A/N: Thank you to all who have read/reviewed/followed/favorited! Thanks to Xaraphis, the bestest beta in the whole wide world.


It was past six when Molly walked into the morgue at Bart's on thursday evening, a visitor's badge clipped to her jumper and her coat folded neatly over her arm. Mike Stamford and Louis Musgrove both looked up when she walked in – matching looks of harried relief staring out at her from behind the clear lenses of lab goggles.

They were stood over a neatly dissected body, each wearing full protective gear – a necessity, in cases such as the one currently laid out on the slab.

"Molly!" Mike nearly shouted her name as he pulled off his gloves and binned them before rushing toward her. "Really, I can't thank you enough for this. All things considered, I know this is the very last thing you want to be doing right now, but we're utterly stumped, the pair of us and Sh…" he paused, coughed, "erm…NSY is breathing down our necks and I've never known anyone better at this sort of thing than you!"

Molly wasn't stupid. Nor was she so far removed from the life she'd lived in London that she couldn't recognize Sherlock written all over this situation. This was his case, of course; she had no doubt about that. She also had no doubt that he was being a miserable git about the fact that they hadn't been able to identify the cause of death. On his best days, he found lengthy delays on their end frustrating…and she somehow doubted this was one of his better days.

At least, not if his mood was anything like as sour as hers had been all day…

"Yes, well," Molly offered Mike a half-hearted smile, "I only hope I can help." She nodded back toward the door she'd come through. "I'll just go get changed and scrubbed in – won't be a moment."

She ducked back out of the morgue before Mike could say anything else, stopping to snag a set of scrubs from the storage closet just down the hall.

Her first instinct, when she'd gotten Mike's call, had been to simply hang up on him and go back to enjoying the first wholly decent day she'd had since she'd arrived in London. But, in typical Molly Hooper fashion, she had suppressed the urge, heard him out…and eventually agreed to come in for a quick consult.

She had never liked the idea of a victim being deprived of the justice they deserved and she thoroughly enjoyed being part of the processes that saw the guilty receiving their due. For the sake of that, she was willing to put up with the possibility of facing Sherlock again. In fact, she had more or less resigned herself to the fact that she would – in cases such as these, he rarely left the morgue for very long, preferring to be on the spot when and if something of interest was discovered.

Once upon a time, she had lived for those moments when Sherlock plowed through the door, his coat flapping dramatically and his eyes glinting with the thrill of the chase. She had lingered at his elbow in those days, trailing along behind him in an attempt to enjoy as much of his company as she possibly could before he was off again.

Now – particularly after last night – Molly just wanted to get in, get out and get it all over with.

Saturday evening and her red-eye flight back to Baltimore, frankly, could not come soon enough.

She was nose to villi with a transection of the victim's small intestines when the inevitable happened.

His voice preceded him; the booming baritone raised in unmistakable annoyance carried through the door just before he banged through it, John Watson close on his heels. Out of her peripheral vision, she could see both Stamford and Musgrove jump, scrambling off the stools they'd been perched on as if they were about to be caught out by a particularly exacting superior.

Molly, on the other hand, didn't even flinch. She simply re-focused her keen gaze on the segment of tissue in her hand and carried on with her investigation.

"...they're idiots, John! I refuse to pretend otherwise anymore."

"They're not idiots," John fired back, sounding equal parts exhausted and irritated, "you're just being a git, as usual. Seriously, Sherlock…how many times are we going to have to…bloody hell," he snapped, "what'd you stop for?"

Molly did glance up then, guessing from the way John was rubbing his nose that he'd walked into his friend's back. Glancing up at Sherlock, noting only that he was, indeed, staring straight at her before shifting her gaze back to John. "That'll be my fault, I imagine," she said flatly, giving the shorter man a tiny nod of greeting. "Hello, John."

"Molly," John returned, eyes darting up to his friend quickly before he stepped around him and approached the table. "What…"

"Why are you here?"

