Author's Note: I ATEN'T DEAD. If you're wondering what took me so ****ing long (it's okay, I don't blame you), well, I now have a master's degree and John was being goddamn stubborn. Between the two, I did not have time to sit down and kick my way through my own character's rock-hard head.
At this time it may be useful to mention that I have absolutely no intention of abandoning this—in many ways this is a story I have wanted to write for years—but I do historically suck at writing fiction in a timely manner. So updates will probably continue to be erratically spaced (though hopefully not to the tune of a couple of months between chapters). While I'm at it, I might as well also note that though the Beeb has jossed me on a few points (wasn't actually expecting them to mention John's regiment—curses!), I'm just going to ignore them and run with it.
Glossary for this chapter:
Fireteam: the basic unit of the modern British (and American) army. It's comprised of 3-4 soldiers and can work independently or with other fireteams as part of a section.
XO: Executive officer, aka second-in-command (also 2IC)
CO: Commanding officer
ACMT: Annual Combat Marksmanship Test. British troops are tested every year on their skill with firearms.
Decocker: Some pistols (like the Sig Sauer P226) have this rather than a safety. Mechanically, they do different things, but for firing purposes, the difference is that you can still fire a gun with a decocker engaged; the trigger just takes more effort to pull, and is therefore theoretically 'safer.'
ATMP: 'All-Terrain Mobility Platform' – basically a six-wheeled, all-terrain flatbed truck for trundling people and stuff around.
John watches the gun sink like the setting sun. Until the last instant, he doesn't know. Either Sherlock has a plan, or they're about to die together. It'd be a leap to say he's content with that, but this will do. Every man has to die.
The moment is caught in amber. He feels the pull of the trigger as if it's in his own hand. He sees the explosion blossom. He feels the hot ripple of concussion curl its fingers around his limbs. He sees it catch Sherlock up in its embrace. The curls over his forehead flutter. Their eyes have time to meet.
This is Moriarty. A man who can unfurl a soul, just to make certain you know the precise value of what he's destroying. The joke is on him. In a look, Sherlock and John live all the things that could have been between them if they'd been destined to survive this moment. He wins nothing. They take it all.
And then the abused air screams. It lifts and heaves them. Flesh splatters like the gelled liquid it is. Bones yield. The hot interiors of the body are misplaced. Pain buries him till he can no longer feel it. Buried in the flat paste of concrete dust clogging his throat and the electric scent of tortured metal. The biting, bitter taste of explosion follows him down on the final fall
into waking.
John jolted hard enough on the landing to bounce him out of his cot. They were set too close together for him to tumble to the floor, so he fell onto Magic instead, who'd been sleeping unsuspectingly to his right. They both hurled themselves up to their knees in a shouting, surprised knot.
About ten men were suddenly upright. Handguns coming to bear crackled in the air like ice, freezing the tableau.
In the silent heartbeats that followed, the tent canvas snapping in the wind brought John back to his senses. The dust and metal taste of Afghanistan lay thick in his mouth, but the pungency in his sinuses was desert heat and male sweat, not a bomb. Not blood. He knew where he was...as much as he ever did these days.
"What the actual fuck?" That was Prathmesh Ashratnam, their comms man, who stood up with arms on his hips and hair that looked like it'd been hit by lightning. The startled tension shattered at the sound of his voice. Shoulders eased all around the room, guns returned to their resting places, and Magic and John dared to resume breathing.
"Sorry. Sorry," John apologized to Magic, to everybody. He flopped back onto his cot and threw his arm over his eyes. Hell, as if he needed anything else to worry about. He'd been getting enough strange looks as it was; after shouting the place awake from a nightmare, his CO would have him in for a psych eval by the end of the week.
Fuck.
It wasn't as though John needed a psychiatrist to tell him what was wrong with him. His dreams spoke loud and clear every night since he'd got here. One night, Sherlock's moment of doubt had been right. John had been Moriarty, and he'd watched from a changing cubicle as Sherlock died for a man he believed gave a damn about him. Another night, he'd been with Dickie again, reliving the hit by the IED in Musa Qala—only Dickie had been wearing the bomb instead of driving over it, and another man in their unit had shot and triggered it, hurling them all into oblivion together. He'd looked just like Sherlock.
Those dreams wedged cold and soft under his ribs, waiting till daylight to burble up into his conscious mind. It was like they were fucking with him, popping into his forebrain every time he found a moment to fight with himself over where to go from here.
He had nine days to make up his mind. After that, he'd go to war regardless, but the question was what he planned to come back to.
