Sherlock: Folding, Unfolding, Refolding
Title: Folding, Unfolding, Refolding
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Characters/Pairings: Molly, Sherlock/John, Mrs. Hudson
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3,965
Disclaimer: I don’t own Sherlock or get any money out of this endeavour.
Warnings: Some autopsy detail, discussion of death, grief, spoilers for Reichenbach.
Notes: ASiB made me want to write Molly. Reichenbach made me need to write Molly. Also I shamelessly sent my characters to a city I already know so I wouldn’t have to research it. Beta by miss_sabre.
Summary: Molly feels different, afterwards. She feels like she’s lost something, some part of herself that was capable of having a crush on Sherlock that, though pathetic, was at least honest and simple.
-
It is Molly Hooper’s job to rinse dead men’s blood away.
Most of them aren’t still breathing when she does.
Her fingers card through the hair at Sherlock’s temple, washing away the dried crackle of blood. He sits on the toilet lid, leaning forwards over the sink. His eyes are closed. Molly dabs at the blood on his forehead with a paper towel, and angles herself so she can see the back of his head, her hip coming into contact with his shoulder.
She wonders what it means that she counts, but that Sherlock still has that awful look of sadness on his face, here, where she can see it. The look that reminds her so painfully, and so wonderfully, of her father.
“Sherlock?” she murmurs, her hand still in his hair.
He takes a shuddering breath and looks up, and he is... unrecognisable. He is not everything she thought he is; he’s something different, something more. Everything he is would never have crossed her mind.
In the intensity of that moment, Molly is profoundly aware that she is the only person in the world who knows how sad Sherlock Holmes really is.
Was.
He’s dead now.
-
Molly goes into the staff room and rummages through the refrigerator until she finds a lunch that looks reasonably fresh. She steals it. Sherlock will need something healthier than what they sell in the hospital cafeteria.
When she gets back downstairs she has to take a deep breath before she knocks on the door to the back corridor staff loo that no one ever uses.
“It’s, uh, it’s Molly,” she says quietly, and Sherlock opens the door.
He looks more composed now; all the blood is gone, though in his shirtsleeves he looks more casual than she ever sees him. Mostly he just looks tired, now. She slips in the door and closes and locks it behind her, and then turns and thrusts the paper bag lunch out at him. “Here, eat this.” He looks like he’s about to refuse. “Please.”
Sherlock takes the bag, and then stands there holding it. After a moment, he looks down at the bag in his hands, opens it, looks in, and closes it again. “Philip Gardner from radiology,” Sherlock says.
“What?”
“You stole his lunch.”
“Oh, I, yes. I did.”
Sherlock sits down on the toilet lid and opens the bag again, taking out the chicken salad sandwich. “I’ve underestimated you, Molly.”
“Because I stole some bloke’s sandwich?”
A smile flickers over Sherlock’s face. It’s the first one she’s seen in... a while. “No. Because I trusted you not to tell, but now I actually believe that you won’t.”
“Not even--?”
He looks up from the sandwich, his face suddenly sharp. “No. Not even John.”
-
Seventeen hours later, Molly receives a text from an unrecognised number.
Thank you.
-
She feels different, afterwards.
Different about Sherlock, about John, about herself. She stands alone in the middle of the morgue, the cold creeping under her coat, into her trouser pockets, through the lacing holes in her shoes. She feels... sad, mainly. Sad for John. Sad for herself. Sad for a man who didn’t know how to tell anyone that they meant something to him until he had no other choice.
She feels like she’s lost something, some part of herself that was capable of having a crush on Sherlock that, though pathetic, was at least honest and simple.
It’s funny, that learning she actually does matter to Sherlock should have been the end of her crush on him. But somehow, knowing that he respects and trusts her has allowed her to let go, to grow up. She has Sherlock’s measure now; she knows what he is and what he’s done and she holds his life in her hands. His life is in her hands, and it feels so unexpectedly, strangely delicate. Intimate. Having Sherlock’s trust feels intimate, a responsibility like reaching into someone’s chest cavity and touching their lungs.
She loves Sherlock Holmes, but it is now the warm, protective, complicated love of knowledge and fierce sadness. A grown up love. Molly knows she has grown up because she does not want Sherlock to come back for her. She wants him to come back for John.
-
She goes to the funeral because she has to. Because she’s mourning too. She misses him too. She misses Sherlock’s casual unexpected appearances in the morgue. God, even his insults. The last time she saw him he didn’t say anything offensive, not once. She misses a world in which Sherlock is secure enough to insult her. When he doesn’t need her.
She’s mourning the same thing everyone else is mourning--the lives they led, when Sherlock Holmes was alive.
John’s face is heartbreaking. He isn’t crying. Won’t cry.
Molly cries for him.
-
At the reception, Sherlock’s brother catches her eye across the room, and raises his glass to her.
He knows.
She turns away without responding, and goes to get her coat.
