I have to thank my friend Archie for being the Sam to my Frodo in all writing things, for always having a word to cheer me up and for coming along with me on this.
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I really love to ramble about billions of theories, and it would be my pleasure.
In this chapter:
"He was carrying too many things. He was suddenly aware of it. Blues and trains and pools; and bombs and fires and oranges; and greys. And all the red."
CHAPTER 4
Everything was blue.
He looked both ways in the long corridor. He could feel his frantic heartbeat.
They didn't have any more time.
"John, there was stuff that you wanted to say, but didn't say it..."
The chlorine invaded his nostrils and his vein jumped on his neck.
He ran, calling the name over and over again. It was his lucky word. It was the word of doom.
He opened all the doors he could find, he tore curtains, he broke windows.
A neat round cut in the centre of the glass. But he couldn't see anything.
Get him, get him.
He called the name over and over again.
Everything was going orange, soon to be hot and burning.
"Say it now."
He waited for the blast.
It never came.
He heard a dry thud. A body. A body hitting the ground.
Everything was grey. The pavement, red.
"Sorry, I can't."
There should be some rubbish bags, he knew, there should be.
There weren't.
Everything was red.
"Sherlock!"
"John?" Mary's voice was a distant point in an ocean of chaos. John's own ragged breath screamed in his years. He sat up in bed immediately, swinging his feet over and planting them on the ground, digging his toes in the carpet. He looked ahead at nowhere in particular, trying to convince himself that everything was fine.
"John?" Mary sat beside him and tried to take his hand. He didn't let her. He needed space. He was suddenly afraid that he wouldn't be able to stop himself from shoving her if she tried to hold him again. There was a panic attack coming, he could feel. His nostrils were full of chlorine, despite the fact that John hadn't been in a pool in years. Since Moriarty, since he had told Sherlock to run.
He closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply. His lungs seemed full of pool water. He had never drowned in it, but he had carried all that water ever since. He was carrying too many things. He was suddenly aware of it. Blues and trains and pools; and bombs and fires and oranges; and greys. And all the red. John hated all the colours.
He tried to drink the glass of water that was on his dresser. It shattered beside his feet. He looked at it to ground himself. Shattered, he thought. Everything seemed irrevocably shattered.
"John, are you all right?" Mary asked, sounding more worried than before, turning on the lamp on his side of the bed. She could be so caring and loving. John loved her. He wouldn't know what do without her. But he also didn't know what do with her in that moment. He had never had an audience for his nightmares before, not like this. She was trying to touch him, to be reassuring, and all he needed was space.
He told himself to answer her at once, to end her worry. He couldn't. He couldn't even nod. In his eyes everything was colour. Everything was red. In his head, Sherlock was still dead. John hated that now that Sherlock was actually alive again, John seemed to need proof of it every now and again. What kind of miserable little captain was he that the loss of one single brother-in-arms was enough to destroy him completely?
What kind of human being was he that the coming back of the same brother-in-arms had carved his chest cavity empty of everything?
"John?" Mary's training finally kicked in, and she took his pulse. He wanted to love her for it so much, but he hated her then. He was the one used to take care of others, not the other way around. He couldn't help feeling a bit of resentment.
John set his mind to standing up. He poured all his lasting energy into getting as far away from their bed as he could. That bed wasn't the place for this. It wasn't the place for him to bring a part of himself that he had needed to bury to save at least something.
John felt the smooth sheets under his fingers. He had never felt so disconnected from it. The part of his life that had been engraved in war, adrenaline, heartbreak and blood had no place on those sheets.
The fluffy pillow Mary had picked especially for him wasn't the place to bring Sherlock and his madness, the madness he had brought into John's life from the day one. The madness John's body couldn't take anymore, but craved at the same time.
He felt sick.
He forced himself to finally stand up and walked erratically to the bathroom. He locked the door and sat on the floor, in front of the toilet, resting his head on the cold porcelain, humiliated. Mary was standing on the other side of the door, asking for him, almost shouting. He wanted to be reassuring, but he couldn't even stand on his own feet. He tuned her out to avoid telling her to shut up. It wasn't her fault, he remembered himself.
It wasn't her fault she had fallen in love with the doctor. It wasn't her fault that now, out of the blue, her doctor had changed back into something ugly and damaged.
