Oh Geez, I'm so sorry for that unexpected hiatus! So a combination of things have precently happened to prevent me from writing at all. 1. I moved. Well more like ran away from home again. It wasn't just an across town bit this time no, I decided to run away and move to Texas of all places. It seemed like a good idea at the time and frankly I don't regret it. It also became far more permanent than the time I decided to run away to the next state over. 2. In the process of all this upheaval, my laptop broke and having no backup I had to wait until I had sufficient funds to purchase another one and 3. I'm currently surrounded by bizarre roommates that were more beneficial to my original work than fanfiction.

Please forgive me and enjoy!

Present—Kira

When something had changed, Kira could tell. Mrs. S. hadn't told her mother that Kira knew for some reason. She said it made her feel more comfortable or something along those lines. It didn't stop her from writing those letters and receiving lots of replies and encouragement from the woman who couldn't be there for her. Apparently, Molly wanted Mrs. S to tell Kira that she was her sister. Yet Kira knew—she just knew that something was up. Something strange had happened and there was a shift in the house.

"Mrs. S…what's going on?"

"…your mummy will be coming to see you." Mrs. S replied, looking up from her book, "She wants to see you. I'm going to let her."

"She was the woman that came earlier right? The one you made me go upstairs for?"

"Yes, Kira…my foster daughter."

"And not my big sister."

Mrs. S. sighed heavily, "No Kira, she's not your sister."

Kira felt a level of excitement building. Her mother was always so pretty and always so sweet and kind in her letters but she wanted her mother to be her mummy and be kind to her in real life, not just through words where she could easily lie.

20 years before

"Molly, hurry up."

"I'm working on it!" She hissed right back, slipping the bobby pin and skeletal key into the lock and opening it after hearing a few of the right clicks. The contents of the refrigerator were suddenly theirs for the taking, no longer under lock and key and key.

"What do you want?" Molly hissed.

"I don't care." Felix replied, his stomach growling, "Quick! Someone's coming!"

Molly grabbed the first things she saw and dashed after him, barely moving out of sight of Mrs. Logan in time. They had left Teddy's hat in the kitchen, hoping that she would think that he took it instead. Molly hated Teddy anyway.

Looking back on that moment, she wondered if that was the first indicator that she could be far more ruthless when the situation called for it, than anyone would ever give her credit for. No…it happened later.

Present—Molly

"Oh. My. God." Felix grasped at his hair and then his ears, miming ripping it out—of course he wouldn't, that was his precious hair after all—and turned towards Molly, "What the hell? What the hell is that? What's going on?"

"Genetically identical." Molly murmured to herself, "It makes sense…more makes sense now but—it's strange."

"What is?"

"Obviously we were all grown in test tubes and placed in surrogates, right? Well most of those surrogates seemed to be from good families—you know, money, class, not likely to be anything other than normal—."

"So?"

"So they would want to do that ahead of time. They would research the people thoroughly and try to place us in homes that were different but still stable—an experiment is dead once things aren't identical or once anyone knows so they would al be kept in the dark. They just know that they were getting children that they wanted—maybe not even that. They would want to study nurture vs. nature on top of whether or not there could be clones without some of the deadlier side effects."

"W-wait, deadly?"

"Most of the shit I know about cloning is ages behind an experiment of this level. It was mostly done on sheep and occasionally dogs. They were subjected to shortened life spans, overgrown cells, cancer, infertility—"

"Okay! Okay! I've heard enough. Just don't go all exorcist vomiting on me and it'll all be fine." Felix took a deep breath, "So…what do we do?"

Molly felt almost blindsided by that question, "…so…eventually Moriarty will figure out who Kira is. If he cares that is. As far as he knows, I'm still dead…unless Sherlock knows. That could ruin it…but for now I just need to keep hidden from him and figure out who wants to kill us and why—on top of that I need to figure out where I came from."

"…but we know that. You're David and Angela Hooper's daughter. It's the records—"

"No, Felix. I'm afraid that one isn't so simple. In the meantime, you need to continue business as usual and keep Kira and Mrs. S out of this."

"Aye aye! Ma'am!"

"Don't do that." Molly sighed, smiling despite herself.

Present—Sherlock

Molly was alive. She was in Toronto. It made sense, why the hell hadn't he thought of it sooner? John, however, seemed slow on this new bit of information.

