Visitation by Haeron

Chapter 1

UPDATE - A series of sequel chapters have been planned! I'm hoping to add five or so more chapters to this fic, so check back on Tuesdays and Saturdays for updates ~

Read Chapter 1

Erestor was reading the obituaries in the back of the paper, a macabre morning ritual well worth the pocket change it cost to buy the local rag. He was perched on the stool behind the counter, the pages of the paper covered near the entire musty countertop. The articles were drab, the listings dire and the sports supplements of even lesser interest - yet Erestor did like to read the obituaries, it sated a morbid curiosity that Elrond had called perturbing, but Erestor just liked to be informed. He was wetting a thumb and about to turn to the next page when the chime above the shop door tinkled. Erestor braced himself for a gust of cold air to be ushered in alongside the customer (the second of the day), but the breeze was warmer when it came. The warm breath of a giant, perhaps.

 

Was winter withered away so quickly? Seasons, even time itself, meant nothing in an antiques shop. Sometimes Erestor worried that he himself was turning into a old relic. Perhaps Elrond could stamp a price tag on him and make a fair profit.

 

Erestor smiled at that but didn’t look up right away, rather he withheld a loping sigh and cast a quick glance over the names on the next page of the newspaper. There was nobody he recognised there, smiling up at him from an inch by inch square black and white portrait, and when he did look up to espy the newly entered customer, they had already become submerged in the maze of the shop. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, Erestor thought to himself, reckoning there should be a sign saying just that above the door. Or the counter.

 

Clutter heaped upon clutter, tables and wardrobes and wicker chairs made up the aisles of the antiques shop and Erestor saw not who had just entered. He heard them, strangely enough, heard the tapping of shoes on the polished floor.

 

It was an oddity that made Erestor lose his focus on the obituaries. The text melted to a blur as he listened, lines of black print suddenly foreign to the eye. Most customers had the decency to mask their footfalls; the shop was quiet and well respected, and Erestor knew he and his default nonplussing provided ample motivation for hushedness. Who then, would think to come striding in like so?

 

A sudden trepid, tense shiver panged at Erestor like an elastic band snapping against the base of one’s back. An inspector? The thought was only half conceivable but plausible enough to slacken Erestor’s breathing. Elrond had made no mention of an inspector, there had been no friendly reminder jotted down on the post-it notes in the staff room (the staff cupboard, more like) and surely if there were to be inspection - Elrond wouldn’t have taken the day off to visit his wife in hospital. And yet, perhaps...

 

The word hung like a dull pendulum, ticking to and fro.

 

There was nothing out of order in the shop. The goods were good, the store was clean despite the disorganisation that Elrond so vehemently claimed was homely. Perhaps, Erestor mused, distractedly glancing over the grainy photo of dear deceased Annie Sugden in the paper, the inspector would have a problem with the non-regulation music quietly filtering through the store. Erestor would take responsibility for that, but there came a point where one cannot abide to listen to live Radio Five any longer. And anyway, who didn’t like Frankie Goes To Hollywood?

 

Erestor took a peek over the top of the paper, and what he saw was no inspector. A tall man, something of a hulk, was meandering through the aisles. Erestor watched him for a time, or as much of him as could be seen, and the low, wooden counter between himself and the mystery man seemed a welcome, impenetrable barrier. Relief swept through Erestor and was promptly swept away.

 

A thug, then?

 

It would be marginally better than an inspector, Erestor never had to smile and play the smalltalk game with the thieves who occasionally targeted the little shop. Sometimes a group or an addled individual would be stricken with the idea of making a fair wad of cash from stealing a few pieces of tarnished silver or gold. Erestor listened to the footsteps, unabashed in their presence. A sliver of fresh apprehension melted cold under the skin of his spine. The clocks were ticking out of time with one another somewhere in the store and all the eyes of the people in the weathered paintings seemed to watch the man, warily. It was quiet, and for the first time in his life - Erestor did not like it.

 

Elrond kept a bat under the desk, but Erestor deemed it too clumsy a weapon even if the thought of wielding it did appeal to him for a primitive moment. He knew better that to confront this maybe-miscreant with a blunt object. Erestor lifted a hand, slowly, time was heavy in the air like an ethereal tar that cloyed the senses. Had the windows always tinted the sunlight amber? Had there always been so many shadows here, merging and pushing into one another? Erestor’s fingers touched the metal of a hair slide he wore, he removed it and a dark lock fell free. It was a dainty thing, the slide, and Erestor turned it between his fingers like a rosary. It was sharp at one end and blunt at the other. Erestor felt his heart in his chest; a caged canary and just as skittish. He slid off the stool and the weight of himself on his feet felt heavier somehow.

 

The sunlight caught on the crockery and figurines as a thin band of luminescence as he went by, stepping quietly towards the “thief” in attempt to put himself between him and the door. Erestor could see his shape through the gap between a 16th century wardrobe and a chaise longue propped up on its side. Why are you here, Erestor asked with nary a sound, a silent interrogation, is it for money? Drug money? That was usually the case, but judging by the size of this fellow, the money would spent on roids of some kind.

 

Erestor could have laughed. He could always count on himself to find his jokes funny, even in the face of (potential) mortal peril. He clutched the pin in hand like a tiny stiletto blade. He was certain the mafia used to kill people with ice picks, didn’t they?

 

He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that, though.

 

And when Erestor rounded the corner nearest the door, with bated breath and a sweating palm, he saw the thief, and the thief saw him.

 

They both gaped for a moment. Erestor squeezed the slide into his palm.

 

And then the man smiled pure sunshine, said hello, said that he’d wondered if he’d accidently “popped in” when everyone was on a dinner break. Erestor could only blink and stare and furrow his brows in response to the barrage of drivel being spouted at him. He was a tall man, at least a head taller than Erestor (who was, in his own opinion, criminally short), and luxuriantly blonde. His hair was tied back, not neatly, but practically. He was a man of the outdoors, evidently.

 

Antiques shops never usually saw many men like that.

 

With no regard for the fragile serenity of the shop, the man talked as though they were sat in a cafe sharing coffee and work gossip and not actually in a small, cramped antiques shop where even a slightly raised voice seemed like to make all the porcelain crack. Erestor was staring, blankly, whilst the man was detailing his journey to the shop from the “track”. It was not a riveting divulgence but Erestor rather suspected the fellow took his open eyed surprise for engagement.

 

In truth, Erestor was musing to himself and thinking on how much this man looked as though he belonged in a porn flick. Playing a “plumber” or a “masseur” or some such. He was well built, strong, and well dressed in a thick, black coat with soft collars that would soon be redundant as spring asserted herself.

 

It was almost a shame he was probably a thief.

 

The heaviness of the sun beaming through the window was an unexpected manifestation of spring’s bright foreshadowing, it warmed the wooden table under Erestor’s palm and warmed too the bones in his body, though he could apportion that to relief. The man, who may or may not be aglib thief, had not bolted for the door with a fistful of French spoons and knives, so Erestor exhaled and bade himself remember his customer service courses.

 

Smile, that was always the first lesson.

 

Erestor didn’t smile.

 

‘Can I help you, sir?’ he asked, effectively cutting short the man’s descriptive tirade.

 

Stopping short in the telling of how he found not one, but two car air fresheners in the pack he had bought that morning at the petrol station (joy of joys!), he looked around, the blonde fellow, and there was an innocent, almost childlike, curiosity in his eyes. He smiled, though it turned to more of a beseeching grimace when he saw the frown Erestor bore him.

 

‘Maybe you can!’ he said, quite merrily.

 

Erestor frowned anew. He didn’t seem like a thief, not even in the kind of mayhap he’s pretending to be a charming gentlemen to knock me off my guard sort of way. He was genuine, Erestor gleaned it easily.

 

‘What are you after?’

 

Ouch. The question was blunt, overly so. The man seemed not to notice, however, or if he did he hid any offense well. ‘I’m just browsing,’ he said, an answer Erestor had head many a time before. Nobody came into a shop such as this to do ought but browse, it would seem. That and leave garish fingerprints all over the tea trays.

 

‘Are you a collector?’

 

He smiled. It was assured and sultry; it suited him and Erestor well suspected that he knew it only too well.

 

‘An opportunist,’ said the man.

 

‘We don’t get a lot of those.’ Erestor loosened his hold on the pin in his hand, brushed a thumb over its length and slid it back into his hair with practised precision. The fellow watched him, more than mildly interested, and met Erestor’s eyes when he turned them to him.

 

Another oddity. People usually looked away. He even smiled, made a noise of breathy laughter. Erestor raised a brow, was he full of such smiles to be able to give them out so easily? ‘Well,’ he began, feeling outright unusual, ‘let me know if you do need any help.’

