Fic for eanor: We All Do Silly Things
Title: We all do silly things.
Recipient: eanor
Author: ficklepig
Characters/Pairings: Molly/Irene (BBC)
Warnings: Brief non-explicit sexual activity and a little gore.
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: Molly wasn't exactly lonely, but it was nice to be courted. It was exciting.
Notes: Set during the events of AsiB. Thanks to swissmarg and bivouack - charming, helpful, patient, and much ignored.
"Funny old thing, isn't he?"
Molly startled and turned toward the voice, behind and below her. As she turned, Sherlock veered out of sight into the emergency stairwell. He'd get what he wanted without her. Probably more than he'd get otherwise.
The speaker slouched at the edge of one of the gray-green lobby seats - indistinguishable from the ones they'd replaced last year - with her elbows on her knees, fingers interlaced, their nails shimmering with pointy intent. Her eyes were fixed on the corner where Sherlock had disappeared.
She had a jaw like a barracuda, thought Molly. Her outsized eyeballs floated in their orbits as if suspended by magnets. Very like a fish's eyes. Glaucous, bulging a little with vitreous malice. Molly blinked a few too many times as she catalogued the effect of bone and cartilage shaved just the right side of too-fine. This person's entire face revolved around the taut mechanics of her eyelids and the edges of her lips. Perfect poreless skin. One line etched carefully around one end of her smile, one line delicate between her delicate eyebrows. Her mouth was a razor slash scarred over, pink and smooth. It was not too small.
Molly warmed to her, for her delicate bony convexities and her not-too-small mouth. She looked like a cruel little girl who didn't intend to be cruel but kept being cruel because whatever she was doing, it was working.
"Seems to think a lot of himself, Mister Holmes."
Molly unwarmed. "Those aren't your clothes," she said.
"No," replied the woman. She picked at the terrycloth midsection of her lumpy green hoodie. "Mine draw too much attention." She looked up. "Oh, you like him. That's nice, someone ought to."
"Mm. Okay, well, um." Molly pulled the door closed on the conversation containing Sherlock Holmes and squirmed a little in the spotlight. "It isn't my job, but maybe we could find you something to wear that doesn't belong to someone quite so ... dead."
The woman angled her foot into the doorway, like a very nosy neighbor with a slate-blue stare. "It's fine, I know all about him - I've seen the news. I also talked with Jim. In IT. He mentioned you."
"Oh. God." A flare of shame in her gut. She hadn't heard from Jim in weeks. Her pride had healed, but she wondered about his. "Is he okay? Jim? I mean, Jim seemed to be very interested, and Sherlock's not, really."
She sighed and eased the conversation open again. "I mean, Sherlock's not really a good person to be interested in."
The woman pulled her ponytail from under her collar and casually shook it out before bundling it back up into its scrunchie. "Jim is fine. Those two entirely deserve each other."
She put out her hand.
"Irene. I work in administration. And you'll be Molly Hooper."
"I'll be Molly. Yes. I guess so."
*
It annoyed her to be spoken of as "shy." Shy meant afraid, and she wasn't afraid. She was awkward, which made other people awkward, which made her a little bit angry, which was hard to explain. She was never very angry - it wasn't her style - but she did spend a lot of time alone.
"Dinner?" came the text. She had just come in from the lab. "We can talk about work."
"It isn't as if I don't have the time," she said to the cat. He meowed and meowed as she closed the door.
*
Social exchanges have a disproportionate impact on a person who spends a lot of time alone. The man who sold Molly a blueberry yogurt in the canteen: she didn't even know his name, but the smiling interaction kept her on edge for hours. It wasn't that she didn't like him, she only wished he wouldn't pay so much attention.
Dead people, though. They did their job, she did hers. Everyone came to a point in their lives when they could simply work with others in quiet productive company. Almost everyone she dealt with in the morgue had reached that point.
One day she looked a woman in the face, straight into her sunken eyes and said "I like you a lot, Laura Fine. I really do." She briskly patted Laura's hand, then glanced at the tag on her left big toe to make sure she had the name right. It didn't change their working relationship at all. It helped that Laura didn't look back, and didn't touch her.