It was atop an ISO container again, the sun a bloody malformed lump on the horizon and a cold wind picking up across the desert, that John confronted facts. He'd lost Sherlock. They were both good as dead, in the…back home. It was glorious to believe that this was a second chance, but look at him here, tripping over the trailing edges of himself like some sad attempt to haunt his own life. How would trying to wedge himself into a facsimile of his life in London be any different? There was a Sherlock in London. Tantalizingly close he might be, but how could he be the one John knew and loved? And that, the thought of going to Sherlock, only to be confronted by a man who had no room for John…
John had dreamed of standing in an empty 221b, his footsteps echoing off the blank walls. He'd dreamed of standing face-to-face with Sherlock, those x-ray eyes finding nothing to catch on as they looked right through John.
John could have phoned. Could have emailed. Just...not yet.
But since he was obviously going to be losing sleep for the foreseeable future, he volunteered for the graveyard shift. Someone might as well benefit from his buggered up headspace, and with military activity ramping up in the northern foothills, they had more injured men incoming at all hours. He discovered that he hadn't lost his ability to differentiate between makes of helicopter in the dark.
The idling double rotors of a Chinook thumped against the night air and echoed off the walls of John's chest cavity as he kept pace with the gurneys coming in from the landing area. "Three men incoming from a fire fight in Kanzay," recited the flight paramedic, briefly jogging alongside. "One concussion with damage to the eyes; one with extensive lacerations; one bullet wound, shattered femur."
The fireteam had been just outside the lethal radius of an improvised grenade. Ugly things; terrorists liked to pack them with dirt and animal dung to maximize the chances of infection for survivors. John helped wheel the backboarded concussion victim into place in the ward while he evaluated him. He'd been facing the explosion, from the looks of it; in one of life's weird miracles, the flak had all but missed him.
The team leader had caught enough for both of them. 'Extensive lacerations' didn't begin to cover it. It was a marvel the medic had stopped him bleeding out on the way in.
Putting him back together took hours. John felt like Doctor Frankenstein, picking out shrapnel and stitching the man back together piece by piece. By the time they finished, his hands were cramping. He pulled off his stained surgical gown, washed up, and headed back out to the ward to check on the other two.
The hospital had fallen into pre-dawn stillness; the quiet hum of medical equipment and sleeping patients dominated the long room. Their gunshot victim was contentedly dead to the world on morphine and antibiotics, blood pressure unsurprisingly low but vitals stable. He'd be fine, though he might become disenchanted with rainy days.
Their concussed private seemed to be sleeping soundly. John studied his face around the bandages protecting his eyes, then flagged down the ward nurse when she stepped out from behind a curtained alcove.
"When did you wake him last?" he asked her.
"About 40 minutes ago, sir. He was coherent."
John pursed his lips and stared down at their patient. "Put him in for a CT scan."
The nurse frowned at him. "He was aware," she repeated doubtfully. "There's already a backlog on the CT…"
"Do it anyway." John snagged the man's chart. Private Cuthbert Pierpont. He wrinkled his nose sympathetically; surgery couldn't fix that name. "Point me at whoever I'll need to argue with to make it happen."
She gave him a look that said clear as words, 'It's your funeral,' and pivoted to stride off, intimidatingly crisp as any parade ground general. John leaned against the wall next to Pierpont's bed till she was out of sight, and then bent over the bed for a closer examination of his patient—not his injuries, but his features.
He couldn't explain to the nurse, but he remembered this man. He remembered losing him. John had been working the day shift. He'd been five hours into it, checking on patients in this same ward when Pierpont had coded due to a bleed on his brain and they hadn't been able to resuscitate.
The idea that he'd felt creeping up on him threw over the slow approach and pounced full-force, threatening to take his knees out from under him. John stiff-armed himself on the frame of Pierpont's bed, staring down into the sleeping man's bandaged face. Dear god, what if he could change that? Save this man's life, change the course of history for a patient he'd already failed.
Christ. Just how much hubris had he absorbed from Sherlock? But then how could he not try? Try to save a man's life, try to find out whether people were meant to die at their appointed time or if fate could change.
He was fucking insane, was what. He'd never put much stock in the theory of doctors having god complexes, but apparently time travel turned you into a megalomaniacal nutter. Just what kind of risk was he contemplating, exactly? It wasn't only poor Pierpont's fate he'd be taking in hand; this could affect the lives of people he'd never even met!
For a horrible moment, John could all but see the future unspooling around him, a wild tangle of possibilities into which he was proposing to knot his fingers and rip. The magnitude of it was a flood tide closing over his head, leaving him awash at the bedside of a helpless young man stretched out and dying slowly before him and...
