So sorry for the holdup, there is no excuse. Here's the next installment. Read and review please, it helps a great deal. Also, if you'd rather read it on AO3, my penname is kaitlynlullabee, and this is posted there as well. Enjoy.
John toes off his shoes by his bedside and crawls underneath the heavy quilt, pulling his knees up to his chest.
"Damn chatty bastard," he thinks aloud. "Weird that today of all days he decided to be a bother about it." John considers this a bit but ends up dismissing the encounter in the kitchen as simply more insanity crammed into his head.
He curses Sherlock his ability to 'delete' things from his memory. John's not wired that way and he wishes he were. He wishes he could delete all of the things that haunt him; all of the things that makes him weak simply by replaying over and over in his head. Like his tour in Afghanistan. He wishes he could delete the feeling of the think sand beneath his thick boots, the harsh winds chapping his harsh cheeks beneath his harsh safety glasses. He wishes he could delete the sweat beading on his brow and blood congealing on his forearms as he's wrist-deep in a fallen comrade's torso. He wishes he could forget the bone deep guilt of letting another man die, of letting another soldier go home in a pine box. He especially wishes he could forget the agony of the bullet tearing through muscle and bone, and every echo he's felt in his shoulder since then.
John rolls his shoulder stiffly against the mattress and squeezes his right hand tightly, letting his fingernails carve half-moon shapes into his palm.
No, John thinks. I don't wish to forget those things. Those things led me here. Those things led me back to London and Baker Street, to Sherlock.
SherlockSherlockSherlock.
John rolls onto his back and ponders the ceiling, following the paint lines from left to right and down. He flexes his right hand, bringing it to his chest to rest. It shakes violently most of the time now, and John thinks that maybe that's why he's begun to rely so heavily on the cane, not just the limp. If he's got the cane in his hand he doesn't have to watch the shake and quiver of his once-steady fingers. If he's got the cane he doesn't have to worry so much about how his body is steadily betraying him. John rolls that word around in his mouth.
"Betrayal."
Hm, he thinks. That's not right. Betrayal makes a person think there's a third party, but there's only me.
His breath catches in his throat but he swallows the grief down hard.
Only me.
It takes a while, like it always does, but John falls into a semi-sleep, something like a twilight state. He thinks he hears footsteps downstairs but can't seem to rouse enough suspicion to get up and see who's mucking about. Even the soldier in him stays quiet.
John finds that when he sleeps too much during the day he can't fully fall to sleep at night, and tonight is no different. John's slept more in the last twenty-four hours than he has in the last week and it burns him from the inside out.
In his twilight-state, John feels hands on his chest, in his hair, down his back. Feather-light touches of soft skin to his face, hands, neck, lips. He can feel the silk of hair he knows is black as sin running through his fingers. Without opening his eyes once he lets his dream-state Sherlock explore his body; kiss his face, his lips. This, here, is heaven for John.
This, here, is also partly why John never raises the L9A1 to his temple. If John can hallucinate Sherlock, can smell him everywhere, can hear his heavy-but-not footsteps in the hall and on the stairs and down the corridors, can see Sherlock in every face he spots no matter their differences, can feel him touching his body, can sense him parading through his mind… If John can do all those things while he's living he knows he'd never get to do those things if he was dead. John's luck ran out when Sherlock jumped.
John twitches in his sleep, a slight furrow forming on his wrinkled brow. His sleepy, muddled mind pushes the fear and memories far from the small area John has resorted to in his cranium. John wonders how Sherlock ever got on with such room inside his mind. John, in all the open spaces his consciousness had occupied, felt strangled and claustrophobic, never knowing what was going to pop out of the shadows and corners. So he has built walls, shutting everything out that wasn't imminent and present. The walls are large, five sandbags thick and twenty sandbags high. What else would a soldier build walls with? They are impenetrable, holding out all the comments and pities and sympathies made at and after the funeral; holding out every insult and accusation spat from a media-person's mouth; holding out every sideways glance at Tesco he'd receive the following months. But those walls don't just hold things out.
