The rest of the team had clocked off some time ago, only he and Kent were left in the dimming of the day. In fact, the day had already dimmed and darkened hours ago, defeated early by the oncoming night. It was the middle of winter after all. The Incident room was silent but for the soothing click-click of Kent's typing. Joe liked the Incident Room best at this time of the evening, when the day's business would stop and the room would wind down in a gradual heave, like an engine groaning to a halt. The quiet helped him think. He felt less battered, less assaulted on all sides when he was alone. Of course he wasn't entirely alone – Kent sat familiarly at his desk, but that was such a usual occurrence that it was comforting in itself. It was nice to know there was someone else there, someone who wouldn't be bothered by his ways, who wouldn't laugh or stare if his eyes happened to catch Joe counting drawing-pins or rearranging his filing cabinet alphabetically for the third time that week. Sometimes, one of Kent's half smiles would stave off Joe's episodes before they started, the little twist of his mouth uttering more than words. His perpetual trust saying It's okay, sir, I at least have faith in you. It was the continuity that calmed him, Joe thought. Kent had been with him since the beginning – he was a symbol of security, of constancy, of loyalty. Steadfast, that must be it.
He drew up his fingers to pinch the bridge of his nose. Spending so much time staring at paperwork was beginning to make his eyes swim. The black type and the white paper mixed together, like paint running in water, a swirling spiral in varying greyish hues. He glanced at his watch. He should probably think about making tracks soon – the weather forecast had promised snow that evening and he didn't want to get stuck in a blizzard halfway home, unsure if the best way forward would in fact be to go back.
"Kent," he called, still looking at his desk as he stood. No reply.
Joe darted a look towards Kent's desk. It was empty, the soft yellow light from the lamp that had washed its joyful colour into the blackness now cold and lifeless. Joe felt strangely bereft, as though his own sense of contentment, such as it was, had been switched off along with Kent's desk lamp. Kent didn't usually just leave without saying goodnight. It disrupted the formula of his day, this last minute unexpected change, and Joe felt sort of lopsided, unbalanced, like an easel with a broken leg. He gathered his things, and began his slow egress from the Incident Room, pausing (he could not quite say why) at Kent's desk as he passed.
"Sir?" The door to the gents' clunked shut with a louder clatter than it seemed to make during the day. The sound rumbled through the silence like a faraway roll of thunder, startling Joe who had been fingering the switch on Kent's lamp. He jumped, his index finger slipping and flicking on the light, which flashed on as though it were the accompanying stroke of lightening.
"Kent. I thought you'd gone," breathed Joe, recovering slowly. His pulse beat insistently and erratically, a stuttering storm of its own. He switched the lamp off and on one, two, three, four, five times as his heart rate gradually returned to normal.
"Sorry, sir," said Kent, ignoring the gleam of light blinking around the room. "I'm just leaving now." He gesticulated with his phone. "Weather report has the snow coming in earlier than originally forecast. We'd better go before it starts to settle."
"Oh… yes. Good. I was just about to…" Wrenching himself away from the light switch, Joe indicated the coat in his arms and the car keys rattling in his spare hand.
Kent grinned, a more full version of the smile which settled Joe's spirits. "Shall we, sir?" he said, holding open the door for Joe.
We? At what point had he and Kent become a we? The whole team could be counted as one, he supposed, and he and Kent as part of that team, therefore… But after hours, in the dim office illuminated only by the sparing glow of disturbed desk lamp and smartphone, what did that mean? We. Grammatically speaking, it was just the first person plural. A clean, simple way of referring to oneself and another, or others. They and I. Us and them. Me and you. But on Kent's lips it felt more than just a pronoun, somehow. We. Oooeee. The pursed osculation followed by the beaming stretch, and then the meaning, allowing the diphthong to become a word. Joe shook himself. For crying out loud, why did he always have to overthink quite so much? All Kent meant was him and Joe, not together, just… the two of them, separately, going the same way.
They stepped side by side downstairs to the station lobby. It was only the skeleton staff left now, the sentinels keeping the station awake overnight. Joe knew most of them by face and by voice, a nod as he left in the small hours or an alert at the end of a phone call in the even smaller hours, but very few by name. Kent seemed to know a few of them, though, judging by his affable farewells, his 'see you soon's and 'have a good evening's. (Though didn't that say as much about the amount of extended shifts Kent pulled as it did about his sociability?) Then, suddenly, his disgruntled "Oh." An abrupt stop at the exit doors, regarding the car park with displeasure, a truncated firmness in his shoulder which had already prepared for his venture outside.
"Wasn't expecting that just yet." Kent's face fell, mirroring the sheets of snow plummeting out of the frostbitten sky. Already the snow had formed a thickening layer over the tarmac, concealing the lines denoting parking spaces. Snow was a great leveller, coating everything the same, from the most expensive flash cars to the crumbliest old bangers, they all metamorphosed equally into rounded, wave-shaped sculptures. Of different sizes, yes, but essentially all just architecture.
"You can't ride your Vespa in that, Kent," said Joe sternly. "You'll freeze to death before the end of the street. I'll drive you home."
Kent made a strange noise in his throat and responded by gesturing vaguely into the street. "I don't think your car's going anywhere either, I'm afraid sir."
"The tube, then?" said Joe, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He avoided public transport as much as possible. Even when he wasn't pushed up into a stranger's armpit, he could feel the existence of the millions of passengers, air thick with their respiration, and worse. He certainly never dared sit down on the underground.
"No luck there, either sir," replied Kent. "All lines suspended."
"Ah." He almost felt relieved.
The silence in the office was heavier somehow, as though the precipitation outside had made its way into the Incident Room, muffling as it went. Joe felt as though he were teetering on the edge of something. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, like the way he had felt the day he was made DI, or the day he walked up to Jimmy Kray and bloodied him with his fists. That almost magical gloss created by snow (even Joe was not immune to it) made the fact that he was stuck at the station feel less of an inconvenience. Yes, he was stranded, suspended like the tube lines, but for some reason that didn't bother him as much as he would have thought. It was an odd word to use, though, suspended. Part suspended even odder. Apparently you could buy magnetic signs saying such at the London Transport Museum so you could relive the misery of commuting each time you looked at your fridge. Though why anyone would wish to do so, Joe could not imagine. Suspended. It made him think of flying engineers, train tracks soaring into the air, into the space between earth and sky. A whole heavenly network of routes built into the stratosphere. Rather than the grinding halt it actually was.
