Normally I was an erratic sleeper, the product of an overworked mind and cigarette withdrawal, but tonight I fell into sleep like I had been heavily drugged. Unconsciousness spread its lazy fingers throughout my body, lacing webs in my mind, pulling me beneath the surface of life like a current dragging the victim to the bottom of the ocean. I doubted the drugs though because, unless John had a viable reason for it, no one had had the chance to administer anything into my system. It didn't matter anyway, the darkness of the ocean's depths were above me where I lay, already so very far from reality.

"Matthew."

The voice that spoke was hushed, pushing through my practically drug induced state with difficulty like someone speaking from a notable distance and not doing much to make themselves heard. It was an eerie prospect but I called it trickery of the mind and commenced to file it under the appropriate folder in the palace.

"Maaaaaathew."

This time the name was elongated and dreamy as though someone were calling me awake, or attempting to anyway. But this was not me, I was not Matthew, so who was the mysterious, and distinctly male, voice addressing? My sluggish mind stumbled over the implications of such a situation as this one posed and came up blind. I was slow, lethargic, and didn't know how to address, or even conceive of, this problem.

"Matthew!"

It was sharper this time, the voice, and pushed me into consciousness like a slap in the face. I sat up so abruptly that the bed seemed to tumble sideways and before I knew it, I was on the floor and tangled up in sheets. The digital alarm clock blared 4:53 at me and I shut one eye against the intruding light, squinting with the other. Suddenly, I recognised John's light tread crashing towards my room and then the door opened, letting in a wedge of light.

"Sherlock!" Exasperation was painted brashly upon John's tone and then curiosity when he saw me on the floor. "Sherlock?"

"I fell out of bed." Wonderful, the only words to fall from my mouth are words that relay the painfully obvious, a trait I very vocally despise in people. John opened his mouth, then shut it, as if dismissing the idea he held in his head.

"Sherlock, it's five in the morning!"

"4:53."

"What?"

"It's 4:53 in the morning," I said, rising as gracefully as one could when knotted up in bed sheets, "you can leave now."

John sighed heavily, shutting the door behind him with a pointed look at me still standing there with my head held high, trying in vain to keep a hold on my dignity. I waited for his steps to disappear before pacing up and down the length of the room, the gears of my mind grinding furiously. "Matthew… who are you, Matthew?" I muttered, eyes narrowing.

John was eating breakfast at the cluttered kitchen table when I strode in at half seven the next morning. He had a morning routine that ran like clockwork, a trait no doubt stemming from his time in military service. I, however, was a little more varied with a tendency to wake up at any time of the day.

"So… you wanna tell me what happened this morning?" He said around a mouthful of toast and jam. I very suddenly busied myself with turning on the kettle, making flicking a switch a laborious task.

"Sherlock?"

"I haven't the faintest idea what you mean, John."

He sighed again, his default response to everything I say lately. "I just thought you'd want to, you know, talk about it."

"Well, I don't." I retorted, rather harshly. I turned my back on John to grab a mug from the overhead cupboard but paused and dropped my hand, turning back to him.

"Actually, I do have a question. Were you in my room last night?"

"You mean before I ran in thinking you were performing some mad experiment at five in the morning?"

"4:53. And yes."

"No, I wasn't."

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously and turned with a not-so-accidental dramatic swish of my dressing gown to make my morning cup of tea. I carried it over on a saucer to sit opposite John, sweeping a collection of papers out of the way as I did so. He continued to eat his toast, turning the page of the newspaper with a loud rustle, when the name burst from my lips.

"Matthew!"

John looked up, heavy confusion apparent on his features. "…What?"

"I was just attempting to expose your possible lie by evoking a particular memory, and therefore reaction, with a key word."

"…What?"

"Oh, don't worry your simple mind," I waved a hand in his direction, signifying dismissal, "you passed with flying colours!"

"Simple–" John pursed his lips, "never mind. What lie am I supposed to have told?"

"You're implying that I still think you told the lie when I know, in actual fact, that you didn't."

"Yes, fine, but what lie? How does 'Matthew'," he mimicked my voice, and quite badly I might add, "relate to what happened this morning or me not lying to you?"

I considered brushing off his questions since he obviously knew nothing of the incident but, having noted the look of impatience he was trying to hide, decided he was owed an explanation. "Last night someone kept… calling to me."

"You mean, like, from outside or that someone broke in? Because I never heard anything. Well, apart from you falling out of bed."

