A.N.: I set this story in the three-month silence in Reichenbach after the trial.

Warning: References to injuries; kissing.

Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock.

Both the boys heard the knock at the door at ten to midnight. Both thought it was strange for someone to be calling this late. Neither got up to answer it when they heard Mrs Hudson's door opening.

"Oh, dear… Boys!"

The call was enough for both Sherlock and John to leap up from their seats – sofa and armchair respectively – and burst through the door to the flat. They paused in surprise at the scene that met their eyes.

Mrs Hudson was holding the front door open for someone to come in. Even in the darkness, the two men could see that, whoever it was, was badly injured: they were holding an arm over their abdomen, and as soon as they had crossed the threshold, they leaned against the wall for support.

"Thank you," the figure gasped as Mrs Hudson closed the door behind them. The voice floated up the stairs, a voice belonging to none other than Molly Hooper. Sherlock and John to immediately leapt into action.

As they reached the bottom of the staircase, Molly's injuries became clearer. She was covered in bruises and a few superficial cuts, and was swaying dangerously. John immediately put his arm around her waist to hold her steady while Sherlock – who suddenly realised that his intense lack of medical knowledge meant that he was useless in such a situation – stayed back.

Already the detective's brain was at work: who had done this, why had they done this? The questions swirled around in his head begging to be answered, growing more and more insistent with every second that passed. He barely registered Mrs Hudson talking to him – something about 'being in good hands' – before he was standing alone in the hallway, John and Molly already having gone upstairs.

Sherlock raced after them, practically throwing himself through the door of the flat. In the artificial light of their living room he could see the pathologist's injuries more clearly. She had a black eye, a bruise on her jaw that appeared to be the work of a knuckle duster, the impression of a hand burning red on her cheek and bruises around her neck, and – most worryingly – a growing red stain on her right side.

"Who did this?" he demanded after he had closed the door and taken a step closer to the sofa. Molly was sitting on the edge of the cushions while John knelt before her assessing her injuries.

Molly flinched at the vicious sharpness of his voice; John shot him a reproachful look.

"Sherlock," the doctor sighed, turning back to his patient as Molly's eyes were began to water.

"We need to get to the bottom of this," the detective insisted, not understanding why John was wasting time.

"Not right this minute," John said, pushing himself up and turning to Sherlock. "The injuries are a priority right now. I know this is your flat as well but I don't want to risk hurting her more by moving her again." He pointed in the general direction of Sherlock's room.

Sherlock blinked at him. "You're sending me to my room?" he asked. John added. Sherlock was incredulous; they needed to catch whomever had done this right now, and he – or she, for though Sherlock seriously doubted that it was a woman, the possibility could not be dismissed without further evidence – would be brought to retribution. He glanced over at Molly, who was sniffing pathetically and fidgeting with the hem of her skirt. For some reason the sight made him stop, and with a scoff he stormed to his room.

He lay on the bed for exactly one hour, three minutes and twenty-six seconds, listening for any sounds that might alert him to something useful. He heard many things – gasps of shock and pain from Molly; apologies from John; the sound of various items being retrieved from the first aid box and utilised – but nothing that would help him. At 12:59am he heard John go to his room. Thinking that Molly must be asleep on the sofa, he pushed himself off of the bed and made his way back into the living room.

Molly was indeed lying on the sofa, her eyes closed and looking more peaceful than she had when she had arrived. Her clothes were folded neatly on the armchair, and he noticed that John had given her a pair of his own pyjama bottoms to wear. They were slightly too short on her, only reaching an inch above her ankle, which gave the scene an almost comic effect. She wore no top, but had no need: her entire torso from her waist to her collarbone was encased in bandages wrapped around her lithe form.

The mystery of this event intrigued him, and he paced the living room as quietly as he could, not wishing to wake her, going over the few details he possessed in his mind. His feeble amount of data consisted only of the injuries that she had sustained, and even then he only knew of the injuries that he could see when she had arrived. He was in no doubt that there were others he had been unable to observe in the brief time that he had spent with her.

