My little project is ten chapters already!
"First you get hurt, then you feel sorry." -Cold War Kids, 'First'
One thing John learned in the army was that if someone received a certain amount of pain from another person, they found it easier to inflict that amount of pain on somebody else. Vicious circles were neverending; the pain went around and around, and it didn't stop. Pain simply changed hands, changed wounds, changed faces. At one point, John had experienced so much hurt that he could kill people without feeling remorse. But, it wasn't just James' fault. Fault changed just like pain did.
You're not right for the army; that's what everyone told him. At twenty-eight he should be planning to start a career, find a wife, move to a suburb and become a GP. But John doesn't want that. As soon as he finished his lightning-speed medical degree and doctorate, he signed up for the army because he wants to do some good in the world. Diagnosing runny noses and the flu won't help anyone in the grand scheme of things, in a sheltered place where nothing is life-or-death. On that battlefield, John will save people. He'll be the reason someone is walking around, the reason someone else gets to live another day. He wants that.
When John gets the call, he runs down the stairs to tell his older sister, Harry. "They said I ship out in two weeks. I'll be home for Christmases and whenever else I have leave, don't worry about it."
Harry folds her arms. She isn't always the sanest-minded one, her drinking still bothers John, though he won't remind her of it, but he trusts her opinion. Harry's his big sister, after all. "I'm more worried if you don't come home in one piece."
"I will. I promise I won't die on the field."
Harry doesn't laugh, but he knows she would. "You can't promise me that."
"I thought that's what you wanted."
"I don't want anything. This is all your decision."
"Fine, then I promise to not die on the field." John smiles almost jokingly, but he entirely means it. He'll find a way, even if he gets shot or partially blown up or tortured, to keep fighting. No matter what.
When he gets off the plane to Afghanistan, he meets a lot of other recruits, young and naïve and he knows he's just like them, but John can't see it yet. "Alright, greenies this way," a gruff voice says to John's left. He follows the voice, because he has to. John essentially sold his life away to obey orders, but it's not so bad. He just has to think about the lives he'll save, and nothing else seems to matter.
"You went through boot camp in your regular training program, but this isn't Britain anymore. This is a place that will eat you up and spit you back out half-digested. You have to be able to fight the area as well as the targets. Am I clear?"
"Sir, yes sir," a resounding chorus of men's voices shout.
"Good." The commanding man nods his head. "My name is Major Sholto. I am to be addressed as Major. Keep a sharp eye about as we go to the camp."
Of course, shortly after that, John will get a gun. He'll beat the hell out of most of the other recruits, and they'll respect him, even though he's a doctor, and not there to shoot people really. He's a fucking good marksman, though.
The years pass. John doesn't notice; the desert takes most meaning out of time. Days are too hot, nights are cold, the natives either are suspicious or have a gun to someone's head. His comrades become his various strange brothers. Sometimes, when John's on leave and there's no one to care, he sleeps with as many people as he can get his hands on. It makes sense somewhere in his head. Having sex is a form of intimacy that he doesn't get in the army unless he's desperate and one of the other men is willing. Maybe it's because he feels like a part of him is missing in Britain, maybe he hasn't shot enough people to feel satisfied. Perhaps John needed something else.
Finding things in Afghanistan isn't easy.
"Watson! You've got a letter!" Murray shouts, waving it in his hand. John runs up to him and takes the paper envelope, ripping it open eagerly. Harry is supposed to tell him how it's going with that woman she met online, Clara. She seemed nice when John met her a few months ago. Hopefully she stays with Harry. It takes a lot to put up with her and love her, John knows that, but Clara and Harry would work so well.
Upon reading the letter, John cheers inwardly, knowing that if he cheered outwardly, the guys would crowd around him and ask if the letter was from a lady friend. Does his sister even count? Harry practically glows with happiness as she writes to him, explaining how wonderful Clara really is.
John has to take this with a grain of salt, knowing three different continents worth of one-night stands isn't enough for him.
No, stop. He must be happy for Harry right now.
Well, he can use his 'happy' feelings at the shooting range again. His Sig Sauer seems to warm in his hand as John walks to the brightly-colored targets. He hits each body in the center, where the heart is, and a few other choice places that would kill anybody. The practice isn't enough though. Why is this so angering to him? He should be more excited, more supportive. What he feels right now is wrong.
You're terribly lonely, that's all, he thinks to himself. There's nothing wrong with you. Of course, John was always good at lying, at hiding things from people. John rarely shows how he truly feels because he has to be the perfect man, the one with the best moral code, the ideal son, the soldier that would follow his commander off a cliff. He's just a man. John is a man with faults and stupid wishes.
His fault is how far gone he can go before he pulls back. His stupid wish is to be just like everybody else.
John hates it when there's a person, an honest-to-God, too-young, too-naïve, too-strong person on the slab in front of him, waiting, hoping to be saved, but John can't save him.
Like the eighteen-year-old boy named James with blood flooding out of his blown-off leg. There's too much of it. John can't staunch the blood fast enough to keep the boy from bleeding out, and so, he doesn't. John just stops.
"Do you know what heaven's like?" James asks softly, knowing the look on John's face before he has to say anything.
John shakes his head. "I haven't had personal experience, but from what I've heard, you'll never be in pain again, and the angels and your loved ones will be with you forever."
The boy smiles, a bare quirk of his lips. His dark hair flops over his eyes, so John can't tell if they're open or not. "You deserve to go there someday for helping me."
"But I couldn't. I couldn't save you," John chokes out. This isn't the first one he's lost, so why does it hurt so much more?
"Some things aren't meant to be saved." James tries to shrug, but doesn't manage it. "I'm okay now."
