Chapter Text
From Afghanistan with Love
When he graduates, John Watson joins her Majesty’s Royal Army.
Basic training settles a comfortable kind of urgency on his bones that reminds him of what it means to be alive and makes his heart pump all the faster. Body armor becomes his skin, and his gun is as an extension of his arm as the medical equipment he carries. He learns to love the color of sand and the flavor of desert sky, when his boots finally find the ground. He wins hands at poker, and loses them, and he smiles among acquaintances he knows can never be friends.
Making friends makes the living dead.
It gives that dull, cracked look in a man’s eyes and makes his trigger finger pull before a room is clear. It makes him chain smoke in the faces of Afghani children and watch blood spatter like it’s artwork. It makes his soul malleable, twistable under the hands of war until they are fabricated to be something other.
Something that finds war to be a religious experience, who prays to the bodies of blackened terrorists and civilians alike, and finds, in their death, a not quite sated desire for revenge.
John doesn’t want to be that man.
So he makes no friends.
The men know him as Three Continents Watson by the time his first tour is under his belt, and the women do oh so love a man in uniform, but he likes to think it’s the charisma. It’s the smile, that really gets them.
He can’t remember any of their faces. The fact doesn’t bother him as much as he thinks it should.
He spends his time allowing the extension of his arm to speak for him a thousand yards away, and becomes his unit’s top sniper within the first two months. He kills more, then. Close range and long.
He becomes used to the dying light and final breaths.
His doctor’s oath sometimes weighs heavy on his shoulders, I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant. He shoots a man six miles from Herat and doesn’t see the children he hid behind him until they smear their skin with blood trying to bring him back to life. I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Two men in his unit, Swanson and Brown, strip a woman of her hijab in public, bruises flare to life on her skin from their hands. The village stones her two days later. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. He pulls a little girl out of her burning school, and she calls him a saint in her language. He doesn’t feel like one. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. He doesn’t sleep much, but he’s never at less than his best. He can’t afford it. Above all, I must not play at God.
By the middle of his second tour, he has a reputation among those they fight, those they hunt in secret caves up high above, the ghosts in the desert. They do not have a name for him. They just whisper about a doctor with a viciousness and power that rivals the explosives that tear a new sun beneath the pressure of a Humvee. They are afraid, and John fights harder.
They lose men quick and hard and John tries not to feel anything. He’s never been too good at that.
They are replaced, or they go home, but John stays there.
He needs this, can’t explain why. Needs it. He grows bored too easy, and spends the quiet nights mapping the most dangerous areas of the country, his time training, his mornings wishing for a firefight to rival all the rest.
When the war finally becomes monotonous, finally becomes easy as breathing with the excitement blurring around the edges, John worries, as is his right to worry. There are demons behind his eyes, now, and he worries about what kind of man he’ll become when they rise to the surface. When they take the desert and mold it between callused, gentle hands, when he becomes the monster Al Qaeda whispers about.
One day he wakes up unable to recall what drove him here in the first place. He doesn’t remember feeling anything but the impulsive need to touch the sky and dodge a bullet.
That scares him.
Xx
They find him in the mountains near Nuristan, the sand-colored tarp of their tents building a small and unstable city against the berating winds and cold nights, but there is no fire on this night. There is nothing but the slow rise and fall of voices over cards and a map of recently discovered cells dotting the lower broad curve of the Hindu Kush.
John is bored, reclining in a fold out chair with his helmet upside down in the dirt at his feet. The night’s cold and impossibly dark; the silence swallows him on all sides and makes everything slow and foggy. He almost doesn’t realize he’s being approached until it’s too late.
But he does.
“Dr. John Hamish Watson.”
There has been no alert, no radio, no communication that any higher-ups were coming to his lowly unit at the ass-crack of the mountains and the breakneck zone for dirty combat. They show no badges, offer no names. John’s got his gun before he’s totally sure of what he’s doing, but it feels like the right thing to do, and he knows enough not to question his instincts.
“Put your gun away, chap. No need for that just yet,” a young man says. His hair is slicked back and his suit is too expensive to ever see combat ground in Afghanistan. His features are cultured, light tan skin and sharp cheekbones with curving lips. An older woman stands calmly at his side; grey hair cut short and sharp eyes that seem to dig their way into the very fabric of John’s soul.
