theonewhocounted | (no subject)

Her laugh echoes down the hallway before she disappears into the bathroom.

The shower she takes is quick. She doesn't want to be away from him for long. It's so silly and not something she'd necessarily say to him, but it's how she feels right now. She wraps herself back in her robe before she pads back to the bedroom to dress. It's when she spots his dress shirt from the night before, flung over her chair that she remembers her thought when she first saw him in it. She smiles and goes to retrieve it.

When she returns to find what he's up to in the kitchen, she is wearing his purple shirt, a fresh pair of knickers and her slippers. The shirt feels and smells divine. He'll be lucky to get it back ever.

"I smell coffee," she practically purrs. Speaking of, she sees Toby eating from his bowl happily and she smiles. Well done, Sherlock.

It's hardly the dress-and-heels combination that knocked him speechless the night before, but Sherlock finds himself mesmerized for a moment by the sight of Molly in his shirt. Yes, Janine liked wearing his shirts too, but that was always just sort of inconvenient. On Molly it's legitimately sexy.

Though, again, maybe that's just the importance of context asserting itself.

Either way, he likes the look.

"I see you kept the skeleton mug," he says, a bit cheekily. "And now I'd better shower, because I did tell you I wanted to have intercourse after breakfast and that will never get done if you and I share the room for more than another two and a half minutes at the most."

Molly goes about the kitchen like she's not wearing his shirt and he's not staring so openly at her.

"Well, someone was supposed to return it," she points out as she takes said mug full of coffee from him. She can hardly blame him from being distracted from the task though. "And I can't exactly waltz in there with it with no good explanation of why I even have it since I can't exactly say that you broke in to make me a latte and forgot to put it back."

Plus, she does love the mug and it's a very nice little reminder of how this all started.

She smiles as he implies that her getup is serving its purpose well.

"Go shower. As soon as you smell crepes cooking your priorities might change."

"Possibly."

As she turns away from him he kisses her temple, just a quick press of lips against her damp hair. He may never quite get used to the fact that he wants to touch her more than he's ever wanted physical contact with any other single person--and that having her physically close, while it may be distracting, is pleasant. It doesn't feel invasive, the way it usually does. (John's seen him flinch from a stranger touching him without warning, a handful of times.) And there's always some familiar sensory input nearby, calming him, helping soften the sometimes-overwhelming rush of stimulus that can come at him while he's trying to find a focus on something.

Yeah, he's definitely nicking a pillowcase. Or maybe this sheet.

He takes a quick detour before the shower, though, to hang up his Belstaff and her own coat--both utterly forgotten the night before--and grab his overnight bag from the hallway.

Again the shower feels like the best part of a very mellow high. A bit like one of the better strains of cannabis he'd tried in university, really: his skin is warm and tingling, details feel vivid without being too sharp or coming at him too quickly, and an easy smile tilts his mouth. There's none of the sluggishness or confusion of weed, though, even if he is ravenously hungry.

(He is momentarily a bit distracted by the detachable shower head, now that he knows what Molly does with it besides washing her hair, but... actually there might still be time to redo his bathroom at 221B so it's got more space for sex. He'll save that thought for later.)

Once he's toweled off and dressed he practically swaggers back into the kitchen, barefoot and still a bit rumpled but looking as if he's about to explain to everyone exactly how he knows the murder weapon they're looking for is a toffee hammer.

The flat is rapidly filling with the delicious scent of cooking crepes. His mouth waters, and for a second it's hard to tell whether that's over Molly in his shirt or the smell of what's shaping up to be a good breakfast.

Edited 2017-03-06 23:11 (UTC)

The quick kiss Sherlock gives her before retreating to the bathroom means maybe more than any of their more heated and pointed kisses they've shared since Saturday. The fact that it's so unnecessary is what strikes her. He just kissed her for really no reason at all except that he must have felt like it. It's a very intimate gesture in its way. It speaks of a certain comfort level and that makes Molly very pleased.

So pleased that she doesn't stop humming to herself the whole time she's preparing the batter for crepes and frying up the sausage to go with them. By the time Sherlock re-enters the kitchen, she has a stack staying warm on a plate in the oven while she finishes up the last batch. She's also put out various crepe adornments on the table - butter, cinnamon and sugar, a jar of nutella, bananas, strawberries she had in the freezer, cream cheese and marmite.

She looks over to see him enter looking clean and shiny, hair wet and tousled, slightly rumpled button down uncharacteristically untucked from his trousers. It's unfair how goddam sexy his is all the time and without really trying.

