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London rain keeps its own hours. It stirs around seven in the morning, tapping lightly at the bedroom window. Kudo Shinichi is always the first to wake, usually not by the rain, but by the jarring chime of a transcontinental case file. The first thing he learned was to slip silently out of bed and flick the kettle on in the kitchen—an unspoken pact between them: whoever rises first bears the quiet honour of brewing the day’s first pot of hot water.
Mouri Ran’s world begins with the day’s itinerary. Wednesday means her art history lecture at the university. As the kettle whistles, she scribbles on a notepad: 10:00 Library—"Patrons & Art in the Renaissance", Buy washing sponge after class, Tesco milk. Her script is neat, sharing the breakfast table with his case files scrawled with frantic symbols—a peculiar, quiet symbiosis.
The narrow windowsill is her miniature ecological observatory, her private bastion against London’s pervasive grey. The basil and mint persist in their half-hearted existence, while only that anonymous weed, sprouting from a cheap Waitrose plastic pot, flaunts its green with unapologetic vigour—verging on a kind of life philosophy.
"Botanically speaking, that’s a classic specimen meant for removal," Shinichi remarked one morning, pausing for exactly five seconds to regard the boldest leaf, his black coffee in hand. He had just loaded last night’s dishes into the washer; his fingers carried the damp, citrus scent of detergent.
"But it’s the greenest thing here," Ran replied without turning, her fingertips brushing the leaf. She was packing a heavy art history tome into her canvas bag, its pages bristling with coloured tabs marking notes like "Giotto’s blue" and "details in van Eyck’s mirror."
Shinichi said nothing more. Why did this weed command more of her attention than the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s letters of thanks? His world was vast, linear; hers was minute, diffuse. Like the paintings she studied—beneath their grand historical and religious narratives lay countless delicate brushstrokes, the granular sheen of mineral pigments.
Their flat was in Bloomsbury, one of those lofty Victorian conversions where the ornate fireplace was purely decorative and the heating perpetually insufficient. Their landlady—a septuagenarian former Royal Ballet dancer who still dressed impeccably—insisted this was "the real London." Below them, a 24-hour Turkish kebab shop sent stubborn tendrils of cumin and grilled meat fumes up through the old vents, seeping into Shinichi’s nightmares of pursuit and darkness by 3 a.m.
When Ran first moved in, she tried to tame the space.
She bought white IKEA storage boxes, hammered brass hooks into the walls, even strung a photo display with twine and wooden pegs by the window. It held vintage botanical postcards from Brick Lane, a cherry-blossom card from Tokyo, and a blurry photo of them both, caught in a sudden downpour at the British Library, not looking at the camera.
Shinichi’s contribution was to solemnly clear half his floor-to-ceiling bookshelf for her art history books. He approached it with typical precision: one entire afternoon spent reorganising the collection by publication year, author surname, and school of thought. Over dinner, halfway through Ran’s chicken-and-egg rice bowl, he mentioned offhandedly, "Oh, by the way, there’s space for your books on the shelf now."
Ran said nothing, but walked over and traced a finger along the perfectly ordered spines, neat as archives.
The next day, Shinichi found a note inside his usual "Great Detective Fanatic" mug. A sketched smiley face, and beside it: Thanks for organising. P.S. Next time, maybe dust the shelves first?
That was their language. Awkward, practical, occasionally tender in ways that caught them off guard—like London’s rare, sudden breaks of sun.
London’s rain, Ran discovered, indeed possesses its own geography.
"The drops on the east window fall straight, distinct. But on the west, the wind slants them, drawing long trails on the glass, like Kandinsky’s lines," she observed one rainy afternoon, wiping the west pane. She’d just returned from class, her hair damp, a denim jacket slung over a chair.
Shinichi was on a video call, dissecting a suspect’s alibi with Inspector Megure from Tokyo. Absently, he responded into the mic, "Yes, that’s due to the prevailing westerlies and the Venturi effect between the buildings."
Ran kept wiping. Outside, a postie in a fluorescent yellow vest pedalled through the rain, his wheels slicing through puddles, spraying grey.
