A/N: Thanks for the reviews folks! Love hearing your reactions. :)
Dust in the Air
by Flaignhan
She's living in a world of boxes.
But, but, she has a garden. She can step out into the sunshine any time she pleases.
She has achieved garden status, in central London, and it feels so so good.
Unpacking the kitchen stuff is easy, because there is plenty of space to hold the contents of her previous flat. Her vast array of mugs fit comfortably into one of the cabinets, as opposed to being crowded onto one shelf, and then overflowing onto the mug tree she used to keep on the counter top.
She's not sure she needs it now.
It's a nice feeling.
Mary comes to visit, and she brings Rosie with her, who stays fast asleep in her car seat while the two of them sit at the breakfast bar and share a pot of tea and a packet of biscuits.
Mary looks around the kitchen, nodding her approval, her hands clasped around her mug. "The girl's done good," she says, a smile breaking out across her face.
"It doesn't feel real," Molly confesses. "I mean, the crushing weight of my mortgage definitely feels real," she jokes. "But this place..."
"You deserve it," Mary tells her. "You do."
"Thanks," Molly says, and she takes another gingernut from the packet, and bites a piece off of it.
"Boys on a case today?" she asks, and a curious expression falls across Mary's face. She skews her lips to one side, her eyes alight with something that might be amusement.
"In a sense," she says slowly. She lifts her mug to her lips and takes a sip of her tea. "John's chaperoning Sherlock while he chooses a housewarming gift for you."
Molly nearly chokes on her biscuit.
"A housewarming gift?"
He doesn't do that sort of thing.
"Yeah," Mary says with a shrug. "John's bringing our one across later as well. I couldn't carry it with her ladyship as well."
"Thanks," Molly says with a smile. She's touched - the only housewarming gift she's ever had was when she bought her old flat, and Stacey had showed up with a bottle of wine of which she'd proceeded to drink the majority.
Still, it's the thought that counts.
"Photos came through by the way," Mary says, and she pulls out her phone, and the two of them look through the photos from the christening, a bright ray of happiness captured on screen.
The photographer's tenacity has paid off - there are dozens and dozens of beautiful shots, with various beaming people holding Rosie, all dressed in their gladrags.
Molly wrinkles her nose at the photos featuring herself, although some, she admits, have managed to capture her good side.
"This is my favourite," Mary says, and she flicks across to the next photo, where Sherlock and Molly are standing apart from crowd, Rosie in Molly's arms, Sherlock with his arm curled loosely around Molly's shoulder. Their smiles are broad as they try to hide their laughter, and it's a rare moment of tranquility for the two of them.
Two oddballs, on the outskirts of normality, embracing their found family.
"Can you send me that?" Molly asks, and Mary does, straight away. A few more shots follow, including a candid one snapped while they were waiting for the cab to take them back to John and Mary's.
"There aren't any photos of us together," Molly says, saving each photo down to her phone as it comes through.
"Not any?" Mary asks. "Nothing?"
Molly shakes her head. "Twenty years, and this is the first time we've had our picture taken." She smiles, and she chooses that one, the one where they're laughing, to chuck onto her Instagram. "And the best bit," she adds as she types a quick caption - Rosie's christening 3 - "Is that we get our picture taken with our goddaughter!"
Molly looks across to Rosie, whose silence is suggestive of a very active night, which would explain the circles under Mary's eyes, just visible under a thin layer of concealer.
Despite this, Mary helps Molly get through a few more boxes, folding towels and bedsheets, putting them in the airing cupboard. She and Molly spend at least half an hour hanging up clothes in the built in wardrobes, and when Mary pulls out an aubergine coloured dress shirt, she raises an eyebrow.
"He's always kept spares at my place," Molly says with a shrug. "Give him the end one," she says, pointing to the single width cupboard on the far left.
Mary does, and soon his shirt is joined by a handful of others, a couple of pairs of trousers, and a spare pair of shoes that are relegated to the bottom of the wardrobe.
"How often does he stay over?" Mary asks. She tries to make the question sound casual, but fails miserably.
"Whenever he's in a bad mood, mostly," Molly replies, folding up a jumper and placing it into the chest of drawers. "Or if he's on withdrawal."
