This fic has been percolating in my head for a loooong time - since watching how angry Victorian Hooper still was in Sherlock's mind palace during TAB. It made me wonder how much of her he had seen since she slapped him, and what sorts of shenanigans could occur in that much time, and that road led me here. I have 4/5 chapters complete and will be posting them twice a week.

Standard disclaimer: not mine.

Sherlock Holmes did not, under any circumstances, get nervous. He was afraid on occasion, and irritated almost all the time, but never nervous. Sherlock had an international reputation for cool reasoning, and nerves were a calling-card for sentiment.

He certainly wasn't nervous now. Why would he be nervous? He was only going to to morgue for the first time in six months. It was a place he'd always been exceedingly comfortable (perhaps too comfortable actually, all things considered). However it wasn't the morgue itself that made breathing difficult and his blood rush loudly in his ears; it was the thought of the pathologist who was most likely occupying at the moment. The last time he had seen Molly Hooper, she'd been slapping him rather forcefully. The last time she had seen him, he had been unconscious after being shot.

The fact that they had engaged in a brief but satisfying sexual relationship directly preceding that and he hadn't made any effort to contact her since was no good reason to be nervous. After all, she hadn't gotten in touch either, and he'd been immobile for months and quite easy to find. He hadn't exactly had cause to visit the morgue until now, as he'd been recovering, then incarcerated for killing Magnussen. Now he was finally getting back to the business of solving crimes, and he needed to see the body of Peter Werth to verify that the sister killed him. If only he could get to the root of his current symptoms, he could get this over with.

He didn't want to solve the crime and be on his way. He wanted to see Molly, to find out if she was as angry as he imagined her to be, to apologize. He wanted much more than that, but even inside his head he didn't want to say the words. If he said it, even in his own mind, he would have to address what a besotted idiot he was and how ridiculous it was to hope for such an outcome.

No. Better to say as little as possible, briefly address whatever recriminations she felt the need to bring up, view the body, and leave.

You may as well be oscillating on the linoleum. What conclusion can we draw from that, brother dear? his inner Mycroft jeered.

Ridiculous. A much more reasonable explanation for his continued heart palpitations and shortness of breath was an early-onset heart attack triggered by years of narcotics and nicotine use. Was his arm tingling? It might be tingling. Possibly.

Good (bad, he meant bad, dreadful really), he should go upstairs to A&E and get evaluated.

Sherlock spun on his heel and ran chest-first into John Watson. He realized belatedly that he'd been frozen staring at the morgue doors for nearly 5 minutes and that his friend was talking (John did that a lot, honestly who had time to listen to it all).

"...and it is Molly. What's the worst she's going to do, slap you again? Patch things up and she'll probably give you a kidney or someth- Oof! Bloody hell, Sherlock, that hurt!" John pushed him back rather forcefully. "Come off it. Just look at the damned body for 10 seconds, call Lestrade with the cause of death, and you can be off. No need to be scared."

"I'm not scared. I don't do scared, John. It's only Molly. Don't be tedious."

It was only Molly. Molly, who was angry at him even in the deepest recesses of his drug-addled Mind Palace. Just Molly, who knew how to operate a bone saw, had access to an incinerator, and who had been forcibly trained in tactical lying by the head of MI6 after she had helped Sherlock fake his death. God. Perhaps he should jump past nervous and be terrified.

He turned and pushed through swinging doors into the morgue, schooling his face into a look of arrogant calm.

Luck was with him (or against him; he hadn't quite worked out whether he was dreading seeing her or hoping for it). There was no one in the main area to mark their arrival. In the small operating theatre adjacent to the mortuary, he could see a short individual with a large stomach in full protective gear and what might be a radiation vest under an operation smock. They were finishing an autopsy (Male, mid-fifties. Cancer, chemotherapy, explained the precautions though they were excessive).

The pathologist nodded at them through the glass and held up five fingers, then went back to sewing up.

He prepared himself to talk to a new doctor, probably some fussy, fat, middle aged man who would be tiresome. Honestly, who wears a radiation vest for a common autopsy? Which of the staff had left to make room for him? He flashed through the doctors - he'd only bothered to remember Molly's name, but there were other pathologists on staff. Maybe Tall Pakistani Idiot with Porn Addiction - he'd been close to retirement age.

