"Do It So It Feels Like Hell", Sherlock, Molly & Irene
t: Do It So It Feels Like Hell
f: Sherlock
c: Molly, Irene (maybe pre-Molly/Irene if you squint)
ch: hc_bingo - bruises
r/wc: PG/3240
s: “Yes, well, pretending to be dead is all the rage these days. Everybody’s doing it.”
n: [Title from Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath.] Post-Reichenbach. I basically signed up for this bingo card and then went SHIT HOW DO YOU HURT/COMFORT so, um, oops. This popped into my head, so, hey. Fun fact: I wrote a lot of this in the form of voice notes on my iphone, and that was a stupid idea that I will not be trying again (I can’t talk with grammar, apparently).
Edit: There's now a podfic of this by elaineofshalott up here.
-
John Watson believes Irene Adler to be dead.
Molly knows this because they have coffee sometimes, and they talk about things; things John doesn’t know how to talk to anyone else about. She doesn’t think that Sherlock’s belief that she doesn’t ultimately matter has extended as far as John because John is still, just about, around the edges, human. But she thinks that he knows he can tell her anything and there’s nothing she can do with the information; nothing she would do with the information, and maybe that’s worse. In any case, she knows all about Irene Adler’s supposed execution, and about the file, and about not telling Sherlock. She knows a lot of things about life with Sherlock; a lot of things she thinks John didn’t mean to tell her.
So, when the woman walks into the morgue with her black hair piled neatly on top of her head and in a pair of heels highly inappropriate for a working environment, Molly thinks: oh. And then thinks: Sherlock probably knows this, doesn’t he?
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she tells Irene because, well, there isn’t anything else to say.
Irene smirks a little, eyes on the dead body lying on Molly’s table. “Yes, well, pretending to be dead is all the rage these days,” she replies. “Everybody’s doing it.” Her gaze flickers to Molly, and Molly knows then that she knows. Of course she does. “Aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Molly says quickly, tearing her eyes away from Irene’s, which are too sharp, too piercing and far too knowing. “Anyway, should you have come here?”
If it were anyone else, Molly would think that this was stupid, but Irene thinks like Sherlock and Sherlock is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. Arrogant, yes; cruel, sometimes; but stupid? No, never stupid. Which means that there’s a reason Irene’s here, and it also means that she believes it’s safe to come here.
Irene shrugs, like questions like that aren’t actually important, and then walks over to look at the man on Molly’s autopsy table.
“What happened to him?” she asks.
“O-overdose,” Molly says, ignoring the slight stammer in her voice.
“I see.” Irene’s eyelids flutter, and Molly can’t tell if she’s being sympathetic or just dismissing the whole thing as boring like Sherlock would. She knows most of Sherlock’s facial expressions by now, even the ones she wishes she didn’t, but she doesn’t know Irene’s yet.
Irene makes a humming sound of recognition, perhaps, and then walks away from the corpse to lean against one of the benches. Molly studies her for a moment, thinks about her earlier words, and then says: “Jim’s dead.”
She doesn’t mean for it to come out, but it does, and Irene’s lips press together, red lipstick and a dozen unsaid remarks. “I like to think so, anyway,” she murmurs at last.
Her gaze is unnerving, and Molly turns away from it, reaching with slightly shaky hands for her scalpel; she’s still at work, after all. She doesn’t hear heels on the linoleum, doesn’t hear the door, but when she looks back over her shoulder, Irene’s gone.
-
Later, collapsed on her sofa with a glass of white wine in front of The Killing, Molly thinks about telling John. And then she wonders how to talk about Irene being alive to a man sinking quickly back into a pit full of guilt and personal demons and things he suppressed when it was just better to deal with other people’s dead bodies.
If John finds out about Irene being alive then, at some point, he’s going to wake up in the middle of the night and somehow know about Sherlock. It seems crazy and unlikely, but it will happen, and it’s already costing Molly too much to keep this secret; she can’t break it all for the sake of having someone to complain to about the fact her workplace isn’t getting any saner.
Further down the wine bottle, Molly starts thinking about Irene turning up on her autopsy table; cold and bloody and her face was in shreds, worse than almost anything Molly’s ever seen, but Sherlock knew the body at once and, well, that means it was a good cover-up, cracks filled in.
