Molly/Sherlock thing for Emily (percychased) on Gift Giving Extravaganza 2014. Possibly AU. Word count: 3,864.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
dandelions
She hates the garden in front of her apartment, hates the waving dandelions and white tulips, the green leaves and dark stems. She hates the way people spend so much time on something that will only wilt, die, wither in the merciless sun.
Molly Hooper doesn't like dandelions.
-::-
A door opens.
"Daddy," a little girl cries as her father scoops her up in his arms, stepping over the threshold.
"Heya, Molly," the tall man replies. He grins at little girl and closes the door behind him, the tired look in his eyes melting away. He swings her around before setting her down and turns briefly to close the open door. "Whatcha got for me this time?"
Molly runs towards the back door, pulling her father with one hand, brown pigtails swinging. Her face is covered with glee, disregarding the fact that her father is tired, just came home from yet another long trip to goodness-knows-where, and should probably eat some supper. She flings the door open with energy and excitement only a four-year-old can exhibit, and they run towards the garden, feet tracing a familiar path on the uneven ground of the lawn.
"Dandelions, Daddy," she gushes as they reach the patches of overturned soil. Little stems waved in the wind, puffs of seeds, Molly's creations. "I planted them myself."
"Did you now?"
Molly nods enthusiastically.
-::-
Detective.
She doesn't know what the word means, but she knows it's a big word and it sounds fancy. She knows it to be a word she would describe her father with. She knows it as the packing of a suitcase and kissing her goodbye, knows it as the sound of a shutting door and anxiety, waiting for the door to open again.
She doesn't like the word very much.
-::-
She's fifteen and still planting dandelions, at least a good half of the garden, between the cherry tomatoes and the turnips her mother uses in stews. She knows they're her father's favorite flowers, and she wants them to be perfect—just for him when he returned from another case. They would sit in the garden with glasses of lemonade, just watching the seeds blow away in the wind, sometimes plucking their own.
The doorbell rings, and Molly's mother asks her to get it. Assuming it's her father, Molly runs towards the door and flings it open, grin wide and eyes bright and already extending a hand to pull the person on the steps inside.
She stops as she sees who it is.
It's a man in a long coat. He wears a blue scarf. He's holding an envelope in his hands. He says he wants to speak to Molly's mother, and Molly lets him inside, slightly startled and wide-eyed.
Her mother greets the man and invites him to their living room, wiping her hands on a dishcloth before shaking his hands.
Molly goes to her room, confused but not wanting to eavesdrop.
She hears wailing from downstairs.
-::-
Molly's read about misery. She's seen it in movies where actors cry and read about it in books where characters shed rivers and waterfalls of salty tears. But those were actors and those were characters.
None of the above was Molly Hooper.
She's read about misery and seen what it's done to people, how it affects your mind like baking soda in vinegar. She's heard about all these things, but she hasn't experienced anything herself.
Her hands crumple her black dress in her fists while she wishes she couldn't feel a damn thing. The young girl hates standing in front of the grave while people shed tears and cried for her father, refusing to put dandelions on his grave because of allergies and whatnot. If you truly understood Molly Hooper's father, you would've known he wanted his favorite flowers on his grave.
When she gets home, she runs to the backyard and rips her dress as she stumbles and falls, rummages in the shed for supplies.
Tears stain the dirt as she digs up the dandelion patch.
-::-
She fails biology in science.
"But you're good at biology," everyone says to her when they get their scores back. "You're top of the class."
Molly grits her teeth and lies about not studying enough, but in truth, all she wants is for them to shut up. What was the point? What was the point of studying something that was bound to die sometime? What was the point if her father wasn't alive? What was the point of dandelions if they couldn't blow them together? What was the point of turnips and cherry tomatoes if her mother wasn't going to be there to cook them, her mother who died in a car crash just a few weeks ago?
What was the point to live if you were going to die?
She still graduates top of her class. Molly doesn't say anything, but she knows the professors gave her an easy pass.
-::-
Molly picks a job at the morgue, much to the surprise of her classmates.
She's top of the class, has a master's degree, and she wants to spend her time with dead corpses, mounds of lifeless and cold cadavers. They whisper about her when they think she's not in earshot, spreading rumors about her when they think she isn't looking. Molly is always someone who fails to blend in with the crowd, but her classmates respect her, the girl who manages to scrape by with perfect scores without ever studying.
