AN: Special thanks to Cinnsn and Stroke-of-Luck on tumblr for being excellent science nerds, who have both been of enormous help on this chapter.
Dust in the Air
by Flaignhan
An almighty crash shocks her into consciousness.
She sits up in bed, heart pounding, and hears someone scrabbling at the front door. She concentrates, trying to steady her breath so she can listen properly.
There's a jangle of keys, and the scraping of metal on metal as someone tries to put them into the lock.
It's him. And he's either high or he's hurt.
Molly swings her legs out of bed and hurries into the hallway, flicking on the light, recoiling at its brightness as she reaches for the door handle. He falls through the doorway, and she catches him, at the expense of the door swinging into the wall, and bashing into the coat hooks.
"What's wrong?" she asks, hauling him upright so she can see his face. There's a deep purple bruise around his eye, and he's having trouble focusing, although she doesn't think he's concussed.
He's definitely taken something.
"Mary," he slurs, and he gropes for the wall, trying to steady himself.
"What about Mary?" she asks. "What have you taken?"
He staggers into the side table, and Molly reaches past him to swing the front door shut.
"Something on the paper," he tells her, his words melting into one another. He squeezes his eyes tight shut and grips the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles pop under his skin. He sniffs, then scrunches his nose, and opens his eyes again, blinking rapidly, as though he thinks he might be able to reset himself.
"Come on," she says, and she places his arm around her shoulders and guides him into the lounge, his weight bearing down upon her as his feet scuff along the floor. She lowers him onto the sofa, and he covers his face with trembling hands.
"She's gone," he says, fingertips pressed against his forehead, the flesh under his nails turning white with the pressure. "She's gone."
Dread floods through her veins like a poison, and she clears a space on the coffee table, perching on the edge of it. She places one hand on his knee to still his jogging leg.
"What d'you mean gone?" she asks.
"Left," he says, voice filtering through the gap between his hands.
It can't be true.
For once, he must have put two and two together and gotten five.
He's allowed to be mistaken sometimes. Especially now. She would love for him to be mistaken now.
"Someone wants to kill her," he tells her, lowering his hands at last, his dilated pupils finding her face. His left hand covers her right one, and she laces their fingers together. "She's gone to find them."
"That sounds like a terrible plan," Molly says quietly, and he laughs, a small, hollow little laugh.
"What do I tell John?" he asks, voice croaking. "What do I tell him?"
"He'll understand," Molly tells him, her free hand finding his and giving it a squeeze.
He won't understand. He'll be devastated.
"I should go and - "
"No," Molly says. "You need to sleep this off first. You're no good to him like this."
"Speedball," he slurs.
"No."
He doesn't argue. He must know it's an idiotic suggestion. Whatever it is that's left him like this (she suspects sevoflurane) should not be dealt with by adding more drugs. She wonders how much of a viable option he considers it to be, regardless of her agreement. She makes a mental note to search through his coat while he sleeps this off, although, if he's made it this far without dosing himself up with cocaine then he probably doesn't have any readily available.
He slumps over to one side, then opens his eyes wide, trying to sit up straight.
"Bed," Molly says, and she stands up, his hands still in hers, and pulls him to his feet. He stumbles into her, and the weight of him nearly pushes them both back onto the coffee table, but she steadies him, and guides him into her bedroom.
She manages to get his coat off of him before he flops down onto the mattress, and she kneels down to pull off his shoes as well. He's out for the count already, and so she pulls back the duvet, lifts his legs into bed, then covers him up, rolling him into the recovery position.
Just in case.
She has a good look through all of his coat pockets, but there's nothing out of the ordinary, and she goes and hangs it up by the front door. She climbs back into bed, her hand finding his wrist so she can take his pulse - fair - and eventually, after much tossing and turning, she manages to fall asleep.
He's gone when she wakes up, and he must be feeling better, because he managed to leave without making a sound.
His shirt lies abandoned in the laundry basket, the door to his wardrobe left ajar.
It's the first night he's spent in the new flat. She hasn't woken to traces of his existence like this for a long while.
She's missed it.
She gets up and goes to make herself a coffee - a proper one, she needs it today. Twelve long hours at Bart's stretch ahead of her and she's fighting yawns at every turn after last night's disruption.
There's a note on the kitchen counter, biro scrawled onto a sheet from letter writing gift set she'd been given years ago and never touched. His handwriting is still a bit wobbly, but that could equally be anxiety, or the after effects of his unexpected dose.
Gone to sort this out, will be away for a bit. Text me if anything important comes up.
Soz about the speedball banter.
S
She knows the non-apology for his bright idea thinly hides a sufficient amount of guilt and so she decides to tuck it away in the mental box of things best forgotten.
Maybe it had been a poorly chosen joke, humour lost in the slackness of his mouth.
