Another update! All for you guys. Hopefully it's decent, I'm still rather muddled, so apologies if that comes across. Thank you all very much for your continued support on this, enjoy.
R is for Reluctance, Reconciliation, Research and Reinvigoration
After her successfully negotiating a holiday and her friends, Molly was feeling reinvigorated with life. She had a spring in her step and was laughing a bit more every day. Mary and John's wedding was fast approaching, spring had truly broken and all was good in the world. Thus, she thought it would be a really good time to try and broach the subject of reconciliation between her fiancé and her man of honour. She was tempted to lock the two of them in a room until they resolved their differences, but didn't fancy seeing either turn up on her slab and having to deal with the fallout, the paperwork! She had carefully engineered scenarios where Tom and her friends, on an individual basis, could have another go at bonding, yes it hadn't worked first time around, but neither had couples outings, group outings or weekends away, so this was her final chance, and she was confident that progress was being made. The fact that Tom had been invited to join John and Greg's weekly 'bitch about Sherlock' pub meets was a good start, and that it fell on mummy-sitting night was simply an added bonus.
Sherlock, on the other hand, was suspicious. There were too many good feelings in the air, Molly and Tom hadn't argued for three days, Greg and his (currently ex-)wife were considering getting married again John had stopped protesting Mary's lurid yellow colour scheme. Even Mycroft seemed to be buying into this strange virus of goodwill as he'd not even tried to convince Sherlock to take on any of his trivial cases or barter over the allocated time spent with mummy, and it was the latter that concerned Sherlock the most, Mycroft never turned down an opportunity to get out of the claustrophobic, judgemental presence of their mother. He'd been exploring his mind palace for clues as to what could possibly be causing the sudden influx of positivity that was unbalancing his life, and come to the conclusion that he must be really bored. John and Mary's wedding planning was mostly done, Molly and Tom's wedding planning had yet to gain any traction, and there was nothing higher than a 3 in his inbox, thus his main sources of recent entertainment had dried up. His war on Tom had grown boring, especially after he'd starting joining in on Greg and John's whine night, the man was too pathetic to get any more fun out of. He was tempted to follow them one evening, and see how long it took for them to notice, but that involved getting dressed, and in the unlikely event he got caught, having to converse with people. He sighed loudly, and tried to concoct an experiment to alleviate his boredom, but couldn't think of anything that didn't involve popping into Bart's for supplies, which in turn meant dealing with a terrifyingly cheery Molly. He would rather avoid the scrutiny today, she tended to nag about his 'awful eating habits' or that 'he wore too many nicotine patches' when she was emboldened by a good mood. He shuddered and opted to remain on the sofa, where it was quiet, and there was no nagging, he'd take boredom over nagging any day.
Molly was almost revitalised to the point where she considered stopping her bi-weekly skive off to Baker Street, until she actually thought it through and laughed at her own stupidity. Why would she give up peace, quiet and the ability to blackmail Sherlock into cleaning with just one word? It was quite disconcerting how wary the brothers were of their mother, but Molly was willing to take full advantage as it meant she no longer had to clear out old experiments of Sherlock's for him, and she got to spend time with Mrs Hudson. The other major benefit was the food, which showed up whether she was at work or Baker Street, always at 7 pm, and had thus far not been the same meal twice. Thankfully, Tom seemed to be none the wiser as to her exploits, and their relationship was better, they were arguing less and Sherlock was interfering less, and she was feeling hopeful that maybe they could set a date for the wedding soon.
John had been spending far more time with Tom than he'd ever anticipated, especially after he got put on Tom-sitting duty while Molly had super-secret-Holmes-stuff to deal with. Whatever it was, he didn't envy her in the slightest, those two took terrible advantage as far as he was concerned. The more he got to know Tom, the less annoying the man became, and the more confused John got. Given Molly's predisposition to dangerous people (Sherlock, Moriarty), he didn't understand what Tom brought to the table in the relationship. He could appreciate a need for normality when considering all the lunacy that Sherlock brought into her life, but Tom took that to the extreme. He may look trendy, but it was obvious that was Molly's influence, he was resolutely a meat and two veg man, and although he didn't know Molly as well as people may think, he liked to think he knew her well enough to struggle to come up with anything the two had in common. The atmosphere on the first Tom-sitting evening was one of the most awkward he'd ever been in, including all the times Sherlock had deduced people to tears, which made it quite the achievement. They'd tried before to find common ground and failed, this time they'd made baby-steps, establishing that neither were big on football, John enjoyed rugby union, to which Tom was indifferent, but both were partial to test cricket, and agreed that T20 was the poorer younger brother. Nothing quite beats a sport that takes so long that you have to break for lunch and tea, takes 5 days to complete one game and has positions such as 'silly mid-off', apparently, as somewhat unsurprisingly both their fiancées were not keen. From this quintessentially English tradition a tentative friendship was born. On the back of this, John invited Tom along to his and Greg's weekly whine about their mutual problem, Sherlock. It allowed all of them to vent, but John and Greg to keep an eye on how Sherlock was tormenting Tom, and fill the latter in on where his misses went at 4 am to try and dissipate the suspicions that had been causing problems over the last few months.
Greg was concerned. Not only was John bonding with Tom, but Sherlock was almost behaving himself, and he was reluctant to believe it would last for very long. He was right. During Tom's ramblings of a budding friendship and Molly's epiphany of a possibility of being a normal social coupe, Mycroft had calculated the probability of Molly's dreams coming true. Even if Tom getting on with John set a precedent for Greg, which had the potential to encourage Sherlock to begrudgingly stop his experiment to see just how little flesh it took to make Tom vomit, which in turn meant that they could be a social couple, she still hadn't factored in that their current happiness was facilitated by them not being social with each other, let alone as a couple. She spent at least half of her weekday evenings either at Baker Street or work, and the ones where she was at home Tom would watch cricket or fishing or something she found very dull, while she tidied, caught up with other friends over the phone or cleaned. Toby had taken up residence in 221B Baker Street on a semi-permanent basis, returning to the flat when Molly dragged him back, only to escape when she went out to work the next day. They rarely walked the dog together any more, and since the little incident by the Thames, she daren't go out with Tom and his friends. The signs were there, and it was up to Mycroft to prevent the fallout that would affect his brother, after all he was supposed to protect Sherlock. Plus he was ever so good at meddling, it would be a waste of his talents not to do so.
Luckily for Molly, Sherlock was too interested in his research for John's stag do to take notice of his brother's calls, as lowering himself to the level of a social human was proving very difficult. After spending hours going through his mind palace to see if he could take inspiration from anywhere and failing, he reluctantly Googled 'how to throw a stag do'. Twenty minutes later he was at Molly's flat with a thawing adult leg in a cool box and some darts, as he had a sudden need to experiment on the bruising patterns of projectile based wounds in Molly's kitchen, where she would shout a lot and hopefully wipe all of the images from the last half hour from his mind.