Notes:

1: Credit to ningen_demonai for the idea that Bill sometimes "unobtrusively asks how people are doing by inviting them out for drinks."

2: Tell me you don't see it! "Take Me Out" on YouTube

3: Quick glossary:

NCO - Non-commissioned officer. Sergeants, corporals, etc.

Forward Surgical Team (FST) - medical teams deployed close to the front lines that provide first care to wounded soldiers.

Operation Achilles - largest NATO op of the war, held in early 2007 to reclaim Helmand Province from the Taliban.

John woke up to find the sleeping area nearly deserted. Only one other of his team's surgeons was there; a medium-sized fellow with a pianist's hands who went by the moniker of 'Magic.' His real name was Colin Brownlowe, and the nickname had nothing to do with medicine. He was the best poker player John had ever met till he'd moved into Baker Street.

Not that he'd ever seen Sherlock play poker. But one could imagine.

John had one booted foot braced on the frame of his cot, lacing it up, when the fussiness of Magic's movements wormed its way through his preoccupation. He let his arms drop around his knee in favour of studying his teammate. "You never said you'd been stepping out."

It came out without John really thinking about it, a normal sort of comment to a mate who was fixing himself up, but Magic nearly leapt out of his skin.

"What?"

"You're off out to meet a bird." John frowned thoughtfully at his collar and cuffs. "You're taking it seriously." This was new. Magic had never said anything to them the first time through. Or at least John certainly hadn't been in the know.

Magic's eyes twitched like he expected spies to sneak up and make off with him. "I, uh, don't...what do you mean?"

John had forgotten what a stupefyingly poor liar the other surgeon was when he wasn't playing cards. He pointed obligingly. "You pressed your shirt, creased your collar, buffed your boots, and did you tweeze your eyebrows? 'Cos they look a little less like they're thinking of crawling off your face than usual." And then he blinked. That had sounded like...when had he begun picking that up?

The sagging look of shock that came over Magic's face was just as familiar. Pleasure and shame warred for pride of place in John's mind for a moment, till Magic sidled closer to loom over him sheepishly. "Yeah. Hum. I... Look, Johnny, could you keep this on the QT? You know how sticky it can get dating in the ranks, but...I think this may be the real thing. I can't just let it blow over without giving it a shot."

John pursed his lips and then nodded. Whatever he had on, Magic had been a consummate professional about it the first go 'round. Privately he nursed a little candle flame of sorrow for the man, because whatever this was, if it had worked...would eventually work? Brilliant, he could see tenses were going to become an issue. At any rate, he suspected they'd have heard about it if Magic had ever met with success.

It was, John mused later over his roast beef and potatoes, a very strange thing to realize he had begun to sound like his flatmate, who may or may not actually exist. It was even stranger to think that he had absorbed bits of a technique that might possibly never have had a man to invent them.

It worked, however he'd learned it. What did that say about its reality?

He stabbed at his potatoes as vengefully as if they were his rogue thoughts. This whole thing was bollocks. What he needed was a benchmark. Specifically, Sherlock. John had learned how to survive a lot. He'd lost everything he'd wanted in life and rebuilt himself from scratch before. He'd do it again if he had to. 2007, 2010, Army, London, he could start over anywhere, so long as he knew whether to expect a crazed fop-haired genius in his life, or if he'd have to settle for having him only in dreams.

He wasn't sure how, exactly, but if that was all he could have, he'd find a way to make it work.

Complication: assuming he existed, Sherlock was half a world away in London, doing whatever he'd been doing in 2007 in whatever places he'd been doing it. Even if John could simply pick up and swan off to the City (which he couldn't), he had about as much chance of finding the man as he did of finding bin Laden. He had to try another way.

A tray clacked down on the dining table across from him. "You realize that fork's been hanging in the air for five minutes now and you're yet to take a bite," Bill's gravelly voice greeted him. "The food isn't that scary."

Bill had a way of crinkling his eyes when he smiled that made it impossible not to smile back. He was his own little chunk of solid reality thumping down in the seat across the table, and John's breath caught on how much he'd missed his old friend. "And you've been watching me and counting out the seconds, have you? I could find you some work to do if you've got that kind of free time."

"Oh, snappish. Glad to see a bit of that bad humour's still in there. Was starting to think we'd lost you to jumpiness and thousand yard stares."

John snorted. "You make it sound like…" Well. He idid/i have PTSD, though he hadn't, at the time. The first time, that was. Now. Never mind. By way of changing the subject, he reached over and stole some potatoes off Bill's plate.

