Baz

I can tell that Snow is about to answer for us, about to cut our only route to safety and in my heart, I still want to believe that my father is a good man. I blurt out "That, uh, that would be great."

Snow gives me the evil eye, obviously knowing something that I don't. And then it hits me, my father would never save us willingly, he must have a plan for us. Maybe he is planning to leave us at the boatsheds, leave us to perish. Snow starts to say "No, no, it's fine, we wouldn't want to slow you down."

"Wonderful, wonderful. I just need to get something personal, we will start in a minute. You two can carry the bags, get yourselves loaded up and we will go." The master says in answer to my statement, completely ignoring Snow.

It is almost midday by the time we leave, for my father couldn't find what he wanted. It turns out that we had already packed it. Just as we are reaching the market place, my father collapses. We try to wake him, but to no avail. I fear that he is dead. Not long after the ground begins to shake more violently than ever before in recent times. As the ground begins to shake we hear a noise like an explosion, as we look around in panic, it strikes me that the top of Vesuvius is missing. The steepest, highest slopes have completely vanished. I cannot dwell on this too deeply though, as Snow is dragging me off of my father.

"We have to get away. We have to leave." He whispers urgently. He kicks my father's body

"Where can we go? There is nowhere to go." I respond, turning around to catch one last glimpse of my father, the man who brought me into this world and made it into a living hell.

"We have to go to the boat houses, down by the water. There will be boats there, we can escape by water."

At this moment burning hot ash and small stones begin to fall from the sky. He starts to run towards the water, pulling me with him. I hadn't even noticed that he had taken my hand. We run through the burning rain, run to the only safety we can think of. We reach the boatsheds and find many people there, but no boats.

We crowd inside, Snow asking about boats, me asking whether everyone is okay. It is too crowded in there, so we go outside, trying to hail a boat. I turn around for a second and gasp. A wall of ash and stone, an avalanche of fire is rolling across the town. Tugging on his sleeve, I say, "Snow, Snow look. Oh my gods, oh my gods, look."

He turns and see the wall, sees our impending doom, and pulls me into the most passionate kiss that I could ever imagine. We stand there, not caring about our impending death, just two boys in love. He pulls away for a second, gasping for air. "I'm sorry, I just needed to do that again."

"Shut up and kiss me," I whisper into his ear, pulling him back into me. We are still in this embrace, still pushed hard against each other when the avalanche hits. It burns against us, boiling us within our skin, but still, we do not pull away, we do not flinch. In our last moments, we are one being, one whole person. Our flesh burns away, but our last moments are encased in stone forever. We skeletonise, but our outlines at the moment the avalanche hit are preserved forever.

In many years' time, when they rediscover Herculaneum, when they excavate the boat houses, they find us clinging together. They will assume that I am a girl, that we were a young couple. "Ah, young love." they will say. They will name us the young lovers and take our skeletons away to a cold dark room. We will sit there until someone rediscovers us, looks carefully at our skeletons and thinks that someone swapped my skeleton. An investigation begins, for there cannot possibly have been open homosexuals. They cannot possibly have been more forethinking, more progressive, more accepting than us, they will say. And they weren't.

But we were.