Antonio wouldn't keep them waiting. Antonio was always there for them, steady warm sunlight in Francis' coldest, darkest nights, gentle hands on Gilbert's burn scars. Antonio was there to put them both back together after they'd caught on each other's sharp edges and torn each other apart. Antonio would be here soon, with the sun rising through the grey, to watch the world end.

Francis waited for him. It was so cold in the mornings, when there was nothing to do but wait. His head was pounding and his chest hurt and he felt so alone, so disconnected from the monstrous thing sitting on the edge of the dock and chain-smoking cigarettes. Alone and cold like he used to be, trapped inside his own head with the grey of alcohol and melancholy, the grey only his best friends could pull him out of.

He didn't really have best friends anymore, did he? Antonio was braver than Francis could bear to be, a warrior of a doomed war. Gilbert was Gilbert, and Francis would rather lose himself to the hopeless grey than seek warmth in his arms ever again.

Francis buried his head in his hands and dreamed of Matthew, complicated and wonderful in a gentler way. Someone who hurt and bled as easily as he did, but who would brave the dark to hold back the nightmares. Matthew deserved someone who wasn't marked all over by Prussian blue and guilt. Matthew, his maple leaf, deserved to be safe and away from Berlin. Francis wished he was away from all of this, this mockery of an execution. He never should have come back to the East.

The sky was lighting above them, slow as cold honey, their fate dripping like melted wax, and Francis wished that it was all over already, that Gilbert had died years ago and that he could go home to Matthew's arms and forget about this terrible, glittering city, full of gunmetal and teeth.

Antonio found them with the sun glimmering through the earliest clouds, his hand steady and warm and blood-streaked on Francis's shoulder, guiding him upright. All of his muscles were stiff with how tightly he'd curled into himself, and moving hurt. His head hurt.

Gilbert smoked on the dock, ember glowing between his fingertips, face lit by the sunrise. Wasn't the sunlight supposed to warm things? Why did it paint him as a burning thing?

Gilbert took the cigarette out and slowly, deliberately raised it into the air, a wavering cherry-red salute to all that they used to be. Francis knew what he would do a moment before it happened, but he wasn't fast enough to know what he wanted to do, too lost and lonely in himself to act before Gilbert ground it into his skin.

Pain and anger and animal intensity, those were the only things that looked natural on Gilbert Beilschmidt. Francis saw all of them as Gilbert hurled the cigarette off the dock, teeth bared and lit red. He didn't know what he wanted- he didn't even know what he was thinking anymore. I want you dead, I want to heal every scar.

In the silence afterwards, all the wildness in him seemed to recede, leaving only a shell of a moon-painted man with a uniform dripping blood. This was how it always was, in the wake of his hurricane. Guilt and the reluctance to admit maybe we are too broken this time, maybe we can't fix ourselves anymore.

'I saved him,' Gilbert said. This was the problem with them: even when none of them believed it, they kept lying to each other.

The sun spilled through the gap in the bombed buildings and across the water, more like lit gasoline and cherry-red embers than soft warm light.

'I didn't think it would turn out this way,' he added, light and careless, as if none of it mattered and he didn't have Ludwig's blood on his hands.

'I did,' Antonio said beside Francis. I wish I could fix us both, Francis thought, but it was impossible. He and Antonio wouldn't be healed until Gilbert was dead. They would never be healed again if their angel had fallen.

Francis made the mistake of looking at him, and Gilbert's eyes locked on his, suddenly bright with ravenous, feral emotion like only now had he realized he was dead and now he was reaching out, hoping that Francis would be weak enough to let him back in-

'Francis, sweetheart. Francis.'

Sweetheart; it was like a knife wound. Francis recoiled, his loathing for this monster of a man, for himself, boiling inside his chest.

'Don't call me that,' he snarled. He refused to save Gilbert this time. He had done all of this to himself. Francis couldn't save him, even if he wanted. Even if Gilbert looked like he was in pain. Even if there was red and gold light spilling like maple leaf paint down his burned forearm and highlighting the smile lines around his eyes. Even if he looked like the boy he'd once fallen in love with.

Francis wanted him dead. Didn't he? Didn't he?