"Oi! Getcher own, mate!"

"Mine have gone cold." He ate them with a show of relish. "Mmm. That delicious flavour of belonging to someone else." Words Sherlock lived by, he thought with a smirk, and went for more, dodging the savage flurry of fork-stabs that ensued.

"Anything on when you get off duty?" Bill asked, once John had yielded the field of battle.

John's mouth opened to make an excuse, but nothing came out. It had been too long since he'd had to beg off going out with army buddies; the civvie dodges that came to mind didn't apply here. Bill's grin expanded in proportion to the length and awkwardness of the growing pause. John finally surrendered to the inevitable. "Ah...no."

Inside, he was cursing. He'd been coming off strange enough, lately. No chance Bill hadn't caught this one. He let it slide, but John had an intuition this wasn't the end of it. "Great. Want to hit the watering hole with me around 1900?"

John didn't, really. Heroes Bar was a social hub of the camp. Everyone spent off hours there, mingling companionably amongst the rowdy packs of fellow soldiers whose hooting, laughing, gossiping, and puppyish roughhousing made John feel suddenly, ridiculously old. It'd only been a year ago—so to speak—that he'd been one of them, a little older than most but as ready to laugh and horse around as anyone. Hell, he'd been (in)famous for the quality of his downtime.

He'd never really analyzed just how much that bullet had changed him. The John Watson he'd been up till the day he'd got shot wouldn't have recognized the John Watson who'd sat up from a London hospital if he'd seen him in a mirror. Now, he found, there was no going backwards again.

But here was Bill, with that teasing grin that twitched at the corners of his mouth like it was threatening to eat his face. A man would be a fool to say no to spending a few more hours of his life with one of his favourite people in the world. "Yeah, alright," John agreed at last, with the same grudging grin the big man had pulled out of him earlier. "I'll meet you there, shall I?"

"Sounds like a plan, Doc." Bill stood and clapped one slab of a hand on John's shoulder.

John watched him stroll toward the rubbish bins with that strong-legged gait that made him look like he could kick a Royal Marine's arse. In two weeks, they'd be chunking along through the Afghan desert, and Bill would be sneezing like a hyena from all the dust, heading north with their forward surgical team for the kickoff of Operation Achilles. They wouldn't have reliable access to civilian communications for two months; he needed to get this thing with Sherlock sorted before that.

If all went well, he'd have it done in two days. There was nothing to be done about it tonight, though, which left him with naught better to do than to shove through a sea of sweaty bodies, trying not to spill the pint in his hand while he strained to spot Bill through the crowd of improbably young, strapping, tall soldiers.

Young, loud, energetically milling soldiers. Brothers in arms, he reminded himself, but couldn't forget that meant they were warriors trained to violence. He caught himself twitching at sudden movements on his periphery and suppressing his flinches when someone barked a laugh too close behind him. He was keying up, he could feel it, and did his best to force it back with iron control over his breathing while he pushed through the swarm.

When he met Bill's eyes through a break in the mountain range of 20-somethings, he knew his jumpiness had been noted and filed. He could recognize the affable scrutiny of a medical professional when it was turned on him.

John was already braced for the talk when he finally popped out from between two NCOs to drop next to his friend on the bench. Bill, bless him, didn't go straight for the throat. "Been rough lately, hasn't it?"

True. With the push to clear Kajaki Dam, there'd been plenty of engagement with the enemy up north. Camp Bastion's field hospital retained the middling cases and stabilized the worst before they got airlifted home to England. It kept John's team in surgery for long hours on an irregular basis.

Not, of course, that this was relevant to the issue. "Yeah," John agreed neutrally.

Bill sat, relaxed, chin tilted curiously. John wondered what he was seeing. His inner Sherlock reared up again. Military bearing, but the spit-shine's worn off. A bit sallow under the tan, slumped a little from exhaustion. Emotional, not physical, though admittedly sleep has been sparse. Faint psychosomatic limp. Really? He frowned and rewound the sense memory of his movements through the crowd. Bloody hell, he had been favouring his leg. Automatically he turned attention to his left hand which, yes, betrayed a slight tremor in the glass of beer he was holding.

His shoulder was aces. He hadn't even been wounded yet. This was...he knew what this was. Same as it had always been. They were talismans, proof that his old life hadn't passed him by without leaving some trace in him.

It was just a different old life, now. Sort of.

"Johnny?" Bill asked softly. "Alright, old son?" John turned his head, and was startled by the depth of concern—no, he almost looked afraid—in Bill's face. "Only you've been...different this past week. A bit odd, like."

