The thought of stewing in his tent, surrounded by his fellow soldiers gabbing and faffing about, clawed at John's throat. He needed somewhere he could think. With a population of thousands, military personnel and otherwise, Camp Bastion had no such thing as a quiet place, but he recalled some places where people would leave him alone. That was how he wound up sprawled on top of an empty shipping container, watching the burning blue horizon and wondering—not whether he was losing his mind, but how.
It was 2007, and he was a surgeon stationed at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province. It was 2010, and his life was wild with adventure and a magnificent madman.
The first thing John had done after remembering how to breathe—in, count, out, count, it still needed occasional tending to—was strip down and hit the showers, where he'd pored over every centimetre of his body in a desperate bid for clues. All was depressingly consistent: no bullet wound in his shoulder, no scars on his ribs from a motorcycle wipe-out outside Qurya in a September he hadn't yet lived. The marks across his cheeks and shoulders from a case of sun poisoning two months ago (2007 time) hadn't completely faded yet. They'd be—been?—long gone by the time of his discharge.
And yet, he remembered the smell of formaldehyde and sautיed garlic burning in the kitchen at Baker Street. He remembered the prickly scrape of Sherlock's coat under his palms and cheek, a thin padding over the hard, living warmth of a man's body.
Sherlock hadn't been wearing his coat at the pool.
His mind felt like someone was picking the stitches out, patches of him falling away into disparate, mismatched lives. Inhale. He was in a coma, from a fucking semtex vest he had been wearing five minutes previous to his loss of consciousness, and his mind was quite understandably confused about which period of his life it was meant to be inhabiting. Exhale. He'd taken an ill-advised sleeping aid after a stress-laden, sleep-deprived night in a surgical theatre up to his elbows in other peoples' guts, and dreamed up a cartoon life back home with a beautiful caricature of a genius detective who was all the things the sane portions of his mind knew better than to want.
He couldn't be dead. If afterlives were this rubbish, they wouldn't bother having them.
Real or not, every fibre of his being hurt with the force of his needing Sherlock. He needed the man's logic. He needed to know if the man was okay. Never mind that if Sherlock were here, the question would be moot. Never mind that John would just pull those long wiry arms around himself and huddle into that warmth until Sherlock's presence forced rationality upon the world and he woke up for real.
Girly image, that. But still tempting. He pulled himself back from the fantasy. Christ. How did a man cope with fantasizing about someone who may or may not be real? If Sherlock turned out to be a delusion, then how crazy would that make John for buying into it?
He grabbed his (short, military-cut) hair in both fists and yanked, seeking for focus in the pain. He had to get a grip. Had to. John had 11 hours left before he had to return to duty, and Bill, chronic mother that he was, was already fretting over him after his initial episode. If this was real, then John was gunning for a court martial and sectioning if he returned to work this flaked-out. Worse, if this was real, his lack of attentiveness would end up killing someone on the operating table. But if this wasn't real, then…well, hell, he had no idea what then. Skip back to England and hope that if he found Sherlock in his dream, he would wake up?
Maybe that was exactly what he needed to do.
Maybe he needed to relive this to get back to the point where he'd ended up.
Maybe this was his life flashing before his eyes, and when he finished, he'd die.
No. No no no nonononononono. It fell into a chant in his mind. John drummed his fists on the container in rhythm to it. He probably looked completely barking to anyone on the ground, but who cared? It drove back the screaming car crash of confusion in his head.
To hell with whether he was real or not. Sherlock was the most rational being John had ever known. Use the method.
If this was real, the consequences of acting otherwise were: sectioning; desertion; court martial; killing his patients.
If this was not real, the consequences of acting otherwise were: who bloody well knew NO goddammit focus they were…probably nothing. If this was not real, then he was lost in his own mind, and everything would wait for him to get to it. If he was dreaming of Afghanistan, then his mind seemed intent on walking through it step by step. A life he'd rather liked the first go-round, an ordeal he'd survived the first time, an experience that, all told, hadn't been a total write-off.
It would do, he decided. It would do for a start. He could work from this while he gathered more information.
He jumped down into the dirt, knees flexing easily with the impact, and then toppled back against the container under the force of the third option.
What if they were both real? What if Sherlock was back in London right now, in 2007, chasing after criminals and doing whatever insane things he'd gotten up to before he met John?
Test the hypothesis, Sherlock said in his head. Yes. He might not be on par with his brilliant flatmate, but John was a scientist in his own right. Question. Research. Hypothesize. Experiment. Analyze. He'd figure this out.