Prompt: Rocket

K+ rated, friendship- no (obvious) slash.

I don't even know what this is. I'm not very happy with it, but I've uploaded it anyway.

When John was five years old, he dreamt of going to go into space.

His bed was shaped like a spaceship. His ceiling was covered in glow in the dark stars. His wall was plastered in crude pictures of planets, glossy posters of the solar system, and, framed, the automated reply NASA sent him in response to his (clumsily crayoned and proudly posted) letter.

Space was where clever people went, and people said John was clever. Space was where brave people went, and John wanted to be brave. Space also happened to contain aliens and aliens would be fun. John thought he might like to meet an alien.

John would close his eyes and concentrate very hard, and he would slip into the same dream almost every night. In it, he discovered a new planet and he was famous and everybody wanted to be his friend. He lived on his planet with his wife and his two children named Alan and Daisy (it used to be three, but Lucas pushed him off the swings and then took the last chocolate biscuit from the tin and so now they weren't friends anymore so John wouldn't have a son called Lucas).

Some nights his mummy and daddy would live there too, but not always. It depended on how much they had been fighting and shouting. Harry was certainly never there- she wasn't allowed to be until she gave him his Lego back. All of his Lego, not just the bits she didn't want.

John's planet was happy. He loved his mummy and daddy and wife and children and they all loved him back. He wasn't scared that they would stop liking him because there were other people who were funnier or cleverer or could name more planets than he could. He was a spaceman, so he wasn't scared of anything, really. He was brave and brave people weren't ever afraid.

John would lie in bed, smiling. He would look up at the glow in the dark stars and know for sure that, one day, he would be up among them.

At first, it had been something of a nostalgic sensation to lie in his bedroom and feel fucking terrified, but it was one John was getting used to.

He had stopped having nightmares at about eight years old and he didn't much appreciate their return. You're not in Afghanistan anymore, he would think furiously to himself. Pull yourself together and just get over this. But what had felt bearable in real life was unendurable in his nightmares.

It was irrational to lie awake at 3AM and feel too afraid to turn your head or open your eyes. It was abnormal to wake yourself up screaming every night, and it was just plain embarrassing to have to go to therapy because of it.

John had to lean heavily on his cane to walk even the shortest distances and the pain got worse as the nightmares did. To clean up his tiny apartment took him nearly an hour, and he had to take extra strength painkillers afterwards.

He still did it, though, every single day. He hated the look of the room when it had his mug in it, his clothes, his books. He didn't want to live the imprint of himself on this place. It was alien and detached and it ought to stay that way. John wanted to live in a box; to touch nothing and have nothing touch him.

Nobody called. He had stopped answering so they had stopped trying. It was better that way. At first, their harsh words had hurt, but the closed over wounds eventually hardened his skin. It was so much easier to keep yourself alone than to try and let everybody down, over and over again.

People you loved would get hurt, or hurt themselves, and they would die. It might be a bullet or a mine or a bomb. Equally, it might be with beer or wine or vodka. It didn't matter. And if he was lonely, that didn't matter either. None of it mattered, not in the end.

When he put things into his bedside drawer, he didn't look at the yellowing stack of drawings and photographs. He threw away the NASA letter without looking at it. Dreams didn't happen. Reality happened, and reality fucking stung.

Lying in bed was when he became truly aware of how weak he was. Despite trying his absolute hardest, John felt fear. He didn't let himself feel anything else.

"I don't understand why you're so perplexed by this."

"Because it's basic knowledge, Sherlock."

"Is it really?"

"Yes. Most people do know that the Earth goes around the sun."

"What's the Latin for oak tree?" There had been no gap between John's point and Sherlock's, but that wasn't that unusual.

"I have no idea."

"Oh, go on. Humour me."

"Alright. Oakus treeus." Sherlock didn't look amused.

"Thank you so much for that stunning contribution to human knowledge. My point is, John, that you did not know what the Latin for oak tree is. Why isn't that considered abnormal?"

"Because nobody normal knows the Latin for anything."