Molly grits her teeth. All she wants is to be closer to her parents, even if that meant being around the dead.
She might as well be dead herself. There's not much left for Molly Hooper, and her heart is an empty one. All day, she slices open cadaver after cadaver, murdering the already-dead as she examines their insides and writes stuff on clipboards.
It's the best way for her to feel close to her parents. She feels like there's a veil between living and dying, a line between swimming and drowning. Molly thinks most people need a physical representation of such a border in their lives, which is why morgues are almost always underground. The ground, the earth, the separation between the living and the dead.
As a matter of fact, she likes it underground.
-::-
"Excuse me," Molly calls. She bends down to pick up a stray lock-pick kit from the ground. The stranger in front of her turns around. "You dropped this." It's hard for Molly to smile, but she gives it her best shot. She hasn't smiled a lot in the past years. The muscles around her mouth move with rigidity.
"Oh, thank you." The stranger crosses the gap between them with a couple wide strides. Contrary to her white lab coat and white gloves, he wears a long and black coat, a blue scarf tied around his neck. As Molly sees the scarf, she unconsciously flinches.
The stranger inspects her before taking the kit. He frowns slightly. "You work here, don't you?" he asks after a hesitation.
Molly bites back a retort that she was here for a picnic. "Yeah," she replies.
"You mind showing me the body that just came in? I can't seem to find my way there."
She checks her clipboard, lists of the corpses. "The body from the crime scene?"
"Yes."
"And how does that explain that lock-pick kit you've got there?"
"If it satisfies your curiosity, I didn't break in here."
Still skeptical and far from reassured, Molly continues to ask him questions. Standard procedures or no standard procedures, she doesn't want to show him around the morgue. In fact, she doesn't want to spend any time around him at all. "And what relationship do you have with—" Molly checks her clipboard again. "—Erwin Smith?"
"None at all. I'm a detective."
She flinches at the word, and she's sure he notices. Trying to keep the bitterness from her voice, Molly jerks her head in the right direction, hoping to get him out of her sight as soon as possible. "It's this way, Detective—"
"Sherlock Holmes. And you are?"
"Molly Hooper."
-::-
"Can I borrow your phone?" he asks, halfway through his examination of the corpse. "Mine's batteries are dead, and I need to send some notes to Inspector Lestrade; I hope you won't mind."
She does mind. She doesn't like men in long coats and blue scarves, even if she's forgotten exactly why and even if it was a childish reason to dislike such an ordinary thing. It's still a habit of hers. Molly just wants Sherlock Holmes to get away from her, away from the morgue. The thought of him touching her phone makes her flinch again, but she resigns to dig through her purse.
Her bag drops to the floor with a clatter as she fumbles with purse, phone, clipboard, pen, and graduated cylinder. With an irritated sigh, she bends down and scoops up the belongings back into her bag, setting the cylinder and clipboard down.
She hands the phone to the detective, who watches as she picks her belongings up from the tiled floor.
"You know," he comments, "if you want to go, you can. I'd like your help, but I'm fine on my own."
"It's my job to assist anyone who needs it, Mr. Holmes. Either way, I need to do an autopsy on Mr. Smith myself." She can't prevent herself from spitting out the word 'assist.'
"I imagine you'd rather be visiting your parents."
She freezes. Her breathing becomes rapid, her heart pounding an uneven rhythm. Molly tells herself not to lose it over some arrogant stranger, tries to prevent herself from tears and punching him right in the face for being so insensitive.
A moment passes.
"If you're not going to go, do you mind helping me with examining Mr. Smith's toes?"
-::-
After she helps help scrape residue off of Erwin Smith's toes, they sit at the lab upstairs, examining the contents. By now, Molly's resigned to the fact that he isn't going to go anytime soon, and since she was the only one working at the time, she had to stay with him.
She sits down with a cup of hot coffee, careful not to spill the drops of liquid over any of her equipment. He seems to know his way around the gears quite well, and she's grateful she won't be paying for repairs anytime soon. Sighing, she turns back to her microscope.
"There's traces of flower stems on his toes," she comments, identifying the cells.
"Dandelions, to be exact," he replies from his own microscope.
She cringes again, but she says nothing. It doesn't help that he's reminding her of all the reasons she was surrounded by corpses to begin with. Minutes pass, and finally, her curiosity gets the better of her.
"How did you know about my parents?"
