The night after John first met Sherlock, he had a dream where he was still himself, but at the same time, in the odd way that dreams had, he was also a hobbit – a human-looking creature that was even shorter than John and had large, very hairy feet – named Bilbo. He was sneaking along down a dark mountain tunnel, far quieter than such very big feet should allow, and at the end of the tunnel there was treasure waiting for him – a treasure and a massive dragon. The dream ended, however, before he was able to do more than glimpse at a gleaming pile of gold.

John woke up feeling strange. Not because of the unusual subject matter of the dream, he'd had loads of dreams that didn't make a whole lot of sense. The strange part was how vivid it had been, almost like one of his Afghanistan dreams. But those dreams were really more like memories he was re-living in his sleep, which, John had always assumed, was what gave them the depth and sense of realness his other dreams didn't normally have.

By the end of the day, he had written the whole thing off as another symptom of his PTSD. Really, with what with chasing after a murderous cabbie and his idiot new flatmate, he had bigger things to worry about.

John curiously turned Sherlock's 'friend's' skull this way and that, cradling it between the palms of his hands. He had been sent to fetch it from Mrs. Hudson – apparently Sherlock was too 'deep in thought' to be arsed with getting up, but not too deep to keep from giving John orders – on the justification that it was a family heirloom. John was pretty sure that was a lie to get his skull back, but if there ever was a family that would keep a skull as an heirloom, it was the Holmeses.

John was just about to set the skull back down on the mantel when it struck him. "Sherlock, this doesn't look like a normal human skull," he said as he began counting the teeth to see if there really were more of them than normal, or if he was just being delusional.

"That's because it isn't a human skull," Sherlock replied off-handedly.

John hadn't actually expected Sherlock to answer, which is the only explanation he could think of for why it took him so long to ask the obvious follow up question (What do you mean it isn't a human skull?) that Sherlock had come out of his mental fugue state enough to properly follow the conversation they were having. At that point, Sherlock refused to elaborate further and honestly looked rather annoyed at himself for saying anything at all.

It soon became apparent to John that when Sherlock told Lestrade he didn't smoke, he had been very much a former addict talking. It wasn't that he was lying, exactly, he was just coming from a very different perspective. Specifically, he was coming from a perspective that didn't consider going through a pack every couple of months to be smoking, not really. And honestly, as long as Sherlock was staying clean of anything harder, John wasn't too fussed about it.

The interesting thing was Sherlock always smoked in the same exact place: sitting on the sill in 221B with the window open so the smoke could blow outside. It was the considerate thing to do, keeping the smell out of the flat when your flatmate was a non-smoker, but the word considerate and Sherlock didn't belong in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. Sherlock didn't appear to be a creature of habit in any other respects either and John couldn't help but wonder at it a bit. So the next time he caught Sherlock smoking, he did the sensible thing and asked him.

Sherlock exhaled a puff of smoke and said, "Secondhand smoke contains at least 69 known carcinogens and can also increase the risks of a number of other diseases, including heart disease and respiratory tract infection."

"You do realize the same and worse can be said about actually smoking, right?" John asked, amused.

Sherlock scoffed. "I'm not worried about myself." That led to such an unexpected conclusion that it took longer than it should have for John to work it out. Once he had he kept it to himself. It was such a pleasant thought that he'd rather not ask Sherlock about it and risk being told he was wrong.

"Can you blow smoke rings?" John asked instead, grasping at a random thought that had been floating through his mind.

"No," Sherlock replied absently, before turning back on John and asking, "Can you?" John knew by now, of course, that Sherlock never said things just to make conversation; if he asked a question it was because he genuinely wanted to know the answer. But even for Sherlock that had seemed excessively intense.

"Yes. I mean no," said John, frowning a bit at his bumbling over the answer caused by vague nagging memories. "I knew someone who could, though. I can't remember who it was now, but there was definitely someone. Why is it important?"

