A/N: This was written for the Ladies of Sherlock Challenge #3 on tumblr: winter wonderland.
If this feels incomplete it's because, basically, it is. I didn't have any larger place I was going to take it (at least not that I remember), but I was going to pull it together a bit more. But I ran out of time. I might come back and rework it later. Or I might not.
x
The winter before her father dies, Molly spends a whole afternoon with her cousins, building a snowman in her aunt's backyard. The do an exceptionally good job. She's the oldest in the group, already in uni, old enough to know her father won't get better, old enough, too, to see the pity on her family members' faces when they look at her. It's impossible. That's why she likes her youngest cousins best. The snowman is more important to them than that world inside, the adults and their tense conversations, the silences that fall too often over them and everyone waiting for an event they will not name. (It won't happen until spring, but they're already poised. They tell themselves it could happen any day now, any day.)
Her father was always jovial, good0hearted and open. Sweets in his pockets, bedtime stories for the nieces and nephews, and for his little Molly-Moon when she was small. She liked the fantastic tales best. Men in the moon and people back from the dead. She knows now that her father used to go off-script for her, that her favourite twists and turns and sudden surprise third acts came from her father's bright imagination, that some of her happy endings are false, but so too are her zombies and her ghosts. She does know the endings that the others know.
Subsequently, she has learned to trust no ending.
This is also why she does not wish to visit him.
The base of the snowman takes the longest time to form. It takes two small cousins and Molly herself to roll it around the garden, a misshapen ball at first, formed of heavy, wet December snow. They let it rest at last, in sight of the kitchen window, where the adults the real adults cooking dinner, cannot help but see. The youngest tries to wrap his arms around it, but it dwarves him. Molly picks him up and sets him atop their snowman base, where he takes on a hybrid appearance, half snowman, half boy. He claps his hands and powdery white snow flutters.
Molly never built snowmen with her father. She'd assumed the activity would hold no memories for her, but everything does. Breakfast, the view from her window, the book on her bedside, her socks. Sometimes it's as if he's already gone. She wonders if he can see them from his bedroom window, where is he and has been resting, and if this vision of their playfulness makes him smile.
Perhaps not.
The snow is wet and heavy; her arms start to hurt as together the cousins (she helps to roll) the middle section of the snowman into a smooth, round ball. They are improving. Molly does most of the lifting when they stack the middle onto the base. Then it's only the head that is left.
Later, she will visit her father's room. She will think that there is something different about him, something beyond his illness [that has altered him]. Something solemn and thoughtful about his face. He still remembers her. He calls her Molly-Moon. For a long time, she sits and holds his hand.
She won't remember what they talked about, or if they talked, but she'll carry with her the image of his hand in hers and the way the forced smile on his face slips away, not because she stops looking at him, but because she looks so long he cannot help but allow his real face to show.