A/N: please please PLEASE leave a cote or a vomment, ty for your support guys, it keeps me motivated :)
"Dislocated ankle. Bruised rotator cuff. Head wound. Concussion." John crossed his arms across his chest and smiled at Sherlock, glaring fucking daggers. "Take off your shirt."
"Why," Sherlock said, his voice hollow, deadened.
"Because you're bleeding through your fucking clothes-"
"John!" Mrs. Hudson gasped-
"-and I'm going to have to spend all night ripping up bedsheets with my teeth to make your bandages. Take off your shirt."
Sherlock's eyes met his in a flickering glance that lasted only half a moment. He winced in pain as he used one arm to ease his shirt off of his bruised shoulder; John suddenly became very aware that his biceps hurt from digging his fingers into the supple skin underneath his mangled sweater. He tried to unwind himself, like a spring giving way, flexing his hands into tight fists, in and out, in and out...
Which didn't work, bottom line, because the purpling, marbled skin of Sherlock's torso under Sherlock's shirt resulted in John being wound even tighter - he boxed his stance and pulled his shoulders back, trying not to snap.
Sherlock's skin was entirely devoid of an area that wasn't splotched with blood and dirt and bruises. He looked like a dirty pond lily, wilted by heat and wetness. John couldn't look him in the eyes. He was afraid that whatever emotion he saw would be as devastated as Sherlock's skin, just as feverish. John could easily see that Sherlock's body was slick with sweat, even standing two meters away, even with the air cutting through John's clothes.
Sherlock shivered, pulled away as John's gaze was forcibly locked on the destruction in front of him. The bruising and cuts notwithstanding, Sherlock's hair was matted down over a head wound. His ankle was dislocated. His concussion was making him woozy. John didn't know what to remedy first. John couldn't fathom this, not an hour before. And now the only thought in his head that made sense was: He could have died. He could have died. He could have fucking! died!
How could he? How could he have done that?
"Are you bloody proud of yourself now?" John practically spat, trying very hard to keep his voice steely. It was dangerously close to wavering, losing tone as it became coarser.
Sherlock didn't respond - but it came off more as defiance than resignation or shame. He gritted his teeth, making angry, unflinching eye contact with the wall, and then his white hot blue eyes slid to John's and John knew that this argument was different. There was something churning in his gaze. Unbridled and monstrous. Maybe it was brought about by the pain that Sherlock was undoubtedly in, or maybe he looked so ruthless because the home he had been raised in for the majority of his life was now a pile of crackling ash - but his eyes were practically incandescent with wrath. John hadn't known he could give off that much wrenching emotion in a look. It took him aback; John almost couldn't make eye contact with him, if it weren't for the fact that he was quite practiced at being just as angry. His stomach felt like wrought iron; he was sick from the images ramming impressions into his head, and a pebble of pure rage stopped the bile from rising into his mouth. He could scream at Sherlock:
Fuck you. Fuck you for fucking all of us, for being a bloody selfish twat. Fuck you and your fucking head wound, stitch it your goddamn self, arsehole.
Instead, John suggestively cleared his throat, looking to Mrs. Hudson for assistance. She was standing by the cupboards, still as decoration. "Mrs. Hudson-"
"Yes?" she replied immediately, her gentle voice a startling, incongruent, sickening presence among the loud rattle of gun fire and bombs. Her urgency took John aback - it took a second for him to say anything.
"...Could you come here and pass me bandages, antiseptic, thread and a needle?"
Mrs. Hudson, as of yet, was the only person out of the three of then that had done anything meaningful. She'd made an inventory of the non-perishables in the cupboard - quite a few air tight jars of beans had expired. The remaining beans were sitting atop a small oven. And in the corner of the concrete room, she'd started a fire in the wood stove using only flint and wet, moldy kindling. Her instinctual maternal resource never ceased to surprise John - she'd found the first aid kit, determined what pain medication had not expired yet, single-handedly fixed a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling over a wooden table - where Sherlock now sat, the harsh light highlighting a sheen of gritty sweat and blood. Mrs. Hudson had wrapped John's purpling bare feet in clean pillowcases - she was, in fact, the only thing keeping him from practically finishing what the bomb raid started and killing Sherlock right there and then.
