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Sleep was absent. He’d expected that.
He paced the length of the floor at the foot of her bed. The sheets were turned down, by her and for him, but he wouldn’t sleep in it, not just yet.
He should text Mycroft, but he won’t.
She was in the spare, which was more like a catch-all room, which happened to have a former roommate’s futon. And that was where she was sleeping.
Everything was dark.
Her living room was small—cramped with television, computer-desk, bookshelves, and a small ghastly sofa, more like a loveseat. Nothing a body could stretch out across.
His foremost thought turned back to Bart’s roof: the look on John’s face. The absolute overwhelming proof that sentiment existed in the world and that, despite everything, Sherlock was trapped in its sticky web despite all his protestations to the opposite.
But the ties were less a burden then they were a physical pain.
And he’d make it up to John. Somehow.
The other image burned on his retina was Moriarty’s pulling of the trigger and splattering his brains everywhere. And really, the physical hand that had pulled the trigger meant nothing. And Moriarty would have known that Sherlock would have considered himself responsible for every single detail.
What a spectacular failure!
No justice, no solution. All out of his control.
Anger was easy to feel, leaving him cold and dispassionate. Anger at Moriarty. Anger, more so, at himself.
And there was nothing for it.
Move forward. Any other direction accomplished nothing.
He would find a solution and what better way than to dismantle everything Moriarty himself had thought to accomplish.
Mycroft would arrange the travel details and Sherlock knew he’d find Adler in Malta.
For now, he was forced to wait.
And he didn’t want to be somewhere easy to locate. Didn’t want Mycroft near him.
Mycroft would never blink an eye in the direction of Molly Hooper’s flat.
One of Sherlock’s only accomplishments in this entire debacle was keeping Moriarty and Mycroft in the dark about Molly Hooper’s extended role. Mycroft knew of her involvement to some degree with the faking of Sherlock’s death, of course: she’d had to ID the body as one of Bart’s pathologists, after all—both ‘his’ and Moriarty’s—but he knew Mycroft would overlook the other details. All Mycroft would see when he looked at Molly Hooper, Sherlock knew, was a little mouse who just wanted to help because of her blindsided affections—poor pitiful Dr. Hooper, Mycroft must think, how does Sherlock put up with her? He was just as dismissive of Molly as Moriarty had ever been.
Which made Sherlock clench his jaw for some unfathomable blood-pumping, fist-clenching moment—he should be pleased, one-upping them all, but there seemed to be a kind of cost attached to the win, the cost of proving Molly right—before he rolled his eyes.
He retreated to his mind palace, still pacing, thinking of his weeks ahead.
He stopped pacing eventually, or must have, as he found himself stretched across the top of her duvet.
He lay diagonal on the bed and on his back, his hands pressed together and steepled against his mouth.
Something had disrupted his mental processes as he considered his dismantling of Moriarty’s web.
Then he heard it again, like a little cry, muffled and indistinct, but the clear sound of distress.
Sherlock was off the bed in an instant, wondering if someone had infiltrated the flat, if he hadn’t been careful enough, if Moriarty’s men were closer—and understood more—than he’d ever expected, until he peered into Molly’s box room through the half-open door.
She was twisted in the sheets, her face screwed up in displeasure. Tears, in fact, were on her face and dampening the pillow. One of her hands was shaped as though grasping—grasping nothing. She made an inarticulate sound, trapped in her nightmare.
Sherlock swallowed, but forced himself to enter the room and then he lowered himself to sit on the edge of the hard futon. He twisted his upper body in her direction.
He wrapped his long fingers around the wrist below her clenched fist with one hand—he didn’t know whether it was to soothe or restrain her, lest she lash-out at him upon waking, though he was holding it with only a light pressure. He then used his other hand to try and pull away and relax the tight, twisted sheets.
She was crying now, much more than vocalizing, though her lips seemed to move without sound.
“Molly,” he said and her name came out a bit sharper then he thought he’d intended.
He was tense.
And that tenseness was alarming in the way it seemed connected to something like concern.
But he should be concerned, shouldn’t he? He didn’t want to be, but for her sake, he could act it, even though that meant feeling it, and….
A sob broke through his stream of thoughts and his brow creased as he looked down at her face full of its emotion.
“Molly,” that was better, that sounded right: soft, calling, beckoning back, “Molly, wake up.”
And then her eyelids were fluttering open, new tears tracing a path across her skin. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Her eyes were unseeing for a moment before his gaze caught hers and she blinked up at him in what seemed like slow motion.
She opened her mouth to articulate something but she closed it again and her lips trembled.
“Nightmare,” he said, never feeling so obvious and clumsy as he did in that moment.
His hand still encircled her small, delicate wrist, her pulse still rapid, and he pretended not to notice any of that.
For her sake. She needs something. Contact.
But her fist was unclenched now and she was moving her fingers.
“I … oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Sherlock.”
She had closed her eyes, but then she looked up at him again and added, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said.
She was still tense, though he wasn’t sure if it was because of a lingering sense of the dream or because of his proximity. He should move away, but he found that he couldn’t. Instead, he used his other hand to finish untangling the sheets.
“You don’t have to,” she said in a soft, pleading kind of voice, “I’m alright. I’ll take care of that.”
She was sweaty from the dream and its toll on her body—anxiety response. He could see the perspiration on her neck and around her hairline, the sweet pungent smell.
