Work Text:
London was cold and wet. The freezing cold of December, half-hearted slush collecting in the gutter, gusts of wind that whistled through straightways between buildings and bit through layers of clothing whenever you turned a corner.
It was nothing like Afghanistan. Every morning in Afghanistan had been cold, the cold of a desert that froze during the night and baked during the day, summer temperatures soaring, dry winds and scorching sun leeching the moisture out of the ground and the people alike.
The sun hadn’t been shining, the day John was shot. On a bright day, one of his unit might have spotted the sniper in the distance: a flash of glass, an oddly shaped shadow on the ground near a clump of trees. But it had been a cloudy day—not London cloudy, where the fine mist built up on your shoulders and gradually soaked through, and sometimes the grey-white mass overwhelmed the sky for so long that you forgot what it was like to see blue—but the strange oppressive hush of a desert wondering whether today might just be the day it rained.
For John—in the base hospital helplessly watching casualties come in smelling of dust and gunsmoke and blood, on an evac flight through clear dark skies that wouldn’t weep for him, in a dim London rehabilitation hospital as patient not doctor, limping between a dingy military-issue bedsit and the office of a sympathetic but not quite empathetic psychologist—the grey clouds had remained everywhere he looked.
He woke from the nightmares—horrendous visions of pain and horror and violent deaths and injuries and brilliant, familiar light—to find himself lit by the false fluorescence of streetlights through the shutters, wracked with grief and loss for the things he’d seen and the people he’d known and the person he’d been before, and the fear that even after winter inevitably melted into spring and blossomed into summer, the sun would never come out again, not for him.
He limped on through, shrouded by overcast skies without and within. How ironic it was, that it was a dark, frozen January night outside when he felt the first gentle rays of warmth on his face again, felt the sun peeking through the clouds despite the darkness.
And he said: "God, yes."
And he said: "That was amazing."
And he said: "You don't seem very frightening."
And he said: "It's all fine."
And it was there, in the warm, dim light of an unasked-for candle, that John finally felt the golden sunlight break through the veil of clouds.
“Come on, John!” called Sherlock. And beckoned him onto the sundrenched battlefield of London's night.