The climax of his nightmares came by design of too much caffeine.

Approximately five days had gone by since they had gotten home. Sherlock's nightmares didn't edge off, so he did what any normal person would do: tried to keep himself awake as long as humanly possible.

It lasted approximately three and a half days, far off his usual record due to the beating he'd taken in Afghanistan, before he dozed in and out of consciousness on the sofa. He managed on a few hours of sleep for another day and a half... by the night-time of which he crawled into bed and fell asleep without remembering the cups of coffee he'd been throwing back during the day.

He woke up from a horrible nightmare, where not only his entire troop was blown to pieces, John was too, drenched in not only sweat, but his own urine as well. His initial reaction was cursing the coffee and the tea and his bladder and his body for falling asleep. His second, more pertinent thought, was that this was not getting any better.

Sherlock stared at the ceiling blankly for a few moments, until it was too cold and clammy and uncomfortable to stay put any longer. He stripped the sheets, stripped his clothes, and shivered as he gathered all of the soiled linens to take down to the wash.

He refused to say that he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He'd seen things all his life that were disturbing and he'd certainly never, with a cringe, wet the bed over them. John had had nightmares of such calibre, before moving in with Sherlock, Sherlock had deduced without saying, but John had been shot. It was a bit different.

His plan of attack was to... What was his plan of attack? Cut back on his liquid intake? That would certainly help the nocturnal enuresis, but the point of all of the tea and coffee had been to keep himself awake. Sleeping agents could help, too, but, in the process, make the bedwetting worse. Ideally, not worrying and getting over his 'psychosomatic distress' would be the best options, but those didn't seem entirely likely.

With a sigh, Sherlock left his bedroom and headed down the hall, sodden blankets and clothes in his arms. He very nearly tripped over one of the wet corners of the sheet dragging on the floor and he cursed aloud, twisting to pick up the sheet.

When he turned back around, he nearly walked smack-bang into John.

Sherlock started at first before a rush of, what was it, exactly? Shame? Embarrassment? Surprise? None of those particularly fit, although he had to settle mostly on the second. The tips of his ears felt warm as he took a step back.

"What are you doing up?" he asked, tilting his head at him.

John's eyes flickered over the mess of laundry in Sherlock's arms before jumping up to his face. Even in the half-light of a never-dark Baker Street flat, he could see concern in John's eyes.

"I couldn't sleep," John said. "Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay?" Sherlock retorted, shifting slightly.

John raised his eyebrows. "There's only two reasons to do your laundry in the middle of the night and I'm pretty sure I know which one is isn't," he said bluntly.

Sherlock's lips twitched towards a smirk. "Then you know which one it is." Not that standing in the hallway in nothing but wet boxers and the tang of urine prevalent in the air left much room for consideration. "Back in a moment."

He took his linens to the wash and started the cycle dully before going back to their kitchen. John was boiling the kettle, which sounded nice, but Sherlock had to have a shower. He was cold and the smell was getting to his nerves.

He returned to his bedroom after a very hot shower to find his bed made up with fresh sheets. He raised an eyebrow before setting to getting dressed in dry pyjamas. He was tempted to just crawl under the sheets again but wondered if it would end in disaster. He was aware that he shouldn't worry about it. Still, he left the bedroom, wrapping his dressing gown around his body to keep the heat in.

He joined John in the sitting room with his own cup of tea. They were submerged in silence for awhile. John broke it.

"It's completely normal, you know."

Sherlock glanced up. "I know."

"Nothing to be ashamed of," John continued. "You've been through a lot."

"I know," Sherlock retorted indignantly. "I know the processes. My dreams produce fear, which triggers my flight or fight response. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for urination, but when the adrenalin kicks in from flight or fight, other systems shut down in order to focus on the stressor. In this case, my ANS relaxed my bladder and, thus, nocturnal enuresis."

John raised his eyebrows again.

Sherlock sighed. "I know how every part in the human body works. I know reactions to fear, albeit I don't understand why they happen, per se. It is completely normal... Completely horrific," he mumbled over his tea, "but normal."

John sighed now, drawing his legs up onto the sofa. "Who ever knows why these things happen due to fear or anxiety... I've been having nightmares again, too."

Sherlock flicked his gaze to John again, frowning through the gloom. How had he not noticed?

"I wondered why you hadn't pulled me up on it yet," John said quietly. "But now I realise you were having your own problems... That's why you've been keeping yourself awake, isn't it? Drinking all that ruddy tea and coffee?"

Sherlock put his mug down. "No, I was just having nightmares to begin with... The other thing just started this morning, probably because of all the caffeine I consumed." He was growing very weary of this conversation, very quickly.

