Brian’s POV “Sir, the ambulance is on its way. Now, I need you to stay on the line with me, alright? Can you tell me your partner’s name?” “It’s…it’s Justin; Justin Taylor.” I stammered out, trying frantically to shake myself from the terrified stupor that had gripped my mind and body like a powerful anaesthetic. My heart was still somewhere in the vicinity of my throat and was pounding so hard I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears. “Alright, Sir, I need you to listen closely; I’m going to tell you how to help Justin until the ambulance arrives.” Vaguely, I wondered why the 9-1-1 operator had not asked me to help Ethan; I wondered how she seemed to know the situation. I’d told her Ethan was unconscious, but not about the dark marks of strangulation on his neck, or the fact he was barely breathing, or about the blood pouring from his mouth and nose. I guess it was obvious my frantic distress and anxiety was for Justin alone. “Just tell me what to do, I’m listening.” I told the operator, telling myself savagely to calm the fuck down because panicking wouldn’t help Justin. “He’s bleeding from the head and he’s…he’s having a panic attack, or something…” I was kneeling on the floor with Justin pulled up against my body, my hand pressed hard against the wide gash on his temple, feeling his warm, diaphanous blood oozing between my fingers. He was mercifully conscious, clinging to me with both hands in an iron-like grip, shaking so badly it was as if he were vibrating with some tremendous internal force. “Alright, now stay calm,” the operator’s authoritative, composed voice answered. “I want you to keep him at rest with his head above his heart. Keep constant pressure on the wound. He’s going into shock, so you’ll need to keep him warm and reassure him that help is coming.” Justin was repeating my name over and over gain in a broken, tremulous mantra. I let the cell phone clatter to the floor and, assuring him that I was there, that it was over and that it would be alright, and wrapped my free arm tightly around Justin’s trembling body, cradling him to my chest. I screwed my eyes shut against a sudden onslaught of guilt and self-hatred. Why? Jesus Christ, why?! Why had I left him? It’d been so incredibly negligent and stupid! Of course that motherfucker had been waiting for me to leave- God, this was all my fucking fault! “B-b-brian…” Justin muttered, the words barely making it past his lips, which were a delicate shade of violet. His skin felt cool to the touch. “He…he…” “Shh…Hold on, Sunshine; help is coming,” I tried to make my voice sound soothing and confident, but I could hear it trembling. I put my lips against Justin’s ear, to make him feel my words as well as hear them. “It’s OK; we’re gonna be OK. I promise” The scene was like some freakish encore of Justin’s prom night, only this time it was in my loft and not in a parking garage. Except…it was different, because it wasn’t Justin’s body slumped, bleeding and unconscious on the floor. This time, Justin hadn’t needed a hero. “Brian…I killed him,” Justin whispered, his voice illogically calm and even in contract to the trembling of his body, now trying feebly to turn in my arms to look at me. I held him firmly in the position he was in, knowing I needed to keep the pressure on his head wound, but I pulled him more tightly to against me. “He’s not dead, Justin. You didn’t kill him.” I assured him, rocking us both gently back and forth, finding some comfort in the age-old, soothing technique. “He’s still breathing. Don’t think about it, Sunshine, it’s over now.” “I was afraid you wouldn’t come in time to rescue me,” Justin murmured, so softly I barely caught his words for the pounding in my ears. “But you did. You saved me.” “No, Justin-” I stammered, alarmed that he was also suddenly becoming delirious. “I wasn’t here. I left you alone because I had to go into work, remember? And Ethan came when I was gone; he was waiting for me to leave you.” “You never leave me…” Justin replied softly, and somehow I knew that despite his condition and everything that had happened to him, Justin knew exactly what he was saying. “At first, I was trying to fight Ethan because I hated him. But…but then I realized I was doing it because I loved you. And it made me so much stronger because I knew you were there, too; I felt you inside me. I knew you’d always been there.” Justin looked up at me, and I felt a lump rising in my throat at his look of absolute, uncompromised trust and conviction. I brushed my lips against his ear again, noticing for the first time how his blood was staining the