Stupid, stupid, ridiculous man. Malicious man. Could anyone be as Machiavellian as him? Sherlock, with his short temperament and his tendency to do idiotic, dangerous, reckless things on a whim?
An hour ago, he had been six feet of blotchy red-purple skin, twisting his ankle on the ice, crying out into the night, into the gutting sound of explosions and machine gun fire. And now, he sat here like a fucking stray dog, biting the hand that fed him, that saved his bloody life. John attempted to parse through layers of inscrutable emotion, tried to find an inkling of gratitude, but he managed to discern only disdain. He had half a mind to leave. Fuck you, fuck you.
John's marination in contempt was interrupted by a loud, unbridled grunt ripped through Sherlock's chest, out of his mouth. His lip split open again as he moaned in pain, pulled apart and already chapped to the point of bleeding. It sounded like something was splitting him, tearing him, and the empathy that was familiar to him - a familiarity he hated, at times - prompted him to immediately place his hand against Sherlock's sweaty, slick back. "Breathe," John enthused through Sherlock's raucous floundering for air. "Down, down, against the table, come on, don't hurt yourself even more." Sherlock exhaled pitifully, the sweat on his back beading into droplets and trickling down. A stab of pity dug into his stomach as Sherlock gingerly leaned into his hand, eventually settling onto the kitchen table with the penetrative hanging white light swinging above it. A bomb touched down, a while away; the light flickered.
"Tell me if this hurts," John murmured, moving to touch him even in his bitter reluctance. He hated touching Sherlock, now. Not because of the dirt and the sweat and the perverse reality of their situation, but because touching him meant he still had the ability to. And if John knew he could, there was no realistic expectation that the next time - if there was a next time - John could resist touching him again. Dragging his fingertips across Sherlock's ribcage like he was reassuring himself he could still feel things. No one - not his parents, not Claire, not Sherlock himself - could expect that of John.
Sherlock made no gesture to acknowledge him. His eyes were glued to the ceiling, glassy. "I'm going to feel for broken bones," John said more to himself. "Do you need water?"
The inquiry was met with pure, unspoken contempt. Sherlock's gaze slid from the ceiling to John, purely livid, his eyes mad with excruciating pain and furious impatience. "I'm trying to bloody help you," John spat to an uncaring, unflinching glare. When Sherlock remained unresponsive, John called to Mrs. Hudson. "Sherlock needs water." And then John began the methodical process of manually finding broken bones; he gently pressed his fingertips against Sherlock's ribcage, feeling for dislodgings in the skin. One at a time, he worked his way down Sherlock's right set of ribs until Sherlock shouted in pain once again.
Even though he knew it had been coming, it surprised him - he pulled back almost instantly and wiped his crusted crimson hands down his cheeks in exasperation. The taste of Sherlock's blood filled his mouth, his nose. "Mrs. Hudson, pillows. Quickly, please," John called behind him without looking back. Within a second, a pillow from one of the beds had been placed on the table Sherlock was laying on.
"How bad" - Sherlock inhaled, sharply, at the sensation speaking left him with, and then began to talk much lower - "how bad is it?" His tone was nothing short of scornful.
"It isn't bloody good. Broken rib." John had no desire to be gentle. He wanted to make Sherlock crack under the weight of his own selfishness, wanted him to writhe with guilt. Still, he lifted the wet mop of ruddy curls in his right hand and put a pillow underneath Sherlock's head with his left. "You're lucky to be alive, git," John snapped, and there was nothing affectionate hidden in his voice. He said "git" with poison in his mouth, to devastating effect. "The head wound, given an inch right, could have easily killed you," John growled, mopping away Sherlock's curls - now crusted with blood - to reveal a nasty black cut in the uppermost corner of his forehead, running perpendicular into his hairline. "You could have fractured your skull. And given the likelihood of brain damage, you would have lost your precious intellect. I mean, you don't give a fuck about anything else, right?"
Sherlock just glared.
"And if your brain started to swell, I would have had to drill a hole in your skull to relieve the pressure, so you wouldn't have had a stroke. Which I'm not sure I could even do, given my supplies, but I sure as hell would have tried. Even if your heart stopped beating on the table." John dipped cottonballs the first aid kit contained in antiseptic - it smelled deadly. "Did you think of that when you tried to be a hero?" At that, John began working away the dirt and blood with the cottonball - Sherlock shut his eyes and sucked in air through his gritted teeth. The frustration was born from anger, not worry. No, this was sadism flaring up in John's mouth, coming out sterile and carcinogenic, like formaldehyde.