Suspended also had another meaning, one which Joe preferred not to think about. It reminded him too much of Kent and the Krays, and how he'd been then. His fingers twitched towards the neatly piled paperclips at the corner of his desk, but he snatched them back into his fist before the mental count, his unrelenting incessant abacus, could begin. Instead, he gripped firmly at his tie, focussing his energies on straightening the silken knot to a precise triangle.
He scowled to himself as he felt the wetness in his collar. For a while, once he had realised he was going nowhere, Joe had stood in the car park, coatless, just listening to the white blur of snow. London always sounded different in the snowfall. It was a deader sound than rain – rain bounced and rattled like a live thing but snow settled into place like a child falling asleep. Suddenly, everything stopped. Cars stopped roaring, planes stopped flying and the city, for a short while, was put on mute. There was peace, then, even at the centre of a snow storm. Even when everything familiar was being reconstructed and reimagined in wind and ice. Even when Joe himself was being given a dishevelled makeover as his usually immaculate hair was damply and blusteringly reorganised and his complexion pricked pink with cold. Although he had only lasted outside for a couple of minutes before fleeing back to the relative security of his office.
Kent had withdrawn to the CCTV suite next to the Incident Room to go over some footage in relation to an assault case they were investigating. It appeared to be simply an argument that had got out of hand when one man had stabbed another in the arm with a broken bottle, but the assailant was claiming self-defence. The only way to prove whether he was lying or not was to find the attack on camera. It wasn't particularly urgent, but Kent seemed to want to keep busy.
"If we're going to be here for a while, I might as well do something useful, sir," he had said, in his way of offering that sounded like a question and answer rolled into one, "and those tapes won't watch themselves, more's the pity."
Joe meanwhile had taken up his usual stance in his office, bent around his chair in a question-mark shape. His phone beeped aloofly with a high-pitched ping. A text from Miles.
[U get home ok? M]
[Dear Miles, Thank you for your message. Kent and I are still at the station and I suspect we may be some time. Yours, Joe.]
Joe had never completely got the hang of texting, still considering it as simply a more instantaneous alternative to a written letter. He couldn't understand how people could just dash off a misspelled, ungrammatical and abbreviated message with such relatively little thought. The first time he had attempted the medium, he had tried to format it with his address and the date, as one would with a formal missive, and the poor recipient (his godmother) had been sent a garbled message full of blank spaces and commas. He still avoided texting when he could, and when he did text, his language usually sounded like something out of Debrett's. Regulated and stiff as a wall.
Miles' reply was rapid and flippant as always. [I see u r channelling Captain Oates already. Don't let Kent work 2 hard. M}
Followed almost immediately by: [Play nice.]
Play nice? What on earth did Miles mean by that? Joe was always nice, or at least always tried to be. Respectful anyway. Didn't he? Though he realised that he hadn't always been fair to Kent, had started to take his loyalty for granted, accept his dedication without recognition. He owed Kent more than just a grateful smile, or a murmured 'good work'. He winced when he remembered how short he had been with him, telling him to conceal his Mansell-inflicted bruises. He recalled the disappointment he felt, seeing that enflamed cheekbone and purpled eye. But looking back, he was not sure whether the disappointment had really been aimed at Kent. It had just been a shock – he would have expected it from Mansell, but Kent? Since the beginning, the young DC had been like him. Not completely, he wouldn't wish that on anyone, but enough to feel that he had understood him, a little. Kent had been the first to take on board Joe's dress code, his methods, even some of his mannerisms. But the bruises had somehow changed that, had painted him a darker colour, marking him as something slightly alien. It would take more than chalk to overwrite that dividing line. Fissures had been building up over months, but something had been knocked down, then, when Mansell had thrown Kent to the floor, and Joe hadn't known how to restore it. Things had improved since, and they were almost back to where they had been, almost, but there was still a lot of building work to be done.
Joe pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the window. The snow was falling ever more heavily, coating everything in its path. The streets outside were made new, glossed in white, the litter and tarmac and mud covered over. Gone was the mess of people, the weariness of strangers, the dirt of the well-trodden road. Not a single footstep spoiled the flawless, pristine ground. The storm kept everyone indoors. It was Joe's idea of perfection – the world seemed fresh, clean, as crisp as a new shirt straight from the packet. He felt for a moment as if even his demons could be kept at bay, locked up by the elements.
He was reminded of how he had felt starting out in his police career, when his godfather had put him forward for the fast track. He had felt fresh and new then too, as though anything were possible. That had been just after his mother had died, and it had been the new start he needed. A chance to build his own foundations, to build something lasting. But life, like the bitter north wind whipping through snowdrifts, turning soft powder into solid icicles, had had other ideas, and here he was. Still a DI, still in Whitechapel. Not that he particularly minded. He was beginning to realise that sometimes it was better to let the wind blow where it would, and allow the rimy shapes to form. He still had his foundations, they just weren't what he had imagined they would be.
Besides, Joe liked his team. Mansell and Riley were good at their jobs, although he didn't always follow their sense of humour. Ed was eager and perceptive, qualities that Joe respected. Miles, despite their volatile beginnings, had become the closest thing to a best friend that Joe had ever had. And Kent… Kent reminded Joe of himself. He was focused, zealous, a bit fussy. Working with him was like discovering the last line of a poem that hadn't been written yet, as though he were the answer to a question Joe hadn't known he wanted to ask, and couldn't have formulated even if he had. He was always just there, with an encouraging glance, an enthusiastic nod.
Speaking of which, Joe realised he should see how Kent was getting on with the CCTV footage. He weaved his way through the Incident Room towards the video suite at the far end. Kent's desk lamp was still lit, its golden light a radiant beacon in the gloomy office. Joe was grateful for its solid beam; without it he would probably have tripped as he threaded through the abandoned desks. Kent sat with his back to the door, his body blocking Joe's view of the tapes. Though he couldn't see the images on the screen, the hazy light from their pixels flickered nebulously around Kent's head, casting him into solid shadow.
"Any joy?" asked Joe.
He must have been walking quietly, silently even, because Kent startled, hissing out an oath as his right leg spasmed, the knee thudding against the hard metal of the desk leg.
"S-sorry sir. I d-didn't mean to…"
"It's alright Kent," said Joe. "I'm sorry for creeping up on you. I promise it was unintentional."
Kent turned around then, a tentative smile trembling on his face. It seemed to be some kind of an equaliser, that smile. No harm done, no grudges sustained. After all, they had both now made each other jump that evening.