 

The man nodded and said he would indeed. Erestor bowed his head shallowly and turned, leaving him to his browsing. He was no thief, plainly, but then he wasn’t one of the regular customers either - in more sense of the word than one. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. The regular customers were those old folks who came in on occasion to buy a monstrous vase and gossip about the ongoing social politics of the retirement home across the canal. He wasn’t even the other sort of regular customer - the playboys and heiresses that would roll up from time to time and buy up half the stock. The tip one mature gentlemen had given Erestor had been enough to see him to wine lunches every day for a month.

 

Elrond had not been best pleased, but, strangely enough, Erestor remembered very little of it.

 

With a wry glance over his shoulder he looked to the stranger. There lingered still a ghost of a smile on his face that had tapered into something of a simple appreciation for the artefacts abounding him. Erestor let out a sigh that was not borne of derision or suspicion, but something that was both and yet neither. The man was browsing, it seemed. Erestor let him be and returned to his stool behind the counter in the corner of the shop, by the window obscured by curtains and wardrobes and stacked Regency tables. He liked his privacy, and liked even more to be surrounded by fine things.

 

Erestor restored the paper to its natural order of pages and folded it neatly in half. He watched the man, at all times, as he lined the paper up with the edge of the counter nearest the window. It was not often a mystery would walk so directly into one’s path, and there was a twinge in Erestor’s gut that said indeed this man was a mystery, fit for unravelling. Was there anything better to do, after all? The cold soup and microwave in the staff room (staff cupboard) was suddenly not the most riveting part of Erestor’s day.

 

Watching the man work his way around the store, pouring over the more delicate items and lifting them occasionally to the sunlight to be viewed, Erestor pondered. Who was he? What was he? A sportsman? A paramedic? Certainly, he had to be engaged in some sort of physical career.

 

And Erestor could appreciate that.

 

He liked to watch folk from his corner, he liked to watch and see which pieces they were drawn to, which items would sing to them. For every person there was a relic, a part of history, that time had decreed belonged to them now. And sometimes folk found those pieces in this shop; it was a base human pursuit, Erestor thought, for did not every human want a part of history for themselves?

 

What will sing to him? What will catch his eye? The thoughts swirled gently in Erestor’s head now that quiet had been restored. The air was not as hot, the music tinkled softly like the ambience of an early morning’s dream. The man would look to him on occasion and Erestor would look back and raise a brow.

 

It was always matched with a smile; a honey smile.

 

-

 

Ten sombre and slow minutes passed and the man had barely moved from where he started, so thorough was his search. Erestor had half a mind to offer his assistance once again but the fellow seemed quite happy within himself as he hummed to an old song Erestor did not know and poured over a glass vase that wasn’t worth the £30 price tag. He had a certain musicality about him, a lilting spirit and step that gave him an air of approachability. How nice for him, Erestor thought to himself, watching him pick up a broad china plate.

 

The man made an appreciative noise, said something in a sing-song voice that Erestor did not catch.

 

But Erestor could have laughed, the urge to was a thing of grim vitriol. That plate, that garish blue and white deviation, was the most expensive thing in the shop. It was one of the few authentic pieces here; here being the country, of course. And yes, naturally, the blonde man was bringing it to the counter looking as though he had every intention to purchase it.

 

Erestor recounted the wine for lunch days fondly. If he were dosed up on Chardonnay, this would be so much easier. The man set the plate down, proudly, as though he had discovered it himself in the bowels amidst the rubble of an oriental palace. He looked as though he might be able to play the part of intrepid explorer quite aptly though Erestor refrained, with an unholy shiver, from thinking about him roughed up as it were, with grazes and dirt and a split lip.

 

I need to go outside more often.

 

The dust particles were dancing in the beams of sunlight, those that could pierce through the gaps in the window. They floated slow, this way and that, and Erestor watched them as he in turn was watched. Inhaling, closing his eyes, Erestor felt the sun on his eyelids. It was pleasant. Did the evening grow near?

 

And then he opened his eyes again, and stared down the maw of reality.

 

‘You’ve read the price, yes?’ he asked, clacking the nail of his forefinger against the pricing sticker in the centre of the plate. A pretty three digit label was affixed. The man looked at it, considered it, and then looked at Erestor.

 

He smiled, as if it were pocket change, enough to buy the morning rag.

 

Surely he’s not serious. Three digits for a gaudy plate? Erestor could have smashed the damn thing against his forehead, but somehow he got the impression this man had no problem with gaudy; he probably had a collection of Hawaiian shirts somewhere.

 

‘It might be worth more someday.’ said he, and Erestor considered the answer.

 

Certainly, it could be true.

 

‘An opportunist,’ Erestor said, wryly, peeling the pricing sticker off and flicking it off his finger. Dozens of such stickers were trodden into the floor behind the desk, the bin was on the other side of the store near the door.

 

‘And much else besides.’ he chimed, Erestor didn’t doubt it and made a low noise in answer. ‘Can I pay by cheque?’

 

The request took Erestor by surprise, he raised a brow and nodded, all the while thinking to himself who the fuck still uses cheques? Last time Erestor had checked a calendar, it had said 2014, not 1984. He was inwardly cackling at his own joke, again, when he saw the pen the blonde man pulled out of his coat pocket. He saw the cheque book.

 

It was all golden, everything was golden.

 

Holy shit.

 

The man saw him gaping unceremoniously and asked if he needed to sign anywhere else. Erestor, shaking himself free of his momentary lapse in reality, nodded and stammered an affirmation. This man had remembered store protocol before he had remembered it? It was absurd! Erestor grudgingly knelt to pull out the transactions book, wishing Elrond (much like the blonde man) would upgrade to the standard of retail technology available in the present century.

 

When Erestor rose with the book, it was clear the man had been watching him.

 

Who the hell are you?

 

It was no longer an accusation, an interrogation - it was astonishment, wild curiosity.

 

‘You really should open up those curtains, it’s a bit dim in here,’ the man suggested airily with another sweet smile as Erestor flipped through the book to find the correct page. Was he aware he was buying an £700 plate? Was he aware he was going to get home with said plate and question the direction of his life?

 

‘The curtains are for sale, sir, so we have to display them in the window, this is where curtains go, you see.’

 

The man laughed and signed his large, looping signature in the free space that Erestor had pointed to. ‘Perhaps you need more breaks then, it does a person no good to be cooped up all day.’

 

There was concern there, genuine concern, but the words, for all their wisdom, were old to Erestor. He looked at him, the proud owner of the plate, and afforded him a small, coy smile. The man’s eyes were very blue, his lashes were long and blonde.

 

Get a grip, Erestor. The lump in his pants is obviously his wallet.

 

‘Do I know you?’ Erestor asked, leaning forward a touch to narrow his eyes. He did not truthfully suspect so, but the question seemed to beg to be asked. The fellow leaned forward more boldly and Erestor leaned back. His smile was candid.

 

‘You could get to know me.’ he said. He put the pen back in his pocket. The sunlight loved his hair, and gave him an earthly halo that was the light of dusk and warm evenings. He carried it within him, like another man might carry the scent of his cologne.

 

Erestor, at a loss for what to say in response, remembered suddenly his customer service courses.

 

‘Do you need me to wrap this up for you?’

 

The man shook his head and picked up the plate in such a way as told Erestor he still didn’t know the value of the thing he held so awkwardly, despite having just wrote out a damn cheque for it. He was holding it like a Frisbee. ‘No, no,’ he said genially, ‘I’m just parked outside.’

 

You were not supposed to just park outside.

 

‘Then thank you, sir.’ Erestor said.

 

‘Thank you,’ the man said.

 

It was a farewell, Erestor realised, and it did not sit well with him. The man would walk out of his door with his £700 discus and he would be left to sit in the staff room (cupboard) with his microwave soup and the remaining obituaries. It felt dull. This man was energy, and when he left...

 

He smiled brightly and Erestor smiled back and was not entirely convinced that it had not been a silent plea. The blonde man was just turning to leave when he seemed to trip and his hand let go of the plate! Erestor gasped. His heart exploded in his chest. He leaned across the table, practically launched himself over it in fact, to grasp the damn thing before it shattered.

 

He grasped it with two hands. Or rather, he grasped the plate with one hand and the mystery man’s hand with his other. And he was laughing - the man was laughing?

 

He let go of the plate and the hand quickly, though a part of him was loathe to do so. The man’s hand had been rough but not unkind, it was warm - and Erestor imagined the rest of him would be so too, the rest of his... body. But, in the end, some marbled blend of mild irritation and exhaustion moved him more strongly that the stroke of lust that, just like a warm hand, in fact, had trailed hotly from stomach to groin.

 

A feint, of course!

 

Erestor covered his face with a hand and wished very suddenly that he might lay on the floor and be forgotten for an eon. Perhaps Time Team would find him in about a hundred years and think he was valiantly slain in battle. The man was chuckling away and Erestor might have joined him, though his laughter would have been borderline hysterical. Laughing at his own joke, the depravity!