"No, you're not," John starts to say, but the line on the heart monitor is flat and unmoving, and James' eyes are closed.
His comrades can tell from the look in John's eyes that something is horribly off with him, but no one says anything because they're scared to. It's like John is dead inside, dead and buried with only the shell of him to make believe that he's still with them.
War messes people up, but it doesn't normally show until they have to go home. Survival instincts that alienate the soldiers from the civilians are too important here to care whether it's normal to grab a gun when a loud noise is heard. John used to be an example of someone well-adjusted, but even the most well-adjusted person has a threshold. That's what was taught about torture: at some point, the pain gets to be too much. Eventually, there won't be enough of the person to salvage. Not everyone can be saved, and it's the entirely not-simple matter of making peace with that.
John doesn't look at all peaceful.
"Give me a mission," he tells the major. "I need a mission, I need something to keep me from going crazy in here."
Over the years, Major Sholto has become friends with John and doesn't reprimand him anymore for speaking to him that way. "Are you sure? Off-shore leave is what you most likely need right now."
"I can't do it. Just let me have a mission."
Sholto nods, but in his head, he's screaming that this is a very bad idea. "Fine."
It isn't supposed to be a comfort that no one knows about James, so no one can comfort John about it. He doesn't want comfort; John wants to maim and shoot and kill the person (the demon) that would hurt someone like James, who shouldn't have even been dragged into this. War isn't glory, and whomever threw that IED did it knowing that's how the boy thought. It can't be forgiven.
John had never understood divine wrath before, but he does now.
He has to punish someone for his and James' pain.
The village is too quiet, but John is past the point of caring. Dying would be nothing if he kills as many of these sons of bitches as he can. He creeps through the small streets and between even smaller houses, barely reading the graffiti on the walls. The night chills him to the bone, but he didn't think to bring his jacket. Marked houses are the ones with terrorist cells; John remembered burying his mark within the propaganda. He could just walk into any one of them.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. John nearly laughs under his breath, but someone could hear him.
Fine; the one on his far right looks ripe. He recalls the people he spied on in that house. They have a daughter they beat until she died, and a son that beat his wife. The parents have a stash of IEDs in the basement. James would have been easy prey for them, and he hates it.
John barely thinks before kicking the door open and running inside, gun perhaps literally blazing, a haze of red coating his vision. He notices bodies on the ground, but which bodies? He doesn't know. There's shot after shot and the sound of blood leaking out on the floor but it's his, isn't it? Or maybe it's theirs. Maybe there's no blood at all, but John can't see anything anymore. All that's left is quiet, because he stopped shooting. Why? Where is he again?
Where did he go?
Hello, operator. Can you patch me in to John Watson?
He can't come to the phone right now. Would you like to leave a message?
When John wakes up, he's tied to a cot or a bed or something. Hands and feet, good knots. Someone knows what they're doing. A man stands in front of him, with another man standing off to the side in the shadows. "Oh, lookie here. Johnny boy's awake!" he says, laughing a little. "What do you say, Farid? Do you wanna start on him?"
The man closest to John nods and pulls out a knife. It's a simple knife, not too fancy. John begs his inner mind not to say anything, not to scream or cry or shout out. Whatever pain he goes through is nothing. He won't die like this.
Several long cuts later, John allows himself to scream.
A few burns later, he begins to cry.
The man in the shadows, Irish by the sound of his accent, leaves the room first. Farid stays behind for a while longer, finding new ways to make John wish he had never been born, but John refuses to give in. This is nothing, he desperately murmurs to himself once Farid has gone for the night, throwing a bit of food and water at him. This is nothing.
But it isn't.
Even John can't stay strong forever. The cuts turn into scars, and more cuts cover the scars after a while or so. The Shadow Man wants to fix him, and Farid hurts him again anew. Burns, cuts, those were just the beginning. Sometimes, he can't even remember what has been done to him because his body hurts too much. Going unconscious is a relief, better than sleep could ever be. Time, just like in the army, has no meaning here. But he can never be free of this, not when the evidence maps his body like highways over Britain.
Once, he wakes up again, and only the Shadow Man is in the room. He looks...sad, if the man can even feel that way. "Why...?" John croaks. "Why...s...sad?"
The Shadow Man steps out of the shadows for the first time since John's been here and he says, "That boy, James, my namesake, he broke you. None of this torture has done anything nearly as devastating as that boy did to you. Nothing Farid has done has pulled you under, you're still alive and fighting and darling, that's amazing. But I figured it out. I figured out what he did to you."
How do you know, John wants to ask. How do you know anything? "You're a Catholic boy, born and raised on the ideas of Heaven and goodness and redemption. You believed that everyone could be saved, if only they just had remorse and forgiveness and penance. Even the people that died on that slab in your tent were alright because they were going to Heaven for helping their country. But James was different. He told you that some things weren't meant to be saved, and although I've known he was right for a long time, you didn't. You still thought everyone could be fixed, but now, you don't, do you? If you can't fix it, no one can, so you've taken it into your own hands to smite the wicked, bury the dead, watch that soul of yours disappear, but it's alright, because you saved those people the only way you could: by killing them."
John has tears running down his cheeks and he's not so sure they're from his wounds. "Get...me...out."
"Oh, of course!" The Shadow Man, the new James really, runs up to him and unties his bonds, helping him off the bed/cot/thing. "I never wanted this, you know. I never wanted them to hurt you."
"You...failed."
James laughs, but it sounds wrong. "I always fail where it matters; I'm too changeable."
"Leave...here?"
And James helps him to a car outside the darkened compound, and they leave that place forever.
It came full circle, as things often do. The source of his pain became the source of John's salvation, which became the source of his pain. Around and around it goes.
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