Author's Note: Well, I can hardly believe it myself, but it seems like after four months we've finally got to the last chapter! When I started writing this fic, I expected it to be short, 30k words tops, and I wasn't planning on including the modern storyline at all – that just came to me independently. Anyway, I just want to thank all of you for being such a great audience – to get so many followers is incredible, and I'm genuinely in shock. An extra big thank you goes to everyone who reviewed with everything from praise to constructive criticism to music recommendations. I really do treasure every single reader.

Anyway, just a quick TW that this chapter contains a suicide, and I hope that the ending lives up to your expectations!

…..

Copenhagen, 20th November 1831

The first snow of the winter was coming in, blown in slanting flurries by the wind. Thick, shapeless flakes collected damply against the window panes, more sleet than anything else. Mathias watched their progress without interest, shivering as the draughts blew down the chimney and into the room. There was no money left, not even enough for firewood. He had had to dismiss the servants a good few weeks ago now, although he was no longer certain when. Everything was blurring, his once razor-sharp novelist's eye blinded and turned inwards by the addiction that was eating him from the inside out. He felt like a ghost, standing in the near-darkness of his formerly splendid drawing room, the dust-sheeted furniture looming in his peripheral vision like the corpses of monstrous creatures. He reached into the pocket of last season's coat, now outmoded, and his hand closed around the last bottle, the last one he would ever need. He had sold his gold pocket watch to afford it.

He wondered what his life would have been like if he had taken Gilbert's advice and married. He would even now have been sampling the delights of this or that party with a beautiful woman on his arm, a woman who could quite possibly already be carrying his heir within her body. He wondered what his child would have looked like. If a boy, he would have called him Lukas. With luck, his inspiration would have returned and he would have been able to manufacture a few more anodyne comedies to keep the money coming in. Lukas would have become a half-remembered opium dream, and Mathias would have done the thing all men like him did and force himself, despite the agony it caused him, to forget the former lover. He would have tried instead to find satisfaction in the unappealing embrace of a woman he did not care for.

But all this wondering was pointless. The fact was that, since that night at the party, he had been out of favour. Gilbert had ceased to associate with him, the invitations had dried up, and he was no longer called upon to provide his famous wit. Elizaveta was expecting a child, and Gilbert had asked another man, a composer – named Edelstein or something, if his destroyed mind remembered correctly – to stand as godfather rather than him. Mathias felt an unexpected wave of emotion rising in him as he reflected on the fact that a friendship that had endured since childhood could be so quickly and completely destroyed by the need to save face in the eyes of other people. He remembered summers at one or other of their country estates – the thrill of being let loose for days on end, of dangling their feet in the brooks that ran through the forests, of climbing trees and playing at being opposing armies until one of the faceless, forgotten servants came to call them in for dinner. Oh, he thought, how different the two little boys had become as men!

Somewhere across the city, Gilbert's new play was premiering. Its title was Truth in Marriage – a nice little irony, Mathias thought, in view of their last conversation on the subject. He was not invited to the premiere, although he could have listed every single person who was. There would be Gilbert's younger brother Ludwig, the army officer, walking arm-in-arm with the Venetian ambassador's daughter. There would be Arthur Kirkland, the new cynical voice of satire who was attracting quite a following, probably trying to catch the eye of the American girl in the lead role. There would be Francis Bonnefoy, famous critic and infamous decadent, watching studiously in order to report on the night's events in the newspaper's theatre and society pages. A single barbed comment from him could be the beginning of someone's social decline, and a single good review could launch and sustain a career. Mathias had seen the man's huge influence and unforgiving observational skills before. A man who had neglected to pull out a chair for his hostess had been noted in the next morning's news and had soon found that he was no longer welcome at certain gatherings. A young girl who had declined to dance with the extremely eligible son of her host was now thirty years old and still unmarried. Nothing escaped the gaze of this reporter, but more toxic still was the anonymously-written gossip column. To appear there was to have done something worthy of social excommunication. Mathias's name had been mentioned several times, a reliable litmus test of his falling popularity.

The first time had not been the worst.

Whether 'author' Mathias Køhler is still deserving of that title is a matter for debate. At a recent dance given at the house of a distinguished lady, few of the guests could name his most recent novel and not a single one of them had read it. Perhaps he should return to his island, where this writer is certain that the gulls will be a more attentive audience.

He could survive attacks on his talent since they were, to an extent, truthful. It was the vitriolic nature of the first remark he objected to, not its content. Other comments had been in the same vein, although some had made reference to his lack of money, but the most recent one had been the most dangerous.

