Thank you D, an anonymous guest, saoirse09, JamesJL, barus, rory'sfan04, desnouer, magicstrikes, Kayka, nhaquyen, Sirius7, and Wrider1004 for the reviews so far!
So I have to address something here because I'm not going to be able to cover it otherwise without a POV change to Moriarty's POV. He knows full well about Sherlock's past. He's been stalking Sherlock for a long time and is far too fascinated to have missed unearthing the accident and the consequences of it. But he also knows that despite getting a giggle himself out of killing Molly, he wouldn't actually be hurting Sherlock at all. Because if Sherlock doesn't know what Molly meant to him, then it won't wound him as badly as the deaths of men he considers brothers and a woman he looks at as his mother.
I'd like to figure out a way to put that into the story but I haven't yet figured out how because this is strictly from Molly's point of view, and the parallel fic will be strictly from Sherlock's point of view and there's not much room for that internal monologue that Moriarty would require of me.
Otherwise, I've doled out hugs as requested for Molly and yes.
Enjoy!
Molly tried to be in as good of spirits as she could around him after that. Someone he cared a great deal for had just died, obviously. Though it was her lab, she tried to be invisible in it, to avoid bothering him. Heaven knows she didn't want to even speak to people after she'd had to give Sherlock up five years ago.
He had had to stay at the hospital until his memory stabilized, and his remaining injuries healed over. During that time Mycroft had sent his best, most discreet people to help Molly move out of the flat on Gower street and into a new one—her should-have-been-brother-in-law paid for the new flat and wouldn't hear a word otherwise. Molly hadn't asked about Sherlock's things, knowing that they were being packed away and moved to the Holmes family house until Sherlock was on his feet somehow.
She hadn't had a single conversation that lasted longer than a minute or two for more than a month, instead living a half-life between her new flat and her new job at St. Bartholomew's—it was with this perspective that Molly tried to comfort Sherlock as best she could. She only brought up things which wouldn't have caused her pain—the fun things, the good memories if he had any.
Sherlock commandeered her lab one afternoon, though, a few months later and x-rayed a camera phone.
It wasn't the weirdest thing she'd ever seen Sherlock do in the thirteen years she'd known him. In fact it wasn't even in the top ten—number one being when one night, during a particularly long bender, he had arranged their entire flat by color, construction material, origin of ownership and size while she was asleep. Number two was his rather pleased reaction to this news the next time he was sober.
She had hoped, as she'd asked whose phone it was that it was the phone of one of his clients—that he was on a case. Molly remembered, looking at him sitting so easily in her lab, the one tour they'd taken as students here to Bart's. They'd loved it, and with her hand sitting in the crook of his arm he had promised that they would both work there someday. He would specialize further into criminal forensics, and she would stick to her more generalized pathology and they would be happy. Here they were—and really, they were as happy as they could be in the situation. He had a girlfriend, it seemed, while Molly was still allowed to be near him.
Molly hadn't known he had yet another girlfriend, but it didn't really surprise her. Sherlock could be charming when he wanted to be—and he was only charming with people who could deal with him. Though rare, such people did exist and Sherlock managed to root them out relentlessly.
"You think she's my girlfriend because I'm x-raying her possessions?"
She didn't tell him about the hyper-assortment of their belongings—instead settling for "We all do silly things."
His rationale, years ago once he'd come down from his high, had been that he had to know what needed to be baby-proofed in case of some accident or failure in birth control. He had been such a silly, wonderful man for her and Molly missed him—she was glad that he didn't look over at her, that he didn't see the tears threatening to rise up in her eyes. He was nearly sweet nowadays, and it had only taken five years. Sure, his flatmate John complained that Sherlock was an unfeeling bastard but really Molly knew better. She was in the midst of willing herself to be happy for whatever woman it was that Sherlock had his eye on when something about their conversation changed his entire manner.
"They do, don't they? Very silly…"
The realization slipped into her head within seconds—he was on a case!
It was a complicated situation—and hard to decipher while not inside Sherlock's head—but Molly relaxed as much as she could. He wasn't dating the woman whose phone he had, was actually slightly derisive of the idea and of the woman it seemed. She grimaced, once he was turned to his work once more, at the thought that she'd almost lost him somehow.
The thing with Sherlock was that he got attached to people, and put others to the side once he formed new attachments. One could never really be sure who he would put away, either, as he input new people into his mental list of "tolerables." Molly hoped to always be on that list, even though she was fairly sure that that wasn't truly the case.
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