A/N - Welcome to the new and improved version of sense! Rewritten so I dont cringe as much whenever I get a new reader lmao. I hope you enjoy :)

Chapter 1 – Rabbit Heart

Emma Stoneheart was nine when she realised she had no future with her family.

Her house had been packed up and her books now resided amongst the city of cardboard boxes, stacked high in every room, towering above her and her half-brother. Emma had tried to like Andrew, she really had, but when he still couldn't do his three times tables by the time he reached four she had decided that he wasn't worth her time. With her step-father it went without saying. He was her step-father, she had no interest in ever regarding him as anything more than an acquaintance, and the fact that her mother had had the audacity to marry him was reason enough to not want to speak to her, even when she disregarded her apparent stupidity.

She said apparent because she was nine, and was probably pretty stupid herself, in the grand scheme of things.

They were moving to Glasgow, a place that Emma would later learn is the armpit of the United Kingdom, to be nearer her step-dad's sister, who Emma had been informed was 'very poorly'. She assumed that this meant that her aunt was dying. She was right. Emma knew about death; she had had a rabbit growing up. That's what pets were for, right?

Emma was ten when she realised that she had been a mistake.

It wasn't completely a shock, to be honest, her mother had never acted like she wanted her. She had often overheard her muttering under her breath about how much better off she would have been if she could have finished her degree, or if she hadn't had a kid to look after. When her mother had finally come out and yelled it at her she hadn't reacted, just nodded and went back to the copy of The Fellowship of the Ring that she was powering through.

That summer Emma read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in two weeks. Her brother finally learnt the two times table.

When Emma was eleven she realised that other people weren't so bad.

Secondary school was a whole new world. At primary school she had only had one friend, a girl with pretty blond hair called Lucy, who liked Westlife and Busted, and painted each of her nails a different shade of pink because she couldn't decide which one looked best. The two were polar opposites, but somehow Lucy was the only one of her classmates that Emma could stand. They remained best friends, but seemed to accumulate several other girls, who sat with them at break times and discussed music and books with Emma, and ignored it when she analysed both beyond a normal year seven's ability.

Finally, Emma had a network of support that she could retreat to for six hours a day, a place she could feel accepted and even appreciated. They stayed close for four years, organising birthday parties and summer seaside trips and spontaneous shopping trips. Emma finally felt like she had a place – until she went home.

By the time Emma reached fifteen she realised she couldn't take it anymore.

There is only so much blatant favouritism someone can take, and something switched in Emma's brain on her brother's tenth birthday as she watched him unwrap a top of the range desktop computer – they didn't want you then, they don't want you now.

Emma had known who her real father was for several years – her mother snapped at anyone who spoke to her within a half hour time period of him appearing on the news, which he had begun to do quite often. She began compiling a collection of his mentions in the newspapers, keeping them in a journal. Soon, photographs started to join the articles – Emma was almost taken aback by how much they looked alike, now she realised why her mother hated her dark hair so much.

He was easy to find – his address was on his website, as well as his assistant(?)'s. There was an email address for inquiries, but Emma didn't know where she would start. Hi, I'm your estranged bastard child, I'm considering running away from home, can I crash with you?

She sighed, and shut her laptop, leaning back in her old office chair and staring out of the window behind her desk. The street was dark; the nights were drawing in for the winter. She preferred it that way. Emma pushed back the sleeves of her oversized hoodie to her elbows and slid the copy of Inkheart on the desk into her hands, before standing and making her way out of her bedroom and down the stairs to the lounge.

Her mother sat on the sofa, half-heartedly flicking through the newspaper Emma had bought on her way home from school. The cover had boasted another story about her father – Boffin Sherlock Solves Another! read the cover, shouting above a large photograph of the aforementioned detective in a deerstalker. Casey Stoneheart looked at it with a face of disgust. Emma sat herself down on the opposite end of the sofa and opened up her book, continuing from where she had left off before her casual web-stalk of Holmes. The television created a babble of white noise, low and boring in the background.