-
In her spare time, Molly folds paper cranes. The previous Christmas someone (God, she can't even remember who--relative? coworker?) gave her a daily calendar of origami paper and instructions, and she's been folding ever since. She knows cranes are sort of obvious, as origami goes, but she likes them. She likes that they have symbolic meaning, she likes their shape, their character. Folding them is delicate, like autopsies, but after autopsies, refreshingly clean.
Sometimes she’ll find one, on her desk or in the letterbox or in among the flasks and beakers in the lab, that she did not fold. She unfolds those mystery cranes, and when she finds the paper blank she refolds them, carefully along the same lines.
She wonders where he is, and where he learned to fold paper cranes.
-
She runs into John one day in a Sainsbury’s, about two months after. He’s holding a tin of beans and staring at it, and she says, “John!” before she thinks far enough ahead to realise she should have just turned and walked away before he saw her.
His face is blank for a moment after he looks up, and then there’s a flicker of feeling, of pain, before it goes blank again. “Molly. Hello.”
“How are you?” she asks, and then wishes she hadn’t.
“Oh, you know,” he says. “Buying beans.”
She does know. She wishes she didn’t.
“Do you want to... abandon the beans, go get a coffee?” she offers. Maybe it’s her duty, as Sherlock’s secret keeper, to look after John for him. Maybe she’s been neglecting that, but it’s hard. It’s so hard to know she could end John’s grief. That she can’t.
John just looks at her for a while, like he’s forgotten how to hold a conversation. “Yeah, okay,” he says finally, his voice rusty.
He puts the beans back on the shelf, and they leave and go to the Costa Coffee across the street. She sits him down at a table in the corner, asks what he wants to drink, and goes to the counter to order. When she comes back he’s still sitting exactly where she left him, looking like he doesn’t know how he came to be there.
Molly puts his coffee down in front of him, and he takes a sip automatically, before she can stop him. Burning his tongue seems to wake him up, though, and he rouses himself to look at her properly. She tries to smile at him, and fails.
“Are you all right, Molly?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Working, you know. People, keep, uh, keep... dying.” Oh, God. She really just said that. To John.
He’s looking at her thoughtfully, though, as if realising for the first time that she must be sad too.
“I never told you,” he says. “He mentioned you.” There’s no question who “he” is. “When he was--when he was on the roof.” It takes him some effort to get the words out, like he’s speaking around a hollow emptiness in his throat.
“He... did?”
“He told me to tell you--and Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson--that the newspapers were right about him. But of course I didn’t, because I... I didn’t believe them.” He closes his eyes and tucks his chin into his neck for a moment. “But you should know that he... that he mentioned you.” He swallows thickly, and takes another burning gulp of coffee.
“John,” she says, and reaches forward to wrap her fingers around his, limp on the table. “I don’t believe them. Please know that. You have to know you’re not the only one who doesn’t believe the newspapers.”
“Molly,” he says, swallowing her name in a huff of breath. “Thank you. He didn’t deserve you.”
“No, John, it’s okay. He told me I mattered to him. Before he--”
But that seems to be the wrong thing to say. John crumples, hunches forward over the table, the hand that Molly isn’t holding going to cover his face. He takes several deep breaths, so loud Molly can tell they’re deliberate, that he’s counting, maybe, and trying not to--. “John?”
“I never... said.” His voice is muffled by his hand, and he wipes it across his face and drops it into his lap, but he doesn’t look up. “I never told him--God, anything. I never told him anything that I--”
“He knew.” Molly says, immediately, firmly. “I swear he knew, John.”
And if he doesn’t, if he really doesn’t know, she can still tell him. Even if she doesn’t know how to contact him. Even if it takes a long time. She can find a way.
John lets out a long, shaky breath. “Thank you.”
-
A year and a half later, she wins a trip to Berlin. That’s what she tells her supervisor, anyway.
It comes in the post, just a PNR code and an itinerary with her name on it. The piece of paper with the PNR code written on it is square, and faint creases are still visible. She follows the lines, and realises what this is.
A paper crane. It’s time to take flight.
-
The man at the money exchange hands her another paper crane.
Friedrichstraße train station, S-Bahn platform, it says, when she sits down to unfold it.
She finds a bus that goes all the way there, and sits down in the back, worrying the tail of the refolded crane until it comes apart in her fingers, becomes soft like old cotton. She gets a little lost finding the train station after she gets off the bus, but the map she picked up in the airport sets her right. The crane remains clenched in her fist, soft and valuable.
Inside the station, she follows the green S, up the stairs and onto the platform. It’s midday, and the crush of people is impossible to see over. She doesn’t even know if he’ll look the way she expects him to. She pushes her way into the crowd, which moves differently from London crowds, speaks a different language, looks slightly different. She’s starting to feel anxious, in a strange place, with no idea what she’s going to do if she doesn’t find Sherlock.
A hand grabs her arm, and before she knows what’s happening she is tugged out of the crowd and into a corner behind a coffee kiosk, face to face with a man she doesn’t recognise.
It’s Sherlock.