'I'm glad that they made you do it.' Gilbert's teeth flashed out in a too-wide grin for a second, shoulders trembling. 'Or did you ask to do it? It doesn't matter. I'd rather die to you than one of the Stasi bastards. You'll make it clean, won't you, Toni? I don't deserve it, you know that best, but you'll do that for me.' His voice dropped to a croon. Gilbert, at the end of the world, sang his death. 'Won't you?'

His head hurt. Everything hurt, so much that he thought it would tear him open as Antonio raised the gun. Maybe it was true that he was weak, that he was suited to an artist's life and Matthew's arms and nothing else. He was weak, but he didn't want to choose. He didn't want to choose between Antonio and Gilbert, and he loathed himself for it. Gilbert was the one who could talk and sing at the end of the world. Francis tried, I love you I hate you I need you, and it came out as a sob.

Gilbert was close to them both suddenly, his forehead pressed to the gun barrel, still as steel. Antonio was the one shaking now. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right that Gilbert could still hurt them so badly. He was moments from death, he shouldn't be able to haunt them any longer.

'Stop. Stop it, Gilbert,' Antonio hissed.

'Francis,' Gilbert murmured, and Francis hated that his body answered before his mind did, jerking his head up to look him in his copper-blood eyes. There were tears in his eyes, nothing was right, nothing was right. 'When you go back to the West, his name- his name is Roderich Edelstein, promise me you'll remember that. He's a musician. Tell him to stop waiting. Tell him I'm sorry for breaking my promise.' His voice was so soft, soft as bird down and singing someone to sleep. Francis couldn't, he couldn't. 'I hope you're happy. I never could make you as happy as you should be. I'm sorry, Francis.'

He couldn't. Gilbert was all wrong and so was he. This wasn't how anything was supposed to have gone, and he was broken, broken. All of those words and all of his love declarations came out in helpless, hopeless tears against Antonio's shoulder. Antonio was the only steady thing, holding him tighter against the hurricane.

'Toni? Live a good life, okay? Remember me. Get out of this place, darling, it's gonna eat you alive.' A soft, soft laugh. 'I'm sorry.'

'Stop,' Antonio pleaded.

'Why?' Gilbert was smiling now, he could hear it. Francis could feel and hear him, his scarred skin, his smoke-ravaged breathing, his scent of fire and this city. Gilbert lifted Antonio's chin, and Francis stared up at him, at the rising sun. Beautiful, horrible, monstrous and angelic; Gilbert Beilschmidt. His name was a concrete poem that made the shape of war.

'Kill me. Kill me, go on. Shoot me like you promised. For Mathias. For Francis. For Ludwig. Do it, Toni.'

'I hate you! I can- I'll kill you, I will, I can.' Antonio's screams broke apart. Francis was shaking apart beside him, gasping for breath, praying that it would all be over soon. Anything, anything was better than this hell, angel choirs singing for death.

'You can't,' Gilbert said simply, and Francis sobbed, sobbed. 'I know you won't kill me, because you already would have.'

Even when none of them wanted to believe it, the truth swam up like silver-pale sharks from dark water and devoured them all alive.

'I'm going to kill you.' Even Francis didn't believe the tremble in his words.

'You won't. I know you.'

Gilbert knew them, Gilbert broke them. When he gathered them both into his arms, Francis broke completely, crying into him, holding on tight. He hurt so much, he hated himself so much more, he wished he and Gilbert both were dead.

'Shh,' Gilbert crooned, and the gun hit the street with a rattle that went deeper than bone.

Gilbert released them and Francis turned his face away. He hated himself. He hated all of this.

'I'll tell Mathias that you're dead,' Antonio whispered. Francis didn't want to watch Gilbert leave. He'd seen enough of that, their eagle flying free, enough for a thousand better lifetimes. He heard him instead, before he was gone.

'Remember me.'

How could Francis do anything but that? How did Gilbert not know that one of his best friends was a vessel spilling over with memory and moonlight and words, and nothing else?

Antonio's arm wrapped around his shoulders and Francis slumped, given up, empty for once. He was walking, he was breathing, he could feel Antonio's sunlit warmth against his cracked-open ribcage, but he was empty.

