(no subject)
FINALLY I post this fic, which is for the beautiful apple_pathways! It's for sherlockmas and is way late, which is terrible as I mod that comm. But! Today is her birthday so let's say this delay is fortuitous rather than a result of my disorganisation. This fic is WAY out of my comfort zone due to the characters, but I hope she - and you - enjoy it.
Title: No Surprises
Rating: R
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Molly/Jim
Wordcount: 2000-ish ballpark
Warnings: references to sex and murder
If this was a story, there would be some grand reveal where the reader discovered Molly had been an evil mastermind all along, that her nervous smiles and her cat-themed blog had all been a ruse that had managed to fool even Sherlock Holmes. That would explain quite neatly why she had done what she had done. But this isn’t a story; it’s simply what happened. Molly Hooper loved cats, and helped her elderly neighbour with her shopping, and in the autumn of 2010 she killed a man in cold blood.
A lot of things happened before then, of course. But at the beginning and end of it all were the same three letters. Jim.
She’d liked him at first because he liked her. He was quite good looking, and he was sweet, but the most important thing was that he liked her. He didn’t need her help - in fact, he helped her with her computer problems - and he didn’t seem that interested in her job. He just liked her. He said that she smelled of apples, and she was glad he’d noticed because she’d bought the DKNY Be Delicious in a nervy attempt to be more fashionable, her usual Anaïs Anaïs put back in the drawer which it had over the years faintly scented with rose and lily. When he kissed her his lips trembled, and that meant she didn’t mind that the kiss itself was clumsy.
And then Sherlock had to spoil everything, sweeping in with his long coat and his mean remarks, and he’d said Jim was gay. Molly didn’t want to believe him, but she did almost as soon as he’d said it. Not because Jim seemed gay to her, but because she’d been waiting, that past fortnight, for the other shoe to drop. To find out what Jim really wanted with her. Apparently this time it was to be a - what did people call it? - a beard. That evening, humiliated, she’d picked a fight with him. His face had closed down, and he had looked for a minute like someone else, someone she’d never met. She felt her breath catch, heart drumming with something like fear and not like fear at all, and then he was leaving, door slamming behind him.
She hadn’t heard from him in days. His desk at work was empty, like he’d never been there. “He was just a temp,” said the head of IT. “Sometimes they just quit,” he added, in the tones of a man used to disappointment. Jim’s phone went straight to voicemail, a standard Vodafone “the person you have called...” message, and her emails went unanswered. By the end of the week she was worried enough that she’d forgotten to be angry any more. If he was gay, it was ok. Maybe he just needed a friend. She could be that, if he wanted.
Then the police had shown up at Bart’s, and she’d found out Jim had another name. Moriarty. At least now she had the comfort of knowing he’d fooled everybody - even Sherlock.
Even Sherlock.
That night she’d felt ashamed as she came gasping against her own hand, thinking you’re smarter than Sherlock, and I kissed you. I kissed you. But it didn’t stop her doing it again a few days later. Maybe the shame even made it better, somehow. She kept googling his name, but the only references she found were for a character in some old book. April turned to May, Sherlock came out of hospital and was the same as always, the police investigation faltered and then ground to a halt. Life went on, and Molly still didn’t know anything more about Jim. So she did what she had to do. She started to learn about computers.
Sometimes people treated Molly like she wasn’t very clever, because she blinked too much when she talked to them and her laugh could be a bit shrill. But she hadn’t got a job like hers at a place like Bart’s without being smart, and so although she’d started out not knowing much about using a computer beyond Microsoft Office and Hotmail, soon she knew how to do all sorts of things. Track ISPs - and hide them. Find personal data on almost everyone she knew. It took many long, painstaking hours, filling up evenings that had been previously occupied with knitting or watching TV or trying out a ceramics class, but at last she began to find traces of him. Nothing very much, and sometimes the clues were so small, so faint, she wondered if she was falling victim to wishful thinking. But really she knew that wasn’t true. He was there, and although he’d tried to erase himself, he’d left marks behind.
At first she’d tried to hide that she was looking for him, but then she realised that someone as brainy as Jim would know. When she thought she was tiptoeing virtually, he probably heard her elephant footfalls from miles away. She didn’t want him to laugh at her - “Poor Molly, she actually thinks she’s being clever” - and so she started to think of ways she could let him know she was looking. So she registered on forums with handles that were puns on his names, and she wrote long blog entries about her cat Toby that were code for a simple message: where are you? After the first post she lay awake all night, afraid that Sherlock would read it and decipher the code, and he would know she was looking for Jim. But nothing happened. Of course Sherlock didn’t bother himself with reading her blog. It would never have occurred to him to think about Molly at all when she wasn’t useful.