What if it was Molly who'd left? This was her normal shift. It hadn't occurred to him until right now that she might not be waiting at Bart's exactly as he'd left her. She was very qualified and likeable; she could probably get a better paying job easily. She might even find a teaching position - she'd never said anything but he knew she fancied being a professor someday. Should he go looking for her or let her go? He could find her of course, but would she want to be found? Would he want to find her? Of course not, better to take this opportunity to clear his head of sentiment.

This was distracting and irrelevant. He needed to focus on the case. John was nattering on again about Mary's latest scan and his clinic and other boring things.

"This is taking forever!" he exclaimed, cutting into his friend's chatter.

John sighed (again, he was always doing that). "So glad we've had this special time to talk, mate."

The pathologist was coming out of the theatre, pulling bloody smock, mask, and various other PPE off and shoving them in the biohazard bin at the door into the main morgue area.

"Thank God," the detective exclaimed, rushing forward. "We need to see-oh! Um. Ah…"

"Hi, Sherlock." Molly Hooper, now free of autopsy gear, moved out of the operating room doorway and gave a small, self-conscious wave.

His eyes flicked rapidly from her face to her stomach, to her face and back again. Face: Molly Hooper. Abdomen: visibly pregnant, well into second trimester.. Face: Molly. Abdomen: pregnant. Molly. Pregnant. With a baby. A human baby.

He knew distantly that he was staring, but couldn't help it. Not a new pathologist then, still Molly. But not exactly as he'd left her, either.

Molly crossed in front of him to take her lab coat from its hook by the door and slide it on. "It's ah, been awhile. Feeling fully recovered Sherlock?" She paused, waited for a response, then pushed on. "Do thank Mycroft for sending those guards for me during the not-Moriarty thing. Um, John, how's Mary?"

John recovered quickly, putting his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "She's good-great! Things are good. Mary's getting huge; feels like she's been pregnant for about 3 years! Course she's still got a month to go." He smiled, scratched the back of his neck and pointed curiously at her abdomen. "Look at you, though! Are you...?"

Molly dimpled and placed a hand over her stomach. "Oh, yes. Sorry, I've only just gotten big enough that people have been brave enough to ask. Still haven't gotten used to it."

"Wow! I guess congratulations are in order. How far along?"

Molly's smile grew wider, meeting John's eyes steadily. She was fixedly not looking at Sherlock, hands shoved into the pockets of her lab coat. "About five months gone, now. Bit of a surprise, but I'm quite chuffed about it if I'm honest."

"I must've missed a Facebook announcement."

"Afraid not - I don't use social media much these days. You never know what sort of psychopath you might meet online." She laughed at her own joke, and after an awkward moment John joined her.

Molly had always excelled at awkward jokes and making people uncomfortable. As he'd gotten to know her, he'd realized she enjoyed it in a delightfully perverse way. She was the only person he knew who could make a joke about James Moriarty cute.

They continued on, chattering about pregnancy and babies and the thousands of items small infants seemed to require. Sherlock tuned them out.

He felt like a computer with a critical error. Molly was pregnant, and for a moment he'd felt - accelerated heartbeat, rapid breathing, fluttering sensation in his chest - classic symptoms of anxiety. But also of excitement. Joy? That couldn't be right.

Careful, little brother.

Joy. He'd been undeniably, irrationally excited by the idea of his DNA stirring together with Molly's to make a tiny person. The idea that they could have made something together out of themselves that would walk and sleep and make noise was actually rather amazing. There was fear too, but it was trivial by comparison.

Then the conversation caught up to him. Five months.

Five months ago he'd been preparing to discharge from the hospital. Nearly six months ago had been the slap, and since then the only Molly he'd seen had been the angry one inside his head.

Molly DNA then, but not his. Little bits of clever Molly nucleotides joined up by covalent bonds to some other man's to form the 23 base pairs of (half) unremarkable chromosomes in a perfectly mundane baby.

The last bit was a lie so large he couldn't even convince himself of it. No baby of Molly's would ever be ordinary. It would have some portion of her warm eyes, her lips that quirked into an oddly infectious half-smile, her atrocious fashion sense, her brilliance, her ability to see more and care more than everyone around her. Her baby would be made out of her, and would be marvelous.

It would just never be made from him, with his nose above her lips, or his curls in her chestnut color. He felt oddly as if he were mourning something he'd never had in the first place, nor had even known he wanted.

They were still talking, going on as if the edges of the world hadn't just unraveled.