"Good shower?" she asks with a smile before she focuses back on flipping the current crepe before it burns. It looks like he just got knighted during the shower the way he's sauntering in.

"Very satisfying, thanks."

Speaking of, his attention turns to the spread she's laid out. He's been at her flat enough times to deduce that she's a competent cook, but actually seeing her skills in action is very different from something he can figure out secondhand.

Distantly he remembers a question he asked John not long after they'd first met. "Is that what girlfriends do--feed you up?"

Apparently the answer is yes, but if you're ridiculously lucky you get one who's got the keenest eye in the morgue, is some kind of secret sex genius, and will go to the ballet with you. So he'll take the trade-off.

"Nutella and strawberries?" He strides over to the fridge. "If you've got a lime here somewhere you'll never be rid of me. Our grandmother used to do lime juice and sugar on ours. Never did figure out where she got the idea."

Edited 2017-03-07 01:43 (UTC)

"Good," she says as she flips the final crepe onto a small stack. Molly thinks Sherlock could use some extensive "feeding-up" so he'll just have to deal with it.

She bends to pull the larger stack of crepes out of the oven and combines them all together before bringing the plate over to the table.

"Oh! I did mean to put out a lemon to go with the cinnamon and sugar," she says. "I didn't think of limes but there should be one in there."

(Molly enjoys a gin and tonic after work every now and again.)

"I've never had lime juice on a crepe before."

She returns to the stove and puts the sausage on a plate and brings that over as well before she refills both their coffee mugs and surveys everything before she decides she can take a seat.

"Try it, then. Not, you know, by itself, but with the sugar it's excellent--aha, there it is." He snags the lime off one of the shelves, then strolls over to find a knife to cut it into slices and sit beside her. "I remember she made them at Christmas. Granny Helen lived through the worst of rationing during the war, and it made her a bit mad for fruit once it was available again."

Giving in to the whole being-fed concept, for now, he snags two crepes. One he loads with the nutella and strawberries, the other gets sugar and a slice of lime squeezed over it. And then he grabs some sausage too, because an increased protein intake seems like a good idea in light of all the recent and imminent sex.

"Well done, by the way. That was, what, less than twenty minutes from start to finish?"

"I will," she says with a smile and finds she likes listening to him talk about his grandmother. She realizes she doesn't know much about his family. She knows his mum and dad come to visit some and of course there's Mycroft and this new sister, but she doesn't really know anything about them. Although, it's probably a bit early to ask him to start talking about his family, given last week's debacle.

Molly takes two crepes for herself and gives one the sugar and lime treatment, the other gets nutella and banana. She'll save the sausage for if she's still hungry or just needs some salty to balance out all the sweet.

"Thanks. I've had some practice. Crepes were one of Tom's favourites..."

It's out of her mouth before she can stop herself and she just freezes. Tom hasn't been a topic of conversation in quite some time and not that it's a topic they should necessarily avoid forever (he had been a big part of her life there for a couple years), but it's terrible etiquette to be talking about her ex at the breakfast table.

He's actually thinking along the same lines--that he knows and can deduce a certain amount about her father, and at least a few certain basic facts about other family relationships, but he'd like to know more--and then she drops Tom's name casually, and he goes still in the middle of licking nutella off his fork.

The memory of that day he'd spent solving crimes with her is still a bittersweet one. He'd been first debating and then planning it for a few weeks before he'd gotten back from exile, imagining it with only slightly less enthusiasm than he envisioned meeting up with John again. Except then he'd seen the ring, and known that this had to be a friendly goodbye instead of... anything else.

Sherlock isn't sure if he'll ever be comfortable enough with this huge and complex tangle of emotions to tell her that he considers last night their second date.

Or that he'd thought at John's wedding that maybe he'd stay afterwards and ask Molly to dance, once he'd seen her stab Tom with that fork.

"Ah," he says, awkwardly.

"Sorry," she says when he looks uncomfortable at the mention of Tom's name. She blushes a bit in embarrassment. "I mean...sort of. I guess. Sorry that I brought him up right now. But...he was my...boyfriend for...a while, so he's probably going to come up. Occasionally."

It's just a fact that she was engaged to the man. She can't change that, just like she can't change having dated Jim or the other blokes she'd dated before that. They were all part of her history and who she is. Sherlock is her present and (she hopes) her future.

It's really mostly weird because he's met the man face to face, has at least some idea of what he must be like (at least from what Sherlock could deduce at the time and what he's reasonably sure Molly will and won't put up with), and because Tom is the only person he's ever been jealous of in this specific way. He's not sure how to deal with that, and he's not sure how to articulate any of it because he's never learned to negotiate being in love with someone.