She wants to tell him to be careful, but she doubts that would rank high on his scale of things which would be classed as important. It would, however, rank fairly high on the scale of things which can be ignored.
Regardless, she heads back into her bedroom to find her phone and type a quick text, hitting send before she can change her mind.
Stay safe x
She doesn't think for one minute that she'll get a response, but at around eleven o'clock, her phone buzzes in the pocket of her lab coat. She takes her phone from her pocket, and a smile spreads across her lips, the constant niggling worry eating away at her quelled with one word.
Always
Stacey pours more wine, which is always, simultaneously, both a good and a bad thing.
Molly doesn't complain, and she picks up her glass, then takes an approving sip from it.
This is the third time they've celebrated Molly's purchase of her new flat. She's not sure that the celebrations will stop here, but as long as Stacey brings the booze, she doesn't mind at all.
"And," Stacey says, lifting a finger to draw Molly's attention. "I can crash in your spare room now, instead of on the sofa."
"You can indeed," Molly tells her.
"Although," Stacey says, pulling a face as she draws her knees up towards her chest, wine glass cradled in her hands. "Has he been sleeping in there? I don't want to catch anything."
"He's been away for weeks," Molly says with a roll of her eyes. "Not that there's anything to catch."
"Honestly though," Stacey says, pausing to take a sip of her wine. "How often do you change the sheets in the spare room? Because I know I wouldn't touch them unless absolutely necessary."
Molly smiles. "He hasn't slept in there," she tells her. This is, apparently, a mistake. Stacey's eyes flash with delight and she leans forward, the ends of her hair dangerously close to falling into her glass.
"But he has slept somewhere?"
"Emergency only," Molly replies, waving away her investigation.
"Is he still having a hissy fit about the flat?"
Molly sighs. Yes, would be the short answer. But if it's good enough in an emergency then eventually it will be good enough altogether.
She'd be really worried if he'd gone to a hospital instead.
"He'll get used to it eventually," she says. She doesn't really want to talk about it if she's honest. She's constantly battling a gnawing anxiety, which only increases with each day and week that passes. She rarely has to contend with radio silence, and given the circumstances, and the state in which she last saw him, this time it's all the more troubling.
Molly leans forward, grabbing the bowl of crisps which they've been steadily munching throughout the evening, and balances it in her lap. She crunches through a few and Stacey, despite being at least two and a half sheets to the wind, takes the point and starts telling Molly about the new consultant vacancy she might apply for in Ealing.
Molly listens, and says vaguely encouraging things, her thumb brushing back and forth against the silver bangle on her wrist.
She's stretched out across the sofa, telly on, blanket half covering her while one leg peeps out from underneath, helping to regulate her body temperature. The TV spits out meaningless noise and images of tearful contestants on some reality show or another. It's hardly the high life, but it'll do, for a Wednesday.
Her phone buzzes on the coffee table, and a few more ad breaks pass before she leans across and swipes it from the corner of the table.
The message is from him.
She unlocks her phone with a hasty few taps of her thumb and opens up her messages.
At the airport. Coming home tonight. Will probably see you at the weekend.
She sits up, her ponytail lopsided after three hours squashed against the sofa cushions. A smile slowly spreads across her lips, and she reaches out for the remote control, blindly finding the power button so she can make the idiots on the TV shut the hell up.
She considers her reply, typing out a dozen different messages and deleting them all, before at last, she settles on something suitable.
Ok, see you then x
It's terribly dull, but she's willing to bet that the length of time he's spent away directly correlates with how decent a trip it was. And she's willing to bet it wasn't decent. He hates things that are long and drawn out, and it's taken him weeks to get to this point.
She wonders how John has coped with him.
Sherlock was already delicate before he went away - irritable, on edge, throwing himself into his work in a pretence of normality. Maybe he needs some downtime.
Maybe he needs a proper holiday.
Although for him, that would most likely mean a proper case. Maybe one that doesn't involve his closest friends.
Maybe it's the wrong job for him these days.
She decides to call it a night, and she drags herself to bed, stifling a yawn as she changes into her pyjamas. She's feeling a lot better already; she's been retaining tension in her shoulders, her body getting stiffer and stiffer each day, but now that's starting to loosen and ease out. Now she's on the mend.
She sleeps through until her alarm for the first time in a long time, and when she goes into the kitchen to make her first cup of coffee of the day, there are two things on the kitchen counter that hadn't been there last night.
The first is a postcard, showing a busy square filled with stalls and people, the ornate tower of a mosque stretching high into a dusky sky. She turns it over, but there's no scrawled message on it.
It's just a keepsake.
She sticks it onto her fridge with a magnet, then turns to the brown paper bag, the top of it folded over and taped shut. She tears it open, and out falls a small beaded bracelet.
It's very pretty; the beads are all different colours and she can tell it's handmade. She smiles as she slips it over her wrist, and supposes that if he's had time to buy souvenirs, things must be absolutely fine.