I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

'East Coker', T.S. Eliot

The sky is a curdled reddish-pink, like a streak of blood diffusing in milk. The sun clings to a point just above the horizon, and it will not set until the end of July. The car moves ever northwards, along roads blasted into mountainsides, tracing the line of the coast like a cartographer's pencil. Lukas has not seen anyone else for hours, and he likes it that way. All is silent here, but it is a different sort of silence from the one at home. It is a better sort of silence – the silence of nothing to say, rather than that of nothing being said. He casts a glance at the water glimmering all those hundreds of metres below and feels a calm rising in him. His veins have always flowed with the salt of the sea, and his heart has always beat with the rhythm of the waves. The drop is vertiginous, steep enough to be almost vertical, and from such a distance, the white caps on the waves look like wisps of summer cloud. Guilt, cold and sharp, washes over him unexpectedly at the thought of his phone, left at home, and he thinks of how it will be angrily, desperately ringing and ringing until the battery dies. He reminds himself that he has not run away – he has only left for a few days, because he has always been happiest alone. Sometimes there is simply too much noise, too many people. But in leaving, and in saving himself, he has hurt someone else.

The solitude is good for him. The car radio lost signal hours ago, the music dissolving to the spitting hiss of static, and he was glad to switch it off. His watch tells him that it is, somehow, eleven at night. He blinks a few times, out of synch with the rhythm of the days in this place where the sun never sets. And yet this is his homeland. He sighs. Has he really been away that long? He's been driving for a good twelve hours. Soon, he'll have to find somewhere to stop for the night, if there is anywhere, or he will have no choice but to pull over by the barrier and snatch a few hours full of uneasy dreams about plunging into the sea. No one will come by, he knows that. There are no road signs here, and no need for them, because the only way to go is further and further north, deeper into the mountains along the ragged coastline. Love would be love of the wrong thing, he remembers. Who does he love? Who should he love? He loves Mathias, rightly or wrongly, and Mathias loves him back – loves him more, gives him more love than he knows what to do with. There is nothing sadder, he thinks, than a relationship where one of the partners is more in love than the other.

In half a mile or so, the coast will fall away to nothing, as though this desolate place really is the end of the world. The road curves in a broad sweep away from the edge, and begins to skirt a valley. There is no darkness here, but the shadows lie full and soft in the creases of the mountainside, and Lukas is relieved to spot handfuls of lights gleaming here and there in the eternal twilight. If he can hang on for just a bit longer, he will come to a village. He'll have a bed for the night, and the company of his own quiet people who speak with his accent, and maybe – hopefully – there'll be somewhere to slot in a handful of change and call home to Mathias. There'll be a chance to explain, and to beg forgiveness. No, not a chance – an obligation. Mathias will want, and have a right, to know why Lukas has disappeared to this despairingly empty corner of the globe; why he has run until there really is no further he can go. He comes to a fork in the road – finally, a choice, rather than simply being made to follow the path that nature has grudgingly allowed man to carve out. One of the prongs leads down into the valley, while the other continues along its edge and vanishes around another bend. For better or worse, he goes down.

…

The room is nice enough. It is small, but there is only him to fit in it, and it has been a long time since he slept in a single bed. There is a window that faces out onto the mountain, and if he looks closely, he can see a narrow stream winding and glinting its way down to the river that threads through the valley floor. It is mostly silent, but somewhere along the corridor, two voices rise and fall in conversation. A couple, maybe, or two friends, or simply a pair of strangers who have met by chance at this, one of the corners of the earth. He closes his eyes and lets the exhaustion of the last few weeks – or months, or years – come flooding through him. It was unusual for him to be able to come to the hotel, ask for a room, and be answered in the heavy dialect of the region that he knows so well. He and Mathias have been learning each other's languages, similar as they are, through a process of elimination, cutting out all the words that result in blank looks or confusion from the other. They have created a nucleus of words that are mutually intelligible, stored up mental banks of the consonant shifts and distorted vowels and changes of accent necessary to make themselves understood. But here, he does not need to make any such accommodations, and he takes a sort of pride in knowing the language, in being one of the people who live – or, in his case, lived – in this untamed place.