Once she would have hated him for that. Now she was grateful, and not just because he wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing now, but because he was the reason she’d met the man she loved. It was August now, and Molly had got over feeling self-conscious about thinking that. She’d liked the Jim she’d met, the one whose whole personality had been gift-wrapped for her. She loved the Jim she glimpsed through police reports and online discussions and dead links to sites that had once been fronts for businesses he’d used and discarded. One morning in the morgue she’d breathed on the front of a fridge and written their initials in the frost. It melted away almost at once, but she could faintly see the traces her fingers had left behind. ISPs that looped back on themselves and her fingers hovering over her keyboard, imagining he could feel her as she typed. It meant more than any other relationship she’d ever had.
Because of that she decided to help Sherlock. Something that had puzzled her for a while was how Sherlock had been so easily taken in by Jim’s pretence at homosexuality, the way he had just slipped on a collection of stereotypes. She was pretty sure Jim had wanted Sherlock to see through it, but he hadn’t. Why? And then one night she had sat up in bed, understanding that - and something else, too.
“You should tell John,” she said the next time Sherlock was in the lab. He was still walking awkwardly, more than four months on, and he was even more irritable these days than he had been before. But she owed it to him to tell him.
“Tell him what?” he’d replied, not bothering to look up from the corpse he was carefully covering in ink from a ballpoint pen.
“That you love him.”
That had made him look round.
“What on earth gives you the idea that I love him?” he said.
“Everything,” she said simply. “He feels the same way.” Sherlock hadn’t realised, of course. For all his brilliance, Sherlock didn’t really understand people. Certainly not the different ways they loved each other. He knew some people were heterosexual and some were homosexual because of the cues they gave him with their body language and their clothes and hair. He categorised people neatly and thought he was the only person who didn’t fit inside a tidy box, because he was Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock was, for once in his life, completely wrongfooted. Back in the spring, when she was still angry with him - for embarrassing her, and then for being what Jim had really wanted - she would have been glad to see it. Now she just felt... tender. That was the word. He’d cleared his throat and gone back to splattering the corpse, and she’d gone back to her paperwork, smiling a little to herself.
That evening it was like the universe decided to reward her for her good act. She’d figured out that people at the very fringes of Jim’s empire had been using OkCupid as a way of exchanging information. Their profiles used code, and she had worked out that they were setting up meetings. She didn’t know where or when - that seemed to be in a different code. She’d set up her own profile, and that night she got a message that said you should stick to watching Glee, you’ll never find someone on here. They’d watched Glee together the night they first kissed; he’d even mentioned it in a comment on her blog. She felt her breath catch in her chest, and she replied deliberately, carefully, to the message, with the phrase a/s/l? She got nothing back, but she hadn’t expected to. She knew it was him, and he was interested enough that he’d told her to leave him alone. Molly felt almost drunk. It was working. Now she needed to do something more, something to make him look at her properly instead of just glancing in her direction.
It had taken her until the start of September to realise what she had to do, and nearly a month to bring herself to go ahead with it. Even as she planned it all out she wasn’t sure she would do it. It was wrong, there were no two ways about it. She couldn’t kill someone just to make Jim notice her. She had to get over this.
And then he’d called her.
The phone had rung, later than she normally got calls - not that she got many - and when she’d picked it up and said “hello” the voice at the other end had just replied: “sorry, wrong number” and hung up. The voice had a soft Irish accent, the accent Sherlock had described in his report to the police, the report she’d managed to download and read again and again. It could just have been a wrong number. But it wasn’t.
That night she booked Eurostar tickets. Going to Paris for the weekend she wrote nervously on her blog, and packed her bag. It was better not to do it in London, because Sherlock would notice. The man she chose at random. He was homeless, and pretty crazy, which Molly knew didn’t make it okay, but at least he probably didn’t have a family. She gave him a bottle of brandy laced with laudanum. It only took three teaspoons for the average person to overdose, so she’d put in five to make sure. She hadn’t stayed to watch, but she had tucked a postcard in his pocket before she left. She’d got it on eBay, where souvenirs of the fake Vermeer were selling for a healthy price. The postcard, which would have been priced at 50p in the museum shop if the painting had been real, had cost her £5 now the print run had been pulped.
She would have liked to be able to say she’d noticed something strange when she got home, but she didn’t. She changed into her pyjamas and got into bed, and she didn’t wake up until there was a hand hard over her mouth and nose. She could smell his skin, and even though her heart was pounding it wasn’t with fear.
“I told you to leave me alone, Molly,” he said softly. She could hardly see him in the dark. She shook her head slightly under his hand, barely able to breathe, and she felt the fingers pinching her nose relax, though his palm stayed over her mouth. “You should have this back,” he continued, setting something down on the bedside table. “Wouldn’t want Sherlock finding out about our little secret, would we?”
He was gone almost without a sound, and when Molly turned the light on she found he had left the postcard behind. She turned it over, but there was nothing written on it. That was alright. She knew he’d be back.