Overall, she decides, she liked it better when people actually died and then stayed dead. These days, there are too many in-betweens.
-
They’re out of earl grey in the staffroom that smells perpetually of cigarettes, a hangover from pre-smoking ban days, and Molly checks the leaky fridge to find they’re also out of milk. She sighs; no one will go downstairs for milk unless she does it, and sometimes that knowledge is a little too wearing on top of everything else. Instead, she resigns herself to black Typhoo with a splash of cold water and two teaspoons of sugar.
Dave from pathology is laughing too hard into his own mug of - milky - tea and Molly glares at the back of his head for a moment before registering just who he’s talking to.
Irene is almost unrecognisable in plain make-up, flat shoes and with a large pair of glasses perched on her nose. She’s also wearing a lab coat and is talking far too knowledgably about an autopsy that Molly herself actually did last week. It makes Molly’s skin crackle.
“Dave,” she says lightly. “I think Cathy was looking for you. She looks quite cross.”
Dave swears softly and puts his tea down on the sticky coffee table, saying goodbye to Irene and scurrying out. After a moment’s thought, Molly sits down opposite Irene and picks up Dave’s abandoned tea.
“Nicely done, Miss Hooper,” Irene notes, and even without the red lipstick her smile is predatory.
Molly ignores it. “You can’t be here,” she says. “What if someone sees you?”
Irene takes off the glasses, tapping her lower lip with one of the arms. “Who’s going to see me?” she asks. “Your charming milk-stealing colleagues?”
John comes here sometimes, drifting like the tired vestiges of a ghost, and Greg Lestrade turns up more often than he really should, and although Molly can’t be sure she think sometimes catches sight of a sharp suit and an umbrella at the end of corridors, though if Mycroft Holmes is really having her watched then Molly would really rather not know the fine details.
“Someone must be looking for you,” Molly replies, ducking the question.
Irene rolls her eyes. “Everyone’s looking for me, darling,” she drawls, for a moment back to playing her role before she seems to recall that she no longer has an audience. “They won’t look here,” she adds, and although it isn’t a promise it nearly feels enough like one to be reassuring.
“Can I-” Molly begins, swallows the rest of the question. Irene doesn’t need her help, that much is obvious, and in any case Molly’s done enough complex favours for this year. She puts Dave’s tea back on the table, worries the hem of her lilac jumper between her fingers.
Irene’s smile is bordering on kind, though Molly isn’t quite naive enough to believe that it really is. Not anymore, anyway.
“Not yet,” she replies. “I will finish my tea before you insist I leave the premises, though.”
“I wouldn’t,” Molly says. “I mean, you can stay as long as you want, I don’t mind.”
“You do,” Irene tells her. “And no, you wouldn’t, but you’d want to, and, well, it’s a little early for us to enter into those power games.”
Molly doesn’t know what to say to that, so she returns to her stolen tea and resolutely doesn’t look at Irene, who is flicking through a crinkled back issue of Heat and looking far more at home here than Molly ever has.
-
Greg Lestrade looks less long-suffering these days, but more exhausted somehow. He’s also started smoking again; his cracks may not be as obvious as the way John has started limping again more often than not, but they’re still there.
Molly doesn’t want to know what hers look like from the outside, but then she is carrying knowledge that nobody else is, wrapped around her hands and her tongue.
Even though he can’t see, she hastily closes the internet page on her phone: Irene’s google footprint, and explicit, detailed and frequently horrifying as it is, it doesn’t tell Molly just how much trouble she’s in. If she’s in trouble at all. She’s thought about asking Sherlock once or twice: she has a number, though he’s asked her not to use it, and while Molly wants this to constitute an emergency she knows he won’t see it that way.
“There are dead people?” Molly offers, deliberately vague for the way it makes Lestrade smile, just a little.
“But nothing...” he trails off, waving a hand, and Molly knows what he wants to say but can’t.
“I don’t think so,” she replies, “but, well, I could never tell.”
He nods, something sad and guilty in his eyes, and Molly wants to say... Molly doesn’t know what she wants to say. He sticks his hands in his pockets, letting out a long breath.
“There’s a vending machine in the corridor?” Molly offers. “The coffee is awful, but...”
