Very sorry about the wait on this one, life is difficult with a chronic illness. Thanks to all of you, as always, and enjoy :)

S is for Stag and Speech Writing

Molly had a laminated piece of paper stuck to the wall in her office, it currently read '3 days accident Sherlock free', the ink stains around the edges betraying the age of the battered sign. She'd taken it from one of the labs after it had been refurbished following a chemical fire, crossed out accident and written Sherlock for her own amusement. It served many purposes: a way of keeping him in her life during his two-year absence, as well as helping to keep up the image she had of the slightly obsessed grieving friend during that period. When he was alive however, it served as a visual prompt that she may need to check for any experiments he'd left lying around. The three days since he'd last been in the lab had been most pleasant, allowing Molly to get through a lot of backed up paperwork in peace –she'd even managed to eat some of the biscuits she brought to work! Usually they all disappeared by the time she'd got enough of a break to eat one, although any biscuit snaffling was vehemently denied by certain males with the surnames Holmes and Watson. She leant back in her chair and took a gulp of her lukewarm tea, readying herself for the imminent return of the dynamic duo and yet more wedding talk. John was evidently fed up with anything vaguely wedding related, and Sherlock wouldn't shut up about it, Mary had spent an hour on the phone to her last night telling her how she had played the pair of them to get them out of her hair. The two women had enjoyed a good laugh at the males' expense, and how easily they could be manipulated without realising it. Molly often employed blackmail rather than Mary's more subtle suggestion tactics, but there was no harm in swapping tips. She downed the rest of the once decent tea, donned her lab coat and safety specs and went back into the lab to start on her next set of tests.

It transpired that it was Sherlock alone that came barrelling into the lab, and much to her surprise, he didn't demand to see something immediately, or ask for results, he simply wanted to talk about the stag do. His master plan was a pub crawl based around every murder they'd ever solved, claiming that something like underground stations lacked the personal touch. It seemed a reasonable compromise, something socially acceptable, but with a Sherlockian twist – who else would take measuring cylinders to a pub? He'd asked her to calculate their optimum alcohol intake, although why the chemist with a brain the size of Wales couldn't was beyond her comprehension. He tried to pass it off as 'lacking practical experience', and whether he meant to or not, in doing so had implied that he thought she was some sort of drunk. She was not impressed, but at least he had the good manners to look slightly taken aback when she called him out on it, making her wonder what his thought process behind saying it may have been. After a slightly awkward silence, he completely changed the subject, telling her that she looked 'well'. The hesitance before the word was somewhat suspect, as if he was trying to find something that was not offensive or deduced, but not too complementary either, and she hoped that this meant he wasn't just trying to say something nice so she'd forget he insulted her. Then he did something very unusual, he asked after Tom, and used the correct name. She'd answered somewhat flippantly that he still wasn't a sociopath, and just to see Sherlock's reaction, she threw in the fly away comment that they were having quite a lot of sex. She thought she'd broken him for a few seconds, before he took his and John's medical files out of his coat, and gave her a brisk set of instructions, before swooping out of the lab, tip of his ears still red.

As amusing as his reaction had been, it was as much to make her feel better about the amount of make-up sex they'd been having, after the arguments that had ensued following her early departure from his mother's birthday party. The arguments had reached their peak when Tom hadn't believed that she'd been out for lunch with his Gran, or that his Gran had said Molly could go back to London afterwards. She'd told him to phone her, and to say Edna had not been impressed with her grandson, or his conduct would have been an understatement. Molly had needed to hold back the laughter as she watched the conversation unfold, his Gran scolded him so loudly that Molly could hear it without needing to be on the phone. Looking as sheepish as he could, Tom had spent the rest of that evening finding different ways to apologise, some of which had been welcome, others, not so much.

When Greg had text her a couple of days later to say he'd just bailed the terrible twosome out of jail, having tried to take a case on when very drunk last night, she nearly cried with laughter. They were well beyond urinating in wardrobes from what he'd relayed, so when a slightly worse for wear Sherlock turned up in the lab later that day, she couldn't help herself.

"Hello!" She half-shouted, grinning at his wince,

"Graham has been on the phone to you, I take it," The curly haired man grumbled, glaring at her cheery disposition

"Did you have a good time last night?" She was sure she resembled the Cheshire cat by now, deliberately putting some of her tools down on their metal plate with a bit more force than necessary.

"You got your sums wrong," Sherlock sulked, ready to pass the blame on to anyone he could.

"I did no such thing!" Molly replied indignantly, ready to produce the notes she used for said calculations,

"Then why were we arrested?!" He asked as loudly as his head would permit.

"Because you vomited all over someone's rug," She answered with a grin,

"Don't be smart, Molly," He bristled, sitting down on the stool next to her, resting his head in his hands.

"Did you get some good material for the speech at least?" She asked, having been worrying over the speech since before John had even asked him to be best man. Unlike Greg and Mrs Hudson, she didn't have a setting for 'it'll be fine' when it came to Sherlock, her flat had almost been set on fire too many times. He simply glared at her, however, before taking out his phone, glaring at that, putting it back in his pocket and disappearing out of the lab. She sighed, hopefully it would be better than any of the other public speeches he'd given, where he would insult everybody as a matter of course. Saying that, at least in those instances, he at least had a case to relay, whereas the best man's speech had no given structure or conclusion. She shook her head, and decided to go and do some paperwork in her office. At least she would have done, had Sherlock not been asleep on her desk, cuddling a packet of her biscuits.