Author's Notes: Finally, an update! This is only a short update, and I can't promise the next update will take less time than this one did, but I hope you enjoy this little chapter anyway.
From: Molly Hooper to Sherlock Holmes, 18 November 1940.
Dearest Sherlock,
If it makes you happy to know, you made me cry again. Your words are so potent, you see. However many letters we exchange. They're kind of… Well, they're like a warm fire on a cold winter night. A horrid metaphor I know, but I am not a poet. Neither of us are poets. It is a special creature who can weave words into rhyme, isn't it? As you say, you are not designed to "cherish" things. You analyse things instead. You solve problems, save others. For that, I'm glad. I don't want a man who sighs into my ear about how much he loves me. I don't want a sweetheart. I had that – and I gave it up.
By the way, I picked up your Belstaff from your flat before I went off to work. Mrs Hudson greeted me with her gift of the promised knitted scarf. It's pink, happily. (She knows me!) She persuaded me to sit down to a cup of tea while I was there, and I managed to have a good look at her cupboards when she wasn't looking. She's got a hell of a stockpile now. She'll get into trouble one day because of it! When I told her of your gift of the Belstaff she cooed and insisted I try it on in front of her. It isn't an exact fit (okay, so that's a slight understatement – the hem nearly goes down to my ankles) but I can see why you like it so much! With the coat tails flapping out behind me, I feel very dramatic. Like I can conquer the world.
I am settling in well to work. I can't go into too much detail, sadly, so I'll just say it's hard, the work – I'm rushed off my feet – and it's often difficult to be cheerful but we manage. Jokes, is mostly how we manage, along with stories of how we came to be there. It's during the breaks in shifts that we're able to talk in detail together. There's one girl, Daisy, who is very sweet. She's quite short, like me, but her hair is a shocking blonde. I got quite a surprise when I first saw it as she always covers it with a large headscarf. (She told me she's scared she'll get her hair caught in the machinery.) She came to the munitions factory after her husband went to war. And she's so young. Sometimes she looks so lost among all the heavy machinery that we have to use. But then I see her work! So often I look at the work the other girls do, like Daisy, and the gravity of it all, of the work – well, none of us can underestimate it.
All this work makes me remember the last case we took on. Before all of this started. I suppose I'll be wrong on the details, but I remember it was at first about a stolen brooch. John was on his honeymoon. Or, as you made a point of calling it, a 'Sex Holiday'. And with the Holmes & Watson combination on hold for the next few weeks, you enlisted my help. Our search for that brooch sent us pretty much all over London. Down alleyways, across bridges. (Even onto a few roofs!) We trekked and we ran. Eventually we managed to find the brooch and the jewellery smugglers that had stolen it but all throughout – it was exhilarating. Nothing like I expected. And in knowing you, I've come to expect it all and more.
You know, people have called the ways I love others "odd". Not odd bad, but apparently I love in an unconventional way? Essentially, I don't shout it from the rooftops. I don't wear a giant smile; I don't wax lyrical for days on end. I keep my emotions tightly wrapped with a laugh and a joke. Maybe a blush. Here or there. But I'm not ashamed of that fact. That is part of me. I am quiet. I do shrink into corners, into the shadows. Loving you has been like that but it's also been so different. I've had years of quashing my feelings, years of hoping they'd fade. That only served to make them grow.
I was honestly content to live with them. I was content to live with those feelings buried away; others have done it, not hard for me to do it. So it is a strange transition to take, the one we've taken, this transition from friendship to love. I am happy, so indescribably happy, to read your words and know that every single one is true; to know that you love me, yet we've been friends for so long. On my worst days, I fear this will be snuffed out when you come home. That we won't know how to express what we've already said, and it'll trickle back to the old routine. Then I read your words from all your letters and I know – somehow – that it won't. Don't ask me how I know. There are some things that can never be explained. Like how Hemingway always seems to attract the most boring people.
Or love. Love is a big thing Sherlock. Treating love as a concept is nothing to be ashamed of. People have spent their whole lives trying to quantify it and make sense of it. Hell, I'm still trying to understand it. Just as soon as I think I do, something happens to change it. To shift my view. You, for instance. You've confused me more than any man ever has.
Come Christmas, you'll have the chance to make up for that, I'm sure.
Yours,
Molly.
