Cet obscur objet du désir

'Pavor nocturnus,' Sherlock whispered in his ear.

John tried to move, but his legs were tangled in his coverlet and his chest was pinned tight to the bed by Sherlock's surprisingly solid torso.

'What are you doing?' John hissed. 'Let me go!' He felt the dampness of his T-shirt against his chest, soaked through, and tried to calm his breath.

'That's not what you said a minute ago,' Sherlock responded.

'A minute ago I was asleep!'

'And ten minutes ago you were shouting bloody murder. So stay where you are. I know what I'm doing.'

'Sherlock—'

'Pavor nocturnus,' Sherlock continued, as if he hadn't heard John. John felt the bony press of Sherlock's hips, felt the other man sink deeply into the hollow in his lower back. 'Night terrors. Psychiatric condition, often found as a sequela to trauma, or secondary to another disorder.'

'Tell me something I don't know,' John said. He meant to sound sarcastic but, strangely, he found himself relaxing into the mattress as Sherlock continued to press against him.

'You don't dream about Afghanistan,' Sherlock said in a low voice.

'No?' John turned his face into the mattress, as if hiding from Sherlock.

'You've – when did this start?' Sherlock's voice was low, gentler than usual.

He felt Sherlock's fingers in his hair, brushing his ear. Sherlock turned John's face to the side, settling him more comfortably against the mattress. He rubbed his nose against the nape of John's neck, nestling in behind him.

'Sherlock—'

Sherlock pulled away, suddenly. John wanted him to stay, remembered something he had not remembered in years.

Harry used to climb into bed with him, when the fighting between their parents got so loud that she couldn't sleep. She was younger, the baby, and her bedroom was right next to theirs, on the ground floor. But when they got to shouting, she'd creep up into John's room, away from the noise, and he'd wake up to find her sprawled over him, her child's body sticky with sweat. He was reminded of that now, and wondered what strange connections his brain must have, to be reminded of Harry when a half-mad detective was still pinning him against the bed.

'You won't tell me,' Sherlock observed. 'So let me guess.' He moved to straddle John, just above his buttocks, his knees holding tightly around John's waist while Sherlock's own hips were carefully raised above him.

'I –' It occurred to John that Sherlock didn't ever guess, that 'guess' was a word that Sherlock didn't like to use.

'You're guessing now, huh? Would you mind getting off of me while you guess–' John managed to flip himself over, and now looked up at Sherlock, who was still kneeling above him.

'I don't know the exact nature of your trauma, John,' Sherlock said in a slow voice, his eyes gleaming eerily in the light cast by the streetlamps. 'So that's why I can only guess. But I have been listening to you these last few months. You cry out in your sleep from time to time.' He paused and leaned down to put his hands on John's shoulders. John wriggled beneath him, discomfited by Sherlock's proximity. 'But you usually are unintelligible. I could only make out a few words, standing outside your door just now. And they didn't have anything to do with Afghanistan.'

'What did I—what did I say?' John asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. He couldn't remember these dreams, the ones where the sound of his own screams woke him up. He could only remember the feeling of having done something terribly, utterly wrong, and then waking up as he was now, breathless and sweaty, his heart pounding. There was a blankness in his head when he tried to conjure up an image of the dream, as if his conscious mind were repelled by whatever night time horrors had come to visit.

Sherlock looked him over carefully, as if deciding whether or not to tell him.

'What, Sherlock?' John asked.

'You said you were sorry,' Sherlock said. 'You said "No," but there's nothing unusual in that. Not for a nightmare. But these weren't ordinary nightmares, were they? And you've had them before.'

'Yes,' John admitted. 'But how did you know that?'

'You said your sister's name,' Sherlock said. ' "Not Harry," you said, and then you screamed.'

'Screamed?' John repeated.

'Yes,' Sherlock said. 'You screamed loud enough to wake Mrs Hudson, and who knows who else.'

'How do you know that I've had them before?'

Sherlock leaned back, uncomfortably pressing down onto John's pelvis.

'Fuck, Sherlock, I might want to have children some day!' John exclaimed. Sherlock lifted himself up and, at last, rolled off of John. He threw one leg over the edge of the bed but twisted around to keep his eyes on John. He brought his left foot close to his groin and rested his bent knee against the mattress.

