Title: I'm Not There
Rating: Umm…teens. Kinda.
Pairing: None
Warnings: Character death. Again =D
Disclaimer: BBC owns the new Sherlock. I own old one, I do believe. To marry, murder and do what I like with. Oh, Conan Doyle, can I not just marry you?
Word Count: 1,727 give or take seeing as I've edited it.

Summary: John never got out of Afghanistan, leaving many mourners in his passing. None of these mourners included a certain Sherlock Holmes.

A/N: I'm bored, listening (and kinda watching) Bob Dylan (Cate Blanchett) and my muse REALLY hates John. I don't get it personally; I think John and his silly jumpers are charming. Self-beta'd because it's painful to drag people through things they don't care about =) So all mistakes belong to me.

It wasn't an accident – rather, it was definitely a deliberate attempt at their best doctor, and it worked. When John Watson was shot the entire squadron was sent into a panic. If it were anyone else there wouldn't be a problem because they'd just yell for the good doctor, and reliable John would run over and sort it out with no fuss, no hassle and a promise of survival. But when that man down was the good doctor everyone instinctively turned to though, it was different. There were other army doctors, of course, and everyone had basic knowledge enough to keep a man alive until they reached the hospital, and this was the instinct they acted upon, opening his shirt to properly examine the wound. If it were any higher it would have been a shoulder injury – painful, of course, but relatively harmless even though the likelihood would be that he'd be damaged enough to be sent back to good ol' Blighty, but on the whole he'd survive. If it were any lower it would have hit his heart and he'd be dead already. As it were, though, it hadn't hit his heart, but it had come bloody close, and the bullet had definitely hit something important. The soldiers were counting the seconds with a held breath, partly waiting for the oppositions to stop damn shooting at them while they had their doctor down, and how long it would take for them to get him to an ambulance or vice versa, but also, they were counting how many seconds it would take for Doctor Watson to stop breathing at all. For the moment, his breath was haggard and shallow, and somehow he was still clinging to consciousness. That didn't sit right with the men, who wanted to get their hands on something which would help to knock the man out instead of having him endure on in agony. He was the doctor who had saved so many lives on so many occasions, and more than one of the men around Watson had him to thank for a well healed wound, or the life of a friend. But, for the moment, while they were being shot at, all they could do was shoot back and count down.

He had woken in the hospital, and he'd been fine. He had positive feedback from nurses and surgeons and doctors who made sure everyday he was in as tip-top help as he could be, and John had also found his own diagnosis to be as pleasing as can be expected. They were going to send him back to England, of course, because he couldn't remain here anymore, the bullet wound was too severe. John had been very angry at this, and then very upset. Finally, he'd just been withdrawn and called Harry briefly, but got Clara. Clara had told him what was happening over there (she was moving out that very second, packing her boxes, leaving right now) and then asked after John, almost as if a second thought. Clara had been a little embarrassed that she'd whined about her and Harry's splitting up when John's health was much more important, but John didn't mind. John never minded; always put others before himself. Clara promised she'd tell Harry (Harry was out at the moment, refusing to be in the same house as Clara), and then made him promise to get back in touch with Harry when he got home – Harry may be a bitch, but she's been missing John more than John would believe. He promised, and said at least fifteen times to Clara that he was fine, he was definitely fine, and that he'd be home soon. He promised that too.

Later that afternoon he collapsed. Some clogging in his internal organs had built up due to the wound and a bit of surgery gone wrong, and, still conscious for a long while, John had started cursing surgeons under his breath, saying he could have done a better job with his eyes closed, and shit, it hurts. Unable to move without it hurting he was put under constant watch, and the nurses had to be patient with him because his heath was very unstable. For the most part they ignored what John angrily shouted, knowing he was merely in pain and doctors were always the worst patients, and then his voice became pain clogged and desperate and then it became too agonizing to talk anymore, and he fell silent, and eventually asleep.

When it became too painful to even breathe, everyone around him was at least expecting it.

On the 29th January, Sherlock found himself in St. Bart's lab, after having whipped a corpse with a riding crop and feeling rather good due to the release of energy. Mike Stamford came in at one point during it, before Molly came in to give him coffee, and he looked lonely and sad. Sherlock asked to borrow his mobile and Mike handed it over without a word.