His hair is so short it looks spiky, and it’s dyed a pale brown. It makes him look washed out, pale in a way that is not attractive. He’s thinner than he was, his cheekbones more prominent. Molly unclenches her fingers and slips the paper crane into her coat pocket. Sherlock’s hand is still curled around her upper arm. He’s looking at her like she’s a ghost, but that’s not right. He’s the ghost.
Her initial overpowering feeling is relief.
-
“What are you doing here?” Sherlock hisses. He shoves her against the wall of the kiosk, his fingers digging into her arm. It hurts, in more ways than one. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
“Sh--”
“Shut up. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Molly puts one hand up and shoves against Sherlock’s chest. He stumbles back, but he doesn’t let go of her arm. “Nothing’s wrong! You told me to meet you here!”
His face becomes, if possible, even more colourless. “I didn’t.”
“But you--there was a paper crane. You’ve been leaving the paper cranes, haven’t you?”
“Yes. But I didn’t tell you to meet me here. Mycroft must have--” He lets go of her arm, roughly, and paces a few feet away and back again. “Tell me what happened. Exactly what happened. Leave nothing out.”
“It came in the post last Thursday--a flight itinerary and a paper crane with the PNR code on it. I assumed you sent it, because of the crane. There was another crane at the money exchange in the airport, that said to come here.” She pulls the worn crane out of her pocket and holds it out to him. He snatches it from her and unfolds it, ripping the soft edges in his haste.
“Mycroft. Bloody Mycroft. He told me he was sending me a contact. A lead. I--” He drops the crane and presses his fingers to his scalp, as though trying to fist his hands in the long curls he doesn’t have any more. Molly, bewildered, stoops to pick up the poor paper crane. “He must have had a reason for sending you. You must know something.”
“I don’t, I just--” She feels a telltale prickling behind her eyes, and she looks up at Sherlock, clearly nervous and jittery, and tries to hold on to the relief she had felt at seeing him. “Please-- Don’t you think he might have just thought you’d like to see me? I know I--it’s so nice to see you.”
“Don’t be stupid, Molly, he must have had a better reason than that.”
One or two tears slide out, at that, but she smiles, too. Oh, she smiles. Sherlock sounds exactly like himself.
He stops pacing and finally seems to see her, still leaning against the kiosk and crying and smiling at him. “I doubt Mycroft would send you to Germany for such pedestrian reasons, but I admit it’s--not untrue.”
Molly laughs at him through her tears.
-
They go to a little restaurant under the S-Bahn tracks, where the walls are covered in black and white photographs of old film stars. It’s well past lunch time, really, so the restaurant is fairly empty. They sit against the back wall, and Sherlock orders a coffee in almost perfect German while Molly orders pasta, awkwardly, off the English menu.
“What have you been doing?” Molly asks, fidgeting with the end of her scarf. She doesn’t know what to ask, really.
Sherlock doesn’t answer the question. “You’re sure nothing’s happened?”
“Yes, I promise. Everything’s fine. He’s fine.”
She knows that’s what he really wants to know.
“Fine?” Sherlock asks.
“Well, he’s okay, anyway. He’s still a bit... sad.”
Emotion ripples across Sherlock’s face, and then tucks itself in again. Molly is reminded of what she said to Sherlock that day at Bart’s, that he looked sad when John wasn’t watching, and she knows Sherlock must be thinking the same thing.
“I saw him at the cemetery,” Sherlock says.
“You went to the cemetery? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
He shrugs it off, like being alive twenty feet from your own grave isn’t dangerous. “I couldn’t hear what he said.”
“He was talking? To your gravestone?”
Sherlock nods minutely.
“He was probably saying the things he... never said,” Molly realises, speaking almost to herself. She takes a deep breath. “I ran into him last year. He said he regrets not telling you things. I don’t know exactly what things; he didn’t say. I can’t imagine he would say things like that, to anyone but you.” She pauses and meets his eyes, and she wonders if this wasn’t Mycroft’s idea to give Sherlock a break, and if it wasn’t a truly terrible idea. She wonders if this isn’t too painful a reminder of everything he’s lost.
They are interrupted by the waiter, who sets down Molly’s pasta and Sherlock’s cup of coffee and their silverware, and asks if they need anything else. By the time the waiter is gone, Molly is beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t tell Sherlock what she thinks, what she knows John wishes he’d said. It won’t help John. He can’t know his message has reached its target. Will it help Sherlock?
Molly stares at her food, and toys with her fork, and is reminded for the thousandth time how sad this story makes her.
“What did he want to say?” Sherlock says, his voice rough and low.
Molly looks up into his face, and wants to cry. “Oh, Sherlock. What does anyone ever regret not saying? That he loves you, I suppose.”
Sherlock’s face....
Oh, Sherlock.
-
Molly learns, in the years after Sherlock’s death, just how few friends she has, and how many she could have. She realises that it’s not entirely Sherlock’s fault that they were never proper friends until after he was dead, that it takes some effort, a bit of pushing.
So she makes the effort.
Three weeks after she gets back from Berlin she rings up Mrs. Hudson, and they chat a bit until Mrs. Hudson invites her to tea. She says yes, because this is what she’s doing now, even if the thought of going to Baker Street makes her anxious.
