Chapter Text
Two thousand years was a long time to exist in the world.
Two thousand years of existing alone was worse, she had realized long ago. She had had many friends, many lovers, but she took care never to give her heart to anyone. She never wanted to experience the pain of giving her heart to a mortal and having it broken when, inevitably, he or she died and she was left to soldier on until the end of days.
That was what happened when your mother was Death, she supposed.
She wondered why she was lost in this train of thought this morning. She usually never really sunk into it, pushing it to the back of her mind except for the three month stretch of December to February. Christmas, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day were the worst things to come out of modern advertising in her opinion. It was so much simpler a few hundred years back, when those holidays weren’t so commercialized and there wasn’t so much pressure for people to love and be in love and be in relationships.
And besides, it was April. Spring was here. New beginnings, a time of growth. And she had a new post, at St. Barts. It had been nearly a hundred years since she’d last been in London for more than a few days at a time. There was something about this city that drew her like a lodestone. It wasn’t home; that was a long gone area that was now part of Greece, conquered many eons ago, and it was so radically different now. For a long time she had drifted, but when Londontown had sprung up on the banks of the Thames she had been drawn there, and ever since she was drawn back, time and again. Macedon may have been the place of her birth but London…London was home.
She had a nice little flat on Montague Street that was near the hospital. She was used to big cities, nice anonymous places where she could blend in. She preferred them because in small towns and quaint villages people asked questions. She still had to move quite often; a woman who doesn’t seem to age a day gets noticed, but these days with Botox and cosmetic surgery and the like being all the rage, she could stretch her time a little longer in places she liked, make herself at home a little longer. She liked that. She might be able to get fifteen years out of London this time. Twenty if she took pains to try and age herself a bit. She’d have to see.
She’d gone to the local coffee shop, intent on getting some coffee and maybe a croissant. Or even better, something sweet, something with chocolate. For two thousand years she’d had a sweet tooth and she doubted that would change until the day there were no longer sweets to eat, which at the rate humanity was going she was sure wouldn’t be too far in the future. Or at the very least the good, decadent sweets would be outrageously expensive and only the upper class would get to enjoy them. Fortunately, one of the privileges of immortality meant having time to accumulate great wealth. She’d be able to afford chocolate when a thirty-second of an ounce was a thousand pounds.
She was so focused on her thoughts that she wasn’t paying attention and crashed into someone coming out of the shop, coffee in hand. The cup opened and spilled all over the man holding it, and her eyes widened in horror. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” she said.
“Bloody hell,” he murmured, looking down. It appeared to have only landed on his dark grey Belstaff coat, not on his impeccable suit, thank goodness. “Waste of a perfectly good coffee.”
“Please, let me replace it,” she said. The man looked at her, glaring, but the minute she looked into his dazzling eyes, flicking from blue to green in a matter of moments she froze as a sensation came over her. She had dreaded feeling this sensation her entire life. Her mother had felt it for her father and then felt two thousand years of pain and sorrow afterward. This man…this man was the man she was going to give her heart to. She felt it deep in her soul. This was the man she was destined to love wholeheartedly, for the rest of his days.
“I’m in a rush,” he said sharply, snapping her out of her thoughts. “There isn’t time.”
“Well, at least let me repay you,” she said, pulling her wallet out of her handbag. She pulled out a tenner. “I know it’s more, but…” She handed it to him. “Treat yourself to lunch, too.”
He gave her a curious look, then took the bill and pocketed it. “Pay more attention next time.”
She nodded, and before she could ask his name or learn anything else about him he was walking away. She watched him head in the direction of the hospital for a moment before heading into the shop. She ordered herself a large hazelnut coffee and a pain au chocolat, still somewhat distracted, and then drank the coffee and nibbled on the pastry as she made her way to the hospital. She had already been briefed on everything a few days before and so she went to the morgue to head into the office, pushing through the doors to see a very familiar figure standing there. “Excuse me?” she asked.
The man she’d bumped into turned around and gave her a slightly wide-eyed look. “You,” he said. “You’re the new—”
“Specialist registrar,” she said with a nod, crossing her arms. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, moving forward and quickly flashing an ID card. “I need information on a body.”
“You need to show me proper identification, then,” she said.
“I just did.”
“You showed me someone else’s ID,” she replied. “You can have him come in and tell me it’s all right to talk to you, though, if he’s not too upset you filched his ID.”
He stared, and then gave her a slight smile. “Fine. I’ll come back with Lestrade shortly.” He made his way to the doors and then paused. “Your name?”
She blinked, at a momentary loss for the name she was using now. “Molly,” she said after a moment. “Molly Hooper.”
He nodded again. “This will be…interesting,” he said quietly before leaving.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” she said to herself before hanging her head. This…this was going to be extremely complicated, she could tell.