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“Are you nervous?”
A second passes before he realises he’s the only person she could be talking to, blinking and glancing at her once, twice, before his eyes fall back to the road, his brow furrowed.
“As terribly plain as my parents are, I don’t often wish I’d stayed in London when I visit the house. Surely you’re not afraid of meeting them.”
“I was at first,” Molly admits. She looks out her window, the passenger side of the little blue car flanked by interspersed houses and yellowing trees and still-green fields, reminding her that summer will soon be coming to a close. She’s not concerned that she has no idea where they are; they’ve only been driving less than an hour.
“Until?”
“Mary told me about them.”
“Well that’s unfair. I hardly had the opportunity to seek advance warning of your awful mother.”
Molly has to swallow a lump in her throat at the mention of her mother and the horrid things she said behind Sherlock’s back when she introduced them. She hasn’t spoken to the woman for more than a few minutes at a time since that day nearly five months ago.
“I utilised my resources,” she manages. “I thought you’d be impressed at that.”
Sherlock lets out a low chuckle. “You are an exceedingly impressive woman. Brilliant work. Very sexy.”
“Thank you. I mean I know you’re kidding about the last part, but I’ll take the rest.”
“Holmes sweet Holmes!” Molly grins at Sherlock’s groan, eye roll, and subsequent escape from the scene of the wordplay crime as he exits the car and approaches the red stucco cottage. She quickly hops out of her own side, running through the little open gate to catch up with Sherlock and take his arm. “Oh come now, it was funny!”
The door opens before they reach it, a stout woman with grey hair and very familiar eyes waving them in with a large smile and closing the door behind them. Molly hears her mutter something about Sherlock’s thinness before she spots the older woman pulling him down to place a kiss on his cheek. She then turns to Molly, holding her arms out for a hug and kissing her cheek as well.
“Molly,” she greets warmly. “So nice to finally meet you. Sherlock talks about you every time he phones. Which, between us, is a lot more often than he used to.”
“Is that so?” Molly and Sherlock’s mum both raise a brow at Sherlock and share a giggle when he pretends to see something interesting out the door’s small window. “It’s nice to meet you too, Mrs. Holmes.”
“Oh, none of that,” the older woman says, waving the title away as she leads her troupe into the sitting room, taking a spot on the sofa with Molly taking a seat beside her. “Call me Mairead, or something motherish, just not Mrs. Holmes!”
“All right,” Molly says with a laugh.
“She actually prefers My Liege, but she’s too modest to say so.”
Mairead gives a “Hush, you” as Molly turns toward the voice, moving to stand and freezing a moment when she sees the man who can only be Sherlock’s father. Father and son shake hands before Molly steps forward to introduce herself. Seeing the two of them standing side by side, she wonders if Sherlock will look just the same as his father in old age.
He greets her in the same manner as his wife, introducing himself as Gregory. She can’t help her snort and soon after she finds herself sat between mother and father Holmes on the sofa, telling them about Greg Lestrade and Sherlock’s inability to get his name right.
She quickly becomes immersed in conversation with Sherlock’s parents, only noticing his silence after Gregory excuses himself to return to the back garden to finish the work he was doing when she and Sherlock arrived. Molly stands and looks around, spotting Sherlock in the kitchen leaning against a counter flipping through a local newspaper.
“Let him have his time,” Mairead says from behind her. “Never was the best in social settings, but we always made sure he knew he could go outside or up to his room when people came round....”
For a moment Molly considers telling Mairead about her own mother’s opinion of Sherlock. It’d probably be too personal a thing to share when she and Sherlock haven’t spoken a word about it since. Maybe another time, then.
She goes back to the sofa with a frown that quickly dissolves when Mairead asks her about her work, feeling no apprehension about explaining what she does for a living. In fact, the more she says, the more Mairead presses her to continue, and the more pleased she appears. Her cheeks turn bright red when Mairead expresses how lovely she thinks it is that Sherlock has taken up with someone as intuitively scientific as himself.
It’s almost enough to make her teary. Tom and his family hadn’t been subtle about being put off by her work, but here she is giving Sherlock’s mother the details of an autopsy and she doesn’t seem bothered in the least. Maybe the woman was used to seeing scientific carnage in her backyard, maybe she liked to be able to show enthusiasm for her sons… Either way, Molly can’t remember the last time she felt so appreciated for being in her line of work outside of work. So she carries on, asking Mairead about her own career and feeling more than a little surprise when the kind and sharp-witted woman declares that she used to be very involved in mathematics.
