[Sherlock/Canon] Strange as Things Are

Blurb:

Sherlock Holmes has never understood love, that muddled, inefficient emotion that interferes with logical reasoning. He has dissected countless feelings, yet categorizes love as nothing more than a meaningless variable.

Until Delaney appears.

She isn't love, yet carries everything love could possibly hold.

She is a paradox, an anomaly Sherlock cannot unravel through deduction. Her existence confounds him, like a mathematical formula that defies classification, like a codebook written in an unknown language. He studies her as he would a cold case, a rare chemical substance, or a corpse that cannot be

explained by common sense.

Sherlock has no love.

He has only Delaney, this strange, unfamiliar variable he cannot ignore.

Delaney Hope × Sherlock Holmes

A story about a master thief and a master detective.

Please read before starting:

1. Some stories from the original works have been adapted to the modern era, and there will also be one or two original cases. Sherlock retains his characterization from the BBC series. Mary and Watson retain their original characterizations, with a few elements from the BBC series mixed in. Mary is not an agent. Everyone else keeps their BBC-series characterization. This is my own take on the storyline. Oros is retained to make the BBC-series characterizations plausible. Includes a platonic Sherlock and Watson relationship, a Watson and Mary pairing, and a Mycroft and Lestrade pairing. If you can't accept the Mycroft and Lestrade pairing, please don't read. They're a secondary couple, but have a lot of scenes.

2. The romance is a slow burn and one-on-one. The story follows two parallel plotlines and uses multiple points of view. Some sections are written in a memoir-like style, interspersed with case logs, MI6 files, Sherlock's experimental notes, and more.

3. The timeline differs somewhat from both the original works and the BBC series. Watson won't appear until later. The male lead is 20 when he first appears, and the female lead is 14. There is a six-year age gap between them.

4. This differs greatly from both The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock. It's fanfiction that doesn't feel much like fanfiction, so please heed the warning if that's not your thing.

5. There is no obvious romance before the heroine reaches adulthood. Sherlock is not a pedophile, thank you. He doesn't even understand love early on.

6. Early in the story, the heroine is something like Sherlock's sidekick and half a student, learning many things from the great detective. She will grow later on and won't follow Sherlock forever. Later, she becomes an agent and joins the intelligence service. There will be stories where she and Sherlock compete over cases or work together.

7. Both the heroine and Sherlock will have relationships with other people. The heroine does so for missions and her own needs, while the male lead does so for cases, but these relationships won't be described in detail. This is an adult push-and-pull, with both of them trying to lure the other in, not a sweet, pure-love story. The heroine is unconventional, with bad habits, a dark side, and a chaotic sense of morality. If you can't accept that, please don't click in just to make yourself miserable. There are countless good stories out there. One of them is bound to be for you.

8. By the way, it's 2025. Does anyone still read original female character Sherlock fanfiction? (tears) If nobody reads it, I'll stop writing.

Theme: May we all become better versions of ourselves.