Molly Hooper met Jim Moriarty long before she knew Sherlock Homes.

It was also long before she became the Molly Hooper that Sherlock would meet, to be truthful. Hooper was a name Jim had plucked out of thin air for her, as a present. A gift of a silly surname to finish up her character. And all for Sherlock Holmes: Molly knew she should be jealous.

Pathology was just one of the many things Molly could have studied: it felt like indulging a passion, just like some people went to University to study literature or art. It was something to do nonetheless, and Molly could fade into the background while engrossed in a wealds and valleys of muscle tissue, intricate networks of veins, soft subways of arteries and the clandestine gurgle of blood. She loved the textbooks with their polished clean pictures that invited the reader into the secret architecture of the human body. Not doorways to the soul. That was laughable: Jim giggled when she told him what her grandmother had said. What Molly loved about cadavers was the lack of soul, if such a thing existed anyway. She loved the fact that they never responded; just listened with glassy eyes while she found out all about them.

Except for Jim, she had little interest in her university classmates who were odd introverted types, or religious, or just unfathomable, like her maybe. People had odd reasons for wanting to work with the dead, many noble, some far less so. Molly didn't fall into any category and so avoided them all. They usually avoided her anyway once they'd spoken to her: her slight frame and mouse coloured hair were at odds with her sarcastic nasty eyes. Jim's presence with her in the canteen (when he eventually consented to it in her second year) was often enough to put people off too; they had an air of wanting to be left alone.

They'd met near the beginning of Molly's first term. He was little older, a PhD student, sometimes there sometimes not.

Molly asked what the PhD was in.

"Maths."

He drew out the word and rolled his eyes. He was chewing gum. "Just don't ask me for more details, you wouldn't understand it." He was thin and pale, dark eyes and agile eyebrows. He often wore dark clothes, tight black jeans and a suit jacket, pale T-shirts. She'd seen him once on campus in a suit, a real suit, with a silk tie and brogues. He'd looked dangerous and powerful and nothing like the unassuming Jim Molly found out he was generally considered to be. He was never like that to her however; the Jim the others knew was stuttering and polite. Molly didn't mind his biting comments though, because they had an understanding.

"We're both quite fucked up the head really," he told her near Christmas of the first year over a plate of chips they shared in a pub, and beer. His eyes were wide and mockingly sad, "But so long as we're both okay with it, I think it only offers interesting possibilities, don't you?" Molly nodded and fed him a chip. He ate it slowly and smiled at her. "Molly my dear, I need to meet more people like you."

She knew little about his life outside of University. He was Irish, "Dublin or somewhere," he waved away the question. He'd done his bachelors and Masters here at Cambridge too, and, "Ran a little business on the side." He knew a lot about Molly however:

"Your mother killed herself, but I bet you found it quite interesting. If she wasn't very happy anyway, you would reason it was for the best. They didn't let you stay long by the body though did they I bet? How old were you?"

She replied that she was nine.

"I see."

Molly had just smiled at him and after a pause and said that she found it amusing that they both looked quite innocent.

"We look innocent?" He raised an eyebrow sceptically.

Yes, she replied, because she was always the little mousy one at home, at school: the sort of face that was cast as the little sister or the cat in the school play, and never the lead. And Jim was like that too, with soft brown eyes and a charming smile. Unassuming.

"But what am I really then Mols?"

She'd giggled. He wasn't half as soft or as nice, but still charming.

"Of course."

University passed in a blur. They spent a lot of time together. At first Jim pretended not to- his image was one of the everyman; offending no-one and charming anything that moved. Molly had more of a reputation- not as nasty- just as someone that no-one spent time with. When asked though, Molly said Jim was her boyfriend.

The first time Jim heard this he'd nearly broken her arm.

"Don't ever say that again." His voice had been low and like black velvet. His grip on her arm was iron, though his mood flicked back to his usual teasing lilt after the initial flare of anger, "You can't claim some sort of fucked up ownership over me, you know? While I'm here I'm still trying to be normal- no I lie, I'm faking it, being what they all want and they all love, but- I can't be seen to be going out with some creepy little necrophiliac."

Once he'd let go of her, and as she massaged feeling back into her fingertips she'd objected to 'necrophiliac:' she found dead bodies interesting, not attractive.

"Yeah well I turn you on, and I sometimes look half dead."

Half, she'd assured him.

He'd laughed and apologised about her arm.

Life carried on.

Jim would lie on her bed texting for hours on end (having snuck into her block) while Molly studied. Jim would have his feet up resting on the wall in his socks, his back flat on the bed, occasionally telling her amusing things or just humming some tune. She found out that he played the piano very well. He was horrified by her attempts at the cello:

"That's one of the sexiest instruments ever- you're meant to caress the strings, not try to file them! Gods Mol give that here- I can't listen to it anymore."

