Disclaimer: God dammit, some of these characters STILL aren't mine! BUT SOME OF THEM ARE, OKAY, AND THEY'RE MINE FOR THE TAKING. CHARACTER THIEVERY IS A CRIME.

Fair warning: The majority of my chapters DO in fact end on cliffhangers.

Chapter Two

Anamnesis

It had begun to snow during the time they were inside, and the explosion had turned the thin layer of frozen rain on the turf grey. Andromeda crawled on her arms over to John, still coughing in the dusty air. She approached him and settled on her elbows beside him. Once he was done clearing his lungs, John's watery eyes locked on her.

"Are all the houses you enter naturally spontaneous?" he gave the girl a look perfected by over use, one of suspect: raised eyebrows and a somewhat haughty "I know what you did," look in the deep blue eyes of John's. If she understood his facial message, she didn't twig and continued to stare forward with her arms tucked underneath her chest. "I mean, they don't just explode by themselves, do they? There'd have to be a bomb. And inside bombs there are CHEMICAL reactions." John was referring to the fact that his friend meddled with the arts of chemistry.

She finally took notice of him and turned her head slightly in his direction, her eyes taking in his face. Her angular lips formed a smile as she deduced the obvious; He thought she had done it! She turned away from him again and laughed, while he continued to stare at her, disbelief at her behavior attacking his facial features. He rolled his eyes and lifted his hands to his face so he could sigh into them.

"Andy, you can't just go around blowing places up." Shuffling sounds beside him cut him off. He looked over to see his tall friend standing, her hands in her pockets. Her coat was covered in yellow and gray dust. Melted snow made darker patches along it. She noticed his silence and looked down. Knowing of his injuries, she held her leather-gloved hand out to help him up. Sighing again, he took it, and she swooped him to his feet. She may be thin, but sometimes her strength surprised John.

"John, you assume too many things." She said. John mocked her, while brushing himself down, as she added, "Always look at the facts we know to be true, and then deduce the impossible from there." She then stalked off towards the gravel road, her iconic coat trailing behind her. John hated that coat. Although she believed she looked cool in it, he always thought it was like her minion- following her everywhere and somehow sneering and laughing at the people she managed to show up and piss off with her large intellect and show off behavior. He never dared to try and tell anyone he thought that, although most would probably agree. She, however, would put a hand to his head thinking he had a fever. John imagined that scenario in his head.

"John," Andy would say, "It is not an immediate assumption for me think you have a fever, because you are imagining coats having faces and laughing at you. Normally, people who imagine things such as this are either drugged and sick or mentally challenged. Also I do not have the data I need to know for my guess that you are sick, and this is me getting the information."

The honking of a horn interrupted his thoughts. The woman, who had accompanied him through the inspection, beckoned him into the car. The cabbie had honked the horn, against his will, of course. Andromeda was very impatient, but wasn't going to leave John out here on his own with no way of getting back home. She wasn't that cruel. She'd leave him alone in London, but not out here in London's greenbelt. He grinned and jogged over to the door.

"Where were you, Watson?" the cabbie spoke as the door slammed shut and Andromeda shifted over to the left side of the car, "Off in your mind palace?" John found that the cabbie wasn't a paid cabbie at all, more a paid Detective Inspector by the name of Gregory "Greg" Lestrade.

"Lestrade, Andy has a mind palace, not me." John replied.

"Of course it is," said Lestrade sarcastically.

"Do you ever bother to pay attention to anything she says?" John had to know.

The DI sighed heavily, and in the rear-view mirror, John could see the worry lines in his forehead deepen. His hair was already grey, and his dark chocolate eyes showed he had seen too much. What was he doing meddling with the mischievous behaviors of two dangerous young people? Doing his job was the answer to that. Not the Detective Inspector part, no, the one another certain Watson had paid him good money to do.

Not addressing Andromeda herself, although she was still in the cab, Lestrade answered, "Sometimes I don't understand that girl, her mind is too different for that." He said the word different as if she were nothing more than just that.

The insult didn't seem to penetrate Andromeda's deep concentration as she gazed out onto the frosty fields, but she listens to everything and filters through the information after. So, flicking her hair out of her eyes and continuing to stare out the condensation-covered window, she murmured, "I guess genius isn't his division." She aimed the phrase more at John than the DI, but he, nevertheless, heard. "Neither are brains or any type of intelligent thoughts, I suppose."

Before the girl spoke, Greg had a nonchalant gaze onto the slowly darkening sky and the, now paved, roads of the British countryside. At her comment, the man's eyes seemed to sink into his skin and his age of fifty-five showed immensely. He'd already had to deal with another like her today, why him? John covered his mouth, attempting to hide his amusement, but Andromeda saw him and smiled. Instead of full on giggling like he had now come to doing, she just grinned and breathed more air out of her nose than she usually would.

Now people usually find, that the more tired they are, the funnier a small joke is. This was so with the two in the back of Inspector Lestrade's police car on the journey back to into Greater London. John had nearly been in an explosion, and Andromeda hadn't slept in, what was it now, four days? At the thought of explosions came one of gunfire and war, like the stories he had heard as an adolescent. The two eventually stopped laughing, much to Lestrade's relief, and John was left to his childhood memories.

