Here we go - I've decided that it's time Molly had her say... This is very much from Molly's POV, and it's my first Sherlock/Molly story (should that be Sherlolly?), so please be kind!

Couple of notes: This was previously published on another site and various comments were made about differences between canon Molly and my Molly. So, just to confirm, this story does (or may) differ from canon in the following ways: 1. Molly is roughly five years younger than Sherlock and some nine years younger than John. 2. She is not a qualified pathologist at the beginning of this story – and there is a specific reason for that which will become clear as the story goes along.

Oh, and by the way, I mean no insult to the noble profession of librarianship, being one myself – a medical librarian, in fact!

Chapter 1

She could never quite remember when he had first breezed airily into her life, as if that was precisely where he belonged.

That seemed…odd. She should recall the exact date, the exact moment. Just like the way people often said "do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot?" Or when Elvis died, or when the Berlin Wall came down, or when those ill-fated jet planes flew impossibly low over the New York skyline on a beautiful September day. That was right – it should have been as memorable as that. There should be a plaque somewhere, saying that this – this! – was the day and the hour and the second when Sherlock Holmes walked into her life and changed it irrevocably. For better or for worse… No. Definitely for better, no matter what happened later.

It disturbed her that, seated in a snug, low-ceilinged living room, her armchair pulled up to the wood burner, over thirty years later, she couldn't remember something so important.

It's your age, John would have said, in his usual brisk but comforting manner. She could almost hear his voice, see the twinkle in his eyes, the laughter lines in that worn, lined, beloved face. Comes to us all, Molly – even a bright young thing like you.

But these gaps in her memory trivialised the event that had changed her life forever, and that hurt. A cliché, but it was true. After all, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. A decision - a sudden whim – without which she might never have met him. Might have lived her bland, unassuming happy little life without knowing anything about him apart from what she read in the newspapers. And how might his life have played out if they hadn't met? What would have happened to Moriarty, to Irene Adler, to John and Mary Watson?

Almost every day since, she had wondered what her life might have been like if she hadn't walked into that laboratory on that certain day…

Molly Amelia Hooper was the child of doctors – from a long line of doctors - who had failed to live up to the expectations of her ancestry. Not that her mum and dad had minded at all; they had simply wanted their only child to be happy. And it had been a happy childhood, and Molly had grown from a solemn brown-eyed little girl into a slightly less solemn young woman with very few psychological scars to speak of. She was a little shy, particularly of men, probably courtesy of the old-fashioned and very ordinary girls' secondary school that had nurtured her. Nevertheless, she'd been liked at University for her quiet, kind ways and her surprisingly robust sense of humour. She didn't have many friends, but those she had were loyal and possibly equally unworldly.

She'd emerged with a handful of GCSEs and A-levels in a variety of subjects – a good, if not particularly remarkable, student. She'd been an 'all-rounder' without a strong aptitude for anything except chemistry, art and netball. Her choice of first degree had been easy – a BSc in Chemistry – but she struggled to know what to do after that. She had insufficient qualifications to be a doctor and no aptitude for the profession in any case. The drug industry might have been a possibility, but she distrusted the commercial world. In the end, with no better idea at hand, she'd taken an MSc in Library Science. From that, she'd worked in an NHS library in a desultory manner for a few months, before deciding that she actually hated librarianship. She stuck it out for a couple of years, guiltily aware of the money that her parents had spent on her education so far.

By twenty-five, Molly was kicking around in a job she didn't much like and wondering what to do with her life. Her beloved father had died of cancer six months' previously, and this devastating loss had left her with a stronger sense of her own mortality and a desire for a direction to her life. Applying for the vacancy of assistant technical officer at her hospital - Bart's - had been a pure whim, and it was no surprise that she didn't impress the interviewers with her panicky, unprepared answers to their questions. The job went to a far better candidate, so she really shouldn't have ended up working at the laboratory in Bart's a mere year later.

The fact that she did stemmed from her developing interest in the role. It seemed to suit her - she'd always been reasonably good at chemistry and she had a strong stomach for gory sights and an interest in the processes and aetiologies of death. She'd looked into the career further and had applied for another post, this time successfully, at the North Middlesex Hospital. With some on-the-job training and a couple of courses on advanced chemistry and introductory pathology under her belt, Molly was a better prospect the following year. When Bart's pathology laboratory found itself unexpectedly and critically short of assistants, she was sent over to help out temporarily.

