One of the secretaries from the reception on the high floor led the trio into the huge floor of a corporate business in Shad Sanderson bank. Emili had never heard of it before, but didn't get the chance to ask John if it was a well-known name in the United Kingdoms. Desks were set up in lines and rows, neatly organized in aligned paths, with tables featuring statues and trinkets and a few clichéd potted plants to brighten up the space. Pillars were up throughout the room for some reason that ran from the floor to the ceiling. They could have been meant for decoration, but given how high the building was, Emili wouldn't have been at all shocked if they were for structural purposes.
Along the outside of the huge office floor were private offices that belonged to individuals and had engraved nameplates on their respective doors. These offices were pressed to the outsides of the building and had wall-to-ceiling windows made entirely of the tinted glass. The secretary let them into the office with the nameplate Sebastian Wilkes on the front and left the door opened for the man to come back.
Emili looked around as Sherlock did the same. John stood with his hands behind his back and his spine straight, like he was still in the army. She supposed some habits might be hard to break; she couldn't imagine holding that position for very long, but it demanded a sort of respect as well as affording the same to whomever John addressed, and the implication that he had served only added to that.
Out of the window, Emili could see other buildings, but not ones that were at the same height. All that she saw were the tops of smaller ones close by, and in the distance, skyscrapers that might have come close to the incredible height that Tower 42 could boast. She could even see part of the Gherkin.
The office belonged to a man. That was pretty evident, even without having read the masculine name on the door. There was no lasting aroma, however faint, of perfume, and no scented soaps or hand sanitizers in sight. There was nothing particularly colorful or feminine, and the office greatly lacked in personal touches when the generous size was considered, which had her leaning towards it being a man's space. The plant in the back corner was a small yucca. Filing cabinets were grey and gleaming, labels stuck on the drawers with forcibly-rigid handwriting for legibility.
Emili wasn't done looking around, and if it were okay then she would have looked in the drawers, but she had reservations about that sort of thing when in a place completely surrounded by other people with the owner expected to walk in at any second. That was a good policy to have in place, evidently, because seconds later, a man just as tall as Sherlock speed-walked through the door and tugged it closed for privacy one-handedly.
Sebastian, Emili presumed, was clad in a dark, professional, three-piece suit tailored to fit his body, had a black-banded watch with a literally sparkling silver face, and wore what looked like diamond cufflinks on his sleeves. Even his shoes looked like they belonged in a commercial, except for the dried mud caked on the soles. His brown eyes were bright and she supposed she could consider him cute if she were actually into people almost twenty years older than her at least, because he was around Sherlock's age, as well, and her brother was in his mid-thirties. Sebastian's hair was dark and thick like Sherlock's, but his was straight, combed, and styled back with product where Sherlock's was allowed to do what it wanted, which was to curl and stay at a natural part. Emili had to stop herself from wrinkling her nose at the cologne she smelled on him, which wasn't bad, by any means, just a strong scent very suddenly introduced to her nose.
"Sherlock Holmes!"
"Sebastian."
Sherlock's voice was flat and bored but he let Sebastian shake his hand enthusiastically with both of his. Emili took a look at the disgruntled look on Sherlock's face and almost immediately decided that she wasn't going to like Sebastian any more than Sherlock, because surprisingly enough she generally agreed with Sherlock's opinion on other people, but then reminded herself that Sherlock was a tactless and insensitive self-diagnosed sociopath, and maybe she should make those kinds of character judgments for herself.
"Howdy, buddy! How long's it been?" Sebastian hadn't let go of Sherlock's hand yet and it had passed from overly-eager to uncomfortably forced about four seconds before he opened his mouth again. "Eight years, since I last clapped eyes on you?"
Sherlock made no effort to hide his dislike, and he rubbed his hand off on his slacks when Sebastian let go. If the man saw it, then he didn't say anything, but rubbed his own hands together. "These are my friends," Sherlock introduced. If Emili didn't know better, then she'd have thought that he said the word 'friends' with subtle but present pride. "Emili and John."
