A gift, and a surprise.
AN: Oh MYLANTA you guys. So my computer is officially dead, and I am currently posting this at the library for you. Because of that I have two whole chapters for you. So hooray, right? I am so sorry this has been so long on this story, but Merry Christmas in July, and I love you all.
xxHoney
Sherlock glares out the window, violin resting down by his side, bow grasped tightly in his hand. The fairy lights wreathing the window are actually giving him a headache, and he wants nothing more than to seclude himself in his room away from all the…festive cheer. He's tried to do so twice, in fact. But every time he makes it half way across the room or into the kitchen, he somehow always ends up on the other end of one of Mrs. Hudson's disapproving glares as if she knows exactly what he's up to. She can be observant at the most inconvenient times, honestly.
"Oh, Sherlock! That was beautiful. I do wish you would wear the antlers, though!" Mrs. Hudson trills, her cheeks ruddy. Sherlock clenches his jaw, tamping down the swell of irritation.
"Some things are best left to the imagination, Mrs. Hudson," he replies curtly, swirling around. His eyes land on the screen of the laptop over Jane's shoulder where she's been sitting doing last minute up-dates to her blog. What's so important that her readers must be informed of right as it happens, he doesn't know, but he notices the hit counter on the page still reads 1895. He almost dismisses the detail, but something sparks in his mind and struggles to ignite. (Maybe —) "Jane!"
"Hm?" she says, getting up from the desk chair and reaching for Mrs. Hudson's empty cider cup.
"The counter on your blog still reads one thousand eight hundred ninety-five."
"What?" she mock-gasps, "Well in that case, cancel Christmas!"
Sherlock frowns at her tone, which is more scathing than normal. She seems to pick up on it too, and grimaces before hastily flicking her gaze away. He knows things have been…difficult between them, their easy loping harmony juddering to a halt. They no longer flowed around each other, each waiting, stilted and awkward for the other to make a move. There was a time when entire conversations could be held with a single glance between them, but now, Sherlock can admit to being constantly bewildered by her expressions, and her half-aborted words and gestures are a mystery. (And he's supposed to be a bloody expert on these things, for chrissake!) He glares back down at the computer screen.
"But it —"
"Give it a rest, Sherlock. Take a day off!" Lestrade says clapping him on the back. "Have a snifter, or two."
"Or seven," mutters Jane, as she hands Mrs. Hudson a replacement glass. Before Sherlock can reply with a scathing comment to either of them, a knock sounds at the door.
"Merry Christmas!" And Sherlock scowls even harder as that whatshisname — Sherman something — bumbles into the flat, tugging off his damp gloves with his teeth like a philistine.
"Who invited you?" Sherlock sneers.
"I did," Jane says, helping the buffoon out of his garish yellow pea coat. "Here, let me take that, Stephen." (Ha! Stephen. What a pathetically common name. Knew it started with an 'S'.)
"Ho-Ho-Ho! I brought wine!" he says jovially, holding up said vintage, cheeks ruddy and smile much too jolly for him not to be taken as an imbecile.
"Oh! Are we having our Christmas drinkies, then? Sorry I'm late," says Molly, entering right behind Mr. Holiday Glee. She hands off her winter coat to Jane as well, revealing a form-fitted black number with thin straps and glittering beaded appliqué atop the bosom.
Mr. Christmas Cheer ogles and nearly drops the wine, and even Lestrade has to close his mouth.
"W-Would you like some wine, Miss? Or some spiced cider?" Mr. Yuletide Spirit (it is here when Sherlock realises he's suddenly picked up Jane's penchant for tawdry nicknames, and cringes) stammers inelegantly. "Or perhaps you would like to start with —"
"Maybe you should start with her name," Sherlock scathes, loosening his violin bow with a savage twist of the screw. The inanity surrounding him on all sides makes his skin crawl.
"Sherlock —" Jane warns.
The two Clandestine Turtledoves (oh god it won't stop) blush, and fumble over awkward introductions, and polite small talk, and it's all so precious Sherlock just wants to vomit.
