There were times when Mycroft complained in passing about how hard it could be to be Sherlock's brother sometimes. The two didn't talk very often and most of their communication was done through covert agents from Mycroft or by using Emili as a messaging service. Emili wouldn't tell him, since the proud brother would take it as an insult, but Emili was certain that he wouldn't last a week living in her apartment.
There were advantages to sharing a building with Sherlock and John, of course. She hadn't felt any safer with Mycroft's security than she did knowing that there was an armed ex-vet downstairs that she actually knew. The landlady was a definite plus – Mrs. Hudson didn't like that Emili lived without an adult, and Emili knew that she wouldn't let Emili stay there alone if it weren't for Sherlock and John being just a staircase away if they were ever needed. Mrs. Hudson enjoyed checking in on her and frequently brought her scones fresh out of the oven – and cookies, when she made them, but Mrs. Hudson would call them "biscuits." Having a doctor just downstairs meant that she had generally on-call medical services. And Sherlock, who didn't have the sleep schedule of any living animal she'd ever heard of, much less a human, liked to play his violin at odd hours during the night – which sounded annoying, but when he wasn't viciously abusing the strings with a bow that needed more rosin, the music was beautiful, and the floorboards were thick enough to muffle it into a lullaby when Em had trouble sleeping.
However, if it was hard to be Sherlock's friend, then that was nothing compared to being his neighbor. As often as his violin helped her sleep, his activities would wake her up, and that was when he wasn't coming up to her apartment and hitting on the door, sometimes letting himself in and giving her a panic attack when she woke up to a tall, dark figure standing over her bed, shaking her awake to tell her to get herself presentable immediately because Lestrade called or because he needed to know if she had any experience scrubbing blood out of carpets, since he needed to clean up the results of an experiment before John saw.
Emili's privacy wasn't a very respected thing. She locked her windows and her bedroom door, but she left her apartment door unlocked at nights in case there was an emergency. She couldn't promise banging on her apartment door would wake her from a deep sleep, but if someone came pounding on the door five feet from her bed, she was sure to hear. She figured that if anyone was going to break in, they would get the lower rooms first, and then the gun-carrying blogger would deal with them. As a result, often when she went into her living room after sleeping in late, she would find notes placed on her kitchen counter or her laptop taken and opened up to a website and left on the couch for her to find. Several times, groceries she had just replaced would go M.I.A., especially her milk and dairy products.
Then there were Sherlock's expectations. He was his own favorite person. That honestly wasn't much of a surprise, but he expected to have Emili's attention and sulked when she refused to go to the morgue with him in favor of a test that needed to be done or a school assignment that needed to be written. She loved getting dragged around and involved in his detective work most of the time, but Mycroft could take that away, and one of the few demands she had to meet for the privilege involved keeping her grades up before the Holmes parents thought that Mycroft was neglecting his duties as an older brother. Which he totally was. In spite of this, he checked in fairly often – or had Anthea do so in his stead – so Emili didn't feel neglected, especially when she counted herself lucky to get a full five hours of alone time in her own home from her other sibling.
The grades had always come easily to her in America. She'd been reading long books before her school had taught her class how to read – of course those books had been at a child's level, like the American Girl series, but it served as a good example of her readiness and willingness to learn. Moving to England didn't change school's difficulty unless it was in her Brit-Lit class (as she called it, short for British Literature) due to her inexperience with the country. She still excelled at writing, science, and social studies, got impressive grades in her frustrating foreign language class, and hated math with a passion, though she was on top of that course, too.
Excelling was no easy thing to do, what with a lot of her time spent on cases that Sherlock managed to solve in under forty-eight hours and babysitting the detective when he got bored. She had introduced him to Star Trek on her laptop and then hadn't been able to get her computer away from him until he'd watched the whole series, nitpicking at the science and the tiny inaccuracies from scene to scene in makeup, clothing, or dialogue.
Emili was trying and struggling to write a paper on Jane Austen for her Brit-Lit class. She'd been meaning to read Pride and Prejudice for years but had never gotten around to it, so she chose to do her literary review on Austen. That meant she had to read the book first. No big deal. She got a recommendation for a bookstore from John and went and picked up a copy. Back at her apartment, she wished she'd gone to the Diogenes Club rather than home – even if Mycroft had been babysitting her, she'd at least have some peace and quiet to read to.
