Sherlock's Monologue

"If I said we really were having a late-night tea party, would you believe me?" Watson stepped forward to defend himself while Sherlock was downstairs.

"Get back to bed." Sherlock's dark red silk dressing gown fluttered through the air. Watson and Janet were clearly more curious about that question, the one everyone wanted to ask.

"So, are you two together? Have you made it official?" Janet clasped her hands, her eyes sparkling in the dark. They were simply too curious.

"I saw Nana give you a goodnight kiss, so don't even try to deny it!" Watson stuck a foot in the doorframe as the door was about to close. As if! He had long since figured out how to counter Sherlock's habit of shutting the door whenever he pleased.

"Not yet." Sherlock looked at Watson helplessly. Why did it feel like this fellow was getting more and more childish?

"No way. You're not planning to be a scumbag, are you?" Watson kept his voice as low as he could, his tone full of disapproval.

"We know what we're doing. Just watch." Sherlock made as if to stamp on Watson's shoe, startling him into pulling it back. Having successfully closed the door, Sherlock flopped back onto the bed.

The warmth of her touch still lingered on his forehead. He reached up to touch it, then feared rubbing it away and covered his eyes with the back of his hand instead. Amid his tangled thoughts, he fell into a deep sleep.

Sherlock's change was just as Molly had said: there were signs of it all along.

He had always had reservations about Sitangna's arrival, even though her reason for coming to live in Britain was perfectly reasonable, and there was nothing amiss with her identity or the arrangements made afterward.

In fact, the first time he saw her, Sherlock had felt like turning her away at the door. Although it was not his home, there was an inexplicable friendliness about the girl that made the hairs on his body stand up and put him on high alert.

At first glance, all the information about her was automatically broken down in his mind, finally forming a description that even he did not quite understand: overly systematic.

She was a normal person, but her demeanor was overly systematic, like a disguise detached from reality. His deliberate probing later confirmed that she had indeed approached him with a purpose.

It was just that her objective seemed to be him.

Mycroft must have noticed too, but he made no move. Sherlock figured that since he himself was the point of entry, he might as well do as she wished and keep her by his side.

Whatever he did, he asked her to come along.

Work, daily life, even shopping-they did it all together. Heaven knew how much he hated shopping.

He knew Sitangna often looked at him unconsciously. In psychology, this behavior was an instinctive focus driven by dopamine rewards and activation of the limbic system.

The human attention system prioritized stimuli related to emotion, survival, or cognitive preferences.

If someone's appearance, demeanor, or behavior triggered a point of interest-for example, a smile, a voice, a particular movement, and so on-the brain would unconsciously mark it as a "salient stimulus," causing the eyes to follow it repeatedly.

He was curious about how she would act, curious about her next move, but she seemed to have done nothing at all, and yet she also seemed to have done everything.

Sitangna was very smart, as was fully evident whether she was helping him solve cases or dealing with the little things in daily life. She was also very kind. People like her generally became targets for him to use, or else stayed far away.

But the friendliness about her gradually turned into attraction in his eyes, and his gaze, too, often followed her beyond his control. This was not a good sign.

After that, he kept trying to fight this strange flutter in his heart. One day, when they returned to Baker Street, Sitangna was not there. The disturbance did not disappear; instead, it grew worse.

He tried to fill his mental space with Bach's violin concerto, but the notes twisted into the sound of raindrops striking a keyboard;

He opened a comprehensive volume on rare poisons of the twenty-first century, but between the lines appeared the comical sight of her holding a measuring cup for him, grimacing from the cold;

He even did something unprecedented: he picked up a rag and wiped away the remains of his work on the laboratory bench. On the tabletop was the strong acid that had burned Sitangna. With a cold face, he poured all that remained into the designated waste bin.

He even cleaned the glassware and the bench until they shone. If Mrs. Hudson saw them, she would surely cry out that the sun had risen in the west.

He did not know why he was cleaning either. Perhaps he was afraid a certain fool would hurt herself again.

Sherlock's love was destined to be a violent revolution in his mind.

He would not indulge in ordinary worldly warmth. Instead, he transformed his feelings into a more complicated form of cryptography. On his personal website, one uncracked key after another looked no different from gibberish to ordinary people. Only he knew the struggle contained within them.

Then Sitangna was forced to part from them for eighty-three hours and forty-one minutes because of a project meeting. After solving the Hound case and returning home, he could not get used to it at all. Habit was a truly frightening thing.

It took an ordinary person twenty-one days to develop a new habit. He needed only ten, and Sitangna had already been in his life for a full fifty days.

He did not believe in love. He intended to crack it, and in the process, he would be forced to confront the fact he had been avoiding.

Emotion was not a weakness, but the most difficult data in human nature to analyze.

"You mean he's fallen in love with a woman?" Compression of the audio signal distorted the woman's cool voice somewhat, but the person on the other end of the screen could still hear the teasing in her tone clearly.

"Who knows? That's what the footage sent back suggests. Aren't you watching it too?" His hand aching, the man put down the video camera and deliberately smacked the gum in his mouth until he annoyed the woman on the other end into telling him to shut up.

"Then you really have failed. The case you created not only failed to run our great detective ragged, it even gave him time to develop feelings for his partner."

The glass covering the wall reflected the woman's dark brown wool curls and eyes like glass beads. She had a pretty face, though she was somewhat pale. After all, that was inevitable when one was locked up year-round in a prison where the sun never shone.

"Look, what a romantic kiss. His partner, family, and lover are all by his side. I want to spend Christmas with them too."

"Jingle bells, jingle bells~ Jingle all the way~"

The Christmas carol sounded eerie no matter how one listened to it when she sang it.

"What a pity. There's nothing here."

"I have nothing!!!"

Eurus collapsed onto the small bed and suddenly shouted at the ceiling.

Moriarty stopped chewing and ran his tongue over one of his pointed upper teeth. "That woman is uncanny. You could say her abilities are on par with Sherlock's."

"She's very perceptive. My informant was so well hidden that even the agents your brother assigned didn't notice, but she spotted the informant immediately."

From the very first second Sitangna appeared on Baker Street, Moriarty had already gathered her biographical records. They showed that, apart from her love of detective novels, the girl had previously displayed no traits related to intelligence.

Could meeting the great detective have awakened her mind?

"Two strong players joining forces-what an exciting game that would make. I almost want to go out personally and meet this crime-solving trio."

Eurus stood up and stretched. Her languid manner inevitably brought to mind a certain someone far away on Baker Street.