Sherlolly One Shots

Struck By Lightning

It was storming outside. Harshly. Violently. It was apt, Molly thought as she curled further into herself. The tears hadn't stopped yet. She had thought she was past this, the all-consuming feeling in her empty chest. It had been weeks since that terrible phone call, months even. She thought she was better. And often, she was. But today ... today Sherlock had come to the lab for the first time since it all happened. She knew he had been in plenty of times in the last couple of months, but never when she was on shift. She sniffed a deprecating scoff. He would rather work with incompetent pathologists (in his opinion) than face her, apparently. But today, that seemed to have changed. Today, he seemed to float into the lab. None of his usual flair accompanied him though. There was no swishing of the coat, no barging through the doors. He entered as any other person would. And, for some reason, that had hurt her more. It reminded her that things weren't normal. She wondered if they would ever be normal again.

He had been pleasant. There to see a body, of course. He had listened to her rundown of the autopsy, politely thanked her, took to sitting at his bench and microscope, and left an hour later. He hadn't said a lot. But he did say goodbye, and when he did, his eyes lingered on her for what felt like a second too long. They were soft and sad. Not alive with logic and deduction as they usually were. They were blue-green pools of what looked like remorse, of what looked like tenderness. Or that's what Molly's traitorous heart thought it saw. And so, she was curled up on her bed and crying, again.

Her chest ached. Her heart ached. And in more ways than one. It ached for herself, it ached for the love it could never have, it ached with embarrassment and regret. But more than anything else, it ached for him, for his family, for everything the Baker Street bunch had had to face in the past year. It hurt, and it made her feel smaller than she had ever felt before. She felt inconsequential. She felt useless because all she wanted to do was help, and she couldn't.

Molly had not yet received an explanation from Sherlock for that day. But she had heard from John, and from Mycroft. They had explained as much as they could. Mycroft had given her a step-by-step of the day, quite emotionless in its delivery but Molly could see the pain in his eyes, in his icy heart. She sniffed at the memory – it seemed both the Holmes boys had feelings.  John had cried. Molly had held his hand through it, her tears falling in sync with his.

But frustratingly, neither John nor Mycroft had told her the full story. Both had talked around the part she longed to understand the most. The room with the coffin. With the phone call. With the decimation of her heart. Oh, she knew the basics. Psychotic sister. Vivisection. Death threats. Bombs. Instructions. Cameras. She still felt slightly ill when she remembered that they could see her when she painfully pulled those words from herself and from Sherlock. In fact, she didn't know which was worse: the fact she had to say it or the fact they could see her when she did. She reckoned it was the latter, but she tried not to think about it.

Her heart liked to think it had heard some sincerity in his voice, some realness. Her head told her she was being idiotic. Her reason told her it was true, to an extent. If he loved her, he loved her the way he loved everyone else. John, Mary, Mrs Hudson, Greg. Platonic love. Friendly love. Of course he wouldn't want her to die. He would protect her the way he protected all his friends. And that was all it was. Protection. Survival. He would do anything for the people he cared about, including jump off a building. That's all it was. It had to be. She didn't know if she'd be able to cope if it was anything else, despite the fact that that was all she hoped for.

Molly sighed as the rain pelted her window even harder. Toby mewed as it woke him, sighing before rolling over and closing his eyes again. She ruffled his ears, slightly jealous of his ability to sleep through anything and everything. She climbed from her bed, slipping her feet into her slippers before shuffling to the kitchen. She absent-mindedly reached for a mug for a cup of tea. Her hand curled around the one at the back of the cupboard, the one from that day. Its blue and white porcelain burnt in her hand. She threw it in the bin and grabbed another.