#as a memento from being my flatmate for a while?

[spoofenshmirtz]

fuck it. cringe is dead. I recently realized that all my expensive fancy figurines (including one I'm considering buying as soon as I can justify it) are of guys and as gay as that is, I absolutely have to get a good-looking figurine of a female character. if I have to own a billion figures I could at least bisexualize the experience

[navigatorwrongway]

No-longer Secret Sherlolly Santa Gift

My assigned giftee was the lovely @mychakk, for whom I wrote a primarily Molly-centric wing!fic. Very sorry that it took this long, but I do hope you enjoy it!!

Molly is 13 years old the first time she grows a feather. She is woken up in the middle of the night to the unpleasant sensation of something tickling her upper back on the left side. She figures it might be the monthly shedding of the uterine lining they were warned about in Health Class, but truly confounding brush down of her lower self reveals no blood. Still, a shower might do her some good. It’s only after looking in the fogged-over mirror does she see it – thin and cream colored, like the one that’s framed in the living room, a memento from the doves released at her parents’ wedding. After the obligatory panic attack at discovering that she’s broken just about every rule of biology she can think of (Some sort of strange mutation? Is she the first of a new species? Homo Avies? No, evolution takes time. One minute change in DNA does not turn a perfectly normal teenage girl into a giant budgie. Or something), she lies awake in bed for number of hours before dashing for the library. Thankfully, it’s a Saturday, so she’s able to lurk in the biology section of the public library that will become her usual haunt without interruption. The next month is spent scouring book after book for information, maybe even an explanation, because, hello, humans are not supposed to suddenly turn into birds.

By the time summer vacation starts, she has two dozen or so feathers that cover the raised mounds that seem to be attached to her scapulai, and has only gotten more confirmation that whatever’s happening to her shouldn’t be. Since her inability to wear any loose tee or tank top with her new appendages really limits ways to spend hot summer days, Molly holes up in her room with every anatomy book she can get her hands on (in the long, lonely hours of her self-imposed exile, she decides that she’s going to be a pathologist).

Mid-July, her best friend calls her, presumably to invite her to come over. Molly lets the phone ring out.

When her friendship with Katlyn dissolves after 9 years of fantastic adventures and later, shared confidences of crushes and hopes for the future, it feels like her world collapses around her. Her father notices, too.

At first, Tobias Hooper is ecstatic that his daughter has decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps, judging by all the science textbooks she’s been hoarding. Then he finds her curled in a ball in the bathtub surrounded by torn-out feathers, spattered with blood and sobbing because it’s all too much and why can’t she just be normal and it hurts it hurts ithurtsithurtsithurts. He holds her until they fall asleep, his beloved daughter cradled in his arms once again. He joins in her quest for an explanation then – two heads are better than one and all that. He helps her organize a system to keep track of how the appendages grow and how to monitor her caloric intake; before she sprouts more feathers, she gets very, very odd cravings. In secondary school she’s the quiet, pale bookworm that wants to study the human body, of all things.

When her advanced biology class begins dissecting fetal pigs Molly is partnered with a tall, lanky boy who declares her to be “slightly less incompetent”. For some reason, the way his eyes (Blue? Green? A mixture of both, she decides, with a splash of grey thrown in) skate over her, pulling her entire life into the light for all to see (he either misses the fact that she has wings [proper wings now, she can move them a little, if she tries] – which is unlikely – or ignores it – even more unlikely), makes her feathers tingle in a way that’s not entirely unpleasant. They aren’t friends (“I don’t have friends, Molly.”), but he tolerates her. He gets bored to the point that he’ll deduce complete strangers for her amusement and she’ll quiz him on decomposition rates or the implications of different types of striations that can be found on corpses. She finds that her wings grow faster when she’s in close proximity to the ornery genius. She can’t say that it’s pleasant, but she’s willing to bear the discomfort for his company.

Once, she grew three feathers in a day while helping him try to convince the police that Carl Powers hadn’t committed suicide. Despite their best efforts, the investigators were unconvinced, and Sherlock had retreated into what he termed his “mind palace” for hours on end. Therefore, her near-constant shifting and stifled whimpers went unnoticed. After that he starts using his skills to solve local mysteries and disappearances, dragging her along with him more often than not. This comes to an end when they go to different universities, though she texts him occasionally with any observation of particular note. He never replies. She tells him the address of her matchbox of a flat in one of the last messages, with an invitation to drop by sometime (she’d be happy to have a roommate, flatmate, whatever, but certain things rule that out [Those certain things are about ten and a half feet across by now, with more joints than any bird wing she’s ever seen. Makes them a bitch to unfold, but admittedly does help conceal them under layers of baggy jumpers with the backs cut out]).