“You can’t call coffee ‘awful’ until you’ve tasted the stuff at the station,” Lestrade replies, and jerks his head in invitation.
They’re all Sherlock’s loose ends, rattling around feeling superfluous, feeling confused, and even knowing what she does Molly still can’t quite fit her life back together. She bites the inside of her mouth for a moment, then follows him into the hall.
-
Her flat is too quiet, and Molly hesitates, fingers clenching around her keys. She didn’t leave the living room light on when she left, she knows, and for a moment she thinks oh fuck please no and then Jim is dead, he is dead.
Molly is aware that she probably needs therapy about that, but she’s not sure how you talk to a therapist about dating a man who lied to you about all aspects of his existence and who then, well, stopped existing to all intents and purposes.
Irene is asleep on her sofa, sprawled across her Laura Ashley cushions, and Molly stands and looks at her for a long moment. She is frowning slightly in her sleep, curled up in something like defensiveness, and Molly can see ugly purple splotches covering her wrists and forearms. She works in a morgue, works with murder victims, has watched Sherlock take a riding crop to a corpse, and she grimaces as she involuntarily pictures what caused them. There’s nothing recreational about any of this.
Molly forces herself to move, going to put the kettle on.
When she returns to the living room, she finds Irene has woken and is sitting upright, sleeves pulled over the marks.
“Sorry,” she tells Molly, “I didn’t mean to still be here when you got home.”
“It’s fine,” Molly says automatically, ignoring the fact that Irene broke seamlessly into her flat without asking her permission, that she’s clearly been quite badly hurt, and that Molly never really asked for any aspect of this. She isn’t sure if Irene really did mean to be gone or not; Jim played games like this, manipulated all the shreds of a situation, and Sherlock did too.
She hands Irene a mug of tea; Irene spends a moment studying the faded Bagpuss design on the side before she smiles a little and takes a sip.
“Thank you,” Irene murmurs, and Molly settles herself into the arm chair opposite. This wasn’t the evening she had planned - which was, admittedly, just microwaving a Waitrose pasta meal and watching Pointless that she recorded on her freeview plus box - but, well, nothing about her recent life has gone to plan.
“Do you-” she begins, hesitates, and then ploughs on: “do you need help?”
“I’m fine,” Irene tells her, too sharp and too hard.
She’s not.
“There’s a first aid box under the bathroom sink,” Molly tells her anyway.
After a moment, Irene sighs. “I know.”
-
After they’ve each had a glass and a half of white wine each, things slide a little more into line. Molly can adapt to ridiculous uncomfortable situations because she’s had to learn to ever since Sherlock Holmes strode into her morgue and dragged in the other assortment of people he’d managed to gather around him like satellites.
“You should let me look at your face,” she tells Irene. When Irene turns to look at her, she adds: “you’re really good with concealer but you’re still wearing too much of it.”
The harsh lighting of the bathroom is different to the softer one of the living room, and Irene sits silent and perhaps sulking on the edge of the bath while Molly takes a Simple face wipe to her skin and uncovers the dark purple bruising all over Irene’s skin. She hisses a little in sympathy, can’t help it, but Irene doesn’t react at all.
“You could have gone to John,” Molly says in the end, just to break the silence.
Irene arches an eyebrow. “John doesn’t like me,” she points out, matter-of-fact, unemotional.
Molly smiles slightly before she hands Irene an icepack wrapped in her Doctor Who teatowel.
“I think John has a lot of feelings about you,” she says.
Irene’s lips curve. “I like to leave an impression,” she replies.
Part of Molly wonders if Irene speaks only in soundbites, in quotations that will linger long after she’s gone. In things that sound like they mean something, but that don’t necessarily mean what they sound like.
“I can tell,” Molly tells her, and steps away.
-
Molly walks into her bathroom in the morning to find Irene reclining in the tub, Molly’s delivered copy of the Guardian crinkling in her hands. Despite everything, Molly notices, her nails are still flawlessly painted in dark red.
“Sorry,” she says, startling, hands coming up to cover her face. “I didn’t mean- I forgot-”
“Don’t worry,” Irene tells her, and Molly can hear splashing, “I don’t embarrass easily, dear.”
