JEAN-PIERRE

Jean-Pierre shifted slightly, in that strange point between wakefulness and further sleep, and then he realised that he was asleep, and suddenly jolted upright with a sudden start. Breathing heavily for a moment, he felt himself shiver, for it was cold in his room, and in the darkness, he slid his hands over the bed, reaching for Aimé.

Aimé was not beside him, and where Jean-Pierre’s palms slid over his place on the bedspread and his pillow, he found that they were cool under his hands.

It was barely light outside, the scarcest sunlight eking in through the night’s darkness, and Jean-Pierre shifted himself forward on the bed, tugging his blanket around himself and stumbling out of the room, down the stairs.

“Aimé?” he called, flicking on the light in the living room, expecting to see Aimé laid out on the sofa, his laptop in front of him, but there was no sign of him, and looking into the garden yielded no appearance of him either. “Aimé!” he called again, this time up the stairs, and he moved back up them, pushing open the door to the bathroom, seeing the bath dry and empty; he looked into Asmodeus’ room, found it as untouched as it had been since Asmodeus had left, with strange gaps on the shelves where he had taken books and clothes with him.

A sort of cold, pitted dread was beginning to form in his chest as he stumbled up the stairs to Colm’s room, and pushed the door open there.

Standing on Colm’s bedroom threshold, he stared as the mess of Colm’s room – his bed, a single with a few patchwork quilts layered over top of it, and the clothes strewn over the floor and piled in Colm’s laundry basket, because he always let them pile up for the longest time before he actually did his laundry. Colm had no books, and no television, either: there was a complicated tank to one side of the room, which he had been growing mushrooms in, and on the shelves were scattered bits and pieces – whittling projects, seed packets and equipment, photo albums. On several steel shelves, which dominated the main part of the room, he had a great many drawers and toolboxes, which were filled with electrical components, screws and nuts and bolts, and tools for any manner of task.

Over his bed, there were a great many framed photographs – photos of Colm standing with other crew members on a US navy vessel, of him laughing with other railway men, of him with De, of him with Benedictine and Jean, and many photos of himself and Heidemarie.

Aimé wasn’t in here, either.

He knew that he was losing control of himself even as it began to happen: he was at the very top of a hill, ready to begin rolling, and try as he might to drag himself back from the edge, from the inevitable, thundering fall, he could not stop his mind from working over the facts as he had them.

Aimé had brought him home last night. Aimé had found out about Rupert; he had found out about Rupert, and he had brought Jean home, and he had held him while he cried, and then…

He had left.

Aimé’s bike was gone.

The betrayal felt so huge, so unfathomably wide and heavy and impossible, and he knew that he should call Colm, he knew—

And then the betrayal cracked like eggshell, and out of it burst rage.

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

When he woke up again, his head was pounding from the sedatives and his mouth was dry and he didn’t want to be alone and he jumped, but Colm caught him by the back of his shoulders and wrapped his arms around Jean-Pierre to keep him from struggling away.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Colm said lowly, his voice pitched low, his hands pressing down hard on the sensitive muscle of Jean-Pierre’s upper back and making him go limp and easy, falling against his brother’s chest. “I got you, Jean, I have you, c’mere,” Colm wrapped one arm tight around Jean’s lower back, and although Jean let out a whimpered sound as he drew one arm away, he was only reaching for a bottle of water, which he brought up to Jean-Pierre’s mouth.

Jean drank.

Once Colm had decided he’d had enough, Colm stroked one hand through Jean-Pierre’s hair, and Jean shivered.

He couldn’t really think, just yet.

He was always slow to come to, after an episode like this one, couldn’t really rebuild himself into something that could think, could feel: all that was left to him was numbness and blankness, and his hands fisted tight in the front of Colm’s shirt.

“How many you take?” Colm asked. As he asked, he stroked one finger gently over the place where Jean-Pierre’s sleeve had ripped, touching the blood that had stained his arm when he’d cut himself on the sofa spring, but the wound had healed quickly, and it didn’t hurt whatsoever.

“Three.”

“Thought you seemed slower to come around than usual,” Colm murmured.

“I needed them,” Jean-Pierre whispered. “I was… too much, I know I was too much, but he, but I—” It was all fragmented, not yet returning to him, and the bits he could remember came in small pieces of black and white recollection, lacking colour or full feeling.

