Summary: Sentiment, he thought. It was always something. (Or, the time Sherlock pitted The Woman's brains against his pathologist's deduction skills and he was surprised at the result.)
A Study in Sentiment
It was unfortunate that, as the most difficult man to exist in the last century, Sherlock Holmes did not come with an instruction manual. Learning how to exist in the same space as him was a process of trial and error. If you were lucky, he ignored you. If you were unlucky, as Molly Hooper so often tended to be, he decided it was his personal calling in life to run commentary on every one of your idiotic life choices.
Happily, Molly Hooper was not confrontational and had the patience of a saint. She understood the drawbacks of working with Sherlock , including his infuriating disregard for all human niceties and his waspish tendencies when disturbed while in the middle of an experiment. Years of babysitting the illustrious Sherlock Holmes had made Molly a great proficient in riding out his often stormy and mercurial personality. All those years' experience summed up succinctly into one rule: do not interrupt.
On his worst days, when his tantrums seemed ready to reach apocalyptic heights, Molly was almost sure that her entire job security came from her ability to weather the storm. And as long as Sherlock's connections were batting with the higher ups, they couldn't ban him from their hospital. Molly was indispensable.
But sometimes, she really wished she wasn't the appointed consulting detective's babysitter. Today was one of those days.
Molly had sequestered herself in the lab because the metal benches were bigger than her rickety office desk. The mound of paperwork she'd had to throw over in favor of assisting on the Bridgemore case for DI Dimmock had put her a good three days behind schedule. The clock ticked loudly on the opposite wall and the flickering phosphorescents hurt her eyes. A dull ache was starting behind her left eye and her cup of terrible break room coffee was stone cold. All she wanted was to tie off the paperwork quickly, retreat home, and watch the first season of Downton Abbey on repeat. The very last thing she needed was any sort of distraction.
It was perhaps unfortunate that at that moment, the world's biggest distraction waltzed in.
The first thought Molly Hooper had on seeing the consulting detective in her lab was always the same. Sherlock Holmes cut an impressive and quite fetching figure in his Belstaff. Her heart gave an enthusiastic wiggle in agreement, but she was quickly reminded of the stack of papers scattered all along the bench. Today of all days, she just didn't have time and her patience was clocking in at an all-time low.
Maybe, if she was lucky, he'd be in the middle of a good sulk and wouldn't need any special handling. He yanked his scarf off with a flourish, revealing the pale expanse of his neck. Molly felt her stomach flutter in response and gripped her pen tighter, focusing on her paperwork with an unnecessary amount of determination.
A crooked smirk twisted the consulting detective's lips, the tit. It was like he could smell the optimism on her.
"Molly," he said. His voice did unmentionable things to her heart. "I need your radiography machine."
It was not the most outlandish thing he'd ever demanded of her, but Sherlock never asked for access to anything. He operated under the notion of "help yourself," and did so quite liberally. He demanded things only when he was being particularly clever and needed an audience to notice.
On any other day, Molly wouldn't have minded, but today she was busy. Quite busy, too busy to mollycoddle. And that didn't have anything to do with the sinking feeling she got in her gut every time she inadvertently remembered the disastrous Christmas party at 221B Baker Street.
Molly remained hunched over her formidable stack of papers, the thought of Christmas at 221B making her less charitable than usual.
"You know where it is, Sherlock," she said. "On the bench, as always."
Her response was sharper than she had intended, but she didn't take it back.
Sherlock frowned, having expected a different response. Molly loved it when he was being clever. Why didn't Molly love that he was being clever now? His brained whirred to life, deducing this newest mystery.
Bags under her eyes. She'd been working longer hours this holiday, to make up the deficit of her colleagues. More graveyard shifts and more than a few bodies on her slab, a consequence of the holidays. Lower lip sore. Molly always bit her lip when she was holding back very strong emotions, indicating that there was something unusual about her victims. Given the time of year and balance of probability, they were victims, partygoers that had met unfortunate ends.
He nearly scoffed. It was that same debilitating problem again—sentiment. Molly was a very proficient pathologist, but she had yet to develop the tough outer shell that characterized many in her field. She felt too much. She always had.
Sherlock felt that he should say something to indicate that he knew about the younger victims coming through, but he was at a loss for how to broach the subject. So, instead, he got to work, placing the camera phone he'd brought with him inside the radiography machine.
