He can't disappear into the good places in his mind palace very often throughout the next two years. That way lies nothing but distraction and hope. Out here, in the real world outside of London, there's no such thing as hope.

One by one, he crosses names off the list. A year passes with little fanfare.

He returns to London when Mycroft calls him. "Sherlock, you have to come back for one day." He pauses for a moment while Sherlock stands at the payphone, waiting for his next words.

"What is it, Mycroft?" he bites out. "I'm only three people below Moran, as you well know. When I find him—"

"When you find Moran, you know as well as I do that more links in the chain of command will be revealed. That will mean you'll be stuck in the chase for months more, without respite. Molly needs you now."

Sherlock stares into nothingness for a moment, the man waiting outside the payphone shifting back and forth on his toes. He's waiting for a call from his girlfriend, either she's pregnant or about to break up with him, he's not sure which, but the chances of breaking up are more likely since this guy lost his job two weeks ago and only told her last night, but at the same time they've been together for three years and they've dealt with this kind of thing before—Molly. Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly.

"Where is the extraction point?"

He arrives in London four hours later, Mycroft's helicopter leaving him about three miles from Molly's flat. Mycroft had refused to say what was wrong with her, only that she needed him. He opens the window of the fire escape that enters into her bedroom, listening carefully to make sure she's alone before dropping soundlessly to the floor.

He hears her crying. It's not a normal sort of crying, either; it's a desperate sort of wailing that you only emit when your heart is well and truly broken. Against his better judgement, he steps to the living room with far more speed than he should.

She's curled up on the couch with a fuzzy blanket tucked around all but her face. Sherlock feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. She's been like that for two days, the text from Mycroft reads. He glances around the room quickly: two security cameras in the living room alone.

Your men were sloppy with the cameras, he replies.

At her insistence, Mycroft says. She wanted to know where they were herself. I assume you've seen the other one?

He puts his phone back in his pocket, glancing up at the overhead light, where one of Mycroft's lackeys is probably watching, unbeknownst to Molly. He hates Mycroft's line of thinking, but it'll be useful if something truly terrible happens. He realizes that the crying has stopped. A tear-soaked Molly is staring at him, her eyes glowing even through the tears. "You came back," she murmured.

"Mycroft said you needed me." He can't think of what else to say. He doesn't even know what's wrong, not really. She's crying. That's about all he knows.

Molly sniffs, tries to smile. "Mycroft's been lovely, you know. He checks on me every week. At the beginning, right when you left, he was weirdly attentive. I thought he figured I was pregnant or something, and he was making sure he wasn't going to have to take care of a mini-you too. He eased off a bit when it was clear I wasn't."

He takes a step closer. Admittedly, they hadn't been too careful that night, and he had been wondering if something along that ilk had happened and Mycroft was calling him back to deal with a new mother and his offspring, similarly to the man at the payphone. But apparently not, as he had eventually decided. Mycroft would have called him sooner, he's sure. He hopes. "What's wrong then?"

Molly sighs, shaking. "He shouldn't have called you."

"Molly."

"Your work is too important for you to waste time on me."

"Then tell me what's wrong so I can go back to hunting."

Finally Molly starts talking, throwing the blanket aside and standing up. "I missed you, okay? I missed you so badly I couldn't breathe for the pain. I bet you haven't had days like that, when it hurts to be away so much that you figure you're having a heart attack and have to stay home for a few days to figure out how to breathe again? And when I'm having to deal with your best friend going through a similar thing—" She finally takes a breath. "I don't know how to keep going, sometimes. This time was just worse. I don't know why Mycroft thought I couldn't handle it like usual."

Sherlock stares at her for a moment. She—he—what did he do to make this woman care for him? This shining, perfect, beautiful woman. With those thoughts, he can't hold back. In one step he's only a few inches away, his hands cupping her jaw. "Don't ever believe that I don't care for you, Molly Hooper."