“I know,” Colm said gently, and he was stroking lines on Jean-Pierre’s back now, up and down, up and down. It was meditative, dizzying, soothed the barely finished thoughts Jean had of clambering out of bed and getting free. “You didn’t do too much damage, don’t worry. Nothing I can’t fix. You took them as soon as you could?”

“When I remembered,” Jean-Pierre said, his own voice sounding distant in his ears. “When I cut myself.”

The rage, white-hot and blinding, was a distant memory to him now – he remembered screaming, and he could feel that he had been screaming, too, because his voice was hoarse and brittle and it hurt to speak, even to swallow, and he remembered tearing, throwing, ripping, trying to do anything that would make him stop feeling everything, so overwhelmed only violent instinct was left to him.

He remembered the sudden, bitter clarity that had come when the spring had cut into his arm, and he had scrambled up the stairs while the clarity lasted through the mist of his own pain, had grabbed his cannister of pills from his medicine cabinet and popped two.

The melancholy, thick and wet enough he could drown in it, had come after that, and he had gathered a nest to himself where he could smell comfort when the sedatives had made his fingers too clumsy and too slow and his brain too foggy to dial Colm on the phone.

When he had thought the melancholy was due to tip into rage again, he had taken a third pill.

The first time a rage like that had overtaken him, it had been in the early 1800s, and he had failed to cure a little boy of a bad injury – had he been quicker, had he not been fast asleep when the call had come, he could have saved him. It had been his fault entirely, and that had been a heavy cross to bear, until he’d snapped with it.

Asmodeus had taken him into the middle of nowhere where he could scream himself hoarse, but it had been Colm who had drugged him with morphine, the second time it had happened.

Things were easier, now.

Jean still hated morphine.

“It’s good that you remembered,” Colm murmured softly, stroking the back of his neck, pressing on the muscle there and making Jean-Pierre melt into jelly in his lap, the horrors of the world fading away and leaving only Colm’s hands behind. “Not so pleased you had to hurt yourself to remember, but that you remembered at all is good. Half the time I come home and have to push them down your throat.”

“I wanted to call you,” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Couldn’t work the phone.”

“Peadar was trying to get in,” Colm said. “Must have been able to hear you screaming, or tell you were upset, anyway – he wanted to get to you.”

“Oh,” Jean-Pierre whispered, and entirely without meaning to, he started to cry.

“It’s okay,” Colm said, his voice still pitched low as he sat up, gathering Jean-Pierre more completely to his chest, stroking his hands up and down Jean-Pierre’s back still, “that cat loves you, that’s all.”

“Aimé left,” Jean-Pierre whispered into Colm’s neck.

“Looks like it,” Colm murmured. His tone was not unsympathetic, and he restrained himself from saying anything catty on the back of it. For some reason, the knowledge that Colm was likely holding his tongue to spare Jean-Pierre’s feelings was worse than Colm having said something cruel at all, and Jean-Pierre began to sob in earnest.

The sobs tore from the very base of his throat, ragged, pathetic sounds that he knew should have embarrassed him, but he wasn’t quite pulled together enough to feel anything nearly that complex at all: instead, he was taken away with the profundity of his grief, and he could only hold on the tighter to Colm as the tears soaked hot on his cheeks.

Colm didn’t say that he was sorry, and nor did he assure Jean-Pierre that Aimé would come back, because he wouldn’t have meant the former, and no doubt he was hoping against the latter: instead, he said softly, sweetly, “I have you, Jean, I’m not going anywhere,” and held him until Jean fell asleep again.

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

When Jean-Pierre woke again, he was overheated with Colm’s arms on him, and he shifted uneasily in his brother’s grip, leaning back and away from him. His stomach growled with hunger, so empty it was making him feel sick, and overtiredness had wrought in him a dull, thudding headache.

“You remember what happened?” Colm asked quietly: his tone was simple, straightforward, not cold but not unnecessarily sweet, either, and Jean-Pierre inhaled, feeling his hands twitch at his sides, but he prevented them from clenching into fists.

The rage was there, that much was true, but it wasn’t the hot, incandescent thing it had been when the bubble had burst earlier that day – it was colder, turned hard and steely where before, it had been molten.

