A/N: This is actually a completed work and will be posted in sets of three chapters each. There are twelve total chapters, and the whole work is around 60k.

Although I didn't write this for anyone except myself, I would be remiss if I didn't extend endless thanks to Clem for enduring my nostalgic rambling and being preoccupied with some of the same specific things as me. It's good knowing there's someone else out there who lives on Diet Coke and nostalgia. I have no idea if she'll actually like this fic or not, but at least she helped get it finished.
Also thanks to Sarah for putting up with my constant bitching.
And apologies to Richard Siken.

Still Left With the River

"A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it
in the river/but then he's still left/with the river. A man
takes his sadness and throws it away/but then he's still left with his hands."

John had never really given a damn about art, before Afghanistan. It had always seemed like something that only certain people were allowed to appreciate, people who had studied for years and been trained to pick it apart and understand it. But he had begun to find comfort in it himself, even if he knew next to nothing about brushstrokes and art styles, oil paint versus acrylic, traditional or mixed media. It wasn't that he had suddenly developed a great appreciation for the classics, the art school standbys like Michelangelo or Picasso. Instead, what it boiled down to, the real reason behind his fixation was much simpler: quiet.

The world was a noisy place, and unfortunately, that made things rather hard on a jumpy, traumatized soldier. No one quite seemed to understand that, friends coming up and clapping him on the back unannounced, startling him, people dragging him to action movies that were packed with explosions, everyone speaking in such loud voices that every tiny noise seemed thirty times louder, every clink of silverware, every phone, every car engine, all of it deafening and exhausting.

But the museums, they were always calm and quiet. John wasn't sure what exactly inspired silence in museums, but he was grateful. The only other places that were ever so serene were churches, and he had had some difficulties where God was concerned after returning from the war.

So a great deal of his spending money was used for museum admissions. The longer he was home, the less he limited himself to just art museums. He spent hours in the British Museum staring at archaeological artifacts, more hours in the British Library examining the scratchy ink-on-paper that made up Beethoven's own music. Over the months he had listened to hundreds of speeches by hundreds of different docents about Manet and Dali and Pissaro, so many that he could almost recite some of them himself. Once, there was a lovely Renaissance art exhibition in London and he was there so often that he could have mouthed the informative little docent chats along with the docents.

Once or twice, he even tried to get Sholto to come, thinking the time out of the house would do him good (and surely if the museums were soothing enough for John, they would have been for him as well), but to no avail. Afghanistan had wounded some people more irreparably than others. That, he could understand.

For weeks, the London art world buzzed with excitement, about the lost Vermeer at the Hickman. John planned to go see it, of course. It would be foolish not to.

Even though special exhibitions like this one were usually more crowded, the crowd was still expected to speak in hushed voices and make no sudden movements, so John believed it would be safe.

The Hickman was one of the smaller galleries in London, certainly not as famous or as popular as the National Gallery or even the Royal Academy of Arts. It could never afford very prestigious pieces, so its acquisition of a piece of art as important and valuable as a lost Vermeer made the news for weeks during the buildup to the opening of the exhibit. John knew little about Vermeer, an artist who he hadn't seen much of compared to others, but as always, he couldn't keep himself away from the temperature-controlled, hermetic feel of the galleries.

It was an evening opening, winter making the world full dark early on. John took his time walking through the museum, looking at all the works, not just those lucky enough to be in the same room as the Vermeer. The white walls of the Hickman were almost clinical when combined with the cool air.

The main room was more crowded, but still blessedly contained, people standing in groups talking quietly to each other, many people's faces wearing the light of excitement. Some stood near other paintings out of courtesy, so that everyone could see the Vermeer, but no matter where they stood, most people's lines of sight still flitted over to the newly discovered masterpiece.

John stood to the side, looking at the painting from his safe place against an empty section of wall. It was a pretty painting, a dark and lovely cityscape, a collection of stars dotting the night sky, the light reflecting off a body of water in the foreground. John could just make out the signature in the bottom left corner. It had a blurry sort of mystery about it, this painting, like concept art from an old horror movie. It wasn't as big as John had imagined, either, though everyone always assumes great works came in large packages. But this recovered art looked to be about the size of a laptop computer, held up by a terribly simple frame, the only piece of art on its wall. A security guard, a heavyset man with a doughy face, walked calmly around the gallery in an endless loop of the same route, and John wondered just how much a museum security guard could really protect priceless works of art if it came down to it.

