A/N: This is my last fic for challenge 15 in the let's write Sherlock challenge. It's for the 'writer's choice' space, and I decided to do parentlock again.

She's late.

Mycroft glanced at his watch for the fifth time in the past three minutes, but it told him the same thing that it had before. Emily was ten minutes late for curfew. She hadn't called, hadn't sent a text. At this point Mycroft would be grateful for an email. He's worried, desperately worried. She could have been hit by a cab, been mugged…

He turns to scowl at Greg, who is calmly reading the paper. He finds that maddeningly unfair, how completely calm Greg is. Emily is his biological daughter, and he knows very well what can happen to a child alone (and even though Emily was a teenager, he still considered her a child, their child), and Greg was just sitting there calmly reading the paper as though their daughter wasn't missing and possibly in trouble or…

"Stop worrying Myc," Greg said, and Mycroft's scowl deepened. "Seriously, relax. Yes, Emily is late for curfew. Yes, it is the first time that has happened. No, we don't need to send the Queen's guard after her. She's ten minutes late. She's going to be in trouble for being late for curfew, especially since she didn't call, but she's fine. I'll bet she's a bit worried about how angry we're going to be, but she's likely perfectly fine."

"If she was 'perfectly fine' she would have been here by now Gregory," Mycroft hissed, moving to look out of the window again. Still no sign of Emily. "She has never been late for curfew before. Not once! She always calls before she goes somewhere, but it's been hours since we heard from her." This is why caring isn't an advantage, a small part of his mind thought. If I didn't care, then it wouldn't matter that Emily is late. I would have been annoyed that she broke the rules, but I would not have been this worried.

Mycoft was just about to suggest Greg call into work and send out a missing person's request (he could do it as well, but it would attract the kind of attention that he tended to avoid), when he heard footsteps on the stairs.

Emily came in, looking exactly the same as she always did. A shirt with those robot things she liked (Transformers, his mind supplied), dark blue jeans, and her black heeled boots. She only wore those when she wouldn't be walking much, regardless of how much she liked them, because they hurt her feet if she walked too much in them.

All of that trivia flitted through his mind quickly, and Mycroft barely registered that he was moving until his hands were on Emily's shoulders. "Where were you?" he snapped, looking down at her. "Do you have any idea how worried your father and I were? Why didn't you call if you were going to be late? For all we knew…"

"I could have been dead in a ditch?" Emily finished dryly, looking up at him with a frown. "Papa, relax. I was going to call, but my phone's dead. I forgot to charge it last night and it died while I was at school today. I was at the library later than I thought I'd be, doing research for one of my projects." She glanced over at the clock above the television. "I'm only like fifteen minutes late, what's the big deal?"

"You deliberately broke the rules we set out for you, that is what the 'big deal' is," Mycroft said angrily. Didn't she know how worried they were? Anything could have happened and they wouldn't have known because she couldn't call them. "Your phone is supposed to always be charged in case of an emergency, and you are always supposed to call us if you are late."

"I forgot!" Emily said, clearly exasperated. "Nothing happened! You knew I was going to the library after school. I didn't know that I was late for curfew because I couldn't check the time on my phone. I left the library on time, but traffic was mad. What was I supposed to do, ask the taxi driver to let me borrow his phone to call my parents?"

Mycroft opened his mouth to reply (and his response would have likely been along the lines of 'yes you should have'), but Greg cut in before he could say anything.

"There's leftovers in the fridge if you're hungry. If not, go to your room, please, while Myc and I have a talk," Greg said.

The teen rolled her eyes but left the room, stopping in the kitchen to reheat the leftover pizza her dad had made for dinner before going to her bedroom.

Greg waited until Emily's bedroom door was closed before rounding on Mycroft, glaring at his husband. "What was that, Mycroft? Jumping down her throat for being fifteen minutes late? And she had a reasonable explanation."

"She broke the rules," Mycroft said, scowling. "Anything could have happened to her, I was worried sick…"

"And so when she came home, perfectly fine, you scold her," Greg said. "Myc, I know that you were worried. If she had been gone a bit longer I would have been worried too. She's fine though, and currently sulking in her bedroom because you shouted at her."

Neither of them needed to yell at Emily often. She was a reasonably well behaved kid, she acted up sometimes but she never did anything truly horrible. She went to school, brought home decent grades, and was respectful to them. She kept her room tidy (for the most part, there were days when it looked like a hurricane had struck), and she helped around the house. They didn't have screaming rows every other day like some of the other parents he knew, she didn't smoke or drink (that he knew of, he had been good at sneaking drinks when he was her age and he wouldn't put it past her to do the same), and so Mycroft shouting at her now was a definite change of pace.

Mycroft sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I was panicking Gregory. Me, panicking. Just because she was a few minutes late for curfew." That wasn't it, not completely. She was growing up too fast and it had hit him that morning, when Anthea teased Emily about flirting with the driver on the way to school, the girl laughing and shaking her head. She was old enough to flirt, old enough to date. She wasn't the little girl who had won him a stuffed fox at the fair, the laughing child who had bounced on the bed to wake them up for Christmas. She was growing up.

Greg understood, he'd had the same thoughts himself a few times (although he'd never started shouting at Emily over it), and he wrapped his arms around Mycroft. "Myc, treating her like a child won't change the fact that she's growing up. We need to trust that we did right, that she knows how to take care of herself when necessary. We're not always going to be here, so she can't stay six years old forever."

"I wish she could," Mycroft mumbled, Greg chuckling and kissing his cheek.

"Well, she can't," he said, smiling fondly at his husband. "Now, I think you have an apology to make to our daughter and I have dishes to do. See if she wants to go out for ice cream after you two make up." There wasn't much doubt that they would. Emily could hold a grudge when she felt it was warranted, but over something like this? She'd likely forgive Mycroft as soon as she came to the same conclusion that Greg had.

He chuckled softly as he headed to the kitchen, hearing Mycroft go to Emily's room. Who would have thought that Mycroft would be the one panicking about Emily growing up, Greg thought, amused.