Some people were further gone than others, of course; some were still with her in spirit, some were long-dead flesh. She was a little melancholy on days she had to work alone.
*
The difference between Sherlock and dead people was that his company wasn't always quiet. Was rarely quiet. That was nice, actually, it was fun. And the difference between Sherlock and not-dead people was that he didn't care what she did or said. He let her work and didn't pry or try to draw her out. He simply wanted her service and attention. A lot like a dead person, only more energetic.
Irene was like Sherlock in this sense: Molly was less her guest than her audience.
No, that wasn't quite right, she thought, as the woman prowled with half-self-conscious grace from the door to the coat tree to the kitchen, shedding her black furs and acquiring two tall and narrow glasses in the process. Irene wasn't treating the fourth wall quite the way Sherlock did. She called for an assistant. But then she served. She attended. She watched.
It was miserable. Almost literally a nightmare. Molly had shown up half-dressed for a play she hadn't rehearsed. Thai, she'd thought. Maybe Italian. Out. A menu and a cab.
"Nothing so mundane. Kate is an admirable chef. Are you allergic to eggs?"
Molly was not. She sat, yellow and pink, on a white, white sofa.
"So, um. You're an ... administrator." She eyed a crystal vase. She had a peripheral sense of luxuriously empty space bracketed by deep crown moldings.
"Administratrix, I like to say." Irene poured from a bottle labeled "fino," no capitals, under gold and inscrutable script.
Molly blinked. She'd forgotten her line. Very rarely, trailing after Sherlock, she longed for the stage he occupied. (Coffee? Lipstick?) But twenty minutes in a scented black sedan had sapped her talent and made her hair go frizzy. She was hyperventilating. She thought about dead people. They were nice, helping out behind the scenes. They'd be there when she got away.
"Are you still with me, my dear?"
Molly grinned a little, stupid. Irene floated in front of her, a hard red mouth on monochrome. Then she loomed close and softened into flesh. The transformation was unsubtle. Irene became the girl at the desk two rows back, the unexpected friend waiting after class. She plumped down beside Molly and sagged against the unforgiving cushion, with no regard for her fine gray suit.
"You look tired."
Freckles showed across the bridge of her nose, where the powder had worn, and some hair had become unattractively tangled in its sparkling clip.
"Let's put on a DVD and eat in front of the telly. You can rub my feet - they're killing me."
*
"Oh my lord," she said. "You definitely know what I like. Now do my calves." She sighed and sat up a little. "Would you like some more wine?"
*
Kate was a puzzle.
"Of course I don't pay her. Don't worry, she's not as dumb as she looks. She volunteers a lot. She has her own … things going on. Have you heard of roller derby?"
Kate, thought Molly, was a sort of John Watson. She thought Irene must feel a little alone, to need one.
Sherlock had made Molly feel less alone. She didn't mind being alone, and hadn't needed Sherlock, really. But he had pushed out the borders of the space she lived in, quite a lot, simply by being another person like Molly. He was better, and faster, and harder, and certainly ruder, but not fundamentally different. That made him much easier to … to bear.
When she'd realized that Dr Watson was not going to change Sherlock, she'd stopped resenting him. Not that she resented him. He wouldn't be her friend, but he was like the nicer dead people. Human. Fairly safe. It was as if Sherlock had acquired a sort of plug-and-play social interface. John interacted but didn't intrude. Sherlock was less inclined to look directly at her, now, and more inclined to let her work beside him.
She should get her own John Watson. Someone who understood and did the shopping and went to parties for her. She would need a big swoopy lab coat. She laughed and the syringe wobbled. She didn't really want a Watson.
Irene laid a cold hand on Molly's arm.
"Watch where you put that needle, miss. Don't use too much - I'm taking notes. The last batch was thrilling. I'll have to keep a supply on hand."
She laughed her charming laugh. "Slap me afterward. I'm sure I can make you want to."
*
Irene was sometimes a bit like John. But better. Harder.
