“I love you,” breathed Molly, almost sobbing.

Toby slowly blinked at her through the oxygen tent, his warm fur shifting with his too-quick breath under her hand.

Molly slow-blinked back at him—a kitty kiss—the tears finally spilling over, tears that had been threatening all day since she’d woken up that morning to find him wobbly-legged and gasping for breath on the floor beside her bed.

He was fourteen years old; his heart had been failing for months. It wasn’t a surprise.

“I’m ready,” she said at last over her shoulder, to the blue-uniformed vetinary nurse who’d been waiting patiently at the side of the bed.

“It’ll be quite quick,” he said sympathetically, and depressed the plunger. “You can come back out the front when you’re ready.”

He gave Molly’s shoulder a pat, and left.

She and Toby stared at each other for a few seconds, until his eyes began to close.

Molly slow-blinked with him again, for the last time. When she opened her wet lashes, he was gone.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the receptionist whispered as she settled her bill. “It’s just for the injection today. Would you mind going around to the back door to collect… Toby? It’s just that it can be upsetting for the other clients….”

“Oh,” said Molly, feeling a strange urge to shout at all the other oblivious pet-owners in the waiting room, accompanied by their fluttering birds and boisterous dogs and cranky cats. “Oh, yes, of course, that’s fine.”

She held the cloth bag with Toby’s body in it on her knees on the tube on the way home from the veterinary hospital, and placed him carefully beneath the coatrack just inside the front door

Tea. Orange pekoe, the way Mum used to make it for her when she was upset.

Of course Mum wouldn't have made it for this.  Mum had all sorts of ideas on women in their thirties whose only regular male companion was a cat. All sorts of opinions about Molly wasting her life pining away over someone she couldn’t have. As though she wasn’t a successful pathologist, earning the kind of money Mum had always thought she should marry into, all on her own. As though romance was the only thing that could complete her as a human being. As though she wasn’t fully aware that Sherlock would never return….

Molly filled up the cup and then leaned on her elbows at the sink, looking out the windows at the little courtyard garden.

She’d need to dig a grave, but she wasn’t really feeling up to that right at this moment. There was probably a reasonable shovel in the shed. Perhaps by the hydrangeas; there was a patch of sun in the mornings there where Toby had always loved to bask.

First: tea. Molly squeezed her shoulders, bowing her head. Orange pekoe always cheered her up. She should get on with it, or it would overbrew.

On the bench, her phone rang.  It was Sherlock.

Molly didn’t get around to burying Toby that day after all.

The next morning, she had work. She hadn’t had much sleep, what with the crying and with the thinking about being a crazy cat lady who'd just lost her major relationship.  But she’d used up too many leave days recently babysitting Rosie, babysitting Sherlock, and besides, she was primary author on a paper that needed to be checked and submitted that day if her PhD students going to get it in for the Lab Med and Path conference in Paris. She couldn’t let them down.

Molly eyed the cloth bag by the back door—but she had at least another day before he really needed to be in the ground. She could put him in the fridge if it came to it, but that was really probably a last resort. The horror stories she’d heard from John made her wary of starting down the path where that kind of thing was okay.

When Molly came home, it had been a long day, and the sky was already darkening with twighlight. She glanced again at the bag by the door before heading in to the kitchen to make tea. There was at least an hour before full dark; time for some liquid fortification before digging.

She’d set it to brewing and sliced the orange before she realised that there was someone in the garden already.

He’d taken off his coat and scarf, the coat carefully folded on the lawn a few metres away, the scarf a crumpled ball dropped on top of it. His sleeves were pushed up above his elbows, dark curls clinging to the perspiration on his forehead, and his designer shoes muddy from being half-sunk in the piles of dirt he’d already excavated and piled up to the side.

On autopilot, she got down a second mug, put in a bag and poured the water.

How had he known?  Well.  Obviously.  He was Sherlock.

Every time she thought she might be going to get over him… every single time….

He could be a dear man, really, on the rare occasions when he tried. When he turned his prodigious talents to actually looking in the direction of what his friends needed. It wasn’t his fault he so rarely remembered to turn it in that direction.

She carried the mugs out in one hand.

“It’s okay,” she said, looking into the small shaft he’d dug between the bushes and holding his tea out towards him. “You don’t have to go a full six feet down, not for a pet. The body’s small enough that the smell won’t penetrate more than—”

She cut herself off, and looked at her tea, taking a calming sip. The steam curled in the cooling evening air.