Molly risks a peek and finds that Irene has a lot of bubbles covering her dignity; enough bubbles that she’s probably used up the last of Molly’s Lush bubble bath, though that can be a problem for a later date. The bruises over her arms and shoulders are wet and glistening and look even worse in daylight than they did before, while her face is still an inglorious mess.
“It probably looks worse than it is,” Irene tells her.
“What happened?” Molly asks, folding her arms across her pink cotton pyjamas and forgetting that she’s meant to be backing out and leaving.
“Complications,” Irene replies. “Always complications.”
“That’s not very helpful,” Molly points out.
Irene shrugs stiffly, turns the page of the newspaper. “You’re already carrying enough secrets,” she says.
Molly backs out of the bathroom, unsure what to say, and hesitates in her living room, which looks perfectly normal and not at all like one of the walls just fell out of her life. After a minute, she calls in sick to work.
-
Irene knows. Molly can’t tell if Jim told her, if Sherlock did, or if Irene’s just been keeping tabs on all of the people who come in close contact with Sherlock. In any case, there’s something like pity in her eyes when she looks at Molly, and Molly’s really had enough of being pitied.
“They tell stories about you, you know,” Irene remarks, eyes on the television where she’s channel-hopping with something that might be impatience. Another abandoned icepack lies on the sofa beside her. “The woman who dated Jim Moriarty and lived to tell the tale.”
“No, they don’t,” Molly says, looking down at her hands. She wasn’t the only one duped, and it’s all got rather complicated.
Irene reaches for her, curls a finger under Molly’s chin and makes her lift her head. “No,” she says softly, “no, they really do.”
Molly doesn’t know who they are and doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to hear how her naïveté is spun into something better or worse.
“Well,” she murmurs, “they shouldn’t.”
Irene smiles a little, sits back, bruised and quiet and yet still somehow holding most of the cards.
“No,” she says, “no, there are far better stories they could tell about you.”
Molly’s knuckles are white in her lap, and she can’t find any words at all.
-
“If you don’t want me here you can tell me to leave,” Irene remarks, shrugging.
Molly’s actually cooked dinner; she went down to M&S to get vegetables and everything, and Irene sat in the kitchen and watched her and tapped her nails against the table and the silence should maybe have been uncomfortable and it somehow wasn’t.
Molly flicks her gaze up to meet hers. “Would you listen?” she asks, and it’s more of an academic question than because she actually wants Irene to leave. If someone tries to do to her what they did to Mrs Hudson then she might rethink things, but for now, as unexpected and probably dangerous house guests go, Irene Adler isn’t bad at all.
“Oh,” Irene responds, dark and deliberately flirtatious, “I always listen to someone’s hard limits.”
Perhaps Molly should look away, should blush and cough and stammer, but she’s tired of being seen as a naive little girl, piled heavy with other people’s secrets because she’s deemed unimportant. She feels her eyes widen anyway, and opens her mouth to say something before laughter bubbles out, unexpected and bright.
Irene stares at her for a moment before she joins in.
-
Two days later, Molly wakes up to find Irene is gone, her flat cleaned of any sign that she was ever there.
Mycroft Holmes comes to meet her at work for the first time; she looks up from the rib spreader she’s inserted into the body of a teenage girl found under a bridge to find him watching her, expression unreadable, mouth tilted slightly.
She doesn’t know what Mycroft knows about his brother, and while she can’t believe that he wouldn’t have figured out that Sherlock is still alive, Sherlock told her not to tell anyone at all and if she hasn’t betrayed him so far she can’t start now.
Molly meets Mycroft in the corridor, fidgeting with the cuffs of her blouse. He is perfectly well put together, smart suit, bland set of his features, and he could be amused that his brother is running rings around the world or he could be falling apart from grief and she wouldn’t be able to tell.
“Miss Hooper,” he says; a greeting, an accusation, and even after playing every last one of Irene’s tonal games, Molly doesn’t know how to interpret it.
Things were a lot easier before Sherlock’s existence and all of its complications collided with hers.
“Mr Holmes,” she replies, and stands still and lets him study her. She doesn’t know what he wants, so she doesn’t know how to give it to him.
Her phone goes off in her coat pocket, startling her; a text message with a tone that she knows only too well.
Mycroft’s eyebrow lifts a little at the sound of the woman’s moan spilling out of Molly’s labcoat, but she brazens it out, doesn’t look away from his searching gaze.
