John went out again for the shopping and when he got back, Emili and Sherlock had, in fact, given up the pretense of being so lazy they couldn't bring themselves to move. Emili had returned to her own apartment upstairs and quickly showered, put on some daytime clothes more suitable for kicking intruders, and laced up some black combat boots. She left her book downstairs, intending to get some school done in the company of Sherlock. While he wasn't exactly a tutor, he was the least likely to bother her, preferring quiet himself.

Sherlock chose to leave both of the doors into 221B open – both the one that opened into the kitchen from the side of the hall, and the one that Emili had come storming through earlier in the morning that opened into the living room from across the stairwell. He leaned forwards in his armchair, a red-covered laptop out on the coffee table that he had dragged over. The six-foot-tall man had to look down and slouch his back to see the computer screen on such a low surface, but he appeared relatively comfortable.

"Mrs. Bennet was, in fact, too much overpowered to say a great deal while Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings found a rapid vent." Emili paused in her silent mouthing of the words to translate that to modern language in her head – Mrs. Bennet talked badly about Sir William behind his back. "In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving the whole matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy together; and fourthly, that the match might be broken off." On the ground floor, the front door opened, letting in the sounds from the street – a honking taxi and the people walking along outside. It shut again and the noise became muffled. "Two inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole; one, that Elizabeth was the real cause of all the mischief; and the other, that she herself had been barbarously used-"

"Don't worry about me," John's voice called up, remarkably managing to sound strained and casual at the same time. Emili perked up, hearing his voice, and she shut her mouth, looking over her book to the doors. The doctor's blond head popped up on the stairwell. He advanced sluggishly, weighed down by plastic bags of groceries loaded in his hands and dangling from his arms. "I can manage!"

The teenager tossed her book haphazardly to the side, wishing she'd chosen something more contemporary (not to belittle Austen, but the novelist's works weren't her speed) and more than willing to help John if it gave her a viable excuse to procrastinate.

"You're back!" Em leapt up excitedly. At the sudden sound of her happy call, Sherlock frowned, his eyebrows drawing together. He stared intently at the computer screen, reading something with such intense focus that he didn't blink, his sharp chin rested on top of interlocked fingers, elbows balanced on his knees. "Did you get the-"

Before Emili could even finish asking about the particular items, John grunted. "Yes, I got your entire shopping list, and your change is in one of these bags here." Emili met him on one of the top steps and the two fumbled to trade bags to each other's hands. For ease, Emili took the ones that he was holding up to his chest while John kept the ones with the handles around his forearms. "Somewhere…" There were over a dozen bags, but most of them weren't packed full.

Emili had seen grocery excursions with twice this many objects in bags, and that was to feed four people. For only one less, this seemed almost unrealistic – but her dad had actually enjoyed cooking and her sister had loved to help, which meant, for a long time, many unnecessary messes and wasted ingredients. What could be expected from someone so small they had to sit on the counter to reach? Emili herself wasn't big on cooking, just knew the essentials and her favorites. She was trying to keep a somewhat reasonable diet, but gone were the days when she stuffed herself with flavored and stuffed chicken, potatoes, and forced herself to swallow steamed vegetables. It wasn't like Sherlock was going to care, and if John would, then he had yet to notice the suspicious lack of veggies on the lists.

Usually Emili and John took turns doing the grocery runs. Having mostly free reign in each other's apartments, they had both arranged to keep written lists on their refrigerators, held up with magnets, and unless Sherlock decided he needed the space or the magnets, his and John's usually stayed there. When one of them went, they checked the other's list.

The groceries Emili was carrying were a mix of hers and John's. The cold carton of chocolate milk was hers, but she sure as hell hadn't asked for the Earl Grey tea bags, both of which were in the same sack. She carried them to the table, thankful that it wasn't completely covered with clutter, and set the things in her arms down. Following behind her, John laid his armfuls of food down, too, and he sighed with relief as the pressure was taken off of his arms.

