Molly heard Greg come into the morgue, and called out, "I'm back here, in my office. How did it go?"

"You're not asking, 'Was he there?'" he responded cheerfully, as he worked his way down the aisle to her door.

"No. You were up there too long for him not to be there."

"Good deduction." She made a face, and he grinned. "He's okay—I think. He talked himself around."

"Mrs. Hudson's been ransacking his place trying to make sure there's nothing there for him."

"Good—I don't think it's necessary, but it may be kinder." Seeing the question in her eyes, he added, "No. He hadn't used. I think that was the point. Tempt himself to the limit, and learn if he'd stop or not."

"He's failed that one before."

"The funny thing is, I don't think he has. Before he's always had Mycroft and me, and later John and Mrs. Hudson as a safety net. When he used, he wasn't testing himself, he was testing us. This time I think he was really afraid there was no 'us.' He had to know if he could stop himself."

"And he could?"

"Yeah."

She nodded, silently. After a moment she said, "Want some coffee? I made a pot while you were up top."

"I will worship you for coffee."

She blushed, and damned herself for it as she hurried from her office and led him back to the main work area, where the coffee pot was. She'd had a small taste of his "worship" earlier, before the phone calls had come in and the search had begun. She'd liked it.

That scared her more than a little. Rather than deal with it, she asked, "Sugar? Cream?"

"Sweet and white. Maybe it will fool my body into thinking I slept and ate breakfast."

"We could go out for breakfast. I'm not actually on duty for hours, yet."

"No. Coffee will do. Thanks for that, though. Look, I'm going to be dead knackered tonight: I'm not the lad I used to be. But I'm off Saturday, so tomorrow night's good. Maybe we could watch that movie we never got to see?" He accepted the mug with a smile and a flickering stroke of a finger over her knuckles.

The hair on the nape of her neck rose and she came out in goose bumps. "I…um. Yeah. I… Yeah. I'd like that." She didn't faint. She wasn't sure why, though. She knew now that going out with Greg meant good odds of kissing—and that he was talented at it. She wasn't sure she could match his skill level, but she'd enjoyed trying. "Friday night, then. Tomorrow. Um…meet here?"

"Works for me." His free hand traced down her arm to her hand, and his fingers laced with hers.

She wasn't breathing quite right, and she knew she was red as a London double-decker bus…but she didn't pull her hand away. Instead she tightened her fingers in a light squeeze. He grinned at her mischievously, brown eyes alight—

And of course, damn it, Sherlock came in and glanced over.

All three of them stiffened and froze for a moment—then shifted into uneasy motion. Molly slipped her fingers free and made a jittery attempt to pour herself a mug of coffee. Greg, spotting her jitter, put his mug down and tried to take over for her—and cracked his knuckles on the pot. Both laughed nervously…

And Sherlock, still and reserved as…well, as Mycroft…looked away from them and paced to the bank of microscopes, seating himself at the new Keyance digital. He leaned over and fiddled, idly. It would have been much more effective if Molly had not known the microscope could not possibly be turned on.

Molly huffed unsteadily, not sure if the sound she made indicated hysteria, laughter, or her hormones going into overdrive. She had Greg leaning much too close, Sherlock far too present and far too ridiculous, and the memory of last night's kisses far too vivid in her mind.

Greg eyes laughed, and he picked his mug back up, toasting her silently. She found herself grinning back. She took a second pass at pouring her own coffee, and succeeded this time. Feeling brave, she called, "Want coffee, Sherlock?"

His head stayed down, bent over the microscope, but one black-gloved hand rose and seemed to brush the suggestion away. "No, thank you. 'Keep calm and carry on.'"

"God, that's tempting," Greg murmured softly, more mischievous than ever. As she blushed crimson, he rolled his eyes. "Don't worry. I know you'd hate it. But, so help me, if you didn't… I think we could probably pay him back for all last night with one proper snog."

"I can hear you, Lestrade…" Sherlock grumbled. "I'm not so easily rattled."