The family spent many evenings like this – Emma and her mother sat on the three-sofa, a cushion and a lifetime of emotional baggage separating them, while her step-dad, Daniel, watched television from the armchair and her half-brother, Andrew, tried desperately to complete the 2000 piece Harry Potter jigsaw on the floor that Emma had got him for his last birthday. He'd been at it for months; Emma was starting to wonder if he'd ever finish it, she had gotten used to it sitting in the corner of the room.

Eventually, Casey gave a long, exaggerated sigh and placed the newspaper between herself and Emma on the sofa, rustling the pages unnecessarily as she did. Emma did not move her head, but her eyes flicked up from the page to meet her mother's.

"Did you have to buy that one?" There was a note of confrontation in the woman's voice. Emma made sure that hers matched.

"Yes," She said shortly, "He's interesting. You should know that more than most, mother." The last sentence was quieter and accompanied with a sly smile, and Emma let her gaze linger for a moment with Casey's before dragging it slowly back to the words on the page, not that she was reading them anymore.

Her mother seemed taken aback for a moment – Emma did not usually fight back quite so explicitly, but today she had decided enough was enough. She was leaving this house as soon as possible.

"Shut up," Casey said, her voice sharp. Emma quirked an eyebrow but did not look up from the volume in her hands. That would be exactly what her mother wanted.

"Well," Emma said calmly, "I wasn't the one who lost a drunken bet and decided to fuck him, was I?"

There was a stunned silence for a moment in which Emma chanced a glance at her mother, who was a deep red in the face. She allowed one side of her lip to curl up – success.

Surprisingly, it was Daniel who spoke next, "Emma, don't swear in front of your brother." He tried to sound authoritative, but he knew that he had never had any sort of hold over Emma, not even when she was a toddler. He had tried, bless him, but Emma was strong willed, and she had never been one for parental figures.

"It's fine, dad, I hear it all the time at school." Andy piped up, seemingly trying to move along the conversation.

"Hm," Daniel hummed, looking unimpressed, "As long as you don't use language like that…"

"He does." Emma said, still not raising her eyes from the page.

"Do not!"

"Do too – you're doing the lying face."

"You're not even looking at me!" Andy sounded defeated despite the fact he was still fighting. Emma quirked an eyebrow,

"It's so obvious I can hear it." She looked up pointedly at him, "Oh look, I was right, you're doing the face. Picking at your fingers too – you do that when you lie."

The television was switched off, plunging the room into a cold silence for a moment, during which Emma's confidence only faltered slightly. Her mother threw down the remote control between them and turned her body to face Emma, a rage in her eyes that was becoming all too familiar. Emma did nothing, but closed her book and placed it on the arm of the sofa.

"This needs to stop. Right now."

Emma stayed silent, looking expectantly at Casey, who seemed to take this as an invitation to continue.

"This is what he used to do – it's no wonder he dropped out, he had no friends because no one could stand him – that's how you'll end up. It's unnatural. It's weird! I tried my best to stop it, but you're turning into him no matter what I do." Her voice was incredibly high; she was upset. Emma would feel sorry for her if she didn't despise her so much.

"I'd rather be weird," Emma said calmly, standing up and smiling down at her mother, "Than like you."

She left the rest of her family looking shocked behind her, and scooped up her book as she left the room, heading back up the stairs to her room and shutting the door quietly behind her. She reopened her laptop and paused for a moment, before opening a new tab on her web browser and searching for last minute train tickets to London.

It was a good thing she had Casey's credit card details memorised…

That morning she had packed a suitcase and left the house, leaving it under her bed and pretended to head off to school, but instead sneaking around to the back garden and hiding behind the tool shed. It had been cramped, and there had been spiders, but Emma reckoned the three hours it had taken to wait for Daniel to finally set off for work had been worth it.

She unlocked the door and disabled the burglar alarm, before heading up the stairs to her room and fishing the suitcase out from under her bed and changing out of her school uniform into something more unassuming. The railway station was a short taxi ride away from her house, and Emma had been hoarding cash for a while for this exact purpose, and so she arrived there with time to spare. She had received some odd looks, being clearly school age and alone, and if she hadn't known that she could handle herself she would have been anxious. Not that she ever got anxious about anything.