And yet, language barriers aside, there is something greater that divides him and Mathias. There is something inexpressible between them, something that defies description and therefore discussion. Not that Lukas would be the one to initiate a serious conversation on the matter. He keeps things to himself, and, in that respect at least, Mathias is his polar opposite. Mathias cannot dwell on things in silence – if he is angry, that anger will be turned outwards. It will make itself known in the slamming of doors, the shouting and the drinking and the surly look of betrayal he will wear until, in a whirlwind of tears and apologies and promises to do better, they are made up and the cracks all plastered over again. They never remember who started it in the first place – whether it was Mathias, who feels everything, or Lukas, who feels nothing. Wait without hope. But what is he waiting for? He knows he is waiting for something, and Mathias is too, but not if they are waiting for the same thing. Perhaps what they're waiting for isn't the best thing for them. Perhaps it is the hope, impossible to suppress, that is killing them from the inside out.

Downstairs, there is a communal room for the guests, with a TV, a pool table and a shelf of shabby Nordic crime novels. There is also a phone, the international rates on a laminated card pinned up beside it, that any of these lost people can use. Hello, I'm here. I can't go any further. In the morning, he will go down there, check how much it costs to call someone in Denmark, insert the correct change and wait – against his better judgement, with hope – for Mathias to answer. Perhaps it will be easier to talk when they cannot see each other, when tears can be dashed away unnoticed and it is no longer possible to collapse into each other's arms and leave their problems unaddressed for another day and night. He wonders what is wrong with them, and if they are struggling to salvage something that should never have come into being at all.

Ah, but he loves Mathias. Love of the wrong thing, perhaps, as the poem says, but love is rarely a matter of choice. They love each other in their own different ways, and therein lies so much of their trouble. Lukas is quiet in his love, sparing in his gestures and declarations, and maybe to the untrained eye seems a little detached, even cold. The love is there, and it is sincere, but it is not overt, not something for show and display. Mathias loves him passionately, and almost with a touch of desperation. He has always been one for the flowers, the gifts, the obsessive commemoration of any halfway significant date, leaving Lukas with all these things piled up and drowning him in these surges of affection that make his own efforts seem half-hearted, barely there. And it all makes Lukas feel unbearably guilty. It makes him feel spoilt when he accepts everything he is given, and inadequate when he looks at his own paltry offerings. He never wanted this sort of relationship, where everything is so clearly delineated and they act out the age-old roles of lover and beloved as if they are living in some sort of outdated drama, a quaint effort to recreate the lifestyles of the past.

But enough of all that. It is one in the morning. It is late, or early, or – by the light of the midnight sun – no time at all. For now, he will shut the curtains on the glittering river cut into the hulking mountain, and he will slip between the cool sheets of his unfamiliar bed until sleep chooses to come. In the morning, he will call Mathias, and as he lies down, he prays that Mathias will forgive him. It is silent now. The people in the corridor, whoever they are, have stopped their talking.

...

Breakfast is a disconcerting affair, a bizarre collection of individuals gathered in this remote outpost of civilisation, and Lukas observes them, as he does the world, over the rim of his coffee cup. There are a few people like him – single, or at least alone, and the inevitable couples looking for something a little different from a weekend in Paris. There is one family, clad in outdoor clothes, the children listening with scowls of reluctance to their father's lecture about safety in the mountains, the importance of sticking together and helping each other. Their accents jar; they are not from round here. It is too late to check out now, Lukas realises, and he will have to spend the rest of the day here. He could go home. He hasn't seen his village in years, and Mathias has never seen it at all. They have travelled the world together, but he has never brought him home. He isn't sure exactly where he is, but he could easily find the village on the map, the place names becoming more and more familiar until he finds it, a cluster of houses in the valley at the head of a fjord. Or he could simply do nothing, and stay here, and wait without hope for the courage he needs to call home – his new home, where Mathias is. There is yet faith. There is always faith. He knows that neither of them would ever even look at anyone else, and it is precisely this devotion that is the source of all their problems. They are too afraid to talk about what has come between them, for fear that it will break them apart and leave them bereft and alone. Better, then, to build on these foundations of sand than to rip down their precarious construction, no matter how close it has come to collapse. Why hasten the end?