Molly was pulling a body out of cold storage, presumably Peter Werth. John must've asked, or Lestrade had called ahead. "I'm not bothered about it, really. My mum left when I was little, and Dad raised us alone till I was in my teens. At least I've a doctor's income; he worked all sorts of crazy jobs to keep us floating. He used to call-"

"From his photo delivery route because his car had broken down in some god forsaken place to instruct you to eat tinned meat and crisps for dinner. Your childhood cat once burned its paws on the stove because he used to leave it open to heat the run-down two bedroom flat you shared with your father and brother. Please for the love of God, can we go back to the body now?" He fired all this off rapidly, trying to stay collected until the moment he could flee (not flee, exit when dramatically appropriate; Sherlock Holmes did not flee).

John blinked, raising his eyebrows. "That was impressive even for you, mate."

Molly unzipped the body bag containing Peter Werth. "No it wasn't. I told him all those stories ages ago. Though I am impressed that you bothered to remember it." She met his eyes for the first time, and twitched her lips in a tiny smile.

He looked away quickly.

An audible vibration cut the air. John pulled his phone from his jeans pocket. "Excellent, this is Mary. I'll ask about a dinner - I'm sure she'd love to swap pregnancy stories." He put the phone to his ear as he left the room.

Sherlock and Molly looked anywhere but at each other. Say something. Anything. Just open the proverbial door.

"Three lovers in three months, very… progressive of you, Molly." Wrong something!

Internal alarm bells were going off - danger, Sherlock Holmes, danger - but he couldn't stop. He had no right to be angry, he knew this, but he found that he was livid anyway. He'd never been great at self-examination and he wasn't about to start now. It was too satisfying to let the confusion and inexplicable sadness coalesce into an easy, tangible rage.

"Tom, me, your new 'baby daddy'," he made air quotes as he said the words, "That is what they call them these days? Still no ring, though, maybe he's not interested in buying now that he's had a sample. I'm sure you'll be very happy together. He ought to keep a weather eye on you for when you lose interest."

Part of him expected her to cry and run away like Molly circa 2010 might have, but she didn't. She stared fixedly at the body between them, but her voice came steady and low. "I'm confused, Sherlock. Are we implying that I'm a whore, or that I'm undesirable? You'll have to pick one."

"I was merely-"

"Were you ever sober, Sherlock? When we made- had sex. All those nights, for nearly a month… were you sober even once?"

She was looking at him now, not quite meeting his eyes but scowling at the top button of his shirt. Her hands were shaking on the slab, and somehow this hint of vulnerability made him feel far worse than her words did. There was nothing remotely acceptable to say, so for once he stayed quiet.

"Yeah. More fool me, then. Do you even remember-"

"I remember everything." He coughed uncomfortably. "I remember everything when I've been high. Even the things that aren't real, strictly speaking."

He had been thinking of his recent Victorian trip through his mind palace, but her reaction suggested she'd found a different interpretation.

She made a tiny noise that was almost a sob, meeting his eyes for the first time. "And Janine - did you get high to shag her too? Did you just, I don't know, pinball back and forth; no one person is enough for the appetite of the great Sherlock Bloody Holmes?" She was shouting now, hands gripping the sides of the table so hard the blood had left them.

"I didn't-"

"No. Bollocks, stop." She put a hand up and let out a long breath. There were unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. "That was a rhetorical question, and it was unworthy of me. You didn't make any promises, and I didn't ask for any. It's my own fault if I thought there was more to it than there was."

"Molly-"

"I'm going to pack up Mr. Phillips in the autopsy room. Clean up here when you're through." She was gone before he could work out what had happened.

John pushed through the main doors, still looking at his phone. "Molly, how's Friday night for supper?" He looked around. "Where'd she go?"

Sherlock resolutely did not touch his own eyes, which were horrifyingly damp. "No idea. I simply indicated she ought to lower her sugar intake as she's gained more than the recommended amount of weight for her prenatal stage; diabetic pregnancy is common among women of her age and she should take that seriously as a medical professional. She left quite abruptly.

"We're done here anyway. Werth killed himself; the sister only tampered with the body so the wife would get life insurance."

"Jesus, Sherlock! You can't…" John launched into a predictable rant about social niceties. He tuned it out easily as he zipped Mr. Werth into his bag.

Two basic laws of deception: tell the believable lie, and distract the recipient away from the truth. John really was so easy to manipulate.