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When they bring the body in, Molly is sitting at her desk. Three finished autopsies are waiting for the paperwork before the bodies can be released to family.
It has been forty minutes since Sherlock jumped.
She hears the fake paramedics, ambulance technicians, and one fake doctor wheel him into the morgue, faces grim and anxious. They are all such good actors for having only taken a one-day crash course watching medical dramas on her telly. There's still cigarette ash—and other things besides—caked into her sofa cushions. They practiced on him while he sprawled on her floor by the coffee table and pretended to be dead. For someone who's only had one day's practise being dead, Sherlock is doing very well so far.
Wiggins hands her the syringe handle first and she shoves it in her lab coat pocket, heedless of the (used) needle sticking out from the other end. There is blood trickling from Sherlock's mouth and it's real blood, real bleeding. He's bit his tongue. He'd been scared. Terrified. Molly can read that in him, can deduce it. When he wakes up again, it'll be harder, but only because it will be harder to look at him then. She can always read him when she can look at him.
"He didn't make it," says Dr Gregory, from A and E, the only actual doctor in the room with her. She looks upset—upset for Molly. Her mere presence here means that the plan has not gone accordingly. No one else but Molly and Sherlock’s homeless network is supposed to even get near him. A surge of adrenaline rushes her body, sends fear and anxiety and a clear head right through it—and then she's calmed herself down, because what's done is done, and the only she she can do is hope it's not all been bollocksed up as much as she thinks.
Molly looks away because she has no idea what the look on her face is right now, and she can’t—Sherlock can’t—afford for her to screw it up now. Dr Gregory comes up behind, slips her hand on Molly’s shoulder and says, as if it will help, “Dr—“ she pauses to look at Wiggins’ hospital badge “—Lawrence and I tried for thirty minutes.”
“I’m sure you did,” Molly says quietly, and Dr Gregory removes her hand.
“Should I ask Dr Colby to come in, Dr Hooper?” She knows Molly knew Sherlock, but she, like everyone else, does not know the extent of Molly’s one-sided friendship. If she did, Molly would never be allowed to perform the autopsy.
“No,” Molly says, perhaps a bit too forcefully. She swallows, and tries again: “No. I’m fine. I barely knew him.” That, at least, is true—in one way at least. Sherlock never lets her near him, but she sees much more than he ever gave her credit for.
Dr Gregory nods. “The brother called,” she says then, and her face is apologetic; she certainly didn’t give Sherlock’s brother permission, but Molly is given to understand that Sherlock’s brother does not need permission for many things. “He wants to see the body before the autopsy. He’ll be here within the hour.” She hesitates, as she’s slipping out the door—calls out, “I’m sorry, Molly,” and then she’s gone.
Molly’s fake autopsy technician is called Winnie, and she has just made two-hundred and fifty quid for doing this job. Molly is certain she deserves a lot more.
Winnie is stripping Sherlock with clinical detachment; she’s had a shower and a hair-trim at Molly’s flat, but there’s still dirt caked under her fingernails as she pops the buttons out of Sherlock’s posh purple shirt. Wiggins is back to giving Sherlock CPR now that Dr Gregory is gone. Molly has to leave the room.
She sits back down at her desk and opens up the mortuary database. Neil Davies’—Caucasian male, fifty-four, cardiovascular infarction—file is waiting for her to finish it so he can be returned to his late wife for burial. Mr Davies had been such a lovely man on her table; soft and genial and he’d been kind enough to present very obviously, so that she wasn’t required to spend hours on his autopsy searching.
She finishes Mr Davies and thinks she might start on Mrs Kiplinger, but Sherlock’s brother is coming, and she can’t put this off any longer. When she steps back into the morgue, only Winnie is still there. Sherlock has been stripped bare, his clothes folded and set aside in a personal effects bag; he’s been tagged, but not put away. The punctured bag of blood is gone. The back and neck braces are well hidden; Molly expects she’ll find them in a drawer somewhere weeks from now.
“He needs to go in the cooler,” Molly says. She’s surprised when her voice doesn’t break.
Winnie looks back from across the desert expanse of Molly’s morgue, where she’s trying to disappear in the shadows of an open corner. “Won’t ‘e get cold, though,” she says, and it’s not really, not exactly, a question.