Sherlock paused before answering, staring at John with the kind of focus that would be frightening coming from anyone else. After a full minute of that, he took a long drag and then breathed the smoke out very decidedly not as a smoke ring – though how Sherlock made exhaling decided was beyond John. "It isn't."

That seemed like and argument that it wasn't worth even trying to get into, so John just shook his head a little at the general Sherlock-ness of it all, then turned back to the crap telly he'd been watching.

The next morning when John went to make breakfast, he found a half-full pack of cigarettes in the trash and a new box of nicotine patches on the table.

John was dreaming he was Bilbo again, but this time Sherlock was there too. It wasn't an eventful sort of dream, just John telling Sherlock about his encounter with Smaug the dragon, and Sherlock looking faintly pleased.

John woke from a nightmare to find that, while he hadn't been treed by goblins and giant wolves and wasn't about to either die by burning to death in a fire or from smoke inhalation, he was excessively warm and having difficulties breathing. And both of those problems could be directly attributed to Sherlock, sleeping sprawled on top of John like a very large puppy. "Sherlock!"

Slowly, Sherlock slitted his eyes open, regarding John with a bleary, half-awake expression. "What?"

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Sleeping," Sherlock responded, with the special kind of disdain he reserved for question whose answers were both irrelevant and obvious. Then the wanker closed his eyes and immediately fell back asleep.

"Sherlock!" John repeated, this time accompanying the demand with a vicious poke to the other man in the side.

Sherlock opened his eyes again, clearly exasperated. "What in the world could you possibly need that can't wait until morning?" John didn't answer Sherlock directly, just looked at him until he had made his point about all the times Sherlock had woken him up in the dead of night. "Yes well, my things were important," Sherlock muttered, proving once again that they had very different ideas as to what constituted something as being urgent.

"My things are important too. You can't sleep on top of me, Sherlock." Though to be honest, John wasn't even annoyed anymore. Sherlock had done far stranger things in the time John had known him, and this particular instance seemed like a time when he was crossing the line because he didn't realize it was there, not because he didn't care.

"Why not?"

"For one thing, I'm not gay," John said. It was a bit frustrating how many people had forgotten that lately.

"Dull," Sherlock dismissed. "As long as we both know there is no romantic or sexual implications to it, I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to sleep wherever I'm most comfortable."

John stopped for a second and really looked at Sherlock. His expression was that of someone who had been woken from a very deep sleep, and the state of his hair proved that he'd been asleep for a few hours at least. And on top of that, Sherlock had made it very clear that he wanted to go back to sleep as soon as John would let him. This from the man who usually only slept in the form of catnaps. For a brief moment, John debated between doing the 'normal' thing and helping Sherlock, but in the end it wasn't even really a question.

"We're not doing this every night," John said finally. Sherlock made a vague noise that, for the sake own his sanity, John chose to interpret as agreement. "And we're definitely not doing this if I have a woman over."

"Obviously," said Sherlock. "I wouldn't want to sleep on top of some random woman."

"Of course not, I don't know what I was thinking," John replied, faintly amused. "Now budge up, you're still not sleeping directly on top of me." John pushed Sherlock off him and the two of them tussled back and forth a bit over an adequate compromise, ending up with Sherlock nestled alongside John with his head on top of his shoulder, a position that could be, if John was willing to think the word, called cuddling. "And I'm still not gay."

"Go to sleep John," Sherlock commanded and, after rolling his eyes, John did.

"Mycroft was in my dream last night," John said, in the vague hope of snapping Sherlock out of the ennui he'd been stuck in for the past four days.

"Really," said Sherlock, with a nebulous sort of interest, which was more than anything else recently.

"Yeah, though it wasn't Mycroft exactly. It was this old wizard guy, he just felt like Mycroft. One of those odd dream things," John explained.

Sherlock gave a John a sharp look, before pulling out his cell phone and texting furiously. He was probably telling Mycroft off for invading John's dreams, or something ridiculous like that, but John was still willing to count it as a win.