 

‘I should bar you!’ he said, and for reasons he could not fathom - he was laughing too.

 

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said the man, and winked.

 

Erestor smiled, and waved him off with a hand.

 

-

 

As he walked past the window, outside, to his illegally parked car, he blew a kiss. Erestor smiled and raised the V of his fingers as return gesture.

 

The last Erestor saw of him, at least for that day, was his golden laughter as he ducked into his car.

Chapter 2

Thank you to everyone who suggested I write some more of this! A few more chapters are planned; the story's just begun.

Read Chapter 2

His name was Glorfindel.

 

Erestor had asked him on a whim one day when he was in the shop - browsing for another god-awful plate to add to his growing collection. It sounded foreign, and more so to Erestor’s tongue when he said it aloud to test its consonants. Glorfindel had smiled and brought a pair of slightly tarnished silver sugar tongs to the counter.

 

‘Do you drink tea?’ Erestor had asked.

 

‘No, no, I’m a coffee man.’ Glorfindel said with a smile, producing the golden pen and cheque book from his interior coat pocket once again.

 

And from then on he became a regular customer. He came by most days to paw over the new relics and from time to time he would bring some abomination of glassware or porcelain to the desk. After a few weeks, Erestor had a suspicion he did it, at least in part, just to see his reaction. It was flattering, in a surreal who-was-that-sort-of-money sort of way, but Erestor did enjoy his visits and their airy chatter about nothing and no one. Glorfindel was a pleasant conversational partner and blessed with effervescent social graces. When Erestor told him so, he’d laughed. ‘My Mother once called me a gob-shite.’

 

It was a dour pre-spring morning when Glorfindel made his next appearance. Erestor heard the chime above the door and deigned to finish reading a particularly morbid paragraph about the local beekeeper’s untimely death (though not, as Erestor had feared, at the hands (stings?) of his own bees). There was a chill in the air that made the skin dry but there would be a sprinkling of dew over the daffodils in the morning. It was a transitory phase of the season, and Erestor favoured it not one bit.

 

‘Erestor!’ it was Glorfindel’s voice.

 

‘Mmhm,’ he said, taking a sip of the milky tea he had brewed himself.

 

‘Erestor,’ said Glorfindel again, more stringently. His tone made Erestor lower the paper to cast a glance above it. He was surprised to see Glorfindel already at the counter and not dallying about, rummaging through the pots and pans and priceless silvers. He had a dusting of rain on the shoulders of his thick black coat and a slight flush in his cheeks. He suited the cold. He was bracing.

 

Again; get a grip, Erestor.

 

‘Is everything alright, Glorfindel?’ he asked.

 

‘Yes, I just need your attention for a moment.’ he smiled, and Erestor refrained from rolling his eyes. At least Glorfindel was candid enough to request it as so. He nodded, made a gesture with a hand and flicked over the page of the paper idly.

 

‘I’m listening,’

 

‘Come out with me.’

 

Erestor looked up. Glorfindel hadn’t quite gotten the hang of using his inside voice yet, never mind his antiques shop voice.

 

‘I’m running the shop,’ Erestor replied with a bemused smile.

 

Glorfindel raised a brow.

 

‘I meant tonight, you dolt.’

 

Dolt. Dolt?! Erestor should have been affronted, but coming from Glorfindel, pure sunshine and powershakes made flesh, it was near downright affectionate.

 

‘Is it a date then?’ Erestor jested, turning his attention back to the obituaries, gleaning quickly that the priest-turned-extreme-skydiver’s career had not quite lifted off. Erestor laughed inwardly at his own pun and then felt guilty.

 

‘Yes.’ Glorfindel said. It was sultry, and blunt.

 

Erestor met his eyes and Glorfindel winked, waiting on an answer with a patience that suggested neither confidence or anxiety, merely... patience. Erestor took the time to take another hearty sip of tea, warming his fingers around the cup. He’d put too much sugar in the brew, he could feel it on his tongue. The truth was he had prior engagements and he regretted, almost, that he could not turn them aside in favour of a date with a dashing stranger.

 

It was the other half of his job - buying. He would meet and greet with sellers in places of varying cleanliness and security and, if the Gods or the stars or whatever other eyes were out there cast a glance down at him, he’d walk away with some prize pieces for the store. He was good at it, it was why Elrond had hired him. You’ve a silver tongue and steel eyes, he had said to him at the end of their trial week together back in 1998. Erestor was still figuring out if it had been a compliment or not.

 

‘I’m acting as buyer tonight, Glorfindel, I’m sorry.’ he said.

 

‘Then we can go out earlier, when your shift ends but before you need to go and play Deal or No Deal with David Dickenson.’

 

Erestor smirked. ‘It’s nothing like Deal or No Deal, and you’re thinking of Noel Edmonds.’

 

‘I meant Flog It.’ Glorfindel winked. ‘I’d just like to take you out of this shop, you know, outside.’

 

‘This from the man who watches Flog It, yes?’

 

‘Well, I just thought that seeing as I’m now an integral part of the running of this shop that I should do my homework.’

 

Erestor had to laugh, he put his mug down and traced a finger around the rim. It was smooth and warm with the ghost of his breath. He nodded, he mulled it all over. It was an opportunity to learn more, he told himself, to pull at a thread of the mystery and unravel it strand by strand.

 

And the idea of a date was never wholly unappealing. Erestor could always get behind free drinks and appetisers.

 

‘I’ll even drive you to where you need to go, later.’ Glorfindel added. Erestor made a noise of faux appreciation.

 

‘Oh my, in your fancy car? The one you park illegally outside the shop every day?’

 

‘That very car, Erestor, that very car,’

 

He was a good sport. Erestor smiled, lowered his eyes. The day had been a smog where time shifted lazily from one hour to the next. A shipment of coins from the war had been delivered and had needed sorting and Erestor’s hands still smelt faintly of copper and polish from where he’d spend the morning moving coins into piles. He tapped his nails against the mug. Glorfindel was sweet, infinitely so.

 

It couldn’t hurt, could it? It was a question to which Erestor full well knew the answer and the reality of it was a dead weight at the back of his mind. Glorfindel was a sweetheart - whereas he, Erestor - reader of obituaries, drinker of tepid tea - was less so. A no danced on Erestor’s tongue for a fraction of a second before he swallowed it with his heaviness.

 

‘Okay,’ he said, feigning defeat. Glorfindel grinned but the smile became demure quickly.

 

The clocks were ticking at the back of the shop.

 

‘Thank you,’ he said, softly.

 

Erestor could not reply. He hadn’t expected that.

 

Glorfindel cleared his throat.

 

‘Has anyone I know popped their clogs?’

 

-

 

The stacks of trinkets, odd and ends and the occasional piece of crockery piled up over the dresser turned Erestor’s reflection in the mirror into a fractured mosaic. He could see just enough of himself by the ambient glow of a battered old lamp and the laptop screen, a bright blur in the glass behind him. Erestor was brushing his hair listlessly, looking, via the mirror, out of the window on the far wall. There was a row of apartment buildings, some windows were lit and were neat rectangles of luminescent yellow, but most weren’t. Erestor blinked - and another went out.

 

There was a smudge on the glass hovering over a section of his face and as he combed, he watched half in a trance the way the mirror warped the shape of him, gently. It was dark in his bedroom save for the little light of the lamp and laptop, but such was how Erestor liked it. There was a comfort to be gleaned in such ambience and many a night had he spent lain abed, listening to naught but the cars below and their muted cacophony of transit. It was life, below him, and he above. It spelled safety.

 

He looked away from the mirror when his bedroom door creaked open. A small white ghost padded into the room to perch where she would upon the dresser in a gap that seemed made for her. She meowed. Her eyes were large.

 

‘I think you’re right, Barbara.’ said Erestor, resigned.

 

Barbara did not deign to respond. She was always right, after all, and black did seem like too much of a morbid colour to wear to a date, in hindsight. And Glorfindel hardly needed to think Erestor even more morbid than the probably already did; what with the obituaries, and all. Erestor tried to mentally envision his drawers, to pick out a shirt more, what, lifelike? Instead, he fell to listening.

 

There was simply something about the rush of cars, the blaring of a horn being stretched into distance and speed. Movement, in the night - where were these people journeying to at such a late hour? Erestor blinked, he saw himself in the mirror, moving only barely. He envied them, really, but roused himself from his daydreaming. He had a date to prepare for. A date, the word was a chime in his head, rebounding again and again. A date, with Glorfindel.

 

Erestor set the brush down and might have smiled if not for the pleasant lethargy. There was a calm within him he’d never felt before, an assurance. He toyed with the idea of perchance wearing something nicer than a shirt, some sensible dress pants and a heavy coat - but the meeting with the seller loomed overhead like an inky, peripheral precipice. There would be no point to it. He could not appear to be anything more or less than he was - so it was with the antiques, so it had to be with their handlers. Of course, it wasn’t a rule that everyone played by.