Sherlock didn't acknowledge their struggles, nor did he object to their polite conversation while they separated each other's things by apartment. John knew what was his and Emili knew what wasn't hers, so they took those things and sorted them out into 221B's kitchen, which was sadly lacking in brightness. Though Emili liked to have her apartment light and colorful, Sherlock didn't care for livening up the living arrangements, and John had an eye for calmer colors, as was evidenced by his array of gently-toned, dull-colored sweaters. John had managed to force Sherlock into forfeiting certain spaces in the kitchen for actual foodstuffs rather than just experiments – for example, the cabinets on one side of the stove were for actual food, and half of the cabinets on the other side were for dishes, and Sherlock could have the other half for whatever he wanted, as long as it was kept away from contaminating their dishware.

Emili found herself storing several more boxes of tea than two men could possibly need while John looked at the big box of red-packaged ramen as if he was just now noticing the things he'd picked up for her. He turned it over to look at the ingredients, made an unhappy face, and put it down inside one of the emptied plastic bags, following it up with a bag of chips with a disgruntled expression. So maybe he had noticed her habits.

"Would you like help getting these upstairs?" John volunteered helpfully while Emili started to gather the lighter bags and push the bags' handles over her arms like John had done, saving the heavier ones, those that contained milk, eggs, and cheese, for last to carry with her hands.

"No, thanks," Emili declined respectfully. There were really only five bags' worth of things, which John had stretched into six by putting a pack of chewing gum, a bottle of honey, and a pack of hot dogs all into one of their own. "It's just a few bags." In America, she had carried as many bags at once as she possibly could, even at risk of hurting her fingers trying to support that much weight. It was a competition between her and her sister that Em won almost invariably, thanks to her status as the teenager compared to her sibling's mere nine years.

Just thinking about her sister's small-numbered age sobered Emili from her mood and she looked down, taking all of the bags in her hands and wrestling them up to her apartment. Her sister had died so young. Like at least half of the girls Emili had known, her sister had wanted to be a veterinarian (but only after she realized she couldn't be an elf for Santa). Her sister was one of the unlucky few that would never get to pursue that dream, or even get to grow out of it and expand her interests.

Emili had wanted to become a lawyer. She had watched TV shows with her parents once Disney got to be too… well, at the risk of sounding like the Holmes brothers, too insipid. The plots seemed the same – misbehaving sibling, over-exaggerated relationship drama, girl meets boy and pines for him for three years, horribly cliché things happen or things that are so unrealistic it almost hurts. Emili had liked realism. She had liked lawyers. On the television screen, they always seemed so confident, so fast with their replies, and so sure of themselves.

Lawyers didn't seem to battle with their self-esteem. Lawyers didn't go clothes shopping with their mom and hate trying on clothes because they even hated the ones that fit, thinking it dropped too low on their chest or was too tight on her hips or stomach. They didn't check out their rear in the mirrors because they had had their ass smacked once as part of a bullying gag from a school soccer player. Lawyers didn't falter in a courtroom and it seemed silly to think that they would be anything different outside of one.

By the time Emili had outgrown the fantasy that becoming a lawyer would make her like an impervious TV character, she had already learned more about the career of her choice and had taken a liking to it, even browsing some colleges' pre-law programs, curious of the scholarships she could hope to work towards.

When her family was taken away from her, being a lawyer suddenly seemed like it wasn't enough and never would be.

There were two lawyers she met recurrently. One was the family lawyer, whom she had actually met twice before and who was friendly as he read to her her parents' will and told her that everything that had been left to her and her sister would now come to her, and she would get not only hers, but also her sister's inheritance when she turned eighteen. The other had been cooler, less invested in talking to a sixteen-year-old, and had only seen to it that the guilty party got time in prison.

Neither of them satisfied her. One was about as helpful as a slap to the face, and the other didn't have the motivation to even be that. Not a single lawyer who ever saw her family's case would have had the power to save their lives. Emili didn't know what she wanted to do anymore, but being a lawyer wasn't it. It felt like too little, too late.