John had given up on asking Sherlock where they were going ten minutes ago and on trying to figure it out for himself five minutes after that. Now he was just mindlessly following Sherlock along while trying to remember some of the riddles from his dream last night. He had gotten as far as "Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt" in the fifth riddle when a glint of light caught his eye.

He turned his head to look, but it turned out to be just the sunlight reflecting off a plain golden ring in a display window.

"John."

When he took a step closer, it turned out not to be a plain ring, but one with a faint pattern etched on it.

"John."

No, not a pattern, an inscription.

"John!"

His ring, just sitting there waiting for him.

"Bilbo. Bilbo, step away from the ring." Bilbo made a faint noise in acknowledgement of the familiar voice, but he didn't look up and he wouldn't leave his ring. "That's not your ring. You gave Frodo your ring and he threw it into Mt. Doom, remember?"

Bilbo blinked, allowing distant memories to trickle back in. That's right, Frodo had taken the ring, hadn't he? Taken it and it was gone now.

John shook his head and turned to see Sherlock looking concerned, of all things. "Sorry about that, I must have spaced out for a minute," John said, shooting Sherlock a reassuring smile.

Sherlock didn't say anything for a minute, letting his expression make it clear that he was unimpressed with John's explanation, before grabbing John by the shoulders and propelling him along past the jewelry shop they'd stopped in front of. "Come along, we have places to be."

"Do you know what your problem is?" Sherlock asked one morning, seemingly apropos of nothing, as he sprawled languidly across the sofa.

"Off the top of my head, I would say the fact that I'm seriously considering listening to your diagnosis of an existential problem that I wasn't aware I was having," John quipped, barely pausing in his reading.

"Yes, that's it exactly," Sherlock agreed, which was so unexpected that John folded his paper down and just stared at Sherlock for a minute.

"What, really?" he asked.

"You've been having an identity crisis since we met and you haven't realized it yet. It's annoying." Of course that was the part Sherlock meant, not the one that might imply Sherlock didn't know everything about everything.

"I actually did notice that, ta. I'd have to be a bit thick not to, what with both you and Mycroft pointing it out the first time I met either of you," John reminded him. Just how many things did Sherlock delete anyway?

"I'm not talking about your displacement after you got invalided out of the military," Sherlock said dismissively. "I fixed that ages ago when we got rid of your cane. I'm talking about your other identity crisis."

"I'm having two identity crises at once? Impressive of me," John mused. "Well go on then, I'm sure you want to fix this one too."

"The thing is, it's just stupid," Sherlock said, exploding off the sofa and beginning to pace back and forth. "You know who you are and I know who you are, but you keep letting things that don't matter anymore catch you up over and over again, which is incredibly moronic of you. You need to stop it."

"Alright, why don't you just tell me who I am and then I'll stop worrying about the rest," said John agreeably. When Sherlock got into one of his moods like this, it was usually best just to go along with it if possible until he worked himself out of it. Course, his eyes hadn't started to go hazel, or whatever is was that they did, so it couldn't be too big of a deal yet.

"You're John Watson," said Sherlock. Obviously, said his tone.

Alright, there was being agreeable, and then there was just being a doormat. "I know my own name, you wanker."

Sherlock sighed the sigh of the deeply put upon and elaborated. "You're John Watson, former military, current doctor, though you treat the sniffles a great deal more now than you used to. You have a number of relationships that straddle the line between friend and close acquaintance, but you can't be bothered to put the effort in to get closer to any of them. You have an estranged sister who you would like to reconcile with, but you aren't going to try because you know any attempts to do so would only be sabotaged by her alcoholism. You have a girlfriend who you're a lot less keen on than you pretend to be. And finally there's me, to whom you're completely indispensable both in general and to the Work in specific."

John blinked a couple of times, completely blown back. "That was – well, to be honest most of that was kind of offensive, but the bit at the end was… nice."

"Really?" Sherlock asked, looking confused, like he had never been called 'nice' before.

But then again, it was Sherlock, so it was entirely possible he hadn't. John smiled at him. "Yes, really."