Disclaimer: I own nothing, absolutely nothing.
A/N: Well, I've been reading in this place for a while and I simply had to add my own Post-Reichenbach fic to the pile. Something that's a little bent, as my mind is usually. To this end I've been forced to make up situations that do not and will not exist in real life, but if Moffat, Gatiss, et all, can blow up a plane full of dead people, I hope I can be forgiven my own contrivances.
Chapter One: Out of the Deep into the Dark
Even when he was very little, John had always imagined his mind to be a plain. Nothing fancy like Sherlock's Mind Palace; just a simple, wide open plain. When he first imagined it (he's not old enough to wonder why he does this at first, he just does and it makes so many things so much easier to handle), the sun shined in an impossibly blue sky, the grass was lush and full, wildflowers were plentiful and fragrant. A slight, cool breeze perfected the place. All his thoughts, memories and knowledge dotted the plain in a wonderful, ordered disarray. It was a place he could run wild, be free and be happy.
The plain has changed as the years marched on, but there is a single constant, off to one side of the plain (it's on the right, he decided that early on. Makes a sort of sense, as he is left-handed) it all ends abruptly. The cliff appears without warning, it is completely sheer, dropping down farther than can be seen, and it is altogether menacing.
*()*()*
Doctors without Borders accepted him without question, for which John is grateful. He spent a year in Africa before things with the Syrian conflict heated up. Turkey throwing in with the rebels escalated the fighting, as well as the death tolls, and refugee camps sprung up close to the Turkish border. Without even thinking, John immediately asked for a transfer to the one of the camp hospitals.
There is a veritable sea of people (mostly women and children) that have fled the violence. A massive tent city has been erected, complete with periodic water and food shortages, and a lack of sanitation. Every day he fights death in the form of disease, hunger, and the casualties of a war that comes closer to them each day. John's hours in the clinic are long, and everything is altogether exhausting.
It is a good (or strange) sort of exhausting though. The work wears John out, but he feels useful. The warzone is altogether different from the one that he fought in, but it is still the same old story. In a way, this place is a perfect mirror of what his life has become. He goes through the days/weeks/years just like any of the displaced refugees, caught in the murky sort of limbo of a life without any sort of stability and no idea when any might be available.
John isn't content with things, but he doesn't yearn for better either, so maybe he's actually worse off than the refugees.
*()*()*
At fourteen - the time of The Incident - John was something of a big deal on the rugby team. Small, but extremely fast and agile, he was hard to catch. If that wasn't enough, he was strong and scrappy, quite capable of delivering some good hits. A perfect all around player. He actually has little memory of The Incident. The doctors said it was a consequence of his concussion, but John knows better. He doesn't remember much of what happened because he fell off the cliff.
Everything happened in the middle of a match against a school he can't even remember the name of now. The other team had a big lad on their side, their main hitter. He was tall and broad, outweighed John by a good three stone, all of it muscle. He obviously had a real future in the sport. That is, if any of hits had actually been legal. As it was, John and his teammates were getting soundly walloped by the big lout. The refs, blind as bats, of course. John remembered getting the ball pitched back to him and seeing the other kid turn to come for him. He remembered tucking the ball and running all out, straight at that blighter, letting out a crazed yell, and that's… about it.
There is nothing more until the moment that he snaps back to himself, as he's fighting being dragged off the field by his coach, the refs, and a parent or two. Then he sees the blood, the kid's unconscious form on the field, his arm bent in a couple of impossible angles (broken in three places he finds out later), and the sick, white, shocked look on the faces of his mates. John feels the pain in his knuckles, and sees the bloody abrasions, and he knows instantly. He understands with distinct clarity that the cliff on the right side of his mind plain is the edge of his sanity. Falling off has disastrous consequences.
*()*()*
John is waiting in the doorway of the tiny, dingy break room that they have in the clinic for the pretty young American nurse that he's taken to eating his meals with. She's wrapping up a Skype conversation with her parents on one of the few computers they have. He listens in as her parents give her warm praises and well wishes from their nice, comfortable sitting room thousands of miles away, and John thinks that they are probably just as naive as their young daughter. Taking in the room at a glance, he sees easily the reason for their ignorance. She's lying to them.
He chooses not to say anything when she's done. "You hungry?" he asks.
"Oh God, yes. Starving!"
