For all the years since, for all that happened, for how it ended, there is a part of him that loves Darius still. That love for him lives deep in his bones, remembers only the kisses and touches, the dancing, the feel of another body in the darkness. It is deep inside of him, cradled safe, and he is not sure he would have it any other way.


Darius left, and he wandered through the house like a ghost. As if he could feel his voice through the shadows, hear him through the lancing rays of sunlight breaking through the windows. He did not cry, he did not rage, he just walked.

Walked, as if he were a ghost himself.

And then he drank.


Whiskey. A bottle he had been keeping for some special occasion, for some purpose and time unknown.

His fingers sought the bottle, and he did not bother with a glass.


His memories of the car accident are a jumbled mess, and ones he prefers not to dwell on, prefers not to try and untangle. It was the whiskey, and the blood loss, and the bang to his head. The aching grief inside and the odd numbness in his hands.

He ought not to have been driving. That much he knew in a subconscious sort of way at the time. The weather was bad, the evening dark, the rain pounding down. But he didn't care, couldn't let himself care, not then.

Darius was gone.

Darius had left him.

That simple fact was all he knew. That, and that he needed to move, needed to run, needed to get away and be somewhere else.

He got in the car without any notion of where to go, and drove.


Screech of brakes and flash of light and the shooting pain in his head.

Red and blue, red and blue and whining sirens.

An indistinct face and a voice asking questions. The date? 18 February 1973. The Taoiseach? Lynch still. The President? DeV the bastard.

And, for a long time, a blur of pain, and darkness creeping at the edges of his thoughts.


"What are you reading?"

Jack has been quiet all day, reading a leather-bound book of poetry, sometimes looking up to stare out the window and sigh, teeth worrying at his lip. Raoul isn't sure he's really reading at all. He hasn't seen him turn any page.

"Yeats."

Reasonable enough. "Anything in particular?"

Another one of those sighs, enough that Raoul decides conversation is unlikely to get anywhere so he settles back against his pillows and closes his eyes. Sorelli will be due in a little while, and she likes to see he's been resting.

"Do you think it was true?" And Jack's voice is quiet, a whisper, or almost.

"Think what was true?"

A breath, and then, "Casement. Do you think the diaries were forged? Or might he really have been one of us?"

One of us.

One of us.

"A homosexual." The word feels oddly heavy on his tongue, though he has thought it many times in these weeks since he and Jack first kissed. "I don't know. I haven't studied him enough. And the books all say—"

"The books can't countenance that it might have been true."


It was the oddest of memories, almost a dream, that lingered on his mind as he came back to himself. Jack's voice soft, as if he were whispering in his ear still, and that leather-bound book.

But it was Sorelli he opened his eyes to. Sorelli, and it took him a moment, groping through his thoughts, to see the paleness of her face, to realize that no, no of course it would not be Jack waiting at his side.

Something wrong with his right eye that he couldn't open it fully, the vision blurred. An aching in his cheek, in his head, and some instinctual thing warned him not to move.

She squeezed his fingers, and he could see the blood on her lip, from where she had bitten it raw.

"You were in an accident," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "But you're going to be alright now, I promise." And her lips were soft as she kissed his fingers. "I couldn't find Darius to tell him."

Darius.

Darius.

His breath hitched, the memory of the door closing driving the breath from his lungs.

Darius.

And tears welled in his eyes so that Sorelli blurred and he swallowed, her fingers tightening around his. And when he shaped the words, his voice was a croak. "Gone."

Darius is gone.


She stayed with him until he lost consciousness again. Stayed with him, and brushed the tears from his cheeks, and kissed his forehead, and lay her head down next to his, so that their faces were almost touching, and he knew she would have hugged him if she could, if she had not been afraid of hurting him, would have held him and given him someone to lean into, but she had to settle for twining her fingers tight with his, and whispering in his ear, and it was her voice that made it easier to him to let go, to give himself the rest that he needed.

It was only afterwards he learned he had had his spleen removed, to stop it bleeding, and an operation on his left lung, for more bleeding, and when he laughed despite the pain it was almost hysterical.

To survive TB, to survive a haemorrhaging lung, and then to almost choke on his own blood because of a car accident. The most ridiculous fucking thing he had ever heard.

There is still a small scar over his left eye, from the gash that was stitched closed, but he didn't laugh when it reminded him of the stitches over Philippe's eye, when he died.

He was lucky, lucky to have come through as well as he did, lucky to not be dead himself after his foolishness.

It didn't feel very much like luck at all. Not with Darius gone.


"To this most gallant gentleman," Jack's voice a murmur in his ear, "that is in quicklime laid."

"I can think of a different gallant gentleman," and it was all he could do to keep the smile from his voice, "whom I should very much like to get to know further."

And Jack flashed him a grin, his eyes dancing, before he kissed him.


Transfusions, painkillers, antibiotics. The knowledge that the best he had ever had was lost to him…

It weighed him down, and sleeping was easier than waking.


For two days he couldn't bring himself to speak. Not to Sorelli, not to Christine, not to the doctors when they asked him questions. He was sure that if he opened his mouth he would start screaming and not be able to stop.

Noël came to see him, on the third day, and made that face, the one that said, I intend to sit here until you say something and I don't care how long it takes.

(Raoul suspected he had learned it from Sorelli, but couldn't confirm.)

And Raoul couldn't explain it but he wanted to tell him, wanted to tell someone what had happened, how he had loved Darius and how it felt like he was the other part of his soul but clearly Darius didn't feel the same way because now he's gone and who's to say that there wasn't someone else? Someone else in Cambridge who caught Darius' heart the way Darius had caught his heart, and the very thought of it made him shiver, made sweat break out cold on his skin.

Could Darius have had somebody else? Would he have?