“’Yet’,” John echoes; his fingers find a familiar hold on his Browning. “I think I’ll hold onto it just as well, thanks.”
The woman almost smiles at that, seems to be fighting it, and says, “I think you’ll be a good choice indeed.”
“For?” John asks, and he feels young beneath her eyes, though he has seen two tours at the very front of the front lines, though he has twenty five years under him that have taught him more than most, though he is a Captain. It is like she has seen a hundred thousand lifetimes, like she has taken the centuries to integrate herself into the very heartbeat of the world she has come to know inside and out.
She doesn’t answer him, and he finds himself, rather suddenly, thinking of her as beautiful. Though the years have weathered away the clear symmetry of her face and time has rounded her hips and her short stature only suits to make her seem stockier, she has a keen elegance to her that reminds John of a knife blade. He feels caught beneath her gaze.
She smiles, then, and it’s a hard thing. It’s a secret thing.
“The crown has need of you, Dr. Watson. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be the most dangerous and complete you’ve ever undertaken. I would leave my associate to explain it to you, but I can already see you’re willing to agree.”
“Who do you work for?” John asks, because he’s seen enough spy movies to be quick on the uptake, and it seems an appropriate thing to ask. The woman seems to think so too.
“We do not exist, Dr. Watson. And if you join us, neither will you,” she says boldly, bluntly, no hint of apologies or sympathy. They both know that home has little to offer him.
And just like that, John gets it. The silence swells between them, and the handsome man beside her chuckles softly to himself. John doesn’t ask what’s funny.
“Disappearing act, eh? I’ll think about it while I wait for the next attack. Since it’s a fucking war. I can’t just up and leave.” But he wants, god he wants.
He wants out of this dry hell hole and into something faster, something that will drive him to very edge of everything and shove him off, so he can get caught in the wind and lose himself in the adventure. The desert has grown too bitter on his tongue, and the open sky has lost almost all of its wonder.
“You can lie to yourself all you want, but don’t think about lying to me. You want something more, and I’m the only one in a position to offer it to you.”
“An offer from no one doesn’t mean very much to someone,” he pointed out with a smirk. He liked her.
“You obviously don’t know the right no ones.”
“Granted, the only non-entities I know here happen to reside in caves with the intent to murder me and the larger whole of democratic society.” He has made no effort to stand, instead settles further into his chair with his gun resting across his knees.
He wonders how they got his information to begin with, and decides he doesn’t particularly care.
“And that fact excites you,” she said bluntly. “You need it. The rush. And I can give you the biggest hit of your life. It’ll never stop, you’ll ride the high until you’re retired or dead, probably the latter, but that doesn’t scare you either. In truth, Dr. Watson, you need us much more than we need you.
“Transport will be here for you in four hours, think about it.” She says it like she assumes he will say no, like he will stay where he is and refuse her offering in favor of the continuation of his tour, of his medals, of his known valor.
John stops her before she can turn away with just a look, curious and calculating. “What’s your name?” It’s a kind of test, and he’s sure she knows it. He will always wonder what the most dangerous sector of the British government saw in him.
She accepts his challenge with a regal sort of pride, acknowledging his understanding and confirming his suspicions.
“You will call me M.”
Xx
He is given a number with two zeros and a license.
The one before him had died six months ago on a mission in Singapore, and he slides easily into the vacancy he left behind. He never asks why he is higher than the man who accompanied M in Afghanistan whose status as seven seems to gather him more respect than most, just like he never asks after the results of his preliminaries. Never asks why he was chosen. Never asks after anything, and M likes him for it.
He doesn’t ask because in his third week, he broke into the record room, and finds himself to be only two points below a perfect score in marksmanship, highly proficient in hand to hand, expert in more than four languages thanks to his downtime in college, expert in resourcefulness thanks to his time in the war, and the rest of it kind of blends together in a sea of jargon about his mental state and ability to adapt to anything.
He tries not to be too proud of himself.
Xx
At twenty six, on his birthday, he’s given his first mission.