He nods in the direction of the small canteen they have and she follows closely. The walk is short and soon they are both sitting down to their meagre meal. They are usually a companionable pair, they can enjoy the silence or talk about nothing for hours. Right now, however, there is a semi-tense silence, heavy with words unspoken.
"It's good to hear from them, you know. Good to know that everything is alright at home." Abby tentatively tries to break through the awkwardness between them.
"Hmm" John's reply is non-committal because he doesn't truly want to get into Abby's deeper issues right now, he doesn't want to upset her.
"They'd worry if I didn't check in every now and then, but it's kinda hard, you know?"
"Abby," John sighs slightly, apparently there is no avoiding this conversation. "You know that no one would think less of you if you went home. Right?"
"Oh, I couldn't do that...no, I just couldn't"
"You could."John counters.
"No, what we do here is important, these people need – "
John can't help but roll his eyes, "Please don't give me some speech about The Work, Abby. The only real humanitarians here are Carter and Djatej. You came for a bit of adventure."
She's glaring daggers at him now, but he can't help but press his point. "You put up banana leaves in the window of the break room that's in the camera frame to give the appearance that you're in a jungle, and you lied to them about the time, which means that you don't want your parents to know where you are. It could be because you don't want them worrying, but they are worried anyway, so it's more likely that they wouldn't approve of you being here, something you wouldn't really care much about if you were a passionate humanitarian."
"At the end of your conversation, you asked your parents to give your best everyone at home, which suggests that you don't have close friends, else you would have been more specific. Lack of close friends means that you lived with your parents before coming out here, and that they are easily mislead by a couple of banana leaves means that you came from a small town, likely were very little ever happened. Ergo, you came out here for some excitement or adventure."
Abby's colour has risen and she doesn't look at him. She doesn't bother to deny anything either, so John knows that he's hit enough right to make her angry. He catches her hand from across the table and looks at her compassionately, "You came out here, and it hasn't been anything like you expected. There's more death, more senselessness, and it isn't at all exciting, it's simply tragic. You don't like it, you don't sleep well, and your nerves are beginning to show." John pauses now that he's got her attention and he sees her eyes begin to water, "It's alright to admit that you can't handle it. It's not failing to admit that you want to go home."
Abby nods as she looks away. She takes a deep breath to compose herself before she looks back at John. "You're right, you're right." She runs her free hand through her hair and lets out another sigh, "but I haven't decided yet."
He pats her hand as he lets go "That's okay. Just think on it."
She turns a small, watery smile on him, "You've managed to dissect why I'm here, but what made you want to come here?"
John answers her smile with a brittle one of his own, "I guess you could say I'm running away from my life."
*()*()*
As John gets older, some of the landscape of the plain changes, he's found it convenient to make some hollows where he can push dark memories (like the day his father had had enough and left them, and the night his mother succumbed to her cancer) and hide them from normal sight. Military life brings a bit of order to the chaos of the place. Knowledge and memories are ranked for priority and obviously those that are useful for saving lives come first. War has given the plain a permanent haze on the horizon, and far more sand than John would have preferred.
However the plain looks, it is eminently useful in times of stress. While under fire and facing casualties he can push back the blazing sun of the Afghan desert and draw up the gentler sun of his mind plain, with all of the information he needs at the ready and a slight breeze to calm him. Focusing in only on the immediate problem in front of him and all the solutions at hand on his plain he is quick, calculating and amazingly efficient in his work. He is clamping off an arterial bleed, feeling his imagined breeze at his back and thinking that he's got the situation in control when he is shot. It's then that John's plain becomes stained with his own blood.
Most importantly, John has never been over the edge again since The Incident. He's been pushed to the edge, he's walked there himself and peeked over, but he's never ever fallen off that immense cliff again.
*()*()*
There are quite a few airstrikes nearby these days, and John is grateful that he managed to convince Abby to go back to her family in America. She didn't need to see this, these mangled bodies that he is searching through for anyone still alive. Technically, he shouldn't be out here at all, this isn't his job, but a group of kids ran up in the early morning hours and begged him to come and help their mother. John along with a couple of other workers immediately came out in the hospital's old Land Rover, and found her. She was alive, but that was obviously temporary. If it hasn't already, crush syndrome will probably kill her within a few days. Regardless, he and the other workers loaded her up along with a few more of the wounded that met them as they drove in.