Mugging was a possibility; she had no bag with her, and possibly was without her mobile so hadn't been able to call an ambulance. Yet unless she had been attacked just around the corner – which was unlikely, for she had no reason to be in this part of London at this time of night – it would have been easier to call for assistance from a phone booth than to trudge to Baker Street in that condition.

That led to questions of whom. Who would have she made such an enemy of that they would be inspired to do this?

"It was Jim."

Sherlock – who by this point was facing the window – turned abruptly on his heel to the woman whom he had believed up to this point had been asleep. She was now watching him intently, though she had not moved.

"I'm sorry?" he asked, taking a step closer to her.

Molly shifted a little, wincing in pain as she did so. "I know what you mean when you tell people to stop thinking. I can hear it from here." She chuckled, but this seemed to jar whatever it was that made those bandages necessary, and it quickly became a pained groan. "You're wondering who did this to me. It was Jim."

"Moriarty?" he asked, turning fully from the window and taking a step closer to her. She nodded. "Did you tell John?"

Molly shook her head. "I was going to tell you in the morning. I didn't think anyone would be… up."

Sherlock considered this new piece of information. Of course, it had always been in the back of his mind, the possibility that this had been Moriarty's handiwork. Even so, it didn't make any sense. Why would he do this? What could he possibly gain?

"Why?" he demanded, his voice snappish and impatient – though quieter than he would normally do so, for he didn't wish to risk incurring the good doctor's wrath by waking him.

"I'm sorry?" Molly asked, looking confused.

Sherlock resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Why? Did he tell you why he was doing this? He's a show-off, he would have wanted me to know."

"Um…" Molly sighed, staring into space as she cast her mind back. "He mentioned… burning hearts?"

"'Burn the heart out of me'," Sherlock scoffed, swishing on his heel and resuming his pacing. Hadn't the criminal gotten over this by now? It was so boring to pursue the same ambition for this long.

"Well, he should know that it would take a lot more than this to burn me," he mumbled. He turned in his pacing and stopped in his tracks when he saw the look on Molly's face: stricken and shocked. He shot her a 'why-are-you-looking-at-me-like-that' face, laced with the usual dose of impatience.

"Hurting me isn't enough to get to you?" she asked, her voice small.

"Of course not," he told her, not understanding why this upset her so. "He merely injured you. Injuries heal. He left you alive, which is where he went wrong."

"Oh," she muttered, and even in this dim light, Sherlock should see that she was blushing. He began pacing again.

"It just doesn't make any sense!" he sighed exasperatedly, tearing up and down the living room as quietly as he could. "Why you?"

He paced for a while, going over the problem in his head, grateful for the pathologist's silence. Five minutes later, he was nowhere nearer a solution.

"He could have chosen anyone closer to me," he muttered. "I may not have found out about this for days."

"What do you mean?" Molly asked, speaking for the first time since he had resumed his pacing.

"You live approximately thirty minutes away from Baker Street, if you're walking, though it probably took you longer to get here in that condition. In most scenarios, it would have made far more sense if you were to have called an ambulance, or gone to the hospital under your own steam, or a drop-in clinic. If you had done any of these things, I would not have found out what he had done for at least a day, maybe even longer. He made a rather rash assumption in thinking that you could contact us so soon."

A thought suddenly struck him, a prospect worrying enough in itself – his mind usually told him all that he needed to know instantaneously, but now it seemed to be withholding information from him; it was most curious. He turned slowly to Molly. "Why did you come here so soon? Why look for medical attention here rather than any NHS facilities nearer to your home?"

A sheepish look crossed her face. "Well…" she shrugged as best she could with her injuries. "If I had gone straight to a hospital, I would have been alone, surrounded by strangers." She looked up at him. "Wouldn't you rather be with friends?"

Sherlock's brow furrowed. He had been injured many times over the years – it was an occupational hazard – and the company he had shared during those times had been varied; he had been injured alone and surrounded by strangers, and he had been injured in the presence of an acquaintance or two. He had never reflected on which was 'better'; such opinions were linked closely with emotions and so he'd probably deleted them.

