Fic: 5 Times John Got a New Scar
Title: 5 Times John Got a New Scar
Fandom: Sherlock
Author: dak
Word Count: 2178
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: angst, blood, assumed character death
Spoilers: S2E3
Summary: Five times John got a new scar (and one time he got one across his heart.)
A/N: For the lovely space_oddity_75 who gave me the prompt. (Sorry it took so long!)
1)
It was John’s mother who first told him he scarred easily. She first noticed when he had turned two and discovered the thrill of running pell-mell round their family’s two floor semi-detached. While a well-placed chair prevented him from testing his speed on the wooden staircase, John loved running in a circle from the sitting room to the kitchen to his parents’ ground floor bedroom and back to the sitting room. He loved it so much, he often did it while he screaming at the top of his lungs.
Though little John had quickly mastered the art of running, he hadn’t fully grasped coordination. One day, the chair blocking the staircase was sticking out into the hall because Harry, on her way upstairs so she wouldn’t have to listen to her screaming, little brother, had forgotten to pull it back across.
John’s little legs couldn’t dodge the chair in time and he collided straight into it, sending his small body crashing to the ground. According to Harry, John cried the rest of the day, even after their mother had scooped him up, cleaned his knee with cotton wool and rubbing alcohol, and secured it with a plaster and a kiss.
Over time, the tears stopped and the plaster disappeared, leaving two white parallel lines on John’s knee as his only reminder of an incident he was too young to remember.
(And John had never stopped loving to run, Sherlock would add, except that now John had learned how to pick himself back up, as well as those who ran with him.)
2)
John may have been drunk. He didn’t think he was drunk, but it was quite possible he was as he could not remember how he ended up in this Tesco. What John did remember was the reason he had wanted to come to the shop in the first place - tea.
He desperately needed tea. Nothing fancy, just a bit of PG Tips so he could have something warm and comforting to wake up to in the morning and help nurse the hangover he was sure to have. While searching the aisles, John wondered if he’d be allowed to have his own box of tea when he left for training.
Yes, John Waston was now in the army, no matter what his family thought on the matter. Well, starting Monday he was in the army. Right now, he was still a regular Englishman and he needed his tea.
If John had left it at just tea, he would’ve been fine and this (possibly) drunken occasion would have been forgotten. He had the box in his hand and his feet were progressing nicely towards the till. But, then his brain decided it wasn’t satisfied with only tea. He wanted some Golden’s syrup as well. Golden’s would taste perfect with his breakfast and, if the army wouldn’t let him have tea, it certainly would’ve let him have Golden’s.
And so, there he was, most likely drunk with a box of PG Tips in one hand while he tried to grab a tin of Golden’s with the other. Why they had to keep the syrup on the top shelf, John didn’t understand. He also couldn’t understand - until the next morning as he examined the gash in his forehead - how a stack of tins had fallen on him.
It was a small wound just below his hairline, which two butterfly bandages helped to heal, though it did leave a light scar, barely noticeable except to those who wished to get that close to his face. When asked about it, John would blush and call it his first war wound.
(His first, Sherlock would add, in a long line of battles with Tesco, eventually ended when John refused to shop there anymore after a fourth - and very heated - row with their chip and pin machines.)
3)
Harry was drunk. She was very drunk and throwing empty wine bottles at her brother. John tried to calm her, tell her that he’d be coming back. He’d always come back before. But Harry only kept shouting, telling him he was selfish, that he didn’t need to do another tour, that the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers could find another bloody doctor and their mother had just died so John couldn’t leave.
John stood there and took the abuse. It was noise, all noise. That’s what the therapists at the family recover programmes said. He didn’t have to listen to noise. He did have to listen when Harry slammed a bottle against the counter, smashing it into pieces and waving the jagged glass above her head.
Harry wasn’t threatening him. She was threatening herself, but when John had wrestled her for the bottle, the sharp edges somehow found their way into John’s arm.
