What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

When You Are Old, W.B. Yeats

…

October 1922

It was early in the morning when they released him, with the sky a thin, tired shade of blue and everything glistening from the previous night's rain. They took him through the echoing main hall with its twisting staircases and rows of locked doors, then down the corridor, past the silent workroom and empty dining hall. Mathias loathed the very familiarity of it. He hated every brick in the walls, every bar across the windows – everything that had kept him prisoner for two years, and for a crime where the only real victim had been himself. Enough of all that, he chided himself, but it was impossible not to feel bitter towards the laws and government that had stolen his youth from him.

He wore the same suit as he had on the day of his trial. It was loose on him now, made to fit a tall, well-built young man, not one worn out by hard labour and insufficient food. In a bag over his shoulder, he carried his few meagre belongings; in his pocket, bound together with a strip of fabric torn from the lining of his jacket, were his letters from Lukas – twenty of them, written at a rate of just under one a month. He ran a finger over the bundle, feeling the sharp edges of the paper; nervously, he thought of Lukas himself waiting outside to meet him, as he knew he would be. What would they say? How could they possibly begin again?

They reached the governor's office, where he had first been placed in the system two long years before. Forms were passed back and forth across the desk, signed with cursory flicks of the wrist; a few terse words were exchanged to the effect that he was free. Within a few minutes, Mathias thought, he would be free of the prison, but his name would remain on record – shameful, criminal, available to anyone who ever cared to probe into his background. But that was inevitable, really. One could not expect to go to prison and then live as if nothing had happened – if Wilde had taught him anything, it was that. He reached for his letters again, let them remind him of all the good that remained in his life. After all that had happened to him, he would not let a blemish on his name – the one thing he had from his father – be the thing that undid him.

The governor turned to him, breaking his train of thought. "You're a free man, Køhler." he said.

…

As soon as Mathias was out of the gates, he saw that Lukas was waiting for him, as he had said he would in his last letter. He was leaning against the high boundary wall, buttoned up in a dark coat that looked new and smoking a nervous, pleasureless cigarette. He dropped it as Mathias approached, the light at the tip flaring once before he crushed it distractedly under his heel.

"Lukas," Mathias said, desperate to speak. "It… I…" He stumbled; he tripped over his thoughts; he staggered under the weight of the words he wanted to say. They were inches apart, and yet even now they could not touch each other – not here, not as the town began to wake around them, for even now there was a man on the other side of the road with the morning paper under his arm, a man turning to look at them.

"I've come to take you home." Lukas said simply.

"Home?" Mathias asked – tentatively, childishly. It was all too good to be true – too much to believe. It was hard for him to think that, after all the years of interruption and disappointment, his trials were over; it was impossible to imagine that he had finally come through it all – that now, at last, he and Lukas would live together, with nothing to separate them.

Lukas gave a wan smile. "Unless you'd like to go somewhere else first?" It was a question; he was not quite certain of himself.

Mathias shook his head. "No," he said. "No, I'm quite happy to go home."

They began to walk to the station, each casting nervous glances at the other, unsure of what to say. It was not as though they were short of things to talk about; it was more, Mathias felt, that they had so many that getting them all out seemed quite overwhelming.

"New coat?" he asked eventually, then cursed himself for it. What if Lukas thought it was a criticism, a suggestion of frivolous spending when he was supposed to be poor?

"Second-hand," Lukas replied. "But hardly worn, I think."

Mathias turned to look at him. The rose of youth, it seemed, was wilting a little at the edges, but that was only to be expected. Lukas was a man, not a boy, and he was closer now to thirty than twenty – they both were. He was still beautiful, of course, but exhausted by guilt and sorrow and everything else. And Mathias still loved him, loved him with an intensity that he felt moving in some deep, ancient part of him. He could only be thankful – how thankful he could never hope to express – for Lukas's quiet faithfulness, for his ability to forgive. Let him have his new coat, he thought.

"It looks nice on you," he said. "You look nice." A gift for thinking up metaphors, he thought, would not be unwelcome at times like this.

Lukas blushed faintly. "Thank you." he replied.

For a while, they were silent. Mathias cast a glance at every person who passed them by, thrilled to be seeing faces unmarred by familiarity. The world, he felt, was unfolding again, wider and brighter than the dull, narrow vista he had been permitted in prison. He half-remembered the streets they were following, but the posters on the walls were new, and the dresses the women wore were different from the styles of two years before, and the record shop displayed the works of up-and-coming acts he had never had a chance to hear. His head spun with the sudden, dizzying broadening of his horizons.