"Okay, but what's it a painting of, Sarah?" a voice asked. John glanced to the side, seeing a baffled looking man standing next to a pretty woman, her brown hair pulled up into a ponytail. John had seen the look on the man's face before, someone who didn't understand the appeal of art, and likely never would. But he couldn't crush the woman's enthusiasm. She smiled more fondly at the painting than she probably ever did at the man.

"It's a view of Delft, in the Netherlands, before the explosion."

John did a double-take, glancing between the woman and the painting and trying not to appear as if he was eavesdropping.

"Explosion?"

"Yeah, in the 1650s, there was this gunpowder store that exploded, destroyed most of the city and killed tons of people. So any painting from before the explosion of the city is a real artistic treasure. The Hickman is incredibly lucky to have it, I mean, dear god, it's a Vermeer," she said, shaking her head in quiet awe. "I heard someone say that it dates to the 1640s, which in historical terms makes it feel like it was from the day before the disaster."

"But it's just a picture of a city skyline?"

The woman just rolled her eyes and looked back at the Vermeer. John smiled to himself. Little views into regular people's lives, those were just little extras that came with frequenting these museums. Everyone was there for a reason, whether it was artistic passion or needing silence or because they were dragged along by their girlfriend.

He leaned on his cane, even though the pressure of its handle had been making his palm ache. The limp, the pain, it had yet to go away. He was beginning to learn to live with it, just as he had learned to like art. He shoved his free hand into his coat pocket, balling it into a fist and breathing deeply, waiting for the spasm to pass. If he focused hard enough, he could turn his thoughts to something harmless, something mundane.

I'll maybe get a coffee mug or something from the gift shop, with the painting on it. That would be nice to have. Maybe a magnet.

It took him far too long to realize that the shuddering explosion that coursed through the gallery wasn't a flashback.

... ... ...

He was aware of the smell of blood and fire before he even opened his eyes. And yet still, the actual sight of said blood and fire was jarring. The gallery was practically obliterated, walls crumbling, smoke curling in the air around the rubble, lights out except for what could run on generators, the ominous red glow of the exit sign across the room a strangely threatening beacon.

And then he registered the bodies as he pushed himself up on his hands. Pieces of people lying everywhere, bits of skin and skull. Some bodies intact, eyes still wide open and staring at nothing, motionless. Some may have been unconscious, others may have been buried in the rubble, but all John could see were the haunted lifeless faces that seemed to greet him at every turn. Once or twice, the faces were familiar, men he'd known in Afghanistan who hadn't been as lucky as he was, and he had to shut his eyes, hands to his face, to make the images go away.

Cuts all over him, a stinging on his face from the ripped skin, and tears in his jeans that were beginning to grow read around the edges with blood. Head pounding, ears ringing, and he could barely tell what was real and what wasn't.

Shell shocked.

There was no sound. Of course, realistically there was, but John had reached a point where any noise in the gallery was somehow muffled and distant. Explosion related hearing damage? He ran through a list of conditions in his head before he could stop himself, the doctor in him trying to regain control. Concussion? Blood loss? Traumatic brain injury? But even these thoughts felt like background noise.

He looked wildly around the gallery, suddenly wondering where the rescue workers were. The room was in apocalyptic disarray, but there were no rescue workers. There was just smoke and broken things and people who were probably past help anyway.

John slowly shoved himself to his feet, his cane gone. But he was relatively steady, too disoriented to even notice if his leg was hurting at all. He turned in a circle – how do I get out of here? – surveying the damage and always coming back to the glowing exit sign across the room.

Be a soldier. Just stay alive.

He took his first tentative step toward the exit, trying to make the room quit spinning, reaching out for handholds and finding nothing more than what appeared to be a section of caved in ceiling. Two steps later and John found a person in his way, a dark-skinned man lying on the floor, a piece of the ceiling jutting out of one of his legs. The other leg, however, was missing almost entirely, blown off above the knee, flesh and bone exposed and charred. It was such a horrible warlike image that John forced a few deep breaths – which stung, broken rib? – into his lungs as he considered how to get past the man. Part of him wanted to help, wanted to staunch the blood steadily seeping from what used to be the man's thigh, but the other part of him knew better. He had seen bleeders like that before, and if the man's face was any indicator, he didn't stand a chance. John bent down, falling a little too hard on his knees, and reached out to the man, teasing the destroyed fabric of his jeans away from the amputation. There was no way he would ever be able to stop the bleeding, no way to fix what had been done.

