IT BEGINS, AS it will end, with a sudden stirring of the winter winds, and with two.

The wind was of the restless kind that intersects perfectly with autumn's end. The winter had seemed as though it would never end—but then, just when they had nearly forgotten it; when they had least expected it—warmth came, and a different light.

It was a nice day, all things considered. All the days that month had been nice—which is to say, of course: frigid, and swathed in a pearly pink light. No, to say that it was simply beautiful would be to blaspheme its creator.

THE TRIAL WAS irretrievably over. Everything that could've been said had been, and Noël Mikkelsen had never once doubted that he would be the losing party.

The verdict had come at nine o'clock, one bright, sunny morning in the final days of November, which are the prelude to the holiday season. Now, all that remained of the trial was a televised summary from the reporters that were waiting en masse outside the Supreme Justice Building.

Noël followed the bailiff through the doors of the courtroom, rubbing the circulation back into his hands, for they had only just removed the cuffs. He paused at the threshold of the main entrance. He was in a foul, black mood, and had no intention of discussing the verdict any further, nor to reiterate his view on the matter. But the questions were unavoidable, and he of all people knew that they must be equally asked as answered.

He had never anticipated that one day he would become a criminal—a dandy, certainly; a fairy, a flamer, a bardash, and a poof most of all, but not the conversation-starter at the table on Christmas Eve, nor the picture that shy young things plastered to their bedroom walls.

And so, he straightened up and gave the cameras a debonaire smile, as the rabble offered up their friendly, flustered greetings from behind the ropes.

"Right. Shall we get on with it, then?" He showed them his straight white teeth, this being a more accurate description than to call it a smile. He pulled at the lapels of his suit, feeling quite pleased with himself, despite it all.

"Where are you off to, Sherlock?" one of the reporters called.

Noel, as ever, forced himself not to roll his eyes. When he was twenty-four, and had just begun publishing his work in Joie de Vie magazine, he had chanced upon a band of bank robbers that had pulled off nine successful heists in the past three years. There was no doubt that it had been the same men in every instance—their trademark had been to hold up three banks at once, with military precision. They had worn horrific, blood-spattered masks, and had thus been deemed the "Nightmare of Copenhagen" by the televised press. Then the papers had redubbed them the "Nightmare Before Christmas," which sounded far more sinister—appropriate, he thought, to the fact that they had recklessly fired warning shots into the masses of incredulous passerby twice.

Their second outing had been at a bank in Copenhagen, just before the city would be settling down to their families and festivities until the New Year. Noël had been home for the holidays, boarding at his mother's, and had been just up the street from the bank. He and his mates were loitering outside the Hôtel d'Angleterre, laughing and chewing the fat, like they always did. His stepfather had made the booking at Marchal, and the others, less wealthy than he, had come running from all directions to gorge themselves on truffles, caviar, langoustines swimming in butter, pigeon royal, and panna cotta before the day was done, and their beloved Noël would be shipped off to Paris once more.

And so, they had stood there in the doorway of the hotel, begging Noël to come with them to the Christmas markets on Kronprinsessegade, when gunshots had ricocheted off the walls, and screaming erupted from the crowd. They had watched idly as a reporter from the local radio station made all due haste for the nearest public telephone, then listened in the stuffy foyer as he dictated a first-hand account on live broadcast.

That was the first Christmas. The second had also been in Copenhagen, and this time Noël had been at an "intimate party" of sorts, in an admirable effort to evade his grandfather's dreadful insistence on Noël performing his "Herr Carlsberg" impression for every guest as they arrived. It was, in truth, a hideous excuse to tart him up in a suit and tie, and to make him part his hair like the man on the telly, so they could all have a laugh at his attempts to replicate the Danish accent. His own was far closer to a Scotsman's, refined by a slight Parisian lilt.

Why he had made the connection, he could never have explained—not to the officers at the Police Nationale; not to God himself—but as he had listened to the morning news, bent over a table, as another man took him roughly from behind, he had recalled the six men boarded in a flat nearby. He had seen them sipping tea on their gallery, across the street. They were the tall, well-built type, and had been bare-chested, even in the bitter cold. There had been something about them that had forced him back out onto the gallery that day, and not only their sinfully beautiful faces.

There had been no reason to suspect them of anything at the time, but still, he had stumbled out onto the gallery after the man had pulled up his pants and helped him to his feet. He admired them from a distance, leaning fetchingly over the railing. That had been the morning of the seventh day, and he recalled being scarcely able to stand, much less walk.

Their room had been on the uppermost floor, overlooking the gardens. Noël had lowered himself down, balancing on the balls of his feet, to peer through the bars of the railing, into the flat's blacked-out windows. From what little he could see, it was empty.

Then, fifteen minutes later, when his cigarette had burnt down to a stub between his fingers, and he was staring up at the blank white sky, a cab had skidded to a halt along the pavement, and the men had emerged, each carrying a black sports bag.

Then, one of them rounded the car and took from the boot something that he quickly covered with the long drape of his coat. Even from a relatively distant vantage point, Noël had identified it as an assault rifle—the exact model that had accompanied him throughout the year of his military service. That was when he'd crept inside, slipping past the others, and rung the police from the telephone in the hallway, thereby eliciting a three-day siege on the hotel and blanket coverage by the media. He had been offered the most exclusive seat, all the while collecting an immensely gratifying fee from the magazines for his interviews. The police had set up their headquarters on the green, just below the room in which the party went on, undisturbed.