After an endless minute, he smiles.
-
f: Sherlock
c: Molly, Irene (maybe pre-Molly/Irene if you squint)
ch: hc_bingo - bruises
r/wc: PG/3240
s: “Yes, well, pretending to be dead is all the rage these days. Everybody’s doing it.”
n: [Title from Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath.] Post-Reichenbach. I basically signed up for this bingo card and then went SHIT HOW DO YOU HURT/COMFORT so, um, oops. This popped into my head, so, hey. Fun fact: I wrote a lot of this in the form of voice notes on my iphone, and that was a stupid idea that I will not be trying again (I can’t talk with grammar, apparently).
Edit: There's now a podfic of this by elaineofshalott up here.
-
John Watson believes Irene Adler to be dead.
Molly knows this because they have coffee sometimes, and they talk about things; things John doesn’t know how to talk to anyone else about. She doesn’t think that Sherlock’s belief that she doesn’t ultimately matter has extended as far as John because John is still, just about, around the edges, human. But she thinks that he knows he can tell her anything and there’s nothing she can do with the information; nothing she would do with the information, and maybe that’s worse. In any case, she knows all about Irene Adler’s supposed execution, and about the file, and about not telling Sherlock. She knows a lot of things about life with Sherlock; a lot of things she thinks John didn’t mean to tell her.
So, when the woman walks into the morgue with her black hair piled neatly on top of her head and in a pair of heels highly inappropriate for a working environment, Molly thinks: oh. And then thinks: Sherlock probably knows this, doesn’t he?
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she tells Irene because, well, there isn’t anything else to say.
Irene smirks a little, eyes on the dead body lying on Molly’s table. “Yes, well, pretending to be dead is all the rage these days,” she replies. “Everybody’s doing it.” Her gaze flickers to Molly, and Molly knows then that she knows. Of course she does. “Aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Molly says quickly, tearing her eyes away from Irene’s, which are too sharp, too piercing and far too knowing. “Anyway, should you have come here?”
If it were anyone else, Molly would think that this was stupid, but Irene thinks like Sherlock and Sherlock is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. Arrogant, yes; cruel, sometimes; but stupid? No, never stupid. Which means that there’s a reason Irene’s here, and it also means that she believes it’s safe to come here.
Irene shrugs, like questions like that aren’t actually important, and then walks over to look at the man on Molly’s autopsy table.
“What happened to him?” she asks.
“O-overdose,” Molly says, ignoring the slight stammer in her voice.
“I see.” Irene’s eyelids flutter, and Molly can’t tell if she’s being sympathetic or just dismissing the whole thing as boring like Sherlock would. She knows most of Sherlock’s facial expressions by now, even the ones she wishes she didn’t, but she doesn’t know Irene’s yet.
Irene makes a humming sound of recognition, perhaps, and then walks away from the corpse to lean against one of the benches. Molly studies her for a moment, thinks about her earlier words, and then says: “Jim’s dead.”
She doesn’t mean for it to come out, but it does, and Irene’s lips press together, red lipstick and a dozen unsaid remarks. “I like to think so, anyway,” she murmurs at last.
Her gaze is unnerving, and Molly turns away from it, reaching with slightly shaky hands for her scalpel; she’s still at work, after all. She doesn’t hear heels on the linoleum, doesn’t hear the door, but when she looks back over her shoulder, Irene’s gone.
-
Later, collapsed on her sofa with a glass of white wine in front of The Killing, Molly thinks about telling John. And then she wonders how to talk about Irene being alive to a man sinking quickly back into a pit full of guilt and personal demons and things he suppressed when it was just better to deal with other people’s dead bodies.
If John finds out about Irene being alive then, at some point, he’s going to wake up in the middle of the night and somehow know about Sherlock. It seems crazy and unlikely, but it will happen, and it’s already costing Molly too much to keep this secret; she can’t break it all for the sake of having someone to complain to about the fact her workplace isn’t getting any saner.
Further down the wine bottle, Molly starts thinking about Irene turning up on her autopsy table; cold and bloody and her face was in shreds, worse than almost anything Molly’s ever seen, but Sherlock knew the body at once and, well, that means it was a good cover-up, cracks filled in.
Overall, she decides, she liked it better when people actually died and then stayed dead. These days, there are too many in-betweens.