Molly put the postcard underneath her pillow, and for the first time in months her sleep was dreamless.
Title: No Surprises
Rating: R
Fandom: Sherlock
Pairing: Molly/Jim
Wordcount: 2000-ish ballpark
Warnings: references to sex and murder
If this was a story, there would be some grand reveal where the reader discovered Molly had been an evil mastermind all along, that her nervous smiles and her cat-themed blog had all been a ruse that had managed to fool even Sherlock Holmes. That would explain quite neatly why she had done what she had done. But this isn’t a story; it’s simply what happened. Molly Hooper loved cats, and helped her elderly neighbour with her shopping, and in the autumn of 2010 she killed a man in cold blood.
A lot of things happened before then, of course. But at the beginning and end of it all were the same three letters. Jim.
She’d liked him at first because he liked her. He was quite good looking, and he was sweet, but the most important thing was that he liked her. He didn’t need her help - in fact, he helped her with her computer problems - and he didn’t seem that interested in her job. He just liked her. He said that she smelled of apples, and she was glad he’d noticed because she’d bought the DKNY Be Delicious in a nervy attempt to be more fashionable, her usual Anaïs Anaïs put back in the drawer which it had over the years faintly scented with rose and lily. When he kissed her his lips trembled, and that meant she didn’t mind that the kiss itself was clumsy.
And then Sherlock had to spoil everything, sweeping in with his long coat and his mean remarks, and he’d said Jim was gay. Molly didn’t want to believe him, but she did almost as soon as he’d said it. Not because Jim seemed gay to her, but because she’d been waiting, that past fortnight, for the other shoe to drop. To find out what Jim really wanted with her. Apparently this time it was to be a - what did people call it? - a beard. That evening, humiliated, she’d picked a fight with him. His face had closed down, and he had looked for a minute like someone else, someone she’d never met. She felt her breath catch, heart drumming with something like fear and not like fear at all, and then he was leaving, door slamming behind him.
She hadn’t heard from him in days. His desk at work was empty, like he’d never been there. “He was just a temp,” said the head of IT. “Sometimes they just quit,” he added, in the tones of a man used to disappointment. Jim’s phone went straight to voicemail, a standard Vodafone “the person you have called...” message, and her emails went unanswered. By the end of the week she was worried enough that she’d forgotten to be angry any more. If he was gay, it was ok. Maybe he just needed a friend. She could be that, if he wanted.
Then the police had shown up at Bart’s, and she’d found out Jim had another name. Moriarty. At least now she had the comfort of knowing he’d fooled everybody - even Sherlock.
Even Sherlock.
That night she’d felt ashamed as she came gasping against her own hand, thinking you’re smarter than Sherlock, and I kissed you. I kissed you. But it didn’t stop her doing it again a few days later. Maybe the shame even made it better, somehow. She kept googling his name, but the only references she found were for a character in some old book. April turned to May, Sherlock came out of hospital and was the same as always, the police investigation faltered and then ground to a halt. Life went on, and Molly still didn’t know anything more about Jim. So she did what she had to do. She started to learn about computers.
Sometimes people treated Molly like she wasn’t very clever, because she blinked too much when she talked to them and her laugh could be a bit shrill. But she hadn’t got a job like hers at a place like Bart’s without being smart, and so although she’d started out not knowing much about using a computer beyond Microsoft Office and Hotmail, soon she knew how to do all sorts of things. Track ISPs - and hide them. Find personal data on almost everyone she knew. It took many long, painstaking hours, filling up evenings that had been previously occupied with knitting or watching TV or trying out a ceramics class, but at last she began to find traces of him. Nothing very much, and sometimes the clues were so small, so faint, she wondered if she was falling victim to wishful thinking. But really she knew that wasn’t true. He was there, and although he’d tried to erase himself, he’d left marks behind.
At first she’d tried to hide that she was looking for him, but then she realised that someone as brainy as Jim would know. When she thought she was tiptoeing virtually, he probably heard her elephant footfalls from miles away. She didn’t want him to laugh at her - “Poor Molly, she actually thinks she’s being clever” - and so she started to think of ways she could let him know she was looking. So she registered on forums with handles that were puns on his names, and she wrote long blog entries about her cat Toby that were code for a simple message: where are you? After the first post she lay awake all night, afraid that Sherlock would read it and decipher the code, and he would know she was looking for Jim. But nothing happened. Of course Sherlock didn’t bother himself with reading her blog. It would never have occurred to him to think about Molly at all when she wasn’t useful.
