This is my submission for the "50 Reasons to Have (Sherlolly) Sex" meme on Tumblr (sallyeloise dot tumblr dot com/post/68948603922). As the title suggests, I selected reason #1: "Because you can't fall asleep." I hope this is an okay contribution!

Thanks to my Adi for betaing this and for being such a wonderful friend who doesn't laugh at me (at least to my face), and thanks to Broomclosetkink for valiantly offering to beta it on her phone in light of her mostly-dead computer (I wasn't feeling sadistic today, so I let her off the hook- though I was, ironically, still sadistic enough to force someone else to read it. I should examine my life choices).

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock or its characters. No infringement is intended; just good, clean (alright, not clean at all) fun.

When he was a young boy, Sherlock Holmes often lay awake at night, refusing sleep's beckoning call. Even as the skeletal fingers of morning light started pushing at the dark sky, his mind would race and his eyes would squint to make out shapes in the dark topography of the ceiling texture. He could spot ships and animals and people and adventures in the space above his bed. Some of those shapes changed nightly, some stayed the same and kept him company throughout his lonely childhood.

As he got older, sleeplessness started to bother him more and more. His mother would leave bottles of herbal sleep aids on his dressing table, and he'd either ignore them or take too many at once. The mornings after those overindulgences, Mummy or Mycroft or some unfortunate member of the staff would take a bracing breath, enter the dim den of the raging genius, and engage in just one more battle in the War on Sherlock Holmes.

"No one is going to win this, but you will wake up now," Mycroft once sighed, trusting that Sherlock could hear him even with his head buried under a pillow. Mycroft was rarely wrong.

Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, Sherlock often came home to escape his stifling, public school dormitory. Those nights that he refused the sleep aids were filled instead with new, tactile wonders of touching himself. As is often the case with teenagers, he explored, figured out what felt good and then figured out what felt really good. He'd exhaust himself in the quiet of his room, biting a corner of his pillow or the flesh below his thumb to keep from waking someone with his sounds of release.

One day when he was seventeen, a schoolmate introduced him to the pleasures of a seven percent solution of cocaine. Soon, everything else paled by comparison. Suddenly, the problem of needing sleep was solved. Suddenly, he didn't need orgasms to find euphoria or to quiet his brain at night. The cocaine was a cure-all.

He entered adulthood reluctantly, nearly killing himself along the way. Mycroft pushed him into program after program, but only the last one actually took, when Sherlock was twenty-five. Somehow, after the hell of detoxification, rehabilitation, and learning to live without the drugs, he began slowly making a new life for himself. He found the consultation work and learned to ignore the buzzing call of the cocaine.

It wasn't that he associated sexual activity with the shooting up. He'd never been a sex addict; had never craved orgasm the way he craved a needle in his arm. He simply decided that the work—his work—was paramount and anything else was a distraction that would muddy his mind to his detriment.

So Sherlock fell back into the same sleep habits he'd maintained as a boy. He felt exhaustion just like any other human, but something just wouldn't let him develop any sort of sleep schedule. He'd go for two or three nights without even climbing into his bed, and then, when his body couldn't hold off any longer, he'd collapse somewhere and sleep for twelve to fourteen hours, before starting all over again.

For Sherlock, mind and body rarely formed a happy band of brothers, and he couldn't see that changing any time soon.

He'd not slept in four days now, and all he wanted was for his thoughts to quiet down, damn it and let him sleep. He had no mysteries to puzzle. He had nothing pressing. He'd be going home in just a few days. After several weeks away, he'd finally solved an arduous case and he'd made the necessary arrangements to leave this hellhole only two hours ago.

He also had that nauseous feeling of utter exhaustion. So why couldn't he just close his eyes and sleep?

He'd tried several times, but each time he'd start to drift off, his brain would kick back on and say, No sleep for you.

There, in a dacha situated beside the Volga River, in the middle of the woods outside of Saratov, Sherlock did not have herbal sleep aids. He couldn't find any shapes in the wood beams on the ceiling. He most certainly did not have seven percent solution, and he told himself daily that he never would again.

What he did have was the warm body lying next to his in the lumpy bed, buried under a goose down duvet and a worn, wool blanket.

