I've been fascinated with the character of Molly Hooper for a while. This is my take on the past and present story of Molly. I hope you can follow my intended jumps between past and present.
Molly Hooper had always loved singing. People always sang at important events, like birthdays and weddings, ceremonies and funerals. It was one of the reasons she had loved going to church as a little girl, the hymns and music. No one stared at her when she sang, because when she was singing, the stutter went away.
"Please Jimmy, just watch it." She was begging him now. "No, really, I don't want to." A cup of tea changed hands. "You'll like it. Please? Just do it for me. If you don't like it after fifteen minutes we can change the channel. I promise." The episode finished with two cold, untouched cups of tea on the coffee table.
He'd always been asking her to sing with him, as he played unrecognisable melodies on his tiny violin. He'd started playing violin at the age of 5 and even though their mother had asked Molly if she wanted to learn an instrument, she always refused. She liked to sing. Her voice would be her instrument.
She began to sing her favourite song, Edelweiss. The Sound of Music had been her favourite film as a child and even now, Julie Andrews was still her idol. Some might say it was disrespectful to sing around the dead, but she disagreed. Her job was to determine causes of death and she had seen some truly horrific injuries. She cut and sliced into bodies, she removed organs. Singing to those who were in eternal rest was not showing a lack of respect, not to her. She saw it as an natural extension of the mourning ritual. Even if she never knew them in life, she could still mourn them in death both by finding out how they died, and singing to them as they began their eternal rest.
They were going to be famous, the two of them. He would play the violin and she would sing. Twelve years old, a twin duo. The Hoopers. Molly would talk about all of the albums they would have, all the concerts they would perform. Mitchell would talk about all the interviews and the appearances, and Molly would get nervous. If she had to talk, then everyone would know about her stutter. Sometimes she would cry when they were talking about the interviews, and Mitchell would say he was sorry and they would watch horror films together.
She hadn't seen Jim for four days and he wasn't answering her calls or replying to her texts. No one in the IT department had seen or heard from him either. After 72 hours, she reported him missing. Now, she was lying on the sofa, drinking cheap red wine as she sang a slurred version of "My Heart Will Go On". Toby purred softly as he stretched across her ankles, a duet of human and cat.
They said it was quick and that he wouldn't have felt a thing. They'd only turned thirteen several weeks earlier. Now, having just had a celebratory birthday party, they were planning a funeral. Their mother wanted Molly to do a speech, but she knew she couldn't. As a final goodbye to her twin brother, Molly would sing. She would never forget the way her voice shook as she tried to gently sing "Wind Beneath My Wings". The autopsy said it was the massive head trauma that killed him. It was then that she decided she wanted to become a medical examiner. It was then that Molly Hooper's life changed forever.
She was asleep on the sofa when the knock on the door came. She slowly got up and stumbled to her feet, praying that it would be news about Jim. Little did she know just what the news would be. If she had, she might not of opened the door to find Detective-Inspector Lestrade standing solemly at the door. If she had, she might not have invited him in. But she didn't know, and she did let him in. So she found out that her boyfriend was a psychopathic serial killer with a penchant for semtex. She found out that her boyfriend was responsible for the murder of several of the bodies that she herself had examined. It was then that Molly Hooper's life changed forever.
She rarely spoke outside her therapy sessions in the years that followed. Therapy for her stutter, therapy for her grief. She was an only child now. Her father had left, unable to cope with the loss of his only son. She only saw him on the increasingly rare occasions when he wasn't drunk out of his mind. She'd never really had much confidence in herself, but her self image was completely shattered. For the first thirteen years of her lif, her identity had been based on being a twin, a half of a whole. Suddenly she was just a half and she wasn't sure who she was anymore. She had few friends because most of her classmates didn't understand her speech impediment and mocked her relentlessly. She grew more and more withdrawn, throwing herself into reading. Every book on the human body she could find. One day, Molly Hooper was going to be the one who looked after the dead. She would be the one who made sure that no one died without being noticed, remembered. She would be the one who learned how someone died.
