Soliloquy

by The Lighthouse's Keeper

It was chance meeting, neither expected the other yet here they were and it changed everything. A short little drabble. No dialogue. Rated T for suggestions of death and suicide. Spoilers for "The Reichenbach Fall" (kind of). My first story.

So I'm pretty proud of this. It's really short (bleurggggh), but it took me awhile to write and it's kind of drabble-y. :/ Whatever. Enjoy! -Oakleigh

He was hyperaware. His eyelashes fluttering together in a blink, his lips being painfully dry, his shirt too tight at the cuff of right sleeve, his heart pounding in his throat, all were crowding the front of his mind and he was aware. Then a numbness, blooming from his left ankle, spreading, spreading through his feet and his legs and up his neck and his whole body, mind, everything was numb but for the gaping hole in his heart. With nothing left to focus on, the hole was growing and growing and growing it hurt.

He felt a shock go through his body and he gasped.

The man nodded, his eyes gleaming with pain and regret and sorrow and for the emotion he was a stranger.

The look threw him off his guard and the man blinked back tears. More emotion who is he he's not who he was WHO WAS HE?

The whisper, for it hardly even counted as such, broke his heart in two all over again and he couldn't breathe couldn't think couldn't see couldn't feel could only hear the other man's voice break into a sob. And he looked up, for the man could not would not did not cry he never had he never should have so why was he crying. The two men looked at each other, two souls so close and yet so far who had felt guilt and fear and sorrow and helplessness. They where haunted by their mistakes, mistakes that refused to let them go to let them move on and live and be free. And the ghosts would haunt them until they die because each man had done things and they regretted those things but they could not change because the men had been pre-programmed to make mistakes and then feel guilt and spend their lives striving to change it because of who they were.

Two brilliant minds trapped in a fishbowl for the world to watch and to wait. To wait for the world to forgive them even though it never would. And they weren't afraid of death, because it meant escape from the torture and the guilt and the regret that they had been running from and fighting against but would it really free them could it save them from their pasts. And they fought to overturn the fishbowl and when they did they found someone like them who had trapped them and himself in it again and laughed at their panic. He had escaped, hadn't he, but he had stolen one of the them with him but not all the way and it split the men in two.

He felt joy and anger and guilt and sorrow and curiosity and a overload of things he hasn't expected nor known he could feel because the two men didn't feel emotions did they because all emotions did was get in the way and tear you apart. And he tried to stop the memories, the feelings but he was powerless and the two men were still standing there staring, two men high above their hearts and ruling from their minds but always always they felt and they denied it and they fought it and suppressed it but it never went away. Because they loved each other in the way men do though they denied it. Archenemies, they said but they knew it wasn't true and they really did care and they relied on each other, always had always will. They had no experience with feelings and so they stared.

The two brothers just stared.