And then he kisses her and she gasps, a shuddering exhale of breath. It's white hot, the fire between them, a fire that even the torturous hunting in Eastern Europe couldn't extinguish. But now, as they're ripping at each other's shirts and sinking down to the couch, now they're home.

They're lying on the couch a while later, fingers and legs tangled together. "I can't even bring myself to care that we did that" —a faint blush appears on her cheeks— "with two security cameras watching," Molly mutters.

"Mycroft has some sense left, I think. He probably gave them the evening off," he murmurs back. He's giving himself—both of them—these few hours because he has to go back. He has to finish what he started. But for once, he's going to let them bask. They're silent for another few minutes. "You're right, though," he finally says.

"Right about what?"

"I don't have days like you have, where you miss someone so much you hurt with it."

Molly sighs. "I know—"

"If I did, Molly, it would destroy me. You know how my mind works, something like that, letting myself feel that much—I wouldn't survive it. That's what I am, Molly, I'm cold and heartless because I lock everything up."

When he cranes his head just a little, he can see that Molly's smiling, just slightly. "I met you when you were on a drug trip every other day, sometimes every day. And I figured that was the worst of it, until I did see you at your worst. I've only known a few reasons for that many drugs, and the main one was feeling too much. I don't fault you for it, Sherlock. Just… sometimes it really hurts and I want you home."

He leans down and kisses her quickly, rests his forehead on hers. "There's nothing I want more than to be home, Molly."

Her smile is worth all of it.

He leaves that night, while she's still asleep. He'd warned her he probably would, just to make it easier and to make sure he was leaving under cover of darkness, what little help it would be. But before he steps out of her bedroom window, he takes a moment to stare at her, wondering and wishing.

His last thought before he leaves is that somehow, somewhere, his frosted heart had begun to melt. And much as he wishes it hadn't, he knows the thawing is as permanent as his memory of Molly Hooper.

Mycroft, of course, does have more information for him that he cryptically hands over before sending him back to Germany.

"Why did you bring me back?" Sherlock asks as they stand in the private airfield. His hair is reddish and his fake beard is flourishing.

"The intel, of course, brother mine—"

"No, I could have figured all of this out on my own." He hands the envelope back to Mycroft, the information secure in his mind palace. "Would have taken an extra week or so, but you didn't need to give it to me."

Mycroft just gazes at him for a minute. "You are not worth the tears of Molly Hooper."

"I know." He stares back for another moment before turning to the plane.

He finds Sebastian Moran, the second-in-command, in a little town in Belarus and manages to chain him by the wrists to a ceiling before the man breaks any of his bones. It's then that he relearns the problem of being reasonably large and somewhat invincible—you get cocky. This man hadn't lost his arrogance since he beat up the first kid in primary school.

He's learned the rest of the information he needed to destroy the rest of Moriarty's web in a week and a half of gentle interrogation and he leaves Moran unconscious but alive. He texts Mycroft his coordinates so he can pick Moran up. Both of them had agreed that it wouldn't do for Sherlock to leave a trail of bodies across Europe. The occasional one in self-defense, that couldn't be helped, but even monsters like Moran would have to be incarcerated.

The next year and fifteen days pass without much thought. Sherlock allows himself five minutes every week to think about Molly and John and Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade, but then he nails his coffin of a heart back up. That way lies only weakness, he knows. But he has to keep the spark she lit alive, for her. He's doing it for her, only for her. He'll return to London for them.

On the sixteenth day of the second year of his death, he's captured. He's known the Serbians were on his trail for at least a month, but there had been nothing he could do aside from fake his death again, which he really wasn't up for.

So he lets himself get captured, one of the strangest moves of his life.

He's getting the skin of his back ripped open—at no charge to him, what a complimentary stay—and trying to remember the information he's gleaning in between the bouts of consciousness that interrupt the gentle blackness he's grown to love. They've been depriving him of it for days now, hoping it'll break him.

"You broke in here for a reason," the torturer murmurs in Serbian. He's holding that metal pipe again. And his back had just finished clotting, too. Sherlock sighs. "Just tell us why and you can sleep. Remember sleep?"

