Warnings errr
Mentions of drug and alcohol abuse
May be a slightly slash attitude but nothing really slashy in it.
Think that's about it.

Sherlock and Co do not belong to me :'( boohoo

Hope you enjoy all the same :)

It was a nightmare, worse than a nightmare and John knew about those.

The war had left him plenty of scars, before then his child hood had been… painful. There was very little in his life that had been normal, happy even simply innocent.

He had nightmares about the war but the worst ones were always about his family, his childhood. He'd run from that to a career in medicine and when that wasn't far enough straight in to the war. He'd been happy there, that had been the disturbing thing. Amongst the death and the fighting he had found a place where he could truly belong. Peace in the heart of chaos, he found peace.

Then he lost it. Back to England, back to his family and the bad memories, his father dead his sister following shortly after with the same habits. He couldn't watch her kill herself with her addiction, he refused to watch it again. He loved his sister he truly did and that's why he couldn't see her. He wouldn't watch her slowly die, trying and failing to save her, not again.

He lived for a time in dull mediocrity, wondering what the hell he could have done to deserve this, to deserve anything life had dished out to him so far. Life was dull and dark and boring, his leg hurt and Harry kept texting him.

Then he found Sherlock. Bazaar and brilliant Sherlock bloody Holmes, the genius consulting detective who turned the streets of London in to a battle ground, moaned, sulked and made rubbish tea. The flat mate that kept him up all night with his violin, set fire to his jumpers and dragged him around London chasseing murderers.

He was a sociopath and yet he cared in his own strange way. They were friends, flat mates and comrades in arms and John loved him for it.

Which was why this was a nightmare. Why this was a bloody nightmare. Not because he'd had an argument with Sara, not because they needed milk and the rain poured down mercilessly while every bloody London cab seemed oblivious to his struggles. No, what made this a bloody nightmare was that one needle resting innocently on the carpet of 221b Backer Street.

For a moment John had just stared at it; water dripping from his coat and on to the floor in a steady tap taping. His mind had gone blank for a moment, because they hadn't had a case in weeks, because Sherlock's only experiment currently involved a frozen pigs head and a wood chipper.

The shopping bags were heavy in his hands and he dropped them ignoring the loud bang as they hit the floor. Everything was silent but for that gradual tapping and his own steady breathing. But that wasn't true; there was something else, another sound he didn't quite want to acknowledge.

A quite rasping of shallow breathing resonating from the sofa to John's right, where a pale slightly shaking body was slumped across the dark material he could see it out of the corner of his eye but he didn't want to look. He was staring at the needle on the floor with a dull sort of horror. His mind having pieced together what had happened, what was happening, froze and jolted, backing up as fast as it could as if to stop this happening all together.

Because this, this was a nightmare.

John couldn't believe it. John didn't want to believe it. Doctor Watson however knew that there was a patient in need of his attention and that instinct was what took over next. Later he would remember it as a haze, a painful and difficult haze but a haze all the same.

He crouched by the sofa mindless of his leg and checked Sherlock's pulse, temperature, checked the dilatation of his pupils. He rolled him on to his side and he waited. He sat and he waited and he listened to the painful rasping of Sherlock's breathing, to the rain hampering against the windows.

He stared at the shrunken pale form of his friend as he shivered and gasped, sweat covering his skin and hair falling lankly about his face. His genius detective, the one he trusted, his friend, Sherlock.
And he's done this to himself…

Johns throat tightened, his chest clenched painfully until he couldn't breathe. Every fiber of his being refused to cry, refused to make anything of the pain that was aching in his heart and burning just behind his eyes. He took a steady breath in, and out. Calm and slow anything to hold back the tide.

He would not react, he would be calm and he would watch and wait and listen, because Sherlock needed him. There was something else though and through this pained professional haze he managed to ignore it. Managed to stare straight at Sherlock's pale and sweaty face, look anywhere but there.

But between one harsh breath and the next he had looked, he had looked and looked away and refused to look again, refused to acknowledge the plain and painful truth. Because there just in the crook of Sherlock's arm, there where the fresh needle mark still showed that tiniest amount of blood, there were four or five similar marks dotted around the same wound, long enough to be a few days old but nothing more.

Some maybe a week, others simply days, none too old as to be before John's arrival (those had likely faded away hopefully long ago) they were there glairing him in the face. Sherlock had been using regularly, he'd been using and John hadn't noticed.

It was horrible, the waiting and the knowing. His mind flashed back to the countless times he'd sat with his sister at home as she was sick on the floor or in the hospital where she sat shivering in the cold white light. Where he begged and begged and she promised and promised him that she would never do it again, over and over.

And he sat there waiting and knowing that Sherlock would be fine he would get better. He would recover and then some time, one day maybe tomorrow maybe next week he would do the exact same thing over again. That brilliant Sherlock knew exactly what he was doing and he wouldn't stop, he would dull that brilliant mind of his, poison himself again and again and then he would die.

He would make John watch. John didn't know if he could.

The good doctor sat on the floor at his friend's side and he didn't leave him all night. He sat and he watched and he waited and he saw every moment in his life where this had happened before, his father, his sister, even his own addiction; the war, the adrenalin.

Those long hours could be described only with one word; excruciating. With his hand wrapped solidly around Sherlock's wrist for the pulse, with his ears listening for every troubled breath John lived out a nightmare and suffered every other he'd had the misfortune to have. When he ran out of memories, they ran back in a loop in his head, this time with some new additions where Sherlock was there in the place of his father shouting, losing all control and still going back, again and again, slowly dying for his vice.

Eventually he reached a point where he thought he couldn't bare it any more. Where his shoulders were shaking and any moment he was going to retch. That moment when the world was spinning and his life, with all its heart break was screaming in his head, screaming for a release that all his army training had denied it.

That was the moment Sherlock Holmes gasped and woke; brilliant blue grey eyes flashed open hidden by blown pupils. He gasped as the morning sunlight hit his eyes, shading them with a shaking hand. This was when he noticed that his other hand was seemingly out of commission and followed it down, down to the wrist where it was clasped tightly in the warm steady hands of his trusted army doctor.

Sherlock's eyes widened, his mouth parting to form a shocked O shape. John didn't say a word, just remaining still under that shocked gaze listening to the choke as Sherlock tried and failed to talk, stared in to those dull eyes of the genius still locked away, still inhibited by the drug.

Then as if a switch had flipped he dropped the hand and stood. Unfolding himself stiffly from the floor, crossing the room to pull the curtains closed, then to the kitchen to get Sherlock a glass of water. He ignored the glassy eyes that followed him all the way, ignored the detective as he leaned forward as if preparing to take after him and not being quite able to do it.

He moved about on instinct even when the haze had melted away and the nightmares had faded, he moved around knowing everything, experiencing his new nightmare in a hollow perfect clarity. The pain was raw, a deep new crater in his heart bore freely to the world.

He helped Sherlock; he helped him get better and sent him back to sleep. He helped him and he sat and he watched and he knew; this was his newest and worst nightmare. He'd found Sherlock who had cured all his ills, set him on the right proper life with purpose. He'd found peace, home and a freind and now he was losing it again and he didn't think he could bear it.

He watched Sherlock sleeping, the calmer healthier breathing a stark improvement to what had come before, the calm restful expression a mockery of the torment he had inflicted on the older man. John sat pensively in his chair by the fire, he knew Sherlock would do this again and he couldn't stop it.

The question that remained was, could he stay and watch it?

Reviews are loved: P If you want this to continue say so, or it can be a one shot who knows :P

Hope you enjoyed thanks for reading

SQ