Mary nods, and continues to hang clothes. She doesn't say anything, and Molly feels a need to fill the silence, and so she opens up a little more.
"He lived with me," she tells her. "For a bit. After rehab."
"Oh so he did go," Mary says. "He did actually go."
"Yeah," Molly replies. "He went in just before I graduated. Missed my graduation of course but it is what it is." She smiles briefly, but then adds, "Don't...mention it to him though. I don't think it was..." she trails off, unable to put her unease about his rehab stint into words, but she knows that Mary won't tell a soul.
She still wonders if it was really the right thing, for him to be holed up for ten weeks. It had worked, and worked for a long while, but the cost had been great.
He hadn't been able to sleep alone for weeks after.
The doorbell goes, and as Molly relishes in the notion that she can walk straight to her front door, no intercoms, no buzzers, Rosie starts to cry. She doesn't appreciate the rude awakening as much as Molly does.
Molly opens the front door, and John and Sherlock are standing on the doorstep, John proffering a huge bunch of flowers and a large silver gift bag.
"For you," he says with a grin, passing them to her.
"Thanks," Molly says, and she moves back so they can step inside.
"This is lovely," John says as he takes his coat off, and Sherlock shuts the door behind them.
"It's a hallway, John," Sherlock says impatiently. He too has a gift, and it's in a large Selfridge's bag - none of the bells and whistles that Mary and John have afforded her.
She can definitely tell he's been dragged around Oxford Street against his will.
He sets the bag down at his feet and takes his coat off as John moves into the kitchen, towards the sounds of his daughter.
"Congratulations," Sherlock says. "You've managed to move your belongings from one part of the city to another, and acquire a larger mortgage."
Molly ignores him. "D'you want tea?"
His eyes meet hers, and he knows he's being wholly unpleasant. "Sorry," he mutters, and Molly shrugs, leading the way through to the kitchen. He picks up the bag with his gift and follows.
Molly sets her flowers and gift from John and Mary on the breakfast bar, refills the kettle at the tap, then sets it to boil. She empties out the teapot, and refills it with fresh bags, then takes down another couple of mugs from the cupboard for Sherlock and John.
Mary passes Rosie to John, who holds her close and sways her. The motion must be comforting, as she soon calms down, and Molly decides to open her present.
It's a beautiful cut crystal vase, and now the flowers make even more sense. She thanks the both of them, and fills it with water, emptying the sachet of plant food into it, just as the kettle clicks off the boil. She refills the teapot, and leaves it to brew, while she starts trying to cut the bottom couple of inches off of the thick stems of the flowers.
Her scissors aren't really cut out for the job, and after a moment, Sherlock pulls his pen knife from the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulls the flowers across to the other side of the breakfast bar, and makes quick work of the stems, before pushing the flowers back towards Molly so she can put them in the vase.
"Thanks," she says, as he flicks the blade back into his pen knife and dumps it into his pocket. Molly sweeps the ends of the stems into her palm, and chucks them into the bin, then moves the flowers to one side of the counter, so she has plenty of room start serving up the tea.
Sherlock helps himself to one of the biscuits, the pack laying open on the counter, next to the bag containing his gift. But then, his eyes narrow, and he scowls at a spot somewhere over Molly's shoulder.
"When did you get that?"
Molly turns around, to try and see what he's pointing at, and then her eyes land on her Tassimo, her coffee capsules stacked neatly next to it on a slender rack.
"Yesterday," Molly says turning back to the counter. She's about to ask what the problem is, but then her eyes land on the gift, and she realises exactly what the issue is.
He's bought her a coffee machine. Of course he has. It was only a couple of days she was complaining about not having one.
"Well," she says brightly, "Now I can have twice as much coffee."
"I'll take it back," he says, and he goes to grab the bag handle but Molly catches his hand before he's able to grasp it.
"No, come on," she says, moving his hand away from the bag. "I'm not sending you back to Oxford Street. I wouldn't do that to you." His eyes meet hers, and there is a hint of gratitude there, but then Molly looks down into the bag and drops his hand.
