Fic: Sherlock (BBC)
Title: The Game Marches On
Author: Alone Dreaming
Rating: PGish (aka, TV-12 or something, nothing that wouldn't happen on the show)
Characters: John, Sherlock
Warnings: Spoilers for Sherlock 1x03, as this could stand to be a tag to The Great Game. Oh, an unbeta'd, unbritpicked, unmedicalpicked beyond my own limited knowledge of everything
Words: 1600 (Lucky you! Clever you! Excellent prompt.)
Author's Note: Written for the prompt given to me by green_wing for our 500!members party at watsons_woes . The prompt asked for Sherlock to carry an injured John. Hope this fulfills your wish! Additionally, I would like to say that while I've done limited research on this story, I am not in anyway medically knowledgeable and my information is limited to two websites and a girl who happened into my store the other week who's training to be a doctor.
Summary: He can't move his legs and the building is coming down around him.
He can’t move his legs.
The initial panic that overtook him with this revelation has subsided beneath years of military service and training so it lingers as a dull roar behind his ears. His breathing has gone from rapid to precise, measured inhales which makes the pressure in his head grow but prevents him from hyperventilating. It doesn’t mean anything, he keeps reminding himself, as he desperately attempts to twitch a foot or bend a knee; not a blasted thing. After all, he just had a ceiling fall in on him, and he knows that half of it hit him at an odd angle, the edge pressing against his back as he came to. His medical training informs him that this could be any manner of spinal injury-minor swelling to something severed-and that there’s no use crying until he gets the facts. For now, he needs to remain very, very still and pray to whoever’s listening that Sherlock has actually managed to signal help.
He thinks, as he watches more of the roof crumble into the pool, that they are both very lucky to be worrying about this at all. They both could’ve died, blown to bits by the bomb, drowned in the pool, crushed by the unstable building, shot by the snipers; they could’ve died but they’ve both lived, Sherlock with a broken hand and any number of scrapes and bruises, and John with his head spinning and his legs two useless lumps attached to his body. Sherlock’s arm will heal and the scrapes will fade away, and John’s ears will eventually stop ringing so he can actually hear things below a bellow. If he’s still lucky, the swelling will reside and he’ll walk within weeks.
He stares at his feet, listening for help, listening for Sherlock’s return, listening for his alarm going off and waking him from this nightmare. Obviously, with his eardrums so abused, Sherlock would have to be clomping about in boots for him to pick up the slightest hint of sound, but old habits die hard and his vision’s not so good. The ringing could almost pass off as shuffling through dust. He turns his head towards an imaginary sound and sees a shadow through a cloud of debris. Immediately, his training goes into overdrive and he clutches about him for something-anything-to defend himself with. Yes, he encouraged Sherlock to get help, to leave him, but that did not mean he was in any fit shape to defend himself. It simply meant that they had no options. Sherlock could not carry him with a broken hand, and even if that were not a problem, he shouldn’t be moved until it was absolutely necessary; and, then, only by professionals.
The shadow melts, morphs, and reveals a pale face and sooty hair. Sherlock cradles his hand close to his body, his eyes set in determination, his stride confident even in the face of utter destruction. As he meets John’s gaze, his body falters, slightly, as though he’s uncertain about something. His pace speeds up at the same pace of John’s body relaxing and he soon reaches John’s side.
“Time to leave,” he informs John, as though they’re at a potential client’s house and John’s too dense to take a hint. “Up you get.” He’s barely audible.
“I still can’t feel my legs,” he whispers, wondering if Sherlock has a concussion. They’ve had this conversation twice already. Reaching forward, he attempts to pry at Sherlock’s eyelids only to have Sherlock catch his fingers with his good hand.
“John, listen to me,” he sounds like he’s talking to a child, and John’s patience is too thin to deal with a condescending attitude. “This whole place is falling apart, both my phones are dead and there are no pay phones in a fourth of a mile radius that work. So, one way or another, we’re leaving, immediately.”
Sherlock’s voice has an edge that he only uses under severe stress or utter annoyance, but that does not change the facts. “To get this done properly we need at least two people and something to stabilize-”
“You have me and thirty seconds,” Sherlock snaps. “If you don’t have an answer by then, I will carry you out.”
