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[theonewhocounted]

The Bright Spot Meme


(Was there every a more suitable meme for dear Molly?)

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[punchmeitssubtext]

What's the expression? Achievement unlocked? Sherlock's every bit as proud of himself for this as he was when he got her bra unhooked in one go. Thoughtful, he's learned, is a compliment that tells him the way his heart and brain connect on problem-solving is actually working.

And then she kisses him, and that's even better than a compliment. He leans into it, relaxed despite the baby still on his lap, smiling against Molly's lips.

It's actually probably a good thing that Rosie's there to chatter and push at him before he gets too lost in re-learning the taste and feel of Molly's mouth against his own.

"Mm--" He pulls back, adjusting Rosie so she's tucked into the crook of his arm, no longer "standing". "--you're welcome. Thought you'd appreciate that more than the beer John asked me to smuggle back across the border."

[theonewhocounted]

"You thought correct," Molly says as she smiles at him and then down at Rosie. She would also be happy to get lost in Sherlock's kisses for a while, but they've got responsibilities at the moment. "Although I might have to steal a sip of said beer to see what I'm missing."

She carefully re-folds the shawl and gets up to go put it with her things so there's no chance of baby drool getting on it.

"It's almost time to put her down again. Do you want to give it a go?"

[punchmeitssubtext]

"Oh! Yes, I actually figured out a trick to it." He grins at her. "She really likes Shakespeare. Puts her out like a light. John gets a bit weird about it when I do the tragedies, but there's plenty of other good solid iambic pentameter to knock her out."

Carefully he gets to his feet, shifting Rosie to his shoulder as he does. "Come on, infant, time to plug you into your crib to recharge."

[theonewhocounted]

"That's funny, Shakespeare sometimes does the same to me," she jokes with her own grin but can't help but be endeared by Sherlock's naptime hack.

Molly stands to and slides her hand over Rosie's head before she presses a quick kiss to it.

"Good night, Rosie Posie. Go to sleep well for Uncle Sherlock."

[punchmeitssubtext]

Rosie sticks her fingers in her mouth, smiling a little around them, already calming.

"Be right back. This usually doesn't take very long."

He pitches his voice low, almost a rumble, deep and soothing as he runs through an old favourite, one he can call up easily from memory.

"This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.' "

(He's always liked that whole brothers-in-arms thing more than he's willing to admit.)

Before he can get as far as "for he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother", Rosie's out cold, lulled by the purr of his voice. He sets her down carefully in her crib, and then moves as quietly as he can out of the room, almost drifting back towards Molly.

"Down for the count," he says, rather proudly.

[theonewhocounted]

Molly can hear him through the baby monitor that she's just turned back on and she feels a bit like a creeper, eavesdropping on this moment between Sherlock and his god-daughter. It doesn't mean she turns it off. She too is lulled and soothed by the sound of his beautiful voice. She can't really blame Rosie for it.

She looks over her shoulder at him when he returns to the room, looking triumphant and proud.

"Very impressive," she says with a smile. She's pulled out a basket of laundry and is folding tiny onesies and matching bitty little socks and putting them into a neat pile on the coffee table. There are also about 100 bibs and burp cloths to be folded. Babies make a lot of laundry is what she's learning from her time with Rosie.

[punchmeitssubtext]

"Thank you." He grins, puffing up a bit, and sinks down next to her again. By now his tea is the perfect temperature, so he starts in on it, watching her hands as she works.

It's a very appealing picture. For just a moment Sherlock can't help but wonder whether they have enough time before John gets back to head into his room again, so he can taste her the way he'd wanted to earlier.

Which is, he reminds himself, a very nice thought but not a good idea necessarily.

"My brother and I used to quote Shakespeare backwards at one another on car trips," he says cheerfully, deliberately reaching for an un-sexy subject. Mycroft being the un-sexiest he can think of. "Drove our parents crazy."

[theonewhocounted]

Molly's had similar thoughts of her own, which is why she's found something to do with herself that does not include snogging Sherlock on the couch. Laundry, she figures, is pretty un-sexy.

Sherlock's right. So is Mycroft.

"Of course you did," she says with a slight laugh and in her mind's eye those two little boys in the back of the car are in impeccably tailored, posh little suits even though she knows that's probably taking it a bit far. "My mum and I used to play I Spy on car rides."

Which pretty much exactly sums up the differences in their childhoods and their intelligence levels.

[punchmeitssubtext]

"Would you do 'something that begins with this letter' or 'something this color', or what?" He leans back, trying to picture her as a little girl. Would she have worn her hair in plaits, or loose? Dresses or jeans?

(Much later he'll find himself wondering, Would we have been friends when we were that young? There's no way he could know, but for some reason he likes imagining it.)

[theonewhocounted]

"When I was really little it would be colour," she said. "I guess probably because I learned those first.

"Then when I got older we would do letters and a little bit of both. Whatever we felt like. I also had a backseat bingo set where you would try to find the different signs along the road and try to get five in a row."