 

Lights danced on the mirror’s surface. It was a beautiful night; the air was bracing but still for the world was at her rest. Erestor could have spent the hours sitting and doing no more than watching or making a few errant notes on the back of supermarket receipts. He wondered then if Glorfindel would like nights like this? He thought so, though it might have been easier to suspect the opposite.

 

He was not all he seemed, and he seemed to be a great deal many things at once.

 

Erestor stood and fell to accosting his chest of drawers, digging through piles of black clothes for a speck of colour. He could barely see but came across a formal jumper that was a hue lighter than the black garments he’d pulled free. With a salute to the heathen hedonistic Gods, Erestor pulled it on - it’d either be a nice surprise, or a reason to keep his coat on and guard himself from the chill; winter’s last, it would seem, if the lengthening days were anything to go by. The clothes he’d removed from the drawers he left on his bed, apologising to his future self half-heartedly, and as he crossed the room again, picking up his coat, Erestor chanced to take a final look in the mirror.

 

A dissatisfied sigh escaped him. His skin was not at its best and the dark circles had returned somewhat under his eyes, making him seem almost a hollow thing. And then it came, that familiar twinge of unworthiness, the urge to hermit and hole up and ne’er dare the outside again, but no, Erestor tore himself away. I have to go, he told himself, I want to go.

 

Barbara sat up. Erestor scratched her behind the ears.

 

‘Wait up for me, old girl.’ he said.

 

She watched, with glassy eyes, as he bent to turn off the lamp.

 

-

 

The Palace restaurant was the kind of high-class building that Erestor walked past sometimes when on a stroll (or a quest for decaf). He’d paid it little notice besides wondering at the rich sots inside, eating caviar at 10am and drinking his year’s wages in a single bottle of wine. And yet now, As Erestor smoothed down his jumper (that thankfully had proven to be a deep, navy blue) and slipped inside the large, arched glass door - he realised that he was now one of those rich sots! Or rather, he was on a date with one.

 

Erestor stepped into the palace from the cold and from one world into another. Expense radiated from the marble floor, the white walls and columns and the golden ceiling - certainly, tonight he’d be dining on something a world away from the soup and rich tea biscuits he usually feasted on. Erestor looked around as he walked the length of the foyer (he’d never been to a restaurant that had had a foyer before). His step of his shoes rang out, clear and crisp, but he walked cautiously so as not to bowl himself across the length of the room like a trussed up curling stone. Thankfully, Glorfindel’s calling of his name spared him from further wide-eyed gawping. Upper-class diners did not, after all, gawp.

 

He spied Glorfindel loitering near the reservations podium, a vision in a white (slightly too tight) shirt, pressed trousers and shoes that shone pleasantly. He’d let his hair down for the evening, literally, and looked half a divinity and half a wild thing. Erestor met his summons.

 

‘You look wonderful,’ said Glorfindel, beaming as Erestor came to him.

 

Erestor doubted it. It’d been windy outside and he hadn’t thought to bring a comb, so a quick brush with the fingers before he’d entered the building had had to suffice. But he accepted the compliment with a coy smile - he remembered some of his date-time etiquette.

 

‘And you,’ he said, in way of reply, ‘you look - different.’

 

Glorfindel laughed and it filled the foyer.

 

‘In a good way, I hope?’

 

‘Of course,’

 

Glorfindel smiled fondly at him and Erestor noted that he seemed palpably relieved. Had he thought that he might skip out on him? ‘Right, shall we find our seats?’ Glorfindel asked and Erestor said it would be a fine idea. Glorfindel rung the small bell on the podium and then they waited, side by side, in an amicable silence.

 

Erestor took a breathe, an inhalation that Glorfindel noticed with a smile and a reassuring tap to the crook of Erestor’s elbow. He so easily could have put his arm around his shoulders or his waist...

 

Would you have let him? asked a voice in the mists of Erestor’s conscience.

 

He thought about it, looking idly at the etchings in the golden panels of the ceiling that were lavish mimics of the frescos ofItaly, daubed in gold instead of paint. He thought about it and concealed the bemused smile that threatened to peak.

 

Yes, thought Erestor. I would.

 

***

 

Glorfindel’s conversational confidence was brilliant. Erestor wondered how many times he’d done it before, the whole wining and dining experience, but thought it impertinent to ask at such a preliminary stage of their date. And what did it matter, truly?

 

He was a glistening conversationalist and sat upon his chair with an easy comfort. Erestor was listening though he pretended that he were only half-listening, and eyeing up the menu where most of the food was unpronounceable - and yet undeniable appealing, even so.

 

They were sat amid a cluster of other diners, at a small, circular table covered over with a pristine white cloth and decorated with a few shining salt shakers and such. Glorfindel had made a  japing comment about how well they’d look amongst his own kitchen utensils and Erestor had to laugh - such was usually the first thing he thought of, too. Away from the main traffic of the restaurant, their table afforded them a quiet and a privacy that Erestor had not anticipated. The neighbouring diners spoke softly and their chattering buzz was a warm current abounding them

 

Erestor felt a little out of place, in truth, and often found himself sitting too rigidly or with his shoulders tensed. But Glorfindel and his gentle conversation proved to be a balm to Erestor’s frayed nerves. Breathe, he told himself often, breathe and say something if he prompts you.

 

Glorfindel certainly had an abundance of stories, and of all the things he might have expected him to be talking about that evening, his uncle’s puppy farm up in the grasslands of Caernarfon would have been the last. It was sweet; sweet talk, and Glorfindel said nothing overly bawdy or provoking - and Erestor wondered why he had even thought he might? Because he seems the sporting type? The gym type? Because he bought that god-awful plate? He’d been unfair, for Glorfindel was a doe.

 

And the jokes, by god, the were really quite awful.

 

But Erestor laughed.

 

Glorfindel was good at this.

 

He kept his eyes on the menu for the most part, sometimes flicking his attention to a waiter or a diner risen to visit the powder room. The food was as lavish as the decor and Erestor could not say he knew entirely what any one dish consisted of. Music tinkled overhead, some classical piece that was largely lost in the hum of the event, save for the occasional piano refrain or warbled note. He scanned a couple of dishes and spotted the word légumes amid a wadding of French descriptives and remembered, faintly, a New Year’s Resolution that had already fallen to the wayside.

 

Eat better, drink less.

 

Tonight’s meal would be a homage to the optimism he had evidently had on New Year’s Eve, then?

 

‘Are we ready to order?’ asked Glorfindel, setting his own menu down.

 

‘I think so,’ he handed Glorfindel his and Glorfindel took it, gently, and made a gesture to flag down a passing waitress.

 

His every action so far had been gentle, his voice, though voluminous and bold, was gentle and Erestor wondered if he were truly such a passive, bridled creature? The thought suddenly gave way to another, far more provocative, and Erestor inwardly cursed and was glad that Glorfindel was already preoccupied with nattering with the waitress.

 

She laughed at his jokes, but then she was getting paid to do so, and read back their orders to them and, in her impeccable French accent, made them seen infinitely more enticing. She bowed and departed, leaving the pair alone. They waited then, glancing at one another and sharing a smile of mutual excitement (that was, at least on Erestor’s part, dappled with just a touch of anxiety).

 

They were plunged into a sudden quiet wherein Glorfindel’s fingers tapping against the tablecloth became little drums, jarring with the music, stirring the buzz of conversation. A dozen more looks they shared and each was a silent communication, a bond to be made. Erestor was about to dare breaking a conversation of his own when suddenly there came the dreadfully iconic sound of a glass smashing to a thousand pieces somewhere. Whether due to nerves or a macabre sense of humour, Erestor had to contain his amusement. The restaurant quieted, Erestor heard a few muted gasps from the dinner goers beside their table.

 

And when he looked at Glorfindel, he was smirking.

 

They saw one another’s expression, and succumbed to a silent, shared laughter.

 

***

 

Erestor smelled the food before he saw it, and each sense of his was bathed in a luxury that surely must be paid for in diamonds. His plate was set before him and he was pleased to see he had ordered some kind of chicken dish with, of course, the légumes. He caught Glorfindel’s eye through the gap between the waitress’s elbow and body.

 

He had a stare that made him shiver.

 

When she left them to their meals, Erestor approached his delicately - testing a mouthful of each beautifully presented piece. The chicken was good and rich and the vegetables did not leave a bitter twang at the back of his tongue. That’s because it’s proper food, Erestor, you dolt.

 

Dolt had become a featured part of the language of Erestor’s internal monologue ever since Glorfindel had said it that morning. And just as Erestor was daintily spearing at his food, Glorfindel ate more confidently. He’d ordered a seafood dish, and was cutting up a piece that looked to be perfectly Erestor-sized.