Seventeen stitches were required to close the gash and a good story was needed to prevent Harry from getting arrested for assault. They never spoke of it again. John made sure to wear long sleeves whenever he visited her after that, so he could cover up the slightly raised line on his right forearm.
(He should have turned her in, Sherlock would add, as it could have taught her a lesson and she wouldn’t be in hospital now, but John shouldn’t feel guilty - he wasn’t the alcoholic - and Sherlock would make him a cup of tea and tell him an embarrassing story about Mycroft, of which there were many.)
4)
Franklin was lying on the ground, his leg blown off below the knee. John had administered morphine and applied the tourniquet, it was all he could do out here, and was moving on to Spence, who was clutching her bleeding side. He applied pressure to the wound but, before he could tie the bandage, he was on his back.
He didn’t know what had happened at first but, when he tried to hoist himself up and put weight on his left arm, pain shot from his shoulder, radiating through the rest of his body.
Beside him, Spence’s screams were quieting. He was losing her. John ignored the pain and rolled onto his right side. His dominant hand was useless, the slightest movement causing a blinding white pain to cloud his vision. He pulled another two doses of morphine from his pack, giving one to Spence and the other to himself. He used the weight of his own body to cover her wound and did not pass out until he saw the choppers arriving.
It was weeks before he was free of the fever and disorientation and could properly examine the fresh hole in his left shoulder. After returning to London, too often he found himself staring at the pale and ragged indent that still itched occasionally - a permanent reminder of all the things he’d failed to accomplish in the war, including saving Spence’s life.
(Of course he had done a great deal of good in Afghanistan, Sherlock would add, as cards and letters John received from the families of those he’d saved arrived weekly, and he shouldn’t focus on his failures or regret the injury that had brought him to Sherlock’s side.)
5)
The amount of dangerous situations John had experienced since partnering himself with Sherlock Holmes rivaled all his years in Afghanistan. Just like in the war, John found himself escaping the majority of them by sheer luck and a little cunning. And, just like in the war, his luck couldn’t last forever.
He and Sherlock were chasing a murder suspect across Hungerford Bridge, a typical Thursday night for the pair. This Thursday night, however, it had been raining and rain made the metal runners on the cement steps of Hungerford Bridge very slippery.
John knew this but had forgotten it in his desperation to catch the man before he disappeared into Embankment tube station. He had ran ahead of Sherlock after the detective had got swept up in a gaggle of Japanese tourists trying to photograph the view of the South Bank and was closing in on the suspect when the suspect flew down the steps towards the entrance of the station.
John flew after them. Then, he fell. He didn’t remember falling. The exact moment was never saved in his brain. What he did remember was the lurch in his stomach as his foot slipped underneath him followed by Sherlock frantically shouting his name.
When John managed to open his eyes, Sherlock was crouched over him, taking his pulse. John mumbled that he was fine, though the words didn’t come out in the right order. He tried to encourage Sherlock to continue the chase but only succeeded in vomiting onto the pavement and passing out.
He was released from St. Bart’s two days later with a sprained wrist, a sprained ankle and a grade two concussion. Eight stitches closed the gash where the back of his head had cracked on the step, leaving a scar John wouldn’t be able to see without a mirror - a scar John often caught Sherlock glancing at with guilty eyes for the next several months.
(Thought it had been John’s own foolishness for slipping on those stairs, Sherlock would add, because he should have invested in better shoes, ones that wouldn’t allow him to fall during a chase because the whole incident was unfortunate and Sherlock, seeing John lying there unconscious with blood pooling around his head had been very, very much a bit not good and John was never allowed to do that again.)
(Ever.)
+1)
John wasn’t permitted to see the body. Well, he had seen it earlier. He’d seen it willingly topple off the roof of Bart’s. He’d seen it lying smashed in a pool of fresh, wet blood so in contrast to the pale, lifeless skin. He’d even felt the body, searching for a pulse that wasn’t there, that would never be there again.
