It takes him a few minutes to do anything after he sees him for the first time. Well. Not the first time. But it feels like the first time, like its been centuries since he's seen that lovely face look at him, and he doesn't understand, doesn't understand, but he decides that he's grateful anyway. If his mind has finally gone, then he is thankful that madness has been so kind to him, so kind to allow him to see this man one last time.
He closes his eyes and sways. Almost falls. A hand reaches out for him. He draws back, and he can almost feel confusion and get radiating off of his delusion.
"Please don't." He says, and his face is a mask of horrible blankness. His voice is firm, and he wonders how that is. How is that?
"Why not?" And oh god. He almost crumpled to the floor when he hears that voice. The voice that had kept him safe so many times, made him laugh, made him scream, and once it made him cry.
But he doesn't want to think of that.
He tries to use the John-Watson-solider voice when he explains. That tone that was his safe-guard. "Please don't touch me. Madness has been kind, but this- this would kill me, you touching me, and I'll wake up and-and...fuck." The solider voice couldn't safe-guard him anymore. It couldn't for a while. Not since he discarded it, and made someone else's voice his protection.
He thinks of this, and this time he really does fall. He feels arms encircle him, and a face press into his shoulder blades when they hit the ground. Well isn't that just bloody typical, of course he wouldn't listen.
When did he ever? He feels tears stain his shirt, and he doesn't know what to think, can't think, is trying his hardest not to think. After being numb for so long, why is it impossible now?
"John, my John. I'm real, you have to trust me, I'm real." The voice sounds impossibly sad, and he decides, delusion or not, new rule: Sherlock's voice never gets to sound like that again. He said it like a plea-as if he didn't feel real, and needed John's confirmation that he was. And god help him, John couldn't find it in him to deny him that.
Briefly John wonders, can you break a delusion's heart? Do they feel emotions?
"I'm real John, I'm here and I'm real, Im real. Please." John screws his eyes shut, an apologizes to his poor, already tortured sanity for what he was about to do. He brings his arms up, and presses them to the chest of his delusion. Feels a beating.
He's a doctor. He's trained so that this sensation is the definition of alive.
He chokes. "You made me-" He can't finish his sentence. His brain plays a sick mixture of his nightmares all at once.
"Goodbye John"
"No-don't."
"No please let me through, let me through, he's my friend. No, he's my friend."
"Nobody could be that clever."
"But you could."
"I can't stop John Watson too. Stop his heart."
"I'm a fake"
"No. Alright, stop it now."
"My best friend. Sherlock Holmes."
"They had snipers John, snipers trained on you, and if I didn't jump, if I didn't kill myself, they would've killed you. Jim Moriarty said that he would burn the heart out of me, I was not going to allow him to."
John's lips were definitely numb now. "I don't understand."
"Oh John. Don't you know I've no heart without you?" The words force John to meet his eyes, those eyes, and see for certain the truth in them.
John always loved his eyes. The blue-green-silver ocean eyes. John always though, fuck Lucy, its him with the kaleidoscope eyes. The were never one colour for certain. Those eyes could hide all emotion, every pain, every thought.
But John could always read them. And what he read now broke his heart.
And so he took the face of the man with the kaleidoscope eyes in his hands, and he pressed his lips to them. Sherlock's lips responded desperately, as if he was real at last, as if he really were dead before, and John Watson was his resurrection.
Well, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were always that to each other, simultaneously the kryptonite and the cure.
They broke apart, and the detective leaned his forehead against the soldier's. A sigh escaped his lips, and the tears still ran down his face. John wiped them off with his thumb, ad kissed the tracks of his tears.
"I was alone and you fixed me. I was alone again, and I see that so were you. Don't worry love. We'll fix each other now."
Sherlock brought John's face back to his own, and John could hear the promise in them. They wouldn't ever be alone again.
Sherlock Holmes made him laugh, scream, smile, and one time, he made him cry. But John didn't want to think of that right now. Right now he wanted to think about the impossibility of the genius detective befriending a lost army doctor, the adventures on the streets of London, and the best of days.
Sherlock and John.