Molly could see the challenge match developing… "No." She shook her head. "Just—no. This is so not happening! Greg, I'll see you tomorrow night. Sherlock? The Keyance works much better when you plug it in. If either of you need to talk to me, I'll be in my office." She grabbed her mug and skittered back to her own safe space, closing the office door behind her. Then she spent the next five minutes trying to recall how to breathe. The life of New Normal Molly was so much more exciting than the life of Old Normal Molly! Terrifying, in some ways. Tempting—oh, very tempting in others.

She closed her eyes and shivered, remembering the night before. If Sherlock had always made her feel small and unwanted and clumsy and stupid, Greg had unintentionally made her feel young and inexperienced. He was good at what he did. There was no mistaking that he'd been a bit of a lad, sown his wild oats, then married and stayed married for years. All that experience was there in glances, kisses, light touches that demonstrated his knowledge. It was blended with sincerity and an adorable first-date insecurity that kept it from being a rote performance. In comparison she'd felt every year of the decade and a half that lay between them—along with the certainty that if he'd been a bit of a lad, she'd never managed to be wild at all, ever. What was the female counterpart of a "bit of a lad," anyway? A bit of a lass? No. That didn't seem right. Whatever it was, she'd never been one. But, oh, dear, the evening with Greg had made her regret it…

She gulped coffee, and prayed for caffeine to cut in…her focus kept drifting in ways it shouldn't.

It didn't help that the line of Sherlock's shoulders, the cant of his head bent over the microscope, even the graceful lift of the black gloved hand had not become one bit less compelling. Instead of a nice, neat either/or, she was now stuck with a raging case of "OMG, both!"

That's impractical, Molly, she told herself. Not sensible at all. You've finally got a great guy at least interested. Don't ask for more, you idiot.

Apparently one did not recover from years of Sherlock-addiction so quickly as all that.

We're friends, now. That's good enough. He loves me, now…in his own weird Sherlock way. And, please, God, I don't want to go back to the old normal. It hurt too much. I don't want to live like that again. It was horrible…and it wasn't even all his fault. It wasn't his choice to have me that crazy for him. He's got his flaws, but he didn't seduce me. I don't want to land there again. I really don't. It was cray-cray. I was cray-cray…

She could hear the murmur of voices in the main lab. If she hadn't been so keyed up, or so tired, she would have realized more quickly that it was Nigel and Sherlock, talking. As it was, she'd been staring into her coffee mug for an unknown period of time before the fact registered.

With a gasp and a curse, she jumped up—then caught herself, and forced herself to slow down. She opened the door quietly, preparing to go out and play "senior lab technician and morgue manager"—and prevent either Nige or Sherlock from becoming residents of the morgue, rather than mere visitors. It took her a second to realize that the voices had already fallen off.

She stopped, and listened. For a long stretch there was nothing to be heard but the standard sounds of Nigel opening up shop for the day: clicking on the main computer they used to log bodies in and out, and to maintain files; doing a check-through of the autopsy room; bringing out the rolling gurney with the first corpses, ready for the medical pathologists like Dr. Kemper to get to work. He checked supplies, refilled drawers and containers, checked the autoclave and primed it for future use. All the sounds of normal activities of the morning. She wondered if Sherlock had left already…or did until he spoke, his voice as frigid as an ice bath.

"Am I truly so offensive to you?"

Molly wondered what Nigel had said to bring that on.

Nigel made a grumpy, sullen sound, then said, "You're a right prat. And you're mean to our Moll."

"I'm perhaps less tactful than some people would prefer."

"Try again, mate. You'd lie outright for a shot at being clever-dick of the hour."

"I do not lie!" Sherlock said, sounding affronted to the core.

"Give over. You'd lie in a second, if it suited you."

"Examples, please?"

"You're not dead. That's one, for a start."

"That was different. You do know Molly helped with that." It wasn't a question.

"Well, d'oh." Nigel had a way with "d'oh." When he used it, it sounded twice as dumb as when anyone else did. "Like there was any way for you to get through listed as dead without someone to help you. Who's it going to be but Moll? It's not like I'd have helped you."

"You'd only been hired at the time, so you wouldn't have been much help in any case," Sherlock said, dismissively. "Nor are you remarkably much improved since that time. You may be a competent lab tech, but you're no Molly Hooper."