It was lately remarked on at an intimate gathering at the home of a renowned literary gentleman that, despite the number of eligible girls, the former author Mathias Køhler has remained unmarried. Far be it from this writer to suggest something so vulgar, but it has been posited that perhaps his desires are satisfied by something else entirely.

It was unprecedented for something hinting at something so undesirable, so illegal, to appear in a newspaper read by everyone. Anyone with a spare penny and rudimentary education bought and read it, discarding the weighty stories in order to find out who had worn what were and who was doing, or thought to be doing, what with whom. He knew that his servants had heard the last rumour – he saw it in the way they looked at him, and when he was forced to dismiss them because he could no longer pay their wages, the young boys were particularly relieved to go. With that single piece of gossip, truer than the writer could ever have known, he had reached his nadir. His transformation from a popular, carefree young author with a sharp wit and wide group of friends into a penniless, laudanum-addicted social outcast with unspeakable predilections had been completed, and now there was nothing more left in the world for him.

On the small card table at the centre of the room lay a tattered notepad, its pages bleached by sun and salt and its leather cover stained by the sea. In it was his great novel, his masterpiece, the monumental work that would lay bare the hypocrisies of high society and the vast, rotting emptiness at its heart – or so he had once imagined. It should have been a fearless indictment of the way an entire social class lived and the way they treated both their own and those below them but, in his eternal reticence, he had been unable to state his meaning plainly. The final admission of this weakness had been clear in his inability to acknowledge it. He had been too afraid of his own inability to resist the easy traps of wit, wine and conversation to bring it to the fore and he had been unable to bear giving a character with Lukas's perfect name and face his own faults. And so the story was an incoherent mess, where genuine insights mingled with incongruent fantasy and the main character was by turns the passive object of the narrator's worship and a brittle young man attempting to survive the strains of a life he had once coveted.

Mathias went over to the table and sat in his one remaining chair – since running out of money, he had burnt all the others to heat the freezing rooms. He opened the book and slowly flicked through the pages, not reading everything but occasionally noticing a particularly luminous phrase. He could be proud of the vision he had had for this book, he thought, if not its reality. The pages of looping black writing spiralled away and away, the paper seeming so insubstantial, and for a moment he was lost in a vision of carving his message in stone, setting it in the wall of some vast temple where it could be seen and, over time and by virtue of its immutability, become truth.

Quickly, too quickly, he came to the last page of the book that would never be finished, that he had never even given a title. He reached for his pencil and, straining to see in the invading, consuming darkness, wrote the last line – not of the story, but of what he could say.

They found him to be mad, and mocked him, and those whose lives were spent cultivating appearances ridiculed one who was bold enough to show his face unmasked and unadorned.

And that truly was all he could say, the most damning thing he could write about high society – that it was a group of people who valued artifice above sincerity to the point that people were afraid to be who they were, and those who were not afraid were punished by all the weapons in the considerable arsenal of slander, libel and simple old-fashioned contempt. He understood, so much more than he had in his days of being a vapid, fashionable dandy, what it was like to be on the receiving end of such haughty censure. He stared at the paper for a few moments, reflecting on the sad trajectory of what he had once hoped would be a glorious writing career, and remembered with a tear in his eye his childhood love of books, the reams of paper he had covered in his boyish, uncertain script. Writing had sustained him through all the attacks of measles and scarlet fever, all the rainy days, all the times when he was banished to his room as punishment for some trivial misdemeanour. He shut his eyes against the vividness of the memory and tore another page out of the back of the book. He was going to write a letter. It would be his last, and in it would be his last request to anyone, for he had resolved to die, and he was doing so on his own terms.

Gilbert,

I pray that you will see this before any others do. I am certain that you will. You must. Forgive my urgency – I am most agitated at present.

In this book is the novel I have been working on for more than a year. It is incomplete, but I cannot bring myself to end it because to me there is no way of doing so satisfactorily. You are a man of letters – you, more than any other of my former friends, understand the drive for perfection that all good writers must feel. It is the fact that this ambition is not matched by talent that bars me from entering the pantheon of genius that you, my dear friend, will one day inhabit.

Pathetic flattery. Gilbert was no more a writer than he was, but, Mathias thought uncharitably, he was also childishly desperate for compliments. Putting that sentence in would make Gilbert more inclined to listen to him – and besides, this was the last time he would ever debase himself in such a way again. He resumed writing.

