An Interlude: Three Days with Mycroft and Molly
Molly dreaded the next few days. She wondered what the Hell she would have to talk about with Mycroft Holmes. She imagined endless awkward silent evenings where both of them would sit in proximity to each other but might as well be invisible. Thank God I have plenty of reading material, she thought. To take her mind off how potentially horrible things were going to get once he arrived in a couple of short hours, she decided to cook dinner to divert her worries into a useful activity.
When Mycroft finally did arrive, it was as awkward as Molly had feared.
"Dr. Hooper."
"Mr. Holmes."
Then there was silence, as neither knew just what to say to the other. Finally, Molly broke the silence. "I've cooked dinner, in case you're hungry."
"Yes, I thought I smelled something. I suppose I could eat. Ok. I'll just take my things to Sherlock's bedroom and I'll be right out."
"Um, actually, I'm staying in Sherlock's room. He's been sleeping in John's old room. But, if you'd rather . . . "
"No, no. That's fine. I'm sure either bed would be equally uncomfortable." And so he deposited his small suitcase in the guest room and came back two minutes later. He scrutinized the flat. "It's cleaner than I've ever seen it. Mummy did quite a job on it."
"Yes" was all Molly could say. "Please sit down, Mr. Holmes. Dinner will be ready in a minute. I didn't know if you drink wine or, if you did, what kind you like so . . . " Molly pointed to a bottle on the table. Mycroft picked it up and inspected it remorselessly.
"It will do," he said, not overly pleased, and sat down.
"Ok," Molly said, wondering if she would be happier in the Hebrides right now. She removed a large pot from the stove, placed it on the table, and ladled out some contents into both of their bowls.
Mycroft sniffed at it, looking unimpressed, and declared, "It doesn't smell objectionable at all."
"Um, thanks? It's, um . . . Romanian Beef Stew with Dumplings." Mycroft raised one eyebrow and proceeded to taste it with extreme caution.
"I have to say, Dr. Hooper, that might be one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted."
"Really? You like it?""
"Like it? I'm thinking of what crimes against the state I can have you charged with just so that I can sentence you to make it for me every night," Mycroft said, smiling genuinely at her for the first time. Molly looked relieved. "How did you come across such a recipe?"
"My mother's side of the family is Romanian."
"Ah Romanian. Well, then . . . " Mycroft poured some of the wine in each of their glasses and raised his to Molly. "Noroc!"
Molly in turn raised hers. "Noroc!"
"Romanian is a wonderful language. I'm no expert speaker of course, but once one knows one Romantic Slavic language, you know, the rest come easily."
"I'll have to take your word for it. I only know a few phrases. 'Noroc,' of course, basic greetings, and, strangely, 'how much for your pregnant goat'?"
Mycroft laughed with real mirth. His faced then turned more serious. "So, Dr. Hooper, how have you been doing with all this package business?"
"You can call me Molly."
"Only if you call me Mycroft."
"Deal. Well, I'm mainly just frustrated. Sherlock won't tell me anything about what's going on in my own case. And he's being high-handed and mother-henish at the same time. I just want this all over with."
"Trust that Sherlock does too. Few things mean more to him than your safety. Trust me, he'll move heaven and earth and piss off half the population of Britain and America to see this through." Molly smiled awkwardly and nodded.
After they cleaned up the dishes, the inevitable awkwardness set in again when they sat in the living area. Both sat reading quietly for an hour, glancing up every now and then as if they should try to make more conversation but then just turned silently to their reading materials once more. Finally, it was Mycroft who broke the silence. "Molly, would you like to play a game of some sort?" She was startled and didn't know what to say at first.
"What . . . what kind of game?" she asked warily. Mycroft stood and proceeded to rummage through the closet until he came out with the game of "Operation."
"'Operation,' really?" Molly said, surprised and a little confused.
"Yes, 'Operation,' but Sherlock and I devised a twist to the game to make it much, much harder." He placed it on a table and sat down. Molly came over and sat down across from him, still looking dubious. As he removed the game from the box, he explained. "Here's the twist: you only look down once before you look back up again and then attempt to perform the operation. While you're removing it, you have to stare elsewhere."
"Mycroft? You do realize that I'm a doctor, right? I remove organs, bones, and foreign objects from bodies every day at work."