"They say talking about it helps," John said quietly, after a few beats of silence.

Sherlock snorted. "I'm not talking about my 'feelings', John. Besides, you never told your therapist anything, anyway."

"How do you know?"

"'Trust issues'," Sherlock quoted, remembering it from a book from John's therapist that Mycroft had nicked a few year ago.

John frowned. "How do you know that?"

"Mycroft told me," he said absently. "But I knew anyway."

John sighed. "Why am I not surprised?" He was quiet for a moment. "I don't really... I'm not good at advice for this, Sherlock. One minute, I wasn't right, and the next, you were there. Things changed when I met you. But I think... I think it's probably a bit different. Our types of PTSD..." John laughed dryly. "God, there's a phrase I never thought I'd say. 'Our PTSD'..."

Sherlock didn't say anything.

John was right... sort of. John's post-traumatic stress disorder had been visible because John had missed the action of war and having a place to belong. Sherlock's... symptoms were there because... because why, exactly? Because he'd been shot at? He'd watched people blow up on land mines? He'd imagined finding John in less than satisfactory condition?

But it all boiled down to 'post-traumatic'. War was traumatic.

He sighed slowly.

"Do you want to play Cluedo?" John asked suddenly.

Sherlock opened his eyes, unaware that he'd closed them. "... What?"

"Cluedo. I... well, I don't even know if you have Cluedo anymore..."

Sherlock stared at him. "I... don't understand. You hate Cluedo," he said bluntly. "You never wanted to play."

"I never wanted to play it with you," John clarified. "But I feel like it now."

Sherlock frowned. "Is this some kind of coping mechanism? You're trying to take my mind off of this," he said.

John shrugged. "So? Where's your game?"

Sherlock's frown deepened. "... A storage unit, I think. Mostly everything that Mycroft took back ended up there and I hadn't had time to move it back in yet..."

John stood up. "Well, come on, then."

Sherlock was certain that the frown hadn't yet left. "'Come on', what?"

"Let's go get it."

"It's four in the morning," Sherlock pointed out. "And I just put these pyjamas on; I don't want to take them off again."

John shrugged again. "I didn't say you had to change." He picked Sherlock's coat up off the door and offered it to him.

Sherlock stared at him for a moment longer before raising an eyebrow. He pushed himself to his feet gracefully (or as gracefully as someone running on very little sleep in the past week could be) and took his coat from John without a word.


If someone asked Sherlock how he and John ended up in a storage unit at four in the morning, having a row over imaginary characters in an imaginary murder in a stupid children's game, he would have honestly said he didn't know.

"No, look," John said loudly, leaning over the table that the Cluedo board was stretched out on (the table that would eventually return to its rightful place between in the windows in the front room of Baker Street). "It is physically impossible-"

"Not entirely," Sherlock said, off-handedly.

John thumped his fist onto the table and leaned back in the chair, shaking his head. "I give up," he said. He was smiling.

"So, I win," Sherlock said cheerfully.

"Dammit, no! Go again!" John said, reaching for the tokens.


Sherlock peeled the candlestick off of his cheek, wincing as he rubbed the tender spot on his face. He didn't know how many games of Cluedo they played; being in a storage unit tended to obscure one's perception of time of night or day. He won quite a few and John managed one or two on his own, too, but that had only been when Sherlock had started getting too drowsy to catch his own mistakes.

And then they had, somehow, ended up both falling asleep, sprawled out on the table over the Cluedo board.

He had fallen asleep on the candlestick and now had an imprint on his face, one that he was trying to rub away as he yawned widely. He rest his arms on the table placed rest his head back on them, looking at John.

His flatmate was still asleep. Through the gloom, he could see that John was deep in the stages of REM sleep. His eyes were moving underneath his lids, but he wasn't exhibiting any signs of a nightmare.

John still looked pale, probably product of the extended stay in Afghanistan, their torture, their recovery. There were dark shadows under his eyes, accentuated by the glow of the singular lightbulb in the storage unit. Lack of sleep from nightmares, from worry, from pain. The lightbulb cast a soft sheen on John's soft golden locks, bespeckled by age with silver and gray.

Sherlock reached forward and gently brushed a piece of hair from John's face. John shifted slightly, but didn't wake up, just pressed his face more firmly into his own arms.

He looked so vulnerable when he was sleeping, Sherlock realised with his half-hearted deduction. Or perhaps vulnerable wasn't the right word. Maybe... innocent. The tension left his shoulders, the lines in his forehead smoothed out; he looked... childlike.