"Hurts, yeah?" John continued, his anger gaining more and more momentum. "Not as much as a bullet to the brain. I bet your brother would get a real kick out of that. His mother and brother dying in the same year." John threaded the suture needle in one stroke, and turned back to his patient, who was now blinking sweat out of his eyes, pupils constricted to tiny black holes as he stared at the light hanging from the ceiling. "Tell me, Sherlock: do you ever think of anyone but yourself?" He strung delicate stitches into Sherlock's forehead, thumbing away the hair covering the last fraction of the cut. It probably wasn't going to scar badly, but John wasn't about to tell Sherlock that.
"I'm gonna need you to sit up."
"I can't," Sherlock strained to say.
"I'll help, but-"
"My rib is broken," Sherlock spat, his voice shaking with effort, yet somehow still ridiculously dismissive.
"I'll help you," John repeated, "just bear your weight on your good elbow."
"Don't touch me," Sherlock growled, pushing up on his arms with all his effort. He was obviously in immense pain - but his infuriating stubbornness spurred him into a slouching position. He groaned, exhausted.
There was a clear place in Sherlock's ribcage - a small, but discernible dimple - where the bone was broken. It had swollen; John reached inside the first aid kit for a roll of ace bandage. "Straighten up a little," John told Sherlock as he leaned over to look at the swelling. John felt a hand on his back, bearing down for leverage. Sherlock pulled his chest up, his navel towards John, eyes closed from the blue tinted light. Looked like he was practically about to unravel on the operating table. (Er, kitchen table, John corrected himself internally.) "Breathe," he said to Sherlock, quiet but firm, "through your nose."
"It hurts to breathe," Sherlock bit out, through heaving, painful gasps.
"Yeah, well," John snapped, "you should have thought about that. This could have collapsed your lung. You would have suffocated."
The tension in the room only thickened, into a visceral lag between speech and emotion and thought. Sherlock kept his mouth shut. John took the gauze bandage from the table, incensed, and began the slow process of healing a rib while listing off the numerous transgressions Sherlock had taken against John during the last three hours. "You could have died. Any number of ways. Brain contusion, whiting out from the pain of the most excruciating migraine anyone has ever felt? Dead. Punctured lung, choking on the blood seeping into your windpipe, out of your mouth, dead. You could have been blown up, or shot in a million places at once," John explained rather garishly, "you could have taken days to die, you could have fallen into a coma." He wrapped gauze tightly around the cracked rib, taking his anger and pouring it into violently healing Sherlock's body. "Do you know what it's like to be paralyzed from the neck down, unable to use your body, until your muscles atrophy?"
"Do you take pleasure in these colorful descriptors?" Sherlock cracked back, but was silenced once again with a cuttingly irate glare.
"Shut up." John did the final wrappings with a degree of un-Hippocratic roughness. Sherlock knashed his teeth as John pushed his hands into the swelling, into the heat of wounded flesh, broken bone, mangled muscle. "You idiot. You fucking idiot. We both could have lost you - I'm not the only one that puts up with your idiocy - Jesus, Jesus."
The last word John spoke was practically deflated; in a matter of seconds, he had come to the realization that this lecture was useless upon deaf ears, and Sherlock had been staring defiantly at John from before John could even remember. Before he started nurturing Sherlock's superficial wounds. Before John had begun to truly lose his composure. From antagonized and frustrated by Sherlock's lunacy to hopelessly aware of Sherlock's indifference, he shot back to the other end of the spectrum in an instant.
"You absolute CHILD!" John shouted madly, definitely loud enough for the bunker to shake a bit. Mrs. Hudson ceased to tend the fire on the far end of the room, and stood dead still in hopes of quelling the rage that was washing over John in tempestuous waves. "Why did you do that? You could have died! You! Could have! Died! What don't you understand about death? Are you honestly so narcissistic, so self-absorbed, that you think you can cheat death? As if after you shatter all of the bones in your body, you just get up and walk away?! You raving lunatic!"