Sebastian looked at Emili first because she was closer to him. He looked her over quickly, raised his eyebrows when he saw her face and probably realized she was two decades or so younger than everyone else in the room, but then moved on to John, who still stood postured.
"Friends?" Sebastian repeated, sounding cynical and chuckling.
Emili frowned. Was that a comment on her age, John's posture, or Sherlock's antisocial habits? And, more than that, she couldn't tell if it was meant to be a harmless tease or a deeper jibe.
"Is that a strange concept for you?" She asked guardedly with an innocent tip of her head, curious how he would respond. Emili could tolerate bullying from no one – not Donovan, not Anderson, not even Lestrade, and she certainly wasn't going to stand by if someone was mocking her brother. Adopted family or not, Emili had never been able to put up with people who thought they had the right to push other people around and hurt their feelings for cheap laughs, and had gained a reputation in her public schools in America as the girl to avoid when you were a known bully, which worked well for Emili and for her friends.
John threw her a look, likely making the connection between her tone of voice then and back when she'd gone off on Donovan the first night they'd met. "John Watson, MD." He said, breaking from his stance and holding a hand out to Sebastian in invitation.
He never seemed to introduce himself to anyone as Captain John Watson. It just occurred to Emili as he stated his degree. Despite his semi-conscious default to army-like behavior, he rarely credited himself with his own service when he introduced himself.
Sebastian shook his hand and took the excuse not to give a reply to Emili's question, moving to stand behind his desk and lean over the table to greet John, who remained on the other side. Sebastian still looked surprised, and he tossed Sherlock an amused look like John and Emili were both part of some joke. Once he pulled out his chair and sat down, crossed his legs and leaned back comfortably, John and Emili glanced at each other surreptitiously. Emili saw her own uncertain and slightly annoyed feelings for Sebastian reflected in John's eyes.
Who needed friends her age when she got along just as well with a middle-aged army doctor?
Sebastian coughed to clear his throat and held a hand out, palm facing upwards, to the chairs lined up on the guests' side of his desk. "Well, grab a pew," he invited. John pursed his lips but pulled out the chair on the far left. With Sherlock already to her right, Emili took the chair in between the two while Sherlock took the one closest to himself. "D'you need anything? Coffee, water…?"
Coffee actually sounded great, and Emili was, in part, thrilled to meet someone in Britain who offered coffee before they offered tea, but her slightly unreasonable stubbornness didn't permit her to ask for any from someone who was ruffling her feathers in the wrong direction.
"No," John politely declined.
The girl noticed that Sebastian didn't even offer any to Sherlock; he had been looking right at John when he'd asked and had only spared a brief glance to Emili herself, never mind the consulting detective.
"You're doing well," Sherlock said, breaking the secondary silence that fell between Sebastian wasting time getting to why they were even there and John refusing a beverage. His coat collar was turned up around his neck. "You've been abroad a lot."
"Well, some," Sebastian agreed, his left hand reaching up behind his head and scratching at his neck, the watch face glinting with a sunlight glare from the windows.
"Flying all the way 'round the world twice in a month?"
"Ha!" Then came the most obviously plastic smile yet. Sebastian took his hand away from his neck and pointed at Sherlock, his cheeks dimpled while he looked down at the desk, shaking his head mirthlessly. "Right. You're doing that thing.
"We were at Uni together," Sebastian told Emili, pointing still at Sherlock. In between listening to what he was saying and thinking that she should tell him that it's rude to point at somebody for long periods of time like that, she nodded attentively. "This guy here had a trick he used to do-"
"It's not a trick," Sherlock muttered, affronted. His voice was petulant and annoyed, but he said it with resignation – the same sort of resignation Emili remembered hearing in her own voice when she told Liza the same thing over and over.
Sebastian completely disregarded that Sherlock had said anything! "-He could look at you and tell you your whole life story!"
