Molly Hooper: On Invisibility
Molly Hooper isn’t anyone special. She’s pretty, but not beautiful. Clever, but not extremely intelligent. Molly Hooper isn’t extremely anything. Except invisible. She’s very, very invisible. She thinks sometimes that maybe that’s why she’s drawn to Sherlock Holmes, like a moth to a flame and with much the same result. She’s used to it now and the inevitable burns no longer come as a surprise, even if they still hurt.
Sherlock hasn’t really spoken about it, but whilst she might not be as clever as he is, she isn’t stupid. She knows there’s a reason he hasn’t told John or Mrs. Hudson or the Detective Inspector where he is, even though he looked as close to crying as she’s ever seen him when he came back late the day of the funeral, the smell of the graveyard clinging to his coat. They’re all too noticeable, their connection to him too obvious.
She was on the tube with John Watson a week ago, and she remembers the stares and the muttering of the other passengers. John just stared straight ahead, his face set in hard lines as the whispers-“There’s the bloke who was sleeping with that detective bugger.”- scraped the scabs off his grief. She wished then that she could lend him her invisibility, just for a while, so he could have some peace.
Her invisibility. She used to think it was a curse. She’d read the missing person stories in the paper and wonder how anyone could possibly want to matter less. The last few weeks have made her think that maybe there’s a blessing in it too. Her invisibility is the reason that she’s the only one not in danger, the only one who isn’t grieving.
Her cold numbed fingers struggle with the key for a minute before she succeeds in slipping it into the lock, opening her door to the strains of a violin melody. She remembers the day the instrument arrived, handed to her with great reverence by a young homeless boy outside the station.
“For him.” The boy had said, and Molly had looked up into the same eyes that she saw in the mirror every day, another moth fluttering perilously close to the flame. Sherlock drew them towards him, all the invisible people, and you’d do anything he asked because when he looked at you, for a few seconds you were opaque.
Molly knows the beautiful, sad melody he’s playing isn’t for her. She isn’t one of the people he’d die for. No one special, and when this is all over she’ll be invisible again. But right now she’s the only person who can help Sherlock Holmes live. For a while she counts, and it doesn’t hurt quite as much when she walks into her sitting room and he tells her that she looks hideous in this dress.