Once she would have hated him for that. Now she was grateful, and not just because he wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing now, but because he was the reason she’d met the man she loved. It was August now, and Molly had got over feeling self-conscious about thinking that. She’d liked the Jim she’d met, the one whose whole personality had been gift-wrapped for her. She loved the Jim she glimpsed through police reports and online discussions and dead links to sites that had once been fronts for businesses he’d used and discarded. One morning in the morgue she’d breathed on the front of a fridge and written their initials in the frost. It melted away almost at once, but she could faintly see the traces her fingers had left behind. ISPs that looped back on themselves and her fingers hovering over her keyboard, imagining he could feel her as she typed. It meant more than any other relationship she’d ever had.
Because of that she decided to help Sherlock. Something that had puzzled her for a while was how Sherlock had been so easily taken in by Jim’s pretence at homosexuality, the way he had just slipped on a collection of stereotypes. She was pretty sure Jim had wanted Sherlock to see through it, but he hadn’t. Why? And then one night she had sat up in bed, understanding that - and something else, too.
“You should tell John,” she said the next time Sherlock was in the lab. He was still walking awkwardly, more than four months on, and he was even more irritable these days than he had been before. But she owed it to him to tell him.
“Tell him what?” he’d replied, not bothering to look up from the corpse he was carefully covering in ink from a ballpoint pen.
“That you love him.”
That had made him look round.
“What on earth gives you the idea that I love him?” he said.
“Everything,” she said simply. “He feels the same way.” Sherlock hadn’t realised, of course. For all his brilliance, Sherlock didn’t really understand people. Certainly not the different ways they loved each other. He knew some people were heterosexual and some were homosexual because of the cues they gave him with their body language and their clothes and hair. He categorised people neatly and thought he was the only person who didn’t fit inside a tidy box, because he was Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock was, for once in his life, completely wrongfooted. Back in the spring, when she was still angry with him - for embarrassing her, and then for being what Jim had really wanted - she would have been glad to see it. Now she just felt... tender. That was the word. He’d cleared his throat and gone back to splattering the corpse, and she’d gone back to her paperwork, smiling a little to herself.
That evening it was like the universe decided to reward her for her good act. She’d figured out that people at the very fringes of Jim’s empire had been using OkCupid as a way of exchanging information. Their profiles used code, and she had worked out that they were setting up meetings. She didn’t know where or when - that seemed to be in a different code. She’d set up her own profile, and that night she got a message that said you should stick to watching Glee, you’ll never find someone on here. They’d watched Glee together the night they first kissed; he’d even mentioned it in a comment on her blog. She felt her breath catch in her chest, and she replied deliberately, carefully, to the message, with the phrase a/s/l? She got nothing back, but she hadn’t expected to. She knew it was him, and he was interested enough that he’d told her to leave him alone. Molly felt almost drunk. It was working. Now she needed to do something more, something to make him look at her properly instead of just glancing in her direction.
It had taken her until the start of September to realise what she had to do, and nearly a month to bring herself to go ahead with it. Even as she planned it all out she wasn’t sure she would do it. It was wrong, there were no two ways about it. She couldn’t kill someone just to make Jim notice her. She had to get over this.
And then he’d called her.
The phone had rung, later than she normally got calls - not that she got many - and when she’d picked it up and said “hello” the voice at the other end had just replied: “sorry, wrong number” and hung up. The voice had a soft Irish accent, the accent Sherlock had described in his report to the police, the report she’d managed to download and read again and again. It could just have been a wrong number. But it wasn’t.
That night she booked Eurostar tickets. Going to Paris for the weekend she wrote nervously on her blog, and packed her bag. It was better not to do it in London, because Sherlock would notice. The man she chose at random. He was homeless, and pretty crazy, which Molly knew didn’t make it okay, but at least he probably didn’t have a family. She gave him a bottle of brandy laced with laudanum. It only took three teaspoons for the average person to overdose, so she’d put in five to make sure. She hadn’t stayed to watch, but she had tucked a postcard in his pocket before she left. She’d got it on eBay, where souvenirs of the fake Vermeer were selling for a healthy price. The postcard, which would have been priced at 50p in the museum shop if the painting had been real, had cost her £5 now the print run had been pulped.
She would have liked to be able to say she’d noticed something strange when she got home, but she didn’t. She changed into her pyjamas and got into bed, and she didn’t wake up until there was a hand hard over her mouth and nose. She could smell his skin, and even though her heart was pounding it wasn’t with fear.
“I told you to leave me alone, Molly,” he said softly. She could hardly see him in the dark. She shook her head slightly under his hand, barely able to breathe, and she felt the fingers pinching her nose relax, though his palm stayed over her mouth. “You should have this back,” he continued, setting something down on the bedside table. “Wouldn’t want Sherlock finding out about our little secret, would we?”
He was gone almost without a sound, and when Molly turned the light on she found he had left the postcard behind. She turned it over, but there was nothing written on it. That was alright. She knew he’d be back.
Molly put the postcard underneath her pillow, and for the first time in months her sleep was dreamless.