“It took its toll more quickly than I would have liked, having to work with such dull people even though I enjoyed the work,” Mairead sighs, sounding ever like her progeny. “I decided the chore of motherhood might suit me better, and I think it has. I don’t expect anyone else to consider such a thing, though. It was a personal choice.”
Molly tries to imagine a life where she or Sherlock would give up their careers to care for a child and comes up empty. Sure she might take leave, he might take fewer cases, but in the long run neither of them would retain their sanity giving up their work completely.
Clearly this woman is a superhero, she decides.
In any other circumstance he would be able to filter, to ignore her voice and enjoy a moment of relative silence in a different room. But in any other circumstance he wouldn't be at his parents' house introducing them to the woman who recently traded in the term girlfriend for fiancée, and he wouldn't be opening every door and cupboard in the kitchen in search of something to make his coffee a little more Irish.
While the intimidation Sherlock feels in his mother's presence is normally next to zero, the knowledge that she and Molly are talking about him in the next room is becoming more frightening by the minute. He wasn't surprised to note that both of his parents immediately took to Molly, but he couldn't just sit around listening to his mother telling her everything she would neither need nor want to know about him.
He would chastise himself for not bringing her round sooner to get it over with, but for the fact that his parents have always hated sitting at home for any length of time and can often be found on a different continent every few weeks. Of course he couldn’t introduce her. They were never home.
A peek through the doorway tells him they've got the photo albums out. Oh God. Maybe he should just go out to the garden and bury his head in the soil with his father to witness his last moments in the world.
“I’ll never be done telling you how glad I am that Sherlock has found his person,” Mairead coos again, holding Molly's hand as if this wasn’t the first time they’d met. Molly shares a smile with Sherlock's mum before looking down at her ring, a little sparkling rose in a nest of gold, so perfect she’s surprised he didn’t make the thing himself. For his person.
I already asked if you would consider becoming my wife. What I ask of you here and now is to have this ring and the knowledge that I love you with my entire being, and that this feeling has done nothing but grow since the moment I discovered it. I deserve none of all you have given me and I claim nothing but that I am yours. With your acceptance I hope to say that you are mine as well.
“It's been a long time since I've seen him this happy.”
“He's hiding in the kitchen,” Molly murmurs with a raised brow.
“More time for us, then. Let him look for the whisky we don't have. Now, where were we?” She picks up the photo album once more and flips a few pages, searching for the next instance of Sherlock. When she next spots him she lets out a small “Aha!” and grins.
“Oh, Paris! I've never been. It looks beautiful.”
“It's absolutely lovely, dear, you should try to visit sometime! We spent a fortnight there the summer before Sherlock graduated.”
Molly sits entranced, soaking up the images of the city, from the styled Métro passages to the bright blue sky behind an enormous white basilica to a handful of photos of Sherlock playing his violin and shaking hands with a street performer to一 “Who's this?”
Mairead leans in to look at the photograph under Molly's finger of two young men sat on a wall of some high-up rooftop, the Eiffel Tower sticking up against the blue and white sky in the background. She recognises a shorter-haired Sherlock, nearly doubled over in laughter while the person beside him points at something off to their right, his own face lit up at some joke they'd shared moments before. She's fascinated by this other man, his tan skin, the bags under his eyes, but still grinning madly and sitting closer than Sherlock generally allows.
“Oh, what is his name?” Mairead mutters, tapping on the photo. She calls to Sherlock, who visibly flinches when she turns the photo album on him and frowns when he identifies the other man simply as Vic.
“Who was he?” Molly asks, patting the sofa beside her and urging him to sit. “Old friend?”
“What an understatement!” his mother says. “Victor Trevor, how could I forget? The two of them were nearly inseparable and he was such a sweetheart, it only made sense to invite him on holiday with us.” She looks over at Sherlock and Molly follows her gaze, seeing nothing but misery on Sherlock's face. “Oh, I've struck a nerve.”
“It's fine,” Sherlock mutters, not lifting his eyes from his hands.
Molly turns back to Mairead with an apologetic smile. “Could we have a moment?”
“Of course, dear,” his mother replies, placing the photo album open on the coffee table. “I'll go see how your father’s doing out in the garden.”
Molly waits until she hears the door close to turn back to Sherlock. “Tell me about him.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
He knows she’ll wait for him, and wait she does. It only takes a minute of him picking nonexistent dust off the sofa cushions to find a place to start.
