A/N: This is a prologue, so the story will pick up in future chapters. I'm hoping to write a longer fanfiction for a change. Reviews would be much appreciated, and lastly, thanks for reading :)


Fugue

This Sherlock was not someone to be trifled with. The hospital visitors who had come and gone (an old woman, a middle-aged man, a posh bureaucrat) had made this shockingly clear.

"Look what Sherlock's done now," they'd say to each other, always punctuating this with an eye roll or a disapproving frown. "Stalling the case, making John upset - terrible."

Sometimes the patient would try to add his two uninformed cents to this. "You're right, you shouldn't have to put up with him; he's professionally and privately hurting you."

Such comments were only ever met with more sardonic eye rolls, however. For whatever reason, these people didn't regard him as qualified to make these claims, as reasonable as they seemed to him. Despite their near-constant bedside presence, the man's visitors insisted on alienating him.

Why?

Sometimes the gauzy veil lifted and everything seemed clear - for the first time in his life, he felt. He didn't know these people and never had. Yet they spoke to him so directly, never sparing his feelings to make an honest point.

What had the patient done to deserve this?

Then his idleness suddenly fled and the man felt a corresponding urge to run. This was someone else's life, someone else's interpersonal failure; he did not deserve this. Whoever did seemed gone for good.

Unfortunately, the coming-and-going nature of his memories proved a challenge to the patient's plans. He could almost never manage to remember when the nurse's shifts began and ended, when the halls were the emptiest, or even what he wanted out of this desertion.

Then he came to his senses standing in the midst of the 9 o'clock rush.

The patient first looked around, but he couldn't seem to pull any sub-surface details out of his surroundings. Predominantly women, blue-clad, big cabinets on wheels...weren't they called crash carts?

Most head-scratch worthy of all was the fact that so many of them were twins. As though in some kind of parody, pairs of look-alikes would strut down the hall past the patient, mirroring each other's movements blink for blink.

"Sir, do you intend to check yourself out?" The man noticed that while contemplating this extraordinary performance, he had wandered up to the hospital's front desk. He began to sway - the bobbing of his head making the clerk assume he'd nodded - but as soon as she'd handed him the paperwork…

He collapsed.