"No, I mean in my subconscious."

"Your subcon– Sherlock, you are the last person on Earth to question something like that! At Baskerville you were adamant that what you were seeing was all in your head and that had more substance for belief than this!"

"I know, and normally I would dismiss this as the product of a mind warped and hazy with sleep after a bout of sleep deprivation but this felt… different somehow, like someone needed me to wake up. Plus, they called me Matthew, an oddity I'd like to explore."

"If I didn't know you were a master of logic and a scientific genius, I would be very seriously worried for your mental health right now."

I ignored that unnecessary comment and continued as though John hadn't spoken. "The most concrete, although it's still pretty fluid, explanation I've come up with so far is that someone somehow drugged me and fed lines to my strongly affected mind, hence why I questioned you as my primary suspect."

"Sherlock," the only accurate way to describe John's expression in that moment was as the face of a man about to throw his hands in the air and give up on everything in life, "what possible motivation would someone have for drugging you and calling "Matthew" over your head at night."

I steepled my fingers beneath my chin. "Ah, you see John, that's the predicament."

"Where are you going?" John asked, his voice behind me as I paused on the top step of the flat.

"Barts. I need to begin testing my blood for drugs."

"Right now?"

"Why not right now? Are you coming?"

"I don't have to go everywhere that you go, Sherlock."

"Fine. I warn you though, Mrs Hudson's baking today and she's looking for a test subject. Telling from past experience, you do not want to be that person. Believe me."

"Who?"

"Mrs Hudson. Look, are you coming or not?"

"Oh, for God's sake, fine."

I smiled to myself as John grabbed his coat.

I pushed the blood sample under the microscope at Barts. John said it was unnecessary to test my blood for drugs because there wouldn't be any traces since I hadn't actually been drugged. I beg to differ, I've been drugged enough to know the feeling by now.

It was approximately midday so Molly was present, hanging about like a fly in my ear. Words fell from her mouth in a waterfall of high pitched sound and she stumbled through her sentences as she always did; she was nervous and we all knew it. I suppose it could have been seen as endearing, her childish attachment to me, but it was mostly just irritating unless I needed something from her. And there was a truth that John would tell me off for. I think. He was giving me his disapproving look across the lab right then so I interrupted Molly's babbling with a quick nod and a smile to please him. She smiled back, velvet brown eyes shining with that rare piece of attention, and continued babbling with renewed vigour until John distracted her with mindless small talk.

My fingers were skilled when using the microscope and I handled it with no small measure of dexterity so it should have been a simple task to scrutinise the blood cells beneath the lens. However, my vision kept doubling every few seconds, making it rather hard to concentrate to begin with, and that was before the dizziness set in. I felt a sudden pressure on my shoulder from John's hand so, since physical contact was a rarity between anyone and me, I must have looked as bad as I felt.

"Sherlock?"

"Matthew". The voice in my subconscious whispered to me again, the hushed tone somehow worse than the shouting one. There was a sinister element about it. I tried shaking my head free of it but, no, shaking was bad. Shaking hurt.

"Do you want me get you anything?" Molly asked. She became serious pathologist Molly when she needed to be and from the sudden stern set of her features and the tone to her voice, it was obvious her professional side was about to come out.

"Matthew."

"No, thank you," I answered, trying to infuse some form of rationality into my voice, "I'm sure it will pass."

And that was when I lost consciousness.

I came to only minutes later. There were fingers on my forehead right where I had smashed it on the edge of the microscope. It took a few seconds for the pain to hit and when it did, it was sharp. I hissed in my breath at the immediacy of the unwelcome feeling and opened my eyes to John's face just centimetres away from mine, his fingertips still probing my head. He stepped back, startled, holding his hands behind his back.

"Just a nasty bruise," he smiled, "you okay now?"

"Fine, thank you."

John didn't believe me, but he was prepared to let that one slide. "What happened there?" He asked.

"I'm not sure I know." I frowned, standing up.

"Whoa, sit back down in case it happens again!" John ordered. I brushed off his concern with a wave of my hand. I wanted to move, I needed to move. I needed to cleanse my system of the experience by stretching some muscles.

And then it occurred to me.

"Where's Molly gone?"

The conversation missed a beat as John's reply was noticeably delayed.

"Who's Molly?" He asked slowly, looking both puzzled and concerned for me at the same time. I studied his face for signs of joking but he looked perfectly sincere. "Sherlock?"

