If, as an outsider, one would look upon the appearance of John Watson sitting at a restaurant table, one would account for two things. One, that he was an ordinary man. From the look of his serious clothing, his neatly combed hair and quiet dining etiquette, there was nothing extraordinary that would single him out amongst the other strangers in the restaurant. Second, he was a sad man. There was something in the way he held himself—in his posture and stance—that indicated a worn out soul. His eyes as well held a deep exhaustion (or perhaps melancholy), one that a person gets after staring at a horizon for too long after journeying on and on in search of something to break the monotony. In John Watson's case, the monotony was missing his best friend: Sherlock Holmes. This is the John Watson you would find if you were to look upon him alone. However, his entire demeanor transforms when Mary, his delicately pleasant girlfriend sits back down and joins him at the table.

John looks up quickly at her and clears his throat a little, blinking away any remnants of the broken John Watson that he allows himself in between the moments he has with Mary. The two have barely resumed their prior interrupted conversation when Mary's phone rings. The call on the other end is apparently urgent, because Mary stands up and excuses herself. She walks out of the restaurant in order to take the call in the cold air of the winter evening.

As Mary is about to step out into the crisp frigid night, she passes a tall and leanly slender man in a full-length overcoat. He holds the door open for her as she passes through and she gives a glance of thanks to him.

The tall, luminous stranger sweeps carefully past the other tables, headed towards one in particular. This man walked with a conviction in his steps and sharp keen eyes beneath his disheveled curly locks. In a sea of strangers, his eyes instantly home in on the man he seeks. His gaze settles on John Watson, and he is quite surprised by the relief that floods his veins. It was as if he expected to find a different man who merely resembled John; afraid the John Watson he knew had gone away somewhere. However, now that he knew John was safely dining not twenty feet away from him, he finally feels he has found his ground again. He has found home.

The fact was he was the one who had gone away. He forcibly dissolved himself into a memory for the sake of his beloved friends and now what faced him was a task so difficult, he was fully enveloped in an emotion he hated: uncertainty. Infamous for being an erudite, he usually moved with an air of acute intelligence and calculation. He was never wrong. But here he stood, unable to make a single step forward for he had no inkling as to how to proceed. He very rarely questioned himself and this hesitation was paralyzing. How does one present themselves to someone who has known you to be dead? How did he, Sherlock Holmes, let John Watson know that, after many grueling and heart aching months spent back in therapy and solitude and waking up to nightmares in the quiet shadows of 221B, he was in fact alive?

Whatever it was he decided, he could not wait for a more opportune time. He briskly marches over to the table and sits himself down across from John, but not without noticing what was on his plate.

"Really John, you must be more adventurous and stop having the same pasta every time you come here. I have already informed you on what it was I saw in their back kitchen—"

Sherlock's eyes flit round the table as he says this, analyzing the utensils' positions on Mary's plate (she's left handed), the napkin (lip gloss, not stick), the amount of food John had eaten (not very much, he merely rearranged his vegetables now and then), and the meals everyone at the surrounding tables were having (five chicken parmesans, three rib eye steaks and three Caesar salads). The perpetually functioning gears and mechanics of his brain whir and load all this new information and it isn't until his eyes finally meet John's that his thoughts halt. The stare that now occupies John's eyes resonate in his face and shifts his body's stature. Sherlock's precise eyes look him up and down, unable to read his emotion and the two sit staring at each other for quite some time.

The only movement between the two is the tremor of John's hand which is now only weakly clutching the fork between his fingers. John has never been more terrified in his life. His greatest fear of being completely mad had come true. His depression had finally manifested itself in a physical form that was so extreme that it was accurate; so accurate that it had mimicked the very intrusive cynicism he had grown to miss. He didn't dare say a word as he stared at the insanity before his eyes, fearing that he may alarm others around him. But, what came next was something John could never have prepared for.

"John, there is no easy way to tell you this so I'll just give it to you straight," the illusion says, and Sherlock touches his hand in an attempt to settle the tremor.

Very abruptly—and quite violently—John pushes himself out of his chair and jerks his hand back so hard, that his fork (along with the piece of chicken on it) goes flying into another woman's plate. John quickly covers his eyes with his palms, desperately trying to erase the delusion in front of him. His breathing quickened and he could feel heat pulsating with every heavy beat of his heart.

At first Sherlock watches in awe at his friend's reaction. The sheer panic that had erupted in John's eyes alarmed him so much that he could feel the same panic rising up in his own skin. He had no idea of the effect he had on John, and even regretted his strategy of showing up at the restaurant. When he sees John back away, he suddenly feels fear. An army of thoughts crosses his mind of John leaving and slipping from his grasp forever; a feeling he had not felt since the incident at the pool with Moriarty.

John staggers backward expecting to hit the table behind him, but a hand catches his arm. He looks up and Sherlock grips him by the shoulders and stares intensely into his eyes, trying to ground his sudden panic.

"John, listen to me." Sherlock urges, seating him back down onto his chair, "Calm down. I—I don't know how else to say this, but I'm not dead. I'm not dead! And I am aware that I made you think so, but I had to do it! I did it for the good of—" Sherlock stops short because John suddenly starts laughing quietly with his finger held to his lips.

"This is incredible. My mind is incredible, it's even got your cheekbones right, and the way you've got your collar up."

"John, I know you think you're having a delusion, but can a delusion do this?" Sherlock pours a cup of water on John's pants.

"Or this?" Sherlock takes a grape from a dish at the other table and throws it at John's head.