-
They’re out of earl grey in the staffroom that smells perpetually of cigarettes, a hangover from pre-smoking ban days, and Molly checks the leaky fridge to find they’re also out of milk. She sighs; no one will go downstairs for milk unless she does it, and sometimes that knowledge is a little too wearing on top of everything else. Instead, she resigns herself to black Typhoo with a splash of cold water and two teaspoons of sugar.
Dave from pathology is laughing too hard into his own mug of - milky - tea and Molly glares at the back of his head for a moment before registering just who he’s talking to.
Irene is almost unrecognisable in plain make-up, flat shoes and with a large pair of glasses perched on her nose. She’s also wearing a lab coat and is talking far too knowledgably about an autopsy that Molly herself actually did last week. It makes Molly’s skin crackle.
“Dave,” she says lightly. “I think Cathy was looking for you. She looks quite cross.”
Dave swears softly and puts his tea down on the sticky coffee table, saying goodbye to Irene and scurrying out. After a moment’s thought, Molly sits down opposite Irene and picks up Dave’s abandoned tea.
“Nicely done, Miss Hooper,” Irene notes, and even without the red lipstick her smile is predatory.
Molly ignores it. “You can’t be here,” she says. “What if someone sees you?”
Irene takes off the glasses, tapping her lower lip with one of the arms. “Who’s going to see me?” she asks. “Your charming milk-stealing colleagues?”
John comes here sometimes, drifting like the tired vestiges of a ghost, and Greg Lestrade turns up more often than he really should, and although Molly can’t be sure she think sometimes catches sight of a sharp suit and an umbrella at the end of corridors, though if Mycroft Holmes is really having her watched then Molly would really rather not know the fine details.
“Someone must be looking for you,” Molly replies, ducking the question.
Irene rolls her eyes. “Everyone’s looking for me, darling,” she drawls, for a moment back to playing her role before she seems to recall that she no longer has an audience. “They won’t look here,” she adds, and although it isn’t a promise it nearly feels enough like one to be reassuring.
“Can I-” Molly begins, swallows the rest of the question. Irene doesn’t need her help, that much is obvious, and in any case Molly’s done enough complex favours for this year. She puts Dave’s tea back on the table, worries the hem of her lilac jumper between her fingers.
Irene’s smile is bordering on kind, though Molly isn’t quite naive enough to believe that it really is. Not anymore, anyway.
“Not yet,” she replies. “I will finish my tea before you insist I leave the premises, though.”
“I wouldn’t,” Molly says. “I mean, you can stay as long as you want, I don’t mind.”
“You do,” Irene tells her. “And no, you wouldn’t, but you’d want to, and, well, it’s a little early for us to enter into those power games.”
Molly doesn’t know what to say to that, so she returns to her stolen tea and resolutely doesn’t look at Irene, who is flicking through a crinkled back issue of Heat and looking far more at home here than Molly ever has.
-
Greg Lestrade looks less long-suffering these days, but more exhausted somehow. He’s also started smoking again; his cracks may not be as obvious as the way John has started limping again more often than not, but they’re still there.
Molly doesn’t want to know what hers look like from the outside, but then she is carrying knowledge that nobody else is, wrapped around her hands and her tongue.
Even though he can’t see, she hastily closes the internet page on her phone: Irene’s google footprint, and explicit, detailed and frequently horrifying as it is, it doesn’t tell Molly just how much trouble she’s in. If she’s in trouble at all. She’s thought about asking Sherlock once or twice: she has a number, though he’s asked her not to use it, and while Molly wants this to constitute an emergency she knows he won’t see it that way.
“There are dead people?” Molly offers, deliberately vague for the way it makes Lestrade smile, just a little.
“But nothing...” he trails off, waving a hand, and Molly knows what he wants to say but can’t.
“I don’t think so,” she replies, “but, well, I could never tell.”
He nods, something sad and guilty in his eyes, and Molly wants to say... Molly doesn’t know what she wants to say. He sticks his hands in his pockets, letting out a long breath.
“There’s a vending machine in the corridor?” Molly offers. “The coffee is awful, but...”
“You can’t call coffee ‘awful’ until you’ve tasted the stuff at the station,” Lestrade replies, and jerks his head in invitation.
