Chapter Text
“Well… here we are…“
Molly inhaled softly when Sherlock’s landlady pushed the door to the upper flat of 221B open and revealed the living room. Everything looked the usual. Sherlock’s chair in front of the shelf, John’s opposite it, the fireplace with the skull on the mantelpiece, the couch, the mess on Sherlock’s desk, the coffee table. The only major difference was that John’s desk wasn’t occupied by his laptop, papers and unopened letters anymore. It looked oddly abandoned in the crammed small room.
A sad sight.
“John has-…?”
“Yes… yes, last week…” Mrs Hudson nodded sorrowfully, “The poor boy… But I understand, Sherlock’s just still so-… present here…”
“Yes…” Molly replied quietly, glancing at the petite elderly lady next to her.
She had cried, it didn’t need Sherlock to see that. The unusually rosy blush on her wrinkly cheeks, the pinkness of her nose, and her reddened eyes gave it away to anyone who looked at her these days.
“Mrs Hudson, I’m so-…” Molly began but Mrs Hudson just rested her light small hand on the pathologist’s arm, smiling faintly.
“I know, dear… We’re… We’re going to be okay… It will take some time…”
“Yes… I-… yes…” Molly returned her smile sadly.
It was horrible, seeing everyone grieve for Sherlock, seeing how shocked and hurt they were, knowing they all cried but only ever when they were alone, John, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, the people that had been closest to Sherlock, but being unable to relieve them of their feeling of guilt. Being unable to tell them that Sherlock was somewhere out there, trying to dismantle every bit of the consulting criminal’s network, and that it wasn’t his corpse they had buried a month ago, but the one of one of Moriarty’s henchmen.
“Mrs Hudson, is there anything I can-…?”, Molly began but the landlady immediately shook her head.
“Oh don’t worry about me, dear… I’ll be fine… I’ll-… leave you alone then… Please feel free to take anything you want… I’ve got all the science equipment packed into those cartons here already but maybe you want-… something that reminds you of him…”, Mrs Hudson sniffed quietly and quickly turned her head away to nod at a couple of cartons next to the coffee table.
“Thank you…”
“Oh don’t mention it. I’m glad you’re taking care of those things… I know now that they’ll be in good hands… Right… I’ll leave you to it then…”
Mrs Hudson turned to head down the stairs after smiling a last time at Molly, and closed the door to the flat, leaving the pathologist to herself.
Molly exhaled deeply through her nose after glancing around the room and then set her handbag down next to the cartons on the floor. Quietly and hesitantly, ironically just like one would behave in the home of a recently deceased, she approached the shelf behind Sherlock’s armchair. She couldn’t help but let her fingertips glide over the soft, worn, black leather of the chair that was covered in a light layer of dust, just like everything else in what used to be the detective’s living room, besides John’s desk.
For a while she just skimmed through the books Sherlock had left behind. Most of them were about science of course, molecular biology, quantum physics, and biomedical chemistry.
But there were also some rare exemplars of classic literature. John Keats. William Blake. Oscar Wilde.
A light smile flashed over her lips when she discovered something and she couldn’t help but pull one book out of its place between an edition of Oscar Wilde’s “ The Ghost Of Canterville” and the Oxford Dictionary:
“A Practical Manual of Beekeeping: How to Keep Bees and Develop Your Full Potential as an Apiarist” by David Cramp.
She hadn’t known. She’d never known Sherlock had an interest in Beekeeping. Or maybe he’d bought it for an undercover case…? Had it been a gift..? Anyways it had been read. There were a few dog-ears, and when she opened the book to smooth those pages, she saw that on each one of them Sherlock had highlighted small passages.
Molly took her time, unable to stop herself from reading every single one of them, from trying to imagine Sherlock sitting in his chair and flipping through the pages, reading twice as quickly as anybody else she’d ever met, his eyes darting over the words, while John was perhaps typing up their newest case for his blog.
She knew he’d not mind it so after half an hour of reading she set the book down on the cartons Mrs Hudson had prepared for her, before she turned her attention back to the rest of the room.
Another hour later she’d examined all the kitchen cupboards and picked up the last few body parts from the refrigerator, twelve fingers, seven and a half toes and half a brain. Also she’d grabbed a couple of shirts, the only two jumpers Sherlock owned, four trousers, a few suits, socks, two pyjamas and underwear from Sherlock’s closet, as she knew he’d probably stay at her place rather than Mycroft’s when he returned to London every once in a while in between his various trips around the world to dismantle Moriarty’s network, and would complain if he had to wear the clothes she’d bought for him after his “death” again. Of course he‘d known he wasn’t able to go home and pick up some of his own clothes but that hadn’t stopped him from nagging about the reach-me-downs she’d bought and how uncomfortable he felt in them because they didn’t fit right, according to him.
All that was left was the mess on his desk.
Molly had purposely waited as long as possible with tidying it up because she’d known it would take ages but now she simply didn’t have an excuse anymore. Though she couldn’t help but curse herself for agreeing to sort out Sherlock’s things so John didn’t have to do it. At least she knew she’d saved John a lot of pain this way, by not forcing him to spend time at 221B again. Mycroft Holmes and Greg were either too busy to do it or, in Mycroft’s case, currently not within the UK, and Mrs Hudson definitely couldn’t be bothered with this tedious and physically exhausting work, considering her hip.
With an exasperated sigh she sat down in Sherlock’s desk chair and carefully pulled a huge pile of papers close to her, only to squeak involuntarily when the very instable pile fell over and a flood of paper spilled onto her lap.
The pathologist groaned softly and then, resigned to her faith, started sorting them all out.
Two and a half hours and three cups of tea later, she’d found a last remain of Earl Grey, sugar and a clean cup in Sherlock’s cupboards (though sadly no milk that wouldn’t have posed a severe risk to her health), the top of his desk was finally tidied up and all important papers were neatly filed into four large lever arch files that rested on the floor.
Molly’s eyes hurt and she had to open the full-length windows after a while to let in some fresh air and oxygen. Besides, the flat really needed to be thoroughly aerated again.
So when she pulled the first few drawers of Sherlock’s desk open and lifted more, thankfully smaller, piles of documents out of them, she could hear the faint voices of people who were chatting and sitting in front of Speedy’s down on the street right below the windows.
With angelic patience and endurance she skimmed through the bills, vouchers, bank statements, scribbled notes about complex experiments, old photographs (the ones of Sherlock from his youth caught her attention and, though with a light feeling of guilt and embarrassment, she took a photo of him as a toddler and one of him as a seventeen year old and placed them between the pages of the book about Beekeeping that she’d take home with herself), and eventually all that was left were about 40 letters in their envelopes.
Most of them were addressed to Sherlock and she put those aside for Mycroft, not wanting to invade Sherlock’s privacy in that way. Also she found some for John, and put them on an extra pile but then she stumbled across something that caught her attention and made her blink confused. On a simple, brown, A4 format envelope it said, in Sherlock’s typical handwriting:
MOLLY H.