white-gold hair a pale bronze. “You saved me too, Sunshine,” I whispered to him, feeling his weight settle more securely into my arms. “Because you never left me, either. You never let go of me. We can’t let go of what we have; not any more.” I could tell from the look in his eyes that Justin deciphered and understood the message for what it was; ‘I love you’. “There’s no turning back.” Justin added softly, tracing trembling, shaking fingers down my face. I kissed his fingers gently, tasting the metallic tang of blood and the saltiness of his sweat. And there was no turning back. But neither was there any regret; there never had been since the moment I’d met him, from that first night when he’d claimed me as his own. As if from somewhere far, far away there came the distant wail of sirens. ~~~ Ten Days Later Justin’s POV I was surprised and a bit distressed to find that painting Ethan was more difficult than I’d anticipated, despite the fact that his figure was little more than a ghost on the canvas. The therapist I’d been to see a few times already had suggested it was too soon to try this kind of ‘artistic therapy’ as she called it, but I didn’t care. I needed the emotions to be raw and fresh in my mind, and I needed that shadowy figure to be Ethan. Otherwise, the painting would lose its meaning for me, and thus the compassion I needed to create it. Ethan’s spectre was painted in shadows; greys and blacks and whites; and rather than alleviating it, his facelessness seeming to add to his sinister aura. And just like in the nightmare which continued to reoccur, Ethan’s figure seemed to be melting, like wax from a candle, dripping with viscuous rivulets of crimson and cerise. The only colour in Ethan’s likeness was the blood. I thought of Ethan then; only just out of hospital with extensive soft-tissue damage to his oesophagus and trachea. I’d also broken his nose and knocked out two teeth, but there (unfortunately) had been no long-term damage. In his turn, Ethan had left me with seven stitches to the head, a compound knee injury, and several serious lacerations to my arms and wrists where his nails had gouged out chunks of my flesh. Ethan had been charged with criminal harassment, physical assault and sexual abuse-and that was before they’d taken my testimony into account. All they would tell me about his whereabouts was that he was ‘awaiting trial’ somewhere far away from me. But it didn’t matter to me; Ethan was dead as far as I was concerned, and he was going to pay for what he’d done. Now he was just a shadow on the canvas. Brian was in the painting as well, although not as a human figure; I knew I could never truly capture his perfection and unique rugged beauty. I had painted him as that surge of energy, that indescribable force that had rushed through me when Ethan had attacked me and threatened to take me from Brian. I knew now what that force had been; the power of our love. In the painting, it was an explosion of colour and life; scarlet, gold, fuchsia, harlequin, magenta, indigo and cyan. It whirled and twisted and swirled around the Ethan shadow, larger than the canvas, larger than life; obscuring him, dissipating his image forever into the hurricane of colour. I was going to call the painting ‘The Greater of Two’. ‘Two’ for Love and Hate, Eternal and Ephemeral, Brian and Ethan. Now I knew the greater of all three pairs. My right hand began the shake as I applied a thin line of burgundy to balance out a streak of pale olive. Cursing under my breath, I shook my hand violently to stop the cramping, hearing my fingers click together in the silence of the deep night. It was 3:35am. As I took up my brush again, a flash of iridescent colour from the vicinity of the bay windows caught my eye. I looked over to see two glowing cat-eyes watching me silently from behind Brian’s gossamer curtains. Wolfram had been unusually shy since Brian (yes, Brian) had adopted him. I knew it had been for me, although I’d never asked him to. After only three days, Wolfram was still getting used to his new home. And all things being equal, his new home was still getting used to him. But I could tell, to my astonishment, that my un-zoologically inclined boyfriend had a definite soft spot for this affectionate feline. Who’d have thought? “Fuck!” I hissed, as pain shot through my right hand again. Even I had to admit I’d been pushing it hard; I’d been at this for almost two hours. Mainly because I hadn’t yet woken Brian. I shook my hand again vigorously, splattering paint across my bare arms and chest. I pressed my fingertips to my forehead in an attempt to draw out