They’re all Sherlock’s loose ends, rattling around feeling superfluous, feeling confused, and even knowing what she does Molly still can’t quite fit her life back together. She bites the inside of her mouth for a moment, then follows him into the hall.
-
Her flat is too quiet, and Molly hesitates, fingers clenching around her keys. She didn’t leave the living room light on when she left, she knows, and for a moment she thinks oh fuck please no and then Jim is dead, he is dead.
Molly is aware that she probably needs therapy about that, but she’s not sure how you talk to a therapist about dating a man who lied to you about all aspects of his existence and who then, well, stopped existing to all intents and purposes.
Irene is asleep on her sofa, sprawled across her Laura Ashley cushions, and Molly stands and looks at her for a long moment. She is frowning slightly in her sleep, curled up in something like defensiveness, and Molly can see ugly purple splotches covering her wrists and forearms. She works in a morgue, works with murder victims, has watched Sherlock take a riding crop to a corpse, and she grimaces as she involuntarily pictures what caused them. There’s nothing recreational about any of this.
Molly forces herself to move, going to put the kettle on.
When she returns to the living room, she finds Irene has woken and is sitting upright, sleeves pulled over the marks.
“Sorry,” she tells Molly, “I didn’t mean to still be here when you got home.”
“It’s fine,” Molly says automatically, ignoring the fact that Irene broke seamlessly into her flat without asking her permission, that she’s clearly been quite badly hurt, and that Molly never really asked for any aspect of this. She isn’t sure if Irene really did mean to be gone or not; Jim played games like this, manipulated all the shreds of a situation, and Sherlock did too.
She hands Irene a mug of tea; Irene spends a moment studying the faded Bagpuss design on the side before she smiles a little and takes a sip.
“Thank you,” Irene murmurs, and Molly settles herself into the arm chair opposite. This wasn’t the evening she had planned - which was, admittedly, just microwaving a Waitrose pasta meal and watching Pointless that she recorded on her freeview plus box - but, well, nothing about her recent life has gone to plan.
“Do you-” she begins, hesitates, and then ploughs on: “do you need help?”
“I’m fine,” Irene tells her, too sharp and too hard.
She’s not.
“There’s a first aid box under the bathroom sink,” Molly tells her anyway.
After a moment, Irene sighs. “I know.”
-
After they’ve each had a glass and a half of white wine each, things slide a little more into line. Molly can adapt to ridiculous uncomfortable situations because she’s had to learn to ever since Sherlock Holmes strode into her morgue and dragged in the other assortment of people he’d managed to gather around him like satellites.
“You should let me look at your face,” she tells Irene. When Irene turns to look at her, she adds: “you’re really good with concealer but you’re still wearing too much of it.”
The harsh lighting of the bathroom is different to the softer one of the living room, and Irene sits silent and perhaps sulking on the edge of the bath while Molly takes a Simple face wipe to her skin and uncovers the dark purple bruising all over Irene’s skin. She hisses a little in sympathy, can’t help it, but Irene doesn’t react at all.
“You could have gone to John,” Molly says in the end, just to break the silence.
Irene arches an eyebrow. “John doesn’t like me,” she points out, matter-of-fact, unemotional.
Molly smiles slightly before she hands Irene an icepack wrapped in her Doctor Who teatowel.
“I think John has a lot of feelings about you,” she says.
Irene’s lips curve. “I like to leave an impression,” she replies.
Part of Molly wonders if Irene speaks only in soundbites, in quotations that will linger long after she’s gone. In things that sound like they mean something, but that don’t necessarily mean what they sound like.
“I can tell,” Molly tells her, and steps away.
-
Molly walks into her bathroom in the morning to find Irene reclining in the tub, Molly’s delivered copy of the Guardian crinkling in her hands. Despite everything, Molly notices, her nails are still flawlessly painted in dark red.
“Sorry,” she says, startling, hands coming up to cover her face. “I didn’t mean- I forgot-”
“Don’t worry,” Irene tells her, and Molly can hear splashing, “I don’t embarrass easily, dear.”
Molly risks a peek and finds that Irene has a lot of bubbles covering her dignity; enough bubbles that she’s probably used up the last of Molly’s Lush bubble bath, though that can be a problem for a later date. The bruises over her arms and shoulders are wet and glistening and look even worse in daylight than they did before, while her face is still an inglorious mess.
