A/N: This story has been cross-posted to my AO3 account "thecollective"
Sherlock Holmes was the last person she had expected to see standing outside her door, but if she were honest with herself, it didn't really surprise her. Not after the last time she had seen him.
The unbidden image of Sherlock bent over, naked, on her laboratory table, embarrassed her enough to make her blush but not enough to keep her from saying, "Come in, Mr. Holmes."
Oh, that sentence made his pupils dilate. She'd have to remember that and further experiment with it. For future reference. For science. For posterity. She wanted to giggle as she thought of John writing down Sherlock's sexual proclivities in a blog post or the inevitable best-selling biography. She could almost picture the detective standing behind the poor doctor, correcting his spelling of "sadomasochism."
"What can I do for you, Sherlock?" she asked. They both knew why he was there, of course, but she wanted to hear his perfect baritone voice say it. Perhaps by admitting it aloud, it would be more real to her.
He sat down gingerly on her sofa.
Right. Gunshot wound. Surely he couldn't have left the hospital so soon?
"I need you," Sherlock said.
Molly smiled. "That's what a girl likes to hear, Mr. Holmes." She moved to the sofa and stood above him. Oh, was he trembling just a little bit? "What do you need, Mr. Holmes?" she asked, her voice breathy and deep. She traced his cheekbones with one finger, first his left, then his right, and she remembered a time when she'd been too afraid to whisper a meager "hello" to him when he'd come into her lab.
Gone were those days.
"What do you need, Mr. Holmes?" she repeated.
He spoke. "John's wife...Mary...she isn't...I don't know how to..." He stopped when he realized the words weren't the ones he needed to say. "I need to be a good friend to John," he admitted, "But I don't know how."
"I see," Molly said. "So why are you here?"
The words poured out of the detective then; it was almost as if Sherlock Holmes was vomiting emotions all over her sofa. Much of what he said didn't make sense to Molly, but when she heard "hospital" and "released myself," she slapped Sherlock Holmes for the fourth time.
He let her.
"Sherlock," she said, "I am going to take care of you, and while I do, you must leave this, all of this, somewhere else. Do we understand each other, Mr. Holmes?"
Sherlock nodded.
His pupils were wide and black and Molly saw then what the great Sherlock Holmes needed from her. It wasn't something D.I. Lestrade or Sherlock's brother or even John Watson could give him. Molly wasn't certain that Sherlock would accept even if they could. She, Molly Hooper, the lab rat who was eternally fixated on sociopaths, was going to give Sherlock what he needed most: distraction.
"Come with me," she said.
She led him to the bedroom. "Lay down," she instructed.
He did.
"Before we get started," said Molly, "I need you to be honest with me: should you be in hospital?"
"Probably."
She wanted to slap him again, because how could the Sherlock Holmes be so bloody stupid? She didn't, though. It wouldn't do any good. He'd just haul his lazy arse elsewhere to cause more mayhem and headaches. She wondered, briefly, why he hadn't gone to John. As she pulled out the handcuffs she'd pilfered from D.I. Lestrade last time they'd gone to the pub, Molly's hands shook in anticipation.
The first time she'd handled Sherlock, she could blame adrenaline. Or anger. This time, she wanted this. Oh so much. She snapped one cuff around his wrist, and the other end to the bed frame. She wished she'd had the foresight to steal a second pair from the D.I. But then again, she'd never imagined she'd have Sherlock handcuffed to her bed either.
Oh, now wasn't that a thought.
"Do we need a word or something for you to tell me if it's too much?" she asked him.
"Redbeard," he replied.
Strange word, and even stranger that it was on the tip of his tongue. It wouldn't have surprised Molly if he'd had the word tucked away for just such an occasion.
"Close your eyes," she said.
He did.
She unbuttoned his shirt as if she were milking the buttons, mostly to see if Sherlock would push her away for twisting the expensive fabric crudely. There was a large bandage across his abdomen, an ugly reminder of the price of Sherlock's deductions. Someday, the detective will have to pay a much larger cost, and the next time Sherlock Holmes ends up laying flat in her morgue, it won't be voluntary.
She traced the bandage with the very tip of her finger, applying almost no pressure at all. He sucked in a breath, and she knew that it hurt him; she could see it in his eyes. He told her not to stop. "Human anatomy does not interest you sexually, not really," she told him. "That's not why you're here. Even if I came around completely starkers, you'd hardly notice, would you? My body, it's not what you need, is it? That's a nice thing, let me tell you. In this world, too many men would take my body and ignore my mind, but it's the exact opposite with you, isn't it?"
The twitching of Sherlock's hands told her that he liked what he heard. "Oh, you like it when I deduce you, don't you?"
Sherlock shook his head.
"Don't lie to me, Mr. Holmes, I'm familiar enough with the human body to know how people respond to something they like." She pushed his unbuttoned shirt away from his abdomen. "Don't move," she breathed against his skin.
"Couldn't if I wanted," he snorted.
Oh, right, the handcuff. She moved his other hand to the bed railing. "Put your hand here, and don't move it," she instructed.
He did.
She let her fingers trail down his hands, down his arm, back to his chest. She pressed her lips where she felt the pounding of his heart, and she lingered, checking his pulse. 97. No need for concern. She hovered over his bandages, and, although she knew he would not like it, she pressed her lips to the corner of the medical gauze, a prayer at the temple of his body.
She knew he wanted her to speak, to distract his mind by using hers. She knew the best distraction was in silence, in him not knowing her next move. He could probably deduce it, true, but a wounded and medicated Sherlock was at a singular disadvantage: he was more a slave to his "transport" than ever before. She proved herself right when she exhaled, slow and hot, over Sherlock's right nipple and he shivered and swore.