“Barbitone,” says Molly, even though she knows it won’t mean a thing, not really, to Winnie. All Winnie knows is that Sherlock jumped a long, long, way, and even if he did land in the back of a lorry full of padding, she still had to shove him out of it onto the cement a half-storey below before his terrified survival instincts stopped her or people came ‘round.
Winnie looks away, and Molly sees, now that her coat’s been removed, that there are angry marks across the side of her neck. “’e were so scared though, weren’t ‘e,” she says quietly. “Near enough took me wi’ ‘im, ‘e did.” She swallows. “I could ‘ardly do it, but ‘e said to me to push ‘im anyway, even if ‘e t’were scared...then Wiggins had to give ‘im that jab sooner ‘an ‘e’d wanted, didn’t ‘e; People was comin’ up, and ‘e couldn’t stop tremblin’ long enough to fake it wi’ your little ball, ‘e was that scart.”
“We need to get him in the cooler,” Molly says again, but softer this time. Winnie just nods her head and stands up on shaky legs. They slide Sherlock’s body from the gurney to the drawer, and when Molly finally, finally, removes the sheet, she feels bile rise in her throat. How long has she yearned for him, she wonders. She has ached for years to see him without his posh clothes, to touch him, and feel his skin beneath her fingertips, but now she has, and now she does, and she thinks she may very well be sick.
ɤɣɤ
Sherlock’s brother looks like no one she’s ever seen.
He’s taller, older, if possible—more detached, and yet she has never seen heartbreak quite this poignant. Mycroft Holmes wears his grief so sharply that she begins to read entire childhoods in it. She deduces that Sherlock is—was—his only family, the only person he’s ever loved, and he confirms it a moment later when he says, “I am just glad, Dr Hooper, that our mother is not alive to be here, in my place.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. It’s automatic, but unwieldy on her tongue. She rarely has to meet the families during identifications. Her attendants do that.
She pulls the drawer out and Mycroft Holmes composes himself with unearthly speed. He looks at Sherlock’s nude body for one, two, three seconds and then abruptly steps back. He looks away, mouth pressed firmly together, and then when he turns back, he says only, “Would you pull it out all the way, please, Dr Hooper.”
She does, and when the cold, blue light of the morgue hits Sherlock’s face, he really does look dead. She has a moment of panic, a moment that—if Dr Gregory could somehow go wrong, then what else might’ve gone wrong, too? Did he have a heart attack? Did they give him too much medication? Does he have internal bleeding that she might’ve been able to fix, a bit, if only she’d been able to give him a proper check up before his brother came?
Mycroft is fingering through Sherlock’s hair. He pulls it apart above his right ear, and there, in soft, tiny, white ink, Molly sees it: Sherlock Winston Rutherford Holmes. She no longer wonders how Sherlock turned out the way he has; he has been cursed since he was named.
“It’s him,” Mycroft Holmes says, and Molly nods, because she could have told him that, even without a rather creepy, if she thinks about it, tattoo on his skull. All Molly needs is to look at his hands and she knows it’s him. No one else could possibly imitate the fragile collection of scalpel scars and alkylant chemical burns on the outside of his left hand.
Sherlock’s brother is already moving away from her, from Sherlock. She sees him build up walls like a fortress, and she sees Sherlock in him when he does. By the time he reaches the door, one would never know he has only now identified the body of his only living family. “There will be no need for a full autopsy, Dr Hooper,” he says, and then he is gone, and the morgue is cold and lifeless like always, but it feels dead for the first time.
Molly waits two minutes, then she’s calling Winnie, and Winnie is rushing back in on graceless legs. Their hands shake from the weight of Sherlock as they hoist him out of the refrigerated drawer and into Molly’s office. Winnie rushes off for hot water bottles and towels Molly hid in the supply cabinet and Molly bends over Sherlock; he’s blue with hypothermia. If Mycroft had been of clearer head, he might’ve noticed that it isn’t all from the harsh mortuary lighting.
She wraps Sherlock in the sheet and covers his chest and stomach with hot water bottles and heated towels, and then, with Winnie standing guard at the door, Molly lays down on top of Sherlock and wraps herself around his torso. She’s given him her time, she’s given him her help, she’s given him her love, and now she gives him her warmth.
It takes another hour for the barbitone to wear off, and she keeps up CPR for most of that. Sherlock is breathing, but very, very slowly, and she reckons he’ll appreciate it later if it saves him from brain damage, though she is certain that she will remember this for the rest of her life and hate herself for how much she feels as she does it.