“We went to museum off the witches’ market, that awful art place,” Jean-Pierre said quietly, aware of how wooden his voice sounded, how cold and brittle. His eyes hurt, felt dry and bruised from all his crying, and when he touched his cheeks, he could feel where the skin was still slightly sticky with dried tears. “They have an exhibit not yet open about angels – L’ange du mort, the Schafer painting, is on display there.”

Colm’s expression didn’t change. He was sitting awkwardly on the bed to accommodate the fact that Jean-Pierre was sitting between his legs, because even though he hadn’t wanted Colm’s arms wrapped around him any longer, he didn’t know that he could stand, immediately, not to be touched at all.

Colm’s lips were loosely pursed together, and he looked at Jean-Pierre attentively, revealing no particular emotion.

“You knew he’d find out eventually,” he said finally. “About Rupert.”

Jean-Pierre inhaled very slowly, gritting his teeth a moment. “Yes,” he said. “But he brought me home. I was upset – he comforted me. He asked me… He asked me questions.”

Was that when Aimé had decided he would leave?

Then, or before? Or had it been once Jean-Pierre had fallen asleep?

What was it, precisely? That Jean-Pierre was cracked, broken, a beautiful thing in a state of disrepair? That he had killed? That he would kill again? That he had killed a man he had loved – that he hadn’t meant to, at the time? That he would do the same again?

All of the above?

His hands were trembling, he realised, in a distant sort of way. His skin felt full of broken glass.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Colm said.

“Why should I be? You wanted him to leave me,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Jean—”

“You told him to, in so many words,” Jean-Pierre cut through before Colm could go on. “Why else would you tell him about Myrddin? A very funny thing to tell him, too, the one part of the matter that wasn’t my fault, where you left me to rot in a jail cell, didn’t even bother to find me—”

“Wasn’t your fault?” Colm repeated sharply. “Uh uh, Jean, you don’t get to pull that fucking card on me – I don’t know what you and Myrddin had going on before that shitty assassination attempt, but you fucking knew it wouldn’t be a third time lucky, and you should have expected he wouldn’t just toss you back to the Embassy again.”

“Six years,” Jean-Pierre said. “And you didn’t even look.”

“I was a little fucking busy, Jean,” Colm said, leaning away from Jean-Pierre, and as much as a part of Jean cried out for the loss of contact, another part of him felt a vicious thrill at having made Colm draw away from him. “Taking care of a different baby.”

“Yes, the Nazi baby you picked from the arms of her dead parents,” Jean-Pierre said coolly. “More important than your own brother.”

That cut him, alright. Jean-Pierre watched the change in Colm’s face, the tightening of the muscles there, the way his jaw twitched, his lip curling ever so slightly, the way his brows tilted forward, knitted slightly toward one another.

“You know what you forget?” Colm asked. “S’that I see you like this every fucking time you fly off the handle and need to be drugged to get you down halfway to earth again, ‘cause you’re such a fucking menace.”

“I’ve never hurt a soul during an episode,” Jean-Pierre whispered, feeling as though he’d been drenched in ice water, his fingernails cutting so hard as they clenched to his palms that he near drew blood, and Colm laughed, a bitter sound.

“Not yet,” Colm said, faux-sweet, his teeth bared. “But we wouldn’t have those fucking tranqs for you if we didn’t know it might be a problem, would we?”

“I expect it’s nice for you when I take my sedatives, feeling like the intelligent one between us for once,” replied Jean. “Coming from a man so thick in the skull he can barely even make sense of his letters, let alone read a page without someone to hold his hand, I’m sure you’d like me drugged senseless more often.”

Jean-Pierre flinched when Colm moved suddenly, expecting a kick, but Colm was just swinging his legs over to get out of bed, and he moved fast from Asmodeus’ room, his feet making heavy sounds on the landing and then the stair as he went downstairs.

Almost immediately, Jean-Pierre regretted what he’d said, and the sharp sense of victory he’d felt, cutting at Colm, scabbed over into something heavy and sickly instead. Falling to the side, he dropped his cheek to the warmth of the pillow Colm had left behind him, and laid for some time in the silence he had left there too.

The sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach, hunger now mixing with anxiety and shame, bubbled into something closer to nausea, and Jean-Pierre crossed his arms as tightly as he could over his chest, squeezing his hands under his armpits and trying to ignore the crawling thickness of the regret creeping over his skin. He knew he was being cruel, and he knew, too, that biting at Colm wouldn’t bring Aimé back.

He didn’t want to think of Aimé just now.

The blinding terror that accompanied the thought of him was too much.

He felt wholly alone in the world, and although his eyes were dry, he ached to begin crying again, as abandoned as he was – and that was the essence of his life, he thought, one abandonment after another.

Abandoned by God, by the Host; abandoned by Jules and Manolis and Benoit and Bui and Colm and Asmodeus and Rupert and Farhad; abandoned by Aimé, now. And he did deserve it, didn’t he, in one way or another? He was beautiful, an image of perfection, and underneath, he was all cracked, and everyone rather hated him.

His chest ached.

Jean-Pierre didn’t know how long he lay in his place, staring into the middle distance and loathing everything in general, and himself in particular, before he slowly wrapped a blanket around himself and descended the stairs. Each step was a slow thud under his bare feet, and when he nervously poked his head into the living room, Colm was sitting on the sofa beside the lit fire, watching a video on his phone.

“I’m sorry,” Jean-Pierre said quietly, although the word felt like poison on his tongue. “That was cruel of me, and unfounded.”

“Yep,” said Colm, not looking up from his phone.

“It is a damning of my own character, not of yours, that I have mocked your difficulty in reading.”

“It sure fucking is,” agreed Colm.

“I know I am difficult,” whispered Jean-Pierre. “I have always been very grateful, that you love me anyway. You do love me, don’t you?”

Colm inhaled, his chest expanding, and then, he sighed. It was a loud sigh, full of resignation. Still, he did not look up at Jean-Pierre, but he did speak. “Couldn’t stop if I tried, and I’ve fucking tried,” said Colm, and lifted one arm.

Jean-Pierre ran across the room, falling immediately against his brother’s side, and he buried his face against Colm’s breast, letting the other man squeeze him so tightly his bones creaked under the flesh. It was a relief, a desperate one, and Jean-Pierre dragged in a little gasp of air.

“I’m not sorry he left,” Colm murmured against the top of Jean-Pierre’s hair, “but I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?” Jean-Pierre asked in a low murmur.

“I don’t think he should.”

It hurt, though it was not unexpected, and Jean-Pierre fisted his hands in Colm’s jumper again, squeezing tightly at the fabric and feeling its texture under his fingers. “I wouldn’t kill him,” Jean-Pierre said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t mean he should come back.”

“Do you think he will?”

“I don’t know,” Colm said lowly. “But if you really loved him, you wouldn’t fucking want him to.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Jean-Pierre asked in the smallest of voices, muffled against Colm’s chest. “If you find me so dreadful?”

“Can’t,” Colm said. “Couldn’t stand to.”

“Would you? If you could?”

“No,” Colm whispered. His thumb tapped the phone screen, pausing the video he’d been feigning to watch. “No, I wouldn’t. Not ever.”

“Because you love me?”

“Because I love you.” Colm wrapped one hand in Jean-Pierre’s hair and squeezed it very slightly, pulling hard on his scalp – the pain was grounding, and not unpleasant – and delivered a strong kiss to the crown of his head. Jean-Pierre’s lips shuddered into the tiniest of smiles, although he knew it didn’t reach his eyes. “You need to eat something, Jean. You won’t feel better ‘til you do.”

“I miss De,” he whispered, and Colm hugged him very tightly, nuzzling his nose against Jean-Pierre’s hair.

“I know,” Colm said. “Me too. But he’s not coming home, not yet. Gonna eat?”

“Okay,” Jean-Pierre whispered, and Colm left his phone with him as he got up to cut fruit. Jean-Pierre’s eyes were too dry to start crying again, so he just hugged a pillow close to his chest and stared into the fire.

*     *     *

AIMÉ

It was late in the afternoon, and Aimé and De were walking down the street together. Asmodeus walked very confidently, his chin high, his cardigan and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows and leaving his forearms bare, and he had his reading glasses hung from the inside of his shirt pocket.