The end of the Nightmare Before Christmas had given him the star-studded nickname that had launched him into the stratosphere as a young author. The media hadn't been able to resist using the headline: "SHERLOCK CRACKS THE CASE." The tongue-in-cheek story had been written by a much younger columnist, and had contained several references to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Angel of Westminster." And, to make matters worse, they had also run the story with the full-colour photo that would later become the cover of his first novel: Noël, seated at the press conference table, holding his hand up to his face, blue eyes piercing in a bone-white face. His thick blond hair had been falling forward onto his forehead, and the sharp-cut roses on his shirt had been the very same red as the blood streaming from his nose.

It made no difference that Noël had never in his life employed the name "Sherlock"—from then on, he had been canonised the patron saint of the late nineteenth century by his peers. It was an epithet used as a means of provocation, neither hostile, nor exceedingly cordial. And, despite his deep-seated respect for Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, whose grandiose adventures were among his fondest memories of childhood, still, he detested the comparison. It had taken him two years and several, far more significant professional successes to subdue it completely, but still he flinched whenever it was used in his hearing.

Now, he achieved a well-meant grimace, and said to the reporter that had addressed him: "Come on, then. Think of something new. You always do."

His tone was not at all unpleasant—they were all familiar with one another, and his most vicious critics hadn't yet made an appearance that morning. One man in particular had been a close colleague of his, and at the New Year's Eve party where he had belatedly celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday, he had almost succeeded in picking up the presenter of France 24: Nicholas Bergamot.

"You took a fatal hit in there today," said someone from the crowd. "How does it feel to have made it out the other side unscathed?"

Despite the seriousness of the inquiry, neither Noël, nor the elder journalists could help but smile. He exchanged glances with Nicholas mere moments before another half-wit nearly took his nose off his face with the hard end of a microphone.

"I can only regret that the court did not come to another conclusion," he grumbled, pressing the cuff of his sleeve to his now pounding mouth.

"Three months incarcerated and thirteen thousand in damages. Seems like the punishment outweighs the crime."

"I've endured far worse, by people far less forgiving."

"Are you going to apologise to Jean-Baptiste?"

A close-lipped smile; a tilt of the head. "Perhaps another time. In fact, I heard the Alain Ducasse just received another star in the Michelin Guide this January. I've been meaning to place a booking to congratulate him." He pushed three fingers into the breast pocket of his suit, producing a sleek black business card with a flourish. "Do give this to him for me, will you?"

Several hands reached forward from the crowd to accept the card, but Nicholas nicked it from between his fingers before they could take a single step toward him.

"How has the trial changed your previous judgement of his character?"

He was pale as a ghost. "I had every reason to publish what I did. However, the verdict has been decided, and I have no choice but to accept the consequences of my actions. I will be discussing the future of my employment with the Joie de Vie editorial staff in the coming weeks. Thank you. Nothing further."

"How could you have forgotten to provide evidence?" Nicholas. Though his expression was neutral, there was a faint glimmer of disappointment in his eyes.

"I have nothing to add," he rephrased. "Perhaps we'll call a press conference at a later date, but for now, nothing further."

It was hardly the answer they had anticipated. Still, the others accepted this as an official declaration of surrender and parted like the Red Sea to allow him entry. But Nicholas took him by the collar and thrust him back against the doors of the courthouse.

"Is it true?" he demanded.

Noël's hand flew to his face, eyes wide with wonder. "You've put yourself on quite a high horse, Monsieur Bergamot. Very ivory tower, very reductive, very far from the point—" he emphasised this with a swift right hook to Nicholas' nose, knocking him flat upon the pavement—"which is that it doesn't matter. The verdict is final."

This was kinder than a man like Nicholas deserved. Noël stepped gingerly over his limp body, skirting round the blood pouring from his broken nose, and provided enough coherent answers to satisfy the crowd, sending them scattering in all directions back to their respective newsrooms. Of course, this incident would be in the headlines for the next week or so, but Noël reminded himself that it was hardly the turning point of the century.

And so, the reporters lowered their microphones, and the cameramen their cameras, and this time, they all retreated without a word.

Now alone, standing on the steps of the courthouse, Noël turned back to Nicholas, gently nudging him with the toe of his shoe. Out cold. He sighed, closing his eyes, and drew in a breath of frigid winter air. He considered walking, but this was the coldest, bleakest day he had seen as of yet, and he was frozen stiff after the interview. Watery white light spilled over the world that trailed in his wake.

As he tripped down the steps of the justice building, cursing himself for choosing such an ungodly shade of blue to wear in court, he saw his stepsister, Lucille Grey, step out of a sleek black car parked along the edge of the pavement. He immediately recognised the number plate. It seemed as though Death in a white silk dress had been waiting to make her melodramatic entrance, as always.

Their eyes met, and then Lucille smiled. "You know, it was worth coming all this way just to see you with that paper in your hand."