“It probably looks worse than it is,” Irene tells her.
“What happened?” Molly asks, folding her arms across her pink cotton pyjamas and forgetting that she’s meant to be backing out and leaving.
“Complications,” Irene replies. “Always complications.”
“That’s not very helpful,” Molly points out.
Irene shrugs stiffly, turns the page of the newspaper. “You’re already carrying enough secrets,” she says.
Molly backs out of the bathroom, unsure what to say, and hesitates in her living room, which looks perfectly normal and not at all like one of the walls just fell out of her life. After a minute, she calls in sick to work.
-
Irene knows. Molly can’t tell if Jim told her, if Sherlock did, or if Irene’s just been keeping tabs on all of the people who come in close contact with Sherlock. In any case, there’s something like pity in her eyes when she looks at Molly, and Molly’s really had enough of being pitied.
“They tell stories about you, you know,” Irene remarks, eyes on the television where she’s channel-hopping with something that might be impatience. Another abandoned icepack lies on the sofa beside her. “The woman who dated Jim Moriarty and lived to tell the tale.”
“No, they don’t,” Molly says, looking down at her hands. She wasn’t the only one duped, and it’s all got rather complicated.
Irene reaches for her, curls a finger under Molly’s chin and makes her lift her head. “No,” she says softly, “no, they really do.”
Molly doesn’t know who they are and doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to hear how her naïveté is spun into something better or worse.
“Well,” she murmurs, “they shouldn’t.”
Irene smiles a little, sits back, bruised and quiet and yet still somehow holding most of the cards.
“No,” she says, “no, there are far better stories they could tell about you.”
Molly’s knuckles are white in her lap, and she can’t find any words at all.
-
“If you don’t want me here you can tell me to leave,” Irene remarks, shrugging.
Molly’s actually cooked dinner; she went down to M&S to get vegetables and everything, and Irene sat in the kitchen and watched her and tapped her nails against the table and the silence should maybe have been uncomfortable and it somehow wasn’t.
Molly flicks her gaze up to meet hers. “Would you listen?” she asks, and it’s more of an academic question than because she actually wants Irene to leave. If someone tries to do to her what they did to Mrs Hudson then she might rethink things, but for now, as unexpected and probably dangerous house guests go, Irene Adler isn’t bad at all.
“Oh,” Irene responds, dark and deliberately flirtatious, “I always listen to someone’s hard limits.”
Perhaps Molly should look away, should blush and cough and stammer, but she’s tired of being seen as a naive little girl, piled heavy with other people’s secrets because she’s deemed unimportant. She feels her eyes widen anyway, and opens her mouth to say something before laughter bubbles out, unexpected and bright.
Irene stares at her for a moment before she joins in.
-
Two days later, Molly wakes up to find Irene is gone, her flat cleaned of any sign that she was ever there.
Mycroft Holmes comes to meet her at work for the first time; she looks up from the rib spreader she’s inserted into the body of a teenage girl found under a bridge to find him watching her, expression unreadable, mouth tilted slightly.
She doesn’t know what Mycroft knows about his brother, and while she can’t believe that he wouldn’t have figured out that Sherlock is still alive, Sherlock told her not to tell anyone at all and if she hasn’t betrayed him so far she can’t start now.
Molly meets Mycroft in the corridor, fidgeting with the cuffs of her blouse. He is perfectly well put together, smart suit, bland set of his features, and he could be amused that his brother is running rings around the world or he could be falling apart from grief and she wouldn’t be able to tell.
“Miss Hooper,” he says; a greeting, an accusation, and even after playing every last one of Irene’s tonal games, Molly doesn’t know how to interpret it.
Things were a lot easier before Sherlock’s existence and all of its complications collided with hers.
“Mr Holmes,” she replies, and stands still and lets him study her. She doesn’t know what he wants, so she doesn’t know how to give it to him.
Her phone goes off in her coat pocket, startling her; a text message with a tone that she knows only too well.
Mycroft’s eyebrow lifts a little at the sound of the woman’s moan spilling out of Molly’s labcoat, but she brazens it out, doesn’t look away from his searching gaze.
After an endless minute, he smiles.
-