But he wasn’t allowed to see the body now, clean on the slab where he was assured Molly was taking good care of it. But if Molly could see the body, why couldn’t he? He should be there in the morgue, be there to make sure it was being handled properly, that everything was alright even though nothing would ever be alright again.
Instead he was sat somewhere - anywhere, it didn’t matter - while some doctor - someone he should know, someone from Bart’s that wasn’t Mike but had been introduced to him by Mike, but it didn’t matter, this person didn’t matter - shined a penlight in his eyes and checked him over for concussion.
John said he didn’t have concussion because his friend had forbid him from ever getting injured again and no, his head did not hurt. His head didn’t hurt at all. And when asked if there was someone who could take him home, John ran his hands through his hair, fingers falling on the scar that he never could see and remembered who had taken care of him when he’d got that scar, and he begin to say, his flatmate could...
Then, he remembered the body he wasn’t allowed to see and he felt a new pain, one in his chest that struck him suddenly then was gone, leaving only an emptiness in its wake, and John knew he’d collected another scar on his easily marred body.
This, too, was a scar he’d never be able to see, but he knew it would damage him more than the one in his shoulder and hurt for longer than the one on his arm and couldn’t be fixed with a plaster - a new war wound from a battle he never fully understood.
No, John would never see the scar, but he would feel it and its effect would be noticeable in the way it would make him pull his cane from the back of the closet and wipe off the eighteen months of dust. He would see it in the way it deepened the lines of his face and drew darker circles under his eyes and the way it caused more grey hair to form at his temples.
Other people would be able to see it. It would be plainly visible to those who knew him well and even strangers who didn’t know him at all would be able to tell that it was there.
John would spend months waiting for it to heal, even though he already knew it never would. He would forget the stories behind his other scars because this would be the only one that mattered, and he would never forget where it came from and he would never stop believing.
(And Sherlock would...Sherlock couldn’t add anything because Sherlock was gone. He had put that scar on John’s body and only he could remove it, but for that to happen, it would require a miracle - a miracle that would need to happen before the scar could stretch and wrap itself entirely around John Watson’s heart, before it embedded itself so deeply that even Sherlock could never remove it.)
Fandom: Sherlock
Author: dak
Word Count: 2178
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: angst, blood, assumed character death
Spoilers: S2E3
Summary: Five times John got a new scar (and one time he got one across his heart.)
A/N: For the lovely space_oddity_75 who gave me the prompt. (Sorry it took so long!)
1)
It was John’s mother who first told him he scarred easily. She first noticed when he had turned two and discovered the thrill of running pell-mell round their family’s two floor semi-detached. While a well-placed chair prevented him from testing his speed on the wooden staircase, John loved running in a circle from the sitting room to the kitchen to his parents’ ground floor bedroom and back to the sitting room. He loved it so much, he often did it while he screaming at the top of his lungs.
Though little John had quickly mastered the art of running, he hadn’t fully grasped coordination. One day, the chair blocking the staircase was sticking out into the hall because Harry, on her way upstairs so she wouldn’t have to listen to her screaming, little brother, had forgotten to pull it back across.
John’s little legs couldn’t dodge the chair in time and he collided straight into it, sending his small body crashing to the ground. According to Harry, John cried the rest of the day, even after their mother had scooped him up, cleaned his knee with cotton wool and rubbing alcohol, and secured it with a plaster and a kiss.
Over time, the tears stopped and the plaster disappeared, leaving two white parallel lines on John’s knee as his only reminder of an incident he was too young to remember.
(And John had never stopped loving to run, Sherlock would add, except that now John had learned how to pick himself back up, as well as those who ran with him.)
2)
John may have been drunk. He didn’t think he was drunk, but it was quite possible he was as he could not remember how he ended up in this Tesco. What John did remember was the reason he had wanted to come to the shop in the first place - tea.
He desperately needed tea. Nothing fancy, just a bit of PG Tips so he could have something warm and comforting to wake up to in the morning and help nurse the hangover he was sure to have. While searching the aisles, John wondered if he’d be allowed to have his own box of tea when he left for training.