And John was an idiot.
Every life he saved came with the same burden. He'd healed villagers he was pretty sure had shot at his fellow soldiers, and probably would again. He'd helped men and women who were, by the law of averages, rapists and child abusers, whose organs could've gone to save others if they'd died. This wasn't different. When he saved a life, he never knew what it would mean for the future. That wasn't his call to make. So long as his patients were alive, it was his duty to try to keep them that way.
He hung the chart back on its nail, and pulled the blanket more securely up around Pierpont's chest. Best go find the radiologist and get that argument out of the way.
John's shift ended before Pierpont's CT scan was scheduled. John hit the canteen for breakfast and put off dragging his sagging arse to bed till the hospital grapevine informed him that Pierpont was going in for immediate surgery.
He considered staying up to learn the outcome, but that'd put him at 36 hours with no sleep for no better return than eight extra hours of pacing. He could get something approximating a reasonable night's sleep in the time the surgery would take. And in the end, it could all be for nothing. He wouldn't sleep any better if Pierpont died on the table.
Maybe some things were just fixed and John couldn't change this. He went to sleep imagining how Sherlock would disown him as a flatmate if he knew John were using Doctor Who as a reference text.
John woke up groggy, mouth disgusting and head grotty with exhaustion and hours of feverish, half-aware dreaming. He'd dreamed of Sherlock being shot, his blood pouring hot and thick over them both while John hunched protectively over him, waiting for the final bullet to take him in the shoulder.
He wolfed down lunch even though his stomach greeted it with all the excitement of digesting cardboard, and hustled back over to the hospital to visit his patient.
Pierpont wasn't currently much more energetic than cardboard, himself. He lay there, drugged to the gills and breathing deep and slow, head swathed in bandages, surrounded by machines that hissed and beeped John's success at rewriting history.
John stared down at him, arms crossed over his chest and chin tucked in, and enunciated clearly in his own head, What in bloody fuck do I do now?
So much for his ability to predict the future. Hell, he'd probably wrecked a swathe through it long before now without even knowing. A large part of him declared its failure to give a fuck, because the outcome the first time around had been totally unacceptable. Just…it was sodding ironic, wasn't it, that here he'd been fretting over Sherlock vs. his patients, Afghanistan vs. London, only to discover that he'd been thinking too small, by a factor of approximately a universe.
The problem was that there was a cost to it. He wasn't stupid, no matter what Sherlock said; he could see what it would mean if he took action. John had places he wanted to go, points in time he wanted to arrive at along with ones he wanted to avoid. If he started changing things—saved lives he'd lost before, or made a concerted effort to keep Sherlock from dying at Moriarty's hands—he'd be flying blind on what he might be giving up in exchange. Or, for that matter, what price others might be forced to pay for him.
This was going to drive him mad. Trying to hold all the 'what ifs' and 'if thens' in his head still felt like reaching into water to touch his reflection. Only he was pretty sure he was also on the wrong side of the water. He wasn't built for this. He couldn't think this way. Christ, where was Sherlock when he needed him?
Four years in the future, dead in an explosion.
Jesus, he felt so alone. Alone and confused and angry as a rat in a maze where some lab-coated wanker kept switching the exits on him. He needed some goddamned perspective on this and all he could manage was to spin in circles and punch walls.
When a man was hovering on the edge of fight-or-flight, John had learned, he was best served to give in and run for it before he started breaking things. So John laced up his boots and set out for the four-kilometre pounded-dirt track that ran around the base perimeter.
It was quiet but not deserted. John wasn't the only person on base who preferred to exercise outside. At this time of year, the air was just shy of chilly, but John broke into a dead sprint as soon as he reached the track and it wasn't long before his skin was steaming and the cool air felt blissful. For about one minute, there wasn't room in his head for anything but the burn in his lungs and the jarring in his legs.
He managed about 300 meters before he had to slow down to a jog, gasping like a landed fish and soaking with sweat. The powdery white dust he'd kicked up mingled with it to coat him in a thin gluey paste till he looked just like the men and women he passed as he ran: animated plaster statues with shining, sweat-carved snail trails of living flesh down their faces and shoulders.
It was better, though. He could lose himself like this, engulfed in his physical body and with the desert yawning away to his left; too big for John to ever leave a mark, able to swallow even his problems without a trace. Immersed in that immensity, John could reach for a bit of objectivity.
He would never fit here. These weeks of trying to line himself up with a John who'd been younger, saner, simpler...of course it was impossible. It was a sham. But no matter how he sorted his options in his head, they settled into three categories, all of which were equally futile.