He shook his head violently, curls falling over his face, and resumed his pacing, ignoring the pathologist's more-than-likely rhetorical question to focus on the main problem at hand: why Molly?

He grew increasingly frustrated with every second which passed while the answer escaped him. His pacing became faster, though he tried to stay quiet, mindful of the sleeping doctor upstairs. As his frustration reached almost unbearable levels, he whipped round to the sofa to rebuke his problem directly, but was silenced when he noticed something that had been invisible in the darkness before his eyes had had the chance to adjust.

"What?" he breathed to himself, lunging forward and kneeling next to Molly's head. Squinting, he tried to make sense of the small, black marking just next to the bruise on her jawbone from the knuckle duster. The low light made it difficult to distinguish and he realised that he needed a better angle to study it properly; he reached out to her chin to tilt her head the other way. Yet before he touched her skin, she flinched away from his hand.

He froze, brow furrowing in confusion. She had flinched. Why? His Mind Palace helpfully supplied the information that the most common reason to do so was to avoid pain. A niggling disappointment accompanied that realisation; did she really think that he would hurt her?

"I just wanted to move your head," he explained softly. "There's a mark on your jaw that I wanted to see."

"Oh…" she mumbled. She appeared to be thinking over what he needed to do, before finally giving him a swift nod.

More slowly this time, he reached forward and gently pressed a finger to her chin, pushing it away from him so he could better see the mark on her jaw. With a clearer view, he leaned in more closely and saw that three letters had been scribbled on her skin next to the knuckle duster blow:

T-G-G.

The three letters triggered a number of various referenced in his head, none that made sense…

Until…

The.

Great.

Game.

The title of their first case in which they had dealt directly with Moriarty. Somehow, this was related.

He leaned in a little closer, looking for more clues – any clues. The letters were scrawled next to the knuckle duster bruise, four distinct ridges making a pattern on her skin…

Four.

The fourth pip.

The Vermeer.

Two deaths caused by a fake painting. Why had they died? Because they knew that the painting had been forged. They knew…

They knew.

Molly knew.

"You know," he mumbled, taking his hand away from her chin.

"Know? Know what?" she asked, her voice shaking slightly.

"You know the truth. You know who the real Jim Moriarty is. That's why he chose to attack you."

A brief silence fell between the two of them. Molly turned her head to meet Sherlock's eyes. Even in the darkness he could see the beginnings of tears in them, and it made him feel…

It made him feel.

There were only a few select people who had ever had that effect on him; John had once joked that those who achieved such a feat should be recognised by an official rewarding body.

"Like a Nobel Prize," he had remarked on his blog. "A Nobel Prize for making Sherlock Holmes human, even if it's only for a moment."

Sherlock was not completely devoid of emotions; there was even a whole room in his Mind Palace devoted to them. The room was quite large, and in the centre was a lake. The lake rippled and changed when he felt various emotions, although it was so rare for him to do so that mostly he simply ignored them and closed the door on the lake.

Yet when John had first moved in – arguably the first winner of the fictional Nobel Prize – Sherlock had found that he needed to understand his emotions. He had designed a piece of equipment for diagnosing his emotions, and kept it stored on the banks of the lake. It was modelled on litmus paper, turning different colours for different emotions. He retrieved one of the – neutrally pink – strips and dipped it in the lake.

As he pulled the paper out, he saw that it had turned a number of different colours; a number of emotions. Red – anger. Green – a desire for revenge. Pink – comfort and safety. Most curiously, though, was the large part of the paper that had turned grey – guilt.

Guilt was not an unfamiliar emotion to him; he had felt a pang of it when he had inadvertently got John as ASBO; he had also felt it when he had fallen prey to Miss Adler's charms and so destroyed the up-to-that-point immaculate plan of his brother's. This was different, however. This time, he was not completely sure why he was feeling guilty. He had not set Moriarty on Molly. He had not done anything to directly provoke him to such violent action; the criminal had been silent since the trial, and had no plans for the detective to foil. What, then, was causing this rather uneasy feeling within him?