I do not feel that I know you any longer, and I do not feel that you wish to know me. If this is the case, and if this letter brings you no peace, discard it, and the book, do not read either and think no more on the matter. If, however, you retain some of the warm feelings for me that you did in our youth and indeed until so recently, then I must prevail upon you for one last favour. I must ask that you see this book is published, by whatever means necessary. I doubt that it will be read, but it must be available to read, so that if even one person happens upon it and understands my meaning then my life will not have been entirely wasted, and I might go to my judgement in the knowledge that I did something of value. I understand that you may not agree with the sentiments within the story, but I would beg of you to see that they are my sincerest thoughts. You once asked me if I had any beliefs of my own. I do, and they are all contained within this tragedy of a young man a little like me and a little like a man I once knew. You are my greatest friend, Gilbert, and I believe that I can trust you with the knowledge that I loved him. I have always been a lover of men; you were correct in your veiled assumption. I once loved you, and it was the pain of this attraction that caused me to embark on my cursed voyage to the distant island.

There is only one thing, then, that remains for you to do. Destroy this letter, and speak of it to no one. I have not seen you in months; I have no way of knowing what you now feel towards me, but I trust that you will honourably carry out a man's last request.

I remain, as ever, your faithful servant and sincere friend.

Mathias Køhler

Mathias walked along the seafront, feeling strangely calm. All things considered, he had no reason not to be: all that needed to be put in order was in order, and all his decisions had been made. The letter lay on top of his book, and he knew that very soon he would be unable to control who read it. He also knew that equally soon, he would be beyond knowing or caring what people thought of him. It gave him an odd sense of relief to know that, in all probability, his memory would not long outlast him. The knowledge made him feel that he could do things for himself, not for posterity. He had left the door of his house unlocked and its interior unlit, and had paused at the end of the street to observe it, observe the despairing blackness of its windows and the shadows where it seemed that night had begun to claim the place from the inside. What would happen to it once he was gone was a matter that did not concern him. For all he cared, they could raze the place to the ground with all his worthless possessions inside – all apart from his novel of course. That was the one thing belonging to him that he considered to have value.

From the waterside drinking places poured light and music and laughter. He could hear the screech of violins, tuneless but joyful singing and the occasional fight. There was warmth in the run-down buildings, and life, and the light seemed to possess a different, more friendly quality from that of the chandeliers in the houses of his wealthy friends. He wondered what his life might have been like if he had slipped into the world here, or in one of the small houses that clustered alongside the docks. He wondered if he might have been happy, or at least more fulfilled. The one regret that continued to trouble his mind was that his true purpose in life had never been fully revealed to him.

"Lovely evening, isn't it?" a passing sailor called out to him, his voice loud and thick with drink.

Mathias reflexively touched two fingers to the brim of his hat as if greeting a society acquaintance. "It is indeed!" he replied, a strange sort of levity in his voice now that he knew how the rest of his life would play out. The cold no longer bit him so deeply; he had an almost omniscient sense of the impermanence of things. It was only now that his life was ending that he had understanding of it. With a wry smile, he wished that he had written that line down.

After a while, he came to place where it was possible to walk down to the shore. Boats lay at anchor, seemingly jostling for space along the quayside, their chains and tackles jingling as they moved. He remembered the last time he had been in a boat, when he had stared into soft darkness of the blue depths and remembered his last night with Lukas. The memories had been as vivid as real life then. Now some of them had slipped away from him, every irresistible drop of laudanum rendering them a little less clear, and to be without his memories was a torture he could not bear to endure. Lukas had been everything to him: his true love, his muse, the one person who could truly understand him and his reason to live. But he was also a man, as well as a thing of the sea, and for those reasons he and Mathias could never be together. And without him, Mathias had no reason to live.

The sea was rough, and as the wind rose, Mathias felt several shards of spray spatter against his face. He looked down at where the very first bold wavelets were beginning to wash over his feet and knew that his time had come. He reached into his pocket.

The laudanum burnt his throat, and he nearly choked it all up again. Never in his life had he consumed a whole bottle, not even on that night so long ago that had started everything. With numbed senses, he peered into the depths, thinking about how much there was that still remained unknown to him – things that now he would never know. The stars were shining, peeping out from behind the thin gauzy clouds. How strange, he mused. They always seemed to be there at the crucial moments in his life, and here, now, he came to hate them. They did nothing. They only watched him. They seemed almost voyeuristic, observing all the best and worst moments of his life. He remembered what he had said to Lukas about wishing on a star and now he wondered what dying men were supposed to wish for. A reason to live again? Perhaps, but nothing could give him that.

