Raffles.

I understood, of course. I don't know that I agreed with his conclusions, but I understood them. I understood him; or so, at least, I thought. For all his pluck at the scratch, Bunny was always a nervous player. He would get so wrapped up inside his own thoughts and tie himself into such knots given the slightest opportunity, it was little wonder things ended up the way they did. He spent so much time worrying that he had none left to think. This was a long time coming.

And I did understand his anxiety over the Wilde case; though I do still believe even now that it was only the proverbial straw upon my ruffled rabbit's already loaded back. That isn't to downplay the seriousness of the situation. For all that Bunny would insist on believing the "scandal" had not affected me — as, of course, I made sure to let him believe, so as not to add fuel to the fire already consuming him bodily — I was in reality as near shaken over it as he, by the end; though more philosophically than out of any personal concerns for my safety.

Still, it was undeniable that circumstances at large had indeed changed for the worse; and they had never been idyllic for people like Bunny and myself anyway. Cassandra that he was, Bunny had been absolutely on the money in his judgement in one regard: People were riled up and on the attack. Accusations and vitriolic condemnations were to fly through society like balls at a boy's first cricket match, with as much good aim and a good many more casualties.

But he had been making himself sick over it. If I was flippant, if I didn't appear to give our situation it's due concern, it was from a desire, perhaps naive in retrospect, to protect him from himself. It wasn't as though there was anything we could do — nothing, at least, that I was willing to consider. If you could only have seen the agonies he was putting himself through... And I hadn't been lying to him when I told him that we had nothing — that we had little — to fear. I didn't lie to Bunny. I never lied to Bunny. Or … I rarely lied to Bunny. Never about anything important, and never for long. Never about anything that wasn't for his own benefit. Not about this.

And yes, true, my minor celebrity status did put me somewhat more in the line of fire than the average working man, but it wasn't by much, and the fact that I was also a cracksman behind the scenes even less so. The added risks that crime and cricket posed to our chances of other charges were so minor as to be non-existent. But Bunny, so focused on the immediate and the close-to-hand as he always was, seemed to think that our few and very minor indiscretions were enough to amount to a charge against us — they weren't even enough for an accusation! Not one with any weight to it. Not one that anyone in their right mind would ever have bothered to make! Our relationship was private. And though that misguided Labouchere Amendment had made even the private actionable, it could only do so if you got caught; or, at least, if you were in a position to be blackmailed. It seemed to me that a lot of those poor souls so unfairly prosecuted under that accursed law had only been so after bringing the private somewhat more into the public; after they had introduced more variables into the equation.

I thought myself more clever than that. Than them. Than everyone. I should have liked to see the person who could blackmail me and come out on top! I accounted for variables; I removed as many of them as I could, in all areas of my life. Bunny and I were, only, me and Bunny. And in spite of what he seemed to believe, I was as careful, as considered, and as conscientious in romance as I was in burglary. Perhaps I may have had indiscretions in my younger days, but I hadn't been caught, and I'd learned thoroughly from my mistakes. I knew better. I was smarter. So I thought. So I persisted in believing, forgetting the lessons taught by the philosophers of old on the matter of hubris. Forgetting all of the times I had myself slipped up.

I should have known better. I should have known better than to think I knew better.

And, as I've said, Bunny had always had a nervous disposition. He was highly strung. In his eyes threats were always magnified tenfold, blinding him to both the details and the bigger picture until his entire horizon was cast over with fear. If I seemed to have an excess of confidence, it was to balance out his complete lack of it. I hasten to add that I don't doubt his fear came from precisely the same place as that remarkable bravery of his which I so admired: True courage comes not from fearlessness, but from fears faced and conquered. The bravest are those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

And Bunny did have true courage; courage of the sort I fear I have always lacked and still now lack. His pluck was never in question; in the moment Bunny could be relied upon to face any beast with his own rabbit fists raised. But he never believed in or, I suspect, even understood the extent of his bravery. To face so many fears each day, to face them as I never faced mine, that takes the truest of strengths, and the most hardy sort of spirit. Bunny was the most afraid, and the most courageous, and a much better man than I could ever hope to be. But having that courage so oft set to the green... It would weaken the nerves of men with far more emotional equilibrium than Bunny had, and with far lesser stakes to play for.

And more than that, more than just courage and fear, Bunny had so much heart, so much compassion — and that was a cause for anxiety in him as much as anything else. Were he less selfless, he might have suffered less. You see, Bunny knew that I had, in my past, been entangled with women as well as with men — although I must state far, far fewer than he believed. And, so he reasoned, I might very well do so again were he not in the equation. I might, he insisted, have so much easier a life were I simply to marry a woman.