The train journey was long and tiring, with so many changes that Emma was regretting not waiting another week just so that she could have gotten a more direct route. As they passed through the north of England, old ladies began trying to talk to her, and her obvious Manchester accent didn't help her to escape. She missed Glasgow, where strangers would go out of their way to not make eye contact with you.

Upon arrival at Kings Cross, Emma pulled out her phone and loaded up the blog of John Watson, scanning the page quickly for an enquires address, and hoped to God that it was where he and Sherlock lived as she got into the back of a cab and recited it to the driver. Her earphones were still in, blasting music at full volume, though the battery of her iPod was getting dangerously low. The buildings outside passed slowly as they moved through the traffic at a snail's pace, and Emma watched with little interest as commuters and tourists bustled around the streets, the former tutting at the latter.

I must become a lion hearted girl, ready for a fight…

Emma shut her eyes and leaned back in the seat, surprisingly calm to say that she had just run away from home. She wondered what her mother would think, when she realised that Emma wasn't coming home from school. She expected that Casey would be happy, though a voice in the back of her head told her that that was probably just the teen angst talking. Emma mentally shook herself, and leaned a little further into the crook of the door and the seat, folding her arms across her chest and allowing herself to sink into the music that now flowed through her, transporting her to somewhere Other, allowing her to step out of reality for however long she was trapped in the cab.

When they pulled up, Emma thanked the driver, handing him the correct change before he had looked at the clock – she had worked out the pricing as they were going, and had had it ready for the past fifteen minutes. She slung her backpack over one shoulder as she stepped out of the taxi and dragged her suitcase out after her, looking up at the building in front of her.

The door was painted black, a stark contrast to the light grey of the stone building it sat in. The three storey building towered above her, and as the cab pulled away behind her Emma considered that maybe this hadn't been a good idea. She was young and small, and London was the biggest city in the country. Emma suddenly had no idea what she was doing there. She had only met her father once, after all, and she wasn't even sure he knew who she was – what if he just turned her away? What would she do then?

Emma swallowed the questions and pushed her shoulders back, standing a little taller. She would never know if she didn't try.

Taking a deep breath, she took the steps up to the front door and knocked three times. There was no answer for a good minute, and Emma was about to consider walking away, hailing a cab and heading back to Glasgow, before the door was pulled back a fraction and an older woman with sandy hair and a lined face poked her head around. Emma put on her best fake smile and cocked her head to one side,

"Hi," She gave the woman her sweetest voice, hoping that she could butter her up for as much information as she could get. The woman looked fazed for a moment, blinking at Emma confusedly, but gave her an endearing smile regardless,

"Oh, hello, dear," She frowned, opening the door a little wider, "Are you here to see Sherlock?"

So he does live here, Emma thought, success.

"Yes, actually. I have an appointment," She lied effortlessly, "For seven thirty? I'm half an hour late but, y'know, I had a lot of homework to do. I'm the one with the missing uncle." As Emma said it she hoped to God that this woman didn't deal with Sherlock's case files. Her muscles tensed as she waited for the woman to reply, but relaxed as soon as she pulled the door open fully,

"Of course, go on up – first door in front of you when you go up the stairs." The woman gave her a kind smile and a nod, and Emma returned the gesture, this time with a little more truth.

"Thanks," She said sincerely, picking up her suitcase and making her way through the dark, narrow hallway towards the staircase. The woman gave her luggage an odd look, but did not question it, just watched Emma as she ascended to the flat upstairs.

As she approached the door at the top, Emma began to hear voices, one deep and calm, the other slightly higher and more agitated.

"It's an ear hat, John!" The deeper voice said, rather aggressively, before pausing, "What do you mean, 'more careful'?"

"I mean," The second voice said, lower now, "This isn't a deerstalker anymore, it's a Sherlock Holmes hat. I mean that you're not exactly a private detective anymore. You're this far from famous!"

"It'll pass."

