Prompt: Sherlock wakes up in an alternate reality in which he has a wife and children, was never a detective, living in a much scarier and crime-filled version of London, and a still-living Moriarty is the Prime Minister., from Michael JG Meathook

I have long prided myself on my intellect and mastery of any given situation, so when I found myself walking along a cold, smog-filled street with nary an idea of how I had come to be there, I perhaps panicked more than most men would. I expect most people find themselves in places they do not intend to be with no idea how they got there with some frequency, judging by the vacant way my fellow men move through the world and the sheer number of kidnappings which take place in broad daylight. Watson would say I am being unfair, though at this thought I was distracted. Where was Watson? I could not imagine I should find myself in such a lonely corner of London alone, especially when I was not disguised.

Well, no matter. I pride myself also on my knowledge of the city and I soon gained my bearings and made my hurried way back to Baker Street. But when I arrived, it was hardly the Baker Street I knew, and I had a sudden intuition that things were not as they should be. The ordinarily bright windows of all the houses were dark, and more than a few were boarded up. It looked much more like one of the impoverished neighborhoods on the East End than the Baker Street I knew, and I was instantly adrift. I dislike feeling lost, and the sight of the darkened windows of 221b only made me press on further. I have learned not to discount intuition, though I will admit I always feel more grounded once I have managed to think my way through it and uncover the unconscious deductions that led me to the conclusion in the first place.

Well, if 221b Baker Street was to provide no clues to this mystery I should have to find somewhere else that would. I turned and headed toward Watson's practice; though I realized later this should have been my first clue that something was wrong, as Watson had long sold his practice and was living at Baker Street again by this time. Odd that I should have forgot this. At the moment, I could think of nothing else but trying to determine the cause of these odd occurrences. I am not sentimental or prone to moments of panic, but I am not also not above admitting that I do have a tendency to run away with myself and that Watson has a long proven calming ability I find most helpful.

When I arrived I was relieved to find the lights in Watson's practice lit, and was about to knock on the door when it opened of its own accord. Instead of my friend Watson, I was shocked to be faced with the figure of a handsome woman with bright, intelligent eyes and two small children,a boy and a girl no more than eight years old who waited patiently for their mother on the stoop. "You must come along, my dear, or else we shall be late," the woman called back into the house.

I confess I was utterly confused. Watson's estimable wife was long dead by this point, and in any case this woman was not her, and they had not had children. Where the devil had they come from? I continued watching, only to have the surprise of my life (no easy feat) when I saw the man who followed his wife out the door.

It was myself. As I appeared now, so I looked there. I watched in a strange fascination as my doppelganger patted the children's heads and locked the door, taking the woman on his arm. What the deuce was going on here? I could come to no conclusion but the most obvious - that somehow this was my wife, my children and my house instead of Watson's save that this was utterly impossible. Perhaps it was for a case. Yes, that must be it, I thought, yet no sooner had this thought crossed my mind than I discarded it. Not if those children were mine, and they carried my features too strongly to be otherwise. No, this must be real.

I am not prone to panic, yet the presence of such an impossible thing drove me closer to it than anything I have yet experienced. I hurried away from the scene and found a corner shop where they sold newspapers. I am not sure what I expected the paper to tell me, but I searched through it frantically for any clue I could gather as to this dreadful mystery I found myself in.

The newspaper was, however, empty of any clues to this world other than multiple stories of particularly heinous crimes, the violence of which I had not seen since the days of the Ripper murders and the Moriarty case. That might go some way toward explaining the state of Baker Street in this odd, alternate world, though how it should have come to be this way, I had no idea.

I closed the newspaper, idly glancing at the front page to experience the shock of my life as I saw a picture of Moriarty himself. I felt a cold flash of fear run through me, for I am not a machine, and he was the worst criminal I had ever encountered. He was also dead at the bottom of Reichenbach Falls. I was as certain of that as I was of my own name.

But not in this world. I read the story quickly, noting with another flash of horror that in this world he was not dead. Far from it, in fact! He had managed to get himself the position of Prime Minister! How? How had such a thing happened? I had seen my alternate self. How had he - I - allowed this to happen? Had he elected not to become a detective, in favor of the marital bliss I had seen? And where was Watson? Had we not met in this universe? Was this a hideous glimpse of the world as it would have been had I not succeeded in defeating the fiend?