“Is it deep enough now, then?” he asked after a moment of looking into the hole consideringly.

“Yes,” she said, drinking a bit more tea. “I’ll go and get him.”

Toby had loved Sherlock, when he’d stayed with her for those few days after the fall, in that way that cats always loved to cuddle up to the least-interested looking person in the room. Sherlock had professed to mild annoyance at the harassment, subjected Toby to blistering lectures, and glared at the white and brown hairs left all over his suit. For his part, Toby had entirely stopped sleeping in Molly’s bed during his stay, and Molly got used to coming out in the morning to find them curled up together, got used to not reminding Sherlock of the fact that if he wasn't comfortable, he was entirely welcome to shift Toby off his lap rather than simply complaining about it until the cat decided to move on.

Sherlock was still drinking his tea when Molly returned. She opened the bag to put Toby’s body into the bottom of the hole; it would decompose faster that way. He was in full rigor and barely recognisable for it.

Molly was used to people going through the stages of death; she was trained in identifying them and recognising them between photos taken in death or from life. Once you got used to it, people’s bodies looked like people, even after death… but a stiff, cold cat didn’t really seem like a cat at all.

Molly stood back, folding the bag. Unceremoniously, Sherlock swept a shower of dirt back into the hole, and was reaching to do a second shovel-full when she finally asked him.

“Did you get what you needed on the phone?”

She was still looking at Toby’s body in the grave; his tabby head and back almost blending in with the mottled brown-black earth, the edges of his white-furred stomach visible through the scattered dirt.

Sherlock slowed and stopped, resting his hands on the handle of the shovel, its blade half buried in the earth

“Yes,” he said. “I did.  You helped stop a murder, Molly, at least I thought—”

Molly shook her head, cutting him off. “Don’t tell me why, Sherlock, I don’t need to know. You said it was necessary, and I believe you. And. Well. I don’t really want you to ruin it. It wasn’t the best timing, but I’m not sorry I got to hear it from you, just once, even if you didn’t mean it. And I’m not sorry that you know now. Life’s short, and there’s never enough time to really make sure the ones you love know it.”

Sherlock followed her gaze into the grave and they stood in silence for a little.  She had half a bag left of his favourite cat treats she’d never given him.

At no particular sign from her, Sherlock continued shovelling the dirt back in until the hole was full, then patted it down with the back of the blade, frowning at it and the disturbed soil all around.

“You’re not to come back and dig him up to observe the decomposition process,” she said firmly.

“Never even crossed my mind,” said Sherlock, avoiding her eye.

She glared at him for a long moment, and then at the smoothed-down dirt at the base of the hydrangeas.

“Once,” she said. “Twice maximum, and don’t let me notice you’ve been.”

Toby could hardly mind anymore, after all, and Sherlock’s interest was hardly ghoulish. Perhaps Toby could help solve a murder in the kitty-afterlife.

“I really do love you, Molly Hooper,” said Sherlock with a wry smile, and bent to place a kiss on her cheek.

He dropped the shovel where he stood and strode over to his coat, lifting the scarf over onto the grass before shrugging into his coat, then picking the scarf up again in both hands. He didn’t wrap it around his neck, though, holding it in his hands as he walked back over to her.

“John says it’s not the right time, but…” He pulled open the twisted ball of fabric to reveal a small black tuxedo kitten in the centre of the fabric. It unrolled and stretched at the movement, yawning and exposing sharp fangs. “He belonged to a murdered couple. You’ll probably see their bodies at Barts tomorrow. No other family, few friends, unlikely anyone will claim the cat. When they were going to call a shelter, I said I knew someone who might want him. I can take him back if you don’t….”

“Give him here,” said Molly sharply, snatching the little thing out of her hands and cuddling it to her breast as it mewled in protest. They’d be sending this dear creature to a shelter over her dead body.

She looked down at the kitten, which slowly closed both eyes at her and cracked them open to watch her again. Molly carefully blinked back, then looked out of the corner of her eye up at Sherlock, who was winding his scarf back around his neck and looking very pleased with himself indeed.  She wondered how far he'd had to look to find a suitable crime scene. London was a big city.

“You bastard,” she said half-heartedly, still looking at the kitten. She was going to call him 'Sherlock', just to spite him. “I love you too.”



A/N: Slowly blinking at or with a cat is known as a "kitty kiss".  Since cats consider eye contact a dominance behaviour associated with aggression, blinking or looking through barely open eyes is a sign of trust and affection.