That Was When I Ruled the World
John received the letter the morning after Sherlock's call that he would be away for three or four days. There was to be a funeral. For Liam.
He had been the one to pull John to safety after he was shot back in Afghanistan. He was the one to put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. He was the one who kept wiping the sweat from John's forehead, telling him he'd be okay, that he was going to make it, he just needed to hang in there.
John felt himself go numb at the news. He literally couldn't feel any kind of emotion. The funeral was tomorrow (the letter dated nearly a week ago). He called into work and gave the reason why he'd be missing it tomorrow and made some tea. He also had to remind himself to eat dinner later that night after remaining at the table for several hours, just sitting there. He never called or texted Sherlock about the funeral, assuming he'd be there and back before the other man got back.
And despite what had happened between them at the Baskerville Estate, John didn't feel that the other man would really care. In some ways, John wondered why he did. It wasn't as if he and Liam had been close. They had trained and fought together but... not much else. Except he had saved John's life.
As John went to bed, he was finding himself wondering if that was really such a good thing. It was an idle, fleeting thought that had come to him as he was falling into sleep but it was still lingering in his mind when he awoke the next morning. It was faint but there, at the back of his mind, being restrained but just barely.
He had found his dress uniform the night before and, after giving it a good brush off and the buttons and few ribbons he had a good polish, he put it on. It still fit just as it had when he first got it (surprisingly). He combed his hair and could only put away some tea as his breakfast. He wasn't hungry. As he came down the stairs, Mrs. Hudson dropped the morning post when she caught sight of John. "My goodness! Don't you look smart! Dashing even!" John bent down and retrieved the paper for her and handed it back to her with a little smile, "Thank you, Mrs. Hudson." He then informed her that he would be out for the rest of the day, he had a funeral to attend. She gave her condolences and John a sympathetic hand to his arm and he just nodded, heading out the door.
He was setting out with nothing but the directions to the funeral and enough money for a cab there and back. He wouldn't bother with his phone - he wasn't about to let it interrupt the service with it's presence and John refused to have the weight in his uniform. He just didn't want any kind of contact right now.
The ride was about an hour's trip from the flat he shared with Sherlock and he couldn't help but feel grateful for the distance.
The casket was closed and that immediately let John know what kind of end Liam had met. His family was there. As well as the young wife he had left behind along with his small daughter. Both were beautiful and devastated. She had thanked John for coming and paying his respects. John had seen the life Liam could have led if he had made it back from his tour of duty and it made John feel even more numb. It also made him feel nauseous through the numbness.
He stayed after the service, walking to sit on a bench in the park opposite of the graveyard and watching how Liam's grave was attended to throughout the day. He didn't move, just watched. Eventually the sun started to go down and then night came. John still had not moved from that spot.
John had been thinking all during this time. About everything and anything in a way he hadn't before. Especially of his life during and after the army. How he missed it. How he wished he could go back and feel a sense of purpose again, even in a war that seemed never-ending.
His childhood had been miserable for the most part. Tried to take care of his mother and sister while his father drank too much and gave into his violent temper even more. He had eventually left, but not before John was put in the hospital at least once for the injuries he had sustained in fighting off his father when he went after his mother.
He couldn't feel any connection with his sister, no matter how hard he tried. He had wanted to love her and on a purely familial level, he did, but nothing beyond that (and even now it hurt him that he couldn't).
His mother had died years ago and John hadn't gotten there in time to say goodbye to her. He had still been in med school and had been halfway across the country in London trying to pass his exams.
The military had been his hope to make something of his life, of himself. The most in relationships had been with friends and his mother. Girlfriends hadn't ever lasted and even the girl he had finally lost his virginity to lost interest in him. Sometimes John didn't know if it was because he didn't care enough to maintain them or cared so much he ended up trying too hard.
Enlisting in the army and going to war to help fellow soldiers seemed like his best opportunity. What better way to make a difference? To help protect and take care of people that needed it?
Yes, he had lost men before but he also saved even more. He had felt close to his fellow soldiers, even if some of them just knew him as the army doctor or only referred to him as "Medic!" It didn't matter. He felt like he belonged. He felt needed and a sense of purpose he had never known before.
He also felt thrill.
While there were times of tedious quiet in between battles, those battles were like nothing he had ever known. Everything depended on getting out of the line of fire, shooting that man before he shot you first, getting the blood to stop, making sure not to nick an artery, keeping your hands steady when cutting and stitching, not jumping at close gunfire or shells blasting all around you.