"Holmes? Holmes, old fellow, are you alright?"

I woke with a start to find myself in the familiar surroundings of our Baker Street sitting room with Watson turned around in his chair, looking at me in concern. "Oh, Watson, I have never been so relieved in my life!" I declared.

"I thought you might be having a nightmare," Watson said. Dear fellow, he has enough demons of his own that he understands mine perfectly. I began to calm, feeling as if the world were righted once again.

"I thought I had woken into a dreadful alternate world," I said. "Baker Street was boarded up and the newspapers were full of the most sensational crimes. I was looking for you, and went to your practice only to find myself living there instead, with a wife. And children!"

Watson, bless the fellow, began to laugh aloud, showing how utterly ludicrous the idea was. "Why, that's preposterous," he said.

"It most certainly is," I said. "I have never had any interest in such things." Indeed, I find myself at a loss to understand the preoccupation most of society has with the forced pairing off we call matrimony. Even Watson, though he had chosen a most intelligent and worthy partner. I do not profess to understand the softer emotions, but I had long ago come to the conclusion that I was lacking a certain drive or force for romance and attraction most of the world seemed to share. In his stories, Watson explains this as a dislike I hold toward the fairer sex, though this is certainly not the case. He and I were both well aware that the mysterious drive I seemed not possess was not limited to the opposite sex, for in some men and women it turned upon their own. I had once been asked by an unpleasantly pompous lord to gather some sordid evidence against an author who he felt had too much influence upon his son. I had not heard of the man in question but Watson had and expressed ardent admiration for. I had refused the case, for it seemed to me that the man should be considered guilty of nothing but frequenting some less-than-respectable establishments, and I was no less guilty of that. My instincts were proven right, for the sensational trial that followed utterly destroyed his life and many others. Bah! It is not my business when men get up to in their private life, and it is not for me to sentence a man to hard labor for it. This case was useful to me, however, in proving that in some men the drive all others considered focused on wooing and marriage to the opposite sex was not the same in all. In my case, it simply was not present, and whatever the reason for that, I was grateful for it. It seemed a great waste of time to me, and I doubted I should ever find better companionship than Watson in any case.

"Not only that, you will never guess who the Prime Minister was," I said. I did so enjoy having Watson play guessing games, as he was invariably so poor at it that it proved most entertaining.

"Mycroft?" Watson guessed.

I laughed aloud. "No, Watson, my brother desires nothing more than to stay in the background. No, it was Moriarty!"

"Well, that is indeed a nightmare," Watson said, after a pause. "You know, this is probably due to that dreadful play we read yesterday, by that American Gillette."

Watson is no observer as I am, but he possesses his own intuition that is most ingenious in its own way. I had not put the two together at all, though now it seemed obvious. "That play where he wrote me as married?" I asked. We had been asked to give our approval, though I most emphatically did not approve of the changes made to my life story. Apparently it was merely a formality, as the show would go on whether we did or not. Thank heavens it was only playing in America thus far.

"That is the last time I allow Doyle to lend out my stories for adaptation," Watson said, though the only reason he had done so was because he was again in dire need of funds. I could not very well revoke my permission now, not when I was no longer allowing him to publish new stores. Perhaps I had been wrong about that…

"It is no matter, Watson. It was merely a nightmare and the world is righted again."

A/N: This is set in about 1898-99, which is when the William Gillette play would have been written (it opened in 1899).

If you didn't pick up on it, the sensational trial Holmes is referring to is the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

I realize I stretched this prompt pretty much to the breaking point. One of the things I personally consider absolutely integral to Holmes's character is that he is asexual and aromantic and I always implicitly write him as such. He's one of the earliest characters where there's on-the-page evidence of his asexuality ("I am a brain, Watson, the rest is mere transport"), and he's still one of the only ones who can even be interpreted as aromantic. Apologies for turning the prompt on its head to get there, but even in an alternate universe I can't see him ever interested in anyone, romantically or otherwise.