I won't be keeping this diary anymore. It was all a lie….

Molly pushed her chair away from the desk and stared for a moment or two at the ceiling tiles. Everything had all gone so horribly wrong, and she wasn't sure how she felt, except that she missed Jim, still. Maybe she should still be angry. Maybe a normal person would shake their fists and scream. All she felt now was the kind of emptiness that comes when all the tears have dried up. It bordered on apathy, but Molly Hooper was never apathetic. If anything, she felt too much. So this was a new experience for her, this hollow in her chest where her feelings should have been.

She had done a little digging when she had decided to pull herself up off the sofa, and what she found was…nothing. Trying to find Jim was like trying to hold the wind in your hands. There were signs of him everywhere, but in the end, she came up with nothing. His boss seemed to accept that he would no longer be coming in to work, and asked Molly if she knew how to get in touch with him. For some reason, the computer couldn't come up with any record of him, but they owed him his last check, and needed to know where to send it.

The ladies in the canteen wondered why they never saw him together with her anymore, and could swear that he had just been in on his own, but come to think of it, wasn't it at kind of an odd time for his shift? Maybe he'd just dropped in on his own time? The pillow he had clutched to himself while watching her favorite shows with her still smelled of him, and the scuffmark was still on her baseboard where he had kicked off his shoes upon entering her flat. Evidence of him everywhere, all of it telling her he had been very real, but still he had vanished like he never existed. She couldn't reach him by phone, she couldn't get through to him with the internet, and she suspected she would find no sign of him at any of "their spots".

First Molly had spent a good deal of time beating herself up. And when she had finished with that, she spent a little bit of time being angry and sad. And then the void filled her up and she felt nothing. Clearly she had never meant that much to him if he could just disappear this way, so why should she feel anything at all for him? Life fell back into its familiar cadence, her friends rarely mentioned him, though they really needn't have feared for her feelings, and work became her world again. Sometimes she would hear a voice on the television or catch a face out of the corner of her eye that would remind her of him, but that was less and less frequent as the days and weeks marched on. Slowly, she let go of Jim completely and hardly ever thought about him at all.

When her thoughts did turn that way, it was more as a sort of melancholy reflection. Jim was a good man. Those were hard to find. He was funny, and attractive, and they had a good time together. For a long time Molly had thought that finding somebody like him would have been the icing on the cake. Her life was supposed to be complete when she found somebody like that. So why didn't she feel like she'd lost more? She stared at her bedroom ceiling for an hour before her alarm went off one day, thinking the same thoughts over and over until finally the shrill sound demanded her attention. She threw her pillow at it and got into the shower.

Who needed a man anyway? She was fine on her own. She had a great job, her own place and roommate that never left wet towels on the floor or ate her food (sure, she found the occasional hairball…), her friends had been there for her through everything, and she had the freedom to do what she liked, when she liked. The air was brisk as she made her way to work, still mulling things over. Maybe a relationship would just complicate things. Even a man as simple and low-key as Jim might have just mucked it all up.

She was smiling slightly to herself as she finished an autopsy on a rather young gentleman, having come to the conclusion that she was fine on her own. A good man? Ha! Was there such a thing, anyway? She straightened up and brushed a bit of hair from the body's forehead. Maybe he had been a good man, she mused as a technician rolled the corpse back to refrigeration. Molly sighed and threw her gloves in the biohazard bin. She knew she was kidding herself. There were good men in the world, she knew a few of them. Her father, Greg Lestrade, and John Watson, just to start. Dependable, trustworthy, predictable. But she knew she wasn't looking for a good man. She needed somebody great. Somebody with a mind she could lose endless hours exploring, somebody with talents she could admire and learn from, somebody who didn't live their life in a rut, like a skipping record. It didn't matter how much you like the song, you don't really want to hear the same verse over and over again. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose against the sudden sting of some rather pungent chemicals as she entered the lab. A familiar baritone surprised her from just next to the door. "Molly, I think you and I could be of mutual advantage to each other." Damn that Sherlock Holmes. He had no idea.


So it took me quite a bit longer to get that last chapter done that I anticipated, and for that I apologize. I think part of me really didn't want to get to the end. Of course, we all knew there was only so much story to be told and it had to happen. I wish I could keep this going forever. If anybody has any ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears! Please review, I LIVE for reviews. I've been so lucky to have you all with me while I've been writing! Thank you thank you!