"I-I've located the attack on CCTV, sir. Here's our vic and the attacker having some sort of conversation. Th-the victim says something here that makes the perp angry, so he grabs an empty bottle and smashes it. The v-victim seems to try and push him away, but he lunges forward and sticks the broken end in the bloke's upper arm. I-it seems a pretty clear case of GBH with intent to me sir."
"Excellent work."
While Kent had been relaying this information, Joe had placed himself next to the younger officer, so that he could more clearly see the screen. His shoulder brushed against Kent's. It was only a glancing touch, lighter than a snowflake, but it jolted through him like a piercing shard of ice. Kent was absolutely freezing.
"Kent? Are you alright?" asked Joe.
"S-sir?" Kent shook violently, tremoring noisily with cold. His fingers, unable to keep still, juddered against the keyboard, clattering like the sound of hail on a rooftop. His breath came in fits and starts, a corrugated whisper as he inhaled.
"My god Kent, you're shivering," said Joe, his voice bright with concern.
"M'ok sir, honestly. I-I think the last r-round of budget cuts got rid of the h-heating in this room. I'm j-just a bit chilly."
Joe narrowed his eyes. "You're frozen solid. You'll make yourself ill if you're not careful."
Joe knew that Kent had a stubborn streak in him, almost as long as his own. He had seen it in action when Kent had refused to take extra sick leave after being striped, when he insisted on travelling on his Vespa to crime scenes, even when it was raining so hard that his shirt had soaked into his skin by the time he returned to the Incident Room. There had been a few occurrences recently when both Joe and Kent had been changing into new suits in the gents' toilets, at the same time though for different reasons. It had almost become a thing that they shared, a few moments where the layers were shed and barriers temporarily lifted, until buttons and zips and cufflinks reasserted their order, pinning them both back into place.
Joe swallowed against the fluttering worry in his throat – it was just worry wasn't it, a natural concern for the wellbeing of his subordinate? – and reached out to Kent. It was supposed to be a purely friendly motion, a collegiate hand on the shoulder, but somehow he ended up pulling the younger man towards him, grabbing him and wrapping his arms around him. He felt Kent tense slightly against his chest, then relax shivering into his hold. Kent seemed to be allowing himself to admit how cold he had been, as Joe's body heat seeped through two sets of jackets. Wasn't it the case that it was only as you began to warm that you really actually felt the cold? Chilblains only began to hurt in earnest once you had come inside, taken off your gloves and started to thaw. The pain meant that the limb was waking up, beginning to circulate again. It was the contrast, the difference between the before and the after, that you really felt. Kent's shivering body sent a chill through Joe and he began to shake in synchrony. He suddenly felt very cold.
"Here, drink this," said Joe, sliding a tumbler of scotch towards Kent. The amber colour of the liquid was warming in itself, and Joe hoped that the spicy, smoky liquor would go some way to melting the chill from Kent's bones. Alcohol may not be the answer to everything, not a good one anyway, but it seemed appropriate on this occasion. The glass grazed against the wood of the desk top with a sound a bit like a door opening. As his arm passed across the desk, Joe's elbow inadvertently nudged his fountain pen into an intrusive diagonal, interrupting the perfect verticals of his watch and warrant card. He wanted to ignore it, he tried so hard to pretend that it wasn't there, but he could feel the point of the pen lid on his skin where it had brushed against his arm, and sensed its disharmony. It was the same pen he had used to sign the paperwork at the nursing home when his mother had passed away. He didn't know why he had kept it, really, but he couldn't bring himself to replace it. His pores prickled uncomfortably until a quick prod with his fingertips realigned it. His fingers moved fluently, rapidly, as though they were on autopilot but knowing they had an audience. He waited for the roiling feeling to subside, though he noted in some disinterested exterior part of his brain that it was slightly milder than it usually was. He grimaced ruefully at Kent.
"It's okay, sir," said the younger man quietly. "I don't like hospitals."
Joe blinked at the seeming non-sequitur. It was as though Kent was saying more to him than he ever had before. Joe knew about his aversion to hospitals – it had been one of the first things Kent had told him about himself – but this time it was more like an admission that he understood, more than anyone else. That he too knew the creeping anxiety that crawled under skin and sat there contaminating every molecule.
The two of them were sat in Joe's office, Joe in his usual seat, Kent opposite. After the brief (maybe all too brief) hug they had shared in the CCTV room, Kent now seemed very far away, the desk become a great crevasse between them. He sat awkwardly, as though he had forgotten how a chair worked, fearing he would fall off at any moment. It was in such stark contrast to the way that Miles would plump himself down assumptively. Miles seemed more at home in that office than Joe did at times, but Kent seemed to be waiting to be ordered to relax. Maybe he was simply still a bit cold. He raised his tumbler to his lips and took a sip, his hands shaking a little as he aimed the glass at a forty-five degree angle to pour the whisky down his throat. There was a soft semi-tuneful ringing as his teeth jangled against the crystal, like the singing of ice cubes colliding with each other. Only there weren't any ice cubes in the glass, all the ice was in the air and on the ground, besieging the station. Barricading them in.
"Thank you for…" Kent gesticulated with his tumbler. "I didn't quite realise how freezing it was in there. I'd started and I… I couldn't stop until I'd found what I was looking for."
Joe felt a sharp unidentifiable twinge pierce the base of his stomach. "And did you? Find it?" he asked.
Kent's eyes delved into his for what felt like hours, but was probably only a few seconds. "I think so, sir," he said, almost silently.
Joe swallowed a gulp of scotch, relishing the burn as it cascaded downwards. He hadn't meant to, but as he replaced his glass on the table, he realised that he had downed the whole thing in one go. There was only the merest layer of liquid resting on the bottom of the tumbler, the last colourful dregs winking at him. Kent was watching him, concern battling with deference on his face. Joe could see in the rise and fall of his eyebrows, the quirk of his mouth, the flex of his fingers as he set his own glass down that he was torn between admonishment and sympathy. Joe felt compelled to reassure him.
"I don't do this every night."
"I know you don't," said Kent. "It's fine. We all need something… sometimes."
Joe's memory was dragged back to the first proper thawing between him and Miles, sat in that caff flattened and dispirited, feeling as green as the mushy peas on his plate.
He thinks we don't know it, but Kent has a little cry – in the bogs or the car park.
Joe wanted to say something, something to prove that he was built out of more than self-medication and guilt and awkward silences. That although he might drink to blur the edges, to stay in control, he could appreciate the value of spontaneity. That although he usually needed things to be a certain way, he was not opposed to change. Not in theory anyway. He didn't know why he wanted Kent's approval, only that he did.
