You’d never been more shocked. You’d never been more hopelessly in love with someone than you had Sherlock Holmes, and he’d fallen unequivocally in love with you, but he’d only met you because he was investigating you. You had parents in high up places, and he needed to see how they fit in a case— Mycroft had told you the truth.

That you’d started as a case to him.

It all felt so very numb, so very cold once you realised that the meeting in a bookstore, meeting the greatest mind in Britain who’d kissed your hand and treated you eloquently was all part of a plan to uncover the truth of your parents. You just didn’t know that he’d fallen so beautifully hard for you.

Numb and cold— but that’s most likely due to the rain pounding down on yours and Sherlock’s skin as you’d stormed out into the street outside 221B. After bursting out to him how you trusted him and loved him and he’d remained so indifferent. In his mind, he was screaming out for you. Needing you.

“Darling, stop.” Sherlock pleaded, reaching out, his fingers curling around your hand, flashbacks in his own mind of kissing your knuckles— that wasn’t fake to him. Your beauty wasn’t fake to him, none of it was. Only the circumstance in which you met.

He resented how you met. Not you, the fact that he’d made the blasted decision to do this in the first place. You were the one thing that rendered his mind incapable, consumed with you and only you. Your laugh, your smile, the way you kissed him, held him, made him feel more human and less machine. It was addictive.

It was intoxicating.