It was hellish. It was horrifying and terrible. It was also incredible and afterward John couldn't ever remember feeling so alive in all his life. He had lived through that. He had survived it. And he did so with little injury, even managing to save a life or two! He had seen the Mouth of Hell and lived to tell about it, even laugh about it another day. Day after day. He defied the odds and made a difference in saving others that had stepped too close to the Mouth and knew he had made a difference not just in their lives but in the lives of their loved ones by saving them. He was army doctor John Watson. He mattered. In the grand scheme of things he mattered.
The ones he lost didn't matter as much as the ones he had saved. He told himself that because they were dead and because there was nothing more he could do; he had tried all he could to save them. That and because the failures, the losses hurt too damn much. Just as saving them and surviving was invigorating and reminded him of how fantastic life could be, losing them was the opposite in reminding him how no, he could not defy death all the time. He knew this was true, he had seen plenty of soldiers die around him. It was the ones that died in his care, under his hands, that made him feel like he had been shot in the chest.
And then he was shot. And that was it. It was all gone, taken from him. Just like that.
He went back to London and carried the memories of the only life he had felt truly apart of and had to struggle like he never had before to go back to being just John Watson. He was still a doctor but in London. London. A city he had once fallen in love with - all its loudness and dizzying noise and bustle. Its unpredictability and rush compared to the small town he had grown up in. But now, after enduring war and seeing the Mouth of Hell, London was tame. So pitifully, spitefully, hatefully tame.
It was like waking up from a dream and having to face "real life" again. It was devastating in many respects. Things were so disgustingly annoying in their predictability. People talking to him about living life after the war seemed to mock him with their "understanding", talking to him as if they knew him. As if they knew what he needed. They didn't know. None of them could possibly understand what he had seen and experienced. Only others like him who had been there and even then how could you put such a thing into words? A blog? Write about it? Might as well ask him the meaning of life or to present the undeniable existence of God in a galaxy that was apart of several million others.
True, there were some things he had realised he had missed and was pleasantly surprised in enjoying them again; mainly simple things like certain kinds of foods and air conditioning and central heating and cushions and real tea. They almost seemed to induce a feeling akin to a little rush somewhere in that pleasure. He tried to relish it while it lasted. Because it never did last.
Then there was Sherlock Holmes. The life he had led John into had been indeed a whole different kind of battlefield filled with different rules and land-mines and trip-wires to avoid. It was exciting and dangerous. It was new and insane. There weren't many people for him to save as most cases tended to come to them as a result of a murder but the ones where they were able to prevent another from happening or figure out something truly baffling in all respects, it did feed John a rush.
It wasn't exactly the same kind of rush, though. Not even the run-in with Moriaty that nearly killed them had done that. John had felt too weak, too powerless, too incapable and incompetent. He hadn't felt like a soldier. He had been made to feel like some kind of worthless invalid that needed saving. Even after saving Sherlock he had felt pathetic, useless. Like he wasn't worthy to fight along the same level they - Sherlock and Moriaty - were.
He, who had saved so many lives on the battlefield in Afghanistan and took so many others in defense and lost so many more with bloody hands, wasn't worth anything in London a second time over, in this whole other world of crime and terror. Everything that had made him matter once didn't matter here. It wasn't elegant or intelligent enough to register. It was all brute force and messy violence.
And the fact that Sherlock had felt the other man, this insane man Moriaty, was brilliant... It made John very aware that the battlefield was no longer that. It was Sherlock's own private little game to keep himself from being bored. To feed his addiction for more mental stimuli. That's all it ever had been. John saw that now. He hadn't wanted to believe that. But now, after turning over all of this all day, he had to accept it for what it was, didn't he? Sherlock wouldn't be satisfied until something truly terrible happened or he was dead. And John didn't know if he could save him because the other man didn't seem like he wanted to be. Sherlock didn't think he needed to be saved. And John was a naive idiot for thinking anything else, wasn't he? He could practically hear Sherlock's voice saying the words.
Some would call war a game and in a way it was. John knew it was. He was not as stupid as Sherlock deemed him to be. Sometimes it seemed pointless and other times it made all the difference in the course of history. But the difference between that and Sherlock's game was the motivation behind and in it. Sherlock was motivated by his addictive behavior and selfishness in not wanting to be bored. John had been motivated by wanting more for his life, for it to have purpose, to serve and save lives. He had wanted to bloody well matter! To make some kind of reasonable and meaningful difference in this absurd world they lived in.
Maybe his motivation was just as selfish as Sherlock's but he was also aware that his went so much deeper into his being. It was tied to his very existence and maybe even his soul (if such a thing existed).
It was also starting to crack through the numbness he had been feeling ever since yesterday when he first found out Liam had died. John felt something in him start to push and twist painfully. He truly was more emotional than Sherlock. And he hated it.