"Kent…" he began, his mouth willing to speak but his brain not prepared. Without momentum, the words shrivelled on his tongue.
Kent tilted his head questioningly, but was interrupted by a throbbing buzz emanating from his jacket pocket.
"Oh, sorry sir," he said, drawing his mobile phone out of his pocket. The phone had been secreted in the inside breast pocket on his right side, and the lining of his blazer shone silkily at Joe with an amethyst shimmer as he reached inside. Over the years, Kent had built up a good repertoire of suits, Joe had noticed, and this was one of Joe's favourites. (He hadn't realised before that he had observed enough to have a preference, but evidently he had.) It fitted Kent well – probably off the peg but well fashioned and of good quality. It made him look taller, gave him a firmer, more solid presence. Joe liked how comfortable Kent looked sat within it. He liked that it had been at his suggestion that Kent had started to wear more formal attire. It felt like a little bit of himself rested on Kent's shoulders. And when Kent slipped off the jacket, and draped it over the back of his chair with a smile and a pat, as he was doing now, it didn't feel like a rebuff, but a veneration.
"Sorry, sir," Kent said again. "It's just my flatmate making sure I'm not stuck in a snowdrift somewhere."
Joe smiled, the stretch of his mouth an overture as he topped up both glasses. "Do you think we get many snowdrifts in central London?"
"I don't know, she says it's getting pretty bad out there." Kent snapped his phone cover shut again with a crack like a falling avalanche. "Apparently our back yard is beginning to resemble Narnia."
Joe had always been peripherally aware that Kent did not live alone, that his home life was not based around a solitary, immaculate fortress as Joe's own was. Kent had several times mentioned his collective flatmates in passing, a nameless, faceless group of people who had birthdays, weddings, lives which intersected his. Who would see Kent out of his professional guise – in the morning, sleep softened, rumpled, unbrushed. These others who knew Kent in ways Joe could only imagine, not that he spent much of his time picturing the domestic arrangements of his team. He didn't have to imagine Miles' home, he had visited it enough times – so often, in fact, that he was now known as 'Uncle JoJo' by Miles' daughter (and only by her, no-one else would get away with that.) Riley's, he assumed, would be much the same, only with different children; Mansell's he avoided visualising for the sake of his peace of mind. He had been to Ed's house many a time, of course, they all had. Kent, though, remained an intriguing mystery. If Joe had taken time to envisage Kent's house (which, of course, he definitely hadn't) he would have liked to suppose that was a little like Joe's apartment – neat, beige, linear. But those flatmates of his, they were an unknown quantity. Joe had never shared a house with anyone, not since he had moved his mother into the care home, and he had to admit he was a little curious about what that might be like. How much of yourself became diluted when you allowed other people in? Did they pollute or enhance your life? Build or destroy?
"Then again, I don't know why she's complaining," said Kent. "She loves all this kind of weather. She'd live in Arendelle if she could."
Joe felt the confusion buffering on his face, not comprehending what was so special about a Sussex town, nor what its significance was to wintry weather.
Kent snorted a laugh, his lips twisting in a W of amusement. "Not Arundel. Arendelle. It's the place in Frozen." Joe still stared blankly at him. "The Disney film? Never mind." Kent shifted in his seat, drawing his legs further under the desk. Joe feigned not to notice that the tip of Kent's foot had inadvertently brushed against his ankle. "Suffice to say it's snowy there for most of the film."
"Oh, I see… I think," said Joe apologetically. "Popular culture is rather lost on me, I'm afraid."
"Most of it bypasses me as well, to be honest," said Kent. "But Mel's niece came to stay for a bit over the summer and she watched that film on repeat for about five days on end. Believe me, when you've heard the song Let It Go that many times, it's hard to forget."
He laughed shyly, his fingers idly tapping a rhythm on the side of his glass. Ping ping piiing, ping ping piiing. Joe wondered whether the sequence of the beats was that of the song that Kent referred to. Did he have music and melody weaving through his head all the time? To have a constant playlist echoing through your brain, it sounded hellish to Joe. A cacophony of sound, livid and uncontrollable. Always being stuck in the middle of the song – never quite reaching the end. Music should be ordered, mathematical, each note appearing in its proper time and place. Structured beauty. The musician controlling the music, not the other way round.
Kent took another sip of his drink, the pitch resonating from the crystal rising by a semitone.
"And this Mel… is your flatmate?" asked Joe.
"Yes," replied Kent. "She's an artist, sculptures mainly. Bit of pottery sometimes – you know, vases and things, but mostly abstract stuff. You might have come across some of her pieces actually – she had a couple displayed at that gallery we investigated the other month, when the security guard got stabbed."
That had been one of their few open and shut cases. It had ended up being completely unrelated to the museum – the security guard had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time walking home on a Friday night, and got a knife in the ribs for his trouble. The investigation had barely affected the operation of the gallery. Which, while on the whole that was good for most people concerned, it had given Joe a sad pause to realise what little indentation the security guard had evidently made on the place. There had been the occasional shakings of heads, mutterings of 'what a tragedy', but no tears, no real grief. None of the suspended breathless shock that Joe had come to expect from people who experienced loss. The security guard's death didn't seem to have made any difference. Even the half-eaten apple he had left on his desk had been thrown out by the cleaners the following day. He had been a ghost even before he died.
After they had closed the case, Joe had spent a little time exploring the temporary exhibitions. Although he hadn't really known what to make of them, he had been impressed by the talent of their creators. At their ability to take raw materials, bronze, glass, clay, and tame them, creating something where before was only void. Even so, abstract sculpture wasn't really Joe's area of art appreciation. Modern art was just a bit too messy for him. He remembered coming across a Jackson Pollock once at the Tate and he had been unnerved by the seeming randomness of it – the black drops, the yellow smudges, the bits of things incorporated into the paint. One of the room stewards had explained Pollock's method – that what appeared to be chance drips and splashes had actually been decisive acts, but that had just made it worse. That the artist could have actively chosen to create something with no focal point, no emphasis to lean on, had caused Joe's head to swim nauseously. The splodges had reminded Joe of falling bodies, tumbling aimlessly as they left the sky behind them.
