A/N: This was actually going to be a five-part separate story about the senses but I like you guys a lot so I'm putting it in here :D update for it every other day!

Also, pretty uninspired lately; I apologize greatly. School is drowning me in boring! Help! Please leave a suggestion if one comes to mind!

Please enjoy, leave a review!

Part One - Smell

The darkness was impenetrable, solid and unmoving but it was never palpable to John. It wasn't as if the arms which flailed at the invisible gunman from his nightmares would actually make contact with something solid and vanquish the fear of dying. Nothing could extinguish that. Nothing he knew of had the power to take that away, nothing yet.

The fear was always there and he thought that that was what made the darkness in his bedroom seem so livid and alive; made it seem to breathe with both life and death at once.

After being painfully shot awake, no pun intended, his breathing was erratic and his heart was pounding like the waves of an inescapable typhoon smashing on the rusted walls of a dilapidated building; the beating felt like it was breaking him down.

His head throbbed with blood and every time he was forced awake mercilessly he nearly cried with the effort it took just to move air in and out of his lungs. He'd collapse while lying down, he'd break while standing still, and he'd burn in cold sweat.

John was slowly deteriorating; he was that building giving out under the force of the typhoon and the typhoon was made of paradoxical darkness.

Tonight was no different: he was back in the beam of that hellishly hot middle-eastern sun, the taste of sand on his tongue and the smell of death and shot and smoke. The smell of war. Then there was a shout, a stinging in his shoulder and the smell of blood; it was too close it was too much it was…

Gone. He'd come crashing back into reality but it'd never be a relief. How could it be?

His shoulder was numb. His head was anything but; it was full of everything at once and it felt like it had been achingly expanded beyond the limit. Did a brain at war with nightmares even have a limit or was its endurance all dependent on the sanity of its consciousness?

Blinking hard and fast he looked around and saw nothing. He was back into the darkness, where the only smells were wood, rain water and whatever his friend had been experimenting on. He'd have preferred that mix that seemed boring to any exotic smell of foreign ones. At least, that was his first thought.

Breathing heavy with his arms stretched above his head, he looked to the side and found his eyes had adjusted to the blackness of night. There was a mass of dark hair directly in front of him. The actual face connected to those curls was staring the opposite way but judging by the steady slow breathing and the lack of actual words coming from that bowed mouth, John suspected his friend was asleep.

Sherlock only stopped talking, stopped observing and thinking, when he slept.

With the adrenaline of his nightmare still running its course through his veins, John swallowed hard and looked back on the past two hours:

The room downstairs, the detective's room, had been quarantined. Because the aforementioned had decided to try recreating the scene of an explosion. He suspected it was not the actual burst of fire which had scorched the victim but it was the gas, the gas now dwelling underneath them, which had suffocated the deceased. Obvious, Sherlock had said. John was inclined to believe him.

Unfortunately, he was also inclined to text Mycroft asking the best way to go about removing the gas from Sherlock's room. Mycroft had dismissed it, telling John he'd call the proper services first thing in the morning but for now, keep the younger Holmes upstairs and away from the room. Easier said than done.

The only way Sherlock had agreed to sleep was if he got to sleep on the bed. On John's bed. Which had led to an argument on propriety, which had led to a huffy detective and a frustrated doctor sleeping on either said of the latter's king-sized bed.

At least Sherlock had agreed to sleep at all, John thought ruefully. With a sigh, he allowed his hand wander lowly into that tangle of curls; the strands wrapped around the tanned fingers like vines on a tree. What harm was there in touching the man if he was fast asleep? God knows he sleeps like the dead…

John felt his eyes grow heavy at the uncensored thought. Maybe if he was gentle enough he could… he extracted his hand carefully from the jungle which was Sherlock's hair and used his elbow to try pulling himself closer to the body beside him but he hadn't thought it through; he had tried lifting himself with his bad shoulder.

He fell too hard back onto the bed and held his breathe.

"John… s'that you?"

"Yeah, you're in my bed," the doctor muttered tiredly.

"Good observation," Sherlock answered groggily. "Everything alright?"

The ashy-blonde man gave a sigh as he looked to the back of his friend. Giving in to that need he felt too tired to withhold, too consumed by to ignore, too pathetically weak to fight, he shuffled himself till his face was encased in those curly jungle vines. His hands rested on the spiny back which now stiffened.

"John-"

"Just shut up, Sherlock. Shut up and let me be," with that the doctor inhaled his favorite guilty pleasure, drug, scent. The dense hair of his friend smelled like lavender with a hint of ash and it should have been overly feminine or out of place but it was perfect; it was a mystery, it was unsettling and it floated with an air of posh sexual charm and that was the epitome of the man who wore it. It was dangerously romantic and curiously homely all at once and it made John's head hurt in the most glorious of ways. It soothed him while lighting his body aflame; it lit up that fucking paradoxical darkness which grew inside him every night, causing it to dissipate. This was what would keep him from dying every night and at that moment, with his eyes closing, John didn't care at all.

Sherlock didn't know what John was doing but he accepted it as something the other man needed. Needing something from someone was often followed by a request for said necessity but the younger man figured it was a mere technicality. He took things from John without asking all the time: He took the man's laughter and stored it in a bottle, hiding it away in his mind. He took his smile and made it his light bulb to illuminate every corner. He took his love and just held it like something to be treasured. There was no life, no thrill, no novelty before John; it took the older man's laughter, smile, and love for Sherlock to finally see that.

Now, as he felt the steady breathing on the back of his head [the man behind him was asleep now, obviously], Sherlock breathed in his own form of medication. John's pillows held the scent of mint [toothpaste], of strawberries [jam], of rain water [shampoo] and of sweat [John]. It should have been a distasteful mix, juxtaposing things Sherlock had no interest in but it wasn't; they melded together in a symphony of smells and he could only cherish while it played it's melody around him, wrapping itself around him like a cocoon.

As a tanned hand gently stroked his spine and another snaked around him, Sherlock felt his eyelids hanging low and heavy. Sleep was finally conquering his mind, and when he dreamed it was of nothing but a crucible of smells which gave way to one singular thought; John.

As a pale hand gently held his own, John's blissfully slumberous mind-void of any dark at all-was filled with the remembrance of lavender and ash.

Neither could recall sleeping that well, that serenely, in far too long.