 

He pushed his fork into it and leaned forward a little to offer it to Erestor.

 

‘Here, kitten.’ he said, and Erestor smiled.

 

Kitten?

 

He knew what he was supposed to do, of course. He was supposed to lean forward too and take the morsel by mouth, to claim how good it was and how grand a decision Glorfindel had made by bringing him here, to this centre of eloquence and fine dining. And a part of him did want to do so, to give in to a side of wantonness that threatened every now and then to rise (and, by God, in public too!). But no, Erestor succumbed instead to the cool touch of modesty.

 

Not today, loverboy.

 

He smiled, and took the fork from Glorfindel by hand. He ate the bite. And it was good - but Glorfindel’s overly dramatic faux-disappointed moan was even more so.

 

***

 

It was only when Erestor felt a warm knee press tightly against his own under the table that he realised they were flirting, and it was only when he pressed back that he realised that they had been flirting all night. Glorfindel was finishing off his plate and Erestor watched, sated by his own meal. That word, that affectionate kitten word had come up again a number of times - and Erestor had liked it.

 

And now Glorfindel knew.

 

The thrill of the evening’s events turned a deathly pale as time ebbed by however, and Erestor became aware very suddenly of the span of time that had passed them by. He would need to go, soon, though he could not bring himself to want to go. He told Glorfindel that time was running short and though he saw clearly that the blonde bachelor understood and knew the severity, he smiled all the same and said: ‘but we have not even had dessert!’

 

‘Another day, another night,’

 

‘Is that a promise?’

 

Erestor lowered his eyes, his smile was abashed.

 

‘We should get going.’

 

Glorfindel nodded and set down his cutlery, crossing them over one another on the plate. ‘Then,’ he said, flagging another waitress with a wave of a hand. ‘we should come back when we’ve both more time. And put your wallet away, you’re not paying for this.’

 

‘But-’

 

‘It’s a thank you, kitten.’

 

Erestor smiled and conceded. The deal awaited and heralded the end of a night where bliss and dread had combined, he sat and allowed it to wash over him like so many tides lapping at his ankles; the music, the voices, Glorfindel’s light banter.

 

It will all come again, you’ll come here again, Erestor told himself in the hope of waking a flame of hope even with such sparse kindling. He watched Glorfindel pay (by card - the pen and cheque book hadn’t been brought along on the date) and sign away on a neat square of paper. They were thanked for their custom and given complementary mints that brought a fresh beaming smile to Glorfindel’s mouth.

 

‘Time to go,’ he chirped, pocketing a few more mints.

 

Erestor masked his solemnity, and rose with Glorfindel to leave.

 

He followed Glorfindel outside where the bite of the wind’s chill was as sharp of a reminder as he could have asked for; nature’s morning-after coffee break. It’s all business now, he told himself. Elrond would be counting on this new stock, the shop would be counting on him. ‘Nervous?’ Glorfindel asked, pulling on a pair of gloves.

 

‘No, not exactly.’ Erestor replied, thinking it over. No, the emotion was harder to place than that and less concerned with the impending deal and more concerned with their walking away from the Palace. It was a kind of melancholy that came with old memories, ones turned to sepia, and it was a feeling that resided in Erestor’s bones and brain and conscience all at the same time. He thrust his hands in his pockets and his fingers found the mint from the Palace, still wrapped in foil.

 

‘We’ll have to come out again,’ Glorfindel reiterated, but his voice was largely lost to the night. ‘Soon, if you’d like.’

 

Erestor nodded, there didn’t seem to be words apt enough to convey his agreement - but Glorfindel understood and deemed that matter settled with a levity that called a small smile to Erestor’s lips.

 

The stars were pricking the sky in the inky spaces between the buildings and wires and the wind brought a golden lock of hair before Glorfindel’s face. He brushed it away with a gloved finger.

 

People rushed too and fro in coats and hats and scarves that would soon be discarded as the spring woke, day by day, and brought the warmth back with it. They rounded a street corner and another, Glorfindel walked fast and Erestor had to pace a little to catch up - but the exertion kept him warm. They passed under streetlights that cast everything a tarred orange, a swathe of electric and fog and Erestor could not remember the last time he had wandered out at night like this, but it was good, and Glorfindel walked close to him.

 

Glorfindel had had to park a few streets away from the restaurant and now Erestor saw it - a boys toy in all its decadence. It was an emerald green Jaguar and Erestor could have laughed. Certainly, the man who bought that fucking awful plate off of him in the antiques shop would have a sparkling, metallic convertible like this. Glorfindel saw his smirk, and asked what? with one of his own.

 

‘Oh, well I was expecting it to have tiger stripes or leopard print or a spoiler and go-faster stripes.’ he said. Glorfindel laughed, unlocking the car with a click of a button on a key clutched in his palm.

 

‘Sadly, they were all out of leopard print the day I bought her, but don’t think I didn’t ask,’

 

Erestor’s laughter came out as a dry bark as the wind seized his breath. He slid himself inside the car, it was cosy and clean despite its flashy exterior, and smelt faintly of vanilla scented car air fresheners. Glorfindel shut his door and then Erestor his, and for a moment they sat stationary whilst the world carried on outside the doors.

 

They shared the quiet intimacy, separated only thinly from the hubbub outside, and Glorfindel pulled off his gloves, tossing them over the dashboard display.

 

He slid the key in the ignition.

 

‘Are we late?’ he asked, poised. There was half a shadow cast across his face and when he leaned forward to rouse the car to life with a twist of his hand, he basked himself in light. Orange light, grey shadow - it split him half and half.

 

Erestor checked his phone.

 

‘No, not yet.’

 

‘Then we’ve some time.’

 

For what? Erestor might have asked, but he dared not. It was simpler to melt into the thrum of the engine that was a buzz in the ear as they began their little journey. Erestor sat back and Glorfindel drove them out of the city centre down the roads that turned this way and that, twisting between high-rise buildings and under bridges where went other cars - a line of electric wisps. Glorfindel turned the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and his face was a picture of contentment.

 

There was something else there, though, but Erestor couldn’t place it.

 

Glorfindel put the radio on, quietly. The music was a light lilt of a woman’s voice and a synthesiser beat, a song Erestor could just as easy imagine himself listening to as he sat at his window on the fifteenth level of his apartment building, watching, watching...

 

But no, tonight he was part of the life, rather than an observer of it. A tingle of excitement tickled his fingers.

 

They drove away from the skyscrapers and towards flatter horizons, peppered by telegraph poles and weathered lampposts, and it occurred to Erestor as he watched them tick by, that he could hold Glorfindel’s hand if he wished. It was right there, loosely ghosting over the shift stick. Erestor looked at it and then to Glorfindel’s face. He didn’t look back, but blinked.

 

He could touch his leg, rest his hand on his thigh.

 

Somehow, Erestor knew Glorfindel’s body would be warm.

 

And he was humming along to a Bryan Adam’s power ballad when they turned down a side road and slowed to a veritable crawl. Gravel crunched under the wheels and Erestor saw Glorfindel’s cautious glance at the multi-storey car park they’d journeyed too. Erestor checked his pockets, ticking off a mental checklist; phone, wallet, keys, lighter - and a mint. He couldn’t fault Glorfindel’s politely masked judgement - the building looked the perfect place to shoot one of those ghost movies Erestor could never sit through. It was a bulky, square construct made of grey steel and grey brick. The cars parked inside were few, but it was a well known “business” ground.

 

It looked dark, and Erestor had a wish to tell Glorfindel to turn the car around.

 

Let’s get dessert.

 

But he could not shirk his duty to Elrond. He had a job to do, and it should be as simple as that. Erestor inhaled. Glorfindel tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, he looked at the speedometer and then out of the window, and then to Erestor, with half a brow quirked.

 

‘Tell me: why aren’t you making a business of picking out wedding venues?’

 

Erestor laughed grimly.

 

‘Believe me, it wasn’t my idea to meet here.’

 

Glorfindel didn’t like that; his suspicion was growing rife. Erestor found it oddly quaint.

 

‘I’ll wait here for a little while, just in case.’ he said, fixing Erestor with a look that brooked no arguments. Erestor smiled, a humble assurance, and opened up the car door.

 

The wind had gathered again and struck him quick. Night-time had her own scent, tonight it was heady; cold air and high skies. Erestor stood and cast a look over to the car park, spotlights and creeping shadows spilling over the parking lines. He spied a few figures, roaming. Bending slightly to look inside the Jaguar, Erestor said his farewell to Glorfindel.

 

‘I’d like to do this again some time,’ he said.

 

For a moment, it seemed as though happiness would overcome the apprehension in Glorfindel’s eyes. Almost. But he bowed his head a fraction and when he looked up again, he was smiling - for both their benefits.

 

‘Call me,’ he said, and winked.