Aimé, on the other hand, was a little cold – he’d pulled on a jumper from his bag, and his fleece coat on top, but it wasn’t really all that heavy, and for being the beginning of November, the wind cutting down the main street in Grenoble was surprisingly bitter.

Aimé was huddled in his coat, his hands stuffed into his pockets. Despite their difference in height, Asmodeus didn’t seem to have any difficulty keeping pace with Aimé – when they weren’t holding hands or arm-in-arm, Jean-Pierre often walked ahead of Aimé without meaning to, or kept taking two steps forward and another step back, but Asmodeus had a slow, deliberate gait, and his loping paces were slow enough that he and Aimé kept rhythm with one another.

Syncopated, almost.

The wine tasting had been nice.

It had been a lot of white wines, not the sort of thing Aimé would normally go in for – they’d all been drier than he’d typically like, and many of them had been sweeter than he’d normally go in for, but it had actually been surprisingly enjoyable, tasting wines with De, actually talking about them.

Asmodeus knew about wine.

He’d never worked on a vineyard, from what Aimé could gather, although he’d mentioned going on tours in vineyards once or twice, but he knew about the actual business – he knew how much every bottle was worth, knew how wine worked on the market, how you bought and sold it as an asset.

“Do you invest in stock?” Aimé asked.

“Not usually,” Asmodeus replied. “I do have a portfolio with a sister who works at an investment firm in Chicago, and another in Singapore. When I invest funds, I typically put them toward small businesses, especially those are struggling and need the liquid for growth.”

“You’re an angel investor,” Aimé said, halfway between disgusted and finding it hilarious, and Asmodeus, smug prick, smiled his cold, close-lipped smile.

“Yes,” he said, radiating pure self-satisfaction.

Aimé’s hand twitched at his side, and tapped his fingers against his thigh. Jean-Pierre did this, when he was anxious, Aimé knew, and it didn’t give him the satisfaction he had hoped for.

He’d actually done a few years of finance before he’d tried to kill himself – it had been fucking soul destroying, but he hadn’t actually been bad at it. He could do maths in his head, he knew his way around a calculator and a spreadsheet, but more than that, he’d found it easy looking at the accounting things they’d covered, at the aspects of financial and economic theory, but it was…

It was different, actually investing in shit for real.

Let alone…

“I can ask you questions, right?”

“Always,” Asmodeus said smoothly. They had come to a stop outside of second-hand clothing store, and Asmodeus was examining a brown bomber jacket with a sheepskin lining, stroking his fingers over its cuffs, brushing his knuckles over the fabric on the inside of its back.

“And if I wanted to ask you— For, for help, you’d do that too?”

“You want a loan?”

“Would you give me one?”

“Of course,” Asmodeus said. “But I have a feeling it isn’t money you want.”

“I don’t know how to make a business plan,” Aimé said. “If I… If I was going to make a business plan. I mean, I know my audience, but I don’t know if my rates are good, for what I do, and I’m pretty sure my invoices are fine, when I, when I give people invoices, but…”

Asmodeus didn’t seem to be paying attention. He had drawn the bomber jacket off of the hanger, and was examining it more closely, reading one of the inside labels. Aimé pressed his lips together.

“You know, I think that’s too small for you,” Aimé said. “Unless that chest is collapsible.”

“It’s not for me,” Asmodeus said, and held the coat up to Aimé’s breast. “Looks good. Come.”

Speechless, Aimé followed Asmodeus into the store.

“You don’t have to buy me a coat—”

“Are you cold?”

“De—”

“I can help you make a business plan when I’m back at Christmas,” Asmodeus said as he passed the coat to the old man behind the desk, reaching into a wallet Aimé was fairly certain was older than the Eiffel Tower and plucking a note out of it that looked so crisp and clean it could have just been ironed. “Much of your equipment is already paid for – are you planning to stay in your father’s apartment?”

“No,” Aimé said, biting his lip. “No, I don’t think so.”

“We’ll look into studio space for you, then,” Asmodeus murmured, murmuring thanks in fluent French – unlike Jean and Colm, he didn’t carry his accent speaking English into other languages, although his accent wasn’t Parisian.

“Do you speak French with a Belgian fucking accent?”

