2. Move-in
After clearing out the dental plaster stab wound models, Molly set herself and Toby up in John's old room. He'd left a few things-alarm clock, some books, an empty trunk that seemed to serve no other purpose than to sit on at the foot of the bed. It had made things a bit homier. She'd only brought a few bags of things from home. Clothes, the book she was reading. She didn't plan on this being a long 'visit,' so she had left just about everything where it was in her flat.
Toby had arrived with more kit than her.
She'd tried to estimate how long it could possibly take to remove all the mold from the basement flat, then rip pretty much everything down to the studs and redo the whole thing for a family of three.
When she heard the screeching of the violin downstairs-random hissing sounds that were dissonant and ugly-she prayed that Mary and John had some magical way to hurry things along. Because there were some things that earplugs just didn't block out.
Toby crawled around the bed, up on the headboard, then lept onto the book case, exploring his new territory. She'd already set down the law with Sherlock. If any harm came to her cat, she would harm him. She'd worked on a lot of murder victims. She knew just how much pain the human body could endure before death. And she could make that happen for him.
Of course it had come out as a stuttering, tripping, falling over of words, but he'd gotten the point. She'd like to say that it was only Sherlock, and his brilliance that tied up her tongue. But really, it was everyone. Every time she meant to say something and wasn't at all angry, and it wasn't pre-planned, it was all a mess. If she was in a rage, it came out perfectly well-as Tom had discovered the night they'd broken up for good. They'd gone from 'needing some space' to 'done for good' in one screaming match where she'd done the majority of the screaming.
Sometimes she thought she was kind of a horrible person. Sometimes. But she donated money to animal welfare societies and it eased her guilt.
She looked around at the humble room. "Well, Toby. This is it. Our little slice of home until Mary and John can get back to babysitting Sherlock. What do you think?"
Toby didn't even look at her when she said his name. Cats ignoring her stung a lot less than people ignoring her. Mostly because she'd wake up in the middle of the night with Toby on her chest, staring down at her creepily. That's just the way cats were.
"Well, let's go down and make dinner." But then she thought about what Mary had said. "I mean-lets go downstairs and have Sherlock make dinner."
Just in case, Molly grabbed her phone. The odds of Sherlock actually knowing how to cook were probably slim, and if that were the case, then he would at least be paying for takeaway. Right after he wrote Mrs. Hudson a cheque for the backed rent.
She wasn't forward, but she could do it on a limited basis, she supposed. Order someone around. Mary had reminded her yesterday about not saying please. Please to Sherlock was a suggestion, not an order. 'Please' worked wonders with her staff, but they tended to be reasonable people. Clerks and attendants enjoyed a please and thank you. Sherlock was as stubborn as a mule and she was here to force him to get himself together. She had a job, and she would do it. And then Mary Watson would owe her many favors, the least of which would be some very, very good wine.
Something crashed downstairs.
She drew in a deep breath, preparing to face whatever new shenanigan Sherlock was engaged in.
Mary Watson may have owed her a very long holiday in a very warm place if this renovation took any longer than a month.
"Sherlock!" she called from the top of the steps. "Whatever you've done, you'd best undo before I get to the bottom of the steps!"
Molly held the door open for Toby, who made absolutely no inclination to come with her, down into the madness that was Sherlock Holmes, bored and self-destructive.
She gasped when she got to the bottom of the steps. "WHY is the coffee table in pieces?"
Sherlock was lying on the sofa, his arm thrown over his eyes. "Why not? Nothing means anything."
Maybe she'd kill someone just so he'd have a case. He hadn't helped her move her few bags in. He hadn't even offered her a glass of water when she arrived at noon, much less lunch. He'd moaned and puttered and swished his dressing gown around like a drama llama until she'd retreated upstairs.
"You're having an existential crisis?" She couldn't believe him right now. She really couldn't. "Call Greg, see if he has anything for you. Call anyone. Do something. Those fingers I brought you last week should still be usable for something."
