John was thrashing again. Sherlock lay nude on his bed downstairs, the covers all bunched down over his toes, and listened. John never talked about it, his trouble sleeping, but he went through every folk remedy in the book - aerobic exercise, warm milk, a hot shower before bed - patently trying to fix the problem. It's been two years, seven months, three weeks, and two days since Sherlock jumped off St. Barts, five months and four days since he returned, and two weeks exactly since John moved back in to 221B. Still angry, desperately angry, but the row with Mary had left him nowhere to live and he was a practical enough man to accept the offer of free temporary (or not-so-temporary, if Sherlock had his way) accommodations. Not Sherlock's fault that she had been cheating on John, not at all, but John had reacted to Sherlock's matter-of-fact recitation as if he were responsible for the sum total of John's personal unhappiness.
And there may have been some truth to it. Sherlock let his eyes drift closed and listened intently to the muffled thumps upstairs. The cheap wooden nightstand being scraped across the floor, most likely a direct reaction to John's flailing arm connecting with it while he slept. John would have a noticeable bruise on his right forearm in the morning. This wasn't the Afghanistan dream - that was quieter, more insidious. When John dreamed of being in the desert, he usually only moved his head, mumbling, until suddenly sitting upright and startling himself awake and sometimes gasping with the abruptness of it.
No, this was a different nightmare, one Sherlock would have wagered everything on having only appeared after his "fall." John wouldn't talk about that either, just brushed aside Sherlock's fumbled explanations and left the room, or pointedly turned on the telly and ignored him. In the two weeks they'd been living together on Baker Street again, John hadn't once managed an entire night of sleep without jolting himself awake at an ungodly hour. It showed, too - he was slightly slower on his feet than he used to be, hesitated a second longer than normal before responding, kept his mouth shut at times he would have angrily snapped at something Sherlock said before. Before Sherlock left.
Another thump, this time accompanied by a muffled shout. Sherlock sat up, threw on some boxers and his dressing gown, and headed up the stairs.
John was a mess. The sheets were tangled around his legs, evidence of his tossing and turning, but his hair was plastered into some strange mountainous alien terrain and even in the pale light from the streetlamp outside, Sherlock could see he was drenched in sweat.
"John." Sherlock stood in the doorway and said it quietly, then louder and louder until John sat bolt upright with a gasp.
"Fuck." John took several deep breaths, his sweat-slick chest reflecting the light as he panted. The gulps of air slowed, gentled, until John could finally look up and meet Sherlock's eyes.
"You were dreaming about me," Sherlock said. Needlessly, because they both knew it was true, but John took several seconds until he finally nodded wearily.
"Sorry to wake you up."
"I should say the same." Sherlock hesitated, running through the likely outcomes of his options, then dropped his dressing gown and crawled into the bed next to John.
"Sher- what are you doing?"
"Getting in bed with you, obviously." Sherlock shimmied downward until his head was on the spare pillow, then rolled to his side so he could face his flatmate. "You need sleep."
John just blinked at him, uncomprehending.
Was it really that complicated? Sherlock groaned in frustration. "Why are you uncomfortable with this? I'm not coming on to you, John - you need sleep and I need sleep and I can't lie downstairs listening to you thrash any longer. You keep having nightmares about me being gone, therefore I will sleep here for the time being. I'll be here when you wake up. Go back to sleep now."
John very carefully lowered himself back onto the mattress, pulling the covers primly up to his chin. He rolled to his side, also, so they were lying face-to-face with their noses less than a foot apart. His breath was warm against Sherlock's face. He didn't close his eyes.
Sherlock waited several minutes, but John seemed perfectly content to just lie there and watch him. It felt rude, somehow, to drift off while John was waiting, so Sherlock just watched back. Finally he rolled to his back, eyed the patterns of light on the ceiling, and sighed.
"Do you want to talk about it? I'm told it helps." He could do this for John, at least, could listen and make observations and maybe even make John smile for a second or two. He didn't have any experience with comforting someone before - never had the need - but then he'd never had anyone close enough to comfort, either.
"Only if you actually want to listen," John mumbled.
"I do." He wanted to help, which was nearly the same thing.
"It's not the suicide." John rolled, also, the two of them lying in parallel and ignoring the fourteen inches of space between their bodies. "It's notjust your suicide, anyway. The Afghanistan nightmares had all but disappeared, you know - now everything's jumbled together."
"How so?"
"It's . . ." John fell silent for so long Sherlock would have thought he fell asleep, if his breathing hadn't still been slightly too fast and shallow. "I don't know how to describe it," he finally admitted.
"Tell me what you remember about the dream you were having just now."