The family are getting up to leave. The children seem to have perked up and are chatting about who's going to get to the summit first. Their parents smile at each other and the father loops his arm around the mother's waist, and together they leave the room. Lukas looks away, scalded. He just wants that simple closeness. But how to tell Mathias without feeling ungrateful? Ungrateful – just the word makes him feel like a spoilt boy being showered with gifts from a besotted lover. A strange sort of fear bubbles up in him at the prospect of calling Mathias. For someone who so craves solitude, he has never wanted to be truly alone. He has chosen to come here by himself; to be forced into it by the simple fact of having no one would be intolerable to him. Mathias is so unfailingly kind, so patient and solicitous, and if he occasionally equates love with money, he can be forgiven for it. The last thing Lukas wants to do is hurt him any more than necessary – any more than he already has.

The breakfast room is almost empty. Lukas decides that he has waited long enough, and so has Mathias. He has driven hundreds of miles to be here because, like anyone lost, something in him has called him home to this place that shaped him. The north has made him in its own image – they are both cold and distant and difficult to reach. It is not impossible to thrive in them, but it takes a special kind of person to carve out a living on the mountainside and someone even more unique to reach Lukas's heart. Mathias has reached it – and, Lukas thinks, perhaps he is afraid of not being able to hold on. He sips the last cooling drops of his coffee and stands up. Everyone seems to be going out. He should have the phone to himself.

…

The phone rings once and goes unanswered. Lukas counts the heartbeats between the first ring and the second.

Wait without hope

It rings a second time, and again Mathias doesn't pick up. Lukas breathes deeply, sick with nerves.

Wait without love

The third ring buzzes in Lukas's ear, and his heart sinks. Normally Mathias answers the moment his phone starts ringing. Is he punishing him for all the years of coldness, of silence? Lukas wants to hang up and run away again, run until the ground falls away under his feet and he plunges into the sea. He has always loved the water and now he wants it against his skin, scorching cold, abrasive with sand and salt and those stinging little pebbles. He needs this purification. He wants to start again in someone else's life, picking up where they left off. Someone better can have his life, someone who deserves Mathias and all his love. And then:

"Lukas?"

At the sound of that voice, so full of hurt and honest bewilderment, Lukas is undone. Mathias is like a child when he's upset. "I'm so sorry." is all he can say – all he should have said before. This little adventure of his suddenly seems hopelessly self-absorbed. He's playing his old part again, the pretty boy who does what he wants.

"Why'd you go? Was it me?"

Lukas feels tears rising. No, he thinks. No, he can blame himself, or the vagaries of life and fate, but never Mathias. It's his own fault. It's always been his fault, for being so emotionless and being so unworthy of all this love. "It was me," he says, the truth plain and stark in his flat voice. "It's always been me. I don't deserve you." He is glad that Mathias is not there to take him in his arms and distract him from his miserable apology.

A sigh, a storm of static in his hear. "You're the last person I ever thought I'd say this to, Lukas, but you're being melodramatic," Mathias's voice is patient, but the patience is strained. "What do you mean you 'don't deserve' me?"

Now it is Lukas's turn to sigh, and he does so as if it is his last breath. Wait without hope. There is yet faith. "You're too kind. You're too good to me. You give me all these things I don't know what to do with and you love me more than I thought anyone could love. I don't give you half of what you give me. You deserve someone who can love you that much and more."

Mathias's reply is sharp and shocked, like a bud nipped by frost. "Is this your way of leaving me?"

Lukas swallows, stunned. Through the window, he can see a group of people on the mountain, their heavy-duty clothing like ragged bunting at this distance. "No," he says weakly, then with conviction. "No, I'm not leaving you. I love you. I love you with all my heart, and there's still not enough love there for you. I'm saying that you should leave me for someone better, someone who'll appreciate all the things you do." He is afraid of his own coldness. He wants to rip himself open, prise out his beating heart and split it into pieces to wring out every last bit of love. There must be more. There must be something else he can give Mathias. Love of the wrong thing. But it is Mathias who, in loving him, has decided to love the wrong thing.

