walking on a string
pairing: sdv harvey x OFC / reader
synopsis: After the unexpected death of her estranged father, Mollie flees to Pelican Town, a coastal village at the edge of nowhere, intent on hiding away in her grandfather’s old, rundown farmhouse.
She plans to stay distant and detached, but Pelican Town—and a certain reserved, infuriatingly intriguing doctor—threatens to unravel all her careful isolation.
Caught between loneliness and connection, healing and hurting, Mollie must decide if falling is worth the risk—or if some people are better left alone.
warnings: some fluff, lots of angst, and eventual smut. SLOW BURN. like annoyingly slow. but we will get there ;)
i have been working on this story for over a year now, and it is completed! though i need to workshop the end a bit, it should be around 70 chapters LOL you can find it on AO3, linked at the top!
here is a blurb from the first chapter: Mollie’s father died alone, surrounded by empty Jack and Coke bottles, the television still humming some late-night conspiracy show. By the time they found him—five days too late—aliens blinked on the screen, grainy footage of men in suits whispering about government lies. Mollie wondered what had been playing when it happened. Did he go out to the history of the world, to the wars of men? Or was it something wilder, something about celestial bodies and things unknown?
She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was this: he died alone. A half-empty Jack and Coke beside him. A crumpled bag of Funyuns. A shotgun, loaded and spent, clutched in his hand.
The shipyard manager told her all of this over the phone, his voice thick with something she couldn’t place—pity, maybe, or just exhaustion. It had been mid-afternoon when the unknown number pulled her from sleep. The man on the other end asked if she was Mollie Cooper.
Then, blunt as anything: Your father’s dead. Shot himself.
She hadn’t caught his name. Later, she would remember his voice: gruff, oil-stained, like the stink of diesel clinging to work boots. He explained that Rick Cooper disappearing for a few days wasn’t all that unusual—he skipped work often, probably nursing some hangover—but five days was different. The trailer had been unlocked. The air, when he cracked the door open, had been thick with something stale, something awful. And there was the blood, of course. The mess of it on the wall.
The man said he knew Rick had a daughter. Had mentioned her, vaguely, but never said much. Still, he thought it was right to call. Thought she ought to know. He had a box, too, a small one, filled with whatever scraps of a life her father had left behind. Thought maybe you’d want it, he said.
Now, Mollie sat on the floor, cross-legged on the faded rug of her mother’s home. The box lay open in front of her. Loose change. A lighter. A pocket knife with a worn handle. At the very bottom, a photograph: a baby with chubby cheeks, mid-laugh, frozen in time. Someone—her father, maybe—had scrawled her name in the corner, the ink smudged. There was a tiny spray of blood on the glass, dried and dark.
He had kept it. Through everything, he had kept it.