"I want to see you again," he whispered, addressing Lukas even as his eyes were on the stars. "I want to love you again and keep my promise to you. And I will see you again, I swear it. We will meet again, even if it is not in the way you expect." Tears were blurring his vision, making the stars seem huge and faint. He tried to take a deep breath and found that he could not, that his chest was tight with the effects of the overdose. His heart thudded in his ears like a muffled funeral drum and when he looked down at his fingernails, they were tinted with deoxygenated blue. He let out a panicked sob as it became even harder to breathe and his head began to feel clouded from the lack of air. More tears spilled out and he swallowed, feeling like he was choking. What were dying men supposed to think of? Their mothers? His mother had died giving birth to him. Their wives? Well, in part it had been his inability to find a wife that had led him to this. All he could think of was Lukas and now, too late for anything to happen, he found himself caught up in visions of the life they might have led together, if only their origins were not so vastly different and if only society were a little more open. A world where love between men was accepted – well, he thought bitterly, that was a story beyond even his imagination.

He took a step forward and the water foamed and surged around his ankles, numbing his feet. His breathing was irregular and desperate, becoming more so as his starved lungs tried to pull in more and more air. His clothes were heavy; the more steps he took, the more insistently he sea tugged at him and pulled him down. He cried unrestrainedly, finally free of the need to appear a certain way. He cried for his own pitiful life; for Lukas, whom he had loved in the fullest and purest sense of the world, with the unrestrained joy that in his former cynicism he would have denied existed; for all the people trapped in the web of society from birth to death; for his own wretchedness as a lover of men, a laudanum addict and a suicide. For the last time, he looked behind him and took in the crowded seafront, with its thousands of lives merging and separating or continuing alone. His own life had only minutes left to run, and he was glad of it. He was a supernumerary, needed by no one except the person who could never truly be with him, and there was no reason for him to live any longer and suffer further humiliation at the hands of the soulless, single-minded organism of society.

By now the water was up to his chest. With the combination of this pressure and the tightness caused by the laudanum, he could only snatch breaths; desperate, shallow breaths. His heart was slowing further with every beat, and soon it would stop altogether. Best to end this torture now, he decided. With a last step forward, he was totally submerged, blinded by the dark sea. The old poem echoed in his ears: With his last rites unsaid and him unmourned/ He drowns, unbaptised, in the sea-foam font. He had always known he would meet his death by drowning. It was not as frightening as his childhood nightmares had been, but he was unprepared for the violent, electrifying cold and the forcefulness of the current. He could not breathe, and this time there was no Lukas with him to reassure him. But he could imagine that he was there, for the one thing that would never fade from his memory was Lukas's unique, ethereal beauty. With his love's image in his mind, and a strange, quiet calm in his heart, he closed his burning eyes and opened his lungs to the water.

…

Havmann Island, 21st March 2013

In his hands, Mathias held the single most important discovery of his life. The letter was unassuming at first; a single piece of paper dried and yellowed with the years, covered in dense black writing. He had found it that morning, unexpectedly.

The end of the storm had woken him, the sudden silence as startling as any noise. He had not expected to sleep, and had no recollection of doing so, but he must have because Lukas had slipped out of the room without him noticing. Alone in the calmness, he had had time to think about what Lukas had said the previous night and had returned to the book with fresh eyes. What he had read had surprised him – for the first time, he had seen evidence of the things which had stood out so clearly to Lukas: the veiled meaning, the cowardly metaphors, the careful avoidance of issues. What had seemed to him to be subtlety now showed itself to be reticence; what had appeared to be allegorical now seemed silly and trite. For a long time he had sat with the book open at the last page, his mind grappling with the conflicting thoughts of his predecessor. He so desperately wanted to keep him as his hero, to continue to admire him, but he was no longer sure if he should or could in light of this new interpretation of his work. He had reread all his favourite scenes, all the lines that had stood out to him when he had first seen them, but now the book was different – now that Lukas had made his pronouncement, Mathias felt that it no longer belonged to him, that he had relinquished his right to call himself the 'expert' on the man who shared his name but increasingly seemed to share nothing else.

Still wrapped in these concerns, he had gone over to the window to inspect the island following the storm. The sky was still grey, but lighter now, like cigarette smoke, and the grass gleamed with glassy drops of rain. He had reached up to open it, to let the breeze in, and his hand had brushed against something hidden high in the wall. The letter. It had taken him a long time to extract it from its hiding place deep in the crevice between two of the bricks, and he had known straightaway that it had been hidden deliberately, that it had never been meant to be found. He had read it through three times and he still could not quite digest it. It changed things; it confirmed things he had privately theorised and built on his tentative ideas. And Lukas needed to see it. He needed to share in this discovery, for it was as much his as it was Mathias's. And he would show it to him, in a moment. First, though, he needed to look over it one last time. He began to read.

