The sky was a bright, hazy blue. There were small wisps of clouds dotting the sea above everyone's head, and the sun was shining bright in the middle of that blue sky.
But it was grey in his eyes. He looked up, and all he could see was the grey color, devoid of life or of any emotion at all. He was not even given the privilege of seeing things in black and white, which allows at least a little bit of difference.
The funny thing was that John Watson's eyes had gotten used to seeing the color he always saw. Day and night, and every time in between, he never wanted anything more. It was why he came here… to get away from it all. It was why he relished it, the silence and the pain. Some people might say it was sick that John enjoyed being here; the way that he regarded it as an oasis or a vacation. Although their real disgust might come from the fact that John simply didn't care.
The first time he was here, he was scared but calm at the same time. The scratchy grass comforted him, got his mind off of Harry's drinking problem, his mother's rage, and his father's death. But the solitude was too much for him back then; John hadn't realized how much he had craved human interaction before almost every chance of it was stripped away from him-thrown into the rubbish bin, along with his fears and his worries.
Afghanistan had been harsh and hot, but had allowed John little time for stupid, tortured thoughts.
Now he was here again, but for different reasons. To get away from, or plunge into the nothing that had surrounded his life and cloaked his thoughts in grey. He wasn't really sure.
A young man of around thirty was wheeled into the make-shift hospital, the tent, and John was thrown back into reality. Here was what he was here to do, what he enjoyed. Here was the work that he loved for taking all of his damn concentration.
The man was of a sturdy build, tall, and pale. He had deep, chocolate brown hair that almost gleamed in the sun, falling into gentle waves around the face that was restful and almost calm. Well, it would come off as calm; if it wasn't for the blood. Scarlet streaks ran down his face, catching on his lashes like red, warm tears and staining the skin. There was a pool of blood right at the top of the man's head, and it had grown dark there, sticking the man's hair. Inspecting it closer, John realized that there was a hole there, about the size of a small stone. He wondered how the soldier had managed that one. The wound was not deep, but was obviously bleeding heavily. Aside from the head injury, the man on the portable examination table had various bruises going up the left side of his face, circling around his neck. His uniform was ripped and blood-stained, and one arm was jutting out at an odd angle.
The expression on his face was peaceful.
John set to work on his patient, gathering up white bandages and disinfectants and a damp cloth. He cleaned up the man's face as best he could, tried to get sticky blood out of chocolate hair. He wrapped fluffy, crisp bandages around the soldier's head like a turban, after cleaning the wound, and laid the damp cloth on a forehead still shining with sweat. He took the man's jacket off of him and continued to patch him, tending to bruise and broken bone alike.
It was mindless work, but not at all in a bad way. It was the kind of mindlessness that John welcomes nowadays, now that the only reason he had for thinking is gone.
Gone. He's gone. Sherlock.
The words hit John like a train, almost knocking him off his feet, and stealing all the air from his body. He staggers a little bit, stopping the fitting of a temporary cast for his patient to stare straight ahead, memories flooding his mind.
Sherlock, shooting holes in the wall with a gun. Sherlock, playing beautiful music on his violin. Sherlock, in his long coat, handcuffed to John and pulling him around like a ragdoll. Sherlock's voice, wavering for the first time since John had known him, sounding sad and old and too accepting. Much too accepting of what was going to happen.
And Sherlock's body, falling from the top of St. Bart's and slamming down onto the concrete, hard. So hard. The scarlet drips that John sees on the soldier's face only remind him of the blood that seeped out of Sherlock's broken body that day.
And fuck, it hurts. John can't bear to think of this. It was why he came back out to Afghanistan, to stop thinking and to just live, without regret and depression. To just spend his days away from the hell that 221B had become. It hadn't become what a lot of people would consider horrible, but something that was just too different. The flat was alien, all of a sudden. There were no messes to clean up, no body-parts in the fridge, and there hadn't been even the echo of a violin's song in almost a year. It was too much. It was hell.
After Sherlock's death, he had sat in the same chair, by the fire, for two months. He just sat, and he thought, and he tried to get his mind off of everything with liquor. Obviously, it hadn't been enough; he was here in Afghanistan now.
John had quit his job, because he didn't need or want it. Sherlock had left John everything, which had turned out to be quite a large sum of money; it left John wondering. Why did someone who had this kind of wealth need a flatmate? Maybe Sherlock was not as sociopathic as he tried to seem. He had wanted someone to talk to. It was a nice thought, that possibly the world's rudest and most difficult person had liked John, enough to even share a home with him. Sure, Sherlock was-had been, John reminded himself painfully- difficult and horrible and just plain mean, but he was brilliant and intimidating and had obviously cared for John. The feeling had been mutual, and to hell with it, it still was.
Why did he even try to tell himself it wasn't true? He had bloody loved Sherlock Holmes, had wanted to punch him in the face at times, but then kiss the bruise he'd made, and tangle himself up in the taller boy's arms. He had wanted to make Sherlock feel, wanted to see his eyes light up at the sight of John, to see him happy.
He didn't matter now. Sherlock was dead. He had killed himself, for Christ's sake, but not before he claimed he was just a 'fake'. Fake my arse, John thought, remembering that conversation. Sherlock, his silhouette at the top of St Bart's, had never been more real. It was impossible to fake brilliance, or true feelings. It was just as impossible to fool John, who had seen it all.
And here he was, back in a war where nobody won, where soldiers gave up their lives while their families wept and nothing was solved. Like the sacrifice Sherlock Holmes had made, because it had to be a sacrifice, or Moriarty's doing. John told himself that it was, because he wouldn't even fucking consider that Sherlock had jumped off a fucking building because he wanted to.
John pushed the thoughts away then, going back to work at his patient and thinking about nothing in particular; but all of what he thought of was grey.
/
If you looked, really looked, you could see past the battlefield. You could move your eyes away from bloody and mangled corpses; tune out the sounds of gunshots and moans of despair. The dirt that covered the ground faded into dead grass a little ways away from the fighting, away from the clash of men against men. And that yellow grass covered a hill, a rise of the ground that sat untouched, and was against the backdrop of rocks and small, dry mountains.
That night, the moon shone bright on that little hill, outlining a tree and a tall, lone figure in a rather dramatic coat that fanned out around him. The expression on his face could only be described as in pain.