A little boy, around the age of eight, sat in an old and torn leather couch; Literally, in it. His mother had screamed at him in one of her uncalled for rages. In the acme of her delirium, she had found her child looking through old family photos.

'There's nothing upsetting about that is there, right?' the boy had reasoned. Wrong. There was one image in there of his mother's last boyfriend, the last one (before she admitted to herself she was gay). That man was a good one, willing to care for the sick woman and cute looking; He had a little, rounded nose, (The same one the boy had inherited) eyes most would call "puppy dog eyes" if they weren't so blue, a small, rounded face, and wasn't all that tall. In fact, he looked a little like the boy's uncle, whom he had met all of once. The woman had snatched the picture frame out of the boy's small hands, took one look at it and smacked the boy across the head with so much force that his little legs buckled and he collapsed to the floor. This seemed to anger the woman further and she picked her child up roughly by the arm and shoved him into the nearest thing she could find, which was the couch. She then had pulled the pillows off of it, and shoved the boy under them. And so the boy sat, not crying. He was used to this.

The boy, being a little bit precocious, knew why she hurt and abused him for seemingly no reason at all. Alcohol. He had tried it himself once, and had the most horrible headache afterwards. Here's what he did: He saw her drink some bottled liquid in the fridge. When his mother left to buy more of the liquid, he drank all of it that was left. The he waited. The little child prodigy found he had the same symptoms as his mother; He felt anger, for no reason at all, fatigue, craving and then along came the horrible headache. He then researched the symptoms, and found his answer.

This little boy, when the housekeeper found his small frame in the pillows and plopped him on the floor, asked who his father was. The older woman turned from adjusting the sofa and looked at him. The boy always loved how soft her lightly tanned face was, despite the fact that time had pressed down on her skin causing it to droop slightly. He looked into her hazel eyes as she spoke to him, all the while her chocolate coloured hair bobbing up and down in its bun as she moved. The French woman sat back on her knees in front of the blonde child and looked into his eyes as deeply as they were blue.

"Mon garçon," her voice was tinted with a purr that most English speaking French have, "You know who your papa is." When the dirty blonde eyebrows in front of her crinkled together in a confused fashion, she added, "Come on, enfant! I know there is something beautiful between those adorable ouïe of yours!" She reached forward and tugged playfully at his earlobe, his giggle as a result. The answer hit him within the minute.

"The man in the photo I had!" he cried and leapt to his tiny feet.

"Chut!" the woman tapped his leg, looking around to assure his mother had not woken from when she passed out a few minutes ago. The child, accustomed to her use of French with English, sat and hushed. "Now tell me how you know that."

In his little voice, the boy spoke. "My mum wouldn't be so mad at me if that man didn't have some relation to me, and if she had regretted doing something in his presence that involved me. She's always saying how I was a mistake, and she would change it so I never existed if she could." He looked forlorn for a second, and then continued. "Basically, she doesn't want me to know about him because she regrets having me because I'm his."

The woman was not astounded in any way. She stood carefully, age affecting her every jittery move. Ruffling his hair, she said, "petit génie," and continued to fluff up the sofa cushions. The boy grinned; a happy, sunshine grin that lit up the gray fog in the sad house. The same one his father, Jamison Matthew Webb, and uncle, John Watson Senior, had.

John was snapped from his thoughts. Literally snapped; Andromeda was snapping her fingers in front of his face.

"Oi! Off my lap, or I'll report you to the station for what you did earlier."

John's first sight as he woke was the back of the dark leather passenger's chair of Lestrade's cab. He was comfortable and he lay on something cozy and warm. It took him a second to realise he was on Andromeda's legs. He clenched his sore stomach muscles and sat up, flustered.

"Sorry," he murmured.

The only other iconic thing about Andromeda Holmes, besides her coat (which actually isn't hers) is her scowl. Ninety percent of the time, she'd be scowling at you for interrupting her thoughts and/or annoying her. But sometimes, she'd just be scowling into space as one thousand deductions whizzed past in her "thought process train" and you'd be lucky to still be in the same room as her to be there for her to scowl "at".

This time, however, was the ninety percent. John stared into her moonstone eyes, which fluxed and changed colour with the weather and behavior of her London home. Currently, they were a stony grey. He sometimes wished there were some caring emotion in those bright, glossy portals to the universe when he looked deep enough. There never was.

His own eyes flicked around the rest of her face. She had fairly thick eyebrows, not bushy, and they were the same colour as her long, ebony hair, which cascaded down her back in soft curls that just went past her shoulder blades. As of that second, her eyebrows were furrowed in the center and pointed slightly downwards. Her sharp cheekbones started almost right underneath her eyes and cut off around the end of her long, Roman nose, leaving an almost gaunt looking curve to the rest of her face. She had a well-proportioned mouth, at least, if you compared it to the size of her head that held her genius brain.

The depression in her upper lip dipped down smoothly, almost gracefully, to just above the opening of her mouth. Her bottom lip was slightly larger than average, but not so much that it jutted out absurdly. John admitted to himself that he had thought of kissing that lip passionately as he felt the curve of her body against his and- He shoved the thought away.