John hummed, low in his throat. Disquiet. "We were in Afghanistan," he said after another long silence. "Not in the army, but living at the hospital for some reason. Which was kind of like St. Barts and kind of like the infirmary I spent the most time at while I was there. You were-" He broke off to suck in a deep breath. "I couldn't find you, but I knew you were on the roof and I had to get my unit back home safe so I could be there and keep Moriarty from killing you. But the insurgents were between me and the camp, and I had to see Bill get shot. Again." In Sherlock's peripheral vision, he saw John turn to gauge his reaction. "I see him die every damn time I dream about the desert."
Bill Murray, John's best friend for the last four years of his deployment - he rarely talked about the man, but Sherlock had been able to piece together enough and felt like he had a reasonably good picture of what had happened. "You were trying to get him to safety when you got hit."
It wasn't a question, but John nodded anyway. And ran his hand over his face wearily. "I know I never told you that - I haven't even told Ella and she's my bloody therapist."
"I see things. I notice them."
"Right." John levered himself up on one elbow, high enough to look down at Sherlock lying flat next to him. "Tell me, then - did you 'see' what your death would do to me? Did you notice that maybe I wouldn't be able to just pick up and carry on? I came back from the war fucking broken, Sherlock - it all got better when I was with you, the limp and the nightmares and all of it - and I'm not saying it was healthy or right, but I felt fine. It was all fine, for a while. And then you went and died and everything went right back to hell." He let his body flop back to the mattress and groaned. "I know, it's not your fault and I'm not supposed to transfer blame or anger for my condition to anyone else - that's Ella's take, by the way - but then I relive the worst fucking moments of my life over and over again and I hate you for what you did. I took a fucking bullet, spent months in recovery, and you managed to eclipse that with something so much worse."
Sherlock lay, frozen, staring at the ceiling. This was feelings. It was emotions and people skills and bloody hell, he was bollocks at things like this, but he really hadn't known-
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
John snorted. And then rolled to face him again. "You're serious."
Of course I'm serious, why wouldn't I be- Sherlock mirrored John's frown. "Of course."
"You're not just saying that because someone told you it's the appropriate social response - you're genuinely feeling remorse."
Sherlock felt like the room was suddenly too warm, like coming up here was a terrible idea - but John was hurt and damn it, he was sorry, and he owed John that much. "I didn't . . . consider that angle," he said slowly. "Faking my death was the only way to keep you safe. Keep all of you safe. Your psychological reaction was perhaps inevitable, but I couldn't have let it change the outcome."
John closed his eyes for a long moment. Debating something, obviously, deciding whether to-
"Closet, bottom-left, bag on the lowest shelf. Go take a look." He sat up far enough to click on the lamp on his bedside table, bathing the room in a dim golden glow.
Sherlock frowned, but got out of bed and padded over to the closet. The lowest shelf on the left held a jumbled assortment of items, the topmost being a plain brown shopping bag. He tugged it off the shelf, set it down on the floor, pulled out the contents-
"My box." He could feel the bile climbing in his throat. There it was, the little carved wooden box his overbearing grandfather had given him for his eighth birthday. The box he'd eventually chosen in a fit of perverse symbolism to house his cocaine, needles, and whatever other drugs of choice he happened to be experimenting with at the time. He could tell by the distribution of weight that the contents were still inside.
"I found it a few weeks after your funeral," John said quietly. "Kept it next to my bed. I figured, cocaine worked for you-"
"No," Sherlock whispered. The thought of John, strung out in an alley, chasing that elusive high-
"Eventually it got to be more than that," John said, continuing as if Sherlock hadn't spoken. "There's enough in there for me to overdose. Easily. I actually got as far as tying off my arm and filling the syringe before I chickened out. I called Harry - three o'clock in the morning, I think, but she came and got me and I moved away from Baker Street the next day. I left the box here - Mrs. Hudson wasn't going to rent out the flat, Mycroft was still paying for it, and I just . . . I needed to know I had an escape available. For when it got to be too much."
"John." Sherlock didn't realize he had moved until he was suddenly back in bed with John, wonderful John, holding their bodies together in a tight embrace and burying his face in John's hair. At least one of them was trembling, and Sherlock wasn't entirely sure which.
"I did move on, a bit," John mumbled into Sherlock's bare chest. "Sarah set me up on a few dates, I met Mary, I tried so hard to be normal again. But I very nearly didn't fucking make it. So next time you get it in your head to 'save' me by making me think you're dead-"
"Never," Sherlock promised, pressing blind kisses onto whatever part of John was closest - the top of his head, his temple, the hairline just above his ear. "I didn't know, John. I'm so sorry - I didn't know."
"Yeah, well." John sighed and ever-so-slowly disentangled himself from Sherlock one limb at a time. "Now you do."
"John."
"Go to sleep, Sherlock." John rolled over on his stomach, pulling the sheets up to his neck but keeping his head turned toward where Sherlock was lying. "I'm too tired to hash this out now, but we can talk more in the morning. Please."
And - since Sherlock couldn't ever again refuse John when he used that tone of voice - Sherlock slipped under the covers too and slept.