He spends the week in the Czech Republic, dismantling a multinational Mafioso group hell-bent on infiltrating a nuclear facility in the east. He drives a fast car, and the explosion at the end of the sixth day is enough to make him grin manically and shout “I love this job!” into his comm unit.
His quartermaster thinks he’s insane, but that’s to be expected.
Xx
For his next birthday, he buys himself an Aston Martin 2 Liter 1937 Speed Model, and he loves it more than anything else he owns, including the Sig he keeps tucked close to him at all times.
He doesn’t take it on missions, but when he’s in London, he drives it through the night until the dawn casts a grey-yellow light across the cloudy sky. And he feels kind of like he’s floating, flying. He wonders if this is happiness.
Xx
It’s more like Six Continents Watson.
Until he gets a short, but interesting mission in Antarctica and the whole world feels at his feet.
Xx
He likes M. And M likes him.
He’s very loyal, very quickly.
Xx
He finally gets what Bond found so funny.
He doesn’t exist but his name and his number are hushed whispers on the mouths of criminals everywhere.
He finds it funny too.
Xx
It’s a decade after he was first signed by M, that he goes back to Afghanistan.
Nothing much has changed, except for the efficiency with which he exterminates his targets and the size of his job. The remoteness and the risk. After tense hours searching through low, squat buildings, John executes two men with the capability to topple the fragile and young emerging peace in the country, two men who shouldn’t have the intelligence they do, who have nothing to their name but body counts, who have a card tucked neatly into the inner folds of their thobes.
Gunfire ricochets off the stone wall to his left, and he ducks behind it quickly, shoves a fresh round into his Sig and hates that it’s his last, but can’t bring himself to hate the thrill the knowledge sends down his spine. The business cards are held tightly between his second and third fingers, and he burns the name into his memory.
“Agent, status report.”
M sounds frustrated, sounds bitter and worn down by the run around they’ve been having. John’s had six missions in six weeks, and he’s beginning to feel the wear on his bones. He feels he is moving too slowly. For the first time in a long time, he doubts his ability to make it out alive.
M has been thinking about moving him up, and he knows it.
He wants it.
“There’s no way these two found the capability to topple UN-Afghani peace on their own,” he bites out over the roar of bullets. John breathes out, slow and calm, twists, fires twice, and rolls back to his safe-haven. There is no discernible decrease in the amount of ammunition finding a home in the concrete protecting him. “Business card on both of them, possibly the one that got them the intel.”
“The name?”
He fires again, his blue eyes sharp and trained on the lower wall of the compound he’d dived into. Dust is beginning to kick up and it swirls violent and stinging into the blackness of the night. Something is thrown from the window of the bird, and John takes off at a run, skids through the sand and feels the heat of the blast against his face. The helicopter above him is not friendly at all.
Masked men fire back at him, and he ducks, weaves through the hailstorm of fire and lead and thinks about praying. Grenades and rockets go off around him like pyrotechnics at a rock concert and it’s too much to weave through. He is backed against another wall, his body thrumming.
“The name, agent!”
He hates this mission.
It was supposed to be in and out, before his week of much needed vacation in the Swiss Alps. Bond offered his cabin, and John hadn’t even bothered to thank him properly before accepting the keys and jumping a plane into the very heart of Al Qaeda.
When he slips inside, he follows a dimly lit hallway with a sinking feeling settling on him. There is a metallic stink to the air; it hovers in the cement walls of the compound and water pools too heavy on the lower floors, sloshes against his boots. He didn’t like that. Not at all.
John finds the men, and drags them outside of the immediate range of their friends. They will say nothing about their supplier, and the alarms are already blaring, so John shoots them.
Twenty minutes later and he was pinned, and he knew it. At least thirty men descended on him, and his heart felt as if it would burst from the confines of his chest. He’s never felt more alive. He can still see the neat print from the business card, it’s burned into his retinas, and he’s ready to speak, the Sig heavy and not enough in his hands.
He can see the stars, a hundred thousand watching an Agent fall.
He doubts he’ll get that promotion.
“M--”
And he stops seeing anything.
Xx
When he wakes, he’s in a place with bitter water and rusted tools.