"Yes," John agreed, sending Sherlock a praising, genuine smile in front of Emili. "I've seen him do it." He was still completely impressed with the deductions from John's phone in the backseat of the taxi on their way to Lauriston Gardens.
Sebastian missed the clearly positive voice that John used and sniffed. "Put the wind up everybody!" He laughed like it was a joke but the words were real and mean in meaning, if not in the way that they were said. Emili had heard that before. It was the same way that people used to talk to their underclassmen and get away with it, because teachers couldn't tell them off if it didn't sound like they were being rude. "We hated him…"
Emili bristled. What a jerk! There was a difference between reminiscing on awkward college days and deliberately poking at old injuries. Someone who worked at Shad Sanderson in a snazzy and roomy office like Sebastian's had to be smart enough to tell the difference.
She looked at Sherlock before she leapt to his defense to see if he was going to do it himself. Instead of an answer, she saw a brief, split-second of emotion, where Sherlock looked away from Sebastian and down at the color-flecked carpet, covering up an expression of hurt feelings before he thought anyone would see. It wasn't obvious and it wasn't dramatic. It was a tic, something that had obviously bothered him a lot before and hurt to be reminded of now.
So much for being emotionless…
"We'd come down to breakfast in the Formal Hall and this freak would know who'd been shagging who the previous night!" Sebastian tried to laugh with John, but he didn't succeed, if only because John would have had to be laughing, too. John just looked uncomfortable and tried to feign interest to be respectful, but clearly he didn't enjoy listening to someone talk down about his friend, and Emili certainly didn't appreciate the use of the word 'freak.'
"I simply observed," Sherlock huffed defensively.
Emili couldn't bite her tongue on this any longer. "If it bothered you to have it pointed out," she said, her voice turning imperious. It was just bad form to talk about college sex and insult your classmates, especially in front of a teenager. Emili may look older than she was, but she was still not someone that Sebastian knew well enough to take those liberties with. "Did it occur to you that it was maybe a sign you shouldn't've been doing it to begin with?"
The double-meaning and the unintended euphemism only occurred to her as she was saying it and it was too late to change her phrasing.
Sebastian's turn to look awkward as he excused what he had said. Good, she thought in satisfaction. "Some things are meant to remain just between a couple and God, not broadcast to the entire campus population!" He exaggerated. Emili was at least ninety percent sure that it was being melodramatic. Sherlock didn't seem like the type to vindictively spread rumors or start gossip – he just stated facts and drew conclusions into conversations like they were common knowledge.
Emili glared while Sebastian nervously laughed his way out of an angry friend chewing him out for being a jerk while Sherlock looked at her with interest. Emili had the feeling it had been a long time since someone had defended Sherlock, much less in front of him where he actually knew it had happened, and her heart went out to him. No one deserved to feel so alone that they were actually surprised when their friends stood up for them.
Sebastian pushed back against the floor with his feet and moved one arm across his chest, the other elbow resting halfway up his forearm with his hand near his mouth, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Emili privately wondered exactly how much thinking he was actually doing and how much of it was being done for him by the people he paid out on the sales floor. "Go on, then, pal, enlighten me." He invited, voice edging on mocking. "Two trips a month, flying all the way around the world – well, you're quite right." He brushed his thumb over his lips, clearing his throat with a cough. "How could you tell? You're gonna tell me there was, um, a stain on my tie from some special kind of ketchup you can only buy in Manhattan?"
Go ahead, be more condescending, Emili scowled at him openly at that point, no longer caring about the impressions she was making. Not even Mycroft was as disrespectful as Sebastian was, and Mycroft could get up on a pretty high horse at times.
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. "No, I-"
Of course, despite begging answers, Sebastian wouldn't even permit his old "friend" to reply. "Or maybe it was the mud on my shoes!" He chuckled.
A beat passed. Sebastian was quiet, finally being considerate enough to allow Sherlock to answer. By this point, Sherlock was just as finished with Sebastian as Emili was, if not more so, because he looked straight into his eyes and flatly explained, "I was just chatting with your secretary outside. She told me."
