Molly
Guys, I honestly teared up at your reviews - thank you so much for the encouragement! SO MUCH.
As for the couple of questions asking if there would be romance between John and Sherlock. At this point, I'm not giving anything away - you'll have to read it for yourself.
When they got to the lab, a woman was waiting, looking flushed and hurried. Her eyes latched onto Sherlock as soon as she saw them approaching, then slipped to John. The smile of greeting that had been on her face slipped a little, and John understood with sympathy, and fell back a bit from Sherlock's side.
"Molly," Sherlock said in greeting. "Do you still have him?"
"Oh!" Molly looked as though she was just barely keeping up with the way Sherlock could control a conversation. "Yes, I - um, I got him ready."
"Good." Sherlock brushed past her into the doors of the morgue, and John noted how Molly's breathing hitched. He waited a moment for her to calm down from the torrent that was Sherlock, then held out a hand.
"Hello - I'm John."
"Molly," she replied, shaking his hand - her grip was light but not limp. "Um, I'm just a lab assistant here - "
"A lab assistant who will get out of bed in the middle of the night to assist Sherlock Holmes. You're a bloody saint." John didn't mince words - he doubted Sherlock ever gave this woman the credit she deserved.
Molly gave a small giggle. "Well, I do what I can." The giggle faded. "So..." John could see the question begging to be asked, and he shrugged as he answered.
"Just the neighbor. Well, flatmate, I guess, she just knocked in a door between the flats. I'm new to all this - " he gestured around, hoping Molly understood - "but as I'm a doctor, Sherlock seems to find me - useful. So far."
Molly seemed to relax at this. "Well, I suppose this isn't so odd to you, then."
"Frankly calming after the Army," he grinned back at her, and she smiled back tentatively.
"MOLLY!" came a shout from the morgue, and John followed Molly through the swinging doors.
"Yes?" Molly asked, and John noted with pity that the woman's virtues were wasted on Sherlock.
"I may need to use the lab. Also can you get me syringes? At least twenty."
"Twenty?" John couldn't help asking.
Sherlock looked up quickly as she whipped a hair tie off her wrist and tied up her hair in a loose ponytail. John could hear Molly catch her breath as Sherlock's neck was exposed. Damn. The poor woman really had it bad.
"There isn't often the chance to study the physiology of a man who may be mithridatic to arsenic!" Sherlock pointed out. "I'll keep the extras in the freezer."
"Your freezer, I hope," John stated, but Sherlock shook her head.
"Half in yours. That way if I lose power some are preserved."
John shook his head. "Sherlock, our flats are connected, there's no way I'm going to keep power when you're out."
"All the same, better to be safe."
"Better to invade my kitchen, you mean," John corrected her, and noticed Molly had left. He plopped himself in a stool and on impulse twirled himself around once before stopping himself with a hand on the table and pulling his book back out.
"You didn't have to shoot him in the heart." Sherlock interrupted him halfway through his first paragraph.
"I didn't."
"You did!"
John shrugged - he was not going to admit to shooting someone when Molly could walk in at any second. "Either way, that isn't the heart. That's the middle lobe of the right lung."
Sherlock ignored him. John counted that as a win for him, for once, and then heard Molly push her way through the door with her hip.
"Ah, right. Let me help with that - " He took some of the syringes from her hands, plastic packaging rustling.
"Sorry," she murmured. "There weren't any spare boxes. I thought of using a specimen bag but the head doctor gets mad when they go missing."
"I needed them," Sherlock muttered as John set down his handfuls of specimens on a table next to her.
"It was three boxes of a thousand each," Molly murmured conspiratorially to John, who grinned.
"What for?" he whispered loudly back.
"I think she was testing acids and bases. Kept burning through them," was the answer, and John chuckled, imagining Sherlock rooting through a kitchen turned into a lab that was overfilled with lab bags, swearing as the test tube she was using began to melt and throwing it into a bag, and then another bag, and then another bag. He wondered if part of Sherlock's fridge was melted through.
"Ah. Right," he replied, then the urge to yawn overtook him and he didn't say anything for a moment.
"Do you want me to get you a coffee?" Molly offered.
"Black, two sugars, thank you Molly," Sherlock replied to the question not asked of her.
"Ah, yes. Right," Molly stuttered out, and John smiled at her.
"I'll come along," he offered. "I could use one myself."
"Oh! Yes, if you like." Molly led the way out, and John followed. He could almost hear Sherlock's pout behind him.