"He said what?" she'd asked Molly. "You need to speak up for yourself." It was all right, Molly had tried to explain, but apparently it wasn't.
"Brainy," she'd called Molly, and kissed her against the walk-in cooler door. "Amazing."
*
It was one thing to be watched, or looked at, it was another to be courted. Only once every few weeks, but it was more than she'd seen Sherlock in months. She didn't rate this, she didn't even rate a John Watson. It didn't make any sense. Some of it was a bit risky, some a bit shocking. That was exciting.
She was neglectful of the people at work, and inattentive. They would sit in silent judgment until she looked away. The cat cried and she shut the door. She went with Irene when Irene called, and tried not to wonder what "administration" meant.
*
Perhaps this was part of it: an unusual late-afternoon call, a request for supplies. A big dark hotel suite.
"You make amazing noises, Molly Hooper. Oh no, that's a good thing. You could do me a favor."
"I don't understand this." Molly was half-dressed and she didn't know her lines. The looming pillows, the sudden intimacy, the weirdly familiar and arousing scent in Irene's hair.
"I have a prank in mind. But I want it to sound real, and it can't sound like me." A muffled laugh. "You'll be in on the joke eventually."
She nuzzled in closer. Her eyelashes were a miracle of persuasion.
*
You shouldn't trust me," Irene said later. She turned onto her front and rested her chin on the backs of her interlaced fingers."I'm a sadist, you know. I hurt people for fun."
"You can be kind."
Irene rolled over, sliding off the rumpled sheets and into the hotel's complimentary satin robe. "I doubt I'll be seeing Kate again. That should tell you something."
*
It ended there. It actually ended in a slightly grubby flat Irene said she was watching for a friend. Molly had finished shopping, and happened on Irene who had paused in the street, intent on her phone.
They spent about twenty minutes inside. It was a small place. Molly stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
"Don't skip the party. It's been lovely seeing you, but I have to pack. I'm leaving town for the holidays." Irene was dressed down, in curvy blue jeans and a silky black cowl neck top. She adjusted an earring, then turned.
"Wait, I have something for you. Battle armor. It'll help you be brave."
"Do you think the …?" She pulled the little box from her handbag.
Irene took off the lid and her big eyes went soft, then hard, then soft again. "This is perfect. Molly, this is perfect. Let me wrap it for you."
She sent Molly out with her hair piled up and new jewelry installed. At the door Irene leaned in close, expensively perfumed and without a freckle showing. She laid one hand on Molly's shoulder and one on her wrist.
"Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper. Break a leg."
*
Molly never saw her again, but at least she was in on the joke.
*
Afterward, she stopped by her own place to change out of the armor. She fed the cat and teased him with his feather, thinking about taking him to Barts with her. "I'll be back by midnight, sweetie." She meant it this time. She was still feeling the effects of Dr Watson's cheap wine.
She met a tall grim man at the morgue and waited with him for Sherlock. The man was horrifying. It was like being crowded by scores of people, all of them long deceased. Not the nice kind of dead people. They surveyed the carnage beneath the sheet with indifferent scorn. He shut off their cold grey eyes with a condescending grimace, and pursued Sherlock through the swinging door. She wanted to shout a warning, but assumed Sherlock must already know about him.
Whoever he is, she thought with residual bitterness, they deserve each other.
It was good that Sherlock could identify the woman That was a good thing, anyway. Too late for Christmas, but if the family hadn't missed her yet it would be a mercy to wait until afterward. Someone wept in the hallway, eerie and cold, and Molly's insides bunched up.
She touched the body on the table. She ran her fingers along its wrist and smoothed her palm over its collarbone, its shoulder, its cool slack skin. She wondered what color its eyes had been, and if there had been freckles on its nose. Probably - there were freckles on its shoulders.
"I'm going to get some dinner," she told it. "I don't suppose you're hungry."
She turned its hands over and examined its blunt fingertips. She gently touched the edge of the ruin of its face. It wouldn't be making much conversation tonight.
"Merry Christmas," she said.
She put away the body and gathered up her coat and bag.