"Why do you keep doing that?" I asked suddenly, directing the full force of my interrogating voice at him with the intention of breaking that sincerity, assuming it was a façade. After all, a person of a sound sanity like John did not just forget people.

"Doing what?" The façade did not fall.

"Acting like you are forgetting your friends? It was Mrs Hudson first and now Molly."

John just continued to look at me blankly until an uncomfortable silence descended as we each waited for the other to say something, to reveal their punch line. But neither did. The quiet was shattered eventually by a strangled cry and I jumped before I realised it had come from my own throat. The dizziness had returned in full force, accompanied by slashes of white in my vision like jagged scars. The room spun around me and I staggered forwards against my own will, making a grab for John as the only safety I knew. He held onto my arms with the strength of a, well, a soldier, trying to drag me over to a chair. I made it difficult for him since my own legs wouldn't support me anymore and the dizziness just grew horribly worse. "What the hell kind of drug is this?" I managed before I blacked out, pulled beneath the ocean of unconsciousness again, and all I could think before I collapsed on John was what's happening to me?

Everything around me was utterly black, peppered here and there with those faint dancing lights like those behind your eyelids when you shut them. There was nothing, nothing but this darkness and, worse, nothing to deduce. I was entirely lost and deprived of whole senses, wondering vaguely if I was dead. It was almost like being trapped underwater amidst the pressing unexplored depths. And then a thin beep broke the endless run of silence and a flash of sickly white crossed my vision, startling me. Panic began to bubble to the surface, dripping its leeching colour into my mind like an annoying broken tap. The whiteness slashed across again like a cold strike of lightning and I felt the very depth of my fear in this unknown place. I wanted out, I wanted out now, but no one could hear me, I couldn't hear myself. I was banging on the lid of my own coffin, too far down for the ears of humanity.

And then the darkness closed over my mind again.

I awoke with cold pavement beneath me and an iron grey sky above. It was quite clearly afternoon and, judging by the position of the sun, I'd say three 'o' clock. I lay there for several seconds recapping previous events in an attempt to work out exactly how I had gotten to this point. I vaguely remembered being with John in the lab… then what? I hadn't the faintest idea. It was as though that memory had faded into this current reality, blurring the lines so I couldn't distinguish the exact point the last had ended. I realised I had better get up considering that I was outside in the afternoon, meaning there would be people around, and I was lying on the wet pavement.

Lestrade's face loomed over mine, startling me.

"What do you think, Sherlock?"

"What?" I asked, rather uncharacteristically scrambling off the floor. I realised I was wearing my leather gloves when I hadn't had them on at the lab. I looked at them quizzically.

"The case, what do you think about the case?" Lestrade continued, furrowing his brow in obvious confusion, "since when have you been so absent-minded?"

"I… what?" I asked, confusion the basecoat of my tone, "how did I get here?"

"Well, I feel fairly certain in the assumption that you took a cab. Just run by me the reason why that's important?"

"But I was just…" I gestured to the ground.

"You were what?"

"I don't… I don't know. I should probably… get on with it… then." I said, flipping my coat collar up and scanning the surrounding area. We, and the team, were standing in a car park devoid of cars somewhere on the outskirts of London. Derelict buildings stood in a cluster nearby, with cracked windows and ivy crawling across the walls in a way that heightened the feel of abandonment. It was all rather bleak and the smattering rain served only as a hindrance to the situation. Lestrade pointedly cocked his head to the dead body on the ground. A man, late forties, looking beaten up and ragged in a way that suggested a mugging. I looked up to Lestrade, realising he wasn't there anymore.

I turned to Anderson behind me. "Where's Lestrade?"

"Who?" He spat out, crossing his arms in evident frustration. The situation at Barts with a disappearing Molly and John's memory loss stabbed at the back of my mind but I forced it down, unwilling to believe that these events were connected even if they obviously were.

"Lestrade, obviously. He was right here!"

"Am I missing something? Who's Lestrade?"

I looked at the idiot blankly. If this was his attempt at a joke and he'd somehow coerced John into it, then I didn't get it.

"Aw, freak's got himself an imaginary friend." Donovan's voice came from my left, a smirk painfully evident behind it. I looked sharply in her direction, cutting with my eyes. "You've got to be kidding me," I ground out, "I am not in the mood for jokes. It's been a strange day."

"Yeah, you never are." Anderson commented.