It was like fairy tales—the horrible old ones his gran had used to tell when he was a kid, where the fairies were cruel as life and no one ever got to keep what they wanted.
He could go to Sherlock. He could tell the future and everyone in his present life to fuck off, along with everyone he could help here, and run to Sherlock to try to change everything for both of them. He could get three more years with him than they'd had on their first go. Maybe even save their lives. He could hope that the Sherlock he would meet if he went now was a man who could be what John's Sherlock was. He could hope he wouldn't fuck up everything for them both.
Or he could stay here. Abandon Sherlock and save his patients. Soldiers, Afghanis, children, all the people he'd failed the first time. Play God. Go slowly mad.
Or stay here and do what he was pretty sure was the ethical thing: try to change as little as possible. Accept that it wasn't his right to make these decisions, avoid tempting fate with the wrong choice. Stand uselessly aside and lose everything. Again.
He had eight days to decide.
He spent For the next two of them bracing for his psych evaluation. Sham it might be, but if he was going to get through his, he needed the comparative sane simplicity of Captain John Watson, RAMC.
Captain John Watson didn't have PTSD. He didn't drive himself crazy pondering questions his little mind wasn't equipped to comprehend. He didn't dream every night of explosions and blood and choking on sand that turned to water when he vomited it out and burning need in his chest that his last sight not be of sly, mirror-bright eyes turning to empty glass, and he didn't wake up shouting, chasing the threads of how he could fix it.
Captain Watson knew his duty, had no question where he belonged, had never heard of a glorious madman named Sherlock Holmes. John did his best to unearth his old self from the sedimentary layers of memory and re-inhabit him, grabbing for that man's calm core to avoid being diagnosed as delusional and, if he was lucky, to find a stable point in the chaos of his mind so he could get a chance to pull it together.
He felt like he was profiling himself: working 12 hour shifts, exercising his lungs raw, playing poker with his teammates in their few hours of free time, and exhausting himself till he could sleep like a coma patient. The cramming method of studying for dissociative personality disorder. It left him feeling like he was standing about two inches out of alignment with his skin, puppeteering his own mind and body. Workouts were the only time when he actually fit into his own space, when everything else was subsumed in the labour of bones and muscles.
But he noticed the subtle tension beginning to fade from his teammates' shoulders when they stood near him. That was...something. It meant he wasn't radiating crazy. It meant he was faking it successfully, and he wasn't sure how to feel about that. Sometimes it helped him feel a little more normal.
His hand was on the doorknob of the psychiatrist's office when the thought struck him that he could deliberately throw this. Get himself diagnosed, sent home, discharged.
It might be the responsible thing to do. Five days till mission launch. They were already packing up their gear, and he was proposing to go into battle with his head tied up like a pretzel. It was stupid, and he knew it. But the thought of bailing out tasted like failure, when he could still help here. To hell with everything else, these men were still his teammates. He still had his duty to do by them.
Besides, if he went out on a medical discharge, they'd inevitably want to know the details, and he wasn't that good a liar. He wouldn't be diagnosed with PTSD, he'd be diagnosed as schizophrenic. He'd probably end up sectioned.
He took a breath, shook his shoulders out and pulled open the door.
The psychiatrist didn't waste time. Busy woman; of course she was. Who wasn't? She moved them right through a review of John's history. Yes, alcoholism ran in his family. No, he'd never been a heavy drinker himself. Yes, he'd had some trouble with gambling in his youth. No, he hadn't indulged since he signed up for the military, wait, unless…did his Friday poker games count?
No, it transpired, they did not.
And then to the point. Her crap standard-issue chair groaned when she sat forward in it to put her elbows on her desk. "Let's talk about the nightmare, John. What was it about?"
He'd spent time on figuring out how to explain it to someone without context. "I dreamed of people I care for, getting caught in a bomb. Civilians. From back home."
She nodded, entirely unsurprised. Now he thought about it, it sounded positively commonplace. "Are nightmares common for you?"
"No." They hadn't been, at the time. This time. Before. He visualized a thumb and squashed that bit of mental babble.
"Have you been under unusual stress lately?"
He gave her an ironic head-tilt. It was such a bad habit; rude, really. "My unit is deploying in six days. I've been dealing with increasing cases of battle trauma as action ramps up." I recently died in a bomb blast. With my best friend, who I might be in love with. And his arch-villain. By the way, I'm a time traveller. Shut up, John. "I've got a…relationship. Back in London. Which turns out to be maybe more than I realized."
His brain only caught up to the significance of that little catch in his voice after the words were out, his throat tightening uselessly as though it could pull them back.
Oh, Jesus, Sherlock.