Sherlock's brain is, for once, fairly useless in this situation. So, as hesitantly as that first time on Saturday morning, he allows his untested heart to do what it wants.

He leans over and kisses one of her red cheeks.

"The awkward leading the awkward, I suppose," he manages quietly, which sounds far more lame once he's said it aloud than it did in the half-second it took for it to bubble up through him, but which he hopes she understands.

The kiss to her cheek is an utter surprise. She brings up her ex and he's kissing her for it. Will he ever stop surprising her?

She huffs out a small laugh at his all too true statement.

"It really is," she agrees and catches his hand with hers, giving it a squeeze to show she does understand and to thank him for understanding too.

"Tom will always be my ex-fiance, but what I felt for him...it wasn't this."

She's not sure what makes her want to reassure him. It's probably unnecessary because she's here with him and Tom is...wherever Tom is. She doesn't really care actually. But she just wants Sherlock to know.

He can't keep the relief off his face when she takes his hand. It's startling and comforting, every time, when Molly intuits something he can't put into words himself. This is another thing, he thinks, that he's never understood about love until now--it's a colossal risk, but if you're lucky it comes with its own safety net.

And not only is the odd tightness in his chest eased by the contact and her quiet words, but the intellectual part of him lights up again with admiration. In a way, Molly's been deducing him this whole time, using the cues he gives as a way to figure out the best path forward and letting him read that she's sincere about it.

"I know," he says. (Some brief electrical connection between his heart and his brain files away part of what she says and turns it into a promise: Tom will always be her ex.)

"And--to be fair, the practice did pay off."

Molly can see that relief in him, can feel the way his body relaxes again and it hits her then that it's her, it's her touch that does that to him. It's really quite an extraordinary power, she thinks. To her it's a natural thing, to reach out and offer comfort, but she knows it's not something that Sherlock has always been willing to receive. It's just another one of those little changes that are really great big ones.

She huffs out a laugh at his statement.

"Well, if you ever bump into him, you can thank him," she jokes and then realizes that Sherlock would in fact probably do that. "But don't really do that."

Talk about awkward. And she doesn't need to hurt Tom anymore than she already had.

Then why--oh. Oh, she's joking. His face warms with a smile, more out of pure fondness for her and her brand of social clumsiness than out of actual amusement.

"Wasn't planning on it," he says, leaning against her a bit. And though he still feels just the slightest bit startled by what's just happened--an unexpected emotional hiccup catching him off-guard--she's still keeping him steady. Even when they both stumble, he's no longer quite so afraid that a stumble will turn into a headlong pitch downhill.

And, as a sort of gesture of goodwill--the kind of thing only a few people can ever coax out of Sherlock--he picks up his fork again with the hand not holding Molly's, and forks himself up another bite of the nutella-and-strawberries crepe he was partway through.

Molly smiles back in return, immediately feeling better.

"Well, one never knows what will come out your mouth," she teases. "Not that I plan on running into him.

But she did meet him through friends so their social circles do overlap a bit. It's not out of the realm of possibility down the line.

Molly is pleased to see him start eating again. Always a good sign that someone is alright - food intake. She goes back to her own breakfast when her cell phone chirps with a text message. Looking around, she realizes she has no idea where it is. It's only when it goes off a second time that she spots her clutch on the floor of the living room.

"Excuse me," she says as she lets go of his hand and goes to check the phone. What she sees first is a message from Mina that has a lot of exclamation points and question marks and not many words.

SHERLOCK HOLMES?!?!?!?!?!?!

Molly is confused at how Mina could have found out already. She hasn't told anyone and Mina doesn't know John and she certainly doesn't know Mycroft.

Then she sees the text message and photo from her co-worker that came in in the middle of the night and she groans.

"Bollocks."

Having a bite of the more familiar crepe calms him further in her absence--and he finds himself hoping she'll like it, when she gets back from retrieving her phone.

Except then she actually locates the forgotten clutch, and he hears that quiet, dismayed exclamation. Sherlock frowns and leans back in his seat, craning his neck to see if he can catch a glimpse of her expression.

"Bollocks to what? Someone call out at the morgue?"

Abruptly he realizes his own phone is still on silent--he never turned Do Not Disturb mode off after the performance began. He stuffs a bite of the lime-and-sugar crepe in his mouth before pushing to his feet so he can grab his mobile from his coat pocket.