God, this was uncomfortable, to be just hovering over Sherlock-Sherlock who was in her bed-and not touching him, not really.
"What do you want from me, Mr. Holmes?" she asked. Every syllable pushed hot breath from her mouth to his waiting skin. He shivered again. "Do you want me to touch you? Tease you? Make you beg?" His injury stymied some of her more creative plans, but Molly Hooper was nothing if not good at improvisation. Her hand cupped the bulge in his perfectly-tailored trousers. "What do you want from me?" she repeated.
He moaned. His eyes-were they blue? or green?-rolled back into his skull. "You, you tell me," he managed between exhales.
So, he did want her to deduce him, then.
She began, "You came to me and not John Watson. Not D.I. Lestrade, either, so it's either emotional for you or it's something that can't be trusted to the police. Likely, it's the latter, and the only reason you'd come to me and not John is...oh. Oh, that's it, isn't it? It's about John Watson? Just like it was the last time you came to me for help."
She reached down and undid his trousers. She knew she shouldn't, knew that it could hurt Sherlock in more ways than one, but she did it anyway. "Mr. Holmes," she said, "I need you to be absolutely still. This is very much against what your doctor recommends." She took him in her hand and stroked him slowly, as if the movement would break him. For all Molly knew, it might.
"You're here because you couldn't go to John, because whatever it is that made you leave hospital, it's consuming you and you can't tell him." She stroked him faster, and the detective arched his hips up to meet her. She slapped him hard on his inner thigh. "I told you not to move," she said.
He didn't apologize, so she slapped him again. Hard.
He glared at her. "I am not John Watson," said Molly, "I am not going to be nice to you." She slapped him once more. Each time her hand struck the detective, it thrilled her just as much as the first time.
He never said "redbeard."
"You don't want me to be nice to you. That's not why you are here." Molly took his cock in her hand again, and if she was a bit gentler this time, Sherlock knew better than to say anything. She twisted her hand around him, pulling, releasing, repeating. He trembled at her touch.
"More," he whispered. His voice was broken. Wanting.
"If you can't go to John or D.I. Lestrade, then whatever your problem is must put John in danger. The police are not an option because…" she let the words trail off. She thumbed the top of Sherlock's cock. He rewarded her with a hiss of pleasure.
"Go on," he said.
"You're protecting someone. Someone who is close to both you and John." It was a guess, and not a very good one, thought Molly, but in this game of deduction, Sherlock would always win. He wasn't here for her deductions, not really. What he wanted was distraction.
But then Sherlock grew quiet and still, and Molly knew she had deduced correctly. He tried to move away from her, but he forgot that he was handcuffed and ended up twisting his body in a such a way that was sure to upset the wound in his abdomen. His wrist jerked and yanked at the handcuff, irritating the milky skin, making it red and raw and bloody.
"Stop."
He did.
"I told you not to move." She pinched his inner thigh until he cried out. "Are you going to do as I say, Mr. Holmes?"
He nodded.
She pinched him again, closer now to his groin. "Say it."
"Yes."
The cliche playing in her head had him calling her "mistress" but she supposed she could save that for another time, if this game of theirs continued.
"Listen to me carefully, Mr. Holmes. Do not move. At all."
She pressed her lips to the tip of his cock, but did not wrap them around him. She teased him, slowly, dragging her tongue down the length of his penis. Sherlock still hadn't relaxed. Distraction, he needed distraction. Wrapping one hand around the base of his cock, she took him into her mouth, sucking lightly. With her other hand, she once again pinched the inside of Sherlock's thigh, causing him simultaneous pleasure and pain. After a few minutes, Sherlock's breaths turned to needy moans, and he began to writhe under her touch. She pulled her mouth off his cock with a loud pop. "I said do not move. I am beginning to think you don't take instruction well at all. Perhaps you don't want me to continue."
Sherlock shook his head. "Please," he choked out. "Please."
He couldn't bring his eyes to meet hers, and Molly saw in that one moment the truth of Sherlock Holmes: his shoulders-skinny though they may be-held up the weight of his networked world of crime and logic and puzzles and Moriarty and John. The insufferable Sherlock Holmes suffered under the burden of it, a modern day Atlas. Fitting, that was. The detective often assumed that the universe was Sherlock-centric, and maybe it was if he carried it on his scapula and acromioclavicular joints.
He came to her for distraction, not deduction. The man who lay in front of her was not the same one who had come undone by the riding crop in her laboratory just a week before. This Sherlock, the one who carried the weight of the world, needed something different from her. "I'm sorry, Sherlock," she said. "I can't. You shouldn't be here." She undid the handcuff. His wrist was swollen and bloody from it. "Let me take care of that?"
She fetched her at-home medical kit and disinfected and bandaged his lacerations. He said nothing, but he watched her with curious eyes. She waited for him to ask her why, why she couldn't follow through, but he didn't. She wasn't sure she had an answer for herself.
She assumed he deduced it.
He dressed just as silently, but she was used to his silences after spending so many hours with him while he researched. She would watch him at work with the microscope, watch the dexterous dance of his agile fingers across blood slides. In those silences, she heard him, heard his deductions in every quirk of his eyebrow, in every twitch of his hand.
In this silence, she heard him suffocating.
As she walked him to the door of her flat, she made her last deduction. "It's Mary," Molly said.
Sherlock said nothing.
"It's none of my business, but I think you should tell John."
The detective left. He didn't say a word to her. She pretended he had gone to his mind palace.
The next time she put on her lab coat, she found a note in the pocket.
"Redbeard," it said.
She pocketed the note and wondered if it had all been worth it.
"Like Tantalus" was supposed to be a one-shot but then plot bunnies. There may or may not be more to come (pun intended).