Molly Hooper could not draw a road map from where she had been before The Fall to where she was now. Frankly, she had no idea how she'd strayed so far from her old life, from the life she'd thought she'd always live. She did, however, know that it began at the end of things—as most stories did.
But what could I need from you?
Those had been his final words to her. The last words that lovely, lovely voice would ever speak to her; nearly stilted with confusion over the idea that Mousy Molly could have a single thing to offer the great Sherlock Holmes. It didn't seem real when she'd been told by a hesitant nurse, the man acting as if she might implode at the announcement. Even though he had jumped from her very own Bart's, the notion of his death did not truly hit her until the funeral. It wasn't real until she was dressed all in black, staring at a closed, black casket covered in flowers. There had been something strange about that casket; it was so very dark, like a void that consumed all around it. It was like the flipping of a switch, laying her eyes on that casket. She was distant from her own body, with every color simply gone out of the world.
Sherlock's funeral wasn't her first, not by a long shot. She had been to her mother's funeral when she was eight, her father's when she was nineteen. Sherlock wasn't the first junky she'd known either, though he had managed to out live the majority of them. None of their funerals had been as quietly posh as Sherlock's but she supposed, even in death, he could not resist a bit of style. She'd thought it would help, having past experience with going through the motions—she always thought it would help. She lingered at the grave, long after it had been filled in, long after everyone had left. It was in the solitude that tears came—long over due. Because it was real. He was well and truly gone.
She wrote up her two weeks notice after that. Printed it off, kept it at her desk, nearly handed it in every time she had to pass that bit of sidewalk with a stain that seemed never to truly fade, every time she found herself in the stairwell she knew Sherlock—the man she had loved unconditionally and unrequitedly—had taken on his way to his final breath. She'd had more than a few panic attacks in that stairwell, more than a few panic attacks in the lab where Sherlock had spoken his final, stinging words to her, and more than a few panic attacks in the dead of night, barely able to breath from the nightmares.
Molly turned to her friends in the weeks and months that followed for shoulders to lean on, for anyone—anyone—to talk to. But her coworkers and colleges (Meena especially, though she shouldn't have been half as hurt or surprised by that) made little time for her when it became clear that no juicy gossip would come from lunches in the cafeteria with a grieving Molly Hooper; Lestrade was fighting losing battles on all fronts (internal investigation by NSY, the very real and looming possibility of forced retirement, messy divorce with no end in sight, and—of course—also struggling through his own mourning of the great detective) and in such bad shape she'd noted he'd even taken up smoking again; Mrs. Hudson had been so distraught over not only loosing Sherlock (whom Molly suspected the woman thought of as her own son) but John as well that she'd closed up 221 and gone to her sister's; and John Watson was always a bit strange about having coffee with her, canceling more and more until eventually she got the message and stopped reaching out.
It was a bit pathetic really, when she looked at the list of people she'd turned to in those dark hours. None of them were really her friends. They were Sherlock's people, his friends, his patchwork family. And in the long nights when she cried into Toby's fur, she wished it was she that had died in his stead. The loss of Sherlock had turned the lives of so many people on their heads but who would have missed her, really? She was alone in the world. The worst that would have come from her jumping from the top of Bart's would have been a bit of inconvenience for HR.
Days blurred together, a dull monochrome of monotony, of pointlessness, of barely understanding why she bothered to take each breath. She'd thought it was the bottom. She'd had some small hope in having no where to go but up.
Then, one day, she came home to find a dead man on her couch, watching her season two Glee DVDs, drinking her tea, and petting her cat. She'd had a brief thrill of terror at having a serial killer in her living room before she remembered: I don't count. Sherlock Holmes wasn't around the play games with anymore, there wasn't a point to killing her.
"You're home a bit late." Jim noted casually, eyes on the TV for a beat before he turned his strange grin on her, "Trouble at work?"
To this day, she could not explain why his casual question had made her burst into such uncontrollable tears. Perhaps it was because—no matter how insincere—it was the first time since The Fall anyone had asked even the vaguest question about her well being. Or perhaps it was terror at having a murderer in her house. Or perhaps it was agony that Jim was the dead man on her couch and not Sherlock. Not that it really mattered. Because it was none of the "angels" that lent her a should to cry on in her hour of need. No, it was the Devil himself.
He'd hugged her and patted her back and soothed her hair and cooed at her and supplied her with tissues. She knew he was probably just running through a checklist of motions but she could pretend in that moment that someone cared.
"There, there, pet. There, there. Jim'll fix it for you." And she believe him. She believed him because even if it was a lie, even if it was a mangled sort of devil's truth, it was all she had now. Perhaps it was more than she'd ever really had.