Disclaimer: None of the characters and albums mentioned below belong to me- if they did, Sherlolly would be cannon.
Author's Note: Please read and comment, there's nothing more invigorating than checking my email to see that one of you wonderful people's left a review. Every time you comment, a Mav get's her wings.
That being said, special shout-out to those of you that reached out with words of support and kindness when the rather interesting comments were left.
Two weeks later, Molly stood in the morgue at Bart's, trying to keep her eyes open long enough to pour coffee down her throat. She was tempted to splash the scalding hot black stuff directly to her face in hopes of waking herself up, becoming more alert. She was back to working backbreaking hours at the hospital, pulling 16 hour shifts with only one day off a week. She took all the work she could get her hands on, and if her sleep pattern suffered then who cared?
At least she wasn't dreaming anymore...
She looked down at the chart in front of her, her chest a chasm of ice because she knew Sherlock, John, and Greg Lestrade were on their way down to hear the results of the autopsy she'd just performed. The woman on the slab was the cannibal's latest victim, or so Sherlock believed. The woman was perfectly intact save for an unassuming incision in the center of her chest where her heart had been removed, and presumably consumed. Sherlock was convinced he knew who the cannibal actually was, but hadn't gotten enough proof for the Yard to actually make an arrest.
"Wotcher Molly," Greg crashed through the doors of the morgue, startling Molly and making her spill some of her coffee on the floor. John Watson followed, giving her a smile and coming to stand beside her in a gesture of support. Then he walked in, Sherlock, his hands stuffed in his pocket, his head bowed, nose and cheeks red from the chill of the London fall. Sherlock stood opposite them with Greg, and she shivered slightly, remembering their last encounter when he'd had his hands in his pockets, looking down at her with his eyes aflame as his hips pumped him deeper in her throat…
"What do we think? Cannibal?" Greg prompted, sounding slightly excited.
"We're just calling this guy 'cannibal'? I thought you said Sherlock knows who it is," she frowned at Greg.
"He won't tell me who it is," Greg answered, rolling his eyes, "not until we have enough proof."
"It's better this way," Sherlock said, sounding exasperated, "if I tell you who it is then you would be too biased in your collection of evidence. Think of this as an experiment with a blind subject and testing parameters, an opportunity for the Yard to actually use their brain cells instead of sitting around the office all day, wasting taxpayer money and gorging themselves on coffee and donuts that slowly congeal your arteries with artificial sugars and sweeteners."
"That was pleasant," John rubbed the bridge of her nose, "Did you find anything Molly?"
"Well there was nothing on the body that would lead to anything we could identify, no fingerprints, no stray hairs, nothing like that," she set her coffee mug down on the empty table and walked forward to pull the sheet off the corpse of the young woman. She had been beautiful, with short brown hair streaked with red, green eyes, and perfect mocha colored skin. "I don't know if this is a cannibal but I can tell you she's missing…"
Sherlock interrupted her, "vital organs. Kidneys, liver, heart, lungs."
Exasperated, she didn't even look at him, "Wrong. She's just missing her heart, everything else is still where it's supposed to be. The incision is perfect, whoever removed her heart definitely has a medical background."
"Why do you say that?" John Watson asked her but she just remained silent, knowing Sherlock wouldn't let her explain.
And he didn't disappoint. "The incision is perfect, directly over the heart, and the way the wound has been closed indicates previous experience. Not only that but an amateur would not have known which tendons to cut, or how to spread the ribcage to access the chest cavity. If this had been an amateur, the chest would have been shredded to pieces, all the ribs broken. But here, the ribs were separated expertly then reattached with wires. He took his time, which means he has the privacy for the activity, and has access to medical equipment."
John looked at Molly, who shrugged, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She had spent 2 days carefully looking at the girl's body, surveying every single detail, as well as cataloging every fiber or smudge of anything that was found on her and in her clothes. Which was a waste of her time. Had she known Sherlock was working on this case, she would have reassigned it to someone else to collect the evidence and worked on something else. She understood how important it was to actually provide evidence to what Sherlock was saying but God help her, she felt wasted and used.
