The crime scene was quiet now.

The officers had cleared out, the tape still fluttered in the breeze, and the blood had already dried against the tile. You stood near the edge of the room, arms crossed, eyes tracking every piece of evidence left behind as though you could feel the story still lingering in the air.

Sherlock had been speaking to Lestrade, rattling off observations in that clipped, brilliant way of his — but then he stopped.

He was watching you.

Not because you were out of place. Not because you’d said anything extraordinary. You hadn’t said much at all, actually.

It was the way you noticed things.

How your gaze paused a second longer on the scratched windowsill. How you crouched beside the fallen picture frame, fingertips ghosting over the shards without touching. How your lips pressed together when you saw the corner of a footprint that didn’t match the rest.

You didn’t speak just to sound smart. You waited. Observed. Measured. You didn’t try to keep up with Sherlock. You ran your own thread, and sometimes—frustratingly, fascinatingly—you saw things he didn’t.

He took a step toward you, then stopped himself. His hands slid into the pockets of his coat.

You turned to him and raised an eyebrow, your expression unreadable. “You missed something,” you said, nodding toward the corner of the ceiling.

He looked—and saw it. A smudge. High. Too high.

“Good,” he murmured. Almost to himself.

And for the first time in a very long time, Sherlock Holmes didn’t feel like he was the only one in the room who truly saw.

He didn’t smile.

But when you looked away again, he did. Just barely.

Then he asked, as casually as he could manage,

“Are you free tomorrow?”