No, for John they also create a new place that holds everything he needs. He's built shelves into the walls, and they hold everything from names in the form of thick and dusty tomes, to memories of house and home in the form of stacks of photos. They prove easy to access, especially when alone and undistracted, and John is proud of his little ramshackle mind-bunker. Surely, it's not nearly as grand and expansive and inclusive as Sherlock's supposed mind-palace, but it's something John's created from nothing but grief and loneliness.
John's especially proud of the entire wall he's dedicated to the last half-decade. The wall is three sandbags taller than the others, and two sandbags thicker. It needs to be, to hold the expanse of data he's put there. He's got a whole shelf dedicated to every color he's seen in Sherlock's eyes, from yellow to deep violet to bright and clear near-white. He's got another shelf holding every smile Sherlock sent him, another split between the insults and compliments Sherlock ever graced him with. He's pinned up his favorite memories in the form of magazine and newspaper clippings. He's crammed boxes full of his own minor deductions about Sherlock's facial features as he's spoken to him, including every lapse of pure emotion he can remember catching Sherlock miss before pulling on that infuriating and gorgeous façade he wore. There's a box he's marked "ANGER" that's considerably larger than the other three marked respectively "JOY," "SADNESS," and "SURPRISE," and they are all lined up underneath the lowest rack. Out of all the people he's met, John has never met a man quite so angry as Sherlock Holmes.
In his dream state John goes and opens the ANGER box and sifts through the top papers. He finds what he's looking for halfway down. A packet of stills of Sherlock's face he's immortalized and filed away as photographs. He opens the case file, something he couldn't resist putting them in, and looks at the first of the pictures.
It's of the day Sherlock had thrown that American man out the window, only to drag him back upstairs and do it again. John had never been so frightened of the younger man as he had been then, but he'd also never been so energized. Sherlock's full rage was expelled upon that brash and moronic American and John had loved it, had loved Sherlock for it.
John replaces the folder in the box and places the lid back on it, pushing it back to align with the others. He pushes to his feet in his mind bunker and places his hands on his hips, rocking back and forth on his heels.
John doesn't have the tremors or limp here and he's grateful for it because they'd make him clumsy and he'd probably put something out of place and lose it. That would be unacceptable. That would be unthinkable. He's worked for upwards of two and a half years on his eight-by-ten bunker and not one thing can go out of place or John would lose his mind completely.
A familiar panic grips the doctor, winding its way round and round his chest cavity till his eyes are squeezed shut and he's clawing at his clothes for release from the pressure. He sinks to his knees in his bunker but as soon as he's down he knows he's slipped past the sandbagged walls and out into a nightmare. Gritty and large-particled sand crunches under his palms and knees. The roaring of his own blood in his ears is replaced by the roaring of the Chinooks above and the grumbling of the Humvees beside him. John recognizes the nightmare for what it is: a flashback. The same flashback every time, the day he gets shot by an Afghan man thirty metres away and at about two o'clock from his position. John knows the role has to play out in order for him to be released from this hot and panicked Hell, so he grapples for the butt of the M16 he knows is slung across his back. He grips the trigger guard tightly, not ready to fire but preparing.
John surges to a crouching run toward the nearest Humvee, reaching for the radio-control on the front of his body armor, shouting orders to the unit through the headpiece laced into his helmet. Like every time since the actual event, John finds that his unit has broken formation and is lost throughout the chaos by hearing the random and pained shouts from the earpiece. He's alone surrounded by comrades who are being picked off one by one by a group of Pashtun aggressors that had not been on the icom three minutes before. It was supposed to be a routine patrol and for the last four weeks there hadn't been so much as a skirmish. John's knows his part so he launches out from behind the Humvee in search of the men he can hear screaming in pain, but sixteen paces from the truck he's blasted backward by a bullet that tears through his shoulder less than an inch above his heart.
John knows it's a memory but that doesn't stop him from screaming out into the desert outside FOB Bastion, from screaming out into his bedroom in Westminster, London.