The Mad Man and Molly
...
He rushed off after that. Said he had places to go, and people to see, and that the old girl had landed him several streets away from where he'd intended. But maybe, she thought, that was good. She didn't entirely understand what he'd said, but if he hadn't had to walk a bit further, he wouldn't have bumped into her like that.
Seeing him again had opened old wounds she wasn't sure if she wanted opened again, but it was good in just as many ways as it was bad. The confusion in her mind over the entire thing - temporal paradoxes, his somehow being able to be the same person she'd been running into for so long, the very idea that he thought she was that important - eclipsed her confusion over why and how Sherlock could have been able to recognise that woman, whoever she really was, from... not her face.
In the end she decided that she didn't really like being forced to choose from one confusion or the other, and instead went with turning on the telly, just for some noise and the sound of voices that weren't hers in the flat not long after she'd got in, taken off her shoes and changed into something slouch-worthy. There couldn't be any more reason why they'd need her tonight.
Although she knew, damn it, but there was a voice telling her that if she did get a call, she'd be back into something she could go out in, out into the snow and the cold and the icy pavements that turned to slush that iced over dangerously, just because it was Sherlock. She hated that voice, because she knew it was right. And right now she wanted nothing more than to curl up on the sofa, like she was doing, and watch crap Christmas telly.
On a whim, she flicked the channel onto the news. She couldn't help but give a crooked smile at that - the reporter was saying how, miraculously, there was no end-of-the-world scenario this year, that maybe they'd been spared or forgotten about. Molly knew better. The end of the world was simply not as obvious this year as it had been the past few.
Nevertheless, after Christmas she went back to work the same as always. She still didn't know why that man, the one in the bowtie, had thought that she was important. She did not still, however, think about it all of the time. She had work to do after all, and Sherlock to look after - what else do you call it, when she still had to provide him with everything he needed here, and deal with his mood swings when he let on sometimes that he wasn't as okay as he said he was - and Toby to feed.
Life went on.
And then suddenly, without warning, Sherlock started acting like normal again. Whatever 'normal' was for him, anyway. She supposed that she should be glad, but largely she was just curious. She'd already figured that he'd been upset about that woman, but this? What could have made him change again? Could it have been her? But... how?
The question had bothered her for a grand total of two days, at which point she'd solidly decided to Not Think About It for at least a good while, as maybe, just maybe - since the woman had to have been dead, Molly had checked herself, and she was good at her job, if nothing else - it was another one of those mad things, like that Doctor and his old girl and his time paradoxes.
Maybe it would be better to leave that one alone.
...
AN: Hokay. So I was looking back through some of my gallery on DA, and I saw that my art for this story (which I now am using as my profile pic) had been really popular (at least compared to some of my other stuff. I'm NOT a popular artist.) And it made me proud. Because usually the stuff I do that gets a lot of hits is the stuff I'd done where I'd coloured other peoples' work. And I have always felt that the attention I got for that was for something someone else had done. Not mine to accept. And here was MY work, for this story, getting so much attention.
So I looked back at where I'd left off, and realised that I'd left it hanging, technically, in the middle of the scene. I'm not sure what to call this, but I don't think it fully constitutes as either a real 'encounter' or as 'filler. Your call, I guess...