Molly still felt that knew him only superficially, though sometimes she wondered if there was all that much else beneath the façade. After the 'boyfriend incident' Jim had made a point of dating other students, mostly men, as though to prove something. Molly didn't really care; in a way it was amusing that he tried to get back at her so much. By the end of her second year he eventually gave up on everyone but Molly, "I've spoken to them all, and they're all useless pathetic little normal people. I fished out any future associates. The rest are no use to me, so they're now victims Mols. Victims or bystanders, that's all."

Their relationship may have been odd, but it suited both of them well. Over dinners in the high ceilinged halls of Cambridge they whispered to each other nasty things about everyone else, and invented crazy things to do to get back at anyone who'd irritated them. They were like children together, malicious and but wide eyed to the others around them. Molly told Jim all about her Father, and how he was a weak and shaky man, a teacher, who lived his life apologetically and didn't understand her. She also told him about her grandmother who tried to love her and scold her and make a pet of her, but in truth was scared of her. He told her little- but listened.

He wouldn't tell her about his business. ("It's far too fun, it'd distract you from your studies.") She didn't even know his real name, as he'd admitted the one he used now he'd invented. "Jim Moriarty doesn't exist you know Mols, if you were to look him up all you'd see if that he'll get a PhD in Maths as well as a handful of other certificates, and after he's got that last gong he'll disappear again and then the fun can start. Will you join me when that happens, Mols?"

She said she would.

"That's good, I'll need someone like you."

Jim usually seemed polite. It was only away from University that Molly really saw his other sides. She only began to visit his flat into her last year. At University Jim was nice to everyone but Molly, to whom he was a little more cutting and (maybe) his true self - though she doubted that he was really. At his flat though, she saw the real him even more. He was still overpoweringly charming, but it was coupled with the ferocious anger of the boyfriend incident. It flared up and dyed away in turn, often spontaneously, so he was cute and giggling one second and threatening to rip out her eyeballs the next.

Molly still didn't mind though, that was just what Jim was like. Just like the dates he'd made a point of parading in front of her, it was quite flattering really. She felt like she was getting to know him. For a start, from his flat she learnt that he was wealthy. It wasn't a student's flat, though it wasn't huge. It was modern though, and beautifully furnished: new wooden floors and fresh white walls, art and bookshelves and rugs.

She'd asked him if he came from a wealthy family, which he found amusing.

"No, I didn't. This is all mine."

So he wasn't even renting it? A mortgage, she queried?

"I could have paid them in cash, though that would have looked like showing off."

Molly could also see more about him, from the selection of designer clothes in his bedroom- and by designer she meant properly designer, not just high street- to the books of literature, philosophy, mathematics and various others, eclectic in their coverage on his bookshelves. He also had an awful lot of music.

She also gathered what ever he did, it was probably illegal. She found that amusing.

Molly didn't know what she would define their relationship as. It certainly wasn't boyfriend/girlfriend. They both, Jim far more often than Molly, dated or just slept with other people. Jim was a serial flirt; Molly was more the introvert, though she'd discovered she could act a part.

"Then why the hell do go around like you do if you can act, and get anything you want, as someone else? Have you not noticed what I do?"

Molly said that she wasn't bothered. She could turn on the extrovert in a crowded bar, drink some good looking guy into the ground, and then sneak him back into her room, but she rarely did. (Only… three times?) She doubted that Jim, even with all his maths, could count the number of times he'd done the same thing. Molly wasn't bothered though, and Jim likewise only encouraged her, though the teasing afterwards was awful.

They almost behaved like brother and sister, scheming evil siblings, or a double act, intent on mischief. Almost.

Molly did find him attractive- who wouldn't- with his lazy grins and dark eyes, lithe frame and charm, though what she loved most was his ease with death. It wasn't like hers; hers stemmed from interest, she liked the architecture of the bodies, their secrets and mechanics. Jim's ease with the whole thing was because of his disregard for life as something to be respected.

Before long, Jim finished his PhD, and Molly graduated.

She stayed with him for a month, avoiding his tantrums when she left a towel on the floor, or a book out of place. She slept in a spare room. Jim planned to move back to London. "Got to be at the centre of things. This sleepy city is dull." Molly knew she'd drift after him.

All they really had was each other.

They also had all their lives ahead of them: neither of them had ever heard of Sherlock Holmes. Molly was young, with bobbed brown hair, black clothes and a deathly quiet mind. Jim was quick witty and calculating, not yet the paranoid multi-million pound suited spider toying with people's lives, like Molly would toy with their deaths. Jim had never heard of Sebastian Moran. Molly had never been to London.

Their lives were only just beginning.

It was always going to be interesting.