The man was still alive, but only barely, his skin clammy and his hands shaking, his eyes wide and wild and terrified. The look was familiar. The man knew damn well how this was going to end. He reached out a hand, grabbing John by the arm, panicked and insistent, leaving a bloody hand print on the dark cloth of John's jacket. But he did this to get John's attention, not John's comfort, and once John looked down at him he drew his hand away. Both of his hands held out in front of him, the man shakily twisted a ring off one of his fingers, pushing it toward John, the blood-smeared gold giving off the faintest glint in the dim light.

John shook his head, tried to gesture that he couldn't take it, but the man continued to shove the ring at him. The man tried to sit up, nearly screaming in pain, and John reached out to take the ring from him, saying over and over, "Okay, okay." The man leaned back, breathing deeply before grabbing John's hand in his and saying, "Baker Street. 221, by the shop." John just nodded, placating.

"Yeah, sure, Baker Street." Even as he said it, the man could stand the blood loss no longer, and John watched the light fade from his eyes as the man's hand slipped away from his.

John shoved the ring into his pocket without thinking, not having time to worry about it now. He stood on shaky legs, thinking to himself that at least he'd worn dark clothes, so the blood wouldn't show as badly.

It was the most excruciating journey of his life, staggering across the gallery, now and then hearing moans from undetectable dark corners of the room, stumbling around purses and shattered phones and shoes. All the while, he searched and searched for a reason that would explain the lack of rescue teams, the lack of any sort of help, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to be the last man on earth.

When the hand grabbed his ankle, he briefly, irrationally thought it was the dark-skinned man come back from the dead. But no. It was the security guard, the one who'd been patrolling the room, trapped under a large chunk of wall or ceiling, gasping for breath, rambling about "the painting." And that was when John remembered.

He looked around at the walls of the gallery. Some of the paintings were mostly intact, obviously farther away from the blast site. Some walls had been so totally ruined that there was no hope for the art that had hung on them. All that art, blown to pieces.

The security guard continued rambling, the only real intelligible words, "The Vermeer." John's head was pounding, but still he tried to remember where the painting had been, finally finding its wall. He didn't look down when he heard the gurgling speech, the horrid sound that came with death. As if the guard had been able to transfer his own thoughts to John, suddenly all John could think about was the Vermeer.

It wasn't out of the way, so he pushed his way to where the painting had once been. The wall was blank, but on the ground, he saw the canvas. Its frame had been shattered, one stubborn edge still clinging to the painting itself. He reached down, ripping the last scrap of wood from it, wiping his hands on his clothes before he picked the painting up, scared to death at the thought of getting blood on a Vermeer. He had to get it out of there. It would burn, or be crushed and ruined, if he let it stay.

Reaching the exit sign was hazy, and he had to carefully set the painting down out of harm's way while he pushed debris aside so he could open the door. He tucked the Vermeer under his arm and forced the door open, the night air instantly clearer, even though he could still smell the smoke on the breeze. But it was better than the dark and threatening blackness of the gallery.

He walked slowly up the side alley outside the door, making his way up toward the street in front of the museum. Up ahead he could see yellow tape and the seizure-inducing flash of police lights. The crowd was back behind the tape, the area immediately around the museum cordoned off. When John reached the tape, he stepped behind it with the rest of the masses, watching the emergency vehicles and police work outside the front doors of the Hickman.

"Why aren't any of them going inside?" he asked the man next to him.

"There's more than one bomb," he said. He was a wiry character, dark hair and eyes, in a white T-shirt that seemed pristine after the dirt and grime of the gallery. The man didn't seem to notice John, not really. He, like all of the other bystanders, was far too preoccupied to tear his eyes away from the spectacle. "They had been doing rescue work, but they found the other bomb, so they called everyone out till they could make it safe again." John thought that the man seemed a little too happy about all this, but chocked it up to human beings being macabre and terrible, always gawking at the disaster, never able to look away.

John could have been stark naked and no one would have noticed him. And he took some comfort in that fact as he gave one last glance over the scene before turning and walking off down the street.

... ... ...

John was on the verge of passing out when he finally let himself into his tiny room. It was little more than a hotel, just a bedroom and bathroom, but he had been incapable of handling much more since returning from Afghanistan. He set the painting down on top of his dresser, pulling his coat off and draping it over a chair. He turned on every single light, as if that would somehow make the evening more cheerful.

