For a prompt on the Cabin Pressure kink meme ( . ?thread=3027215#cmt3027215) : Martin wakes up one morning about five inches taller with dark curly hair and everyone thinking he's an arse.

Sherlock wakes up the same morning to some insufferable woman (divorced, small dog, two sisters, lives with her son) telling him he needs to fly a plane.

(Bonus points for Sherlock having to fake a relationship with some smug bastard called Douglas, and Martin having to pretend to be in love with John, who's a lovely chap but so very boring, can he have his smarmy boyfriend back now, please.)

Title is from Dylan Thomas' "Should Lanterns Shine":

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.

Unbetaed and unbritpicked. If you want to volunteer for either please do so.

In his defense, it was early in the morning. True, it wasn't much of one, since there were about a hundred other things he should have noticed, but it was something. No matter when Martin woke up, he had fifteen minutes of haze to work through before coming fully awake. And he'd woken up in so many different hotels over the years he was used to his surroundings being unfamiliar. That really wasn't an excuse, but it was something.

He had noticed something as soon as he woke up - the room smelled different. Most cheap hotels smelled like cigarette smoke, must, and roach spray, and this room only had a faint spicy odor. He even half noticed that the bathroom didn't smell of mildew. It didn't bother him that the shampoo and soap were unfamiliar; he was used to that. Once he was ready to get out of the shower he noticed the towels were nicer than those hotels usually had, and looked ridiculously expensive. Still, a towel was a towel, and he dried himself off without thinking much about it.

It was only when he turned to look at himself in the bathroom mirror that he screamed.


Sherlock knew he wasn't in the same place he'd fallen asleep in before he even opened his eyes. The room smelled like stale cigarette smoke and pesticide. The mattress was lumpy and uneven. And furthermore, the amount of heat that the person next to him was generating indicated whoever it was was far bigger than John. He kept his eyes shut for another thirty seconds, trying to figure out as much as he could about his surroundings without them. The smell and the mattress indicated a cheap hotel, if one that wasn't in the business of unrespectable guests (none of those hotels would have bothered to spray for bugs). The person next to him was a large man, sleeping on his side. He seemed accustomed to sharing a bed with someone, possibly through travel but more likely through romantic relationships. Not enough information to indicate which of the two had been present before Sherlock had replaced his bed mate.

He opened his eyes. The ceiling was definitely one of a shabby hotel room. He looked to the left and saw an electrical outlet with three small holes in a row. So he was in Germany, then. He looked to the right and saw a large man with salt and pepper hair sleeping facing the other wall. There was nothing else to easily see and so Sherlock got out of the bed. It was then he realized something had happened that was more severe than just being moved. He was four or five inches shorter than he usually was. Time to make his way to a mirror, then.

The small bathroom had an equally small mirror perched over the sink. His head - or at least the head of someone - barely came up to the bottom. His hair was now a bright flaming red; he now had green/hazel eyes. And at least an entire face full of freckles. He looked down and saw he now wore pajamas with airplane patterns on them. A quick check of the rest of the bathroom revealed nothing helpful, so Sherlock stepped back into the hotel room.

Clearly he couldn't have undergone such drastic bodily changes overnight, nor could he have gotten to Germany in that period of time unless there was an airplane involved. The only explanation for this had to be that he had swapped bodies with the ginger man. Or more precisely they had swapped consciousnesses. True, such a thing only existed in theory, but he couldn't have gotten into someone else's hotel room in Germany while also being drastically physically modified in any theory at all. His first instinct was to ring John, but looked at the one clock in the room and saw it was five-thirty here. He'd still be asleep, then, and the ginger man (if he was truly in Sherlock's body) wouldn't wake up for several hours; there had been a run of cases until very recently.

Sherlock walked over to the table the clock sat on. The only thing on it besides the clock was a battered wallet. The size of it indicated it belonged to whoever his body did. He opened it and found one five pound note, a torn paystub with "get more laundry detergent" written on it, and a driving license, reversed so he could only see that the man was certified in the UK to drive a car, a minibus, and a motorbike. He flipped it over and was faced with himself in his new body. The man's name was Martin Crieff. Nothing else was there. The pay stub indicated he wasn't paid a lot, but he must have had some job that required travel. The other man was probably a co-worker; if this Martin Crieff had a lot of one-night stands he would be carrying a great deal more money in his wallet, if nothing else.

The room had a closet door and it occured to Sherlock that he could probably find the man's work clothes. He opened the door and found two uniforms hanging in there, one neat and one worn. Stripes on the cuffs. Oh, they were pilots. That made him pause. Sherlock knew about more things than most people gave him credit for (besides John), but that did not include flying an airplane. The uniforms didn't have any logos he could recognize, so it had to be a smaller company, but even then he knew anything they wanted him to do would be beyond him.

This was clearly going to be more complicated then he originally thought.