He has tried to be logical, calm, collected since he came to under the rubble, and has done, in his opinion, a fairly admirable job. However, that does not mean he has been thinking clearly or logically, beyond instinctual military fall back. His mind stalls as he attempts to assemble any sort of plan to resolve this situation. Utter failure, he decides, because he knows if Sherlock had the appropriate knowledge, he’d already have rigged some sort of contraption that would’ve levitated John out of the building and into the safe zone outside.
“Up you go,” Sherlock says, signaling an end to his thirty seconds. The Detective’s hand is on his shoulder, preparing to drag him upwards. He squirms in protest, begging himself to be reasonable, to come up with something.
“Wait,” he gasps. “Just a minute. Wait.” His hands fumble down his sides, searching for answers.
Sherlock’s movements have turned frenzied. “John, we don’t have the time.”
He has no difficulty breathing other than the abnormalities caused by stress, no loss of bowel control, no ascending numbness or paralysis. When he pokes his legs, they tingle distantly at his upper thighs, only truly fading to nothing by the time he reaches his knees. These symptoms almost assure that his spinal cord is in one piece and that swelling (or possibly pressure) has caused his inability to move. Depending on deduction has become a common course of action for him but he finds himself unwilling to trust it now. Sherlock, after all, makes the conclusions; he just stands about, in awe of them.
“Lower back injury,” he mumbles. “Probably between L3 and L4. Lower back. Need to keep it stable as possible.”
“What do you suggest?” Sherlock inquires, looming over him, his injured hand now tucked in his pocket. “Focus, John. Quickly.”
He can’t. “I-”
And Sherlock, despite his warnings, gives up. “Damn it all.” And he does exactly what John did not want him to do. He puts his one arm under John’s legs, another behind his upper back and lifts.
The pain could be described as phenomenal but John’s always applies that word to positive events, and pain, in his opinion, has never been something pleasant. Maybe he’s an emotional masochist-just look at his choice in friends and his wish to believe the best in everyone-but physically, he prefers to avoid pain as much as possible. Tonight has simply not been his lucky night, between Moriarty and the bomb and the snipers and, before all of that, the Golem; he’s had his fair share of roughing up. Enough, even, that he thinks it a little unfair that fate has dealt him yet another bad bout.
He thinks he might’ve shouted somewhere in there as Sherlock carries him out. It’s not a smooth journey and every stagger of Sherlock’s feels as though he’s tumbling about in the back of a racing vehicle. Whatever sound he makes must annoy Sherlock. The tiny clips of vision he gets between clenching his eyes tight, reveals Sherlock’s tightened features and pursed lips. No, not pursed, he realizes, as tiny spots of light decorate his vision; they’re moving minutely but the tone is far too low for him to hear.
Then the movement stops with an agonizing drop and the air goes from dusty to cool and damp. He jerks, yelps (far louder than he hears it, no doubt, as the hand tighten around him and hold him closer), lets the air escape his lungs in a low keening sound. Nearby, loud enough to startle him, he can hear the sound of the building tumbling down brick by brick; he even sees it for a brief second when his eyes flutter open. There’s a plume of smoke as the left wall goes down, half the face of it following suit, so the rest of it just barely manages to stay up, swaying. He must be swaying too because everything swirls before his eyes so much that he has a giddy, nervous moment that he’s still inside, bobbing about in that pool, about to drown like poor Carl.
But he’s not. The pain has not lessened to any manageable standard but the borderline delirium it caused recedes enough for him to establish that he’s outside, that he’s relatively warm and that something has him cradled in a perfectly still position. Underneath the pain, he finds a twinge of embarrassment; he’s not some maiden in distress or a child. Later on, when he’s had time to think, he will admit that the fireman’s hold would be a poor choice and that Sherlock had very few options and that really, the actions saved his life. But at the moment, he can barely open his eyes to assure himself that it is Sherlock clinging to him and not Moriarty taking him away to start another sick game.
As though in response, he hears one, solitary beep; he thinks he imagines it at first but his eyes are opened enough to see Sherlock react. It’s so soft, so familiar and he knows exactly what it means. Despite the pair of them being down for the count, the fact that he now cannot feel his lower thighs at all, the fact that Sherlock has probably mutilated his hand in the attempt “rescue” him, the fact that the police will be here at any moment to check out the explosion, that the game has still not ended.
