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Title: Seventeen Steps
Fandoms: Sherlock (BBC); Sherlock Holmes (Authur Conan Doyle) (kinda sorta)
Author: tardisjournal
Summary: A light flared. Sherlock craned his neck upward. Looming above him was a freakishly tall, winged figure with dangling ears and a single glowing red eye.

Sherlock's body froze in limb-locking, breath-holding terror before his rational mind had a chance to catch up (stupid transport!). He couldn't be seeing what it looked like he was seeing. He couldn't be.

Because it looked like a monstrous cyclops had strode straight out of the pages of mythology to terrorise Baker Street.
Word Count: 3,390
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Greg Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes (references); Sherlock/John
Rating: R
Warnings, Kinks and Contents: Description of injuries aquired during a case, passing reference to illegal drug use
Spoilers: S1.01--A Study in Pink
Additional tags: Hurt/Comfort, Ambiguity, Angst, Blood Loss, Aftermath of a Case, Playing Operation with Mycroft, The Game Is Afoot, John is a Very Good Doctor, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings
A/N: Inspired by the fan_flashworks pompt "footwear" (though it also works for the seasonal prompt "haunted"), my hc_bingo square "blood loss," and the land_deduction prompt "Sherlock".

There were seventeen steps leading up to Sherlock's flat—ten to the “dogleg” landing, then seven more. He made it to number nine before collapsing and sliding back down.

He tried to rise, but his good arm refused to take his weight, and his trembling legs seemed to be no longer be under his control. How annoying, that his transport should give out now, when he was so close to his goal.

Sherlock sighed and rested his head on the step beneath him. He had been too stupid and too slow, and these were the consequences, he reflected ruefully. He was bleeding from at least a half-dozen lacerations to his hands and arms; the worst being the one to the area currently swathed in ruined cashmere, but there were at least three others that were worrisome as well. There was also a considerable gash on his left thigh where he'd dodged too slowly to avoid the cleaver-wielding maniac with whom he'd had an altercation earlier.

The maniac, a middle-aged landlord with a propensity for cheap suits and exorbitant rents, had surprised Sherlock by being far more unhinged than Sherlock had expected when confronted. Sherlock had known he was a killer, yes, but he'd pegged him for a methodical, deliberate one. He been rather surprised when the man had launched himself at Sherlock in an insane, blade-whirling frenzy, and then jumped out of the second-story window, taking the glass with him. Sherlock had followed in hot pursuit but had slipped in the glass when he landed and fell, striking his head on the pavement. By the time he was able to sit up and look around, the landlord had disappeared.

It had not at all been what Sherlock was expecting, and, upon further consideration, he had beaten a hasty retreat to 221B Baker Street. Not out of fear, mind; rather out of a need to rethink things. He'd texted John a couple of their code words as he was on his way home, planning to go over the case with him in the hopes that John could help him suss out what he had missed.

The looks on the faces of the people that he'd passed, especially that of the American woman with the nearsighted little girl that had crossed the street to avoid him, made him realise that his injuries might be a bit more serious than he'd thought. Well, that and the fact he was having trouble standing upright. He supposed he'd need John to patch him up a bit before they could start work. (What a waste of time!) It was a wonder that no one had called the police on him, but there never was a policeman around when you needed one, was there? Finally, he had made it home.

Well, almost made it home.

Sherlock stirred, and marvelled at how heavy his limbs had become. And cold, especially his hands and feet. He idly wondered if that was the effect of the blood loss, or the beginnings of shock. There wasn't much pain, at least. What with the adrenaline still coursing through his system (a high as good as anything for sale on the street and free at that!), he barely felt it. More worrisome was the fact that he might well bleed out on his own stairs before anyone found him.

No, that wouldn't happen. John would come in time.

John always came.

He just had to wait.

Waiting was boring. He'd have to find something to occupy his mind with in the meantime. There was no point in going over the case without John there, so Sherlock turned his attention to his surroundings. Or at least what little of them he could see from his resting place on the staircase.

The bare wood of the step upon which his head was resting had been whitewashed within the last six months, but the original darker stain was already peeking through, especially in more frequently-trod middle. (Clearly Mrs. Hudson would be better-served by buying a more expensive brand.) Though the step had been undoubtedly been fashioned from a hardwood (though he couldn't tell which kind without scraping off a century's-worth of stain and paint) it felt almost soft against his cheek. The slight bow in the centre, put there by the tread of countless footsteps over the years, seemed to be just the right size to cradle his head. That was odd. He'd never thought of wood as, well, comfortable, before.