He was grieving. He had been since he'd got here. How had he never noticed? His chest burned as though admitting it made it real. It took every bit of stoicism he could scrape up to keep his expression from giving him away.
"And that's what bothers you."
He gave in to the urge to rub his hands over his face. No point in pretending he wasn't agitated, and oh god, he needed just a few seconds to himself. "I don't have much time," he told her when he dropped them back in his lap. "In six days I'll be out of touch, under fire, and that…" He tamped down the grief with a firm inhale and tried to anchor the oncoming lie in it. "It makes you realize where you are. That there's a chance of not coming back. Not getting to-" His larynx ached from forcing his voice to stay even, and he wasn't managing to lie at all, was he. "That you may never even get to touch them."
The psychiatrist sat silently for a few beats, absorbing what he'd just told her. Or maybe demonstrating her respect for his emotions; some kind of psychotherapist's customer service code. "So you're feeling your mortality," she summarized.
The laugh erupted before he could stop it, because that, that was the essence of black comedy. "Not mine, no."
Then he cursed internally at her predatory head-tilt. Catching her attention was the opposite of what he wanted. "Not yours?" Analysis flickered in her eyes, lightning-fast. John wished fiercely it were Sherlock sitting across from him. "Is she unwell? At risk?"
He let the gender assumption slide. The last thing he needed was more questions, and anyway she was right, wasn't she, in the ways that mattered? Besides, as free as he officially was to have a male partner, he had no illusions about the unofficial blowback if that one got out. "Let's say that I've known people with safer lifestyles."
"Really." She raised an eyebrow. "How so?"
"Not my story to tell." Let her assume that this fictional girlfriend was a drug addict, stunt performer, police officer, or government spy; it was all the same to him. She'd be at least partially right on all counts.
But it didn't all quite jibe. His reactions were off, and she could sense it as well as he could. He watched the wheels turn behind her eyes as she shuffled the facts around, searching for the point of failure in this self-portrait he'd sketched.
He opened his mouth and words started coming out. "It's hard," he began, "being the one who waits. I'm used to…" What? He was used to this. To being present, in the action, able to do something. "I'm not good at…" No, fuck, wait, where was he going with this? A cane, a limp, and months in a bedsit so bland he'd felt it driving him slowly insane. And then craziness and running and the amazing, vibrant feeling of a smoking gun in his hand and a live madman, staring in wonder. Shut up, John. But her eyes were fixed on him, and he didn't dare leave it hanging. He admitted lamely, "I'm not good at being useless."
God, he felt pathetic saying it. He felt useless, right now. His ribs ached from caging all the things he'd swallowed down, and he felt horrifically exposed. Out suddenly became a priority. "Are we done here?"
She nodded, recognizing his discomfort. "Just about." After a few more notes in her book, she snapped it closed and met his eyes. "Based on this interview, I'd judge you fit for service, Captain. But I want to ensure that you understand the dangers of your situation. Your history shows a number of escalating risk factors for PTSD…"
Her spiel on stress management faded into the wallpaper while he choked on the ridiculous, stupid injustice of it all.
Christ, Sherlock. We died. John had lost him and he hadn't even met him yet. He had no idea how to mourn this.
And he'd wondered why he couldn't think straight.
He'd got over childish ideas about the universe's fairness when his mum died. Life kept moving even if you stopped, and John had a decision to make, whether or not he was ready to. He supposed he had the psychiatrist to thank. At least now he knew where he was coming from.
The next day (T minus four) found him at the firing range. When he needed to think, guns forced him to focus. There was no room to lose track of a loaded gun in his hands: where it was pointed, how he handled it, who was in the line of fire.
Taking out a clip's worth of his frustrations on a painted plank kept his mind from chasing itself in circles, but he wasn't convinced that this was better. Every shot jarred through his diaphragm like a sob, and the sensation kicked up the cloud of grief around him. He couldn't decide whether it was cathartic or just miserable.
The trigger clicked on an empty chamber, and John dropped out of firing stance.
"You're the only Marksman in the RAMC, John," Bill said from behind him. "Do you really need the practice?"
John sucked in a startled breath, fumbled and caught the magazine he was ejecting before it hit the dirt, and then breathed out again in a long stream. "She cleared me." He was so sodding sick of dodging and pretending, and it was worst with Bill. He felt like he was kicking a puppy that'd offered to help him with his math homework. He pocketed the mag and drove in a full one.
"So does that mean you're alright, then?"
John huffed, cycled the slide, and fired three times.