"Your parents?" He doesn't look up.
"You said to me earlier downstairs, 'I imagine you would rather be visiting your parents.' How did you know about my parents?"
"I don't."
"You're telling me you made a guess?"
"No, I made an educated guess." He looks up from his microscope at her and narrows his eyes slightly. "When your belongings fell from your bag, I saw a parking ticket, the street by the cemetery. Of course, there's no parking lot in the cemetery, and the times stamped on the ticket revealed that you spent quite a lot of time inside the graveyard. You're surrounded by dead bodies, so why would you need to feel your life lacks Death? I concluded it was either one or more of your loved ones you were visiting.
"You don't strike me as someone who's romantic, and I don't see a ring on your hand. That rules out any romantic relationship or children. Parents it is. So, a woman who works at a morgue and visits the cemetery on a frequent basis is obviously mourning the loss of her parents. Not one, both. You're not the most emotional person I've come across, but you're sharper than the majority yet still so slow on the uptake. Don't be offended, mostly everyone is. Out there, however, anyone else with a mind like yours would've taken some other job. You work at a morgue to feel closer to your parents simply because there's no one in your life to tell you that you're throwing your life away.
"To expand on that, you flinched when you saw me. You didn't seem to realize it. That kind of behavior sprouts from childhood habits, and flinching suggests traumatic ones. The death of your beloved parents? Quite possibly. I took this factor into consideration and it all seemed to fit the puzzle well.
"In truth, Molly Hooper, you're just surrounded by dead bodies. It brings you no bit closer than you were to your parents than—"
"Are you done?" she asks, trying to contain her anger. She isn't used to interrupting people.
He looks into her eyes, and she knows he sees her bubbling rage. Sherlock Holmes doesn't lower his eyes by one fraction, nor does she see shame in his eyes. She realizes that to him, she is just another clock he dissected, gears he could piece together by his skills of observation. No one in this world is remotely human to him, just ticking clocks.
But then again, didn't she think so, too?
-::-
She sees him again from time to time while she works at the morgue, but she doesn't talk to him or try to make conversation. Molly's painfully aware of Sherlock's eyes on the back of her head, watching her ponytail swish as she walks past, deliberately training her eyes away.
She is just another clock to him, he's just another bump on the road for her.
-::-
Detective Lestrade comes to her the next day, asking to see a body.
"Didn't forensics examine this already?" Molly asks, leading him down to the morgue.
"Yeah." He lights a cigarette and blows a puff of smoke. She wants to tell him off for smoking in the hospital, but she doesn't. There was only so much damage you could do in a morgue. "There's someone else who's going to examine it. A consultant. We're out of depths on this one, and we're hoping he's going to pick up something we didn't."
"Who is it?" She opens a door for the detective.
"Well, his name's Sherlock, and he calls himself a consulting detective. Real asshole, just so you know. Sorry you're going to be working with him for the rest of the day."
-::-
She helps him identify more compounds and chemicals—acids and bases and everything in between. Molly doesn't know what he needed with the information, but she wants to help Lestrade close the case. Even though she likes to surround herself with corpses, she doesn't like murderers, criminals her father dedicated his life to stopping.
After this case, he turns to her for another. And another. And one more after that. During the next month, Molly finds herself spending more time with Sherlock than anyone in the last years.
It doesn't make her feel any more positively towards Sherlock, but it did have one benefit.
It's what her father did. Her father spent time in labs identifying chemicals and studying murder wounds like Sherlock. He spent his time helping England and catching murderers, dedicated his life to studying criminals.
For the first time in a long time, Molly feels close to her father.
-::-
"Solving cases," he comments one time. "Sure beats just surrounding yourself with the dead, huh?" She looks up to see him peering intently through a microscope. Without waiting for an answer, he continues, jotting down some notes with a pen. "You work at a morgue to feel closer to your parents, yes? Why not solve some murders along the way? It beats just dissecting them mindlessly."
"The world's not a clockwork gallery for me," she replies coldly, a fresh bout of anger fueling her words. "I don't solve crimes because I find it fun, unlike you. I find these mutilated bodies horrifying."
"Then why do you do it?"
Molly lowers her eyes, her anger vanishing as quickly as it had come. "My father was a detective, too."
She hears his confusion and the surprise, loud and clear.
"Acidic, pH scale number 4."
They go back to work, in silence.
-::-
She asks him if he wants some coffee on one sunny afternoon.