She was storing her groceries on autopilot when it finally occurred to her that maybe the reason she liked going with Sherlock was because it wasn't dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy – it was getting justice for the victims, but it was also stopping the people responsible before anyone else was hurt. The Bailyre couple's lives had been saved on a more recent case that came to Sherlock's attention. They didn't have children, but no one would have to notify their trembling next-of-kin that their belongings would be passed to them.

Thoughtlessly, Emili closed the refrigerator after she had the contents organized to her liking, and she raised a hand up over her chest. The silver chain around her neck felt cool to the touch, though her throat had long since grown used to the temperature.

"I miss you," she whispered to the empty air of the apartment. The teenager vividly remembered joking with her family about how she couldn't wait to move out so she wouldn't have to pick her way over her sister's toys. She remembered the first time Liza had understood what that meant, and had ended up crying for almost forty minutes with learning that one day Emili wouldn't live with her anymore. She recalled, with a tear streaking down her face from wet eyes, Liza giggling and playing with their mom, who crawled on the floor after the giggling four-year-old, snapping her teeth and making growling noises playfully.

Emili knew it had been in her head, but for a moment she thought she could have seen her family standing in her new apartment. Her sister, bouncing on the couch; her mother straightening the family portrait over the mantel, and her father wrapping his arms around his wife and kissing her cheek. Then, before her eyes, the figures of people she'd loved faded away as fast as they had been taken.

She called Sherlock and Mycroft her brothers, but they weren't her family – at least, not in the way that Liza had been her sister, and she knew and accepted that they didn't care about her like she'd loved Liza. It would've been weird if they did, having known her for such a short time in comparison, and they were vastly different from most everyone else anyway. Emili called them her family because she needed a family. She was a sixteen-year-old living on her own in a new land with excess money, too much free time, and not enough guidance. Calling Mycroft her brother made her feel like she had the guidance if she needed it and just pretended that she was too stubborn to ask, not that it wasn't being given.

Taking in a shaking breath, Emili wiped her face with her hand and rubbed away the tear that slipped down to her chin. Thankfully there wasn't makeup on her face to smear when she ripped off a paper towel from the roll by the sink and pressed it to her eyes, soaking up the tears before they fell. She considered going into her bathroom and putting on some cosmetics to try to cover up that she'd been crying, but while it might have worked on John, she wasn't sure how effective it would be on Sherlock; John had the tact not to press once it was established that yes, she was okay, but she didn't want to talk about it, anyway, so there was no point in making it into a big deal, or convincing Sherlock that it was a big enough problem worth hiding.

Em took another look at her apartment. Her dad would've liked the place but her mom would have wanted a yard, because she had always said that when they got a new house, she would be getting a dog.

Swallowing, the sixteen-year-old pulled her arms close to her body in a self-comforting hug and turned off the lights, pulling the door shut and locking it behind her. She went back down to 221B, hoping that Sherlock and John would distract her. If they didn't, she always had Pride and Prejudice.

The boys had left the doors open still. "Is that my computer?" John asked Sherlock, agitation increasing from nil to fifty.

"Of course," Sherlock calmly said like it was obvious, and that didn't help.

"What?!"

"Mine was in the bedroom." Again, said like it was obvious. Emili hesitated before stepping in, but rolled her eyes at herself. They were adults. And if John got homicidal from his nerves being ground into the floor, then he had a gun, and he was a damn good marksman, so it was still decently safe for Em.

"And you couldn't be bothered to get up?!" Really, Emili thought with a sort of fondness for the veteran. She had to learn to appreciate the quirks of having them as neighbors, or she'd have knocked their heads together like the three stooges before the first three days was up. "It's password-protected!"

Sherlock winced. "In a manner of speaking," he delicately replied, unfolding his hands under his chin and bringing elegant fingers to the keyboard. Without missing a beat in his response to John, he started typing something most likely unrelated. "Took me less than a minute to guess yours. Not exactly Fort Knox."

Emili scowled. That was a little alarming. Her phone was locked by fingerprint, so she wasn't too concerned that Sherlock could break into that. She knew there were methods, but surely he wouldn't be so fascinated with a teenager's cell phone that he would go to those extents. Her laptop was another story. She didn't have anything on there that was incriminating or embarrassing in nature, but it did have a journal that she had reluctantly started to write, and it was very personal to her.

