SUMMARY: He wasn't the benevolently chivalrous knight in shining armor. She wasn't the fair maiden who fainted at the sight of blood. – Molly learns that the bedtime stories of yore aren't meant for thirty-something pathologists. Sherlolly.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: My very first venture into the Sherlock fandom and I'm extremely nervous and excited and anxious. I won't pretend to be an expert on the idiosyncrasies and idioms of our neighbor – sorry, neighbour – across the pond so if you find a particularly infuriatingly incorrect use of language, feel free to PM me.
Disclaimer: Don't own and never will.
CAMELOT
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;
On burnish'd hooves his war-house trode;
From underneath his helmet flow'd
His coal-black curls as he rode,
As he rode down to Camelot.
– Lord Alfred Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott"
Molly Hooper is no stranger to death.
It clings to the edges of her knickers and, if she was fully truthful, it had probably latched onto her soul from the very moment of birth.
She can still imagine the moment now – her newly born cries barely thwarting the stifling silence of death – the moment when she entered the world and her mother exited. Her mother, the bright-eyed woman of the city (the perfect complement to her father – the dusky-skinned country bumpkin with a heart of pure gold) fading into the off-white cotton sheets on her hospital bed just moments after holding her first and only child. Her cries slowly quieting once she noticed the overwhelming lack of noise before she was quickly rushed away – pried from the arms of her dead mother – into an incubator for further monitoring and study. Her father, still towering over the petite corpse, clutched a lifeless wrist in his giant hands with unspoken tears and wishes.
Her father often said she was lucky – always told her she was lucky – to be alive. He said it was a bloody miracle seeing as how premature and tiny she had been. Her birth becomes the source of all luck – and all despair. She is small, tiny, and paltry because of her early birth. She is soft-spoken, horridly shy and horridly awkward because of her early birth. It becomes a psychological scapegoat that takes up shop right above her heart, carving out a hole that grows bigger and bigger each day.
But despite the empty weight above her heart, Molly learns to love, to laugh, to smile as well as to weep. Her father adored her – showering her with enough affection to supplement the lack of a mother – and she adored him. And she was happy with their modest life – the life of a butcher and his daughter filled with books and cats and dining catastrophes. Their life together was simple and quiet.
She endures the cruel outside world as best as she can – filled with snobby teenaged witches (who later become aging housewives with saggy skin who are just as spiteful and bitter) and pig-headed jocks (who still won't give her a moment's glance) – even when Molly would love nothing more than to curl up in her comforter and snuggle with her wonderfully indifferent cat Toby and read terribly trashy romance novels.
But sometimes, when the world is clashing much too loudly outside her door – the annoying thumps and noises of the city drive her absolutely mad – she would find herself reciting the poems her father used to tell her before bedtime. She is quite the fan of Tennyson (and Keats and Byron and . . .) – she remembers when she listened to her father in an enchanted awe as he retold the stories of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere through the words of Lord Tennyson.
She spent many hours wishing herself away to the kingdom of Camelot as she watched chivalrous knights fight for the hand of their beloved. Molly had always been a sappy romantic – even as a little girl.
But no matter how old she gets – or how lonely – she would find herself thumbing through her father's collection of poems (dog-eared and yellowing pages) as the familiar words slip off her tongue leaving to battle against the suffocating noises of the outside and slowly the loneliness is forced back into its cage (tied and gagged) but only temporarily.
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.
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Molly always watches others from a far – whether it was through a window or doorway or even the corner of her eye – but even though she has tried to stop, it is a filthy habit she is much too eager to indulge. Molly always reasons that this distance protects her – it protects her from the outside world filled with loud noises (so loud that they drown her) but she is growing tired. She no longer wishes to look at life through a glass, a filter, a screen. She wants to live.
Sometimes – late at night, when there is still too much noise and not enough silence – Molly wonders if it is even possible for her to live since she has watched life run away from her the moment she was born.
Molly doesn't like to dwell on it.
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.