Christ. Odd didn't cover it, though, did it? How different must he seem? Not just his preoccupation, or his failed excuses over lunch, or his twitchiness in the crowd. He'd withdrawn compared to the gregarious John Watson his teammates were used to. He could feel the walls he'd put up between himself and his friends, but he couldn't bring himself to pull them down and open up like he'd been used to. Couldn't afford that kind of honesty, even if he'd wanted to. Then there was that little show with Magic, and yesterday he'd startled Dick by snapping at him for singing along to his mp3 player. He liked Dick's music; sometimes he even joined in. He just couldn't listen to "Take Me Out" without memories of Moriarty and the pool scrolling like music videos in his head.

From his speech patterns to his sense of humour, John had changed so much in his past three years that he should count himself lucky if Bill wasn't considering the possibility of alien clones.

Jesus, but he felt alone. He stared into Bill's worry-creased features and tried not to let it show. "Yeah," he finally said again. "You're right. I have." He swallowed. "Listen, Bill. I just...I need you to trust me, alright? Something came up, but I can't explain it. Everything's okay in the ways that matter," a lie from John's angle, but not from Bill's, "but I'm waiting on an important bit of news."

He felt like a wanker, holding out like this on the man who would save his life. But there was no explaining it without sounding certifiable before he even knew whether he was certifiable.

But Bill wasn't stupid. More to the point, a chronic mother hen like him could hardly miss the signs of someone else fretting over people. "Is it...Harry?"

"No, no, Harry's as right as she ever is. It's..." Hell. How was he meant to describe Sherlock? The man who brought me back to life. That chunk of myself I spent the first 35 years of my life looking for without knowing it. A hallucination I can't live without. "A friend," he finished lamely.

Bill's eyes widened. Curse the perceptive bastard. He'd just heard everything John hadn't said, hadn't he? "I didn't know you had someone like that, John."

And what the hell was he meant to say to that? John gave up and simply shrugged. "Could be I'll let you know about that by the end of the week."

It was as good an explanation as any, really, and honest enough in its own way, but the look of ferocious support Bill turned on him threw him off enough that he nearly reared backwards off the bench in surprise when Bill flopped a big dark hand down on his head in wordless allegiance. He ruffled John's hair like a schoolboy, and then concentrated on drinking his beer without saying another word.

John bent his face into his own glass, to hide the hot prickling in his eyes.

Being on rotation for time online didn't exempt a man from waiting on queue. Poor as the connection was, the computers were in such high demand that John seldom bothered to claim his turn when it came up. He had no one back home he was yearning to talk to, and he still got most of his news from the papers and the television. Around base, gossip tended to be more informative anyway.

In this case, however, it was the best research tool he had access to. He had 30 minutes. If God didn't hate him (a bet he wouldn't take, at this point), his first stop would be all he needed. The fallback plan was to dig up any phone numbers he could find for the Metropolitan Police and spend his weekly phone call convincing someone to patch him through to DI Lestrade. Assuming Lestrade existed.

What would happen, he wondered, if he Googled Mycroft Holmes? Probably it'd be one way to find out the truth. In the interests of not ending up in an undisclosed detention site, however, he pushed that option to the bottom of the list.

Instead he typed in "science of deduction.

And there it was.

Dear god. Remind him to mock Sherlock about that background. His first attempt at web design had been...enthusiastic.

No address listed. John jotted down the phone number, then signed off the computer and walked out, as coolly as if his entire body weren't racked with tremors.

Sherlock was real.

Sherlock was real.

More notes:

For those who likey the researchy:

I'm placing John (and Bill, Dick, Magic, and the rest of their crew) in the 16 Close Support Medical Regiment, which is permanently embedded as part of 16 Air Assault Brigade.

All members of 16 Air Assault Brigade, including the medical regiment, are parachute-trained, which means that, yes, John and his friends are badass air assault army medics. They get dropped right into the action along with the rest of their parachuting compatriots. Take a look at the Pre-Parachute Selection Course, and then consider that marathon parkour run across London in ASiP, when Sherlock and John were only passingly winded by the time they got back to 221B. Makes more sense now, doesn't it? (Of course it doesn't provide an explanation for Sherlock, but then he's iSherlock/i and doesn't really need one.)

I am fudging the timelines a bit. 16 Air Assault Brigade was among the first groups deployed to Afghanistan, but as far as I can tell, they pulled out a couple of months before Operation Achilles got kicked off. But it's fiction, and I'm the author, so I get to invoke artistic license.