My Dearest, My Truest, My Most Beloved Lukas

I write this in the knowledge that you will never read it, and if it were otherwise then I would not be able to set down these thoughts at all. I write today for the same reason I always have: to make sense of my life and the acts I commit in this life and perhaps, in some small way, to justify them.

My darling, nothing causes me more pain at this moment than my having to leave you. Looking back now on my life before I came here, I am filled with dread at its imminent return, and my love for you blazes even brighter against its dismal background. There is not a single thing I want more than to stay here forever and make a life with you, and if I were a stronger man I would do so in an instant. But I am a weak man, one easily swayed by the demands of society, and I cannot resist them for long. I am a fool, and I do not deserve your true and noble love. I do not deserve the constancy and faith which you have always shown me, and continue to show me. I will never love anyone else, and I do not wish to now that I have had you.

I have tried to explain my life on land to you, and I have seen you try to understand. I doubt whether you could make any sense of the complexities, contradictions and overwhelming hypocrisy of which high society is composed. Indeed, I hardly understand them myself. More than that, I do not know why I am so desperate to by accepted by a world that so hates those like me. Those like us.

Lukas, my love, believe me when I say that I love you. I am not only a weak man but an insincere one, and my life is founded on lies, but the one shining and eternal truth by which I live is the love I have for you. I had never felt love before I met you, not in the true sense of the world. I thought I had. I loved a man once, and it was the pain of these unreturned feelings that almost killed me. But when I began to love you, I saw that I had not even understood the word. To me, you are the embodiment of the Classical ideals, the Renaissance glory and the modern Romantic passion. None of these words will mean anything to you, so let me explain it thus: beauty such as yours has been worshipped throughout all history. It has been worshipped as I, with an intensity of feelings beyond words, have so often worshipped at your pristine altar. Your body sets me alight; it is perfect, and satisfies all my desires. I would gladly adore you for all my life; I would gladly look on nothing but you until the moment of my death.

I close then, my love – my true love, my only love, the summation of all the good in the world – with this last declaration of my feelings and demonstration of my weakness. You see, Lukas, even as I write this, the desire for sweet oblivion has overcome me, and I have drunk deeply of it.

If you still want me, to the end of time I will remain

Your Mathias

The words were stirringly intimate, vaguely erotic, and Mathias felt strange frissons of pleasure coupled with shame at reading something never meant to be read. Parts of the letter continued to echo in his mind as he walked into the kitchen to pass it on to Lukas like the oldest sort of chain letter. Lukas was leaning against the worktop, clasping a cup of coffee and looking off into the distance, his thoughts clearly turned inwards. He looked up as Mathias approached and smiled shyly, inviting conversation in a way unusual for him.

"Are you alright after last night?" Mathias asked, his voice tight with sudden awkwardness.

Lukas nodded in reply. "Yes, thank you. I just couldn't sleep thinking about that book, so I got up early to work on your portrait. It's coming along quite well."

"Are you making me look beautiful?" Mathias joked, at ease for once.

"I did say you have a good face for drawing." Lukas said, smiling again, then looked away with a quick, nervous motion.

Mathias continued watching him, a similar awkward smile rising unbidden. Damn this being in love, he thought. The letter had unsettled him. He knew Lukas, that was the crux of it. He knew him like a memory, he knew the fathomless darkness of his eyes and the elegant figure that was as slight and luminous as the crescent moon. Crescent. He vaguely remembered its origin. Latin, meaning 'increasing' or something like that. Increasing. But what was increasing? His love? He felt his heart thudding heavily in the pit of his stomach. Lukas raised his cup to his lips with an air of consideration and Mathias found his gaze drawn to the pale hands. They were so delicate, he thought, so suited to Lukas's chosen calling, to handling the infinite and infinitesimal gradations of pencil, the minute differences between dark and light. Art was a precarious dance between the two opposites. Like themselves. His hand went to his pocket.

"I found something," he said, his mouth dry. The paper crackled as he withdrew it from his pocket.

"What's that?" Lukas asked, setting down his cup and going over to him.

"A letter," Mathias replied. "I think you should read it. It's important. It changes a lot of things, things I thought I understood. It sort of backs up what you said to me last night." He handed over the letter. It looked right in Lukas's hands, and he had a sense of everything being put back in order now that the letter had reached its intended recipient at last.