Ten minutes later, call ended, Shinichi looked up abruptly. "It’s like when you sorted the wardrobe yesterday. Frequently worn clothes within easy reach, off-season items stored higher up. Behaviourally logical and efficient."
He said it while staring at his screen, tone flat, but the tips of his ears flushed. This was his way—using the language of deduction to clumsily translate her daily rituals. He couldn’t simply say I notice the things you do; he had to detour, pretending to state an objective principle.
Ran paused her wiping. She turned, studying the back of his head—his hair, ruffled from intense focus, stuck up like a wary cat’s.
"Shinichi," she said, "sometimes rain is just rain."
"I know," he replied. "But when you say it, it’s not just rain anymore."
The words escaped too quickly, startling even himself.
Ran smiled. Then she walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and pulled out a box of Tesco’s Bolognese pasta.
"This for dinner?" she called.
"Sure," he said, finally turning towards the kitchen. "I’ll cook."
"You?" Ran peered out, skepticism plain.
"I can cook pasta," he insisted, a hint of affront in his voice. "It’s boiling water. No technical difficulty. Boiling point is one hundred degrees, package says ten minutes."
The result, inevitably, was overcooked. The noodles clumped together, limp and formless. Ran took a bite, her expression a study in neutral effort, chewing with exaggerated slowness.
"Well?" he asked, visibly tense.
"Hmm," she finally swallowed, choosing her words. "Very… earnest."
"Be honest," he sighed.
"It’s awful," she complied.
Shinichi put down his fork. "I knew it."
"But I’ll finish it," Ran declared, scooping up another determined mouthful. "Because you made it. And wasting food is wrong."
"What kind of logic is that?"
"The logic of love," she said, utterly matter-of-fact.
Shinichi bowed his head, attacking his own soggy portion with sudden focus. But Ran saw it—the flush burning from his ears down his neck.
The story of the leaf began on a morning Shinichi didn’t come home.
Waking to find him absent wasn’t rare. The rarity was the most perfect leaf on the weed, now missing a neat, crescent-shaped bite, as if nibbled by a tiny celestial dog.
She held the marred leaf up to the ashen morning light. The cut was clean, the edges smooth—not random damage. It looked intentional, like the work of a small creature, or perhaps a Matisse cut-out, decisive and formal.
At 9 a.m., Shinichi returned, drenched in dew and exhaustion. The hem of his trench coat was muddy, his hair plastered to his forehead; he looked dredged from the Thames.
"The incision is smooth, no torn edges, the angle is nearly perfect. Not random insect damage, more like a deliberate…" He slipped into deduction mode on autopilot, the analysis firing like rounds before his sodden coat was off.
"It was a caterpillar," Ran interrupted calmly, placing the leaf on the table, weighted by a grocery receipt. "The most common cabbage white butterfly larva. I found it, fat and green, and released it in the flowerbed downstairs."
His deductions halted mid-trajectory. He stood dripping in the doorway, absurdly stalled.
"Oh," was all he managed.
"Go take a bath," Ran said. "The water’s hot."
He moved obediently towards the bathroom, but paused at the door, his damp back hesitant. "Ran."
"Yes?"
"That leaf…" He hesitated. "Don’t throw it away."
She looked up, surprised. "Why?"
"Nothing," he said quickly, almost rushed. "Just… keep it."
The bathroom door closed. The shower hissed, mingling with his relieved sigh. Ran studied the leaf, already beginning to curl in the warm air, its edges tinged with wilt, the crescent bite still stark.
She slipped it into a book—the one from the sofa he often read, Advances in Forensic Toxicology. A brick of a book, over five hundred pages, densely technical, poorly printed on rough paper, its corners soft from use. She knew he read it often; the bookmark—a tram ticket, a coffee shop stub—was always in a different place.
And so the leaf came to reside permanently in the chapter on "Plant-Based Toxins." Every time Shinichi turned there, he saw it—dried, curled, faded to a dull tan, yet preserving that caterpillar’s neat crescent. A tiny, silent reminder.
