A Broken Man
2
He had thought himself shattered after Afghanistan.
You aren't haunted by the war, Dr. Watson. You miss it. Welcome back.
Mycroft- damn Mycroft- had been right.
His limp was back, and worse than before.
Sherlock Holmes had saved his life.
Staring blankly at the ceiling of the small, run-down flat he'd fled to after realizing he was simply incapable of being in 221B, Baker Street, Captain John Watson closed his eyes briefly.
Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes.
Friend. Fraud. Companion. Liar.
He didn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. If he even began to entertain the very possibility… the few threads of sanity he had left would crumble.
The best man… the most human human being I have ever known.
Yes.
That was Sherlock Holmes.
And exhausted, he tried to fall back asleep.
With disastrous consequences.
Sand.
The sun was so bright- it reflected off of everything, into his eyes. He couldn't see, couldn't see- how couldn't they know that he couldn't see?
He was the doctor. Captain John Watson, MD. He patched them together when they fell apart.
But who repaired the repairman?
Captain!
An explosion. A shriek.
Blinding, fiery pain.
The sounds of his own screams woke him up.
Psychosomatic limp. PTSD. Suicidal.
The nightmares had been better. So much better. When Sherlock… before, there hadn't been any.
And now, since… it?
Every.
Single.
Night.
It was either this: drug himself with the pills, sleep, and have the nightmares, or stay awake all night in fear of the dreams.
He had survived Afghanistan, but the death of Sherlock Holmes had broken him.
I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies and will observe and obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors and of the generals and officers set over me.
When he reached for his cane, John's hand trembled violently.
The soldier's promise. Why had it so suddenly gone through his mind?
Slowly, painfully, in an attempt to evade the question, John made his way towards the promise of morphine in the medicine cabinet.
**
Like John, Sherlock's first poison had been morphine.
He had been eleven years old, in that terrifying hospital, for six weeks.
The first time he'd woken up, there had been an instant of nothing- of dark, of simplicity, confusion, fear.
And then it had all flooded back.
His eyes had flown open as the pain screamed into his system, fire in his chest, arms, leg, everywhere!
He'd howled, and the sound hadn't been human.
And something in his chest had seized, cramped, viced on itself excruciatingly.
And everything had gone black again.
Not much later, he'd woken up again.
He didn't know anything of these surroundings.
Use your brain, you stupid thing, a snide voice in the back of his head chided. Mycroft's is better, but it's all you got, you worthless piece of shit.
White. Sterile.
Hospital.
Instantly, the location was fused with the emotion of fear in his mind. A hospital bed, strapped down, rails on both sides like prison guards: the essence of fear.
A few snippets of voices, far off in the distance. English. Accented.
Britain, somewhere.
His brain was fuzzy, but vaguely, the light glinted off of the needle jabbed into the back of his hand, catching his eye.
He followed the tube- there were other tubes like it, he realized, but this one was most interesting- up to the clear bag of I.V. fluid dangling from… whatever you called those things.
Bliss.
The drug- morphine, it said on the bag- had taken away the pain.
Thank God.
**
Without the drug, for the first while, the pain would quickly overwhelm his system and cause his heart to seize.
So, he was quickly made… dependent.
When they removed the needle, it was like waking up- to a world of physical pain, and to a deep, nagging sense of an incomprehensible wound in his heart: betrayal.
Sherlock did not want to wake up. Not yet. Not when he'd barely started to explore that heart-wound from his mind, safely hidden from the pain of it: there was no space or energy left for the physical.
He'd had excellent senses, but his eyesight was badly damaged- along with his hearing.
Most pitied him.
Poor boy. What happened to him? He never speaks. Only stares. Watches.
Freak.
Indeed, after that one scream, Sherlock had not spoken a word.
His parents had been delayed by various things that blocked off the routes of transportation from rural Britain to wherever this was. He hadn't heard from them.
Or Mycroft.
Mycroft, who would have watched his brother die if somebody else hadn't been brave enough to pull those fiends off of him.
Mycroft, who had broken him.
The first night, he didn't sleep.
He wept.
Sherlock Holmes turned away from the world, pressed his face into his pillow, and cried.
**
He made it five hours, forty-eight minutes, and seven seconds without morphine.
He waited, forever, for the lights to go out.
The instant they did, he sprang out of bed, waited as the world spun, holding on to the bedrail.
If he'd tried during the day, his hampered senses would have resulted in instant capture.
Give nighttime, and a corridor bed instead of a room…
He walked, barefoot, down the moonlit isles, listening for anything, watching even though his sight was unfocused and blurred.
He knew where to go, and quickly picking the lock on the door, slipped into the storage room.
He had interest in only one syringe, and found it quickly, grabbing it, yanking off the needle-cover with his teeth (spitting it out without a second thought), and shoving the point into the vein on the back of his hand, pressed the plunger as he'd watched the doctors do.
Relief. His eyes flicked back briefly in his skull as the ecstatic feeling raced up his arm, spread from his heart to the rest of his body. Relief was magnificent, pure and spectacular.
He dropped the syringe, mind dulled like his senses by the drug, and didn't bother to lock the door on his way out.
With the fingerprints, the DNA evidence off the needle and cap, not to mention the security cameras, the very next morning, they confronted him with it.
Worst of all, his parents arrived that very day.
**
Today was another of those days.
John walked down the now-familiar path of the graveyard, barely noting the sharp, icy bite of the air, the nip of approaching winter.
Unwittingly, he was following- in the grand scheme of things- in the footsteps of the man whose gravestone stood before him, footsteps laid twenty years ago.
Sherlock Holmes
The inscription was as simple as they came.
"Not much to say," John murmured, easily dropping to a knee, his limp forgotten. "Nothing much has happened- actually, nothing ever happens. Nothing ever happens to me. It was all you, Sherlock- damn it all, it was you. Cut out that, and there's nothing left of me."
He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. Months had passed, and pain was only festering.
John, as a doctor, was supposed to patch men together when they fell apart.
Sherlock, as a consulting detective, was supposed to see through everything in an instant.
And here, it had been a reversal.
Sherlock had healed John.
John had shown Sherlock a deeper side of himself that neither of them- hell, nobody- had known existed.
I need you, Sherlock. I'd do it all again- the bomb, the gunfights, the bloody body parts in the fridge- I'd do it all again if it meant having you back.