Nigel laughed, wickedly. "I've a bird in Croydon's glad of it, too."

Sherlock made a sound as though about to tear Nigel apart with analytical brilliance—and then he stopped with a slight choke, before saying in tones of stunned horror, "Good God. You do, don't you? Is the poor girl mad?"

"Like as not. She has a bit of a thing for gingers. That helps," Nigel said, cheerfully. "Still, I'm mad, too, but only when the wind's north-by-northwest. When the wind's to the south I can tell a hawk from a handsaw, me."

There was a long pause, then Sherlock said, "What?" Molly could hear the sound of his brain suddenly and completely crashing—blue-screen Sherlock.

Nigel made an incredulous sound. "Huh? That's Shakespeare, yeah? Hamlet. You know? 'Alas, poor Yorick?' 'To be or not to be?' 'Good night, sweet prince?' Just the most famous sodding play in the whole sodding world?"

"Oh," Sherlock said, dismissively. "I don't bother with things like that. They're not useful to me."

"You're having me on, right?"

"No. Brains are limited in capacity. What value is there in keeping trivia like that?"

"You don't mean it. You really know bugger-all about Shakespeare?" He whistled. "That explains a lot. Look, you may be a complete whiz, but if you don't know Shakespeare, and Dr. Who, and the Bangles, and the Beatles, and who the Spice Girls are, and who won the World Cup, and what the latest movies are, or the classics, or who Cole Porter is, or…or all that…you're going to make such a mess of things! All that stuff, it's not useless: it's…it's…" he stopped, stunned by the enormity of such ignorance. "It's people stuff. It's all…" he paused, then said, firmly, "It's evidence, y'great pillock. It all means as much as grit on a shoe or brown sauce on a lapel. You don't know stuff like that and you can look and look and still not know what you're looking at."

"Passionately argued, but I've not found it to be the case," Sherlock replied. "On the contrary, I find those who fill their heads with that sort of 'stuff' to be incredibly boring."

"Yeah, and I fall asleep if you sit me down with a bunch of math types. But that doesn't mean what they're saying isn't important. It just means I'm too stupid or ignorant to know why it's important. You're blinkered…and you don't even know it."

Sherlock snorted. "You sound far too much like my brother Mycroft. Well—not like him. However, he'd agree with your thesis, while being stunned at the plebian limits of your expressive capacity."

"He's the one who's… I mean, yeah. I forgot he was…" Nigel sobered, ignoring Sherlock's insult. "Hey, I'm sorry."

"It's hardly your fault."

The two were quiet again. The steady sound of the morgue waking up replaced their conversation. Molly was about to go in to add her own contribution to opening up, when Nigel cleared his throat.

"Anyway. Um…just between us? Geek to freak? You're not so bad, when you're not being a total prat. Just… don't dick around with Molly, ok? She's good people. She doesn't deserve it."

Sherlock cleared his own throat, then murmured, "Yes, she is, and no, she doesn't. And… Freak to geek? You're almost intelligent. Sometimes."

"More often than you think."

"Don't push it."

"Yeah, yeah. Toff. "

"Geek."

"Freak."

Molly couldn't believe it. It was…

It was male bonding. Real, authentic, insult-ridden, classically juvenile male bonding—in her morgue! Between Sherlock and Nigel! Any minute now one of them might well pound the other on the bicep and offer to stand the next bloody round. Fighting back laughter, she punched the air silently, then crept back to her office, collected her mug, and swept back in to the lab.

"Good morning, Nige. Need a hand with the first gurney?"

"Nope. No point till later. Dr. Changwani's not scheduled for the DOA till ten, and he's the first for the day."

Molly poured coffee for herself, Nigel, and Sherlock, adding the correct amounts of sugar and cream automatically. Nigel took his black, she liked hers with a sugar and a splash of cream, and God knew, she had Sherlock's black-two-sugar down cold. Once done she rinsed the pot and started a new one. She and Nigel fell into the comfortable, familiar rhythm of morning set-up, neither paying all that much attention to Sherlock, who remained where he was by the microscopes. Only when the morgue was fully prepared for business did she stop to lean against the lab table and talk.