I gave them all another scolding glare and walked swiftly away in the direction of the nearest road. They could make their deductions alone.

I stormed through the door to 221B, tearing off my coat and throwing it on the floor. It landed with a muted thud by John's chair, distracting him from his novel. He raised his eyebrows at me, a question on his face.

"I work with imbeciles." I huffed before flouncing into the chair opposite him.

"What's Anderson done now?"

"Jokes, I hate jokes. Why do people joke, John?"

"Because…" I could practically see the gears turning in his mind, "because it's a boost of self-confidence to make someone laugh."

"Incorrect. People make jokes because they're intelligence cannot exceed that of a turkey and so it's all they have left." I laid my head back and closed my eyes against the surge of irritable feelings that refused to be quashed. Relaxation was doing nothing for me, so I leapt up with a cry of frustration, yanking my violin from the nearby table and drawing a long piercing note from it.

"Did Lestrade phone here?" I asked absently.

"Who?"

"Lestra– oh, not this again! Have you been conspiring with Anderson?"

"Why would I talk to Anderson, I can't stand the guy," John put the newspaper he was reading down gingerly, readying himself for something, "Sherlock, I need to ask you something."

I gestured at him with my violin bow to continue.

"Are you… okay? Because first it was the 'someone's calling to me in my sleep' thing and now you're talking about people who we don't even know, people who might not even exist."

"John, there comes a point when a joke goes too far and I think you have surpassed it. How would Molly feel if she knew you were ignoring her entire existence? I'm disappointed in you."

"See! Molly? Who's Molly?" He spoke with such sincerity to his words and despair in his actions that it was as though a switch flicked in my head and my heart beat faster in my chest. The violin dropped to my side and I looked at John with horror. "You really don't know?"

"No, Sherlock, I don't. And I hate to say it but I think you need to see a doctor."

"I have a doctor, thank you." I said, in quite a haughty manner, still trying to clamber over the hill of my shock.

"One that isn't me. A psychiatrist."

"No, excuse me." I murmured walking swiftly to my bedroom where I commenced to phone everyone I knew to ask if they had heard of a Mrs Hudson, Molly Hooper or Greg Lestrade.

They hadn't.

What was happening to me? Some form of mental illness? I was Sherlock Holmes, I reminded myself, and I did not suffer from illness, especially of the mental kind. I was perfectly sound in my own mind as well as in everyone else's because clarity of mind was my middle name. I paced the length of the room, back and forth, back and forth, scanning my brain for anything that might help with this case.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. People did not just drop off the face of the Earth and they definitely were not wiped from memories so, having eliminated the impossible, what was the improbable truth? I didn't know, I simply did not know, because people were disappearing from the face of the Earth and they were being wiped clean from everyone else's memories and my entire life was unravelling before me and I couldn't work out whether I was insane or the only scrap of sanity left.

I was entirely alone because where was the help when nobody realised what was happening around them?

I stopped pacing and put my head in my hands as if all this madness would right itself if I physically tried to force the broken pieces of mind back together. Because it was broken wasn't it? I had to accept that and I had to accept that this situation was beyond any comprehensibility. John watched me from his armchair, looking mildly baffled. I caught his eye for a few seconds, trying to deduce more important things about him than the fact that he'd been to Sarah's this morning. So he hadn't forgotten her then. I resumed pacing, with anger in my step this time.

"John, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's happening, I don't know, I don't know! People keep disappearing, why are they disappearing? And they don't just disappear, they disappear, wiped completely from everyone's mind like they never even existed." My voice ran on feverishly, and then it hit me like a wrecking ball of ice, cold and forceful. I almost leapt over to John, my eyes sparkling with renewed terror, where I grabbed him on either side of his arms and leant down to look closely in his face. "John, you have to stay with me!"

"What are you talking about, Sherlock? I'm not going anywhere."

"Don't you disappear, John. Please God, not you."

"Alright, Sherlock," he spoke as he would to a child, "c'mon, calm down. I'll make you some tea and you can calm down." He navigated his way out from my grasp, heading off in the direction of the kitchen. I kept my eyes on him the entire time, a very rational surge of worry sparking at my nerve ends, making me fidget.

The doorbell rang downstairs and from the pressure on the button and the length of the sound I recognised Mycroft's signature ring. I made the mistake of looking immediately in the direction of the sharp sound for a mere second and "no!" burst from my lips as my eyes darted back to where John should be but where he wasn't.

