It was February of 2007. Sherlock was in a not-yet-burnt-out building in Bethnal Green. He was watching Detective Inspector Lestrade, a few years younger and a little less grey, haul away a man who had just attempted to kill him.
Lestrade strode back in from the hallway where he'd been talking to a sergeant (not Donovan, she was still a Detective Constable). "Think that about wraps it up. Any parting shots before we clear out?"
Fire was such an unpredictable entity. It could destroy one side of a room and leave the other untouched. The tea mug in his hands was one of the things he'd salvaged from the blaze. John used it all the time. Try as he might, Sherlock could not get the facts to correlate.
"When did you hear from John last?" The question was either grossly anachronistic, and would leave Lestrade terribly confused…or it was not, and his reaction or lack thereof would give the game away.
The idea of time travel could hardly not occur to him, but he'd relegated it firmly into the realm of fancy, barring impressive evidence to the contrary. Or the elimination of all other available explanations, of course. The key to deduction was to follow where the facts led, but he had to grant that it was toward the bottom in terms of likely hypotheses.
Well. Possibly a notch above 'dead and in Heaven.'
"John?" No, that had only started Lestrade running through all the Johns he knew and trying to figure out which one was relevant.
"Oh, stop thinking, Lestrade. John Watson," Sherlock clarified impatiently. "Short blond fellow. Army man, doctor. Helps me out on cases?"
Ah. It was to be anachronism after all. Lestrade gawped like the words coming from Sherlock's mouth were Sufi poetry. "Did… Sherlock, did that bloke dose you with anything?" He leaned in, trying to get a closer look at Sherlock's eyes. "You eat or drink anything he might've spiked?"
Sherlock stared him down, unblinking. Explaining himself would only reinforce the impression of insanity, even if he'd been inclined to waste the effort. Besides, in his head the words carried an unpleasant tang of self-justification. Lestrade's explanation sounded all too plausible, and he didn't like it.
A drug-induced hallucination. Possible. He was no stranger to drugs, would've sworn before a jury that he hadn't been dosed, but…possible. Perhaps even likely.
Fortunately he could test that easily enough.
And as for the thin, frigid wire of dread that slid through him at the thought of John Watson being a figment of his imagination…well. He could test that too, though it might cost him something.
He lifted a hand from the mug to steer Lestrade towards the door with stiff fingers on his shoulder. "Never mind, you're quite right. I'm speaking nonsense. Long night. Nearly strangled. Going to sleep now, goodbye!"
He all but slammed the door in the face of the long-suffering policeman, leaving him to linger in the hall wondering what the hell had just happened.
Sherlock made tea in the mug that John liked—it didn't taste of him, the way it would in a few years—counting off enough time for the police to finish clearing off and allowing for a few extra minutes for Lestrade to tire of loitering about and fretting. Once he was certain that London's finest had ceased to darken his door, Sherlock shrugged his coat on, swept up his mother's scarf from the lamp and went out.
He walked to the nearest CCTV camera. Stretching an arm out toward it, he snapped his fingers twice and held up a hand next to his head, thumb and last finger extended in the universal sign for 'call me.' Then it was just a matter of waiting.
He felt humiliatingly slow. It had occurred to him while inhaling tea that in his last moments of awareness before the world gave up all efforts at making sense, he had been in Moriarty's power. If there was a better explanation for this madness, he was hard-pressed to think of it. While it was, to the best of his knowledge, beyond the man's ability to engineer something this sweeping, Sherlock couldn't dismiss the possibility that he had found a way.
No matter what else Moriarty was capable of, however, he could not fake Mycroft.
Sherlock followed a meandering route through the neighbourhood, content to think and walk until a sign was given unto him. It didn't keep him waiting long. He was ten minutes into his stroll when the phone booths began to ring.
"I need a favour," he said upon picking up.
"A favour." Mycroft's voice was all polite surprise. Ugh. Him and his airs. As if they weren't both perfectly well aware that he'd just shocked his brother out of his hideously expensive silk/cashmere blend socks. "From me. Do share, brother mine, what can I do for you?"
"I need you to find someone for me."
"Someone you can't find yourself? Sherlock, are you quite alright?" Now that, that was genuine concern underlying the delicate sarcasm.
It was oppressive. Good god, how old did he have to get before people conceded that he could care for himself? "I'm fine," Sherlock snapped. "He's military, you can do this more easily than I can, and I'm in a hurry. John Watson. A surgeon in the RAMC. Rank…" Actually, he realized, he wasn't entirely sure. "Most likely Captain. Possibly Lieutenant. Currently deployed to Afghanistan. Roughly speaking. I can track him from there if you find him."
"Interesting." Sherlock wanted to tell Mycroft how priggish that drawl made him sound, but unfortunately: favour. "You realize it's an abuse of my power to go poking about in military records just to satisfy your curiosity."
Sherlock rolled his eyes at the camera pointed in his direction. "Oh, please. You're fishing for a return favour. As if this requires more effort on your part than picking up your phone and asking someone at the MoD to look it up for you."
The silence was vast and dignified. There was no arguing with it.
"Fine." He huffed. "I'll attend your next hateful soiree, then. You can wave your elegantly bohemian younger brother under the noses of all those stiffs you have to pretend to like, and I'll mock them so that no one else understands us. Satisfactory?"
"Not especially." But it came accompanied with a huff of breath. Ha! He'd made Mycroft laugh. Or as close as he got to it, anyway. Victory was assured.
"Just think, môn frère. You're saving so much effort compared to the two weeks you'd spend chasing down security leaks after I blag my own way to the information." Sherlock smirked at the camera and hung up on him.
A notch over Mycroft and shortly an answer to what currently weighed in as life's most pressing question. Triumph gave him an appetite. He recalled a tidy little cafe two blocks over which sold excellent pastries and their own coffee blends well into the night. It would shut down by the end of the year; best take advantage while he could.