Chapter Text
He liked watching her sleep.
It wasn't because he was a stalker; he most certainly was not. And once she had agreed to stay with him, he disgruntledly accepted her boundaries. Which were many, as far as he was concerned.
But when she was sleeping, she was calm. Peaceful. She brought him to a place of peace, a respite from the mundane noise of everyday life.
Something he desperately needed.
It always started the same way when they weren't on a case.
She would take off her stilettos and suit, and have an evening shower that lasted three minutes longer than her usual shower time. Then she would get into her pyjamas and slippers, and if it was cold, she'd put on that red cardigan. It was old, worn out and overused, but she always preferred it over any new ones he might have bought her over the years. It had been long since he'd stopped trying to replace it; he knew better by now.
She'd blow-dry her hair, then find him to say goodnight. Sometimes she'd stay a bit longer, share a cup of tea with him if she needed the company or thought he needed it. Sitting on the chairs of the media room, close together but without touching. Or in the library, close to the fire he had started, sitting on the ottoman or the armchair, sharing the silence.
Finally, she would retire to bed.
He would wait, sometimes for hours, until he was sure she was asleep. And then, he would walk up the stairs, minding the fourth step that creaked. Often, he would take off his shoes before, making sure his steps were silent.
She had two chairs in her bedroom. One served as a bedside table. The other was broken — it would take years to replace — and it always sat at the far end of the room, opposite the bed. Sometimes it was empty, more often than not it was full of clutter: books, water bottles or discarded clothes.
He would methodically take everything off the chair and then lower himself onto it, minding the leg that was broken. He sat, barely breathing at first, with his back straight.
And he watched.
He watched for minutes, often hours. Sometimes, when his mind was particularly troubled, he stayed until the first rays of the early morning sun came through the windows. Some other times, he'd found, much to his dismay, that being in that room with her calmed and relaxed him to the point of falling asleep. Who would've thought?
The first night he’d visited, he stayed.
He’d tried everything.
He’d played the violin until the strings protested. He’d paced the brownstone from attic to basement, run calculations in his head, mentally dissected old cases, and recited chemical formulas backwards. None of it worked. The static remained—low, relentless, humming beneath his skin like an itch he couldn’t reach.
But nothing silenced the restlessness clawing at the walls of his chest.
He sat in the library for hours, watching the fire die down. At precisely five past three in the morning, he rose from the armchair and moved through the brownstone in silence. The lights remained off. He didn’t need them.
Every step, every corner of the place was imprinted in his mind like a blueprint. He could navigate it by instinct alone. He knew the creak of every board, knew how to move without sound. It was an old habit.
At the top of the stairs, he paused. Her door was cracked open.
What was he doing? But his feet took him to her door, as his hand grabbed the doorknob.
He hesitated on the threshold.
He didn’t mean to intrude. He only needed… silence. Just a moment near her quietness, her steadiness. He was familiar enough with her to know that she had no idea what she gave off; it wasn’t just calm.
It was something solid to tether himself to when his own mind grew too loud.
He breathed out through his nose and eased the door open, one hand brushing the frame to steady himself.
The room was dim, just the soft golden wash of the hallway light spilling through the doorway. She lay curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other resting loosely on the comforter.
Her breathing was steady. Deeper than REM — she was in slow-wave sleep. She wouldn’t wake.
He stepped inside.
He didn’t need to look around; the layout was fixed in his memory. Two chairs. One near the bed, with a mug of herbal tea long since cooled. The other a book and a blouse on it.
He left both items on the floor, careful not to make a sound, then he lowered himself into the chair.
Back straight. Hands resting loosely on his thighs. Eyes on her.
There was no rational purpose to his being here; no case to observe, no experiment to test.
Just her.
Watson.
Asleep. Peaceful. Unbothered.
She grounded him without trying.
Not by speaking, not by analysing, but simply by existing. Her stillness was a metronome that his heart gradually began to sync to. Her breath, steady and slow, filled the room in a way that soothed something primal in him.
He watched the rise and fall of her shoulders with each breath. The comforter was slipping slightly from one shoulder, revealing the worn sleeve of a soft grey T-shirt. Familiar, mundane details.
But to him, they were everything.
He sat still for minutes. Then longer. Time became difficult to track. He didn’t fidget, didn’t reach for his phone.
At one point he closed his eyes, the image of her sleeping ingrained in his inner mind. And he let his mind focus only on one thing: her breathing, his breathing, in perfect sync.
There were moments where the weight in his chest lifted slightly, where the thoughts lost their edge. Not silence, exactly—but a softer kind of noise. Manageable.
She shifted once, in her sleep, turning onto her back. For a brief moment, her brow furrowed. He leaned forward a fraction, holding his breath—but she settled again, sighing softly.
He exhaled.
He remained there, motionless, until the early edge of dawn began to blue the windowpanes. The sky outside was pale and washed-out, the kind of quiet that preceded a city’s waking breath.
And still, he stayed.
Only when the sun began to rise in earnest did he finally stand. He moved carefully, adjusting the blanket that had slipped from her shoulder, then turned and left the room without a sound.
He returned to his own space, but the quiet followed him. And for the first time in days, as he prepared tea for him and coffee for her, he started to feel lighter.
Not long after, she appeared in the kitchen, clad in her worn-out red cardigan and a smile that reached all the way to him. Present. Steady. Tethering. And for once, when she looked at him as if he were the only star in the universe, the part of him that feared needing her fell mercifully silent.