I got excited so a bit earlier than a week! So I kind of lied then.

It's a bit odd that I only feel guilty about lying when I get caught. Maybe I should abstain from lying for a day and see how well that turns out (cue mass chaos and confusion) okay so maybe not…

Molly sat on the airplane in business class, wearing a dark and sleek suit—what on Earth did Beth do for a living?—her hands trembling slightly as she obtained a glass of water and leaned slightly against the window. She jumped as a man slid in next to her—probably harmless, but she could never truly tell. James Moriarty seemed harmless at one point. He seemed safe. So she gave a small waning smile to the man and took a sip.

"Didn't mean to startle you there, love."

She worked up her accent, it was getting better with practice, "Oh no, it's fine. Sorry."

"American then?"

"Canadian actually."

"Can't seem to spot the difference to save my life."

Molly grinned, "Oh that's easy. We apologize a lot, put gravy on our fries, and really the best indicator is that we call that—" She gestured towards the loo near the back, "—the washroom."

"Oh thanks uhm—"

"Beth." Molly held out her hand to shake.

"Anthony."

"Nice to meet you." For the first time in her life, Molly decided to be completely and utterly rude to the attractive stranger sitting next to her. Beth Childs was a woman with a rich boyfriend, after all, not a desperate little pathologist who panics about her biological clock despite having no wish to reproduce. Molly was also an Un-Person in the way, no longer able to be Molly Hooper, but not quite Beth Childs either. She would have to find out why exactly that was, once she knew Moriarty and Sherlock were distracted and a world away.

Funerals had a tendency to bore Sherlock. He had no religious affiliations, he didn't understand the point of a bunch of sad people gathering around a corpse or a pile of ashes, and it made it incredibly easy to figure out the idiotic culprits. Molly's funeral, however, was different. Molly always struck him as the type to have few friends and fewer family members, but he found that there were so many present that many were regulated to standing in the back. Lestrade and every member of the police force that ever interacted with her were there, several nurses, interns, doctors, all sat in a large clump and then there were the people that looked quite a bit like her friend Felix Dawkins, all lower class, less educated, but all quite sympathetic. It was a large turnout for what Felix said would have to be, 'the quick sort of affair someone as modest as Molly would like.' He still couldn't figure out her connection to him—let alone a deep lifelong friendship.

"Molly was my best friend." Felix sat down beside him after saying a few short words, answering the question before it could be asked, "We were in care together after her Dad died. She was eleven. All I saw at first was a little middle class brat that only had one thing ever go wrong in her life…but she didn't linger on it. In fact, she rarely ever seemed sad at all, just a cheerful little girl with a sick fascination with death. And she was smart, so smart…. Listen our foster parents—they weren't kind. At all. The lady was spending all our care money on drinks and her husband had a nasty habit of knocking us around."

Sherlock's fist clenched at the idea of someone hitting Molly, she didn't deserve something like that for a moment, "Go on."

Felix took a deep, shuddering breath, "One night he tried to—well rape me I suppose, I dunno what was going through his head, but Molly stabbed him in the neck with some scissors. The lady lied, putting up this great big story and I decided that since Molly was smarter, and Molly was kinder, and Molly did it to save me, that I'd take the blame."

"Hence your criminal record."

"Yes. Molly was furious…but we've been best friends ever since. You wanted to know."

"And how did you know that?"

"Everyone wants to know." Felix gestured towards himself and flipped his hair, "How a hottie like me could be friends with a smarty like her."

Molly absentmindedly sniffed the soap in the loo—washroom—washroom—it was sandalwood, nothing like the lavender scents she used. It was yet another thing about herself she had to strip away, leading her to step into the shower of Beth Child's townhouse, spending a long time under scalding hot water, trying to wash away an old life, and trying to think of all the ways that Beth could be identified as herself and not Molly. If Molly had been the pathologist on duty, she would have run prints simply to be thorough, but it would only be those of the UK and Europe. They would realize something was messed up with her on record fingerprints, and still cite a positive identification. She didn't even know if DNA would show enough of a difference; obviously she and Beth were from the same stock.