He'd never quite realized before how much Bill's voice reminded him of Sherlock's. They both had that quality of filling a space. But Bill's voice held the warmth of a cup of coffee and a blanket. Sherlock had only ever come over that comforting when he was being manipulative.
John fired twice more, breathing through the hard clench of his lungs and the kick of the recoil, before he had to lower the gun and engage the decocker, mortified at how close he suddenly was to falling apart in public.
He held still, eyes fixed on his gun, trying to get himself back under wraps. There'd been a time when he might have been a little all right with falling apart in front of Bill, but he'd learned to be alone since then. Another one of the things he'd found he couldn't go back on.
When he'd pulled it back together enough to pay attention, he found Bill in the middle of talking, unfazed by the near-miss with emotionalism. "-Didn't hear a word if you want." His mouth quirked. "Just tell me why the planks need to die, John."
John choked, caught between a sob and a laugh, and started coughing on it. Christ. What he'd give to be able to. He shook his head helplessly. "It's complicated."
"I'm smarter than I look."
John turned to face him. Bill raised an eyebrow, as if he thought John actually were surveying how smart he looked. Stood there, like a bloody pillar of strength inviting John to lean on him. Also, desperately failing to feign casual with how he was blocking the exit to the shooting stall.
John couldn't stop himself from giggling. "You look like you're suffering with rheumatism."
Bill snapped upright and rumbled sheepishly, with something that might've been a blush on his dark cheeks, but his feet stayed planted. John sighed. He was going to regret this, but he was too fucking tired to care. He held out the Sig to Bill. "Fine. Practice."
Bill stared down at the thing like John was force-feeding him avocados. That hangdog expression dredged up another, only slightly hysterical snicker from John. He hefted the gun a little, keeping its barrel pointed down-range. "Come on. You need it or they'll drum you out at your next ACMT. You shoot and I'll talk."
There was a day next year when Bill being a better shot could save at least one life, along with a little piece of his friend's soul. That alone made this worth doing. And…selfish as it was, John was going off his chump keeping it all to himself.
"I dreamed of an explosion," he admitted, once Bill took the gun and scuffed his feet into position. "Don't lock your elbows."
"Stress dream," Bill observed. Pop! Handguns did not sound terribly impressive in the open air.
"Yeah." No wonder Sherlock found it so easy to lie. When you knew so much more than the next bloke, you could tell the truth with impunity.
"Who was exploding?" Bill fidgeted a little, concentrating on his stance far more intently than it really needed.
"You know who." Pop pop pop! John squinted against the afternoon glare. "Not bad."
"You cannot possibly see from here. And yeah, well, I don't. That's the whole point, isn't it?" Bill glowered sideways over his bicep.
John dipped his head a bit in acknowledgement. He'd promised to explain about his 'friend' last week, but he never had. That said enough, really. He sure as hell couldn't manage it now. He sucked in his cheeks and chewed on their inner lining while he shoved away his last glimpse of Sherlock, fringe ruffling over his eyebrows before the blast picked them up and threw them. "What's your greatest regret, Bill?"
Bill straightened warily and lowered the gun. "Missing my little girl's first two years." He twisted towards John to assess him, his big frame looming a bit in the small space.
When he got worried, Bill had a way of shuffling in towards people like a massive dog trying to crowd them into feeling better. John's stomach twinged with guilt. Bill had been worrying for a while now, and John had let him. "If you had the chance," he began, searching for a way to say it that wouldn't sound alarming, "if you could go back and change things in your life, go a different route, would you risk it?"
He hadn't succeeded, from the way Bill's lips thinned, but his eyes went distant. "I've got my regrets, John, but they're nothing I can't live with. The life I've got now…it's not perfect, but nothing ever is." He shook his head, focussing back on John. "Bugger, you've got me spouting cliches. I save lives, Johnny. I'm blessed to be surrounded with the best people a man could know. If making my mistakes helped me to get here, I can live with them."
A hot flash swept through John at those words. He held his hand out for the gun. Bill hesitated for a second, then handed it over.
John swept the Sig over one-handed to unload five rounds in a cluster in the plank's 'heart.'
It was just a piece of wood, but killing it did make him feel a little better.
"What if you couldn't live with it?"
"Then I reckon I'd do what I had to do." Shoulders gone tight, Bill held his hand out for the gun. John passed the weapon over. Bill's attempt hit the chest area two times out of five. John waved at him to keep going; he wasn't sure Bill would give the gun back if he asked for it. "John…"
John shook his head at him. "If I left the military, people I could save would die."
Bill sucked in his breath. "If you left the military…?" He looked down at the gun in his hands and went silent. Bill fell into himself sometimes, when he went deep in thought, but John could follow along from the way those big hands fiddled with the Sig. He ejected the magazine, emptied the chamber and stood for a long moment with the cartridge clenched in his fist.