"Why don't I take this and let it breathe for a bit, yeah? That way you can…get to know each other," Jane says, taking the wine with a smug glint to her eye. Sherlock slams the lid of his violin case shut with a snap. (She planned this, he just knows it.)
"So, er, Miss Hooper — it is Miss, correct?"
"Oh, god," Sherlock bemoans.
"Yes…just Miss," Molly says, setting the paper bag she brought at her feet. She subtly tries to scoot it behind the red armchair, which only causes it to topple over, brightly coloured packages spilling across the floor. "Oh dear —"
The pristine red one catches his eye almost immediately, and the deductions snap into place so fast it's like breathing too much oxygen at one time. His mind has literally been rotting away, desperate for any kind of stimulation, that he pounces on the token thread with a malicious alacrity even by his standards.
"What do we have here?" Sherlock says scooping up the present before she has a chance to do so.
"Sherlock —" Molly says, eyes wide.
"I wouldn't get too cosy, there Sheldon —"
"It's Stephen."
"— It's obvious Molly already has a boyfriend, and that she's seeing him this very night, in fact."
"Sherlock," Jane says sharply.
But Sherlock is picking up steam now, the pieces slotting into place like the tumblers of a lock, and it's all so crystal clear.
"And it's quite serious, too, judging by the gift you bought him," he says, examining the package. "Surely you've all noticed the attention she's given to this one in particular, whereas the others are slapdash at best. Perfectly creased corners, pretty bow, and a shade of red that echoes her lipstick. Whether or not that was a conscious decision on her part, the association in clear: our Miss Molly Hooper has lurrrve on the mind."
"Sherlock."
Sherlock ignores Jane, and steps even closer to Molly, where she shifts in her too-tight Manolo Blahniks, an embarrassed flush creeping up her neck. He shoots Stephen a look, thoroughly enjoying his poleaxed expression and what's about to come. "The fact she's serious about him is clear in that she is giving him a gift at all, you see. Semiotics 101. It's evident she's seeing him tonight from her makeup and what she's wearing," he fiddles with the gift tag, flipping it open, "False eyelashes, an exorbitant amount of eye shadow, shimmering lipstick and sparkling evening gown, blatant compensation for the size of her mouth and breasts…" and freezes dead in his tracks when he actually registers the name penned inside the innocent looking label.
Dearest Sherlock,
Merry Christmas.
Molly xxx
"You – you always say such h-horrible things," Molly says into the thunderclap of silence.
He swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat, and finally glances up. Her brown doe-like eyes brim with tears, lips trembling, and all at once white hot shame engulfs him. She heaves a breath. "Always."
Molly's shattered expression punches him in the chest, and suddenly it's someone else's face superimposed over hers, broken and betrayed, and horribly, horribly hurt.
"You can't just leave well enough alone, can you?" Jane had shouted at him, the pain and fury coming off of her in waves after he razed her to the ground with his deductions that day in the art gallery. It was something his own foolish hubris fell for time and time again, and it's too similar that even Jane could realise the connection. To attempt to backpedal now would be just as disastrous, knowing his unrepentant callousness was what almost ended them.
Maybe he's masochistic, but he forces himself to meet Jane's gaze, prepared for the disappointment he knows he deserves. Instead, what he gets is…another unreadable mask. Which is ten times worse. He swallows through the sudden burning wanting nothing more than to turn away, escape to some quiet dark alley and —
He turns back to Molly. "I am sorry," he says, unable to focus on anything but the gift in his hands. "Forgive me. Merry Christmas…Molly Hooper." He smoothes down the bow, and kisses her on the cheek…
"Unnh!"
Sherlock's gut squirms at the sound, because for whatever reason, the bloody universe has decided this moment isn't bad enough.
"Oh!" Molly stammers, turning as crimson as Christmas tinsel. "That wasn't me! I – I didn't —"
Sherlock closes his eyes reaching for his pocket. "No, it was me."
"My God, really?" Stephen gapes.
"It was my phone," Sherlock snaps, opening the new text message.
Xx – 8:36 PM
Mantelpiece.