She was also the main reason for his restlessness.

Mycroft had sent Molly Hooper to Sherlock two days earlier so that Sherlock wouldn't be alone for too long. Sherlock suspected his brother was worried that he'd still be in Russia for Christmas (which was seven days off, Sherlock had sneered to himself. Did Mycroft really doubt his ability to solve this case before then?). Perhaps it had been a mistake to reveal to his brother and John just how important the pathologist was to him, but he'd fought a grin as he disconnected the call with Mycroft and hurried to the airport to pick her up.

Molly had smiled happily when she saw him, given him a soft kiss on the cheek, and had not said a word about the blistering winter cold of Russia as they drove through the deep snow to the dacha. Sherlock told her about his case and explained his suspicions, confident that he would conclude it within twenty-four hours.

It was only when they parked in front of the small house that Sherlock grew a bit uneasy. He'd rented it without the slightest notion that he might eventually have company.

"A-frames are designed with the bedroom on the upper floor, where the heat gathers," he'd haltingly told her as they trudged from the car to the front door. "But that's not saying much. The nights are miserably cold here." Unless she wanted to sleep in a chair by the pellet stove, the lone bed was her only option.

Molly had shrugged affably, not needing him to explain further. "I'm not a mattress or blanket hog. Are you?"

He'd shaken his head and ushered her inside. He'd not realized he was staring at her until his eyes burned with the need to blink. It was just so odd, seeing the drab furnishings of the dacha, to which he'd become reluctantly accustomed, and seeing Molly standing between the scarred kitchen table and the worn, plaid settee. He'd only had an hour's notice that she was coming, and he'd not thought about the implications of it all until then.

The first night proved not to be an issue.

Sherlock had stayed awake, drumming out the solution to his case. He'd wandered upstairs just as the watery, winter light of morning was starting to creep in the window of the room. Pausing only a moment to watch Molly's huddled form in the middle of the bed (just her face visible from her self-made cocoon), he'd quickly gathered clean clothes for the day and crept back downstairs to the laughingly appointed bathroom.

He'd left for the day not long after she'd shuffled sleepily downstairs.

"Make yourself at home," he'd mumbled to her and then decided to hurry away before he did something stupid, like brush her hair out of her face (it was tangled, half of it hanging in her eyes, and she was too groggy to push it back. His fingers itched to do it for her), or compliment her attire (sweat pants and shirt, heavy wool socks. She looked warm and sleepy and it made his belly clench) or something equally ignominious.

"Congratulations. You've successfully dodged the dangerous pathologist," he'd remonstrated with himself as he drove away.

The second night, was a different matter altogether.

It was late when he finally made it back to the house. The pleased flush of triumph was still high on his cheeks and Sherlock happily told Molly just how absolutely right he'd been about everything. She'd laughed as he painted the picture of a guilty mobster running naked from a sauna and landing face-first in a drift of snow as he tried to flee Sherlock's accusations.

Sherlock had hardly noticed the bowls of baked potato soup that Molly kept refilling and putting in front of him. He ate mindlessly, merely filling his stomach to make up for the many meals he'd forgotten over the past several days.

Finally, when he did realize that his stomach was almost uncomfortably full, Sherlock had told Molly that he'd clean up and encouraged her to go on to bed (she'd looked at him in shock until he'd huffed, offended by her lack of faith in his housekeeping skills).

"You look like you're ready to drop, Sherlock. When did you last sleep?" Her voice was pitched with concern.

"I will sleep, I promise. Go to bed, Molly."

Though she'd looked like she didn't believe him, she had finally nodded and climbed the narrow stairs, disappearing from sight.

He'd sat by the stove, soaking in the small bit of warmth that it and his laptop afforded as he booked seats on the next flight out (which wasn't for three days—Saratov was too remote for regular service—but at least the end was in sight). And then he'd checked his site for new clients. Following that, he checked John's blog and made a few snide comments to make up for the doctor's twee posts. And then he'd used Wolfram Alpha to inquire on the disparities between the Thames and Volga rivers' volumetric.

Certainly he'd not been delaying going up to bed. What was there to avoid?