The book was dry compared to Harry Potter, which she still believed to be the pinnacle of British writing. The language was outdated and it didn't help that even half of the British slang in the modern age was foreign to Emili – she had asked for a bag of chips at the supermarket and was directed to an aisle in frozen goods with French fries. The formality was irritating – people had ever really talked like that? – and it seemed like it was going to take forever to read.
And it really would, if the banging from the apartment below never stopped.
"With a renewal of tenderness, however, they repaired to her room on leaving the dining-parlour," Emili mouthed along with the books, having to speak the words herself to manage to stay focused rather than just let her mind wander. "And sat with her till summoned to coffee. She was still very poorly, and Eliza-"
Another thud coming from 221B made her muscles jump where she laid on her stomach on her bed, having slept late and decided to wake up by reading, only getting up long enough to brush her hair and teeth and wash her face. Gritting her teeth, Emili resumed reading after ten seconds of nothing from downstairs.
"-And Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her asleep, and when it appeared to her rather right than pleasant that she should go down stairs herself. On entering the drawing-room she found the whole party at-"
Something loud shattered and then something heavy fell, making her tense up again. It sounded like a piece of furniture had tipped, something had fallen off of it, and then it had fallen back onto its feet again.
"-At loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting them to be playing high, she declined it, and making her sister the excuse, said she would-"
Something slammed hard into a wall downstairs in Sherlock's apartment. Emili was astonished that John was letting the ruckus continue for so long, and if the blogger wasn't going to do something about it, then she would. It was getting ridiculous.
Emili pushed her bookmark in between the open pages and then slammed the novel shut, pushing it to the side of her pillow and hopping off of her bed. She looked down at her nightgown, which had the image of the TARDIS designed across the front, and pulled it down her thighs, freeing the material where it had gotten bunched up. At full length, the dress went about to her knees.
A dress and long pink hair didn't make her look very scary, but at least she was taller than John, and that was a fact that Emili was very proud of most of the time – she may not be big enough to scare Sherlock, but she wasn't the smallest.
As she stormed downstairs, the noise just continued. A muffled yell came while she was huffing on the stairwell angrily and she almost viciously thought I hope you burned yourself and then immediately hoped that if Sherlock had gotten hurt from an experiment, it wasn't bad enough to need anything more than some cold water.
Emili didn't knock on the door before she tried the handle, and it swung right on open when she pushed. The teenager put her hands on her hips and pushed the door shut with a kick, looking around for Sherlock and John irately.
"Excuse you, sir Neanderthals," she hissed, knowing that it was a weak insult most of the time but one that this man in particular would take offense to. "Some of us are actually trying to maintain our GPAs up here, and it's really hard to do that when – oh my God!"
She cut herself off and covered her mouth with her hands, eyes flying wide with shock. Sherlock came leaping out of the kitchen, hurrying backwards and looking over his shoulder to avoid tripping, while someone else followed, wielding a long sword with a slightly-curved blade. The attacker turned to look at her, pausing his assault on Sherlock. Emili was only in her nightgown and fluffy socks with her hair tied casually back. Whoever was giving sword-fighting lessons was decked out like a ninja, wearing a long black robe that covered all of him but his face, which was wrapped with scarves. The thinnest, most see-through scarf was deep red and went over his eyes, allowing him to see.
Emili regretted drawing the attention to herself with her shouting before figuring out what the commotion was from. The robed man took his eyes off of Sherlock and changed course, coming towards her. Part of Em thought that it was because he didn't want witnesses to his intended murder, but another was already looking around for something to combat a sword with. There was a table against the wall with a lamp and a steel candelabra. Emili picked up the candelabra and held it up to the ninja or whatever he was supposed to be.
When the sword came down at her, she held up the candelabra in front of it and the blade was stopped by the curve between two of the candle rests. Throwing her arm to the side, Emili jerked the candelabra, and the sword, to her left. With the blade not poised to strike, she turned to her left and raised her right leg, delivering a strong kick into the man's chest. She was thankful for the self-defense videos on the internet – she was surprised she got her leg up that far and wished she hadn't just flashed a nice shot, but the sword flailed out of the candelabra and its bearer went stumbling backwards, bent over with a hand against his sternum.
Emili looked over at Sherlock to demand what was going on. The detective was straightening his jacket and fixing the cuffs on the sleeves. Her jaw dropped incredulously. Weren't there more important things to do than fix his clothes?!