1 Minute Before

It took Sherlock three hours to figure out all that he had said wrong and to figure out that he still didn't know why Molly was upset. She really wasn't that clumsy of an individual and she seemed...terrified. He came to the conclusion that he should apologize and gather information a moment later and spent the thirty minute cab ride to her flat trying to formulate it. Something acceptable had come to mind by the time that he made it to Molly's flat, but when he knocked, he got no response. Sherlock assumed that she was asleep, and decided to pick the lock to come in. it was vacant obvious by the lack of coat hanging over the chair and the unfed cat rubbing against Sherlock's legs. Sherlock looked around before clicking the "Play" button on her answering machine after finding four messages.

"Oi! Molly! You're no picking up your mobile! Answer I need to talk to you!"

"Molly, you were supposed to show up an hour ago, where are you? You really scare me when you do this, you know. If you're sleeping, I'm going to kill you tomorrow. You aren't seriously going to do it are you? You're really psyching me out"

"…Okay Molly, you never go this long without even a text. I've called you eight times! I'm going to get a bunch of acne from this! I feel the redness! I feel the bumps on my skin rising."

"Shite, shite, bloody shite, Molly pick up right now. Just pick up right now, I need to hear your voice. God FUCKING damn it , pick up the bloody phone!"

Sherlock was most shocked by the panic the man was displaying in the last of the messages. He was in his twenties or thirties, obviously gay and from Brixton, and particularly familiar with Molly. Before he could ponder it further, he received a call from Lestrade, "Sherlock...Molly Hooper has committed suicide. She threw herself in front of a train."

For one single moment in time, everything in Sherlock's mind raced to a screeching halt. He didn't know how he got to the hospital (Logically, anyone with a few brain cells to rub together could hail a taxi, walk down a familiar path to the morgue and see—see her laying there with blank eyes like she was just another body, just another mystery. He stood there for a long time, aware of, but unable to process the whispers of Anderson and Donavan. At some point, he would be brave enough to draw those from memory, but for the moment, that part of his mind palace remained darkened.

Molly sorted through the clothes she had. For the most part, they seemed posh but boring, tending towards dark and drab colors like gray and black. A lot of Beth Child's clothing were quite suitable for racing about the city, with low heeled and practical shoes outnumbering the designer heels. She searched through, looking for more clues, trying to act like Sherlock in a way, looking for the tiniest of details. Like Molly, Beth seemed to be a bit particular about cleaning, but didn't have the taste for brightly colored jumpers. There was a picture of her and Paul on the refrigerator, finally giving her more than a blurry picture of his face to his name. He was cute, but not quite her type, with blond hair trimmed short and a general look about him that screamed military of some kind. Maybe it was just that he reminded her of John.

Sighing, Molly sank to the floor right there in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey next to her. What was she doing? She couldn't do something so simple as talk to Sherlock without stumbling the first couple years of her existence, why the hell did she think she could pull off making him—and everyone else she knew—think she was dead? For all she knew, Felix could be a worse actor than she thought, and she had actually been given away right away. But if that were true, something would have happened. Molly was sure of that. Moriarty wouldn't allow her to believe that she had outsmarted him for long. He would hate to give anyone that sort of surge of superior feeling over him.

She hoped.

"Sherlock, I think you should try going outside." John was worried. Sherlock had a case and yet all he was doing was sitting there, simply staring at the wall. This wasn't the time for the supposed and totally not high functioning sociopath to break down like any other man would. John knew he was being selfish, but he had a child on the way and he wanted the Moriarty problem to end as quickly as possible especially after…Molly.

Yes, Molly was the reason for Sherlock's almost complete lack of action, John knew this. At first, Sherlock had been in a mad frenzy, but then it seemed that once he realized that nothing would change the fact that Molly's body was sitting in a drawer in the morgue he shut down. There was no searching for Moriarty, or trying to figure out how to defeat him, there was just silence. John found it absolutely maddening and so…so oddly normal.