 

Erestor closed the door and pulled his coat tighter about his body lest the wind tease it from his shoulders. It blew against him, and Erestor prayed it was not an ill omen. Omens somehow always seemed more prevalent in the moments before a deal. Never when I’m picking my lottery numbers, Erestor jested internally, but it did little to lighten the sudden heaviness.

 

It was like he were walking through a bog.

 

The walk was long. His pants rippled around his legs as he strode through the gusting tide of twilight’s wind and the approaching car park did not seem as though it were like to give him any apt shelter. The few men and women who loitered under the light were sharing a cigarette and none, save one or two, looked up when Erestor walked past. He was glad for that, and even more so when he spotted the licence plate he had been told belonged to the seller.

 

Erestor’s every footstep rang out into the car park like a fracture, echoing in the hollow spaces. He cast a giant’s shadow on the far wall as he approached the car and bade himself not fidget - not when his silhouette was painted half a mile high. Suddenly he felt vulnerable - as though he should have a gun secreted away somewhere, or at least a few more hair slides to fall back on. The concrete ceiling felt too low.

 

He had never liked it here, but if there was a deal to be made...

 

Just as Erestor approached the Mercedes, a man in a slightly unfashionable brown suit exited from the passenger seat. A pale, rotund man in the autumn of his years, Jonas, the mononymous seller from two cities over, smiled to see Erestor approach.

 

He reached back into the car for a briefcase.

 

‘What do you have for me?’ Erestor asked, coming to stand a little ways away from the seller, and his words were rich with reverberation. The car park warped his timbre but the effect was power. Jonas sighed, contemplating like he had not a clue where to begin describing the wonders he had to offer. It was a game, a charade. Erestor allowed him his theatrics, though the thought that he might close a deal before Glorfindel drove away was a tantalisation he knew he should not be considering.

 

You can’t rush a good deal.

 

‘Where to begin!’ Jonas clucked, tapping his briefcase with a hand decorated with a number of “gold” rings. ‘Where to begin?’

 

There was a gap of four or so feet between them.

 

‘The carpentry you got for me last time went down well,’ Erestor said, quite truthfully, there were always folks in want of chairs and tables. ‘More of the same would be appreciated. And gold and silver are always nice. Shiny things, you know, to bring in the magpies.’

 

Jonas laughed with far more gusto than the jest had warranted, in truth.

 

‘Gold, yes, well then, I might have something to whet your whistle indeed.’

 

Erestor said nothing though the idiom inexplicably rankled him, but lifted his chin a fraction.

 

‘We’ve some plated playing card holders come in recently, pretty little things that the old dears go mad for - somewhere to store their sewing bits and pieces. Gold, gold, ah, let me think... There’s a picture frame and a nice one too, a huge thing - and that’s got gold embellishments, and as always there’s the usual tableware-’

 

A twang of disappointment crossed Erestor’s face.

 

‘And this is why you wanted to meet here, in practically the dead of night? Jonas, I never knew you to favour the mundane.’

 

Jonas laughed, but not as merrily. ‘Mundane,’ he said, tasting the word. A touch of businesslike severity could do wonders to cut to the quick with these doddering sellers - but there was a line, and Erestor knew better than to cross it.

 

‘We’ve already enough picture frames to rehouse the Louvre.’

 

Jonas’ stood upright, adjusting his jacket. The light that glared down on them both from a faltering spotlight built into the heavy, solid ceiling cast a geometry of sharp shadows on Jonas’ face; around his eyes, under his nose. He looked like a morbid caricature of a skull.

 

Erestor hoped it was not another omen.

 

‘There is... something.’ Jonas said.

 

That’s more like it.

 

‘Something?’

 

‘Quite something, indeed.’ and he smiled, a slow reveal of teeth.

 

No.

 

Erestor took half a pace backwards and liked not at all the grin curving Jonas’ lips, nothing at all like the bluster he had sported not moments ago. Erestor noticed the number of cars, parked oh so nonchalantly around them. He noted the tinted windows. He noted the figures behind the glass shade - shades themselves.

 

‘Smell a rat?’ said Jonas, pulling something out of his suit pocket. It was a gun, an antique pistol. ‘Do you see it? Do you like it? What would you give to get your paws on it? Oh, it’s a vintage model alright - fromAmerica, you see. Gilded and in perfect working order.’

 

It was a beautiful gun, that much was true.

 

Erestor could feel nothing save for the heartbeat under every inch of his skin. He felt the beat of it in his mouth, in his neck...

 

‘Do you think it’ll devalue the price if I were to shoot you with it? Or do you think you’d make me a tidy profit? Shall we take a risk?’

 

Jesus Christ,

 

Erestor blinked just as he saw Jonas point the gun at him. Time became a thick haze and slowed to a dull, dull slog. There was static filling Erestor’s ears. The light above them was afire and Jonas’ smile was replaced with the barrel of the gun as he brought it to bear upon him.

 

What the fuck!

 

Jonas’ face twisted in disgust. There were shouts behind Erestor, the sounds of a clamour and the sounds of bodies thwacking against the ground; a flat, bass thud that was entirely mortal. Erestor tried to turn but saw suits and suits and white collars abound. Someone shouted his name and he looked, but could see nothing beyond his own dizziness.

 

Don’t let me die in this fucking car park, thought Erestor to himself, he turned, he saw the gun, and then Jonas pulled the trigger.

Chapter 3

The next chapter will be posted on Tuesday, thank you for staying with me.

Read Chapter 3

Erestor had met the pavement hard, his shoulder attested to that. He lay on his side and listened to the gunfire burst in explosions that forced the water from his eyes when he squeezed them shut. His panic was mounting, his breathing laboured and far-away sounding and he’d broken out into a cold sweat, lying on the pavement where he’d been knocked over and seemingly forgotten. How many bullets flew over his body? How many screams had he muffled by biting down onto his own tongue? How many of the shouts he heard were shouts of his name? It all sounded so strange; too loud and yet too far even though he was certain he was in the thick of the conflict. He did not dare to look for faces for fear that someone see his and mar it with a bullet. Erestor could see the white parking lines on the floor and, if he looked, upwards, the lights in the concrete ceiling.

 

That was all he needed, but he needed to hide, too.

 

People were rushing around in a frenzy and the echoes of their steps sounded strange and staggered. Erestor pulled himself across the ground in a half-crawl to seek the shelter under the belly of one of the ominous Bentley’s that had boxed him and Jonas in. He’d seen cats take cover like this.

 

From his safe-spot, Erestor rubbed his eyes and tried to centre himself, blocking out the pain in his shoulder and the ache in his head that glared like a siren and screamed each time a gun was fired; which was startlingly often. Cling to reality, Erestor said, making it a chant to focus on, find some strain of reality. But reality was the first thing to shatter when he opened up his eyes again - he saw a thin strip of the action from under the car, and he saw Glorfindel.

 

He saw Glorfindel shooting people.

 

‘What the fuck,’ Erestor whispered, his voice a whisper but sounding loud. ‘What the fuck?!’

 

He looked for Jonas and saw the man slumped on the floor against his Mercedes, clutching at a leg wound that was sparingly merciful. Was that Glorfindel’s work? Glorfindel’s work - Erestor let out a shuddering breath, what was Glorfindel? A hitman? Some sort of secret FBI agent? A madman with a gun and too much money?

 

But the way Glorfindel wielded the slick, black pistol left no doubt that he had been trained to use it - with lethality. He shot another oncoming thug in the leg and turned to shoot another in the shoulder. They weren’t mortal blows, Erestor noted, but they’d be enough to kill if they didn’t have the sense to retreat and seek help. How does he know what to do? Erestor found himself wondering, the thoughts melting and combining and flourishing in a panic. A bullet hit the car Erestor was hiding under and he clapped his hands to his mouth to stifle the yell of terror. There were a lot of men on the floor, there were a lot of groans of pain.

 

Another well-dressed miscreant began to emerge from one of the boxed in Bentleys, but Glorfindel pointed his gun at him - and everything suddenly went still.

 

‘You’re going to leave,’ he said, and his voice was no longer honey sweet; it was sheer authoritarian command.

 

One of the men made to argue, to swear, to curse or otherwise contradict. Glorfindel pre-empted him with a bullet in the foot. He made a strangled cry that twisted at Erestor’s stomach. ‘You’re going to leave,’ Glorfindel repeated, deadlier this time. ‘And God have mercy if I ever see a single one of you again.’

 

His voice had shaken with a quiver of fury but his demands were met and the men were piling into cars, pulling their fallen comrades in with them with a terror-inspired lack of gentility if need be - they were beaten. Erestor heard Jonas say something vitriolic, and Erestor heard Glorfindel shout NOW. Engines started, six cars pulled away from the blonde in the white shirt, idly holding a gun by his side, and six cars made a beeline for the exit. Erestor was left exposed and shivering.

 

He lay there. Cold.