Author: Alone Dreaming
Rating: PGish (aka, TV-12 or something, nothing that wouldn't happen on the show)
Characters: John, Sherlock
Warnings: Spoilers for Sherlock 1x03, as this could stand to be a tag to The Great Game. Oh, an unbeta'd, unbritpicked, unmedicalpicked beyond my own limited knowledge of everything
Words: 1600 (Lucky you! Clever you! Excellent prompt.)
Author's Note: Written for the prompt given to me by green_wing for our 500!members party at watsons_woes . The prompt asked for Sherlock to carry an injured John. Hope this fulfills your wish! Additionally, I would like to say that while I've done limited research on this story, I am not in anyway medically knowledgeable and my information is limited to two websites and a girl who happened into my store the other week who's training to be a doctor.
Summary: He can't move his legs and the building is coming down around him.
He can’t move his legs.
The initial panic that overtook him with this revelation has subsided beneath years of military service and training so it lingers as a dull roar behind his ears. His breathing has gone from rapid to precise, measured inhales which makes the pressure in his head grow but prevents him from hyperventilating. It doesn’t mean anything, he keeps reminding himself, as he desperately attempts to twitch a foot or bend a knee; not a blasted thing. After all, he just had a ceiling fall in on him, and he knows that half of it hit him at an odd angle, the edge pressing against his back as he came to. His medical training informs him that this could be any manner of spinal injury-minor swelling to something severed-and that there’s no use crying until he gets the facts. For now, he needs to remain very, very still and pray to whoever’s listening that Sherlock has actually managed to signal help.
He thinks, as he watches more of the roof crumble into the pool, that they are both very lucky to be worrying about this at all. They both could’ve died, blown to bits by the bomb, drowned in the pool, crushed by the unstable building, shot by the snipers; they could’ve died but they’ve both lived, Sherlock with a broken hand and any number of scrapes and bruises, and John with his head spinning and his legs two useless lumps attached to his body. Sherlock’s arm will heal and the scrapes will fade away, and John’s ears will eventually stop ringing so he can actually hear things below a bellow. If he’s still lucky, the swelling will reside and he’ll walk within weeks.
He stares at his feet, listening for help, listening for Sherlock’s return, listening for his alarm going off and waking him from this nightmare. Obviously, with his eardrums so abused, Sherlock would have to be clomping about in boots for him to pick up the slightest hint of sound, but old habits die hard and his vision’s not so good. The ringing could almost pass off as shuffling through dust. He turns his head towards an imaginary sound and sees a shadow through a cloud of debris. Immediately, his training goes into overdrive and he clutches about him for something-anything-to defend himself with. Yes, he encouraged Sherlock to get help, to leave him, but that did not mean he was in any fit shape to defend himself. It simply meant that they had no options. Sherlock could not carry him with a broken hand, and even if that were not a problem, he shouldn’t be moved until it was absolutely necessary; and, then, only by professionals.
The shadow melts, morphs, and reveals a pale face and sooty hair. Sherlock cradles his hand close to his body, his eyes set in determination, his stride confident even in the face of utter destruction. As he meets John’s gaze, his body falters, slightly, as though he’s uncertain about something. His pace speeds up at the same pace of John’s body relaxing and he soon reaches John’s side.
“Time to leave,” he informs John, as though they’re at a potential client’s house and John’s too dense to take a hint. “Up you get.” He’s barely audible.
“I still can’t feel my legs,” he whispers, wondering if Sherlock has a concussion. They’ve had this conversation twice already. Reaching forward, he attempts to pry at Sherlock’s eyelids only to have Sherlock catch his fingers with his good hand.
“John, listen to me,” he sounds like he’s talking to a child, and John’s patience is too thin to deal with a condescending attitude. “This whole place is falling apart, both my phones are dead and there are no pay phones in a fourth of a mile radius that work. So, one way or another, we’re leaving, immediately.”
Sherlock’s voice has an edge that he only uses under severe stress or utter annoyance, but that does not change the facts. “To get this done properly we need at least two people and something to stabilize-”
“You have me and thirty seconds,” Sherlock snaps. “If you don’t have an answer by then, I will carry you out.”
