Copenhagen Harbour, 15th March 2013

As Mathias stood on the deck of the ferry, watching the city slowly recede until it was only a glimmer veiled in the mist of early morning, he felt suffused with a wonderful sense of relief. Now, away from all the pressures of society, all the preordained patterns of existence and the dreadful, ever-present feeling that life was somehow passing him by, he was content. The mask was slipping from his face and revealing him to himself, the man he had forgotten existed under all the layers of artifice and dissatisfaction. Alone as he was, separate somehow from the crowds that surged around him looking for a view of the place they were leaving behind – for what reason no one besides them could ever know – he took time to reflect on recent events.

For him, what was most significant was that Lukas was with him. Not physically at that moment – he had gone to get what Mathias supposed would be the first of many cups of coffee – but accompanying him on this self-consciously artistic endeavour. It hadn't been easy to persuade him to come. He let out a fluting sigh and turned his gaze from the shore to the sea, lost in thoughts as fathomless and ultimately unsolvable as the ocean itself. Lukas, upon his being declared fit to return to decent society, had flown like a long-captive bird straight to the one person he remembered as having shown him kindness – Mathias himself. He had seen Lukas at his most vulnerable, when he hadn't yet shaken off the shades of nightmares that still clung to him. On seeing him in such a reduced state, Mathias had had to ignore the blossoming feelings of attraction and act principally as a friend and confidant, even as he itched to know if his love was returned. But Lukas had seemed so crushed, so bowed and defeated, that Mathias's first instinct had been to protect him.

"I can't spend another minute here," Lukas had said in despair, "I can't stand this city. I thought that if I moved here, it would be fine since no one would know me. But even the people who don't know you still find ways to judge." Mathias had seen his misery and in that moment had so desperately wanted to throw his arms around him and promise something – he didn't know what – that would reassure him. Instead, he had let his hands lie limply folded in his lap, afraid of breaking through Lukas's layer of reserve.

"I know somewhere we can go." he had replied, feeling his conviction grow with every word. "Do you remember my picture of Havmann Island?"

Lukas had clutched his coffee cup, frowning over its rim. "Why do you want to go there?" he had asked, but with curiosity rather than hostility. A good sign, Mathias had thought, and pressed on.

"I don't know," he had admitted. "But I've been thinking about it a lot recently and the more I do, the more I feel like it's somehow special to me. And I think we both need this, this isolation. I can write there, and you can draw, and really I just want to be away from people for a while."

Lukas had demurred, shaking his head and taking refuge in another long draught of coffee. "I'm not sure," he had said weakly. "I'll have to consider it."

Mathias had insisted. "I don't see why not. You want to go away, don't you? It's as good a place as any, surely."

Lukas had put down the cup and remained silent for a few moments, thoughts flickering like clouds across the impassive moon of his face. Mathias had observed him secretly, marvelling at his beauty, a pale statue lit by the white light of the grey day.

"Alright," Lukas had said at last. "Alright, I'll come with you."

Mathias was brought out of his trance by Lukas coming up beside him, carrying two cups of coffee.

"I got yours with the caramel syrup in," he said, proffering one of the drinks. "You seem the type."

Mathias took it and thanked him. They were out of sight of land now, and he felt a faint stirring of nerves. He had never liked travelling by boat and never liked being in water either. He'd had a mortal fear of drowning all his life, and as a child had had dreams of his mouth and lungs filling with seawater, waking up coughing and bringing up nothing. But he couldn't say that to Lukas, who had suffered so much more at the hands of the sea than he ever had. He thought back to his first swimming lesson. Holding on to the side of the pool, he'd been fine, but as soon as they'd had to let go and take their first few experimental strokes, as soon as he was untethered and began to sink, he had become hysterical, screaming in terror and causing his mother to come running in, thinking her son was being drowned. In the end, he'd never learnt to swim, and always been a laughing stock at teenage beach parties, where he hadn't dared wade in above his knees.

"Are you excited?" he asked Lukas brightly, wanting to think of something other than the unmeasured depths below them and wishing he'd never been persuaded to watch Titanic.

Lukas shrugged as much as was possible in his fitted jacket. Mathias envied his sense of style, the slimness that let him carry off outfits that Mathias himself could only dream about. "Not really," he replied neutrally, "Although I'm glad to be getting away." There was a moment's pause. "I went down to the car to move some stuff around," Lukas continued after a moment. "Any particular reason why you brought beach toys?"

Mathias grinned, a little embarrassed. "Just for fun, I guess. We have our own beach – it would be…" he stopped himself just before saying 'madness' "… pointless not to build some sandcastles!"