Holding her tongue for the last few minutes had been worth it. Sebastian's face was priceless. Comically panicked at being made to look like a jackass, he uncrossed his arms and gripped both of the arm rests on his chair, floundering for something to say to recover. Sherlock's face was blank, but Emili didn't try to hide the smile growing on hers. John frowned, but not at Sebastian – he leaned to look around Emili, frowning questioningly at Sherlock. Of course the detective hadn't talked with the secretary. Few people kept his interest long enough to hold conversations with, and Sherlock detested pointless chatter made just to fill silence. John just didn't get the somewhat petty reasoning for passing on the opportunity to show off.
Emili was delighted to find another aspect of their humors that she and Sherlock had in common, if only because it was benefitting her mood so well in the moment.
"Although, now that you mention it," Emili did take Sherlock's place in being the know-it-all. She couldn't let him have all the fun of putting a real jerk in his place. "If, some Monday nights, you want to go traipsing around in the mud, you should probably put on some sneakers instead of your nice dress shoes." Monday had been the last day that it had rained, and the most recent time for the man to have gotten mud on his shoes to begin with. She smiled sweetly at him while Sebastian's nose twitched and he stared back at her with thinly-veiled irritation. Sherlock looked down at his lap and smirked.
For a solid twenty seconds, half of the people in the room were smug, a fourth of them were annoyed and contemptuous, and the final twenty-five percent was just questioning what had just happened and how long it would be before the Earth was put back upright.
Finally, Sebastian couldn't take it anymore, and, although it was long overdue, he acted like he'd grown up. "Anyway, I'm glad you could make it over," he lied. "We've had a break-in."
Sebastian took the trio out of his office, but they didn't go far. From his desk, he could see several of the desks out of his window. He led Emili, John, and Sherlock to the right of his office door and to another of the larger spaces in front of the trading posts. This door was closed.
"This is Sir William's office – the bank's former Chairman." Down to business, Sebastian kept sounding clipped and on track. He may have been rude but at least now he wasn't picking on Sherlock. "The room's been left here like a sort of memorial. Someone broke in last night."
Sebastian turned to stand with his back to the door and looked at the three. When he looked at Sherlock again he defensively raised his arms across his chest, uncomfortable with just having his hands down to his sides.
"What did they steal?" John asked in concern. It was a bank – there was presumably a lot they could steal, especially information on clients' accounts.
"Nothing." That bothered Emili – if nothing had been stolen, how did they know someone had broken in? It's not like a window was broken by a stone; they were in the upper half of one of the tallest buildings in London! It wasn't like just chucking a rock up to the second story. "Just left a little message."
A yellow, white, and orange key card with a black magnetic strip was produced from Sebastian's pocket and the man held the side with the strip down against the card pad to the right of the door. The light turned green after he held it for a few seconds and a mechanism made a soft snick. Sebastian tucked the card safely back inside his pocket and twisted the knob down, pushing it to open.
It took Emili a moment to realize what she was supposed to be seeing. The computer screen was dark, the photographs had been placed facing down on the desk, there were no folders in there. The filing cabinets were still there and closed, but if they'd had any information relevant to the bank, they'd probably been emptied. Nothing was amiss on the carpet. The only thing that seemed unusual was the completely clean state of the office, with what very few personal touches its owner had had being stereotypical to the point of being rather easy to look over.
The only thing that wasn't easy to look over was a painting, a portrait of an elderly man with grey hair in a grey formal suit, hands politely in front of him, sitting down, and staring towards the painter, which made for the odd, creepy effect of feeling like the portrait was watching you wherever you went in the room. Emili hoped it had been insured, because it seemed like the yellow painting over it wasn't part of the original work, especially because it left the portrait and also expanded to the wall. Over the man's painted eyes and brow was a long line of yellow paint. That was it. It was a lot of paint for one motion and had started to make trails going down. It could have been done with a paintbrush, but the one stroke was fairly thin, and Emili doubted that a paintbrush thin enough to make that line would have been capable of holding enough paint to make the trails, too, so she guessed it was from a spray can.