"Molly threw herself in front of a train—Sherlock we saw the body—"

"That wasn't Molly!" Sherlock could have jumped up and down in glee, "That's the beauty of it! It must have been the Italian girl that woman was on about—" John winced at his no doubt callous words but Sherlock didn't want to linger on what he could have possibly said wrong. "She's in Canada—Toronto to be exact! That's where her foster mother lives now and where her foster brother happened to go! It all makes sense—"

"Don't you think you're letting your feelings—"

"Feelings? What feelings? I knew there had been something off about it—"

John gave him a pointed look and Sherlock knew that the man didn't believe him but Sherlock didn't care. Molly was alive and hopefully safe. He had to find her. There were so many thing he had a desire to say but didn't know where he could possibly begin. He always seemed to say the exact wrong thing to her but she always loyally stuck around. Something as simple as Moriarty couldn't keep his pathologist from coming back. Molly—clever, brilliant, wonderful Molly—had managed to outsmart the greatest minds she had ever encountered as simply as it had been a routine autopsy. She even managed to provide a body she didn't have to bludgeon the face of for an identification.

"Then how did she do it?" John asked, "And how could she have known that Aryanna would be at the stop at the same time—"

"Moriarty had someone cut the cameras, probably so we couldn't see her face or any warnings she would make. Aryanna was likely on there by coincidence."

"Sherlock…." John had a warning tone at what Sherlock was implicating but possibly ignoring, "How then, did another woman end up in Molly's place so conveniently?"

Sherlock didn't particularly like what John was implying. It wasn't likely that Molly was a killer—it couldn't be, it simply wasn't in her makeup. Then again, she was desperate and such an opportunity wasn't easily passed over by a desperate woman, "Perhaps the woman leapt in front of the train of her own volition."

Twenty years before

Sherlock Holmes was not a well liked child. He was quite aware of this fact but couldn't help the little twinge of disappointment he felt. School was always something that he waited for to be over in absolute agony. It was always the same except for tiny differences that seemed to make it bearable for everyone else. No one wanted to be friends with Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock felt like they were all idiots. It really wasn't a surprise to anyone that one day, when he was fifteen years old, he decided to skip for the first time.

Beyond deciding not to go to school, he didn't have any particular destination in mind. He wandered from the building to a nearby bus stop and boarded it with no particular destination in mind. People, none more interesting than the next, boarded and then got off at various places. He ended up getting out at a seedier part after hours of riding and found himself in a place he had never seen before. People obviously under the influence of one drug or another stumbled around him and groups of boys around his age eyed him. It was obvious from his posh school uniform to his stature that he didn't belong there at all. Yet Sherlock didn't belong anyway so he didn't let that stop him from proceeding.

"Are you lost?" A girl asked him, crossing her arms over her silly kitty jumper, "That school's all the way that way." She pointed.

"And how would you know?" Sherlock sneered, automatically trying to armor himself.

"I ride the bus around sometimes." She shrugged.

She couldn't have been older than twelve, "Your parents let you ride the bus around?"

"My parents are dead." There was no sadness, she simply continued to smile up at him, "I'm in care right now."

That bright smile couldn't hide anything though. He could see quite plainly that she wasn't treated well. He couldn't very well bring himself to care too much on the matter, if it weren't for the next words that fell out of her mouth.

"I have to go. Fe told me there was a dead bloke fished out of the sewer this morning and stuff is still there. I wanna see."

She dashed off before Sherlock could ask anything more of her. It was a memory that he thought shouldn't have stuck with him over time but for some reason it surfaced every time he thought of Molly Hooper. In fact, he never got the opportunity to ask her if she happened to be the little Brixton girl that ran off to find a body before he could learn more about her. It would have made sense considering her profession and her upbringing.

Present—Molly

She sat anxiously, looking around the decent home that Mrs. S created for herself so far away from Brixton. There was no reason not to come anymore. Molly figured that her life had been torn to shit anyway. Actually acknowledging her daughter like a big girl was a start. There had been so much that she screwed up on and this one was the biggest mistake of her life. Kira walked in, looking just like her pictures: A cute little girl that got her father's golden hair but her own dark eyes and a rounded face that would either remain or be tapered into a fine point. She held herself proudly and regarded the woman before her with a mixture of suspicion and excitement.