They put a bullet in his shoulder, and do something to his leg he doesn’t watch. It’s hot and ripping and searing and he thinks maybe a brand, maybe acid, maybe a knife. He is told later he is right on all counts, but the damage is superficial enough to give him full mobility.
He’s never screamed like this before.
Most of the time, they don’t even ask questions. They just make sure he forgets the look of black script on a white card, the formation of a name in his mind, on his lips
At some point, he starts begging for his life, but he isn’t sure when.
Time stops being linear and starts being blood. When he bleeds and when he doesn’t. Water. When he chokes on it and when he doesn’t.
Xx
It takes three weeks, in the end.
Three long fucking weeks.
When 007 hauls him up off the floor and drags him back into the sunlight, John throws up onto the sand. He can’t put weight on his leg, can’t move his arm. Can’t breathe.
Can’t remember the name.
Xx
It takes two weeks of PT before M comes to visit him. He doesn’t look at her. She doesn’t say sorry.
“After all this time, ten years--” he can’t quite finish. He doesn’t have to. M knew where he was. Of course she did. She waited.
“It was necessary.”
“Fuck all if it was necessary! I trust you to watch my back, M, like I watch yours!”
John looks at her then, and her eyes are just the slightest bit red, just the slightest bit watery. He’s never been so angry.
“Watson, you can’t be sent back out. Maybe if it’d been six years ago, but now?” she asks, and he thinks she looks so much older, so much more worn. The years have not been so kind to them.
He doesn’t think about it. Just wants out. Feels the cold concrete and bitter water beneath him, feels his leg throb with pain it shouldn’t have any more. They’d fixed him, he’d thought. But the memory still wears too heavy on him.
“I can’t be a desk worker, I need the field,” he says, because they both know that it can’t be undone. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, she doesn’t have to.
“You have been invaluable to--”
This hurts them equally, so John cuts her off.
“I know.”
Xx
He is given back his name, and 003 fades back into John Watson.
Ordinary.
Dull.
He’s never hated anything more.
He gets to keep his Sig, and on the bad nights, he presses it against his temple in the pale imitation of the danger he’d come to breathe by. He wonders if his heart is beating. He puts the Sig back in the lockbox.
He keeps the license. No one had asked him for it, so it stays tucked away in his old wallet. Just in case.
Xx
His leg heals completely, there is a scar, but it does not hinder motion.
He limps anyway.
Xx
He doesn’t spend his extravagant pension.
He buys for himself what he would be able to as a discharged Captain, which is what the records say, and visits the therapist that will never understand why he limps and why he doesn’t care for water or cement.
Xx
Bond calls him once, but he doesn’t answer.
He never really liked him all that much anyways.
Xx
He considers speaking to Harry, though they haven’t seen each other in six years now.
In the end, of course, he doesn’t.
Xx
He thinks a lot about reenlisting, but knows they wouldn’t take an invalid.
He thinks a lot about the service he’s left, the years he’d given to an agency that didn’t exist.
John Watson wants to stop thinking so much.
Xx
And then there’s Sherlock Holmes, whom he lets borrow his phone while swimming in that hateful fog of memory, where he dances between university and basic training and more than basic training. He barely notices the way he catalogues the paleness of his skin and the way it feels when it brushes against his.
“Afghanistan or Iraq?” he asks, and John can see his pale eyes roam him distractedly, uninterested. He is dressed impeccably, and it makes John remember when exquisite suits hugged the hard-packed muscles on his form and made him Seven Continents Watson. Has it only been a year?
“Sorry?” John asks, because he honestly hasn’t been paying much attention. Stamford had hauled him bodily up here, prattling on about the time John’s been away. John thinks about the stories he could tell, the looks he could draw on Mike’s face.
The man is thin, elegant and strong looking with icy, pale eyes and wild dark hair. His features are sharp, elfish and John finds himself lost in the keenness of his gaze. It’s like being pinned beneath M’s stare again, only more, and John wonders what he sees.
It shoots a thrill down his spine, the same way M did when she gave him a new mission.