To the left of the painting was another graffiti mark. The bright yellow paint had a horizontal line even with the other but on the white-painted wall, and underneath that one was what looked like a number 8, but with less curves and sharper edges, and the top loop didn't connect, instead broken off with the top missing.
Sebastian looked over expectantly and stayed out of the way, not appearing to want to step inside the office. Sherlock stared at the painting marks with very rapt concentration even after Emili was done looking at them, so she turned to Sebastian and asked, "Don't you have security cameras?"
It was reasonable to assume that the reason they were there was because Sebastian had seen something about Sherlock's detective work in the media or maybe his website online and had assumed that their history in college would be reason enough to have the favor of a private detective's help, regardless of how he'd evidently seemed to be one of Sherlock's bullies, not friends. Which was all good, Emili supposed that was a fair enough reason to hire someone – knowing they're competent is more important than liking them when you pay for a service – but a straightforward break-in seemed like it would be easy for them to catch, especially if they were a rich enough company to work in Tower 42.
Sebastian nodded to her. "Back to my office, lads," he invited.
Sherlock whipped around, done with the graffiti in the blink of an eye, coat trailing off behind him while he went out the door that had been held open. John left lingering frowns in the paint's direction while he followed after Sherlock because he didn't want to be left out of the loop. Sebastian was obligated by responsibility to stay behind their abrupt departure to lock up the office for security and preservation purposes.
Emili hovered outside the doorway, but far enough away for him to have the space to lock the door and make sure that the mechanism kept it that way, smiling smugly.
"So you think Sherlock can solve this, right?" She questioned. She had yet to see someone as sharp as her brother, except for maybe Mycroft, so she wasn't asking out of drawing her own confidence. She just wanted to rub it in Sebastian's face exactly how much of a bastard he was being.
"If anyone can," he answered, confident himself.
"So then maybe you should have spent less time bullying and more time listening to him?" She asked smartly. The unspoken maybe you would have learned from him made Sebastian's assured smirk fall from his face as he looked back at her, grinding his teeth. Emili grinned and held out her hand to shake. "Sherlock left out my last name," she continued with a half-smirk pulling up her lips. "I'm Emili Holmes. His sister."
The look of I screwed up on his face made everything else worth it. It was almost as good as the whole travel-and-secretary thing, because how much lower can you get than talking badly about someone to their little sister?
Sebastian had state-of-the-art security cameras, and for all of the boasting that those cameras might have been able to do in other situations, they were, evidently, worthless when it came to the Shad Sanderson break-in. They stopped being video recorders and became cheap, scrappy cameras.
"Sixty seconds apart," Sebastian narrated, holding the freeze-frame on the available greyed image on his computer screen, timestamped 23:33:01. He tapped the forward arrow key with the ring finger of his right hand. The next frame was an entire leap of time ahead – not a second passed, but sixty of them. The timestamp had become 23:34:01. "So someone came in here in the middle of the night, splashed paint around, and then left within a minute."
The only differences in the frames besides the timestamps were the graffiti. One second, there's nothing out of the ordinary. Exactly a minute later, the spray painted marks are vandalizing the office. Emili would have thought the camera would have been put out by a laser, but the laser damaging the camera for exactly sixty seconds and then making an instant recovery seemed strange. Her next guess would be someone hacking into the security system, but Shad Sanderson seemed to have the highest-expense lines of stability and security in their technology (not that it had done them much good the night previous). Her third suggestion would be someone tampering with the tapes, but that was slim for the same reasons as the previous.
For obvious reasons, Emili didn't have much experience with crime in real life, but she had watched plenty of procedurals. She thought back to an American show where some of the main cast's characters had broken into a consulate and tricked the security cameras by using a selfie stick to hold their phone in front of the camera lens. There would have been movement on the camera, had that been the case with the bank, but could they have located the cameras and then covered them somehow for exactly that amount of time without showing signs of movement?
