Author note: This is my first fanfiction ever. I have no idea what I'm doing, so I'll need all y'alls help. I expect this little story to be several chapters long, so don't be dismayed if I give you hardly any information in the first chapter. Please read and review, and help me know what I need to be doing better. I am American, so I would love to know if you catch any Americanisms. Warning, there are references to drug use in this story (although all of my information comes from Wikipedia, since I have zero experience with drug use; again, feel free to correct me).

I do not own Sherlock.

It was morning.

John hadn't seen morning in a while, and he blinked in the sudden daylight. Two steps. Then another. The daylight was still there, the sun still looking at him from atop the skyline of London. He waved a hand at the sun, shooing it. It was bright and hurt his eyes.

Everything hurt his eyes. Or maybe his eyes just hurt. He couldn't tell. He dragged a hand across his eyelids, digging his knuckles in. Both of his eyeballs popped out and rolled in front of him, heading towards the sun. The blinding sun. He giggled and blinked and blinked again, and his eyes were no longer on the ground, but stinging behind his left hand. He could feel his eyelashes on the scarred tissue of his knuckles. They tickled. He blinked, twice, three times, four, slowly. Should he count his eyelashes, make sure they were all there?

He giggled again.

Several more steps and he was in the street. The pavement felt weird to him, too blackly hard. His bare feet didn't like it. They wanted the cold wetness of the basement wood, the familiar pacing path up and down and up and down and up and …

He giggled.

A loud sound knocked him down. Or maybe it was the graze of a car, coming out of nowhere and swiping his shoulder.

"Oi!" he shouted. "These are my best pyjamas!"

The loud sound happened again. He sat on the pavement of the street, waiting for the giggling to slow down. Or waiting for the sound to stop echoing inside his head, pushing against the inside of his eyeballs. A vague thought told him that it would be better for his eyeballs to remain inside his head, instead of leaving him for the sun. The blinding sun.

He giggled.

A man ran up to him, dressed not in pyjamas but in a brown suit, relentlessly starched. The man stretched a hand down to John.

"You okay, mate?" he asked.

John looked up, squinting. The man's face looked just like the sun, light reflecting and refracting from a pair of brown eyes and pale lips. The real sun got higher, and the beams of it invaded John's vision until he couldn't tell where the man started and the sun ended.

"I'm fantastic," someone said. That someone sounded strange, like they were singing, or reciting children's poetry in the library. John realized his mouth was still open. The words hung in the air in front of him. If he could reach them, he could play with them, rearrange the letters until they spelled something much more appealing. Fanatic mist. He closed his mouth. The man standing over him heaved a sigh, looked down at his watch.

"You just pissed, then? Right." And the man hurried off. John watched him go. The man walked fast, his eyes checking his watch.

Watch. Something about a watch.

The thought bugged him, buzzing around his right ear, trying to get inside his head just like the sunlight. He swatted it away. And giggled.

Another loud sound. This time he recognized it as a car horn, and he rolled out of the way just in time not to get hit by the cabbie. When he stopped rolling, he was on the sidewalk again, and something was raining down his leg. He unfolded his umbrella and put it above his head, then remembered he had no umbrella. And it was still raining. But not on his face, only on his leg and his shoulder where the car swiped him. The rain was red and warm, and it smelled like the inside of Sherlock's bottle that was supposed to have after-shave.

Sherlock.

John looked up at the sun, tilted his head a little. The sun was red around the edges, just like his leg, just like the tiny tiny holes that made constellation patterns on the inside of his left arm. But the holes on his arm didn't burn, like the sun did.

Sherlock.

Something was wrong. The sound was wrong. Someone was giggling too loudly; it hurt John's ears. Make it stop!

He closed his mouth and the giggling stopped.

The sidewalk leaked cold through his pyjamas, and his arms and legs and fingers and ears and eyes all jumped up and left him sitting there in the cold. He called out. Only one arm stopped to see what he wanted, the arm with the tiny tiny holes.

"I think . . . I think I should go home now," John told the arm. He gathered all his limbs about him, reattaching them where they needed reattaching. Then he stood and walked, his bare feet protesting each step on the too-black pavement.

The giggling led the way, stretching out ahead of him through the streets, telling him when to turn left and right. But the giggling was giving way to something else, something much less comfortable. Something that hurt. He flexed his left hand, flexed it and flexed it until the muscles in his whole arm began to complain, and still the something-less-comfortable threatened. Warmth began to invade his arm, starting at the tiny tiny holes and spreading. And as it spread, John became aware of where he had ended up.

Baker Street.

The urge to giggle was gone. He grimaced instead, grimaced against the pain in his arm and the pain in his leg. He was leaving a trail of blood behind him, he saw. Not too bad. Dr. Watson can patch it up in a jiffy, once I get home. He drew his brows together. No, I am Dr. Watson. Right. I am John Watson.

The warmth changed to fire. Agony, grabbing his breath straight from his lungs and tearing it away from him. Just a few more steps, John.

At the doorway to 221B he stopped, reaching out a hand to hold himself against the door. He couldn't quite remember what was inside, couldn't quite remember how to use the door handle. Couldn't swallow past the pain that rode him like the proverbial horse.

"This is home, John," he told himself firmly. "If you open the door, you can go inside."

The door was black, just like the pavement. John wondered if the door would also feel strange on his bare feet. Then he shook the thought away from his head, gasping at the pain that small movement caused.

Then the door opened. A man stood in the entry, a tall man with curly black hair, a long wool coat, and steel blue eyes. He looked at John in astonishment . . .

Then reached out his arms to catch John as he fell.

AN: And that's the first chapter. See you in chapter two, when we (and John) find out who the mysterious curly-haired stranger are.