It’s raining when she gets there, and she splashes down the street, the hems of her jeans getting soggy, her hair going limp. By the time she knocks on the front door she feels like a drowned rat, which really isn’t the look she was going for, but Mrs. Hudson exclaims over her and gets her a towel, and tells her to take off her wet trousers in the bathroom and drape them over the radiator. She stands on Mrs. Hudson’s bathmat in her pants and socks, feeling embarrassed but still wanting to laugh at the circumstances.
Mrs. Hudson knocks on the door. “Here you are, dear,” Mrs. Hudson says, as Molly hides behind the door and pokes her head around. She takes the pair of pyjama pants Mrs. Hudson hands her, and closes the door again.
They’re Sherlock’s, she realises, when she unfolds them and pulls them on. She has to belt them up around her waist, and roll up the cuffs, but Sherlock’s so skinny that aside from the length they almost fit.
She feels awkward sitting on Mrs. Hudson’s sofa in Sherlock’s pyjamas, at first (but then, she always feels awkward, that’s why she’s doing this), but Mrs. Hudson makes dry, shocking jokes, and they don’t talk about Sherlock, and it’s okay, really. It’s nice.
They start having tea every week, and it stops being awkward. It’s comfortable. Molly wants to tell Sherlock. They’re still here, she wants to tell him. They’re okay. You saved them.
-
Molly’s been counting the paper cranes. She keeps the ones she makes or receives at work in a tote bag from the British Museum, and the ones at home live in the shoe boxes she’s kept from all the pairs of shoes she owns, which she saves obsessively. It’s a mental tally; Molly’s always been good at remembering numbers, though sometimes she does write it down if she has a pen handy.
It’s been almost three years since, and she has nine hundred and eighty-seven paper cranes.
-
Molly is sitting at her kitchen table, drinking a glass of water and folding her thousandth paper crane, when Sherlock Holmes knocks on her front door and resurrects himself.
He doesn’t look as he looked the last time he was alive, or as he looked in Berlin, but she recognises him and lets him into her kitchen, and she sits him down at the kitchen table across from the shoe boxes of origami cranes, and feeds him tea and a slice of toast. He tells her that he’s done it, what he died for; he’s killed the ghost of Jim Moriarty he had to become a ghost himself to kill.
He hasn’t gone home yet.
“Don’t expect it to be exactly like it used to be,” she counsels. “But I promise it’ll be all right.”
-
The first time Molly sees Mrs. Hudson after Sherlock comes home, they sit in Mrs. Hudson’s living room and for the first time in a long time Molly is uncomfortable here. She stares at her fingers, twisted in her lap, and doesn’t know what to say.
“Molly, dear, you might have told me. I can keep a secret, you know.”
Molly looks up so fast her neck twinges, and she should have known, shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hudson won’t begrudge her a secret kept for a friend. “I’m sorry,” Molly says. “I was afraid. I was so afraid for him. And you, and John. All of us.”
“I know. Don’t you worry about it now.”
Molly nods, and glances up at the ceiling. “Are they in?” she asks.
“No, they’re off at a crime scene, I think. I wasn’t exactly sure where they were going. Sherlock was shouting something about toes.”
Oh, that sounds like him. “So they’re okay, then?”
“Oh, you know how they are. I’m never sure whether they’re having a fight or--”
It’s so good to be here in Baker Street, Molly thinks, laughing, with something other than dead silence upstairs. No one blames her for keeping Sherlock’s secret. And she kept it well, she knows she did. She kept Sherlock’s secret because she herself was his secret, because no one, not even Molly, knew that she was his friend.
She accepts the cup of tea Mrs. Hudson hands her and sinks back into the sofa, content, finally, with the way things are.
-
Molly never would have imagined, in all her imaginings, that she would ever see Sherlock so naked, so bare, so utterly transparent with all his clothes on in the morgue, in the loo, in a restaurant in Germany.
He is still Sherlock as she knew him, still insulting, still cold, still brusque and dark and funny, but he’s not the fiction of a man she once had a childish crush on. She’s seen what he looks like when no one can see him, a tree that falls in a forest, from a building in a forest of buildings. He’s not the man she expected him to be, but he’s a much better man for that. She loves Sherlock, and she knows him, and she’s thankful he and John are back in 221B Baker Street, together, as it should be.
She’s working late one night when he arrives in the morgue, unannounced. He hoists himself onto one of the autopsy tables and sits, watching her examine a dead woman’s mouth. She squirms under his gaze. “Ms. Maitlin’s death wasn’t suspicious, Sherlock,” she says.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Sherlock says. “A congenital heart condition. Obvious.”
“Are you... here for any special reason?”
“No.”
“Did you need something?”
“No. I’m just here to--‘hang out’, I suppose you’d say.”
She looks up at him, surprised, and then goes back to examining Ms. Maitlin. “Ah. How’s John?”
All the edges in Sherlock’s face soften. “He’s fine.” Sherlock clears his throat. “Good.”
Molly smiles down at the dead woman, and thanks all her lucky stars, and a thousand paper cranes, that Sherlock Holmes is alive.