Sherlock's voice, harsh and hard, cut across the room, silencing John and sending both Stamford and Musgrove back a step. Even Molly, accustomed as she was to both his temper and his derision, flinched slightly, though she recovered quick enough. Lifting her chin proudly – yes, she had done him wrong, but she was absolutely done with cowering before him because of it – she met his gaze without hesitation for the first time in over three years. "They were stuck – I was available. If you have a problem with it, take it up with Mike. He's the one who called me in for a consult."

Sherlock took a step forward, his face blank but eyes stormy as he turned them on poor, put upon Mike Stamford. "And why, precisely, would you have called her?"

"Seriously, Sherlock?" Stamford shook his head and gave a helpless shrug. "You know why!"

"No, I'm afraid I don't."

"Yes, you bloody well do," Molly bit out, quite done with him for the present. "You can think what you like about me personally, Sherlock…but I won't allow you to dismiss me professionally. We both know that I'm extraordinarily good at my job, so why don't you shut up and let me do it."

He sputtered for a moment, but recovered quickly and took another step forward. "Be that as it may, Doctor, the fact remains that for the past three years, Bart's has…"

"Has gotten on fine without me," Molly finished for him, dropping her eyes back to the intestine in her hand. "Yes, I remember, thank you – though it's lovely of you to remind me. Again."

Another step – she could see the toes of his shoes out of the corner of her eye. "This is my case, Doctor Hooper," his voice was low; cold as it only ever was when he was about to verbally eviscerate someone, "and I will decide who examines these remains. So I will thank you to leave. Immediately."

Molly lifted her head slowly, her own narrowed gaze meeting Sherlock's blazing one. From behind her, Louis Musgrove – bless him – stepped bravely into the fray.

"I think that would be a mistake, Mr. Holmes," the younger man said sharply. "We both know that Doctor Hooper's experience far outstrips mine. If you weren't being so deliberately obstinate…"

"Shut up, Musgrove," Sherlock snapped, his eyes never shifting from Molly's.

"Don't be a dick, Sherlock," John snarled. "If you want this case solved, you know damn well there's no one better than Molly to do it."

"I highly doubt…"

"It's potassium poisoning."

Molly's voice, high and clear, silenced the room. More particularly, it silenced Sherlock, who's mouth snapped shut mid-sentence. For several long moments, he simply stared at her – or glared at her, more like. Then, he drew himself up, looking down at her with the coldly haughty disdain that she had always suspected he'd learned at his elder brother's knee.

"What?"

That tone paired with that look – the combination so reminiscent of Mycroft Holmes that it set her back up – was the categorical last straw. Dropping the bit of intestine back into the examination pan, Molly tore off her gloves and chucked them hard into the bin beneath the table. "Your cause of death," she said fiercely, pulling off her goggles and the apron she wore in quick succession. "It's potassium poisoning – not surprised it was missed. Notoriously tricky to spot unless you really know what you're looking for."

She dropped the soiled gear into the appropriate hazmat bin for cleaning before turning back around to face the room at large, though her eyes went directly back to Sherlock's. "Good thing for you that I've seen it before."

"Potassium poisoning," Musgrove was repeating, already gloved up and looking at the cross-section of ileum that she had been examining. "What…how can you tell that? I thought it was undetectable!"

"It is," Molly agreed. "A tox screen would have given you nothing. But as I said, I've seen it before." She walked back toward Musgrove then, finally tearing her gaze away from Sherlock's. "It's just there," she pointed, careful not to touch. "Do you see it? The mucosal necrosis?"

Musgrove leaned in closer, eyes narrowed behind his goggles. "Fuck me," he said after a moment, pulling back to look over at Molly, admiration in his gaze. "I would have never seen that."

"Yes, you would have," Molly disagreed. "Eventually. The only reason I noticed it as quickly as I did is because I went looking for it." She reached out and caught up the victim's medical records, thumbing through until she came to the charting that had been done upon his admission to A&E prior to his passing. "Did you see here? The flaccid paralysis paired with the paresthesia and the tachycardia? Pairing that with the intestinal paralysis I identified upon examination, hyperkalemia presented as the most logical answer. As soon as I saw the local mucosal necrosis, I knew I had it."