Of what? He couldn’t quite say. Perhaps of that morning, him standing cold and damp on the threshold, steeped in the smell of a case, and her calm "Go take a bath." Perhaps of her walking downstairs specifically to release an insignificant larva into a patchy flowerbed. Perhaps of her very existence—this perspective so different from his, attentive to leaves and caterpillars. This fact, this certainty, pressed like a leaf into a page of his life, quietly persistent, indelible, subtly altering the texture of the entire volume.
London’s autumn arrived slowly, then all at once. One day, Ran visited Tate Modern for a special exhibition, Still Life and Vital Force: From the Dutch Golden Age to the Present. Shinichi, miraculously free of urgent cases, decided to join. They took the Northern Line to Southwark, emerging into a sudden downpour. The rain fell thick and heavy, pocking the Thames’s grey-green surface.
"Run for it?" Ran asked, clutching her canvas bag with notebooks and the exhibition catalogue.
"Running just makes you wetter," Shinichi reasoned, yet he shrugged off his thin wool coat, holding it aloft over both their heads—a makeshift shelter. "Just walk faster."
They hurried across the Millennium Bridge, its steel cables stark in the rain. The wind lashed the rain sideways, easily penetrating his flimsy canopy. It soaked through his shirt, plastering it to the tense line of his spine. Ran thought of saying something—"Just wear your coat"—but instead walked faster, trying to lessen the wind’s strain on his outstretched arm.
The gallery was warm, humming with the murmurs, footsteps, and damp wool scent of tourists. Ran headed straight for the exhibition. Shinichi followed, his damp shirt making him look slightly dishevelled, out of place amidst the curated elegance.
"You could wait in the café, look at the river view," she offered, glancing back. "I’ll be fine alone, might take a while."
"I’ll stay with you," he insisted. "Nothing else to do, anyway."
And so he did. He stood with her for twenty minutes before Adriaen Coorte’s painting of a cabbage, watching her sketch the insect-bitten leaf in her notebook; he read every plaque about symbolism, vanity, and 17th-century Dutch bourgeois taste; he browsed the gift shop, scrutinising Monet-printed scarves and postcards, pronouncing the iris-patterned mug’s "glaze colour accuracy insufficient."
"Aren’t you bored?" she finally asked.
Shinichi considered. "Not really. Observing behavioural patterns. Most people spend less than thirty seconds per painting. You look longer. Wondering why."
"Because I’m an art history student."
"No," he mused. "Other students don’t look as long. You’re really seeing them. Not for exams or papers. You’re… conversing with them? Something like that?"
Ran stared. This was perhaps the closest Shinichi had ever come to articulating the essence of art appreciation.
"Yes," she said softly. "Exactly."
They sat in the gallery café by the window. Rain still streaked the glass, blurring St. Paul’s dome across the river like a watercolour not yet dry. Shinichi ordered a double espresso to ward off the chill and fatigue; Ran, a hot chocolate crowned with whipped cream.
"Shinichi."
"Hm?"
"Thank you for coming with me."
"It’s nothing," he stirred his coffee, shifting his gaze. "Just… wanted to see what you usually look at."
He said it quietly, but she heard. Cradling her hot chocolate, watching the blurred city outside, she felt this damp, cold London become suddenly, marginally, more bearable.
The weed flowered unexpectedly one afternoon in October.
The flowers were absurdly small, timid little things, a milky white with five petals thin as cicada wings, clustered in the leaf axils like spilled grains of rice, or the gentle highlight on a face in a Rembrandt.
Ran discovered them just before leaving for class. She stood before the windowsill, staring for so long she nearly missed the Tube. On her way, she texted Shinichi a photo—needing magnification to discern the blooms: It’s flowering.
He was in a Scotland Yard conference room, assisting with a complex smuggling case involving art shipments. Glancing at his phone, the blurry white speck gave him pause. What?
The weed on the windowsill.
Oh. He typed the reply, then was immediately summoned to examine new structural diagrams of a painting. The phone went back into his suit jacket, the conversation truncated.
