Chapter Text
Molly supposes it’s a good thing that no one at work ever asks about her family. She really isn’t sure what she’d say, after all. Old money. Snobby aristocrats. Dysfunctional.
The words she wouldn’t say stick in her throat like molasses. Pure blooded. Magical. Bigots of the highest and worst order.
Molly never talks about her family, and she never gets close enough to anyone in this world for them to ask. She lets them think her alone, because alone is preferable to having to give an explanation.
Molly Hooper is not her real name, after all. Molly is, to an extent, but she was born as Melinda, and her dad used to call her Molly affectionately, no matter how much her mother told him it wasn’t dignified.
Melinda Selwyn.
Molly Selwyn.
She doesn’t like to think about that name much anymore.
When Molly graduates from Hogwarts, she immediately throws herself into a healing program, learning to fix everything from spell damage from infectious diseases (dragon pox fascinates her). Wizards live a long time, she knows, but mortality is mortality, and she’s kind of fascinated by how little the magical community likes to think about their own mortality. Their own humanity. Their deaths.
Wizards die just as muggles do, she thinks, but they don’t like anything that makes them similar to muggles. Even the most progressive of wizards don’t like it, she knows. They may praise muggles, and advocate for them- advocate for muggleborns as well- but Molly has seen the same exchange many times at weddings and the society functions that both her status and her grandmother force her to attend.
“Oh, they have to be guided, of course, but I met the most darling muggleborn girl who truly does them credit-“
“Well of course- if they integrate into our society- if they present themselves properly- not like those uncouth muggles- I mean, the idea of guns- can you imagine something so ghastly?”
“Muggles can’t help what they are, certainly-“
“Well I don’t see you advocating for the removal of the statute of secrecy- they’d ruin our way of life.“
“And muggleborns aren’t already? It’s not right to let them keep those ties to their families- not when it puts us all at risk of discovery.”
“It would be far kinder to take them in early, if at all. A simple memory charm, and they’d truly be a part of our world.”
Even when she’s eleven, and hiding under a table to avoid having to talk to the McNair brothers, Molly can tell that something isn’t right about this. These thinly veiled insults disguised as progressive opinions- this can’t be right. They don’t like muggles- that much she knows- and so anything that makes them like muggles is scorned and shamed.
Blood is important to the circles that Molly’s family runs in. Is important to Molly’s family. It will take her years to realize how truly vile this is- these ideas that she’s grown up with.
Death doesn’t care if you’re a wizard or not though. Death doesn’t care how prestigious your bloodline is. It just is.
Molly doesn’t mind it, actually. She thinks it’s peaceful, an equalizer, and there’s a quiet dignity in death.
This makes her an oddity among wizards and muggles alike.
Then the war happens, and Molly is one of the only ones at St. Mungo’s that knows how to do a passable autopsy and she spends her second year as a healer buried in the corpses of friend and foe alike. Some of the Selwyn family flees, and a number of Molly’s cousins- extended family- throw their lot in with the death eaters. Her immediate family stays relatively neutral in the conflict by fleeing, but Molly can’t bring herself to leave- not with the work she has to do, and her brother stays as well.
Death becomes closer to her, and she to death, and on one sunny May afternoon- the first hints of summer appearing through the dreary rain of spring- it becomes more personal than Molly ever expected.
After the war, she tries to bury the memory of family, of friends, appearing in her morgue- tries to forget the hatred and horror that cling to the walls, but she can’t. They threaten to drown her every time she steps into St. Mungo’s, and Molly thinks that her mind is going to disappear soon if she doesn’t do something about it. The memory of his stony face, frozen in fear and defiance, laying on her table, is all she can recall when she walks the halls of the hospital, and before Molly knows it, she can feel herself fading away- wasting to nothing amidst the mess of her world. When they try to rebuild, Molly and her morgue are reminders of an unpleasant truth, and so she watches as the wizarding world mends, and wonders why she can’t.
And so, she takes a risk. She leaves.
Her grandmother threatens to blast her off the family tapestry. Molly can’t bring herself to care, and she doesn’t see why her grandmother does, either. It is, after all, the most ambitious, the most Slytherin thing that mousy little Ravenclaw Molly has ever done. There are already too many holes from the relatives that fought to keep the status quo of hatred and lost their lives to it. Molly is tired of hate and anger and could care less about her own social status anymore. Who does she have to impress- her cat?