"I remember it," he said. "The Philosophy of Shape or something along those lines, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, that's the one. Mel was really chuffed to get exhibited in that exhibition," continued Kent. "She's been having to fall back on doing ice sculptures for weddings, corporate events, stuff like that, to keep the money coming in. Mind you, she's really good at them. The other year when it snowed heavily she built the most amazing snowman in the back yard. Not just your average three snowballs on top of each other with a carrot for a nose, but like a proper statue of ice. An actual man made of snow, with limbs and a face. She spent hours on it, but by the next morning there'd been a fresh downpour of snow, and that along with the wind had made it unrecognisable. Icicles had formed off the arms and a layer of frost had settled over the head like a veil. Like a twisted old crone. It was just… irredeemably altered. I found it quite sad, but I think that's what Mel likes about snow - its impermanence. The fact that it changes everything and nothing. While it's here, it's like a new world, but it's transient, it soon goes, either covering itself up or melting. It just frolics away. You can't control it no matter how hard you try."
Joe noticed that Kent had stopped calling him 'Sir'. He was tempted to invite him to use his first name to stop himself from feeling like a nameless entity. But was that too forward? He liked to think not. It must have been the scotch coursing through him, but Joe felt a closeness to the young DC, a softening powdery feeling that might have been a form of affection. Now that was new. Probably. Or had it always been there, waiting for something to bluster it into view?
"I never expected your life to be so full of artistic endeavour," he blurted out, taking another gulp of whisky to cover his awkward breathing. The attempt was unsuccessful, as it nearly took the wrong path down his throat. That was him all over though – taking the wrong fork and ending up drowning. He coughed inelegantly to try to redirect the flow of liquid down his oesophagus rather than into his lungs. The sweet-sore sting of the alcohol surged up his nose and behind his eyes, and he blinked firmly, his tears malt-mingled. Kent was looking at him strangely, his eyes narrowed as though he was squinting through half-drawn blinds. He was probably just bemused by his normally polished and graceful DI spluttering into his hands like a dying fish in a frozen pond. Though all of Joe's polish, his control, was just an act, wasn't it? Just dressing. Like his sharp suits, it was merely a cover for the mess of insecurities he actually was. On the surface, he was cool and cold like the untouched and unadulterated snow. But underneath, he was still the choking little boy who couldn't press the air back into his father's lungs, or put the light back into his mother's eyes.
"Mel's the arty one, not me," replied Kent. "She was at art college with my sister, actually – that's how we met. Her full name's Melisende, so we bonded over our frankly ridiculous and unwieldy first names." He laughed, although the humour in it sounded strained.
"Oh?" said Joe, continuing to clear his throat. "What's so ridiculous about your name?"
"Well, carting about a name like Emerson didn't exactly do my street cred any good when I was at school. You can't even shorten it to anything practical. I mean, there's Em, but then you get all the Wizard of Oz 'Auntie Em' jokes." Kent spoke tightly, as though from bitter experience. "I tell you, coming out as gay was hard enough – I could've done without being called a 'friend of Dorothy' all the time as well. I guess that's another thing we can thank pop culture for."
Kent's shy smile had faded, clouded over and been subsumed beneath a layer of painful memories. Joe found that he badly wanted to recover it, to coax it out from where it had hidden.
"If it helps," he began hesitantly, "I always liked the name Emerson."
Kent threw him a look, midway between a start and a glare, flickering between the two in the dim light like an old film reel. "With all due respect, sir," he snapped, "you never had to live with it."
The office was thick with silence, the kind of strangled stillness of standing on a frozen lake and feeling the ice crack underneath you. That moment of disbelief before you either spring to the shoreline or plunge downwards into the frigid depths. Joe couldn't bear to look at Kent's face and study his expression, fearing to read accusation in his eyes – that maybe Kent felt that Joe was the one whose footsteps who had caused the fissure, and the one who was holding him down below the surface. They had been breaking the ice all evening, hadn't they, in a colloquial sense? But now Joe wished fervently for a more solid ground to walk upon.
You never had to live with it.
No, Joe had never lived with anything much, besides his demons. He didn't even have a lot of furniture in his flat. Only the necessities (bed, sofa, table and chair, oven) and a couple of cupboards – one a wardrobe for his suits, the other a drinks cabinet. He wouldn't be without somewhere to keep his protective layers. And he had never allowed anything else in, never wished to share his space with anything, or anyone, else. Until now part of him was beginning to feel that he might like to learn how to. Unless he could bring himself to look Kent in the eye, though, he was not going to get very far.
Joe kept his eyes fixed on his knees, feigning a sudden and all-consuming interest in the pattern on his trousers. The suit was a precise pinstripe, all verticals, but on closer inspection, he could see that the thin lines were actually woven out of tiny dots, which blurred together losing focus the longer he looked at them. Like the way that a beam of light spreads over a surface, refracting out from its singular beginning into a thin haze, then nothing. It was still perfectly meticulous, but somehow softer than he had thought.
A tentative nudge at his elbow urged his eyes upwards. He met Kent's gaze cautiously. He could feel his eyelids dashing against each other in a nervous twitch.
"I'm sorry, sir, I shouldn't have spoken to you like that," Kent said, a gentle shade smoothing his syllables. "I should know not to think about my time at school, especially not after I've had a drink. It never does me any good." The hardness that had previously solidified across his face had melted.
"No Kent, please… it's fine. I'm… I should have been more considerate." Joe had a strange sense that he was referring to more than just their most recent conversation. "I didn't mean to…"
Kent cut him off. "It's okay. Let's just… let's forget about it, yeah?"
Kent leant back in his chair, his shoulders and neck tightening together before relaxing with a heavy exhalation. That was so often the way of things, in Joe's experience – things had to stretch and tauten first before they could settle. As Kent eased backwards, Joe bowed forward, resting his elbows on the desk, his own stance of repose. The weight of his shoulders sank down through his arms and out, travelling like sound waves through the wooden table and into the floor. The two of them sat mirrored across from each other in comfortable silence.
"'In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed,'" said Joe, the words slipping from his mouth almost without conscious thought, as though they were written in the air and all he had to do was follow them.
"Sorry?" said Kent, his brow ruched like a blind being pulled up in order that its owner see more clearly.
"It's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson," explained Joe. "From one of his essays, I think. You know, you should be proud to have such a namesake."
The essay had been on prudence, if Joe remembered correctly. A virtue he found he had in decreasing amounts lately.