"Someone took a photo of us last night," she says with a sigh as she makes her way back to the kitchen, still looking at the screenshot of the photo on Tatler that Sophie sent her. They do look like a handsome couple, she must admit. Not that it makes her feel much better about having her picture there. She resolves not to visit the site itself because the comment section is bound to depress her.

Sherlock passes her and she wonders where he's going until she realizes he probably wants to check his phone too.

"It's already on the gossip sites. Or well, at least one. Your favourite."

(There's a single comment on the page that Sherlock won't find until much later, and that's only because it catches John's eye and he takes a screenshot of it:

Fair play, Mr Holmes. She's a stunner, and she definitely likes you more than I do.)

He blinks at her for a second before grabbing his phone out of his pocket. The first text alert he's got is from John--Didn't I say something like "don't let me see you on the news" last night? Pretty sure I did.--and the second draws a dismayed little noise from him.

To: Sherlock
From: Mummy

Call me straight away and tell me everything about her!!!

"Bollocks," he echoes. Funnily enough, while being able to show her off was one of the highlights of the evening (at least the part of the evening that happened in public), he realizes he hadn't considered there might be uncomfortable repercussions for him and for Molly.

Edited 2017-03-09 01:06 (UTC)

"Mm," she agrees as she sits back in her chair. Another round of text messages from Mina comes in.

To: Molly
From: Mina

10:01AM Don't tell me it was just for a case. You looked way too cozy.

10:05AM You're with him right now aren't you? OMG you are!

10:05 AM I'm so happy for you Molls! Call me as soon as you can!

Molly lets out a sigh and silences her phone.

"Who've you got?" she asks him. Luckily, Molly's mum lives far enough from London and doesn't enjoy the gossip rags so she'll have some time before she needs to make that phone call. She's not really looking forward to it. They have a strained relationship and her mother always manages to say something discouraging about everything.

"My mother." He decides he's not even going to bother with his email or the rest of his texts right now and just... slips the phone back into his coat pocket. For once he's lost all desire to have it close by to fidget with. He follows her back into the kitchen to attack his plate of crepes again. "She's harmless, just... excited. Though I'd rather have told her myself."

It could be worse, though, he thinks. If there's a photo of them on the internet from the premiere, it's most likely of nothing more intimate than the two of them holding hands. So really, even if his brother disapproves and John is exasperated, he can honestly point out that he hasn't got anything to be embarrassed of. And Molly did look bloody fantastic last night.

"Oh," she says and is suddenly struck by the fear that maybe he wouldn't want his mum and dad to know about her at all. She's not posh or a genius. She comes from a lower middle class family. Her job is...not really something to talk about in polite company. She's not very polished in her manner of dress or how she presents herself. She didn't go to public school or to uni at a place like Oxford.

These worries fly through her head as she watches him sit next to her and continue eating like he's not worried. She takes a sip of her coffee and tries to swallow down her fears with it.

"Were you going to tell her? I mean, eventually."

Her voice is quiet but questioning and she pokes at her crepes to do something other than look at him. She can't help but ask. Molly's always been a little bit insecure but Sherlock has always heightened those feelings because he's so...everything.

Edited 2017-03-09 01:45 (UTC)

He glances over at her, and for the first time he sees that insecurity not just as a factual conclusion of his deductions but as something that's negatively affecting someone he cares for.

And he finds he really wants to make an effort. Sherlock sincerely wants her to know, and to believe, that he doesn't want to hurt her any further than he already has.

"John and I are estimating that the cleanup at Baker Street will take another two to three months. I thought that would be a good timetable to--get used to things, before I introduced you to my parents." A pause for breath, and then--because he's Sherlock, and there's always that one more thing that falls out of him before he can stop it-- "Dad used to be a barrister. Mum's the genius, though. Quit teaching maths when she got married, but she's kept publishing, and she taught me everything I know about practical geometry."

It's not until he starts talking about months that she looks up at him. He's actually been thinking this out. Although, he's Sherlock, what doesn't he think out? But he's been thinking out their relationship and not just in terms of ballet dates, but in terms of months spent getting comfortable with each other and this and his parents.

"Guess we sort of mucked up that plan last night," she says with a tiny smile that's a bit apologetic. For her, being seen in the company of Sherlock Holmes ups her social status by a huge margin. She doesn't do much for his, she's afraid. Not that she thinks he cares anyway. But she does feel bad that his mum found out that way and not from Sherlock in his own time.

"I look forward to meet them...whenever that is."

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Ha! I love Drunk History! I didn't know there was a UK version.

It's glorious. XD Anthony Head is Lord Nelson in one of the eps, it's GREAT

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