She'd had trust issues since she was a child, having learned at an early age that letting people in to see the real you almost invaribly led to them abusing trust. Yet here she was, at 31 years of age, finally allowing herself to trust and still she got it all wrong. First she went and fell in love with a sociopath who appeared to be either gay or asexual and couldn't care less about her feelings. Then she had gone and become smitten with an IT consultant who turned out to be a psychopathic criminal mastermind who was partially responsible for keeping her in a job. For a moment, she was thirteen again, a shattered young girl who was mourning the loss of someone she loved. Because she had loved Jim. But the Jim she knew and loved was dead. He no longer existed. Some would say he had never existed, but that would be like saying that a fictional character had never existed. Just because Jim from IT had been a fictional creation, an act, did not make him non-existent. It just meant that he ceased to exist when the fiction ended. Jim no longer existed, there was only Moriarty.
The first time her speech therapist suggested she try talking to an animal, Molly thought she was mad. How could an animal possibly help? But hermother immediately went out and bought a kitten at the therapists request. Within a month, Molly's stutter had improved more than it had in the two years previous. She found it oddly comforting to have something alive to listen and know that it wasn't judging you and that it didn't mind if she stuttered a bit. She'd given it a simple name, Ron, which she thought was a silly name for a cat but it made her laugh. She didn't have trouble with R's. She still didn't talk very often, but she knew that she could if she had to.
She couldn't go back to work, not yet. She suddenly had no confidence in her abilities as an examinor. Any assurance in her capabilities had been swept away by the constant undermining of her opinions and conclusions by Sherlock. Even when she was correct, he still made her feel like she was an idiot. That and the morgue made her think of Jim. She didn't want to think of Jim. Singing made her think of Jim, so she didn't do that either.
By eighteen, Molly didn't stutter anymore, unless she was in high stress situations. She made an hour long commute to university every day so that she could see Ron. She was top of her class, having studied so much of what they were learning already of her own volition. She was good, she knew she was. This was what she wanted to do, who she wanted to be. For the first time in her life, Molly felt comfortable in being her own person. She was no longer the lost half. She was a whole person.
Doctor Watson was the first to notice something was wrong. Sherlock had observed the weight loss, naturally, but had failed to make any deductions from it. John, having heard said observations, immediately came to a correct conclusion. Molly had stopped eating properly. He confronted her and she didn't have the strength to even pretend she was okay. People seemed to be under the impression that she cried often, but the truth was that she rarely cried. But when John told her that he was genuinely concerned about her wellbeing, she broke down and sobbed. Unrestrained emotion, pouring out of her. She felt like she was falling apart, crumbling. The whole was becoming a half again.
The day she graduated was one of the happiest days of Molly's life. By that evening, she had her 'piece of paper' framed and hanging on the wall. Above it, a picture of Mitchell and her on their thirteenth birthday. She smiled, tears making her vision blur. If there was an afterlife, she hoped that he was as proud of her as she was of him.
She was in therapy again. John wasn't stupid, he knew the underlying reason for her eating was psychological. She'd stopped going to her speech therapist, and her stutter was beginning to return. She wanted to talk, but she didn't want to trust. How was she supposed to talk to a stranger about her problems when she wasn't sure she would ever be able to trust again?
She never understood the people who said they hated their jobs. She loved hers with such enthusiasm that it frightened some people who didn't understand that it wasn't the death that fascinated her, but the investigation. So when the tall, thin man with excitement in his eyes entered the morgue asking questions that weren't the kind that the police normally asked, she was naturally intrigued. She enquired after him, finding that he wasn't an official member of the law enforcement, but a private consultant. A child prodigy, a master of logic, and a skilled violinist. The last part was the bit that really caught her attention. Violins reminded her of Mitchell, skilled violinists even more so. That was the beginning of her infatuation with Sherlock Holmes.
It was three months before she returned to work. Sherlock seemed to be walking on eggshells around her and she had a feeling that had something to do with John. She was grateful for it. A personal breakthrough came when she detected a particularly subtle murder, she knew only highly skilled medical examinors would have been capable of noticing. She got home from work that evening in high spirits and as she stirred a pot of vegetable soup on the stove, she softly began to sing.