'I have been mistaken on more than one occasion when it comes to your family,' Sherlock said, as if they were still talking about his guessing game.

'Relevance, Sherlock?'

'I wasn't there,' Sherlock admitted. He had one hand around his left ankle now, and was absentmindedly stroking the arch of his own foot. John noticed that Sherlock's feet were bare, elegant and long in the darkness. 'I don't know exactly what happened to you. But pavor nocturnus is common enough in childhood. Common after exposure to trauma, too, so that's why I never thought to ask if you'd had this problem before. Before Afghanistan, I mean.' He stilled his hand, lifted it from his foot as if he were going to take John's arm, and then pulled it away. 'You see? I could so easily have guessed PTSD from war exposure alone, missed the point entirely.'

'Sherlock—' John started, then looked away. His breath was coming quickly again, like it had when he had first woken up.

'But that's not the whole story, is it?' Sherlock asked. 'You had these before, in childhood. But they must have subsided in adolescence; otherwise, you'd never have been able to join the Army. Can't have a bunkmate shouting in his sleep, now can you? They'd have rumbled you straight away during basic training. So, the night terrors stopped before you were commissioned. Maybe you thought you outgrew them; you wouldn't be the first adult to do so. Outgrow them, I mean.'

'Yes,' John said simply. He felt the brush of Sherlock's hand against his, just for an instant.

'May I continue?' Sherlock asked. John nodded and hummed. 'They clearly wouldn't have let you in the Army if you'd had night terrors when you joined. So they began again later. After deployment, correct?'

'Yes,' John said, amazed, not sure which part of the question he was responding to. 'Yes, to all of it.' He could see Sherlock's profile, his smug grin as he waited to continue his deduction.

'You must have a high level of tolerance for violence, though, because you specialised in trauma medicine before you joined the Army, isn't that right? Almost as if violence were normal for you, expected, even. So much a part of daily life that you'd hardly bat an eye if someone came into the A&E with only a broken femur.'

'Yes. No. Yes. Sherlock—' Sherlock reached for John again, and this time he pulled John's forearm into his lap. He bent his head down to get a closer look at John's bare arm in the pale light. From elbow to wrist, Sherlock ran his fingers lightly over John's skin, as if feeling for something, palpating invisible wounds.

'You thought you were inured to it, to violence and pain. And that's where you went wrong.' As if it were an afterthought, he added, 'Where I went wrong.' He rubbed his fingers again and again over the same area near John's elbow until, shocked, John realized what it was that Sherlock was touching. The cigarette burn was old, and certainly not the most prominent of John's scars. It didn't surprise him, that Sherlock had noticed it, or that he had remembered its exact location well enough to sound it out. But it did unsettle John that Sherlock would sit there on his bed, close enough that John could feel the heat from his body, and talk to John about trauma and nightmares even as he was feeling out John's old scars.

'Sherlock—' But Sherlock had let him go, and he was on his hands and knees again, hovering over John, his eyes darting from side to side as he examined John's face.

'Will you let me finish?' Sherlock asked.

John gulped. He nodded. Sherlock was so close that he could smell his skin, smell a faint trace of sweat.

'I can guess what happened because I have to know these things about people,' Sherlock began, speaking quickly while keeping his upper body absolutely still, suspended a foot above John's chest. 'I have to know, because when a person is hurt, he'll either hurt another or he'll hurt himself. It's an almost chemical reaction; alchemical, some might say. Violence begets violence. Not that I think you'll hurt anyone else – you're too masochistic for that, John. Your night terrors just confirmed that for me. You think you're to blame. You fault yourself for whatever you saw as a child, whatever you thought you could have prevented, if you had just been old enough, good enough, strong enough, whatever fantasy of omnipotence you had.'

Sherlock stared at him, his mouth close to John's. He might – would he? –

'I killed the cabbie,' John pointed out, turning his face away. His heartbeat had not yet returned to normal after the nightmare, and he could feel the blood throbbing in his temples. John clenched his fists and pushed them into the bed, raising his torso slightly even as he pulled away from Sherlock's too-close face.

