It is surprisingly (and perhaps a little worryingly) easy not to freak out about the hidden camera. It doesn't make her as nervous as she might have thought; it's too hard to keep in mind at all times that the one living person who scares her most might be watching. It's much easier to remember it at intervals and be anxious a few minutes at a time. As for being angry-well, if she were capable of being really, deservedly angry with Sherlock, who knows where they would all be now?
She even tries to oblige him. With a little practice, both on set and off, she gets good at letting her voice carry unobtrusively while she records notes on autopsies, and casting smiles into empty space in the direction of the camera without arousing suspicion.
Oh, she knows she has a problem, all right?
For all that Sherlock is rude and oblivious and surveils people on hidden cameras without their consent, he's also clever and brave and since John showed up there seemed to be something else, another gentler, more complex Sherlock that she seldom could catch straight on, like a speck floating in the corner of her eye. You don't pick who you love.
He doesn't have anybody else, she thinks, as she pats down her hair before she enters the morgue for the day. I'm all he's got.
It's only been two days since she got a text and she isn't expecting another soon, but she keeps her phone in her pocket anyway. It's a slow day; it's just her and Meena in the morgue and no work to be done except for the forms and files from some things earlier in the week. She is working on that, doing her best to ignore the camera (he can't possibly watch her all the time, he has other things to do and she's not even interesting) when John comes in.
She was so accustomed to seeing him once that for a moment she forgets that she is no longer accustomed to seeing him, so at first she just stares, trying to figure out why his appearance is startling.
The moment she remembers is also the moment she notices how terrible he looks.
She hasn't seen him for about six months now-there just hasn't been much reason, and she's been busy and he's been... well. She always meant to go check up on him, but she just never managed it. Greg had, and he'd said John wasn't looking so good, but that was to be expected, really.
She wonders if Greg has seen John looking like this.
He looks like he's aged ten years since he last came in here with Sherlock, before all the heartache started, and he carries himself like a soldier who's just marched eighty miles and is struggling to keep posture for an inspection. He is leaning on his cane. His eyes are haunted and bruised looking, and if she was worried about him before she is doubly so now.
"John?" she says, trying to be warm instead of alarmed. She gets quickly up from the desk and comes over to meet him. "It's so good to see you. How have you been?"
His smile, crumpled and perfunctory, is even more upsetting than his frown. "Hello, Molly," he says. "It's good to see you too."
"Oh John." She leans forward on impulse and wraps her arms around him for a long hug. Over his shoulder she makes a meaningful eyebrow gesture at Meena, who nods and slips out of the room. "What brings you to St. Bart's?" she says as she releases him. "You're not on a case, are you?"
Molly sees him wince and immediately regrets saying anything. "I'm sorry! I just-Greg said he might ask you and..."
"No, it's fine," says John with a smile that's probably supposed to be reassuring. "Yeah, he did, but I'm... I'm not..." he struggles to find words, but decides in favor of a halfhearted shrug. "I'm not," he says simply.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly. John doesn't even try to smile this time. There is a brief silence which Molly quickly fills. "So did you get a job at the hospital here, then?"
He shakes his head. "No, not here. They did take me back, though, at the clinic where I'd been before."
"That's nice," Molly says falteringly. She doesn't know what she's supposed to say and is beginning to wring her hands in spite of her best attempts not to.
Suddenly John sighs a gusty sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. He somehow looks even more tired than he already did.
"I'm sorry about interrupting you at work, I'll leave you alone but I, uh. I had something I wanted to ask you."
"Anything," Molly says sincerely. She waits while John gathers his words, his eyes closed. Finally he breathes deeply and opens them again.
"You did the autopsy, right?"
Molly goes cold.
If her moment of panic is visible, John gives no indication that he has noticed. He is looking at her, waiting for her answer.
"Yes," says Molly. Her tone is more level and casual than she expects it to be.
John closes his eyes again briefly, and then sets his gaze on the floor somewhere just past her. He stares fixedly, and the hard line of his mouth she recognizes as his expression of barely maintained control.
"I never saw... it," he says quietly. "Except for that one glimpse, I never-I didn't identify it."
