Odd

Queer

But Molly prefers the term 'introspective'. She was always wondering about something and everything, often at the same time. It was speculated such curiosity in a small girl could only stem from her father's side of the tree, the oddity swinging down from branch to branch.

On one of her more memorable warm day dalliances, she questioned if it was the thought that really mattered. If most people hesitated in the heat of the moment but tended to follow what occurred to them after the first thought, then wouldn't that be the afterthought? And if everybody on earth hesitated a million times, would that not mean the birth of a billion afterthoughts –that being only the estimate of the true amount of after-thinking done.

(Sometimes, when Molly feels particularly invisible she wonders how many of the billions of afterthoughts were for her.)

It also begs the question: what font are they in? Since afterthoughts are something of precious sand grains to dull ordinary thoughts, surely they took on a script; perhaps more than one sort. It wouldn't surprise her if they were computer letters –probably the only letters man will remember in the years after tomorrow; the upper cases perfect with the other uppers and the lower cases humbly insignificant with the other lowers.

The pathologist liked to imagine them buzzing in acrobatic swirls like bees in Times New Roman –at least the curiously ordinary ones. Also, there were the ponderings in Book Antiqua; the possibly important ideas that often piled upon each other in such quick succession they morphed into Arial or –god forbid– Comic Sans. There were also the small afterthoughts, almost the same as regular thoughts, crammed into will-soon-be-forgotten crannies in Tw Cen Mt.

Molly fancied hers to be in Cambria, the lower cases always slightly out of alignment with the rest. She could adapt a new font, but it would feel artificial. Very un-Hooperish. She enjoys thinking that her mental postscripts are as spectacularly arranged as quartz in a cave; every one of them floating aimlessly at the back of her eyelids. However, in the peripheries, there is a name.

Mycroft Holmes

He was an afterthought in italics and Helvetica. She could never quite bring herself to simplify the elder Holmes into Cambria, immediately catching on to the thread that he would never fit in her quaint small box of fonts and ideals. Much like their acquaintance, the three-syllable name occurs to her when she least expects it; most of the time on afternoons when the rain should've been colder and the bodies less dead.

"Ms. Hooper?" asked a pale dashing gent in a manner that said he was quite sure of whom she was. He strolled in her laboratory as if he were the Queen in pinstripes and Armani.

"Yes? May I help you?"

"I'm here to inform you that the latest of my brother's requirements will no longer be necessary."

"He said he needed the cadaver for a case." Molly protested; though her infatuation with Sherlock has reached expiry, it did not mean she was blind to what a Holmesian tantrum looked like.

"Quite right" the stranger clipped "However, seeing as the unfortunate corpse is outside the scope of his current adventure, it no longer warrants observation. Never mind the paperwork to return it. Tomorrow a team will arrive to take it off your hands."

"Thank you…" She waited patiently for his name, letting the ellipses hang in the air.

"Mycroft Holmes."

Sixty five seconds after Mycroft Holmes had exited the morgue, and had driven off in an anonymous looking auto, Sherlock texted.

"Don't listen to him. Need the body tonight. –SH"

"Alright. Should I tell Mycroft's team tomorrow to sod off? –MH"

The five minutes it took the reply message to alert her was uncharacteristic.

"He gave his first name? –SH"

Molly was doing a splendid imitation of a certain sleuth's Blackberry texting when a consecutive message arrived.

"Interesting –SH"

Exactly tea time the following day, the corpse was gone in its black bag, her tools were in a strange ascending order, and there was a short note on the steel table.

London will be unexpectedly fine tomorrow evening, as its wine will also be. A car will be sent at your earliest convenience.

Mycroft E. Holmes

The day wasn't any different. Molly still autopsied bodies, filled out mounds of English bureaucracy, had tea cakes for breakfast and English breakfast for tea, and walked the twenty-seven streets home rather than hailing a cab.

It would no doubt be poetic; sweet even; if Molly Hooper said that the walk home was lost in the babble of wedding-invitation Monotype Corsiva underneath the serenading torrential rain, but the truth is she really can't –and does not quite care to –remember.