221B wouldn't cooperate, so it's a triple drabble and a half (is there a word for that?). Same night as Courage
He opened his eyes to the darkness of his room, wondering what had awoken him. All was silent for a long moment before it came again: a faint noise coming from the sitting room.
He got up, padding softly out to find Watson asleep on the settee.
He was unsurprised the doctor had chosen to sleep in the sitting room instead of his bedroom. Watson's unease had still been very much in evidence when he had finally gone to bed in the small hours of the morning. Finding the snake in his bedroom had shaken him badly, and he wondered what it was like to have such an all-consuming fear of something.
Another thought crossed his mind, and he suppressed a shiver of his own and amended his original thought: he wondered what it was like to have such an all-consuming fear of something harmless. Everyone feared something, he knew, some spiders, some snakes, some other physical things, but people who feared none of those often feared something much less tangible, and much harder to avoid. He had never decided which was better: to fear something harmless but completely illogical, or to fear something logical but certainly not harmless.
He pushed the question aside as the faint noise sounded again, identifiable now as murmuring. Watson moved restlessly, twitching on the settee and obviously caught in a nightmare. He wondered what to do. Would Watson want to be woken, or would it embarrass him?
Watson started thrashing, and he worried the doctor was going to throw himself off the settee.
"Watson!" He put a hand on the doctor's shoulder, both to wake him up and to prevent him from falling. "Watson, it is just a dream."
Watson started awake, sitting up so quickly despite the hand on his shoulder that they nearly knocked heads. His eyes were wide, and he was hyperventilating, gasping for air as if he had just run a marathon.
"It was a dream, Watson."
The relief and thanks in Watson's gaze was enough to keep him in the sitting room instead of returning to his own bed.