FIC: Constriction
Title: Constriction
Rating: no idea; there's some graphic flashback imagery in here and violence, if that worries you. People bits in places they shouldn't be. And I don't mean the fridge.
Words: 2,424
Notes: Here, another Sherlock fic by a non-writer. I really need to get some things sorted out. Anyway, this was an idea I and my friend hoc_voluerunt/cuddlytogas had when we watched TBB together tonight; we talked about a fandom theory that John had PTSD flashbacks when he was tied up and that was why he was so useless in that bit at the end. Then we each ran off and wrote fics vaguely related to that. I don't know if she'll ever post hers; I, unlike her, have no patience of extensive editing so I'm just going to POST THIS SHIT tonight even though it's sort of terrifyingly late.
Edit: Wait okay I actually did a spot of proofreading the next morning. Huh. Never thought I had it in me.
There's muffled sounds coming from an exterior room, and John feels his head leaning against a cold, corrugated metal surface, perpendicular to the dusty floor. Behind his eyes and at his temples, there's a dull pounding, and at the back of his head a sharp intermittent pain. There's something wet along the back of his neck. Bleeding somewhere, the doctor in him -- somehow still coherent -- supplies. Probably concussed. He squeezes his eyes open and is burned by the too-bright light of a single hanging bulb.
It's then that he realises that his hands are bound behind his back, tightly, with sharp wires that cut into his flesh; there's another wire across his chest, and ones holding his feet together at the ankles and knees. Cloth is in his mouth, and he has to concentrate to avoid gagging on it. He smells blood, and urine, and death.
He twitches involuntarily, and is struck first by the pain in his midsection, possibly from broken ribs, and then -- suddenly, without the slightest warning -- the reality of his limbs, pressed together within a wire net, completely confined. He is consumed by a sudden, inexplicable desperation to have free reign of his arms again, and the wire on his chest is suffocating him, a leaden weight a thousand times heavier than it should be, about to crush his ribcage and all the organs inside completely.
He tries to take a deep breath, but it does little good to calm his suddenly hysterical heart, banging at his ribs like they're prison bars and it wants to be set free.
His head pounds again, the temples screaming under the application of imaginary pressure, and he can't help but think of crushed skulls; of the sight of Parry's auburn head pulverised by the wheels of a heavy lorry, of the sight of a piece of concrete about to fall on Sherlock's stupid brilliant cranium, of the sight of sixteen Afghani children with crushed bloody bowls where their heads should have been lying out in the sun for the scavengers to come and take away, of the sight of Sherlock with a bloody ragged hole in the middle of his foreh--
--- it's then, with that thought, that he realises he can't tell where he is.
He looks up.
His vision swims, but he can make out the nose of a gun, pointed in his face. A ridiculous leather coat, and dark glasses. Rubbish bin aflame a short distance away.
Muffled sounds come from close by, and he can't -- he knows something terrible is about to happen, but he can't pierce the fog of confusion and concussion any deeper than that. He is trembling all over, his hands too jittery to even clasp together properly in front of him (tied together, of course, oh god, oh god, oh godohgodcan'tmovecan'tbreathefuck-- ) and his head is bleeding. Probably inside as well as outside. He can barely control his body, rocking back and forth from a desperate need to get away, away, move, breathe get away havetomovecan'tbreathenoohgod --
The trigger is pulled.
There's a concussive sound, that of an impact or a gunshot or a cry of pain -- he can't tell the difference in his state, too busy floating between various nonsensical futures and pasts and his hands are tied above him this time and his feet don't quite reach the floor and his mouth and eyes are covered and he can't see or move or scream and there's all this detritus swimming around between him and the outside and the Afghani children are shrieking as he runs up the hill to save them despite the horrified bellows behind him to get back get cover get back here away get away get away can't move can't breatheawaycrushedcan'tohgodohgodandthechildrenarescreamingforhimandSherlockischokingandohgodohgodthere'smuffledsoundsfpainorisitfearorisitevilorisitdeath --
He struggles, and draws blood upon his arms and chest and wrists and ankles. He continues to bleed. He feels he might just bleed himself dry as the cruel wires crush him to a pulp, continuing to press upon him and confine him and smother him.
