Chapter Text
The first thing is the sky.
It is grey and it is wrong, not wrong in itself, skies are often grey in London, but wrong in the way it is arranged above him. The sky should not be directly above him. The sky should be sideways, or at an angle, because he should be upright, because he had been upright, because he had been running.
He catalogues this before he catalogues the pain.
The pain is at the back of his head. Localised. Dull rather than sharp, which means it has been there for, not long. Minutes. Possibly less. The ground beneath him is damp concrete. There is rust somewhere nearby; he can smell it. Iron railings, probably. The air has the specific cold of late afternoon in the second half of the year. October, then. Late October, given the quality of the light filtering through the cloud. He is in London, the traffic two streets over has the particular rhythm of the A501, or something like it, which places him in the north-east quadrant of the city. Clerkenwell, possibly. Shoreditch at the outside.
This is useful.
None of this is useful.
Why is he lying here, on the ground?
Someone is kneeling over him.
He registers the someone before he registers their face, which is the wrong order for registering a person. The someone has hands. The hands are on his head. They are doing something, pressing, assessing, checking something at the base of his skull.
The hands are warm and they are not unpleasant, which is strange, because hands on him are almost always unpleasant.
His body has not flinched. His body is, in fact, slack in a way that suggests it has already made a decision about these hands that his brain has not caught up to.
"Sherlock, can you hear me?"
The voice knows his name. The voice is above him and slightly to the left, and it is saying his name with an inflection that is not a question, exactly, but is checking for something. Checking whether the name still lands where it is meant to land.
He opens his eyes properly.
The man above him has a jumper on. Oatmeal-coloured, cable knit, a bit stretched at the cuffs. He has sandy hair and a face that is doing several things at once, he is frightened and he is not showing it, he is a doctor and he is not showing that either, he is a soldier and is showing that only in the economy of his movements, the way he has his fingers set against Sherlock's pulse without fuss.
Sherlock does not know him.
Sherlock does not know him and the body beneath the jumper does not move away. The body beneath Sherlock, which is to say, Sherlock's own body, does not move away either. Does not tighten. Does not prepare the automatic withdrawal it prepares around every other human being that has ever touched him. His body, apparently, has met this man before, even if he has not.
"Hey," the man says. "Hey. Stay with me. Now I need you to stay still and do not move your head. Can you tell me your name?"
"You just said it."
The man laughs, short, startled, wet with relief. "All right. Fair. Can you tell me where you are?"
"London. North-east. Clerkenwell or thereabouts. October, late October, probably Tuesday or Wednesday given-" he stops, because he cannot place the year. He can place the month from the light and the ambient temperature and the specific wet-leaf undertone of the air, but he cannot place the year, and this is the first thing that has genuinely interested him since he opened his eyes. "What year is it?"
The man's face does a thing.
"Sherlock," the man says, very carefully, "what's the last thing you remember?"
The last thing he remembers is a case. Not this case, an older one. He had been alone in his flat. Montague Street. The bedsit above the antique shop, the one with the gas ring that never quite worked and the windows that let in the particular cold of a building that had been subdivided too many times. He had been in his dressing gown at the desk by the window, going through a box of unsolved burglaries from 2008 because he was bored, and then...
And then nothing. A gap. And then concrete, and grey sky, and a stranger with warm hands who knew his name.
"Who are you?" Sherlock says.
The man, soldier, doctor, not showing it, goes very still for perhaps half a second. Then he says, "I'm John. John Watson. I'm, I'm your friend."
Friend is not a word Sherlock has a category for, not in this configuration. He has Mycroft, who is something else. He has Lestrade, who is something else again. He has Mrs Hudson, he has Mrs Hudson, who is-he pauses. Mrs Hudson is his landlady at Baker Street. Which is not right, because his flat is in Montague Street. Except that some part of him knows, with a kind of bone-deep certainty that does not need evidence, that Mrs Hudson is his landlady at Baker Street, and this is a piece of knowledge that contradicts the rest of the data he has.
He does not have friends. He has never had friends. He is aware that this is a deficit in other people's eyes and not in his, and he has long since stopped caring.
"I don't know you," he says.
"I know," says John. "I know you don't. It's all right. Any nausea?"
"No."
"Vision all right?"
"Yes."
"Follow my finger."
He follows the finger. The finger is steady. John's hand is steady. John's eyes are a steel blue and they are doing something he does not have a word for, they are holding him in a particular way, the way a clinician holds a patient but also a way that is not that, a way that has weight to it, the kind of weight that suggests a long accumulation of looking.
"Pupils are equal and reactive," John murmurs, more to himself than to Sherlock. "Good. Good. Okay." He sits back on his heels.
"I don't feel right." Sherlock says.
It comes out flat, clinical, a report, not a complaint. He is observing himself as he would observe a specimen. The cognition is lagged. The memory architecture is showing gaps where gaps ought not to be. He is perfectly capable of identifying that something is wrong; he is simply unable, at the moment, to locate the source of the wrongness from the inside.
"Yeah," says John. "Yeah, I know. You hit your head. I need you to…"
"Please call this number for me. 020-7946-0041. It's my brother Mycroft. Tell him I'm…" he gestures, vaguely, at his own head, at the pavement, at the general condition of himself. "Tell him I'm not right."
John's face, Sherlock notes, does that thing again. The several-things-at-once thing.
"Okay," says John, and he is already taking out his phone. "Yeah. I'll ring him. I was going to anyway."
John rings Mycroft from a kneeling position on the pavement, one hand still resting lightly on Sherlock's wrist, ostensibly to monitor his pulse, actually, Sherlock observes because John does not want to stop touching him until someone else has confirmed he is all right.
Sherlock listens to one side of the conversation.
"Mycroft. It's John. No, listen. He fell. He hit his head, he's conscious, he's oriented to place-ish, but he's missing time. He doesn't remember me. Yeah. Yeah, I know. No, he can deduce the month, he can't tell me the year. He gave me your number like I wouldn't already have it. I'm going to say-retrograde, some, but I'm more worried about the anterograde. Exactly. Yeah."
A pause. John's thumb moves very slightly against the inside of Sherlock's wrist. Probably involuntary.
"Clerkenwell. Corner of, hang on-" he cranes his neck to read a street sign. "St John Street and Percival. Yeah. Okay. Thank you."
He hangs up. He does not immediately move his hand.
"He's sending people," John says. "Medics. Ten minutes."
"Who were you just speaking to," Sherlock says.
John closes his eyes for a fraction of a second. Opens them.
"Your brother," he says. "Mycroft. You asked me to ring him. He's on his way-well, people are. He knows. It's handled."
"Good," says Sherlock. "Good, he needs to know. I'm not…" he gestures again, at his head. "I don't feel right. You should call Mycroft. The number is-"
"I have it," says John gently. "I've got it. I just rang him. He knows."
Sherlock takes this in. He files it. He looks at John.
"Who are you," he says.
"I'm John. John Watson. I'm your friend."
Friend. He turns the word over. The word is not sitting anywhere. It is floating somewhere above the system of his ordinary classifications, untethered, refusing to attach itself to any existing hook.
He looks at the hand on his wrist.
He does not ask it to move.