Machines, like those housed in the lab, he understood. People were much harder.
Interpersonal communication, even with someone like Molly, whom he was comfortable with on most days, was so difficult. He saw too much of what people were hiding to ever be adept at interacting with them on such a basic level. This is why he needed John Watson. He would understand why Molly was so unwilling to watch him be clever.
However, the former army doctor had expressed that he had no interest in visiting the lab on days they didn't have a case and had added he, "had a few things to be getting on with anyway."
Those things, incidentally, included chatting up the new Tesco cashier who, incidentally, was a lesbian—honestly John, look at her cuffs!—which was apparently the wrong thing to say, as John had promptly offered him the finger. Humans were so daft and difficult.
The machine whirred to life, bringing the image of the camera phone on the screen. Always curious, Molly's pen scratching on her reports paused. Sherlock feigned he didn't notice, but both of them knew she was caught. Molly Hooper loved a good mystery almost as much as Sherlock Holmes.
"Is that a phone?" she asked, standing up and moving closer. Her reports lay, forgotten, and Sherlock couldn't help but feel a bit smug.
"It's a camera phone," he said. His tone was short, mirroring her previous sharp response to his question, but he felt justified. She'd been set on ignoring him only two minutes before.
"And you're x-raying it?" Molly leaned against the counter, her lips quirking in amusement. "Whose phone is it?"
"A woman." He was purposefully vague. He tapped a few commands into the computer, magnifying the image of the camera phone on the screen.
"Your girlfriend?" she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them.
Sherlock blinked, surprised.
"You think she's my girlfriend because I'm x-raying her possessions?" he asked.
"Well," she said. It did sound ridiculous when he said it like that. He didn't bother to look at her, and Molly felt her confidence crumbling. "We all do silly things."
Silly things, like spending hours getting ready for a Christmas party that she'd only been invited to as an afterthought; silly things, like matching her lipstick with her giftwrap; silly things, like packaging up her heart and expecting him to accept it.
"Yes," he said.
His eyes were still glued to the screen, uninterested in anything Molly was saying. She could feel herself wilting.
And then, something clicked. You could see the entire epiphany race through his body as if he'd been struck by lightning. His previous sulk vanished, replaced instead with the ecstasy of understanding.
"They do, don't they?" he said. "Very silly."
He whipped around to the radiography machine and yanked the door open, ignoring Molly's confused look. The camera phone that had been on the screen was now cradled between his fingers in an almost reverent manner.
"She sent this to my address, and she loves to play games," Sherlock said, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
Molly thought immediately of how they'd held his violin at Christmas, coaxing out a sweet tune that had carried down to the street. The pleasant thrill she'd gotten from hearing Sherlock play the violin had been vanquished with a throaty moan, and Molly felt her mind whirring with its own deductions.
Molly didn't like the way he said that last bit. She loves to play games.
"S-she does?" she stammered.
But Molly could have been a body on the slab, one that had died in the most boring and unoriginal way, for all the attention Sherlock paid to her.
Whatever conclusion Sherlock had jumped to, it was clearly the wrong one. The phone buzzed angrily—errgh! Clearly, he'd gotten it wrong. It was almost comical the way his face pulled into a grimace. Sherlock very rarely got anything wrong.
If he hadn't betrayed that speck of disappointment, the one that transformed his face into a lonely little boy, Molly might not have said anything. But Molly Hooper had never been able to stand one of her friends in any kind of turmoil, not if she could do something to help it.
"You haven't been able to figure out the password?" Molly asked. At Sherlock's cold look, she stuttered to add, "I mean, you always figure out passwords. You have mine in a moment, no matter how many times I change it."
"You are predictable," Sherlock said, in much the same way he might have said the word stupid. "Everyone is predictable, ordinary, but she… she is…"
He trailed off, probably unaware of how sentimental he sounded. Molly felt like someone had taken a scalpel to her heart.
"She's different," she said. "You—you're impressed by her."
"Impressed? No," he said. He whirled around the lab, agitated, fingers tapping on the camera phone. "I was intrigued by her when Mycroft told me she was interested in making a power play with the most powerful family in England. I was interested in her when she proved to be more than the usual boring, run of the mill, criminals. Hardly impressive. The only impressive thing she's done has been coming back from the dead, a trick only one in a million could pull off."