"The fingers were incinerated in the toaster."
"There is NO way that pertains to detective work."
"You say that now, until someone is murdered by a toaster, and you need to pull prints off the burnt fingertips of the unfortunate toaster murderee."
She was getting a migraine. "You just like setting things on fire."
He didn't respond. And it was a good thing too. She needed the breathing room. br /In the kitchen, she dug around for the kettle. "Why is there a potted plant in this kettle?"
"Why not? I don't use it."
She would have asked just how he made tea, without an electric kettle, or even a serviceable kettle for the stove, but she was deeply afraid of the answer. She often worked on long-dead and well-decayed corpses of both murder victims and people who had not been found in their homes for ages. One of her most recent clients had been mostly liquified. That said, she found the state of his kitchen appalling.
She sighed, hands on her hips. "I am going to have to nuke water in the microwave, aren't I?"
His arm was draped over his eyes in dramatic despair. "Don't open the microwave."
Again, she didn't ask. There was only so much stress she could handle in a single day. "Alright. Here is what is going to happen. I am going to order takeaway. YOU are going to do the dishes."
"Dishes don't matter," he moaned from the sofa.
"They matter to me! You don't have a single clean one, and I really don't care if YOU get some ungodly disease that ends you on my dissection table, because you're getting on my last nerve, and I've only been here for six hours. I, however, can do without every bacterial infection known to man while living here."
She was proud of herself. All the words were coming out without a single stumble, mostly because she was working up to a place where she wanted to slap him silly again. Sherlock Holmes had thought he had seen her angry, but there were hidden depths within Molly Hooper that could one day lead her to kill a man. Probably Sherlock, if things kept on how they were.
Sherlock made no move to get off the sofa.
Marching into the living room, she stepped over the broken furniture pieces and grabbed him by the shirt, twisting it. "Dishes. Now."
His nose wrinkled. "Or what, you'll Taze me?"
"I hear the loss of bladder control is quite magnificent." Or so she'd heard from a television show once. She very much hoped it was true.
"Just throw all the dishes out. Buy new."
Letting go of his shirt, she grabbed the top of his ear and twisted. "I am not John. John might have done all the dishes so that you all didn't die of sepsis or MRSA or something even worse. I am willing to pull my fair share in this roommate situation from hell, but you have to do your part too."
He winced and sat up. "God, you're evil when you're on a tear!"
But she didn't let go of his ear. She dragged him to the kitchen by the cartridge until he was standing in front of the sink. "This is a sponge. This is washing up soap. These are the dirty dishes, and I expect you to use hot water. I am going to Mrs. Hudson's for some bloody hot water and a tea bag. I expect to see progress when I return."
zyx
Mary rocked the baby in her carrier, which sat on the replaced coffee table. She and Molly sat comfortably on the sofa, enjoying the quiet flat. "The place is cleaner," Mary noted.
Molly took a sip of her beer. "We compromised. I let him have his ridiculous stacks of paper if he helped me make sure we didn't go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink."
Mary's jaw dropped. "Sherlock Holmes compromised."
"You just need to know which ear to twist." Molly blushed a bit.
Laughing, Mary picked up her own drink, milk. "I think John's far too passive-aggressive. He'll complain, but that's all he'll do. This place must have been a hell hole when they both lived here."
Molly shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think Mrs. Hudson would let it get that bad." She pointed to the recently cured new floor boards. "I think she really might have turned him out if he hadn't gotten that fixed. But now he knows contractors are going to be working on the bottom floor. He doesn't know it's you two moving. Well, you three." She looked down at the drooling child who was staring at her. Babies were lovely. When you could give them back when you were done. "Mrs Hudson told him it was because he never pays the rest on time. He was fuming."
"He's really taken to you being here. Far more easily than I thought he would."
Shrugging, Molly put down her bottle. "I think he was lonely. He wouldn't admit it. But he even talks to Toby, that's how lonely he is sometimes. Speaking of renovations, how is it going?"