"How's Emil?" he asked after several minutes. They had turned on to the main road that led up to the station, and Lukas had withdrawn two tickets from his coat pocket.

"Much as you left him," Lukas replied, tensing slightly so that the tickets were crumpled in his clenched hand. "He's… a little more understanding, I think. Of all that went on, I mean."

"Is he happy where he is?" Mathias asked, wondering if Emil was still in that awful, sterile place crowded with the ghosts of living men.

Lukas shrugged, his face darkening with his old sorrow. "That's not really the word for it," he said. "I'd like him to live with me – with us – but I don't want him to have to be somewhere where he's surrounded by people who don't understand. Me, for one." He laughed bitterly.

"I'll come with you to see him soon," Mathias said as they climbed the steps leading up to the main hall of the station.

"Yes," Lukas agreed. "I think he'd like that."

They had to wait an hour for the train. Mathias could tell that Lukas was embarrassed; that he had hoped to execute their journey seamlessly, and that he was annoyed that it had come to a slow halt here at the station.

"Never mind." Mathias said, trying to put him at his ease. He hardly minded the wait; he was content to watch the infinite variety of people coming and going, and to read the place names off the announcement board – all the places he was now free to visit, he thought. The 10:15 to London Euston was about to depart; the 10:20 to Cambridge had suffered a ten-minute delay. He was going somewhere, he thought with joy. At long last, after all his dreadful, unnatural confinement, he was going somewhere.

"I'm sorry." Lukas said, staring up at the board with his customary frown.

"It's not your fault." Mathias reassured him. A young couple walked past them, part of the throng spilling out of the Brighton train. They walked arm in arm; the woman whispered something to the man and they both collapsed in conspiratorial giggles. Something in Mathias ached at the sight. If only he and Lukas could do that, he thought wistfully.

"Do you want to go back outside?" Lukas asked.

Mathias shook his head, his eye drawn to a small tearoom beside the ticket office. "You know," he said, trying to be cheerful. "I can't remember the last time I had something nice to eat."

They took their seats next one of the windows that looked on to the bustling hall. Mathias, having agonised over the cakes for several minutes, eventually decided on a Victoria sponge; Lukas went for a simple cup of coffee and said he wasn't hungry.

"Is this alright?" Lukas asked, watching Mathias take the first bite.

"Lovely." Mathias replied, wishing he would relax a little. This solicitousness was something new in Lukas, this desperation for everything to go smoothly. Mathias wondered if they were lovers yet and, if not, when they would be. He looked at Lukas as he sipped his coffee, as graceful as always, his movements tight and self-contained. He looked like someone who had spent his whole life trying not to be noticed, Mathias thought.

"Want a bit?" Mathias asked, positioning his fork to cut off a corner of the slice.

Lukas shook his head. "It's all yours." he said. He pushed up his sleeve to check his watch.

"We won't miss it." Mathias said kindly.

Almost guiltily, Lukas let the sleeve drop. "Just making sure." he mumbled.

Eventually, the time came for them to board the train. Mathias was excited to be travelling again and tried to be playful and make Lukas a little less tense.

"I want the window!" he said jokingly as they found their seats, and managed to elicit a weak smile from Lukas as they sat down together.

"We're third class, I'm afraid." Lukas said apologetically. A man came and sat across from them, then opened a tin box and extracted a large sandwich from it, which he began to eat. Crumbs dropped into his lap and onto the floor, and Mathias saw a frown of upper-class disapproval cross Lukas's face. It amused him, for some reason.

"Suppose I'll be among my people then," Mathias replied in an undertone, and was gratified to see Lukas's answering smirk. "How long is the journey, again?" he asked.

"About five hours," Lukas replied. "I came up yesterday evening and stayed in the railway hotel."

Mathias gave an exaggerated sigh. "You wouldn't happen to have a pack of cards, would you?"

"I've got a book." Lukas offered.

"It's not in Latin, is it?" Mathias joked.

"I'm afraid it is." Lukas said ruefully.

Mathias couldn't help but laugh. They smiled at each other, and Mathias was filled with the simple warmth of shared affection. He felt at last that he had a reason to be hopeful. They would be alright, the two of them, once everything was all ironed out, he thought.