'Yes, and that proves my point, exactly,' Sherlock responded. He turned John's face towards his, the pads of his fingers hot against John's cheek. 'You killed him and you feel guilty about it, or you wouldn't have mentioned it just now. You killed Jefferson Hope, and the fact that he wasn't a very nice man really had very little to do with it. You killed him because you couldn't let me kill myself. And your calculus isn't blind. You took the Hippocratic Oath, but you'll still value a friend above an enemy. You killed Hope, and you let Soo Lin die to save my life.'

'You fucker,' John growled, but he didn't push Sherlock away. He was angry and he was aroused and he was fascinated, and he would let Sherlock finish this.

'Others count for you, John, and not just in the abstract. Harry counted, which is why you can't stand to talk to her now; if you hadn't been so close to her, you wouldn't be so devastated by her failure, would you? And I count for you, or you wouldn't have saved my life over Soo Lin's, a woman you had just met. You valued my life above hers, and you blame yourself because she died, even though it was an assassin who killed her, not you.'

John began to tremble, closing his eyes against the tears. He covered his face with one hand, ashamed to let Sherlock see him cry. What was it he felt? Alexithymia, Ella had said. Inability to label one's emotions. No, he could label them. Relief. He felt relief, though he didn't understand it. The trembling in his legs ceased; his stilled his arms and let himself feel the heft of Sherlock's body against his.

'I know all about you, John,' Sherlock continued. John kept his eyes tightly closed; he heard Sherlock's voice close to his ear. 'You couldn't protect Harry, when you were younger, so you strove to become that man, didn't you? A better man, a stronger man. You studied hard, went to medical school, learned what you had to do to cure a fever, read an X-ray, set bones – I wonder whose bones you saw broken first? – and you joined the Army so you could fight the bad ones, as if the world were that simple. Such that even if you weren't fighting, you could tell yourself that you were on the right side.'

'Don't tell me you don't do the same,' John blurted out. 'You, out there, solving crimes. Helping the police when they're out of their depths. You're trying to fix things, too.' He opened his eyes suddenly, looked up at Sherlock. Sherlock looked away as if caught.

'Absolutely, that is what I do,' Sherlock said, pulling off of John to sit upright again. 'I'm not saying I don't. But I have simpler moral decisions to make. The people I work for are already dead.'

'I don't believe it's only about the game for you. You care.' John was aware that the sweat had cooled on his body; without Sherlock lying over him, he noticed how cold the room was. The window was open and his quilts were on the floor. John shivered.

'I already told you, it's not just about the game,' Sherlock hissed. He turned to swing his legs off of the bed, sitting with his back to John. He was silent for several seconds, then 'Why do you think I know so much about night terrors? Why do you think I'm here, with you?' There was a plaintive sound to Sherlock's voice, a tone that John had not heard before.

'Please don't say things you don't mean,' John said. 'I'm not a hypothesis for you to test out.'

'I don't understand,' Sherlock said, turning his head to look at John.

'Don't treat me like an experiment,' John said, gathering the quilts from the floor.

'This is not an experiment.' Sherlock said, his voice suddenly muted as he turned his head away from John. 'This is an intervention. I thought that was clear.'

'No, it damn well wasn't clear, Sherlock. But you have intervened enough as it is. Let me sleep.' John pulled the covers tight around him.

Sherlock stood and looked him over. 'But next time -' he began.

'Next time you will let me sleep.'

'And the night terrors? They won't wake you?'

'They're mine, and they are my problem to deal with. Not yours.'

'Are you sure, John?' Sherlock was posed in the doorway, his outline dark against the light in the corridor. 'I thought I did rather well with the limp.' He turned, light illuminating one half of his face, and winked at John before walking out.

'Name's Sherlock Holmes', John remembered. He knew about the limp, even then. Knew it was psychosomatic. Knew I'd go with him, too.

Exhausted, he fell back into a fitful sleep.

"Sleep terror disorder (pavor nocturnus) is characterized by abrupt awakenings from sleep, usually beginning with a panicky scream of cry, and lasting about ten minutes. The individual experiences intense anxiety and symptoms of autonomic arousal such as sweating, rapid breathing, flushing of the skin, and pupil dilation. In children, the disorder usually begins between ages 4 and 12 and resolves spontaneously in adolescence. In adults it begins between ages 20 and 30 and tends to become chronic."

PDM Task Force (2006). Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. S307: Psychogenic Sleep Disorders. p. 123.