"You shouldn't sleep alone,"Sherlock says baldly as they are reading the papers one morning.
John takes a breath and battens down the immediate thought, which is that Sherlock is suggesting John sleeps with him. He puts down the paper, which is full of bile about Eastern European criminals. "OK ...why not, exactly?"
"You get nightmares." Presented as fact. Paper still raised, eyes scanning text. But John sees the millisecond glance up, at him.
"I get nightmares anyway." Solitude and nightmares - now obviously linked in Sherlock's assessment of John.
"No, you don't. You never got nightmares when you had girlfriends staying over."
John notices two things at once: that Sherlock has been monitoring his nightmares, since day one, and also, that he is speaking about John's girlfriends firmly in the past tense.
"Right. You know that, do you?" He hadn't mentioned anything specifically to Sherlock about nightmares until ... Avebury. Ties that thought down tightly too.
"You seemed to seek out overnight company more when you first moved into the flat. There was always somebody." Paper lowered, resting on the table. Sherlock's hands loose and easy.
"And it didn't occur to you that this might be my natural animal magnetism?" John forces a grin. This conversation is weird even by their standards.
Sherlock smiles. "It's obvious that you wanted to avoid the trauma of the nightmares. So you were trying not to be alone whenever possible. But now you're not. And you're getting them again, more often."
"Do you stand outside my door all night or something? -Don't answer that, I'm just being facetious."
Also, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this is exactly what Sherlock does, and John does not want to know.
"I've just been too busy to bother lately," John said. "And, you know, things are fine as they are. Being single. It's no big deal." He has yet to say anything - even Thank you - to Sherlock about the other night, when he had the fear just fall on him as he sat in Sherlock's room. He wished Sherlock had not seen it, witnessed his weakness, another sign of his total inferiority. Sherlock has said nothing about it either. Does not appear to have an opinion on it. But he did try to help, which is...embarrassing, mortifying, and painful to recall. "I'm fine," he reiterates.
"Apart from the nightmares."
"What are you getting at?"
Big silence.
Sherlock is staring at him, really staring. He is an inveterate gazer at the best of times - seems to want to save time and effort by telepathically transmitting direct into people's brains - but this particular stare contains a lot of flicker. Sherlock's mind is working, whirring away at something and is trying to frame it in a way that John's feeble brain will comprehend.
John waits, seeing the sky reflected in Sherlock's eyes, grey onto blue, light flaring like fire around his black pupils. He could honestly do this all day: watch Sherlock, allow him to be the one to speak, thinking his own thoughts safe inside whilst looking at Sherlock's fascinating eyes.
"Nothing."
Sherlock gets up and stalks to the window, looks out. "That Romanian beggar is there again. But that's not a real baby she's holding," he says. "Might go and take a look."
"OK." John begins to get up from his chair.
"No no, it's fine. I'll be back in a bit."
And off he goes.
"Sherlock, let me in." John is standing in front of him with a determined expression. He is clearly in, got home from the hospital an hour ago.
"What?"
"You're shutting me out. Working on a case, I know you are, and you haven't told me anything about it and I want to help so please, let me in." Arms folded feet planted squarely, presenting as an immovable object.
"It's dull. You wouldn't enjoy it."
"Why don't I be the judge of that?"
They glare at each other for a moment, then John says, "I thought this was meant to be a partnership. Us."
"You know it is."
"So treat me as an equal. I don't care if it's dull or what it is, I just want to help."
"You are my equal." Does he not know this?
John humphs at this and stands, waiting.
"Ok," says Sherlock. "I'll tell you what I'm working on. And there's something you can help me with right now as a matter of fact."
He gestures out of the window. "While I explain, please can you shoot those security cameras? You're a much better shot than me and the neighbours are starting to get antsy about their brickwork."
John looks at him. Sherlock can see the tension being released from his forehead. John is right, as he often is. Sherlock should have told him to start with about Mycroft's threat.
Now John looks better. Happier. Good.
"I'll get the air rifle," says John, and strolls out whistling.
"Got you this. Might help."
It is a short silk dressing gown, navy blue. It is wrapped and folded as if new. But that night, as soon as John takes it out of the ribbon he knows that it is not new. Or rather, it is, but it has been worn. By Sherlock.
Another mysterious message? He doesn't think so. Thinks Sherlock is just trying to help. Has thought of this, and will want to know, tomorrow, if it worked. An experiment.
He wraps it around himself and ties the belt. Lies down on the bed. Breathes Sherlock in.
It does help. It is like having him here, potent, beside him.
It may not be helping in the exact ways Sherlock intended, though.
John places his hands on his chest and prepares for sleep. Realises that sleep, enveloped in Sherlock, is not possible. Allows his hands to slide down inside the dressing gown, over his bare chest, down to his stomach. Waits. Surely not. Not wearing this.
Oh, yes, wearing this, for sure. Unstructured silk which has had Sherlock's naked skin inside it, his body, his long legs and supple hands and his beautiful -
Downstairs on the settee, Sherlock tilts his head up towards the ceiling. He thought it would help, and it seems as if it has. Good.
