A/N: So this is an Old Thing dredged from the bottom of my hard drive, and also the second fanfic piece I've ever written in the history of ever. Apologies for unnecessarily pretty prose and a friendly reminder of the post-Reichenbach feels (that shall be rewarded in S3?)
Spring returned, but life did not resume.
It was strange, Molly thought as she stirred two creamers into her tea, how easily the morgue at St. Bartholomew's slipped back to the half-forgotten pattern of the way things were before the maverick genius. (No one referred to him as the consulting detective anymore. To those who read the papers, it just weren't right what the man had done; to those who knew him, that title only ever belonged to one person in the world, and now he was gone, and so why bother mouthing dead words). The old standard became the only standard and had stayed that way for months now. It was strange, and a bit unsettling, she thought as she snapped on purple Nitrile gloves, how quickly people turned heel, and how completely they forgot, and how little of anything ever remained besides another unidentified body on the shelves.
The municipal-fund trees outside the break room window budded and bloomed and grew white flowers and green leaves against the grey, grey, grey of London, sky sinking into concrete. Birds and doctors went about their lives in downturned silence, too tired of every song and shift cut off by the never-ending cascade of sirens.
There was always work now, Molly thought. Someone's festering gran found by the concerned daughter-in-law. Some pretty young thing with postmortem handprint bruises on the upper inner thighs. Another, unidentified, mid-thirties, Asian. Missing tosser turned up on Bankside, waterlogged and a week old. Body, found, dead, another after another after another. And probably no lunch break today, because Dimmock just phoned in from a prominent West End theatre, probably not to talk about the lead actress's performance.
She missed having more than a bag of crips between breakfast and dinner.
Life did not resume, and the lunch shift salesboy at Pret couldn't quite pin down why this spring felt so much lonelier.
Sometimes Molly considered phoning someone. Anyone. Just to hear a voice that knew enough to say, "Remember when?" She would glance sideways at the old handheld on the laboratory wall (next to the examination safety protocols, beneath the getting home safely protocols), start towards it, and then she'd remember the steel scalpel in her hand and the growing pile of analysis reports on her desk, and she'd sigh and plan to pick up something stronger than tea on the way to work next morning. It was all unrealistic. Lestrade tried to put up with the weeks after but wound up moving to someplace in Scotland proper, goodness knew where. Mrs. Hudson had been unofficially adopted by a gang of Latvian assassins, and there was no talking to her without having seven types of Glock pointed at one's head. Mycroft - well. She wasn't that desperate. Or brave.
John was the closest, but he barely spoke. He worked three floors down as a surgeon, deadly accurate at stitching together everyone else's heart bypasses. She saw him at the staff meeting the other day and wanted, so badly, to whisper what she knew, three words in his ear that might jolt the frozen stare out of him.
Spring passed on, and life did not resume.
The worst part, Molly reflected as she buttoned up her light cardigan and moved the pepper spray to the top of her bag, was the last entry in her address book. He'd kipped out at her place for the first three days, and then left a number and a note saying, "Don't make stupid calls". Couldn't she, though? She was entitled to that much, and she had thirty drafts of what to say to make him come back and bring sanity back with him.
But she couldn't. She wasn't supposed to, because he would never be so obvious. (Once, she took a swig of whiskey and grit her teeth and, a little sniffly, dialed. The phone just rang out along staticky satellite lines. The number was wrong, wrong, wrong, and she couldn't change that fact any more than the fact of the famous actress's body on her slab.)
It was almost funny, Molly thought as she pried an empty pill bottle from the actress's rigor mortis clamp, because she had almost gone to see that show a year ago. It was frustrating, because she'd finally booked tickets for next week, and now -
She wondered what it was like for him. Both hims. She'd thought she was in love, back when she carried black coffee and lipstick like her life depended on it. But then, it turned out that she really did prefer tea with cream and sugar and that her lips felt best slightly wind-chapped and that life was so much more tenuous than an office crush. In the old days, she had flushing heat and fluttering hands and, oh, goodness, the stammering. Now she had work. She had stiff cadavers and pallid skin and bags beneath her eyes, but she had a job. Half of her wanted to shake the world by its shoulders, wanted to slide down the wall screaming - but she was here. And she was meant to be here, and so she soldiered steady on. There was not pressure, and there was not emptiness. Despite the world going to chaos outside, at the very least she felt she had her space, at last, because infatuations wouldn't let you breathe until they were gone.
(She'd gone to an open surgery once and noticed that John held his breath when he made the first cut.)
Her cat had a litter sometime mid-May, and she had a box of kittens to press onto coworkers. John wordlessly agreed to take on the blackest, leanest one of the bunch, who stared at his new owner with bored blue eyes before yawning. John's mouth twitched twice. Later, Molly watched from the break room window as the two walked towards the Underground. It had just rained, but the sun, for once, came out to set and, in the gentle lull, a harrowed swallow found cause to whistle. She thought that here was the way things were supposed to be, beige cable knit and haughty blue-blackness at the center of it all. It would always be those two, a universal constant like the way bodies decayed and cars backfired and people left, but also how people adjusted and leaves unfurled and cats made kittens, and so on.
She took a sip of tea, slowly. There they were, beige knit and blue-black, the blogger and his detective, and also the suggestion of summer, of life resuming.
And in the meanwhile, she thought as she turned away from the window, she was here. There was another siren, another body on the way. And there was just Molly - Molly Hooper, mortician, with her awkward layers and kitschy florals and, lately quite strong, the air of hospital-standard sterility.