So this is the last proper chapter thank you so much for all of your kind reviews and support it's really made this a really fun AU to write! If you have any other questions after chapter 22 (that'll be the last official one I think) please feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you somehow haha, anyway thank you so so very much it's made the past couple of months amazing!

Second Summer (RAC remix) - Yacht
About You (Dream Koala remix) - XXYYXX

For the first few seconds after his scream had died and he suspected Mathias with it Lars found himself in the strangest state of numbness, of denial. Of course not. Of course Mathias wouldn't have done something so stupid. He could handle the fact Mathias killed people, he could handle the fact he was involved with some terrible people hell he could even handle the fact Mathias could look so distant at times like he wasn't even there and would even leave Lars questioning if he ever existed in the first place. How he felt like looking into blue, past the meadows and pill induced laughter he saw a vast landscape of fog and shade that vaguely resembled a wasteland he did not wish to stray too deep into. However he would never

be able to handle

this.

He blinked, pinched his thigh, bit his hand hoping that perhaps he would wake up to a time where he accepted that writing was safer than words, he wouldn't stutter or say the wrong thing when he was writing and if he did he could change it with a line through the middle like he was trying to cut it out of his memory or even erasing it until nothing was left. Words would not be stuck in his throat and spew out like garbage whenever he was at a loss for the right things to say, his lips wouldn't shape the wrong syllables when his hands wrote the perfectly shaped letters. Because writing can chose whether to show emotion if the reader wishes to see it the way the human body doesn't have the choice but to express their thoughts and feelings with a spontaneous and cruelly sharp tongue.

If he had said the right words the way his hands would have been able to write them...

Maybe this wouldn't have happened.

He wouldn't be dealing with the sudden grief stricken plunge of a knife with alone scrawled across it twist deep between his ribcage to get where it hurt most.

Lars for the first time in his life cried without the safety of his pillows or with crossed over arms to smother his face against, he raced forward almost of the verge of jumping down straight after him to the point that he wobbled unevenly on the ledge, looking down on the busy city waiting to hear shrieks and engines as he scanned the fogged over pavement for a crumpled body, there were now mournful crowds gathering on the side walk, he couldn't see a thing, there was nothing, life still went on and people walked by without a care in the world and he had no fucking clue what was going on anymore. His eyes continued to well with tears which he hastily scrubbed away with the backs of his hands.

Maybe he was just imagining everything, perhaps it was just a bad dream. He prayed it was simply a bad, bad dream. Maybe this empty space he was feeling in the absence of his smiling Dane was like a trick of the eye.

Then he heard a cigarette lighter crack and he looked down again, actually taking the time to scan down the side of the building rather than metres upon metres below where the mist hung heavy and low. The ache in his bones from the other's absence, the choking, irritable itch to scream in despair halted in it's effort to settle in his bones, sunbeams kissed pearls on freckled skin and his jaw dropped in disbelief.

Mathias held onto the windowsill of the first floor apartment, smoking lazily as if he hadn't just thrown himself off the roof. At Lars' heavy gulp he looked up and smiled tightly.

"Hey."

Lars forgot how to speak. His hands stopped shaking with the urge to fill space where his tongue did not.

"You look stupid not saying anything with your mouth hanging open. What? Did you really think gravity would be the death of me?" He laughed out pants of nicotine. "I'm untouchable even to the planet's strongest force. Though I did think for a split second 'what if I didn't reach out?' then maybe I'd be doing a favour to whoever made money from scraping my rotting ass off the side walk."

"Mathias you're fucking insane." He said hoarsely, the scream still scraping against his voice box. "You're fucking stupid, insane reckless shitbag don't fucking do that to me."

"I can't die. Even if I wanted to, some revolting force of nature would keep me going." He took another drag, the cigarette balanced on his lips as he pulled himself up to the ledge of the apartment window. Another quick manoeuvre and he was standing in front of Lars and spitting out the half smoked butt of his marlboro gold. "Unfortunate for you huh? You have to see my stupid, insane, reckless, shitbag face until you decide you've had enough."

He tensed at the sudden change in the Dane's mood, his earlier dreamy stare and airy words was decaying away into a sneer he had not yet been the witness of. Still despite the unattractive snark in Mathias' tone he dug his nails into his palms and kept himself steady. Sure. Determined. "I'm not going anywhere."