At any rate, Mathias spent most of the journey asleep, the profound exhaustion of his miserable two years weighing on him with the dull coldness of death. It was a purifying sleep, deeper and calmer than anything he had experienced for years. Once or twice, a dream flickered out of the darkness to disturb him; he forced it away. At one point, the veil of sleep was brushed half aside so that he became aware of the rattling of the engine, and the hard press of the windowsill against his shoulder, and the semi-rhythmic sound of Lukas turning pages.

"Are we nearly there?" he asked, mumbling like a drowsy child.

"There's another while yet." Lukas replied gently.

"Suppose I'll just go to sleep again then." Mathias said, somewhat disappointed.

"Have you been ill?" Lukas asked, concerned.

Mathias shook his head as much as his position leaning against the window allowed. "Just tired." he reassured him.

"I'll wake you when we're coming into the station." Lukas promised.

"Thank you." he replied, and closed his eyes again. There was a murmuring of conversation, and the swish of a turning page, and the darkness behind his eyelids deepening as the sun slipped out of the sky, and then he was asleep once more.

…

They reached home in the darkness of late evening, after a long walk from the station through narrow, low-rent streets cold and bright with frost. Lukas had two rooms at the top of a poorly-kept old house that lurched drunkenly on its foundations, leaning forward so that the street nearly came to a point overhead where the houses came close to meeting in the middle. It seemed that the crush of habitation on either side was the only thing that kept these terraces – the previous century's breeding grounds for cholera – from collapsing into dust.

"Watch your step now," Lukas said curtly, just in time for Mathias to trip. "The electricity's been gone for days." The stairs were uneven and uncarpeted, the only source of light a weak glow that seeped out from under some of the doors.

Mathias did not reply. Lukas had become quieter and quieter the closer they had come to the house, lapsing into his old silence. He was, Mathias realised, profoundly ashamed of his circumstances. An argument drifted out of one of the rooms, grating and spiteful. How he longed for him and Lukas to have a home from their own, and for freedom from everyone else's struggles. But that would come later, he thought. For the moment, he was simply content that they would be living together.

They had reached the landing, and Lukas was bending to fit the key in the loose, rattling lock. Mathias noticed that he was shaking slightly, then more and more as the battle with the key continued. Eventually, there came the reassuring click.

"Here we are," Lukas said flatly. "I can't say much for its comfort or its beauty, but it's a place to sleep."

The door opened into total darkness. There was the hiss of a match being struck, then three small flames leapt up in quick succession as Lukas touched the it to the half-finished candles on the tablr, then Mathias heard his sharp, pained inhalation as the match burnt down to his fingertips. Lukas picked up one of the candles, lit five more with it, and then there was at last enough faint light by which to see. In the glow, Mathias saw the glint of gilded spines along the bookshelf, and a modest dining table with two chairs, half a loaf of bread on the sideboard, a fireplace with a tin bath in front of it and a coal scuttle which was almost empty. Apart from the books, there was nothing from Lille Skarstind - nothing to elevate this haphazard domesticity into anything grander. Lukas, it seemed, had abandoned the old house entirely.

Mathias looked around his new home for several minutes. It was the beginning of his life, he thought - a place that, no matter how temporarily, he would share with his true love. Lukas had turned away from him, burying himself in spurious chores, rearranging things in the cupboards with no real aim in mind. Mathias could see that he was nervous - that he was unsure of exactly how two people who had experienced as much as they had might go about building a new life together.

"Lukas." Mathias said simply. Lukas turned to him, his face open and vulnerable - the mask dropped and shattered, his thoughts plain - and Mathias held out his arms.

For the first time in eight years - for the first time ever, since they had never held each other with such tenderness - they embraced. Standing there, with Lukas in his arms and their foreheads pressed together, Mathias felt a calm that he had forgotten. They breathed together, in a soft rhythm, and there was no need for further words. And although it was true that Mathias loved Lukas with his body as much as his soul, for the moment it was enough to simply stand there, and hold him, and put his hands on his lower back and feel through them the faint movement of his breathing. It was all very chaste, and quite beautiful.