Finally, though, his eyes had begun to droop and he could fight it no longer. Slowly, he'd climbed the stairs and entered the dark of the bedroom. Without looking at the bed, he quietly pulled on his own flannel pajama pants and an old jumper of John's that he'd nicked ages ago.

Molly had warmed the bed quite nicely, and Sherlock had to admit that it made it that much more pleasant to lie down when one wasn't having to climb into frigid bed sheets.

He'd expected to drop off instantly and sleep like the dead.

He'd been very, very wrong.

Now, Sherlock lay there, listening to Molly's quiet, deep breaths. He felt a small stab of resentment that she obviously wasn't experiencing the same turmoil as he. Shouldn't she be the one who was all atwitter with the idea of sharing a bed with him? She had ages of unrequited love building to this moment, while Sherlock only had, well, alright, two years' worth.

He certainly hadn't meant to develop any sort of attraction to her. It wasn't his fault that she happened to be intelligent and kind and lovely and sweet and Molly. But he'd been fine. Just because he was having these feelings, it didn't mean he had to do anything with them, or even acknowledge them. Molly certainly didn't think he was leading her on or toying with her. So why should it bother him to spend an innocent night in bed with her?

Sighing, he shifted his legs a few times and tugged the duvet up around his chin as he pitched over onto his side.

And found Molly's head turned. She was awake and watching him quietly, her large brown eyes just pools of glassy black in the dark.

"Are you okay?" she whispered.

"Yes. Fine. Yes," he said, trying to sound casual. He nearly cursed when she rolled over onto her side to mirror him.

Her hand left the safe warmth of their duvet to tug the wool blanket further over so that it now covered Sherlock, too. "Sorry, I wasn't meaning to keep this one to myself."

He clung hopefully to the excuse. "Yes, you promised me that you aren't a blanket or bed hog. So far all signs point to your being wrong."

Molly mumbled a, "Sorry," and started to scoot toward the far side of the bed.

"What are you doing that for?" he asked. He didn't mean for it to come out quite so desperately.

Her brow crinkled. "I was trying to give you more room. You just told me I'm a bed hog."

"I didn't say I mind it."

He hadn't meant to say it. If he weren't so damn tired, he'd probably have given her a lofty 'Thank you,' rolled in the other direction, and stared at the wall.

But it was out now and he would have to live with the consequences.

When she returned to her original spot, or possibly even a little closer, and he could feel the warmth radiating from her, he decided he rather liked the consequences. He almost thought he was feeling a slight pressure where her body almost brushed his.

Sherlock clamped his eyes shut.

Silence filled the room again. Molly had gone back to sleep, if her even breathing was any indication. He could feel it puff out from between her lips and spread across his throat. He could smell the spearmint of her toothpaste mixed with smell of body-warmed washing powder.

It was soothing. Maybe this was what it would take to get him to sleep.

No.

Ten minutes passed and he was still awake.

He opened his eyes again and looked at her silhouette. He let out a frustrated grumble, and regretted it instantly when Molly's eyes snapped open once more.

"Sorry," he muttered.

"You're having trouble falling asleep."

He almost made a sarcastic comment about her deductive skills, but instead he just nodded once.

"Is it the cold?" she prodded.

"A bit, yes," he said vaguely.

He could see her bite her lip, whether in thought or uncertainty, he wasn't sure. But he didn't have long to wonder.

"Would it help if we tried lying closer together?" she asked.

Doubtful.

"Perhaps," he croaked.

And so Molly closed the distance between them. She watched him carefully, perhaps afraid that he would snarl at her when she wrapped an arm over his waist and pressed her other hand to his chest. He could feel each of her fingers, five points right over his heart.

He swallowed hard. In addition to her hands and arm, he could feel every other spot where they touched acutely. He could feel the softness of her breasts against his lower ribs and the firm points that had to be her nipples, responding to the cold. He could feel where her thighs met his. He could feel her soft, slightly convex belly pressed to his groin.

He could feel blood starting to pool in his cock.

Sherlock went very still.

Oh, this is restful, he took time to think to himself even as he desperately tried to talk his traitorous body back under control. His mind raced with mathematical figures and World War II cryptography and other trivial facts, hoping he'd succeed before Molly noticed something amiss.

Her knee moved between his and she only pressed closer to him.