Kent rubbed his eyes. "Yeah, that's what my dad would say. Waldo Emerson's his favourite writer, so he decided to name me after him. It's a sort of Kent family tradition. My grandad was a professor of literature and thought it would be… fun… to name his kids after famous poets. And my dad and uncle carried on the practice. So now all the men on that side of my family have got daft names – my dad's called Whitman, my Uncle Tennyson definitely got the short straw, though. My cousins Blake and Eliot got off fairly lightly, I guess." He shrugged casually. "But if it hadn't have been for my dad, I'd have gone by James, my middle name, a long time ago. Then again, if it hadn't have been for him, I would never have had such a stupid name in the first place." Kent laughed again, a breezier, looser laugh than before. The corners of his mouth curved upwards, lightening the tense scar it had been. "I suppose I should just be grateful his favourite poet isn't E. E. Cummings."
A chuckle startled out of Joe's mouth and spun through the office, dancing whimsically around the room like the snowflakes floating in the wind. It was nice, more than nice, to hear Kent joking, to feel a levity in the atmosphere which the cramped office rarely experienced. When the other members of the team made jokes, Joe never felt so at ease. Mansell, and Riley alongside him, seemed to exist on smutty innuendo which was not to his taste, while Miles' teasing always had some point to it, a sharp pair of tweezers needling at Joe's skin, unpeeling him little by little to get at what was underneath. But Kent's gentle, self-deprecating humour fitted Joe like a woollen glove. It didn't seek to get under his skin, only to sit quietly by it, embracing but not grabbing. Holding, but not incarcerating. It felt safe.
He should have known it was too good to last.
"So, what about you then?" asked Kent.
"What about me?"
"Got any embarrassing family members? Any funny stories from your growing up?"
Joe stiffened, his previously comfortable smile now heavy and cumbersome. It was as though icy water was being poured from a great height over his head, and he couldn't wield himself quickly enough to avoid it. His laughter froze in mid-air, crashed to the ground and rolled into the corners of the office to shrink away and conceal itself.
"No, I haven't," he said, the words having to force their way through his compacted breath.
Kent looked surprised. "Really? Nothing at all? I thought everyone had something. Come on, I've told you mine. I promise I won't laugh too much." His hand moved as though to touch Joe's arm again, but Joe pulled away, his chair legs screaming against the floor as he moved.
"You forget yourself, constable," he hissed.
Kent visibly withdrew, his face turning pale so quickly that his cheek took on a mottled appearance, a bluish dappling like a bruise. Like a slushy handprint desecrating the hitherto unbroken layer of snow. Joe could almost believe that his brittle spat-out words had struck the younger man with real force, their letters and consonants marking his skin like fingernails. The last time Kent had worn that expression in front of Joe, his face had been injured in reality, swollen and puce from Mansell's fists. He had been in almost exactly the same spot back then, only standing rather than sitting. His face drooped now as it had then, like the inside of a forgotten balloon. His hand snapped back across the desk as though it had been bitten, and he winced as he caught his wrist on the corner of the table. A pang of remorse jolted through Joe with the sound of bone striking wood, but something, some repressive weight, kept him from reaching out. His limbs felt as though they were buried under a mile of solid frost.
Joe's fingers clawed angularly as he scrabbled for his Tiger Balm. How could he? Why would Kent ask him that? How could he make light? Joe had thought that he was different from the others, that he understood. But perhaps it was all just an illusion brought about by the whiteout. Wishful thinking on Joe's part. It was fine, he had been alone before this night, so nothing had really changed. Nothing overturned, nothing broken. So why did he feel so upside-down, inside-out, so upset?
The funny thing was, he didn't think that it was Kent that he was upset with. Not really. After all, he knew in his heart that the young DC hadn't meant anything by it. It was the logical progression of their conversation – a perfectly normal question for one friend to ask another. Because they were friends, he and Kent, weren't they? They had gone beyond mere colleagues a long time ago, that was clear. Sometime in between bruises, they had developed into something more. But what Kent was asking, Joe just couldn't answer. Kent couldn't possibly know how painful it was for Joe to talk about his family, to brush away the hoarfrost, to delve beneath his protective coating – a layer that had taken over thirty years to build. To bare himself like that took more courage than Joe had.
"I… I'll leave you alone, sir," whispered Kent, a red-raw cracking in his voice. "I'm sorry… I wasn't trying to pry… You have every right... I apologise." He stood, picking his suit jacket from the back of the chair as he did so. He folded the material distressedly under his arm, the purple lining flashing in the light like tears.
"No, Emers-… Kent, wait!"
But his words fell short and they collapsed, shaking, into the glass door as it shuddered shut behind Kent.
Joe had seen many midnights in the Incident Room, far more than he should have by rights. Many, many more than was healthy. When there wasn't an urgent case, he would watch the second hand on the clock rotate around the clock face, always moving yet never really going anywhere. There was a morbid fascination in watching the seconds tick past, each one another turn of the key unlocking the next day. But Joe had none of the usual romanticism about the new day. It was never a fresh start, just a continuation. There was no fanfare as the clock went from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00. Just another tick, then the whole sorry thing began again. At best, it was another chance for him to mess it all up again. At worst, it was a death – a reminder that the former day had gone and could never be recaptured or replayed. Regret was a terrible thing to live with. It sank, venomously, deep into the veins and was carried around the whole body, making every act a funeral, every thought an interment. A memorial for who you could have been, if only…
It had been three hours since the last midnight and Joe was still awake, entombed in his office. His mind was caught on a hook, examining his and Kent's conversation over and over. Each time he tried to drive it forward it snagged back. He would try to focus on his desk, to do some paperwork, to think about something, anything, else, to no avail. He picked up his pen to sign a document, but his hand shook and the nib scratched angrily against the page. The snowfall outside had stopped finally, leaving tides of white in its wake. But its joy, the magic of its wintry purity did not touch him. Or if it did, it was as a smothering shroud, suffocating and dull.
He looked over at Kent's desk, veiled in gloom. Kent appeared to be asleep, hunched over the keyboard of his computer. He was too far away to see clearly, but Joe imagined the keys would be indenting upon Kent's face, their letters imprinting a coded message upon his cheek. His curly hair flopped loosely over his brow, the product he usually used to keep it in order evidently defeated by sleep and the lateness of the hour. After leaving Joe, Kent had disappeared for some time (Joe thought he could guess where he had gone, but hoped he was wrong). After a while, he had returned to the Incident Room, his eyes actively avoiding Joe's – though how Joe knew that, he wasn't sure. He categorically had not been watching or seeking out Kent's gaze at all. Except that he had, hadn't he? Otherwise, how would he know that Kent had shuffled from the loos to his desk, the heel of his hand dashing something persistent from his eyes, and collapsed, crumpled, into his chair?
