~Spoilers for The Great Game, The Hound of Baskerville, and The Reichenbach Fall~
NOTE: This is my THIRD time trying to upload this story. The site is driving me up the wall: the story just won't - show - up. I've never experienced this in other fandoms... I guess Sherlock is kinda tricky. Hehe. Anyway, sorry if anyone who subscribed to me got three emails announcing this.
I heard you were abroad somewhere getting shot at. What happened?
I got shot.
John Watson didn't get scared.
You could see the looks on some men's faces. They'd smile and boast and slap you on the back, and the scorching sun covered up for them if they were pale, but after months of blood slowly wearing them down they started blinking too much, and there was something in their eyes that stayed still when their mouths moved to grin. John was more reserved, but he put any fake bravado to shame, handling everything, everything without a twitch.
He was lying, face down, breathing in the scorched red dirt floating around him. It was hot - the heavy air trapped between his shirt and his jacket, the sunlight, thick with dust, marinading his skin in sweat. Eyes wide.
"Please."
He didn't roll over, didn't move. Didn't inspect the blood dripping from the bullet in his shoulder. He was dead, he knew it, and panic had set in to stiffen his bones. Sweltering fear like he'd never tasted lay heavy like iron on his tongue. This was it. But only a moment, and maybe not so bad.
His body denied his mind like it never did, lips moving without his permission.
"Please, God, let me live."
What God - what God - what God?
oOo
Again. He had been close to explosives, and he had probably had snipers' scopes trained on him during the war. If he could think straight he would be able to assure himself that this had happened before, this kind of thing, and that it wasn't, wasn't a big deal. But being used to threaten his best friend, his only real friend, being used as a mouthpiece for a murderer - somehow, it shook him. And he didn't like that word, "somehow", because it was so vague and it gave his heart permission to thump too fast when his mind had no explanation for the fear.
You can talk, Johnny boy.
He didn't want to talk. He hated this, being the ball of string in the claws of a slick, bloody kitten, having no control. A trigger-pull away from staining the water of the swimming pool red. And yet, it was by accident that he found himself praying silently. "Please, God, let me live." He couldn't stand this.
Do or die: he pulled Moriarty back, against the tangle of wires looped around his own neck, the lights on the explosives blinking out the beats of his adrenaline-fuelled heart.
Sherlock, run!
Oh, John didn't need to survive if he was going to go that way. That would be the way he'd want it, if he was going to die. Only a split second of pain, taking the man who would burn, burn the heart out of Sherlock with him. And he didn't need to cling to life if Sherlock's gun was the thing that shook him into the dark. And so he was reassured and told himself it didn't matter, even when Moriarty's phone rang and saved their lives.
Coincidence is what makes up life, luck and bad luck.
oOo
The third time the smell of antiseptics, of white surfaces scrubbed whiter, of rubber gloves and emotionless, half-masked faces burned in his nose. Holding onto the lifeline in the darkened lab that was his mobile phone, he whispered for rescue. It was coming, the hound with glowing red eyes, the one that shouldn't have existed, but did...
This wasn't like the battlefield: this was flesh and blood against something supernatural, and for the third time in his life he was scared - he was really, properly frightened. He wouldn't let himself think about it, that was important, he'd just keep calm and wait for rescue. But there was a part of him that kept up a steady monotone of horror: his own keycard hadn't worked, why should Sherlock's? And if it took his friend more than a few minutes to get down here, he'd be dead. What if there was no rescue?
He shut the voice out, and paid no attention as it started to moan - "Please God, let me live. Please God, let me live."
oOo
He was flipping through the channels, looking for something to watch, while Sherlock read the news and growled at the blips of sound coming from the shows having their one second of screen-time.
Some sports channel showing a diamond of grass and dirt flashed though, along with the sarcastic remark of a commentator. "Three strikes and you're out, buddy."
John hit the power button. Good day for a book, maybe.
"D'you think God plays baseball?" He said.
"What are you on about?" Sherlock's eyes didn't lift from the squashed, square text flowing across his paper.
"I don't know." John looked down on the rainy London street.
"What, do you believe in God?"
"No. No, not really, no."
"Oh."
"What, do you?"
"No. Of course not."
oOo
Sherlock's face was so white. That was all that registered, for John. "I'm a doctor ... please, let me through ... please, just let me through. He's my friend. He's my friend." Pulse? (of course not). No pulse. Black-red puddle on the pavement, bright awful streaks of deep red on the pale skin. Eyes empty, transparent blue.
"Please... just..." John's mouth moved, and for the fourth time, his mind didn't register what his mouth was saying. But now the words that the coherent sections of his brain were screaming were the pleas he had denied intellectually so many times before. Because now, more than every before, he was desperate.
"Please, God, let him live."
Is it true: three strikes and you're out?