Greg and Molly

A gift ficlet for a dear reviewer of mine, Arty Diane, who is a doll and perfect and wonderful and I adore her. A Greg/Molly romance with a smattering of John Sherlock friendship. This is divorced from the canon storyline but fits in sometime after the Christmas party.


We matter


Molly wasn't meek. She really wasn't. Who was able to speak with conviction when their idol was near them? Was any physicist able to properly enunciate their words when Steven Hawking rolled into a room? Could a science teacher string together the chemical compound for glucose if Neil deGrasse Tyson asked him? Molly didn't think so. And if they could, they were a damn fine actor who undoubtedly had ulcers the size of chocolate biscuits in their stomach.

So Molly stuttered and squeaked and jumped when Sherlock imposed his presence on her; but not because she was insecure… well, fine. She was insecure, but try not to be around Sherlock bloody Holmes. She was offset because this man had a mind that worked in overdrive all the time. He saw things in an instant that she had been trained to see in 8 years of university. She'd gone to medical school and graduate school and summer courses and seminars and Sherlock Holmes walked into her morgue one day without anything like formal school and just… smoked her.

So she was impressed, but also deep down she was a little… She was determined to be better. And that was where her almost fanatical drive for Sherlock to notice her came from. She might have been infatuated with him too, but she wanted his attention for her intellect more than anything else.

Greg wasn't lazy. He really wasn't. He worked day in and day out jailing run of the mill criminals. Everything from robbers and carjackers to murderers. Not all of his cases are closed room homicides. Not all of his cases have a mysterious invisible attacker who talks people into committing suicide. All he wants is to protect his city and his loved ones, so all day every day he puts the cuffs on Chavs, drug addicts, and worse.

Until one day he meets the little brother of Big Brother. He encounters Sherlock Holmes; brilliant, enigmatic, not completely lucid but still marvelous the way a cyclone is marvelous.

His entire career was eclipsed with one cracked cold case, and instead of feeling ill toward Sherlock, Greg looked a little harder at him. Well, to be honest he fumed and raged at him for days; complaining to his wife about the uppity little tosser that made him look like a fool in front of his officers. But eventually Greg looked harder at Sherlock.

What he saw was a boy looking for attention. What he saw was a soul that was good, but didn't really care about being good. So Greg made sure that Sherlock got a steady stream of cases from him; not because he was lazy but because he didn't want that fragile flame of humanity deep inside Sherlock to be snuffed out by the downward spiral he found the boy in.

Greg and Molly were thrust together by their interactions with Sherlock. Almost by accident.

Greg had come to the morgue looking for Sherlock, and Molly was there in the autopsy bay staring at body so hard her eyes were nearly crossed. She was willing herself to see like Sherlock saw.

The infuriating man had stopped by earlier and had remarked, quite to himself but loud enough for her to hear, "Isn't that interesting?" upon seeing the late Mr. Hedrick.

Greg watched as the lovely woman in the neat white lab coat stalked back and forth next to the gurney. If he didn't know better, he'd say he was watching a female and petite version of Sherlock examine a body. She turned her head and squinted the same as Sherlock, and she grumped to herself and sighed and twitched her shoulders the same.

Finally she shouted at the corpse, sounding exactly like Sherlock in a mood and startling Greg into laughter.

"JUST WHAT IS SO INTERESTING ABOUT YOU, YOU DEAD BAG OF MEAT?"

At Greg's laugh, Molly whirled around and squeaked, not expecting the tall good looking man to be in her realm.

"I-I I don't normally shout at corpses," She stammered and managed to scatter a tray of autopsy scalpels as she hurried over to Lestrade.

"Don't worry, I have a …friend who does a similar thing," Molly's eyes got wide, but before Greg could explain, mentally kicking himself for sounding so strange, she blurted out,

"You know Sherlock too?"

A friendship bloomed over shared stories of how the raven haired detective had ruined their nice quiet little lives with his excitement and his cheekbones and his…

He was an important person, they decided one night in front of Lestrade's fireplace. The wine was gone and they'd finished the Italian take out they'd brought back after a night at the cinema. An important person indeed. Just look at his brother; practically the British Government, but more than willing to bend rules to keep his kid brother out of jail and rehab and real trouble.

Greg said Sherlock was a great man.

Molly said Sherlock was a great mind.

He mattered because he brought them together.

A love grew with each case Sherlock dragged through their lives. Kisses stole the spotlight from Sherlock's latest idiosyncrasy, and quiet touches replaced the irritated laughter of his most recent social 'faux pas'. Soon, they were entranced with each other.

Greg's wife had left him sometime before that first kiss shared after a heated discussion of just how Sherlock got that text message tone and what John thought of it. It was sudden and sweet and just right and they laughed.

John mattered, they decided over cooling bodies and tangled sheets. Funny how their discussion had turned back to the person that had frustrated them into a hurried, then loving evening. Funny how the hot bubble of annoyance turned into a different kind of heat. But in the cooling evening, they decided John mattered because he was turning Sherlock into something.

Not just a great man with a great mind, but a good man, with a kinder mind. He asked "Not good?" with genuine concern, and they were slowly beginning to see that the young man wasn't heartless, just oblivious. He'd turned so many things that made him human off inside that mind palace of his that he just… it was like telling a child there was a sweet hidden in a room of priceless china, and saying he could check each pot individually or use the sledge hammer.

Sherlock was a sledgehammer when it came to emotion, and John was his insulation. He padded and softened the blows and smoothed hurt feelings and soothed ruffled feathers.

So Sherlock mattered, and John mattered.

They mattered because they filled Greg and Molly's life with adventure and excitement and a never ending reason to love each other.

Maybe they wouldn't have found each other without Sherlock. Maybe they wouldn't have stayed together without John.

But that didn't matter.

They loved each other, they had each other. They had their little family strung between Scotland Yard, the Morgue, and 221b Bakers Street. And that mattered.

They mattered.