John clutched the pillow nearest his head and rolled upon his left side and craved air to fill his greedy lungs. 'One. Two. Three, and breath. One. Two. Three and breath.' He continued this mantra through his panicked body as the nightmare gradually faded from memory.

This was the third nightmare this week.

The torpid sky. The gray coat whipping in the air. The echoing thud. That is all John can remember, but those sensory memories are more than enough to remember. Realizing that he is in a pool of his own sweat, John crawled out of his bed and limped to the bathroom. He flicked on the light and exhaustedly moved his head upward to gaze at his own reflection in the dim-lighted room.

The first thing John noticed were the dark bags beginning to form under his eyes. Scheduling himself a full schedule at St. Bart's was not the best coping mechanism. Next observation: the ever-paling skin. Not eating created this effect; John decided that was not the best coping mechanism either. The wrinkles around his eyes aged him another ten years. His hair was steel wool with little specks of gold thrown haphazardly on top. He has not shaved for a couple of weeks, but co-workers at work did not seem to mind, so neither did John. But the worst observation John catalogued was the emptiness in his own eyes, the deep hole that would never seem to fill again. John's blue-green eyes did not possess any joy as when Sherlock told John that he stole an ash tray from Buckingham Palace, nor was there awe as when Sherlock declared superhuman deductions which always astonished John. There were no emotions displayed in John's easily read eyes.

John was a shell of his former self, he was a walking cadaver.

Talking to his therapist seemed to help, but only for a little while. It seemed that Sherlock was everywhere John went. He was in the clouds above Baker Street, behind the trees in the park, in the cabs that drove by him as John walked to the hospital, even when John was back in 221B for the late nights, Sherlock would seem to be at the kitchen table performing elaborate experiments of sitting like a nine year old child in his chair watching crap telly.

John does not want to admit it, but Sherlock was everything to him. After John returned from being medically discharged from Afghanistan, John lumbered about with his cane a shell of a man, a man who possessed no emotion and whom felt an ever-expanding emptiness inside him. The day that John ran into Mike Stramford was the day John was saved from the darkness residing within him. He did not know exactly what he was getting himself into, but John's lonely life pushed John into having an adventure.

And what an adventure it was.

After the first case, Sherlock and John forged a bond stronger and closer than they had ever experienced, Sherlock being the self-labeled sociopath, thus denying himself emotional connections and social interaction and John coming from a family of misplaced and misunderstood love. They were two halves of a whole, possessing a desperate need to be with each other. One filled the cavernous places where the other was empty while reinforcing the parts of each other already existing.

They needed each other.