Finally he reloaded the gun he'd just emptied. "I imagine...some would die that you might've saved. And probably others would live that you would've lost." He fixed John with a scrutinizing stare. "That's how it works, mate. We all make mistakes. We just make different ones. You're a good doctor, John, but you're not God."
John laughed under his breath. Too right. "If I don't leave the military," he murmured, trying the words on, "people I could save would die."
Bill engulfed John's left shoulder in one hand. "That's not what I mean!"
John wanted to tell him it wasn't what he meant either, but what he really meant was Sherlock, so he said nothing.
Bill kept his grip on John's shoulder, studying him with a tense confusion that made John's heart clench. Watson, you selfish git. Couldn't keep his mouth shut and now he'd gone and scared the shit out of the poor man. He watched a parade of replies pass and die unspoken on Bill's face before he settled for, "Thinking of clocking out on us? I had you for a career man."
John smiled sadly. "So did I." The one thing he couldn't have no matter which choice he made. But at least he could ease the damage he'd done here. "How do you deal with having two lives, Bill? When they both need you in different places?"
Bill's shoulders heaved in a heavy sigh, visibly relieved at finally getting some context that didn't sound like the rough draft of a suicide note. "I married a saint."
John gave a startled bark of a laugh. "Yeah, well. That won't be an issue for me." He gestured to have his gun back, secured it and slipped it back into its holster. "Practice your shooting, Bill. Where we're going, you'll need it." With a parting clap to the back, he left his puzzled friend behind him.
Trauma medicine had an element of timelessness to it. Once you'd seen enough injured bodies, the times and places all began to blend together. His shifts came as a bit of a relief, considering. That evening, John leaned over a young soldier in the ward, probing at the wound encompassing his leg while the boy—God, had John ever been that young?—watched his hands with eyes the size of teacups.
They were so bloody stoic, these kids, and so afraid.
The examination was mainly for the lad's benefit. The diagnosis had come to John at a glance, but patients didn't find the Sherlock approach to medicine terribly comforting. He ignored the pang that hit whenever he thought of the man, tidily folding down the sterile bandage and granting the soldier a crooked smile. "I have good news and bad news."
The soldier—Corporal Mark Potts—went stiff.
"I should be able to save your leg." John watched anxiety drain out of the young man with a certain detached sympathy. He remembered that. The inexpressible relief of You'll live. You'll be whole. When Potts tensed again at what he saw in John's face, John continued gently, "The bad news is, there's no possibility of you staying in the service."
Potts hollowed out before his eyes. Yeah, John remembered that, too. He studied the young man, suffering in his hospital bed, and dug after something useful to say. All he'd wanted to hear when it'd been his turn was, "Whoops, sorry, had that wrong."
"You've got people waiting for you, right?" he finally asked.
Mark nodded.
"Then heal," John told him. "Work for it, for them. And when you're better, find the thing you can do and throw yourself at it. Don't let anything hold you back."
Mark frowned, confused. Fair enough; John sounded more like a guidance counsellor than a doctor just now. "You're not useless," he insisted anyway, with more force than he could justify. "The Army's not the only thing you're meant for. There's something else out there that needs you."
It must seem to be coming out of nowhere, he supposed, watching the uncertain furrow deepen between Mark's eyebrows. But it was true, and maybe something to keep on with through the platitudes they spoon-fed recovering patients.
John nodded farewell and peeled off the nitrile gloves on his way to the next patient, tracking them blankly on their arc towards the biohazard bin. He'd been like Mark. Once upon a time, this life had been all he'd ever wanted for himself. He'd never thought of himself as lucky, but he really, really was. But how much good luck could a man receive? How many reasons to live could he count on finding?
Three days to mobilization, and the base was swarming with 2,000 troops, 600 vehicles, and a field hospital in the midst of preparations to move out over the next three days; a quarter of the base's resources and personnel, moved in slowly over the past four months for this very purpose, and deploying in the space of a week.
John's own platoon was packing their vehicles with equipment and supplies. In three days, they'd light out cross-country to the north, heading for what would turn out to be some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. And John would be with them.
He had to face the fact that he'd lost Sherlock. No matter how much it hurt, if John interfered with his life now, then Sherlock would never become the man John knew. John wouldn't—couldn't—be that selfish.
He couldn't be so selfish as to abandon his people here for the sake of his own hurt feelings. People like Pierpont and Potts, he could help them now, and there was nothing he could do for Sherlock yet except intrude.
