A Legacy left Behind - Initial encounters

Part 1

Parwan Detention Facility

Near Bagram Air base

Afghanistan.

In a Limbo

Voices...

There were a lot of them...each kept drifting in and out of the numb haze he had retreated into. He had learned to ignore them a long time ago. They wanted things from him, wanted to know things. They wanted him to do things, and in return things were done to him. And when he refused to get with their program, they started hurting him.

But then again, it wasn't the first time he had been in the same situation. It might well be the last though; he had a feeling that they may have taken things past the point of no return awhile back. He wasn't really sure, but he'd guess it was around about the time the constant agony that was his close companion born out of the various parts of his abused body like a gestalt, had gone silent. The ominous kind of silence, not the soothing kind.

His body had given up passing any kind of independent feedback on the dirty and long list of lacerations, breaks, dislocations, fractures, burns, cuts, tears and fuck knew what else. It had choked it all up into a fiery ball of unending misery and was now just waiting in a kind of fugue state for his brain to catch the hell up and start shutting the hell down. He was way past containing any reasonable resemblance of life now; he just had to get the message to his brain that was still firing synapses and the heart that was still valiantly beating away for him.

Well, let those assholes keep coming, he was a stubborn bastard anyway, was born that way; no reason to change now just because he was on his way to his grand finale. They were probably huddling together somewhere, plotting away at how to get him to cooperate. Or maybe they were confused by the last couple of fuck yous he had thrown at them in all the languages he was conversant in, before he lost the strength to do even that.

Besides it was peaceful here; just his own musings to keep him company until whatever that came after. If only these incessant yet incomprehensible voices would just go away... It wasn't too much to ask for, in the last couple of minutes he had on this earthly plane now, was it?

But it turned out the universe was a touch too cruel to grant John his last wish after all. It got worse. Touches joined the voices. They were everywhere. Touching, prodding and poking; trying to move him. The body parts that had begun to shut down were coming back online with a vengeance, releasing all the backlogged misery-related complaints at him in droves, in response to this new development.

He must've made a complaint of his own; a sound of some kind, because for a blessed second all touches and voices disappeared. But before he could revel in it, they all returned.

They were much gentler this time though; only a feathers touch on his shoulder and a soft murmur.

"Major Sheppard, son, we need to get you out of here. It's all right now, it's ok. We've got you."

John latched onto the commanding tone of the voice more than anything else. It had the confidence and the cadence of an officer that came from experience in the field of battle and war, not days spent behind a desk. It was reassuring that he was at least in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. He lost the urgent calls the officer made into his comms, citing John's fast-declining condition and the request for the emergency exfil. He also missed the hurried commands the mystery military man threw out at his team. They were to apprehend and round up the stragglers who had taken off running soon after the military unit had appeared and when it became obvious the fight was one-sided. He didn't hear the officer issuing last set of instructions to his second in command to secure the whole facility either.