She remembered that she'd had her hair cut recently into a longish shaggy bob – a style that had looked great on a magazine model but had, inevitably, ended up looking lank and unkempt on Molly. She recalled that this had made her feel more than usually self-conscious – she could still feel that tight, prickling sensation of discomfort - and that she'd tried to compensate by wearing a top that was a little too low cut and a little too tight, and had then tried to compromise for that by wearing a knee-length wool skirt that was supposed to make her look older and more responsible. She also remembered that Toby, officially the Kitten from Hell that had invaded her life a few weeks before, had scratched her hand just before she dashed out of the door, and that the cut had bled through the plaster on the Tube. And she also remembered that she had tripped over an unexpected step as she entered the laboratory, while trying to dab her hand with a crumpled tissue…and that the resulting stumble had made the tall man at the far end of the laboratory glance up impatiently from his microscope.

"Um. Sorry," she offered, sheepishly, but the man had already turned back to his work, as if she were of no consequence. "Um, are you Dr Stamford?"

"Obviously not," was the acerbic response, delivered in a cultured, rather public school, baritone. The man didn't even look up.

Why 'obviously not'? she wondered silently – at least, she was pretty sure she was silent, but even so, the man sighed as he continued studying a slide through the microscope and replied as if she had spoken aloud. "No staff badge, no white coat or scrubs. And I'm clearly not standing here expectantly waiting for a new employee to arrive, which I would be if I were him and an unfamiliar person came in, clutching an introductory letter…which you appear to have bled on, by the way."

Only then did he look up, his eyes dropping to the letter in her hand, as if to confirm what he had already described. "What do you want with Stamford, anyway? No, wait – don't tell me…"

His oddly light-coloured eyes narrowed and he looked her up and down in a familiar way that would have been insulting if she hadn't found this strange man's behaviour so intriguing. "Twenty five – no, just turned twenty six. University educated, but your qualifications didn't get you very far. You've been working as a laboratory assistant for a year, but not here, although you'd like to, for sentimental reasons - why? Ah… a parent worked in this hospital at some point – your father, recently deceased, and you think you will remember him better if you work here."

His voice was neutral, the delivery monotone, almost as if he were thinking aloud to himself rather than addressing her. There was not a scrap of emotion in it and no sympathy, not even over her father's death.

His eyes ran over her hair and clothes and his lips twisted into a nasty smirk that sent a chill down her spine. "A cat lover, single, and it's not hard to see why. The top doesn't suit you – it was designed for women with more…visible attributes, and makes you look too thin. The skirt ages you. Oh, and it was a mistake to cut your hair in that style – but you already know that. As for why you're here – easy! You've been sent from your usual place of employment to cover the staff shortages. Your boss is an old university friend of Stamford, which is why he asked him for help."

His eyes glazed over for a moment and then slid away from her to focus back on his work. Later, she recalled that it was as if he had abruptly lost interest - almost as if he had severed her from his vision with a pair of scissors. At the time, she wondered, uneasily, whether there was something not quite normal about him.

She opened her mouth to reply, but her voice seemed to have deserted her. Belatedly, she noticed that he was dressed quite oddly for a laboratory worker, in a dark suit that was, even to her untutored eyes, well-cut and probably bespoke. His hair was at odds with his neat appearance, being over-long and untidy with wild curls that he kept pushing out of his face. This seemed to fit the theory that he might be an escaped psychiatric patient who shouldn't be in here at all…although where would he have got his clothes from? They seemed to fit him quite well, and yet they seemed old fashioned for a man who looked to be only a few years older than her.

Almost against her will, she found herself drifting nearer to him, trying to pretend that she was interested in his work. In any case, he didn't appear to be aware of her perusal or, if he was, he didn't care. He replaced one slide with another, his large hands moving with a strange delicacy. They were long-fingered and well-shaped, but the tips were stained yellow. A smoker. He had a chemical scar on the knuckle of his index finger and a long thin scar snaking across the top of his thin wrist – a knife cut, perhaps? Her initial thought was this might be a cack-handed attempt at suicide or self-harm, but that theory didn't seem to fit very well with the man before her. He was, she suspected, far too clever not to kill himself effectively, if that was his aim. Something else then – a fight, perhaps?

