All Part of the Cover (A Sherlolly Fanfic)

Every Waking Moment

ValkyrieRyder

Molly's eyes snapped open.

She was hot, and her hair was sticking unpleasantly to her face and shoulders in dull, damp strands. She liked to sleep with the widows open, to let the cool air in.

Sherlock had shut them. It wasn't safe, apparently.

She rolled over, brushing his arm. He was cold and pale as ice, sculpted as a  marble statue of a Greek god. He hadn't even broken sweat. Sleeping for once, breathing deep and slow, his arms wrapped defensively around his torso and tangled in the sheets.

She allowed herself to touch one of the dark curls that graced his head, sprawled out in a dark halo on the pillow, pushing it out of his sleeping face softly.

That was her ration for all eternity.

Sighing, she sat up, pulling her soft curtain of hair back into its usual long ponytail, hunting around in the dark for an elastic before she realized she had one on her wrist.

She folded her hands in her lap out of reflex, and found herself fingering her wedding and engagement rings. The engagement one was a slim, simple band of gold with a tiny diamond, whilst the wedding one was a solid band of titanium that Sherlock could wear whilst he worked with his acids and chemicals and yet not damage. Practical.

Her wedding ring slid on and off easily, as did her engagement ring. Wasn't there supposed to be a point in every happy marriage when the ring would no longer come obligingly off her finger? Molly was only one day into her marriage, and yet she was certain that a time like that would never come for her. Not whilst she was married to him.

She sighed again, a sound becoming increasingly familiar as it leaked involuntarily out of her lips. So, this was her wedding night with Sherlock Holmes.

Not at all like she'd imagined, fantasized about.

She rolled over reluctantly, closer to her sleeping husband, pulling the pale sheets more tightly around her. And when she closed her eyes, letting the deep, dark chasm of a fitful sleep claim her, crystalline tears rolled out.

~One Month Later~

 Sherlock couldn't find sleep tonight.

He turned over to look at his wife, whose dulled hair fell over her sleeping face. She looked so utterly at peace when she slept. How lucky she was.

His wife. He was still getting used to the phrase. The strings were very much attached now, and that frightened Sherlock. No turning back.

He turned over and got up, untangling himself from the sheets and gently moving Molly's arm, which was draped around his waist, and went into the small, red-tinted living room, lighting the fire. He'd always preferred firelight to the artificial glow of bulbs and to moonlight.

And to total darkness.

He picked up the paper as a sort of reflex, flicking through, eyes flickering over the crammed pages but not registering anything, before something caught his sharp eye. Murder article, page three. Local. These murders didn't usually make the front page until they were solved. Sherlock decided it could do him no harm to give himself a mental workout by solving the case.

In fact, the case was so incredibly simple that Sherlock solved it in a matter of minutes, just by looking at the information in the paper. The sister. With the blue sapphire and poison. In the Jacuzzi. It was like a game of Cluedo. His eyes sparkled with dry satisfaction as he steeped his fingertips under his chin and gazed at the number underneath the article.

Contact us if you have any information regarding the incident...

His fingers reached for the phone of their own accord, and before he knew it, he was staring at the first nine numbers in the sequence that he'd dialed.

Slowly, he punched in the tenth and the phone was picked up almost immediately, after only two rings. An anxious voice on the other end.

"Hello?"

"Arrest the sister if she has a Siamese sapphire in her possession and the poison found in the dead woman's system. It was her."

The flustered officer on the other end wrote this down fervently, the phone tucked under her chin as she balanced a mug of Oolong mountain tea in one hand and wrote with the other. "Thank you, sir. And your name is...?"

Sherlock, on the other end of the phone, smiled for the first time in a long, long time. "Nobody. Just nobody," he said.

~The Next Day~

When Molly woke up, Sherlock wasn't lying next to her.

She shot out of bed in her black pyjamas, with their little white dots and piping, and grabbed Sherlock's grey silk dressing gown, pulling it on.

She smelt burning, which, in her experience, was not a good thing. She braced herself for the worst - that he'd set the curtains or her oak table on fire again - but she raced out of the bedroom to find Sherlock up and dressed, playing a light vivace tune on his violin with a plateful of burnt toast smeared with loganberry jam and a table place with her name on it.

She sat down in front of us, surprised, as Sherlock waltzed by her and set down a cup of strong peppermint tea. It was such a sweet gesture, for him, that Molly didn't have the heart to tell him that she hated peppermint tea. She smiled up at him.

"In a good mood today, are we?"

Sherlock sat down opposite her with his own cup of tea. "Hmm? Yes."

She smiled at him, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear coyly. It had come out of her loose French plait that she now undid, letting her now wavy hair cascade down her back in a sheet. She thought she looked better with her hair down. 

"Oh? And why's that? Anything special?"

Sherlock looked at her over the paper and smiled a smile that made Molly's heart do a tap dance when it was directed at her.

"Because the game, Molly, is on again."