“Put the coat on, Aimé,” Asmodeus said, depositing the coat into his hands, and Aimé smoothed his fingers over the worn, comfortable leather.

“You’re so fucking unbearable,” Aimé said.

“Spoken like one of the family,” said De, smiling down at him, and patted his cheek. It made Aimé blush, furiously, embarrassingly, and he turned around so that Asmodeus couldn’t see the way his cheeks were reddening as he dragged off his raincoat and pulled the jacket on instead.

It fit him like a glove, lighter than he’d expected, and he swore under his breath as he zipped it up, huddling in it for a second and marvelling at the heat in it.

“This is too cool for me,” Aimé said. “I don’t wear clothes like this.”

“You’ll hardly have it for long,” Asmodeus said smoothly. “Jean will have it from you in a heartbeat – if you decide to go back, of course.”

Aimé had already been smiling at the mere thought of Jean-Pierre sneaking the coat off of the hook and wrapping himself in it, or just as likely, trying to cram himself into it while Aimé was still wearing it, and the smile froze on his face as Asmodeus finished his sentence.

He looked at Asmodeus’ face, at his smug, amused smile.

“Unbearable,” he repeated, and Asmodeus folded Aimé’s raincoat neatly into what should have been an impossible square, sliding it into his satchel. “You look like an Egyptology professor from 1834.”

“Nonsense,” Asmodeus said. “They’d never have let a man who looked Egyptian study Egyptian history.”

Aimé jumped on that quicker than he meant to: “So you’re Egyptian?”

Asmodeus looked thoughtful. “I’ve had Egyptian passports.”

“What year?”

“Oh, we weren’t counting years back then,” said De, and Aimé laughed despite himself, putting his face in his hands as he stepped out into the street. “Come to think of it, our concept of Egypt was a little different, as well.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, you’re as old as time, and you choose to sound fucking Belgian. You’re cracked in the head is what you are.”

Asmodeus’ laugh was low and smooth and so resonant that Aimé felt it in his ribcage, even through the leather of the coat, and it made him shiver. He wondered, couldn’t help but wonder, if Jean-Pierre would laugh at this too.

“What’s he doing right now? Jean?” Aimé asked.

“If you want to know, there’s one way to find out,” Asmodeus said. It was a challenge, simply posed, and the two of them stopped on the street together, both of them still.

Aimé bit the inside of his lip.

“Or,” Asmodeus said, “we could go to the ballet.”

“The ballet?” Aimé repeated sceptically.

“You’ve never been?”

“You think I’m rich enough to go to the ballet?”

“More than.”

“You think I hate myself enough to go to the ballet?”

Asmodeus gave him a look somewhere between disapproval and affection, a look that shouldn’t have been the same between his face and Jean-Pierre’s, with how different they were, and yet was startlingly similar nonetheless.

“There’s a beautiful Ondine,” said Asmodeus. “I know the school very well.”

“Can I get drunk during?”

“After,” Asmodeus said, patting his shoulder, and the two of them started to walk together.

“Is he losing it?” Aimé asked. “Am I… I’m hurting him. ‘Cause I left.”

“You left because you needed to,” Asmodeus said. “Will you spend your life, Aimé, letting Jean-Pierre cut you because you don’t want him to cut himself?”

“It’s what you and Colm do, isn’t it?” What Colm did, anyway, Aimé thought – he’d definitely seen Jean-Pierre snap at Colm for no reason at all, but he’d never tried to kill him, not that Aimé knew. But… “But it’s different, I guess.”

“Not so different. We chose Jean-Pierre,” Asmodeus said. “We love him very dearly. We’ve just loved him for longer, that’s all.”

Aimé squeezed his hands inside his pockets, and then he steeled himself, looking forward.

“If this ballet kills me with boredom, you have to tell Jean.”

“I’ll shout it from the mountaintops,” promised Asmodeus, and Aimé scoffed.

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

The minutes of the week passed by at an agonising pace, each grain of sand through the hourglass dragging at his skin as it went. There was no peace from the tumult of feeling that stewed inside him: there was never even the scarcest moment of calm.

When he wasn’t drowning in grief, loneliness, desperate melancholy at being left behind, unlovable, he was torn to pieces by his terror that Aimé would never come back, that he’d never see him again, and when it wasn’t fear, it was fury, and the rage would come upon him so suddenly, so painfully, so burning hot under his skin, that Colm would have to hold his hands at his sides to keep him from breaking anything apart, or doing injury to himself.

