To Molly, he was always Jim's friend. He wasn't the only person James Moriarty spent time with during their brief and doomed relationship, but he was the only associate who seemed able to hold Jim's attention for more than six minutes at a stretch. Jim and Molly spent two evenings with him at the same pub Molly walked into tonight. The Goose and Cloud, with drinks too expensive for her to justify on her own budget and local musicians on weekends. The drinks were overpriced and she'd spent half of the cab ride breathing into a paper bag. Molly went in anyway. She'd been invited.
Sebastian sat at the far end of the bar. He scowled at the pub door from the shadows. Waiters passed back and forth behind him, ferrying drinks to customers who were in better humor than he appeared to be. The intermittent flashes of light cast by the football game on the telly over the bar exposed the bags under his eyes long before Molly reached his side. His face told of three weeks of hell since the fall of Sherlock Holmes.
"Um." Molly looked heavenward in exasperation with her own eloquence and tried again. "Hello. How, ah, how are you?"
She perched on the stool next to him. A tug to her black skirt assured that she showed some leg but not all of it. She squirmed under his cold gaze. Many heartbeats later, Sebastian said "Not bloody great, actually." He took a long pull from his beer and banged the bottle on the bartop so loudly that Molly jumped. The noise caught the young bartender's attention, and she whisked over to their corner with a raised eyebrow for Sebastian's disruption.
Molly ordered a beer with honey in the name, the first one that came to her mind. Sebastian snorted and took another long gulp from his own beverage. Now that Molly was close enough to see him clearly, she noticed the flush in his cheeks and the care with which he set his drink on the bar, next to the coaster, not on it. Not his first of the night, then.
"So, ah, you wanted to talk to me?" Molly tried after another awkward thirty seconds or so.
"Yeah," said Sebastian, "I did. About a mutual friend."
It was like he didn't know how to stop speaking in code. "I haven't seen Jim lately, if that's who you mean." Damn, of course that's who he meant. Who else? "I don't go out with men who try to blow up my friends." Liars and evil geniuses, yes, she apparently did go out with those, but not once she knew them for what they were. Not that he'd given her a second thought. No. She wouldn't put herself through that again now.
Sebastian nodded, a roughly casual toss of the head that threw his dark hair into his eyes. He brushed it away with the back of a hand. "Yeah, sure, all of his girlfriends said that."
Damn them both. Molly pursed her lips and gave him her best you-know-you-should-have-filled-out-this-chain-of-custody-form-properly glare. Sebastian smirked at her for a few seconds. "At least you were a cute one. They weren't all cute." The bartender returned with Molly's Bumble Bee Honey Ale and a glass. Molly took a bigger sip of the sweet beer than she intended. She had to calm down somehow.
Sebastian waited until the bartender departed before he continued "You're too easy to upset. You're even too easy for me. You must have bored him to tears."
Molly's clinically short fingernails tapped on the glass as she clenched her hand around it. "What do you want?"
"What did he give you?"
Molly's eyelashes fluttered as she tried to think back to those few good days before the nightmare realization. "I... well, the usual, flowers, chocolates. Anti-virus software." She remembered how cute she'd thought that little gift. Protective, she'd thought. Just as she was supposed to.
Sebastian frowned. "Yeah, of course. I mean after that. Something small, like you might keep but not treasure."
And there it was. A token, a trifle. Something that wasn't obvious. Molly took another sip of her drink and pretended to give this some serious thought. Now that he'd said it, Molly remembered just such an item. Jim bought them tickets to a James Blackshaw concert, one of Molly's favorite musicians. A total surprise. At the time she didn't know how he'd known. Now she didn't want to know. He'd insisted she keep the ticket stub afterward, to remember what a lovely time they'd had.
"He did give me something. I'm not sure this is what you mean..." It was like she'd blown on the smoldering coals of Sebastian's eyes. His beer sat forgotten near his hand. A waiter bumped into his shoulder and murmured an apology that Sebastian didn't even acknowledge.
