My tutor told me once, just before my finals, that people were wrong about us. They thought that to do this job you needed to be hard and detached, you needed to at ease with death, to embrace and accept it. But the best forensic pathologists, he said, needed to be gentle and empathetic, they needed to fight against the finality of death, the finality that there were no answers and that death was simply something that happened to everyone. You need to be at war with death, not at peace with it, you need to fight it for answers, and you need to make it talk.

So I went off, fighting an endless war with death, and I cared about the body in front of me, I wanted to know its killer and I think, maybe, that was why I was drawn to Sherlock. It's not that I didn't find him attractive, because it would be a lie to say I didn't, but it was more than that, more than his coat, more than his cheekbones, it was his fire and passion. It was how it moulded onto my own. He, too, was at war with death, and we sought the same answers. I envied him. In a way, we were so different, he could read a body in a way that I couldn't, and he could understand patterns that had taken me hours to work out in a second. He was quicker, sharper, and cleverer. Unlike me, he had learnt to be hard around death, fierce, but fundamentally, we wanted the same thing. To know how and why a body was lying in front of us.

It's 2AM when I hear a crash at my door. Thinking the worst, I grab the baseball bat from the side of my bed. The floor is freezing but I'm scared to put the light on so I walk, icy step by icy step, to the frozen glass window flooded by orange streetlamp light. I know it's Sherlock before I reach it, and I let the bat drop from my hand and run the last few steps. Sherlock should not be at my front door in the early hours of the morning. Something must be wrong. I open the door and he falls through, I notice a bundled blanket in his shaking arms and for a second, I think he's done something truly awful.

'Sherlock, what's wrong, it's two in the fucking morning! Are you hurt!?'

'No, I'm not but...'

'Just tell me, what have you done? Are you in trouble?'

'Okay, but I came to you for two reasons, and the first one was is that I trust you'

'Okay Sherlock, just tell me...'

'You have to promise not to tell anyone! Not anyone at all! Not even John okay. Especially not John!'

'Okay, I promise, please just tell me what's happened'

He places to bundled blankets softly in my arms and I feel a weight that I vaguely recognise but can't remember. I place my hand into the middle of the mass and feel cold skin, cold skin covered in blood. I am shaking so much Sherlock reaches out to steady my arms. I am terrified now, I am sure it is some horrifying evidence of a crime, and a part of me is paralyzed by the fear that it make be the result of Sherlock's doing.

'Look, Molly...'

He peels away a corner of cloth and reveals the wrinkled, tiny head of a baby. He or she looks only hours old. There is blood around the corners and in the creases of his face and he/she isn't crying. Immediately, I check for a pulse, a breath and a part of me, the part beneath the left hand side of my ribcage, swells. The baby is alive.