Before reading, please note: there is minor character death in this story. John Watson, at the beginning, is 30 years old. During the dream he is 28. The ages I have taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's canon. See the end of this work for full notes.
As John Watson recoils from the force of the bullets ripping viciously through his abdomen, he remembers Afghanistan.
While the world around him tilts in Hollywood-esque slow motion, he thinks about the first time he was shot.
With his vision tunneling rapidly and the skin of his palm grazing against the damp warehouse concrete as he tries and fails to catch himself, London's grey drizzle melts into familiar burning sand and sun and endless sky.
Kandahar province.
The last traces of the city fade away and he finds himself standing rather than lying in the desert, conscious and altogether unconcerned that he had apparently broken several laws of physics and was no longer suffering from bullet wounds. Distantly he realizes he must be dreaming.
Feeling distant, John turns his head, sees an unimpressive mountain chain to his left, sitting lonely and tired beneath the unforgiving sun. To his right he sees only hungry desert, desert that he is positive doesn't end with the faraway horizon. Twisting around, he can just make out a dusty and sagging town directly behind him. Maiwand, some part of his brain supplies helpfully. God, does he remember Maiwand.
Time moves slowly, it seems, in his memories. Twenty minutes pass before he wonders why he has wandered outside of the base alone, without goggles, helmet, body armor or gun. Another half-hour goes by before he realizes he is no longer dressed for chasing criminals through back London alleys, and instead for a firefight in Afghanistan. The old weight of his Browning pressing into the small of his back greets him like an old friend, cold but reassuring, while the sullen heaviness of the issued SA80 hanging over his shoulder taunts him with the persistence of an insane ex-lover.
He had always hated that fucking gun.
She was a bitch to care for and use, as the one he'd been given was dysfunctional at best. She had been used by three other soldiers before him, three other obviously dense soldiers who had never learned proper treatment of firearms. The sight was off by half a millimeter and super glued in place, the magazine absolutely refused to be driven home until at least the fourth try, and occasionally a bullet became wedged inside the rusty, dinged barrel. John preferred his handgun, his sleek and shining beauty of a Browning L9-A1, handed to him with a cautionary word the minute he stepped off the plane in Kuwait, along with his helmet and Kevlar vest. She shot cleanly and straight, required little service, and for the first three months of his deployment served as his teaching tool while he learned how to shoot from distances.
The body armor he was now wearing was heavy, but heavier still was his pack, and the fatigues made sweat dripped down off his forehead to land on the tip of his nose. Bloody Afghanistan. Though an eternity had passed since he landed here in this fever dream, and it was logically expected, he still found himself shocked that already he was sweating like a damn pig in August. As he scrubbed his face with a gloved hand, he heard a voice called from ahead, "Oi! Watson! The hell are you doing, mate?!"
John's head snaps up, eyes searching frantically for the source of the voice, that voice, the one he hasn't heard in over a year, the one that belonged to a man who, until half a second ago, had been dead. His chapped, sunburned lips mouth the name, but no sound or breath slips past, not until he clears his dry throat and tries again. "Bill?"
A figure, approximately four meters ahead on the gravelly road, dressed sensibly in fatigues, waves. Quite suddenly, struck by the gesture, it dawns on John that he isn't dreaming but remembering. He remembers that wave, how he had stopped on the side of the Kandahar-Herat Highway to pick up a broken piece of bottle glass that glinted in the sun and reminded him of the stars. How Bill Murray had been the first of the other three men to notice he wasn't with them, how he'd paused to call for John.
How a single, savage gunshot cracked through the air.
It had been a routine assignment. Their superior, while smoking a Cuban, ordered them to leave the town and walk the road several kilometers in order to meet an Afghan National Army envoy from Mahajerin, and then to escort the civilians the envoy was carrying back into the safety of the city limits. They hadn't even been gone an hour. It is the twenty-seventh of July, 2009.
There were four of them assigned, a medic (John), a sharpshooter (Bill), a blond and cocky EOD named Patrick McIntosh and a rather young guard who was called Victor Smith. A scruffy, white, malnourished dog called Bobbie had decided to tag along, trailing after McIntosh and Smith. John and Bill were on loan, as their commander liked to call it, from the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers to the 66th Berkshire Regiment, for two weeks while the rest of their company was on leave in Kabul. Both had pled to stay on, wanting no rest. He remembered, Colonel Foxe had been weary, but agreeable.
Taliban activity in the area was minimal, and had, up until then, been limited to several IEDs that had yet to cause any casualties. The town was too small and too remote to be more than a blip on their radar, one of the reasons the crew hadn't brought along an armored vehicle or have their guns drawn. McIntosh was there, walking at the very front of the group slowly, eyes focused only on the ground, to see that they didn't blow their legs off. It was fairly early that morning when the first shot dropped him like a ragdoll.
John, walking a good bit behind the rest, was the first to notice and react. "Move!" He screamed to the others, sprinting forward and off the road zig-zaggedly, making himself as bad a target as possible, and pulling the rifle off his shoulder at the same time. Cover. They needed cover.
It was only luck that an abandoned collection of shacks stood ten meters off the side of the road, away from the direction of the shooting. A second bullet whizzed by his head as he changed direction slightly and motioned for the other two to head for the biggest building.
Assessing while he ran, John determined that McIntosh had been killed instantly. The bullet had hit him right between the eyes—they were dealing with a long-distance sniper.
Shit.
He kept his eyes on Bill and Smith while more shots rang around them. Dust puffed up in great columns as they were missed, until one struck Smith in the back of his right knee when he had just made it to the doorway. He went down immediately. Bill, just behind him, bent for the barest of seconds to haul the young soldier up over one shoulder and push past the entrance of the hovel, seconds before John himself made it. Bobbie had scarpered.