Lukas shook his head. "How old are you?" he asked in a voice which Mathias could have sworn contained a note of amusement.

"Lukas!" he protested playfully. "It's rude to ask a lady her age!"

Lukas's mouth quirked up at one corner for a fraction of a second, then became a thin line once more. Mathias smiled to himself. Away from everything, he was beginning to recover his natural optimism and humour. Perhaps, upon his return, he would be able to retain it, he thought. Everything seemed brighter, the clouds parting to allow a gleam of early spring sunshine onto the deck.

By the time they began to see the trickle of buildings that precipitated the flood of occupation as they came into Stavanger in order to catch their second boat, it was early evening, and Mathias sensed that something had changed between him and Lukas. Perhaps it was the profound relief of having no responsibilities, or perhaps it was simply that they were beginning to feel more at ease with each other, but despite their being mostly in silence, when their conversation came, it flowed easily. Lukas had been making sketches for the new book, an idea which he had welcomed, although he hadn't really understood the purpose behind it.

"It's a nice idea, Mathias," he had said, "And I'd love to do the illustrations, but I don't really understand what the message is. What are you trying to say here?"

Mathias had stared out of the window for a while, watching the mountains that glowered down at the road as if they resented the presence of humans in this empty, unpopulated, elemental place. Eventually, he had formed a response.

"I suppose," he had said at length. "It's for anyone who's ever felt out of place – you know, trapped between two worlds. Children have such a struggle fitting in, and I want the book to show them that, though it may be painful or difficult, they'll find where they belong eventually."

Lukas had given him an appraising look and asked, "Have you found your place in the world yet?"

"No," he had replied. "No, I don't think I have."

Lukas had inclined his head in acknowledgement of the answer and gone back to his drawing of the imagined boy, a life being created on paper.

A little later, once they had been silent for a while, Lukas had spoken again.

"You know," he had said. "This book is my first commission."

Mathias, startled both by the information and the fact Lukas had willingly initiated conversation, had been unable to hide his shock.

"Really? But you have your degree and your website and everything else!"

"No one likes what they see," Lukas had explained wearily, "Or if they do, they meet me and don't want to work with me afterwards. I don't mind particularly. I draw whether I have to or not. I read. I stay awake."

Mathias hadn't been able to resist asking where he got his money from.

"My parents are rich, remember?" Lukas had replied. "They send me money every month to keep me in paint. Just as long as I don't come home, of course. They don't want anything more to do with me. They've washed their hands of me, because I can't wash the blood off my own." His voice was expressionless – clearly, he had come to realise this fact a long time ago.

"Oh. I'm sorry."

A sigh. "Why do people always feel the need to apologise?" The question required no answer, and got none.

A little way outside the town was a church that Mathias had been meaning to visit for a long time. It contained a memorial to his predecessor, put up by his best friend in the wake of his death, and as they approached Mathias felt a faint tingling of trepidation in the back of his mouth. The stones of the church were a forbidding grey even in the sepia light of the spring evening, the building a hulking form vaguely redolent of the country's Viking past. It looked as though it could withstand the day of judgement itself, standing like a fortress in the middle of the scattered mass of gravestones with a hundred individual tragedies inscribed on them. It was a singularly unwelcoming place, and the colourful posters on the noticeboard that did nothing to dispel the air of disapproval the place seemed to exude. He pulled into the car park and turned the engine off, an act which caused Lukas to look up with a frown of confusion.

"Is everything alright?" he asked.

Mathias nodded. "Yes, but I'd just like to stop here for a minute. We're in plenty of time and there's a plaque here to a writer I really admire. You don't have to come in. I won't take long."

Lukas shook his head. "No, it's fine. I'd like to have a look as well."

Mathias smiled to himself. Every time Lukas took an interest in something outside his obsessively introspective guilt or his art, he felt like they had both achieved something.

Once inside, Mathias was struck by the opulence of the church's interior compared to its outside austerity. He hadn't been raised a churchgoer and had never got into the habit himself, to which end he knew very little about churches. Still, he found something almost comforting in the idea of being part of a community, although equally he didn't want to be defined by his beliefs. He existed in a fairly comfortable state of deciding not to worry about the afterlife until he was dead. He wondered what Lukas believed in, and whether it brought him comfort or even greater pain. Did he fear oblivion for Emil, Mathias mused, or damnation for himself?