"Oh, Lukas..." Mathias says, and then cannot go on.

Lukas closes his eyes against the continuing tears. He loves Mathias. He loves his voice and his silence, his eyes and his smile. He loves him more than... And here he is lost in useless metaphors... He loves him more than the northern sky loves the sun it refuses to let sink. He loves him more than the land that must love the river to let it carve a path out of it. He loves him more than those ancient kings who built palaces and temples for their lovers. It is a love that boils and surges every minute of his life, a profound love that he feels moving in him in the darkness between dreams. It is true love, but, if he is found unworthy of it, he is bound to relinquish it." It defies words, but he must speak.

"I love you," he says again. "You don't have to buy me all these things to make me love you. I'd love you if you didn't have a penny to your name. All I am saying is that there are people who can love you better than I ever will. Every time we argue, it's me. It's me being cold or boring or ruining something or you buying me something and me not liking it."

There is silence from Mathias, a terrifying silence. Lukas runs his tongue over his teeth and swallows. His throat his painfully dry, even though his hands are slick with nervous sweat.

"Why would I ever want to leave you?" he eventually asks. "I've chosen to be with you, honestly. I haven't been brainwashed into it or something."

"I don't know," Lukas admits. "I've just had it in my mind for so long. I feel like the reason we fight all the time is because you feel trapped or something because of me. I've wanted to say it for a while, but I thought it was too late to be raising thingd like that."

"We don't fight that much, Lu. Besides, it's got to happen once in a while. We're different people, that's the thing. We're just high-spirited. Well, I am, at least."

Lukas feels a wonderful sense of relief washing over him. So this is all their arguments are to Mathias – the necessary sparks thrown up by differing personalities. No hidden frustrations, no resentments – to Mathias, they're just something that happens once in a while. All these doubts, all the worry and sleepless nights, are disappearing from him as a wave runs down the shore. His long-held fear that Mathias was caught in their relationship, an unwilling participant, has been proven unfounded. "I'm sorry for running off like this," he says. "I suppose I just had to be alone."

"Well, you could have at least brought your phone." Mathias concedes.

"I know. That was stupid of me." He doesn't care. He's smiling for the first time in too long. They're going to be alright, the two of them.

"You went north, didn't you? As soon as I saw the Norwegian number flash up, I knew it had to be you."

Lukas sighs. "I wanted to go home," he says, a lie that becomes truth as he tells it. He will go today. "I haven't been back since before we met."

"That's a long time," Mathias remarks. A thought occurs to him. "You've never taken me there."

"I will," Lukas promises. "It's beautiful. So far away from everything. I love it."

There is a pause in the conversation. The people on the mountain have disappeared over the ridge, continuing on their way.

"When will you be home?" Mathias asks.

"Tomorrow night," Lukas replies. "I'll leave early. I can be back by nine. I'm sorry about all this."

"Alright, sweetheart. I'll see you then."

Lukas feels like crying again. Mathias's voice is so calm, so full of love and acceptance that it breaks his heart and yet at the same time makes him so unutterably grateful to have him.

"Thank you." he whispers, overcome.

"I love you." Mathias says sincerely

"I love you too," Lukas replies. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Lukas stays standing there for a long time after the conversation has finished. Today, he will go home and swim in the waters of the fjord like he did all his boyhood summers. He will emerge cleansed and reborn and free of all his old concerns, and tomorrow he will go back to Mathias. They can start again, building their love on the certainty of the shared truth rather than the careful avoidance of issues he has been too afraid to bring up. The faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Yes. And this is what he has been waiting for. And this is what his and Mathias's love and faith has brought them.

…

Author's Note: Hey guys! Hope you liked the little oneshot. I wrote it for a friend's birthday, but I'm hoping that it's cured my writers' block for long enough to get me going on the next chapter of 'That Friend of His'. So yeah, hope you enjoyed!