Thank you so much for all the wonderful feedback. Apologies for the prolonged absence, I've been unwell, had finals, and moved house since the last update! Busy bee indeed. I fly to Canada tomorrow for couple of weeks holiday and will then be moving house again shortly after, so more sporadic updates I'm afraid. This chapter follows on from the previous chapter directly, as requested. Enjoy!
H is for Hysteria, Heavy Traffic
John was correct, the drive back to London was long, arduous and infuriating for everyone concerned. Sherlock kept complaining that they were thinking too loud, and he couldn't concentrate, to which John and Greg swapped irritated looks and gritted their teeth. It took 15 minutes to get onto the A23, and a further twenty onto the motorway, which may not sound like a long time, but by Crawley they were ready to strangle the detective.
"I will drop you at Gatwick and you can get the train." Greg growled, thoroughly fed up of the day he was having, and he knew as soon as they got back into central London it would only get worse. Sherlock ignored Greg and kept staring out of the window, amusing himself with how Mycroft would have enjoyed Molly's inane chatter in the confines of the helicopter. He knew Anthea would enjoy watching his brother be tormented by the little lady, who was likely so nervous that she gabbled the entire way.
"What are you smirking at?" John asked Sherlock,
"Molly and Mycroft in a confined space, she babbles when she's nervous, and Mycroft is less patient than me," The taller man explained,
"Poor Molly," John said, he had experienced first-hand what happened when the elder Holmes was irritated.
"That's the joy, John, he'll be too polite to say anything. He'd rather explode than risk being rude to a woman. Old fashioned that way." They grinned at each other, any opportunity to aggravate Mycroft from a safe distance was taken and enjoyed.
"For crying out loud, any day but today!" Greg shouted, slamming his hands on the steering wheel as they approached the junction with the M25, the motorway come car park that encircles London. Today, it was acting as the latter, which was not unusual, but highly frustrating, as even with the sirens on it would take them twice as long to get to their junction. Thankfully, Sherlock was suitably involved with his phone rang to not get bored or Greg would have had no choice but to abandon him to the hard shoulder of the most hated road in Britain. It took what felt like a decade to get to the next junction, so they could turn off and start driving with the sirens through Greater London. The sirens weren't strictly necessary the whole way, but they did a good job of drowning out Sherlock's complaints.
Molly walked into the morgue expecting several phone calls, at the very least Tom and Sherlock would ring her for a petulant rant and results respectively. She'd connected up the Bluetooth headset and was just waiting to tune out Tom's whining when the first call turned out to be her mother-in-law-to-be. Her very irate and not overly bright mother-in-law-to-be, who she was already at the end of her tether with before Sherlock showed up.
"Right. I think you've got some explaining to do," The rudeness of the woman's statement put Molly's hackles up, not even a hello!
"What would you like explained?" She asked, trying to keep her voice as level as possible. Her disdain for the woman was growing by the second.
"Who were those awfully rude men that trespassed on our private property earlier?"
Molly attempted to explain her long standing sort of friendship with the brothers, without making it seem overly familiar or too weird. She tried to hammer home the point that they were just friends, and he had boundary issues, it wasn't anything like it came across at the party. Unfortunately for her, Tom's mother wasn't keen on listening to anyone's viewpoint but her own. Despite using every phrase in the English language for 'we're just friends' Tom's mother would not let the matter lie.
"You two seem very… friendly," She harped on, trying to sound casual and failing.
"We've known each other a long time," Molly replied through gritted teeth, maybe she should convince John to kidnap her, and then Tom's mum might by the story that all her friends are like that. She sioghed internally and waiting for the next inane question.
"You let him go through your things," the older woman remarked, as if you wouldn't let old friends find things for you or stay at your house. Granted, the level at which that boundary was set was a little higher than normal, but it wasn't that weird. If she had a close girlfriend, she'd let them do most of the things Sherlock did, right?
"I gave up trying to stop him doing that years ago. Look, I know you mean well, but what you're trying to implicate is-" Molly tried to explain, maybe allowing people to know her friends wasn't such a good idea after all. She took a deep breath and squeezed the eyeballs she was holding like stress balls, there was a reason she dealt with the dead, she wasn't overly fond of people
"-very valid, we don't want to get to the church to find the whole thing under disrepute." Tom's mother was practically shrieking down the phone at her now. It was with the accusation of cheating that Molly was very glad that eyeballs require an awful lot of pressure to cause them to burst,
"Excuse me while I bag up these eyeballs," She said through gritted teeth, it was childish and moderately vindictive, but Molly was past caring.