Sherlock lifted a shaky hand and ran his fingers over the concavity. How many footsteps had it taken to form it? With a start, Sherlock realised he knew very little about the history of the house that he called home. How many people had lived in the upstairs flat before him, each contributing minutely to the wear and tear of the stairs every time they went up and down. What had they been like?

It wasn't something he could figure out himself. The reading of the distant past wasn't his area. Other people, in their general obliviousness and their self-centred desire to rearrange things to suit themselves, tended to destroy all traces of the past fairly quickly. He couldn't deduce from evidence that wasn't there, after all.

Sherlock could tell who had used the stairs earlier today (John; the crisp scent of his aftershave still lingered). He could tell who had used them last Wednesday (Lestrade, bearing the cinnamon roll he had taken to buying from Speedy's every time he stopped by; that crumb in the corner of the step looked to be about four days old). He could even tell who had used them within the last three weeks (that light-grey worsted-wool thread caught on a splinter could only have come from one of Mycroft's summer suits, and it had been too cold for such a suit before that.) Everything beyond that, though, was lost; a victim of Mrs. Hudson's regular sweeping and dusting regimen.

There were flashing spots around the edges of his vision by the time Sherlock deduced all that he could from his step, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he process had taken rather longer than it should have. His mind seemed to have acquired a disturbing tendency to wander off to a strange blank place. It was rather like the place he sometimes found himself in upon waking suddenly from a deep sleep--a colorless, formless void where there was awareness but no data. Sherlock hated that blank place. He forced his mind back on task. The white paint, the aftershave, the crumb, the thread. What else? There had to be more.

Oh, but he was tired. And cold. And every time he moved his head his stomach lurched in a way more reminiscent of riding on a waltzer than lying in his own stairwell. His transport kept urging him to close his eyes and just... rest. Nevertheless, he forced himself to keep them open and fixed on the green textured wallpaper in front of him. He had a feeling if he closed his eyes he wouldn't opening them again anytime soon, and that seemed like a bad idea indeed. He might be concussed. He would likely succumb to shock. His injuries didn't frighten him, but the thought of losing consciousness, possibly for a long time, was deeply unsettling.

John would be along shortly. It was imperative that Sherlock be awake when John arrived, both for his own sake, and because he had something to tell John. Something... important...

Before him, the horizontal lines of the wallpaper blurred. Sherlock's eyes ached and burned. The urge to blink was becoming overwhelming. He mustn't sleep, he knew that. But surely one quick blink, to clear his eyes and restore his vision, wouldn't hurt anything. One blink. That's all.

Sherlock closed his eyes. The darkness was cool and soothing. Why had he been fighting this? Maybe he'd just keep them closed. The blank place loomed, quiet and peaceful. Inviting, almost.

No! He mustn't! Sherlock pried his eyes open to find it had grown quite dark around him. How odd. Had he fallen asleep after all? No, there was light filtering in from the stained glass window above the landing. The angle of it suggested that it was still mid-afternoon. So he hadn't fallen asleep, then, or at least for not very long. But why was it so dark? It was as if the bulb in the overhead light fixture and the one on the table by the front door had both picked the same time to burn out.

Unlikely.

Perhaps he had only thought he opened his eyes. He blinked a few more times experimentally. The views alternated between pitch darkness, and the dim and shadowed staircase.

He'd take the staircase. He opened his eyes as wide as they would go.

Sherlock began to realise that some other things were different as well. There were strange, palm-sized shapes adorning the formerly plain wallpaper. Further inspection revealed them to be stylised roses, descending from the ceiling in vertical rows. The stair under his cheek, too, had changed. It was now stained a dark chestnut and and seemed... harder. Sherlock lifted his head and squinted downward. The comfortable groove in which he'd been resting his head was gone. The step was level.

Above him, on the landing, a light flared. Sherlock craned his neck upward. Looming above him was a freakishly tall, winged figure with dangling ears and a single glowing red eye.

Sherlock's body froze in limb-locking, breath-holding terror before his rational mind had a chance to catch up (stupid transport!). He couldn't be seeing what it looked like he was seeing. He couldn't be.