He was explosive, but that was alright.

Colm was a munitions expert, after all.

On Sunday, Jean-Pierre dropped a glass with a shaking hand, and burst immediately into sobbing, painful tears: Colm lifted up and held him tightly until Jean-Pierre was together enough to sweep up the shards, although it took time for the tears to finally dry away.

On Monday, having emailed his lecturers to advise he would not be present, he caught his finger on a splinter on one of the wood shelves in Colm’s greenhouse, and he was so abruptly angry he punched his fist through the nearest glass pane. Colm had hauled him out and away from the greenhouse, had quickly, neatly pulled the shards of glass out of his flesh even as the wounds healed.

On Tuesday, a sudden shot from outside – Mr Delaney’s battered old Ford backfiring – sent him into a sharp, wheezing panic attack, and Colm had settled him beside the fire, sitting with him until he could stop shaking.

Colm didn’t try to take the feelings from him, but only because Jean-Pierre begged him not to – he knew he wasn’t well, when he was like this, knew his own emotions dizzied him with their strength, but it was worse when Colm leeched them from him and left him suddenly numb on one side, and unbalanced in some places more than others.

“It’ll pass,” Colm kept saying. “It always does. It did for the others.”

“But that’s different,” replied Jean-Pierre. “They died. They didn’t leave.”

And then Colm would change the subject.

Peadar had scarcely left the house, and the kindly old creature would keep his heavy weight continuously in Jean-Pierre’s lap, would loudly purr, and even when Jean-Pierre sobbed into his fur, buried his face against the ruffed fur of his neck, he continued to rumble happily, and knead his claws into Jean-Pierre’s knees and thighs and belly, which Jean-Pierre didn’t mind at all.

On Wednesday, Colm called Pádraic over and pretended it wasn’t to babysit him, and Jean-Pierre didn’t care enough to point out that he knew aloud, so long as he wasn’t left on his own.

He knew he was being embarrassing. He knew he was being irritating, that he was being clingy, but he could hardly stop, couldn’t bear to be alone even for a second in case it went on longer – he shadowed Colm as he cooked or worked in the greenhouse or fixed small things at his desk; he slept in Colm’s bed or curled against him on the sofa; even Colm bathed, Jean-Pierre sat on the bathmat with Peadar in his lap, and waited for him to be finished.

When Pádraic came, and Colm left for his allotment and the church, Jean-Pierre settled at Pádraic’s feet with Peadar curled into a ginger ball on his lap, and they sat for the longest time in silence, Pádraic knitting as Jean-Pierre looked at book pages and didn’t really read them.

It was beginning to settle, he thought.

He had had times like this before, that much was true – Colm was right, that he’d survived much the same as this before, and it took time for him to even out again, to regain a sense of equilibrium, of balance, of normalcy.

It had come before – it would come again.

It was difficult to remember that, when something as little as a loose thread on his shirt made him break into tears, but the desperation of his feeling would fade.

On Thursday, he ran down the stairs expecting the postman, or a neighbour, and when he opened the door and laid eyes on Aimé, he felt as though the wind had been punched from his lungs.

He stared, his mouth agape, at Aimé, whose stubble had mostly grow back onto his cheeks, now, although he did not yet have the beard he had had before, and he was wearing a new coat, a jacket with a ruffed collar that rather suited him.

Aimé stood there, his hands in his pockets, and looked at him.

“Where have you been?” Jean-Pierre asked in a whisper.

“France,” said Aimé. “Grenoble.”

“Grenoble,” Jean-Pierre repeated uncomprehendingly, feeling, for just a moment, numb, and extremely calm. If his emotions were a storm, here he had found its eye, and yet the silence, the blankness of it, was far from comforting. “You were— you were in Grenoble? The whole time?”

“I needed it,” Aimé said. “Time away.”

“Away from me,” Jean-Pierre said, his own voice so loud that it hurt his ears, and the letter opener from the hall table was in his hand almost before he lunged, and he saw Aimé’s mismatched eyes widen as Jean-Pierre came for him.

The eye had burst.