Lukas immediately detached himself to go and look at the stained glass in the windows and Mathias began to search for the plaque. It was no easy task in the candlelight, the windows dark with evening. Their euphoric blaze of colours was something to be viewed in the daylight. When he eventually found it, he was surprised at how small and insignificant it was, nestled among memorials to other forgotten people, made out of dull copper and with the inscription in sober black. His predecessor hadn't died on the island, nor in Stavanger itself, but the circumstances of his death had made a small commemoration far away from Copenhagen desirable. He read the writing out loud, feeling a shiver run down his back at reading his own name off a grave.

Sacred to the Memory of Mathias Køhler, Born 2nd April 1805, Died 20th November 1831

'One whose name was writ in water.'

Put up by Gilbert Beilschmidt in February 1832 to commemorate a true friend

"He's got your name."

Mathias almost jumped, dredged out of his trance by Lukas's unexpected arrival and comment.

"Yes," he replied. "Though we're not related. Just one of those little coincidences, you know."

Lukas moved a little closer, raising a hand to the metal. "Where did he live? I might know it."

Mathias shook his head. "Not around here. He was from Copenhagen, and died there, but he spent a year on one of the islands in the chain we're going to, and it's there that he was happiest. But really, the plaque's here instead of there because when he died, things were sort of covered up," He sighed. "You see that quote?"

Lukas nodded. "I've heard of it somewhere." he said.

"It's from the grave of John Keats," Mathias explained. "Keats meant it to show that his fame was short-lived – although of course it wasn't for him – but here it has another meaning. The thing is, no one's quite sure what happened to Mathias – sorry, it's a bit weird saying my own name like that – since, like I said, it was sort of covered up. The general idea is that he drowned, and the plaque backs that up." At the mention of drowning, Mathias felt a sort of memory echo in the oldest, most animal part of his brain, a vague feeling of cold water closing over him and of being pulled down, so far down. He recovered himself in time for Lukas's next question, surprised that Lukas seemed unbothered by the thought of drowning. Perhaps it was because he blamed himself instead of the sea, Mathias thought.

"So what was so bad about that?" Lukas asked.

Mathias cleared his throat. "Well, the official line was that it was accidental, but there was also speculation that he had… done away with himself, and of course in the nineteenth century that was absolutely shocking. So he wasn't talked about in polite society anymore, his friend had to put up the memorial a long way off, and he's still forgotten today."

"Do you think he deserves to be remembered?" The way Lukas asked the question was almost like a test, as if he was measuring Mathias's devotion to his idol.

"Yes," Mathias replied with certainty. "But only for his last book, the one he never finished. His earlier stuff is just terrible. He wrote half of it when he was stoned on laudanum and it really shows, but this last book is different. It's absolutely impassioned and completely sincere when almost everything else he wrote was so untruthful, so obviously written for the money. I think you should read it, because I've never read anything more heartfelt."

"What's it about?" Lukas asked.

"Everything he hated," Mathias said. "There's the hypocrisy of high society, the soullessness, the way everyone pretended to care about other people but really didn't. The main character's called Lukas, actually, and he's this young man who makes his debut and absolutely falls in love with the glamour of it all, but then he begins to hallucinate strange things. He confides in a doctor, who ends up spreading the rumour that he's gone mad, and – since the book was never finished – it ends with Lukas about to be locked up. I wanted to write about it for my university thesis, but my lecturers said it wasn't considered a classic. I would have written about Lukas, such a fascinating character. I think he was half Mathias's creation and half himself – the virtues were another's but the vices were his own." He stopped abruptly, a little embarrassed at having gone on for so long and appearing to be a bore. "So yeah," he finished lamely. "You should have a look at it. I've brought it with me, if you want to borrow."

Lukas nodded slowly, seeming to pick up on Mathias's love for the book. "I think I will." he replied.

Between Havmann Island and Stavanger, 27th May 1831

The sands of time had run out. Sand, like on a beach. Sea and sand, sea and shore, unexpected union and inevitable separation. It was quite beautiful, really, at this time of day, at this time of year. There was always a strange stillness about the place, though. Not even a bird disturbed the silence, never did. Silence. He'd got used to that. He'd had so much of it over the past year.

Mathias blinked slowly a few times, trying to clear his mind and distinguish his thoughts from one another as they swirled in an opiated haze. His year was up and he was returning to the place where he least wanted to be: home. He had always known that his time on the island would be limited, but in the absence of any sort of obligations the days had merged into one without anything to mark them out from each other. Christmas, New Year, his birthday… All had passed by unnoticed. But the one date that had always hovered like a rain-filled stormcloud in his thoughts had now arrived, and he was leaving everything he cared about.