Ran stared at that lone Oh as the train rumbled through dark tunnels, her reflection ghosting the window. Her professor lectured on plant symbolism in early modern art—lilies for purity, oak for strength, ivy for fidelity—but her mind kept drifting back to those flowers, devoid of symbolism, simply blooming for themselves. Their existence seemed meaning enough.
Shinichi returned late that night, preoccupied. He sank at the dining table without removing his coat, spreading out documents and printouts of paintings. The air carried a faint trace of tobacco (from the Yard officers) and his clean, sharp aftershave.
"Have you eaten?" Ran called from the kitchen, her hair damp from a shower.
"Yeah," he said, eyes not leaving the complex charts and painted details, fingers pressing his temples. "Don’t wait up. I need to review this. It’s complicated."
Ran said nothing. She placed a glass of water by his hand, then washed up and went to bed, listening to the rustle of papers and occasional keyboard taps from the living room. The clock ticked. Drunken shouts and fragmented songs drifted up from the kebab shop. She watched the ceiling, where shifting light from the rainy street played like a silent film.
By 2 a.m., he finally put the files away. He crept into the bedroom, thinking her asleep, but her voice, soft with sleep, came from the darkness: "Shinichi."
"Yeah?"
"That weed flowered." A repetition, like a somnambulant murmur.
He stilled in the dark. After a moment: "I know. You texted."
"You only replied ‘Oh.’"
"…" A beat of silence. "Sorry."
"It’s okay," she said. "I know you’re busy. Just wanted to tell you. The flowers are tiny. They’ll probably wilt soon."
He didn’t lie down. He went to the window, drew the curtain slightly. London’s night is never truly dark; the distant streetlights cast the room in a gauzy film, illuminating the weed. He bent close, peering intently, finally seeing the minuscule blooms. So small he’d passed them countless times unnoticed. In the faint light, they seemed almost translucent, fragile.
"They’re lovely," he said.
"Really?" Her voice held a thread of sleep-stripped delight.
"Yeah," he turned, trying to find her eyes in the dark. "Lovely. Like… that line from the poem you read the other day. All the green in the world, contained in a single leaf." He paused, searching. "These flowers too. All the… white? Is here."
Ran laughed.
"Shinichi, that’s a clumsy metaphor."
"I know," he finally lay down, the mattress dipping. "Couldn’t think of a better one."
They lay side-by-side in the dark, listening to each other’s soft breaths. Outside, London’s rain began again, fine and persistent, tapping the glass, a fitting score for the night. After a moment, Shinichi reached out, found her hand under the duvet, and held it.
"I’m off tomorrow," he said. "I’ll go anywhere with you."
"Really?" Her fingers shifted in his palm.
"Really," he added, a note of complaint edging his voice. "But must we avoid the gallery? My shirt from last time still smells of it."
Ran laughed again, the sound shaking the bed slightly, dispersing some of the accumulated gloom. Shinichi chuckled too, a low, resigned, yet willing sound.
The rain, her laughter, his, the radiator’s stubborn clanking, the cumin rising from below—these sounds and smells mingled, composing their London, their life, their occasionally frustrating, yet persistently converging, way of loving.
The flowers wilted within the week, as predicted.
Ran wasn’t bothered. That was the nature of things: bloom, fruit, wither, repeat. But she noticed Shinichi had started paying attention to the weed. He’d pause by the sill while waiting for coffee, studying the traces of dried night dew on the leaves. If Ran forgot to water it during essay crunch times, he’d silently pick up the cat-printed watering can, spraying awkwardly, droplets sometimes pooling unevenly in the leaf hearts.
"I thought you said it was a weed," she teased once.
"Weeds are plants too," he stated, impassive. "And it’s been here so long. Practically a resident."
"A resident?"
"Metaphor," he said quickly. "A botanical one."
But Ran saw his ears redden. She didn’t press, turning away to prepare dinner, humming a disjointed tune.