As her belly rubbed against him with her slight movements, he bit off a curse and clenched his eyes closed, knowing that the situation between his legs was only worsening. He was getting harder and harder with each slight, inhaled breath that she took and he felt the exact moment that she realized what was happening.

Molly froze, too. "Sherlock?"

His name on her lips was hardly even a whisper. And somehow, it only made him ache for her more.

"Hmm?" he tried to ask casually. But it came out as more of a moan.

"Do you want me to move back to the other side of the bed?"

He looked at her, wishing it were easier to say "Yes, please do."

He'd done a rather good job ignoring or compartmentalizing sex since his early twenties. Oh, sure, there were a few exclusions, but he didn't seek it out, because his mind was where he felt true arousal. His mind was what needed tending so that it didn't fall stagnant and fall back to addiction. Sex was a distraction from that.

But the thing was, Molly was rather good at arousing his mind as well as his body. He didn't feel stagnant or childishly distracted by her or his body's reaction to her. If anything, he felt like he was seeing things sharply for the first time since this round of exhaustion set in.

So, where he should have said, 'Yes, please move,' to her, instead he gave a guttural, "No."

"Do you want me to…?" She swallowed and let her eyes drift nervously to the side.

"Yes."

Her gaze snapped back to him.

Carefully, Molly hitched her leg over his. The only sounds in the room were the rustle of the duvet and their quiet breathing.

When Sherlock didn't object to the intimate contact, or to her short nails that dug into his jumper and flesh, she exhaled a calming breath. Slowly, experimentally, she rolled her hips against him, and his body jerked in response.

He sucked in a lungful of air and then moved his head so that his lips could seek hers. It didn't start out slow or sweet. They looked for each other and found a tempest of pressed lips and sliding tongues. Each breath and sound they made, the other felt.

As their mouths met over and over, Sherlock allowed his own arms to work their way around Molly. He had to wriggle is right arm under her body, but it encouraged her to press closer still to him.

She continued to move against him while he grabbed handfuls of her sweatshirt, bunching it up higher and higher with each press of her hips. Reluctantly, he allowed their bodies to move apart long enough for him to tug it over her head, and she took the opportunity to treat his jumper in kind.

He relished the jolt that shot right to his cock as their flesh met. He realized he was murmuring words of encouragement to Molly ("Yes, please, Christ, yes"), though he doubted she could tell much of what he was saying, since the majority of it was mumbled against her lips.

When his hand traced up the delicate line of her waist, over the bumps of her ribs, to finally cup her right breast, she made her own noises of praise. As his thumb strummed her nipple, her back arched away from him and he took the opportunity to curl around her, latching his mouth to the peak of her untended breast. He suckled her, feeling his cheeks pull in with the force of each draw.

Molly's thin, graceful fingers wove into and tugged at his hair, and he looked up at her face, dark in the night of their unlit room. Her lashes were long shadows against pale cheeks. But even without a light to aid him, Sherlock could tell that she had a building flush. Where her skin had been a blue-alabaster before, now there were hints of violet along her cheeks and across her chest.

He could not resist tracing that flush with his lips, following it from clavicle to breast and back, nipping and tasting as she writhed against him.

He drew back to look at her—Molly on a winter's night—and she blinked her eyes open to stare back at him.

"Kiss me" he whispered, and she was only too glad to comply. The sweetness of her lips meeting his was a strange dichotomy to the carnality of everything else they were doing. He gratefully accepted it, and her hands cupping at his shoulders and then her nails dragging lightly down his back.

His arm moved back around her waist, and he held her lower half almost completely still as he rubbed against her again and again. As he moved with her, their mating mouths kept time.

Finally, he could stand it no longer, and Sherlock began pushing impatiently at the elastic band of her sweatpants, and Molly's fingers got busy unknotting the string on his pajama bottoms. They both refused to roll away from each other, so they moved with no grace as they worked to shed their remaining clothes.

"Now I know what a beached porpoise feels like," Molly laughed, before snorting in relief when her flailing knee nearly caught Sherlock in a sensitive place but just missed. He hardly noticed. He was too busy fighting with his socks to pay much mind other than his body's aroused hum at the notion of Molly Hooper lying before him, completely naked and waiting for him.

