Warnings: Spoilers for Sherlock 2x02 (Hounds of Baskerville)

3. Nightmares

They are ok some days, the nightmares. Sometimes, Henry drifts off in a hazy cocoon of warmth, a sleeping body pressed up next to him, and his head is blissfully quiet, a blank slate that is peaceful in its absence of anything at all. Or else his night is filled with the scattered normal dreams that everyone else has – the fragmented conversations, the seemingly normal scenarios, the bizarre ones with wings or super-powers or set back when he was at school – normal manifestations of an active subconscious. Every one of those nights is a small but solid success to him.

They are more common than they were before, and he's still getting used to the novelty of managing a full nights sleep without being disturbed. He hasn't visited his therapist since he saw the dog – the real dog, smaller than he would have thought, not glowing, not with fearful red eyes, not readying to rip him limb from limb – lying with a bullet in its head, his trials over after so many years of wallowing within a limbo of crippling self-doubt and a tattered emotional stability. Any after-care he has needed has been subtlety been taken over by Martin without the man even realising it, the companionship, the solidarity, and he wonders what the therapist would have said if he told her that a prescription of some of Martin's kisses have done far more for his anxiety issues than any of her pills did.

But the old dreams still come back, like a scar that will never truly heal, new skin threading over it but the tissue still mismatched in shade from the surrounding flesh. It might always be there in some way.

And tonight they are bad.

His own breathe exhales out in front of him, billowing in the cold, and in his head is the slaughterhouse screams of his father, struggling, writhing, agony ripped out from his hoarse throat – it is just a man, he tells himself, just a man you will see there – but when he looks, it is the hound that stares back. Charcoal fur matted with dirt and blood, growling with a death knell, low and threatening, slobber dripping from a scarlet maw in which vicious teeth are sharpened to points – it is not real, it was never there – and it barks once before it lunges at him. Claws shredding the sleeve of his jacket, swiping across his face, through skin as though it's tissue paper, and he's screaming in pain and fear, and he wants it to stop, wants to shout for his dad, but the man is already lying dead on the boggy ground, and Henry is so so alone as the hound's foul teeth clamp around his throat...

He wrenches his eyes open. The imagery of the hound, the stench of its breath on his face, the copper tang in the air, all fade into an unbroken dark. There is no death here.

I am not in Dartmoor anymore, he reassures himself, slowing his breathing, working on regulating the rhythm so he can get his breath back, I am safe.

He tells himself this, but his heartbeat is still erratically fast, fight-or-flight instinct well and truly kicking in, sweat sheening across the skin of his forehead. And though he knows there is nothing there, his eyes scan the darkness for what he is so sure is going to jump out at him, tear him down, rip him up.

There is a shifting beside him, a creak as the sofa bed dips and moans, and he looks around to see Martin open his eyes, bleary and thick with sleep to squint at Henry. A soft frown creases his forehead as he realises what must have woken Henry.

Martin knows that some nights there are dreams like this that will wake Henry up with a cry in his throat and a shivering through his body that is not from the cold, but he has never yet asked what happened all those years ago, and Henry is not quite sure he is ready to explain to anyone quite yet, the wounds too raw still and the words too hard to say. Martin had smiled in his own self-conscious way when Henry had stumbled over his sentences in an effort to put his request not to pry into words, and said quietly that if Henry ever wanted to talk about it, he would be there to listen, and if not, then he would gladly wait until the other man was ready, even if he never found out what it was.

Wordlessly, the pilot shuffles nearer, wrapping one heavy arm over the other man and pulling him in close so that there is barely any gap between them. His fingers whisper across Henry's wrist before they find his shaking hand, and he laces Henry's fingers with his own and draws it against the other man's chest in a near approximation of a one armed hug. Henry knows that he'll wake up in the morning with the pilot draped all over him, tangling their legs up, erasing any concept of space between them. That is never a bad thing, he smiles to himself, as Martin presses a sleepy kiss to a spot above Henry's ear, murmuring a "G' back to sleep" barely understandable it's so quiet.

The pilot falls steadily back to sleep within a few minutes, emitting soft light snores against Henry's neck, burrowing nearer as though trying to absorb any body heat he can by maximising proximity. It must have been a long flight yesterday, Henry thinks, and he resolves to let the man have a lie in the morning (or later today, as it technically is) for as long as possible. Henry doesn't look round for fear of jostling the man and waking him up, but he knows what he'd see if he did: Martin with his mouth slightly open, his face withholding none of the stresses and concerns it does in waking hours, nuzzled into his neck in his usual overtly affectionate manner.

It's too late for Henry to worry that he's stupidly, hopelessly in love with this man.

Martin, who hogs the bed space, clutching limpet-like at sources of heat, who drives a beaten-up van that runs on jump-leads and the power of hope, who lives in a miserable attic that Henry's somehow started to consider a second home, without fuss moving in his CD player, some of his books (nothing like Martin's collection of course – the man could start a small library), his clothes hanging in the wardrobe and his shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet.

Martin, who smiles like he's discovering how to for the first time, who when they're on the sofa watching a film will run his fingers through Henry's hair or interlock their fingers and at random intervals will press his lips to the side of Henry's head when he thinks he's gone to sleep. Martin, with his grin always achingly wide, eyes surprised when Henry kisses him without cause or tells him he loves him, as though he doesn't quite believe yet someone is talking to him and only to him. Henry gets the feeling that Martin's never received much in terms of verbal and physical affection before.

That bothers him sometimes, when Martin has dark moments of self-doubt, when he is so sure he will wake up one morning and Henry wont be there, or when they fight about stupid insignificant things and the pilot thinks that means Henry will leave him, that he's done something wrong and ruined this; a distraught look that spiders across his face that makes Henry forget about their fight immediately and tell him Of course, I'm not leaving, love. Stuck with me now, aren't you? It makes him angry – not at Martin, never, never at Martin – when these moments show up how insecure the pilot is about this, how all his relationships before seem to have let him down or used him, before it just bolsters his own firm resolve to stay as long as Martin will have him, to take up space in the bathroom and use the hot water and share half the bed, to make this beautiful man know exactly how much he is loved.

Henry takes longer to drift off back to sleep, shaking off wakefulness and succumbing to his own tired body's wishes. Any recollections of the nightmare are now blunted by the enveloping hold around him, the heartbeat he can feel pressed up against his back, the sensation of feeling completely and utterly protected.

I am safe, he thinks again, and this time knows it's true.

He dozes off into a dreamless nothingness, not to the snarls of a growling hound or his father screaming, but to Martin snuffling in his sleep.