John sent them back to the camp without him, he wanted to look for more survivors, and treat them if possible. He'd ordered them to come back in four hours to the outskirts of town, and he'd have any more patients that needed transport ready and waiting. Now as he goes from destroyed building to destroyed building, calling out for anyone that needs help, he knows that anyone he finds isn't going to be in better shape than the woman form earlier, that anyone able to move has already left. He won't stop though, something keeps him going forward. Something keeps him swallowing the dread, ignoring the flashbacks to eerily similar situations in a different country, and continuing in this foolhardy quest.
He's just out of one building when he sees a Jeep coming down the road, the whole thing packed with men carrying very large guns, M-16's. John knows that he's already been spotted, and that he's in deep trouble. He curses his pride, or foolishness, or whatever kept him from going back with the others. He's got his hands up already when they surround him, pointing their guns at him.
"I'm a doctor," John tries in a few languages. "I'm not armed," and he's not, his gun didn't come with him to this warzone, and he curses that too.
One of the men steps forward and relieves John of his bag. Another comes up from behind and roughly binds his hands together behind his back. Together they push him to the Jeep and manhandle him into the back. John ignores his instincts screaming at him to fight back, and doesn't resist the ill treatment. He chooses not to say anything more, and none of his captors have deigned to speak to him either. He doesn't know why they decided to take him, but he knows he'll find out soon.
*()*()*
One would think that living and working with Sherlock would mean that John is constantly within striking distance of the edge, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sherlock actually keeps John firmly in the middle of the plain. Through all of the things that they do, all of the craziness that following criminals and solving mysteries entails, Sherlock gives John purpose. It's his job to make sure that the bloody idiot doesn't end up dead due to his own reckless stupidity. Yes, he feels like he might always be at least a step behind the great detective, but he's managed to keep up far better than anyone before him, and John views that as quite the accomplishment.
It is losing Sherlock, losing that sense of purpose, failing to protect the man that he's - he was -closer to than any of his actual family, that sends John back to the cliff's edge. He knows that he's walking along the edge, and he knows that it is dangerous. He can see it at his very feet, the deep, dark, completely unknown realm of his mind. He lost several things when Sherlock jumped, happiness, confidence, a sense of belonging, but oddly he's also lost a little bit of the fear of his precarious location. Sometimes John wonders about the fall.
*()*()*
John's been able to count the days, he knows that he's been captive now for three of them. He doesn't have any of the normal cues of sunlight or darkness, but he can tell when it gets colder, and he can tell by the growth of his own beard, and the changing stenches of his captors.
From his interrogations, John's gathered that they do not believe his claims of being a doctor, of being from the camp just a little ways away. Apparently, he's a spy. Nothing they've done to him has been too severe as of yet, but he knows it's early days. The room that he's in is completely windowless, and doesn't even have a chair. He is simply bound hands and feet and sitting on the floor. They've given him a little in the way of water, but no food. John knows it's only a matter of time before they kill him.
The door opens, and John recognizes the man that enters as Someone of Importance in the group. He's talked with this man before, and he's got a good grasp on the English language. Last time, John asked him to at least try to verify his story by checking out the camp. That the man doesn't immediately hit him or kill him gives John a small measure of hope.
"Well, Doctor, you do seem to have strayed a little far from your post," the man says as he hands a plastic cup to John.
"You've had someone in the camp then?" It's really a more of a statement than a questions, one he gets out between small sips of water.
"Yes," Someone Important says amusedly, "But I do not believe that you will like how that information changes your situation."
"Oh?"
"I was simply going to have you killed. Now, you'll be working for us, Doctor. I doubt that will please you much."
"I'm a doctor." John shrugs.
"Yes, you are. However you do not see that your occupation means you've traded a quick death for a long and tortuous one." Someone Important smiles darkly, "You see, there is nothing you can do that will allow you to leave this place alive."
*()*()*
John knows that this is bordering on madness. He can all but see Death standing there, waiting for him to follow, but John no longer wants to. He's been issued a challenge, and it's glorious. The situation in front of him is impossible, and he knows what battling that will mean. He knows that even if he succeeds he may never be back on his comfortable plain. But really, what exactly is the value of sanity anyway? Without hesitation, John leaps.
*()*()*
John can't manage to control the grin that spreads across his face, just as he can't control the slightly maniacal laughter that erupts from his chest.
"What is amusing? Do you think I am joking?"
"No, it's not... it's just... well, life. Or death if you'd prefer." John continues, still laughing. "You see, you just never know."