In the dark sky above him thunder ripped through the sounds around him and rain softly started to fall. It started becoming difficult for John to breathe, he had to do so through his mouth. He started gasping for air the harder the rain started to fall. He didn't move from the bench; he stayed there, fists balled up so tightly his fingernails were digging into his palms. His hair was getting drenched, as was his uniform and hat next to him on the bench but he barely felt it, still looking in the direction of Liam's grave.
Everything he was feeling was internal. And it was overwhelming. It was all hitting him at once now. It was too much.
Seeing more and more of Sherlock's "true" character had soiled the brilliance John had originally saw and was blown over by. It was like being awoken from another dream and made to face the unpleasant "real life".
He had lost Sarah by his complicated relationship with Sherlock and his own frustrations with his inability to truly commit romantically (at least that was what seemed to be the case).
He also couldn't sort out everything he felt towards the other man; everything kept coming into question and then other forces kept trying to convince him to stay and remain with Sherlock. As if that was what was best for him. But it wasn't. It was what was best for Sherlock. John's life was no longer his own and he was assigned a role that, ultimately, made him feel just as meaningless as when he arrived back in London.
At first, the affection that came with the role, the "importance" in Sherlock's life, had seemed enough. John was willing to accept it as such. But... it just wasn't the same. It wasn't enough. John was his assistant but that... it seemed like an insult now. He was an army doctor, goddammit. He had been out in the thick of real war and survived. He had felt alive and nearly invincible while feeling utterly small and vulnerable. He had felt indispensable and capable.
Here he felt useless and empty.
John wanted Liam to be alive. To live this "regular", monotonous, storybook life with his beautiful wife and child that he had wanted so badly to get back to, the life he had been looking so forward to, that he had actually had a purpose in living.
John wanted to be back on that battlefield like he used to be. Defy death by saving life, feel alive by enduring true terror and certain death every day, and matter by being needed in the only way he had ever truly felt useful in his miserable, bland life.
He wanted to do that again. Liam had saved his life and now look at him - what kind of life was this? He couldn't accept this anymore. He didn't want to.
Liam shouldn't have been the one to die on that battlefield. John should have. It was where he belonged. Not here. Not like this.
A sob broke from him. It was painful and raw and the harder it rained, the harder he cried. He hadn't cried in years and once he started... he couldn't stop. He just couldn't stop.
He had been the one to pull John to safety after he was shot back in Afghanistan. He was the one to put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. He was the one who kept wiping the sweat from John's forehead, telling him he'd be okay, that he was going to make it, he just needed to hang in there.
John felt himself go numb at the news. He literally couldn't feel any kind of emotion. The funeral was tomorrow (the letter dated nearly a week ago). He called into work and gave the reason why he'd be missing it tomorrow and made some tea. He also had to remind himself to eat dinner later that night after remaining at the table for several hours, just sitting there. He never called or texted Sherlock about the funeral, assuming he'd be there and back before the other man got back.
And despite what had happened between them at the Baskerville Estate, John didn't feel that the other man would really care. In some ways, John wondered why he did. It wasn't as if he and Liam had been close. They had trained and fought together but... not much else. Except he had saved John's life.
As John went to bed, he was finding himself wondering if that was really such a good thing. It was an idle, fleeting thought that had come to him as he was falling into sleep but it was still lingering in his mind when he awoke the next morning. It was faint but there, at the back of his mind, being restrained but just barely.
He had found his dress uniform the night before and, after giving it a good brush off and the buttons and few ribbons he had a good polish, he put it on. It still fit just as it had when he first got it (surprisingly). He combed his hair and could only put away some tea as his breakfast. He wasn't hungry. As he came down the stairs, Mrs. Hudson dropped the morning post when she caught sight of John. "My goodness! Don't you look smart! Dashing even!" John bent down and retrieved the paper for her and handed it back to her with a little smile, "Thank you, Mrs. Hudson." He then informed her that he would be out for the rest of the day, he had a funeral to attend. She gave her condolences and John a sympathetic hand to his arm and he just nodded, heading out the door.
He was setting out with nothing but the directions to the funeral and enough money for a cab there and back. He wouldn't bother with his phone - he wasn't about to let it interrupt the service with it's presence and John refused to have the weight in his uniform. He just didn't want any kind of contact right now.
The ride was about an hour's trip from the flat he shared with Sherlock and he couldn't help but feel grateful for the distance.
The casket was closed and that immediately let John know what kind of end Liam had met. His family was there. As well as the young wife he had left behind along with his small daughter. Both were beautiful and devastated. She had thanked John for coming and paying his respects. John had seen the life Liam could have led if he had made it back from his tour of duty and it made John feel even more numb. It also made him feel nauseous through the numbness.
