Sherlock came to—misleading, it felt more like a change of state than waking up—hanging upside down over the back of the sofa in his old Bethnal Green studio. He was at a loss as to how he'd got here, or indeed how the place existed, but first order of business was incapacitating the intruder who'd just bowled him over.

He reached up to snatch the portrait off the wall, capitalizing on his lankiness to fold over and swing it into the man's face. Hardly a fatal blow, but it got Sherlock clearance to regain his feet, at which point he could get considerably more drastic with the cheap metal frame.

Once he had his assailant sprawled unconscious across his rug, Sherlock crouched next to him for a better look. Remarkable. He was the spitting image of a blackmailer Sherlock had helped the police put away in 2007. In fact—he straightened up and frowned around the room—that fellow had followed him to his flat in Bethnal Green in hopes of ambushing him before he could hand over the final pieces of evidence to Lestrade. Sherlock distinctly remembered tipping backwards over his sofa and then bludgeoning his attacker senseless with the picture frame.

Evidence which was—he spun and strode over to check—right where he'd left it, inside the skull.

He glowered at the little envelope in his hands for a moment, before turning back to give the unconscious criminal a judicious kick to the head, just behind and below the ear. That'd keep him out until Sherlock…

…What?

Called the police?

Called John?

Figured out what the bloody hell was going on here? Five minutes ago he'd been in the process of blowing himself, his best friend, and his arch-enemy to kingdom come. Now he was standing in the midst of a categorical impossibility: a flat that had burnt down three years ago. And yet, a single glance was enough to tell him that this wasn't some complex reconstruction. Every detail was accounted for. The skull still lacked the char marks it would eventually gain. The scarf his mother had knitted him when he was 14, which he'd lost in the fire, still hung over the lamp nearest the door.

The door had the holes in its panelling from the time that enforcer from the Clerkenwell crime syndicate had tried to bludgeon it down with an iron poker.

"John?" Completely futile, of course, but one always felt ridiculous for overlooking the obvious answer. "John, is there any chance you're here?"

Silence. No, of course not. That would be easy.

It didn't feel like a dream. Sherlock always knew, on some level, that he was dreaming. The inconsistencies where logic didn't quite square with itself were a dead giveaway. He supposed he could be in a coma. He didn't feel like it—he assumed, not that he'd ever been in one before to have a basis for comparison—but he'd heard truly remarkable stories about the experiences of coma patients. If that was the case, then that was absolutely fascinating. He hoped he'd survive it and retain enough memory to write it up as a case study.

He could, he supposed, be dead. Though this made for a rather naff afterlife. He liked to think that if the supernatural had the gall to actually exist, it would at least take the trouble to be interesting.

Unfortunately—he tapped the envelope restlessly against the knuckles of his other hand—regardless of whether he was in a bomb-induced coma or dead or somehow occupying a no longer extant flat, that still left the burning question of what had happened to John.

"Dammit." He reached into his trouser pocket—a cut he no longer wore—for his Blackberry—an older model in the same line as his current one, oh and look, there were the teeth marks from that ferret that'd used it for a chew toy—to call John.

Only it wasn't John whose number was on speed-dial under '2.' It was Lestrade. Just as it had been at the time, at a number that was—in 2010—no longer in service.

It rang. Lestrade picked up. "Come get your criminal, Detective Inspector, before his drool does permanent damage to my carpet."

He hung up on Lestrade's predictably mystified vocalizations, and dialled John's number in.

Not in service.

Sherlock stared at his phone like it was deliberately obstructing him. "John, where in hell are you? Where in hell am I?"