"It better pass." The second voice was getting angrier now, "The press will turn, Sherlock, they always turn, and they'll turn on you."

Emma assumed this second voice was that of John Watson, Sherlock's assistant and, seemingly, his only friend. There was a pause before the first voice, who Emma had identified as Sherlock, spoke again,

"It really bothers you?"

"What?"

"What people say?" Sherlock sounded genuinely concerned. Emma stopped behind the door, choosing to continue to eavesdrop instead of knocking.

"Yes." John said shortly.

"About me?" Sherlock countered, "I don't understand, why would it upset you?"

She had heard enough – Emma didn't want to be interrupting any potential bromance moments. She knocked loudly, and the voices stopped for a moment before Emma hear Sherlock say shortly,

"John, door."

"Yes, I know." John sounded exasperated, and his face matched that assumption as the door swung open to reveal it, lined with worry and approximately three inches lower than her own. He was short, with grey-blonde hair and an obvious military background, and gave Emma a clear look of confusion as soon as he focused his attention upon her.

"Um, can I help you?" He asked, before inclining his head toward the man behind him and asking, "Did we have any more clients today?"

"No," The other man said shortly. Emma wished that John would move so that she could get a look at him. Her stomach was knotting itself so tightly that it was only a matter of time before she lost all composure.

"Doctor Watson?" Emma posed it as a question, though she knew that she was right, "Love the blog." She held out a hand for him to shake, and he took it briefly, before stepping back a little. Emma took this opportunity, pushing herself past the man and into the shabby flat. She didn't take in much of the surroundings – nothing but the violin by the window, the skull on the mantle and the person she had been waiting fifteen years to be introduced to.

"Sherlock Holmes," She said, a small, genuine smile snaking up one corner of her mouth. She allowed the backpack to fall off of her shoulder, and pulled the earphones out of her ears, letting them hang from the neckline of her hoodie where they sat silently, her iPod having run out of battery half an hour before. Sherlock did nothing, but arched a single eyebrow at her, some sort of realisation behind his eyes. Emma could tell that he knew exactly who she was.

John, however, did not seem to be up to speed, "Listen, if you're some sort of weird fan or something –"

"Shut up, John." Sherlock cut him short, holding up a hand and regarding Emma with a calculating gaze that made her feel as if she was about to get yelled at, "She's something else…" He said slowly. Emma considered for a moment that maybe he didn't know who she was after all. She didn't know how, however, they looked incredibly alike, even more so than Emma had noticed for the news coverage.

He had the same pale skin and facial bone structure as Emma did, with the same coal-black hair, though Emma's was thicker and far longer, curling down towards the middle of her back. His eyes were lighter than hers, and his nose completely different, but the resemblance was still striking. There was no denying that they were related.

"You've come from Scotland, but you're not Scottish." Sherlock started, taking a few steps towards her.

"That much was obvious, yes." Emma wondered for a moment if he was ignoring the obvious conclusion because he would rather it wasn't the truth. Her stomach twisted again. "Train ticket deliberately sticking out of my pocket; clear English accent. Easy."

"You're not looking for help, or, at least, not with a case." Sherlock was watching her far more carefully now, seemingly unfazed by her attempt at a test.

"Do you remember a woman named Casey Williams?" Emma asked him, deciding that she was probably going to have to be the one to bring up the elephant in the room, or else they would never get anywhere, "Sorry, I got bored."

Sherlock's eyebrows raised for a moment, before dropping, his face becoming stern, "Oh God." His voice was bitter.

"Yep." Emma gave him a weak smile, "Hi, I guess." She took a step towards him, "My name is Emma Stoneheart, and I don't have a case, or any money, or, in fact, any means of getting home. I'm here to meet my father – properly, that is, not just in passing at a reunion. I was hoping that I could stay here?" Emma faltered for a moment, seeing a shot of panic flash across Sherlock's face, before it settled back to a completely unreadable expression, "Please? I can't go back home."

The room was plunged into a long, sticky silence. Emma did not have to turn to face John to know what expression he was wearing. Sherlock, however, looked completely neutral. Emma swallowed, her throat dry and her palms clammy.