Mathias reached up to brush Lukas's cheek with his fingertips. He was in love, so in love - for eight years now, he had been in love. They moved slightly away from each other, and Mathias leaned forward to kiss him. He kissed Lukas, and the kiss was returned, softly and without the urgency of their last one. They had been nervous then, pressing on with everything before they had a chance to falter, and mortally afraid of death. He was without that fear now, and the unopened years stretched out before them. Children, he thought of their younger selves - young men with the irrationality of boys, who knew nothing, who had mistaken the thought of love for the feeling itself and who had suffered more than anyone should suffer for their error.

"I love you." Mathias said once they broke apart, putting every ounce of his sincerity and conviction into the words.

"I love you too." Lukas replied, and Mathias began to cry.

It was the agony of the knowledge that their years of his separation had been his own fault that broke him - the pain and guilt of having no one else to blame. And it was not only the thought of what they had lost but also of what had been taken from them - their youth, their chance to get to know each other. He wept like a child, his face pressed into Lukas's shoulder, feeling so tired, so distraught that Lukas was the only thing holding him up; the only thing preventing him from falling to the ground, from falling into hell.

"We never had the chance to be young." he said, his voice thick and muffled with tears. It was the tragedy of their generation, the generation that had slipped through the cracks, the thousands who had gone from children to old men.

Lukas, he knew, was not someone to whom kindness and tenderness and the right thing to say came easily, and yet it was in Lukas's arms that he felt more loved than he ever had - safer and more loved and more peaceful. He wept for the cruelty of the world, and for love of this fragile good that had risen from the ashes.

"I don't think I'll ever be young." he said.

"I know, I know." Lukas replied soothingly, as if comforting a child after a nightmare. Yes, Mathias thought, he felt like a child - all these years of having to be a man, and yet he was still no more than a child. He felt like he was five years old - five years old, the age he'd lost his father.

After a while, he straightened up and drew a tired hand across his dully burning eyes. He sniffed. It would be alright, he thought. His memories rippled through his mind, troubling his calm, but it would be alright.

"I'm so sorry for the way I treated you." he mumbled.

"I forgive you." Lukas said.

"I'm just so tired." Mathias continued.

"You must be," Lukas said. "After everything that's happened."

Mathias looked around the room and felt his eyes blurring with tears again. His life was beginning. "I'm just..." He paused, swallowed, started again. "I'm just so glad to be home."

...

It was not until several weeks after their reunion that they made love for the second time - or, all things considered, the first. It was a tacit agreement of theirs, an unspoken understanding that they would wait, and do as they should have done before by letting things move at their natural rate.

In the meantime, Mathias took pleasure in the simple joy of having someone to come home to. It had been easy enough to find work again - in every town and village, war memorials were being commissioned, and every stonemason in the country would be employed for years. It was a sombre task, and he worked with a constant knot of anxiety in his stomach - a fear that, somewhere on the least, he would encounter the name of an old friend. He never did, but the countless names told their own wretched story, even if he could not put a face to any of them. But he tried to rid himself of this sadness whenever he came home to Lukas. They would make a sort of race out of it sometimes, a good-natured competition to see who would get there first. Most evenings, Mathias would lose, having lingered to chat to his workmates, and would come home to see Lukas sitting at the table absorbed in a book or the day's paper, or trying to light the temperamental stove, or preparing their dinner. He always left off his work when Mathias came in, always gave him one of his rare, shy smiles. Mathias would never get tired of their kisses, he decided. They had eight years to make up for, after all.

Mathias considered himself to be a happy man - he was in love, and he had work, and he had somewhere to live, but he could never have called his life perfect. He still had dreams of the war, sickening dreams of the blood he had spilled, and sometimes he had to stop his work for a few minutes, caught by a rush of violent anger, by the battlefield madness that turned the chisel in his hand into a weapon. He knew that, somewhere in his mind, there was something twisted or snapped, too deep and broken to be fixed. He could only be thankful that it had not been any worse. Lukas had taken him to see Emil only once since his release from prison, and it had been a painful comedy of manners, with Emil bitter and intractable and Mathias affected, as he always was, by the thought of how close he had come to madness. The day had been a disaster, frostily silent, Lukas's questions met with disdain by Emil, who clearly begrudged him his happiness. On the way home, Lukas had been his old, reserved self.

"This godforsaken war." he had said through clenched teeth once they had closed the gates behind them, then said nothing more for the rest of the night.