He doesn't dwell upon how insane that sounds, doesn't dwell upon the possible mental slips he could be having right now, the cracks in his psyche where he's falling right through onto the other side in an entirely different reality or past or future or place or time or situation where the problem's always the same because he's gasping.
He takes a deep breath, and his throat stings of chlorine. No, no, that's all wrong, it's not the same, this is a panic, PTSD; there are specific triggers, it’s not a full-blown revisiting of every potentially awful situation he's ever encountered --
"Do you have it?"
"Do I have what?"
"The treasure."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
A snarl; then, a blow across the face.
"We burned the village and there was nothing. So, where are you actually getting your supplies from?
"W-what?"
"The hacked mobile, you idiot! Where is it?"
"I have no idea wh-- "
"Tell me how much Josephine Morley told you, or I'll shoot him through the temple."
The sound of a gun being cocked, for added emphasis. He blinks. Sherlock is thin-lipped, and pale as death.
Someone screams.
John's throat is raw.
The air hangs damp and heavy and cold upon him, and he recognises the heavy lids that come with injuries to the head. His breath, dry and stale, escapes from him in cloudy gasps of vapour. He is assaulted with everything, and nothing, all at once. His head is afloat and his senses feel at once razor-sharp and rusted to the bone.
He wonders, oddly, if he is dead.
He gasps out, taking huge mouthfuls of air, rejoicing in his freed mouth. Nothing else is liberated; the rest of him is confined, caged, netted, and he feels panicked claustrophobia begin to gnaw at his battered edges. No, not now, not when he has to -- no, he can't, not now, what if Sherlock needs him --
Sherlock is thin-lipped, and pale as death.
No.
The muffled cries of the children subside, and there's a cascade of coat blowing around the bloody forms, and the bile in John's throat retreats to camp as he hears the poor soul's demise dissected into all of its diverse empirical parts.
There's a muffled sound, and a baritone cry of pain.
He blinks.
He remembers the present, or at least what he thinks is the present. The case: three missing teenage girls, a stolen home alarm system, and an equivocating priest with blood under his left pinkie fingernail. Then there was a wet old cellar, and blood upon the walls, and what John was sure was bits of pulverised small intestine strewn in mangled heaps upon the floor.
He is trembling, not from the cold. His skin feels aflame.
The room is large, at least there's that. So if the electrical cord he's tied with constricts suddenly around him, at least he won't have the too-close walls descend upon him and crush what’s left; it's a small comfort.
He breathes again, willing his heart to cease its terrified fluttering. It doesn't listen. He fidgets in the chair he's been fastened to. Tied at the elbows, and knees, and ankles, and wrists.
He breathes again, this time through his nose, and is struck suddenly by the overwhelming, permeating, smothering, suffocating stench of blood and acid. He gags and pitches forward, and his stomach lurches horribly. He gives into it; a thick stream of fluids, not all of it vomit, pours forth from his mouth. He pales when he looks at it: there's blood in it.
Buggering hell.
He wonders how long he'll have.
He eases himself back upright, and casts his eye around. His vision is still a distorted mess of confused, ever-changing shapes, and images that he knows, knows must not be there nevertheless continue to burst forth from his subconscious and cloud his vision; still, he can see that he is alone. He continues to quiver, and he finds himself rocking back and forth unwittingly. He stops; it's undignified, and at the very least he wants to die with some semblance of pride.
He wonders if Sherlock made it out alright, before unseen assailants descended with metal rods and sent John miles away and years behind. John hopes that Sherlock's still alive.
John screams.
No, that's not right. Sherlock's mouth is wide, and the sound is in his deep voice, and it's his arm that's taken a scalpel to the inner elbow. It's his face that has been wiped of all semblance of thought, of all coherence, as his vision disappears and he is sent into a white reality of pain.
But it's John who screams. John who is anguished. John who kicks out, blindly, in the direction of the brightly-skirted figure, so innocent looking in her round cheeks, and receives a laugh in return.
It's John whose throat burns.
And then there are children, and Sherlock is still screaming, and John's breath comes out in visible clouds of crystalline sand, suspended before him like gleaming droplets of anti-water. There's blood in the impossible vapour.
John's not alone anymore.
The figure, dark and blurry and rough around the edges, stands a little ways away. It has a -- no, not a riding crop, that's just silly -- a poker, in its hand. It turns it slowly, inspecting it.