He has tried to be logical, calm, collected since he came to under the rubble, and has done, in his opinion, a fairly admirable job. However, that does not mean he has been thinking clearly or logically, beyond instinctual military fall back. His mind stalls as he attempts to assemble any sort of plan to resolve this situation. Utter failure, he decides, because he knows if Sherlock had the appropriate knowledge, he’d already have rigged some sort of contraption that would’ve levitated John out of the building and into the safe zone outside.
“Up you go,” Sherlock says, signaling an end to his thirty seconds. The Detective’s hand is on his shoulder, preparing to drag him upwards. He squirms in protest, begging himself to be reasonable, to come up with something.
“Wait,” he gasps. “Just a minute. Wait.” His hands fumble down his sides, searching for answers.
Sherlock’s movements have turned frenzied. “John, we don’t have the time.”
He has no difficulty breathing other than the abnormalities caused by stress, no loss of bowel control, no ascending numbness or paralysis. When he pokes his legs, they tingle distantly at his upper thighs, only truly fading to nothing by the time he reaches his knees. These symptoms almost assure that his spinal cord is in one piece and that swelling (or possibly pressure) has caused his inability to move. Depending on deduction has become a common course of action for him but he finds himself unwilling to trust it now. Sherlock, after all, makes the conclusions; he just stands about, in awe of them.
“Lower back injury,” he mumbles. “Probably between L3 and L4. Lower back. Need to keep it stable as possible.”
“What do you suggest?” Sherlock inquires, looming over him, his injured hand now tucked in his pocket. “Focus, John. Quickly.”
He can’t. “I-”
And Sherlock, despite his warnings, gives up. “Damn it all.” And he does exactly what John did not want him to do. He puts his one arm under John’s legs, another behind his upper back and lifts.
The pain could be described as phenomenal but John’s always applies that word to positive events, and pain, in his opinion, has never been something pleasant. Maybe he’s an emotional masochist-just look at his choice in friends and his wish to believe the best in everyone-but physically, he prefers to avoid pain as much as possible. Tonight has simply not been his lucky night, between Moriarty and the bomb and the snipers and, before all of that, the Golem; he’s had his fair share of roughing up. Enough, even, that he thinks it a little unfair that fate has dealt him yet another bad bout.
He thinks he might’ve shouted somewhere in there as Sherlock carries him out. It’s not a smooth journey and every stagger of Sherlock’s feels as though he’s tumbling about in the back of a racing vehicle. Whatever sound he makes must annoy Sherlock. The tiny clips of vision he gets between clenching his eyes tight, reveals Sherlock’s tightened features and pursed lips. No, not pursed, he realizes, as tiny spots of light decorate his vision; they’re moving minutely but the tone is far too low for him to hear.
Then the movement stops with an agonizing drop and the air goes from dusty to cool and damp. He jerks, yelps (far louder than he hears it, no doubt, as the hand tighten around him and hold him closer), lets the air escape his lungs in a low keening sound. Nearby, loud enough to startle him, he can hear the sound of the building tumbling down brick by brick; he even sees it for a brief second when his eyes flutter open. There’s a plume of smoke as the left wall goes down, half the face of it following suit, so the rest of it just barely manages to stay up, swaying. He must be swaying too because everything swirls before his eyes so much that he has a giddy, nervous moment that he’s still inside, bobbing about in that pool, about to drown like poor Carl.
But he’s not. The pain has not lessened to any manageable standard but the borderline delirium it caused recedes enough for him to establish that he’s outside, that he’s relatively warm and that something has him cradled in a perfectly still position. Underneath the pain, he finds a twinge of embarrassment; he’s not some maiden in distress or a child. Later on, when he’s had time to think, he will admit that the fireman’s hold would be a poor choice and that Sherlock had very few options and that really, the actions saved his life. But at the moment, he can barely open his eyes to assure himself that it is Sherlock clinging to him and not Moriarty taking him away to start another sick game.
As though in response, he hears one, solitary beep; he thinks he imagines it at first but his eyes are opened enough to see Sherlock react. It’s so soft, so familiar and he knows exactly what it means. Despite the pair of them being down for the count, the fact that he now cannot feel his lower thighs at all, the fact that Sherlock has probably mutilated his hand in the attempt “rescue” him, the fact that the police will be here at any moment to check out the explosion, that the game has still not ended.