One unexpectedly bright November weekend, they visited Kew Gardens. Shinichi insisted it was for "understanding London’s biodiversity"; Ran insisted he just wanted a walk.
The gardens were vast. They wandered the winding paths all afternoon. The greenhouses were humid, water droplets occasionally falling from the glass domes, splashing on the gravel. Ran stopped in the tropical zone, pointing at a large leafy plant. "Look, each leaf is different."
Shinichi leaned in. True, the veins, the serrated edges—each was unique.
"Like fingerprints," he said.
"Yes," Ran murmured. "Each leaf is singular. So… all the green really is in one leaf. Because each contains its own entirety."
He looked at her. Her profile was soft in the greenhouse’s filtered light. Her hand still hovered in that gentle, almost reverent gesture, as if touching something infinitely precious and fragile.
"Ran."
"Hm?"
"I love you."
Her hand froze mid-air. She turned, eyes wide.
"What?"
"I said…" He took a breath, ears burning crimson, but he held her gaze. "I love you. Like… like you love that weed." He immediately grimaced at the analogy. "No, not like that. It’s… more complex. More… Just…" His language systems failed again. He stood there, speechless.
Ran laughed, a sound mixed with tears.
"Shinichi," she said, "that might be the most awkward confession ever."
"I know," his shoulders slumped slightly, the blush spreading down his neck. "So…?"
"So I love you too. When you forget to eat because of a case, when you clumsily cook pasta, when you start noticing that weed… Every time."
He stared. Then, slowly, he smiled.
The greenhouse bustled with tourists, a babble of languages. No one noticed the Asian couple in the corner. They stood there, in the shadow of immense, silent tropical plants, and simply, naturally, linked their hands, fingers intertwining tightly, as they were always meant to.
Outside, the London sky remained pale and clear, the air crisp. But for them, in that moment, it was the brightest, warmest afternoon in the world.
There is no dramatic denouement here, really. Life isn’t a detective novel; it needs no final chapter revealing a singular truth. Life is the persistent present continuous.
Shinichi still burns the midnight oil on transcontinental cases, the desk lamp highlighting his furrowed brow and scrolling data. Ran still buries herself in the library until closing for her thesis on "the secular nature of marginal plant illustrations in medieval manuscripts," returning with armfuls of weighty folios.
The weed still flourishes on the sill, green and unapologetic. The heating remains inadequate, the kebab shop below, perpetually smoky.
But some things have shifted, with time.
Shinichi has learned to cook a decent pasta. He no longer relies solely on package instructions, but watches the texture, adds a sprinkle of black pepper and dried basil to the sauce (though the fresh one on the sill remains largely unused). When Ran works late, he’ll quietly prepare instant miso soup, clumsily adding tofu and seaweed—hardly elegant, but steaming hot, perfect for warming hands and heart.
When he’s out all night, phone off, she no longer calls, but sends a brief message: Remember to eat. Or, when the chill sets in: Your coat is in the left-side closet by the entrance. She knows the hidden galleries in London’s markets better now, visits exhibitions of unknown artists alone, finding resonance in their bold or obscure attempts.
The leaf pressed inside Advances in Forensic Toxicology remains. Dry, curled, yet whole. Like their relationship: imperfect, but real, carefully preserved within the pages of their lives, part of the whole.
Sometimes, Shinichi pauses when he chances upon it. Ran asks what he’s thinking.
"Nothing," he says. "Just thinking… it really is very green."
Ran looks at the now-brown specimen and laughs, correcting him gently, "It’s been brown for ages, Great Detective. Is your colour perception finally failing?"
"I know," he smiles slightly. "But in my memory, from the moment it was pressed, it was green."
So this is their story. No grand separations, no life-or-death dramatics. Just London’s incessant rain, pasta progressing from disastrous to edible, a weed greening defiantly on a sill, the memory of a dried leaf in a book, two planets on different orbits yet irrevocably drawn together, and the ordinary truth of love—learned, practiced, and understood in the daily minutiae, the separations, and the clumsy, persistent steps towards each other.
All the green, indeed, is in a single leaf.