She never actually expected him to show up at two in the morning, looking (and smelling) like he hadn’t seen the business end of a showerhead in a month, pupils the size of dinner plates, and telltale track marks along his arms. As shocked as she is, she simply pulls him into the relative warmth, and goes to her room to see if there’s anything he could wear. One of her dad’s old shirts and sweatpants from when he last visited in hand, she steps back into what serves as her living room to find him… Pissing in her hall closet. Perfect. Wonderful.

“Um… Hey, Sherlock? What are you doing?” He glares at her in the isn’t-it-obvious-you-idiot way he’s mastered. Its effect is lessened, however, by the glazed, unfocused quality his eyes have taken. Oh, god, how is she supposed to deal with this? What took her closest non-friend, her ornery, brilliant, gorgeous non-friend and brought him this low? First things first, Molly-girl, an internal whisper that sounds (almost disturbingly) like her dad tells her. Right. Personal hygiene, then.

She steers Sherlock into the bathroom and leaves the clothes on the toilet seat. Get food, pipes up the voice. A grilled cheese is always good, right?

Bread? Next to the instant ramen. Cheese? Fridge, under the lettuce. Butter? Butter dish. Can of tomato soup? With all the other cans of soup. Can opener? Unemptied dish drainer. Pan? Already on the stove. Where you put it not five minutes ago, Molly, you dolt.

So focused (sort of) on her task that she didn’t hear the opening of the bathroom door, Molly only becomes aware of someone watching her when her feathers fluff up of their own accord as if to make her appear larger – ridiculous, yes, but instinct was instinct.

And then he’s lurching towards her, very little of his typical catlike stealth and grace evident (or is this clumsiness his new[ish] usual? Oh, god. How could she not have at least checked up on him? Then she would have known earlier, and she might know what to do now…) in his movements. Whatever he’s taken (Morphine, Molly suspects) has made him sluggish, allowing her the reaction time to dart out of reach from the hand that’s grasping at her wings.

Wings.

Oh, bollocks.

In her feverish panic regarding Sherlock, she’s completely and utterly forgotten that her sleepwear (a tank top and fuzzy pajama pants with little penguins) really don’t help conceal her feathered friends. At all. Which obviously poses a problem. Because wings. Is it too much to hope that he wouldn’t mention it? Probably, but that didn’t change the fact that Molly would wait until he (inevitably) brought the topic of her additions up.

Damn near miraculously, Sherlock doesn’t question her wings for his entire visit (if that’s the right word. She’s not quite sure). In fact, he barely speaks a word while he’s there, just staring at her with those ohgoditssowrongforthemtobesohazy eyes of his. He collapses on her ratty foldout sofa-bed, having been borderline force-fed soup and half a sarnie, about two hours after he first turned up on her porch. She keeps vigil over him that night, in terror that him might drown in his own vomit if she doesn’t watch him, after she cleans up the repurposed wardrobe. She must have dozed off at some point, though, because he’s long gone when she wakes up with a crick in her neck from sleeping in her beaten armchair. She can’t stay to see if he’ll be coming back – she has an interview with a Dr. Stamford at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.

She gets the job. It’s just a position as an underling in the mortuary, but she can’t imagine working anywhere else. Her supervisor isn’t Mike, but a sexist, nasty, crotchety old toad whose hands shake to the point that she has to physically restrain herself from ripping the scalpel away from him before he cuts himself, her, or parts of the body that aren’t supposed to be cut. The hospital makes up for it, though, particularly the roof. On long, empty night shifts she can sometimes sneak up to the roof and spread her wings without fear of being seen. As long as she keeps low enough, she can glide and practice staying aloft and work on carrying increasingly heavier weights for longer when she feels the need.

Her co-workers notice her odd fondness for the place, and it officially-unofficially becomes recognized as ‘Hooper’s Territory’. At least, that’s what Molly gleans from overhearing Meena warning a new lab assistant away from the space. She can’t say she’s displeased.

It all goes very smoothly, until she’s called on by Scotland Yard to assist on a case that has their usual pathologist stumped. Once she finds a piece of evidence that eventually puts the nail in the case’s proverbial coffin (Seriously, why didn’t anyone think to check inside the upper lip?), the dubious honor of being one of the main contacts is hers. Over time, she strikes up friendships among the force, particularly with a charming older Detective named Lestrade, and to a lesser extent, Sally Donovan. Phillip Anderson was summarily banished the day he tried to tell her how to do her job (as if she doesn’t outrank him in pretty much every category except maybe socialization skills).

A year goes by, and nothing goes overly horrifically wrong, save Meena’s one and only attempt to set her up with a friend of a friend (she adamantly refuses to talk about why a documentary on Ireland’s Hooper swans sent her into peals of hysterical laughter, and everyone except for Caroline eventually lets the matter rest). And then Greg tells her that he’s bringing in a consultant – a private detective, outstandingly brilliant, apparently. As it turns out, she probably should have asked for a name.