"Molly?" Greg prompted her, his tone suggesting that he'd been talking to her for quite some time.
"Hmm? Sorry, I'm leaving for holiday tomorrow and my mind's already taken off," she smiled at Greg, asking him to repeat what he had said. "Oh sure, I'll have Mike send the paperwork to your office once the lab results are in."
"Holiday?" Sherlock asked, suddenly interested, his eyes intent as they sought hers, "where are you going? We're in the middle of a case."
"You're in the middle of a case darling, not me," she told him, pulling the sheet back over the body to give her something to do. The term of endearment had slipped out before she knew it, and once it was out there, she pretended she didn't want to turn back time and take it back. Molly decided to just pretend she hadn't said it.
"Where?" he demanded.
She had deliberately picked a spot where Sherlock wouldn't be able to trace her, where he wouldn't even imagine that she would travel to by herself. She had essentially spun a globe and booked her flight and lodging wherever her finger landed. Which happened to be on a remote island in the Pacific. She would also double check anything Sherlock could've come into contact with for tracking devices. "Nowhere special," she looked up at the three men, "is there anything else I can do or are we finished here?"
"I think we've got everything we need," Greg pushed himself away from the wall he'd been leaning against, coming towards her to give her a hug, "enjoy yourself and stay out of trouble. Let me know if you need anything," he told her.
She smiled, returning his hug, "I will," she answered before pulling away. Sherlock's eyes burned the back of her head, he was watching her so intensely. "I'll swing by your place later to see Rosie," she told John.
Molly had never been the type to want to cause or create drama. Her inability to look at Sherlock was due to the fact that she was afraid it would trigger all her rage, all her want, all her love if she even glanced at the prick. She refused to make anyone feel awkward around them…especially the haphazard family that they had created. The last thing she wanted to do was for anyone to pick sides about their relationship, or create any awkwardness between them.
So, she steeled her heart, taking a deep breath to look to Sherlock, expecting him to say something. But he was playing with his phone, a furrow creasing his brows as he concentrated on his phone screen, walking out of the lab without a backwards glance.
Molly wished she had called after him, telling him that he should stop standing across from her flat like a specter every night for fear of giving the neighbors a fright. She wished she had let him know that he wasn't being clever, spying on her. That she had spotted his vigil the night after he had walked out on her…But she just watched him walk out of the lab.
She knew that if he had made any kind of effort in the past few weeks to talk to her, to contact her, she would take him back into her arms gladly. But he hadn't…She knew him, knew that if he wanted to get in touch with her, he could. Whatever it took, he would find her if he truly wanted to talk to her, wanted her back in his life. But he clearly didn't think she was worthy of his time or affections, of his trust.
Love was nice and all that but without trust, it was rotten.
She wanted to collapse, to roll into a tight ball right there on the floor and cry until she couldn't breathe. But there was no use in that. Crying solved nothing, giving up made everything worse. Her only option was to pick herself up, stand up straight, and carry on like everything was fine until it became fine. She would deal with the pain when it arose, and taking some time away from London would help her gain some perspective.
Or so she told herself.
As she rode the tube back to her flat, sitting across from a couple who sat there looking content just holding hands made her want to throw up, or yell at them. She could've handled it if they'd been snogging but the mature appreciation of each other, the quiet contentment of simply sitting next to each other, holding hands, steady in the knowledge that their love sat next to them made her wish she was dead.
"Oh, get a grip," she muttered to herself, walking home from the station at a punishing speed.
She distracted herself by listing off what she still needed to pack for her holiday. She had bought a brand-new bathing suit for the trip. She had stood in the shop for hours, wondering if she were brave enough for the skimpy two piece that would leave nothing to the imagination, but had opted for the more modest one piece that left the color of her bottom to the imagination at least. But she had splurged and bought herself short shorts, colorful tank tops with matching sandals, and accessories including rather large sunglasses and a floppy sun hat. She made a mental list of the books she would need to keep her company during her trip, the only piece of technology she was taking was her phone, only because it had all her music on there.