He stayed after the service, walking to sit on a bench in the park opposite of the graveyard and watching how Liam's grave was attended to throughout the day. He didn't move, just watched. Eventually the sun started to go down and then night came. John still had not moved from that spot.
John had been thinking all during this time. About everything and anything in a way he hadn't before. Especially of his life during and after the army. How he missed it. How he wished he could go back and feel a sense of purpose again, even in a war that seemed never-ending.
His childhood had been miserable for the most part. Tried to take care of his mother and sister while his father drank too much and gave into his violent temper even more. He had eventually left, but not before John was put in the hospital at least once for the injuries he had sustained in fighting off his father when he went after his mother.
He couldn't feel any connection with his sister, no matter how hard he tried. He had wanted to love her and on a purely familial level, he did, but nothing beyond that (and even now it hurt him that he couldn't).
His mother had died years ago and John hadn't gotten there in time to say goodbye to her. He had still been in med school and had been halfway across the country in London trying to pass his exams.
The military had been his hope to make something of his life, of himself. The most in relationships had been with friends and his mother. Girlfriends hadn't ever lasted and even the girl he had finally lost his virginity to lost interest in him. Sometimes John didn't know if it was because he didn't care enough to maintain them or cared so much he ended up trying too hard.
Enlisting in the army and going to war to help fellow soldiers seemed like his best opportunity. What better way to make a difference? To help protect and take care of people that needed it?
Yes, he had lost men before but he also saved even more. He had felt close to his fellow soldiers, even if some of them just knew him as the army doctor or only referred to him as "Medic!" It didn't matter. He felt like he belonged. He felt needed and a sense of purpose he had never known before.
He also felt thrill.
While there were times of tedious quiet in between battles, those battles were like nothing he had ever known. Everything depended on getting out of the line of fire, shooting that man before he shot you first, getting the blood to stop, making sure not to nick an artery, keeping your hands steady when cutting and stitching, not jumping at close gunfire or shells blasting all around you.
It was hellish. It was horrifying and terrible. It was also incredible and afterward John couldn't ever remember feeling so alive in all his life. He had lived through that. He had survived it. And he did so with little injury, even managing to save a life or two! He had seen the Mouth of Hell and lived to tell about it, even laugh about it another day. Day after day. He defied the odds and made a difference in saving others that had stepped too close to the Mouth and knew he had made a difference not just in their lives but in the lives of their loved ones by saving them. He was army doctor John Watson. He mattered. In the grand scheme of things he mattered.
The ones he lost didn't matter as much as the ones he had saved. He told himself that because they were dead and because there was nothing more he could do; he had tried all he could to save them. That and because the failures, the losses hurt too damn much. Just as saving them and surviving was invigorating and reminded him of how fantastic life could be, losing them was the opposite in reminding him how no, he could not defy death all the time. He knew this was true, he had seen plenty of soldiers die around him. It was the ones that died in his care, under his hands, that made him feel like he had been shot in the chest.
And then he was shot. And that was it. It was all gone, taken from him. Just like that.
He went back to London and carried the memories of the only life he had felt truly apart of and had to struggle like he never had before to go back to being just John Watson. He was still a doctor but in London. London. A city he had once fallen in love with - all its loudness and dizzying noise and bustle. Its unpredictability and rush compared to the small town he had grown up in. But now, after enduring war and seeing the Mouth of Hell, London was tame. So pitifully, spitefully, hatefully tame.
It was like waking up from a dream and having to face "real life" again. It was devastating in many respects. Things were so disgustingly annoying in their predictability. People talking to him about living life after the war seemed to mock him with their "understanding", talking to him as if they knew him. As if they knew what he needed. They didn't know. None of them could possibly understand what he had seen and experienced. Only others like him who had been there and even then how could you put such a thing into words? A blog? Write about it? Might as well ask him the meaning of life or to present the undeniable existence of God in a galaxy that was apart of several million others.
True, there were some things he had realised he had missed and was pleasantly surprised in enjoying them again; mainly simple things like certain kinds of foods and air conditioning and central heating and cushions and real tea. They almost seemed to induce a feeling akin to a little rush somewhere in that pleasure. He tried to relish it while it lasted. Because it never did last.
Then there was Sherlock Holmes. The life he had led John into had been indeed a whole different kind of battlefield filled with different rules and land-mines and trip-wires to avoid. It was exciting and dangerous. It was new and insane. There weren't many people for him to save as most cases tended to come to them as a result of a murder but the ones where they were able to prevent another from happening or figure out something truly baffling in all respects, it did feed John a rush.