Like John, it had been suggested to her after her trauma that she vent by writing. John chose to publish his online because it focused on the day-to-day occurrences that distracted him. Emili kept hers private because it was where she released pent-up feelings – seething fury at her parents' loss, overwhelming grief for her sister, tired resignation as she was moved to another continent, irritated declarations of the first impressions Mycroft had made which she wasn't exactly proud of putting down on a record, but couldn't bring herself to delete. Rereading her thoughts and comparing her feelings then to the current days helped put in perspective how much less time she spent in mourning and the gradual lift from what came close to, if not qualified as, depression.

"You should see if there's an option of security questions instead of a password," Em recommended to John, having the same thought make a home in her own mind. Sherlock might guess passwords, but security questions? If they were about histories, then he or Mycroft could dig them up easily enough, but preferences and memories would be much harder to hack through.

John stomped over to the detective and put his hand on the back of the screen. Sherlock pulled his hands back in the nick of time to keep John from crushing his fingers when he closed the screen of the computer. John glowered heatedly and picked it up protectively under his arm, carrying it safely to the other recliner that the doctor had claimed as his own. Sherlock glared at his back for a few seconds before the gaze lessened in ferocity and he started to steeple his hands over his mouth again, his default thinking position.

Emili sat back down on the couch again and picked up her Jane Austen book. She opened it back up to the page with her bookmark. She looked at the black words on the white page and tried to convince herself that she needed to get at least through chapter thirty today in order to give herself a reasonable time frame to write her paper on it without staying up late and cramming.

Try as she might, Ms. Bennet's nosy intrusion on other peoples' lives just wasn't as appealing as the darkened room where she could retreat to temporary solitude.

John sat down and carefully stood the laptop up on its side, leaning it against the side of the chair. Emili watched it, unsure that it would stay standing if John put up the footrest and shifted the position of the chair. He didn't; he picked up a small stack of papers from the side table, most of them wide like mail envelopes, and grimaced at them.

Although Emili was criticizing Ms. Bennet for being nosy, she was doing the same thing, surreptitiously looking up from Pride and Prejudice to watch John look through his mail, looking steadily more discontented as he went from item to item. He landed on an envelope colored red for urgency and his forehead creased.

"Oh…" he sighed quietly. "I need to get a job."

"Oh, dull," Sherlock clucked dismissively.

After an obvious internal struggle with either moral hang-ups or his pride, John fidgeted forward on his seat, wringing his hands together in front of him awkwardly. He leaned forward so that most of the pressure of his weight was on his feet instead of the chair.

"Listen, um…" the man started to say to Sherlock, looking altogether very uncomfortable and even a little bit pained. "If you'd be able to lend me some…"

He trailed off, cringing at himself. Emili smiled sympathetically and put two and two together – a red letter and a comment about needing a job? She was no stranger to people receiving bills and then making grousing remarks about their income, even if those bills were just email copies of receipts from online orders.

"You can get some from me if you want," the girl offered kindly, not outright saying what it was she was offering. If John couldn't say it himself, then she doubted it would help to hear it bluntly stated by someone else.

John shook his head, not even giving himself time to consider the proffered help. "No, I'm not taking money for bills from a sixteen-year-old." Emili shrugged. She wasn't going to argue him on his finances, although she didn't really get what the problem was. People were funny about their money sometimes. Then, she supposed she'd have felt uneasy taking money from her baby sister for something that she should have been able to afford on her own – like an iTunes card or Hot Topic shirt – and wondered if John felt the same way about taking money from her as she did from Liza. "Em, don't you have a part-timer?"

Given how often she left the apartment when it wasn't with either of the two, Emili could see how it was a reasonable question, especially since she never seemed to complain about money or allowances, which she guessed most kids would be doing. "No." She stated honestly, shrugging. "When I'm not with you two or working on school, I'm just… out."