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Characters/Pairings: Molly, Sherlock/John, Mrs. Hudson
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3,965
Disclaimer: I don’t own Sherlock or get any money out of this endeavour.
Warnings: Some autopsy detail, discussion of death, grief, spoilers for Reichenbach.
Notes: ASiB made me want to write Molly. Reichenbach made me need to write Molly. Also I shamelessly sent my characters to a city I already know so I wouldn’t have to research it. Beta by miss_sabre.
Summary: Molly feels different, afterwards. She feels like she’s lost something, some part of herself that was capable of having a crush on Sherlock that, though pathetic, was at least honest and simple.
-
It is Molly Hooper’s job to rinse dead men’s blood away.
Most of them aren’t still breathing when she does.
Her fingers card through the hair at Sherlock’s temple, washing away the dried crackle of blood. He sits on the toilet lid, leaning forwards over the sink. His eyes are closed. Molly dabs at the blood on his forehead with a paper towel, and angles herself so she can see the back of his head, her hip coming into contact with his shoulder.
She wonders what it means that she counts, but that Sherlock still has that awful look of sadness on his face, here, where she can see it. The look that reminds her so painfully, and so wonderfully, of her father.
“Sherlock?” she murmurs, her hand still in his hair.
He takes a shuddering breath and looks up, and he is... unrecognisable. He is not everything she thought he is; he’s something different, something more. Everything he is would never have crossed her mind.
In the intensity of that moment, Molly is profoundly aware that she is the only person in the world who knows how sad Sherlock Holmes really is.
Was.
He’s dead now.
-
Molly goes into the staff room and rummages through the refrigerator until she finds a lunch that looks reasonably fresh. She steals it. Sherlock will need something healthier than what they sell in the hospital cafeteria.
When she gets back downstairs she has to take a deep breath before she knocks on the door to the back corridor staff loo that no one ever uses.
“It’s, uh, it’s Molly,” she says quietly, and Sherlock opens the door.
He looks more composed now; all the blood is gone, though in his shirtsleeves he looks more casual than she ever sees him. Mostly he just looks tired, now. She slips in the door and closes and locks it behind her, and then turns and thrusts the paper bag lunch out at him. “Here, eat this.” He looks like he’s about to refuse. “Please.”
Sherlock takes the bag, and then stands there holding it. After a moment, he looks down at the bag in his hands, opens it, looks in, and closes it again. “Philip Gardner from radiology,” Sherlock says.
“What?”
“You stole his lunch.”
“Oh, I, yes. I did.”
Sherlock sits down on the toilet lid and opens the bag again, taking out the chicken salad sandwich. “I’ve underestimated you, Molly.”
“Because I stole some bloke’s sandwich?”
A smile flickers over Sherlock’s face. It’s the first one she’s seen in... a while. “No. Because I trusted you not to tell, but now I actually believe that you won’t.”
“Not even--?”
He looks up from the sandwich, his face suddenly sharp. “No. Not even John.”
-
Seventeen hours later, Molly receives a text from an unrecognised number.
Thank you.
-
She feels different, afterwards.
Different about Sherlock, about John, about herself. She stands alone in the middle of the morgue, the cold creeping under her coat, into her trouser pockets, through the lacing holes in her shoes. She feels... sad, mainly. Sad for John. Sad for herself. Sad for a man who didn’t know how to tell anyone that they meant something to him until he had no other choice.
She feels like she’s lost something, some part of herself that was capable of having a crush on Sherlock that, though pathetic, was at least honest and simple.
It’s funny, that learning she actually does matter to Sherlock should have been the end of her crush on him. But somehow, knowing that he respects and trusts her has allowed her to let go, to grow up. She has Sherlock’s measure now; she knows what he is and what he’s done and she holds his life in her hands. His life is in her hands, and it feels so unexpectedly, strangely delicate. Intimate. Having Sherlock’s trust feels intimate, a responsibility like reaching into someone’s chest cavity and touching their lungs.
She loves Sherlock Holmes, but it is now the warm, protective, complicated love of knowledge and fierce sadness. A grown up love. Molly knows she has grown up because she does not want Sherlock to come back for her. She wants him to come back for John.
-
She goes to the funeral because she has to. Because she’s mourning too. She misses him too. She misses Sherlock’s casual unexpected appearances in the morgue. God, even his insults. The last time she saw him he didn’t say anything offensive, not once. She misses a world in which Sherlock is secure enough to insult her. When he doesn’t need her.
She’s mourning the same thing everyone else is mourning--the lives they led, when Sherlock Holmes was alive.
John’s face is heartbreaking. He isn’t crying. Won’t cry.
Molly cries for him.
-
At the reception, Sherlock’s brother catches her eye across the room, and raises his glass to her.
He knows.
She turns away without responding, and goes to get her coat.
-
In her spare time, Molly folds paper cranes. The previous Christmas someone (God, she can't even remember who--relative? coworker?) gave her a daily calendar of origami paper and instructions, and she's been folding ever since. She knows cranes are sort of obvious, as origami goes, but she likes them. She likes that they have symbolic meaning, she likes their shape, their character. Folding them is delicate, like autopsies, but after autopsies, refreshingly clean.
