"Aren't you going into work?" Sherlock asked from his position at the kitchen counter. During daylight hours, he was confined to the back of the flat, out of view from passers-by, nosy neighbours and long-lens cameras (or sniper rifles). Not that it really mattered – he wasn't there to gaze out of the window and admire the view.
Molly was still in her dressing gown, and seemed to be preparing breakfast at a fairly leisurely pace. Everything was more or less back to normal between them, it seemed. After their shared night in Molly's room a week ago, he had risen early and made sure he was showered and fully dressed before she woke. The morning had apparently brought forgiveness, and she never mentioned their conversation again.
"It's Sunday, Sherlock," she replied, as though that was sufficient explanation.
"Don't people die on Sundays?" he countered.
"Yeah, but, handily, being dead, they can wait till Monday," she replied, her nose crinkling when she smiled.
He watched her from over the screen of his laptop, pulling her long hair into a messy ponytail and securing it with some sort of elastic thing.
"Have you had breakfast?" she asked over her shoulder, as she peered into the fridge.
Surely anyone who was going to have breakfast would have had it by this time, Sherlock thought. Although apparently, weekends were supposedly different from any other day of the week.
"Nope. Working," he replied. "Slows me down."
He heard Molly snort.
"Um, you know that theory isn't supported by science, right?" she said.
"Hm," Sherlock grunted. "Works for me."
He heard the sound of packets and crockery being arranged on the counter behind him.
"Well, I know what works for me on a Sunday morning," Molly replied. "Bacon sandwiches. White bread, proper butter, Heinz ketchup. I switched to wholemeal once, but it wasn't right."
One thing Sherlock had noticed in his short tenure chez Molly was her tendency to offer seemingly unnecessary detail to conversations – and he wondered whether, if he wasn't there, she would be having the same conversations with herself (or, more charitably, with the cat). The slightly unnerving thing was, though, that he was starting to get used to it – and, worse than that, miss it when she was out of the flat.
"Brown sauce," he said.
"What?"
"Everybody knows that bacon sandwiches should be accompanied by brown sauce," he elaborated in a flat tone, which he hoped would convey his disinterest. "Not ketchup."
She snorted again.
"For a genius, Sherlock, you can be wrong about the simplest things."
That comment registered two things with him: one, she was hugely mistaken about her choice of condiment, and two, Molly Hooper thought he was a genius. Why did that suddenly seem to matter to him?
"It's your breakfast," he shrugged.
"Yes - it is," she replied, dropping two pieces of bread into the toaster. "My kitchen, my rules."
It was his turn to snort at that. She'd been fairly malleable up until this point when it came to house rules, although some of them seemed completely irrational and arbitrary– including the fact that he had to keep his shoes off the coffee table, but it was perfectly fine and sanitary for the cat to sit on the kitchen counter.
Sherlock returned to the screen in front of him, silence descending on the kitchen aside from the occasional soft hum from Molly as she made her breakfast. And the not-so-soft growl of his stomach in response to the aroma of cooking bacon. Molly must have heard it too, as she purposefully wafted the plate under his nose as she strolled past him, barefoot, to the living room.
00000000
For most of the day, she moved around him, cleaning and tidying, bringing groceries home from the shops, and other things that normal people apparently did at the weekend, as though the weekend was somehow different from any other day. At one point he heard her on the phone, talking to a friend (Mara? Maria? Meena?), and he gathered that Molly was being asked whether she was okay, whether she was managing. Apparently, there were people who thought that Molly would be devastated by his death. Ordinarily, Sherlock couldn't care less about whether he was the topic of other people's conversations, but he found himself wondering just how often – and in what context – Molly and her friend had previously discussed him. With a measure of shame, he imagined it probably wasn't good.
Still, he had to hand it to her – she was good at maintaining a cover or, as she would put it, lying. Sherlock almost started to wonder whether she'd done something like this before.
The tone of the day shifted as he dug himself deeper into his work, and he suspected that Molly sensed it, too. The chatting tailed off, and she started to maintain a careful distance as she went about whatever it was that she did on Sundays.
But, apparently, she didn't need to be talking to him or constantly beside him to gauge what he needed. At one point – having been out and come back again - she placed a take-away coffee cup in front of him.