“Started off as a client,” he mumbles. “Well, no, he started off as a stranger whose dog liked to bite my feet. But he asked me to look into something for him. He kept hives on the roof of his building and he was concerned that someone had poisoned his bees.”
“Oh, is that where that interest comes from?” Molly teases, nudging him and managing to pull a small smile.
“Maybe. I admit I probably did more research than was necessary. But he was the only person who didn’t hate me, who talked to me and liked me, and… I liked him.
“Anyway, it turned out no one had it out for him or his bees and it was the smoke from a previously unoccupied building upwind that was choking his colony. I suggested a new location for his hives.”
“On your roof?” He nods. “When was this?”
“Second year. We… were together.”
“You can go into detail,” she reminds him. “You’re not going to put me off by talking about being with a boy. I’ve had girlfriends, remember?”
“It wasn’t like you, though. You are physically attracted to both, I’m not.”
“It comes after, I know. You loved him first.”
He’s still for a moment before nodding again. “I did. And I’d experimented before, trying things on because everybody else was, but there was nothing there with any of them. No satisfaction with release. And then Victor Trevor happened and everything was different, as if I’d suddenly figured out what I liked and I wasn’t just some freak who didn’t like anything. And before you say it, I know there’s nothing right or wrong about asexuality, now. I enjoyed that talk. Asexuals aren’t broken, grey and demisexuals aren’t picky, bisexuals aren’t greedy, et cetera, et cetera.”
“You’re getting agitated, Sherlock.”
“Of course I’m getting agitated, you’re about to ask me what happened next,” Sherlock says sharply. “Which is that we finished school, I couldn’t make enough people listen to me, and in between those rare times when I actually had work coming to me I had mountains of lists of what I was using to keep my brain running. Victor got sick of it, moved the bees out before leaving without a word, and the morning after that I woke up in a hospital with Mycroft there to tell me of the dangers of sentiment before seeing me out and shutting me away, alone, to fix me.”
He visibly shrinks into himself at the words, hands balling into fists and eyes glaring dead ahead. Molly can’t help but feel guilty, like she’s abused the trust he’s put in her to yank out his secrets. She can’t make him look at her, so she takes one hand in both of hers and waits for his tension to ease, her thumb rubbing circles on his knuckles. She scoots closer and rests her head on his shoulder, unable to smile even when she feels him lean into her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Not your fault.” His hand opens slowly and his fingers intertwine with hers, pressing against the ring on her left hand with a comfortable weight.
“Are you happy to be where you are now?”
“Immensely.”
“Even though you were looting your parents’ kitchen for whisky?”
“They don’t even have any.” Sherlock turns to her then, looking down at their hands just as she looks up at him. “They adore you, you know.”
“I might steal them,” Molly says with a smile. She doesn’t mention how much better this visit has gone compared to when she introduced Sherlock to her own mother. He knows, and she knows he doesn’t need to be reminded of that.
“I think you might,” Sherlock murmurs, turning her left hand over so her ring faces up. “After all, you did agree to be my person.”
“I love that you call it that. It’s so informal and cute. No wife or husband or life partner, just you and your person.”
“I am not cute.”
“You are cute.” She pinches his cheek lightly and is rewarded by his ears turning pink as a smile flickers on his lips. “You’re my cute consulting detective who forgets his friend’s name because he can only have one Gregory in his life and it’s his dad.”
“Don’t tell Lestrade.”
“I won’t.”
“You texted him already.”
“I did.”
“I’ll never hear the end of it.” Sherlock stands with a sigh, holding onto Molly’s hand and pulling her up with him. “Come on, they’re probably being mauled by dog-sized marrows and it is my duty as son to provide aid.”
“I’ve certainly made a wonderful choice of person.”
Sherlock pauses mid-step and turns back to her, wide eyes blinking slowly like he’s trying to figure out just why she said what she did. It’s a common thing even now, and even though it’s a little bit sad Molly finds it completely endearing.
“You think so?” he says quietly.
“I know so,” she confirms with a squeeze of his hand. “You’re my person, Sherlock Holmes.”
“And you are mine, Molly Hooper.”
He brings her hand to his lips, placing a soft kiss on her knuckles with a crinkle-eyed smile that makes her all the more certain that she is precisely where she should be. They stay where they are for a moment longer before they move out to the garden, her small hand very comfortably wrapped in the warmth of his.