John nearly had the wherewithal to walk away to where Mrs. Hudson stood, motionless at the open fire, but a new thought blasted its way into his stream of thought. He practically spun in order to face Sherlock again, whose silence was smug, self-congratulatory. "No, no - it's worse! Because a lunatic doesn't know he's a bloody lunatic. Oh," John exclaimed, his voice becoming a sardonic, bitter chuckle, "oh, but you. You are aware. You fucking love it. You love playing with your prey. A sadist. I love" - John swallowed, losing the word to his mouth, to his feral smile. "You're a sadist. You get off on this. Seeing me riled. It's a game for you. A sick game."
Sherlock's blood was still under his fingernails. Along with his semen, probably. If John murdered him, right now, in this bunker, would the coppers pin him, or blame the bombing? Would James slap the handcuffs on? John revelled to wonder.
The self satisfied grin had slowly worked its way into a self satisfied frown. John didn't want to wait for Sherlock to say something awful. He wanted to rip out Sherlock's stitches. Make him bleed. Force him to feel how he felt - betrayed, guilty, pitiful. And yet, Sherlock did not find pity in himself, did not try for humility.
"Are you done now?" he asked, like a husband to a nagging wife. "Have you gotten it out of your system?"
John straightened his back into a rod, set his head low on the plane of his shoulders. His finger went up to point at the bleeding man before him. "I don't wanna hear another word out of you."
"I know it was idiotic," Sherlock carried on unflinchingly. The pain must have ebbed. Maybe he was faking everything, just so John would touch him like he was about to die. "I know I could've been blown up. I calculated the probability of that-"
"So you KNEW!" screamed John, spreading his arms apart in infuriating betrayal. His voice strained from the constant working of his vocal chords. "Calculate this, Sherlock. I don't fucking care what you have to say."
Sherlock - to John's surprise - seemed to become a little indignant at that.
"You have no reason to be upset," he replied, almost incredulous, almost as if he was the one being sensible. As if John was raving mad, overreacting, wrapped up in his own self-indulgent fairytale where he didn't have to stay with Claire, marry Claire, love Claire.
What did Sherlock want from him? He'd give everything, he'd shoot men for this bastard, he'd run away to America if it would make Sherlock need him more. If loving Sherlock was murder, he'd slaughter himself. Scars on his knees from childhood, scars from knife fights over Harriet - scars from falling in and out of love, hideously, messily - it was nothing compared to what he was willing to do to himself for Sherlock. He was a doctor, but he could perform autopsies just as well on living flesh. He would walk around with a Y incision in his abdomen for this man. He would fucking cut out his lung if it helped Sherlock breathe easier.
And fuck - there wasn't enough regret in the world to make John regret Sherlock.
John shouted. It shook his head, strained his lungs. "You KNEW you could die and you didn't care!"
"Yes," Sherlock affirmed evenly. "That is what I said." Not even skipping a beat.
"Sherlock, I swear to God, I swear to whatever is out there, whatever" - his voice became venomous as he practically spat poison - "cursed me with you, I don't wanna hear you speak unless it's an apology."
"Why," Sherlock asked. His voice was so cold.
"You owe me an apology," John told him in a dangerous whisper, falling to his knees before Sherlock, even so.
"I don't owe you anything," Sherlock began-
"You only care about yourself, selfish bastard." He worked the shoe and sock off Sherlock's swollen ankle dutifully, speaking mostly to himself. With much dramatic flair, John shoved up Sherlock's pant leg to his knee, exposing the ankle.
"-You think you're a Saint? While you sit in your ivory tower, hurling down stones at the liars and thieves among us, do you ever look at yourself?"
"Measure your next words very carefully," John whispered into the cold air, voice deliberate and gravelly. His hands were gripping onto Sherlock's dislocated ankle.
"Well, choir boy, Saint John - everyone believes you're still fucking your fiancée while you smugly take it in the arse behind closed doors - so who's really the selfish bastard?"
There was nothing clinical about what John did next. That, at least, he knew.
"Fuck you," a warped part of him snarled out. He summoned all his strength and all his bitterness, every frustration he had felt for the last six months: choking glances from Claire, people telling him what he couldn't do, parties where poison sunk into his skin, nights lost to alcohol, clammy hands crawling across his shoulder; Moriarty, singing: Then your pretty fiancée won't be pretty by morning. Every time Sherlock told him that they couldn't, that he was using him, that this was just a fling, that only fools coveted forbidden things - he took every ounce of negative energy he had and he focused it into pulling.