He'd find a way to deal with Moriarty. He had a couple of years to think about it, after all.
John jounced into the heliport on the back of an ATMP, along with a few of the lads from his platoon. The place was a tightly leashed catastrophe. Support helicopters kept up a perpetual sandstorm, coming in and out on supply runs. Crew and maintenance personnel scurried about, bent low out to stay clear of idly spinning blades. A miniature mountain range of crates and containers had formed along the east side of the flat area, over whose peaks and valleys Logistics Corpsmen clambered on their endless quest to help soldiers locate the supplies and ammunition they needed.
On the west side, a convoy of three Chinooks was spitting out their shipment of supplies and Royal Engineers. The ATMP trundled over towards it; John followed the lead of the Logistics Specialists he'd come out with, and leapt off the back before it even stopped. Their Sergeant went jogging over to the man supervising the unloading, while the Lance Corporal started poking his nose around the containers. Since John was along to help with the medical supplies, he tagged along.
Hopper, the LC, elbowed him and pointed. "Doc, check it out." The incoming troops had cleared out enough to reveal the knot of out-of-place men standing near the loading ramp of the third Chinook stand out. "What's a fuckin' SAS colonel doin' running escort duty?"
John rubbed at his watering eyes—fucking dust—and peered at them. An SAS colonel and two non-coms, two men wearing civilian clothes that were so nondescript they could only be secret service, and another civilian who anything but nondescript.
He arrested John's eye: tall and dark-haired in civilian clothes and body armour, he was obviously the colonel's charge. He was arguing, pulled up to his full height and making sharp, darting gestures. For a moment, while the man paused and listened to something the officer was telling him, John thought, God, he looks so much like...
That silhouette. The storkish elegance. The arrogance.
"Sherlock!" John shouted before he knew what he was doing.
The dark-haired man snapped around. For all of one second, he hovered in place—triangulating—and then he was moving, crashing in John's direction like a storm surge.
It is. It is. What the fuck is he doing here? Oh Christ, he's goddamned glorious.
And then Sherlock was standing a foot away, looming right down at him, eyes blazing, wide, brighter and sharper than John had ever seen him. Slashing at his lungs. John couldn't breathe.
"You know who I am."
Oh fuck. No. Bloody buggering fuck. He wasn't meant to balls it up like this! Hadn't he just been telling himself he was better than this? The Sherlock in John's mind started speaking half a breath before the real one. How do you know who I-
"John?"
Notes:
Fun gun facts!
1: The gun we see John (and Sherlock) using in the show is a Sig Sauer P226. While the Browning L9A1 (aka the Browning Hi-Power) is still standard issue in the British Army, the Sig P226 has been issued to some units, including paratroopers, which includes members of 16 Air Assault Brigade and their associated groups. (In other words, John's unit.) However, the two guns do have a very similar profile. So when Moriarty calls it a Browning, either 1: the writers got it wrong, 2: Moriarty got it wrong, 3: Moriarty was mouthing off and didn't care, or 4: we're supposed to pretend the Sig is a Browning because they didn't want to buy too many props.
Well, I find it interesting anyway. ^_^
2: British troops take the Annual Combat Firearms Test every year, to check their proficiency with firearms. Those who score the highest are awarded the Marksman rating in recognition of their skill. Mainly this means they get a nifty badge they can wear, but it also means that if a team needs somebody on the sniper rifle and they don't have an actual, y'know, sniper handy, the Marksman is likely to be asked to fill in. Ordinarily, medical personnel don't fight except in defense of themselves or their patients, but at satellite bases, they do stand guard duty and take shifts on patrol. Given his facility with guns, it's quite possible that John found himself in this position a couple of times.
3: I have no idea how many Marksmen there are in the RAMC, and neither does Bill. There probably aren't many, but he was deliberately spouting crap.
4: It's not against the laws of war for medics to fight or bear arms. Medics are given special protection under the Geneva Conventions so long as they abide by certain requirements. Essentially, it's a crime to target medical personnel if they are wearing the red cross symbol and maintaining a non-aggressive profile—i.e. staying out of combat except in defense of self, patients, or medical supplies. But if they take off the red armlet, then they are free to act as regular military, and to be treated as such.
Of course it's moot in Afghanistan. The Geneva Conventions only legally apply between fellow signatories—even if most signatories consider it the decent thing to apply it to all enemies—and you can bet that guerrilla fighters have not signed, and won't be holding to the Conventions even if you do. In fact, in a situation like Afghanistan, wearing the armband can make medical personnel more of a target, so sometimes they ditch it (though it does also signify to allies where to find help, so it can still be useful).