There is a problem, however, two problems in fact. Maybe leading to further problems, which is the precise reason one should never engage in relationships in the first place, although clearly it is too late for that now, they are on this path, he understands that they have been for a long time, and only careful thought will steer them to a destination of minimal pain and disruption -
Firstly, when it needs a wash, Sherlock will have to appropriate the dressing gown, wash it and then wear it, then return it. Should have got two dressing gowns. Maybe give John one of his others while this one is in the wash.
Secondly, if it is Sherlock, rather than silk, which John finds so ... comforting, then why is Sherlock here, downstairs alone? Why is he not upstairs being caressed and moaned over and sobbed into?
In essence, what does the dressing gown have that he does not have? Answer, nothing. He is certainly better than any dressing gown.
He chuckles, and wriggles to get comfortable. John is not having nightmares. Quite the reverse, and now Sherlock too must try to get some sleep.
But sleep is not available. He never factored this in, that he would experience pain, not physical pain of course, although it presents as a knot of discomfort around his navel, but psychological pain, loneliness. Transforms in a heartbeat into desire, swaps back again, impossible to tell if the one has simply led to the other.
He understands very well how being alone can drive a person to seek comfort, to seek physical contact, to seek ... oblivion. All those early mornings walking back to hall, cold, the afterglow already draining away in the light of another day to be spent with nobody like him.
He wanted nothing then. He found it, briefly and often.
He has been wanting nothing again lately, but not the same nothing. Can there be two nothings? A nothing of the absence of anything and a nothing of the presence of nothing?
There can. It is the second thing he seeks. The presence of nothing.
Nothing as experience, as whiteness and emptiness and the creation of a silent place where he can rest, free from thoughts and emotions.
A silent place which lasts.
Impossible.
Thinking has quelled desire, as expected. Good. But it has led to more thinking, and now he is wide awake.
The dressing gown gift was intended as a nurturing thing, not a sexual thing. Fretful babies are sometimes comforted by placing an item of their mother's clothing in the cot. Her scent, the unconscious belief that the mother is close by, helps the child to relax. The wonderful things you can learn from the internet.
He wanted to nurture John in this way and had deduced that his own scent might help. His presence had helped in Avebury. Fact. John's only peaceful night in a long time.
It is hard to smell yourself, so he had to trust that a week of wearing the dressing gown - after showering - had left an imprint.
It was meant to be intimate, not sexual - how he thinks of him and John. But John has taken it and worn it and it has become a thing infused with desire, no doubt of that, and now Sherlock considers it in this light, it is hard to know where intimacy ends and sex begins.
Hard to measure what is happening when the knowledge of - the sound of - John's desire transforms so immediately into his own. For John? He has not thought seriously about that for a long time. Or about desire for anyone.
He is thinking about it now and his heart beats quickly. He rejected this path when he first began to think about attachments. When he first met John, although the temptation was clearly there between them. He already understands that sex and attachment are, not mutually exclusive in general, but certainly not cause and effect. Has never sought that. The one - straightforward, biological, physical, comprehensible. The other - mysterious, intangible, dangerous.
He is attached to John, of course.
He blinks and sits up. Of course. But - desire for someone you are attached to? Really? For other people, yes, yes, obviously - but for him?
It could be awkward and wrong, like incest, like Frankenstein's creature built from desecrated flesh and Frankenstein's own longing.
Or it could be - just him and John, as they have always been.
Could he do sex, with John? Yes, of course, (if John accepted the idea, which it now seems that he might), it would be easy, it is only sex. But John would assign significance to it, in the way that other people do, and this is another reason why Sherlock stopped bothering with sex.
Also it is John, who is a real person. Sherlock has not catalogued his former partners, but almost none of them were real people. Presumably they had lives, thoughts... names.
John is not on that list. He is Sherlock's friend.
What's the difference between love and friendship? How can you tell? Maybe you can't. John's voice.
Physical release plus emotional connection: it is what popular songs, films, books all extol as the pinnacle of interpersonal relationships.
Idolisation of the other person, something Sherlock has never stooped to, is a key component of romantic love. A belief in your lover's infallibility, patently a stupid idea. Sherlock cannot imagine believing another human is perfect. It is a biological impossibity for a start, regardless of any emotional meaning. Or the reverse, their absolute belief in you.
Ok, this is a more plausible scenario. But it would still be misguided to think that he is infallible.
For a start if he was incapable of a misjudgement he wouldn't be lying on a sofa thinking about sex whilst cataloguing reasons why he is not going to engage in any. He can almost hear the Idiot's voice saying this, and for once Sherlock concedes that he would be right. He smiles, somewhat painfully.
Time has passed. John is silent. Asleep? Presumably. Naked? Perhaps. Satiated? He can only ... imagine.
Sherlock flings himself back onto the sofa and composes his robe around him. His hands rest lightly, alertly, on his chest.
Sleep. Just sleep.