He knew he couldn't do anything until he got the death off him. His clothes were a mess, beyond help, really. They would be discarded at a later date.

In the harsh glare of the bathroom light, he looked himself over, finding cut after cut, including a very impressive one at his temple that made him wince when he brought a finger to it. But he supposed that he was untouched compared to a lot of people.

The blood washed away in the shower as if the whole disaster had never even happened.

He found clean clothes in one of his suitcases and sat down on the edge of his bed, feeling only marginally better. And he lasted as long as it took to dress before he thought he would go crazy in the room.

Outside, the streets were mostly empty, due in part to the late hour, and, he was sure, due in part to the Hickman bombing. It was easy enough for him to slip unnoticed into a pharmacy on the next block, hood of his jacket up to try and conceal the cut. The other customers didn't pay him any mind. He was a ghost to them.

Still, he felt jittery as he picked up first aid supplies, feeling like any second someone would question him or worse, recognize him as having been at the Hickman. But that was irrational, he kept telling himself, grabbing a small home sewing kit and hunting down the aisles for easy food.

By the time he returned to his room, he was a nervous wreck, on the verge of a full panic, and it took nearly fifteen minutes for him to calm down.

He sat again on the edge of his bed, reaching for the remote on the side table to turn the television on. All the major networks were reporting live from the Hickman, detailing what little authorities knew.

"Earlier this evening, during the opening of the Lost Vermeer exhibit, disaster struck the up and coming Hickman Gallery when a bomb went off in the museum. When emergency services arrived on the scene, a second bomb was found, and crews are still working to make sure that the second bomb is properly defused. This has resulted in nearly all emergency personnel being removed from the building. It is unknown at this time how many victims are still inside, and whether those still inside are alive or dead. Emergency personnel have already reported three deaths, and many more taken to nearby hospitals for treatment. Little else is known at this time." Behind the reporter, John could still see the hordes of people, which had only grown since he'd left the scene.

What if all the people he had seen at the gallery were dead now? What if he was the only survivor from their room?

His head was pounding, an incessant headache, and as a doctor, he logically knew he should go get checked out. But also as a doctor, he decided it wasn't worth it, that surely he was fine. He had had worse, after all. Just exhausted. Some sleep would help.

But sleep never came that night.

... ... ...

John stayed in his room for days, ordering in whatever food could be delivered so he wouldn't have to face the rest of the world with his healing cuts and bruises. He looked like he had seen far better days, like someone who had gotten in a particularly nasty street fight. There was no way he could go outside. Or so he told himself. Food delivered, newspaper delivered just outside his door every morning. He had everything he needed.

It was two days before he was able to sleep, and at that point, it was less a matter of falling asleep and more of a matter of collapsing from exhaustion. He expected more nightmares than he had, finally deciding that Afghanistan had raised the threshold for what his subconscious considered frightening.

He read the newspaper obsessively every day and became a television news addict, tracking any and all developments on the Hickman bombing. Everyone was upset, not just because of the tragedy itself and the loss of lives resulting from it, but also because of all the works of art that were destroyed.

"As teams scour the Hickman site in desperate attempts to recover some of the paintings, the crown jewel of the gallery, a newly discovered Vermeer, remains missing, presumed destroyed."

John's eyes flitted to his dresser, where the painting still sat, untouched for days. It haunted him, but he told himself that it was safer here than it was in the wreckage of the Hickman.

But it shouldn't be so near a lamp, he decided, and he got to his feet to pick the painting up from the dresser, setting it on the bed for a moment while he dragged out his largest suitcase. He left some clothes in it for padding, but threw most of the contents onto the room's floor. Gently, he lifted the painting and lowered it into the suitcase, putting a few more articles of clothing on top of it to cushion it. He zipped the suitcase and slid it under the bed. There. No damage from light or heat or anything.