"Well, no offense, dear, but you're a pathologist. All your patients are already dead. How important can precision really be? Besides, you can only look but once for each piece. That's the real challenge." Molly shrugged, but Mycroft continued. "We use billiard rules. Did you want to go first?" Mycroft looked smugly confident, having played this version of the game so many times with Sherlock.
"Alright." Molly looked down at the cartoon body and studied it for nearly half a minute. Then she picked up the game tweezers, looked straight into Mycroft's eyes and proceeded to pick up the funny bone without coming near buzzing out, but, instead of looking back down again before attempting the next removal, she just kept her eyes on Mycroft. She then retrieved all the other items, all without tripping the buzzer and without ever looking down again. When she finished removing the last item, the rubber band in the leg, she smiled triumphantly and said, "Can you do it faster?" Mycroft slumped back in his seat, equal parts annoyed and impressed.
Never graceful in defeat, Mycroft went to the closet once more and retrieved the 'Scrabble' game. "Well, hand-eye coordination was never my best talent. What do you say to a test of brain power, Molly dear?"
"Well, it's not my best game," Molly confessed, "but I do enjoy it. Just played it yesterday with Malcolm."
"Malcolm?" Mycroft asked as he set up the game.
"He's the man outside the door right now. Security. Works the night shift."
"Oh," he said, holding out the bag of tiles to Molly.
The game lasted an hour and a half, ending with Molly announcing "QUIBBLE. That's triple word. 143 points and I'm out."
Mycroft turned his own letter rack over in a huff, annoyed. "The one problem with this game," he opined, "is how much of it is determined by random chance. If you don't get good letters, you can't do much of anything."
Molly held her tongue and just smiled. But Mycroft wouldn't let things rest on that note.
"Now chess. Chess is the sport of kings."
"No, that's polo. Sports, by definition, must involve at least some physical exertion and coordination."
"Well, in any case, it's a pure intellectualism and strategy. Can you play?"
"Yeah, my Dad's taught me. But, Mycroft, chess games can run long and I have to work tomorrow."
"If it gets too late, we can always pick up where we left off." So Molly agreed to a game. Luckily, her fears of the game interfering with her sleep were totally unfounded. She achieved check-mate against Mycroft in 45 minutes.
She did feel some sympathy for Mycroft, who now appeared thoroughly disheartened. "Perhaps I should have mentioned that my father reached the quarterfinals of the 1984 World Chess Championship. Garry Kasparov defeated him," Molly said sweetly.
"Of course he did. I'm going to bed now."
"Good night, Mycroft. I 'm sorry you had such a lousy night."
He looked at her, surprised. "Lousy? It was one of the best nights I've had in months, maybe a year." He turned to keep walking to bed, but he stopped and called back to Molly. "Don't cook tomorrow night. There's a recipe I've been dying to try. I'll cook."
And Molly, as the cliché goes, could have been knocked over with a feather.
Mycroft was already in the flat when Molly arrived home from St. Bart's the next evening. He was buzzing around the kitchen but stopped when he saw her.
"Molly dear. Do make yourself useful and pour the wine."
"It smells amazing. What is it?"
"Moroccan chicken with jasmine rice. And, although I certainly don't need it, for dessert, I made a sticky toffee pudding. I thought about making a traditional Moroccan dessert such as Gazelle Horns to stay with the theme of the evening, but, let's be honest, only the Germans and the British do desserts right."
"You're going to spoil me, Mycroft."
"Well, I but rarely have the time to cook and, even when I do have time, it's not that much fun to cook for one, anyway."
"Yes, I agree. It's so much effort and then no one to appreciate it." They smiled at each other, both knowing the loneliness of single life. Mycroft served dinner, which Molly enjoyed thoroughly. While Mycroft cut the pudding and drizzled on the toffee, Molly said, "I don't really have any room for dessert, so my stomach is just going to have to make room, because I'm not passing this up."
After dessert, they both sat at the dining room table, moaning from fullness and enjoying more of the wine.
Mycroft said, a bit nervously, "If you ever feel like it, I wouldn't be unamenable to cooking every now and then. You could come over, I'll cook and you can share with me some of your father's chess strategies. But, of course, that's if you . . . "
"I'd love to, Mycroft, and I'd love for you to come to my flat and I'll cook for you. If I'm ever allowed back into my own flat again, that is. But, I was under the impression from Sherlock that you don't like people in your home."
