Title: A Single Life
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, War
Summary: Written for kink meme. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson belong together, no matter what the age, what their lives may be, they are two parts of a single whole.
Once upon a time he had a name, a face, a life. But that was before the war. Before his face had been the last thing dying men saw as they slipped into oblivion.
He was fighting for his country, doing the only decent thing he could. He was saving men that would die on the field without him, saving men no one had any hope left for. Boys abandoned in a foreign land to die.
The day he had left he had a name, a face, a life.
He had been a child.
It had been weeks, months, since that first day.
All the men he knew on his first day in France were dead. They all seemed to die in his arms.
They believed in him, they cried out as if he could save them. Men with blood filled lungs looked at him with hope. Men eviscerated spent their last breath pleading his name.
In the dead of night he could hear their cries, their screams. Every night he woke trying to get to them as they bled out from major arteries, from shrapnel that cut them into ribbons. His friends, his fellow soldiers reduced to bloody heaps in his memory, in his nightmares.
Other men called him lucky.
The only survivor of his squad.
Some joked he would outlive his new squad, these strangers who called him the name on a coat he took from a dead man.
Once upon a time he had been a child. He had a name, a face, a life.
He watched as these new men fell around him. He threw together bandages, battled to keep blood in and then left them, sending them to fates unknown, never asking if the men that fell at his feet survived the trip to the makeshift hospitals. Too many times he had heard the answer. Too many times had he been the last thing a man saw in this world.
Each day he wondered. Would it be today? Tomorrow?
Will today be the day I die?
New soldiers were arriving every day, replacing the stilled bodies he had sent away in pain and blood with only a few layers of gauze holding them together. New children with guns, new bodies to watch be destroyed.
And then it happened.
He didn't scream, didn't cry out but he saw him fall all the same. He watched as the man's lithe body fell to the ground; he could almost hear the soft hiss of air out of his mouth as he ran toward him.
His eyes were clear and grey, they stared up at him not like he would save him, not as if he were the angel of death, dirty and emaciated, but rather he looked up at him with a strange familiarity. A curiosity that had died in the eyes of every other man in this country.
His arm had been shot straight through, blood saturated his sleeve but it had missed the bone.
A thrill of hope shot threw him, a feeling alien and shocking.
He could save this man. There was no doubt that if he could get him off this field he would live. Finally a reason for him to live, a reason to his life here.
A single saved life.
He pressed the wound to stem the bleeding; his meager supplies were enough to wrap the wound. Unused syringes of Morphine rolled against his fingers and instinctively he held one, ready to stop the screaming, to quiet it, but the man beside him was not screaming, only his deep haggard breathes betrayed he was in any pain. He looked at the man's face, ready to see agony, to see pleading or demanding, desperation in all its forms.
Clear grey eyes looked up at him with wonder and a hint of a smile lingered beneath a pointed nose.
"Have we met before?"
He dropped a roll of gauze into the mud, watched as its clean white turned brown and fell away from them.
"No." The man mumbled to himself, under his breath but not trying to conceal his words. "I would remember your face." He winced as the bandage pulled tight around his arm.
The blood soaked through instantly and he could not help but wonder what arteries or veins the bullet could have torn through.
"Can you move?" His voice was thick with disuse and raspy as gravel but the man on the ground didn't seem to mind. His grey eyes flitted once over his face as if looking for something and nodded. Together they scrambled into a shallow trench as their fellow infantrymen shot into the narrowing strip of no mans land.
"You saved me."
His voice sounded like home. It sounded like safety. It recalled warm beds and skies without shellfire. It recalled a life he had almost forgotten existed.
"Its nothing."
He should get back out there. He should drag more nameless bodies and broken boys back to the trenches they should have stayed in. But no one is yelling for him. No one is screaming. Maybe they are all dead.
"My life sir is not nothing." He lifted himself laboriously to one elbow, his long body laying in mud, his pristine bandage already dark with grime. "Please, your name."
He took a breath as shellfire hit nearby, a cloud of dust drifted over them. Somewhere a man screamed and fell silent. "Gregson." He muttered with his inhuman voice.
The man was pale, almost alabaster as he lay in his mud puddle. Was it shock and blood loss that stole his color or was it his true shade? Against the black hair that fell into his face he could almost be made of marble if not for the finite scratches on his skin marring him with crimson.
"Your real name." The man waits until he gets a look of stunned surprise before he speaks again. "Next time you take another man's jacket make sure he is at least approximately your own size. Now quick your name."
Another shell hit somewhere behind them, dirt sprayed over their bodies. Too close. Above them was a call to retreat to their stronghold, men screaming as gunfire filled the air.
"We have to go." He held out a hand to the fallen man but a slender hand grasped his own and pulled him down with surprising strength.
"Your name." Grey eyes only inches away from his own blue. He could feel the other mans breath on his face, his miracle.
"Watson. John Watson."
Just like that the fallen stranger gave him back his name, his life.
He stood again, ready to run, ready to retreat.
He heard it the way he heard a million gunshots. A million anguished cries.
He felt it like fire exploding in his shoulder, like metal cutting him to ribbons, a mass of bloody flesh.
His day had come.
He fell forward, his vision blacked out as the world rushed toward him. The scream he recognized as his own died on his lips. He would rather die in silence than become someone else's nightmare.
"WATSON!"
Thin muscled arms found their way around him, lifting him from the dirt. Elegant hands ransacked his supplies and applied them to his mutilated shoulder until another wretched scream was torn from his throat.
He was moving, being carried over a man's shoulder. Blood poured into his face, into his eyes.
He was going to die.
An eternity passed before they stopped moving, before each pulse of his heart wasn't forcing more blood free of his body and he was lowered to the ground.
"I NEED A MEDIC!"
Long cold fingers held his face. He opened his eyes and his one saved soul was looking at him with a strained smile and grey eyes that pierced him as deep as the bullet had.
"Well Doctor Wastson it seems we will be spending some time together in hospital."
For the first time since the war began for him he smiled, albeit small and pained, as if the nameless medic had died out there and Watson was waking up for the first time.
"Please." He mocked with a strained voice and shinning irony. "My saviors name."
The grey eyed mans smile this time seemed to come from his very soul, it lit his face from deep within. The medic was falling to his knees at their side when his voice drowned out all the sounds of war and pain around them
"Holmes. Sherlock Holmes"