.
"My hands are cold, my body's numb.
I'm still in shock; what have you done?
My head is pounding, my vision's blurred.
Your mouth is moving; I don't hear a word."
John wakes up in a cold sweat.
He knew, of course, that this was coming. The nightmares. It hadn't prepared him, because this is horrible.
He was stuck on the ground again, staring up at Sherlock, but everything was muted. He couldn't hear Sherlock, couldn't say anything, but the word suicide had echoed throughout his ears, over and over and over. And then, when Sherlock was supposed to fall forward, he gave him a sardonic smile and jumped.
The next time John wakes up with a racing heart, the nightmare has changed. Sherlock's still dying, of course. John suspects that he'll very much have to take a sleeping aid tonight if he wants to sleep the rest of the night uninterrupted.
Sherlock had been in Afghanistan with him, in the dream. And John hadn't known, but had crawled through the dust and dirt to assess a soldier with blood pouring from a gash running up the length of his leg and John had found it was Sherlock. And he tried to stop the bleeding and he tried to talk to Sherlock, but he couldn't hear him over the gunfire and the bombs and the shouting. But then Sherlock had gone still, those cold, lifeless eyes staring up at him...
... and that, of course, is when John sits up, gasping for air and staring at his hands as though he expects the blood from Sherlock's wounds to be all over him.
Or maybe the blood from his own wounds, he doesn't know. Because these dreams have to be literally physically hurting them. They have to be. It feels like his heart is bursting.
The third dream is from the Atwill-Porter Baths, so many months ago with Jim and Sherlock and the Semtex. And instead of Jim's phone going off, the bomb does, and John wakes up with the echoes of a gunshot in his mind. Like those dreams so many months ago. So many months ago.
He doesn't know when the shaking stops, or if it does, and where the tears start. He is encompassed by miserable darkness and there is no light to save him now.
"I'm falling through the doors of the emergency room.
Can anybody help me with these exit wounds?
I don't know how much more love this heart can lose,
but I'm dying, dying from these exit wounds."
Song: Exit Wounds - The Script.
Disclaimer: I do not own the song or Sherlock. Rights to their respective owners.
I have loved this song for a good long while. It was one of the first songs that I started with when I went out on a search for songs. But, then again, I really love The Script.
Special thanks to:
- isi7140. For catching my stupid 2:00 in the morning typos!
- Book girl fan. For catching my stupid typos all the time within stories and I've never thanked you.
- storylover18. For inspiration on the Afghanistan scene... something we wrote a long time ago in an RPG inspired the idea.