"It was a sticker with a kitten on it." Molly purposely focused on a green bottle on the shelf above her and to the right. She let her bitterness show through her small smile. "It looked just like my Toby. He stuck it on my labcoat and I wore it all day."
When she looked back to Sebastian, she couldn't stop herself from gulping. His expression cycled from confusion to anger to a deadly blank stare all in the span of a breath. Molly took another drink to hide her fear behind her glass.
"Is that all?" Sebastian leaned toward her, right into her personal space. Molly leaned back. She felt like she had a bird trapped in her ribcage. "Come on. He was a generous man. What else? Think carefully, Ms. Hooper."
Molly breathed slowly in and out through her nose. "I... I don't remember anything else small. Roses. The flowers were roses."
"Of course they were fucking roses!" Molly cringed away from Sebastian's shout. "You expected roses, you got fucking roses, you predictable little cunt!" Sebastian looked around and appeared to notice that every person in hearing range was staring at him. More quietly, he said "If you like Toby so much, you'll tell me every single thing that Jim Moriarty ever gave you. Right. Fucking. Now."
Molly thought back to March, when it all started with a comment on her blog. There were roses, and chocolates and coffee, the kind from the shop down the street that she didn't buy for herself. Sebastian was intrigued by that one, but once she told him that Jim had gotten coffee for her almost every week he scowled again. "Go on." There was the wine he brought when he visited her apartment, and a white catnip mouse for Toby once he realized how much the cat meant to her, but Sebastian's eyes didn't light up for any of these.
When she got to the Java upgrade that Molly's computer downloaded a day before anybody else's in the hospital, Sebastian stood up so quickly that he knocked his stool over. He slammed a wad of cash on the bar, and Molly startled again. "You," he said, "are useless." He stormed out the door without a backward glance.
And this was the hard part. The part that Molly had dreaded all night. The part that almost made her tell the cab driver to turn around and take her back home. She had to leave the pub sometime, with an angry assassin somewhere out in the dark.
She took twenty minutes to drink the rest of her beer, holding the glass with both hands to stop the trembling. A couple of men and one woman cast glances her way, but she was busy pretending to follow the match on television. All too soon her glass was empty, and she was afraid to drink any more. No good putting it off any longer.
She cleared her throat, louder the second time, before the bartender returned to settle her tab. She touched the tips of her fingers to the bar for balance as she stood. One of the men who'd been looking at her appeared at her side. He smiled easily and offered her an arm. "Hey, I'm Max. Can I get you a cab?"
Maybe she didn't have to do this alone. "Um, OK." She returned his smile and allowed him to flag down a cab for her.
He even held the door while she got in. There really were still decent men interested in her. Before he closed it, he handed her his card. Max Burling, LLM. Educated, too, how nice! "I come here a lot." He grinned. "Maybe I'll see you next-"
The passenger window shattered. Half a second later Molly heard the gun's report. Max Burling, LLM, crumpled to the pavement like his knees had just been broken. Something wet ran down the side of Molly's face. She screamed "Drive, please just go!" to the cabbie before she'd processed what just happened.
She threw herself flat on the seats and covered her head with her arms. The cab's tires peeling out as it accelerated apparently muffled the sound of the second shot, because all Molly heard was the back windshield breaking and falling over her. She slid across the seat as the cab turned a corner.
Almost two hours later, Molly was finally alone in her apartment. The police had been kind and understanding, and the emergency medical personnel stitched up the cuts in her arms right on the scene, although there wasn't much to be done about the pain. She suspected that at least one laceration was deep enough to scar. Damn that man.
A small white lamp with a pink shade sat on an end table in her living room. On her way to bed, Molly lifted it from its place and set it on the window sill. She left it lit as she walked to her bedroom with Toby running ahead to get the best spot on the pillows. She bloody well hoped Sherlock would appreciate what she'd gone through to lay this false trail for him. But he wouldn't. If she'd learned one thing from her last boyfriend, it was that everyone underestimated Molly Hooper.