Lukas read through slowly, and Mathias waited for him to finish with bated breath. He was afraid of a negative reaction, of Lukas feeling shocked or simply removed from these people who just happened to share their names, who just happened to have been desperately and futilely in love. The letter felt like a link between the past and present and a confirmation or validation of the idea that he and Lukas were meant to come together. In this morning, this light, Lukas was beautiful, divinely so, the pale light through the window like a halo framing the silver-gold of his hair. Mathias felt a flood of electricity through his body. He wanted to take Lukas in his arms and kiss him, to love him and show him that he could still have and deserve love in spite of his past. He bit the inside of his cheek and hoped his face wasn't going red.

"It's so sad." Lukas said simply after a long moment. He lowered the paper and his eyes were gleaming with as-yet-unshed tears. There was the faintest tremor in his voice.

Mathias nodded. "I know." he replied. He could hear the waves crashing on the beach below them. Lukas placed the letter on the table, apparently relieved to no longer be touching it. He sniffed.

"It's just… There were so many secrets, you know. He couldn't tell the truth about anything so he lied and lied and lied until he couldn't even be truthful in the book that was supposed to lay bare his soul. His life was wasted – all those fine things he could have said but didn't say! He could have said society was a poison and a disease, and if he had then he would have been remembered. He could have said he loved men, and then he would have become a figurehead for the cause. We'd still be reading him now."

Mathias shook his head. "He would have been a martyr," he replied. "They wouldn't have let him live for something like that. He would have ended up like Oscar Wilde – prison, poverty and early death."

Lukas sighed. "But he died young anyway, didn't he? Better a martyr than a suicide, don't you think?" When Mathias failed to respond, he went on. "He chose death over life without this Lukas person," He brushed away a tear with a precise, angry motion. "They were split apart like every couple is eventually. I don't know what else he thought would happen. It's not as if they could have been together, the way the world was then," He faltered then, and for a tiny moment it seemed as though he might go forward to Mathias, looking for comfort the way he had the night before. Instead, he took a decisive step back, half-turning towards the door. "And if you love someone so much that death is better than life without them, then maybe it's a dangerous mistake to love at all." he said bleakly. He opened the door and quickly went out, pulling it shut with a firm click. Clearly, he did not want to be followed.

Mathias stood frozen in shock in the centre of the room, all that Lukas had said echoing in his mind and mingling with the words of the letter. Something – perhaps his developing knowledge of how to deal with Lukas – told him to wait a while before going after him. He picked up the incendiary piece of paper and studied it, only letting his eyes rest on the writing without actually reading it. It was a thing of beauty, every letter immaculately formed with little flourishes at the ends of words. The writing, like all writing, was powerful; it memorialised the long-ago emotion and kept it immediate. He looked around the room as though for the first time, excited by the idea of the first Mathias having been there before him. Could his predecessor have sat in his window seat, or bent over his notebook at the corner table, or paced the same floor looking for the perfect simile, the exact word to make a beautiful sentence sublime. And would his Lukas, whoever he was, have been there too? Yes, he must have. Mathias tried to imagine them together but it was like seeing himself and his own Lukas; it was too strange, and his mind refused to show it to him.

It was not until late afternoon that he judged it safe to go and find Lukas. He had spent most of the day tormented by his rising, irresistible feelings of love to the point that he had realised that it was a case of confess or go mad. These thoughts had invaded every part of his mind, stopping him from reading or writing or looking out of the window – even eating. Now he was on the beach. Lukas was a little way off, his clothes a bold streak of black against the anodyne colours of the sand and misty water. He stood staring out to sea, and from his vantage point Mathias could make out a few notes, diluted by distance, of a mournful song that he had heard before, somewhere, so long ago. Perhaps at school, or hummed into his cot to calm an infant tantrum – he could not have said for certain. Perhaps even before then, in another life. The wind was rising – soon the sun would begin to set and the air would sharpen and taken on its evening chill. There was no chance of a storm, but the night out here in the Norwegian Sea would nonetheless be punishingly cold. He began his approach down the sands.

Never before had Lukas seemed more delicate, more volatile, than now. He was like a dark, velvety-winged butterfly; Mathias half-feared that he would fly away if confronted.

"You've been out here a while." he said with forced lightness.

Lukas turned to face him, cheeks red and sticky with hours-old tears. "I had a lot to think about." he replied, folding his arms.

"It's getting cold."

"I don't feel it."

Mathias sighed. "Lukas, please, what's wrong?" he asked desperately, tired of their delicate evasion of the issue at heart. Emil might as well have been standing there between them; so strongly was he there in spirit that a physical body could hardly have added anything to his presence. He was the millstone around both of their necks, the unavoidable consequence of an indelible act.

