He had needed her. And he'd told her. And in a decidedly out-of-character roundabout way apologized. For general low-grade beastliness, disciplined awkwardness, mumbled words with crystal clear delivery, expressions of bored disdain, feigned interest while the massive intellect computed behind his eyes. All of it. But he did not apologize for her attraction to him, her affection, her desire. Those things he needed and those he called out in her, the shepherd to the lost lamb.
He also needed John, but that was a different need entirely and one that he kept warm but did not allow to be brought to the boil. For now. For now.
So, he went to her and predictably she began to bud and bloom and blossom under the intensity of his particular sunlight. Together they found the perfect corpse. She secreted herself to Baker Street and returned with a bag of his clothes, an overcoat, and a pair of his wingtips. They dressed the corpse and she put the curl into its hair which he felt was a bit much. And he calibrated her mobile. And tried, but not very hard, to puzzle out any clues Moriarty might have secreted on her person, in her subconscious. He despised riddles and this entire game was playing out like a very silly Inspector Morse episode on the telly, but of course, with far more dire consequences. Far far more. It sobered him, and unbelievably – in his estimation – it was humbling him. It was all a G3 played on the soprano-ed violin. The lowest note capable of being plucked within his own body.
So, he needed her. To help him solve a crime, tease out the tangled riddle, to create a grand illusion. And to break his virginity. He'd decided that he'd really held onto that affectation long enough.
It was the second evening of his self-imposed banishment. He was in her flat, a bit twee really but who on Earth was he to accuse one of that? He was sprawled in a rather uncomfortable chair beside the cast iron chimney piece, he could feel the broken spring beneath his right arse cheek. He was sullenly watching her move from the kitchen to the sitting room and back again. She was bustling and he told her so.
"You're bustling."
She stopped and wiped her hands on the apron she had put on when they arrived home. "Am I?" Her voice was contrite.
"You are. And why are you wearing that?"
"What? This?"
He shook his head in an approximation of a nod.
"It's an apron."
"I know what it is. I asked why you're wearing it. Playing at 1950's American housewife?"
"American housewife? Why do you say that?"
He shrugged. He didn't actually know why he had forced that comparison. "Take it off. It's bothering me. Irrationally."
She nodded and reached behind her for the ties and in that movement, the head bent, the slim neck twisting, the feminine curve of her arms and torso, the untying, all of that undid him and he stood suddenly and startled her. And the startling elevated his blood pressure and he filed that away for future consideration – somewhere in his reptilian brain he reveled in this masculine movement and her feminine response.
"Sherlock?" she whispered.
"Be quiet," he answered and drew her into his arms. She resisted the slightest bit and he excerpted an answering force and she melted against his chest. He was so much taller than she was and he could feel her breath against his collarbone. "Molly," he said softly and she reached for his hand and led him into her bedroom. He wanted to focus on all of it, memorize it, build it a room in his memory palace, but the fact that she closed the bedroom door when they were the only two in the flat blanked him out. The act lodged itself into his heart in the shape of a question. To keep that irksome cat out? No, it was her need for privacy, her need to have him completely to herself. This was not his experience to categorize and file away and identify by the vulva-shaped doorway. This was going to be theirs. And that was something new. He smiled slightly and she furrowed her brows and he pressed his lips against the line between her eyes and she tilted her face up and he was kissing her.
A tad clumsy, he gauged it to be fast and perhaps the tiniest bit furious. But she was gracious and kind and had hands that fluttered like doves and after a shortish silent recovery she urged him onto his back and pressed her thin girlish body against his, pressed him down into her clean sheets that smelled of delicate flowers and he responded, his body responded to her gentle ministrations. He'd had no clue of what he would be capable of. She took him, one arm slid beneath his shoulders, the other bent beside his face, her palm fast on the top of his head. She rocked him into a kind of oblivion he had never known.
She kissed him and his eyelids slid shut. He let her soothe his battered ego, his bruised psyche, his grievously injured sense of self. With her body, her mouth, her warmth, her delicious womanhood. She soothed him. The only thing he kept in his consciousness was the feeling of the waves rolling him upon the beach, lifting him, rocking him, carrying him away.
Hours later and they lay awake. She had lit a candle which he thought eye-rollingly silly but then as the soft light began to illuminate her room, the place of his deflowering, he found it to be setting a kind of idyllic atmosphere. He realized he was insanely comfortable. Naked in her bed. They had talked and he had even laughed at a small joke she made. Irreverent topics and finally he steered her towards the archenemy. He despised himself for it, but he knew that there would have been clues left. She had become the badly used pawn in Moriarty's dismal game. He, Sherlock, had, at least, made her Queen.
He had managed to see it in his mind, the scattered dates, the request to get into the lab. He could imagine Moriarty fingering and caressing all the things he himself had ever touched or used. It was rather sickening.
"The last night, he called me a plain gash. He had changed."
He was stunned by this, but needed her to continue talking. "Changed? How?"
"Well, in a lot of ways. It was like he was no longer the person who'd chatted me up at the coffee bar. For one thing, he was wearing a suit. That was something new. A really high-end suit, you know. He stood differently, moved his hands differently. His hair was different. We had gone to dinner, I was horribly under-dressed. It was terrible. He'd said fish and chips but it was California Cuisine." She was abashed and Sherlock had to look away. "He got out of the cab here and told the cabbie to wait, then he walked me up and we stood in the foyer. He looked at his wristwatch, then at me, said that - you know, about the plain thing - as though he was stating the weather conditions outside, and then he left. A plain gash."