"Fifty-seven," Jane says quietly, and Sherlock jumps. He didn't hear her sidling closer, probably due to the odd rushing noise in his ears.
"What?" Sherlock says. He spots a small red box with black bow sitting next to his skull, and his heart plummets.
"Fifty-seven text messages," Jane repeats in a flat voice.
"Yeah," he says, distracted, and manoeuvres around her towards the mantle. "Excuse me."
The rushing in his ears increases ten-fold as he carries the small box back into his bedroom. The weight in correlation to its size only confirms the contents of the package, and opening it is only a detail.
Still, his hand shakes when he takes the black camera phone out of it tissue paper bedding, dread making it hard to think.
For a second, there is nothing but static in his head, and he lets it fill him up, reveling in the thundering blankness before the fallout that he knows is going to happen, happens.
He walks over to his window and with numb fingers dials a familiar number, forgoing the speed dial.
"Good lord. We're not going to have Christmas phone calls now, are we? Have they passed a new law?" Mycroft says, and his typical disdain somewhat a relief in this surreal moment of his.
"You're going to find Irene Adler tonight," he says.
"We already know where she is. And as you were so kind to point out, it hardly matters."
Sherlock closes his eyes. "No. I meant you're going to find her dead."
"Sherlock?" Jane says from his doorway, and Sherlock hangs up the phone. "Everything okay?"
He turns around, and the look on her face is more honest and open than he's seen in a fortnight, concern etching its way around her eyes and mouth. It's too much, and he clenches his hands into fists.
"Fine," he says. She steps closer, and the scent of her clears the fog from his mind slightly. She smells like spices from the cider, and that almond bread she's been helping Mrs. Hudson bake all day, and in this moment he feels closer to her than he has in a long while. His strings feel cut all of a sudden, and he leans his forehead against hers.
"Sherlock…?" she whispers, freezing for a moment, and he realises how this must be a mistake — a liberty he's not longer privy to. He goes to pull away, but she stops him at the last second, a tentative hand smoothing up his chest to rest on the back of his neck.
"I have to — I want to —" he breaks off, not knowing what or how to say what needs to be said in order to repair the rift growing between them.
"What? Sherlock what is it?"
Before he can answer, his phone rings, and he squeezes his eyes shut, trying desperately to repress a shudder. Reluctantly, he pulls away, and answers.
"Mycroft."
"Jane Doe brought into St. Mary's earlier this evening. I'm having the body moved to St. Bartholomew's," Mycroft relays. "No one has come forward to identify her."
He lets the information wash over him, his limbs growing cold. He tries to anchor himself with Jane's warm gaze, the familiar bursts of gold and green rallying him somewhat. "I'll be there."
...
An hour later, he's stood in the morgue staring down at a body covered with a stark white sheet.
"You didn't have to come, Molly," he says, willing his tongue to work around the bulky words.
"No, it's fine," she says playing with the hem of one of her familiar frumpy cat jumpers, the black dress and lipstick abandoned. "Everyone else was busy with…er, Christmas." She clears her throat. "Now, just to warn you, the face is sort of bashed up so…"
She lowers the sheet, and the mottled swollenness and broken bones hardly register. At this point, this body could be anybody, and it would be foolish to jump to conclusions. (He doesn't realise he's holding his breath, and when he does he tries to let it out quietly through his nose. Mycroft, of course, still notices.)
"That's her, isn't it?" Mycroft asks, jolting him back to the present he seems to be trying so hard to retreat from.
"Show me the rest of her," he says. Molly looks at him in confusion before folding the sheet back down below her knees. He lets his eyes rove clinically down the length of her body.
When she was standing there in front of him in that parlour, he forced himself to keep looking at her face. However, there was something he couldn't help but notice —
— and there it is now. That peculiar birthmark shaped like a rose bud just left of her navel. (That's it, then.)
"That's her," he says, and turns away, headed for the exit. Never has the morgue felt so oppressive before…so empty.
"Who is she? And how does Sherlock know her from…not her face?" he hears Molly ask just before the door shuts.