Noël did not reply. They had known each other seven years, and had worked together as field nurse and second lieutenant in the British Royal Marine Corps. It had always been a question of chemistry and compatibility—the foundations for a lifetime of enmity had been laid between them long ago. In Noël's eyes, Lucille was a third-rate nurse, and an irksome person at best. She had the remarkable ability to chafe all those in her company—particularly those who got too close. Noël would never forget each insufferably rude remark, all of which had too often been aimed at their superior officers. After their first argument, there had been another, and then the antagonism had turned personal. In the years since then, they had regularly run into each other between restaurants the world over, but it hadn't been until two years before that they had truly become archenemies.

Lights up; stage set. Christmas, 2018, the Savoy Hotel, London. Outside, it is negative ten, and snow has been falling steadily since nightfall, forming great blasted heaps that halted the flow of traffic on the M25. Noël Mikkelsen, twenty-four, has just published a double-page spread about his experiences in Afghanistan—one he was commissioned to write by a close friend at the Guardian. He has taken into consideration a number of articles published by Lucille Grey. These involved a number of their superior officers, including a spectacular extravagance of lies pertaining to the untimely deaths of two newly-instated officers. Lucille had come across a pompous fool, turning reality on end, writing eulogies to the living by concealing them in fictional foils. Strangely enough, Noël had been the first to challenge the validity of his claims. He would even publish a reprint in novel form a week after, with his notes in the margins and Lucile's deceptions highlighted word-for-word.

Lucille, of course, had retaliated with a book of her own: a case study on sexuality and gender, with her stepbrother as her chief representative of the queer community. She had made bold accusations of Noël's continued interest in her—this couldn't have been further from the truth—as well as long-winded narratives of each individual attempt to act upon these impulses. And then there were the betrayals of confidence: Lucille hadn't created all those incidents in Copenhagen, which Noël had spent hours telling her about over the telephone, back when they had still been best mates.

When they met on the public transport train in Oerlikon, the conflict that had been slowly brewing between them reached climax, and then it had come to fists. They had both been rushed to A&E after Lucy put a six-inch hunting knife through his right cheek. That was just before she'd been stunned by a police taser. It had taken thirty-six stitches to close the wound.

Witnesses said that Noël had thrown the first blow, and that Lucille had then retaliated, pushing him down the steps to the lower level, where he could hear the air rushing past through the crack beneath the doors. Lucy had pinned him with one hand on his temple, the other clamped like a steel limpet round his shoulder. Then Noël had headbutted her, sending her sprawling to the ground. Then Lucille had come up with the knife, and suddenly the world had gone white.

Lucille could just as easily have tripped him on the platform, sending him out before an incoming train. There was no doubt in Noël's mind that he would've died that night, had it not been for police intervention. In the end, they were both charged with aggravated assault—for Noël, the first on his record, but for Lucy, only the most recent. Lucille Grey was an intelligent psychopath, and Scotland Yard had been searching for a reason to incarcerate her for seventeen years, and now they had it: battery, assault, and the attempted murder of a twenty-four-year-old man in a foreign country—and in public, endangering passengers in sealed transportation, nonetheless. Lucille had been sentenced to serve seven years in Pentonville Prison, but had gotten off early on parole just last month. She had left the military to teach at the Royal Academy, and was granted a considerably higher salary that, much to Noël's disdain, was withing Jean-Baptiste's sphere of influence.

And yet, despite it all, here she was, live and in the flesh.

They looked not at, but through each other for a long moment. Then Noël pivoted on his heel and walked away.

He started up the Boulevard de Palais and the Pont du Change, toward his flat on Champs-Élysées. It came as no great shock that Lucille Grey had flown to Paris all the way from London, just to stand there and laugh at him. A public transport bus—one of the red ones with two floors—braked in front of Lucy's airport rental car, and Noël hopped on to make his escape.

He got off at the Arc du Triomphe, still undecided what to do, with the judgement document still in hand. Stepping round the flocks of men, women, children, and otherwise, all wrapped up in heavy winter coats and leather gloves, he walked twelve minutes southeast to Café Citron, where he unknowingly stepped into view of another story—one that will, one day, become his own, as fire and petrol are united in a singular death.

Half a minute after he'd ordered a bottle of snaps and asked for a wineglass, the morning news came on the radio half an hour late, which was rather strange to begin with, and perhaps no great coincidence, all things considered. The story followed a series of suicide bombings in Syria and Jerusalem—ones that had levelled cities to heaps of ash and smoking stones—and that a new commission had been assigned to investigate the alleged formation of a drug cartel within the New York branch of the Italian Mafia.

How curious a world, in which forty-five people were so ensnared in their own personal endings, as not to notice the bridging of this world and the next—the segue of the Before and the After. The world had never been such a desirably escapable place.

These bar patrons all shared a common problem: they were largely unhappy a vast majority of the time. Perhaps that was why they were seated on barstools and booths, quaffing ale, in the first place. We must all have our methods of blotting away the melancholy that bleeds through, but these were people still mostly concerned with how it could be possible for what they believed to be stainless steel to rust. Though, it was neither the pipes, nor the kitchen knives, nor the parcel blades that lamented for their deaths, but those that now had to replace them.

And then, one Friday, several millennia after an innocent man had been crucified for attempting to heal a broken world, another man, seated alone in a round-the-clock café in Paris, realised what had gone wrong from then onward, and in this a purpose.

