Chapter Text
December 31, 1924, 11:57 PM — NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
There’s snow in his hair. That’s the first thought Gaunt has. The cold December humidity makes the ends of his soft curls damp, his skin bloom pink in the bracingly cold air. There is a Christmas tree wreathed in little twinkling lights, visible through the glass doors of the balcony in the building opposite them, and the beginnings of a mild winter storm makes the trees of Central Park rustle under gentle snowfall. He stands with his back to the railing, the stretch of Fifth Avenue spread down below, intermingled voices and cheerful laughter drifting up from the sidewalk. Moonlight illuminates him from behind, making his pristine white shirt glow. There are crystals in his hair.
“Have you heard me?” Ellwood says, with a touch of uncertainty, and his lovely mouth turns down slightly at the corners, a mouth that Henry has committed to memory, has traced and tasted and immortalized over and over and over again.
“Yes,” Gaunt only says.
The moment stretches between them, both elastic and paper-thin—a moment comprised of a thousand moments, of fourteen years, of unimaginable loss and unparalleled horror and a kind bone-deep, sickening, love, the kind mountains would buckle under, of the past and the present and the unfathomable stretch of future—a moment that contains all of the lives that have made up their small little universe.
The snow is cold against his skin, the wind making the tips of his ears turn pink from chill, and it’s winter, but it’s not the kind he remembers. He misses it suddenly, with an enormity that nearly guts him—the cold, miserable drizzle of England, cold water soaking through the shoulders of his coat, the roll of thin, white clouds against a dreary grey sky, the crunch of grass under his boots, frozen under the year’s first frost, that unshakeable chill, the kind that crawls under your clothes and stubbornly settles into the folds of them, into you, sinks into your bones until your teeth chatter and you think, distantly, that it may not be possible to ever be warm again. He was not made for warm places; he has always been best suited to the dark, bracing bitterness of a quiet winter’s night.
Ellwood, though. The years have been good to him. Wonderful, even. He still has his bad days—they both do—but they’re less frequent now. He smiles more, laughs more. That anger he had carried with him after the war—that tight, uncompromising knot of fury that no one, not even Gaunt, could relieve him of—had become quieter, if not completely faded away. When he looks at Ellwood now, he can only see how leaving England had saved him.
And so Gaunt can’t begrudge this place this—a winter that will never feel like his own—even if it just makes him ache for home in a way that will always feel like devastation.
“Henry,” Ellwood says and Gaunt feels his breath catch in his throat. Ellwood’s eyes soften. “I’m sorry.”
Ellwood doesn’t waver, but Gaunt’s vision does. His heart, that stubbornly resilient and shockingly delicate thing caught under his breastbone, the gnarl of long-healed skin—the raised ropes of scar tissue stretched taut above—constricting.
“It has taken me an unforgivably long time. I never meant to keep you waiting.”
There’s something in his throat, some kind of awful lump.
“Can you ever forgive me?” Ellwood says softly.
Snow falls onto his hair, the ends of his dark curls sparkling with little crystalline flakes. White dusts across the tops of his shoulders, his ears, down the scarred side of his face, pink with cold. It has been so many years and he still always wears a mask, still always prefers to hide—a ridiculous notion, he has never once been able to make himself truly disappear, Sidney Ellwood was not made for such a thing—but he takes it off and tucks it into his coat when it’s just the two of them, because once, many years ago, Gaunt had traced the curve of his remaining eyebrow and said, gently, I like you better without it.
Behind him, everything ripples with thrill—neighbors, strangers, friends, almost-friends, anything-but-friends, the entirety of the city nearly tense with the excitement of ending one year and beginning another, the chance to begin again, clean, new, like the blank page before the start of a poem.
Ellwood takes something out of the small box cupped in his hand.
For the first time since the war, Henry Gaunt begins to cry.
* * *