<>
Recipient: eanor
Author: ficklepig
Characters/Pairings: Molly/Irene (BBC)
Warnings: Brief non-explicit sexual activity and a little gore.
Word Count: ~2300
Summary: Molly wasn't exactly lonely, but it was nice to be courted. It was exciting.
Notes: Set during the events of AsiB. Thanks to swissmarg and bivouack - charming, helpful, patient, and much ignored.
"Funny old thing, isn't he?"
Molly startled and turned toward the voice, behind and below her. As she turned, Sherlock veered out of sight into the emergency stairwell. He'd get what he wanted without her. Probably more than he'd get otherwise.
The speaker slouched at the edge of one of the gray-green lobby seats - indistinguishable from the ones they'd replaced last year - with her elbows on her knees, fingers interlaced, their nails shimmering with pointy intent. Her eyes were fixed on the corner where Sherlock had disappeared.
She had a jaw like a barracuda, thought Molly. Her outsized eyeballs floated in their orbits as if suspended by magnets. Very like a fish's eyes. Glaucous, bulging a little with vitreous malice. Molly blinked a few too many times as she catalogued the effect of bone and cartilage shaved just the right side of too-fine. This person's entire face revolved around the taut mechanics of her eyelids and the edges of her lips. Perfect poreless skin. One line etched carefully around one end of her smile, one line delicate between her delicate eyebrows. Her mouth was a razor slash scarred over, pink and smooth. It was not too small.
Molly warmed to her, for her delicate bony convexities and her not-too-small mouth. She looked like a cruel little girl who didn't intend to be cruel but kept being cruel because whatever she was doing, it was working.
"Seems to think a lot of himself, Mister Holmes."
Molly unwarmed. "Those aren't your clothes," she said.
"No," replied the woman. She picked at the terrycloth midsection of her lumpy green hoodie. "Mine draw too much attention." She looked up. "Oh, you like him. That's nice, someone ought to."
"Mm. Okay, well, um." Molly pulled the door closed on the conversation containing Sherlock Holmes and squirmed a little in the spotlight. "It isn't my job, but maybe we could find you something to wear that doesn't belong to someone quite so ... dead."
The woman angled her foot into the doorway, like a very nosy neighbor with a slate-blue stare. "It's fine, I know all about him - I've seen the news. I also talked with Jim. In IT. He mentioned you."
"Oh. God." A flare of shame in her gut. She hadn't heard from Jim in weeks. Her pride had healed, but she wondered about his. "Is he okay? Jim? I mean, Jim seemed to be very interested, and Sherlock's not, really."
She sighed and eased the conversation open again. "I mean, Sherlock's not really a good person to be interested in."
The woman pulled her ponytail from under her collar and casually shook it out before bundling it back up into its scrunchie. "Jim is fine. Those two entirely deserve each other."
She put out her hand.
"Irene. I work in administration. And you'll be Molly Hooper."
"I'll be Molly. Yes. I guess so."
*
It annoyed her to be spoken of as "shy." Shy meant afraid, and she wasn't afraid. She was awkward, which made other people awkward, which made her a little bit angry, which was hard to explain. She was never very angry - it wasn't her style - but she did spend a lot of time alone.
"Dinner?" came the text. She had just come in from the lab. "We can talk about work."
"It isn't as if I don't have the time," she said to the cat. He meowed and meowed as she closed the door.
*
Social exchanges have a disproportionate impact on a person who spends a lot of time alone. The man who sold Molly a blueberry yogurt in the canteen: she didn't even know his name, but the smiling interaction kept her on edge for hours. It wasn't that she didn't like him, she only wished he wouldn't pay so much attention.
Dead people, though. They did their job, she did hers. Everyone came to a point in their lives when they could simply work with others in quiet productive company. Almost everyone she dealt with in the morgue had reached that point.
One day she looked a woman in the face, straight into her sunken eyes and said "I like you a lot, Laura Fine. I really do." She briskly patted Laura's hand, then glanced at the tag on her left big toe to make sure she had the name right. It didn't change their working relationship at all. It helped that Laura didn't look back, and didn't touch her.
