A/N: Guess who did some painting yesterday! I did all the woodwork, like a good girl, and I'm not all out of masking tape. Anyway, I'm posting this, and waiting for the gloss to dry so I can start chucking emulsion everywhere. I have a rule though. I want to get out the last chapter even more than you guys want to read it. So I'm not going to post it until I have finished painting that godforsaken room. Hopefully that means that I'll be updating fairly late tonight. If not tonight, then definitely tomorrow. However. I can't do anything until the gloss is dry. Which means I have a few hours to kill. Which means I'll be working on a one-shot companion piece which will be posted tomorrow night. If it's finished. As ever, thank you so much for your wonderful reviews. I hope you like this chapter.

Schoolgirl Crush

by Flaignhan

He is lying across her sofa, repeatedly tossing Molly's bangle up into the air and catching it. She watches it glint in the light as it spins, and her eyes follow it back down to his hands, which enclose around it. She's had it for years, but every now and then it'll disappear for a few weeks. She wore it religiously throughout her student days, back when chunky tarnished silver was cool, and she sometimes wears it now, if the occasion calls for it and she can actually find it.

"I've met someone."

Molly's heart sinks.

"A girl?" she asks, trying to keep her voice casual.

"No," Sherlock turns to look at her, frowning. From the tone of his voice, he may as well have asked her if she were mad. "A man."

Well she hadn't seen that one coming. Or maybe she had. He'd always been very well dressed after all.

"How long have you been seeing him?"

"I'm not seeing him," Sherlock responds impatiently. "This isn't a romantic liaison, this is professional."

Molly's heart swells a little. Professional is fine. Professional she can deal with. Professional is a-okay with her.

"We're going to look at a flat together tomorrow. I need a better base."

Molly can't help but laugh.

"What?" Sherlock asks, sitting up at last and facing her, his fingers still enclosed around the bangle. "What's funny?"

"Holmes HQ?"

"Don't mock me."

"You do it to me often enough."

Sherlock narrows his eyes for a moment, but apparently concedes that Molly has a point. He settles himself back onto the sofa and starts launching the bangle into the air again. "It's in Baker Street."

"Right," Molly says, casting her mind to the tube map which is engraved on one small corner of her brain. After a moment she realises that it's just a few stops away, and that it will be just as easy to visit him there, as opposed to in Islington.

"He's a doctor," Sherlock adds as though this settles the matter.

"Good." She doesn't know what else to say.

When Sherlock throws on his coat, an hour later, Molly knows that things are going to be different from now on. He's seizing his independence with vigour, and she's happy for him, she really is. She's just going to miss him.

"I can't believe you thought it was a woman," Sherlock says, pulling his scarf around his neck.

Molly smiles.

"I've got enough in my life already, what with you and Mycroft."

With that, he is gone, and Molly is left on the sofa, staring dumbfounded at the closed door.

"New jumper?"

Molly braces herself for a torrent of criticism. "Yes."

"It's rather nice. For you."

"Almost," Molly says. "So close."

Sherlock looks up from the microscope and meets her eye. "What?"

"You almost managed a compliment. Tripped up at the last minute. Just couldn't help yourself, could you?"

"Well it's not my fault that you usually dress like someone with a severe visual impairment."

Molly slams down her beaker. "Not fair!"

"It's true," Sherlock shrugs, lowering his eyes to the microscope once more, his fingertips fiddling gently with the dial.

Molly huffs. "If you think I'm getting you access to the DeVere corpse now..."

Sherlock laughs, and Molly scowls. "Empty threat, Molly. Empty threat."

She knows he is right, and sure enough, when the time comes for her to do the DeVere autopsy, he has made her a cup of tea and told her that her hair looks particularly nice today. All the while of course, he is standing far too close, the scent of his aftershave intoxicating, awakening the fifteen year old inside of her - the fifteen year old that would not mind one little bit if he decided to mess up that particularly nice hair of hers today. Or any day, come to think of it.

The Jim debacle is something she'd rather forget. She is completely humiliated, and left with one question: What the fuck is she supposed to do now?

She tried. She really honestly fucking tried to have a proper relationship with someone, tried to find some sort of happiness, but Sherlock, being Sherlock, naturally had to ruin it. He was far too smug when he broke the news to her, far too happy that she would have to break it off, and far too disgustingly content that she was single the next time he saw her.

