Lexie very generously gave me permission to color her beautiful Molly & Sherlock sketch! It’s been awhile since I’ve colored someone else’s lineart so I hope you guys like it. I went with more realistic colors and a comic-book kind of style this time. You can view Lexie’s original drawing here.
Challenge: write a fic about this scene! Whether platonic or romantic!
POST REICHENBACH
It’s late, Molly knows that, she doesn’t even have to check her watch to know what time exactly as she scans her ID badge at the employee exit of St. Bart’s. She pulls on a jumper before pushing through the great white double doors, and hears, through the thick metal barriers, the angry and gunfire-like rain outside.
Immediately she groans, rummaging through her purse. She hasn’t got an umbrella and neither does she any money for a cab; she’d lent her last 30 quid to a friend and the drivers weren’t the most considerate to people who have to “stop by an ATM first,” apparently cab driver-vernacular for “make a run for it” after stopping the cab.
She massages her temples with index and middle fingers, adjusts her ponytail, puts on a brave face, and pushes through the exit door and is instantly met with an ice-cold stream of rain strands (they are too long to simply be rain drops anymore, she thinks). She crosses herself, keeping her purse in front of her, hugging it close to her as she begins to walk down the road. She’s got to go down this road to get to the tube station, but even then it’s a little more than half a mile down and it would be more likely that she’d turn into an ice pop before reaching the station alive and well.
She thinks she hears someone faintly calling out for her but she can’t tell with all the rain falling around her. “Molly!” she thought someone said. She looked back and no one was there; at least from what she could see. She kept walking, kept her head down as the rain sliced through her clothes soaked her to the bone. The rain fell around her, on her, through her; the splashing sound of drops hitting the ground becoming a sort of metronome, keeping her steps in time. A steady beat of sorts.
There was that voice again, calling for her, but it could’ve just as easily been a cab’s garbled muffler or people fighting far behind her. But when she could hear more steps than she was making, and her name alternating with the exclamation, “Duck!” she wondered what silly person could possibly be named “Molly Duck,” and laughed as much as she could without letting water into her mouth.
It was when she noticed a red light, a laser point, aimed at her left breast, that she realised Molly Duck wasn’t a name, it was a command, and she turned and ducked.
A bullet (or at least she assumed it was a bullet) whizzed by her ear, the sound of gunpowder igniting following soon after, and a flash of long limbs and black fabric made its way past her crouched-down body.
She turns back around at the sound of fists on flesh and bodies hitting the pavement, a disarmed skinny man on the receiving end of her black-clad hero’s punches and neck chops. In a few seconds her hero had downed her attacker, then he picked up the man’s gun, armed the safety and tucked it into the back of his pants. He turned and Molly could scarcely control her frantic, quivering body; even less so what spilled out of her mouth––
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she said. She’d not meant to say it aloud, or to say it at all; but the fact was there and Sherlock was alive. “I declared you dead at the hospital.”
A small smile cracks at the edge of his lips and immediately recedes back into nothing, and he says, “It was a trick.” People don’t get excited about being able to fake their deaths; then again Sherlock was definitely not one of them.
“Does John know?” she asks in a whisper, but instead of an answer he gathers her close and pulls his raincoat up, holding it over her head.
“Not now,” he says, and he hails a cab with his free hand.
She reaches for his face, moves to touch him –– and she recoils slightly when her fingers feel him, feel his cheek and his jaw and her hand settles on his chest and Sherlock is alive is all she can think; she should be terrified and screaming for answers and calling for help because this is a dead man walking. Instead she feels relief (she can hear him sigh, and thinks he must be pretty relieved too).
“You should get in now,” he says as the cab pulls to a stop beside them.
“Will you come with me?” she asks.
“Not yet,” he says. “You need to get out of here,” and he leans in to press a kiss to her cheek, before he opens the cab door and decidedly tells the driver to take her to 221B Baker Street.
“But what about you –– and John, oh god John –– does he know?” but again he evades.
“Molly, that doesn’t matter right now. You matter right now. I need you to be safe. Do what I tell you.” He doesn’t say please but he implies it, his tone is sincere and his eyes are looking straight into her soul.
“I’ll go,” she says, awkwardly manoeuvring with him to get to the cab. Before she gets in she presses her lips to his cheek, and tells him, “Please don’t disappear again.”
Strangely enough the only thing going through her mind as she is driven away from the scene is that she still doesn’t have any money to pay the cabbie with.
