A/N: It was a simpler and happier world the last time I updated this story. I hope you're all safe and doing OK. I haven't been able to muster up the enthusiasm to write this, so I'm sorry for the hiatus.

After finally convincing Lestrade to take his own bed, and leaving Sherlock lying—chain-smoking again—on the sofa, John went down the stairs and tapped on the door of Donna's flat. It was shortly before four in the morning now, but the lights were on and she opened the door almost immediately, wrapped in a pink silk kimono over a ratty cotton nighty, a lit cigarette in one hand. He made a valiant attempt at not showing any disgust at it.

"Sorry," he said, unsure of any other way of starting a conversation with her under the circumstances.

"I was up." She ushered him past her into the flat and shut the door behind them with one hand, taking a drag of her cigarette with the other. Then she wandered over to the ashtray sitting on the kitchen table and stubbed it out. "What's wrong? I heard voices earlier."

He strongly suspected she'd heard voices because, with Michael away, she was on high alert for any unexpected returns to her flat. It had been one element of returning from Afghanistan that he hadn't expected: constant watchfulness, compounded by knowing you were not on a military base, you weren't surrounded by high-tech equipment that could warn you of an incoming air strike, you weren't beside people who were just as on guard as you. In a dingy high-rise council flat in Hackney, the first place he'd moved into after his release from hospital after coming home injured, he'd been on his own with that. He had lay awake until the early hours of most mornings, perhaps the only person in the building awake, the only person ready for a sudden emergency. For the first six weeks after his hospital release, sleep had only come to him via exhaustion or sedatives.

"Just a friend," he said. "He's a little… um. He got into a fight earlier."

She frowned. "Is he okay?"

"Yeah, fine. But…"

She smiled. "But he's crashed in your bed, right?"

"And Sherlock's on the sofa. It's fine, I don't mind sleeping on yours…"

"Since when do you ever sleep on my sofa? Come on." She reached out for his hand and led him into her bedroom.

It was past dawn when John woke again, finding Donna fast asleep beside him. He watched her for a few minutes, not so much out of sentiment—he had none in that department, he barely knew her—as out of what he'd convinced himself was medical interest. Her black eye was much darker today, or seemed so in the daylight streaming in through the tiny bedroom window, high up in the wall opposite the bed. She snuffled heavily in her sleep, but as he had no recollection of any of the previous times he must have shared her bed, he had no idea if this was because of her injuries or because she had a smoker's snore. He nudged her until, without waking, she turned over onto her side.

Shutting the bedroom door behind him, he found himself in a small half-corridor, with a shut door directly to his left and another at the end of the hall A faint whishing noise, as of a leaky pipe, from behind that door indicated that it was a bathroom. To his right, a half-wall revealed a glimpse of the small living area and kitchen. This, it seemed, was the extent of Donna's flat.

Donna and Michael's flat.

John tapped gently on the shut door to his left, then, when there was no answer, gingerly tried the handle and pushed it open a few inches. The room beyond was dark and cave-like, barely lit by a small window on the opposite wall that was hung with a heavy green curtain askew on its runner. Before it was an unmade bed strewn with dirty clothes that stank of cigarettes and the general sour funk of a teenage boy who didn't always shower when he should. There was a single bedside table next to it, bearing a crooked lamp, an empty packet of cigarettes and a plate sprinkled with crumbs, which John instantly decided he was not bothering to take to the kitchen and rinse off. The walls, painted a dark dove-grey, were festooned with various posters, mostly of late-Seventies and early-Eighties UK punk bands: Skids, The Clash, The Angelic Upstarts, Big Audio Dynamite…

John stopped, a chill running through him.

He had never been a music devotee, even in his childhood and teens, generally sampling whatever his peers were listening to and preferring television and books over records. Harry, on the other hand, had always been sincerely mad for anything with a solid beat, and that included a good three quarters of the bands adorning Michael Meade's bedroom walls. It was only because of this that John happened to know one thing about B.A.D: it was the band Mick Jones had formed after getting kicked out of The Clash.

In 1984.

I bloody knew it, he thought, though he was too dazed to have been able to explain to anyone who asked just what he knew. It was a few seconds before he caught up with himself: sitting in Lestrade's Capri, listening to David Bowie singing Ricochet. He'd bought its album, Let's Dance, on the day of its release in the UK, with some money his parents had given him for his birthday. His twelfth birthday. Here, now, in March of 1983, he was still only eleven. Michael Meade and Greg Lestrade were both into music that didn't exist yet.

He went through to the sitting room, looking around and quickly locating the phone exactly where he had left it the day before, plugged into the wall and resting on a fake-teak stand next to the box-like television. He lifted the receiver and, almost automatically, dialed his childhood home phone number. The line buzzed a few times, and then, just as he was starting to wonder what on earth he was doing and could decide to hang up, the line gave a faint click and a cheerful female voice said, "Hello?"

