It started quietly, the way most of Sherlock Holmes’ greatest revelations did—not with fanfare, but with stillness. A pattern disrupted. A routine nudged just slightly off-course. You had entered the room like a whisper, your presence marked not by noise or flourish, but by the precision with which you moved. The way you aligned your notes with the edge of the table. The way your gaze lingered not on people, but on anomalies—much like his.

John noticed first—not your arrival, but Sherlock’s reaction to it. The prolonged silence. The fraction-of-a-second delay before he responded to a question. The way his eyes tracked your movements, not with suspicion or calculation, but with something dangerously close to curiosity. That was rare. Almost unheard of. Curiosity was for puzzles, not people.

You weren’t beautiful in the way magazines defined it, but you were ordered. Composed. Intellectually formidable, quietly assertive, and utterly uninterested in social trivialities. Sherlock had tested you once—deliberately—by leaving crime scene photos scattered out of sequence. You reordered them before he even finished his deduction. No flourish. No smugness. Just a tilt of the head and a return to your own work. He didn’t say anything then, but he catalogued it: competent, fast, lacking the need for validation.

You reminded him of himself—but softened. Sharpened in the same places, yes, but tempered by empathy he couldn’t quite understand. You noticed things, like he did, but you cared about what they meant to people. That confused him. Fascinated him. Unsettled him.

John said it outright one evening: “You like her.” Sherlock didn’t respond, merely stared at the microscope as though it might offer a chemical explanation. It didn’t.

It became harder to ignore. The small things. The moments. You brought him coffee once, black, precisely how he liked it. He never told you. No one did. You simply… knew. You didn’t talk much. He liked that. The silence between you wasn’t awkward; it was collaborative. Thoughtful. And when you spoke, it was with intention. Insight. Efficiency.

Molly saw the way Sherlock’s fingers twitched when you brushed past him. Mycroft saw the way he lingered in a room just a few seconds longer when you were still in it.

But you weren’t fooled. You didn’t mistake him for something he wasn’t. You saw him—his sharpness, his impatience, the thinly veiled disdain he had for dullness. And you didn’t flinch. You challenged him, but never tried to soften his edges.

That’s when it happened. The realization. Not loud. Not dramatic. It came to him mid-sentence, while explaining the trajectory of a blood spatter pattern. You stood across from him, brows drawn in thought, lip tucked under your teeth as you considered the data. And something inside him shifted. Not in a poetic, heart-pounding sort of way. No violins. Just a mental note: I don’t want her to leave the room.

For a man who prided himself on control, that thought was chaos. Disruptive. Dangerous.

And yet—he let it stay.

He didn’t tell you, not right away. That would’ve been foolish. Vulnerable. Besides, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. The idea of affection wasn’t foreign to him; he simply deemed it inefficient. But this—this was something else. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t even comfort. It was connection, built not from longing but from alignment.

You weren’t his opposite. You were adjacent. Parallel. A separate hypothesis leading to the same conclusion.

And that, somehow, was far more terrifying.

The night he told you, it wasn’t planned. You were in the middle of reviewing a toxicology report. The lighting was dim. The air smelled faintly of formaldehyde. He watched as you narrowed your eyes at the results, lips moving slightly as you did calculations in your head.

He spoke before he could stop himself. Quietly. Almost like an experiment. “Statistically speaking,” he said, “this shouldn’t be happening. But… it is.”

Then he looked up, eyes searching yours for some echo of comprehension. “I think I love you.”