Molly smiled, "You know who I am, don't you, Kira? I'm sure there were pictures. And Mrs. S was certainly against lying to you." Molly knew the instant Mrs. S told her that she did as Molly bade that she was lying. She knew the woman too well for such deceptions.

The spell was broken and suddenly Kira had launched herself in her mother's waiting arms.

"Kira darling, I'm your mum." Molly said after a moment, wondering why on earth she could have ever rejected her—actually she knew why. She didn't consider herself worthy of being a good mother at all. She wasn't even that great of a person.

"…I know."

"I know that you know. I just felt the need to say it once." Molly ran her hair through Kira's hair, noting its softness. She really did look just like her father. At that thought, Molly felt her cheer fade a little. A reunion was the last thing she needed—but he did live in Canada so that should be held as a possibility—as a last resort more likely.

Kira nodded, "Mrs. S said that you had to stop seeing me because of dangerous people and then we had to move here."

"Yeah, Kira. Some very, very bad people are after me. They are people I have to stop. People I might have to hide you from."

"Again?"

"Yes." Molly felt bad but since that story was suddenly true, she didn't feel so bad about not being able to explain to her daughter that she simply panicked at the prospect of being a mother but wanted to keep her close.

"Can I call you 'mum' then?" Kira asked, "It sounds much more grownup than 'Mummy' you see."

Molly thought on it for a moment, "I think I'd like that very much, Kira…so would you like me to start trying to buy your love with a bit of ice cream?"

Present—Moriarty

Sherlock Holmes had a weak mind constantly occupied by the dead pathologist. Moriarty didn't think that he would be so silly as to abandon the game entirely. He was no longer playing by the rules, no longer wanting to prove himself cleverest of them all. It was so utterly boring that he found himself at a loss for how to gain the consulting detective's attention. If he had realized just how important Molly Hooper was to the game at hand, he wouldn't have made the foolish woman jump. But she did and as promised, he bestowed a large sum onto the gay prostitute.

As predicted, the streetwise idiot took the money and ran.

What Moriarty didn't expect was how quickly he was able to make the money disappear into thin air. It was likely that he found a way to quickly segment and launder the money, keeping a fairly large sum around his name but the rest wasn't accounted for so easily.

It seemed that Felix Dawkins was either smarted than originally expected (doubtful) or had a clever criminal lay.

In the end, he decided to settle among the Toronto art community just as predicted. Humans could be such bothersome and silly creatures, now couldn't they? Nothing ever surprised him anymore.

Present—Sherlock

He broke into Molly's flat again. They were going to clear everything out soon enough but he wanted to make sure that he had every clue that he could possibly need beforehand. Everything was exactly as it was before, and before that when he stayed at her flat out of necessity after his fall. He went to the kitchen and decided to heat a pot of tea while he rooted through her drawers. It was, after all, an enormous waste of excellent and rather expensive tea. Now that he had figured out it wasn't Molly's body, he felt a level of relaxation. It was as if he hadn't breathed since the moment he learned that Molly supposedly killed herself. Really, all he wanted was her tea, in her flat, surrounded by her smell—even if it was getting a bit stale in musty. There really wasn't any reason for him to be there.

It was amongst receipts that he found something particularly interesting, heavily sentimental, and wholly engaging. Sherlock sat down slowly, untying the bundle of papers varying from kindergarten wide lines with dotted medians to more sophisticated wide ruled and the occasional stationary.

Dear mummy,

S says she's my mummy but you were my mummy once. but I can still writ to you. Is that ok? I kno you are busy. I drew you a pictur.

Love Kira.

Dear mummy,

I want you to come see me. I got a part in a play. I get to sing. Ms. S. says I got that from you. I know your to busy to see me but I thoght I'd ask anyway. There's a boy at school who pulls my hair. I think he likes me or hates me. I can't decide. Thank you for the atlas. I like knowing where you are. I circled London with a big red marker.

Love Kira.

Molly's daughter had been writing to her with increasing frequency since she learned to write, it seemed. The child was very intelligent but puzzled by Molly's existence and distance. The fact that Molly kept such a correspondence with her adopted daughter was nothing short of…Molly. Kira's pictures were all very rudimentary but slowly improving with age as well as her grammar and sentence structure. Sherlock gathered up the letters and placed them in his pocket. It seemed that Toronto was where he would be going next.