Title: The Final Problem

Genre: Angst, Hurt/comfort, Romance

Word Count: 506

Rating: K+

Warnings: Feelings. A lot of feelings.

It was a game for them more than anything.

Which isn't to say either party enjoyed playing, but it was necessary for them now.
So they played.

She pretended not to wait up for him, and that she didn't know he had made a key.
He pretended he wasn't planning on going, and that he didn't worry about her on nights he was away.

She didn't tell him about the nightmares she had the nights he was gone, and he made no mention of the nightmares he committed during the day.

They spoke of nothing, acted completely businesslike.

But the way she nuzzled into his chest and his possessive arm around her waist said the opposite.

They were an explosive combination of conflicting realities; battling morals and lives so vastly different the chasm that separated them was near impossible to breach.

And yet, every night it permitted, Jim Moriarty; the consulting criminal, father of much of the bloodshed in London (if not all of England) found his way to the bed of Molly Hooper; a lonely morgue attendant from Saint Bart's hospital.

She went to bed around nine-thirty. She fed Toby, brushed her teeth, and slipped in between the sheets of her bed, wide awake.
She wouldn't admit to waiting up for him, but she did.

He would come around midnight — sometimes earlier, sometimes later, sometimes not at all. She would barely hear the creak of the door, and Toby sitting up on the bed at the sudden noise.
She tried every night to gauge how long it would take him to walk from the door to her bedroom, and every night his silent quickness surprised her.

They spoke no greeting as he undressed to his lowest layers and slid into the bed next to her, their bodies remembering the shape of each other and fitting together in the most natural way. His chest pressed to her back, they fell asleep to the syncopation of each other's breathing, embraced in impossible longing.

In the morning, when she woke up alone, the only evidence to spite the creeping doubts, the thought that it might have been a dream, was the lingering scent of expensive cologne on the other side of the bed.

As she would never admit to waiting for him, she also would never confess to the pangs in her heart when she woke up without him.
Or the tears that dripped to her pillow.

Similarly, he would never give voice to the conflicted pain he felt when rising from her side or the hazy distraction for the first few hours as he tried to go about his sordid affairs without thinking of her, and failed.

For that was the real purpose of the game, this game of endurance.

How long could they, such opposing forces, such opposite magnetisms, draw closer together?

How long before their proximity caused them to explode apart, shattering them both in the process?

It was a game with neither victor nor prize.

And yet they played it all the same.

A/N: BRB throwing myself off a cliff.

Eternal props to my beta reader, Corscopa for trudging through the feels to fix grammar.

Let me know your thoughts!

- ACG