"I'm keeping it," she tells him, pulling it out of the bag. It's a proper coffee machine, a chrome one, one of the posh Italian ones, with sharp stylish angles.
"Are you actually going to use two coffee machines?" he asks with a sigh.
"I work sixty hours a week for the NHS," she says, and he relents with a smile, understanding her point. His sour mood lessening instantly. Molly catches a glimpse of Mary, whose shoulders sag in relief, before she looks across to John.
First Oxford Street, to get a housewarming present to go in a flat that he doesn't like, followed by said gift being very nearly made redundant by a recent purchase...he's treading a fine line between malcontent and shutting himself away for a week and a half.
He doesn't like change.
She pours his tea into his mug - although it no longer lives on the mug tree, it still sits at the front of the cupboard - and pushes it towards him.
It is one piece of familiarity he can rely upon.
She rolls over, and grins when her new bedroom comes into focus.
She keeps forgetting she's here.
She reaches out for her phone on the bedside cabinet, and has a quick browse through Facebook. Mary's uploaded and tagged all the christening photos, and Molly's notifications are filled with likes from people that she vaguely recognises from their outdated profile pictures.
It's a similar story on Instagram, except here Stacey has kept her account active, because she's not constantly seeing boring people she went to school or uni with popping out children or getting hitched, between swathes of armchair activism.
It's a fair enough decision, Molly will admit.
Stacey has, however, in addition to liking the photo of Molly, Sherlock, and Rosie, left a comment below, amongst all the 'cute!'s and 'Love your dress!'s.
Wow, you and Lord Pompous McArseface have been busy!
Molly rolls her eyes, and has a good mind to delete the comment, but then chooses to reply instead, just to make it clear to anyone who had any doubt whatsoever.
We're godparents. GODPARENTS. xx
Stacey knows this already, of course, but it doesn't hurt to reiterate.
She hears the sound of metal on metal, a quiet clanking from the hallway and she gets out of bed to investigate. She heads out into the hallway, and it's him, of course it's him. He's got the front door open, the cylinder of the lock is lying on the floor, discarded, while he slots a new one into place.
"Morning," she says. He has a screwdriver held between his lips, so his greeting in response is a bit muffled.
"Coffee?" she asks, and he nods, fiddling with a tiny screw, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Molly leaves him to it, and sets about making coffee - proper coffee, in the machine that he bought for her. She takes his mug out of the dishwasher - her kitchen is big enough for a dishwasher now, which makes her heart leap with joy - and sets it on the counter with hers.
She pours the coffee and dumps two sugars into it, then one in her own, and gives them both a good stir. She takes the coffee out to the hallway and sets his on the side table, where the keys to her new lock sit, shiny and freshly cut.
Molly leans against the wall and takes an optimistic sip of her coffee - far too hot - and watches while he secures the cylinder into place. At one point he gives it a good thump with the heel of his palm and the door shudders, but there is a tiny click, and he seems satisfied. He takes both keys and tests them in the lock - one is a little bit stiffer than the other, the edges a little sharper, and so he gives her the other one and instructs her to put it on her keyring.
"Thanks," she says, as he takes a break to drain some of his coffee. "You didn't have to - "
"You've been here three days," he says, lowering his mug and placing it back on the side table. "And you still haven't done it."
Molly opens her mouth to argue, but Sherlock cuts her off before she can say a thing.
"Besides, there's no point in wasting four hundred quid on a locksmith, is there?"
His estimate seems a bit steep, but then she spies the second packet on the sideboard. Instead of shiny brass, this lock is white, and she realises he must be planning to do the back door as well.
"Thanks," she says again. It's nice, when she feels like she might drown under her to do list, to wake up and find him sorting out a very boring and rather costly job for her. It makes the whole thing seem a bit less daunting.
He still hates the flat, she can tell.
Maybe he'll hate it a bit less if he's involved in some of the decisions.
She's suspects she's being optimistic again.
She heads back to the kitchen to put some bacon on - she's certain he won't have had any breakfast, and last night's dinner is questionable in terms of its existence too. She butters a couple of rolls and leans against the counter as the scent of bacon fills the air.
