Title: Sad

Author: Still Waters

Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.

Summary: Perhaps this was why Molly worked with the dead: she didn't have to see the sadness in their eyes. (TRF scene/character study)

Written: 11/26/14

Notes: I've had the vague idea of doing something with Molly's "you look sad, when you think he can't see you" scene from The Reichenbach Fall for awhile. This piece came out of nowhere on a gray, winter day off, written in one sitting and with minimal editing. Dialogue quoted from the episode does not belong to me. As always, I hope I did the characters justice. Thank you for reading and for your continued support. I cherish every response.

When Molly's dad's congestive heart failure began to worsen and his hospital admissions became more frequent, he made little I.O.U. coupons for her, for things they'd do when he was home and feeling better.

I.O.U. one of my grandmother's famous chocolate raspberry cakes as a late birthday gift

I.O.U. help with finishing that cat playhouse for the RSPCA fundraiser

I.O.U. a trip with you and your mum to that history museum exhibit

With each discharge, he would return home with more medications, higher dosages, more supplemental oxygen. But it wouldn't be long before the swelling would increase again, his lower legs puffy even through the compression stockings, his eyes squinting through periorbital edema, his breathing labored around a wet cough. The district nurse would try to smile gently around the frown in her eyes as she listened to his lungs, called physicians with updates, and often ending up sending him right back to hospital for more IV diuretics, lab work, and echocardiograms.

And when the nurse would see him back home again after the latest round, knowing the numbers of his recent test results, she would bend down to pack up her things at the end of the visit, and, thinking no one could see, looked sad.

But Molly's dad made sure she kept the I.O.U. coupons, and continued to add more.

They celebrated his birthday on a Thursday at home. He smiled and joked and was lovely.

A week later, he was dead.

Molly still had the coupons.

Years later, dragged into assisting Sherlock Holmes in an over-bright laboratory while he addressed her by another person's name, the enigmatic man stared into a microscope and said three letters that brought Molly back to a warm flat, a pale, swollen smile, and the rumble of an oxygen concentrator: "I.O.U."

Molly glanced over at him and found herself speaking. "What did you mean, I.O.U.? You said I.O.U., you were muttering it while you were working." She tried to quell the hint of desperation, of breathlessness, as her memories latched onto the phrase and propelled her into speech.

"Nothing," Sherlock dismissed without looking at her. "Mental note."

Not nothing. The I.O.U. coupon folded and tucked securely in her purse was not nothing.

"You look a bit like my dad," Molly said with an awkward combination of nonchalance and wistfulness, to a man who was physically the exact opposite of her dad. "He's dead. Oh, sorry," she cringed.

Sherlock tried to stop her, reminded her that he preferred silence, that conversation was "not her area."

She pressed on, some inner need driving her forward through the pain and awkwardness, spoke again despite the intermittent tremor in her voice, the hesitations within the persistent push. "When he was dying, he was always cheerful. He was lovely, except when he thought no one could see. I saw him once. He looked sad."

Sherlock warned her again, her name a deep, exasperated, distracted rumble.

Molly looked right at him, her voice gone steady, unflinching, sure. "You look sad. When you think he can't see you."

And Sherlock looked up from the microscope; didn't know what to make of her, but saw her.

There was no stumbling through her next words, memory lining them up with certainty and a demand to hear each one delivered. "Are you okay? And don't just say you are because I know what that means, looking sad when you think no one can see you."

Molly had seen her dad's eyes as he came back down the hall from the loo that night, just before they cut the cake. Saw him adjust the leg of his trousers around the oxygen tubing, saw the blossoming wet spot on a new pair of compression stockings. He thought everyone was in the kitchen, didn't know that Molly had gone back to the couch to wait for the loo herself. She saw him. And he looked sad.

That's when she knew. She wasn't an idiot, she knew his condition was worsening, that there was only so much modern medicine could do. But when she saw that sadness in his eyes, she not only knew that he was terminal, she knew it would be soon.

Three hours after the guests had all left, an ambulance was taking him back to hospital. His BNP had skyrocketed even further, his ejection fraction was dismal. His legs were weeping fluid in an attempt to relieve the pressure as his lungs struggled under the load of congestion.

He transitioned to hospice care that same day.

Within a week, he was gone, ashes scattered to the unrestricted breaths of sea winds.

And Molly folded one of his handwritten I.O.U. coupons as tightly as she wanted to fold into herself, tucking it into her purse so a part of him would always be with her.

Sherlock prided himself on projecting a certain image, of being the cleverest, the most mysterious in a room. But Molly saw him. And whether he couldn't - or wouldn't – admit that he understood exactly what it was that she saw, he acknowledged it. By looking right at her, with a mixture of bewilderment, unconscious pleading – don't tell John – and that same, familiar sadness.

She helped him, because she offered, she promised. If only she had known about the eyes in the aftermath.

Her dad died in shades of pale white skin, blue tinged fingernails, and clear liquid seeping through his legs and coming from bottles and syringes to ease his discomfort. Sherlock died in an explosive impact of dark clothing and bloody pavement. And while Molly's family's eyes were sad in the end, there was some relief there too, at the end of a loved one's suffering.

For those left in Sherlock's wake, the suffering was only beginning.

Molly saw so much sadness in the following days. Saw Mrs. Hudson's open weeping, Donovan's stoic shock, Anderson's barely contained guilt. Saw Lestrade's raw, bloodshot eyes, the sleepless look of a father who had just lost a son. And John….. John's eyes captured by a photographer near the scene that awful day. John's eyes at the door of the flat on the way to the funeral. John's eyes which tried so hard to be empty, to channel the anger into white-knuckled fists and to feel nothing, which only served to make the sadness that much more devastatingly prominent.

And Molly saw it in her own eyes as well, in the mirror after the funeral, after having to pretend Sherlock was dead while knowing he wasn't. Yet there was nothing pretend about the sadness looking back at her. It was impossible not to be affected by the sad eyes surrounding her, to feel her dad's loss all over again.

Mrs. Hudson had invited her to come to the cemetery once the headstone was placed. Molly made her apologies and busied herself at work instead.

"It's all right, dear. I understand," Mrs. Hudson had soothed over the phone, struggling to keep her voice from cracking.

Molly coughed back a sob and swiped at her blurring eyes. Washing her hands in the morgue sink, she struggled to ignore the reflection in the faucet.

The body on the table was covered but for the face. Sometimes the eyes were open, other times closed. This one's were a deep brown, like her dad's before he was sick.

Molly took a steadying breath and got to work. Perhaps this was why she worked with the dead: she didn't have to see the sadness in their eyes.

The emptiness was easier to bear.