The corridor is dark and quiet, and the moon, shining silver through the window. He steps into the pool of light expecting it to feel as cold as it looks, but of course it doesn't. The snow continues to fall outside, covering the ground in silence, glittering like stars under gas street lamps. It's beautiful out there, but in here it's ugly. He didn't use to think so, but now he is on the other side of the table, as it were. He never imagined it, but he thinks he is supposed to feel something other that this buzzing numbness in his fingertips and a lead weight in his gut.
What does this mean, that the final link to his past — to who he used to be — is gone? As existentially maudlin as it sounds, he wonders who this makes him now.
Of all the death he's witnessed and taken part of, never has he felt so directly responsible as he does now. Even in cases where he wasn't quick enough or smart enough, he'd never felt like such an abject failure in the absence of someone else's life. Maybe because from the moment he met Irene Trevor he recognised her for what she was: a wealth of potential. And it was exciting for him in his youth to have some one absolutely resonate right along with you. (And if he were to admit it, it was just as exciting seeing her again after all this time.) She is his compliment in every way.
Was. Christ.
"Here," Mycroft says from behind him, a cigarette extended over his shoulder. He reaches to take it, but Mycroft holds it aloft. "Just the one, mind."
"Why?" he says, and Mycroft finally hands it to him.
"Merry Christmas?" he says, flicking on his lighter for him.
Sherlock faces him with a grunt, inhaling the sticky acrid smoke. The ashy burn feels wonderful, and ironically, he feels as if he can breathe for the first time since coming here.
"For what it's worth —"
"Don't," he bites out, stopping that dreadful conversation before it could manifest.
Mycroft's lips thin, and it's clear he wants to say something more, but after a moment he inclines his head and taps out another cigarette for himself. He blows out a long smoking stream, absently picking a fleck of tobacco from his lip.
"Smoking indoors. Isn't that one of those…law things?" Sherlock says when the silence begins to feel too smothering.
"We're in a morgue, there's only so much damage you can do," he says, a grin hovering in the corner of his normally starched lips. All things considered, it's as close to compassion as he gets. Sherlock turns away, not quite sure what to do with himself if Mycroft gets it into his head toconsole him. Thankfully, Mycroft doesn't attempt anything of the sort and instead asks, "How did you know she was dead?"
"There was an item in her possession, one she said her life depended on. She chose to give it up," Sherlock says flicking ash against the window pane.
"And where is this item now?"
A murmur of voices sounds from further down the corridor, and the brothers turn their heads toward the noise. A couple stand in front of the viewing glass, their expressions visible through the sliver of window on the other side of the door.
Sherlock can see the moment just before recognition: the desperate hope that who ever is under the cloth is a stranger, and the worst night of their lives need not happen this night of all nights. But indeed it is, and identical hopes are crushed, crumpling into visceral sorrow as they turn into one another, clinging to each other as their whole world shifts on its axis. A sob tears itself from the woman, its muffled echo bouncing off indifferent concrete walls while her husband sets his jaw attempting to remain stoic. She collapses under her grief, her mouth working around some sort of plea (a name?) too steeped in despair to be heard with any clarity.
Sherlock turns away before he can deduce anything more, automatically forcing his heart to stop its ridiculous, sympathetic staccato.
"Do you ever think something is wrong with us?" he asks, taking another healthy draught from his fag.
"Well it depends. Whose standards are you basing this on? Ours? Or theirs?" Mycroft queries. "Look at them. They all care so much. It's really a rather messy affair, don't you think?"
"And you can live with that, can you?" asks Sherlock without rancour.
Mycroft shrugs. "All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."
Sherlock turns back toward the peaceful world outside, and they spend the next few minutes in silence, staring out at the snow. Sherlock takes one last puff of cigarette, and looks down at it curiously.
"What ever happened to 'low tar?'" he says, arching an eyebrow.
"Well…she was more than just an acquaintance, that woman. I thought the occasion called for it."
Sherlock grunts again, and stubs it out against the steel grey wall. Without looking 'round he makes his way to the exit, that utter coldness already creeping back into his bones.
"Merry Christmas, Mycroft," he says, and pushes his way out into the silent night.