He joins her shortly after, coffee in one hand, lock and screwdriver clutched awkwardly in the other.
"That's an improvement," he says, glancing towards the grill.
"What? Breakfast?"
"The smell," he says, and he starts taking apart the handle of the back door, twirling the screwdriver between his fingers.
"What d'you mean?" Molly asks.
"Have you not noticed?" Sherlock asks, abandoning his work and turning to face her, an exasperated expression on his face. Molly looks at him blankly, waiting for him to elaborate, and when he does so, it's with a huff of impatience. "The smell."
"What smell?" Molly asks, and she sniffs the air. Whatever it is, she can't smell a single thing besides the sizzling bacon
"Other people," he replies, and he turns back to the lock, jamming the head of the screwdriver into one of the screws with a little more force than is necessary.
Oh. Oh.
"What do other people smell like?" she asks, half curious, half concerned that he's picked up the scent of something dreadful. Surely her enthusiasm for a spacious kitchen and a back garden can't possibly have distracted her enough to hide anything particularly terrible. Can it?
"Beetroot," he says through gritted teeth. "And one of those stupid vape things. And cheap incense. And musty furniture." He's on a roll now, there's no stopping him. "Rotten potatoes - they only cleared that cupboard out the day before you exchanged," he points to one of the base level units, next to the fridge. "And Camembert. On top of all that, Camembert."
Molly opens the oven, and is hit by a blast of warm, bacon scented air. Hopefully that will improve things for him, in the short term.
She dumps a couple of rashers into her roll, and a couple into his, and opens three different cupboards before she remembers where she decided to put her plates.
She might need a reshuffle, once some of the bigger jobs are out of the way.
"Well," she says, placing Sherlock's plate on the end of the counter. "I'll do my best to overwrite all of those smells. I might need about fifty scented candles, though."
He's not amused, but he sets the screwdriver down and picks up his roll. "Thanks," he says, and he takes a bite of it, before placing it back on the plate and recommencing work while he chews.
She wonders if she just ought to get some plugin air fresheners, whether that will be enough to mask the smell, or whether it will just add another problem into the mix. She ponders her options while she eats, and when she finishes, she decides to go and get showered and dressed.
She uses twice the amount of body wash as normal, but the mild coconut fragrance won't be any real sort of competition for the other elements in the flat.
Still, it's an effort.
Once she's dressed, and her damp hair is twisted up into a loose bun, she searches through the cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous knick knacks, and manages to source a couple of half spent scented candles - one vanilla, the other shea butter.
She puts one in the lounge and the other on the kitchen counter and lights them, knowing full well that she's fighting a losing battle. There's far more to Sherlock's displeasure than a handful of old smells that will disappear after a few weeks. She wonders if he even knows what it is. Maybe it's just a vague sense of unease that he can't quite shake off - a lack of familiarity proving a stark contrast to the tower block he had known so well. Maybe it's too quiet, without the grinding of a lift and neighbours on every side but one, or maybe it's too noisy; at ground level you can hear the traffic, the pedestrians, neighbourhood cats having a squabble, and even ambulance sirens from the nearby high street.
But he's barely been here to register that. He hated it before he set foot through the door.
Still, she supposes, he's made the trip, first thing, and he's helping her out. He's trying.
When the back door is looking proud with a bright new lock, Sherlock presses her second new key into her palm. He wanders into the lounge with a fresh cup of coffee and sinks onto the sofa. This is still the same, and she wonders if she'd better hold off replacing it until he's grown used to the rest of the flat. He pulls at a loose thread on the front of one of Molly's embroidered cushions, and Molly goes to join him.
"You okay?" she asks softly.
He nods, but doesn't say anything.
"Thanks for sorting out the locks," she adds. "That was very kind of you."
He looks across to her, eyes narrowed as he evaluates her and her gentle words, then after a moment, he releases a sigh, running a hand through his hair.
"I'm sure it'll feel more like home soon. You just need to get used to it."
"You know people can see you through these windows?" he gestures to a couple of women walking past the bay window, laughing loudly at something on one of their phones.
