Molly Hooper had a surprisingly long and complicated relationship with cigarette smoke.
When she was a child and still known largely as "Little Lizzy Hooper," she loved the smell of cigarettes. Specifically, the scent of Player's No. 6; her dad's favorite. He'd had to switch when they stopped making them in the early 90's but she'd never forget that particular scent. It smelled of home. It smelled of looming ends.
After her mother died, her father went from a pack every week or two depending on how stressful work was, to a pack a day. The scent that once lingered lightly in the cushions of his favorite chair and curled about their humble home like a lazy cat turned into clouds of smog in every room and butts littering every inch of their property. Still, though it was so thick little Little Lizzy thought her hair would still be smelling of Player's when she was as old and wrinkly as a prune, it was the smell of home and of her loving father. It did, however, become the source of much grumbling as her teen years crept upon her, despite her fondness for it.
People were more enlightened about the risks of tobacco in the mid 90's when Mr. Hooper was first diagnosed with oral cancer. But gentle recommendations to ease off the fags from a waify doctor with a posh accent that barely saw fit to make eye contact did little to convince the stubborn, working class man with grease permanently etched into the creases of his heavy hands. He'd never quite recovered from the loss of his soul mate and had less than no idea what to do with Molly as she barreled head first into puberty. A posh doctor with a nice car and a stay at home wife to mind his kids didn't know the first thing about being a widowed single father and if fags helped him get through the day, then he'd keep smoking like a damn chimney to keep himself sane for his little girl. Even if the surgeries to remove the tumors left the lower half of his face rather mutilated and gave him a bloody terrible lisp even his best mates could barely understand him through, he was alive and his little Lizzy didn't flinch a bit at kissing his scarred cheeks nearly every night before bed.
Sad then, that it was lung cancer that got him in the end.
After that, Molly Hooper (there was no one around to call her "Lizzy," anymore) went away to university and left behind her love of permeating cigarette smoke. She spent the first half of her time at school disdaining the fags that took her father and the drink that murdered her mother. She dogged through her studies, through the classism and sexism of her professors and peers, through the "I'm sure it's just a phase" she always got from her academic planning councilor who—without fail—suggested a switch to nursing on every visit. She held her head high and kept her humor through the pity when people realized she was poor, realized she was an orphan, realized she didn't really have any friends despite her cheery disposition. She worked part time and odd jobs to pay her way. She managed scholarships and carved out a place for herself. But every Hooper had a vice, a little devil to lean on when things were hard—when there wasn't anyone else to count on.
It was with the end in sight that Molly felt the weary weight of it all. And all it took was a half polite invitation to a party from her roommate to rekindle Molly Hooper's complex relationship with deadly vices. The music had been far too loud. The people inside far too rowdy, far too familiar with each other. She recognized so many faces, so many people; but no one recognized her. And why should they? She wasn't anyone.
Eventually, she'd sought the relief of some fresh air, lingering outside, unsure if she was supposed to wait for her roommate to leave or if the social rules allowed her to duck out without a fuss. (The other girl had been rather quick to vanish into the crowd, rather blatantly ditching Molly at the door.) Then the drifting whiffs of tobacco had curled about her, purring against her senses like the lazy cat she remembered from a lifetime ago. There were still plenty of people who smoked all about campus, it wasn't as if it were the first time she'd smelt burning tobacco since her father's passing. But for some reason—perhaps the fingers of whiskey she'd liberated from the kitchen horde and quickly downed, perhaps the looming mid-terms she wasn't entirely sure she was at all prepared for, perhaps the nerves that still shook her from the humiliation she'd endured from a particularly ancient professor—these teasing whiffs outside a party well on its way to becoming a rager, they struck a cord in her.
Her mother's hair looked properly copper in the sun that filtered through their living room window, into the tiny room. It was mussed from her cleaning rampage, the loose wisps catching the light to make a halo about her head. Her father was a giant compared to her mother—but everyone looked giant compared to her mother, really. He wasn't just taller than her, though, he was bigger. He was a brick house of a man, not an inch of him soft. He'd worked hard, hard labor all his life and it showed. Lots of folks thought her father was a bit terrifying, a bad sort. But here, having a shuffle about the room with his little wife, his head dipped low to tuck against her ruffled head, murmuring into her hair, making her giggle and slap his shoulder with her bright yellow washing gloves still on and utterly forget her tears of frustration; he was simply a man very much in love.