Joe had tried to sleep, but it wasn't an act that came naturally to him at the best of times, let alone trapped in a stifling office, in a chair that he could not recline. His suit clung to him uncomfortably, for the first time feeling like a restraint, his arms shackled to his shoulders. The knot in his tie had been worried to a fine point which would require witches' fingernails to undo. Throwing off the jacket, he rose to his feet, everything groaning, and walked uncertainly into the main room. The larger office was noticeably chillier than Joe's own, and he immediately regretted taking off his upper layer, but did not return to put it back on. Kent was wearing his own jacket as a blanket, draped and crinkled over his shoulders.
As Joe treaded quietly towards him, Kent pushed himself upright to stare unlookingly at his DI and the jacket slid to pool at the small of his back. His eyes were blurred and distended with restless sleep. However Joe had imagined Kent after waking, this was not it. He was not comfortably smudged in a gentle doziness, shining like a restful midwinter morning, but red-rimmed, shadowed and underslept. His mouth opened in the shape of subdued greeting, but no sound emerged. Joe mirrored him, galvanising his vocal cords into speech even though his brain and lips had not yet agreed upon the words. He spoke without thought, without prior knowledge of what he was going to say.
"Do… did you know that there was an Inspector Joseph Chandler on the force at the time of the original Ripper murders?"
Kent just looked blearily at him.
"He was the first officer on the scene at Annie Chapman's murder on Hanbury Street. Like we were for Alice Graves. He covered her up, made sure no-one touched her until the police surgeon arrived. He couldn't save her, but he tried to give her some dignity in death. At least, that's what I like to think. Four years later, he was found to be drunk on duty and demoted. I always wondered whether it was what he saw that night in 1888 that drove him to drink. And I sometimes wonder whether I am like him in more than just name."
"Sir?" came Kent's faint croak.
"Maybe he did his best, but he still failed. Everything he'd worked for, everything he'd built, destroyed by his own hand."
Joe was not a believer in fate, how could he be? But some would whisper that it was not just coincidence that he had ended up serving in the same district as his namesake. After all, he kept making the same mistakes. History was not just the past, it existed side by side with the present, its emaciated hands always clinging, pulling back. Even without copycats and reenactors, it lived on repetitively, like a recurring motif. But if mistakes had been made before, surely he simply had to follow the map of how to rectify them. That was why he had taken on a historian to live in the basement, wasn't it?
Kent struggled to his feet. "You're not a failure to me," he murmured.
The left side of Joe's face curled into a wry smile. "Oh, but I am Kent, I am."
He stared at Kent for a few seconds, wishing he knew what he was going to say next, wishing that Kent would tell him what to say next. He almost wanted to laugh – he was a failure even in dialogue.
"I think you know that I suffer from OCD? And I sense that maybe you know something about the condition?"
Kent blinked, his eyelids nodding in affirmation.
"Most of the time it's fine," Joe continued, "I can cope. I can avoid my triggers and it's okay. I can function at least. And then suddenly I can't. There doesn't even need to be a reason all the time. And I use my routines, the organising and cleanliness, and… alcohol… as a crutch. To beat away all the feelings, the things telling me that I'm no good. That I can't do the job, or I don't deserve… I build up huge barriers to hide behind and I lash out at anyone who tries to break them down. As a last resort, I bury myself underneath my suits and my ties and my rank. Because I fear that if they all were taken away, I would be nothing. Just a withered husk."
"Oh, Joe." It was the first time that Kent had ever used his first name. Joe's breath froze in his throat as Kent took a step closer, his eyes shimmering wetly in the weak light, tracking a path down his cheek. The two men faced each other, both in their shirtsleeves, the air heavy and charged between them. The first step had been taken, the pillars of rank removed. They were as equals now. Kent tentatively, as though swimming through snow, reached out to touch Joe's arm. Hand to elbow, Joe could feel his long fingers through the thin cotton of his shirt.
"I wasn't always like this," he said, not daring to move more than he had to. "My godfather, Commander Anderson, he says that I was quite a normal, happy child, if you can believe it. We used to go sailing together. We used to have… fun," he spoke with an echo of incredulity, "until… well, I suppose it was always inside of me, waiting for the chance to suck me under. When I was ten, my father… my father… he drowned himself in the bath. I remember finding him in there. I thought he was just joking at first, messing around. Even though he wasn't the sort to make those kind of jokes. I suppose I was just refusing to see the truth. I remember his hair, of all things, how it shifted in the water like the seaweed at the shore. But he was under too long, and he still had his clothes on. He… he wouldn't have wanted to be found naked, you see, and I realised that he… I tried to pull him out, to do CPR, and his shirt was wet and clinging, and I could see his chest hair through it and I was screaming, and my mother came in and she was screaming and there was water everywhere. Everything was all so… chaotic. And I couldn't save him. It was too late. I still lie awake at nights wondering what went through his head in his last minutes. It must have taken an awful lot of willpower to hold himself underwater for long enough. For months afterwards, all I could feel on my hands was that shirt scraping stickily against his skin and it didn't matter how often I washed them, it wouldn't go away."
While Joe had been speaking, Kent's hand had gravitated downwards so that it was looped consolingly around his wrist. At Joe's last words, Kent had started to pull away, but Joe grasped back desperately, interweaving their fingers with a squeeze as if to say, Please stay.
"After the funeral, it was just Mother and me in our big rambling house. Someone, I can't recall who, had told me that I had to be the man of the house, to look after her and keep things in order. I tried, I really did, but there were times when I wouldn't see her for days. She'd be out visiting mediums and psychics, trying to contact my father, trying to find out why he did it. Only she never got any answers and drove herself insane in the process."
Joe could feel Kent breathing next to him, his gentle exhalations warm in the cold air.
"Joe, you don't have to tell me all this," Kent said, his thumb rolling over Joe's knuckles as though committing their shape to memory. Reading their history through every bump and tear, learning the braille of Joe's skin.
"Emerson." The syllables tasted different to how they had before, sweeter now the bitterness of Kent's past had melted. "It's okay, I want to tell you. I've kept this all wrapped up for too long. I've told Miles some of it, but I need you, out of everyone, to understand why I'm like this."
Kent's smile budded slowly like a winter flower miraculously growing though the frost.
"I couldn't make her smile," Joe continued, "I couldn't make it better. But I pretended, for a while, until the money ran out. She'd spent a fortune on all the spiritualists, and it got to the stage that we had to sell the family home and move in with my godparents. But my mother, she kept forgetting that we'd moved, and she'd give me the slip and disappear, wandering back to the old house again and again looking for my father. That was the only time I saw her smile, standing on the driveway as though she expected him to just saunter out and meet her. Luckily the new owners were very understanding – they even started telephoning me when she went there so that I wouldn't worry, well, so that I'd worry less at least. But it was becoming harder and harder to fake it, to keep things organised so that no-one would notice.