"Sherlock, when's the last time you ate?"

No response.

"Sherlock? Sherlock? I need you to tell me—"

"She is a competent pathologist." Nothing but the bare minimum of movement from Sherlock's mouth told John that he had actually spoken out loud, and that John hadn't just imagined it.

"Yes, Sherlock, she was the best, that's why you worked with her." John nodded, settling on the sofa beside Sherlock.

"Therefore, what I told her, or at least what I implied was a lie." Oh, that had been the last thing he said to her.

"She knows—knew—how you can be."

"A replacement will be nearly impossible to find."

"A replacement pathologist or replacement Molly?"

"A replacement Molly would be impossible." Sherlock snapped.

"Yes—yes of course—"

"Molly Hooper is too cheerful, she has terrible taste in clothing and men alike, she spends most evenings home alone with her cat and she either says too much or too little, she panics at inopportune times, and she decided to go out and find a fiancé that bore a striking resemblance to myself! She is annoying!"

"Sherlock—the engagement's been off, you know that—and what does that have to do with—?"

"John! I do not need food or comfort or whatever you've come here to thrust upon me, I am thinking! I am thinking! I need to stop him before—but it's too late at the same time all I can do from here is damage control and he's ruined everything. Things were finally going to go back precisely where they want them before!"

After being on the receiving end of a bit more shouting, John left, realizing a couple of things as he slipped into the taxi.

Sherlock refused to speak about Molly in the past tense. (Denial: Confirmed)

Sherlock was obsessing over Molly's engagement. (Suspicion: Confirmed)

Sherlock was definitely going to do something about Moriarty, and there wouldn't be games this time.

John didn't know what this meant. He doubted he would like the man Sherlock would become without him to keep him company or without Molly. It was heartbreaking, really, seeing how close they had become. James Moriarty had obviously seen this. More than ever, John simply wanted to shoot him in the head himself.-

Three Weeks Before

Molly and Sherlock sat in the lab in a companionable silence. She was doing her supremely dull paperwork while Sherlock was working on some sort of experiment that she hadn't had the proper chance to look at yet. While Sherlock knew that even Molly had some boundaries when it came to the lab, she still wanted to make sure that the likelihood of something blowing up (literally or otherwise) was relatively low. Her superiors still didn't like the idea of Molly being Sherlock's go to pathologist after the whole dead-not-dead incident. She tried not to let Sherlock know how much trouble she would be in if it weren't for his brother, but she was pretty sure he knew or didn't really care to know anyway.

"I'm making coffee." Molly stood up, stretching her hand, trying to shake the soreness from it, "Want any?"

Sherlock made a noncommittal grunt that she supposed was a yes and Molly left, returning with both. She placed his coffee next to him and returned to her stool, picking up where she left off. Oddly enough, this was more comfortable than anything she ever did with Tom, bordering on the absolutely shameless openness she shared with Felix. What drew her to Sherlock was the way he didn't flinch when she spoke of gathering tissue samples. He didn't care that she could chatter all day on the subject of stab wounds but could barely string together a sentence in the form of small talk. Sadly, he didn't care about her either. Not really anyway, certainly not in the way that mattered. But it was still comfortable, sitting there.

If Molly could, she would have times where she didn't speak for days.

The pink burner phone was ringing again. Its tone drove Molly up the wall. For the most part, she could ignore it, but after a while, she knew she would have to pick it up. After all, until Felix could arrive with the money (if he got it at all) Molly had to be Beth. This included all of Beth's problems—like whatever led her to suicide. Slowly she picked it up.

"Did you meet with the German?"

"Huh?"

"Damn it Beth, what did she say did you get the briefcase?"

"I uhm—"

"So you didn't get it?" The voice sounded so much like Molly's but with a different accent that Molly couldn't quite place. It was either American or Canadian—definitely not British or Irish, she would be able to tell that one right away.

"No, no I didn't—"

Suddenly the line went dead.

What the hell had Molly gotten herself into?