But no, Mathias thought as he fitted his key in the lock, he was happy. He had a key, after all - his own key, which he needed to gain entry to his own home. And Lukas had a key that looked the same, because the two of them lived together - together! What joy! They had had to tell the neighbours that they were friends, but that hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. That particular evening, he was home later than usual, having accepted the invitation of one of his new friends to join a few of them at the pub. He no longer drank - had been ribbed by all of them on account of it - but as he opened the door and hung his dust-ingrained working jacket on it, he felt almost tipsy with the pleasure of good company.

As he entered, Lukas looked up from the apples he was chopping and Mathias, still glowing from his evening, felt a sudden surge of love for him, a love that was closely allied with desire. Lukas was so perfect. He was no longer the boy he had been, the beauty cast in the classical mould of the type that sent men into raptures, but Mathias would never tire of looking at him.

"Are you going to come in?" Lukas asked, a little sharply, and Mathias realised that he was staring.

"When I've finished looking at you." he replied.

"I haven't changed since this morning." Lukas countered, staring down at the counter to hide his blush.

Mathias went over to him. "Maybe I should just reassure myself," he said teasingly. "These things have a habit of creeping up on people," He pulled Lukas close to him, spun him round playfully so that they were facing each other. He held him tightly, kissed his soft lips and the corners of his eyes where faint lines, like the cracks in a porcelain glaze, had begun to appear. Mathias had never known anyone to worry so intensely, nor so silently. "It seems,"he said eventually. "That you've got even more beautiful since this morning."

"Really?" Lukas asked, putting on a show of scepticism.

"Really," Mathias confirmed, kissing him again, more deeply this time. He was beginning to feel aroused. It felt right, he thought, a natural feeling accompanied by the love from which it had, in his experience, so long been divorced. It was time, they both seemed to be silently saying - they had waited, and now it was time. They parted, and Mathias felt Lukas's heartbeat and his own, together, clamouring, pounding, an exhilarating rush. "My love, my love, my love." he said, a desperate hitch in his voice.

"My love," Mathias said again, pressing his lips into the juncture between neck and shoulder. "My Lukas."

Lukas breathed in sharply. "I love you." he murmured.

"I want to make love to you." Mathias said, knowing that it was, at last, the right thing, at the right time, with the right person. Lukas. Lukas was always the right one for him.

"Yes." Lukas said simply, as he had on the night of their first kiss, the night before their separation. But this time, there was no doubt in either of their minds, no fear, no awkwardness, and tonight would sweep away whatever had come before.

They went into the bedroom where, for weeks, they had slept chastely together, but never done more than that. Mathias was glad that they had had the good sense to wait. They undressed, with assurance this time, without blushes or missed buttons or eyes that were not sure where to look. Mathias held his hands loosely over his scar, nervous, not wanting any memory of the war to intrude on their love, then let them fall away so that he could embrace Lukas - hold him, run his hands and mouth over his perfect body, feel the cool skin warming to his touch. It was beautiful. He had Lukas in his arms, their bodies together, their souls about to be joined, and it was beautiful.

"Oh, Lukas," he said, catching hold of Lukas's wrist and kissing his fingertips. "To think I might never have seen you again."

"I know," Lukas replied. "And to think I spent so long thinking you were dead."

"And I spent years thinking you never loved me." Mathias said, kissing him again, the words absurd even to his own ears, such a ridiculous conclusion to draw from his own silence, their shared foolishness.

"I always did." Lukas reassured him - reassured him again, Mathias thought, in his own quiet way, of his fidelity.

"As did I," Mathias said, taking his hand and leading him to the bed - their bed. "As did I."

They made love then, and Mathias found himself weeping with the sublime happiness of it all - weeping the clean, pure tears of the absolved. It was nothing like their first time, and nothing like what he had had with any of his one-nighters. There was no fear of death now, and no fear for his own humanity, because he knew now, having loved and been loved that, no matter the sufferings of his past, he was still human. It was love that made this time different from all the others - it was a sustained passion, profound and mature, the love of two people who had lived long enough to understand it. Mathias felt a peace descend on his soul, a peace that filled the place in him where before there had been darkness.