Sometimes she’ll find one, on her desk or in the letterbox or in among the flasks and beakers in the lab, that she did not fold. She unfolds those mystery cranes, and when she finds the paper blank she refolds them, carefully along the same lines.
She wonders where he is, and where he learned to fold paper cranes.
-
She runs into John one day in a Sainsbury’s, about two months after. He’s holding a tin of beans and staring at it, and she says, “John!” before she thinks far enough ahead to realise she should have just turned and walked away before he saw her.
His face is blank for a moment after he looks up, and then there’s a flicker of feeling, of pain, before it goes blank again. “Molly. Hello.”
“How are you?” she asks, and then wishes she hadn’t.
“Oh, you know,” he says. “Buying beans.”
She does know. She wishes she didn’t.
“Do you want to... abandon the beans, go get a coffee?” she offers. Maybe it’s her duty, as Sherlock’s secret keeper, to look after John for him. Maybe she’s been neglecting that, but it’s hard. It’s so hard to know she could end John’s grief. That she can’t.
John just looks at her for a while, like he’s forgotten how to hold a conversation. “Yeah, okay,” he says finally, his voice rusty.
He puts the beans back on the shelf, and they leave and go to the Costa Coffee across the street. She sits him down at a table in the corner, asks what he wants to drink, and goes to the counter to order. When she comes back he’s still sitting exactly where she left him, looking like he doesn’t know how he came to be there.
Molly puts his coffee down in front of him, and he takes a sip automatically, before she can stop him. Burning his tongue seems to wake him up, though, and he rouses himself to look at her properly. She tries to smile at him, and fails.
“Are you all right, Molly?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Working, you know. People, keep, uh, keep... dying.” Oh, God. She really just said that. To John.
He’s looking at her thoughtfully, though, as if realising for the first time that she must be sad too.
“I never told you,” he says. “He mentioned you.” There’s no question who “he” is. “When he was--when he was on the roof.” It takes him some effort to get the words out, like he’s speaking around a hollow emptiness in his throat.
“He... did?”
“He told me to tell you--and Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson--that the newspapers were right about him. But of course I didn’t, because I... I didn’t believe them.” He closes his eyes and tucks his chin into his neck for a moment. “But you should know that he... that he mentioned you.” He swallows thickly, and takes another burning gulp of coffee.
“John,” she says, and reaches forward to wrap her fingers around his, limp on the table. “I don’t believe them. Please know that. You have to know you’re not the only one who doesn’t believe the newspapers.”
“Molly,” he says, swallowing her name in a huff of breath. “Thank you. He didn’t deserve you.”
“No, John, it’s okay. He told me I mattered to him. Before he--”
But that seems to be the wrong thing to say. John crumples, hunches forward over the table, the hand that Molly isn’t holding going to cover his face. He takes several deep breaths, so loud Molly can tell they’re deliberate, that he’s counting, maybe, and trying not to--. “John?”
“I never... said.” His voice is muffled by his hand, and he wipes it across his face and drops it into his lap, but he doesn’t look up. “I never told him--God, anything. I never told him anything that I--”
“He knew.” Molly says, immediately, firmly. “I swear he knew, John.”
And if he doesn’t, if he really doesn’t know, she can still tell him. Even if she doesn’t know how to contact him. Even if it takes a long time. She can find a way.
John lets out a long, shaky breath. “Thank you.”
-
A year and a half later, she wins a trip to Berlin. That’s what she tells her supervisor, anyway.
It comes in the post, just a PNR code and an itinerary with her name on it. The piece of paper with the PNR code written on it is square, and faint creases are still visible. She follows the lines, and realises what this is.
A paper crane. It’s time to take flight.
-
The man at the money exchange hands her another paper crane.
Friedrichstraße train station, S-Bahn platform, it says, when she sits down to unfold it.
She finds a bus that goes all the way there, and sits down in the back, worrying the tail of the refolded crane until it comes apart in her fingers, becomes soft like old cotton. She gets a little lost finding the train station after she gets off the bus, but the map she picked up in the airport sets her right. The crane remains clenched in her fist, soft and valuable.
Inside the station, she follows the green S, up the stairs and onto the platform. It’s midday, and the crush of people is impossible to see over. She doesn’t even know if he’ll look the way she expects him to. She pushes her way into the crowd, which moves differently from London crowds, speaks a different language, looks slightly different. She’s starting to feel anxious, in a strange place, with no idea what she’s going to do if she doesn’t find Sherlock.
A hand grabs her arm, and before she knows what’s happening she is tugged out of the crowd and into a corner behind a coffee kiosk, face to face with a man she doesn’t recognise.
It’s Sherlock.
His hair is so short it looks spiky, and it’s dyed a pale brown. It makes him look washed out, pale in a way that is not attractive. He’s thinner than he was, his cheekbones more prominent. Molly unclenches her fingers and slips the paper crane into her coat pocket. Sherlock’s hand is still curled around her upper arm. He’s looking at her like she’s a ghost, but that’s not right. He’s the ghost.