"Whose funeral was it?" Sherlock then wondered, and Mike looked at him startled a bit, as if he didn't know Sherlock could tell he had been to a funeral due to his clothes, starting with polished, shiny black shoes with dirtied soles – the mud and gravel typical of a church yard close by, and the shoes decidedly untypical of Mike. Mike also wore a lot less black than that which we wore today, and his clothes were usually less formal, and the threats on his back were too fancy for work happenings, such as a large lecture or a meeting. His face was sombre and it looked like he had tears wept into the lapels of his dark overcoat. So, in conclusion, Mike had attended either a particularly hateful wedding or a funeral. Judging by the amount of grief on his face, it wasn't someone particularly close to him like a family member or a spouse, but it was probably an old friend whom he hadn't seen for a long while and had felt compelled to attend the funeral simply because Mike was an emotional person and nostalgia was a dangerous feeling.

When Mike had gathered himself back together he nodded in confirmation that Sherlock had been right, which was really a ridiculous action to make when Sherlock was always right.

"It was my mate, old University friend, John Watson. Only got home a week ago." Sherlock was right about that too, then, more or less.

"Afghanistan or Iraq?" And there was that amazed look again, like it hadn't been glaringly obvious that a man of Mike's age who was dead and who, quote, 'only got home a week ago', was a soldier, especially since soldiers were always dying. Sherlock flipped through his memory briefly to see if he had heard about John Watson in the news, but seeing as his mind was never interested in people dying in war and only ever interested in people dying in their beds at a young age in a locked house with seven security systems and invisible random lasers splitting them and their murderer, Sherlock was sure he wasn't going to remember.

"Afghanistan." Mike eventually answered, and Sherlock nodded in a general way, not caring anymore and, truthfully, not having cared in the first place. Yet, Mike idiotically took it as a sign to continue. "His sister is devastated, of course, only family she had. Drinking herself silly at the pub when I left. She's had loads of calls, of course, people telling her that they're sorry for her loss, giving her flowers and chocolates and she's getting calls from Afghanistan singing his praises. God help him, the man was the best doctor I ever knew."

Sherlock wasn't even pretending to pay attention now, and so when Molly came in, interrupting Mike midstream, Sherlock was thankful the string of mind-numbing noise had stopped. "Thank you, Molly." He said as she handed him his coffee. "What happened to the lipstick?" He asked as he looked at her again. She shrugged.

"Wasn't working for me." She muttered, blushing a little, and Sherlock was taken aback a little.

"Really? Oh, I thought it was a great improvement, your mouth looks too small now."

He returned to his experiments, and out of the corner of his eye saw Molly turn to Mike, politely asking where he'd been. Sherlock sighed at her thankfully, though he knew she wouldn't see it. Let Mike cry on somebody else's shoulder. He felt the entire conversation starting to escape his memory anyway, as it was unneeded in Sherlock's life, and unbearably tedious to even remember.

Mycroft had sent Sherlock a sum of money which went straight to Sherlock's bank accounts and Sherlock was partly angry at his doing such a thing, but didn't complain aloud to such a degree that would encourage Mycroft to take it all back. What the money meant to Sherlock was that he would be able to afford 221B Baker Street for a few more months as his search for a flat share continued, partly in vain, but Sherlock knew that eventually someone would show up. Sure, plenty of people had tried so far, but they couldn't quite put up with Sherlock's little idiosyncrasies. He'd driven out at least three with dead body parts (why, he couldn't understand, it wasn't like they were really hurting anyone) and another with the violin which the angered man had come close to smashing. One horrific time was when his flatmate turned out to be an obsessive compulsive neat freak, and Sherlock couldn't be dealing with that.

For the moment, options were worn thin on whom he could split the rent with, and without any real job and only the odd jobs when friends (like Sebastian) called up to say 'hi' and 'someone's grafittied on my wall', Mycroft helping him without Sherlock having to ask was somewhat of a blessing, though Sherlock would never admit to such a thing.

Earlier in the week, Sherlock had stumbled across an old newspaper which had been under the sofa for a while now, and he went to throw it away as the past really held little interest for him unless it had something to do with a case. His hand paused though, as it hovered over the bin, when a familiar name jumped out at him. The headline told of the return of a body of an army doctor who had died in Afghanistan of a wound to his chest, having survived the actual shooting but not the after effects of the surgery to remove the bullet. It was dated two and a half months ago, and held a picture of a generally non-descript man with no particularly interesting features. It also held one of an older photo, before he joined the army, with a family member which was captioned as "Harriet Watson, John Watson's sister and only remaining family member".

John Watson. It was a fairly usual name, and nothing was interesting about that, either, but for some reason it was ringing bells deep in Sherlock's subconscious, but for the life of him he couldn't remember where from.

Shrugging, he dropped the paper in the bin because it wasn't important.

End

A/N: ehehehe.