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The closest Molly has ever felt alive is whenever he comes into the morgue. He, in this case, being the wonderfully brilliant and passionate and sharp-tongued Sherlock Holmes – the apple of her eye, the object of her affections and the current source of her sexual frustrations and fantasies.
The passion he shows for his cases emanates from him in waves creating electrical sparks within Molly's own veins leaving her feeling flushed but alive. Her buzz, of course, is quickly and ruthlessly killed by said man the soonest moment he opens his mouth (or doesn't open – depending on the day, the time and the case).
It's tiring, Molly knows, to be strapped to a roller coaster of feelings that never stops – she never knows whether she is traveling up or down, only that the highs are amazing and the lows are unbearable.
But even this feeling is familiar to Molly to an extent – unrequited love is another filthy habit she can't quit. Sherlock isn't the first man to make her feel this way but Molly is unsure whether there can be another man after Sherlock – he was a hard act to follow, so to speak.
At this point, Molly feels almost ready to adopt five more cats and live out her days as a spinster pining over a man who would never give her a second glance even if she strips naked and straddles his lap.
But then he goes and does things that make the feelings come back – making Molly swoon and falling for him all over again – and it frustrates her to no end. Molly is eternally patient – a trait that she's learned from babysitting her many younger cousins – and she foolishly believes with time her feelings will fade and she will move on from this stupid crush and get on with her grown up adult life.
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She snaps one day – it's only natural, of course – it had been a rather long week (the bloody interns who couldn't do their jobs properly; she had overheard the snooty receptionists gossiping about her; she had been invited to her ex-boyfriend's wedding; Sherlock had complimented her – in a backhanded way, of course – into working overtime despite her lack of sleep et cetera) and Molly has been growing increasingly tired since the day her father was buried.
It's over something stupid and trivial and puerile – Sherlock complains about his coffee (too sugary, he says – and why on Earth did she add creamer? Didn't Molly know that he only likes his coffee –), and her reply is seething anger, biting bitterness and touch of unadulterated disdain.
She is overwhelmed by the urge to rip his head off as tears collect in her eyes – why did she keep insisting on this self-inflicted torture? – and, in a moment of sheer defiance and pure un-Molly-ness, dumps his scalding cup of coffee (black with two sugars) onto his trousers before sprinting away to safety and silence of her apartment not daring to look back.
She bolts the door shut – takes out the battery from her mobile with a shaky hand – and declares herself dead to the world.
She crawls into her comforter, Toby curled at her feet, and stares at the shadows on the wall.
Molly is half-sick of the shadows.
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She takes the next day off and everyone at St. Bart's is understanding – maybe it's because they can see her breaking silently and quietly rotting away at the morgue – and she spends the day watching trashy shows and absentmindedly petting Toby. She is dressed in clothes that really ought to be in the bin but she can't bear to toss out – they have too much sentiment now, it would feel as though she was throwing away a part of herself.
Her mind is blissfully numb and her focus is elsewhere. Molly may not have been alive but she feels content – a feeling that she hadn't felt in years.
She returns the day after as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the very first day she had walked into the morgue. Something inside of her has snapped permanently and Molly doesn't bother to glue the shards back together – it isn't worth the time or the effort or the pain.
And she's quite alright with the fact that she doesn't see him again for nearly three weeks.
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The next time he barges into the morgue with his coat billowing behind him like a cape, Molly is humming a pop song and doesn't even bother to give him a moment's glance. There is a slight pause in his step – as though he was expecting something different – and this paints a bitter smile onto Molly's face. His behavior doesn't evade John's eyes either and as Sherlock frantically wanders around the room trying to avoid her while trying to not make it blatantly obvious.
Sherlock whips out his mobile and taps at it furiously as though it might snap in his capable hands. The familiar chime of John's mobile is heard over Molly's soft humming and he is still as he reads the message.
"Oh sod off, Sherlock! Ask her yourself, she's right there for god's sake." He indignantly replies before taking a seat next to Molly.
Sherlock conveniently becomes deaf as he settles down behind a microscope and begins analyzing a skin sample.
"Is everything alright?" John asks in a hushed whisper – it's silly really, since Sherlock is seated a few meters away and he can hear them – his face is drawn into concern and slight confusion.
