Drowned!Watson angst fic
Title: This is how it Feels
Rating: PG (for injuries and injuring)
Disclaimer: YES, i still own nothing.
Word Count: 970
Warnings: ANGST, tense and POV changes
Summary: Drowned!Watson (an expanded scene from my recent anniversary fic) and Holmes' subsequent reaction.
A/N: I thought of this in the shower. Kinda morbid, huh?
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Have you ever almost drowned before, either from a childhood mishap or some extraneous accident?
This is what it feels like.
It’s your lungs being reduced to nothing, pulling whatever is left until you feel your throat collapse and your brain beginning to slowly expire and you’re just alive enough to experience every excruciating minute of not dying. It’s debating between keeping still and fighting to get to a surface you cannot see, that you can’t be guaranteed is even there.
It’s of being utterly blind and afraid and dumb and stricken, everything made worse by the fact there is a part of you that still hopes you can get that one last breath of air because that is the part of you that can’t comprehend never waking again.
And when you can take it no longer, you draw a breath because your body is trying its best to function. It. Is. Agony. There is no air like you hoped, only water. It’s dense and it chokes you, burning your nose, spilling into your stomach, making you cold from the inside out before you feel it start to suffocate.
Then amongst your worst suffering, you die with only the memory of pain.
This is what drowning feels like.
And I was not even the one who was chained to a cinderblock and dumped over the side of a bridge.
That was Watson.
I was the one who woke in excruciating pain at Baker Street, my ulna and radius scraping against each other, one of their shattered ends trying to burst out of my skin. I was the one who stared at the mucked and muddied and bloodied floor of our sitting room and knew they had left with Watson. I was the one who ripped out my desk drawer and clutched at my bottle of morphine, debating whether I could risk using it. If I wanted to use it. If it would make things better or worse.
I was the one Lestrade and his officers found streaking out of our broken front door, screaming at them to follow me to the Osney Bridge.
I was the one who dived into the river, hoping to retrieve my friend and only coming up with a corpse.
I dragged his body to the shore, his head lying limply upon the sand. His lips were parted but with no breath between them.
I was shaking him with one good hand, convinced I may be able to bring him back if I had both of them. The stark reality of the moment is a pain unto itself, which is why I couldn’t take the morphine. If this was to be my last moments on Earth with John Watson, I was going to feel them, every last agonizing minute of it.
Because they were minutes. Several of them. Three minutes of me shaking him, calling his name like a prayer. Two minutes where Lestrade tried unsuccessfully to pull me off of him to which I responded by throwing myself prostrate over his body which lay cold and still beneath me, letting out a sound like when I played my violin sometimes, except I did not have my violin and ten billion concertos turned to one keening, sobbing howl.
This is what drowning feels like.
~*~
This is what dying feels like.
It’s watching your dearest friend put his arm in the way of a cudgel so that it doesn’t smash your skull to pieces. It is hearing his cry cut off midway as one of the thugs deliver a solid blow to his head and knowing for a bitter fact that his was worth much more than yours.
It’s being thrown against Holmes’ sturdy chemistry table, the corner digging jaggedly into your back as a few dozen pipettes and beakers scatter and break. It’s of being kicked in the face and then in the side and back. It’s of seeing the sitting room you have spent so many evenings look ransacked, ruined.
It’s knowing that the reason this has all happened because of a mistress’ vengeful anger when Holmes solved a petty murder scheme and sent her companion to the nearest gaol.
It is being dragged away from the unconscious form of someone you have lived with for over six years and you know that whatever happens to you, he will never be the quite same man, not the one you have come to cherish, at any rate. You know this not out of egoism, but because you would feel the exact same way if the roles were reversed.
The brutes take you to the same bridge you cross every day, threading the chains attached to your ankles around a cinderblock and throwing that and you over the side of the bridge. The cinderblock jerks your legs nearly out of your hips and then you hit the water.
It is being too surprised to prepare properly and taking a breath too early and choking as soon as you hit the water.
I probably screamed something as I died. There was a word in it. It does not take a brilliant mind to guess what it may have been. After all, I put as much stock in the miracles Holmes has done as the invisible ones God performs.
Dying feels like Afghanistan and India and the bottom of the Thames.
Dying is a descent into nothingness, which you don’t notice because you eventually become a part of it…
…until I hear a sound, an unearthly wail of naked anguish, so cutting because there is no barrier between it and my soul. I flow back along its threads because the nothingness isn’t half so compelling as whatever made that sound.
This is what rebirth feels like.