The attacker recovered swiftly from the kick and went for the first person he saw upon standing up. Even with two against one, Emili thought that the sword definitely made the fight more than fair. This time, the man (he didn't have breasts or Emili would've noticed when she kicked him) held the hilt of the sword in one hand and the flat edge of the blade in the other and went after Sherlock again. She watched helplessly as the attacker forced Sherlock into the kitchen with the sword held ahead of him.
Emili picked her way over the pieces of a shattered vase on the carpet to get far enough into the living room – er, parlor – to see the adjoined kitchen. Sherlock was forced down onto his back over the table, arms up and working on shoving the sword away from his throat. The man definitely trying to kill him was bent over him between the detective's legs, trying very valiantly to be stronger than Sherlock and cut his throat.
Unable to believe that this was actually a real situation, Emili charged the kitchen and leapt from a couple feet away onto the man's back. He made no move to catch her, but she wrapped her arms tightly around his throat and her legs around his waist. It took some awkward wiggling to secure a position on his back, but then she put her chin on his shoulder and reached after his arms, grabbing at his wrists and pulling the sword away from Sherlock.
With more force pulling the sword away, Sherlock pushed harder with one hand than the other and let the end of the blade go down while the other kept going back towards its wielder. The tip of the sword pushed into the table and dug into the wood, and without such an imminent threat so close to his neck, Sherlock started to kick, repeatedly jabbing his knees into the man's legs. Emili let go of the wrist trying to get the sword out of the gauge in the table and got that arm around the man's throat, tightening her grip in a stranglehold.
Finally, with not just his assassination thwarted but his life threatened, the man let Sherlock free and stood away, dropping the sword. Both of his hands went to Emili's arm, and painfully strong fingers gripped her arm like claws, trying to forcibly loosen her grip. The teen held on and even leaned back, using her weight to her advantage. The intruder stumbled with the added weight and backed into a wall.
Emili wheezed. That was a lot more hurtful than it had looked in The Princess Bride.
Coughing over the man's shoulder, her arm loosened from his neck and her thighs relaxed. The man ripped her arm off of his throat and elbowed her violently in her side, bending backwards further. Emili lost her grip and crashed down to the floor, leaning on the wall and nursing a sore back and what felt like a broken kidney.
"Look!" Sherlock shouted, getting the man's attention back to him. He pointed with his left hand to the mirror over a dressing table that had found a home in 221B's parlor.
For just a second, the assassin held himself straighter, seeing the movements of Sherlock and himself. It wasn't long at all, but it was long enough for the detective to step forward and swing his fist forcefully into the attacker's jaw. The man reeled before he dropped a few feet away from his forgotten sword, and Emili curiously stared at the body, wondering absently how long he was going to stay unconscious.
Sherlock, again, fixed his black blazer and his collar, brushing off the imaginary dust on the sleeves like a perfectionist. He looked down at the prone body, huffed indignantly at the rudeness of being assaulted, and then looked to Emili, who remained seated by the wall, the confusion catching up with her now that no one's life was in peril.
"Friend of yours?" She asked, holding her left hand over her right side where she'd been hit.
"Assassin, more like, from a Hindi museum jewelry heist." Sherlock lowered himself into a kneel in front of her and took her chin in hand, turning her head to one side and then peering into her eyes. "Are you injured?" Suddenly the face-grabbing made more sense – for all he knew, Emili could've hit her head on the wall, too.
"Just winded," she replied. She was hurting, but there wasn't much that even John could have done about that. It was pretty obvious at this point that John wasn't home. If there was internal bleeding, then she could apologize for accidentally lying after the emergency surgery. "When did you take a new case?"
Sherlock pursed his lips in vague annoyance. She had about half a second to wonder what she had said to tick him off. "I believe it was when I tried to wake you up and you replied with some profane language about it being too early," he stiffly responded.
She didn't even remember being woken up this time. She must have been really tired the night before. Although Sherlock looked very unhappy with her, Emili started to giggle… which just made him scowl at her.
Emili had always been a bit impish. She liked to pull obvious pranks with her sister and more complex ones on the little girl. She drove her parents half-nuts with her antics, ranging from pretending she had no idea what they were talking about on one occasion and on another laughing for no reason just to alarm them and watch them panic, wondering what she'd done this time. Nothing was ever harmful, just… silly.