Mathias' faltering mask of the asshole Lars once thought he was slowly crumbled into childlike confusion. Something wild flickered behind his gaze, more than the beast he'd been trying to hide under the confines of smiles and mindless flirting. It was something broken, something free but something without control or reason. Yet at the same time it was something empty. He looked broken, he looked tired and he looked like he'd left down all his cards face up for the Dutchman to see he'd given up. His maelstrom brain returned back to the vast and barren stretch of nothing Lars had been trying not to stroll into and he now had by accident.

Did he have regrets about holding onto life?

He had been alive during the nights, and now Lars realised he was looking into a vessel that had used up all their oil to fuel their mental strength and slowly Mathias sat back down on the ledge, his back to the city and Lars followed suit. His breath was crisp in the morning air, his lips dry and cracked and rough against his tongue as he curled in on himself with his arms around his knees and looked at the man who so much in that moment resembled a boy that he couldn't help but love. A strength Lars hadn't even realised Mathias had been holding onto by the barest threads had been chipped away until it cracked and shattered and he was left looking at the ghost of who he'd been staring at day after day. The kryptonite that weakened the supports to his determined mind had surpassed his skill of keeping his thoughts on something every second of everyday that stopped the only thing stronger than his mental strength from getting in. The fight made the Dane look exhausted. As if the fight didn't matter in the end anyway because it still got in.

"Mathias were you actually going to do it?" Lars said through his splitting lips.

"Maybe." The distant reply came. The fire that had once been in his voice was nothing but smoke and ashes by that point. Lars nodded once and rested his chin on his knees. He took in the bags under the Dane's eyes that resembled darkened violets, the divinity in the downward arch of his frown, the resigned eyes that stared at seemingly nothing in particular. "I think it would have tasted sweeter than the bitterness I'm enveloped in right now."

The Dutchman raised an eyebrow, waiting patiently and requesting silently that the other continue.

"You have to wake up knowing I still breath everyday now don't you? You have to wake up and know the thing mercy will never touch is still able to smile."

"I love you Mathias. And I won't waste my time trying to fix you. I'm going to laugh in glee at the universe for not taking you away from me. I'm not going to stop fighting for you and just because you have done a lot bad things, doesn't change the fact you still deserve love."

"You can't fix people Lars, all you can do is let acceptance claim your lips. Devotion won't change the fact there's a monster back under my skin. In my head. It's everywhere between my ribs and bleeding out of every little wound." He smiled, the muscles working to create a plastic grin and Lars almost cried out in frustration at the false joy. "I'm relieved you can still love me after everything I've put you through. Even though you're scared of me. You still love me?"

"Of course I do. I'm not scared of you at all. I'm curious and worried about you." He ran his tongue over his lips, tasting the sourness on his breath, saliva creeping into the broken grooves on his mouth. He reached out, his hands shaky and jagged and he knew why. Perhaps he was telling lies when he said he wasn't scared, indeed he was fucking terrified. The pulsating object on the other side of the space separating them was foreign, he once thought of him as immortal, ever ending and everlasting. Only now had he been given a painful glimpse of just how mortal Mathias was, time was measured through the blonde's heartbeats and the coffee stains left on the kitchen table in the mornings before either of them left for work. He was scared of watching the other one spiral into a depression so great he would not see the light of day, he was scared to wake up never to see that sleepy smile and the lavender rimmed ocean greeting him silently in the mornings.

"You are. I can see fear in your eyes Lars, you've been too expressive with that forest of yours for as long as I've known you." The being of sadness and intertwined unpredictability had a kiss that made the Dutchman's lips burn with a sickly searing pain, with an empty stare and emptier laugh that still managed to strip Lars' core bare with invisible fingers. Those lips brushed against his knuckles in silent gratitude. If they were on his own lips he would have tasted heartache. "Unfortunately I love you too."

Love would have become meaningless, nothing more than a convoluted emotion made by those who whispered obscenities in the form of hopes and dreams if Mathias had slipped away the way Lars had believed he had for what felt like and eternity, but in all reality, was a few sluggish minutes. He would not have been able to lie and say he did not love the Dane for he would be left to carry around the heart he had carved out of it's intricate casing and watch it beat for nothing.

However the other's reply to his declaration of love sounded hollow. And confusion was still in his eyes.

"Do you?" He said, Mathias' dirty toes flexed and his frown etched in deeper.

"Of course I love you. I wouldn't have held on if I didn't." Lars felt okay with the confirmation. "Most of the time whenever I have...nearly...it's been delirious, hallucinatory conceptions. A hope for an escape from an imaginary danger, or from myself. But I couldn't leave when I thought you might be put in that danger."

Word, after word from page after page of physiological textbooks had his tongue speaking for him. "A maniacal suicide.."

"Mmm. If that's what you call it."