But this isn't his story—not now; not yet. Though, the very existence of our story from now on is a consequence of that epiphany, and of what that man did after he'd finished his pint and paid his tab; after he'd stepped out into the sombre light of autumn's end, into his own beginning and the end of all others. But, before that man crossed the final threshold, he called Noël on the shoulder and pressed his lips to his cheek, then paid his tab with a twenty-pound note. However, he was far too enthralled by that peculiar white light to take any notice, gazing wistfully out the window and recounting to himself how autumn's end had always broken his heart. The bartender pushed it into the pocket of her apron and turned away.

He turned slowly back to the verdict, lifting his cup to find that it had left a ring stamped upon the paper. A dark heaviness settled like ballast in the pit of his stomach. It was twenty-five pages long, declaring him guilty of fifteen counts of aggravated libel against Jean-Baptiste Belmonte, meaning that each hand had cost him nine hundred and eighty euros and six days' imprisonment. Then, of course, there were the court expenses and solicitor's fee to take into consideration. He could not, in his drunken stupor, bring himself to begin sketching out the figures on the drawing board of his mind, but knew well enough, even then, that it could've been far worse: he had been acquitted on seven other counts.

When the trial had first begun, it had been devastatingly clear that it would take a divine intervention to escape unscathed, and so, mercy he had received, though certainly not in the way he had expected. He had long ago made his reconciliations with every possible outcome. He had survived three days with an even temper, and then waited eleven more for the court to finish their deliberations and create the document he now folded his arms over, to rest his head upon. Only now, when it was far too late, did the despair wash over him. He took a bite of the Yorkshire pudding another patron had left uneaten on the table adjacent, and felt the bread swell in his mouth. He choked it down, resisting the urge to cough, and pushed the plate forward to be cleared away, suddenly immensely glad that he hadn't paid for it.

This wasn't the first time he had faced charges. In fact, this particular case was a trifle, compared to the robbery, rape, and murder for which he had previously been accused. However, it was the first time that he had been declared guilty. From a financial standpoint, it was serious: Joie de Vie did not have unlimited resources, and neither did he, scarcely breaking even from one issue to the next. But the verdict didn't necessarily spell out Judgement Day just yet. The problem was that Noël had a share of the magazine; he was the shining star of their writers, and his family paid to publish his work each week. The damages he would pay for out of pocket, although this would more than wipe his own savings from the face of the earth. Joie de Vie could cover his court expenses. With a careful budgeting plan, it would all even out in the end—and hopefully not in a flatline.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He pondered the potential of selling his flat. When he was seventeen, still living with his mother in Copenhagen, he'd had a steady job and a fine salary as a drug runner, and had been searching for a more permanent place to settle down. He'd run on foot from one flat showing to the next, before he took the Eurostar to Paris, and stumbled upon a small studio on Champs-Élysées. The previous owner had been in the midst of making it inhabitable, when suddenly they had been offered a well-paying position oversea, and Noël had taken it for next to nothing.

He had rejected the interior designer's plans and sketches, and had finished the project himself, as he saw fit. He'd put a bit of money into fixing up the amenities—but, rather than putting in a parquet floor and rewiring the electricity, he had smoothed and refinished the floorboards, white-washed the walls, and concealed the worst of the damage behind cheap reprints of famous watercolour collections. The result had been a kitchen akin to standing naked on the edge of the Arctic Sea, a small bedroom that scarcely fit a standard double bed, and a pitch-black washroom without the luxuries of hot and running water, leaving him washing and shaving out of a basin with a flannel, seated on the side of the bathtub. The porcelain was scratched to show the silver beneath—a surface with something to hide. There were three dormer windows, each with a view of the rooftops on Avenue Montaigne and the rolling grey waters of the Seine. Above it, the sky was a still, blank white, and in his mind's eye, there he stood, staring at that tumbling quicksilver and the wheeling flocks of shearwaters.

Still, the fact that he would be losing the flat was nothing compared to the knowledge that he had, professionally, received a broken nose. It would be years before the damage was fully repaired, if indeed that was even a possibility. It was a matter of trust in the eyes of the nation. For the foreseeable future, editors would hesitate over whether to publish articles under his by-line. He had plenty of acquaintances in the business that would realise he'd fallen victim to remarkably terrible luck under the most unusual circumstances, but he would never again be able to make even the slightest mistake. But, worst of all, was the humiliation. He'd held all the aces, and yet had lost a deadly game to a despicable spectator of evil, lifting neither a finger, nor a beneficiary note to end the wars that had cost Noël the full use of his right arm for months, and who had sneered at him over the rims of his reading glasses throughout the entirety of the trial. The affair had begun with such promise, in the cockpit of a bright yellow sailboat, just off the coast of Italy five months before.

It had all been by chance, simply because Lucille had wanted to impress her new warden. She had rashly rented a boat for a week of romantic sailing off the coast. Jean-Baptiste had only just arrived on the world stage, to start up a mortuary franchise for London's grateful dead, and had agreed to a brief holiday in the interim. That was, after putting up the token resistance: he would only be coming if his business partners did, as well.

As it happened, they didn't have a half-hour of sailing experience between them, and unfortunately Lucy had more enthusiasm than understanding. Three days before they were scheduled to make sail, she had rung Noël in desperation and persuaded him to come along as the fifth crew member—one that could safely navigate them away from the sheer-falling cliffs as well as any fleet commander. Noël hadn't thought a great deal of the proposal, but had conceded at the promise of a few days' respite, with fine wine and no shortage of entertainment.