"How's Jim?" he had asked, dropping half a dozen test tubes into a rack.

"Fuck off."

She had looked at him later, and saw he was positively beaming. She had never wanted to punch him so much in all her life.

She is still a little disconcerted about the whole thing. Ice cream keeps her company, along with trashy TV and the messy love lives (or reproductive lives) of the guests on Jeremy Kyle. She can take some comfort in the fact that she's not sitting in that studio, scowling at an audience who are there, like she is, to make themselves feel better.

When there is a knock at the door, Molly mooches over, blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She doesn't care who sees her in her old jogging bottoms, with her hair tied up in the messiest of messy buns.

And then she opens the door, and there he is.

Scratch that last, there's one person who she doesn't want to see her in jogging bottoms with messy hair. And as bollocking bad luck would have it, he is the man standing in her doorway. He thrusts a box at her and Molly takes it, her blanket dropping to the floor and pooling around her feet. He walks past her and into the flat, throws open the curtains, switches off the television, and puts the ice cream back in the freezer.

"Chocolate will increase your serotonin levels more than ice cream. And sunlight wouldn't go amiss either." He tugs the curtains open roughly then turns to face Molly.

Molly stands there, staring down at the obscenely large box of Thornton's Continental chocolates he has brought for her.

"I'm sorry you got involved but what's done is done. I'll see you tomorrow."

He is gone in a heartbeat, leaving Molly in her joggers with enough chocolate to last her at least five minutes. She sighs, puts the chocolates down, tosses the blanket onto the sofa, and then goes to run herself a bath.

He's right of course. As always.

The more confidence he gets, the more independence, the more he realises that he doesn't need to fall on Molly, the crueller he is to her. She puts the disastrous Christmas incident to one side. Gives him his pardon just this once, because he apologised, and more than that, he apologised with an audience. But still, she gets brushed aside these days.

Not for the first time, she feels like she has wasted far too much on Sherlock Holmes.

It is to her surprise when he comes in, one night in February, without John, just as she's finishing.

"I need to go home," she tells him. "I'm really tired. It'll have to wait until morning."

"No, I'm not here for anything, I just thought I'd walk you home, seeing as it's late."

Molly frowns. There is something quiet, subdued about him. She has no idea what to make of it, but permits him to escort her through the corridors.

"I got carried away," he says, as they dawdle along the street. She's not used to him dawdling. She's used to be dragged along by her wrist, used to her toes trying to grip onto her pumps for dear life. She's not used to this slow stroll that he has adopted tonight.

"With what?" she asks.

"With everything."

He's not making sense, and so Molly waits for him to continue.

"I've been neglectful," he continues. "Of you."

Molly raises her eyebrows, but says nothing. She will not assume a damn thing because assumption and Sherlock do not go together. Unless you're making the assumption that he is, more often than not, a complete and utter prick.

"I try to forget everything that happened. I can't remember half of it anyway, if I'm honest. But the rest...I try to delete it. And by extension, I end up deleting everything you did."

"That's okay," Molly mumbles. "I understand."

"No," he says sharply. "It's not." He stops walking, though Molly takes a few more steps before she realises. She turns around to see him, looking more human than she has ever seen him.

"Sherlock..."

"Molly, I'm clean. I'm alive. I'm better."

Molly nods. "I know."

"There's no way in hell I could have done that without you. When everyone else had given up..." he stops talking and casts his eyes up at the sky, his chest swelling as he inhales deeply. "Mycroft had practically written my obituary. I know that."

"Sherlock this was years ago..."

"And I never said thank you. I thought it was long overdue."

"It's okay. I just...did what I thought was right."

Sherlock opens his mouth, but then reconsiders his words. Molly waits patiently.

"Have you had dinner?"

Molly shrugs. "I had a packet of -"

"Monster Munch," Sherlock finishes. "I noticed."

With four simple words he can make her paranoid. It seems silly, to be paranoid over a packet of crisps, but if he can smell them. Christ. Hardly appealing, is it?

"I'll take that as a no then," Sherlock continues. "There's a Thai place two streets away."

"Okay," Molly says.

"Good."

For the first time in years, Sherlock holds out his hand.

She takes it. She is fifteen again.