Disclaimer: I own nothing and make no profit, except my enjoyment in writing.

A/N: Set in the moment after a certain man made the only decision he could make...

Yet the world fades into darkness

The truth neither one denies,

In the end hold fast to love

Revealed by alexandrite eyes.

–bcbdrums

Alexandrite

You turn and kneel, your shoulders tense. Your head bows as the hero collapses and only the human being is left, humbled and waiting for judgment. I can but watch as all your powers are taken from you along with your freedom and you are left just a man, the facade of invulnerability finally shattered. But it is not your mortality that takes my breath away.

Once you were immovable, a set force within the macrocosm of London. Like an angel of the Almighty you observed the rapid spinning of the earth, a great thinking mind raised above the day-to-day activity of mere mortals, disdainful of the commonplace things that men hold so dear. With eyes hard and piercing as diamonds you watched me move among them and gave the same unfeeling appraisal as when at your work, the failure of a former surgeon no different to you than the success of a serial murderer. Lives saved or taken, all are but players in the all-important game of keeping you from being bored. To you there was no higher priority.

But at some point the smallest of shifts occurred—a slightly different color to your eyes when an innocent life was lost, or when I emerged from the city's maelstrom, worn to a feigned attempt at living when everything happy and ordinary became too crushing. I watched the label of sociopath gently fall away as you reasoned with a client that their life without a loved one was worth living, and as your late-night violin caprices erased my own lack of self-worth and lifted me back to a place of peace. Could it be that you began to find peace as well?

But anything I thought I knew was challenged upon your return to the world, when the great deception was revealed. Triumphant you came, proclaiming victory over intellect, evil, and even death, with no other thought than to be restored to your throne. Your eyes glimmered like the gold of a prize you thought you had won—the honor certainly due a superior mind. Perhaps it was then that I was of most use to you, stealing away the gold and leaving only grey upon the revelation that it is so much more than the mind that matters in this world. And in the wake of that harsh truth I find that you have led me to mine.

I see my own facade now, built sturdily around that which I think I can control. Cloaked under words like ordinary and average, I live the life every good soldier should. Do the job well and come home to the wife, obeying the routine. Obey the routine. I must, because without it I will surely lose myself again. Stay within the structure of what is typical to the world, because I have nothing else.

I might have eventually come to accept what I am and what I like, eventually find a balance between the person the world wants me to be and the person I am. But now with your choice for which I know I am responsible, what will there be for me? A life clothed in uncertainty and danger, but not the sort that should be. And what I wanted and even yearned for, what I subconsciously strove to glean in your soul, has been simultaneously revealed and stolen away. Because in the end, the world always wins.

The curtain has fallen and the lights turned out. No masks are worn and I see who you are behind yours for one final time and perhaps truly the first before you turn, even as I fight to maintain my own. Your eyes have dimmed and the soft soul of humanity is all that they hold as your words reveal to me—only and always—who you really are.

Your mind is tenacious, stable, and capable of resisting even the most terrible of forces. There is always an answer when you think, and indeed you found one tonight. The result is what matters and your mind always delivers. But beyond the mind is the heart, and through the prismatic shifts in your deeply pooled eyes all of its fractures are plain to be seen.

My own I can feel screaming as our world falls away. How could this be the answer? How could you, of all people, have come to the place where your heart was forced to decide? Maybe I shouldn't have demanded so much. Maybe all would be right if I had accepted who I am long ago, and I wouldn't have driven your mind to this point.

But I know my arguments are in vain, for one thing I have seen clearly in your final, crystal gaze...

Your heart has been making your decisions for a long time.