He was rambling, but Molly felt her own epiphany rocket through her body like a bolt of lightning. She violated the cardinal rule of working with Sherlock Holmes. She interrupted him.
"Do you mean to tell me," she said, "that the woman on the slab, the one you came in to identify on Christmas, is actually alive?"
"Do keep up, Molly," Sherlock snapped. "Of course she is."
And, despite everything, Molly knew enough about Sherlock to know that it wasn't her he was frustrated with. If there was something Sherlock hated more than being bored, it was being wrong.
But Molly couldn't help her voice squeaking or jumping an octave. This didn't happen in the normal world. This was not an episode of EastEnders. People did not just come back from the dead, and the woman on the slab had been very definitely dead.
The amount of violence that had gone into ensuring that this woman was dead had been staggering. The bashed in face accompanied by the other signs of physical and sexual violence had been nauseating. Whoever had killed that woman had done a thorough and sickening job. And now, knowing that she was alive, Molly felt ill at the lengths the woman had gone to in order to fake her own death. If the woman on the slab had not been the same woman with the throaty moan, who was she?
It was a question that would sit in the pit of Molly's stomach for a long while.
But there was another round of questions that had to be asked first.
"If she's alive, why did she give you her phone?" Molly asked. "What's so important about it?"
Sherlock shoved the phone into his pocket, his face pulled in an exaggerated sulk. He looked like a little boy about ready to throw a wobbly.
"She told me that this camera phone was her life," he said. "She would never have given it up willingly. I believed myself to be correct in believing that she would be found dead because she had given it up to my possession, but now…"
"She's alive," Molly said. "Which means there's something else going on here."
Sherlock rolled his eyes at her and heat flooded her cheeks. The familiar burn of mortification pooled in her chest, making her heart beat faster. She was such a masochist when it came to him.
"You don't have to be an arse about it, Sherlock," she said, moving away from him and making her way around the other side of the bench. "I'm just trying to help."
Sherlock scoffed.
"Yes," he said. "And a lot of help you're being."
Molly understood better than most that it was his frustration with the woman's phone that was making him such a pill, but she was tired. She had so much paperwork to be getting on with and every time she looked at the consulting detective she found herself reliving that awful moment in his sitting room when he'd ripped her open for all of their friends to see.
In short, Molly Hooper was close to her breaking point with the detective. She was patient, but she also wasn't a saint.
"If that's all," she prompted, sitting down heavily on her metal stool. "As you can see, I'm actually quite busy—"
"People are creatures of habit and pattern," Sherlock said, cutting across her. "Women especially tend toward sentiment more than men. They are easily compromised and require an emotional stimulation almost more often than a physical one, and yet when you add in her chosen profession of a dominatrix…"
Molly choked, flipping a folder onto the floor in surprise, and Sherlock frowned at her.
"Do control yourself," he said. There was a smug undertone to his voice when he added, "It only has to do with sex."
"I know what a dominatrix is," Molly said in an indignant tone. "I just, Sherlock, this is ridiculous. You can't pigeonhole all women into a category!"
Sherlock didn't look the least bit concerned. He leaned back against the bench and gave her a searching look, as if she were a mildly interesting experiment that had yielded an unexpected result.
"Of course I can," he said. "Women, in general, are predictable. They are emotionally driven creatures of habit, and yet none of these indicators have been the least bit useful to me. This woman, the woman, is… different."
His tone smacked of that exact sentimentality that he so despised. Molly could feel the jealousy creeping over her shoulder. She was overcome by the desire to do something out of the ordinary, to break out of the category of ordinary women that he so despised. Molly Hooper was not ordinary, and she was going to prove it.
But how?
"Hand me the phone," she said, and Sherlock wasn't the only one surprised at her commanding tone.
"I don't think—"
"Actually, you really think too much," Molly said. Her frayed nerves and bottled up frustration took the stammering right out of her. It really was like dealing with a swotty five year old. "You came in to show off and now have nothing to show for it. What do you lose by letting me have a look?"
Sherlock looked as if for a moment he might refuse her. Molly was afraid that he might dash off into another one of his deductions, this one ripping apart any self-respect she might have left, but he dropped the phone into her hand.