When Sherlock wakes up, it’s a violent affair. He is tragically, heartrendingly terrified, and when his flailing hand clips Molly round the jaw, she only closes her eyes tight and holds him as he whimpers and keens into her hair. Winnie watches the door, and neither of them say a word when Sherlock’s mewling turns into gasping breaths. Molly’s neck is soaked, Sherlock is having a panic, and Winnie hands him an Arsenal hoodie and a pair of chavvy tracksuit bottoms.
When he calms down enough to put on a pair of trainers, Winnie leads him out the back, and Molly hopes that she hasn’t just saved Sherlock Holmes, only to kill him a different way. He keeps his head down as he walks, and she has never seen Sherlock look quite so defeated.
ɤɣɤ
They bring in Jim’s body that night, when she’s only two hours left before the end of her shift. While her supervisor is willing to look the other way in Sherlock’s case, there’s no way he can feign ignorance when it comes to Jim Moriarty.
Dr Colby is called in two hours early, and when he flips on the voice recorder to begin the autopsy, he says, “Richard M Brook, Caucasian male, aged thirty-five years. Preliminary analysis suggests death due to single gunshot to the brain, via the oral cavity.”
Molly leaves and does not look back.
ɤɣɤ
Wiggins opens the door for her at her own flat. He’s lost the lab coat but maintains the anxious look.
“He ain’t good,” he says quietly as Molly slips in the door. Sherlock is on her couch watching The X Factor and saying absolutely nothing. He’s cocooned in about eleven separate blankets, plus the duvet from her bed. Winnie’s tucked hot water bottles in every available spot around him. He still has the hood up on his jumper. He looks up at her when she comes in, eyes wide and startled like a newborn deer. Simon Colwell makes a horrible remark and Sherlock doesn’t even react to it; she thinks the two of them might’ve got on like a house on fire once—for all of three minutes before Sherlock reduced him to a quivering mess, much like he does to Molly on occasion.
“Molly.” His voice is soft, anguished.
“Sherlock...” she says, but she stops there because she doesn’t know what to say after it. Instead, she pulls out another two fifty pound notes for Winnie and Wiggins, and says, “I’ve got it from here. Thank you.”
She makes tea to calm her nerves, then sets both cups down on the coffee table, where neither of them are likely to touch them before they go cold. “Can you lay back?” she says.
He does. She half expects him to watch her the entire time, analyse her hands and movements and facial expressions, but as soon as her fingers touch his scalp, his eyes slide close. Molly checks for bumps and swelling, runs her fingers over his face and checks his pupils for symmetry. He snaps his lids closed again as soon as she moves down to his chest presses her ear against his skin to listen to his heart and lungs, because she forgot to bring a stethoscope home with her. She moves to his stomach to palpate his liver and kidneys and gall bladder. “Does it hurt at all?” she asks, as clinical as she can be.
He shakes his head.
“Feel dizzy? Sleepy?”
“Cold,” he says. “Nothing’s broken.”
She sits back with a relieved sigh. He will know if it is. “You need to sleep,” she says. “Come on, you can have my bed for the night.”
He allows her to pull him up, and she leads him by the waist because he’s trembling, and she doesn’t think it’s from being cold. He slides into her bed and presses his face into her pillow, and she spends about four seconds regretting that she hasn’t popped down to the launderers in weeks. Her sheets must fairly reek. She pushes her research off the spare chair and tries to settle in, as much as she can in a wood-backed chair. “I’ll wake you up every hour, just in case,” she says.
He turns his head to her, eyes gleaming in the light of one-a.m.—London streaming through her window. “Molly,” he says. His hand slips out toward her, deliriously weak. It goes limp before it even fully extends. Then, “Please.” When she doesn’t move—hardly knows what to do, really—his fingers curl up, grasping , and she feels herself rising from the chair and padding over to the other side of the bed.
She leans against the wall—no headboard, but one day, maybe, if she ever buys a flat instead of renting—and he curls around her like her hair in humidity. She slides her hand into his hair and feels caked-in blood between the strands.
It is one in the morning, and she has the graveyard shift tomorrow. She sets her alarm on her mobile to ring on every hour, and at the last minute, changes her ringtone from Teenage Dream to something less startling. She picks up her Kindle and tries to get into some pretentious bestseller list literary fiction, but in the end, she gives it up and switches to Dexter by Design. One day, she will be well-read like her mum wishes she were, but not when she needs to stay awake for Sherlock.