She had forgotten that moment. She had forgotten that moment of peaceful happiness and that broke her heart. With open arms, she welcomed cigarettes back into her life, filling her lungs with them in her father's stead. It quickly became a bit of a game of Russian roulette, however, as sometimes the smoking brought peaceful little moments of her childhood back to the forefront of her mind and sometimes... sometimes they brought back the long nights of listening to her father sob in his chair in the living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette as if to burn the tears from his eyes. When they started bringing the memories of doctors and hospital rooms and the eight month death that dragged out without a bit of mercy, Molly found a friend in whiskey.
Never enough to be a real problem—never like the binge drinking so prevalent with some of her peers—but enough to take the edge off of the bad moments. Enough to avoid the problems, numb the loneliness a bit, enough to let her pretend she was alright. (She'd never know her father had done much the same through the years, when the quiet was simply too much.)
Then she failed her first class. Despite her years of diligent hard word, despite her years and years of excellent work, of pristine academic achievement, every idiot of authority clucked their tongue with some sort of grown up variant of, "Well, I did tell you so, you poor sweet girl. Have you thought about nursing?" Well, they could all go straight to hell. Molly Hooper did not quit on her dreams. Molly Hooper did not quit, full stop.
She dabbled with a few helpful aides, various medications meant to focus the mind, and found Adderall was, by and large, the most effective and alarmingly easy to get her hands on. Balancing work and academia was much easier when she hardly needed to sleep any more, when she could get a little pick-me-up whenever she felt herself fading. A bit of chewing gum during the day, a mouth guard at night, and she wouldn't even have to worry about long term damage to her body! Cigarettes, whiskey, and a steady dosage of Adderall fueled Molly through the home stretch of her uni days. And through those last years at uni, wrapped up in the scent of tobacco once again, Molly had felt rather like her father was watching over her.
The unpleasantness of slowly weaning herself off the Adderall turned her off her other vices for a brief period, though her dislike of tobacco still wasn't as strong as it had been after her father's passing. A balancing of the unhealthy relationship with the silent killers.
Then Sherlock bloody Holmes had waltzed into her life, chain smoking his way through NSY cases and the withdrawal of seven percent solutions. Needless to say, the new association of Sherlock to the scent of burning tobacco did not simplify Molly's complex relationship with cigarettes.
To this day, Molly could never seem to make up her mind about the scent. Mostly, she hated it; even if a wave of nostalgia occasionally tried to knock her off her feet on the rare times she passed by the smokers' benches. Cigarettes had tied themselves to men she loved dearly, men that died long before their time in very ugly, heart breaking ways. But as the spring air of London carded its fingers through her jumper, strong breezes pulling at her hair, her eyes closed to the world as she stood nearly unnoticed on her perch, she found some comfort in the sweet, sweet scent of Sebastian's tobacco.
Sebastian Moran didn't buy his cigarettes like Sherlock and her father. Moran was quite picky about his tobacco; had some friend send him a parcel of it from some secret place he'd not name (though she did very much enjoy the faces he made when she guessed at purposefully outlandish points of origin). Maybe it was this mystical tobacco that made the smoke so sweet, so unique. He even rolled his own, not bothering with filters, and kept them in a battered cigarette case.
"If I live long enough for the cigarettes to kill me, I'll be a lucky man." He'd said the first and last time he caught her looking at him a bit worried while he smoked on her back step. Never again did she hesitate to love the scent of his tobacco, never again did she have one bit of conflict over Moran's purring tobacco.
"Makin' me nervous, Hooper," he drawled. He'd come pluck her from the edge if she lingered too long. In the early days, it had been more often that not that he had to do so. She still sometimes lingered until he came and got her, secretly glad for the reassurance that he would pull her back from her own dangerous self when she need.
But not today. Today was not a bad day. So, instead, she opened her eyes, took in the vista of bustling London before her, slowly from right to left before her gaze wandered down to the street so very far below. She couldn't make out the stain on the pavement anymore; not from here, at least. The world was moving on from Sherlock Holmes. And perhaps that was for the better.