The first thing Sherlock sees are ceiling tiles.
Not hospital ones. They are blackened out from one side, probably to hide whatever camera is looking down on him. This is for surveillance. From where he is lay, he comes to two possibilities - the first, he had somehow survived the explosion and is being carefully monitored, or Moriarty had seized him from the scene and is keeping him like some kind of wounded animal.
Stiffly, Sherlock sits up and looks down upon himself. Hospital gownn heavily bandaged, yet limbs are still perfectly movable (the bandages are therefore to contain surface wounds.) A medley of machinery sits around his bed. Strike that, it is more of an examining table than a bed. Upon looking at the machinery he rules out the hypothesis of being Moriarty's captive - the National Physical Laboratory logo clearly punctured into most of them.
The situation is oddly impractical.
He had been subject to an explosion. Fire, smoke and damagingly loud noise. If not dead, then he should be severely burnt .. or at least have some respiration problems. Yet, when he looks down upon his arms and touches his face, he finds that his skin is perfectly undisturbed. He claps his hands to test the damage to his hearing, the sharp sounds coming in clearly.
Not being able to fully conclude his current situation is irritating to say the least.
When Sherlock decides to remove himself from the bed, he finally finds the damage he has been looking for. Immediately upon standing, he falls down and hits the ground with a sharp slap. His legs, evidently, do not work.
As if summonded by the groan he had emitted, a haggard John suddenly rushes in from the single door arch. The whole room constructed more like a lab than a hospital.
"Sherlock!" He drops down beside him, and Sherlock waits for him to help him up. But, to his surprise, John downright refuses to touch him. "They didn't tell me you were awake."
Sherlock finds that he has to sit himself up. "I've been experimented on."
John is stunned into silence, not knowing what to immediately say. His lip quakes, head hung low. The exact confirmation Sherlock had been looking for. He glances away, though his face remains unchanged - unable to conclude a reaction from the little he knew.
Finally, John speaks. "You were in a bad way, Sherlock. You were in a really bad way. They said - "
"That I would die. Emotional blackmail at it's finest." Sherlock dryly responds. "I'd like to know what they've done. Not what they've said, John."
"They had Mycroft sign all these authorization forms ..."
Before Sherlock can properly express his disgust for anyone giving permission for his brother to make choices in his favour, the man himself is sauntering through the door as irritatingly casual as he usually does. The fact that Sherlock cannot stand and shoo him away only adds to the frustration of not knowing the full facts.
"Ah ah, don't excite yourself." Mycroft says, in a voice that he supposes is soothing but it only seems to make Sherlock's lip curl more. "It's alright, John. You can touch him. Help him back onto the bed."
John obliges, practicing with careful hands and placing Sherlock at the foot of the bed (as the man seemed to stiffen in protest when he tried to lie him back down). "What have you done to my legs?"
"I didn't do a thing, Sherlock. You well know that your immobility is down to your actions, that endangered not only you but John as well." Mycroft responds, acknowledging that Sherlock does not react well to such criticisms. He keeps it short. "You will be glad to know that it is only temporary, until the circuits reconnect to your pelvic skeleton."
John continues, standing beside Mycroft and looking gently down at his seated friend. "Sherlock, your legs got blown clean off."
"Unlikely."
Mycroft and John exchange troubled looks, "No, really. One flew in the pool with me and they found the other on the second floor balcony."
"We'll spare you the gory details, brother-mine. But you would have definitely died had it not been for the GADGET program."
The only reason Sherlock had listened as intently as he had, was because he had no choice. Stuck at the end of table/bed, looking up at Mycroft and John with mixed expressions of scorn and numbed down bewilderment. He lowers his head so that he might take an inconspicuous inhale of composure, to which he hears the tiniest of mechanical whirs as his chest lifts.
"What have you done to me?"
At this point, John had turned away with his face in his hands - leaving Mycroft to give the final blow. "Genetic Artificial Devices Grouped with Electronic Transmissions, or 'GADGET', is a highly confidential procedure currently being developed. You are now a sophisticated network of tissue, hardware and software."