Because it looked like a monstrous cyclops had strode straight out of the pages of mythology to terrorise Baker Street.

Run! cried a tiny, frightened part of Sherlock's mind. Hide!

Not possible! Sherlock snapped back at that despised part of himself. Think! It's an hallucination. It has to be. That explains everything. The changes to the room, the appearance of the Cyc—the figure.

Carefully, deliberately, Sherlock closed his eyes. If it was an hallucination, that might dispel it. Or cause it to change, like lucid dreams do when one becomes aware that one is dreaming. Of course, that might change it to something even more horrifying, but at least then he'd know for sure that it wasn't real.

He opened his eyes again. The stairway was still dim. The ugly wallpaper remained. The figure was still there.

Oh god, oh god!

Shut up! Sherlock fought down the urge to screw his eyes closed and give in to the panic rising in his gut. He forced himself to look closer at the figure instead. Really look.

Reluctantly, his panicked mind began to process the details it had ignored before. Details that painted a rather different picture.

Stupid! It's just a man, standing on the landing. A tall man, granted, but not freakishly so. It was just a trick of perspective and shadow that made him appear that way. Look at where his head is in relation to the ceiling. He's no taller than you. The “wings” are nothing more than an old-fashioned Ulster with a hip-length cape. And it was the flaring of a pipe you saw, not a glowing eye, which should have been immediately apparent from the plumes of acrid smoke hovering about the landing. It's just a man. You idiot.

But what about the ears? that tiny, frightened part of his mind insisted.

Sherlock had no answer to that until the figure took another flaring puff on his pipe, then turned his head and glanced over his shoulder back toward the interior door of the flat. Sherlock recognised something familiar in the movement about his head, and in a flash he had it--the "ears" were the loosened flaps of a ridiculous ear-hat like his own. The one that he had nicked to disguise himself from reporters, and somehow never got around to returning.

So not a monster, then.

Oh thank god!

Sweet relief flooded Sherlock's insides, warming him. A man, real or imagined, he could observe and learn from. There were insights to be gleaned about his character if it were the former, or the inner workings of Sherlock's own mind if it were the latter.

The man was wearing a ear-flap hat like his. Now that was curious. Not many people ran about modern-day London with a hat like that. Was it the original owner come to reclaim it then? Unlikely How would he know where to go to find it? Granted, the photograph of Sherlock wearing it had gone viral (thanks, John!), but how would the wronged party know for certain that that particular hat was his? And more importantly, why on earth would he want it back? More likely he was a crazed fan that had broken in and taken it, or was wearing one of his own in some sort of twisted homage. But what, then, about the rest of the outfit?

The mysterious figure stepped to the edge of the landing, affording Sherlock a glimpse of his black shoes and shiny white spats, then paused again. Sherlock wondered if he'd been spotted. He realised he should probably move, or do... something--but he found himself unable. No longer frozen in fright, his limbs nevertheless felt so leaden he knew they wouldn't be up to the effort. And even thinking about moving made him queasy. All Sherlock could do was to catalogue all of the strange details before him and hoped that he didn't get stepped on. Or shot.

“Come, Watson! The game is afoot!” the figure suddenly shouted in a booming voice, and Sherlock froze all over again.

In the time it took to be able to resume breathing, Sherlock discarded the theories that the man was a fan, perhaps on his way to fancy-dress ball or a historical reenactment, or just completely deranged. He hadn't liked those theories much anyway, because while they explained the Victorian-era clothing, they hadn't explained what had happened to the house. But now that he had heard the man's voice, there could be only one explanation. It was an hallucination after all. Because the man's words were an echo of something similar Sherlock had said to Mrs. Hudson and John once, in the privacy of their own home. No one else could have possibly known about it.

The game, Mrs. Hudson, is on! That had been a peak moment, the kind of moment he lived for: when the possibilities of new, challenging case stretched out before him and he had no idea where they would lead. The moment had been further sweetened by the realisation that in his new flatmate, he might have found a worthy assistant. He'd never forgotten it.

But what a strange way to put it. Why, even in an hallucination, would he refer to John as “Watson”, as if they were some sort of public-school mates? They had never addressed each other in such a fashion. And as for the second part of what the man had said...

Distantly, behind and below him, past the feet he could no longer feel, Sherlock heard a door open. It seemed very far away.