"I beg your pardon!" Was the exclamation from the other side of the call,
"I'm working, I have bright yellow eyeballs that need attention," Molly said shortly, the shocked silence on the other side of the phone gave her an idea, she started talking through her process out loud, muttering to make it seem accidental. She smirked to herself; evidently this was where Tom got his squeamishness from. She knew Tom was too much of a mummy's boy for her to be able to cause any proper upset, he was a bit wet behind the ears but when it came to his mum he defended her like she was some kind of saint (which she wasn't, which really annoyed Molly). She pondered out loud over an enlarged right testicle before Tom's mother finally snapped,
"There are things I need to attend to, I will speak to you later," not even deigning to say goodbye before she promptly hung up. Molly allowed herself a small giggle over her childish victory. Her humour was short lived however, as Sherlock crashed through the morgue doors.
"What did you find?" Sherlock asked bluntly,
"I'm not telling you anything until you apologise, I've just had Tom's mum on the phone! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to grovel to your future mother in-law when you're inspecting a dead man's testicles?!" Molly's mood turned again to anger, she may not expect a hello from Sherlock but he at least owed her for an apology.
"You weren't grovelling, Molly," Sherlock snapped, causing John to roll his eyes, and Greg to clear his throat in an attempt to avoid the domestic that was brewing,
"Apologise! To make matters worse, they thought I was a normal doctor, they never asked particulars and I never brought it up, now I'm back to being that creepy girl that cuts up bodies! Why do you always ruin everything?" She ignored both John and Greg's attempt at dissuading her from shouting at the detective, it felt good to take charge every now and then,
"It's not my fault people are stupid!" Sherlock hissed, he was not appreciating the delay in the findings, Molly took a deep breath and tried to explain why she was upset with him.
"You cannot go about saying those sorts of things in public! I've known you long enough to be used to the weird mind-reading comments and lack of boundaries, but his family are normal, they don't get it. The impression you gave them… MY PROSPECTIVE MOTHER-IN-LAW THINKS I'M A BIGAMIST!" Her attempt at calm failed miserably as she vented her anger at the ridiculous notion being bandied about.
"How stupid are these people?" Sherlock asked flippantly, not best pleased about the assumptions made about himself and Molly, they were friends, and had been a long time but that was it. She'd saved his life, he'd tried to keep her as safe as possible. That was the end of that. Molly deserved to be happy, she deserved far better than Tom and his family were willing to give her, but it was not his decision to make, he'd learnt that by now. Molly was more than capable of looking after herself, he knew she'd given her fiancée time to adjust to what life would revert to now he was allowed to be alive again, and that was coming to an end. Tom was doing surprisingly well, despite the apparent sulkiness. He was brought back sharply from his thoughts by what could only be described as hysteria from John and Greg.
"They… They seriously…" John couldn't even say it through the tears of laughter he was sheading, Greg was equally amused, as he struggled to breathe for laughing.
"I'm sorry she's bitter, twisted and shallow. The mother is trying to get you to break up, she's embarrassed that because you're more successful than her son, she's jealous of your hair and doesn't want you marrying into her family and now she knows you're a pathologist she has the excuse that you'll put the family image at risk. She doesn't respect you Molly and you shouldn't be trying to win her affections, she's unhappy from being forced to marry a man when she's obviously gay. Her family wouldn't accept her, and she won't accept you." Sherlock fired out his deductions at breakneck speed, pleased to get off his chest what he'd been suppressing in the short period he was a t the garden party.
"Why do you always have to be right?" Molly whined, frustrated at the absurdity of the situation she was in.
"Don't answer that, it was rhetorical." John added breathless from laughing, as Sherlock opened his mouth to speak again.
"Now, results?" Sherlock glared at John and all but snatched the spectra and tables out of Molly's grasp, scanning for relevant information as she relayed an overview to him.
"Our highlighter man has been a busy bee, almost non-stop travelling for months, there are traces are several poisons from multiple continents in his blood. However, none of the toxin concentrations are high enough to have killed him on their own, so it's been a long slow process, conducted very carefully. Another 24 hours and there would be no chance of finding a couple of them." Molly was very pleased with how the analysis had come out, that combination of poisons was theoretically very difficult to process and analyse.
"Mycroft?" Sherlock asked shortly, he had a suspicion as to where his older brother may be lurking and why.
"Is here in my office making phone calls." Molly shrugged, it took a lot for her to be surprised at either of Sherlock or Mycroft's behaviour.
"Interesting, you didn't by any chance happen to leave some of those chocolate biscuits you eat when you're doing paperwork in there?" Sherlock smirked knowingly as Molly nodded. "I ought to have a word with mummy about his diet." He smiled half a smile, a decent case and catching his brother in the act of cake snaffling was making this a very good day indeed.