"Are you dead yet, Sherlock? Or have you just gotten this whole thing over with and killed the child before he suffers too dearly?"

"John Watson!"

"Well! It is awfully quiet considering there's supposed to be a baby here somewhere."

"He's eating in the kitchen," Sherlock said dryly, stepping around the wall from said room to the flat's entryway as he interrupted John and Mary's dialogue. "Rather happily, I believe. It appears that Molly's made friends with him or something of the like."

"Well," Mary said teasingly, walking past the two men and into the kitchen with her arms loaded with bags full of baby items. "Of course he's enjoying the company of a pretty girl."

Sherlock scoffed under his breath, nowhere near willing to have Molly insulted – or pettily hurt – by him when she was being such a savior in this sudden, horrid situation.

John went in for a jab of his own as he asked his friend under his breath, "What? Like you haven't noticed that she's pretty."

"You are a married man, John Watson."

"And you are not married or blind," John answered pointedly before changing the subject with a "help me with all of this stuff, will you?"

Sherlock obliged, taking a couple of the bags off of his old flat mate as he asked, feeling slightly horrified, "How much did you buy?!"

"Mary went a little overboard on the baby clothes for a minute," John admitted. "And the cot's still going to be delivered here in a bit yet."

"Good grief," Sherlock muttered. "What am I? It's like you think I'm setting up housekeeping with this... this…" Sherlock couldn't think of any new nouns that he hadn't already employed earlier in the day, so ended lamely, "Daniel."

John looked at him with mild surprise, asking, "Well, aren't you?"

This frank question from his friend startled Sherlock a little, forcing him to see the potential for this situation's permanency as he looked at the numerous grocery bags. Sherlock counted them, realizing that he held two, John still had four, and Mary had brought in at least as many as her husband. And they were discussing things like cots too now – a big, hulking thing that he had no idea where to put in his flat, which was still certainly the absolute least of his problems at the moment.

A sudden unfamiliar giggle from the kitchen tore Sherlock out of his own head and back into reality with a jolt, and he and John both peered around the kitchen doorway to see if the noisemaker was who they thought it was. Molly was sitting in a chair at the table with Daniel in her lap, and Mary was sitting in another chair beside them, running her fingertips across the soles of Daniel's feet – hence the laughter had come from the child; a noise which in turn made Molly and Mary burst into their own fits of giggles.

"Really, Sherlock," John repeated in a low voice so that the women couldn't hear. "What are you going to do about all of this?"

"Hire someone, I suppose," Sherlock mused. "It's not like I'm hard pressed to afford it."

"Hire what sort of someone? A nanny to take care of him while his new 'daddy' is out on cases? A social worker to find him an adoptive family instead of this? What, Sherlock?!"

"I don't bloody know, John!"Sherlock snapped, louder than he had meant to.

"Then you'll still need a nanny for now, then," Mary called out to the two men, eyeing what she could see of Sherlock's agitated expression from where she sat at the kitchen table.

Sherlock glared at her out of the corner of his eye, not turning towards her while pointing a finger at Mary and ordering sharply, "Stop it. Stop trying to deduce my thought processes on this situation, because believe me, you won't be able to – not when I don't even know my own bloody thoughts about it. You've never seen through me like that before, and you won't be able to start now, Mrs. Watson."

"Don't snap at my wife because you're having a bad day," John demanded.

Molly, who had faded into the background a bit in the midst of Sherlock's harshness, spoke up with a surprising amount of confidence as she asked Sherlock, "Do you want to know what I think you're thinking?"

At this, Sherlock turned towards the pathologist, eyes blown wide with sarcasm as he tried to conceal what was very closely bordering on panic. "Oh, please, do tell, Miss Hooper."

Molly stood from her chair and approached Sherlock as she began to speak, Daniel still in her arms. "I think that you… there is a part of you… that wants to keep him. There was a flash of that in your eyes when you looked in here and saw him laughing. You… softened a bit."

"That is the most ridiculous thing you have ever said to me," Sherlock declared, chuckling dryly.

"Ridiculous?" Molly repeated, looking totally undeterred as she continued to slowly carry Daniel closer. "Probably." She stopped in front of Sherlock, looking up at him with a small smile of triumph playing about the corners of her mouth. "But still, not wrong."

Sherlock growled irritably in the back of his throat, glaring at her with dark eyes, put out that she had noticed the moment when that thought had slipped through his head – that she could read him so bloody well.

Molly's grin just widened – she'd apparently taken his displeasure as a signal of the correctness of her observations – and she ordered him, "Here, hold your nephew."

She tried handing Daniel over to him, but Sherlock stubbornly crossed his arms over his chest, still glaring.

"Which one of you is the one-year-old here?!" Molly asked in sudden exasperation. "Take him!"

And she held Daniel out to Sherlock, hands under his armpits and let the boy hang there in the air between them. Sherlock smirked when he noticed that she was ever so slowly releasing him, not believing that she'd let Daniel fall to the floor. But her hold on the boy became less and less, loosening bit by bit and when Daniel bucked suddenly backwards, Sherlock found his hands instinctively shooting out to take him in his arms in the second before his nephew dropped to the hardwood.

"See!" Molly said cheerfully. "I knew you cared!"

"I don't care to have to pay for any unnecessary medical bills because he was dropped on his head," Sherlock replied coolly, trying to settle Daniel more comfortably in his arms.

"No," Molly contradicted. "You care about him."

"I never said I didn't," Sherlock finally replied as his nephew burrowed into his shoulder.

Because he suddenly realized that he did care about Daniel. Now he just had to figure out how to take care of him.