"How many ways into that office?" Sherlock promptly answered. Emili had no idea if he had even had her thought process, or if he had skipped over parts, or if he had the entire thing and then another five minutes' worth in the five seconds it felt like there was between Sebastian flipping back and forth on the frames and his response.
Sebastian stood up from the desk monitor and smirked at Sherlock, finding it interesting that even this much later, his old college classmate still wanted to get to the bottom of anything that wasn't instantly obvious. He's a detective; what did you expect? Emili thought with another flash of irritation.
"That's where this gets really interesting," Sebastian commented.
Interesting for us normal people, or interesting for Sherlock?
For some reason, Sebastian found it necessary to lead them all back out to the front reception to use one of the computers he temporarily took from a secretary, telling her to take a short break. While they were back out in the lobby of the bank and in the perfect position to marvel at the incredible interior of Tower 42, Emili couldn't help but keep looking up and down, at the escalators, elevators, gold- and silver-plated banisters and the frosted glass panels between the metal banister and the end of the floor where the reception dropped off to overlook the lowest floor.
"Every door that opens in this bank, it gets logged, right here." Sherlock and John weren't as taken with the building as Emili still was. Was that what feeling star struck was like? "Every walk-in cupboard, every toilet…" While Sebastian showed them the log he was talking about on the monitor, Emili couldn't keep her attention on a computer screen when there was so much to see.
Sightseeing wasn't what she had been brought along for, although increasingly she felt like she and John were decorative pieces to Sherlock's detective work. It seemed very infrequent that he actually needed their input to make progress. "And there was no activity in the office last night?" She asked despite not looking at the computer.
"Precisely," Sebastian confirmed, not looking at her. That was okay; Emili wasn't looking at him, either. He wasn't exactly the Magic Mike cast, so really, the architecture was a much better sight. "There's a hole in our security. Find it, and we'll pay you… five figures." Sebastian clicked the tab on the monitor and stood up, clearing his throat. When Emili looked back to him, wondering if he'd been trying to get her attention, Sebastian produced a pre-written check from the interior of his blazer. "This is an advance," he told Sherlock, holding the order towards him. "Tell me how he got in, and there's a bigger one on its way."
Sherlock didn't even look at the check to see how much it was. Em supposed he didn't really need the money – his family may force him to generate his own income but she very highly doubted that his parents would tolerate him not being able to pay the rent – and she knew that trivialities weren't really his thing.
He lifted his head higher. "I don't need an incentive, Sebastian." Sherlock declared, speaking down to his former classmate as if he had been grievously offended by the offer of payment for services rendered. Coat whipping, he stalked away from the reception without taking the check, going on the route they'd taken out of the trading floor to get back into the bank.
Sebastian, John, and Emili all looked after the detective. Emili frowned at his back as he walked away. John grimaced like he was getting a headache; Sebastian just looked nostalgic. Evidently, Sherlock's behavior hadn't changed much in the last ten, fifteen years or so.
"He's, uh, he's kidding you. Obviously." John started to reach for the check. Sebastian looked down at him cynically. "Shall I look after that for him?" While John looked up at Sebastian in question, Sebastian rolled his eyes and apparently decided to hell with it. He handed John the check, shaking his head, and walked off in the opposite direction. "Thanks…"
"So, five figures in America's at least ten grand." Emili stepped a little closer to John and looked over his shoulder, which was a pretty easy thing to do with her height advantage.
John held the check out in front of him and leaned back, staring at it incredulously and then looking around for Sebastian. "This is an advance?"
It wasn't hard to find Sherlock. He had returned to the scene of the crime. John and Emili looked at Sherlock taking photographs of the graffiti with his phone, having gotten someone to open the office door for him, and he'd left it open while he observed.
The doctor and the teenager had a nonverbal argument over who was going to be left babysitting the investigator. After John looked particularly pleading, Emili sighed and waved him off. He smiled at her thankfully and went to go look elsewhere, maybe to grab a snack from the vending machines. Emili took another look at Sherlock through the floor-to-ceiling windows and then looked off towards the floor.