"Molly…" he murmured, finding his voice deeper than usual. He didn't know why he had to apologise, but he knew that he did; somehow, this was his fault. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she nodded, a small, awkward smile twitching at the corners of her lips.

The rational part of him screamed at him that this was not his fault. Yet there was another part of him – one that, up to this point, he would have denied ever existing – that seemed determined to believe otherwise. It was this part that was making his Emotion Lake ripple in urgency, with an emotion that he had felt many times before, but never in this context: need.

It was probably the emotion that he was most familiar with: he had needed a case; he had needed a witness or a suspect or of a client to not be boring, please don't be boring; he had needed access to a cocktail of acids for his latest experiment – but he had never needed like this before.

He had never needed forgiveness.

His suddenly traitorous and slow mind decided at this point to supply him with the knowledge of another thing of which he was ignorant. When unimpeded by his somehow malfunctioning consciousness, he would have known long before why she had needed a bandage to encase her entire torso, when from the short catalogue of injuries that he had taken before he had been sent to his room only mentioned a cut to her side, nothing that would need such extensive treatment. He stared at the bandage, willing his mind to tell him why she would need it, but it wasn't doing what he wanted it to. With a sigh of irritation, he realised that he would have to the very one thing that Sherlock Holmes never did: ask.

"Why do you have a full bandage around your torso?" he queried tentatively, for his throat was hurting for reasons unbeknown to him and he didn't wish to croak.

"Oh, I guess you didn't see. My right side is, apparently, 'just one big bruise'."

He looked up at her. "Is that what John said?" She nodded. He stared at her right side, wondering what horrors were under that bandage.

Horrors? He had seen bodies mutilated beyond bruising, and had never paid them much attention. Why, then, when on the form of someone living, breathing, did his mind take such an aversion to the thought? A voice in the back of his head was screaming:

Friend! Friend! Friend!

"How?" he asked, unable to look away from the bandages for the images that his currently disobedient consciousness was conjuring before his eyes.

"I…" she began awkwardly, "may have been slammed into a wall."

Her words washed over him, and he expected to feel angry. He expected this statement to make him want to go over to Moriarty's flat – wherever that actually was – and bring him back to Baker Street just to drop him from the window onto Mrs Hudson's bins. That was his natural reaction – had always been his natural reaction – to being wronged in such a way.

Since he had returned from Dartmoor he had realised that his statement to John about having only one friend was perhaps not entirely true. Indeed, in the cell that Mycroft had locked him in for twenty-four hours for fear that exposure to H.O.U.N.D. would cause him to relapse, he had found the opportunity to self-reflect, and had discovered – as much to his own surprise as John's when he had told the doctor a few days later – that he did not have just one friend: he had, roughly, five, one of whom was lying injured on the sofa before him. And one did not harm the friends of Sherlock Holmes. One would get dropped out of the window onto Mrs Hudson's bins.

Yet it was not anger that he felt, in any way, in reaction to this statement. It was the emotion that he had felt when he had thought that John was not going to agree to move in with him; it was the emotion that he had felt when he had thought that John was Moriarty; it was the emotion that he felt whenever he got told off by his landlady for something that he realised was his fault and was a Bit Not Good: it was sadness.

Hoping that this did not show on his face, he looked up at Molly once more, only to notice yet another detail that he had missed – though he felt inclined to blame it on the low light and the positions of the shadows rather than his malfunctioning mind.

His over-active brain noticed almost everything, most of it automatically. The absence of lipstick, for example, when to others, such a tiny change – for he never believed that make up made any significant change whatsoever, and certainly never made a positive one – would be missed. This change was similar to her removal of lipstick, though he had a sickening feeling – what was it with feelings this evening? – that this change had been caused by something considerably more sinister.

"He kissed you," he commented, thankful that his voice seemed to have drained itself of emotion once more. Maybe he had felt so much that his brain had hit the reset button. It wouldn't have been surprising.

A blush rose up her cheeks. "H-how did you know?"

Sherlock smirked. "Molly, please."

She looked away, obviously embarrassed. Was she ashamed? She had no reason to be. This was almost entirely his fault – even though he still didn't know how – and none of hers.