Her initial overpowering feeling is relief.
-
“What are you doing here?” Sherlock hisses. He shoves her against the wall of the kiosk, his fingers digging into her arm. It hurts, in more ways than one. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
“Sh--”
“Shut up. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Molly puts one hand up and shoves against Sherlock’s chest. He stumbles back, but he doesn’t let go of her arm. “Nothing’s wrong! You told me to meet you here!”
His face becomes, if possible, even more colourless. “I didn’t.”
“But you--there was a paper crane. You’ve been leaving the paper cranes, haven’t you?”
“Yes. But I didn’t tell you to meet me here. Mycroft must have--” He lets go of her arm, roughly, and paces a few feet away and back again. “Tell me what happened. Exactly what happened. Leave nothing out.”
“It came in the post last Thursday--a flight itinerary and a paper crane with the PNR code on it. I assumed you sent it, because of the crane. There was another crane at the money exchange in the airport, that said to come here.” She pulls the worn crane out of her pocket and holds it out to him. He snatches it from her and unfolds it, ripping the soft edges in his haste.
“Mycroft. Bloody Mycroft. He told me he was sending me a contact. A lead. I--” He drops the crane and presses his fingers to his scalp, as though trying to fist his hands in the long curls he doesn’t have any more. Molly, bewildered, stoops to pick up the poor paper crane. “He must have had a reason for sending you. You must know something.”
“I don’t, I just--” She feels a telltale prickling behind her eyes, and she looks up at Sherlock, clearly nervous and jittery, and tries to hold on to the relief she had felt at seeing him. “Please-- Don’t you think he might have just thought you’d like to see me? I know I--it’s so nice to see you.”
“Don’t be stupid, Molly, he must have had a better reason than that.”
One or two tears slide out, at that, but she smiles, too. Oh, she smiles. Sherlock sounds exactly like himself.
He stops pacing and finally seems to see her, still leaning against the kiosk and crying and smiling at him. “I doubt Mycroft would send you to Germany for such pedestrian reasons, but I admit it’s--not untrue.”
Molly laughs at him through her tears.
-
They go to a little restaurant under the S-Bahn tracks, where the walls are covered in black and white photographs of old film stars. It’s well past lunch time, really, so the restaurant is fairly empty. They sit against the back wall, and Sherlock orders a coffee in almost perfect German while Molly orders pasta, awkwardly, off the English menu.
“What have you been doing?” Molly asks, fidgeting with the end of her scarf. She doesn’t know what to ask, really.
Sherlock doesn’t answer the question. “You’re sure nothing’s happened?”
“Yes, I promise. Everything’s fine. He’s fine.”
She knows that’s what he really wants to know.
“Fine?” Sherlock asks.
“Well, he’s okay, anyway. He’s still a bit... sad.”
Emotion ripples across Sherlock’s face, and then tucks itself in again. Molly is reminded of what she said to Sherlock that day at Bart’s, that he looked sad when John wasn’t watching, and she knows Sherlock must be thinking the same thing.
“I saw him at the cemetery,” Sherlock says.
“You went to the cemetery? Wasn’t that dangerous?”
He shrugs it off, like being alive twenty feet from your own grave isn’t dangerous. “I couldn’t hear what he said.”
“He was talking? To your gravestone?”
Sherlock nods minutely.
“He was probably saying the things he... never said,” Molly realises, speaking almost to herself. She takes a deep breath. “I ran into him last year. He said he regrets not telling you things. I don’t know exactly what things; he didn’t say. I can’t imagine he would say things like that, to anyone but you.” She pauses and meets his eyes, and she wonders if this wasn’t Mycroft’s idea to give Sherlock a break, and if it wasn’t a truly terrible idea. She wonders if this isn’t too painful a reminder of everything he’s lost.
They are interrupted by the waiter, who sets down Molly’s pasta and Sherlock’s cup of coffee and their silverware, and asks if they need anything else. By the time the waiter is gone, Molly is beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t tell Sherlock what she thinks, what she knows John wishes he’d said. It won’t help John. He can’t know his message has reached its target. Will it help Sherlock?
Molly stares at her food, and toys with her fork, and is reminded for the thousandth time how sad this story makes her.
“What did he want to say?” Sherlock says, his voice rough and low.
Molly looks up into his face, and wants to cry. “Oh, Sherlock. What does anyone ever regret not saying? That he loves you, I suppose.”
Sherlock’s face....
Oh, Sherlock.
-
Molly learns, in the years after Sherlock’s death, just how few friends she has, and how many she could have. She realises that it’s not entirely Sherlock’s fault that they were never proper friends until after he was dead, that it takes some effort, a bit of pushing.
So she makes the effort.
Three weeks after she gets back from Berlin she rings up Mrs. Hudson, and they chat a bit until Mrs. Hudson invites her to tea. She says yes, because this is what she’s doing now, even if the thought of going to Baker Street makes her anxious.