The ankle shifted into place with a sickening "pop."
More chilling was Sherlock's horrifying roar of primal, indiscriminate pain. It was like its own concussive blast - for seconds afterwards, John's senses faltered into white static. His muscles went slack as he heard Mrs. Hudson shout something wordless, something terrified, and the reality of what he'd done sunk in.
The foot looked aligned. But Sherlock's face was crushed in pain. And he could tell that there was confirmation in what he had just done, be it for Sherlock's physical benefit or for his own gratification.
John fell back from his haunches with nauseating force, bearing all his weight on an aching wrist as Mrs. Hudson attempted to haul him away from Sherlock by the armpits, to put distance between them. She only succeeded in budging him a couple of inches before her back bumped into a concrete wall, and even then, she pulled him up, without much effect.
He was dead weight. He was going to be sick. And at times, he could hear Sherlock, over the white static ringing in his head - he was afraid to look at him, to match the screams to Sherlock's face. His entire body was leaden.
"John!" he heard Mrs. Hudson shout, completely irate. "You foolish, foolish young man!"
And then, Sherlock's voice. Crystal clear, everywhere and nowhere. "I want you to leave," John heard. His eyes drifted aimlessly to where Sherlock sat, and he was saying it - it was his voice - but his face was warped. Wet and pink and bleeding red, tears streaking his cheeks. And then Sherlock's voice took on water, wobbly and broken up from emotion. "I... want you... to leave."
"I will in the morning," he heard himself say, softly, lost in shame, closing his eyes against what he had done. In the far distance, the sirens finally silenced.
***
He knew Sherlock didn't fall asleep until the exhaustion overtook the pain. His breathing slowed an hour before dawn.
John was practiced at staying awake, for long shifts at various clinics and hospitals he had worked at over the years. It felt like he was on duty, a little bit. Watching patients sleep in twin sized beds, wondering who they were when they weren't sick, dying.
Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock were squeezed together for warmth on a twin sized bed - there were only two, and if John slept on the floor he would have been frozen solid. His feet were still numb, and it was much too cold underground, even with the fire blazing in the woodstove. Sherlock was turned away from him, laying on his back. Firelight cast his face in shadow.
He was sorry, and yet, he knew that this had been coming.
An hour later, John was putting on Sherlock's shoes. They didn't fit, and he didn't have socks, and his clothes were still a little damp. Mycroft's people would come to make sure Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson were alright, so he didn't feel too bad taking Sherlock's shoes. He didn't really know what time it was, but hoped it was morning. He hadn't gotten any sleep and part of him was worried for Claire's safety, although they too had a bunker in their backyard.
James would have been on duty. Mark had patrol that night, so he would have been, too.
To expel those thoughts, John looked pointedly at Sherlock's form, submerged in orange light. His chest was rising very slowly. He wondered if he should say goodbye. Sherlock was a bed away, close enough to reach out and touch.
"I have to go home," John forced himself to murmur to no one, trying to concrete that sad yellow house in his mind as a home for him. He didn't want to leave Sherlock here, but he couldn't stay. Sherlock didn't want him to, anyway.
John gave them one last longing look before climbing up the metal rungs, into the snow blackened by ash.
***
The house was intact - fortunately, the whole street had been spared. John crossed the snowy lawn, wrapping his coat closer to him. He had his excuse ready. They closed the roads. I couldn't get here when the raid started, I'm so sorry.
He looked in the flower pot for the spare key, finding it, and sliding it into the lock with a series of gentle clicks. Half of him hoped that Claire was at Allison's, whose road was also relatively undamaged - just so he could get some rest. He turned the key, and he didn't even have time to remove it before Claire swung the door open.
John tried to process her face, quickly, her presence conpletely unfamiliar to him after so long. He didn't remember her eyes being so startlingly blue, her hair being so bright blonde, and fairly longer. She looked like a stranger, and yet it was definitely her - who after a second's silence, sprang into his arms, beginning to violently sob.
"Claire, what - what's happened?" John asked the space where she once stood, remotely present.
"My father," she cried, tears wet against John's neck. "He... he..."
Realization quickly dawned on John; he looked down between his arms, where she was shaking apart. Slowly, he placed his hands on her back. "I'm sorry, Claire," he whispered gently against her cheek, through her grief, unsure if he was lying. "I'm sorry."