Okay everyone! I am infinitely sorry for the delay. I lost my muse for this story, and then I was gone travelling for several weeks, and only now upon returning has the urge to write struck me again. Thank you for all your support and kind reviews. Hope you enjoy.
Three years.
Three years pass.
After that night, that night where everything slipped sideways and he'd kissed her on the sofa, kissed her for real, she hadn't known what to think or what to do. She'd stayed there, frozen in place, her lips still tingling from the pressure his mouth had exerted on her own, hard and fast and hungry. She could still feel his hands under the crook of her knees, pulling her against him, his touch like ice on her burning skin. But then his hands had pulled away, and his mouth had left hers, and he'd bolted through the door, leaving it open in his wake. Minutes or hours later, she'd finally pulled herself up off of the sofa and put herself to bed, her head still reeling, the image of his eyes looking into hers still haunting her as she fell asleep.
In the morning, when she'd opened her eyes half hopeful that it had all been just a dream, he was still gone. And continued to be, every morning after.
For the first few weeks, she finds herself constantly checking over her shoulder, looking for a shadowy figure in a long jacket trailing behind her, watching her every move. She studies faces on the tube, on the bus, on the street – looking under hats and mustaches and hooded sweatshirts to see those high cheekbones, that porcelain skin that she knew so well. But that man in the jacket behind her on her way to work is nearly fifty years old with a paunch bulging through the lines of his long coat, and the face shadowed by a hat on the Victoria line is an octogenarian, laugh lines and wrinkles criss-crossing his time-worn features.
Sometimes, late into her shift, the door to the morgue will open and she will turn to face the newcomer, fully expecting to see that oh-so-familiar figure walk through the door, tall and quick and confident, already barking out a request before he even enters the room. Her heart always skips a beat, but falters when she realizes it's the lab technician returning a sample to her, or a doctor coming in to check on results, or a janitor entering to clear the rubbish bins.
She slowly lets Edmund Mortimer fall out of her life. She mentions less and less 'dates' with him to her mother, and gradually lets it slip that Edmund is considering a move to Melbourne, to take up a new position at a local hospital and in order to be closer to his aging mother and stepfather.
"Surely you can find a job there as well, Molly? Australia must also have need of pathologists; people die everywhere, you know."
This surprises Molly. Her mother had never been keen on letting her daughter move too far away – but Australia was somehow okay? Madelaine must like Edmund more than she thought... (but didn't everyone just love Edmund? What with those eyes, and that mouth, and that smile, that beautiful smile...)
Molly shrugs. "I – I don't want to go to Melbourne. I like my job here..." she says, her voice faltering at the end, willing herself to follow this deception through.
Her mother only grimaces and shakes her head, and two weeks later, Edmund Mortimer "boards" a Qantas flight for Melbourne, leaving England for a place halfway around the world.
Months pass. Winter comes back to London, with a chill in the air and the appearance of the heavy winter windbreakers she always associates with the change in the season, signalling the end of yet another year. She spends her days and her nights alone, watching films and reading books that remind her of him, detective novels where the hero always saves the day and evil is always vanquished.
One of the endocrinologists from St. Bart's asks her out on a date in February, and when she can't quite think of an excuse quickly enough, she accepts, meeting him two nights later at restaurant in Shoreditch. He is kind and witty and handsome enough, but when he leans in to kiss her at the end of the night, all she can see behind her closed eyes is Sherlock, leaning in, his lips on hers, pulling her closer to him.
She doesn't see the endocrinologist again.
A year after the fall, she meets John for coffee, the first time she's seen him since that last run-in, so many months ago.
The tabloids have all been featuring stories about the anniversary of the great consulting detective's suicide, follow-ups about his lies and his deceits and his failures. It hurts her heart to see him shamed so publicly, to see how devastatingly complete Moriarty's destruction of Sherlock Holmes has become.
John is positively bristling with anger when she meets him outside the Liverpool Street station. "Look at them all," he mutters as they walk along the road, "reading that trash. They don't know anything." His body is tense, so tense – like a elastic stretched to its limits, taught to point of snapping.
She touches his arm lightly, and she can feel some of that tension pour into her, and she can feel the anger the doctor feels too, nearly tangible between them. "It's Moriarty, John," she tells him softly. "Moriarty did this."
John's mouth only takes on a hard line, jaws clenched in an expression of both deep anger and remarkable self-control, and they walk onwards to their destination in silence, both of them trying so hard to keep their emotions in check.
Sometimes at night she swears she can feel in him in her flat, right when she wakes up, as if his presence in one of her dreams has brought him back here in real life, bringing him back home.