'She never would.' He did one last longing look of her face before realising her expression had morphed into an amused one that clearly said, "I'm TOTALLY not judging you." (The thing about this woman, is that she doesn't judge you for what you're wearing, more how fast your brain can work, or, in John's case, staring into space too often without any useful thought behind your eyes.)

"John, you're staring." The DI driving eyed him in the rear view mirror, the soft crinkles beside his eyes showed he was laughing at him.

Andromeda had gone back to her oblivious peering out of the window. John wasn't surprised, the girl loved snow.

He thought the subject had dropped, but obviously not, because she turned to look at him again, a mischievous, know-it-all complexion to her. "Don't worry, John. Many people find me beautiful." She watched his cheeks go a bright, cherry red. "Do you want me to explain why?"

Now it was John's turn to stare absently out of the window on his side. He pressed his cheek against the window in an attempt to subside the colour. "You have no modesty do you?"

"John, society is weird, and so is the human race's description of attractive. But normally, as I have seen on your magazines, the placing of women's facial features is normally the same on all of them. Their figures are all the same too, may I point out, all slim and 'sexy'. Now, people get bored of basically the same woman over and over again, and crave something slightly different: Larger lips, sharper features, more prominent cheekbones maybe? Basically, I'm part of that something different."

"So, no?"

Her lips spread into a wide smile, "Never assume, John."

All the while, the Inspector had been listening in to their bickering. He noticed John's emotions, but did Andromeda?

After a long silence, John became aware of Andy's earlier threat. "What did I do?"

Both the Inspector and detective laughed. "How slow are you?" Lestrade asked, rhetorically.

"Idiot," Andromeda rolled her eyes, but there was no real hate behind them, "I was going to blame the explosion of the country house on you."

John didn't have time to come up with a sassy retort because the car jerked to the right abruptly and, while swearing could be heard flowing from the man in the front seat, Andromeda found herself flung against John. His arms immediately wrapped themselves around her frail body, out of instinct of years protecting others from his mother's rage. The blonde man's heart rate upped, and, as Andromeda pressed herself up from John's protective grasp, felt it in his wrist. She looked at him, her face twisted into one of either horror or surprise, John couldn't tell.

'Either one,' he thought, 'would be a new expression for her.' But he didn't know why her mouth opened slightly and her eyes widened at his touch. He had been there for her when she woke sweaty and screaming three nights ago. She had trusted him enough to let him into her bed (while both of them in their pajamas), and let him snuggle up to her, mingling their hair in a tangle of blonde and black. Why is he not allowed to touch her now?

An abandoned (or so they told her) female, only six years old, sat on the cold tiling of a laboratory, screaming her lungs out as the blood pooled around her legs. She held her head, the black hair on it getting tangled in the process. She couldn't move. It wasn't going to happen. Eventually, an adult came in and lifted her from the floor. She was completely dry, but the screaming didn't stop. She kicked as the man slung her over his shoulder and carried her away. The girl felt emotions now. They had done something to her, but she was so overwhelmed with all the fluttering and flips her insides seemed to be doing, she couldn't get a straight though through her head before she passed out.

Well, none other than a single word: "Help."

As she slipped in and out of consciousness, the ebony haired girl heard snippets of a conversation.

"Her psychopathic behavior seemed to go away for a while, she was afraid at least." The voice was smooth, like her very words were made of silk.

"No! No, no, no!" A hoarse man's voice echoed across the room. The girl kept her eyes shut, but guessed that she was still in the laboratory, based on how the sound bounced from wall to wall. "For one thing, you imbecile, she is a SOCIOPATH. Another thing, we want her to be able to feel love, not fear necessarily. THAT IS THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THIS EXPERIMENT. If she can be sentimentally attached to something or, if we are lucky, someone, we can find that thing or person, threaten them and hence manipulate her mind for our purposes. I thought I told you this!"

Silence.

Later: "What about her mother?" The female voice piped up again.

"She didn't care anyway."

She didn't care anyway.

Andromeda shook as she exited the cab. She almost fell onto the slippery cement, but managed to catch herself in time. Never again would she feel emotion. NEVER.

She stood on the curb of the pavement, shut the door, and then put her hands on top of the car for support as she looked around across the street. "John, where are we?" she asked, putting a little quiver into her voice for effect (and maybe to cover up the fact she almost slipped). She experimented with John's emotions.

Apparently, he had not forgiven her for shoving him away from her in the car earlier because he said, with no sympathy in his voice, (good riddance) "You know where we are."

The woman stood straighter, still facing the cab, until the information clicked in her head. She HAD been tracking every turn of the car since they left the, now abandoned, country home, despite her little doze.

"Shit," she growled.

"I thought you'd say that, but you do have to give the coat back." John's voice was slightly further away now, so she deduced that he was at the door of the dreaded flat. "He's going to be very pissed off."

Lestrade poked his head out of the cab, "Welcome home, Holmes."

The snow fell on her hair and landed lightly on the soft black waves. She closed her eyes, only to open them again when she turned slowly around to take in the dark wooden door of 221B Baker's Street, London.