Fic: Salvation - John Watson (one-shot) PG-15
Title: Salvation
Genre: Character Study, Introspection
Summary: We have all fought many wars. Sherlock is John Watson's salvation.
Word Count: 900ish
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Discussion of war, soldiers, Afghanistan, death.
A/N: This was supposed to be a part of an Ancient Rome AU I'm working on but I was drawing on John's Afghanistan so much (particularly in light of this week's news) that I decided to make it part of the modern verse. Fits with any and all of my other fics so far. This fic does not aim to lecture, just to observe.
Afghanistan was hell itself; your unit left Jalalabad with the hollow expressions of empty-eyed children burned on the backs of their eyelids. The first few miles outside the city were disturbingly green, shot through with black-burnt wreckages of old cars and rotting bodies of goats. The grass thinned the further you marched, and eventually the rest of the world was scratching sand that offered no comfort except to soak up the blood of the wounded as you trudged along. You remember a mass of blue berets, pulled low to shade the men’s eyes from the glaring sun.
You marched all that day, and all the next, and the one after. The desert land looked like the aftermath of the apocalypse; just a few sheep wandering through the sparse scrub, their wool dirtied and crawling with parasites. There were no birds. It was too quiet.
You weren’t just shot; it wasn‘t just trigger-click and bullet-slip. You tell people you were shot because it’s simpler; they stop asking questions. They look at the floor, at the wall. You leave it there. It’s easier.
You were twenty miles from Kabul when it happened.
You remember an explosion, and then oblivion. You remember being nothing but a tiny voice in a sea of pain and swirling scarlet, and waiting for someone to drag you out of the abyss. You remember screams, and staccato gunfire, and the sound of Barry vomiting somewhere nearby, vomiting and vomiting, and then a horrible choking sound that seemed to go on forever - until it stopped, and that went on forever too. And then there was nothing - absolutely nothing - and no one there to help any of you.
You remember saying “Please, God. Let me live,” while another part of your brain was screaming, “Please, God. Let me die.”
You remember waking up in the makeshift medical tent, bound up in so many bandages you could hardly move. Another man was on the next pallet, but his bloodied chest was unmoving and shrapnel glinted out of a shoulder that came without an arm. Serrated ribs were visible through a gash in his exposed side, blown inwards from the explosion, and you - you, who had already seen everything in your time as a medic - leaned over and vomited thick lumps of yesterday’s rations up your gullet and onto the floor until there was nothing left in your stomach, and retched until they plunged a sedative into your arm out of sheer desperation. And now -
Now, you read the debates in the papers and watch the reports about the men who die too young fighting for no one’s sure what. They never tell you about the deaths on the other side’s front.
It’s hard, sometimes, not to see yourself in criminals’ dead faces; it’s Sherlock they whisper about at the Yard, but that’s not fair; not right. You remember what Sherlock repeated to you about the cabbie over a quiet Chinese; imagine an ordinary man killing strangers because there are children who need protecting. You try to imagine a man who has taken lives and still wanders free and anonymous around London, drinking tea and eating chips and using public restrooms, stopping at Starbucks for coffee. A man who goes home to his children or his parents or his best friend every night after work - and you realise you don’t have to imagine, because you can see him in the transparent mirror-reflection of every darkened window.
You don’t know if Britain or America were right to go to war, marching into the East heavy-handed with their judging fingers on cold metal triggers. It’s not why you went out there; not to kill. You’re not racist, or anti-Islam; you’ve known good Muslims and bad Muslims in the way you’ve known good Christians and bad Christians and good atheists and bad atheists. You went out there to heal. You went out there in the bitter heat and biting desert so that one more mother didn’t have to bury her child; so one more child could grow up with both her parents.
But in the swirling desert sand there are men whose lives should have ended differently - should have begun differently. There are men who lie dead because of you, because of them; because of Parliament, because of the people; because of oil, because of honour; because of peace, because of war; because of a terrorist or a politician who could not say love.
You swore an oath to Queen and country, but so do Cub Scouts. It’s not your country, in the end, that matters, or the enemy’s country either, or anybody's king or queen; it matters only that you are men and women and you all believe in something.
You were part of the unit who went marching out into the swirling dust towards Kabul and never came marching back. But war has always been war, and war will always mean death. Each piece of ground where a dead body lies is history and the future and the present. Afghanistan is Thermopylae, is Troy, is Gaul, is Rome, is Hastings, is Agincourt, is Waterloo, is Somme, is Stalingrad, is Hiroshima, is Vietnam, is Iraq, is war, is death, is unending, is forever.
Sherlock Holmes is a minefield of another kind. He is unpredictable. He is uncontrollable. He is dangerous. People around him have a habit of getting hurt. Sherlock has a habit of getting hurt.
He is your atonement, your penitence, your salvation. He is the sun and the moon and the stars and every endless thing that ever lit someone’s path. You are tired, and a little broken; but you will follow him, save him, die for him, live for him until your last breath because Sherlock is the minefield you can defuse; set right instead of set off; the man to whom you can say love.
This is also a companion piece to a video I made a while ago, which can be viewed here:
http://theshockblanket.livejournal.com/2770.html
Feedback is much appreciated :)