Molly smiles, "Of course. I'm actually going on a date after work – his name is Matthew; he's a banker."
"Oh." John murmurs.
The silence that follows speaks volumes.
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Matthew gives her lilies and daffodils when he arrives at her apartment.
Molly is sure that Matthew doesn't know the significance of a bouquet of lilies and daffodils, he merely says that they remind him of her – when they met at the coffee shop – saying that they're bright and sunny and cheerful and pretty just like she is.
Molly gives him a genuine smile; she wants this to work. She wants to like Matthew. She wants to live and stop looking at life from a glass window.
She wants to be able to feel alive without him.
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Molly isn't expecting the knock on her door at three in the morning – then again, one doesn't quite expect these things (death, love, life). He stands in front of her door, his coat still like a cape and his dark curls reflect the dim light coming from her dwelling. His wonderful blue eyes are sharp and piercing like they've always been – there's a slight flush on his cheeks but it's because it's cold out not because he's standing on the other side of her doorway at this ungodly hour.
There's another moment's pause – as though Sherlock expects her to break first and Molly laughs silently since she had been broken since before they had even met.
"I want to know why you've been avoiding me." A slight pause follows before he shortly adds, "Please."
Molly wonders how long this has been bothering him or whether he's just confronting this because he's bored and he needs the lab at St. Bart's for research and he needs to be in her good graces. Molly knew that before she would have easily faltered – she never would have lasted this long – and buckled under his intense gaze. But Molly has come to realize that she can only stand to gain from her newfound aloofness, by keeping Sherlock at an arm's distance she has become the source of his frustration.
She contemplates slamming the door in his face and burying herself in her sheets so she can salvage the rest of her sleep.
"I didn't hear an apology in that sentence, Mr. Holmes," Molly calmly states (she feels satisfaction when she notices his obvious dislike at the use of his surname), "So if you wouldn't mind . . ."
She begins to shut the door slowly.
"Wait!" He bellows as he shoves his limbs out, preventing her from closely the door properly.
"I . . ." He pauses again, unsure what to say – it's obvious that he isn't sure why she doesn't just forgive him already so that he can move on to other things. But still, a small bit of Molly hopes that he will finally realize how much he's hurt her.
"I apologize for any of my actions that might have angered you." His apology is quick and short and precise.
Molly sighs. She doesn't understand why she even thought he would have been able to understand after all, Sherlock is Sherlock.
"I'm not angry Sherlock," Her voice is soft, "I'm tired." Of waiting for you return my feelings. Of waiting for your every beck and call. Of being as useful to you as a pet. Of loving you.
She shuts the door quietly, leaving a confused consulting detective outside.
The hot tears trickle down her face and she doesn't bother to wipe them away.
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She goes on another date with Matthew.
He is kind and nice and sincere and likes her back.
Molly still wants this to work but she knows it's just a matter of time.
It's always just a matter of time.
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She is working the graveyard shift at the morgue – it's her favorite shift actually because the entire hospital is usually filled with sweet silence – and she's humming quietly to herself as she dutifully fills out paperwork. She doesn't even notice that he's there until she notices the lily he places onto her desk as he stands silently waiting for her to look up.
"Mr. Holmes," she notices the slight twitch from him – he still isn't used to her calling him that, "Are you familiar with the works of Lord Tennyson?" She picks up the flower, rubbing the soft petals between her fingers.
He says nothing, studying her face for cues – trying to decipher her like one of his cases. His fingers reach out as he gently strokes her face since he is not sure what to do – how to get her to forgive him. It's a small gesture but Molly can feel her heart pounding in her chest wanting to burst from the sheer life that she feels.
It's intoxicating – the feeling of being alive – so much so that Molly takes a chance, a risk, and a gamble. She leans forward, quickly and clumsily, pressing her lips against his – the life bursting out of her chest in loud audible thumps as it shatters the silence of the morgue.
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Common sense be damned, practicality be damned, unrequited love be damned, all Molly feels is the life that comes from him and she drinks it greedily.
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But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."