Molly had known him far longer than anyone else, excepting Mycroft and perhaps Mrs. Hudson, yet she still managed to surprise him. It was the surprise, the split-second glimpse she afforded him of her ironclad and rarely exerted will, that motivated him. Never mind that he'd refused John's request to handle the camera phone just that morning. Sherlock didn't believe for a moment that she would find anything he hadn't already considered.
Molly cradled the phone in her hand carefully, flipping it over and running her fingers over the rounded corners of the phone. Her forehead creased in concentration, she activated the lock screen with ease.
I AM - - - - LOCKED.
Funny lock screen, Molly thought. Most phones didn't have words or anything on the main screen. The woman who owned this phone must have known someone who could specially program phones. Why would she go to all that trouble just to have her phone announce that it was locked?
I AM LOCKED. Molly mulled it over in her head, fingertips ghosting over the buttons with a methodical air. I am locked.
I. Am. Locked. I am—oh. I am locked.
Molly stared at the screen in disbelief. The answer was right there, hidden in plain sight. The epiphany spread through Molly like a hazy drug, opening her up to a new world. Is this what it felt like to be Sherlock Holmes?
But, no, it couldn't be that easy. It just couldn't. Surely, if this was The Woman, the definite article as Sherlock claimed she was, she wouldn't allow herself to be ruled so easily by sentiment.
And yet, despite all he claimed, Sherlock was a man of habit just as much as everyone else. He claimed that he did not allow sentiment to rule him, but the blatant apology after the Christmas disaster and his lips brushing her cheek had painted a different story. For all he claimed to be a high functioning sociopath, sociopaths didn't react like that. They wouldn't have felt guilt, wouldn't have broken off mid-deduction when they realized how they had truly violated Molly's feelings.
It was possible, if this woman was anything like Sherlock Holmes, that she had allowed sentiment to get the better of her. Maybe. Improbable, but…
It couldn't be that easy, it just couldn't, and yet everything that Sherlock had to say about this mystery woman indicated that it was. She was infatuated with Sherlock, completely taken in by his genius and unflappable nature. How long had Molly been sitting in the same boat? How long had she felt exactly the same way?
"What have you tried?" Molly asked, her fingers hesitating over the buttons.
Sherlock scoffed, reaching to take back the phone. "I hardly think—"
"Sherlock," Molly said, and her heart was beating so fast she almost couldn't hear him over it. "Just tell me."
He looked at her, really looked at her this time. She'd never used such an impatient tone with him in all their years of knowing one another.
Pupils dilated. A sudden surge in her adrenaline levels. Increased respiration rate. Her heart was beating faster and a slight grin was pulling at the corner of her mouth. Molly Hooper was on to something, or at least thought she was.
But how could she have seen something that he missed?
"1895," Sherlock said. "John's counter on his blog was stuck at 1895. I thought it might have been hacked, but it didn't work."
Molly nodded, her fingers tapping one of the phone keys. "What else? What did you try just now?"
"221B," he said. Molly entered another letter. "Because she sent it there. Molly, what—"
"Sherlock, for once," Molly said, her finger keying in the last letter. "Trust me."
And before he could stop her, she hit enter, sending up a prayer to heaven.
I AM S-H-E-R LOCKED.
The phone dinged open, a woman's life laid bare by the unassuming Molly Hooper.
Sherlock had no words. He stared at Molly, who released a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding.
"Eureka," she said, and her voice was weak because she could barely draw a breath over her heart's frantic fluttering. "Here you go, Sherlock."
She pressed the phone back into his hands, and he curled his fingers over it, trapping her hand in his. He continued to stare, eyes transfixed on the slight woman in front of him. An unmoving Sherlock was off-putting and Molly quickly became nervous once more.
"Not too shabby for a pathologist, right?" she said. Her high and nervous voice was back, grating on even her nerves. "That should secure my job here for at least another few months."
This comment pulled Sherlock from his shocked stupor. He held the phone limply in his hand, almost as if he'd forgotten about it.
"Your job is in jeopardy?" he asked. Was that a note of concern in his voice?
"No, no, well, I mean," Molly said. She pulled her hand away and walked around the bench, anxious to put space between them again. She couldn't think when he stood so close. "I don't think it is. I just meant I was glad I was able to, you know, be of use. I like being useful to you. No, I mean…"
"I know what you meant," Sherlock said. He dismissed her nervous stuttering with an impatient wave of his hand. "You are always very useful to me."
