He recovered quickly from his unwanted fit, thankfully, and as he came to himself again, Watson automatically clamped his hand over Holmes's on his shoulder, treasuring, savouring the familiar feel of those fingers under his. He thought he'd never hold that hand in his again.

"I make a scene?" he said, trying not to sound hysterical. "You come in here in disguise and jump out at me like a... like a common thief, and I'm the one who makes a scene. You're really too much. After two years--"

He trailed off, looking at Holmes properly now, drinking in his face and his features and the way he was pressed up against Watson's legs. Two years. It had been two years? It was one thing to stubbornly believe in an impossible love affair in an even more impossible setting when that was the only thing that gave him any comfort. It was a little harder to act on it. There had been the telegram to Mycroft, he was sure of that. The mention of the island had to have meant what he thought, didn't it? What other possibility was there?

He thought he felt a tingling in the skin of his face, as though someone had touched him there, but that meant nothing, and he could not remember the touch in any event, not reliably.

Watson leaned forward in his chair, not trembling although he could not think why, and brought his face very close to Holmes's. He slid his hand over Holmes's shoulder, just at the crook of the neck -- justifiably a casual touch if he had to defend himself, he thought desperately as he did it, but far more appropriately intimate if he was not completely mad, if he was not imagining things that had never happened.

But then, would Holmes be sitting like this, pressed against him, if it was all a lie?

Watson let his forehead come to rest against Holmes's, and it was all so familiar, so right, even after these long two years and all the doubt and fears that he was losing his mind.

"Where have you been?"