"That's ugly, isn't it?"
She shrugged.
"You didn't let that injure you! Did you? Molly."
"At the time...it was a bit shocking. Un-nerving."
"It's unrefined and designed to injure, to dismiss. You must see that? It's not personal. More about him than you. Really. It was all a well-orchestrated prelude to an interval in his mad opera."
He tapped his upper lip thoughtfully. "I wonder. If that was the night he found John..."
She looked endearingly bewildered. And then her gaze grew distant, turned inward and suddenly she gasped. "Oh."
He sat up. "You've remembered something."
"I have. Oh!"
He waited and stilled his hands from fluttering wildly in her face. He breathed deeply, watching her, the ravenous raven on the fence post with the road kill still twitching on the hot tarmac.
"He said...I can't believe I forgot this, I can't believe I've remembered it." Her hands were wringing and he reached out for them, lacing his fingers through hers. She squeezed back and he prodded gently with an answering grip. "He said that you were too squeamish for the wound that never heals. Said my crushing on you would amount to nothing. I'd age badly, bitterly, and you would be hard pressed to remember me at all in a decade's time."
He lowered his head, the great intellect silenced with this crude sketch of his personality. He decided. Simply. Definitively and defiantly. He reached out for her, pulled her into his arms and kissed her. He was beginning to like that part very, very much. It was so unlike him. To let another human being so close, into his space. He smiled against her lips, and then whispered into her ear.
"I'm here, aren't I? I am here, Molly." She nodded against his face. "Squeamish, was it? Hmmm..." He hummed and pressed his lips against her neck, down between her breasts, still humming, ghosting across the taut lines of her abdomen. He open-mouth kissed her jutting hip bone and then he lowered his face into the dark and mysterious place of her. She moaned and dropped herself gently to the mattress and it was his turn to rock her into the wild waves of the bed.
He took a truth and stripped it until the truth of it was gone and it became something else entirely. He had no head for metaphor. Found it poetic and somewhat untrue to nature. "The wound that never heals" not really a clue, more an insult. Or a taunt? He turned that over in his mind. No, he didn't think so, it wasn't meant for him, Moriarty could never have imagined Molly in this bliss. No, the clue was still unearthed. He needed to dig deeper.
The next morning, he lay in her bed and listened to her moving about in the small flat. From the bathroom to the kitchen, clattering metal, that would be the coffee on, smell of toast, cutlery clinking, the table being laid, and he half-slitted his eyes in the grey light, remembering the hours they had spent in this new place he'd found. He thought of Moriarty's prediction of his character and suddenly a door on a long-ago day opened inside his mind. He and Mycroft as boys, in St. James Park, with a nanny. (They'd gone through several, they had been termed incorrigible.) But that morning it was a beautiful warmish spring morning and Londoners were out in the sun, soaking up its thin warmth, sitting on the green, rolling up trouser legs and pulling back hems. Mycroft was getting of an age and he'd been staring. The nanny noticed and told him to stop it straight away and he turned to her, his big brown eyes open and innocent and asked her, "What do girls have under their skirts?" And the nanny had boxed him, the corner of his lips swelling and told him he was a very dirty little boy. And that memory lived in a dark room inside Sherlock's palace. He had forgotten it completely on a conscious level and here it was revisited as fresh as yesterday.
She roused him from the bed and he was sorely tempted to pull her back beneath the waves but he relented and went to breakfast. She'd opened his egg and that surprised him. The table was lovely. He studied her over the rim of his mug.
"Molly, what sorts of things did he ask you about your job?"
She pulled a face. "Really? You're still on about him? At the breakfast table?"
She shook her head. He waited, sipping slowly, watching her. She paused, fork midway to her mouth, then gestured slightly with it. "Oh."
Again, she had remembered. "Yes?"
"He was very interested in murder suicide cases. Strangely obsessed I'd say."
"What about them? Any one in particular?"
"No, not any particular case, more in a general way. He wanted to know how it was decided, you see?"
"I'm afraid I don't. How what was decided?"
"Who was the murdered and who had suicided. Said was it really possible to know. And painted a dreary picture of what he called an inverted murder suicide. It was strange and I didn't like it at all."
"Inverted?" He jumped to his feet.
They only had the barest of time, the slimmest of moments, the thinnest of cracks to slip through and disappear into.
Afterwards, she didn't want to do it. But he had to make her. Walk her through the steps of it again and again, help her to memorize her lines, play her part. John, Mycroft, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, the godawful newspapers, the televised news. She was the coroner, the bearer, the messenger, the corroborator. And she returned to him with wrenching stories of unstoppered grief and he had to sit on the edge of the sprung chair and smoke a cigarette and when that was nearly gone, light a new one off the glowing ash-end. He wanted his violin.
At the end of the first week, it was better. Considerably, remarkably. She had helped him through and he had allowed himself to be led. She bought him a decent violin at a pawn shop. She took him out of himself every night and most mornings. She went to work and left him with bad telly and bad novels, the persnickety cat, and he cooked their dinner. He felt he had to visit the gravesite and it coincided with a strange visit by Mrs. Hudson and John and he grit his teeth and bore it.
He had a new telephone, John's mobile was the only number keyed in and Sherlock Holmes developed the habit, courted it actually, of rubbing the phone with Doctor Watson's number. With the square tips of his long fingers, he rubbed at the phone whenever it was inside his pocket. It became his touchstone. It calmed him and it helped him to wait.