers the night he overdosed. Greg had called her, asking her to go upstairs in the hospital to check on Sherlock. He gave her the room number, and she'd gone up. Sherlock had been unconscious, and the nurse hadn't wanted to let Molly in to see him—and then a phone started ringing at her elbow, and after she answered it she went pale. She'd hung up and motioned Molly towards the doorway of Sherlock's room.
"That's because I don't count." His fingers flex tighter and Molly winces. The pain gives her the courage to finish what she's saying, because her words have stopped everyone else in their tracks. It is just her and Sherlock now. Just like it had been before, when she'd been brought in to look after Sherlock in his darkest hours.
He had been so still in the bed, his arms bound down with straps. Another had been at his waist. Normally gaunt, Sherlock had looked skeletal. He looked inches from laying not on a hospital bed but on one of her slabs. Stored not in a room—with monitors, a tube up his nose and taped to his cheek—but in a fridge locker. Molly still hadn't been in love with him, but she had started to actually care for the wreck of a man there in that lonely room.
"Greg invited me, didn't you know? He told John, of course. And John told you and Mrs. Hudson. But I don't count to anyone who was here tonight, not really. I don't matter enough for anyone to perhaps tell me I ought to put the glass down, or take the bottle off to the sink. At least, not to anyone here earlier." His eyes are motionless, staring at her. Molly tries to lean away from him—human eyes constantly flick and move, and he can stare without such motion and it is unnerving—but Sherlock jerks her an inch towards himself instead. She will have bruises tomorrow—maybe even tonight—and Molly knows that she should be mad at him. That she shouldn't care for a man who has ever hurt her, ever restrained her like this.
"Everyone left me to my half bottle of wine," how kind of him to round down for once in his life, "Sherlock because I don't have anyone. No one who cares how I cope. But we all care about you, which is why you aren't left to deal with your pain as you see fit."
She wonders how he manages to keep his grip so viciously tight—most men's hands would have cramped by now, or begun to relax subtly. Perhaps it is the drug coursing through his blood, perhaps it is just how he is by nature. Since she's got his attention, she risks asking him—a risk because probably it is obvious to himself, or his scary brother, and Sherlock is especially prickly when he's high. She's never, ever, seen him hit someone out of the blue but she's also never seen him willingly touch someone this long either. Molly hopes that Sherlock will remain only verbally combative, because she knows how strong he is when he's like this.
"How much did you have?"
"You mean do I plan on getting more." She can't argue, so she nods.
The blood rushing through the muscles on her left arm is painful as he lifts his right hand to stroke her hair back behind her ear. His fingers curl briefly there, pressing meaningfully down on her pulse and following it down her neck. Greg had told her once that Sherlock was particularly tactile when he was out of it like this, and her detective friend had wondered what he got out of it.
Sherlock's gray eyes—really truly gray, though occasionally they look green—aren't on hers anymore. They are tracing every movement of his free hand, which is moving up her throat once again. His fingers slide into the hair just behind her ear and hold her head still. His eyes also slide, away from his hand to look into her own once more.
"No." Her other arm rushes with blood now as he brings his left hand to rest against her throat. His thumb covers her pulsepoint, the fingers wrapped around the back of her neck. Molly knows then that he's going to kiss her. Maybe not this instant, but the cocaine will make him do it soon enough before the high wears off. She doesn't want him to kiss her, though. Not like this, not when he's not himself and certainly not after the string of insults he'd leveled at her earlier.
"Sherlock, let her be—"
"Shut up John." Sherlock's eyes don't move as he reprimands his flatmate.
His scary older brother says nothing other than murmur that the problem seems to have worked itself out. He leaves quickly after that, forcing Mrs. Hudson down the stairs to her own flat. John is standing somewhere she can't see him, and she can't turn her head because of Sherlock—and the reminder of his terrible strength at the moment. Those hands which had bruised her arms are at her neck now.
"Molly and I are going to go to my room, John, and wait for my body to come down. Shouldn't be longer than twenty minutes until that happens. Do not come in unless Molly yells for you." Molly gulps and Sherlock's eyes follow the motion. His hands fall out of her hair and away from her face, one going behind her to lead her away from the living room. The door behind them snaps shut, louder inside the room now than it was from the outside earlier.
He sits her down on his bed and then turns to open his window. He digs out a pack of cigarettes and lights one up. Then a second. A third and fourth, and finally just minutes after he started he stubs out a fifth. She hates the brand he normally smokes, being much more familiar and comfortable with the one her father preferred when he was alive—the same brand as the one Sherlock was just chaining up with. Trust Sherlock Holmes to be one step ahead of all of them as usual.
He stands front of her and reaches down to take one of her hands. He inspects it, seeing probably every old scar and botched nail-lacquer. He does the same with the other hand, with each finger, but holds her hand gently with his own when he finishes. His thumb slides in a repetitive pattern on the inside of her wrist.
"I did four bumps, earlier." She stares up at him, vaguely aware of what he means by that. She's never had the luxury of a scary older brother being there to smooth everything over for her—she's never gotten high the ways he's gotten high. Molly prefers alcohol to sooth her feathers on bad days. Sherlock drops her hand and goes around the bed to curl up behind where she sits.
"Molly…" she twists around a little to look down at him, and has to resist putting her fingers through his hair to comfort him somehow. Her friend David often says that she loves an illusion, the perfect vision she has of Sherlock Holmes—David doesn't know about the night she'd sat with Sherlock after his overdose—and that she can't really be in love with him. David is wrong, Molly knows.
"Molly tomorrow you and I are going to have a talk. A long, tedious one. But tonight will you lay down, right here, and hold me? I can manage to keep just to shivering if you do, I think. Else I might start shaking, or scratching when it starts to itch." Molly smiles and wants to shake her head but doesn't. She lays down next to him and lets his arms close around her once again. His touch is more careful this time, though, far different from the roughing up he'd given her out in the living room.
"What are we going to talk about, Sherlock?" He is throwing off heat like a furnace, not his usual fare. Sherlock wears his coat and scarf everywhere because he is just very slightly anemic and needs to keep whatever warmth he can get.
"About the fact that I believe I might have been viciously tricked. We're going to talk about people who lie. About the woman in the morgue who might not be the woman I said she was, because the woman I said she was is a liar and a thief and has made me a liar too. About how I lied to my brother tonight, and how that hurts and how I hate that it hurts." His arms tighten around her, and Molly feels his lips graze her forehead.
"We're also going to talk about how I lied to everyone that you, Molly Hooper, have anything that needs compensating for." She still doesn't want him to kiss her, but she lets him. It's not the invasive, alien kiss she has been expecting since she realized he was going to do it, either. Sherlock kisses her with just a press of his mouth to hers, and she somehow feels his eyelashes flutter closed.
Molly knows, and has known for as long as she's been in love with this awful man, that this is the kind of person she can expect. She knew that earlier today, wrapping presents, that Sherlock Holmes is like a hedgehog covered in needles. She knows that he is a former addict, and she knows that he has beaten his cocaine addiction—for the most part—with new addictions to cigarettes and deductions.
She hopes that when he is once again right in the head, tomorrow by his estimate, he will be sorry for the bruises which are rising on her arms. Molly hopes that Sherlock will remember that she held him through his trembling, that she answered his requests for another line of coke with kisses instead of the drug, that she brought his face down to press into her neck as he wept and carded her fingers through his hair. She's not sure that he will, but she still hopes.
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