Chapter 9: Silence
John bolts upright in the dark, panting. The echo of his own voice is dying off the walls of his room and Sherlock is a tall shadow in his doorway.
"Alright?"
John collapses back into the bed clothes and lets himself breathe too fast. Easier to just hand himself over to it, let his body get it out of its system. Sherlock's eyes see everything. John doesn't try to fight those either.
He remembers nights waking up like this in a lightless bedsit, choking on fear and isolation and almost yearning to have the nightmare back because inside them, at least he hadn't been alone. Inside, he didn't possess hindsight of the futility of it all, that the end result of all his struggles to survive would be an aimless existence in mind-numbing beige room-for-rent in Clapton.
There's no room for loneliness under Sherlock's sight. John knows he doesn't even have the privacy of his own mind right now. The relief overwhelms him.
"Your PTSD isn't from the gunshot," Sherlock says because he knows he's allowed. He knows a voice will be welcome. He knows he can see the things John can't say and so John will answer.
He comes in and sits down on the end of the bed when John shakes his head in confirmation, swallows thickly to open his throat for the words. "My section was captured in the highlands. They had us for two weeks. Kept me alive because I could treat them." He holds up four fingers, unable to make his voice work. Of those four who'd survived, he'd been the only one who could still walk when they were rescued. There's no way to talk about what had been done to them, about watching his teammates be murdered while he was held back from them. He hadn't been allowed to treat his own people. Couldn't even take their pain away. He would have been killed too, eventually, the last to die once their captors were finished with him. Or, maybe not. His skills are so very valuable in that part of the world. There's an outside chance they might have traded him off for a tidy profit. As in all walks of humanity, some guerillas are fundamentally more decent than others. These had not been very nice people.
Sherlock's expression doesn't change, that same silent fixation John remembers from the night he'd shot the cabbie. John loves him a little bit for that.
"What is the desert like?" Sherlock asks.
John tells him.