Sebastian wasn't in sight, but his office door was closed and the light was on, so maybe he had gone back into solitude to take care of his own responsibilities. No one in the bank seemed to notice Emili was there, much less care about what a teenager was doing in the staff floor. Most of them were busy, tapping on their keyboards or answering the landlines at their desks, but she had to muse exactly how much concentration it would take away from their jobs if they just looked around and noticed what – or, rather, who – was out of place. It wasn't a bad idea to learn to be more aware of your surroundings. Even in her own apartment, when she was the only one home, Emili did sweeps of the room to make sure everything was as she'd left it.
While she was thinking about it – Emili turned back around to look through the tan wooden blinds on the inside of the office and thought her heart had just fallen out of her chest. Her stupid brother was standing outside of the window, precariously on a narrow balcony step that Emili really didn't think was safe. She covered her mouth before she made any noise, not wanting to startle him, and hurried into the office.
Sherlock wasn't outside for long before he came back to the interior of the room, and Emili's heart started to slow down. That was a long fall. She had always liked going up high on roller coasters to feel the adrenaline rush as they plunged back down, but since she had almost fallen from the roof of a college building, she was a lot less inclined to feel that rush. More sensitive to heights, Emili chose not to look up nearby amusement parks.
Still, what would the world look like from so high up? What would London look like from so high up? While Sherlock disregarded the thought of closing out the window (which Emili hadn't realized until then was intended to open, fastened to a hinge), she crept over to the opening and put her foot up hesitantly on the ledge, leaning outside, her hands inside the office and holding onto the glass window to her left.
At first it was breathtaking, like riding to the top of a Ferris wheel and then looking out at the carnival, all lights and color and noise and usually pounding music, either pop or upbeat, instrumental fairground pieces. The lack of dark-light contrast that a carnival ride had was made up for by the scenery being so exotic. Emili had never seen a city quite like London. The streets seemed narrow up here and the people like pinpricks on a map. Cars looked like toys and buildings that had seemed large from the ground looked like she could build them with Legos, or pinch them between her fingers.
Emili could see the Gherkin, only a fourth of it now higher than she was, but the sunlight and the angle gave her an entirely new perspective on the artistry that went into its architecture. The light hit the black dome of the top of the Gherkin and made the black shine a deep, rose-colored pink instead. She could see a blue-purple haze of lights from another district miles and miles away. She even tried to pick out the most iconic tourist sites, but she couldn't find the clock tower or the London Eye, and she supposed that even if they were close enough, which, by her exploration of the city, they were, she was probably looking in the wrong direction out of the office and they might be on the other side of the tower.
A gentle breeze played with her pink hair and made a few strands lift from her shoulders and fly across her face, temporarily in her view before they smacked against her forehead and then fell down when the wind subsided, hanging in front of her eyes. Emili felt like she was on top of the world – breathing the freshest air, feeling the coolest draft, and seeing more than she ever could have seen from the streets below.
Then she actually looked down, and it was a long fall. The understanding of why Sherlock might have stepped entirely onto the ledge fell away, replaced with tension that overtook her posture and an anxiety for the stories between herself and the concrete. There may not be a serial killer trying to poison her, but she was significantly higher than she had been at Roland-Kerr.
She swallowed and it stuck in her throat. Her stomach flipped. She should have climbed back into the office but instead she was frozen. An intrusive thought told her she should jump and see how long it took to hit the ground. She batted the fleeting impulse for self-annihilation away easily, but the anxiety that provoked it wasn't so easy to get rid of.
Suddenly there were heavy hands on her shoulders and Emili almost screamed, for a millisecond thinking she was being pushed, but no – she was pulled back inside, away from the ledge. She shouldn't have stepped out, not when she knew that heights could be a trigger, and she stood inside while Sherlock closed the window, grateful that he had not only noticed the rising panic, but done something about it.