Wiping away the baby's slobber, Mary chuckled. "John wanted nothing to do with the design. Now he's complaining there's too much blue."
"I thought the kitchen tiles you wanted were lovely. Who hates cobalt blue?"
"John Watson does, apparently."
They both chuckled.
Eventually Molly leaned back into the sofa, far more relaxed than she'd been in a few weeks. "It's nice to talk to… someone. Another…"
"Woman?" Mary supplied helpfully.
"Adult," Molly settled on.
Mary made that exaggerated, radiant face that overcame her so much of the time. She seemed so damned happy. Not that Molly begrudged her. But she wondered where that type of contentment came from. "Oh, I think you like it."
"Babysitting a brilliant man who thinks magic fairies bring his tea in the morning?"
"Also having company. And the challenge. And it won't be for too much longer. Now that everything is stripped, they can start the renovation proper. And I'm good at moving. I can have us ready to go in two days."
"I've lived in my flat for seven years. I think I would need a dumpster if I moved. You just collect so much stuff." She looked around this flat. Some of her things had migrated from upstairs to the living area. A few of her books and journals (but Sherlock had been reading them too), a cat-shaped clock on one of the tables since they seemed to be opposed to time-keeping devices down there. One or two other reminders from home. But the rest of it was Sherlock's. And it was a lot. "I think if he ever moved out of here it would take more than a dumpster. Look at all this stuff."
"Bomb flat, start over," Mary instructed.
Toby brushed his cheek against the baby carrier. "aww, that's sweet," Molly said. "She thinks she owns the baby carrier."
"Aww, it is sweet." Mary gave the cat's head a little rub, but Toby ducked her hand and jumped off the table and walked away. Mary laughed. "I see why they get along so well. They're equally standoffish. They probably have little contests while you're at work."
Molly tapped the mouth of the bottle against her chin, thinking about the prospect. "I think I consciously choose not to think about what he does when I am gone. I think he knows everything is negotiable except for invading my personal space and harming my cat. He can stay up all night playing his racket, and I'll make breakfast before he goes to bed, I've even taken over the vacuuming as long as he does the dishes. It's not terrible. But I used to babysit. They eventually start testing their boundaries."
Mary unbuckled the baby seat and pulled the little girl out as soon as she got fussy, unabashedly unbuttoning her shirt and letting the girl latch on. "You are the one who keeps saying he's not a child."
"He's not. he just behaves like one. That's my professional opinion." She had to smile at Mary-she really didn't care for propriety. It was just the two of them. Molly had seen far more breasts and was quite frankly immune to them. At least they were being useful at the moment.
"Love, you work with dead people."
"I know," she said with a giggle. It was her second beer, she must have been feeling it. It was so nice that Mary didn't mind her morbid sense of humor. It made things so much less awkward than when she tried to talk to real people-well, people outside of the orbit that ran around Sherlock.
She scrunched her nose as she looked at the cat clock. "They've been gone for six hours."
"John's been gone overnight with him a few times. Then I get to make excuses at work for him. Oh, I'm sorry, your only surgically trained GP has faffed off with his best friend. They're probably getting shot at, or maybe making out. It has yet to be determined."
Molly's hand went to her mouth. "You don't think-"
Soothing the baby, Mary shook her head. "Oh lord no. Sherlock's too repressed and John's perpetually insisting he's not gay, as if there were only two options. I just like to tease John about it. He gets so indignant. It's adorable. Those two can have their little adventures, or trysts or whatever. I know who he comes home to."
Putting her head onto the sofa's headrest, Molly curled up, feeling warm and contented. "I know who Sherlock comes home to. A human skull and my cat." She giggled in exhaustion. "I'm just the person who crisps the bacon the way he likes it."
Tutting, Mary reached out and squeezed her arm. "It's not like that at all. You're his friend. He listens to you. He does dishes for you. That's practically wearing his team jacket, where I'm from."
