I do not own Sherlock or The Kingkiller Chronicle. Otherwise I would be quite wealthy. This is a little oneshot in the style of Patrick Rothfuss's prologue; I might decide to continue it sometime in the future, but that seems unlikely. However, if any of you would like to continue it, please just let me know, drop me a message with the title of your story, and credit me for the idea! Enjoy!

A Study in Three-Part Silences

It was quiet in the suite the two men shared.

Of course it was not completely quiet. Through the closed, always-latched window the bustle of Imre made itself heard. Iron-shod hooves clacked against the cobblestones. Wooden and metal wheels groaned in protest as the weight of precious cargo bore down on the axles. Men and women called out to each other—greetings, complaints, thanks, insults, apologies, laments, pleas. In a busy city such as Imre there was no such thing as complete quiet. Yet somehow the suite held something truer than mere quiet: silence.

A careful listener could perhaps observe that it was a silence of three parts.

The first silence belonged to the rather short, sandy-haired man in the armchair. His was a silence made of books absorbing sound with both their physical pages and the weight of the information they contained. It was also comprised of soft, well-loved wool skillfully knitted into warm and comfortable jumpers. It was a silence of the pleasant feeling of a good supper followed by a full night's sleep, but underneath the books and the jumpers and the vague, hazy glow of satisfaction lay rock-solid nerves and flashes of cold iron and bright, flexible steel.

The second silence surrounded the other occupant of the suite. This was darker, colder, more sinister, but somehow complementary to the first. It was the space between the whirring of gears, the jittery almost-hum of activity cloaked in a sheen of icy stillness. It was the silence of silver or blue or green or brown eyes (for they could never seem to settle on a particular color from one moment to the next) flicking from the bag of thumbs to the jar of eyeballs to the severed head and soundlessly observing, seeing, recording, cataloguing every minute detail with scalpel-point exactness. It was the silence belonging to the striking, pale, exceedingly strange-looking man who sat nearly motionless, staring at some dead thing under a magnifying monocle, flitting from observation to conclusion quickly enough to put the most well-oiled machine to shame.

The third silence twined between the two men. It was deeper than the other two, encompassing and shaping them but still leaving them intact and whole on their own. The fair-haired wool-and-haze-and-metal man rarely looked up at his suitemate; the gears-cold-pale one certainly never glanced from his experiments to his companion. But the silence slid between and around them in an almost-tangible wave of awareness, thrumming with excitement just waiting to reveal itself. And danger...yes, this silence held danger too, just under the surface. It was the silence of a stalking cat: lax but ready to spring at any time, all claws and teeth and smooth, lithe muscles. It ebbed and flowed, in and out, a tide over barely-concealed razor-sharp rocks. It was intoxicating and it was alive.

It was the impatient, smoked-beehive sound before the striking of a storm.