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The lab in the basement at St Bart's is quiet, except for the small scraping sounds as Sherlock prepares the next slide, the ticking clock above the door, the breathing of the person who watches him from the other side of the room, perched on a stool. Sherlock is only aware of one of those sounds.
Scrape, scrape.
Red blood dotted on paper, red blood painted on cotton, red blood thickened with pollen. There is no need to adjust the focus on the microscope; he has been staring at slides for hours in silent contemplation.
"What do you see?" asks Molly, breaking the silence.
Sherlock doesn't answer, but Molly doesn't expect a reply. He marks something on a paper, frowns, and switches slides.
"You looked at the cut on the side of Mr Robinson’s hand, and you knew everything that had happened to him. The murder weapon down to the make and model,” says Molly. “It's never just a cut to you. It's a story. What do you see, when you look at them? Do you see someone fumbling with a knife? Do you see them putting on the plaster afterwards?"
"Molly," says Sherlock, wearily, and Molly shakes her head.
"Sorry. I know you want quiet. I'm just - I'm trying to understand."
"Why?"
Molly doesn't answer. She hops down from the stool and turns her back to him, busies herself with zipping and unzipping the body bag on the table. "Asphyxiation by flowers."
"The next will be covered in wood shavings, at this rate."
Molly sucks in her breath. "There will be another?"
"If you persist in your questions and don't leave me in peace, yes," says Sherlock irritably, and Molly turns her back to him again and clutches at the table.
"I don't know why I don't hate you," she says, under her breath, and Sherlock glances from the microscope.
"There's a cut," he says finally. "It was caused by a knife. It's not about what I see or don't see."
Molly lets out a breath. "It's never the person, is it? You don't see people. You just see what they tell you."
"I see people."
"No, you don't," says Molly. "Does it make it easier? Not seeing people. Just seeing where they're cut?"
The door to the lab bangs open, and Molly jumps at the sudden intrusion.
“Body in the skip at the back,” Donovan shouts breathlessly, before dashing back out again, and Molly is off. Faster than Sherlock, light on her feet, headlong into the dark rainy night, without even stopping for her coat. By the time Sherlock catches up, all he can see of Molly is her white lab coat, hung on the side of the skip in a futile effort to keep it clean.
Molly appears for a moment, standing in the skip. Her eyes are strangely bright, and Sherlock can see the tension in her jaw. “Blunt force trauma, with post-mortem rhabdomyolsis,” she says, eyes only for Sherlock, who slides to a stop, waving his arms to keep from falling on the slick pavement. Molly, in the skip, catches him off-balance. “It’s exactly as you said. Splinters under the fingernails!”
She disappears into the skip again. Sherlock has to fight the smile, and goes to join her.
When Molly comes out of the skip, drenched in rain and chilled to the bone, the sirens and sounds of a police operation are in full swing. Sherlock sees her shiver, her arms wrapped around herself. She could return to the lab now, but her eyes watch the skip, the removal of its body, and her unwillingness to leave is evident in the way she leans toward it, almost as if she wishes she hadn’t left the safety of its walls.
Sherlock steps next to her, and waits, hands in the cavernous pockets of his coat. His breath fogs in the half-light of the rainy night. She breathes in, and lets go of her breath in a long sigh.
“Wedding anniversaries,” she whispers into the rain, which answers in a sudden downpour, drenching them both. “Paper, cotton, leather, flowers, wood. It’s all wedding anniversaries.”
“Yes,” says Sherlock.
“Sweets next. Or iron,” says Molly, but Sherlock knows this already.
Molly shivers in the rain again.
He might love her, in this moment, water coursing down her face like tears. She ran toward death, she tasted the questions it left on her tongue. She would jump back into the skip if she could.
He sees her, or thinks he does, and she reminds him so much of himself that he opens his coat and wraps her inside, a cold sprite damp with rain. She turns to him, into his warmth. It’s instinct; he feels her cold skin through layers of clothing, and is oddly comforted.
She says nothing, looks up at him, words in her eyes that will never be said. Her body is cold beneath the thin blouse, her fingers are chilled.
And then she steps away, out of the circle of wool, and smiles a nearly confident smile, which only wavers at the start.
“I forgot,” she says, her voice wavering through her half-confession, half-accusation. “When I saw the splinters, I forgot that he had a name worth remembering.”
She turns and walks away, back through the mist and the yellow tape, to her lab. When he sees her next, she will be Molly Hooper again, dried and warm, and no longer the damp and death-touched sprite huddled in the warmth of his coat.
In the same moment she is gone from view, the moment in which he might have loved her is lost.