It's an unconscious choice of words. She's thirsty, and she's tired of watching him whip a fresh body to test for bruises. They may be attracted to dead corpses and they may be sociopaths, but Molly has her limits.
Over the past half year, they've worked on a total of seventy-eight bodies and fifty-two cases. Molly still thinks Sherlock is an insensitive prick of a man, but he's grown on her. She watches his movements with grudging admiration instead of indifference and disdain. His words hurt her less and less, and she finds that he treats everyone with the same attitude.
It's amusing for her at times, and she feels brighter around him on their good days. She doesn't know how to describe him—he's not exactly a friend, but he does keep her company, which is more than enough for Molly Hooper.
He asks for black coffee, two sugars, and she complies. Yawning, Molly Hooper walks to the coffee machine and pours two steaming cups.
She can't help but feel a little disappointed.
-::-
At Christmas, she plans to stay at home alone, like all the other holidays before. Molly celebrates alone because she has no one to celebrate with. She's generally okay with it, being alone. Years and years of living by herself has taught her how to handle loneliness.
Slowly, the impact of not having anyone around creeps back into her heart, and secretly, Molly wishes she and Sherlock could be something more than just partners and co-workers.
She's invited to a Christmas party for the first time in decades, and Molly jumps at the opportunity.
Hoopers were never fancy, but she does put on a dress and some make-up. It's been a long time since anyone's been kind enough to invite her to a Christmas party. Whispers do tend to follow one who surrounds herself with dead bodies. Molly knows this, and she smiles at the fact that they were all a group of people who belonged nowhere, unable to fit in.
When she shows up at the doorstep of 221B Baker Street, she hears Sherlock's violin. It makes her smile. She's starting to find the muscles around her mouth easier to move upward.
The smile which is quickly wiped away when he deduces her intentions. He doesn't realize that she's holding back tears, crying for herself, for her parents, for spending another Christmas alone.
"You always say such horrible things." She doesn't say anything else, nothing about the just for the sake of showing off part. No use in getting more people upset on Christmas Eve.
He's an asshole most if not all of the time—she knows it, Lestrade knows it, goodness knows John knows about that aspect of Sherlock. Even sweet little Mrs. Hudson had been a victim of his insensitivity.
Which is why she's so surprised when he apologizes to her.
He places a kiss on her cheek.
-::-
She talks to him about her grandfather, about the way he looked sad when he thought no one was looking. These days, Sherlock reminds Molly of her grandfather. He's dead on the inside. They're all dead on the inside, dead and empty.
He looks surprised to see she knows, that she sees.
Molly Hooper smiles bitterly. She doesn't count to Sherlock because she's just another gear in the universe of clockworks, but she understands that dead and empty feeling. She wants to say thank you to Sherlock, just because he helped her overcome that years ago when they met. He said things that hurt her every step along the way, but he told her that surrounding yourself with corpses and lab equipment isn't helping her getting closer to her parents. Being close to them is doing what they tried to do, to make a change in the world.
Her job is helping.
There's not a lot she can do for him, for anyone. She helps them, of course, she helps them solve mysteries and does the work the great minds around her don't have the time for. That's all she is, a gear in an endlessly ticking clock, her job being running things as smoothly as possible.
Molly Hooper doesn't save lives, but she still tells him she's there to help.
"Why would I need your help?"
She walks away before he sees the tears in her eyes.
-::-
Molly isn't a heroine, and she isn't married to the idea that she is.
All she does for Sherlock is shove a corpse out the window at the right time, in time to fake his death.
Apparently, that is enough to save one life, and that is important enough for her. It doesn't matter if Sherlock's an asshole and infuriating to the point where Molly sometimes thinks he doesn't deserve to be saved, and she knows he thinks so as well.
But he is one of the only people in her life to show her some degree of welcome, even a dash of kindness, that she mattered in some little way, that she could do so much more with her life.
Sherlock makes Molly realize she is important, and that is enough for her.
-::-
She knows it's impossible for him to come back to London. He's gone, he's off in the wind solving crimes elsewhere, he can't come back. The world knows him as a suicidal fake genius, but she knows different. John, Lestrade, Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson—they know differently. She smiles, realizing that in some impossible way, Sherlock has also made them realize their importance in this world.
Molly doesn't count on seeing him again, and maybe that was for the better.
-::-
She finds a dandelion on her desk that night.