The younger pathologist shook his head. "That's…that's brilliant."

"It's exactly why I called her in," Mike declared and Molly didn't need to be looking at him to know that he was glaring at Sherlock over her head.

Leaving them to gush, Molly stepped back again, turning once more to face Sherlock. He wasn't looking at her anymore. In fact, he appeared to be looking everywhere but at her, his jaw clenched and his still-gloved hands curled into fists at his sides.

Sighing, Molly walked toward where he was standing, John at his side. "I'm very sorry that things have to be like this between us, Sherlock," she said softly – quiet enough that Stamford and Musgrove wouldn't be able to hear. "But all the same – and whether you like it or not – I'm glad to have been able to help again. I always did like to help."

Sherlock said nothing. Instead, he simply turned sharply away, stalking out of the morgue without a word to anyone and letting the door bang shut loudly behind him.

Molly watched him go, resigned and so unutterably sad that she could barely breathe through it.

"Molly…"

She pressed her lips together, and shook her head at John. "I'm going to get cleaned up," she rasped, the words barely making it past the lump in her throat. Without waiting for him to say anything, she moved past him and headed for the locker room.

John was waiting for her just outside the locker room, back propped against the wall of the corridor and arms crossed over his chest. Molly, lips pressed together tightly, hitched her bag up on her shoulder and gave him a nod. "Walk me out?"

"That was the plan, yeah," he said, his own smile strained.

They fell in step beside one another on their way down the corridor toward the lifts. Neither said anything the entire way up. It wasn't until they had stepped out the front doors and onto the pavement beyond that John turned to her, a determined look in his eyes.

"You shouldn't have left three years ago," he declared hotly.

Molly sighed, shoulders slumping – she was tired of hearing that as well. "You really think I don't…"

"But I think it would be an even bigger mistake for you to leave now."

Her mouth snapped shut and her brows shot up. He had certainly caught her off guard with that rather remarkable statement. "How can you possibly think that? As pleasant as I'm sure he's been this week…I should think that you, of all people, would be glad to see the back of me."

John stepped in toward her, pinning her with an utterly earnest look. "And you, of all people, know him well enough to know what it means that you being here affected him the way that it did. Don't pretend that you don't, Molly."

She looked away, sniffing from the cold. "The only thing I know, John, is that he hasn't forgiven me. That he will never forgive me. I broke his trust and you and I both know that there'll never be any mending it. Honestly? I'm not sure he'd know how to even if he wanted to."

"And what if that was exactly the problem?" He was urgent now, as if he could sense how close Molly was to walking away. "What if he wanted to mend things between you but had no idea how to even begin?"

"John…" her voice broke on his name and she looked away, swallowing hard. "Don't."

She didn't want to hear things like that. Things like that gave rise to hope. And hope…

There was nothing crueler than hope.

"No, Molly, listen to me! I know he's been a total bastard, but it's Sherlock…of course he has! He doesn't know how to be anything else, particularly when he's hurting. And he is hurting, Molly. You must have seen that."

"I can't do this, John."

John growled in frustration before reaching out and grabbing up her hands in his. "Yes, you can. You're one of the strongest women I have ever known and the only person I've ever seen put Sherlock-bloody-Holmes thoroughly and absolutely in his place." He stopped, sighed, his expression turning pained. "I'm sick of seeing my best friend miserable, Molly and seeing you again, well, I'm sorry, but you don't look much better. Please…for both your sakes…at least, try."

Would you…perhaps…let me try?

Sherlock's words from so long ago swam up from the depths of her memory, joining with John's in a nightmarish carousel of guilt and fear and sadness. Shoving it all deep, deep down inside, she pulled her hands away from John's and straightened, looking him square in the eye. "It was good to see you again, John," she said, the words only barely trembling. "Please, give my love to Mary and Emily."

That done, she very coolly turned away and walked toward the curb to hail a cab, pretending all the while that she hadn't seen the disappointment in John's eyes.

Pretending even harder that she didn't feel it herself.