Mathias ran his thumbs over Lukas's protruding hipbones. He brushed his fingers against his stomach, the buttressed sweep of his ribs, and his thumbs caressed the length of his two collarbones then met, almost, as he brushed them over his cheeks. To touch him like this, as he had dreamed of doing for so long, was incredible - joy of joys, Mathias thought through the pleasurable haze of his mind, wonder of wonders. He did not think of his one-nighters. They were gone for the moment, though not eradicated - for now, finally, the past had given him a reprieve. It was waiting for him, he knew, just outside the door, but it was elsewhere. He kissed Lukas again, long and lingering, deeply passionate but far too imbued with love to be lustful. He gave Lukas his soul - gave it and gave it and gave it, and though it was naked and bloody and scarred with a thousand scars and blackened and bruised with his years of shame and guilt, it was part of him and all of him. It was the most precious thing he had to give, and he gave it without reservation.

Once it was over, and they were lying in each other's adoring arms, breathing together, the silence like the silence at the end of a storm, Lukas told Mathias that he had found a buyer for Lille Skarstind.

"An American millionaire," he said. "Loves England and everything in it. Said he can't wait to raise a family there. The letter came this morning. He's got the money for a project like that." he said, his voice a little bitter, filled with the residual shame of being the last in his family, the one to lose the house and name.

"You're not happy about it, are you?" Mathias asked, stroking his hair.

Lukas sighed and shifted position so that he was lying with his head on Mathias's shoulder. "I should be," he said. "I'll have money for Emil now, and maybe for us to live somewhere better. But if my parents knew I'd sold it..." He tailed off.

Mathias pressed a soothing kiss to his brow. "We'll talk about it in the morning," he promised. "But not tonight. Let's not worry about anything, just for tonight."

…

February 1983 (Epilogue)

"And would you like to purchase a guidebook for £3, sir?"

Mathias dug into his pocket for the right money, found by feel three of the small, thick pound coins and placed them on the till. The young woman at the desk took the money, smiled at him in the patronising way that the young reserve for the old and handed him his guidebook and ticket.

"You can come and go at any time, but if you leave and come back, make sure you keep your ticket to show that you've already paid."

"Thank you." Mathias said. I know how tickets work, Lukas would have snapped, proud and irritated. She pitied me, Mathias thought, because I'm an old man on my own. He had lost his Lukas, three months ago now, sixty years almost to the day since the first night they had made love in their rented room. They had had long enough, he thought. He could only be grateful that, after all that had happened, they had come together at all. That was what he told himself, day after night after day, when the bed they had shared seemed cold and empty, and Lukas's bookmark travelled no further through Political Life in Ancient Athens and he did everything alone, in silence, and, like the months following the war, everything he saw or touched sent some memory or another rushing to the surface. It was not only that he missed him; it was that he did not know how to be without him.

Sighing, he opened the guidebook and flicked through. There was a map of the grounds, a page about the history of the house, a few pages about the architecture and interiors and several that encouraged visitors to try the restaurant and gift shop. Advertising! he heard Lukas's voice say. And to think we paid for this! He smiled sadly at the thought and turned to the page marked 'History'.

Lille Skarstind, he read, was begun in 1690 as a gift to Sigurd Bondevik, the closest friend of Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne of England, who in 1702 became queen. The house was completed in 1696 and in 1710 was inherited by Bondevik's eldest son...

Mathias skimmed the rest of the paragraphs, the story of wealth and the loss of wealth, his eyes alighting on the last one.

In 1922, after years of financial struggles, during which the house had fallen into disrepair, it was sold to Alfred Jones, an American oil millionaire, by Lukas Bondevik, the last in his family to inherit the house. Jones, a lifelong Anglophile, carried out a thorough programme of restoration and, upon his death in 1959, left the house to the National Trust for the public to enjoy.

The house has been furnished to replicate how it would have appeared during the 1750s, at the height of the family's wealth.

Mathias closed the book, feeling the dullness of expected disappointment. The house, he knew, would be more beautiful than he or Lukas had ever seen it - as he walked slowly, laboriously, up the hill, he could see that the gardens were different - trimmed back, ordered, redesigned, with information boards covered with accessibly large print located at intervals along the path. And people walked around and ate their picnics and commented on the unseasonably warm weather, and knew nothing of the sorrows of the old man steadily climbing the hill.

Eventually, he reached the top, silently marvelling at the thought that he had managed to cycle ten miles here every morning, and then climb the hill, and then do a full day's work and still feel no more tired than could be expected at the end of it. He was old, he thought, and he was mortal. All his life, death had stalked him, and he had feared it, but now it was welcome. It was the thing that would bring him back to his Lukas, if there was life after death, if there was anything.