"You didn't want to kiss him," he noted, trying his best to make her feel better.

"No, I didn't!" she told him forcefully, and he realised with no small amount of horror and confusion that her eyes were glistening with tears. He was supposed to be making her feel better, not worse! What was he doing wrong?

Suddenly, one of the doors of his Mind Palace broke open, and a very particular memory came bursting out of the room beyond. Sherlock froze in shock; despite all of the transgressions that the Palace had been committing this evening, nothing like this had ever happened before. Usually, the doors in the Palace stayed firmly shut, patiently awaiting his hand on the door handle to open them and visit whatever he kept inside. Never before had it acted of its own accord in such a way, and its sudden rebelliousness discomforted him so much that he missed the few seconds of the memory that his mind seemed desperate to remind him of.

The memory had been retrieved from the smallest room in the Palace, one that contained the few memories from his childhood that he hadn't deleted. He guessed he must have been four or five when he had fallen out of the tree in the back garden and cut his arm open. The cut had not been deep, but it had been surprisingly painful. Instead of crying – for Sherlock Holmes never cried – he had simply complained endlessly to anyone who would listen, and a few people who wouldn't, about the amount of pain that the injury had been causing him. To silence him, his mother had done the one thing that Sherlock had ever seen that he could have called a miracle: she kissed it better.

It was a tiny thing, something so minute that it was bordering on the ridiculous that it would ever work. Yet it did. It defied all the laws of science that he had ever discovered, and even now he found himself ignorant as to how it had, indeed, relieved his pain – if only slightly. He gazed over Molly's injuries: the bruised right side, the cut left side, those strangulation marks on her neck, the knuckle duster bruises on her chin, the red cheek, the black eye, and the chaffed lips that had been forced into osculation.

The memory returned to its rightful place, almost giving him a praising nod as he closed the door behind itself, glad that he had understood its message. Without a single word, Sherlock leaned forward and brushed his lips against each of her injuries, from the bruised side to the black eye.

When he pulled away, the tips of their noses nearly touching, she was staring up at him with confused eyes.

"Sher-" she began, gulping. "Wh-"

But he didn't give her chance to finish. He had one more thing to kiss better, and that was her own bitten and battered lips.

It was already happening by the time he remembered that he had never actually done this before. A moment of panic passed before he realised that his body was taking over. His tongue – of its own accord – ran long her bottom lip, as though asking permission to be let in. He didn't have the chance to ask himself if he was actually comfortable with that or not when that permission was granted, and he suddenly tasted… mint.

Mint?

This was not what he had been expecting. Her lipstick – though she wasn't wearing much – was obviously strawberry, so why didn't he taste some kind of fruity combination of artificial colours and flavours? A flash from the trial came back to him, and the answer was all of a sudden horribly clear.

Moriarty chewed gum.

Mint gum.

He wasn't sure how long kisses were supposed to last, but now he no longer cared; this kiss would continue until the mint was eradicated completely, replaced with the coffee that was the taste on his own tongue.

He didn't know how long it took, but eventually he uncovered a fruity taste, one that was more compatible with her lipstick. The mint was going… going…

Gone.

He pulled back, finding that it was all of a sudden more difficult to breathe. This, he was sure, was perfectly normal given the circumstances, but nevertheless left him with another emotion that he couldn't define. He retrieved what he hoped would be his final piece of litmus paper that evening – he was beginning to run a little low – and tested the emotion. Before his mind's eye the litmus paper became white as snow, a colour he had never seen before, the colour for one particular emotion he had always believed himself to be above: vulnerability.

Molly looked disbelieving, as though never in a million years could she had made herself believe that this would happen – and, in all honesty, Sherlock had never thought that it would happen.

Yet it had. And he didn't regret it.

"He'll never hurt you again," he told her, his voice barely more than a murmur.

"You can't know that," she sighed, the corner of her mouth twitching in a smile.

"I can. He will never hurt you again."

And indeed, when snipers were setting themselves up all around the city waiting for the call that either they were to shoot, or that Sherlock Holmes was dead on the pavement, there was no one ordered to kill Molly Hooper.