Chapter Text
“Go find John!”
The shrill scream clangs around in his skull, tearing reality out of his hands. His head feels hollow, as his mind seizes like an engine. Not again, not again! Thought, deduction, reason – it was all slipping through his fingers like a sieve once more and he desperately tries to hold on to something – anything. Everything is sand. It’s all turning to sand…
‘Go find John!’
The voice is more of an echo now, something its realness he suddenly isn’t sure of. The dullness is starting to set in behind his eyes, and he’s aware that it doesn’t really matter what he was doing before even though he knows it was important. Nothing matters really…
A sharp pain stabs his right side, causing electric bursts of light to rupture in front of his eyes and his teeth to throb as he grits them against the pain. He didn’t realise he had been running, tearing through the dark streets of London until he crashed into the wall of a dark alley. He takes a moment and sucks in as much air as he can before his apparently broken ribs force him to stop. The pain, he finds, clears his head a little, and with his knuckles he presses into his side, desperate to lift the fog in his brain a little more. He allows a strangled gasp to escape his lips.
‘Go find John!’
There’s a ringing in his ears and everything around him is threatening to overwhelm him entirely. There’s just too much information, too much… data. His surroundings are assaulting him all that once; the bitter air of the city leaving the foetid smell of rubbish in his nose, the taste of petrol on his tongue, and the glare of the lights as they shatter against the wet asphalt force him to gag and squint through bleary eyes. The people’s faces are the worst, and a twinge of nausea twists his stomach if he tries to focus on them for too long. It’s a torrent of information he doesn’t know how to order or catalog. He can only keep his eyes on the ground and force himself to run past them at a shambling, painful pace. Oh, God he doesn’t know where he is.
Through the fear and chaos, an image suddenly leaps to the surface of his mind and he clings to it as if he was drowning.
Brass numbers burn every time he blinks as if they are branded there on the inside of his skull. They even float there in front of him whenever he is able to keep his eyes open against the too bright street lamps.
221B…221B…221B…
It was like flicking on a switch in his too dark skull, illuminating everything and bringing a brief moment of clarity in the confusion.
Baker Street.
John.