Thanks to everyone who has favorited, followed, or commented! It keeps me going. Thanks a million to LilSherlockian1975 for betaing even through computer issues.
The day that Molly Hooper found out she was a Jedi was the best day of her life. She was thirteen and had a life that she supposed she couldn't complain about. She was fed and dressed and not mistreated. However, sometimes it didn't really feel like a life at all.
Molly's father had died two years ago. She knew her mother loved her, but Mum's method of grieving seemed to be keeping herself as busy as possible. Her parents were older than most; she had the impression she'd been a bit of a surprise. Now that Dad was gone, Molly couldn't help but feel like an imposition on her mother's carefully ordered life. She had learned to do most things for herself and just tried to stay out of the way. She'd always been closer to her father anyway.
Dad had always played fantastic games with her when he was alive - "Can you get all the way to the end of the road without anyone spotting you, little one?" or "Can you find me up in the trees?" They had taken Hide and Seek to new and inventive levels. Dad had taught her how to hide, how to make herself unremarkable in a crowd, and how to climb and swing in the tall olbio trees near their house.
Molly was a shy child, and her classmates were often cruel. Most of the friends she'd made in primary school had not gone to her secondary school, and she found herself frequently alone and lonely. Alone was better than being teased and bullied, so she'd put energy into staying that way. It hadn't been much of a leap from playing hiding games to actually hiding. In school she worked to fade into the background, slipping between other students in a sea of movement between classes too quickly for anyone to catch her. She disappeared at lunchtime to read in a disused storage cupboard (She'd "borrowed" a key from a custodian long enough to make a copy, then returned it while he was going to the bathroom. Another trick she'd learned from Dad's games.). After school, she would scurry outside as soon as the bell rang and climb a tree, high enough that she could hide in the leaves.
Her constant companion was the lizard creature who lived in the tree. Its talons were sunk into the tree, drawing the nutrients it needed to survive (and ensuring that she had a captive audience). She had named it Toby for the wizard's cat in her favorite book. It always seemed quieter in the tree, as if there were a constant buzzing in her ears that she only noticed once it was absent. She would lay in the sun-warmed branches reading until everyone, teachers and bullies alike, had left. No one was waiting for her at home anyway.
Until the day that someone was. A man with dark blonde hair, a kind face, and a brown robe had been sitting on her front porch as if he belonged there. His outfit seemed familiar- she knew she'd seen it in a book or in vids somewhere.
They stood calmly sizing each other up for several moments.
"Are you a Jedi?" she asked.
He smiled. "Are you?"
Luke Skywalker had come to Myrkr following a faint trace of a rumor that a Jedi had escaped here after the Clone Wars. She learned that the ysalamiri, lizard creatures like her friend Toby, repelled the force in bubbles around themselves. It was the reason her tree and her house had felt so peaceful; her home was surrounded by the olbio trees that the creatures made their homes in. Separated from the Force, she couldn't feel the thrum of life and echo of other's thoughts that had unknowingly followed her all her life.
Skywalker had never found the Jedi he'd been looking for, but he did find Molly. It had not been difficult to convince her mother to allow her to go to Yavin to train as a Jedi.
He collected another trainee on the way to the academy - a tiny Chadra-Fan woman with huge bat-like ears and the face of a rodent. Meena was already an adult, but was so deeply silly that she made Molly feel a wise old woman by comparison. The two were fast friends by the time they arrived at the academy. They were given a room to share and a friendship that was easier and more fun than any she had ever known.
Ben Solo was already at the academy when she arrived. He was two years her junior, the youngest person by far at the academy and painfully lonely. She knew what it was to be lonely, and felt an instant kinship with the boy. They had formed a friendship based in that shared understanding. She had always felt he was keeping something from her, but had supported him through his contrary moods nonetheless.
Henry Knight, a young Miralukan had arrived a year later with other padawans that Master Skywalker had sought out. He was awkward and shell shocked by the life he had led before arriving at the academy, near her own age. She found herself befriending him and helped him to understand the rhythm of life at the academy. She never pushed for details about what his life had been before Yavin, but eventually he had shared the burden of his memories. Molly realized she may have a tendency for "collecting" the lost and lonely.
It was a strange life, full of meditation, lightsaber practice, and bettering her unusual talents. No one else had shown interest or skill at Jedi concealment and deception, so many of her lessons were one-on-one with Master Skywalker.
It was strange, but it was hers. As far as she was concerned, it was positively brilliant.
And then Sherlock Holmes came to the academy. Two years her senior, Sherlock had been seventeen and was possibly the most beautiful person she'd ever seen up close. It wasn't his cheekbones or his ridiculously perfect hair or the fact that he wore Jedi robes the way a king might wear the finest silk. It wasn't even that he was breathtakingly intelligent (though watching him deduce fellow students to tears should probably not have been as erotic as she found it).
More than anything, it was the way his personality was so intense, so large that it shone out of him. His body seemed almost too small for everything that he was. He was somehow more alive than everyone else. She wouldn't have been surprised to learn he'd become Force-sensitive by sheer willpower. He reminded her of Master Skywalker a bit actually. As if someday you'd be sitting around in a pub, and you'd be proud to say you met him once.