 

His shoulder throbbed and his head whirred round and round and threatened to induce nausea. Part of him wanted to call out to Glorfindel but another part refrained; he’d just seen him shoot half a dozen criminals not an hour after they’d been sat together in civilisation, touching under the table, sharing jokes, smiling...

 

Hadn’t Erestor thought him gentle? Hadn’t he thought him a doe?

 

Perhaps he made a noise then, out of pain or confusion, for Glorfindel was suddenly alerted to his presence. The ferocity melted from his face in a heartbeat and he stowed away his gun and came jogging over to kneel beside him. Erestor flinched from his touch but Glorfindel smoothed back the dark hair from his damp forehead and said something in a low voice that Erestor could not discern; it became a warm hum, nothing more.

 

Erestor shook, he could not breathe for a moment nor sit up, but Glorfindel was there and Glorfindel was shooshing him, calling him baby, touching his face. ‘He’s gone,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘he’s gone.’

 

Glorfindel misunderstood, but Erestor hadn’t the energy to speak.

 

He closed his eyes, and fell out of space.

 

-

 

Something was hurting.

 

Something was wrong.

 

His shoulder... It was his shoulder.

 

It hurt, and the pain seemed... big.

 

Erestor opened his eyes and was not in the car park. He was moving but he could not move, and there were lights going over his face; again and again and they made his eyes ache if he tried to look at them. They went by too fast. He could see Glorfindel at a funny angle but Glorfindel didn’t see him. Everything was blurry, everything sounded submerged - like they were underwater.

 

That’s a silly thought.

 

Erestor’s shoulder ached, and he realised he was in a car (Glorfindel’s green car) and that it was night-time - that they were driving fast. The engine growled like a chthonic beast. Glorfindel looked worried, his eyes darted here and there and he was murmuring something inaudible. A prayer, maybe. For me - am I dying? Erestor hoped not. He’d not even been able to make a deal.

 

He couldn’t move, he felt like a drained battery, but his hand, he saw, was resting upon Glorfindel’s knee and placed a little awkwardly. How inappropriate of me! thought Erestor to himself, but he felt the lull of slumber more keenly than the twang of guilt, and try as he might, he could not move his hand.

 

But it was warm, he was warm.

 

Glorfindel was warm.

 

And then there were the lights, the engine...

 

And then there was nothing at all.

 

-

 

Nothing, nothing - until there was everything. Sound was restored to Erestor first. He heard beeping, voices, a phone ringing somewhere and the creaking of doors. And then smell - the cloying sanitation of hospital.

 

Oh shit.

 

Erestor opened his eyes and saw that the world was skewed. He tried to right himself but a dull ache reprimanded him for the attempt. He heard a mumble, a call, and someone was standing by him. Why am I on a bed in my formal clothes?

 

‘Easy there kitten, easy.’

 

Kitten.

 

Glorfindel. He was there, looking down at him with a tired stare that had suddenly brightened. He heaved a sigh of relief and rubbed his eyes with both hands, shaking his head, saying something, saying something that was surely not in English. Erestor blinked. His eyelids were heavy and his brain seemed as though it would need the smelling salts to rouse it to functionality.

 

Fucking hell.

 

He felt - rough.

 

‘Erestor, can you hear me?’

 

Yes. He could hear but he could not respond, his throat was dry and scratchy. He licked his lips, and daydreamed of a cold, tall glass of iced water, but it just made matters worse.

 

They were in a cubicle, partitioned off from what was surely the rest of the hospital ward by a tall, white curtain.

 

‘Why...’ Erestor began, and his voice was a dry scrape. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Why are we in a cubicle?’

 

‘We’re in A&E, we need to get that graze of yours checked out, Rambo.’ Glorfindel said, and Erestor was pleased to note that he had finally grasped the concept on an inside voice. He smiled, drowsily. Nothing much made sense but the grogginess in his head was at least no longer an acrid pang - and it was nice to be lying down on something soft.

 

‘Can I sleep?’

 

‘Not yet, we’re waiting for the nurse to come. But then I’ll take you home and you can sleep the next century away if you like, and nobody’d question it.’

 

Erestor might have laughed if he didn’t feel eighty-five years old all of a sudden. When he looked at Glorfindel he was struck stark and white by the clinical overhead strip lights. His shirt was untucked in places and his golden hair ruffled but otherwise he looked no worse for ware, considering what had happened.

 

The memory was numb and tender to the mind’s probing touch. His head was numb. Glorfindel was smiling down at him, worriedly, but Erestor could not raise his voice to reassure him, he simply didn’t have the strength. He wanted to sleep or at least rest his eyes, but Glorfindel tapped him when he closed them and said in a soft voice that he had to keep them open, he had to stay awake. But if he stayed awake - then he would remember.

 

Bullets hitting the car, Glorfindel pointing the barrel at Jonas - and the deal, the deal that had never been!

 

Erestor suddenly felt revulsion like a swathe.

 

Elrond would... Elrond would be so disappointed, but how on Earth would Erestor go about explaining it all to him? He blinked slowly and tried to focus on the ceiling tiles and the grooves between them, probing for an answer to his own conundrum. He followed the grouted patterns whilst his mind churned over. I’m sorry Elrond, but I couldn’t secure new stock for the antiques shop because I was assaulted by a seller and saved by the man who I’d just been on a date with.

 

He could just picture Elrond’s face.

 

And the eyebrows.

 

Fuck.

 

Perhaps he said the word aloud. Glorfindel laughed, but it seemed more a statement of his own lagging stamina rather than any expression of mirth. ‘I’ve phoned Elrond, if that’s what you’re worried about. He says he’ll call you tomorrow and that he might pop round to yours, if you feel up to it.’

 

Erestor swallowed, his throat was dry. He’d like some water. He’d like to have secured some business for the shop, too.

 

‘And don’t worry - he’s not angry. How could he be angry?’

 

Glorfindel brushed the back of his hand gently across Erestor’s brow, and his fingers were cool.

 

Erestor let his eyes close for a moment. The touch was a refreshment, a balm, and the hospital was alive with ambiance unique to itself; hope dangling by a thread, smiles masking a greater trepidation; falsity with honest intent. They’d touched their knees together under the table in the restaurant, Erestor’s hand had rested on Glorfindel’s knee in the car...

 

There was something gnawing at him.

 

‘You shot some people,’

 

Glorfindel acknowledged the truth of it with a soft yes but said nothing else to alleviate Erestor’s concerns. He nodded, simply, and then the nurse came - pulling back the curtains. They scraped along the rail and Glorfindel flinched.

 

She had a kind face and straight, shoulder-length hair. She couldn’t have been much older than Erestor, with a sweet smile and little crinkles around her eyes that were the etching of a merry soul. She was dressed in white, and suited it.

 

‘Good evening,’ she said to them both, ‘how are we doing, then?’

 

Glorfindel said good, good! and Erestor made a vague noise of agreement. The nurse laughed, and it was a tinkling sound. ‘I’m going to ask you a few questions and do a few checkups, but you should be free to leave within the hour if we’re lucky.’

 

She spoke slowly, clearly, and asked if it hurt when she touched Erestor’s shoulder. He said it hurt only a little and not as much as it had, and the nurse seemed well pleased with his answer. ‘I’m going to need to take a look at the graze.’ she said and it took a moment for her underlying request to hit Erestor.

 

‘Oh!’ he said, and acquiesced. It was hard to sit up, Erestor’s head felt like it were made of lead and when he managed to pull himself to sitting he gave himself a moment to acclimatise. His eyes swam - the lights were very bright, and his arms and hands and fingers felt very clumsy as he tried to pull off the navy jumper.

 

He imagined it was not a very seductive disrobing, but the nurse did not seem to mind.

 

Glorfindel had meanwhile turned around and was reading a poster about the proper disposal methods for needles and used vaccinations. He seemed very invested in it, Erestor noted, as he pulled the jumper over his head and piled it in his lap to bury his hands into the fabric.

 

The cubicle was a bit chilly. Erestor shivered.

 

‘Relax for me, that’s it.’ said the nurse, touching his grazed shoulder with gloved hands. She had a firm touch, poking and pushing here and there and gauging Erestor’s reaction. It twanged, it ached - but the greater injury he’d sustained in the car park wouldn’t be so easily forgotten, and no amount of ointment and bandages could mend a waver in the conscience.

 

Once the nurse was done with her ministrations with the ointment and bandages, she helped Erestor tug on his jumper and free his hair from the collar. She said he had pretty hair and he returned the compliment. It made her laugh. He said she had a pretty laugh, too, and he saw Glorfindel smirking at him as he turned back around. In truth, Erestor was barely aware of what he was saying, such was his tiredness - but it’d just seemed right.

 

‘I’m going to fetch the doctor to come and sign your papers, and then we’ll see about letting you loose again.’ said the nurse, and with a bow of her head she excused herself through the cubicle curtain. Glorfindel came close.

