[Sherlock BBC] {Fic} Reich
Title: Cycle 3/Round 2: What If?
Series: thegameison_sh
Genre/Warnings: Gore?
Rating: PG.
Characters: John, Stamford.
Word Count: 663
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, and this is fiction purely written for entertainment purposes and no monetary gain is attained from it.
It’s the Autumn of 2010 and he’s exhausted. From the day he started secondary school until now all he feels he’s done is work, work, work. Study. Train. Be useful. When he was a child the term ‘Proletariat’ didn’t mean much more to him than a twisted -feeling mouth and the potential embarrassment of being laughed at when he couldn’t quite get the sounds right. When he hit the age of understanding what, exactly, being useless meant, the word became synonymous with fear.
He’d graduated college in ’99 - a little late, but so had been all the other boys in his class thanks to the indentured service in the forces. It was an old, antiquated tradition dating back from the Great War, and though the Youth Party protested it venomously, the other parties were run by much older politicians and so the stagnation remained. He’d gotten a taste for the adrenaline there, and though he’d disputed the enforced training at the time much like his peers, when he had returned, he felt the stronger man for it. But tired, because no matter how right he had felt with the adrenaline and the serotonin rushing through his body, the method of it somehow felt wrong.
The drive to be useful - to be indispensable, powered him through his higher education. He had studied while he had served, learning medicine and healing arts while he was trained in the best way to subdue and ‘infantise’ the enemy. Not that there had been any enemies at that point. Not from the outside.
By 2006 he had graduated with his Bachelor of Medicine, his Bachelor of Surgery, and had served as a Peacekeeper for four years and in Retrievals for another three. He had just received notification to attend to a unit in the French colony when civil war broke out at Eberhard Karls. On arrival in the Vaterland, he was sent further into the Dominion to assist in settling disputes in Basel, and then in Copenhagen. For three years he was bounced from colony to demesne while everything fell steadily apart around him. The war brought honours, promotion and satisfaction to many of his peers, but he was not to find any. Misfortune and disaster followed him everywhere, and anticipated the places he was to be. Capture and imprisonment were nothing to the visions he saw day in and day out, tearing across plazas-turned-battlegrounds, Retrieving and/or performing major surgery on a street corner with a Youth Party Lieutenant struggling for the breath to scream beneath his hands.
It had been in one of those blood-splattered plazas somewhere in Ferrara, a child of no more than seven, he’d been guessing, draped across his knee with little fingers digging into his shin, when the punch and pause of being hit by a bullet had laid him out flat on the stone. The child had been screaming beneath him, squashed by the weight of his body, but overcome by sudden weakness, he had been unable to move.
Now, released from hospital months later to a colony already much changed and to the year 2010 he never saw in while aware. He’s limping and scarred and viewing a new Nation with old eyes, and he contemplates that word again, that ‘Proletariat’ word, and just what it means now when he doesn’t even have children to contribute to… whatever society this was now. He has no money - his pension is all but decimated by the civil war - and accommodation is too expensive. He doesn’t know if there’ll ever be a job for him. Retrievals are a thing of the past, and medicine is out of the question when he can’t hold a scalpel without his hands trembling violently.
He contemplates leaving the city and going out into the country and finding some less pretentious and expensive rooms than where he’s currently staying. He’s already drawing up plans and maps of Sussex in his head when someone calls his name.
“Watson? Johannes Watson?”
Series: thegameison_sh
Genre/Warnings: Gore?
Rating: PG.
Characters: John, Stamford.
Word Count: 663
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, and this is fiction purely written for entertainment purposes and no monetary gain is attained from it.
It’s the Autumn of 2010 and he’s exhausted. From the day he started secondary school until now all he feels he’s done is work, work, work. Study. Train. Be useful. When he was a child the term ‘Proletariat’ didn’t mean much more to him than a twisted -feeling mouth and the potential embarrassment of being laughed at when he couldn’t quite get the sounds right. When he hit the age of understanding what, exactly, being useless meant, the word became synonymous with fear.
He’d graduated college in ’99 - a little late, but so had been all the other boys in his class thanks to the indentured service in the forces. It was an old, antiquated tradition dating back from the Great War, and though the Youth Party protested it venomously, the other parties were run by much older politicians and so the stagnation remained. He’d gotten a taste for the adrenaline there, and though he’d disputed the enforced training at the time much like his peers, when he had returned, he felt the stronger man for it. But tired, because no matter how right he had felt with the adrenaline and the serotonin rushing through his body, the method of it somehow felt wrong.
The drive to be useful - to be indispensable, powered him through his higher education. He had studied while he had served, learning medicine and healing arts while he was trained in the best way to subdue and ‘infantise’ the enemy. Not that there had been any enemies at that point. Not from the outside.
By 2006 he had graduated with his Bachelor of Medicine, his Bachelor of Surgery, and had served as a Peacekeeper for four years and in Retrievals for another three. He had just received notification to attend to a unit in the French colony when civil war broke out at Eberhard Karls. On arrival in the Vaterland, he was sent further into the Dominion to assist in settling disputes in Basel, and then in Copenhagen. For three years he was bounced from colony to demesne while everything fell steadily apart around him. The war brought honours, promotion and satisfaction to many of his peers, but he was not to find any. Misfortune and disaster followed him everywhere, and anticipated the places he was to be. Capture and imprisonment were nothing to the visions he saw day in and day out, tearing across plazas-turned-battlegrounds, Retrieving and/or performing major surgery on a street corner with a Youth Party Lieutenant struggling for the breath to scream beneath his hands.
It had been in one of those blood-splattered plazas somewhere in Ferrara, a child of no more than seven, he’d been guessing, draped across his knee with little fingers digging into his shin, when the punch and pause of being hit by a bullet had laid him out flat on the stone. The child had been screaming beneath him, squashed by the weight of his body, but overcome by sudden weakness, he had been unable to move.
Now, released from hospital months later to a colony already much changed and to the year 2010 he never saw in while aware. He’s limping and scarred and viewing a new Nation with old eyes, and he contemplates that word again, that ‘Proletariat’ word, and just what it means now when he doesn’t even have children to contribute to… whatever society this was now. He has no money - his pension is all but decimated by the civil war - and accommodation is too expensive. He doesn’t know if there’ll ever be a job for him. Retrievals are a thing of the past, and medicine is out of the question when he can’t hold a scalpel without his hands trembling violently.
He contemplates leaving the city and going out into the country and finding some less pretentious and expensive rooms than where he’s currently staying. He’s already drawing up plans and maps of Sussex in his head when someone calls his name.
“Watson? Johannes Watson?”