As ever, all these promises had come to naught, and the expeditions had become a far more disastrous narrative than he could ever have imagined. They had sailed a scenic, yet terribly undramatic route from Roquefort to Bilbao. At scarcely ten knots, one of Jean-Baptiste's partners had gone quite white in the face, heaving over the railing when a sudden gust of wind hit the sail. Then Jean-Baptiste and Lucille had begun to argue heatedly over whether they ought to dock in Bayonne for the night or venture onward to Spain. All the while, none of them had shown even the slightest interest in learning to sail. It had become only more apparent that Noël was expected to take charge of the vessel, while the others gave him well-meant advice on how to do so.

Needless to say, after the first night of sleeping soaked through on the sands of Soulac-sur-Mer, he was more than prepared to cut the line anchoring them to the dock and ride the rails for the next five hours back to Paris. Only their desperate appeal had persuaded him to stay.

The next morning, early enough that the bay was still mostly empty, he had tied them off at the visitors' wharf in Donostia-San Sebastian. While the others went off in their wellies and very little else, in search of oysters to dig out of the shore with sticks, Noël threw something together over a fire in the sand. He had only just finished washing his plate in the waves, when he had noticed another sailboat gliding into the bay using only its mainsail. The gap between their boat and another on the starboard side was the only slot remaining. The narrow M-30 would just fit. He stood up in the water and waded to the pier, pointing as he clambered hurriedly up onto it. The sailboat captain raised his hand in cheers and began steering toward the wharf—a lone sailor, with no apparent interest in starting up the engine. Noël heard the rattling of the anchor chain in the distance, and then the mainsail had come down, as the skipper moved like a scalded cat, guiding the rudder straight for the opening and readying the line from the bow.

Noël dipped over the edge and held out a hand for the painter, damp blond hair falling forward over his forehead. The new arrival made one last course correction, then glided perfectly up to the stern of their sailboat. It was only as the man in the straw boater had tossed the painter up to him that they recognised one another, and grinned in delight.

"Hello," Noël said, pulling at the collar of his linen shirt, the undone sides of which were flapping excitedly in the salty breeze. "Why not use your engine, so you don't scrape the paint off all the boats in the harbour?"

"Hiya, Carlsberg. Thought there was something familiar about you." He glanced back with disdain at the engine. "I'd be happy to, if it hadn't popped off two days ago, out by Arcachon."

"So, all it takes to get you out of Drammen is an oyster festival?"

"Ah, you know me: always dragged off on a whim."

He smiled. "Indeed, I do."

They shook hands over the pier. Then, when the man had stepped up onto the platform, Noël enveloped him in a tight embrace, pressing a kiss to both his cheeks—then, on second thought, a far more tender one to his lips.

It seemed only yesterday that he and Tero Hämäläinen had been inseparable. As is so often the case, their relationship had faded somewhat after they had parted ways, Noël to Denmark, to be with his mother, and Tero out the door of their boarding school in Oslo, and on to university in London. They had met nearly every month since then for the last twelve years, the last one having been at La Pyramide in Vienne, where Noël had taken him to an extravagant supper at the hotel's restaurant, and then had shown him what it was to be worshipped like a young god.

Now, though, Tero slowly pulled away, and they studied each other with a profound interest. He had fiery red hair and a week's worth of stubble. Even in the pearly pink light of dawn, his face was white as snow.

Noël was immediately in much better spirits. When Jean-Baptiste and his consulting knobheads went off to watch the Nordic women dance round the Maypole, he stayed behind on the shore, nursing a bottle of crème de menthe he had brought in preparation for a toast, and admiring the face of his beautiful boy through the dancing shadows of the fire.

For the first time in what had seemed years, things were quite peaceful. They sat amicably on opposite sides of the fire, Noël sipping from the bottle, as the edges of the world blunted and blurred, and Tero painting the waves that danced along the sand. He had always kept a box of watercolours with him on his travels, in the event that there was something so beautiful he simply couldn't bear for its beauty to remain uncaptured.

It is the general consensus that, in our final moments, as our life's thread unravels before our eyes, that it all returns to us then: every, every minute, like the frames of a film reel, moving silently in the still, cold darkness of a cinema.

But that wasn't how it happened for Noël. He had always dreaded that final moment, and the resurgence of the world best left forgotten. He would've been more than delighted to leave behind all those kindergarten choir performances on Christmas Eve, dressed by the teachers in coats and hats trimmed with white wool, and the flickering of the flames in the candles on the pews, behind their glass cages; all the infernal Masses, and the insufferable parent-teacher conferences that he had scarcely survived the first time around.

The truth was, though, that there were also the blazing glories to remember: the birth of his first child, and his wedding day, gazing down into the sparkling blue eyes of the man he loved, and dancing drunkenly on the beaches of Sardinia with the family he'd chosen for himself, stripped to their skins and pissed as newts, and roasting a suckling pig over a spit at an estranged cousin's wedding. And then there were all the New Year's parties, when gold confetti had rained down upon his head as he laughed—a bright, clear sound, like the ringing of a bell—until his face had gone black and piping hot, and his thirtieth birthday, on the edge of a rooftop in Firenze, surrounded by thousands of flickering tea lights, clambering up on the table to raise a shot of snaps to God himself, and the dark, heavy scent of espresso and a sprig of mistletoe overhead—all the moments he could never forget, and those he wished to be remembered for.

