A/N: I started writing this story over five years ago, right before the beginning of my freshman year of high school. Now, I've graduated university and am getting ready to go to grad school in the fall. I'm a very different person now than I was when I began this (I'm now the kind of person who doesn't mind loosing views over an author's note) but that's okay. The girl in this story becomes a lot of different people too. That's what happens when you're young and just finding your footing in the world. Sometimes, you wake up in the morning and don't know who you are or where you fit into your family (blood or made). I stopped writing this I suppose largely because I didn't like the direction in which the show was going; I now find it callous and insensitive . But here I am now to finish it, to wrap up this part of my life and Allie's. It stays close to the show up till season 3, my OC flitting in and out like stage-crew dressed in black, but now I'm giving myself permission to let it go where it wants to. Come with me if you want. Best Wishes, Anya.
Little British Bird
Four Years Previously:
Bullets ricochet.
"John! John?"
The sun beast down onto the girl's helmet.
"Over here!"
She worms on her stomach through the sand, rifle held tightly in her hands.
"John," she whispers, pulling herself behind the smoldering wreckage of the hummer. John is tending to a man with a large piece of shrapnel in his leg.
"Here, hold down on that. Don't let up." He takes the girl's hands and guides them to the blood soaked bandage that plaster the man's calf. All the noise seems to vanish, leaving the girl hearing only John talking. Blood keeps gushing, the soaked bandage isn't helping. After a moments hesitation, Wombat strips off her jacket and shirt, holding the white tee over the bandages. With quick, practiced movements, John wraps a piece of elastic above the sergeants knee to form a tourniquet.
"Is he out?" Wombat whispers. She looks so vulnerable, the petite girl, squatting on her heels in the Afghan desert, army pants and a bra.
"Hit on the head." John sighs, placing his fingers on the mans neck. "Damn it! I'm calling it." I'm calling it. Words said out of habit, not needed deep into the red zone.
She sighs and pulls her jacket back on over her bra, zipping it up. A rough pair of hands jerks her around, and she's staring into the face of the lieutenant colonel.
"Get up and do your job!" he orders. Noise floods back into her brain: bullets and yelling.
Wombat jerks backwards.
"She's fifteen!" John yells, outraged.
"We've done our jobs keeping her safe! Now it's her turn!"
John begins to argue, but Wombat shakes her head. She looks almost calm.
It was what John has feared from the moment he was assigned to this unit: she has accepted her fate.
"It's fine John. They're right. It's time for me to do my job." She rises to her feet, rifle in hand, bullets flying all around her. "It's my job."
Wombat likes running. It helps her feel like she is outrunning bad dreams, leading them on an impossible goose chase down Baker Street. She pushes open the peeling door of 221b and hurries up the stairs to the top flat of 221e. But as she's passing the open door of the former flat, an all too familiar voice pulls at her attention. With a shriek, she throws herself at back of the short man.
"Oh my God! No, no Sherlock it's okay!" John laughs, out of breath from the girl's sudden impact.
Wombat's laugh fills the air and she puts her feet back on the ground. "John!"
"Wombat! What are you doing here?"
"I live here!"
"Here? As in, the attic?"
"Hey, don't be rude to my flat!"
"Oh, uh, Wombat, this is Sherlock Holmes, my flatmate."
They shake hands, and the girl turns to Watson. "Let me go get changed, and we should go get coffee."
She dashes out of the room, heading towards her original destination.
While no Helen of Troy, Allie Lark is, nonetheless, exceptionally pretty. She sits on the floor of her apartment in front of a mirror and brushes out her pin-straight chestnut hair. A thin, heart shaped face housed delicately green almond shaped eyes. Her face could hold the same sharpness as Sherlock, however the hardships of what she's been through have left her vulnerable and wary. Her mania of earlier has subsided, leaving her quiet and contemplative as she concentrates on running the brush through unruly strands and blocking out monsters.
"Wombat!" John calls up the stairs. "Are you ready yet?"
Setting the brush down, she slides on her bum out onto the landing. Staring up at her from the doorway of his apartment, John is surprised. He's never seen her in civilian clothes: tight jeans, knee high boots, an oversized jumper. She looks truly like an Allie in that moment: something dainty and sweet, not a mad man's plaything.
John realizes he spoke to loudly and lowers his voice to a near whisper, so as not to spook the ghost of a girl, the one that wasn't there half an hour before. "Do you want to go get some lunch?" He leans forward to kneel on the stairs and hold out a hand to her. "You look thin."
She smiles a ghost of a smile and takes his hand.
"What happened after they transferred you?" John asks as they dig into takeout boxes of cheap noodles. They sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens, John sitting normally and Wombat facing his profile.
"Got sent to Pakistan to work with the Americans."
John doesn't miss the slight infliction on Pakistan and Americans. It tells him what she can't without endangering him.
"Did it involve a team with the number six?"
"Eventually. I ran a lot of spy stuff first." She talks with a hand covering her full mouth, then swallows before continuing. "That's what I'm doing back in the country. They thought more domestic issues would be better. Well, they wanted to keep me over there, but a man, my benefactor I suppose, convinced them otherwise. It wasn't a moment too soon either."
John mutters something intelligible (but still obviously sarcastic) and they eat in silence for a few moment. The girl can hear only cars rushing by and wind in the trees; she's not having to work to stay sane. John does that for her, keeps the bad things away, a bit like a father checking in his daughter's closet for monsters.
"Was it getting bad?"
"Anyone starts to go crazy," she says after a moments thought. "That much pressure, that much violence. That much hate for so long. It makes anyone start to go wrong in the head."
"So bad. Will they let you see a therapist?" John stares at her, trying to coax her out from where she's picking at her noodles with chopsticks.
She looks up and gives a weak smile. "With the things I have flying around in my head? Not bloody likely."