Molly smiled with half-hearted vigor, picking up a stack of discarded papers and shuffling them thoughtlessly. "
Why do you think Barts keeps me around?" she asked. And then, as if realizing what she said, she added, "No, sorry, I didn't—"
But it was too late. Sherlock had picked up the scent of a new mystery, and not for the first time Molly wished desperately that he would turn his deductions elsewhere.
"You think that the only reason they've kept you around so long is because of me?" Sherlock said.
In three long strides, he was back her side, towering over her. His unique smell wafted towards her, violin rosin and soap, and Molly struggled to keep her composure, biting back a mortified blush. The heat pooling in her cheeks and stomach didn't help her concentrate in the least.
"I didn't say that," she said.
"You did," he said.
"But, well, I mean..." She looked around, as if seeking an exit from this extremely uncomfortable conversation. "I don't know what I meant. I didn't, I didn't mean that."
"You did," Sherlock said. "You wouldn't have said it if you hadn't meant it."
He was correct in his deductions, as always. Molly felt the tips of her ears warm with color. She'd lost the battle with her blush and it was quickly spreading throughout the rest of her face.
"Well, I just," she said, stuttering. She took a deep breath, telling herself that she wasn't intimidated in the least by the quicksilver eyes fixed on her. "People always say things they don't mean. I was just being—being flippant. It was a joke."
"While I'm not as well-versed in the area of jocularity as John might wish, I'm also not a complete idiot," Sherlock said. His voice was as velvety as ever, but there was an annoyed undertone to it. Molly recognized it as him very quickly losing patience with her inability to explain herself.
He continued, "In general, jokes are supposed to be funny, and that was not funny. It was a deliberate attempt to undermine your accomplishments, of which there are many."
Molly felt as if her heart had dropped out the bottom of her stomach. "I wasn't—"
Sherlock's eyes narrowed and he pitched his voice louder, intent on being heard over her. He was in full deduction mode now and would not be ignored.
"You are the youngest pathologist to ever be hired here at St. Barts," Sherlock said, and Molly recognized the quick and hurried breaths that always indicated one of his oncoming rants. "In order to even be considered in the first place by such a prestigious hospital, you would have had to graduate in at least the top five, perhaps even two, percentile of your class. You would have had to not only impress the board of directors in order for your superiors to even consider hiring you right out of school, but also overcome their misogynistic reservations about a woman's ability to perform in such a field.
"Your personality has been incorrectly defined as introverted. Over the twelve plus years it took to become a certified pathologist, you rarely had time to interact on a social level even though you empathize greatly with the human race. So, not an introvert, but an extrovert who has cultivated the habit of introversion through years of hard work and isolation.
"This is reinforced by you spending almost every holiday working, in order to give those around you the opportunity to spend it with family. You have no close family nearby, your father died five years ago from liver cancer and you have an overwhelmingly affectionate cat named Toby who is no doubt spoiled and overfed because you funnel so much of your excess emotion into him.
"You are many things, Molly Hooper—intelligent, capable, and worthy of your post here. You definitely do not need to rely on me for your job security."
Molly was sure Sherlock didn't take a breath throughout his entire deduction and wondered, not for the first time, if he was entirely human. She felt equal parts humiliated, insulted, and strangely pleased,. And yet, beneath his biting and unnecessary commentary on the private aspects of her life, she understood what he was trying to say.
Sherlock Holmes, who didn't suffer idiots, had called her intelligent and capable. Molly felt like pinching herself.
"There are many reasons I continue my presence here at Barts," Sherlock continued, invading her personal space once more. His voice was pitched low, so low that Molly had to concentrate to hear it. "Mostly, it's convenient, but there are other reasons. I am not a social being. I do not enjoy people's company on principle, in general because people tend to be idiots. Your presence, however, I find is not entirely… intolerable."
Molly's inner-Austen fan swooned. She wasn't sure if it was an insult or not, but from the emotionally constipated man before her, it might have just been a compliment.
Not intolerable, she thought. Sherlock Holmes thinks I'm not entirely intolerable.
He continued to stare at her with his mercurial eyes. Molly only felt equal to meeting them for a few seconds before turning away. She could feel her shyness creeping up over her shoulder, ready to settle there like an unwelcome roosting bird.