Not out of the blue, John thought, bitterly. He was trying to slow his own breathing, to get a hold of his body, to get his hands to stop shaking.
Not his hands. His hand, his left hand. The hand that had given him away to the Holmes brothers. The same hand that once again was showing John how utterly lost he was.
Sherlock Holmes had saved him once. Only Sherlock Holmes could have shattered him so completely again.
John had run out of options. To be fixed by Sherlock wasn't a possibility anymore. It seemed as if all had been lost. Sherlock's coming back had just make it fairly obvious.
John didn't have anywhere to run away to.
His soon-to-be wife was pounding at the door. Sherlock was pounding in his head. Neither of them had the slightest idea of how devastated John was.
Ella had known. From the moment he had sat on that stupid chair in front of her after Sherlock's fall, she had known. She had seen. John had never come back after that. He hadn't needed a reminder. He had needed to forget.
Well, that had happened for a brief period of time.
Now everything was coming back to haunt him. A six foot tall ghost who had come back to life to remind him how completely pathetic John had been for grieving.
His stomach turned in revulsion. He couldn't take anymore, he emptied its contents in the toilet, feeling tears of rage running down his cheeks.
He had said goodbye to that life. He had tried to move on. He couldn't live until the end of his days feeling sorry for himself, waking up trembling and sweating because of a man that had given no second thought to jumping off a building right in front of him.
Putting John back together wasn't Sherlock's job anymore. Maybe they had been fools to think they could try again. Maybe John had been a fool, Sherlock was probably well aware of the fact, had deduced it long ago and was now trying just for the scientific kick.
John told himself to calm the fuck down.
He swallowed the bitterness and straightened his back. Captain Watson was better than that.
He trained his breathing, focusing on the grout between the tiles of the bathroom wall.
He swiped his disgusting mouth on the sleeve of his pyjamas and rested his back on the wall. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing the terrible colours to go back to the hidden corners of his mind.
Hold on, stay put, survive. He had been doing it all his life. He would do it again.
Mary's voice invaded his ears once more. Sweet, loving Mary, who was his fiancée and who was worried sick about him. Mary who needed a word from him to know he was okay, it didn't matter how much of a lie that would be.
"John! John, I'm calling the neighbour to run down this door if you don't answer me right at this second!"
"'M okay," he said, weakly.
He was crying involuntary tears, his mouth reeked, his hand was shaking, his head was pounding and he felt lost. But he was going to be fine.
"I'm taking a shower," he said, while standing up from the floor and looking himself in the mirror. He washed his mouth and face, trying to remember who he was, apart from the sidekick that had been left behind.
He took of his clothes slowly and looked his naked torso in the mirror. That scar was proof of what he could endure, of how resistant he was. He had survived war, had survived many different wars. John Watson had survived an alcoholic mother, an alcoholic sister, Afghanistan, an infection. He had survived Sherlock Holmes and their life, and Sherlock Holmes and his death. That bullet scar was the proof that John was going to survive Sherlock Holmes and his resurrection.
And he was going to do it by himself. Therapy be damned.
The water was scalding, and he stayed under it until his skin was pink and burning. He took deep breaths and closed his eyes, letting the physical reaction calm his chaotic mind. After some time, he shut off the water and dried himself in one of the lilac towels Mary left in the bathroom. It smelled faintly of lavender and John was glad for it. He was glad for anything that wasn't chlorine.
John wrapped himself in the towel and looked at his wreck of clothes. He would throw everything away, including his pants. He didn't need any reminder of this night.
To think that the confrontation with Mary was waiting for him outside gave him pause. Mary was understanding, but she had never seen John like this, she would want and need to talk, like normal people did. Like John could never do, like he had never needed to because early in his life there was his mum, and then Harry, and then the army, and then Sherlock. Not for the first time, he thought this was the first normal relationship he had ever had.
And he had to adjust to it. He wanted to accept it wholeheartedly. This was what he needed, he knew it now. He would patch himself up and be good to her, he would be better.
John took a deep breath and straightened his back, determined to answer any questions Mary had. He would blame the war. Sherlock Holmes wasn't anybody else's business but his own. And he would bury it again.
He unlocked the door and Mary was there with her big, wet eyes, waiting for him. He knew he should give her a hug, but the thought of being trapped right now seemed too much. He let her embrace him anyway and was truly glad for smelling their bed in her hair and on her neck. The smell helped soothe him.