the pounding headache that had begun to develop. I’d had numerous headaches and migraines over the last few days, brought on by combination of tiredness and over-stimulation. But I stubbornly decided to keep at the painting, knowing that if I stopped I would only fall asleep and return to the world of vivid nightmares. Caught up in these thoughts, I nearly leapt out of my skin when a hand suddenly closed over my wrist from behind, deftly plucking the paintbrush from my grip. The hand kept a tight grip on me while another quickly cleaned the brush in the water, laid it down next to the others, and quickly screwed the lids on the paint pots. (By now, Brian knew that I’d have a conniption fit if my paint dried out or the brushes went uncleaned.) Without saying anything, Brian laid a hand on the small of my back and gently propelled me back up the stairs to the bedroom. He waited while I obediently climbed back onto the bed and crawled under the sheets, feeling a bit sheepish at having been busted yet again. My knee didn’t hurt constantly anymore, but it was still very stiff and I hissed softy as a line of sharp pain shot through it. I watched as Brian went back into the main room to turn off the lamp I had been working by. I was still surprised the light hadn’t woken him up sooner. I watched with surprise as Wolfram ventured out of his hiding place and padded along after Brian, rubbing against Brian’s ankles until his new owner scooped him up, scratched him under the chin, and placed him back into his cat basket. Brian went into the bathroom and came back out after a few seconds with some aspirin and a glass of water. He handed them wordlessly to me, and I wondered how he’d known about the steady throb that had begun to pound behind my eyeballs. I swallowed the tablet and drank the water gratefully before laying down against the pillow feeling sleep straining to wash over me, like an overfilled dam. “Better? Here, let me see your hand.” Brian ordered softly, as I felt him lie down beside me. He picked up my right hand and began to massage the knuckles and fingers soothing, as only he could. “You’re pushing this hand too hard, Sunshine; it’s really badly cramped up.” “It’s fine; it’s just tired,” I replied, trying to focus on Brian in order to ward off the tendrils of sleep. “And so are you,” Brian chided me, brushing hair off my forehead and out of my eyes. “This is the fourth night this week I’ve found you doing this. I think it’s great that you want to put all this emotion into your work, but you need to sleep sometime. Your body and mind are still healing themselves; you need to give them some downtime.” “I can’t sleep,” I protested weakly. I was about to say I was afraid to go to sleep, but that sounded so childish and pathetic. “The nightmares…they just come all the time. I can’t stop them…” “But I can,” Brian assured me softy, shifting onto his side so my head was cradled in the crook of his elbow. “At least, I can try to. But you need to tell me about them; talk to me, Sunshine. Wake me up if you have to, I don’t care. I want to help; I’ll do anything to make this easier for you.” I reached up and wrapped my arms around Brian’s neck, and he rolled us onto our sides so he could hug me back. I felt his hands rubbing soothing circles on my back, and his lips against the side of my face and along my jaw. Inwardly, I struggled with myself; I wanted to tell him about the nightmares, but I knew some of them would really upset him. In the most disturbing dream of all, the Ethan I had been strangling had turned suddenly into Brian, and in the nightmare I hadn’t been able to unlock my hands or even to stop squeezing. I had never seen anyone actually die, but the way the life had drained from Brian’s eyes in the dream had been horrifyingly vivid. I rested my head against Brian’s shoulder and closed my eyes, concentrating on the feel of his skin and the rate of the pulse beating just beneath it. I took in his distinct Brian scent, the softness of his hair, the caress of his fingers, the warmth of his breath, and the rippling of his muscles. I resolved to tell him in the morning. I fell slowly into the dark oblivion of sleep, feeling Brian inside and outside and cramming into all the spaces in between. I knew that the edge of the woods was still lost in dense thickets of fear and trepidation, and rivers surging with challenge and despair. But at least I would not have to walk the path through it alone. I had the greater of two. ~~~ A/N: Apologies for the brevity of the chapter and the belated update. I’ll try to have the final chapter up ASAP. Thanks!