"That's... for the best," Molly says gently. Her heart is hammering.
"Yeah," he replies. John is not looking up, and he's not blinking. His grip flexes on his cane handle, and his stare is ready to burn a hole in the floor tiles though Molly doubts he's seeing them at all. "Yeah, maybe." He takes a deep breath in through the nose. "I just wanted to ask you..."
The pause is just long enough to make Molly nearly panic. But then he wrenches his eyes off the spot on the floor and meets Molly's.
"Was it him?" he asks her. And his face is broken and pleading and she's no longer worried, just heartsick. The question is the one she was waiting for but it doesn't mean anything she thought it would mean. It's just a last resort he thinks he has the answer to already but needs to hear from someone else.
"John..."
"I just... I know what you're going to say," he says all in a rush. "I know but I had to ask, I had to... how sure are you? There isn't any way it could have been..."
"Could have been what, John?" She's going to cry in a moment. She can't stand this.
"Not him," he finishes, but it's choked and he claps his mouth shut quickly over the end, like he doesn't trust his voice any further than that. She sees his jaw clench and unclench and a hard swallow go down.
She clenches her jaw too as she shakes her head. If she opens her mouth the truth will fall out. She's never been any good at lying, she's never been directly asked about this, she's never had to talk to John about this, of all people. She knows the darkness in his eyes is not suspicion but desperation, but it's awful all the same. It's awful, it's awful, it's more than her heart can take.
Thank goodness he doesn't require her to say anything more. He just nods, and swallows again, and nods again.
"Yeah, I... Yeah." He blinks once, hard. "Yeah, okay. That was all, really. I've been doing much better lately, I really have. But that was..."
Molly nods back at him, but still doesn't open her mouth, still doesn't trust herself. John smiles that tight, grim smile again.
"I'll let you get back to work," he says, and without another word, turns and limps back out of the morgue.
Molly stands staring at the doorway for a minute or so, until she is shaken awake by a ping from her pocket. She retrieves the phone dully.
You can't tell him.
Molly shoves the phone back to her pocket, then stalks over to the industrial shelf against the south wall. She rips the hidden camera from its puttied place, and shoves it to the back of the shelf, behind some seldom-used boxes and bottles.
"I know," she says savagely. She turns around and sets briskly back to work, tears stinging her eyes.
If she's all Sherlock has, that isn't her fault.
It's his.
It is an unfortunate fact, which Sherlock learned when John was first getting him off cigarettes, that you seldom know how much you need something until you lose it. He guessed at the impact that losing John would have; he has made no such guess about his St. Bart's camera. The camera must be face down on the shelf, because it is utterly dark; as for sounds, nothing more than an intermittent, staticky murmur makes it through the wall of supplies between him and the morgue.
It is a week and a half before he finally texts again.
I'm sorry.
He pretends unconcern for a full hour, and then breaks down and checks the feed. The camera has not been put back up.
At the end of the day, it is still down.
It isn't even a matter of pride, really. Not here, not hiding like a rat in Places Undisclosed. If he knew what to say to get her to put the camera back up, he'd say it.
He just wants some sort of update. He assumes she's angry, but it would have to be for a promise she made freely half a year ago, which bewilders him. He doubts it's for insulting her intelligence by repeating the instructions about John-even if she were the type to consider it a slight, she wouldn't still be angry.
But how is he to know what type she is anymore, really? He is unequipped to deal with this other Molly, who shows up only on camera and whom he's never actually met.
He hopes she's only angry. He hopes she's all right.
At the end of the second week, he sends an encryped e-mail to Mycroft that just reads Molly?
His brother's reply an hour later says only Fine.
Four days later he buys a paper from a stand and opens it up to find a white envelope falls out of the gossip page and the advice columns. In it are some printouts of CCTV snapshots, similar to a packet he got while he was staying in France; shots of John, of Mrs. Hudson, two of Lestrade. This time, though, there is also one of Molly, remarkably clear, as she sits on a bench and eats her lunch somewhere outside.
He lingers over all of them, but he leaves Molly's picture out on the desk when he puts the rest away.