Some people were further gone than others, of course; some were still with her in spirit, some were long-dead flesh. She was a little melancholy on days she had to work alone.
*
The difference between Sherlock and dead people was that his company wasn't always quiet. Was rarely quiet. That was nice, actually, it was fun. And the difference between Sherlock and not-dead people was that he didn't care what she did or said. He let her work and didn't pry or try to draw her out. He simply wanted her service and attention. A lot like a dead person, only more energetic.
Irene was like Sherlock in this sense: Molly was less her guest than her audience.
No, that wasn't quite right, she thought, as the woman prowled with half-self-conscious grace from the door to the coat tree to the kitchen, shedding her black furs and acquiring two tall and narrow glasses in the process. Irene wasn't treating the fourth wall quite the way Sherlock did. She called for an assistant. But then she served. She attended. She watched.
It was miserable. Almost literally a nightmare. Molly had shown up half-dressed for a play she hadn't rehearsed. Thai, she'd thought. Maybe Italian. Out. A menu and a cab.
"Nothing so mundane. Kate is an admirable chef. Are you allergic to eggs?"
Molly was not. She sat, yellow and pink, on a white, white sofa.
"So, um. You're an ... administrator." She eyed a crystal vase. She had a peripheral sense of luxuriously empty space bracketed by deep crown moldings.
"Administratrix, I like to say." Irene poured from a bottle labeled "fino," no capitals, under gold and inscrutable script.
Molly blinked. She'd forgotten her line. Very rarely, trailing after Sherlock, she longed for the stage he occupied. (Coffee? Lipstick?) But twenty minutes in a scented black sedan had sapped her talent and made her hair go frizzy. She was hyperventilating. She thought about dead people. They were nice, helping out behind the scenes. They'd be there when she got away.
"Are you still with me, my dear?"
Molly grinned a little, stupid. Irene floated in front of her, a hard red mouth on monochrome. Then she loomed close and softened into flesh. The transformation was unsubtle. Irene became the girl at the desk two rows back, the unexpected friend waiting after class. She plumped down beside Molly and sagged against the unforgiving cushion, with no regard for her fine gray suit.
"You look tired."
Freckles showed across the bridge of her nose, where the powder had worn, and some hair had become unattractively tangled in its sparkling clip.
"Let's put on a DVD and eat in front of the telly. You can rub my feet - they're killing me."
*
"Oh my lord," she said. "You definitely know what I like. Now do my calves." She sighed and sat up a little. "Would you like some more wine?"
*
Kate was a puzzle.
"Of course I don't pay her. Don't worry, she's not as dumb as she looks. She volunteers a lot. She has her own … things going on. Have you heard of roller derby?"
Kate, thought Molly, was a sort of John Watson. She thought Irene must feel a little alone, to need one.
Sherlock had made Molly feel less alone. She didn't mind being alone, and hadn't needed Sherlock, really. But he had pushed out the borders of the space she lived in, quite a lot, simply by being another person like Molly. He was better, and faster, and harder, and certainly ruder, but not fundamentally different. That made him much easier to … to bear.
When she'd realized that Dr Watson was not going to change Sherlock, she'd stopped resenting him. Not that she resented him. He wouldn't be her friend, but he was like the nicer dead people. Human. Fairly safe. It was as if Sherlock had acquired a sort of plug-and-play social interface. John interacted but didn't intrude. Sherlock was less inclined to look directly at her, now, and more inclined to let her work beside him.
She should get her own John Watson. Someone who understood and did the shopping and went to parties for her. She would need a big swoopy lab coat. She laughed and the syringe wobbled. She didn't really want a Watson.
Irene laid a cold hand on Molly's arm.
"Watch where you put that needle, miss. Don't use too much - I'm taking notes. The last batch was thrilling. I'll have to keep a supply on hand."
She laughed her charming laugh. "Slap me afterward. I'm sure I can make you want to."
*
Irene was sometimes a bit like John. But better. Harder.