"I'm okay," he said, trying to disentangle himself from her, but holding her hands in his own. He rubbed her palms and kissed each one of them. "I'm fine, love, I'm sorry."
Mary seemed so scared, John hated that he had made her feel like that.
"You're going to have to talk to me about this," she said, and sounded apologetic. She sounded as if she too hated that she had to ask that from John.
John took a deep breath and nodded, pointing to their wardrobe, signalling that he was going to put some clothes on so they could talk.
He put on an old pair of boxers and a t-shirt. His body was still warm after everything. He threw his dressing gown over and offered his hand to her. "Let's talk in the kitchen, okay?"
She accepted his hand, but didn't take her eyes out of his face. Her scrutiny was nothing close to Sherlock's, but John could admit to himself that it made him feel slightly more uncomfortable, especially now.
He was uncomfortable because he was trying to come up with a credible lie. He was trying to bend the truth to fit the purpose of explaining to Mary why, without exposing something not even he could think about just yet. He knew he would have the whole day to do it. The whole week. He'd probably have the rest of his life to notice again every little crack Sherlock's ruse had caused him.
In the kitchen, she told him to sit down and busied herself with putting the kettle on. She took the milk out of the fridge and brought the sugar to the table, setting their cups and spoons. While waiting for the kettle to boil, they stayed in silence and she petted John's head, running her fingers through the strands of his damp hair. He rested his head on her stomach.
After their cups were filled, she sat in front of John, looking at him with eager eyes, but trying to mask her worry. John vaguely asked himself how pathetic must he appear that she didn't want to trigger him with a simple look. She didn't ask anything, just waited for John.
"It used to happen a lot, that kind of thing," he started, as inarticulate as expected. She just nodded. "It has been some time since I last had one this intense. Something about PTSD," John explained. Mary knew about PTSD, but she couldn't imagine his reverted condition. He couldn't imagine telling his fiancée that the problem was that his body, while traumatized, still craved the conditions which had caused the damage. John had to thank Mycroft Holmes for this reading. Or shoot him for it.
Mary was looking at him, questioningly. Had she asked him anything? John was zoning out again. He asked her to repeat.
"Will you tell me what the nightmare was about?"
John paused with his cup of tea mid-air. He wouldn't tell her the truth, but he could tell her something. This nightmare hadn't been about the Afghan war, but this explanation would be as good as the truth. In John's head sometimes they were all the same thing.
"War things. Gun shots, IED explosions, this sort of thing. Wound, etc," he motioned vaguely with his cup of tea. As good as the truth. She didn't need to know it was him holding the gun and killing a cabbie, that the explosion had never happened and that the wound hadn't been his.
"Was that all of it?" She asked, holding her cup in her two hands, warming them on the china. John remembered it was still winter and he should be cold. He wasn't.
"Yes," he said, trying to sound convincing. Sherlock had always thought he was a terrible liar, but Mary wasn't as cunning as him. Nobody was, with the exception of Mycroft.
Mary was looking at him sadly. There was no sign of pity. Instead, she looked disappointed. John didn't understand, Mary wouldn't be disappointed in him for this. He didn't say anything, however, he didn't want to keep talking. In fact, he didn't know what he wanted to do, since going back to sleep was out of the question.
She seemed to have something to say, so John lifted an eyebrow and waited for it. Whatever it was, he wanted her to spill it out at once. He dreaded that she was going to tell him to go back to therapy.
Mary cleared her throat, and her features changed into something of determination. John was proud of her.
"You screamed his name, you know," she said, simply, and sipped her tea.
And John was falling all over again.
How could he not know that? It hadn't crossed his mind.
He tried to recollect the moment he had awoken, but it was just a blur in his memory and he was partly glad for it. He cleared his throat and paid attention to any lingering sting. Of course his throat was a mess, he had just thrown up to the point in which bile was all there was inside him. He asked himself if Mary could be fishing for that answer and then chastised himself for it. She wasn't the one who lied to John.
John had always dreamed silently. He had always felt comforted by the fact that even his subconscious seemed so secretive that it didn't come jumping out of his throat without his consent. It didn't matter how loud things were inside his head, his mouth was sealed.
But then again, he told himself, he had never had an eye witness before, he could have been screaming for his dear life and not know.
