Freak
Author's Note: Sorry for the long delay to all of those waiting for the next chapter of my Sherlock/Doctor Who, been doing a lot of work on an e-book I was writing. Don't worry—I still love writing Sherlock stuff. This is a little short piece about Molly inspired by The Fades.
She doesn't know exactly when this started, but she knows it's been with her as long as she could remember there being anything. She had to wonder if she had seen them before that, the un-ascended dead that roamed the streets of town and stood on roof tops aching for the contact and closeness of their lost lives.
The ladder to heaven had broken a long time ago and it might have been meant to be, but Molly Hooper didn't think that made it fair. The same way she never thought it was fair that she'd been burdened with this—burdened with being a freak for so long that she treated it like it wasn't there.
They called people like her Angelics, or that was something people like her called themselves. When she first found out about them and learned their practices she knew right away that she didn't want any part in it.
Molly would help the dead in her own way, after all that was how she'd gotten this job, how she got by in life, how she learned to cope with me being lonely. The dead were always around her, they seemed to be able to tell that she could see them even if she tried not to let on. She didn't try to hide it from them, thought. There was no shame in being different.
They called her a freak and shoved her when she was little and made fun of her because she was a little too curious around graveyards. (Only because so many of them were gathered in there) Maybe a girl is too old to have an imaginary friend in sixth form, but that taught her a valuable lesson about when it was okay to talk to them.
The Fades…
She had never liked the name, not because it didn't fit them. There wasn't anything better she could think of. Molly had always been terrible at naming things. Her cat was only called Toby because she got him a day after seeing Pleasantville. Molly supposed that she didn't like the name Fades because of the man who had first informed her of it and what she was.
His name was Neil, though she wondered if he was telling the truth about that. He tried to get her to leave her life behind to help him…and what he said that he wanted to do seemed more like warfare than anything she would call angelic.
He stuck around for a week, coming into Bart's at all hours of the night and day to bother her. The Fades that were there didn't like him. The ones that could talk told her themselves while the others just stayed away.
Molly thought he would have never left and he might not have if Sherlock hadn't blown into her lab that same week like he owned the place. Neil couldn't come and go as he pleased with Sherlock sulking around the examination tables night and day on a case. It was the first case that Molly ever saw him work and driving Neil out had been the first good thing Sherlock had ever done in presence.
One night when Molly was leaving the hospital she overheard Sally Donovan calling Sherlock a freak. She recognized the tone and severity of the hatred in the words because she'd had similar sentiment direct at her.
Being a freak didn't really matter to her anymore and with the way the words rolled off of Sherlock's back they apparently didn't matter to him either. But as Molly watched him stroll off into the night and pop that huge black umbrella open over his head she smiled thinking that if she had to be considered a freak—it was nice to be in such good company.