Stephen Hart is a man who believes in skipping steps if that is what is necessary to make things happen. This is why it was so strange that his and Nick's relationship followed such set stages.

Stranger to colleague.

Colleague to friend.

Friend to lover.

It's a bitterly cold winter morning and Stephen's jacket isn't quite long enough, leaving him with a strip of freezing cold skin at his back and vaguely numb hands.

The university is beautifully landscaped and built, yet seems to form some kind of wind tunnel and the dry winter wind whips under Stephen's clothes sending shivers up his arms.

He glances at his watch, ten minutes early, but the science faculty building is a bloody rabbit warren and he'll need every minute to find the office.

The wind chill cuts the cold a little as he steps into the building but the hallway isn't heated, it's as though they want to hurry passing students along as fast as possible, so Stephen just retreats back into his jacket and starts counting off the numbers on the doors.

Little patches of warmth spread out from closed doors and it washes over Stephen as he opens Professor Cutter's.

Cutter doesn't seem to notice, he's muttering at something on his desk so Stephen knocks on the doorframe. He watches with a crooked grin as Cutter startles and the piles of paper on the edge of his desk cascade to the floor taking a couple of interesting fossils that Stephen hopes aren't originals with them.

Stephen kneels to help Cutter collect the sheets, hiding his grin as he fishes a few sheets out from under an overflowing filing cabinet.

He hands the last sheets to Cutter, he takes them frowning at Stephen confusedly, Stephen snorts.

Stephen dusts his hands on his pants as he rises before offering Nick his right.

"I'm Stephen Hart Professor, your new assistant."

Cutter's brow crinkles and he glances over at the calendar, in bright red letters on today's date it says 'New Assistant'. Cutter raises his eyebrow and finally shakes his hand.

"Is it Friday already?"

Stephen nods with a smirk.

"Huh. Nice to meet you Stephen."

Cutter is getting despondently drunk on the couch and guilt is eating its way through the lining of Stephen's stomach.

It's been six months since Helen went missing, twelve since she broke it off with him and the fact that she's actually gone seems to finally be sinking in, not just for himself but Cutter as well.

Cutter's got the bemused look of the spectacularly drunk as he stares at his mostly empty whisky bottle. His head tips back against the back of the sofa to steady it as Cutter cross-eyedly watches the last few drops of liquor roll down into his mouth.

Stephen had tried to hate Cutter for a while after Helen had broken it off, hell he'd tried hating Helen, but it was hard to hate a man as oblivious as Cutter and Stephen had given up on it.

Now he just felt spectacularly guilty as he watched Cutter go through the various stages of grief. Through the first few frantic weeks when Cutter had barely slept, spending all his spare moments at the forest or on the phone to the police, posting flyers or just walking along the street hoping to see her face. Through the next months when he was angry, at everyone and everything, the police for scaling down their case, Stephen for a million small things, Helen for disappearing and at himself for not finding her. And now depression, watching Cutter drown himself in a whiskey bottle as if pickling his liver was any real answer.

Stephen isn't sure how he managed to be the person helping Cutter through this, maybe it had started as a desire to find Helen but now six months later Stephen couldn't find one good reason while he was still here, accepting Cutter's rage and pain and despondency.

But he was and he supposed that was what mattered.

Stephen levers himself up from the armchair and walks over to Cutter. He slides the empty bottle out of the weak hand and sits it on the table before slipping his arm under Cutter's and pulling the other man from the couch.

"Come on Cutter, time for bed."

Cutter mumbles a few half heard obscenities into Stephen's shoulder as they stagger up the stairs but is fast asleep as soon as he falls onto the bed. The room is overly musty and smells of stale man and sheets left to long unwashed, Stephen wrinkles his nose as he pushes Cutter onto his side and covers him. He tugs the blanket tight at Cutter's neck and smiles.

"Goodnight Nick."

He closes the door behind him and walks through the fractured shadows of the hallway to clean a few of the bottles away before it all begins again tomorrow.

It's been four years since Helen disappeared and Nick is finally whole again, it took another few weeks of the cycle of getting drunk and being put to bed for Nick to move onto acceptance but he's an unbroken man now and Stephen can finally look at him without guilt pooling in his belly.

They have a friendship that at its most fledgling stages has been tested more than most people's ever will be and it's the closest Stephen has ever had.

Which is probably why it takes so long for him to figure out that there is something different between them now, a fission of something dangerous just below the surface.

Something in the way he feels when Nick smiles at him, or throws an arm over his shoulder that obliterates the barrier between platonic and something else.

It snuck up on him, building somewhere in between putting a drunkenly depressed Nick to bed and falling out of lust with Helen, being suddenly there before he even knew it could exist.

The only consolation is that Nick is the most oblivious man Stephen had ever met and is unlikely to notice anytime soon.

He was utterly unsurprised that Nick had ended up with someone like Helen who had probably jumped him rather than wait for him to notice her attraction.

He'd actually asked her once but she had just smiled mysteriously, contemptibly, and bitten down on his neck just a little too hard. She'd broken up with him two weeks later.

So Stephen is just ignoring it, riding it out until such time as it goes away, but it's not going away, it's weaving itself in amongst the banter and comfortable silences until it becomes part of them.

Stephen is lulled into an easy equilibrium, this attraction has just become part of them and Nick doesn't seem like he's going to notice anytime soon. It's comfortable here, not necessarily the best place, but it's comfortable and Stephen doesn't want to upset anything.

This sense of security he'd fallen into is probably why he's so surprised right now.

Nick's pressing him against a wall, body far to hot against Stephen's and mouth slick wet against his lips.

Stephen clings to Nick's shoulders as he pulls away and the smirk Nick's wearing really shouldn't be that attractive.

Nick watches him gape for a few long moments before speaking.

"Well if you weren't going to do it."

Nick kisses him again before he can reply, Stephen's pretty sure he does that on purpose.