And Noël must have seen something in his face, because he frowned, and tapped his fingers lightly on the back of his hand, the gentlest tapping, enough to remind Raoul to breathe, enough to bring him back to himself.

"If there's anything you want to tell me—"

"Darius…" And Raoul's voice was hardly more than a whisper, the tears threatening to well in his eyes and he blinked against them and turned his head to Noël fully. "Darius is—"

"You mean that he's your lover?"

And it sounded so blunt, so plain, put like that, and how could Noël know? Raoul never told him, never told anyone, except Sorelli and Christine, let everyone else think Darius was just staying with him to save money and because they were friends. He never told anyone about him, about them. How could he? It was illegal, it was indecent, it was a sin and an affront to all that was good and right in the world. How could he just tell people?

"Raoul," and Noël's voice was very low, those dark eyes concerned and careful, "I've known you're a homosexual since 1952." And then a slight smile. "I don't know what Clongowes was like, but I imagine it wasn't too different from Beaumont."

Clongowes and the boys in the dormitories creeping into each other's beds. Stress relief. 1952.

1952.

So Noël knew about—

"Jack." The name was just as familiar, the shape of it just as right, on Raoul's tongue as it ever was.

"Since Jack." And Noël patted the back of his hand. "I could not be certain, but then after you had your haemorrhage, you kept asking for him." It was all Raoul could do to keep breathing, slow breaths, to fight the aching tightening in his throat, the pain in his chest from the surgery and that old grief still in his heart. "For him and your brother both. And then I was certain." A slight smile twitching the corner of his lips. "It was what Sorelli didn't say."

And Raoul felt another great rush of love towards Sorelli, his dearest, oldest friend, protecting his secrets and always there for him, always ready to rush to his side.

He swallowed and found his voice. "Was."

Noël squinted, just slightly, that contemplative squint that Raoul went to a good deal of trouble to learn. "Was?"

"Darius was my lover." So strange, to give the words voice, to let them out into the air.

The barest flicker of something in Noël's face and then, "ah." A beat, "explains a good lot." Raoul might have asked him what it explained, but he thought it obvious that maybe it explained why he got drunk and crashed his car and landed himself in hospital, until Noël sat back in his chair and said, "Sorelli swore she'd hit him if she ever saw him again."

And in spite of everything, Raoul laughed.

(It was crying more than laughing, and it turned to weeping, but he felt lighter, afterwards, for it.)


"Is there anything you want me to bring you? Any books?" Noël getting ready to leave, and Raoul considered.

Scott and Tennyson were things that Darius read. And Austen and Burney.

The memory of Jack's voice, soft in his ear.

…most gallant gentleman…in quicklime laid…

"Collected Yeats. With the Casement poems."


Christine came to see him that night. Christine, stealing into his hospital room like a ghost. Her face pale, and she looked so young, younger than he had grown used to seeing her, her face pale in the low light.

She sat down on the edge of his bed, and he winced as the movement pulled on the new stitches in his stomach, and leaned into her.

Christine. Always coming when he needed her, called back through time to his side.

If he were not so tired, he might have asked her about it. But he was so very tired, and the grief of missing Darius had settled back into his heart, so instead he asked her the same thing he always did.

"When are you coming from?"

"March 2020." Her voice was soft in the darkness. "There's a pandemic."

A pandemic? That couldn't be good. Frightening, really, to think of her living through such a thing, but this bit of her future he could give her, for once. Not often, that he could make promises to her. "You'll come through it alright. I've known you older."

Her fingers brushed his forehead, careful with his new gash, that maybe she had seen as a scar. "I've known you older too."

Simple things, little words, these pieces they could give each other.


(She was flicking through the book of Yeats Noël had returned with, and it was all he could do to stay awake, for her sake, and when she saw that the tiredness was pulling at him, she put the book aside and kissed his forehead. "Sleep," she whispered, "and I'll sing you a song that doesn't exist yet." She always had the most wonderful voice, and she never sang enough, and when his eyes drifted closed she kissed his fingers and her voice was soft, wrapping around him. "Handsome I am, a red-blooded man…" And he sighed, and that sweet singing bore him into gentle dreams.)


A/N: Some small notes:

The Taoiseach is our version of a Prime Minister, and in February 1973 - before the election at the end of the month - was still Jack Lynch.

DeV is Eamon de Valera, who, after a lengthy period of time as Taoiseach, was elected President in 1959 and served two terms before retiring in May 1973 at the age of 90.

The song Christine sings at the end of this chapter is 'The Black Diary Waltz' by The Mariannes, which is *gorgeous* and on both YouTube and Spotify.

The poem quoted in this chapter is 'Roger Casement' by W.B. Yeats. Casement was an Irish nationalist (and considered the father of 20th century human rights investigations for his work investigating the exploitation of the Congolese by the Belgians for the sake of the rubber trade, and similar subsequent work investigating the abuse of Peruvian natives for the rubber trade), and was stripped of his knighthood in 1916 after attempting to smuggle German guns into Ireland prior to the 1916 Easter Rising. He was captured, tried, and hanged for high treason on 3 August 1916, then buried in quicklime in an unmarked grave on the grounds of Pentonville Prison. Prior to his hanging a number of photographed diary extracts were circulated in an attempt to destroy public support for him - these diary extracts revealed him as a homosexual. However, the provenance of these "black diaries" is debated, with a school of thought insisting that they were forgeries in order to smear his character. There is a great deal of evidence for both sides of the debate, and it is likely that the diaries are authentic or authentic up to a point. Casement is considered by many to be a queer Irish icon. His remains were repatriated in 1965 and buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Yeats believed the diaries a forgery, and wrote this poem to voice that opinion. A second poem of his, 'The Ghost of Roger Casement' is anti-British imperialism in general and largely uses Casement as a framing device.