Meena always said that Sherlock was like window shopping for fancy shoes - "Nice to look at and maybe even think about taking for a spin, Molly-Olly, but you wouldn't really want to own them. They'd pinch you." Then she would let out her squeaky bark of a laugh and remark on his appalling lack of ear hair. "Everyone knows that the length of a man's ear hair is directly proportional to how long his…" It was always at this point that Molly would tune out and try very hard to think about the Force.
She herself thought that Sherlock was a bit like a museum sculpture - just being near it was lovely and made you feel as if you were a small part of something bigger than yourself, but you shouldn't have any designs on bringing it home with you.
If sometimes late at night she thought about… well, about bringing him home with her… she would try very hard to have forgotten about those thoughts by morning.
Molly wished she could say they were friends, but friends actually talked to each other. They studied together frequently as they were learning many of the same skills, but they rarely discussed anything outside what they were learning. In addition to making her even more tongue-tied than normal, being near him forced her to focus on shielding her mind. Sherlock was quite adept at telepathy; it would be completely mortifying for him to pick up one of her more lascivious thoughts. Her telepathic skills had actually improved quite a bit as a consequence. She suspected Skywalker or Soo Lin would probably not want to know that the reason for her excellent mental shielding had to do with thinking about a fellow student while she was in the shower.
Victor would understand, though, and not just because he probably also thought about Sherlock Holmes in the shower. Victor would understand because he, better than any of the new Jedi, embraced imperfection and then let it go.
In the Old Republic, Jedi had been carefully selected and trained from infancy that attachment was the way of the dark side. At the new academy, Master Skywalker sought out and trained anyone with force ability regardless of their age or level of potential. Relationships were the least of his concern and she suspected (though he would never say so) that he wanted a new generation of Jedi babies far more than he cared about the risks.
Every year, he found more force-sensitives to study at the academy. Recently it had become well known enough that people had started showing up on their own for training as Sherlock had done. It had been all anyone could talk about at the time, as his brother was on the rise in the new government. He could have been anything with his gifts and social connections, but chose the Jedi academy. Molly had never followed galactic politics much, and had never heard of Mycroft Holmes, but he was apparently quite popular.
Ben disliked the older boy instantly; they'd been aware of each other in a general way as they both had family in government (even she wasn't so clueless as to be unaware of Leia Organa's position). Strangely, the more Molly grew to like the taller boy, the more her friend hated him.
The mutual animosity grew over the next three years. She'd felt Ben slip farther and farther from her, especially in the past few months.
The two had their own spot in the jungle where they'd sit on a large, flat-ish rock and often read from the same data pad. Heads together, long cinnamon colored hair would mix with black (always slightly greasy; he detested the showers on Yavin which could never compare to the Capitol worlds') while they read, warm in the sunshine. She patiently listened whenever he was upset, usually at his uncle for refusing to teach him the advanced Force skills that he felt he was ready for. It was a bit like having Toby back again but so much better, more like having a younger brother. It made her feel as if she had family again.
Lately though, he had refused to read with her, refused walks in the jungle (he would walk, she swung laughing through the trees and tossed palm fronds and nuts at him), and refused late night impromptu parties with Henry and Meena in her room. Last month had been Molly's 18th birthday. Meena had smuggled a bottle of Tagree, a bitingly strong form of alcohol from her homeworld, all the way to Yavin for the occasion. Ben had turned down her invitation to celebrate with them, though she knew he was doing nothing more taxing than brooding in his room.
She had hoped he had simply decided to get serious about his Jedi studies and was trying to eliminate worldly attachment. However she saw the way the Masters watched him, felt the turbulence within him, and worried.
She hadn't worried enough. Even Molly's nightmares could not have prepared her for today.
Today she had held Meena's small hand from under a table while watching her jerk and writhe, gasping for a breath that would never come. She had held eye contact with her dearest friend until there was nothing left behind round yellow eyes that had held so much mirth and warmth only this morning.
Today she had most likely killed a man for his gun. She waited until a trooper had walked out of sight from his unit and strangled him from behind until he stopped struggling. It turned out to have been completely pointless. Victor was dead when she got back. When she saw how outnumbered they were, she hid like a coward.
Today she watched Ben kill Henry. She could remember a time not so long ago when they'd all had a popcorn war and had found kernels in unlikely places for days. Telekinesis and very high speeds had been involved. Ben had caught the neck of his friend's shirt and dumped an entire bag into it; the popcorn had collected at the waist and made Henry look rather pregnant. They'd teased him for weeks.
Henry and Dorsk together had lasted less than five minutes fighting Ben and another of the helmeted Sith. Of the two opponents, Ben chose to fight his friend rather than Dorsk. Henry had never been a fighter - he'd been training to be a diplomat. He went down quickly.
It was then Molly remembered Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock, meditating in the jungle. Sherlock, probably on his way back to them now, alerted to death and danger but not to the extent of it.
Sherlock, who had always seemed more alive than everyone else and who she wasn't too late to keep that way. If she could save him, there would be a purpose to her still being alive when her friends were either dead or murderers.
So she shot him. She would shoot him a hundred times to keep him alive (Molly was distantly aware of how bizarre that sentiment was). Someday, she could sit in a pub and tell the story of saving the famous Sherlock Holmes.
But she wouldn't. If she survived (and that was a big if), she was never going to talk about this day again.