Sherlock's tired of all of this, so he tells the man about his past. The soldier in the corner asks, "What? Well? What did he say?"

"He said that I used to work in the navy, where I had an unhappy love affair," the Serb says with disbelief.

"What?" the soldier repeats.

The torturer keeps relaying his words. "…that the electricity isn't working in my bathroom; and that my wife is sleeping with our next door neighbor!"

Sherlock takes another glance at the man's shoes and adds another deduction. Who cares if they aren't really true, anyway. Should get the man gone.

"And? The coffin maker!"

The soldier shifts in his seat with interest. Final piece of the puzzle. The git.

"If I go home now, I'll catch them at it! I knew it! I knew there was something going on!"

The man runs out of the room, leaving his pipe behind him. Sherlock slumps in the chains, too tired to do anything for a few minutes except breathe. No one is going to check on him, anyway, at least not for another few hours when the lack of screams becomes too curious. The man with the cheating wife had been given full jurisdiction over him.

The soldier stands and Sherlock tenses. "So, my friend. Now it's just you and me. You have no idea the trouble it took to find you." His accent is off. He grabs Sherlock's hair and pulls him up, just a little, and he tries not to groan when he smells Mycroft's cologne. "Now listen to me. There's an underground terrorist network active in London and a massive attack is imminent. Sorry, but the holiday is over, brother dear. Back to Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes."

Despite the pain, despite the horrendous cologne in his nose, despite the hell he's been through, Sherlock smiles.

"You have been busy, haven't you?" Mycroft says from behind his file. Sherlock puts his newspaper down, trying not to wince as his beaten and broken deltoids protest the movement. It's the first time in two years and four months he's getting a professional shave, and the minuscule scratches on his face are not appreciating it despite the care the man is taking. "Quite the busy little bee."

"Moriarty's network—took me two years to dismantle it." Mum used to call him a little bee, when he was a child. He groans inwardly. He's going to have to see them soon. Dad's going to be mad. Or—more likely—they're going to smother him with their concern.

"And you're confident you have?" Mycroft asks rhetorically.

"The Serbian side was the last piece of the puzzle."

"Yes. You got yourself in deep there. Quite a scheme."

"Colossal," Sherlock confirms. If he didn't know better he'd almost think Mycroft's words were a compliment.

"Anyway, you're safe now." Sherlock makes a noncommittal hum. Mycroft sits back in his seat, as casual as a man searching for a crumb can be. "A small 'thank you' wouldn't go amiss."

"What for?" he asks.

"For wading in. In case you'd forgotten, fieldwork is not my natural milieu."

He struggles to sit up, holding his hand up so that the barber stops the shave. This new beating is going to make his reunions with Molly and John very complicated, depending on whether they decided to hug or punch him. Going to be worth it, though, to see them again, something he never truly thought possible. "'Wading in'? You sat there and watched me being beaten to a pulp." He also never thought this level of sentimentality was possible, he muses.

"I got you out," Mycroft protests as if that's exactly what happened.

"No, I got me out," Sherlock bites out. "Why didn't you intervene sooner?"

"Well, I couldn't risk giving myself away, could I? It would have ruined everything."

Sherlock tilts his head, staring at his brother. "You were enjoying it."

"Nonsense."

"Definitely. Enjoying it."

Mycroft complains about the inconvenient parts of going undercover and he glares at his brother for another moment. John would have done better at breaking him out. Molly would have done better. Probably the infant on the next block over would have managed better. Then he lets it go.

"I didn't know you spoke Serbian."

"I didn't, but the language has a Slavic root, frequent Turkish and German loan words." Mycroft shrugs, clearly proud of himself. "Took me a couple of hours."

"Hmm—you're slipping." The language had taken him about two hours, three less than Mycroft had taken.

His brother smiles thinly. "Middle age, brother mine. Comes to us all."

Anthea steps into the room with the timeliest interruption he's ever had the pleasure to witness. She's holding his coat and the rest of his suit, and he thinks, all of a sudden, that he's happy.