But, before he died, he didn't remember any of it. All the hell he had razed, and the mayhem that had ensued in the aftermath was a distant, dreary echo of the past. He couldn't quite make out the face of his family in the pews, from when he himself had stood among the ranks of the choir, or recall the first light of morning, and how it had glazed the walls of his bedroom, or the way it had shone through the fragile petals of snowdrops in the bleak midwinter.

Instead, he thought of Tero, and that night in the hold of his sailboat. Coincidentally, they had discussed the matter of death whilst basking in the heat of the fire. He could never recall how the conversation had begun—only that he was swilling crème de menthe and insisting that he was far too drunk to be swimming. Tero was pulling his hands, and he was smiling like a fool. He lapsed to the side to fiddle with the dials on the portable radio they had half-buried in the sand, and Tero swatted his hand away like a bothersome fly. Noël was desperately trying to explain his theory of death in broken, slurring English, and they were regaling each other with tales of their finer moments.

Noël chose to tell the story of Jean-Baptiste and the New Year's Eve party, of course, and Tero, who was complaining about the cold and threatening to drop dead from pneumonia, participated only long enough to say that he would be perfectly happy to drink wine and make love in Paris for the rest of eternity if Noël would just put down the bottle and get in the fucking water. They were both smoking, and the wind that ghosted over the sand fire blew upward through their hair in a searing white draft.

And then Tero switched off the radio, seeking to provoke him—perhaps because he was sick of his whining. And so, the drunken Noël had stumbled forward and set it blaring again. He shouted as Tero's elbow sank into his neck. Then the cigarette fell from between his lips, landing with its glowing red end down on the exposed flesh of his thigh. He released a flamboyant collective of expletives, wincing as he brushed the still-smoking embers from the hole they had burned into his skin. The crashing of the sea echoed in his ears, and the air was thick with thin white wisps of smoke that rose into the darkness like the breaths of phantoms. And then there was a rending screech as his chair collapsed, and he was deposited heavily into the sand. He smelled fire.

And then it was quiet.

Of course, the worst bit of death is that one never knows when it'll come knocking. He hadn't risen that last morning feeling ill—hadn't even taken into consideration that only a few short hours after it would be bursting with spoiled milk. There hadn't been shadows cast upon blank white walls, or time to remind anyone how much he loved them, or for farewells at all.

No, the first death had been when a cold hand, small as it was certain, slid over the flat plane of his stomach. The story of an hour so quickly became that of a lifetime—if only he had woken when the alarm went off that morning, and not twelve seconds before; if he hadn't been so preoccupied with the prices of produce at the market; hadn't spent hours arguing with the vendors; if only he'd listened to his head and gone with the others to take part in the festivities.

But he hadn't.

And so, as the sun spilled its watery amber light across the horizon, they cast the broken chair upon the still-burning fire and surrendered the ongoing battle with Spain's notorious mosquitoes. They tripped hand-in-hand down into the hold of the M-30, laughing helplessly, hindering more than helping, jostling and caroming off each other, drunk as much with lust as alcohol and stifling heat. Noël had stumbled over his own feet at the bedside, and Tero, trying to help, had fallen atop him in a dizzy heap of red hair and slender legs. He appeared terribly flushed, dishevelled, and wide-eyed, his shoulder-length hair tousled from where Noël was running his fingers through it. Beneath him, Noël's pale countenance was level and serene as a glass plane, or the still surface of a lake iced over in the winter. There had always been a part of him that was afraid of Noël—his hideous beauty, evident in the perfect angles of his face; the light that snapped and crackled just below the fragile surface of his skin; the very element of him, that seemed to bleed into the air around them. There simply was no one quite like Noël Mikkelsen.

He drew in a sharp breath through his teeth. All this time, Noël had been staring up at him with the same blank expression, measured and controlled. There was nothing in his face that extended an invitation into the hot darkness of his mind.

He shifted his head, in an attempt to loosen Noël's grip on his hair, and tilted his own, to maintain unbroken eye contact. The slight movement brought the red-gold sunlight to one half of his face, shadowing all the sharpest angles, and silhouetting it from behind, like a halo. He rather seemed as though he was luminous. Tero leaned his head forward, pressing his cheek to Noël's glistening chest. His eyes fluttered closed, though he would not recall them doing so.

"You scripted this out beforehand, didn't you?" he heard himself murmur. "You knew this would happen—you wanted it to. You manipulated me this way and that, and spoon-fed me my lines as you saw fit."

Noël pressed his lips together in a hard, flat line, but did not respond. His eyes flickered over Tero's innocent face in a way that was both sensual and unnerving, as though peeling back his skin to reveal what festered and rotted away beneath. "I do... have an inkling as to how I might remould your perspective, but I couldn't begin to predict the outcome, mon chéri."