London was a big city with lots of places to explore. It would be a lie if she wasn't out in the vague hope that she might meet someone famous, like Emma Watson, or end up walking by the cast of Doctor Who filming a scene for the upcoming season. It happened to other people, why not her? And though it was very unlikely, at least she still got to immerse herself in the culture, desensitize herself to the accents, and learn to better adapt to the differences in terminology.

"The family's pretty well-off," Em explained to John, not knowing if Sherlock had already or not. Emili wasn't privy to the full story, but she did know that Sherlock actually did need someone to split the rent with; despite the overall wealth of the Holmeses, Sherlock had been cut off at one point or another. Although she knew better than to ask, she suspected that it was because his family didn't want to risk a higher income facilitating a regression back into drugs. "Mycroft sees to my rent, since technically an adult needed to sign the contract anyway, and I get pocket money every week."

John looked marginally surprised, but then chagrined, like he believed he should have expected as much. "That's generous."

It was a very generous allocation of money, indeed. Pounds and euros didn't go as far as dollars in the general world economy, but they still stretched pretty well – especially when Mycroft didn't seem to realize that Emili didn't want most of what she was getting. What was she going to do with it, exactly? Save up for a vacation to Italy?

Actually, that wasn't a bad idea. Having the government as a brother probably opened doors to travel, right?...

"It's to occupy myself so that I don't bother him," she disillusioned John quickly, lest he get the wrong idea.

John cracked a small grin. "Slightly less generous."

Sherlock cleared his throat to get attention, and a small part of Emili was irritated that he got it just by making noise. Most people politely said the others' names, but not Sherlock.

"I need to go to the bank," he announced loudly, hopping up from the chair with the sudden energy of a rabbit and springing for his dark coat and long blue scarf. Emili still didn't get why he wore them everywhere – she could comfortably go out in just one layer (two, if undergarments counted) but Sherlock never seemed uncomfortable in the extra clothes.

Emili looked after him curiously while he pulled his coat on. Sherlock was tall and slender; very lean, built like a track member or a swimmer, not a football or basketball player. With the jacket, he looked a little taller, even – almost twice his size, which added to his presence around strangers, she supposed, and the people who didn't know upon seeing him to shut their mouths because he would probably deduce them right into a semi-permanent blush and some stuttered consonants.

Of course, it also made his silhouette look like the dark shadow figure that the kids were warned about with the Stranger Danger program in America, but, ah… Sherlock didn't seem to care about that part.

The teen turned her entire body to John, rotating on the couch and rocking her knees to the side. "That's convenient, given the topic." Leaning down, she tugged at her shoelaces to make sure they were tight enough to hurry and keep up with an energetic Sherlock Holmes.

"Do you think it was coincidence?" John questioned lightly, significantly more relaxed now that he'd ripped his computer away from its kidnapper and been forced to mellow out by the bills.

Her shoulders fell. If she knew how to read Sherlock, she'd know how to read Mycroft, and her life would have gotten at least thirty-two percent easier. "It's hard to tell with him," she sighed, and John nodded, echoing her frustration in companionate commiseration.


Sherlock led Emili and John into a taxi and gave the driver the address of Tower 42, Old Broad Street, and nothing else. The location meant almost nothing to Emili, but it seemed crystal-clear to the driver, who put the car into gear and started driving. It wasn't a very long ride, but Emili, for once, had a window seat, and she all but pressed her face to the glass trying to look outside.

She still thought that their driving was weird, since she had a minor heart attack every time they broke what would have been an American driving law, but neither Sherlock nor John seemed at all alarmed when these things happened. Em was going to have to get used to it sooner rather than later if she intended to stay in England, even after she turned eighteen.

Tower 42 turned out to be a building – a very distinct one, at that. On Old Broad Street, there were a lot of big buildings and heavy foot traffic, but Tower 42 made all of the other structures look like toys – except for one, an absolutely incredible feat of architecture – an almost-cylindrical, bullet-shaped building covered in windows of glass that gleamed all hues of blues, greys, and dark blacks and greens in the sunlight that bounced off of the sides of the building and threatened to blind her with the glare. The top rounded off and came to a tipped point in a dome-like cover of darker windows, or maybe it was just the angle. Emili stared off at that building with wide eyes, captivated. It looked like something unreal, like something she would see in a picture but never in real life, like the golden city of Tel Aviv.