His hands fascinated her. They were pale, the skin almost translucent with the blue veins very prominent. In fact, from what she could see of his face, it was also abnormally pale. Rather morbidly, she thought that he looked a bit like the corpse of a young drug addict that she had recently been asked by the grieving parents to dress in a new suit for his funeral. And, just like that young man, he was overly thin, almost skeletal…

She glanced around the quiet laboratory, a little nervously. Should she call someone? If he was a drug addict, and possibly a deranged one at that, shouldn't she make sure he was removed from the premises, assuming she could find a security guard? She'd visited the pathology department during her failed interview, but wasn't sure she remembered the layout.

He gave another sigh and she jumped. "Not an addict. Or a patient. That's what you were thinking, wasn't it? That I'd broken in here to steal drugs?" He looked up, those oddly pale blue eyes mocking her. She could see that they were clear and sharply intelligent. Not the dull, lifeless eyes of an addict.

"Um," she responded, awkwardly, apparently unable to say anything else. He rolled his eyes and went back to his work. Her eyes dropped to the worktable. There were a series of test tubes and corresponding slides, each containing a drop of liquid.

"It's dirt," he told her, suddenly. "Taken from three pairs of shoes and boots belonging to a man who has been accused of raping and murdering his niece. She was found half-buried in deserted factory grounds."

"And this proves that he was there?"

"No." He glanced up at her again, but this time there was no mockery in his eyes – in fact, she was surprised to see an open, interested expression on his pale face. "I'm not working for the police – not on this occasion, anyway. It's a private client. The man's a convicted paedophile with a penchant for teenage girls, and so naturally, with their usual lack of imagination, the police have arrested him. But they're wrong. He didn't kill her – in fact, he's successfully kept well away from all girls since his release; he's scared of going back in, since he can expect more brutal treatment from the other inmates... There's a particular chemical in the soil of those grounds and my findings prove that it's not present on any of the man's footwear."

She noted that his deep voice had lost some of its arrogant quality. He was talking to her in an informative, enthusiastic manner – a teacher to a particularly able pupil. He resembled nothing so much as the archetypal mad professor, particularly with the hair, but oddly this put her at ease enough to speak freely.

"How do you know he's given you all his shoes? Perhaps he threw away the ones he was wearing when she died, or burned them?"

He shook his head. "No opportunity. And he's on a low income – unemployment benefits with the occasional bit of labouring, cash-in-hand temporary work where no one needs to know his history. He can't afford more than three pairs of shoes. He can't even afford to pay me – I contacted him because I want to get involved in the case."

"Why?"

He looked at her as if she was mad. "Because there's a murderer to find, of course. And once I've convinced Lestrade that they've got the wrong man in custody, he might let me see the files."

Before she could answer or ask who Lestrade was, the double doors at the far end of the laboratory opened, and an overweight, middle-aged and rather sweaty man hurried into the room, looking harried.

"Are you Miss Hooper? I'm so sorry, meant to be here on time, but at least you found your way into the place… Where's my rota? Damn… Please come on in, anyway, and I'll show you where everything is… I see you've already met our resident pest." Dr Stamford grinned at the young man, who scowled back at him and turned pointedly back to his experiments. "His name is Sherlock Holmes, if you're prepared to believe that. Please just ignore him – he seems to come with the furniture, but you'll soon find that he's harmless if left alone – relatively speaking."

On this strange last comment, he went back through the double-doors into what she assumed was the morgue. As she moved to follow him, a voice came from behind her.

"You'll get on better with him if you stop opening and closing your mouth like a fish. Despite appearances, he's not actually a fool. Apart from the fact that it makes you look more stupid than you actually are, it's a deeply unattractive mannerism, particularly on you."

She flushed, suddenly angry, and turned back to direct a glare at him. However, the man – Sherlock Holmes – was intent on his work and didn't seem to notice her. Before she could turn away again, he spoke once more. "By the way, there will be a job available here by the end of today – the assistant who claims to be off with gastroenteritis has in fact gone for an interview for a job as an air hostess which, judging by her physical attributes and general air-headedness, she is likely to get. Stamford will be desperate, so if you offer to transfer, he'll take you on immediately."

After a further moment's hesitation, during which she tried and failed to form a suitable reply, she turned away silently and followed Dr Stamford. At the door, she glanced back again, but Sherlock Holmes didn't raise his head.