The answer to all of those things he wonders about her as a child would be 'yes.' Although she always wore jeans more than dresses, especially when she got older. As for them being friends as children, she thinks maybe they would have. She was always a bit of an outsider, never really fit in with the other girls. Her best friend until she was in middle school was a boy actually.

[punchmeitssubtext]

"We had one of those too. Made up our own rules for it after a while. They got really baroque if we were in a mood with each other." He pauses, then adds, "Come to think of it, that's sort of how we lost our Nintendo privileges. We got in a fistfight over a Tetris challenge and Mum made the power cord to the console disappear. Never did figure out where she hid it, actually."

[theonewhocounted]

Molly is surprised they had Nintendo. It smashes all her preconceived notions of him and Mycroft just reading large book and creating science experiments and making all the lego men do their bidding (that one's mostly Mycroft).

"Honestly, I'm having a little trouble picturing you and Mycroft playing video games," she says.

[punchmeitssubtext]

(Maybe some day he'll tell her about the month he spent making a pirate ship out of an arcade cabinet he found in a skip in town. Granted, it was taken over all too quickly by a pregnant fox while the family spent a week in France, but he finds he wants to see her reaction to that part of the story too.)

"It didn't last long. Less than a year before Mum drew the line at Tetris fistfights." He grins and downs more of his tea. "I suppose, though, our parents thought it'd keep us from getting murderously bored when we couldn't tear about in the yard or the woods."

He takes another moment to study her, to imagine and appreciate all the things he can't possibly know.

"Were you an outdoor girl? Climbing trees when you weren't supposed to? Or more the type who wandered off at the museum to look at the bones the other kids didn't think were interesting?" he half-teases.

[theonewhocounted]

"I always kind of prefered Dr. Mario," she said, thinking about her own Nintendo years. "The colourful capsules and the germs you were trying to eradicate. And I guess wanting to be a doctor, it appealed to me on that level too."

She's still folding burp cloths as she thinks back on the hours she spent in the den on their little telly trying to line up coloured pills on a screen, racing her friend Tim in two-player mode.

"I was an outdoor girl until I got to an age where my mum decided it wasn't lady-like to be out playing in mud with the boys," she said with a shrug. "She was always a bit old-fashioned that way. But my dad used to take me fishing and showed me how to prepare the fish we caught. Those were the first bodies I ever sliced and diced."

If he were her other friends, she would realize how flip she sounds and apologize about joking about dead bodies, but she knows it won't bother Sherlock for her to talk about them that way.

"I was the museum girl too, though. When I got older. Didn't make me very popular, as you can imagine."

[punchmeitssubtext]

Not only does it not bother Sherlock, he loves that she can talk about corpses as casually as he does. Part of the appeal. And he tucks away that bit about Dr. Mario, because he remembers that game too and because there's something about it that suits her so well it charms him all over again.

He looks at her with faintly narrowed eyes over the lip of his mug, trying to picture her as 'the museum girl'. (And, yes, he can't help but remember being eight and getting in a world of trouble for breaking into an exhibit at the British Museum for a closer look--although now, he finds himself thinking about how that incident would have gone if he'd been able to share the adventure instead of taking it as proudly and stubbornly alone as he's done for several decades.)

The thought that she didn't have a lot of friends, though--that's new. He's always sort of thought of Molly as one of those people to whom connection comes vastly more easily than to someone like him, and it's odd to realize that hasn't been a constant in her life. That she may have been, at some point, almost as lonely a child as he was.

"Popular's overrated," he says, the least awkward way he can think of to say I understand, and now we're here together, which is better. "I'd probably have made you show me how you'd butcher a coelacanth."

[theonewhocounted]

"Popular is definitely overrated," she says with a smile. "I think back on it and I know me and my little group of misfit friends were having loads more fun geeking out over science and making our own radio shows than the popular kids who were just trying to keep up with each other all the time. How stressful it must be, all that fitting in."

She smiles at him, assuming he was also an outsider like her. Although she imagines that while she was someone who nobody paid much attention to so she wasn't bullied so much, Sherlock would have been the kid to drawn more attention to himself and might have been more of a target. She imagines it's not all Eurus' fault for why he locked his emotions away.

"A coelacanth? Is that a type of fish? I don't think we had those in Portsmouth."

[punchmeitssubtext]

One of the things he's always envied, hated, and loved about his brother is how well Mycroft can make himself fit in with other people. Not that Mycroft is friendly, but, well, Sherlock's had less and less inclination to pour his energy into social graces every time someone's called him a freak, and that's happened a lot more to him than it has to his brother. (At least, that he knows of.) And he's always so infuriatingly calm about it.

And yet Molly Hooper--Molly, who's emphatically not a freak, who has a heart that's not essentially a hot mess with a pulse and a highly competent brain--finds negotiating social bullshit just as exhausting as he does.

For a second that weird falling feeling hits Sherlock again.

Her question, though, pushes it safely to the back of his mind to be processed later, and he huffs out a laugh.

