Spencer had always prided himself on being able to notice things other people didn't. It was more than the accumulation of degrees, or the way facts lined up in his mind like dominoes waiting to fall. It was the small things: gestures, hesitations, the words people thought slipped past unnoticed. Lateu, every conversation with Quinn had felt like a puzzle in which pieces were scattered, some fitting, some turning over in ways he couldn't yet map.

At first, it was minor, the kind of thing most people would never register. A pronoun where it didn't belong. "We" instead of "I". He had let it slide the first few times, chalking it up to casual speech.

Quinn sometimes looked at him like he had handed them information for the very first time, even though Spencer knew, with his certainty about memory and recall, that he had said it before. A favorite author, a story from his childhood, a theory he had been thinking about. Gone, like he had spoken into a void. It wasn't just forgetting. It was the shifts. Switches?

The subtle but profound changes in posture, in tone, in cadence. Quinn would sit differently, hold themselves differently, carry a new rhythm in their speech; not random, not like mood swings or the masks people wear when tired or stressed. No… there was something ordered about it, even if he couldn't trace the full structure yet.

Spencer had spent enough time in psychology to know better than to leap to conclusions. People weren't puzzles to solve for sport. Still, when the threads began weaving themselves together in his mind, he felt the quiet weight of recognition. The term surfaced gently, like an old memory resurfacing: Dissociative Identity Disorder.

The thought unsettled him, not because he was repelled, but because it explained too much, and explanations carried responsibility. Knowledge was never inert. Now that he had noticed, he couldn't not notice. He couldn't watch Quinn struggle with disjointed conversations, mismatched recollections, and not see what it pointed to.

He told himself to tread carefully. Too many clinicians had pathologized what they didn't understand, and too many people carried scars from being treated like curiosities rather than human beings. He didn't want to be another person cataloguing symptoms. He wanted to be a friend who noticed, who listened, who could make space without forcing answers.

Still, there came a point where silence would have been negligence.

They were in his apartment when it happened. A quiet evening, books and tea, the kind of comfort he only offered to the rare few he trusted with his space. Quinn had just laughed at a quip he'd made about the way Arthur Conan Doyle misunderstood his own character, but then, almost seamlessly, something shifted. It wasn't the kind of thing most people would register, but Spencer's eyes caught it instantly. The set of their shoulders altered. The warmth in their expression dimmed or brightened, he couldn't yet tell which, and when they spoke again, it was with a different tempo altogether.

Spencer felt the sting of awareness again, sharp as glass. He thought about all the times they'd said "we" and how he'd pretended not to notice. He thought about the gaps in memory, the times they looked at him with eyes that seemed to belong to someone else.

He set his teacup down slowly, deliberately, grounding himself before he risked a word. "You know," he began softly, "you're not as invisible as you think."

He wasn't accusing.

"I've been… observing some patterns," Spencer said carefully. "The way sometimes you speak as if you're more than one person. The way you forget things we've already talked about. And how, sometimes, you seem to shift into someone I don't quite recognize. At least, not in the same way."

"Dissociation is… it's more common than people think," he continued, his voice quieter, tinged with that professor's cadence he sometimes fell into when he needed to hold onto facts as if they could anchor him. "And Dissociative Identity Disorder isn't…" He broke off, catching himself before he slid into lecture mode.