He stood in front of the house, looking up at the sweep of the façade. It had been cleaned and polished, the cracked windows replaced. The fountains, the old fountains that had sputtered and spat and then lain silent now fired up together, their jets in full flow. It was here that he had met Lukas for the first time, master and servant, fulfilling the roles they had been trained for in a world that had only a few months left before it broke into pieces. It was here that he had fallen in love. He could remember that day - the thickness of the heat, the rattle of the feeble streams of water hitting the bowls of the fountains, and the two brothers standing there, home from school. Lukas standing there, and Mathias, from the moment their eyes first met, falling for him.

And, of course, Emil had been there too, as yet unbroken. His ending had not been a happy one. War had broken out again in 1939, and his home had been requisitioned for the flood of new mental cases about to come in, the next generation of half-alive boys. He had come to live with Mathias and Lukas, by then living in their own house and known to their neighbours as Mr Køhler and that friend of his who lived with him, Mr Bondevik. His cough had got worse over the years since the war, as everyone had always known it would, and by the time he had moved in with them it had been in its final stages. Mathias remembered Lukas during those years, how he would slip out of bed two, three, four times a night to look in on Emil. Emil had never called him his brother again, never talked about their shared childhood or family history, and Mathias knew that the broken relationship was the one irreparable crack in Lukas's heart, his eternal shame that had plagued him until death. And Emil had died, finally coughed himself to death, on a night in 1941 when the city was bright with the fires of bombs.

They had been the only two people at his funeral, too profoundly exhausted to make excuses for their relationship, denuded by grief, unable to be anyone but themselves. And the vicar - you only got church funerals back then, Mathias remembered - had looked from one of them to the other, then would not look at either of them.

"It was this war that killed him," Lukas had said later, through his tears, as they lay sleeplessly in the thick darkness of the Blackout. "He couldn't bear another war."

Mathias entered the house. Someone held the door open for him, and he smiled an embarrassed thanks. He wished, sometimes, that people wouldn't do things for him. For God's sake, he heard Lukas say in his mind's ear, did I ask for help? The young tour guide in the entrance hall asked to see his ticket.

"Welcome to Lille Skarstind," he said, with the same smile as the one that the woman in the ticket office had given him. "All rooms on the ground floor are open to visitors, and we have some photographs of the other floors for visitors less able to manage stairs."

"I'll be fine." Mathias said, finding it harder and harder to be polite. I don't think much of that boy, his inner Lukas remarked tersely. Who's he to be making assumptions like that?

A few minutes later, a little out of breath from the stairs, Mathias found himself standing in the room where his troubles with Lukas had begun, and where, years afterwards, he had heard the truth of what he had done in the war. It was different, of course, decorated in a style that had preceded both of them, and the bed with the red curtains was gone - firewood, most likely, and he was glad of it - but the shape of it was the same. The bed was in the same place as the old one, and so was the desk, and the ornate fireplace had not been changed, but the memory of having been there before was overpowering. He stood there, and Lukas's story echoed in his mind, the anguish as fresh as it had always been for Lukas, the shame as acute.

But Lukas was not with him, and Mathias missed him so much that the pain was almost physical. A couple entered the room, loosely holding hands, chatting brightly. Not once in sixty years had Mathias been able to hold Lukas's hand. He left the room. There was nothing more to see. There was no trace of Lukas here in the house, nothing more than a stubbed-out branch on the family tree, his name not linked to anyone else's.

"I would have liked to marry you." Mathias had said to Lukas once, not so many years ago, when they were already old.

"Don't be ridiculous." Lukas had replied, an impatient sadness in his voice - an awareness of improbability.

Mathias went out into the garden to eat his meagre picnic, a sandwich and an apple, and watched the world passing him by. He was desperately lonely. He would go home, and there would be no one there to talk to, no one to have dinner with, no one to fall asleep beside. His life with Lukas had been heavy with sorrows, their eight turbulent years impossible to ignore, but it had also been the happiest life he could have had with anyone. They had travelled the world together, and learnt the wonderfully similar languages of their ancestors, and seen the real Skarstind. He could remember so many times where they had laughed until they cried, Lukas correcting his spelling with good-natured impatience, the hundreds of books they had got through together, the sublime joy of their lovemaking. For now, Mathias thought, his memories would have to be enough. He did not expect to live much longer - did not expect to have to struggle much further without his beloved Lukas. He loved him with a love that was inexpressibly deep, a love that had for so long been a secret.