It made him even less coordinated, and Sherlock usually prided himself on his sure movements.

But when he looked back up at her eager face, he couldn't keep a small, huffed laugh from escaping, realizing that she was having fun. That he was, too. It was a strange sensation, to be achy and breathless and embarrassingly gauche and be happy about it.

Once their clothes were kicked down to the foot of the bed, Sherlock dove for Molly again, and she for him. They collided as their hands smoothed over flesh, gripping and pulling each other closer still.

Sherlock ran his hand down the length of Molly's thigh and cupped it around the back of her knee. He ignored her ticklish jolt and tugged at her leg until it was hooked back over his hip. He moaned as the head of his cock brushed against her wet heat, and Molly didn't help at all as she wriggled against him, stopping when he was situated right at her entrance.

His hand came up and curled around her neck, and the beating of her pulse against his thumb should have told Sherlock all he needed to know. But still, he whispered, "May I?"

She smiled at him and nodded. With a push forward, he was sliding into her beckoning heat. He groaned gratefully and felt her own, fluttery breath ruffle his hair.

Tentatively rocking of his body against Molly's, he moved in her, feeling the slick strength of her muscles clasp around him, and his pleasure was a strange sensation of icy, burning heat. Their mouths met periodically, and there was no art to their kisses, just a primal rooting for contact. The rest of their time was spent with their faces pressed against each other's shoulders.

Molly's chest heaved with their efforts, and Sherlock flattened his hands between her damp shoulder blades, eager to feel the sympathetic flex of her back muscles with each, labored draw of her lungs.

Lying as they were on their sides, Sherlock was aware that their range of movement was not optimal. At first, he didn't care. He liked how close they were this way, how easy it was to reach her lips for a kiss or to drag his mouth across her cheekbones. But after a while, it wasn't enough.

Though she protested when he hooked his elbow under her knee, she soon sighed with approval as he followed her over so that she was covered by him. He hovered over, holding himself up on his hands and knees, though his left arm was still keeping her leg hitched up

The lumpy mattress tried to make him collapse in a heap, but he managed not to lose his balance as he continued to work in her. A low moan filled the room, and Molly's muscles grew more and more taut with each thrust.

He looked down on her small form beneath his. He could see vague shadows where they were joined, and the unclear glimpses only served to excite him more, and made him move faster and harder. The thought that he could have been doing this for ages bothered him, as did the notion that he hadn't made himself clear before they began.

"I'm not with you because I'm tired," he panted in her ear. It suddenly felt important that she know.

"Good," she gasped, though it was clearly and effort for her to speak through all of the tension in her body. Kicking her head back on the pillow to give him more space to bury his face against her neck, she did manage to say, "I'm not with you because you're tired."

"Excellent," he assured her. His pace was nearing a frantic roughness, and he felt a tightening in his back and balls, and knew he didn't have long.

Moments before his vision blackened and everything became a rushing release and ringing in his ears, he heard Molly give a low, hoarse cry, and felt the tight fluttering of her muscles around him.

He stayed suspended over her for a moment, his hips twitching a little against hers, until his muscles turned to jelly. He sank down on top of her, trying not to knock the breath out of her lungs. Sherlock moved so that her leg was no longer hooked over his forearm. Absently, he rubbed her hip and her thigh in case the position had bothered her at all, but if her hands running up and down his back were any indication, she was feeling no ill effects from their encounter.

They didn't speak for several minutes. By the time they finally did, their heartbeats had slowed their breaths had evened out.

"You do realize, with the sheets being all damp, that it's going to be even more frigid when we finally cool down," she whispered in his ear, nuzzling at the hair that curled over it.

"Then I guess we'll just have to keep each other warm," Sherlock slurred. He tried to stay alert, to mark every memory of her skin against his cheek and every stroke of her fingers across his back with indelible ink. But he then decided he'd just have to reinforce it all in the morning. He had three days to lose himself in Molly Hooper, after all.

And many days after that, he suggested to himself with a drowsy smirk.

After hours and years of trying, Sherlock Holmes sank into a deep, dreamless sleep, his head pillowed on her chest and her arms holding him tightly.

The End