"Okay, no," John said suddenly, walking around Emma so that he now stood in front of her, "Not following. Can someone fill me in, please?" He looked to Sherlock, which surprised Emma, as she was expecting that she would have to be the one to explain everything. Sherlock sighed,

"Emma, this is Doctor John H. Watson, my good friend and flatmate. John, this is Emma Myra Stoneheart, my…" He paused, and twisted his face a little before settling on a word he felt comfortable using, "Offspring."

Emma quirked an eyebrow – he had said the last work with so much distaste that she would almost have been taken aback, had she not have been used to the idea of being unwanted. She was curious to see that he had known her middle name, however it didn't exactly shock her. Sherlock seemed the type to have looked her up at some point.

"Since when have you had a daughter, Sherlock?" John was seemingly getting more and more distressed as the conversation progressed.

"Since almost sixteen years ago," Sherlock shrugged.

"And you didn't think to mention it?" Emma wouldn't have been surprised if John actually started tearing his hair out soon, he looked close to breaking point.

"It never seemed relevant."

Emma couldn't argue with that, and neither, it seemed, could John. He stared at the two of them for a few moments, his mouth open as if to say something, but ended up closing it without another word.

"What is relevant now, however, is the pressing matter of why on earth you would come here in the first place." Sherlock turned his attention to Emma. She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze, unable to order her thoughts properly. She had always felt so clever, yet now she felt incredibly stupid.

"Uh, well," She stopped herself, collecting her thoughts quickly in order to articulate them efficiently, "I guess mum has never really kept it a secret that she didn't want me? Like, she was kind of awful to me. I don't know, it's probably just the fact that I'm an angsty teen or something, y'know, but I just – I'm not sure I can cope living with her anymore."

"She makes you feel inadequate and unloved, yes?" Sherlock interrupted her. Emma shot him a look.

"Yeah, I guess."

"And you came here looking for something other than that?" Sherlock raised an eyebrow at her. Emma felt stupid,

"No, I –" She sighed, "I came here because you're the reason she hates me – we're too much alike. I figured that you couldn't hate me as much as her, because, y'know, I'm like you."

Emma shrugged, dropping her gaze to her feet. She daren't look up, not wanting to see the expression on her father's face, dread creeping up the back of her neck. She was going to have to get back on the train to Glasgow in the morning, she could feel it.

The silence was thick and tangible and lasted for far too long. It was John who finally broke it, speaking to Sherlock, not Emma,

"You're not actually considering this, are you?"

Emma's head snapped up, falling upon the sly smile on Sherlock's lips. Her stomach did a flip – was she going to be able to stay?

"Why not?" Sherlock asked, "There's another room upstairs. There's also the delightful bonus of annoying Casey Williams, who I never liked." There was something in Sherlock's face that made Emma laugh, and she felt the anxiety that had been clinging to her since she had got out of the taxi start to ebb away.

"If you hated her then why'd you –"

"Oh, please, John, we were drunk. We lost a bet."

The next few days were worse than Emma had imagined. She was enrolled at the local secondary school almost immediately, despite her many, many protests ("I ran away to avoid things like school for God's sake!"), and any time she spent at 221B was spent mostly in silence. She may have been boring and borderline-abusive, but at least Emma's mother had actually made an effort to speak to her, even if most of the things she had to say weren't particularly nice. To make things at 221B worse, Emma kept finding body parts in various places around the flat and, on one particularly bad occasion, in her bedroom.

Emma had been organising the bookshelf in her new room for half an hour undisturbed, arranging the books that she had managed to squash into her suitcase onto the shelves alphabetically by author, then chronologically by the time of publishing. She moved one particularly large volume to reveal a jam jar nestled in the space between the pile and the wall, it's sides slightly clouded and greyish. She picked it up and inspected the contents through the glass, frowning.

"OK, those are eyes," She muttered, before dropping the jar as quickly as possible.

They're staring at me, she thought.

"Stop that." Emma said to them. The eyes stared back.