Mycroft convinces him not to try to see John and his old man mustache quite yet—apparently, he's bound for a beating from that one—and it doesn't take much more convincing and a bizarre plea in Mycroft's eye to tell him to see Molly. It's almost like Mycroft wants him to keep this goldfish, as he would say, in his life.

So he steps into St. Bart's Hospital, the site of his demise, to make his resurrection. It's almost lunchtime, which means that Molly will be at her locker, grabbing the sandwich and crisps she'd thrown in a bag on the way to work. She'll be wearing her lab coat and absentmindedly scrubbing at her hands to get the feeling of latex glove off her fingers. She'll—he doesn't have to imagine anymore.

He stands in the locker room just behind her, and he's about to call her name when she opens the little door and sees his reflection in the mirror she's glued inside. She whirls around and stares at him.

He only takes one step forward before she's flung herself into his arms. He's right about the pain and he thinks his doctor was wrong about his ribs being "only bruised, not broken." Admittedly, he'd only allowed the man a four minute check-up. He doesn't really care.

"When did you get back?" she whispers into his neck. They're sitting on the bench in the locker room, partially because it's more comfortable and partially because she could tell he was about to collapse. Hopefully she won't figure out the level of pain for a while yet, though.

Her hair smells exactly how he remembered it. "About five hours ago," he whispers back. "No one else knows."

"So Mycroft, Anthea, and maybe fifteen others know?" He nods. Close enough. She pulls back and stares at him, disbelief coloring her face. "What about John?"

"Mycroft told me to leave his reunion for later, said I was probably going to get a beating." He takes a breath and prepares for the first bit of complete honesty he's said in a year. "And I wanted to see you first."

Her cheeks burn with a faint pink tinge that he—somehow—falls in love with, and she leans forward, slowly and shyly, and kisses him. Home feels like her, and her embrace is completely worth the pain of his back.

"John is going to beat you up as well as he can," Molly murmurs when they break apart. "Please be careful, Sherlock. I know what you look like when you're in pain, and I'm fairly sure I don't want to know how much morphine you feel like taking."

"I promised my mum I'd stay sober, and morphine is equivalent," he replies, glibly not specifying the amount of pain medication he wants. The answer is a lot. So much. Molly smiles, and he doesn't stop himself from leaning forward and kissing her again.

Molly texts Mike Stamford and claims a family emergency. She takes him back to her flat and makes him lie down on his stomach so she can check his bandages and rewrap his ribs. He'd forgotten how much he missed her caring for him. He shakes his head to knock a few shelves loose in his mind palace when she's in the bathroom washing up. Sentimentality. He's straightening up his scant information on gardening and bees when she walks back in.

"Are you okay?" she asks once she helps him roll back over, panic clear in her voice.

He hums an affirmative, information back in place and wall reconstructed between himself and affection. She must have seen the dissociation in his eyes. He needs to work on getting that out of his expression.

"Why are you back, anyway? Is Moriarty—"

"Yes, the web is dismantled and Mycroft sent MI6 in to get the rest of the Serbian branch."

"So is it back to work with John on detective stuff?" Molly appears to be rearranging her sweater drawer in an effort to not look at him. He's not exactly eager for her to look at him—all he wants to do is pull her down onto the bed with him and sleep for a week, but he has to see John in a few hours and between now and then he wants to surprise Lestrade and perhaps Mrs. Hudson. And he has to get rid of this sentimentality, even though it's holding far closer than he would have dreamed.

"If he agrees, then yes. But Mycroft's making me work on a problem of his, something to do with terrorists." He waves his hand in dismissal. "Should be interesting."

"Have you heard much about John while you've been gone?" she asks, apparently stuck on the John topic.

He sighs loudly. "No, I've heard nothing. I only came back to London the one time, as you'll no doubt remember." He does his best to make his voice unaffected, but she steps to the bed and sits down next to him. Her soft smile is enough to make him lose the unaffected air he really needs to get back. He holds out a hand to her and she curls into his side. He sighs again. Such a beautiful distraction.