Stubbornly and misguidedly loyal to me as he was, Bunny had never stopped insisting that I had other options, though he had written himself off as a lost cause. He always believed that I might live a personal life with considerably less inherent danger, that I could choose to live a life less dangerous — me, of all people! Ridiculous. But my popularity with women, paired with the fact that the sex of my paramours sat low on my list of reasons for choosing them, conspired into leading Bunny to believe that in him I was settling foolishly for a more difficult and less comfortable life; an even more laughable presumption when one knew the type of women with whom I had in my time been infatuated... Bunny could never accept that my relationship with him was better, and in all ways that mattered to me safer than any I had ever had before — and better than I could ever have again. That he was better. Yes, there was an element of risk in being with him, but there is risk in everything. And if he knew me he would know that any relationship I entered into would always have its own peculiar set of dangers — I tended to lose interest in anything that didn't. But Bunny would never see that I was the problem, not him. I was always the problem. I am the problem. How can I escape danger when I actively court it?

Still, I feel no need to deny the fact that I had considered it, the traditional, sensible, legal marriage that most people, regardless of their true preferences, settle for. And when I speak of preference I don't speak only of men who prefer men, or women who prefer women, but of the lady who prefers a man with a complicated life, the actor, the adventurer, the soldier, the man she would have to fight for, but who settles instead for the chap next door and the easier life he could give her. I speak of the gentleman who prefers a poor woman but who, for the sake of expediency, gives his hand to the wealthy heiress who would provide him with luxury and lucre, if never with love. Compromising merciless and mercurial emotion for the sake of a simpler existence is the way of the world — and not without reason, if without romance. I would have been wilfully blind not to have understood the benefits behind such choices, and wilfully stupid not to have considered them for myself. I like to think that I am neither.

Of course I had considered it. Even after I was reunited with Bunny I had considered it. Even after I was far, far gone in the depths of my adoration of that stubborn, selfless, superlative little rabbit, I was never so lost that I wasn't aware of the alternatives in front of me. I had thoroughly considered all of the ways in which my life might be easier should I make such a compromise; all of the ways in which marrying a good woman would be simpler; all of the reasons why such a path might be desirable. I was not blind to the appeals of the fairer sex, and neither was I deaf to the appeals which Bunny, in his misguided martyrdom, made on their behalf. The appeals that he made on my behalf.

I considered everything, as I always try to do. I considered everything, and I made my choice. I considered everything, and I chose him.

How could I have ever chosen anything else? Any danger, any sacrifice, wasn't it all worth it for a life with such a creature, such a wonder, such a friend as Bunny Manders? The gap between him and the rest of the world was insurmountable. No one else could measure up. No one else could stand a chance. He was my unrivaled rabbit.

No; I was always the lesser party in our arrangement. I was the problem, I was the dangerous element — not him! Bunny was taking all of the risks; Bunny should have chosen the safer path — the safer path being any that led away from me! If I were a less selfish person, if I were half the man he believed me to be, if I were half the man he was, I would have made him leave. I would never have let him in. I would have left. Bunny was always too good for me. I always knew it; I was only waiting for him to realise it, too. But when that realisation finally came, it came too late, and the damage had already been done. When I fell, I dragged Bunny down with me.

In the end, perhaps this outcome was inevitable; written in the stars from the outset, and merely speeded along on its course by the events of that Spring. Bunny knew it, I think, and by the end I knew it too, though we'd both had our eyes shut for far too long. It was a dream that we were either bound to wake from or die within. A dream wherein we forever carried on as we had begun, where our days would all be cricket, our nights all crime; a dream where we would storm together ever onward, hand in reckless hand, the masters of our own fates.

But perhaps that was my dream, and Bunny was only swept along with it. Perhaps to him it had been a nightmare. Perhaps Bunny had always known better, and perhaps it had always been he, not I who was the one awake, knowing and seeing that all dreams eventually die upon the knees of the gods.

And yet he stayed. And yet he came back.

Nothing is forever. Nothing lasts but the shadows of those dreams unbound from their silken leash, intangible and ideal, untouchable and beautiful and lifeless as the Grecian Urn; as far removed from fleeting reality as I am now from him. It's an irony that would be funny, were it not so sad, that in this evanescent, ephemeral, transitory world where impermanence alone reigns eternal, amidst my now salted earth there is but one useless blossom which persists unrelenting, one hardy nightshade which refuses, much as I wish it would, to die:

I love him.

—I can't do this.

-end of manuscript-