Tero spent the next several hours circling warily around him, flinching and breaking whenever they touched. Of course, Noël didn't try to touch him—he didn't need to, because he knew that Tero would come to him if he waited long enough. Things should've been ill at ease between them, but they weren't. What was profoundly ill was Tero, whose heart was the slamming in his chest. He supposed these strange waters that had opened between them were the emanation for not acknowledging to himself that nothing could ever be forthright or candid with Noël Mikkelsen. He only gave himself away when Tero caught him glancing at him out of the corner of his eye with a faint smile on his face—the interpretation of which altered depending on his mood; sometimes it was vaguely affectionate, other times sinister as the black mouth of death opening before him.

And so, when the moment came, it was completely and utterly unexpected.

It was late at night, and Noël was reading on the sofa, while Tero laid his head in his lap. He wasn't sure how they had ended up in such a compromising position—one minute, he was sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, chin resting upon them, and then he slowly began to slide down the sofa, toward Noël, as if he were a magnet, until finally he was laying atop him. It should've been strange, but it wasn't—they fit together perfectly, and the realisation of this made him calmer and more content than he had been in a very long time. The night was unusually quiet, and there was little to hear apart from the crashing of the waves and the turning of pages. One of Noël's hands was absentmindedly stroking Tero's hair.

And then, after a while, he put the book down and tipped his head back against the rear of the sofa. His hand began to move again, sliding rhythmically through Tero's fiery red hair, and down his neck, then down his shoulder, and, finally, gliding down his arm. Tero made a small, rumbling noise like a purr, and Noël's hand traced his waist, ribs, hands, and wrists, briefly allowing their fingers to entwine before moving back to his shoulder again. And then Noël made a soft, pleased sound and pushed the heel of his hand against the throbbing hardness between Tero's legs, and Tero made a long, low moaning noise. His head tipped back upon Noël's knee, and his hand found Tero's forehead, lightly brushing the top of his cheekbone with the pad of his thumb.

Noël let this go on for another minute, until Tero was gasping, deep and desperate, before stopping suddenly and leaning forward to place a light kiss to Tero's lips. He instinctively opened his mouth to deepen the kiss, but Noël pulled back and said:

"Shall I take you to bed?"

His eyes snapped open. Noël was looking down at him, smiling quite tenderly. In all the years they'd known each other, Tero had never seen Noël smile as much as he had that day.

Naturally enough, Tero found that he couldn't fully commit to an answer. He appreciated that Noël wasn't assuming, but, to be perfectly honest, he actually wished that he hadn't asked—that he had just let things take their natural course, with momentum for him to hide behind. The request to commit himself wholeheartedly to a decision had ripped him away from his oblivious state of being, and tossed him headfirst into the cold, cognitive world of rationality and consequence. Noël pressed his palm between Tero's shoulders to help him forward, as he looked up at him with innocent blue eyes. He was carefully observing Tero's face, and he appeared to be fascinated.

"Have you done this before?"

The unexpected change in tone—the very fact that Noël, a god on earth, was asking him something any normal human being would—suggested to him that he was deliberately shifting the focus for a moment to give Tero a moment to regain his composure. He slowly shook his head, and Noël nodded, as if this was exactly the answer he was expecting.

"Have you?" he asked, already knowing the answer, even as he said the words.

Noël shrugged. "Of course."

They fell quiet for a moment, as they studied each other from beneath their eyelashes. Tero had the sudden mad urge to hide his face in the front of Noël's shirt. This wasn't at all how he had expected this to go. In all of his wildest fantasies, Noël was aggressive and dominating, and Tero himself was self-possessed and acquiescing. He couldn't even hide behind a latent sexuality crisis: it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Noël was a man—it was the fact that he was Noël Mikkelsen.

And then, suddenly, Tero remembered something terribly inconvenient, and a high flush coloured his cheeks. "I don't have... anything."

He must have seemed a bit panicked, because Noël gave him a long, thoughtful stare. "On second thought, Tero, I don't think this would be a good idea. We're mates. I don't want that to change." The inward destruction—the complete and utter crashing-down of all his hope and confidence—must have shown upon his face, for Noël leaned in and kissed his forehead. "Forget about the past, Tero," he murmured, softly. "The past is a foreign country. People do things differently there. I'm not going to touch you..." Tero sighed, and nodded, sliding off of him, and falling back upon the armrest on the opposite side of the sofa. He looked at Noël with an expression that conveyed absolutely nothing. "Yet. But you can touch yourself, can't you? Would you do that for me, Tero?"

"Of course," he murmured, beginning to feel slightly unhinged. What was he saying? When had he become so utterly shameless?

But Noël just kept smiling up at him with a vaguely hypnotic gaze, from which it was impossible to look away. Without a trace of self-consciousness, Noël unbuttoned his shirt and cast it onto the floor, keeping his eyes locked with Tero's as he did so. His muscles were incredibly well-defined, and his skin whiter than white. He nudged Tero closer and pulled his shirt over his head, lightly running his fingertips up and down his ribs. When his hands rested upon Tero's waistband, he paused, looking up at him for confirmation.

Tero was quite at a loss for words, and so he nodded, instead. This moment was surreal, and he couldn't fully believe he wasn't dreaming—that he wouldn't wake any moment in the darkness and cold. He was literally and metaphorically beside himself. It was incredibly vulnerable of him to be naked in front of Noël, but it also served to highlight how profoundly defenceless he felt at all times. Exposing his body was nothing at all to the exposure of his mind—the careful, methodical stripping-back of every barrier and layer since the day they met.