"So...your problem with this flat is the fact that the windows are see-through? Like...all windows?" She braces herself for the retort, knowing that he feels there is a much deeper meaning to his comment that makes it an incredibly valid point.
"So were your windows on the fourteenth floor, but you didn't have to worry about anything there, did you?"
She's exhausted by the conversation already.
"I'm not worried about anything here," she tells him, stretching her patience out as far and wide as she can.
"Well you should be," he says. "There are at least eight places that even an incompetent burglar could break in. Twelve for a semi competent one."
Molly sinks back further into the sofa. She wonders if he's feeling very alone at Baker Street at the moment.
Maybe he feels left behind.
She doesn't know why he should, plus she's closer than ever, just a twenty minute walk north, around the outskirts of Regent's Park. It's hardly a perilous journey.
He used to have to get a train and a bus in order to meet her after school.
She turns sideways, stretching her legs across the sofa, so that her left heel comes to rest on his knee.
It is a more effective counter argument than she could have realised, and he must realise that despite all his good deeds this morning, he's in an absolutely vile mood. He places his hand on her ankle, thumb brushing against the top of her foot.
She doesn't press him any further for details of his unnatural hatred of her new flat, but he sits quietly until he finishes his coffee. When he starts waggling his toes, tapping his feet against the floor, Molly knows he is itching for something to do, and he takes to the task of unpacking her books with something that looks almost like enthusiasm.
"How d'you want them?" he asks, pulling open the folded lid of the nearest cardboard box.
Molly purses her lips, knowing she is about to destroy his day further.
"I saw something on the internet," she says, looking down at the stacks of books tucked inside the boxes.
"Yes," he says, dragging out the word, evidently predicting some sort of terrible faux pas on her part.
"Well," she says, a brief smiling forming and disappearing as she pauses. "They were sorted by colour. You know, all the red spines together, all the blue ones..." She stops talking. He knows what colours are.
"Right," he says, blankly.
She wouldn't say that he looks dead on the inside, but he definitely looks like his respect for her has slipped into a coma.
He starts unpacking the books, and Molly decides it's probably a good opportunity to take on her gas and electric suppliers. It is the most boring day on record, and, nearly an hour later, when she's finally been shifted on to the right tariff, and set up her direct debit, she ends her call and goes to check on Sherlock's progress.
It's not quite the cute bookshelf she'd imagined. She had been hoping for a spectrum of colours, like a rainbow across her shelves.
The reality is, the spines of most of her books are black, white, or red. There are a good handful of multicoloured spines, and a decent number with photographs that stretch around the front and back covers.
What she takes away from this lesson, is that she doesn't have any green books. Or purple ones. Or pink. There are a handful of beigey yellow paperbacks, but nothing like the golden sunshine that she had been expecting.
It's a style that suits people who buy books for the way they look, as opposed to the words they hold.
"Alphabetically?" Sherlock asks, hands on hips as he looks between Molly and the neatly stacked shelves.
Molly nods, a pang of guilt tugging at her insides.
"By title or author?" he asks.
Molly thinks for a moment, glancing across to her books to see what would make the most sense. Half of the authors' names are unfamiliar, but they're books that she's read, books that she'll go back to, time and again.
"Title?" she suggests, although she's sure there's a right answer and this isn't it.
Sherlock raises one eyebrow, and waits.
"Author?" she says, changing her mind.
Sherlock nods. "And then?"
"And then what?" she asks. He's lost her now.
"And then by date?"
"Oh," Molly says, frowning. "No don't worry about that, that seems a bit much."
He continues to look at her, and she doesn't know why he's bothering to even ask her opinion, when he's just going to do what he thinks is best anyway.
"Fine, by author, and then by date."
"Good," he says, and he gets to work, index finger sliding along the spines of the books as he starts picking out all of the A's.
The wick on the scented candle is burning low, and Molly wonders if she might have another one tucked away in the bottom of one of the boxes in the spare room.
When she reaches the hallway, something shiny catches her eye. She turns to the side table, to see his set of keys, sitting on the tabletop. He's attached the two spare keys from Molly's new locks to his keyring.
He might hate her new flat, but it seems he's planning to spend plenty of time here.
She doesn't mind that. Not one little bit.