John slammed the phone with a violent crash.

Just past eight-thirty, he thought, glancing at the clock and trying to get his shuddering breaths back in order. Dad's at work. Harry and I would have both left for school by now. Jesus, I really should have thought that through.

Trying not to think too much about what he had just heard, he left the flat and went up the stairs to his own.

Here he found Sherlock and Greg sitting in the living room. Both were showered and fully dressed, though Lestrade, apparently lacking any other clothes on hand that fit him, had put on his torn, bloodstained uniform from the night before. The two of them were smoking, using a shared ashtray on the cluttered coffee table between them.

"I told you not to do that," John said, reaching over and stubbing out the cigarette nearest to Lestrade, who barely reacted. Probably just out from under the wing of a domineering mother, John thought. Then he paused, the cigarette butt still between his fingers, suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to… take a drag out of it.

He had never smoked, unless you counted the summer when, aged fifteen, Harry had taken up the habit and he'd tried to get her to stop by lighting up every time she did. The upshot of it had been that they'd both had a nicotine addiction by August, but John had got rid of his a week after term started and Harry, to this day, still smoked heavily. It had been easy for him to kick the habit, because he'd never enjoyed smoking in the first place. But here and now he wanted, more than anything, to stand by the open window and smoke Lestrade's cigarette down to the filter. And then, perhaps, light another one.

"Alan hasn't… been found?" he asked instead, and Sherlock threw him a disdainful look that confirmed he hadn't. John reproached himself: if Alan had been found, would Sherlock and Lestrade be sitting in his living room? There were six scum-ringed ceramic cups on the table between them, around the heaped ashtray and interspersed with a pile of scribbled notes, which suggested they hadn't each gone to bed for long. Apparently, John thought as he collected the colder cups and took them to the sink to rinse out, Lestrade was—or had been—just as bad as Sherlock for making continual cups of coffee without bothering to clear away the old ones.

"How's your head?" he asked him, leaning back over the table to confiscate the ashtray as well and discard its contents into the kitchen bin.

"Fine." Though John noted he winced as he put his hand to it.

"I'm assuming they're not expecting you at work today."

"Yeah, I wouldn't think so. I doubt I've got a job at all now."

"No, I'm pretty sure you do," John said, "thanks to a guy called Alfie Margent. Sherlock?"

Sherlock must have gone out at some stage earlier, John thought, noting that the paper in his hand was current. "Julie's on her way," he said absently, without looking up from it. "John, in the absence of any less primitive methods of investigation, we're going to have to copy those case notes. They're important. Particularly the statements from the parents of the missing boys and from the Noonans."

"Great. And just how do you think I'm going to get those? I'm about as popular as Lestrade is down at the station."

"Oh, we have a friend on the force, remember? One who apparently hasn't compromised himself yet."

Some friend, John thought. He still had no idea of the guy's name, and the previous night's foray into the cells had been the only time he could remember that he'd directly addressed him.

Lestrade was looking between them, on the alert. "What friend?" he asked.

John decided to bite the bullet. Lestrade—or at least, the Lestrade he knew in London—was used to letting things go if and when he didn't quite understand them, so long as you told a good story to cover yourself. "I can't remember his name," he said. "About this tall…" he gestured in thin air… "fortyish, fair hair, blue eyes? He was with us when we found Derek Metcalfe's body, before you took me home."

At this, Lestrade frowned, honestly baffled. "What, Brian Stern?"

John glanced at Sherlock, who was sitting back in his seat with his eyes shut, as if he was meditating, and apparently not paying any attention to this. "No," he said, "one of the other guys…"

"What other guys? You're talking about the day before yesterday, right, when I took you home?"

John, now helplessly confused, looked again at Sherlock, who opened his eyes and abruptly stood up, his superior attitude falling from him like a dropped jacket. "Lestrade," he said, "can I just confirm that you did not see anyone except Brian Stern with John when Derek Metcalfe's body was found?"

"Should I have?"

"If you could answer the question, that would be splendid—"

Sherlock was cut off when, behind him, there was a series of sharp knocks on the closed door. John opened it, and, for the first time, caught a glimpse of nineteen-year-old Julie Clarke. He opened his mouth to greet her in some appropriate way, but she virtually ignored him, making a beeline for Greg Lestrade, who stood up.

"Oh my God," she said, "what happened to you?"

"Got into a fight," he said cheerfully, as if the previous night had all been a sort of laddish game. "Don't worry about me, I'm fine. Got a doctor taking care of me." He gestured to John. "You haven't met Dr. John Watson, have you? He's the FME on… well, he's the FME. Police doctor. Dr. Watson, this is Julie."

"Please, just call me John," was his response, offering Julie his hand, but hoping Lestrade might take the hint as well.