She thumbed through a few papers on the lab counter, head and heart spinning. When she felt able, she said, "Thank you, Sherlock. That means… well, it means something, coming from you."
Sherlock raised an eyebrow in a doubtful sort of way, but he didn't comment. His eyes remained fixed on Molly's back, cataloguing her every move. His grip on the camera phone in his hand tightened.
"You said I couldn't pigeonhole woman into one category," he said, careful to keep his tone light and unassuming. "And yet, you did that very thing."
"I wasn't pigeonholing anyone," Molly said. She felt a dull throb in her left temple, which was always the result of interacting with the illustrious and stubborn Sherlock Holmes for too long. "But yu forgot a very important piece of information."
Sherlock raised an eyebrow at her. "By all means, then, enlighten me. What was this key bit of information?"
Molly always felt naked when he looked at her like that, his eyes deducing every part of her uninteresting soul.
"Sentiment," she said simply. "You forgot to account for it. You named her 'The Woman,' meaning that she captivated you. It wasn't too much of a jump to assume that the reverse was also true."
Sherlock continued to stare and Molly gave a half shrug, pulling back once more, trying to reestablish her balance and thought process.
"You're a hard one to ignore, Sherlock," she said. "If The Woman was anything like you, the mystery of Sherlock Holmes would have enthralled her completely. And you don't just recover from that."
Sherlock's brain was firing on all synapses, though to the casual observer he hadn't moved a muscle since Molly's last deduction. He took in everything about her, trying desperately to catalogue it.
Hunched shoulders. She was embarrassed and defensive, unsure about how much of herself she had exposed in explaining The Woman. Shaking hands, biting lip. She was wrestling nervousness and her natural desire to be helpful, even at the cost of her pride.
Molly Hooper had single-handedly cracked the Woman's phone with one cursory look and forced him to reevaluate, once again, his assumptions.
Sentiment, he thought gruffly. It was always something.
"Thank you, Molly Hooper," he said. "Your assistance, as always, has been invaluable."
He leaned over and, for the second time in as many weeks, he kissed her cheek. Without waiting for her response, he turned on his heel and left through the lab doors with a swish of his trademark Belstaff.
Molly stood with her back to the lab doors, trying to regain her composure.
Sherlock had said she wasn't intolerable and that her assistance was invaluable. From any other man, that would have been an insult, but from Sherlock Holmes, who treated emotion like a communicable disease, it meant something.
But what, exactly, Molly wasn't sure.
Was she ready to go back to where she had been for that dratted Christmas party? Was she ready to allow her heart to be battered and broken, all at the whim of a self-diagnosed high-functioning sociopath?
As if in answer, her phone dinged.
If convenient, come to Baker Street after your shift.
If inconvenient, come anyway.
SH
Her heart thumped and her hands shook more than ever.
Another ding came right on the heels of the last, and her heart stuttered to a stop.
Naughty girl. He wasn't supposed to get help.
Let's have dinner.
A/n: This was done originally in answer to a prompt I found on tumblr. I tend to skulk around the Sherlolly tag and someone (can't remember who-edit: it was vixensfire on tumblr) expressed interest in having Molly crack the code to Irene's camera phone. I jumped on it immediately, but it's taken weeks for this bad boy to finally reach the point where I didn't cringe every time I looked at it.
So much of the characterizations in this piece are due to the BAMF!Molly from series 3. This is a spoiler free post for all the Yanks who haven't seen episodes 2 and 3 yet, but the rest of you will know what I mean. Loo Brealey is a goddess and I'm so happy that she's so willing to share her acting talent with our crazy fandom.
This piece hasn't been brit-picked and seeing as I have little to no medical or laboratorial knowledge, you'll probably find those areas lacking as well. If you have corrections for me, submit them in the review and I'll do my best to rehabilitate them.
Thanks again, all. Drop me a line, let me know what you think.
P.S. Let it be known that I am suffering from a mild concussion received on Friday. I'd like to take this unprecedented opportunity and blame any mistakes on that. Technically, I should be asleep as there is nothing worse for a concussion than looking at a computer screen late in the night, except maybe a second concussion. However, my obsession knows no bounds, and here you have it.
Okay. Laterz.