He considered denying, but it wasn't really an option. He was sure his face had already given him away. He hid his hands and braced himself on the chair to stop himself from fleeing. He wasn't ready to discuss this, he had never been.
"So... Are you going to tell me truth now?" Mary asked, but she didn't sound impatient, just worried.
"Everything I said was true," John said simply. It was the truth. He hoped Mary stopped asking questions and saved them both from the frustration.
"So he appears in your nightmares about the Afghan war?" Mary asked, sounding skeptical. She was pushing him, maybe too hard.
John didn't want to lie to her, nor did he want to tell her about the imagery that was finally leaving his immediate memory. "I don't want to talk about it," he said, and it was the best he could offer her. It was the truth. Not the one she wanted, but no less true because of that.
She seemed to debate with herself if she was letting him get away with it. Mary wasn't that kind of person, she was tenacious and she was always up to solve things. If she thought for a second that she could help John, she wouldn't shut up about it. John prayed that she would give up.
As she wasn't saying anything else, John assumed she had let it go. He stood up, walked around the table and planted a kiss on the top of her head as a thank you of sorts. He took their empty cups and the spoons to the sink and started washing them to give himself something to do.
That was why John never talked about them to anyone. Because he never seemed ready to tell the truth, and the lie left a sour taste in his mouth.
But Mary would get over it. He hoped.
He hoped he got over it. He prayed to whatever deity that was in charge that the nightmares didn't come back on that intensity. John had had his unfair share of soul crushing dreams for a life time.
"Are you going to tell him?" Mary asked, and it took John by surprise. When he finally understood what she had meant, he wished he hadn't.
What could he possibly tell him? He was Sherlock Holmes. What could John possibly tell him about nightmares? The simple thought made John feel the bile rise again to his throat. He didn't want to think about that, to feel this exposed before Sherlock, to see in his face that he understood how pathetic John was. He didn't need that; the near panic attack after Sherlock had fallen over the rubbish bags had been quite enough. John didn't want to consider that if he had had one eye witness to his nightmares, it had been Sherlock. He didn't want to think about how many times he must have screamed in his sleep and revealed too much of himself to the maniac downstairs playing the violin, experimenting on body parts or whatever it was that he had been doing. John dismissed the whole train of thought.
"I said I don't want to talk about it," John said, in lieu of clarifying to her that he had meant he didn't want to tell anyone about it. Was Mary asking because she thought he was going to open his heart to Sherlock and not to her? John decided it didn't matter. He really was done talking, he wanted to hide all the triggers and forget.
"Maybe you should tell him, or talk to someone," Mary said, as if John hadn't talked.
John couldn't believe his ears.
This, this had been the one thing John had tried to avoid. Now, in the middle of the night, not half an hour after he had thrown up all his stomach's content wasn't really the time for all this.
He turned to Mary and his look left no room for argument.
"This is me not talking about it. I'll have the sofa, you get some rest," he said, kissing her on the forehead and leaving the kitchen.
00oo00oo00
John spent the day at home. Mary had not left for work until he had promised to take the day off to rest.
On one hand, he was glad for not having to deal with cases of flu and boring diagnoses; on the other, the more free time he had, the more his mind floated back to the nightmare and his own reaction to it.
After trying very hard to escape the memories, John just sat on the sofa and let his mind wander. He poured a glass of whisky and ignored his inner doctor's voice – that funny enough, was exactly like his own – that said it wasn't healthy to drink in the middle of the day. He was trying to glue the pieces of his life back together, he deserved to drink the whole bottle if he damn well pleased so.
He felt the strong taste in his tongue and swallowed the liquid while running his fingers through the glass.
It hadn't been his worst nightmare. Fortunately, John did not remember every single one of the nightmares he had had, but he knew there had been a few worse than the one from the night before. Still, it had made him throw up and shake all over, something the nightmares about the Afghan desert hadn't done.
Sherlock's death had always caused the worst nightmares for John. He was as used to it as he could ever be. Right after it had happened, he had avoided sleeping for dread of the things he would see. On the days he went to bed, he left his gun far away from him out of fear of doing something stupid.
The nightmares after the war had exhausted John, had reminded him that he wasn't an active captain anymore, that he had been shot and that he was back to the civilian life, broken and alone. The nightmares about the war reminded him of a life that wasn't his anymore. After meeting Sherlock, they had changed completely. He then had adrenaline enough in his day to day life to fuel his mind, awake or asleep.