"Or tell you that every night for the first three months at our flat you checked your doors and windows and furniture before you went to bed out of habitual fear from your days in the military for fire arms or bombs? Or how I pointed out that you ordered that pasta primavera every time we've been here? Or that you've had precisely eleven girlfriends and this one won't last either?"

John looks up to see Mary standing behind Sherlock in confusion and irritation. She leans around him and says "Who is this man?"

John is about to answer when he says, "Wait, you—you see him too?" He walks past Sherlock to Mary and grabs her by the shoulders, his face inches from hers. "You mean to tell me, you see this man…standing right there, with the hair and the coat and the…face?"

"Yes…John, what's going on?" Mary's eyes flash with fear; she's never seen him act like this.

Suddenly John turns around, takes his coat from his chair and heads for the door. Mary and Sherlock stare at his retreating back for a moment before they chase after him.

As soon as Sherlock steps out onto the sidewalk, there is a fresh sheet of snow on the ground, his feet making fresh patterns in white. Sherlock looks up at the flakes descending lightly from the black sky, the night silent and the street empty except for the one figure hastily crossing the street to the other side. Sherlock watches John for a few seconds and as he does, he could literally feel the distance between them, growing with each step John took. For three years he had lived with this sensation—this disparate feeling he had between his mind and his heart—and only now could he pinpoint exactly what it was. He had waited three, very long years for this moment. He wasn't going to let it walk away.

"John!" he yells, and John stops in the middle of the street.

I love nights like this—the first snowfall of the year is what crosses John's mind as he stands in the middle of the street. The silence, no cars on the street and just the snow floating down humbly as if embarrassed to be bearing witness to this moment. But to John, he always liked the image of the crowded flakes falling together in harmony. They were never alone, and he felt loved in their company.

As he stuffs his hands in his pockets, ready to walk on despite his name being called, he hears footsteps close behind him. He inhales the cold air through his nostrils and lets it crawl down into his lungs. He finally turns around and exhales, clouding Sherlock's face with his misty breath. As soon as the mist clears, all he can see is his sharp blue eyes piercing down at him from beneath his hair. No words pass between the two as they stand in the middle of the street with a single halogen light above them.

It was an odd scene to Mary, who decided to stay just outside the restaurant door, watching the two just stand there. But she knew that this was something of John's affair. Something was special about this man, and she wasn't going to intrude. Who that man was she could begin to guess, but wasn't entirely sure of her own deductions.

John finally decides to speak, but hadn't decided on what he was going to say until he hears himself say,

"Why?"

Sherlock takes a moment. A long moment. John notices his prominent jaw clench in contemplation. Sherlock looks away with a gloss in his eyes. Finally, his eyes locks with John's once again and he utters in his deep voice,

"I couldn't stand to have you killed."

John breaths out a small laugh as he shakes his head and Sherlock looks at him with a raised brow. Suddenly, without thinking, John's hand whips across Sherlock's face, knocking him onto the street. John stands over him for a moment, as Sherlock sits up rubbing his cheek, before he climbs on top of him and starts wrestling with him clumsily.

"Agh—John—" Sherlock muffles as John's hand covers his mouth, and his other hand pushes Sherlock's face into the snow. Sherlock manages to wrestle John's hand away from his mouth but doesn't fight to get him off. John's hands then move to Sherlock's hair, aggressively ruining it (for lack of a better word; he wasn't really accomplishing anything) and then grabs Sherlock's collar, shoving him again and again into the ground.

The two look ridiculous on the street: two grown men awkwardly getting into a row with the smaller man clearly winning. The truth of it was, Sherlock knew he deserved every bit of scuffle from John and was letting him have at it as much as he liked. Every shove stood for a day he ate breakfast alone. A rough smack for each day he came home to an empty flat. And the truth of it was, John wasn't trying to hurt Sherlock at all; he just really wanted him to be real. Every grapple a confirmation that he was alive. Each frustrated grab a certainty that his best friend was home.

Soon enough though, Sherlock realizes that John isn't really angry and he starts to laugh as John tries to roll him over using his own body weight. Sherlock is much heavier, and John really isn't able to move him that far. So he ends up just flopping down onto his stomach as John lies on his back, panting. The two lie side by side, and Sherlock looks up at his friend from the concrete and says breathlessly, "Are you finished, John?"

John turns his head to look at his friend and says, "You really are a bloody bastard, you know that?"

Sherlock gets back up to his feet and offers a hand to John. He helps him up when suddenly John grabs him by his coat collar again.

John grabs him and holds him there as hard as he can and trying to believe as hard as he can that this was Sherlock Holmes. That he is not six feet under the ground. That he may be able to wake up tomorrow to the wretched sounds of his violin and not have it be a hallucination. That he may go to sleep—after probably being insulted—knowing there was someone in the living room analyzing specimens until three in the morning.

He wants to tell him to never stop talking ever again, that he could talk for three days straight if he wished because he wanted to listen. God he wants nothing more than to listen to him rant on and on about blood work or how stupid coroners were or how the gait of a man dictated his affairs and to see the mess in the kitchen and the living room and to yell at him for the obscene body parts and the fact that there was no milk and he wanted to tell him to never leave me again—

But he could not. He could not hold himself back any longer and he started to cry.

Sherlock watches John's face crumple in sadness and as his breathing heaves, he takes John's head and tucks it in against his chest. He brings his other arm to protectively embrace him and there is no sound except for the muffled sobs into Sherlock's coat. Sherlock only ever had three hugs in his life and two of them were from his mother.

Sherlock tilts his head back to stare into the falling white flecks above and breathes, "Oh, my dear Watson."