It’s raining when she gets there, and she splashes down the street, the hems of her jeans getting soggy, her hair going limp. By the time she knocks on the front door she feels like a drowned rat, which really isn’t the look she was going for, but Mrs. Hudson exclaims over her and gets her a towel, and tells her to take off her wet trousers in the bathroom and drape them over the radiator. She stands on Mrs. Hudson’s bathmat in her pants and socks, feeling embarrassed but still wanting to laugh at the circumstances.
Mrs. Hudson knocks on the door. “Here you are, dear,” Mrs. Hudson says, as Molly hides behind the door and pokes her head around. She takes the pair of pyjama pants Mrs. Hudson hands her, and closes the door again.
They’re Sherlock’s, she realises, when she unfolds them and pulls them on. She has to belt them up around her waist, and roll up the cuffs, but Sherlock’s so skinny that aside from the length they almost fit.
She feels awkward sitting on Mrs. Hudson’s sofa in Sherlock’s pyjamas, at first (but then, she always feels awkward, that’s why she’s doing this), but Mrs. Hudson makes dry, shocking jokes, and they don’t talk about Sherlock, and it’s okay, really. It’s nice.
They start having tea every week, and it stops being awkward. It’s comfortable. Molly wants to tell Sherlock. They’re still here, she wants to tell him. They’re okay. You saved them.
-
Molly’s been counting the paper cranes. She keeps the ones she makes or receives at work in a tote bag from the British Museum, and the ones at home live in the shoe boxes she’s kept from all the pairs of shoes she owns, which she saves obsessively. It’s a mental tally; Molly’s always been good at remembering numbers, though sometimes she does write it down if she has a pen handy.
It’s been almost three years since, and she has nine hundred and eighty-seven paper cranes.
-
Molly is sitting at her kitchen table, drinking a glass of water and folding her thousandth paper crane, when Sherlock Holmes knocks on her front door and resurrects himself.
He doesn’t look as he looked the last time he was alive, or as he looked in Berlin, but she recognises him and lets him into her kitchen, and she sits him down at the kitchen table across from the shoe boxes of origami cranes, and feeds him tea and a slice of toast. He tells her that he’s done it, what he died for; he’s killed the ghost of Jim Moriarty he had to become a ghost himself to kill.
He hasn’t gone home yet.
“Don’t expect it to be exactly like it used to be,” she counsels. “But I promise it’ll be all right.”
-
The first time Molly sees Mrs. Hudson after Sherlock comes home, they sit in Mrs. Hudson’s living room and for the first time in a long time Molly is uncomfortable here. She stares at her fingers, twisted in her lap, and doesn’t know what to say.
“Molly, dear, you might have told me. I can keep a secret, you know.”
Molly looks up so fast her neck twinges, and she should have known, shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hudson won’t begrudge her a secret kept for a friend. “I’m sorry,” Molly says. “I was afraid. I was so afraid for him. And you, and John. All of us.”
“I know. Don’t you worry about it now.”
Molly nods, and glances up at the ceiling. “Are they in?” she asks.
“No, they’re off at a crime scene, I think. I wasn’t exactly sure where they were going. Sherlock was shouting something about toes.”
Oh, that sounds like him. “So they’re okay, then?”
“Oh, you know how they are. I’m never sure whether they’re having a fight or--”
It’s so good to be here in Baker Street, Molly thinks, laughing, with something other than dead silence upstairs. No one blames her for keeping Sherlock’s secret. And she kept it well, she knows she did. She kept Sherlock’s secret because she herself was his secret, because no one, not even Molly, knew that she was his friend.
She accepts the cup of tea Mrs. Hudson hands her and sinks back into the sofa, content, finally, with the way things are.
-
Molly never would have imagined, in all her imaginings, that she would ever see Sherlock so naked, so bare, so utterly transparent with all his clothes on in the morgue, in the loo, in a restaurant in Germany.
He is still Sherlock as she knew him, still insulting, still cold, still brusque and dark and funny, but he’s not the fiction of a man she once had a childish crush on. She’s seen what he looks like when no one can see him, a tree that falls in a forest, from a building in a forest of buildings. He’s not the man she expected him to be, but he’s a much better man for that. She loves Sherlock, and she knows him, and she’s thankful he and John are back in 221B Baker Street, together, as it should be.
She’s working late one night when he arrives in the morgue, unannounced. He hoists himself onto one of the autopsy tables and sits, watching her examine a dead woman’s mouth. She squirms under his gaze. “Ms. Maitlin’s death wasn’t suspicious, Sherlock,” she says.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Sherlock says. “A congenital heart condition. Obvious.”
“Are you... here for any special reason?”
“No.”
“Did you need something?”
“No. I’m just here to--‘hang out’, I suppose you’d say.”
She looks up at him, surprised, and then goes back to examining Ms. Maitlin. “Ah. How’s John?”
All the edges in Sherlock’s face soften. “He’s fine.” Sherlock clears his throat. “Good.”
Molly smiles down at the dead woman, and thanks all her lucky stars, and a thousand paper cranes, that Sherlock Holmes is alive.