Lukas. Lukas, Lukas, Lukas. The name was a promise, a prayer, a two-syllable poem with the first syllable stressed. LU-kas. LU-kas. It was his compass, his truth, his validation. And it belonged to someone he would never see again. He wondered where Lukas was as the rickety boat forged its uncertain way through the waves. They had said their goodbyes the previous day, and it was then that Mathias had been reminded of the gulf that existed between them. He had seen Lukas with his tail on again. He had pressed his hand to it and marvelled at its pulsing, living strength, at the regular pounding of blood along its length. He had seen how it fused so perfectly with Lukas's human torso, without any appearance of jarring or unnatural transplant, and how it was so fully him, how it was not part of him but his own self. It was at that moment that he had come to see the truth of things: the tail was Lukas's true nature, the reality of him and the reason why no union between them could ever be permanent. Every beat of blood Mathias felt through the gleaming blue scales marked off another moment of their time together, and he felt the narrowing of it keenly. He wondered that they had ever come together at all when Lukas lived a life so unknown to him, and was so completely a thing of the sea.

He had told Lukas that he would have to leave soon, and been gratified yet guilty that Lukas had taken it stoically. He could never tell if Lukas hid his emotions or truly didn't feel them, and it was something that was frustrating to him.

"I'll try to come back." he had promised, taking Lukas's hand and being amazed anew at the glorious array of shades in his shining scales. Even as he had said the words, he had known that the subtle entrapments of society would make another escape impossible.

Lukas had shaken his head. "Do not make such a promise," he had replied. "You will make a liar of yourself."

"I am a liar, and have always been a liar. I trade in lies." Mathias had said with a hint of bitterness at his own weakness.

"You have never told me anything but the truth." Lukas had answered, his simple reassurance and expression of trust more than Mathias's poor bruised heart could bear.

Mathias felt nausea rising and took a few breaths to calm his tormented body that once more was suffering from too much of the vile drug. He stared down into the depths, imagining hundreds of silvery tails flicking the darkness. Lukas, perhaps, would be among them. Their last few hours together, which they had spent the previous night, would forever live in his memory as the time when they had been able to forget their parting just for those few short hours allotted to them, and during those precious hours they had existed wholly in the bliss of the moment and thought of nothing but each other and their love.

"I will be back. I will be yours again." he had whispered fiercely in an instant snatched between kisses that became ever more desperate as the night wore on and between murmured declarations of love, repeated countless times as they tried to reassure each other of their sincerity.

"Don't say that," Lukas had protested. "Love me truly, not with these impossible vows. Let me remember you as an honest man."

The moon and stars had blazed with an almost violent brightness, burning through the window of the small house and filling the room with silver, silver that had caught the cross Lukas always wore in his hair and made it glow gold.

"I love you." they had told each other countless times. "I love you, and I am glad to have lost my heart to you, and I will always remember you."

Mathias felt tears pricking his eyes and stared into the depths. He willed himself to become one with the water, to be cold and slow-moving and emotionless. To have energy but be lifeless, to be a force but not a thinking creature – that was how he would survive the rest of his time on earth. He would pay homage to Lukas's strength by emulating it. But the agony was unbearable. He and Lukas had found their twin halves in each other. They had fused and now, with indescribable pain, they were being split apart.

And there was one more thing. Once Lukas had gone back to the sea, once he truly couldn't stay another moment and they had pressed their lips together for the last time and been parted for the last time, Mathias had done two things. Firstly, he had opened his neatly-packed luggage and withdrawn from it a single bottle. The lid had been stiff and difficult to remove, but it had come away eventually. He hadn't been tempted by the false pleasure of the drug in a long time, not since that starlit night so many months before, but now this was truly the only thing that could ease his pain, the first real pain he had felt in his life, the pain that made all other pains nothing. The laudanum had tasted more bitter than he remembered, and it had clung to his mouth and throat and made him feel like he was choking on a damp cloth. The second thing he had done was to take out a pen, paper and second bottle – this time of ink – and write a letter to Lukas; a letter that would never be sent, addressed to a lover who could not read. He had slipped it between two of the bricks in the wall, somewhere he hoped no one would ever look, and then sipped a last drop of laudanum and fallen asleep without dreams.

….

Author's Note: Hey everyone! Sorry about the long wait – GCSEs have legitimately been taking over my life, and I also had to draft this chapter five times before I was happy with it, so I hope it's not too awful. I finished my overall plan the other day, and I can confirm that there will be two more chapters after this one, making a total of thirteen. Hope you enjoyed the chapter!