"They're living fossil fish. Thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in 1938. Not sure if there are any specimens on display in Portsmouth, though, or would have been when you were younger."

[theonewhocounted]

Molly was called a freak once by a boyfriend when she made the mistake of answering him honestly about how her day had been during her pathology rotation in med school. She'd been feeling so pleased about how much she was enjoying the rotation and he was entirely appalled by how excited she seemed about doing post-mortems for a living. That relationship didn't last long after that and Molly stopped talking about her work with boyfriends.

"Oh, interesting," she says sincerely about the fish. "I think if there had been one in Portsmouth, I would remember it."

The last burp cloth is folded and added to the pile before she puts all the folded piles back into the laundry basket so they can be put away.

"If you don't mind, I might start getting ready for the ballet so I'm not holding us up when John returns."

It'll take her arguably longer to get prepared than him. She wants to do her hair up and put on some more makeup than usual.

[punchmeitssubtext]

(She'd probably better not tell Sherlock about that. He will find out who the man was and go out of his way to humiliate him in public, because that's almost as satisfying as dropping someone out of a window three or five times. If he's learned any useful social attitude from his mother, it's that you don't call an intelligent woman a freak, or at least you shouldn't if you want to keep your front teeth.)

"Right. Any preferences for dinner, or shall we improvise?"

[theonewhocounted]

"I don't know, something like tapas maybe?" she suggests. "Where we can split some small plates. I hate going to the theatre after I've eaten too much."

Molly checks the baby monitor and sees Rosie is still dead asleep. It's likely she'll still be napping when John returns.

[punchmeitssubtext]

"Narrows it down considerably." He smiles and fidgets his phone out of his pocket again, pulling up a list of potential options between here and the ballet. "Go get ready, then, I'll change when you're done."

He pauses, and then looks up at her, frowning slightly.

"It's not horrible manners to bring an overnight bag, is it?"

[theonewhocounted]

She smiles.

"It might be if I wasn't already planning for you to come over after," she says. "Which I am. If that wasn't clear."

She leans down to give him a quick, reassuring kiss before speaking into his ear.

"And just so you know, before we took the edge off earlier, I was very much ready to forgo dinner and the ballet altogether just to get you back there quicker."

She stands up again and gives him a bit of a mischievous smile before she picks up the laundry and heads down the hall to put it away and then get ready.

[punchmeitssubtext]

Well. As much as he'd like to show her off to the dancers and anyone else who might recognize him, any plans he might have been developing to do exactly that evaporate when she murmurs in his ear. And it takes a real effort to keep that edge from surging back in full force--largely imagining his brother in his Lady Bracknell getup, to counter the thoughts of how Molly might look at him once they get back to the door of her flat.

He stares after her for a second before getting up to drag his suitcase into his room and grab something smaller. Something that has just enough room for a change of clothes, his toothbrush, his phone charger, and the variety pack of condoms he picked up on his way back from the train station.

This is, he decides, going to be an amazing night despite the fact that the chance of running into an interesting murder on the spot is vanishingly slim.

[theonewhocounted]

Molly puts away the baby things quietly in the nursery and takes a moment to watch Rosie sleeping before she goes and grabs her dress which is hanging in the nursery closet and her other small bag. She then goes into the bathroom to get ready.

About 25 minutes later she steps out of the bathroom wearing a dress she'd managed to find time to buy while he was gone, along with sheer black stockings and a pair of black pumps. It's a more subdued style than some of the things she owns but it still has colour and sparkle while still being elegant. Or at least, she hopes. Because Sherlock always looks like he's stepped out of a bloody Armani ad and usually she doesn't care how she looks in comparison, but now that they're essentially a couple, she doesn't want to look too outlandish next to him.

Honestly, she knows he thinks a lot of her wardrobe is a wreck and she's never going to be terribly fashionable or sophisticated, nor does she think she should have to be to please a man, but she does want to please him. And if that means trying a little harder not to look like she lives at a second-hand shop, then she's okay with that.

Her heels click down the hall as she heads to the sitting room to see what Sherlock is up to.

[punchmeitssubtext]

He's taken the time to put away the remains of their tea and change (and several moments of running through a meditation exercise to make absolutely sure he doesn't follow her down the hall and interrupt her), finding a dark purple shirt he knows always makes her stare a little longer at him and a fresh suit. It's a dramatic look, he knows, in contrast to his pale complexion, but he does feel like showing off.

When she comes in, he's got his back to her, fidgeting with his phone again--sending reminders to various contacts that he is 100% Not Available for the next 36 hours.

"Right. So tickets are confirmed, there's this place called Barrafina that's a bit of a walk from the Opera House but if we cab it straight there we can--"

And the rest of the sentence just sort of falls apart like a house of cards when he sees her.

Well. That's a fairly different style on her, and she looks more comfortable in it than she did in that Christmas dress, which improves it tremendously. And while he will always be at least a little fonder of her ugly jumpers than he likes to admit, when she really cleans up, she looks pretty damn good.

"...uh," he manages. "I. Did. You say something?"