"He said what?" she'd asked Molly. "You need to speak up for yourself." It was all right, Molly had tried to explain, but apparently it wasn't.
"Brainy," she'd called Molly, and kissed her against the walk-in cooler door. "Amazing."
*
It was one thing to be watched, or looked at, it was another to be courted. Only once every few weeks, but it was more than she'd seen Sherlock in months. She didn't rate this, she didn't even rate a John Watson. It didn't make any sense. Some of it was a bit risky, some a bit shocking. That was exciting.
She was neglectful of the people at work, and inattentive. They would sit in silent judgment until she looked away. The cat cried and she shut the door. She went with Irene when Irene called, and tried not to wonder what "administration" meant.
*
Perhaps this was part of it: an unusual late-afternoon call, a request for supplies. A big dark hotel suite.
"You make amazing noises, Molly Hooper. Oh no, that's a good thing. You could do me a favor."
"I don't understand this." Molly was half-dressed and she didn't know her lines. The looming pillows, the sudden intimacy, the weirdly familiar and arousing scent in Irene's hair.
"I have a prank in mind. But I want it to sound real, and it can't sound like me." A muffled laugh. "You'll be in on the joke eventually."
She nuzzled in closer. Her eyelashes were a miracle of persuasion.
*
You shouldn't trust me," Irene said later. She turned onto her front and rested her chin on the backs of her interlaced fingers."I'm a sadist, you know. I hurt people for fun."
"You can be kind."
Irene rolled over, sliding off the rumpled sheets and into the hotel's complimentary satin robe. "I doubt I'll be seeing Kate again. That should tell you something."
*
It ended there. It actually ended in a slightly grubby flat Irene said she was watching for a friend. Molly had finished shopping, and happened on Irene who had paused in the street, intent on her phone.
They spent about twenty minutes inside. It was a small place. Molly stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
"Don't skip the party. It's been lovely seeing you, but I have to pack. I'm leaving town for the holidays." Irene was dressed down, in curvy blue jeans and a silky black cowl neck top. She adjusted an earring, then turned.
"Wait, I have something for you. Battle armor. It'll help you be brave."
"Do you think the …?" She pulled the little box from her handbag.
Irene took off the lid and her big eyes went soft, then hard, then soft again. "This is perfect. Molly, this is perfect. Let me wrap it for you."
She sent Molly out with her hair piled up and new jewelry installed. At the door Irene leaned in close, expensively perfumed and without a freckle showing. She laid one hand on Molly's shoulder and one on her wrist.
"Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper. Break a leg."
*
Molly never saw her again, but at least she was in on the joke.
*
Afterward, she stopped by her own place to change out of the armor. She fed the cat and teased him with his feather, thinking about taking him to Barts with her. "I'll be back by midnight, sweetie." She meant it this time. She was still feeling the effects of Dr Watson's cheap wine.
She met a tall grim man at the morgue and waited with him for Sherlock. The man was horrifying. It was like being crowded by scores of people, all of them long deceased. Not the nice kind of dead people. They surveyed the carnage beneath the sheet with indifferent scorn. He shut off their cold grey eyes with a condescending grimace, and pursued Sherlock through the swinging door. She wanted to shout a warning, but assumed Sherlock must already know about him.
Whoever he is, she thought with residual bitterness, they deserve each other.
It was good that Sherlock could identify the woman That was a good thing, anyway. Too late for Christmas, but if the family hadn't missed her yet it would be a mercy to wait until afterward. Someone wept in the hallway, eerie and cold, and Molly's insides bunched up.
She touched the body on the table. She ran her fingers along its wrist and smoothed her palm over its collarbone, its shoulder, its cool slack skin. She wondered what color its eyes had been, and if there had been freckles on its nose. Probably - there were freckles on its shoulders.
"I'm going to get some dinner," she told it. "I don't suppose you're hungry."
She turned its hands over and examined its blunt fingertips. She gently touched the edge of the ruin of its face. It wouldn't be making much conversation tonight.
"Merry Christmas," she said.
She put away the body and gathered up her coat and bag.
<>