Molly packed her suitcase and imagined herself meeting someone on the island. Someone big, muscular, tanned, with hair streaked blonde from hours spent in the sun, and eyes as blue as the sky. He would take one look at her and fall in love with her, and give himself freely to her, without doubting her at all.
As she tried to give the fantasy more detail, she realized it was an impossible task. Her heart and soul belong to Sherlock, he was keeping her prisoner. She hated him with all her heart for throwing her away so easily, for leaving her without a backwards glance, for making her feel like she had to be the one chasing him. But all the same, the love she felt for him never left her…and she had a feeling she would never stop loving Sherlock.
He was the love of her life, the love of her heart and soul.
She wished it had been harder for him to walk away from her, had hoped that after all the time they spent together, after all they had lived through…
She sat on the edge of her bed, rubbing her forehead and all the memories of the past six months flooded her. From the night he had shown up to weep in her arms, to the way he'd driven her mad in the kitchen when she'd been attempting to cook or bake, his inability to quietly watch telly falling silent only when his head was in her lap and her fingers in his hair, to the mornings he attempted to make the bed to impress her before jumping in the shower with her…in her mind's eye, she saw clear as day the nights and days they had spent together in this very bed…She only had to close her eyes to see the way his delicious lips touched her nipples, feel his breath on her wet skin, his hair tangled and twined around her fingers as he suckled her. The heat that would be in his incredible eyes as he watched her, the wet, hot suction of his mouth on her nipples sending fissures of electricity down her spine…
She wanted to jump out of the window.
After she finished packing, she glanced outside to see her silent specter standing there, watching her flat. She thought it would've been a good idea to go out there, talk to him. Instead, she shut off all the lights in her flat and put on Nick Cave and the Bad Seed's newest album, the Skeleton Tree. She curled up on the couch and listened to music.
She tried not to think about how delicious his skin tasted…the way he would smile, his head thrown back in ecstasy, exposing the long column of his elegant throat as she kissed her way down from his lips, his chin…tracing his jawline with her lips and teeth…down his throat, tasting his Adam's apple…trailing butterfly kisses over his chest…finding his nipples, using her tongue to trace a path lower and lower until he would groan her name, gripping her hair tight in his fist…lifting his torso off the bed to watch her…
Shit.
Rational Molly kept reminding her that this was Sherlock. He was a self-professed sociopath, a junkie who tried to keep off smack by solving crimes. He was the man that had treated her like mud on the bottom of his shoe, who had repeatedly humiliated her out of sheer ignorance. He was the man who hadn't understood why people had cried during his best man speech, he was the same man who had been confused when his best friend took offense to him having pretended to be dead for two years.
Rational Molly knew that Sherlock had grown up convinced that emotions were silly, that they were something to be experienced and felt only by the lower categories of human. He was above it all, or so he had convinced himself. From the revelations of the past few months, it was becoming clear that the emotionless man before her had once been a boy who had felt completely, better than his siblings. The man who had committed murder for the sake of his friends had once been a normal boy with normal emotions and extraordinary intelligence. His ignorance of feelings was practiced to perfection, not borne out of nature.
Trauma had forced those emotions into a cage, forced the little boy to transform into a man that was so convinced of importance of intelligence alone, he'd convinced himself that emotions, feelings were insignificant.
Rational Molly knew all that.
Heartbroken Molly however knew that she had been the one chasing him down all these years, she had been the one to patch him up, she had been the one to beg him to let her help him deal with whatever he was dealing with. For once, she wanted him to need her without her having to tell him so.
As Nick Cave sang his "Girl in Amber", she pretended that the tears flowing down her cheeks were for the song written by a heartbroken father, not because her heart had shattered along with her soul.
Author's Note: Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it! Review, comment and recommend! -Mav. X