Because Holmes insists I was not the one given a second chance.
Rating: PG (for injuries and injuring)
Disclaimer: YES, i still own nothing.
Word Count: 970
Warnings: ANGST, tense and POV changes
Summary: Drowned!Watson (an expanded scene from my recent anniversary fic) and Holmes' subsequent reaction.
A/N: I thought of this in the shower. Kinda morbid, huh?
-----------------------
Have you ever almost drowned before, either from a childhood mishap or some extraneous accident?
This is what it feels like.
It’s your lungs being reduced to nothing, pulling whatever is left until you feel your throat collapse and your brain beginning to slowly expire and you’re just alive enough to experience every excruciating minute of not dying. It’s debating between keeping still and fighting to get to a surface you cannot see, that you can’t be guaranteed is even there.
It’s of being utterly blind and afraid and dumb and stricken, everything made worse by the fact there is a part of you that still hopes you can get that one last breath of air because that is the part of you that can’t comprehend never waking again.
And when you can take it no longer, you draw a breath because your body is trying its best to function. It. Is. Agony. There is no air like you hoped, only water. It’s dense and it chokes you, burning your nose, spilling into your stomach, making you cold from the inside out before you feel it start to suffocate.
Then amongst your worst suffering, you die with only the memory of pain.
This is what drowning feels like.
And I was not even the one who was chained to a cinderblock and dumped over the side of a bridge.
That was Watson.
I was the one who woke in excruciating pain at Baker Street, my ulna and radius scraping against each other, one of their shattered ends trying to burst out of my skin. I was the one who stared at the mucked and muddied and bloodied floor of our sitting room and knew they had left with Watson. I was the one who ripped out my desk drawer and clutched at my bottle of morphine, debating whether I could risk using it. If I wanted to use it. If it would make things better or worse.
I was the one Lestrade and his officers found streaking out of our broken front door, screaming at them to follow me to the Osney Bridge.
I was the one who dived into the river, hoping to retrieve my friend and only coming up with a corpse.
I dragged his body to the shore, his head lying limply upon the sand. His lips were parted but with no breath between them.
I was shaking him with one good hand, convinced I may be able to bring him back if I had both of them. The stark reality of the moment is a pain unto itself, which is why I couldn’t take the morphine. If this was to be my last moments on Earth with John Watson, I was going to feel them, every last agonizing minute of it.
Because they were minutes. Several of them. Three minutes of me shaking him, calling his name like a prayer. Two minutes where Lestrade tried unsuccessfully to pull me off of him to which I responded by throwing myself prostrate over his body which lay cold and still beneath me, letting out a sound like when I played my violin sometimes, except I did not have my violin and ten billion concertos turned to one keening, sobbing howl.
This is what drowning feels like.
~*~
This is what dying feels like.
It’s watching your dearest friend put his arm in the way of a cudgel so that it doesn’t smash your skull to pieces. It is hearing his cry cut off midway as one of the thugs deliver a solid blow to his head and knowing for a bitter fact that his was worth much more than yours.
It’s being thrown against Holmes’ sturdy chemistry table, the corner digging jaggedly into your back as a few dozen pipettes and beakers scatter and break. It’s of being kicked in the face and then in the side and back. It’s of seeing the sitting room you have spent so many evenings look ransacked, ruined.
It’s knowing that the reason this has all happened because of a mistress’ vengeful anger when Holmes solved a petty murder scheme and sent her companion to the nearest gaol.
It is being dragged away from the unconscious form of someone you have lived with for over six years and you know that whatever happens to you, he will never be the quite same man, not the one you have come to cherish, at any rate. You know this not out of egoism, but because you would feel the exact same way if the roles were reversed.
The brutes take you to the same bridge you cross every day, threading the chains attached to your ankles around a cinderblock and throwing that and you over the side of the bridge. The cinderblock jerks your legs nearly out of your hips and then you hit the water.
It is being too surprised to prepare properly and taking a breath too early and choking as soon as you hit the water.
I probably screamed something as I died. There was a word in it. It does not take a brilliant mind to guess what it may have been. After all, I put as much stock in the miracles Holmes has done as the invisible ones God performs.
Dying feels like Afghanistan and India and the bottom of the Thames.
Dying is a descent into nothingness, which you don’t notice because you eventually become a part of it…
…until I hear a sound, an unearthly wail of naked anguish, so cutting because there is no barrier between it and my soul. I flow back along its threads because the nothingness isn’t half so compelling as whatever made that sound.
This is what rebirth feels like.
Because Holmes insists I was not the one given a second chance.