"It's none of my business, but just what did happen last night?"

Sherlock scowled into his cup. "I just pointed out that Mycroft would hate being turned into the big-eyed poster child for MI5 and MI6. Really, Molly, it was quite saccharine."

"Mmm. Would he hate knowing his people care about him that much?"

Sherlock shrugged and refused to meet her eye.

Failing to get any further response, she asked, "Are you making any progress on learning who's trying to kill him? Or on the stuff you're working on for his people?"

"None," he said, voice growly and annoyed. "Beemish is investigating the attacks on Mycroft. He and William are continuing to send me summaries on the issue of his concealed agent. My own contacts are sending in information—but none of it suggests a pattern."

"Do you know if the two are connected, or is the killer someone taking advantage of opportunity, and the agent-thing just the fallout? It just seems like a lot of stuff to be going wrong at once, if it's not connected…"

He paused, and something flashed in his eyes. She'd seen that alertness before—a sudden tension, a revving of the mental engines. He sat, still but poised, frozen for second after second, eyes flicking as he studied something unseen by anyone outside his skull. One hand rose, then, and seemed to push an invisible object to one side. The other hand rose—pulled something into alignment. Something was flicked away; something was drawn forward. He studied his invisible array, pondering.

"Heall right?" Nigel asked, worried.

Molly frowned. "I've seen him do it before. He's thinking."

"I think every day without conducting the choir invisible."

"That is because you have no composition or structure to give your thinking form," Sherlock snapped, coming out of his fugue blazing with intensity.

"You've figured it out?" Molly asked, as breathless at the sight of him in action as she'd ever been.

"Not all, but a start. The hunt's begun, Molly! It's begun." He uncoiled from the lab stool and shot toward the door—then stopped, almost as though his shoes had been glued to the lino. He struggled, then, seeming almost torn in two by conflicting impulses.

Then he turned and walked back to her with that insanely good posture, head up, chin up, like a man going to face a firing squad and determined to shame his executioners.

"Sherlock?" she asked, bewildered. This was when he usually raced off, leaving her feeling awed, amazed—but also wrung out and completely irrelevant. He looked down at her, and her breath caught. She'd seen that shattered vulnerability so rarely, but every time it had stolen her heart.

"I'd meant to speak to you alone, but…"his eyes shot around, restlessly, and he growled, "there's no time. I have to go. I…I wanted to apologize. I'm sorry I embarrassed you yesterday afternoon. There was no shame in your laughter or your friendship with Nigel. I wanted to apologize for frightening you and my friends last night. It was uncalled for. I wanted to apologize for interrupting your engagement with Detective Inspector Lestrade. You both deserved better from me. I seem to be apologizing to you far too often lately…or perhaps I'm only beginning to apologize enough. But Nigel is correct. You are a good person, Molly Hooper. You do not deserve to be hurt. I hurt you too often. I am sorry."

It shattered her. She placed a hand on his chest, and said, softly, "I make it hard not to hurt me, Sherlock. I'm sorry about that. And I'm glad to be your friend, even when it's not easy."

He gave a curt little nod. "Thank you, Molly." Then he reached out, and tentatively drew her into a hug, lowering his head over hers.

She'd seen him hug Mrs. Hudson much the same way—Sherlock, who didn't hug or touch, had crossed some boundary that allowed him to treat his landlady with an affection that didn't require personal space that could be measured in leagues. The only time he'd ever hugged Molly, though, was the night he'd died. Then, as now, it hadn't been particularly sexual—but then, as now, it was overpowering.

And then, almost at light speed, he was gone.

Molly made herself breathe. It wasn't the easiest thing she'd ever done, but she managed it. She decided if she kept it up, some day it might be natural again.

Nigel studied her, wide-eyed, then said, contemplatively, "So. How did your date with DI Hunky Cop go, anyway?"

"Really good, Nige. Really, really good," Molly said, with a shiver.

"Uh…huh. Oooookay." Nigel drew a breath even deeper than hers, and said, calmly, "Molly-me-love, you're in deep, deep trouble. You know that, don't you?"

"Oh, hell, yes," she said.