“Thank you,” he says into her hip. Her fingers pause in his hair, and she struggles to resume her ministrations before he notices—what is she thinking? Sherlock always notices. He is asleep within moments. She feels it as his fingers slowly uncurl from her work shirt, and his breathing evens out. There are moments when she panics and thinks he’s breathing too slow again, but he’s fine. It’s Sherlock—he’s fine.
There are about a hundred-thousand pieces of her heart right now, and every one of them belongs to Sherlock.
ɤɣɤ
At two, Molly slides her hand from Sherlock’s hair to his back in long, slow swipes. She bends over him, and says his name as quietly as she can. He mumbles and clings, and she says his name a bit louder. His eyes blink slowly up at her and she smiles at him in a go at reassuring, and he lets his eyes slip closed again.
At four, Sherlock is shuddering in his sleep. She checks his forehead for fever or chill and finds it fine. Sherlock is Sherlock; he’s always fine. She wakes him anyway.
At six, she does not wake him because he’s just flung his arm about, and is now sprawled on his back. If he’s capable of having a nightmare, he’s not in a coma.
At eight, Molly has finished Dexter and is trying once again at the pretentious literary fiction; she finds her eyes are drooping. She slides out of bed to make coffee and repeats Sherlock’s name again and again until his eyes blink open.
“Coffee?” she says, but does not wait for an answer.
Molly is tired, and scared, and she has just spent an entire night in bed with Sherlock. She has already broken into pieces and she desperately needs distance.
Sherlock comes up behind her, looms over her, and she takes a deep breath, pulls herself together. She turns, smiles, and offers him a cup. “Black, two sugars,” she says.
His eyes are rimmed in purple and his cheek is bruised a horrid, sickly yellow-purple where he hit the cement. She hands him a paracetamol and feels awkward for doing so, because what good is a paracetamol when you’ve just fallen six storeys and were barely breathing for an hour? He takes it anyway.
“Thank you.”
That’s twice now that she’s heard him say that. Twice in twenty-four hours, and she can’t remember him ever saying it once before and meaning it. They take the coffee to her sitting room and let it cool while they stare at each other and the walls.
Finally, Sherlock clears his throat. His voice is scratchy from sleep, even still. There was a time, and it was not all that long ago, that Molly would have died to hear Sherlock in the morning. Now, it makes her heart ache, yes, but for an entirely different reason. Defeat is not a state of mind she has ever expected to find Sherlock in. He says, "There were three snipers and a watcher. I should find them before they find you."
"Snipers?" Molly says, and hates the way she sounds so childlike and unsure of herself. She's read that book on power women and how to be one from her mum, but she always seems to forget the process when Sherlock's near. Don't make statements into questions, it had said. Be confident, it had said.
But then she hears the second part and, as they say, hope springs eternal. "Before they find me? Why would they care about me?" Statements, Molly! she reminds herself. Not questions.
In her head, she rephrases everything she just said like a power woman and it sounds like, Snipers! What an extraordinary development! However, Sherlock, I simply can't imagine why any should look for me. My plan was entirely too clever for anyone to guess at. Even you said so. Even your brother was fooled. Snipers, pah! Now, tell me more of these piddly snipers so that I may assist you in neutralizing them.
But, as Sherlock is wont to do, he knocks her down a step, back into Molly-territory, where she is comfortable being introverted and shy, and sometimes a great deal lonely. He says, "To get at me, of course." Not, of course, because she mattered to him. No, like his estranged brother, Molly is only peripheral to his life, circling ghost-like around him, a forgotten satellite who will identify him by his secret tattoo when he dies, and possibly perform his autopsy, but will never be allowed to grieve like John and his landlady, or even Greg.
"Oh," she says. "Ah. Well. Can I help?"
He looks at her for a long moment, and she just knows he's about to say, Don't be silly. Of course not, but...something changes in his face, and what he actually says is, "You've done enough for me, Molly Hooper. Just...let me stay on your couch for a couple of weeks while I get in touch with my contacts, and then I promise I'll be out of your hair forever."
"Oh," she says again. (Power women don't say 'Oh' her mum would say.) "Of course you can stay." Don't leave forever, she thinks. Stay forever.
He doesn't exactly smile at her, but he does look, and she knows that this time, he also sees her.