Yes, John Waston was now in the army, no matter what his family thought on the matter. Well, starting Monday he was in the army. Right now, he was still a regular Englishman and he needed his tea.
If John had left it at just tea, he would’ve been fine and this (possibly) drunken occasion would have been forgotten. He had the box in his hand and his feet were progressing nicely towards the till. But, then his brain decided it wasn’t satisfied with only tea. He wanted some Golden’s syrup as well. Golden’s would taste perfect with his breakfast and, if the army wouldn’t let him have tea, it certainly would’ve let him have Golden’s.
And so, there he was, most likely drunk with a box of PG Tips in one hand while he tried to grab a tin of Golden’s with the other. Why they had to keep the syrup on the top shelf, John didn’t understand. He also couldn’t understand - until the next morning as he examined the gash in his forehead - how a stack of tins had fallen on him.
It was a small wound just below his hairline, which two butterfly bandages helped to heal, though it did leave a light scar, barely noticeable except to those who wished to get that close to his face. When asked about it, John would blush and call it his first war wound.
(His first, Sherlock would add, in a long line of battles with Tesco, eventually ended when John refused to shop there anymore after a fourth - and very heated - row with their chip and pin machines.)
3)
Harry was drunk. She was very drunk and throwing empty wine bottles at her brother. John tried to calm her, tell her that he’d be coming back. He’d always come back before. But Harry only kept shouting, telling him he was selfish, that he didn’t need to do another tour, that the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers could find another bloody doctor and their mother had just died so John couldn’t leave.
John stood there and took the abuse. It was noise, all noise. That’s what the therapists at the family recover programmes said. He didn’t have to listen to noise. He did have to listen when Harry slammed a bottle against the counter, smashing it into pieces and waving the jagged glass above her head.
Harry wasn’t threatening him. She was threatening herself, but when John had wrestled her for the bottle, the sharp edges somehow found their way into John’s arm.
Seventeen stitches were required to close the gash and a good story was needed to prevent Harry from getting arrested for assault. They never spoke of it again. John made sure to wear long sleeves whenever he visited her after that, so he could cover up the slightly raised line on his right forearm.
(He should have turned her in, Sherlock would add, as it could have taught her a lesson and she wouldn’t be in hospital now, but John shouldn’t feel guilty - he wasn’t the alcoholic - and Sherlock would make him a cup of tea and tell him an embarrassing story about Mycroft, of which there were many.)
4)
Franklin was lying on the ground, his leg blown off below the knee. John had administered morphine and applied the tourniquet, it was all he could do out here, and was moving on to Spence, who was clutching her bleeding side. He applied pressure to the wound but, before he could tie the bandage, he was on his back.
He didn’t know what had happened at first but, when he tried to hoist himself up and put weight on his left arm, pain shot from his shoulder, radiating through the rest of his body.
Beside him, Spence’s screams were quieting. He was losing her. John ignored the pain and rolled onto his right side. His dominant hand was useless, the slightest movement causing a blinding white pain to cloud his vision. He pulled another two doses of morphine from his pack, giving one to Spence and the other to himself. He used the weight of his own body to cover her wound and did not pass out until he saw the choppers arriving.
It was weeks before he was free of the fever and disorientation and could properly examine the fresh hole in his left shoulder. After returning to London, too often he found himself staring at the pale and ragged indent that still itched occasionally - a permanent reminder of all the things he’d failed to accomplish in the war, including saving Spence’s life.
(Of course he had done a great deal of good in Afghanistan, Sherlock would add, as cards and letters John received from the families of those he’d saved arrived weekly, and he shouldn’t focus on his failures or regret the injury that had brought him to Sherlock’s side.)
5)
The amount of dangerous situations John had experienced since partnering himself with Sherlock Holmes rivaled all his years in Afghanistan. Just like in the war, John found himself escaping the majority of them by sheer luck and a little cunning. And, just like in the war, his luck couldn’t last forever.