John moved away, curling more over the Cluedo board. His eyelids fluttered for a moment before his gaze slowly came to look around the room.

Sherlock met his gaze, not bothering to raise his own head from his arms. "Morning."

John sat up slowly. Sherlock caught every wince as John moved. The psychosomatic limp had come back while he had been gone, Sherlock could tell, even if it was gone now. The war had kept it and the tremor at bay, but sleeping curled over a table did nothing good for anyone's body. Even Sherlock felt stiff, and he had slept in a lot of strange places.

"... Says who?" John mumbled, stretching. "Oh, f..." He rubbed his back after it cracked particularly loudly in the otherwise silent room.

"Well, assuming that the sun is indeed out, it is morning. Or even afternoon or evening, although I doubt that I would have slept that long," Sherlock said.

John sighed and stood. "Oh, God," he muttered, after his joints cracked with the motion.

Sherlock smirked briefly. "You're getting too old for this, John."

John, as per usual with any aging member of the human society, bristled at the comment. "I am not!" he snapped, twisting around to work the kinks out of his back. "I'm just not used to sleeping over a bloody table, that's all!"

Sherlock turned his head into the crook of his arm to yawn again. "If you say so."

"I'm not even forty yet," John muttered.

"In a year and a half," Sherlock remarked, finally raising his head. He got to his feet, stretching his arms behind his back.

"Oh, shove off."

Sherlock tilted his head, looking towards the vertically sliding door. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," he said, as John started towards the door.

"Why not?" John asked distractedly. "I want to go home. And go back to bed."

"It's raining outside," Sherlock said, peeling back the flap on one of the cardboard boxes in the storage unit. "We have a three minute walk to the gate, let alone getting a cab."

John stopped. "Wait, it's raining? I don't hear it."

"It just started. It'll be pouring in a few minutes. Best not to risk it."

John sighed and flopped back into his chair. "Grand."

"Must be relatively early... ten o' clock, I'd guess. If you wouldn't have rushed me out of the flat earlier, I would have grabbed my watch. Oh!" Sherlock pulled out a box of nicotine patches from the box he was looking through. "Fantastic."

"Sherlock," John muttered. "What is all this stuff, anyway?"

"The stuff from Baker Street," Sherlock said, shrugging. "Mycroft said you let him take care of the flat after my death." He weighed a small model train in his palm, setting it aside. "My microscope is around here somewhere."

"You haven't taken that back to the flat? I hadn't noticed," John muttered, joining him by the box. "What's this?" he asked, picking up a yellow mold in the shape of a face.

"That," Sherlock said, swiping it from John's hand, "was a facial imprint for a case.

"The Case of the Yellow Face?" John asked blandly. "What, did the victim have jaundice?"

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "No." He put it back in the box.

"I've never seen this stuff before," John said, picking up a book. "Le Petit Prince? What is this? Is this a children's book?"

Sherlock swiped that away from John quickly. "You're saying it all wrong. It's not 'lay'. It's luh. And it's not 'prince' like in 'princess'. It's prince."

"It sounds like you're trying to say 'prawns' and you've got a hairball."

Sherlock sniffed. "Just because you fail at speaking another language doesn't meant that I do."

"What's it mean, then? It does mean 'prince', doesn't it? Like royalty."

Sherlock thumped the worn book back into the box. "Yes."

"Doesn't petit mean 'small'?"

"You're not pronouncing that correctly, but yes."

"So, Le Little Prince."

"Le means 'the'," Sherlock muttered.

"The Little Prince?" John picked the book up again, flipping through the pages. He looked up at Sherlock, raised his eyebrows, and burst out laughing to himself.

Sherlock bristled and grabbed the book back again. "I was a child, John," he said defensively, putting the book back again.

"Sorry, sorry... Little princes don't seem like something you'd deal with, though," John said, still chuckling. "Oh."

Sherlock glanced towards John. The doctor bent down to pick something up; Sherlock realised it was a photograph a half second after John touched it.

"Are these your parents?"

Sherlock sighed and looked over John's shoulder as the photo. "Yes."

"Your Mum's pretty."

Sherlock didn't reply. He instead went back to the box, rifling through old case notes for anything he hadn't seen in awhile.

"I see the bloody cheekbones run in the family," John muttered, handing the photo back.

Sherlock threw it back in the box haphazardly. "So it would seem."

"You're not very family-oriented, are you?"

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Sherlock asked absently. "I don't remember this stuff. This must have been stuff that Mycroft had at the house. I certainly wouldn't keep childhood mementos."

"Yeah... Why don't you read this to me?" John asked, picking up Le Petit Prince for the third time.