The thick wood and metal of the building blocked most shots from coming through. The shooter was fairly far away, then. Kneeling next to the injured Smith Bill had deposited carefully in the middle of the room on the packed dirt floor, John tossed Bill his walkie-talkie and instructed him to contact the envoy first, stopping them from coming this way, and to then radio back to Maiwand to ask for immediate backup. Slipping his pack off his shoulders, John switched into doctor mode.
Smith was unconscious, lying in a slightly unnatural-looking position with his arms at stiff angles away from his body and his mouth hanging open. Blood nearly the color of pitch pooled beneath him, and his breath was labored and quick. John carefully examined the man's wound, thankful he had already passed out, from pain or blood loss, it was difficult to tell. It was a clean shot, straight through, but it was bleeding heavily and would likely not heal to the point where Smith could put much weight on it ever again. Digging around in his field med kit, he found his CAT and locked it just above Smith's knee. He had almost finished cleaning up when he heard Bill cry out behind him, though it sounded like it was more in surprise than pain.
John, alert, moved over to him, where he now lay groaning on the ground. "My leg, Johnny, God, my leg…" A single hole had been shot through his clothing into his upper thigh. John paled, shushed him and set about extracting the bullet, while trying to stay turned away from weak spots in the building's exterior. His femoral artery had been nicked; both of them were quickly becoming bloody messes.
"Shit. Shit, shit shit shit." John murmured biting his lip, trying to quickly stanch the flow of blood. Bill was losing too much, was paling far too quickly, "Bill, are you hemophilic?" A sharp nod from his comrade. "Fuck. What the hell are you doing in a warzone, you bloody masochist?!"
The corners of Bill's mouth lifted slightly and he huffed out a small laughing breath at John's strained and somewhat hysterical tone. Though they both knew he could remain calm in a crisis, and how hard he was trying.
Outside, John could hear the crunch of tires on gravel, backup arriving from Maiwand. Beneath him, Bill closed his eyes, exhaling. Time slowed and blurred. Two soldiers John recognized from the base burst into the shack, one carried out Smith delicately and the other helped John with Bill, setting him into the back of a truck.
Bill had taught John how to shoot. He had learned accuracy, timing, all from Bill Murray, his best mate since the recruiting office. They had waterbombed their superiors together.
Bloody idiot.
Numbly, John calculated the odds of a hemophilic surviving a severed femoral artery. Numbly, he realized in was 0.
Climbing into the passenger seat of the truck, John heard one more shot ring out, and almost immediately after felt the skin of his shoulder rip open. He hissed in shock, and again in pain when the backup soldiers pulled him through the door and shot away down the road.
The pain was incredible. It felt as if his shoulder was on fire. Here is where his memory begins to go haywire, fuzzy from pain and exhaustion and eventually medication, where the very last thing he remembers for some time is glancing hazily into the back of the truck and seeing Bill's peaceful smile.
He wakes up three days later in an army hospital with his arm in a sling, high on morphine and feeling very much in need of a strong cup of English tea.
When the nurse comes round to deliver him an antibiotic and a fresh drip, she tells him with moist eyes that Bill died four minutes after his wound was inflicted. She also says, thinking to alleviate some of his worry, that when they found him, he was smiling.
John wishes he were comforted by this fact.
Ten days after waking up, and seven after he is allowed to wander around, he is sent to Kabul via chopper and from there, stashed on a connecting military flight to London, along with two other wounded men and six whose terms of service are up. The plane touches down at around midnight local time and he steps off to be greeted with the first rain he's seen in weeks. He decides it's symbolic.
It isn't until several painfully dreary months pass in a London-grey daze, at the beginning of October, that his cookie cutter physical therapist declares him, the depressed soldier with a trembling hand and a psychosomatic limp, "mint condition." He has just recently decided that mint condition isn't exactly his area, has placed his gun (illegally) cocked in the drawer of his desk, written a single entry for the therapeutic blog that is set to publish itself at midnight, and found his heart aching to be with his best friend, when his life catches fire.
He meets Sherlock Holmes.
The blog entry is deleted.
He keeps his gun with him in this new life of his, always cocked but never pressed under his own chin. This, too, is a part of the remembering dream.
When he blearily opens his eyes again for the first time after the second occasion he was shot, noting that waking up seems mostly the same as the first, John Watson peers over to the couch in his hospital room and to the long, curly-haired man drowsing upon it. It's been long then, if he's sleeping.
He drags the last of his thoughts out of the lonely expanse of Afghanistan and refocuses on the new war he's fighting in, and the new best mate he's fighting for.
A/N: Please note that I have mixed BBC canon with ACD canon, and also with real-life occurrences. I realize that in BBC canon Bill Murray survived and was a nurse. The date I picked for the day John was shot is the date of the Battle of Maiwand of the Second Anglo-Afghan war, which we are told in A Study in Scarlet is the battle John was wounded in. The guns I have mentioned are standard issue for British soldiers. The reason John and Bill are not with the Fusiliers in this story is that at the time of the Battle of Maiwand, that regiment was actually stationed near the Khyber Pass. While the 66th Berkshire was at the battle, the two other named soldiers and one named colonel in this work are fictitious. The dog, Bobbie, was really at the battle. I have never before been to Afghanistan, nor have I been in the army, so please forgive me any mistakes on that front.
Thank you for reading and suffering through this note! Please, feel free to leave a review, comment, concern, or even a simple hello!
-With regards, googly-eyed-ghost