Fic: Mnemosyne (Sherlock BBC)

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Title: Mnemosyne
Characters/Pairings: John-centric, Sherlock/John
Rating R
Warnings: Allusions to violent deaths, war-trauma and murder.
Genre: Angst/Drama/Romance
Word-count: 542
Disclaimer: Don't own, unfortunately never will
Summary:  'There are ten bodies on his very first shooting and John has no idea if he shot the enemy soldier or the little girl accidentally caught in the midst of it or no one at all'

 

 

Mnemosyne

 

John doesn’t remember the first man he killed.

It becomes a blur so fast: the sand in your eyes, in your mouth, creeping in everywhere. The firearms needs to be cleaned every night, because sand ruins and when he’s done, on most nights, there’s blood on them as well, because John’s hands are, after all, a surgeons hands. He looks at it and thinks: comrade and when he’s out there, he thinks of the dying men and women on the table and it’s not that hard to pull the trigger.

One can never know, not really, not when it’s from such a distance. There are ten bodies on his very first shooting and John has no idea if he shot the enemy soldier or the little girl accidentally caught in the midst of it or no one at all. Maybe his bullets just hit the sand, like a stone disturbing the water and creating circles that would reach out to the very edge of the lake.

That night he dreams that he’s skimming stones across the ocean with the dead girl, like he used to do with Harry when he was just a child and she was still sober enough to keep her hand steady. He wakes with a pounding hard and wonders if it would have been better with a nightmare of death and screams.

The first time John knows that he’s killed someone – and it might be the first or the third or the fifth – is two months later and Bill Murray has just stepped on a land-mine. John had been told of this, veterans describing the horror of watching a fellow soldier being torn to pieces, but the sight of legs being ripped off is not something that John could ever have imagined to its fullest. He pulls the trigger and gets the rest back home. Murray – what’s left of him – is sent back home and six feet under.

It’s easier once time has started to slip by and John isn’t sure if getting used to all the death is a good or a bad thing, but then everything is ripped away by a shot in the shoulder and he wakes up in a white room, for the first time in months thinking of Bill Murray and the flash of fear in the eyes of the fifth – certain – man that he’s killed.

Army surgeon. Overqualified field- medic.

It’s John’s hand that shakes now and he hates that the only time it doesn’t is when he’s cleaning the gun. There’s no sand anymore – and John almost resents this fact as well – but it’s the only routine that he can keep with him and he can’t make himself stop, even if an off-part of his mind has already vowed never to use it again.

It turns out that he has to break that promise. And all for a skull-talking, severed-head-keeping madman. But John’s hand isn’t trembling as he does it and it doesn’t tremble afterwards either. It’s steady for several months in fact and he thinks, as Sherlock presses hot and tingling kisses to his stomach, that he might not know or remember the first man he killed, but he knows – and will most definitely always remember – the man he loves.