Molly falls in love when she goes to muggle medical school, but not with another person. She falls in love with the unique spirit- the optimism- of modern muggle medicine. The way that muggles innovate- the way that they push boundaries with new ideas that absolutely blow Molly’s mind- it’s something that her father would have loved, and it’s something Molly loves now. Molly thinks that her father would have cheered her on, laughing at the way her grandmother sneered at her, and winking at Molly behind the woman’s back.
When she finishes her schooling, St Bart’s is a welcome reprieve from the chaos of St Mungo’s. It had been a risk- studying to be a muggle doctor- a pathologist, they call her- but she takes to it well. Her morgue at Bart’s is quiet, and she’s yet to see a familiar face on her slab. She feels a little lighter each day she doesn’t have to walk the halls where Neil died, and her enthusiasm for other things begins to return as well- the theater, food, life itself, even.
She’s a little lonely in this world, but she was a little lonely in the other world too, and this one isn’t still reeling from a war of it’s own making. Molly isn’t expected to be the perfect pure-blooded daughter here. She can make friends and go on dates and never have to worry that someone she knows is standing over her shoulder, watching and judging.
It's a louder, yet quieter, world, and for a while, Molly likes that about it.
Molly Hooper does not love Sherlock Holmes. Not that way people think, at least. He reminds her of her older brother- the one who was too smart and too arrogant and was killed for asking the wrong questions. She misses her brother so much so that she lets Sherlock get away with behavior that would get anyone else kicked out of her morgue. She listens to him deduce, and listens to him lecture, and she thinks about Neil and tries not to cry.
Mycroft is different, and Molly easily flies under his radar the first time he appears in her morgue. He does not remind her of a loved one, or a family member, but she is wary of him all the same.
There is a part of her that is reminded of Lucius Malfoy, and his sneers and big words, and his constant connections in the ministry of magic, and it is this part that she despises beyond words. But there is something else to Mycroft Holmes that doesn’t entirely fit her initial perception. He is cruel, and unthinking, and intelligent to a fault, undoubtedly, but she watches as he does everything he can to take care of Sherlock Holmes, and she realizes that she and Mycroft Holmes have something in common, there.
She pretends to be a nervous mouse around him- it isn’t a difficult act. If anyone could discover her secret, it seems as though it would be Mycroft Holmes, and she is careful not to give him reason to suspect. She hates memory charms- they had long been a favorite of her grandmother’s, and Molly still, even now, felt sick with guilt at the mere idea that she knew how to rummage in someone’s mind.
And so she’s careful, and cautious, and Mycroft, for all his importance, doesn’t look twice at her.
Molly is very careful with men, in general. Not because she’s afraid of men- which is a perfectly valid fear, in her opinion- but because she is not willing to obliviate a muggle in her private apartment, damnit. She’s not her grandmother, and hopes she never will be.
She has a separate, magical room attached to her apartment that only she can see- only she can enter- and everything magic she owns is inside of that room. It might not exactly be legal, but Molly’s good enough at the undetectable extension charms that she isn’t worried about the misuse of muggle artifacts department coming around.
Besides, she thinks Arthur and Molly Weasley are lovely people (she’d met them while a part of Arthur’s care after he was bitten by a snake during the war) and Arthur writes her on occasion to ask how certain muggle objects work after he learns that she’s essentially moved out of the wizarding world.
Molly Weasley occasionally sends back very long and heartfelt thank-you notes when Molly tips her off as to what ridiculous piece of tech Arthur’s tinkering with this week, as well as how likely it was to explode. Apparently, it’s saved their garage more than once.
And so Molly does not date very often, even when her friends pester and mother-hen and try to set her up with everyone from the new surgeon at Bart’s (Molly’s pretty sure he doesn’t like women), to Greg Lestrade (and she’s still not sure if Sally meant it genuinely, or as a way to express her irritation at one of them. Either way, Greg’s a lovely guy with way too many familial conflicts and Molly’s had enough of those for a lifetime).
But when Jim from IT asks her out, Molly’s oddly flattered, and agrees, partially to get her friends off her back. Her grandmother would be completely horrified that she’s going on a date with a muggle, and something vindictive in Molly really gets a kick out of that.
Jim’s kind and sweet and watches Glee with her, and when he smiles, Molly doesn’t trust him one bit. She’s seen eyes like that before, and they were in the faces of men and women who killed without thought or consequence, and she recognizes the feral danger he’s hiding behind his bland exterior.
There’s madness there that reminds her of a photo of Bellatrix Lestrange she’d seen once in the papers, and so Molly doesn’t let him get any closer.
