Sherlock X Reader One Shots || 𝐹𝐿𝑈𝐹𝐹 + 𝑆𝑀𝑈𝑇

A Cure For Insomnia (Part 1)

CONTEXT: (Pre relationship) Sherlock can't sleep.

__________

Sherlock had thought tonight would be different.

He'd carefully tweaked the dial of the radiator in his room, keeping the air slightly crisp---but not so much so that the cold would nibble through his duvet and torment him in the night.

He'd washed and dried his favourite pair of pyjamas; faded with age from navy to dusty eggshell blue, the label cleanly picked out with a seam ripper, the material soft and familiar.

He'd even scoured the internet for a bit, dredging various health websites for tips on how to beat insomnia—which all involved pictures of white middle-class women meditating or doing yoga in a park. He hadn't bothered with the yoga or the park, but he'd tried a few of the other tips like keeping his phone switched off and exercising during the day.

Everything had been going well---his relaxing shower and pleasant evening beating Y/N at Monopoly had left him contented and warm both inside and out--- and, after a few chapters of Lee Child, he even felt his eyelids growing heavy.

Hesitantly, as if that flicker of tiredness was a flame he was afraid of accidentally snuffing out, Sherlock tucked the receipt between the pages of The Visitor and placed it on his bedside table.

After clicking off the light, he shut his eyes quickly before they could adjust to the irritating orange hue of the streetlamps he didn't seem to be able to keep from leaking through his curtains.

As soon as his head hit the pillow it began.

I don't know if you've ever had the displeasure of attempting to get an autistic brain to succumb to sleep. It's like trying to find inner peace whilst in a crowded aisle of Curry's PC World during their busiest hours; there's a hundred television screens each playing something different, a hundred customers each having loud, overlapping conversations, and a constant stream of vexatious music playing from God knows where.

During the day, this persistent nattering can be more or less ignored. Sometimes it's even useful; Sherlock's ability to absorb and process more information than the average human is, of course, the reason for his blossoming crime-solving career.

During the night, however, when bullet trains of thought and heightened senses are the last things a person needs, that extra processing power becomes a curse more than anything else. Most nights are spent with---what feels like---a brain full of wasps.

Now, laying there in semi-darkness, his neurons flinging thoughts about his skull like a disorganised, crowded office building, any drowsiness Sherlock had previously harboured evaporated like a drop of water in a desert.

Every night is like his, so it's nothing new. But recently it has been worse.

He's not thinking about anything in particular. Nothing is bugging him or unravelling his easily frayed nerves. In fact, the opposite is true; lately, he'd been uncharacteristically, wonderfully, phenomenally...

Happy.

For once, every single one of the pillars supporting his fundamental contentment is stable and strong, standing ridged and proud and unmoving.

Of course, there are a few of these hypothetical pillars that he is missing; for example, a love life. However, they rarely bother him, as far as he knows, and he has, in a way, learnt to live without them. He doesn't need them (or so Sherlock has convinced himself), for he can just substitute them with other things.