Because I was feeling bad about this story. Feeling bad like no one liked it. Someone told me they missed it, just yesterday, and so I ovaried up and did some editing and even got some writing into it.
Enjoy!
Sherlock of course couldn't remember if he'd had hallucinations while he'd been a slave to a drug addiction. Most days he was glad of it, except for the fact that it meant he'd never hallucinated something patently supernatural before, and therefore had no coping mechanisms. He dreamed sometimes, of course, and sometimes he had nightmares, but nothing that his brain threw at him happened while he was awake. That had perhaps made the imaginary hound all the more shocking, really. Perhaps it was this reality of seeing things that weren't real that triggered his regular dreams to turn bizarre, perhaps it was a latent side effect of the HOUND project's gas—but his dreams while he was in Devon were terrifyingly real. So much more real, in details from the texture of fabric to the warmth of skin, than seeing the gigantic hound that Henry Knight had described to him. His dreams were worse than seeing Jim Moriarty under the gasmask, worse than the leering, demon-toothed grin the apparition had worn.
He had legitimately avoided sleeping, hoping to escape his nightmares.
He dreamed of Molly—but not his Molly. This Molly was younger, got less sleep if the bags under her eyes meant anything, and she loved him. He went to sleep on the floor of the room their second night there—John was being childish about the bed—and woke up with his head in Molly's lap. The fingers of one hand were twined with his, resting above his heart, while her other hand stroked his forehead. Her smile was hesitant as he met her eyes.
"You came back then, silly man?" her lips sobered into a brief frown, "You missed Dr. Abernathy's lecture. It was all about decomposition of ligament. It was actually quite funny, he had a cadaver arm—oh, that made the diener all out of sorts by the way—and just," she made a stilted flop of her arm, nearly disengaging their fingers with the move, "gestured with it as he shouted questions. I have the notes, if you want to look over them."
"Just my sort of—I'm sorry I missed it, Molly." She mumbled something along the lines of "'sokay, Sherlock," as she looked away and squeezed his hand. The words, words he never remembered speaking, tumbled out of him then as he reached up to touch her cheek with his free hand. She leaned into his touch but didn't look back at him.
"It isn't a problem, just a little experiment. Lost track of time, really. It's like floating—and my mind just slows down. I can think of one thing at a time without feeling rushed and—Molly, I'm sorry. It won't happen again." Sherlock remembered, once he'd woken, that her smile at that had been like her smiles since Irene Adler had ruined his chances with her. Like she didn't quite believe him. Her eyes not quite meeting his, her smile not revealing her teeth, using only the corners of her mouth to smile without actually stretching the skin of her lips. It was very rare these days that Molly actually smiled at him—in fact he remembered the last time. He had still been tangled up with Irene Adler and he'd been the one to chase that smile away with his focus on the case rather than the woman beside him.
Though there had been no actual fear in the first dream, nothing terrifying, nothing jumping out of the dark at him, Sherlock could only classify it as a nightmare. He didn't want to dream of Molly holding him so sweetly but smiling at him like he was lying. Out of all the people he'd met or re-met after his accident, at least Molly felt genuine. Like she hadn't been told by Mycroft what to say and how to act around him. John reminded him a lot of Molly. It was, Sherlock liked to think, why he was friends with the man at all.
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