He reached into his bag and took out a book, one of the many Lukas had given him as part of his lifelong quest to 'civilise' him, as he had put it. It was Paradise Lost, a story of exile that reminded Mathias of one night, a good thirty years ago now, when they'd been driving through the area on the way home from somewhere. He couldn't remember which of them had suggested it now, but they had ended up driving halfway up the hill so that Lille Skarstind was just visible.

"Do you want to drive up and have a look?" Mathias had asked Lukas, but there had been a light shining in an upstairs window, and the house had belonged to someone else.

"No," Lukas had said, his voice brittle. "I wish I hadn't seen it. I'm never coming back." For the rest of the journey, he had gone into one of his silences.

Mathias opened the book to the front and read the inscription there, dated Christmas 1955. It brought tears to his eyes, now that his Lukas was gone and the memories the only thing left of him.

To my dearest Mathias,
My paradise is wherever you are.
With all my love, forever,
Your Lukas xx

He turned to the last page, to the lines that, on his first reading, had struck him as a perfect summing-up of their lives together, the marriage - oh, if only they could have married! - of sorrow and hope, of two people who had done things for which they could never forgive themselves. It was a poor sort of love that ignored the sins of the lover - it was the best and most precious sort that acknowledged them and carried on regardless. It was the love he had shared with Lukas, the love of the damaged soldier and the guilt-ridden coward, as Lukas had always seen himself. It was the greatest sort of love, the love of two people who knew the worst of each other, and who gave the best of themselves. He looked down at the page, and read in the lines there the story of their lives:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

…

Author's Note: Well, it's finally finished! I hope you enjoyed the sort of happy ending (I'm a wimp who can't write smut, so I hope you liked the big block of purple prose OTL).

I'm probably going to go on a bit here, because this story has been so close to my heart – the very first seeds of it were sown almost a year ago now, and the writing itself has taken seven months (sorry to anyone who's followed from the beginning!) I personally think this is my best story to date, and I've put more of myself into it than anything else. The First World War, and its effects on the people who fought in it, is a subject of great interest to me. I chose not to give Emil a happy ending because there were so many soldiers who didn't have one either, and who suffered lifelong injuries just like his. I chose not to write a reconciliation between the two brothers because, again, the war broke some relationships beyond repair. I felt a genuine responsibility to write realistically, and I couldn't have done that if I'd tied everything up to the mutual satisfaction of all the characters.

The story is full of guilt and shame, and so were many of the soldiers. Many, like Mathias, were followed by the war all their lives – some, like Emil were overcome by it. It's important to remember how young all the characters are at the beginning of the story – Mathias is an eighteen-year-old boy who wants to do something to distinguish himself and be more than just a servant, and Lukas is another eighteen-year-old who's been raised to take his place in a world that's about to vanish. I'll be turning seventeen in a few days, and I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be just a year older than I am now and to be faced seriously with the prospect of death.

I've read a lot of war poetry, and a lot of novels about the war, and I would highly recommend absolutely anything by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. In particular, I believe the verse from Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth quoted at the start of this chapter is the most exquisitely beautiful piece of poetry to come out of the whole war, particularly the final, melancholy 'drawing-down of blinds'. I also recommend Owen's Mental Cases and Sassoon's Repression of War Experience and Dead Musicians for a real insight into the minds of shell-shock victims such as Mathias and Emil – an illness that we now know to be PTSD. In terms of prose, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is an excellent novel, which I read while writing this, about the German war experience, written by a real ex-soldier. Also, Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, is one of the great novels about the war, although I personally thought it focused a little too much on the romance, at least near the beginning, and another Faulks novel, Human Traces. The war is a comparatively minor part of this one, but it's my favourite book, and I hope one day to rival the spectacular, devastating beauty that is Faulks's writing at its best.

I just want to thank you all for reading, and for waiting so patiently for the sinfully late updates. I'm in Year 12 right now, and I'll only get busier next year, so I'm not sure when or if I'll return to the fandom, but if I do write another chaptered fic, you can be pretty sure it'll be a DenNor AU with at least one foot in the past!