"Good morning, Doctor Watson," it says, in a cool androgynous alto, and impales his leg with the instrument.
He wishes he were dead.
Sherlock's arm has been shredded by a scalpel, and -- no, no, shut up, that never happenednoenverhappened --
The children are all dying and bleeding and the birds have plucked out their eyes -- no, no, that was years ago, that was Afghanistan, that was before, that wasn't herenotthisthisisn'therethisishomethisis --
Sherlock has gone sheet-white and ash-grey, and the skirt rustles around him, and the gun presses against him. Blood leaks from John's mouth and he can hardly sit up, he's in no position to save him, oh god, Sherlock, I'm so sorry no, no, that wasn't -- that's not this, that was last summer -- no, that -- no, not this, nonoSherlock'sfinethat'snotthisthisisherethisisnowandSherlock'ssafeandalive --
The poker kisses his flesh again, and he screams. It really is his scream this time. He is alone, Sherlock's safe; if he lets himself believe that Sherlock's not, he'll probably expire of heartache. So he continues to believe in Sherlock's survival, because nothing else here is real but the pain.
John is alone with it. The walls threaten to crush him, to imprint him with their corrugated pattern, and the wires and electrical cords and ropes and handcuffs and cloth are all conspiring against him to suffocate and confine and murder and swallow him in a single bite.
There's a concussive sound, that of an impact or a gunshot or a cry of pain, and another, of a bang or artillery fire or a door being thrown open. Someone shouts:
"Leave him, or I'll shoot!"
John looks and, for the first time, believes in what's before his eyes.
Sherlock is thin-lipped, and pale as death. His eyes are aflame, promising bloody retribution should the alto figure not relieve John of his companion pain. He points John's gun at the alto.
John blinks, and blinks again, and wills the confused shadows away.
Sherlock's hand is shaking.
Sherlock is a terrible shot.
John can hear the sound of gunmen approaching, though that could be in his mind.
The alto only straightens, but doesn't retreat. The poker hangs close by John's bleeding side, still laying claim to his body. Sherlock narrows his eyes, but John recognises (even now, when he can barely see and he can barely hear and he's not sure he remembers correctly what year it is) the signs of a suppressed look of worry, of brows willed into placidity that want to crease in fear.
Sherlock is terrified.
There are still muffled sounds approaching, though that could be in John's mind.
He takes a deep breath, hard against the crushing restraints of the cords, of the air, of the atmospheric pressure, of the walls, of everything that could possibly contain and overcome and imprison and interrogate him. He plants his feet firmly on the floor. He ignores the serpent hiss of the boa constricting restraints upon his devourable flesh. He is going mad.
He glances to the door. So he was right about the gunmen. Or, they could still be in his mind, but they look damned real anyway.
Then, with an effort, he lurches forward, lobbing himself and the chair he's bound to at the androgynous alto's legs. The alto is caught off-guard; he collapses on top of them, chair and all, crushing multiple bones in the process, not all of them the alto's. The poker slips, but doesn't leave the alto's grip entirely; John takes a moment to try to change position, and the alto seizes the poker again.
Sherlock screams in John's voice as the poker pierces through John's back. Though both of those things could have been in John's imagination.
Then there's the sound of feet upon wet concrete floor, and a series of grunts, and Sherlock snatches the offending poker from the assailant and strikes them across the face with it one, two, three times, with a look in his eye that would have worried John had he been in any position to notice it. Then there's a scraping sound, and Sherlock is at John's side, righting the chair carefully and scrambling to untie his rapidly-fading friend.
"John! John, can you hear me?" Sherlock asks, sounding as desperate as John's heart was a few moments ago.
Then the cords are gone, and Sherlock tries to lift John to his feet, tries to get him to stand. His hand is against the spot where John was stabbed, and John is genuinely incapable of telling whether or not the pain is gone because Sherlock's hand is there, or because he was never impaled.
Then he blinks through a thick fog, and finds he can't see anything at all, and before he knows it his legs give out under him and he collapses into Sherlock's terrified arms. The confused sounds fade, and there's warmth around him as arms hold him and shallow breaths touch his face in fear as Sherlock listens for his heartbeat. John should feel guilty, but he's still half-convinced he's only dreaming.
Then there's no pain at all, only palatial darkness.