She moved over to her suitcase and flipped it open, pulling out a t-shirt and throwing it over the jar with a look of disgust. She scooped up the heap and carried it at arm's length down the stairs and into the living room. Presenting them to Sherlock, Emma cleared her throat.

"Fridge." Sherlock said bluntly, without looking up from the microscope he was squinting into.

"They're eyes?"

"Yes. Fridge."

Emma looked at him blankly for a few seconds, expecting him to say something else, before shrugging and carrying the jar through to the kitchen and opening the fridge.

"Are there always toes in the cheese drawer?" She called to Sherlock whilst slipping the jar next to the jam in the refrigerator door (jam on the left, eyes on the right; she didn't want to get that mixed up in the morning).

"No, sometimes there are fingers." John smiled at her, placing a mug in the sink. Emma hadn't noticed him enter the room behind her, but that was probably because she was focusing on not dropping eyes all over her socks. She pulled the t-shirt from over the jar with a flourish, much like a magician, and then shut the fridge door.

"Alright," She folded the t-shirt and placed it on the kitchen table, nodding to herself as she processed the information, then gave John a half-hearted smile.

"It doesn't bother you? His experiments?" John asked, pointing vaguely at the fridge she had just closed with a thumb, a puzzled look crossing his features. Emma had noticed that his face looked like that a lot over the past few days.

"Why would they? I just don't like eyes, I'm fine with everything else." Emma thought for a moment, and then said, much louder than before, "As long as he doesn't leave them in my room!"

"You're as bad as John!" Came the reply from the living room, and Emma felt her lips curl up into a small smile.

John was regarding her with an odd expression, and he was silent for a few moments before he spoke,

"You know, you're not at all what I expected Sherlock's child to be like."

Emma quirked an eyebrow, "How so?"

"You're just… normal, I guess. I always thought the whole of his family would be, y'know…"

"Like him?" Emma guessed, "I don't even know what he's like."

John regarded this for a moment, tilting his head slightly, "Well, he's a bit of a prat really, but he's beautifully intelligent."

Emma snorted, raising her eyebrows at him, "That's a bit gay, John."

Emma tapped her foot along to the beat of the song on her iPod as she consumed the words of the book she was reading. It was now early afternoon, but Sherlock was still sat in front of his microscope, though he had moved from the living room to the kitchen, and had hanged someone from the light fitting. Admittedly, a plastic someone, but Emma expected they had had it coming anyway. The music blared in her ears, blocking out the room around her until one earphone was tugged out by John, who poked her in the knee, indicated to the dummy and asked,

"So, did he just talk to him for a really long time?" He was grinning, obviously proud of his joke. Emma shrugged and paused her music, sensing a conversation was about to take place as John went to sit in his armchair, opening a newspaper.

"What, oh," Sherlock glanced up at the doctor briefly, then went back to his microscope, "Henry Fishgard never committed suicide," He slammed the book next to him on the table shut, causing dust to erupt from its pages, "Bow-Street Runners... missed everything."

"They were a vigilante police force from the 1800s, weren't they?" Emma put her own book down so as to join the conversation from where she sat on the sofa, "that 'case' you said you were working on must be over 200 years old."

Sherlock looked up at her "What an esteemed deduction, I can see you will go far in the line of detective work."

"No need to be sarcastic, Sherlock." Emma raised her eyebrows at him.

"Pressing case, is it?" John interrupted, shooting Sherlock a warning look, obviously wary of the rising tension between the two of them and wanting to avoid it. Sherlock sighed, going back to his microscope,

"They're all pressing until they're solved..."

The room fell into silence again as they each went back into their own business, Emma again becoming consumed in the book in front of her. They remained silently in each other's company for a short while, until Sherlock's phone went off half an hour later.

No one moved to check it, which obviously irritated John as he folded up his paper noisily and muttered, "I'll get it, shall I?"

Emma watched him go to pick up Sherlock's phone out of the corner of her eye, only putting her book back down when John nudged the detective,

"Look at this."

Sherlock took the device and scanned the screen quickly, then stood up.

"Emma, get your coat."