“Tell me about the dream,” he said.
In theory, asking such a question seemed like the right remedy for someone like Molly: he’d be the receptacle for her unburdening of anxiety through the act of telling. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her explain. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be the recipient of disclosed emotions. Molly was a fountain of sentimental feeling, but he couldn’t offer real sharing because he had no space: not a receptacle, but an event horizon, annihilating every feeling at the egress of his mind.
But a strange compulsion lingered. The compulsion to ask—no, to tell—Molly to respond, knowing she would, knowing that, on some level, he could ask her to do anything. Anything. She didn’t want to talk about the dream, either, he surmised as she angled her head away. Which made his receiving of her response all the more paramount—to negate her easy dismissal—and, at the same time, despicably undesirable—he shouldn’t care either way.
This was all going so very wrong.
But before he could lift himself away, words had begun to tumble out of her.
“I was trying to stop you from jumping because everything wasn’t complete, the set-up, and … you … but you kept going, you didn’t want to hear me or couldn’t, I don’t know, and John was there, and it was real and happening, and it was all my fault. And then you both … you both,” a new wave of tears pulled out of her and she sucked in a breath trying to stop them, “died. You and he … oh,” she shuddered and for the briefest of moments Sherlock was back up on the roof and he couldn’t just feel his own strange fear at losing control of everything: he felt Molly’s horror, too, even John’s by way of reimagining the other man’s expressions, the three of them coalescing into that single event. She continued, “and he was holding me back, Jim was, and he wasn’t dead at all, because he had me the whole time,” the tears were in earnest, free and loose, “I’m sorry I ever brought him down there,” she brought her free hand up to her forehead and then used it to cover her face, “I’m sorry I introduced him to you. I feel so sick that I even brought him back here—to my flat. And I just … it was all just…” she couldn’t say whatever it was she wanted—needed—to say.
“Just what?” he whispered, looking down at her. He reached up with his free hand to the wrist of her other hand, bringing it away from her face.
She looked up at him, now exposed, and shook her head, her lips tight.
“Tell me, Molly.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed.
“To make you jealous,” she whispered, softening her voice which he assumed was a method of trying to lessen the impact she thought her words might have. Then she did the oddest thing and gave a very tight and unconvincing laugh as though all of it had been based on some kind of bad joke.
“It wasn’t your fault, Molly. He used you to get to me—he’s known about me for a while and…” Sherlock could still remember Moriarty’s words about Carl Power and none of it still sat right in his mind, it was all still off and he couldn’t position the events and their meanings back into their proper places.
“Obsessed fan, then. That’s a bit worse,” she made the same little emotionless laugh after a moment, “like me.”
Sherlock rolled his eyes at her.
“Please, Molly, that’s a most ridiculous comparison.”
He released her, then, and as he stood away he pretended to ignore the ever so slight way he imagined he had let his fingers press and linger on the vein along her wrist before his hands had lifted.
“He used you, Molly, and … I am sorry about that.”
She pulled the covers up a bit higher.
“Well, it’s not your fault either, Sherlock.” She swallowed—he watched the movement of her throat—then she added, “We were pretty easy, though, weren’t we? I mean, it wasn’t very hard for him to play either of us off one another…” Her laugh was stronger this time and a bit more genuine sounding. His lips twitched in response. Molly added, “I mean, he got a leg over and,” he lifted an incredulous eyebrow, “… oh shit,” she said, laughing with an uncomfortable but genuine mirth, “not like that though.”
“No? He didn’t get his leg over … you know…” and his gaze drifted lower.
It was so easy to tease and discombobulate Molly Hooper and he couldn’t help but enjoy watching her squirm—in a sadistic pleasure he’d never admit to having.
“Sherlock! No! And not after just three dates!”
He shrugged as though it was none of his concern whether romantic meet-ups, zero or five-hundred, were necessary before a couple’s copulation.
“They’re just urges, Molly. Sex doesn’t mean anything. It’s all separate. And who knows, maybe he’d have been a thrilling lay….” The words came out with a bit too much sarcasm—a bit too much self-deprecation. And then the thought of Moriarty near Molly in any kind of sexual capacity sickened him.
“Jesus, Sherlock,” Molly was back covering her face with her hand. “Probably less than thrilling seeing as he was, oh, you know, a genuine psychopath. Probably incapable,” she muttered.
“Sociopath, Molly, and you should know.”
She threw her hand to her side, which made a strong thump on the futon, and stared up at him. Then she said, “Technically, something more like psychopathy as in Antisocial Personality Disorder,” Molly ground her teeth, “But we’re not having this conversation!”
She’d all but forgotten the nightmare. Good.
He’d elicited so much indignation that she was sitting up now and glaring hard at him.
“You stop that,” she added, “I won’t have you saying such ridiculous things about yourself!”
He shook his head. “On some level, your strange devotion to believe in me as anything other than a monster would be touching, Molly, especially after seeing what I’ve done to John in all of this, but I don’t do—”
“Uh huh,” her sarcastic tone indicated she wasn’t at all agreeing, the sound cutting off his ‘don’t do touching’ before he could voice the end of it.
She threw her covers aside and stood from the futon, punctuating the force of her interruption, facing away from him, angry. “Fine, Sherlock, whatever you say.”
He stared at her tense back, annoyed at her implied dismissal, as she sorted out the blankets with jerky forced movements. He left the room without saying another word.