Her mischievous sense of humor had dulled significantly after her family's deaths. She loved their reactions and their input on her jokes. Without her audience, who was there to perform for? Her crowd, her mom and dad, gone – her assistant, her baby sister, there one second and gone the next, like smoke. Then she moved to England, and she went from being the poor kid who didn't really talk to being the weird American.
Emili healed in her own time. There was still a lot further to go, but the Holmes parents had been nothing but kind, and once, she had dared to resort to an old classic – mixing Skittles and M&Ms together in a bowl and leaving it innocently out on the counter. She had gotten both of the married couple, and thankfully, they'd found it funny, too.
Mycroft wasn't the type to appreciate jokes, so Emili wasn't really up for it at first. He was too austere, and she wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't throw her out if she annoyed him. She got more comfortable the longer she stayed. Mycroft lacked genuine patience, but had perfected the art of pretending he had inexhaustible reserves, and though he claimed not to care what insipid activities she got up to elsewhere, Emili wasn't an idiot, and she noticed when she was being followed by Anthea or some other falsely-named employee of Mr. British Government. He wanted her safe, even if it was for the sake of his parents.
Sherlock wasn't his brother. Though he was the dynamic opposite of Mycroft, he still turned his nose up at what he perceived as juvenile antics. Maybe they were childish, but Emili took her amusement where she could. Her family had died all at once and then her life had been entirely uprooted. Since she'd come to England, she'd had to deal with learning to operate as the ward of someone who a lot of people in various foreign agencies probably wouldn't mind to see assassinated, moved into her own apartment, and had been victim to her own attempted murder. She'd seen someone die. She'd been in various crime scenes and had become such a common feature at New Scotland Yard that a fair few of the detectives now greeted her by name. Em figured that she deserved whatever laughs and stress relief she could get, so long as no one was hurt.
But in the process of not hurting anyone, she didn't want to make trouble for herself with the brother that actually seemed somewhat inclined to act like her sibling, even if he had only become so after she'd proven that she had the guts and the skills to be a partner in semi-crime and crime-solving. Mrs. Hudson was out of the question in most cases, because she was very easy to startle and Emili hated to bother her when she was always so generous. John, however…
John was an easy target. She didn't worry about scaring him, because he had a ship-shape health bill and the nerves of an army captain. He was certainly an adult, but unlike the Holmes duo, John was an adult that saw the value in enjoying one's self sometimes, and he chuckled along with Emili at the slapstick humor she liked to play on her TV for background noise.
So of course, Emili had been the first to address cleaning up the evidence of the fight with the would-be assassin. Sherlock dragged the body out of 221B and presumably off to Scotland Yard, but Em didn't ask and he didn't tell. If he had a funny story to tell, then what was funny to her would likely be annoying to him, and he seemed no more peevish than he'd been before he'd left. She swept up the ceramic from the smashed vase. Sherlock disposed of the sword. Emili replaced the things on the table that had fallen when Sherlock had been pinned, and Emili had taken a long look at the wall where the sword had made a deep slash, winced, and then decided to shift the stick-on tabs just a little bit to the side so that the detective's long Belstaff coat would cover the imperfection when the veteran came home.
She wasn't sure what she was more eager to see – John struggling to figure out why the apartment seemed off, or John oblivious to anything having happened while he was out.
Sherlock was reading a thick, tightly-bound tome in his reclining armchair when John returned, the footfalls up the stairs pausing as a key was inserted into the lock. Emili reclined further back into the couch, her own book over her chest while she read and struggled to focus on the formal language. Sherlock hated being bored and needed something to occupy his brain, but Emili was far more selective in being bored – she could have something to do, but if it was something she didn't want to do, she was far more likely to be bored.
"Hi, John," Emily welcomed calmly, masking up the excited butterflies that bubbled up in her chest, almost making her break out into a suspiciously keen grin. She held her bored façade up while she read a long line that went almost an entire paragraph.
John looked around the apartment. Emili kept watching in her peripheral vision, pretending she didn't notice him hesitating. He stood right at the doorway, the door still swung wide open, and he squinted around. He looked at the hanging coats particularly hard before he shook his head.
"Morning, Em," he called back, sounding completely worn out and two hundred percent done with the day, even though it was barely noon.