He and Sherlock were chasing a murder suspect across Hungerford Bridge, a typical Thursday night for the pair. This Thursday night, however, it had been raining and rain made the metal runners on the cement steps of Hungerford Bridge very slippery.
John knew this but had forgotten it in his desperation to catch the man before he disappeared into Embankment tube station. He had ran ahead of Sherlock after the detective had got swept up in a gaggle of Japanese tourists trying to photograph the view of the South Bank and was closing in on the suspect when the suspect flew down the steps towards the entrance of the station.
John flew after them. Then, he fell. He didn’t remember falling. The exact moment was never saved in his brain. What he did remember was the lurch in his stomach as his foot slipped underneath him followed by Sherlock frantically shouting his name.
When John managed to open his eyes, Sherlock was crouched over him, taking his pulse. John mumbled that he was fine, though the words didn’t come out in the right order. He tried to encourage Sherlock to continue the chase but only succeeded in vomiting onto the pavement and passing out.
He was released from St. Bart’s two days later with a sprained wrist, a sprained ankle and a grade two concussion. Eight stitches closed the gash where the back of his head had cracked on the step, leaving a scar John wouldn’t be able to see without a mirror - a scar John often caught Sherlock glancing at with guilty eyes for the next several months.
(Thought it had been John’s own foolishness for slipping on those stairs, Sherlock would add, because he should have invested in better shoes, ones that wouldn’t allow him to fall during a chase because the whole incident was unfortunate and Sherlock, seeing John lying there unconscious with blood pooling around his head had been very, very much a bit not good and John was never allowed to do that again.)
(Ever.)
+1)
John wasn’t permitted to see the body. Well, he had seen it earlier. He’d seen it willingly topple off the roof of Bart’s. He’d seen it lying smashed in a pool of fresh, wet blood so in contrast to the pale, lifeless skin. He’d even felt the body, searching for a pulse that wasn’t there, that would never be there again.
But he wasn’t allowed to see the body now, clean on the slab where he was assured Molly was taking good care of it. But if Molly could see the body, why couldn’t he? He should be there in the morgue, be there to make sure it was being handled properly, that everything was alright even though nothing would ever be alright again.
Instead he was sat somewhere - anywhere, it didn’t matter - while some doctor - someone he should know, someone from Bart’s that wasn’t Mike but had been introduced to him by Mike, but it didn’t matter, this person didn’t matter - shined a penlight in his eyes and checked him over for concussion.
John said he didn’t have concussion because his friend had forbid him from ever getting injured again and no, his head did not hurt. His head didn’t hurt at all. And when asked if there was someone who could take him home, John ran his hands through his hair, fingers falling on the scar that he never could see and remembered who had taken care of him when he’d got that scar, and he begin to say, his flatmate could...
Then, he remembered the body he wasn’t allowed to see and he felt a new pain, one in his chest that struck him suddenly then was gone, leaving only an emptiness in its wake, and John knew he’d collected another scar on his easily marred body.
This, too, was a scar he’d never be able to see, but he knew it would damage him more than the one in his shoulder and hurt for longer than the one on his arm and couldn’t be fixed with a plaster - a new war wound from a battle he never fully understood.
No, John would never see the scar, but he would feel it and its effect would be noticeable in the way it would make him pull his cane from the back of the closet and wipe off the eighteen months of dust. He would see it in the way it deepened the lines of his face and drew darker circles under his eyes and the way it caused more grey hair to form at his temples.
Other people would be able to see it. It would be plainly visible to those who knew him well and even strangers who didn’t know him at all would be able to tell that it was there.
John would spend months waiting for it to heal, even though he already knew it never would. He would forget the stories behind his other scars because this would be the only one that mattered, and he would never forget where it came from and he would never stop believing.
(And Sherlock would...Sherlock couldn’t add anything because Sherlock was gone. He had put that scar on John’s body and only he could remove it, but for that to happen, it would require a miracle - a miracle that would need to happen before the scar could stretch and wrap itself entirely around John Watson’s heart, before it embedded itself so deeply that even Sherlock could never remove it.)