"He's been dating a woman, a Mary Morstan. I've only met her once, and I saw far more of her than I'd have liked." Sherlock smirks, the disgust and remembered shame in her voice clear. "John's face was hilarious, though, and it's his fault for forgetting we had lunch that day. Anyway, she's been really good for him."

She's avoiding something, hiding something. "What are you trying to say, Molly?"

"I don't know if John's going to want to get back into the detective world. Of course, he's an adrenaline junkie, and—and he'd love to go out with you again—not like that…" Molly buries her face in her hands for a moment. "But Mary's been pulling him more toward domesticity," she finishes.

"If you were to ask Mrs. Hudson, John and I were in the heights of domesticity." Molly slaps his chest lightly and tries to say something else, but he interrupts by pulling her on top of him, kissing her without reservation. Sleep can wait. Loss of affection can wait.

One Molly Hooper, distracted from the topic of one lovesick John Watson, instead focused on him. Mission very much accomplished.

They're at the second restaurant, he and John and Mary Morstan, who is hiding something. But that's not quite important at the moment. He's rather lost count of the number of times he's seen murder in John's eyes.

"Oh, so it's your brother's plan?" John asks incredulously.

"Oh, he would have needed a confidant," Mary inserts. John looks at her with eyes wide, and it's amazing how quickly they've accomplished the conversation without words. "Sorry."

Mary appears somewhat embarrassed, and Sherlock can't stop his eyes from going back and forth between the couple.

"But he was the only one?" John continues, insisting. "The only one who knew?"

John is going to hate him. "Couple of others," he says reluctantly. "It was a very elaborate plan – it had to be. The next of the thirteen possibilities—"

"Who else?" John whispers. "Who else knew?" Sherlock hesitates for a minute. There's a possibility that he's about to destroy the friendship between the woman he—loves?—and his best friend, and really this isn't his story to tell. "Who?" John demands.

"Molly."

"Molly?" Oh yeah, that may take a bit of fixing.

"John…" Mary whispers.

"Molly Hooper—" the most important one of them all, really, in the end "—and some of my homeless network, and that's all."

"Okay." John sits up straighter, glances at Mary, and there's about to be a test, Sherlock knows it. "Okay. So just your brother, and Molly Hooper, and a hundred tramps."

At least this is something he can redeem himself with. "No! Twenty-five at most." And he must have failed the test, since John tries to beat him up again.

They're kicked out of that restaurant, and then the next one, and then he's watching John Watson ride away from him as the smell of blood permeates his nose. Ironic, considering that it's his own nose causing the pungent smell. This is not what he was expecting tonight. He wasn't really expecting John to come running into his arms—although that would have made Mrs. Hudson happy—but he was expecting some sort of happy surprise, not the violent encounter he received. His phone chirps.

How'd it go? M

How did you know it was over? SH

Intuition. And I figured if I was too early, you wouldn't look at the message yet. M

My nose is still bleeding. The lip stopped bleeding about twenty minutes ago. SH

If he were a different man, he would make several innuendos about that injury. But he's Sherlock Holmes, and she's Molly Hooper, and they don't have to say it. Or, at least, they won't.

Lestrade next? M

Yes. SH

Do you need help with the terrorist problem? I'm taking tomorrow off. M

Mycroft and I are meeting about that tomorrow. Afterwards, would you like to come over? SH

What has gotten into him? Sherlock stares at the text message and wishes he could take it back. Or at least explain better. But the three little dots have already appeared.

Okay :) M

Somehow, the little smiley face in her text is enough to bring a smile back to his face, since the smile that Molly's presence had given him disappeared when John refused to recognize him. He really didn't know how he was going to keep doing this without John, without that tie to the side of the angels and unwavering friendship he'd always taken for granted.

Lestrade's reaction to seeing him alive ten minutes later is enough to make up for at least a little of John's anger.

Mrs. Hudson's piercing screeches—happy, she eventually clarifies—are still ringing in his ears the next morning.