Noël must have been aware of at least some measure of this, for he cupped Tero's face in his large, warm hand and gave him a searching look.

"Don't look so anxious, Tero. It's only me. Nothing to be afraid of. I would never lay a hand on you in anger, or hatred, or spite. Nothing will happen to you of which you are not in complete control."

He smiled slightly, then slowly and deliberately ran his palm down the centre of Tero's chest. Tero stared pleadingly down at him, and Noël stared right back. And then, with a tormenting slowness, he pulled Tero's face down, to kiss him.

It started off gentle, almost chaste, with Tero unresponsive as a statue, his mouth slightly open, and Noël stroking his slightly-bearded jaw, and softly brushing their lips together, occasionally caressing them with the tip of his tongue. For a moment, everything went completely still—no movement, or noise, as if the entire world was holding its breath. No one had ever looked at him that way in his entire life. It was longing, and passion, and hunger, glimmering with something infinitely bright and angelic, and at that moment, something inside of Tero snapped, and he lunged toward Noël in the precise second Noël did the same. They met in a clash of teeth and tongues, gasping into each other's mouths, ravaging, as though they were attempting to devour each other. The electricity coursing through their veins was like raw voltage, or lightning cracking across the sky: intense, and brilliant, and fierce. And, at that moment, any last doubts he had of backing out were extinguished in an instant, because he simply couldn't get enough. They were parched for and drowning in each other; the wild, fiery, hellish heat that enveloped them melting and remoulding them into something new.

Without releasing him, Noël leaned back against the sofa, roughly pulling Tero down on top of him, and Tero let him, pliant and submissive as a marionette. He was so deliciously overwhelmed that it was impossible to construct a single thought. Noël had hardly touched him, and yet he was already more passionately, desperately overwhelmed than he had ever been in his entire life. Noël slid a palm lasciviously across the smooth, flat plane of his stomach. His skin was glistening with sweat, in small beads, sparkling like a scattering of stars, and Noël glided his hands over every inch of him, touching him everywhere but where he truly wanted him to. By then, he had gone completely mad, and was arching upward, pulled taut as a bowstring. He let his head fall back upon Noël's shoulder, as the man's teeth closed upon his earlobe. He cried out, then bit down on the side of his hand in an attempt to subdue the frantic noises he couldn't help but make. Noël pulled it firmly away and kept his hand gripped in his.

"No. Don't hold back. I want to hear you."

And, over the pounding of his heart in his ears, and the long, sobbing groans he was releasing, Tero could hear his own voice, fierce and desperate, gasping out something which he didn't want to admit, but which he knew was hopelessly, helplessly true: "I want this, Noël. I want you."

And, when he said this, Noël make a dark, possessive sound deep in his throat, then wrapped his arms round Tero's chest and pulled him up, so that his mouth was resting against the curve of neck and shoulder. And then he bit down, and, suddenly, it was over. Tero slumped back against him, no longer making sense of Noël's words, shaking uncontrollably, as the world spun and twisted around him. For a while, there was complete silence, broken only by the sound of Tero's deep, panting breaths. He must be in shock. He must be. He couldn't believe what he had done.

Noël sighed deeply, and held him tighter. He kept his arms wrapped round him until he was no longer shaking, and his breathing had slowed to something less reminiscent of cardiac arrest, kissing the top of his head and murmuring in French. Tero raised his hand to touch Noël's face, and the man grabbed it suddenly, pressing his stone-cold lips to the back of it, as Tero blushed, feeling the sharp, sculpted line of his cheekbone. It was then that he realised he'd never touched Noël's hair before. Somehow, it was softer than he had expected it to be.

He knew that someone was going to have to speak eventually, but he wanted to delay it for as long as possible, because it felt as though the moment the silence was broken, the real world would come creaking back to life, and all the lovesick madness would begin again. Tero felt strangely protective of the silence, wanting to preserve it, as something rare and precious, because for the few remaining seconds it lasted, he could pretend that they were only people, holding on to each other to keep themselves from falling apart.

And then Noël sat up, bringing Tero with him, as though he weighed nothing at all. He vanished into the washroom, reappearing with an alcohol pad, which he used to clean the bloody imprints of his teeth. He had also brought a glass of water, which he held up to Tero's mouth, cupping his face with the opposite hand to keep it steady.

"Pauvre, douce chose," he murmured. "You look exhausted."

Noël reached down to the opposite side of the sofa and fetched a red woollen blanket, which he draped round Tero's shivering shoulders. He knelt down before him, as Tero fumbled for words, until, at the end of it all, he fell forward, so that their foreheads were pressed together, and reached blindly for his hands. Their fingers were so tightly entangled that it was difficult to tell whose were whose just by looking—hard to tell where he ended, and Noël began.

"Thank you, Tero."

There was a smile in his voice, though an enormous line had been crossed this night—this was only the beginning, and after tonight, nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, at the moment, he couldn't bring himself to care. For now, he only sat there, with Noël's breath on his face, Noël's lovely blue eyes staring into his, and Noël's skin burning against his. He stared down at their hands, entwined and interlocked. And then, in that moment, it was just the two of them.

Just them.