His absence shoved at me constantly, smashing a hole somewhere in the region of my heart and causing a feeling that I had only ever experienced once before. John had implied that it was heartbreak then. I released a shaky breath into the ominous silence, somehow enhancing it instead of breaking it, and a tear that I hadn't known was there splashed on the floor, followed in quick succession by many others.

"John."

The world was wrong. It was all wrong. I couldn't be sure whether I was standing ram-rod straight or crippled on the spot or full out laying on the floor because the world didn't look right at all. The white like cold lightning kept flashing across my vision again and again and again with an eerie brutality to it and everything kept breaking up and shattering and piecing together and being all wrong. There was a constant running beep in my ears, so loud it was almost a touchable sound, tangible to my fingertips. The world came back to me with a clarity that was too perfect, the colours too vibrant, and I could see the dust motes dancing in the air and the curling steam from the unfinished tea on the worktop in delicate detail. And then it softened again, blending like pastels before running like blood. My head felt like it was being compressed and compressed into nothing, pushed and pushed into a different shape altogether, and the white kept returning in beats. I think I screamed and the world fractured with cracks like spider webs on glass. Suddenly, Mycroft stood over me with a hardened expression but I could see the gnawing worry beneath, God knows I had made that face myself. I tried to tell him what was happening to me, what had happened, how I was scared, but all my lips could form in this confusion was one word. "John."

"Who's John?" He asked. I wanted to tell him that John was my best friend but John was gone, that the whole universe had forgotten him but that I never would because it was one thing to try and befriend Sherlock Holmes and a whole other thing to succeed quite so thoroughly. But the beeping in my ears began to sharpen until I physically tried to struggle against it, pushing the heel of my hands against my head. It was shaping a word, a name that sounded odd amongst the piercing tenor. Matthew.

"Mycroft." I mumbled as unconsciousness slipped over me like a noose around my neck.

I awoke in a hospital bed and a tiny room. It was very white, white wallpaper, white linoleum floor, white ceiling, and white bed sheets. Wires snaked from various parts of my body, pumping fluids in and out through transparent tubes and a machine vaguely beeped every now and again. I tried to recall previous events and came up short; I'd have to be patient until someone informed me of my current situation.

There was a man sitting by my bedside, someone I was trying to ignore since I didn't know them. He had a full head of white hair, peppered here and there with grey strands, and creases cut into his face that showed his age to be around eighty years. He was dressed smart, sharp, with a suit jacket over a white shirt, I would have concluded that he was here to do a job, something for the media perhaps, except that the emotion plastered across his well-worn face told of an attachment to me. He obviously knew me and was here for a personal visit, so how did I not know him?

I was suddenly struck with the fact that I needed John. I needed him to tell me what had happened and what was happening now, but I also needed him for reasons beyond those obligatory questions, I needed John because I was scared without knowing why and because he was my friend and because I feel so very alone without him, my blogger. Sentimentality, I tried to scoff to myself, but were sentimental feelings really so unapproachable? And, just as I had been struck with my need for John, I was struck by the want to tell him how I was being invaded by feelings and how I had been all along, so I turned to the unfamiliar man beside me and asked the most important question I knew to ask.

"Where's John?"

"John?" His voice held a slight waver, he was nervous then, and obviously, judging by his very blank expression, he did not know John, at least, not by Christian name.

"Yes. Watson, John Watson. He must have been here." Of course he was here, he was always here.

"John Watson… as in Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes' friend?"

"Yes, Sherlock Holmes' friend. My friend."

"He's your friend?"

"Yes, do keep up. You obviously know me as Sherlock Holmes and anyone who knows me, closely or not, associates me with John, whereas you, you don't even know his name, so who does that make you?" My voice wandered off absently as I brought my fingers together in a prayer like gesture against my lips.

He stared at me in piercing silence for exactly seven seconds before shifting to lift a paperback from my bedside table. The author's name printed across the spine flashed into my vision for a meagre second, and I caught the word Doyle. The name was familiar to me, if only a little. It tickled the edges of a memory in an area of my mind palace that was harder to locate than others, a tricky part to navigate. Thinking about it, I'd never even realised the information was there, locked away in a tiny shadowy corner. I made a severe mental note to explore it later.

The man spoke up again, his voice hushed and tentative with a thick colouring of anxiety.

"Matthew, you've been in a coma for six months. Sherlock Holmes is a book character. He and John Watson, they don't exist."