"And then the house was sold again and bought by a private health provider who turned it into a hospital – a very exclusive nursing home for palliative care. My mother… she was distraught the day she went down there to find the buildings had been renovated. She didn't understand – all she saw was her home being reconstructed around her and I couldn't find the words to explain it to her. She stopped eating then. Eventually she was so ill that I couldn't look after her anymore, so my godfather paid for her to go to a hospice, which by an ironic twist of fate turned out to be the same private hospital that used to be our home. I suppose she was finally happy there – she ended her days in part of what had been her and my father's bedroom, now completely unrecognisable from what it used to be, just waiting for my father to come and join her."
He closed his eyes and dropped his face towards the floor, watching the swirling world that hid behind his eyelids. What was this place that you only saw when your eyes were shut – this place of brown billows, negative colours and patchwork light? It was as if all of his eddying thoughts had been given shape and were being projected onto his eyes in assorted shades.
"I've felt the guilt for that every day. And I'm like I am because it feels as though I'm being punished, that I have to make amends somehow. Because I couldn't save my parents, because I couldn't catch the Ripper… because I hurt you. And every time I fail, it's like… Sometimes it feels as though everything is changing around me, like it must have been for my mother, as though I'm standing in a building, and all the walls are moving and the floors turning into icy water. If I don't keep order someone else will get hurt, and it will be all my fault. The only way I can cope is… well, you've seen it. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was angry at you. I hide behind brusque words when I'm caught off guard. You didn't deserve that. You deserve so much better than… I'm sorry I'm not the man you want me to be."
Joe found that, even with his eyes shut, he was still aware of everything around him – of Kent standing breathlessly by. The thin skin of his eyelids was only a partial veil. It didn't separate him as much as he would have thought. He could still see the fluctuations in light and dark from the world outside, even the afterburn of Kent's face was imprinted in front of him.
"Joe," he heard Kent say, "you're exactly the man that I want, as you are."
Then, with a wave of movement, everything went black and he felt Kent make the final move towards him. His mind stilled completely when he detected fingers on his cheek, cupping his jaw and guiding him forwards. His entire field of sense contracted to touch, Kent's touch. Kent's nose was cold against Joe's face – of all the things to notice, his nose was cold. Oh, but his hands were warm, and his mouth was warm, and the heat of his body pressed against Joe's seemed to mingle with the burn of whisky he had consumed earlier. Kissing Kent was better than any alcohol because he felt he could drink him down forever and it would never be too much. There would be no headache of regret, and if there was stumbling they could grope their way back together. It might make him lose his reason, it might even make him lose control, but, drunk on Kent, Joe felt his barriers finally crumble, the demons that had kept him frozen for so long finally melting. After all, everything changes, doesn't it, and it isn't always a thing to fear.
When they eventually eased apart, Joe could still feel Kent's fingers dancing just underneath his collar.
"Are you alright?" Kent asked.
Joe swallowed, treasuring the feel of Kent's fingers against his neck, knowing that the younger man could feel the swell of his throat as it contracted.
"Yes," he replied, huskily. "I had no idea you…"
A look of astonished disbelief passed over Kent's face. "Seriously? You had no clue? I've lo… liked you for ages. I thought I was being about as subtle as a brick."
Joe laughed gently, more of a condensed ripple in his larynx. "You probably were. I'm just not very good at reading signals. Not of this type anyway. I didn't even realise that I felt like this until a short while ago."
It was Joe who instigated it the second time, letting his lips lead the way. He enjoyed seeing the curve of surprise on Kent's mouth, before he was too close to see anything but his eyes. Joe wasn't well versed in the technique, being wholly underexperienced in intimacy of all kinds, although he was fairly sure that you weren't supposed to be grinning like an idiot while kissing someone. He couldn't help it. If he didn't know better, he would have said it was a kind of hysteria, brought about by an excess of emotion. But he had never felt calmer than he did in that moment. They could have been buffeted about on all sides by wind and storm but between the two of them there was, somehow, peace.
He rocked forwards slightly as Kent pulled away to rest his head on Joe's shoulder.
"So where do we go now?" Kent murmured into his collar bone.
"What do you mean?" asked Joe.
"I mean," replied Kent, "we're snowed in together at the moment. But what happens when it all melts and everything's back to normal? What will we do?"
"I don't know why you're asking me," Joe said, his words threading through Kent's hair. "I thought tonight proved that I don't know what I'm doing half the time."
What he did know, though, was that he couldn't possibly go back to what they had been before. Even if he had wanted to, it simply wasn't possible – too much had been said, too much done. Too many doors had been opened to consider closing them now. And he really did not want to revert to awkward, stifling silences and denied glances. He had always liked Kent because he sensed a kindred spirit, someone who was the same as him. But he had been wrong – Kent was similar to Joe, but he was different as well. Each snowflake was unique, even if they all landed on the same ground. That was their random beauty. And Joe needed Kent, he needed the contrasts between them to bring him to life. He needed him like the wind needs air to blow and snow needs a surface to settle upon.
"Come with me," he said, ushering Kent over to the window.
They stood together, arms bent gently around each other, looking out to the whitened, untouched landscape. The glass reflected their images back to them translucently, so that it looked as though they were themselves floating out in the winter air. The snow had been whipped up by the wind into unearthly, beautiful, fay-like shapes. Wrought by the north wind, forms at once stern and frolicsome. A vast tapestry of white had been woven upon the mundane ground, creating a new world with its architecture. But it was not built to last. Before long, in a number of hours or days, these whimsical structures would melt and all would be as it was. Everything changes.
But for once, Joe wanted to create something that had the strength to survive, something good, something constructive and valuable, that would not fade. That had the suppleness to move with the wind but not be determined, nor be destroyed by it.
"Kent… Emerson. I'm not used to this sort of thing. I don't know how this is supposed to go, and I'm sure I'll get a lot of it wrong. But I think… I think I'd like to try… to see what happens, how it might develop. Would that be okay with you?"
"That's very okay with me," beamed Emerson. "And, hey, we'll figure it out together, won't we?"
We. That word again, spoken this time with no doubt as to its right meaning. The first person plural. Me and You. Shaped like a kiss and a grin. And didn't that just say it all?