What was it? What could it be? What on Earth could that warm, cancerous feeling be? Cancerous because it seemed to grow and grow until he couldn’t ignore it. Sherlock tried to deduce it with all his might but he couldn’t. The feeling like his gut was taking a never-ending dive down a cliff. The possibility of seeing you again giving him the same thrill he had when he was working on a new case. This was Sherlock’s biggest case. You were his biggest case to date. His most intriguing case to date, because he couldn’t begin to fathom how he felt around you.

Right now, Sherlock was playing the violin to clear his mind.

Focusing on the brilliantly written Beethoven piece that he admired and usually played at the more difficult cases, he’d take liberty in calling you one of those brilliant cases, as he couldn’t get you out of his head.

He needed to clear all those thoughts before he got distracted.

Sherlock’s fingers flew over the bowstring, more furiously each second as what felt like a myriad of memories of you flitted in front of his eyes. What was the fluttering?

The moments where he’d go insane if he hadn’t heard your voice for too long? Sherlock let out a huff of breath. Maybe you were a distraction. A most welcome distraction.

He finished the piece, and when he set it down, he saw you. You. “I didn’t see you there.” For him, it felt like time stopped. Damn it, what did that mean? Sherlock wanted to decipher these emotions.

Decipher the effect you had on him, you beautiful woman, you, but he could never seem to know.

Sherlock Holmes was stumped. For the first time in his life, he had no clue what he was doing. The case he’d been working, yes, he had a clue of that, but his self assigned case - to find out what effect you had on his being and why - he couldn’t solve that.

He could never fathom why he got irritable and paranoid when he hadn’t heard your voice for an extended period of time. “Who sent you?”

Sherlock was frustrated.