"No sign?" he asked Julie hopefully.

She shook her head. "Dad's talking about… well, you should hear him," she said. "He's not even making any sense—"

"He's probably tired, Julie." Apparently, Greg Lestrade's easygoing excuses for the excesses of other people's behaviour had developed early. Good defence mechanism, John thought, against Sherlock driving him mental. "Bet he's been up all night?"

"So have I!"

John expected—and expected so strongly—that Sherlock would interrupt this exchange with some comment on how he had also, that he turned around. The flat door was ajar, and Sherlock was gone.

"Did he just leave?" Lestrade asked, baffled, as if noticing this at the same time. "I'm going to need him this morning, what did he leave for?"

John shrugged, trying not to show how annoyed he was. "Get used to it," he said dryly. "Listen, he was right though, about the case notes. We need to get copies of them somehow. Any idea how we do that, without being beaten to a pulp?"

It was a warm and clear morning, so far as March mornings went in the south of England, as Sherlock turned onto City Road and headed west toward Central Police Station. A warm and sunny morning, and a walk of barely a mile. But the street, now quiet and still in the morning sunshine, bore the signs of an eventful evening the night before, and after side-stepping his third puddle of urine and his second puddle of vomit, Sherlock was wondering if there was some longer way around that wasn't quite such a threat to his Italian leather shoes. If he'd had any currency on him minted before the early 00's, he would have tried to hail a cab. Even if such currency would be accepted by a 1983 cab driver, it would make him far too memorable.

Lost in his own thoughts, it was a long time—a few seconds, perhaps, which for Sherlock Holmes was a few seconds too long—before he realised there was a car crawling quietly along the kerb beside him. A white Ford Grenada with a lurid red stripe down one side and, he knew without checking, POLICE in blue lettering along the other side. He looked through the passenger window and saw, in the driver's seat, the fair-haired officer Lestrade had just told him didn't exist. At the same time, the car pulled to a gentle halt. The driver leaned over the gearstick to wind the window down and said, "Get in."

Sherlock glanced around. Apart from two young boys, maybe eight years old, who were crouching behind a low wall outside one of the houses across the street and clearly mitching off school, there was nobody in sight. Sherlock opened the car door and got in. The vinyl seat squeaked under him, and the smell of aftershave was so strong it almost stung his nostrils. He slammed the door behind himself, half expecting the car to take off from the kerb. But the driver, hands grasping the wheel at six o'clock, did not seem in a hurry to go anywhere.

"I don't believe I know you," Sherlock said, watching as an elderly woman in a brown print dress and a pinny came out of the sandstone house across the street and immediately spotted the two boys crouching behind the wall. She marched down the front steps and over to them—neither child had the gumption to run, Sherlock noted with a sort of dull contempt—and grabbed the nearest one by the shoulder, scolding him in a thin, sharp voice. She was flicking her free hand from the wrist as she scolded, as though she were feeding chickens.

The stranger said nothing.

"I don't believe anyone knows you," Sherlock went on, "because I don't quite believe you exist."

"You didn't stop to wonder what that old biddy just saw you do?" The stranger smiled, revealing teeth that were all slightly askew with one another. It gave him a boyish, inoffensive look. "You think she just saw you get into a car that doesn't exist?"

Sherlock opened his mouth to give some sort of clever retort, but at the last second he realised he didn't actually have one and decided to shut it again. "Who are you?" he asked instead. "I want your name."

The man shrugged. "'Jack' will do."

Sherlock was sorely tempted to demand a surname, but it occurred to him that perhaps supernatural entities didn't have surnames, and if they did, perhaps asking for one would cause offence. "We need to solve this crime," he said instead. "Four missing boys, and one dead one. If I understand this correctly, we need to find the missing and avenge the dead." He could not help a contemptuous tone creeping into his voice. In London, Lestrade had every now and again tried to get him to solve more crimes for him—ones that weren't in the least interesting—by arguing that the dead deserved justice. Now, apparently, John had started up that nonsense as well. "And I suppose," he said, his contempt growing stronger, "you're here to help us. I'm not convinced I require your help."

"Aren't you?" Jack raised one eyebrow, taking his right hand off the wheel to rummage in his jacket pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes. "Got a TARDIS somewhere in John Watson's flat, do you?" He lit up, not offering the packet to Sherlock, and wound his window down a crack.

Since he hadn't the faintest idea what a TARDIS was, Sherlock decided to ignore this remark, and hoped Jack would do the same. With a beleaguered sigh, he he resigned himself to the inevitable. "Okay," he said. "We'll do this your way: How do I get John out of here?"

"Now you're finally asking the right questions." Jack twisted the key in the ignition and the idling engine fell silent. "You need to talk to Dr. Edwin Cairfax."