Mycroft waved that idea off with a dismissive hand. "No, I don't like Sherlock in my home. He practically lays waste to it every time he pops by. He removes books from the shelves and never puts them back. Tears apart the newspaper and lays them, beautiful mind-style, all over my dining room table. He claims that I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I just have Anti-Sherlock Disordering Disorder."
Molly laughed loudly. "Well, if it's any consolation, he claims that I'm OCD too. If that isn't the pot calling the kettle back. I just like things ordered rationally."
"Me too. Did you see the state of his kitchen cabinets?"
"Yes, it was a nightmare trying to find anything yesterday when I was cooking."
"Same with me today."
"There's no rhyme or reason why items are grouped together in the drawers and cabinets. I've half a mind to reorganize them all myself," Molly threatened.
"I've half a mind to help you." They laughed and looked at each for a long second, then both sprang to their feet and furiously started emptying the cabinets. Thus began several hours of what, to them, was quite a lot of fun. At the end of the evening, both were pleasantly exhausted, enjoying companionable chit-chat in the living room until bed time.
As Mycroft stood up to go to his room, Molly said, "So tomorrow's our last night together. Is there anything you'd like me to cook?"
Mycroft thought about this and said, "No, I'm taking you out to dinner. Be ready. 7:00 pm. Semiformal."
Mycroft thought Molly looked lovely. While the "little black dress" was a staple of almost every woman's wardrobe for a reason, he had to confess that Molly allowed the dress to achieve its maximum potential.
He'd ordered a very expensive champagne to start. "To Molly," he toasted. "I freely admit I came into this living arrangement with trepidation, thinking it was going to be dreadfully boring and awkward, but I have to say that I looked forward to seeing you every night."
"That's very sweet, Mycroft. I can honestly say the same thing."
"So, have you heard from Sherlock at all while he's been in America."
"Just a strange little call in the middle of the night last night. He was very weird. He said he just needed to hear my voice, to know I'm alright. He rang off right after that. I think he's very homesick. You know how he hates to travel."
"Ummm, yes," Mycroft said, all the while thinking that more was behind the call than mere homesickness.
"What was he like as child—Sherlock?"
Mycroft was taken aback by the question but answered quickly, "Clever, of course. That goes without saying, even though I just did. He had a wonderfully vivid imaginary life. When he played pirates with Victor Trevor . . . " Here Mycroft looked sad. " . . . he placed himself utterly in that world. To be around him when he was playing was to believe you really were on some creaky 18th century ship out at sea. I'm surprised he never came down with scurvy just to make the experience more real." Molly laughed appreciatively. Then Mycroft's look became even darker, "His teenage years were more difficult."
"Why?"
"Like me, he was too clever for the other children. While his expansive imagination and wonderful sense of drama and play made him a good companion as a young boy, it made him fodder for ridicule and cruelty as he grew older. When I was that age, I was able to bear it better—the loneliness, the isolation. I wore it as a badge of honor that I was above such imbeciles. But Sherlock, Sherlock took loneliness hard. I suppose that's where his defense of being a 'high-functioning sociopath' came from. He couldn't admit how sad he was that he couldn't make friends easily, so he pretended not to need them when, in fact, he needed them so very badly."
"How sad. For both of you."
"Yes, well . . . what about you? You were obviously more clever and intelligent than other children."
"That was never my problem. I was always invisible, which can have its advantages. You may notice sometimes that I still stutter. It was much worse when I was a child and a teenager. So it seemed a blessing to be be neither seen nor heard."
During the rest of their meal, they conversed easily, like people that had been friends much longer than they had in reality. At 221B that night, their last night as housemates, Molly did offer him some pointers to improve his already strong chess game. They drank wine and talked some more. When once more it came time to say goodnight, both stood.
"I'll be gone by the time you get up tomorrow morning, so I should bid you farewell now, Dr. Hooper." He kissed her cheek.
"Goodbye Mr. Holmes. You're a good one."
As he walked toward the bedroom, he turned back to say, "As are you. Now I know why Sherlock's in love with you." He stopped abruptly realizing what he had said. When he turned back toward Molly, she looked completely shocked, unable to process his words.
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