Sherlock walked ahead of his moderately-confused blogger and astonished sister. John noticed Emili's reaction to the building visible from entire streets away, dwarfing its surroundings almost as well as Tower 42. The doctor chuckled.

"The Gherkin," he told her, snapping her out of her awed reverie. Emili turned to him, unsure what he'd said, and he pointed over her shoulder at the building again. "The Gherkin. 30 Street Mary Axe. We can go there sometime if you like."

Emili didn't even care that it was John offering to take her instead of one of the men who were actually somewhat obligated to be including her and introducing her to the country. She just nodded dumbly, excited at the prospect of seeing that up close and observing what it looked like from the inside. It had to be incredible.

Coming up too close to Tower 42 brought the teenager's attention back to the matter at hand – whatever it was. It was a huge skyscraper, even taller than the Gherkin, and stretched up so high that even when she tipped her head back to see it, she was pretty sure she wasn't looking at the top. It was also covered in glass panels, but these were darker. Less impressive. The size was admirable, but the style was very plain rectangular-shaped windows, and the colors were uniform, not varying and planned like the triangle- and diamond-shaped patterns of the Gherkin.

Stepping inside made it seem like an entirely different world, but John didn't hesitate to follow after Sherlock, and Emili wasn't so reverent of the surroundings that she was afraid to go inside. It was just a building. Crossing the threshold made it seem like much more. Extravagant, gorgeous, huge. In a way it reminded her of looking up the center of the Marriott Marquis when she'd gone to a convention one year with her mom, but this was so much more impressive. She couldn't imagine how much it had cost to build the place. The interior was stunning. Marble and linoleum and reflective metals from the escalators all caught her eyes at once.

"Yes, when you said we were going to the bank…" John drawled sarcastically. This was not what he'd had in mind when Sherlock had announced their destination in the apartment.

Sherlock stepped onto an ascending escalator. John got onto the next step, and Emili mindlessly followed, only to grab the rail and stumble forwards when half of her footing rose while the other stayed behind, having stepped on two stairs at once.

Now with a higher vantage point, Emili could see more of how the interior functioned. It was offices, receptions, lobbies, bars, the fronts of mood-lit restaurants. Clearly being rented to many corporations and business at once, everything mashed together into a clutter that somehow seemed modernized and complimentary.

"In America, when I went to a bank, I went to a one-story building no bigger than a post office." What was next? Emili thought. She truly was in another country. Was she going to find that post offices come in the forms of castles now? "Are all the banks here practically the Marriott, but better?"

No one answered her, but when she looked to her left to see if John had even heard her (because he was less likely to ignore her), she saw that he was smiling down at his shoes. She was sardonically glad to be of amusement, but internally pleased that at least someone outwardly enjoyed having her around.

The escalator took them up to a big station with a long marble reception desk with rope stands cordoning off lines that weren't very full at this time of day, and the people in the queue moved quickly as the secretaries did their jobs efficiently. Emili turned around after getting off of the escalator to put her hands on the silver banister and look down. Many, many stories lower, she could see the tops of people going about their lives and errands on the ground floor. Realistically she knew she wasn't as high as she felt, but it seemed like she was already up higher than a building could reach. When she craned her neck back to seek out the ceiling, it was only barely closer to her than the first floor.

She giggled. This was the part of travel she liked. This was the part of going to England she had been looking forward to and hadn't really gotten to indulge in, getting too caught up in serial suicides and an incoming flow of schoolwork and pesky, eccentric, and sometimes downright jerks for brothers. Her new adopted parents had tried to get her interested in sightseeing, but at the time her psychological and emotional wounds had been much fresher, and she had to push herself to get excited to do much of anything.

Now she could laugh and laugh and take pictures with her phone before she looked around in search of Sherlock and John, saw the latter motioning her over while Sherlock waited impatiently at his side, hands in the pockets of his coat and sighing at her apparent childishness, and Emili didn't feel even a little bit sorry.