Fear made the Dane's mind appear decayed, sick, distorted his perception and made his physical appearance when it truly bore down on him look as if his bones were broken and stuck back together terribly when he sunk in on himself. Lars refused to let himself succumb to the same emotion with fail. The frail bones Lars loved, stretched and ruined skin he adored. Roughened from years of working himself to the bone from an occupation Lars tried to deny time and time again, it built up dangerous strength racing through his thinned veins but did not reach his brain.

But the scales had dropped and the façade had crumbled leaving behind the tears that showed his weakness, sentences that were scratched over with malice. Lars tried to reach out to the other again, shifting his weight just a little to brush his nails against uneven porcelain and found himself with his head cradled against the Dane's chest and below the layers of fabric, epidermis, dermis and diaphragm he was able to faintly hear the ocean. Their fingers laced together and despite the urge to shake away from the tender treatment he could feel the pain of two decades of internal struggle, illness and wisdom like a dull ache.

And he couldn't see into his mind, not the deeper parts of it where the other was no doubt hiding himself. He could see the heavy application of concealer under his eyes that still didn't do the desired job, a halfassed attempt at a shield to hide the physical toll the war had taken. He wanted to see in, just to see where the boy was cowering, to lead him back by hand.

However this wasn't an occasion or a situation he could help the other through, he'd have to wait it out and wait for him to come back home.

Mathias' heart beat like a humming bird against his ribcage, wings flapping desperately at steel bars to try and weaken the supports so it could break free. Lars' own couldn't help but be weighed down with the feeling that the Dane had been the type of boy to wander into his centre of feeling without greeting, without taking off his shoes or coat and simply made himself at home.

It was inhumane, it was pathological, it was illicit how they worked. How Lars had simply accepted everything that had been told to him without asking twice.

Mathias was the first to shudder away, as if coming back to his own awareness and trying to get away from the bodily contact like he were touching lava and immediately Lars found a question against the roof of his mouth and the Dane picked himself up, the soles of his feet stained black from the soot and gravel on the ground and he moved as far away as he possibly could.

Lars found he understood why.

The other wrapped his arms around himself as if to replicate the embrace and Lars knew he didn't feel deserving of any tenderness. The regret and mild guilt for giving Mathias that kind of mental state was instantaneous. He already mourned the contact.

A sweet, poisonous smile dripped from the edges of Mathias' lips. "Why aren't you afraid?"

"I am." Truth ghosted over his words and he was not regretful nor was he close to gleeful.

"Of what exactly?"

"I'm afraid of you." He bit the tip of his tongue and opened his mouth to try again. "I am not afraid of who you are if that's what you're wondering. I'm scared of how fragile you are in general, I'm scared that if something pushed you too far you'll shatter. I'm afraid because I love you but I don't know what it is that is making me love you."

Lars buried his fingers in the depths of his pockets to cease their trembling, with his eyes closed he pretended for a minuscule second that he'd disappeared and along with it the ashen face that looked at him in dead confusion. He was alone. He squeezed his eyelids closed and counted backwards from ten, trying to steady his breathing, restart his heart, hope when he opened his eyes he wouldn't be seeing the breathing corpse of the man directly in front of him.

When his eyes opened again light that filtered through the fog blinded him, the sun too bright that Mathias was only a silhouette against the glare. Acceptance came in the form of a nod and Mathias' shadow disappeared by the time his eyes readjusted to the light.

He was alone.

xxx

Crisp white writing took the place of distorted figures on the blackboard walls, one half of a snapped stick of chalk sat beside the haunting scripture and Mathias simply had his back turned to it, the ends of his fingers coated in white and they were steady around the mug excess chalk smudged against. Lars took a seat beside him, mindlessly translating the messy German into a language he was more familiar with. Poetry.

why is there fog everywhere
am I real am I crazy theres not something wrong with my mind
chemical imbalance
the voices stopped
Lars I can hear you clearly
but I can't see
you've helped me
I love you.

Mathias walked the world of goblins, zombies and ghouls like an angel that had fallen from his place in the sky with the same damage and collision course of a commit. His wings and purity burned on his way down and his skin ravaged by scavengers who added their mark to his body before throwing him back out into the hateful planet. Lars could not blame him for a life he had not chosen, he could not hate somebody he'd love unconsciously for over a decade. They'd been thrown into each other's time lines and Lars was the wandering ghost that carefully tried to bandage up the worst of the damage and pray for the best.