But when she opens her eyes, the room is always empty, just her and Toby alone in the dead of the night.
The days and the weeks and the months roll on, like rocks on the edge of the hill, slow at first then picking up speed, crashing onwards through time.
Mrs. Hudson finally manages to rent out the basement suite, after months of renovations plagued by delays (several of her contractors quit immediately and without warning after Sherlock's 'demise', leaving her in the lurch). The older woman finally works things out with a butcher down the road, and takes a long trip in Florida that does not end in a homicide case involving her travel companion. 221B stays the same as always, the rent continued to be paid by Mycroft, who seems to find solace in the continuation of some small part of his brother, even if it is only through his books and furniture and half-finished experiments. John still can't bear to return to the flat, eventually relocating to a lovely flat in Muswell Hill with his new fiancé, a beautiful young lawyer named Mary Morstan.
Molly feels left behind by it all, as if time is moving everyone forward but her, leaving only Molly Hooper stuck in its wake. Nothing in her life changes, really. She gets up, goes to work, eats her meals, goes home, goes to bed. She takes little holidays to Majorca and Rhodes and Nantes, and comes back home pretty much exactly the same as when she left. She meets some men, goes on dates, but she can never seem to make it work past two or three months, letting relationships passively fall to the side. Her mother seems to have given up hope for her daughter's potential matrimonial success, and slowly stops arranging dates and asking questions about Molly's romantic life.
Sometimes she wishes that he had actually died. Sometimes she thinks that it would be easier if she knew he was actually dead, a lifeless body buried in the ground or reduced to ashes. If she knew he was dead (like John and Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade confidently believe), perhaps then she would be able to move on, grieving and bargaining and coming to terms with all that had gone on. Instead, she lives every day with the smallest grain of hope that the next man around the corner, the next figure half hidden on the train is Sherlock Holmes, coming home once more.
The name Sebastian Moran haunts her still. She can still hear his voice in her flat that night so long ago, telling her it was all about Moran, the former Army colonel, Moriarty's right-hand man. Is Sherlock still looking for him? Did he find him and fail to succeed? Or is he still looking, lost at the far ends of the earth?
She is staring at an ad on the bus for Morocco when she thinks of this again, wondering if Sherlock had made it to the rolling dunes and crystal waters of the North African country. She smiles slightly to herself, imagining him there, alabaster skin reddening under the harsh sun-
Her reverie is broken as a man stumbles onto her, reeking of cheap whiskey and covered in filth. She wrinkles her nose as she slips past him, even as he mumbles a barely comprehensible apology. She hits the buzzer for the next stop and moves to the door, pulling her jacket closer around her as she prepares to head out into the chilly London night.
The bus pulls up to the stop and she steps out, moving quickly down the road towards her flat two streets away. She doesn't like this walk at night, especially on a Friday, when drunken youngsters and bored teenagers make their way up and down the pavement in the late hours of the evening.
She makes it around the first corner when her foot catches on the edge of the kerb and she stumbles, pushing out her hands to arrest her fall. Her knee slams against the ground and she cries out in pain, collapsing.
A hand grasps onto her back, and she looks up to see the drunk from the bus looking down at her, swaying on the spot as he reaches his other hand down to her. "Ne-need some 'elp, miss?" he slurs , and she reluctantly takes the offered hand to bring herself upright again.
The instant she is on her feet again she lets his hand go, pulling her purse strap higher onto her shoulder and taking a slight step back. "Th-thank you," she says softly, before turning to leave, her heart beating furiously in her chest.
"Need to be more careful, miss," he mutters, waggling a finger at her, taking a step closer to her.
"I will," she answers, before backing up another step. She can feel the wall of the building behind her approach her back, only a couple steps behind her. Her pulse quickens, and she fights to suppress her instinct to panic.
He takes another step towards her, and she steps back again, and suddenly the wall is at her back, and her breath catches at her throat, and she doesn't know what to do. The drunk leans forward towards her and presses his hands down on either side of her, and she means to scream, but her vocal chords won't work, nothing works.
"Please, no," she manages to croak out, and she can feel his breath on her throat, so close now.
"You need to be more careful," she hears in her ear, and suddenly the slur is gone, replaced by a crisp and cool voice that is hauntingly familiar.
"Wh-what?" she stutters, her heart leaping into her throat at the feeling of recognition that builds inside of her.
"You are being watched, Molly," he whispers into her ear, and she knows that voice, would know it anywhere.
"Sherlock?" she breathes, turning her head slightly and meeting a very familiar pair of clear, blue eyes.