Wind
And sometimes Sally's so coiled and taut that she looks like a piano string; Molly would reach out and touch her if she weren't afraid that she'd snap. It's Anderson, this time, with another piece of Sherlock's puzzle—two weeks spent matching metal flakes, placing the body of a now-dead sniper in an abandoned building one block away from the roof of Bart's—and Sally's back goes rigid, though her eyes remain impassive. "Thank you," she says, professional but not curt. Anderson doesn't say anything.
"Have you phoned Lestrade?" Molly asks, more to break the tension. "I'm finishing my report now, and it would be best if he got all the results at once. I think," she adds as an afterthought.
Sally nods, staring at the wall behind Molly's head. Her sternum is tight and straight, and Molly feels herself standing taller, is this how she does it; is this how she stands against the guilt over her head? Anderson's head hangs, and so does Lestrade's, and Mrs. Hudson's. John does not look down; he does not look at all.
Molly is afraid, so afraid. She's always looking back over her shoulder; checking her closets at night. She rarely speaks for fear of the monster breaking from her jaw and cutting her tongue loose. She is as wrought and wound as Sally, perhaps even more so, she thinks, but rather than bury the anguish in her bones, she tucks it into her shadow and maybe that's why she looks behind her. Not for Sherlock, whose location is also tucked away—graffiti on the back of a bench in Hyde Park or placed discreetly in the pocket of her jacket: two numbers, meaningless to everyone but her—but for Sally, whose decisive mouth and squared shoulders are bars and padlocks on her small, invisible prisons