He'd been forced into witnessing the possibility of the worst case scenario, for now he was back between the space of heaven and hell as he watched Mathias sip at a coffee in clothes the Dutchman didn't remember Mathias changing into and kept his fingers crossed behind his back that nothing would come between them like the small piece of truth that had tried to create a wedge between them.

Childhood corruption had spilled into the Dane's adulthood, his smile now painted on like that of a china doll. His happiness scripted. Eyes like the bottom of a flame burned whenever he lingered too close. His existence overall suffocating. But they'd crashed together like stars and created a galaxy of their own in each other's minds and they understood each planet, each thought and each built up empire like they were vein patterns on the backs of their hands.

It was scary how easy it was for Lars to still love him, despite the fact he felt as if he were stumbling along alone until he found the life into Mathias again he still loved the vessel that possessed the ashes of him. They sat in silence apart from the occasion drawn out sip at the edge of his mug from Mathias or the too heavy breath from Lars himself. He ghosted words into Mathias' skin with his fingertips in a silent prayer that he would know he was forgiven, his own name was scripted in there in between and selfishly he hoped it would never drift off the blonde's arms. Lars thought it was Mathias' fault he'd become selfish from the Dane loving him. He wanted to make sure the entirety of him wasn't to touch another dirty soul, that the filth from his own hands was scrubbed in over Mathias' fingerprints it was caked too thick to ever come off. He wanted every freckle, every angle of his body, every tear and drop of blood as his own.

Psychotic, he'd admit this admiration, adoration and devotion was psychotic but he would not give up. With a gaping hole dug that deep he couldn't imagine the thought of giving up on digging it deeper. In wanting his own signature permanently written into the make up of the Dane's soul he so terribly wanted it to be returned. Perhaps it already was, that would explain why he found nothing in his body or mind that screamed at him to leave him behind.

Their demons, dreams and desires all lined up. They were compatible and thanks to such, Lars would have found it physically paining him to walk away without a second glance. Even when he looked into the hollowed stare of the other, he could not dream of leaving him behind, not even if the light turned back on.

In all honesty he didn't know who he was looking at when he looked into his eyes, nor did he know exactly what it was. But he didn't mind.

He continued to stroke between the skin of the other's thumb and forefinger until it felt nothing like skin and more like velvet that his fingers wouldn't be accustomed to no matter how many times he repeated the gesture. Dusty sunlight hit their skin in rays and he felt tranquil in their little universe of nothing but them and the furniture around them. Their home in general was not made up of all of the nouns they could touch, rather the stars that exploded on the ends of their tongues, the silken petals that dropped from their mouths and the thorns that lined the roots that made up the structure of what held everything together.

"Mathias, what do we do from here?"

"Whatever you want to do. We go back to our lives and everything returns to normal if you want." Mathias let the empty cup fall to the table top, it rolled once before coming to a brake on it's handle. "I'm happy as long as you are."

Lars skin collected dust as he sat still, his breathing shallow and he closed his eyes just as he had when they were on the roof. But he felt Mathias' lips ghost over his eyelids and he cracked them open again before he could get to seven. His lips travelled to the bones of the Dutchman's wrists and Lars nearly felt the shackles that had been invisibly put in place the second they were in each other's memories. Where bruises may have been if the iron was real and was chafing against the Dutchman's skin Mathias let his teeth graze and the contact linger.

"I'm okay with this. Just come back." Lars clutched the Dane's face between his hands, cautiously pushing strands of hair out of unfamiliar eyes. "I miss you. Come back when you've found yourself again."

"You've found me already Lars." He smiled for a world that had not been merciful to him, memories adding depth to the crinkles in the corners of his eyes. "It's just taking a little while to regenerate. But you've found me."

Lars had seen things in life, he was surprised but what he'd seen. He'd seen heartache and longing, he'd seen happiness and tasted the cyanide that made weapons of words lethal. Would it benefit the earth if he were to admit that, would it be the call for Mathias to come back to his body if he were to tell him of the thing's he'd seen.

Probably not.

He held his tongue.

Rain began to reverberate against the windows, glass shaking in the panes and the longer he kept their skin swapping atoms did he see the flickers of somebody he truly knew. A storm started up outside and the same thunderstorm began to vibrate against his skin, lightening cracking in cobalt irises and muted thunder shaking in the other's breath as laughter started up. Fulfilment aided the music in his chuckles, new life in every shallow pant of breath and every soothed frayed nerve.