“Which was it, in Afghanistan or Iraq?” He sounds impatient, and John reorganizes his mental picture. Blindingly, piercingly intelligent, but the social mannerisms of an antisocial two year old. John knows the type, has seen them wander the lower floors of SIS with their fingers dancing over new and improved devices. The Q division had a personality all its own.
John answers the way he must, because he is good at what he does, though he does it no longer.
“Afghanistan, sorry, how did you know?”
A young, mousy woman breezes past him with a cup of coffee in her hands, and John shifts slightly to the left, his hand tightening around his cane before he relaxes again. There is no threat in the arrested way she looks at the dark-haired man.
He doesn’t seem to notice her.
John feels a stab of empathy for her, and smiles softly as the man insults her without meaning to. He isn’t noticed much these days either.
There was a lover in Casablanca that told John he was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen, but it’s been so much time since then, and he wonders if the form beneath the sheets would still invite him in with that coy, dark smile. The starburst scar on his shoulder and the weight on his mind makes him feel like part of the walls.
“How do you feel about the violin?” The man’s voice cuts through the tension John doesn’t feel and drags him back to reality. He’s more than mildly surprised this ethereal man still realizes John’s standing there when not even John had.
“I’m sorry, what?” John asks, not because he hasn’t heard, but because the only other person to ask him questions like that was M, and it was usually followed by a deep undercover mission. He half expects the man to request him to take on the guise of a violinist protégée in order to stop the mind control of an audience of two million by the composer.
“I play the violin when I'm thinking and sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.” His voice resonates somewhere deep down in John, somewhere that echoes and urges him to nod his head and follow him wherever he might lead. It brings color to the room.
John’s forgotten all about what he said to Stamford about needing a flat, a piece of truth hidden in a larger lie. He didn’t need a roommate for the money.
He could afford anything but being alone anymore. He’d been staring at the Sig much longer these days.
“You told him about me?” he asks Mike.
“Not a word,” he answers around a smile.
“Who said anything about flatmates?” John asks, suppressing the twitch of his lips with the calm ability of a man ten years consumed by acting.
“I did. Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't a difficult leap.” He looks so impossibly bored.
“How did you know about Afghanistan?”
He is suddenly, blindly glad it’s been a year. Any earlier and John was sure this man could pick apart his entire life story, could take one look at him and know about the years he’d spent serving a branch of the government that didn’t exist.
“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. We ought to be able to afford it. We'll meet there tomorrow evening, seven o'clock. Sorry, got to dash. I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary.” And if that isn’t a sentence to remember, John doesn’t know what is. He wants to ask a billion questions, but the one he goes with is bland and boring, even to himself.
“Is that it?”
“Is that what?” the man asks, clearly annoyed now.
John feels distinctly out of place, and misses the smooth slide of silky words whispered in the dark from his mouth. He is not the man he had been. That man’s name was a number.
“We’ve only just met and we’re going to go look at a flat?”
A case in Monaco two years ago had started similarly, only the woman asking him to move in had been a Russian mafia daughter and John had known it. He doesn’t think this man is dangerous, not to him at least.
“Problem?”
“We don't know a thing about each other. I don't know where we're meeting; I don't even know your name.” I have night terrors that wake up my neighbors, I punch the walls when the slowness gets to be too much, I still don’t have a job, I’m twenty nine percent sure that I’m going to crack and become a serial killer soon, I may or may not be vaguely suicidal, and I’m an international murderer, sorry, spy.
“I know you're an Army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan. You've got a brother worried about you but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic, quite correctly, I'm afraid. That's enough to be going on with, don't you think?” he passes back John’s phone with an elegant outward flick of his wrist, and John thinks this man is a genius, thinks that even though he’s wrong, he’s the most amazing mind John’s ever had the pleasure to meet.
Because he’s wrong in all the right ways, got the story down so beautifully, he didn’t even have to try.
He thinks that if this man wanted to, he could find the cracks just as easily, and is blessedly glad that he doesn’t.
The man sweeps towards the door, dark curls catching the makeshift breeze and pushing back from his pale face. A smile twitches over his stoic expression, and John is reminded of the existence of his heartbeat.
“The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street. Afternoon.”
And then he’s gone.
And for the first time since he left MI6, John Watson breathes and exhales a smile.
He is alive again.