"Love never does any good," Lukas replied. "It can only ever hurt. When a friend dies, that's sad. When someone you love dies, it's a tragedy. You can recover from one but not the other, and if you love someone you shouldn't want to recover." His tone was defiant, but Mathias saw the meaning he was so obliquely hinting at.

"You loved Emil, didn't you?" he asked, though it was hardly a question.

Lukas nodded, undone. He took a step towards Mathias and then stopped, hopelessly caught between the past he could not escape and the future he did not believe he deserved.

"Yes, I loved him," he said at length, beginning to cry once more. "I don't know if you can understand. He wasn't just my best friend. He was a little brother to me, and I adored him. I didn't know him very long but you don't really need to know someone for a long time to love them, do you? I loved him. I would have done anything for him. Those few weeks we played together, I was so happy. We swore to stay friends our whole lives, and our friendship killed him."

Mathias came forward and tentatively placed a hand on Lukas's shoulder. Their eyes met and Lukas gave a watery smile.

"You don't give up, do you?" he said. "I tried to make you give up. Anyone else would have, but I suppose you're not like anyone else. I was so awful to you when we first met, and it was because I didn't know what to think of you. Even after I told you not to get involved, you insisted. You cared, and it didn't bother you when you found out the truth. You didn't judge. You tried to understand, but eventually you managed to accept that there were some things you never could," He moved closer to Mathias. "You're a truly kind person. You have a sincere heart, and…" He stopped for a long moment. "… And I really do like you a lot."

Mathias pulled him into his arms so that Lukas's head rested against his chest. "I knew you were worth the effort," he said. "The more you struggled, the more I knew you really did need help. Even when you told me to leave you alone, I couldn't. I don't hate you for what you did, but I do hate the fact that you hate yourself. And I really like you too."

Lukas sighed, leaning a little more heavily against Mathias. "I do feel guilty," he said. "And even if it's not quite the same as cold-blooded murder, I do have to accept a degree of responsibility. The pain and the guilt will always be there. The nightmares will still come regardless of what I do, and no matter how much you try to help me you can't be with me in my dreams."

Mathias gazed down into the troubled, limitless depths of his blue eyes, feeling his heart swell with a mixture of love and compassion. "I know I can't be with you in your dreams," he said reassuringly. "But I can be beside you while you sleep," He took a deep breath. "I love you, Lukas," he said. "I love you, but I would never insult your strength by saying love could be a cure. You're so much stronger than I could ever be, and I love you for that."

Lukas's eyes widened in shock and for a second Mathias feared that he had gone too far, that he had ruined the friendship they had so carefully built around the innumerable obstacles they had encountered along the way. Friendship was a wonderful thing, yes, but how could he be satisfied with friendship now that he had felt love?"

"And… And I love you too Mathias," Lukas said at last, quietly and sincerely. "You're better than the others. I trust you. I've told you more about me than I've ever told anyone, even all the people who try to split my mind apart and read the secrets there. You're curious, I know you are, but you respect me as well."

Mathias leaned down and, as though it was the most natural thing for them to do, their lips met in a perfect kiss. He tasted the faintest hint of salt and a memory-emotion ripped through him, its power almost making him weak. It was familiar, and it was like a blessing on this new love. Something was being put right, here and now. Something was being put to an end, and something else was being built on it. He let himself luxuriate in the kiss for what must have been several minutes. He wrapped his arms around Lukas's waist and pulled him closer so that they were pressed up against each other, fitting together seamlessly. Every part of him on fire with the emotion that he had never before felt but that was somehow, in the strangest way, familiar. How could he have ever thought himself in love before? This was incomparable, beyond even his author's vocabulary. Eventually, they broke apart, and sought each other's eyes.

"Lukas!" Mathias cried out, laughing with the pure joy of their having come together at last. He cupped Lukas's pale face in his hands. "You're so beautiful," he said reverently. "So incredibly beautiful. Has anyone ever told you that?"

Lukas smiled – a real one, wide and bright and displaying his almost-perfect teeth - there was a tiny chip out of one of them. Mathias made a mental note to ask him about how it had happened at some point. There would be time for all that, to discover all the silly little things about each other, the things that would never have interested anyone else. "No, no one ever has," Lukas replied happily. "So you have the honour of being the first."

"Everyone else must have been looking the wrong way." Mathias said. They kissed again, and he realised with joy that they could do this every day, that love really could be forever. He tasted the salt again, and wondered whether it was from Lukas's tears, or from the sea, or both, and in the end decided that it didn't matter. What mattered was that the tears were dry, and that if there were ever any more then he would be there to stop them.