Unimportant.

“The game is afoot,” Sherlock repeated to himself. “Afoot. A. foot.” What an odd turn of phrase.

“The foot bone's connected to the ankle bone,” Sherlock added, and then chuckled. He hadn't thought of that silly song in years. He was accustomed his mind throwing a bunch of seemingly random things at him and leaving him work out the logical connections slowly and methodically, but even he was aware that this train of thought had the all hallmarks of him losing the plot rather than real insight.

Strangely, he didn't care.

“The ankle bone's connected to the knee bone,” Sherlock sang softly. The little ditty was not anatomically accurate, of course, he'd known that even as a child, but he had liked to sing it when he played Operation with Mycroft. Mostly because it drove Mycroft mad.

A picture of the game rose up in his mind; the board with the naked cartoon man splayed splayed out as if ready for surgery (his big belly obscuring anything that children shouldn't see), with slots cut out where certain “body parts” should go. The object of the game had been to remove the parts without touching the sides of the slots. Had there been a foot piece in it?

No, but there'd been an ankle piece, Sherlock remembered--a little wrench, meant to represent a “wrenched ankle”. There had also been a bucket to represent “water on the knee” and a little apple for the Adam's apple. Sherlock had loved that game, primarily for the puns, even though Mycroft had sniffed and dismissed them as “juvenile” and “the lowest form of humour”.

Sherlock had been eight.

He was a juvenile, as he'd cheerfully reminded Mycroft.

“Why a foot, though? Why not a hand?” Sherlock mused out loud. “That's much more practical.”

“Christ, he's delirious,” a voice cried from somewhere down by Sherlock's feet; a voice made gruff by too many cigarettes and late nights.

Lestrade.

“I'm not surprised. It looks like he's lost a lot of blood," came a matter-of-fact reply, though this blunt assessment was softened by a note of concern.

Wats—John. John had come.

“John,” Sherlock whispered, trying to shift his shoulders so that he could look down the stairs. Around him, the hallway grew bright again. Too bright. It hurt. Automatically, Sherlock shut his eyes, then realised what he was doing and opened them again. The figure on the stairs was gone.

“It's all right, Sherlock. Don't try to get up. I'm here. The ambulance is on its way." Warm fingers brushed across his hand, leaving three little trails of heat in their wake. The contrast between them and his clammy skin was startling.

“John,” Sherlock choked out. “The serial killer is... the landlord. Not the evicted tenant...with a grudge. Like the police thought. Tell them to be careful. He's, ah, rather skilled with a cleaver."

“Got it,” Lestrade said, masking his sharp intake of breath with brusque efficiency.

"That's great, Sherlock," said John. "You did great. But for now, just rest, yeah?" Sherlock heard a stair creak and felt a comforting presence wedge itself in next to him. “I'm just going to put pressure on this until the paramedics come take over. It might hurt a bit. But you'll be all right.”

"I know I will.”

The stairs creaked again, then Sherlock felt a sudden, sharp pressure against his injured arm. It seemed to be coming from a great distance. He felt himself relax in a way he hadn't been able to before.

It was safe now.

He was safe now.

“Hey, no sleeping. Not until we can get that head wound checked out,” John admonished.

“Mmnot.”

As they waited, John prattled on about nothing in particular, no doubt to help Sherlock stay conscious. Sherlock paid no the words, preferring instead to listen to the rise and fall of his familiar inflections, riding them like a surfer rides the waves. Until...

“When you're better, though, we're going to have a talk about the fact you've taken up smoking again. Don't try to deny it, I can smell it. Mrs. Hudson's going to be furious if she finds out you've been smoking in her hallway, you know. And not only that, you must be rolling your own because that smell is really pungent. You know those are even worse for you, right? Yeah, we're definitely going to have a talk.”

Sherlock stirred. He hadn't been sleeping, not exactly; rather drifting in a sea of undulating green wallpaper and John. “Wait, what?” he slurred.

Then came the sound of a shout and Lestrade's answered, “In here!” Several pairs of feet thudded across the wooden floor. John started barking instructions. A discussion broke out between John and two others, one male, one female, about how best to move him. Sherlock wasn't paying much attention.

John smelled it too. But that's not possible. I was hallu... was Sherlock's last thought, before the blackness of unconsciousness rose up to claim him at last.