Strays

I just called to say...

Perhaps it was his weakened physical state, but Sherlock Holmes had been surprised when he watched Molly dart out of the hospital entrance she used each day to meet... a young prostitute.

He'd known the minute she'd collided with him in the entrance of the morgue that she was in a rush to meet someone. If she'd been wearing some shade of lipstick or taken extra care with her hairstyle, thrown on a dress and some heels, he would have known it was a man she was rushing to meet. Someone she was meeting for a lunch date or some absurd mating ritual.

Her appearance didn't meet the criteria, however, so his curiosity was piqued. Sherlock decided to watch and see what she was about since, honestly, he had nothing else to deduce at the moment. He had been curious also about why she was planning to leave the hospital so soon after her arrival. Her coat tossed haphazardly across her desktop and not hung on its normal peg in her office had given that away.

Now here she was, cup and food container in hand as she hurried across the street to the girl who slumped on the sidewalk on the other side. Typical Molly. So caught up in her efforts to help, she didn't once look for traffic as she went, completely disregarding her own safety. It was really a shame the pathologist was so mired in sentiment. She was of above average intellect and with a little more focus on that and a little less on her endless, fruitless quest for domesticity, who knows where her career might have gone.

Not that Sherlock was personally complaining. Her life choices had brought her to work in St. Bart's and the pathologist was of great use to him in his cases, his experiments. Of course, there was her attraction to him and he'd had to maintain his boundaries with her, deflect her subtle attempts to engage him in small talk. He'd had to make sure she understood that their relationship was strictly a professional one. It was more efficient that way.

Yet, as he watched her hand the food and drink containers to the girl, talking to her quietly, he realized that it had been some time since she'd tried to have a conversation with him or tried to flirt with him in small ways as she had before.

Sherlock supposed he should be grateful for that. When he'd returned from dealing with Moriarty's network, he wasn't entirely surprised to learn that she'd found someone. That she had agreed to marry the mystery man had taken him off guard. Molly's taste in men was horrid. That they were willing seemed to be the only requirement she had really and it concerned him. The fact that she'd gone out with a disguised Jim Moriarty three times with no sense of foreboding whatsoever was testament to that fact.

John Watson had been much the same way, dating any woman who would go out with him. He too had found someone to love and had ended up engaged while Sherlock was away. John, however, had somehow lucked into finding someone who cared about him immensely and married her. Granted, Mary had concealed the truth about her past from John and the lot of them and had shot Sherlock in her effort to maintain her relationship with John and secure their future together for their forthcoming offspring. While Sherlock was still recovering from that bit of handiwork, he understood why Mary had done it. And truth be told, it wasn't a terrible thing that John had a wife with her assassin skill set watching his back.

Molly's engagement hadn't ended happily as John's had. Sherlock had expected as much. When he'd finally met her fiancé, he'd assumed the man's superficial similarities to himself were the reason she'd selected him for a potential mate. While the man seemed kind and well-mannered, he was of average intellect – maybe – and a poor choice for someone like Molly. He wasn't surprised when her engagement ended. Molly's cross behavior with him immediately afterwards wasn't entirely unexpected either.

Now, however, everything seemed fine. Molly no longer seemed angry with him. She was no longer trying to win his affections in a futile effort to draw him into a romantic relationship with her.