Afterwards, they stood separately, and were quiet for several minutes. Each knew that the other had his own thoughts to untangle in the aftermath of such an event. The tide slowly advanced up the beach, the water silty from the sifting sand, and soon it came to lap at their feet, as though reminding them that they were in a place not their own, that the sea was coming to claim its due.

"I'll never forget him, you know." Lukas said eventually.

Mathias took his hand. "I know," he replied. "But you can be happy at the same time. You're a good friend for never forgetting, and I'm sure you were a wonderful big brother to him."

"When I read that letter," Lukas said slowly. "That was the first time I'd cried over anything that wasn't Emil in sixteen years. I can't really explain it, but when I read it I felt like someone was telling me it was alright, that I was forgiven. It was such a sad letter, such a sad story, and I think I understand the book a bit better now, knowing that Lukas was real. I hope they were reunited somehow, even if it was after death."

Mathias nodded. "I'm sure they were," he agreed. He gestured to the advancing sea. "We should go inside. The tide's coming in, and it'll be dark soon."

"Yes, you're right," Lukas said. "I do like it when the tide's coming in, though. You find strange things. My cross clip washed up on the beach when I was little. It's always felt like mine. I don't know why, it just always has."

"This world is full of strange things," Mathias said. "But sometimes the beauty is in the strangeness." This said, together they walked up the sand to the small house that was already beginning to feel like home. The sun was setting and already the first few stars were appearing in the pink sky. They would be bright tonight.

And so the two lovers were, in the purest and truest way, united – or, perhaps, reunited, depending on your point of view. The letter lay on the table; in the morning Mathias would take it down to the sea. The ink would be washed away and for a single vanishing instant, the first Mathias would be one whose name truly was 'writ in water', a name that for a moment would mingle with that of his beloved Lukas, and the star-crossed couple would at last be put to rest. But that lay in the future, and for now they had only themselves to think about. And perhaps it was the blissful conceit of a newly-joined pair of lovers, but to them it felt almost as though the tide moved to their rhythm, as though the stars had aligned themselves into the most auspicious pattern to bless their coupling, and as though they were the axis of the earth's movement. And it was, perhaps, the fulfilment of a prophecy, or a cynic might have said the satisfaction of desire, but the truth of it was that it was the fusing of two incomplete souls who had found their missing pieces, a perfect and unbreakable union, built not on the irrevocable past, nor depending on the capriciousness of the future, but simply founded on the certainty of the present and of each other.

And, in the cool, dark stillness following, Mathias looked at the stars. The window was open a crack and the breeze varyingly caused the curtains to billow into the room and be pulled back flat against the frame. He focused his gaze on a single star, a single instant in the cosmic story, and watched it until the rest of his vision thickened to black and the star was the only thing in view.

Beside him, curled snugly against his side, Lukas slept silently, without fear and untroubled by dreams. Mathias was no hopeless romantic. He knew that this was a temporary reprieve, that there would be times when nothing could persuade Lukas to shut his eyes, times when the awful self-flagellating torture would return with a vengeance and no amount of murmured reassurances could make him doubt his guilt. But he would take such moments as they came and either do what he could to help or accept that there was nothing to do but wait them out.

As for himself, he knew that there would come a time when he doubted his own right to decide the fate of the letter, a time when he wondered if perhaps the world should know the truth about his predecessor. The letter was in the other room, but Mathias felt its presence strongly, the faded ink detailing emotions not all diminished by the years. Ultimately, he knew that the only honourable course of action was that which he had already decided. The letter had never been meant to be read; what he had to do was ensure that it was never read again. He smiled to himself, glad to finally be free of all his conflicting thoughts.

He leaned over and kissed Lukas on the cheek. Their relationship was new enough for him to still be surprised by the warmth of the skin he had always expected to be cold. He stroked his hair, studying it. Never before had he noticed how closely its colour matched the salty foam of the sea.

"I love you." he whispered for what must have been the hundredth time that night.

Lukas stirred slightly. "You too," he mumbled sleepily. "And I love this house."

"We'll come back here," Mathias promised. "I'll even buy it for you if you really want." But Lukas had already fallen asleep again, leaving Mathias to lie awake and imagine the future that they would share.

Outside, the waves rushed up the beach and retreated like an impossibly ancient sort of ritual dance. Everything was following the natural order, unchanged from when, so many years before, another love had played out on the island: a cursed love, a love between sea and shore.