Post-Reichenbach- on his hunt for Moriarty, Sherlock makes a mistake. This is the story of his final moments as he bleeds out, anonymous and ordinary.

You can't understand, really, what it's like. For you, it's just the difference between barely damp and bone dry, and what you feel seeping away from you as your brain slows oh so so sluggish to a grinding halt, and there's nothing there.

But me, oh, God, my mind is-was- the raging river, a fantastic torrent of thoughts that came from every direction at once and there were patterns and currents and it was glorious, my mind. Oh, yes, it was like chinese water torture at times, and sometimes I just needed it to slow down for a second, so that I could eat or sleep or do something my more corporeal elements desired.

But I've felt things you could never have imagined.

I could do so much.

You don't get it.

It's like- no, you can't understand the analogies I would use.

It's like taking a test, and you've always been able to score the highest on tests. Not just the highest- you could always finish the entire test before anyone else finished the first question, and you'd beat them all by so much every time.

And then the day comes when you let some bloody idiot shoot you which really isn't fair, because you were perfectly alive even if you had pretended to be dead oh, why the hell do you even try.

Who are you, anyway?

And that day comes, and they all finish before you understand the first question and you remember breezing through these tests, your mind already moving on, but now it's impossible, a foreign tongue you've never seen or heard or spoken.

I don't know where he went, the idiot with the gun. I don't know his name, or his cover occupation, or where he was born, or if he has a girlfriend.

But I know that I should.

I don't even know who else is dying, now.

Someone, I'm sure, because I smell so much blood.

I suppose I would have known that too.

There's a shoe in front of my eyes, well, just my right one.

My left one is too close to the ground to see it.

There's a shoe, and it's made of leather.

But it's so blurry.

Should I be able to see the shoe?

Should you?

Is the shoe mine?

I can't tell.

Oh, the stench of blood.

That bloody shoe.