What she does do is introduce him to Sherlock, because while she’s perfectly confident in her ability to defend herself with a wand, Jim reminds her of a dog that she once saw a vet put down- furious and rabid and dangerous. She has a lot of faith in Sherlock Holmes, though, and if anyone can put down the dog that is Jim, it’ll be him.
She’s wrong- so very wrong- and when Sherlock comes to her, she decides that it’s worth risking a stint in Azkaban to fix the mistake she’s created. She decides that she can do this without Sherlock needing to know about magic, though. She knows he’ll want to know how she performs the switch, and she expects questions from him and prepares her answers accordingly.
She doesn’t quite expect Mycroft, though.
Molly is the one to handle Sherlock’s body after his fall, and so it is to Molly that Mycroft appears. Interestingly enough, she seems to have done such a spectacular job with the body that even Mycroft actually seems to believe it, and he looks so stricken in her morgue that she’s tempted to take the spell off of the replacement corpse just to reassure him.
The look on his face is heartbreaking, and she wonders if this is how she had looked when she had seen her brother on her autopsy table for the first time at St. Mungo’s. She has to bite her lip to keep from saying something- to stop herself from offering words of comfort beyond what would be appropriate for a pathologist in this situation.
Several weeks later, he returns, and asks to speak with her.
It’s in this moment that Molly knows.
Her office has been soundproofed- by magic, not by muggle means, and so she shuts the door all the way, and invites the elder Holmes brother to take a seat in front of her desk. He’s looking at her as though she’s some sort of puzzle- a game to be figured out- and Molly stares right back, raising an eyebrow at him that almost seems to startle him.
“I happened to run into a mutual acquaintance of ours recently.” Mycroft tells her, and it actually throws Molly a bit, because other than Sherlock, she can’t possibly think of anyone they would both know. “Mr. Shacklebolt sends his regards, Ms. Selwyn.”
Molly bites back a nice diatribe of curses. She was going to kill Kingsley. He had been one of Neil’s closest friends, from before, and he and Molly had occasionally caught up before the war with a cup of tea on weekends. She knew he had been made Minister of Magic after the fighting had ended, and she had sent him a congratulatory owl, but hadn’t heard from him since.
Apparently, Mycroft held a far higher position in the British government than she had realized, if he had been introduced to Kingsley Shacklebolt. This was information to remember- Molly did not think this was the kind of thing most people got to know about Mycroft Holmes.
“I prefer to be called Hooper.” She responds, keeping her tone as even as possible. She knew that Kingsley would never had purposefully endangered her- he had been like an older brother to her- but she didn’t know what Mycroft’s business was, and she didn’t know what kind of a threat he was.
“An odd notion, but understandable after the war.” Mycroft nods, keeping his chin high, and fixing her with an irritating look of satisfaction. “Your family was responsible for quite a few atrocities, it seems.”
“Quite a few of them were, yes.” Molly responds, coolly, and Mycroft raises his eyebrows, like she’s surprised him. She refuses to give him the satisfaction, though, and stares right back at him. He tilts his head slightly, and Molly refuses to give him an inch. If she had survived her stern, screeching grandmother, then she could easily handle Mycroft Holmes. He seems to realize that she isn’t going to continue.
“I’ll get straight to the point, then.” he tells her, tilting his head in that imperious way. “You helped my brother fake his death. Why?”
“How would I have helped him?” Molly carefully asks, looking for direct confirmation- she still hasn’t heard him mention a single word about magic, and Molly has always been taught to be careful. Mycroft gives her a half smile that looks somewhere between annoyed and constipated, and a part of her wants to hex him. The furnunculus curse would be a good look, she thinks.
“Why, with your magic, of course.” He tells her, still giving her that infuriating, patronizing smile. “I suspect you cast an illusion upon a corpse- that was the insight that Mr. Shacklebolt had, at least.”
“An illusion could be risky.” Molly pointed out. “How would I know if it held?”
Mycroft looks confused for a second.
“I think transfiguration of a corpse would be a far more effective measure.” Molly shrugs. “Perhaps not a common skill set, but I did learn several things from my grandmother, and that was one of the few that wasn’t completely abominable.”
Mycroft’s expression twists into one of deep contemplation, and for a moment, just a second, Molly sees something interested and curious in Mycroft’s face, rather than the arrogance he’s covered his expression with previously. He shuts it down quickly though, which makes Molly simultaneously wary and terribly interested.
This can’t possibly be good.