"You took your time," Sherlock drawled from the armchair, not parting his eyes from the novel in his hands. Steam rose from a teacup to the right of his chair.
"Yeah," John agreed, and blew out a long, deep breath through his nose. "… I didn't get the shopping," he copped, pursing his lips and looking down.
"What?" Sherlock looked up and stared at John sternly. Emili thought she was going to giggle uncontrollably if Sherlock, of all people, gave John a talk about how important groceries were. Sherlock, who, half of the time, had to be bullied into eating by irritated doctors and exasperated sisters. "Why not?" He demanded, affronted, putting his book down on his lap, the pages facing down onto his legs.
That was all it took for John's agitation to come up to the surface. He held out his arms and sarcastically retorted, "Because I had a row, in the shop, with a chip-and-PIN machine!"
Emili took a moment before she figured that he'd been struggling with a self-checkout. She hated those some days, but others, they seemed like the best human invention yet. Not enjoying the absentminded chatter that went on between cashier and customer, Emili liked to pay herself, but the machines could be worthy of Satan himself at times. Sometimes they insisted that there was an unauthorized item on the scale when it was really just the popsicles she'd just scanned. Other times, they stubbornly declared that she had to wait for a sales associate, which just negated the entire point of fighting with a machine instead of a human.
"You… fought… with a machine…?" Sure, Emili had had her… differences… with the things in the past, but she'd never just left her groceries there because she'd had a fight with them. She canted her head at John and gladly took the distraction from Pride and Prejudice, closing it up and tossing it to the other side of the couch, where it bounced on the cushion. "How, exactly, did this work?" She started smirking at him, unable to help herself. Had the blogger pulled rank on the machine or something?
Now more embarrassed than irate, John cleared his throat and looked down at his shoes. "It… sat there, and I shouted abuse," he admitted.
That seemed much more characteristic of the usually level-headed army captain when he had had too much. Emili giggled. He must've looked really dumb, yelling at a self-checkout stand in the middle of a busy supermarket. She wished she'd gone just so that she could have watched. John rolled his eyes when he understood where her sympathies had lain, but though he objected to the side she took, he had no problem with her lounging around in his apartment.
"Have you got cash?" He asked Sherlock, looking straight at the detective as he asked, a pinkish blush rising to his face.
Sherlock shook his head slightly in disbelief and he tilted his head momentarily towards the kitchen table. "Take my card," he invited carelessly, picking up the book he'd put down. Evidently he'd decided that whatever it was promised far more interesting sentences to peruse than John had.
John turned his back to the two of them and started to go towards the kitchen, but suddenly he turned on his heel, raising a finger and pointing at Sherlock in a manner reminiscent of a mother who was doing all the chores. Emili, for her faults, had always been a fairly responsible child, but she was very used to seeing the expression on John's face when her mother had scolded her sister.
"You could always go yourself, you know," he suggested, tone suggesting that it wasn't as much of an offer as it was a miffed realization that he was pulling all of the domestic weight. "You've been sitting there all morning!" Sherlock didn't even go to the trouble of feigning guilt, staring at his book. Emili had no doubt he was both reading and listening. "You've not even moved since I've left…"
Right. Not moved, at all, Emili agreed in her head. She waited for the almost four unbearable seconds before John recognized that he wasn't going to be taken seriously and turned to stalk over to the table, then raised her fist to her mouth and bit down over her thumb to stifle her laughs. There were no life-or-death fights in here.
"And what happened about that case you were offered?" John demanded, oblivious. "The Jaria diamond?"
With the familiar rustling of a crisp page, Sherlock turned to the next part of the book. "Not interested," he lied. "I… sent them a message."
Emili looked over to see her brother. Sherlock sensed her looking at him and smirked at her over the top of his book before his face went blank again and he continued acting innocent.
John, meanwhile, picked up the black billfold that Sherlock tended to carry from the table next to the detective's microscope. He unfolded the three folds in the leather and thumbed through the contents until he found the debit card, slid it out of the card slot, and closed up the wallet, putting it back down. As he replaced it right where he found it, he happened to notice the damage to the table from the sword.
Em bit down on her lower lip, gentler than she had sunk her teeth into her fist. John looked over the entire table, zeroed in on that spot again, and rubbed his fingers over the shallow dig like he thought it was just a result of water or dust making a lighting trick. When it didn't change or go away, he scowled at it and puffed.