'I'm sorry,' he said, to his best friend, to Matthew, to all the people he'd believed and who'd believed in him.

'Gilbert Beilschmidt isn't your fault,' Antonio said. It caught in Francis' heavy head for a moment, the comforting and not entirely untrue idea that Gilbert wasn't a person as much as a force like a hurricane, a terrible unstoppable consequence of cities like this. It was easy to make a monster out of someone who encouraged it like he did.

'So who is at fault for him?' The idea that none of this was on his shoulders settled warm around his heart. Francis could hate himself for it later.

'Berlin,' Antonio said.

They stopped outside the Wall. Francis felt lightheaded. Antonio shifted to support him. The thunderstorm weight of everything was pressing on his lungs, on his head, threatening to split him wide open.

'Antonio-'

Antonio cut him off, holding up a finger. He was steady, steady, this fighter, this warrior.

'I forgive you for everything,' he said softly, and Francis fell, fell into him, the pain and guilt fading back like ghosts burnt away by the morning sun. Antonio wrapped his arms tight around him and Francis buried his head in his chest, breathing him in. His skin smelled like sun and spice instead of sweetness and pine, but he loved it just as much.

'Thank you,' Francis gasped. Antonio held him as the sun rose.

'I'm glad you ran that night. I wish I'd ran too.' Antonio took a deep, shuddering breath. 'I wish things could have been different. I wish he wasn't Gilbert. I wish I hadn't wanted to kill him. I wish I didn't…' He broke off, fingers digging into Francis' back.

'You can say it.' A laugh bubbled up from the broken part of him. 'I love him too.'

'I loved him. Once. Not anymore. I love someone so much better now.' Antonio stroked his hair. 'You saw- did you see? At the bar? His name is Lovino.'

Antonio carefully took a photograph from his jacket, showing the young man with his brows furrowed and sunlight making a halo in his dark hair. Antonio had always had a talent with his camera, but there was such raw love in this one that Francis could feel it at a glance.

'I love him,' he said softly. His eyes shone like springtime. Francis felt himself smile for the first time in what felt like weeks, and stretched to press a kiss to Antonio's forehead.

'It's beautiful.'

'He really is.' Antonio tenderly tucked the photograph away. 'After this...after this I'll do something better for him. For us. We'll get out of here.'

It's gonna eat you alive. Francis turned his back on the hissing ghost and leaned against Antonio's shoulder, into his warmth.

'I'm glad.'

Antonio smiled, thumb brushing Francis' shoulder in easy, gentle circles, coaxing the tension away. After the adrenaline rush, Francis was spent, almost asleep, and he wanted this moment to last just a little longer.

'I have a lover,' he confessed, and the words felt like doves. 'His name is Matthew Williams. He was a soldier. He's gentle, and braver than he knows. I miss him. I'm going to him, as soon as I can.' The memories of Matthew flooded into him like watercolour dawn, filling him up, making him warm.

'That's good,' Antonio said, and then again, louder, prouder. 'That's good!'

'It is!' Francis was smiling again, smiling wide as Antonio picked him up in a twirl.

Love, loved, lover. All dangerous words in a city like this. Three out of a thousand ways the Stasi would try to kill you if they could. Francis wouldn't let them. He was alive, and he was free.

'I'll see you again,' he said, holding up a finger to cut off Antonio's goodbye. 'We will. I promise. After this whole damn thing is done, we'll meet again. I've heard Canada is a beautiful place.'

Antonio smiled, warm and open. The sun spilled down his features and his smile like warm golden honey.

'I love you,' he said. Antonio kissed his temple once, murmuring I love you too, and they both held onto their last embrace for as long as they could.

'I'll see you in the West some day,' Antonio said when they finally let go, with a smile so bright it banished any thought of Gilbert.

Francis ran West for the second time, free and light, watching the dawn through tears. There was war, but there was also sunlight. He collapsed on the West side and stretched his hands to the pale purple-blue of the sky, dreaming of Matthew, and freedom, and a space away from war, full of moonlight and love. Things would be okay.

0o0o0o

:: Woolen scarves where you can feel the twisted threads