The nightmares after that day – the red day, the day Sherlock died – had been another thing altogether. He didn't dream about their life, their cases, the criminals they arrested, or Sherlock's deductions. He dreamed about Sherlock's death, over and over again. And then he dreamed about all the little deaths that brought Sherlock to the roof of St Barts and John to the front row seat for the whole act.
Moriarty, it was always him. He was always there, even when John couldn't see his face. He reminded John of what he had accomplished. He hadn't exploded the pool, but he had burned them all anyway.
By the time John had decided to ask Mary's hand, the nightmares had been better. John got used to fact that some nights' sleep would just not come and his mind would play tricks on him, and that in other nights, he would go to sleep and there would be nightmares that would make him feel tired the day after.
However, it had been some good months since John had had such an intense reaction to a nightmare. And it had been some time since he last had had a dream that brought back bits and pieces of the life and certain deaths he and Sherlock shared. He knew Sherlock's fall a few days earlier had triggered it. He dreaded to think of everything that unfortunate misstep had triggered in him.
It seemed to John that his mind was giving him a warning. He would succumb to all the pain again if he let himself forget, even for a second, what that kind of life had brought to him. Not because of the adrenaline, or because of the danger, but because John knew what happened when one made Sherlock Holmes the centre of his life and then lost him. And John would invariably lose him again and again, because that was what Sherlock did. John asked himself if it wasn't his own fault for having ignored the amount of times Sherlock had left him alone everywhere. Maybe it had been a prelude of his final detachment.
John snorted without any humour. Why was he even thinking about this, again?
What angered him the most was that he already knew all that. From the moment his eyes had flown to Sherlock's in that restaurant, he had known exactly to what extent Sherlock was a sociopath. The joke had been on John for ignoring people around him again and again. He didn't resent the life he had had, but he knew he couldn't come back to it. It would kill him. To have everything again and then lose everything again would cripple him. The mere thought made his stomach wamble.
John had never dreamed about Jefferson Hope before. It had never registered to him as something other than the first time he saved Sherlock's life. He had done it so many times after that, and had offered to do it so many more times than that, that Jefferson Hope had stayed locked somewhere safe in his memories. Now John had to stop and admit again that he had been running after the Sherlock Holmes since day two.
John had done that to himself. He hadn't thought twice before running after him again.
It was impossible not to think of Donovan. "He enjoys it, he gets off on it."
What about me?, John asked himself. What did it say about him that he ran after him over and over again?
He took a large gulp of whisky. He was feeling restless. He knew it had been that kind of restlessness that had propelled him to be Sherlock's friend or sidekick or whatever the hell one might decide to call it. That mood was natural to John, but he promised himself to find another way to get rid of it, one his body could take, one that didn't leave him all scattered.
As if on cue, his phone buzzed. Before looking at his phone, John knew who it was. It couldn't be Mary, she had called him half an hour before and she almost never texted. John ran a hand through his head and laughed without humour. He half hated, half loved Sherlock's timing.
He completely hated his own inability to make peace with whatever shitty piece of life his mind used to destroy him. He grabbed the phone in his hand and opened the text.
Care to help solve a perfect robbery in which nothing was taken? -SH
John smiled and then scolded himself for doing it.
That was how it always started. Whenever he let himself be wholly dragged down into Sherlock's rabbit hole again, he was never able to leave. It had almost killed him once. And when he finally got kicked out of it – as he had been before – the joke would be on him, he told himself.
Am working, he answered, telling himself that only lies had details and that Sherlock would know. John didn't know why, but he felt vaguely glad for it.
No, you aren't. -SH
Of course he would know. John felt his chest tightened and told himself to stop being a coward. He could simply say he didn't want to. He could say, if he could mean it. He was sure he could. He wasn't sure of anything. It was highly frustrating.
You don't have anything do to, but won't come with me.
Are you ill? -SH
John had to smile at Sherlock's inability to be modest. Of course if John didn't want to go with him, he must have other reasons, like being terrible ill or something. Because of course John would want to, that was why they were so well matched.
That was exactly that kind of thing his mind and body couldn't take anymore.
No, I'm not. I just can't go. Goodbye, Sherlock, he answered, and turned off his phone.