Fic- Down the Rabbit Hole- Chapter One
Chapter One ~ In Which John Falls Through a Rabbit Hole
This had to be some sort of crazy dream. Otherwise it might prove to be too much, even for him.
It had started with being drugged and kidnapped. He had awoken to find himself strapped to a bomb.
Lovely.
Then he had been paraded about in front of Sherlock, Moriarty’s sing-song tone grating on his already frayed nerves.
He’d been so relieved when Sherlock had thrown the ridiculous semtex vest away, he’d even made a joke about them being a couple. He’d only been half-joking, really…
To discover that it was not over, as he’d thought, when Moriarty came prancing back in- well, it was just getting ridiculous.
But what truly convinced John that the whole fiasco couldn’t possibly be real, was the black void that opened up in the middle of the pool as he tackled Sherlock, the bomb exploding with a force that propelled them even further than John’s considerable strength could on its own.
As they hit the blackness, the air was slammed out of John’s chest. He couldn’t breathe, and he was suddenly falling ever so quickly. But what truly panicked him, was the fact that Sherlock had been somehow torn away from his arms. John flailed wildly as he fell, trying to find him, but his hands closed on nothingness.
In a sudden rush, he found he could breathe again and he gasped, sucking oxygen greedily into his lungs. He was not falling through water, but through space. A light began to appear, dim at first, but steadily growing stronger, and John could see now that he was falling through an earthen tunnel, roots poking out of the walls. Odd and strangely familiar bits and pieces were floating around him. There! That was his service revolver. He tried in vain to reach it, frowning as he fell, since he knew a gun might come in handy. A packet of custard creams floated off to the right, and was that-
Was that the head from the refrigerator?
John didn’t have time to find out. The light had become blindingly bright at this point, and with a sudden FWUMP! John hit the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of him again.
“Fuck!” he gasped, when he got his breath back.
In the moments that followed, John lay unmoving, eyes shut, cataloguing every bump and bruise on his body. There was a cut above his left eyebrow, but it wasn’t bleeding terribly. He’d sprained two ribs on his left, possibly cracked one on his right. His ankle hurt, but he’d likely only twisted it a bit.
Sherlock was not with him. That was very not good.
It was the last thought that finally made John open his eyes. He was looking up at a ceiling that looked oddly like a floor. He turned his head slightly to the left and found that he was lying next to a chandelier hanging- up?
And with that, gravity righted itself, and John once more found himself falling violently to the floor, albeit this time, the fall was relatively shorter.
John groaned in a heap on the ground. The worry that Sherlock was not with him was dissipating now, since there was absolutely no possible way that this was real. This was beyond even the powers of Moriarty (the smug bastard).
So John picked himself up, and looked around in earnest. He was in a small room with no doors or windows. No, wait. There was a door. John crouched so he could examine it. The door was about a fourth his size. He couldn’t imagine anyone fitting through it.
In the center of the room was a table, and on the table was a small vial. John was just going lift it when a crash startled him and he spun around.
It was Molly. Molly from the morgue. And yet it wasn’t Molly, because he didn’t recall the girl ever having a pair of white ears and a fluffy white tail before. As in, real ears and a tail.
“Oh, bugger it all!” she exclaimed, checking her cell phone. She didn’t even glance in his direction. “I’m terribly late!” Molly ran to the door, her tail twitching, and in a moment, she had somehow shrunk to a third of her size and was out the door, slamming it behind her.
John, somewhat dizzy, reminded himself that this was nothing more than a dream, likely caused by the fumes of one of Sherlock’s experiments while he slept. He therefore shook his head, shrugged and turned back to the table. He picked up the vial to inspect it and found a small note attached to it.
Drink me.
Huh.
John frowned. This whole scenario seemed oddly familiar for some reason, and yet he could not, for the life of him, figure out why.
He looked again at the door and the wall surrounding it. The wall wasn’t made of brick, or stone. In fact, it looked very much like plaster.
Drink me.
Ha.
John had lived with Sherlock long enough to know that you never drank anything you weren’t certain was drinkable. He therefore pocketed the vial, and grabbed the table instead. John’s ribs protested violently and he grimaced as he rammed the table into the wall above the door.
As he’d expected, the wall fell to pieces, and after his eyes adjusted to the suddenly blinding light of day, John found himself looking out at the most fantastical garden he’d ever seen. There were flowers in colors he’d never known existed, some as tall as he was. The grass grew higher and seemed much greener than the grass in Regent’s Park back home. A fly buzzed passed his ear, and John’s eyes widened slightly when he realized it was a small rocking horse.
This was a dream. Just a dream. He simply had to put up with it until he woke up.
“Right,” he said. “Okay.”
And with that, he stepped over the remains of the doorway and began walking.