He told himself over and over that day that he needed to give the painting back, but every time the thought occurred to him, he worried that if he came forward with it that he would be arrested for theft instead of thanked for preserving the Vermeer. And whether or not he would admit to himself, over the days he'd spent in seclusion, he'd begun to feel as if the Vermeer was somehow attached to him now, some extension of himself. Whenever he asked himself why he took it in the first place, he would rationalize: I probably had a concussion and was traumatized and had just survived an explosion that triggered the hell out of me and I was trying to save it I was trying to do the right thing. But then when he asked himself why he still had it, all logical answers about arrests aside, his most frequent thought was: I just don't know what else to do. It was a weak answer, and he knew it, but his times of greatest anxiety had been when he wasn't near the painting, like that first night when he'd gone to the pharmacy, or the fleeting seconds in the hallway picking up the newspaper. The more distance between himself and the Vermeer, the worse the entire situation made him feel.

It wasn't as if such a scenario was ever covered in med school or basic training.

At least he could be grateful that no one in London knew he was even at the Hickman that night. His phone had remained as quiet as ever, no concerned acquaintances to annoy him, no questions to be asked. And since no police or other officials had shown up at his door for his firsthand account of the bombing, he began to believe he was in the clear. The last thing he wanted to do was discuss it. There was something sort of comforting about the fact that no one seemed to remember that he existed. It made his life easier. No one knew he was there that night. Security cameras were likely all destroyed, and he had paid in cash and hadn't seen anyone in days. He had disappeared.

A few days after the bombing, the newspaper did a huge front page story about it all, a memoriam for the victims. "The greatest tragedy of the decade," the journalist called it. And it did seem awfully tragic when put in this context, a list of those dead in the explosion. The paper had gotten pictures of nearly all of them, from friends and family members he assumed, and had their names and ages under their photos. A grim thing to see first thing in the morning. John didn't even try to count how many photos he saw. There were so many.

He looked over the different faces. A woman in pink named Jennifer Wilson. The owner of the gallery, a severe looking woman named Wenceslas. Further down the list was the dark-skinned man who had given the ring to John, Chatterjee they called him. And Alex Woodbridge, the desperate dying security guard who had told him to take the Vermeer.

Well he didn't explicitly tell you to take it. He was just babbling about it.

John pushed the thought away.

There was a press conference on television later that night, headed by a curly-haired woman named Donovan and a DI named Lestrade. They talked about how the police were classifying the bombing as a terror strike, that threat levels in London were critical and that security would be tightened in what he called "vulnerable places" (other museums, major tourist attractions, government buildings). The police weren't sure who was to blame, and John got the impression that they were almost desperately grasping for leads in a case where no leads were likely to present themselves. They didn't even seem all that sure that it actually was a terrorist act. It could have just as easily been an isolated madman, or a particularly vicious group of garden variety monsters. But terror strike sounded quite a bit more official than just bomber.

John glanced again at the paper surrounding him on his bed, the DI talking on and on about what people could do if they wanted to help the victims and families of victims, charity of all levels and standing in solidarity. John just tuned him out, staring at the picture of the Chatterjee man staring up at him.

And that was when he really remembered the ring as an actual object instead of merely a fleeting thought.

He stared at his ruined coat across the room, still slung over the chair where he'd left it that first night. John had considered trying to repair it as he had attempted to do with his shirt with the home sewing kit he'd bought – how different could it be from sutures, really? – but in the end he hadn't even bothered. The tear was too large, the cloth too soaked in blood. It had been far easier to leave it where it was, trying to forget it even existed at all.

John crossed the room, reaching into the pocket of the coat, pulling the ring out. Safe and sound. He rinsed the blood off of it in the bathroom and held it up to the light. It was pretty, gold band with a red stone. Not a wedding ring, just a regular piece of jewelry. But pretty. He walked back into his room, setting the ring down on his bedside table, trying to remember what the man had said to him in the gallery. Baker Street. 220-something.

A few hours later he finally remembered: 221. And something about a shop.

He sighed. He had slept fitfully the night before, and while he hadn't noticed any pain in his leg while escaping the museum, he certainly noticed after the fact, the same old pain creeping up on him with a vengeance. A cruel joke, he thought, since his cane was part of the gallery rubble. He chided himself for not buying a new one from the pharmacy that night, but these practical thoughts kept being pushed from his head by the ring. He would have to deal with it at some point. It wasn't like the painting. He had been given clear instructions on what to do with the ring to an extent.

Thinking that perhaps returning the ring to its rightful owner would somehow ease his conscience, that it might help him sleep at night to put at least part of this to rest, he turned the television off and swore to himself that whenever he could bring himself to leave his room next, that he would go deal with the man's ring.

But when his conscience asked what he should do about the painting, he ignored it, and did his best to try to fall asleep.