It wasn't exactly the same kind of rush, though. Not even the run-in with Moriaty that nearly killed them had done that. John had felt too weak, too powerless, too incapable and incompetent. He hadn't felt like a soldier. He had been made to feel like some kind of worthless invalid that needed saving. Even after saving Sherlock he had felt pathetic, useless. Like he wasn't worthy to fight along the same level they - Sherlock and Moriaty - were.
He, who had saved so many lives on the battlefield in Afghanistan and took so many others in defense and lost so many more with bloody hands, wasn't worth anything in London a second time over, in this whole other world of crime and terror. Everything that had made him matter once didn't matter here. It wasn't elegant or intelligent enough to register. It was all brute force and messy violence.
And the fact that Sherlock had felt the other man, this insane man Moriaty, was brilliant... It made John very aware that the battlefield was no longer that. It was Sherlock's own private little game to keep himself from being bored. To feed his addiction for more mental stimuli. That's all it ever had been. John saw that now. He hadn't wanted to believe that. But now, after turning over all of this all day, he had to accept it for what it was, didn't he? Sherlock wouldn't be satisfied until something truly terrible happened or he was dead. And John didn't know if he could save him because the other man didn't seem like he wanted to be. Sherlock didn't think he needed to be saved. And John was a naive idiot for thinking anything else, wasn't he? He could practically hear Sherlock's voice saying the words.
Some would call war a game and in a way it was. John knew it was. He was not as stupid as Sherlock deemed him to be. Sometimes it seemed pointless and other times it made all the difference in the course of history. But the difference between that and Sherlock's game was the motivation behind and in it. Sherlock was motivated by his addictive behavior and selfishness in not wanting to be bored. John had been motivated by wanting more for his life, for it to have purpose, to serve and save lives. He had wanted to bloody well matter! To make some kind of reasonable and meaningful difference in this absurd world they lived in.
Maybe his motivation was just as selfish as Sherlock's but he was also aware that his went so much deeper into his being. It was tied to his very existence and maybe even his soul (if such a thing existed).
It was also starting to crack through the numbness he had been feeling ever since yesterday when he first found out Liam had died. John felt something in him start to push and twist painfully. He truly was more emotional than Sherlock. And he hated it.
In the dark sky above him thunder ripped through the sounds around him and rain softly started to fall. It started becoming difficult for John to breathe, he had to do so through his mouth. He started gasping for air the harder the rain started to fall. He didn't move from the bench; he stayed there, fists balled up so tightly his fingernails were digging into his palms. His hair was getting drenched, as was his uniform and hat next to him on the bench but he barely felt it, still looking in the direction of Liam's grave.
Everything he was feeling was internal. And it was overwhelming. It was all hitting him at once now. It was too much.
Seeing more and more of Sherlock's "true" character had soiled the brilliance John had originally saw and was blown over by. It was like being awoken from another dream and made to face the unpleasant "real life".
He had lost Sarah by his complicated relationship with Sherlock and his own frustrations with his inability to truly commit romantically (at least that was what seemed to be the case).
He also couldn't sort out everything he felt towards the other man; everything kept coming into question and then other forces kept trying to convince him to stay and remain with Sherlock. As if that was what was best for him. But it wasn't. It was what was best for Sherlock. John's life was no longer his own and he was assigned a role that, ultimately, made him feel just as meaningless as when he arrived back in London.
At first, the affection that came with the role, the "importance" in Sherlock's life, had seemed enough. John was willing to accept it as such. But... it just wasn't the same. It wasn't enough. John was his assistant but that... it seemed like an insult now. He was an army doctor, goddammit. He had been out in the thick of real war and survived. He had felt alive and nearly invincible while feeling utterly small and vulnerable. He had felt indispensable and capable.
Here he felt useless and empty.
John wanted Liam to be alive. To live this "regular", monotonous, storybook life with his beautiful wife and child that he had wanted so badly to get back to, the life he had been looking so forward to, that he had actually had a purpose in living.
John wanted to be back on that battlefield like he used to be. Defy death by saving life, feel alive by enduring true terror and certain death every day, and matter by being needed in the only way he had ever truly felt useful in his miserable, bland life.
He wanted to do that again. Liam had saved his life and now look at him - what kind of life was this? He couldn't accept this anymore. He didn't want to.
Liam shouldn't have been the one to die on that battlefield. John should have. It was where he belonged. Not here. Not like this.
A sob broke from him. It was painful and raw and the harder it rained, the harder he cried. He hadn't cried in years and once he started... he couldn't stop. He just couldn't stop.