"You fool, you don't have to say a word to me to bring me back. I told you I'm already here." His redemption came with the light that shone back through his gaze, his lips cracked electricity on Lars' lips when they came down on his own and he whispered into Lars' agape mouth so breathlessly that he could barely feel the words against his teeth. "I was just playing hide and seek."

xxx

Mathias had spoke once of being scared of what he would become, if only Lars had known sooner he was already comfortable with who he was but was scared of becoming something better. He'd become what he was scared of becoming and he told Lars this after they'd parted and found their destination outside of the walls of their apartment and wandered relentlessly through the Belgian streets that had colours darkened by rain water.

"Come into my world for a little while Lars, let's imagine somewhere that we're better people with stronger lives, let's imagine that we've watched empires rise and fall and have stood amongst them. Lars, when we die let's imagine the lives we want to be reborn into and pray we meet there again." His voice was hoarse and cracked from a short while of disuse, sonnets being sketched into Lars' cheekbones as Mathias traced the angles of his face. Re-remembering the structure and texture until under the stinging rainfall and Mathias' calloused fingers Lars' skin went hypersensitive and he nodded, merrily going along with the notion of imagination until he believed in the other's delusions.

His beautiful creature let him throughout the streets and his vision of the world draped over the Dutchman's vision until he could almost believe they were eternal, through the streets they ran as torturous rain stabbed at their exposed limbs and in the velvet of twilight Lars watched in amazement at how fluid the other moved. His strides melting from runs to leaps to a slow gyrating of his hips. Their voices left the mortal world and the Dane's laugh sounded ethereal, Lars' name gasped from his upturned lips and life came back to him in every moment his toes dropped to touch the drenched concrete they travelled across.

Hesitancy was in neither of their strides, they would run together, stop together to touch to kiss to articulate inaudible sentences. Their hands forever in each other's even when there were atoms between their fingers. The night carried of seemingly forever and Mathias continued to laugh out about how he was the king, he was a kingdom and he was a nation that stood against the test of time and how Lars ruled was his own nation. Crazed words overflowed from his crazed mouth but it seemed that with ever idea that burst from the Dane they were simply creating a new reality. The ideas took forms closer to colours and sounds rather than anything either of them could truly understand.

They stopped for several moments, Lars counting the vertebrae of the other's back hoping it translated enough into love and Mathias in his crazed euphoria kissed him until their lips were ever number from the cold and he was sure the edges of his cracked lips had cut into Mathias'.

Mathias' lips tasted like a promise of forever, of freedom. The idea he had been contemplating seemingly weeks before he'd found out the last piece of the puzzle to the masterpiece he'd been restoring threatened to leave Lars' own after every peck. They darted after each other through the naked trees that stood pale against their own darkened forms. The quiet pitter patter of their feet hit the crunching of dead leaves almost melodiously, despite the night everything that was illuminated by moonlight and street light alike appeared crisp and the air smelled pure, the bare fingers of tree branches held onto each other the same way Mathias and Lars worked at pressing their skeletons closer through their skin when they clasped against each other's palms. The water made their hair stick to their skin, Lars found himself intoxicated off the embrace of their fingers and kissing in the rain for the what felt like millionth time that night, commitment nearly swallowed his heavy breathing, and it would have if Mathias had not spoken the words that would make that day more memorial for the both of them than any other.

"Are you alright Lars?" He asked, breathless himself and his cheeks red from the cold. With the life that was back in his eyes came genuine concern. "I'm a little worried over how quiet you've been."

He was quiet because he was filled with the world of promises, of expectations of committing himself to a man he suspected he'd already devoted himself too in a similar way. He dropped to his knees, picking through the layers of broken leaves for any kind of flower, a single daisy still hanging on for dear life, it's petals ruined and falling away from the centre but still. He fashioned it into a circle and rose to his feet again, ignoring the dampness that soaked through the knees of his trousers. What was to come for the future was not on his mind as he smiled in pure joy at the grin that stretched the other's cold slapped cheeks and the tears that sprung forth through the skies torrential crying.

Autumn rain was caught on the bowls of his upturned palms as he held onto the other's near frost-bitten hand. They rolled off his finger tips and spilled onto the Dane's, the exchange following the flow of that last two words that had been straining in his mouth. He had no ring, no plans nothing romantic planned. His broken record began to tremble like the final leaves that struggled to stay on the branches of the dead trees surrounding them and pressing his lips against the finger between Mathias' pinky and middle finger on his left hand he mouthed his request against his skin.

"Marry me."

Lost in the acid rain of his past the Mathias he'd been picking through rubble for to find for days had been found and his right hand clapped around his mouth to muffle the shriek of what Lars suspected to be happiness, fingers separating for his reply to be whispered over the weather.

"I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to hear you say that."

They were eternal.