Molly didn't quite catch the reference, but got the general meaning. "Well, it's peaceable. The first few days it got tense now and again. But not some huge standoff like the first day. Of course getting a new kettle helped. I wasn't nearly as cranky with proper amounts of caffeine."
"Oh god, I live off caffeine now. I've skipped tea and moved straight to energy drinks. I have a case under my side of the bed. I just slam it down before I even get up, and by the time I've toddled off to the nursery it starts to kick in. And before you give me a line about it being expressed in breast milk like John did, I have done absolutely everything I'm supposed to do with her, the world can let me have some caffeine before I turn murderous."
"Figuratively, I hope."
"Oh neither of those two men should push their luck with me," she said knowingly.
Molly decided not to question it further.
The downstairs door swung open, bounced on its hinges and came flying back toward the door frame. Neither of them heard it actually close, though. "Well, that would be them," Mary pointed out, gently coaxing the baby to unlatch from her breast. Below the feet on the steps were uneven, almost dragging at points. Despite this, Mary calmly buckled the baby back into her seat, plunking a dummy in her mouth so she wouldn't fuss, breast still bared for the world to see.
Just as the flat door flew open and John dragged Sherlock through the threshold, Mary tucked her breast away and clipped up her nursing bra. She left her shirt unbuttoned as she rushed over to them.
Molly was right behind her, pulling a chair over for John to dump Sherlock into. He was pale and there were two gashes on his forehead. She hoped that's where the majority of the blood was coming from, because there was another spread of red across his white shirt. His coat had been lost somewhere along the way.
"John, what the hell?" Mary asked, grabbing Sherlock's wrist to check his pulse.
Huffing, John put his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. "He's fine-he'll be fine. He had a little help getting down a set of cement steps. Smashed into the wooden gate at the bottom."
Molly pressed a clean dishcloth to his forehead. "He's going to need antibiotics. There's wood in this wound. And I see something sticking out the other."
Mary pulled the fabric away and winced. "It's not that deep. We can get it. Sherlock-you idiot. You should have gone to the hospital."
Shaking his head, John took a few more deep breaths and went for a box in the hall cupboard. "The only way you can drag him there is if he's unconscious."
"Well, good job, Husband Mine, he's almost there."
Sherlock groaned. "Shut-Up. I'm sitting right here."
John started tossing bottles of antiseptic, analgesic and pain killers over his shoulder. "It's all expired. Dammit."
Making a face, Mary grabbed the nappy bag and dumped it. Beneath six changes of clothes, a breast milk pump, more nappies than she'd ever need and other miscellaneous items, came out a first aid kit.
"Molly, antiseptic?" she tossed a bottle, which Molly barely caught. Pulling out two vials and a handful of sterile packaged syringes, she handed them over to John. "I have something to knock him out too, but I think he should suffer."
"Locals should be fine. Why is this stuff in the baby bag?"
"You're complaining now?"
He shook his head, like they'd be discussing this later.
The baby started fussing behind her, protesting a meal interrupted. "Well, you two are grownups. I'll leave you to it. She's hungry and my boobs are leaking." Before picking up her child, she unclipped her nursing bra and popped out her other breast, having no care for who saw.
"Grownups?" John asked as he examined the piece of brittle, dusty wood sticking out of Sherlock's side, just below his ribs. "That's reassuring."
Mary made a face. "You're both medical professionals. Until I return from maternity leave I am just The Milk Lady." She scowled at Sherlock who was wincing every time John poked around the edges of the wound. "You're interrupting my precious bonding time with my child."
Sliding on latex gloves, Molly began flushing the head wound. "I'm sure she doesn't mean it," Molly consoled Sherlock. But then she looked over at Mary, whose lips were still pressed together in a solid pout. "Ok, she means it. But I'm sure you didn't intend to interrupt feeding time. But you are getting blood on the carpet. Mrs. Hudson may have a problem with that."
Sherlock groaned. "Ugh. Just let me die."