Sherlock glanced at the book and rolled his eyes. "No."

"I want to know why you liked it!" John protested. "And I can't read it."

Sherlock sighed and grabbed the book back, again, and trudged over to the table. "Oh, let's see." He licked his thumb and paged the book open, past the publishing information, the dedication, to Chapter One. "'Lorsque j'avais six ans j'ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur-'"

"Not in French, you daft bastard, in English!"

Sherlock looked up, eyebrows raised and fighting a smirk. "Oh, I didn't realise."

"Yeah, you did," John muttered, sinking into the chair opposite.

Sherlock rearranged his grip on the book (it was so ragged that the spine was bent and draping) and returned his eyes to the words. "'Once, when I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.'"

"Oh, this is a wonderful bedtime story for children," John muttered.

"At least it had some science in it," Sherlock retorted. He returned to the story. "'Here is a copy of the drawing.'" He sarcastically flourished the book towards John, showing him the picture.

"Huh. Teaching kids to copy others work. Lovely."

"Do you want me to read it or not?" Sherlock griped. "I might face the walk in the rain if we're going to keep doing this."

John laughed quietly. "Don't be tetchy, Mr Defensive. I'm just joking. Continue. Please?"

"I do have other things I could be doing."

"Yeah, like what? Rooting through boxes of useless tat or reading me a story from your childhood; which sounds better to you?"

"My things are not useless. They all have their special place."

"Like the green goo I found under the couch cushions yesterday?"

"I don't know how that got there." Sherlock ruffled the pages of the book pointedly. "'In the book, it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that, they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion."'"

John didn't comment and Sherlock pressed on.


The pattering of the rain against the metal roof and Sherlock's voice must had lulled John back to sleep. He was still sitting up, but his elbow was propped on the table and his head on his fist and his breathing had evened out to match sleeping rhythm.

Sherlock's eyelids were growing heavy from the combination of the stuffiness of the storage unit and the rain and the book.

He'd never admit it, but he still sort of liked The Little Prince. Yes, it was stupid; it was whimsical and it was childish. Sherlock didn't like any of that. But there were still certain morals that were meant for adults in that story. The thing about The Little Prince was that, reading it as a child, one saw the colourful pictures and the talking flowers and foxes and snakes and sheep alive in an illustrated box and it was all wondrous and amazing. When one read it as an adult, there were so many meanings and morals that it almost seemed too deep to be a children's story. Greed, beauty, self-sacrifice, the nature of Life and Death itself. Sherlock didn't put too much stock into much of any of it, but he did enjoy the story, always had. It wasn't logical but it had been his first venture into such things and even consulting detectives didn't delete that.

Albeit if it was in a little box labelled Danger: Childhood Memories. Proceed with caution. in his mind palace.

There was one thing, though. Just one thing that he had picked out out of all of it: that which was important was invisible to the eye. True and not true.

The heart was the thing that mattered. It was essential to life. Sherlock knew that, but he didn't put much into emotion and things. They were there, but he tried to ignore them. He considered the brain most important, but the heart was essential. He wasn't stupid. But feeling and seeing were two different things.

He'd never had something that he could say that he 'saw the importance of it with his heart'. It just had never made much sense. He saw with his eyes and his heart kept him alive. Another funny thing. His heart kept him alive...

Sherlock pried his eyes open and looked towards John.

He could see with his heart now. It was strange, and it was frightening, but he could see with his eyes and his heart. So, the most important thing could be seen with the eye, but the meaning beneath it could only be felt.

Sherlock smiled faintly and rest his head on his arms, closing his eyes again. He fell asleep to the sound of rain, and the smell of old books, and the gentle snoring of the most important one at the table opposite him.


This took longer than I had planned to get posted, but it's about double the length of a normal chapter of mine, so there you go. And while I'm springing surprises, this the final chapter of this story. :( I know. I hadn't planned to end it here, either. But some times are better left unsaid, and while I could go on and on about how they work through their PTSD, I think this is a good place to let it be. I'm sorry for the sudden springing of a final chapter on you, but I quite like it. (I actually enjoyed this whole story a lot more than I planned, too.)

Oh, for the record, if you haven't read The Little Prince, you should. The beginning in which Sherlock reads to John does start out sounding a bit strange- boa constrictors eating mice?- but it really is an amazingly touching story after you get into it. And while it is meant for children, there is so much for adults to take away from it. I wholly recommend it.

I do not own Sherlock. I do not own Le Petit Prince (by Antoine de St Exupery). I love your reviews and I thank you for your continued support. :)

Believe.