"And why not?" Sherlock pointed out.

"Because nobody needs to know."

"Exactly!" Sherlock exclaimed, satisfied. "So why should I need to know astronomy? It's not that I'm unaware of it- I opted not to learn it because it doesn't affect me."

"But astronomy is cool!" John blurted out. Sherlock raised an eyebrow.

"Interesting. I meant interesting," John corrected. If it was anybody else, he wouldn't have been worried. But Sherlock had a way of seeing your whole self through the tiniest feature, and John might as well have just handed the man his diary.

"So go on, then. Elaborate."

"What?"

"Tell me what it is about astronomy that you find interesting."

"Oh. Um, okay. Space is… space is amazing. It's something we can never understand, you know?" John tried to explain. "It makes everything seem so small and insignificant because there's all this… space."

"Enthralling."

"No, seriously. There's so much of it and it really puts everything in perspective. You don't have to worry about anybody else or anything else because it all just fades away. What might happen and what has happened stops mattering. Nothing seems impossible when you think about everything that happens up there."

Sherlock stayed quiet for a few minutes. John briefly wondered if he'd fallen asleep while John was talking (it would not have been the first time).

"That's conceptual, though," Sherlock eventually mused. "That isn't scientific. That sounds less like knowledge and more like… dreaming."

"I don't dream."

"Everybody dreams."

"Well, I don't." Sherlock looked at John in a way that made him a little uncomfortable. It was as though he was under a microscope, and he felt the sudden, desperate urge to get away.

"I didn't know you were interested in outer space," Sherlock eventually said.

"I used to be, yeah."

"Why aren't you now?" Sherlock leant forward.

"Oh, no, I am not having this conversation. This is not 'deduce things about John' hour."

"Your reaction tells me more than your words ever could." Sherlock looked so smug that John wanted to punch him.

"It was just a hobby, Sherlock. A stupid, meaningless hobby."

"You should take it up again," Sherlock declared. The urge to punch him was not receding.

"And why would I do that?"

"Because you used to enjoy it."

"So?"

"It made you happy."

"I don't- why do you even care about this?" John asked, exasperated. Sherlock's eyes met his and it was the microscope feeling again, but worse. Sherlock was reaching out with more than his mind- John could see Sherlock's heart glimmering in his eyes, and that scared him more than anything else.

"That's what friends do, isn't it?" Sherlock murmured softly.

Since he met Sherlock, the nightmares had lessened. They hadn't gone away, but they were quieter. More manageable. Whilst he still awoke at ridiculous times, he never made a sound and he could get back to sleep within the hour.

After the first few weeks of new books and old books and Google searches, John slept through the night for the first time in over a year.

After the trips to the library and out into the countryside (just to stare at the sky and allow himself to exist), John dreamt. It was a typical, mundane affair, with no death or gore. It had taken him a while to adjust to that. He spent nearly ten minutes after he woke up just lying back and smiling.

After he got the drawings out of the tightly packed boxes and flicked through them gently before moving them to the bedside drawer, and after Sherlock started coming out on the trips with him, and after a few months of running and hiding and living, it finally began to sink in that this wasn't going to end. There would be no huge, terminating realisation that John wasn't good enough to stay around. Sherlock wasn't going to leave him.

After they left the swimming pool, unscathed and so very alive, John dreamt old, childish dreams. There were alterations, of course. The wife and children, for one, seemed rather less important. John had spent so much time as a child imagining how it would feel to be praised for being clever or amazing or fantastic. In recent dreams that didn't seem matter quite as much.

John dreamt instead about the kind of things he'd told Sherlock. Things like looking up at the sky and seeing something so much bigger than yourself. Accepting that it isn't all down to you.

(You don't have to save everyone.)

John dreamt about people he loved and that still, despite everything, seemed to love him. It took a few days before Sherlock arrived in his night-time world and offered him a rocket.

John dreamt that he came down from his solitary planet and re-joined the human race. And as he slowly woke up the next morning, he felt like he might finally be ready to.