"Black. Three sugars," was all she said, before taking her own coffee with her to the living room.
He found himself wanting her to stay with him, to keep talking, just so he'd have an excuse to say something back to her. Initiating conversation wasn't really his thing – and normally the concept of a pointless conversation was anathema to him - but today it was different. Because as the day wore on, the communications came through and the leads piled up, he was starting to realise that it could be his last chance.
A text from Mycroft early in the evening seemed to confirm this. It came through not long after Molly had nudged a bowl of steaming pasta under his nose.
Tomorrow, 0400. Tbilisi. Expect the car 0245.
He had always known it was coming, but thought perhaps that he had a few more days. But that was the problem when your future was out of your hands.
He ate mechanically, aware of the murmur of the television and aware, too, that Molly wasn't really watching. She was watching him, although trying to pretend that she wasn't. She had seen him read the text, and apparently he wasn't as good at concealing his reactions as he'd thought.
She set her empty bowl down on the coffee table beside her glass.
"When do you go?" she asked.
"Early morning," he replied. "Well, middle of the night, really. You can throw away anything I leave behind."
He wasn't sure why he said that.
She looked up at him, questioningly. Up until this point, the longest he'd been away from her flat was a couple of weeks, but there now didn't seem to be any point in him keeping any belongings there – probably safer for all if he didn't.
Molly nodded, avoiding eye contact as she excused herself and stood up to leave the room.
"You can have your bedroom back," he'd told her, before he'd really had a chance to think it through. "I won't be sleeping tonight."
He wondered later what she'd then thought when, shortly before midnight, he climbed into bed beside her. If it took her by surprise, she didn't show it. In fact, Sherlock was fairly certain that he was the one with the more elevated pulse, the one who didn't understand what was going on.
He had made up his mind to leave early. It made sense to follow up a couple of local leads under cover of darkness, and to tell Mycroft to arrange a different pick-up point instead (again, safer if strange, unmarked cars weren't parked up outside Molly's flat). He'd only intended to look in on Molly one more time before he left, but apparently his rational mind wasn't in the driving seat.
Because he was Sherlock Holmes, because he was an emotionally-stunted bastard, he hadn't truly told this woman how indebted he was to her, that he owed her his life. She knew she counted, yes, but that seemed like an insult now. It didn't begin to describe what she really was.
Shrugging off his jacket and toe-ing off his shoes, he eased himself under the covers and gently inched towards Molly's body. She was lying on her right side again, her long hair leaving the back of her neck and her shoulder-blades exposed. He didn't remember her seeming so small in the bed, las time. Sherlock felt the warmth from her body increase as he moved closer, and he was aware that his usual ability to control his heartrate was failing him. But then, he'd never prepared himself for this scenario.
Eventually, in the darkness, he felt his chest make contact with Molly's back, and this achingly scant touch caused her to stir. He stilled himself, realising that he hadn't anticipated a situation where she would wake up and he might have to explain himself. But she didn't fully wake, didn't turn around, didn't question him – instead, Sherlock felt her shift backwards towards him, fitting their bodies together more closely. He heard his own intake of breath and tried to let it out gently, concentrating on his breathing as a way to steady his heartrate. This was no easy task, given that he now had his nose in Molly Hooper's hair and a hand that he had no idea what to do with. Eventually, tentatively, he reached his arm across her, settling it loosely over her middle, his hand resting on the bed in front of her. Really, he was barely touching her. A moment or two later, Molly's hand came up and small, slender fingers laced with his, anchoring them.
Very soon, his breathing fell into step with Molly's, their chests rising and falling together.
He watched the digital display on her bedside clock, carefully and assiduously committing every new sensation to memory, and when the time came to slide his hand out from underneath hers, Sherlock felt as though something deep within him was howling in protest.
An unfamiliar pain in his chest was still there as he climbed into the waiting car, still there as he smoked a last cigarette on the airfield, and would revisit him late at night in dosshouses and abandoned warehouses for many months to come. He knew he had access to those memories, could revisit them any time he wanted – but he didn't dare, because if he allowed himself to drift back to Molly Hooper's bed, even for a moment, there was a possibility that the work would be forgotten, and Moriarty – even in his grave - would win.