 

‘Does someone have a thing for women in uniform?’ he asked.

 

Erestor smiled, and raised a hand to rub the skin under his eyes.

 

‘I’ve a thing for my bed, and that thing is undying, unconditional love.’

 

‘A romantic,’ Glorfindel said with a soft smile that Erestor returned, and for a dozen heartbeats nothing else passed between them save for that glance and a shared warmth. But then it came again; the memory of the car park and the men clutching at their knees, writhing, writhing on the floor...

 

Glorfindel had left his gun in the car.

 

Erestor shifted on the bed, he had a crick in his back.

 

‘Glorfindel, do you maybe have something that you need to- that you want to tell me?’ he asked, keeping his voice as low as he might. It was a rasp, and Glorfindel looked down for a moment. When he met Erestor’s eyes again, his smile was just a tad weak.

 

‘Shall we go for a drive again? Or for some later night dinner? Another date?’ he laughed, but Erestor did not. Bright eyed, Glorfindel faltered. He pushed back his hair and gave a sigh. ‘I can tell you everything - tonight.’

 

-

 

Glorfindel had driven them to an electric diner in the heart of the city’s night scene where the doors were always open and the neon sign that flashed Rita’s! was never dark. The classic 20s style diner here was meshed with the modern urban overture of the city, a pristine depravity - and it worked. The waiting staff were in costume, and their tongue piercings and ombre hair somehow authenticated their attire.

 

It was fusion.

 

Erestor held his head in his hands, seated uncomfortably in a booth opposite Glorfindel. The leather seats were a bright tawdry lemon colour and two cups of decent coffee sat in front of them like bargaining chips, but Glorfindel had already drank most of his wager. He would watch the lights flash around the menu over the counter sometimes, and Erestor would see its reflection in the black of his eyes that was surrounded by the blue. Too tired to emulate any kind of appropriate social grace, Erestor sat and stared and waited.

 

He had been promised answers. It was 1am, but he would get them, sure enough, sure enough...

 

Strange to think that not so long ago they had been sat in similar positions in the Palace, wearing the same clothes, the same shoes - and yet now they seemed to be entirely different people. Erestor blinked, tiredly, and Glorfindel was apparently mentally psyching himself up for his grand reveal. He took a swig of coffee. Erestor had not touched his, and sometimes the steam rose up and lost his focus - watching the tendrils that lured him to slumber, rising up and up and then vanishing to thinness. Gods, but in-between the shoot out and the hospital; Erestor was tired.

 

But the city never sleeps, even if she sleepwalks.

 

‘Who are you?’ he asked, a bit bluntly, but there were only five people in the diner to overhear the exchange. He and Glorfindel seemed to be the only two who had any kind of lucidity, however. A youth in a worn leather jacket sat at the counter in the middle of the diner, staring vacantly at a Smartphone, and two older ladies sat by the window talking in a hush together, sharing a slice of pie and a shade of lipstick.

 

Erestor hoped their date was going better than his.

 

They have pie, of course it’s going better.

 

‘Who am I?’ Glorfindel tasted the question aloud.

 

Erestor raised an expectant brow.

 

‘I’m Glorfindel,’ said Glorfindel in attempt at humour but it was wasted. Erestor was too far gone into the realm of sleep depravation to be appreciative of his chirps and japes. He remembered that he’d laughed in the Palace... Glorfindel furrowed his brows a little, resolving himself to the severity of the situation. ‘But I am an... agent, of a kind.’

 

‘A federal agent?’ Erestor asked with incredulity stretched by a yawn.

 

‘Yes,’

 

‘Oh, good.’ Erestor’s laughter was dry. ‘Am I under arrest?’

 

‘You’re not under arrest.’

 

‘Am I under surveillance?’

 

‘You’re not... under surveillance, no.’

 

The hesitation made Erestor frown.

 

‘Then what am I under?’

 

Glorfindel worked hard to conceal a smirk. He tried to take another sip of coffee but found that he had already drained his cup. Erestor pushed his cup towards him, and Glorfindel met his eye and took the offering only when Erestor had nodded his certainty. He took a sip and deliberated.

 

‘Protection,’ Glorfindel said. There was a siren somewhere outside and he looked out of the window (or rather, the wall) but the streets, though largely empty, were a sparse and timed cacophony of headlights and taillights passing in a rush. The drivers in the dark skirted the bounds of the law with their speed. But it was night-time - and the law saw best with sun upon her brow.

 

‘I’m not sure I understand,’

 

‘There’s no easy way to explain,’ Glorfindel said, smiling his plight of the sincere. Erestor could understand but wished he’d try, regardless. He looked at him, at Glorfindel the federal agent. It at least explained the fucking £700 plate and the gun and the Palace. Glorfindel returned the stare, seeking to prove something in the contact, perhaps? If so - it was another wasted gesture, for Erestor was aware of nothing more complex than Glorfindel’s pretty eyelashes and the strength of his shoulders.

 

He might have told him so if the mood had been better - as it was, he still didn’t rightly know where they stood in relation to one another anymore. And I’m tired. I am literally the tiredest that a human being has ever been ever before in the history of the world ever. ‘You could always just have a go - but use small words for me I’m... not at my best.’

 

Erestor relinquished a drudging smile, and Glorfindel brightened.

 

‘Jonas is a known scumbag - a criminal, rather - and we’ve been tipped off about him for months now but without a fixed location on him or a preferred meeting place of his. He’s tangled with Elrond before. Jonas wanted to, well, he thought that yours and Elrond’s little enterprise was ripe for the plundering.’ Glorfindel paused, he looked ponderous. ‘Can you plunder antiques?’

 

Erestor said that you probably could, yes, if you were some kind of sugar tongs pirate. Glorfindel laughed at that. ‘Didn’t I buy some of those of you?’ he asked, genially.

 

‘You did, but don’t go off topic.’

 

‘Pardon me, I don’t mean to,’ Glorfindel apologised and Erestor was inclined to believe him. The was a candidness about him here, tonight, in the diner at 1am. Perhaps they both were too tired to maintain a perceptible front, perhaps they were both too tired to hold up their usual masks.

 

And again, it was intimate.

 

But Erestor still didn’t understand.

 

‘The people I work for are interested in preventing this sort of thing. When bad guys take over the good guys - it’s just another syndicate waiting to blow up in all our faces. Elrond pays for protection - for himself and the shop, and for you, kitten.’

 

Doubt crested and reared like a foamy wave coming to brace against Erestor, and he felt the slam of it like a dead weight. It stung his eyes. It made him numb. He chewed the inside of his lip, nodding, thinking, fretting disquietly. Protection. Had that been the motivation for all of this? For the date and the ride? Had Glorfindel come into the shop on that first fateful day because he’d been paid too?

 

Erestor sighed, a short huff that exhumed the air from his lungs. A thousand fresh doubts tapped him with fey fingers but he had not the brevity of wit sufficient to tend to them tonight, and Glorfindel was making puppy eyes at him.

 

I’m so tired.

 

Glorfindel looked sad.

 

He was using me.

 

Glorfindel was shaking his head.

 

Erestor had to look away. When he turned his head the world blurred for a moment, neon and silk and the late night electronica show on the radio.

 

The waitress at the bar was cashing up the till, noisily piling coins together and bagging them up. She chewed gum and had a shock of electric blue hair for a fringe where otherwise her head was shaven. She caught Erestor’s eye and widened her own - a kindly gesture, somehow.

 

‘Erestor,’

 

Erestor rubbed his eyes, and turned back.

 

‘Erestor, I know what you’re thinking and it isn’t true.’

 

‘Isn’t it?’

 

Glorfindel looked strangled for words, frustrated with himself. He tapped the table a few times with anxious fingers and then drew himself forward a little.

 

‘I’ve never been directly involved with the shop before, or you! The orders they... well, the jobs come as the crime does, does this make sense? No, no, probably not. I knew of you, Elrond talks about you all the time and I knew you did the buying for the shop. And I knew Jonas would rear his head eventually and make a move against you. That’s where the protection part comes in, see? But I’m glad I met you for you, that much is true.’

 

So it’s logic. Funny, even though logic was a perfectly rational and admirable motivator, it did tend to leave a person hollowed. There was no emotional depth to logic.

 

Emotion - Erestor was ruled by it, though he had the world thinking otherwise. He asked Glorfindel in an undertone if he could have a sip of their shared coffee and Glorfindel nodded and pushed the cup back across the table. It was cooling, already, and grainy. Erestor checked his phone - no calls, but a quarter of an hour had passed. It was 1:24am, and the hour was an ache behind the eyes.

 

‘I’m honestly not sure what to make of any of this,’ Erestor said, truthfully. ‘How did it get to this? Do you know how mundane my life was before all this happened?’

 

Glorfindel smiled, just a little.

 

‘Come on,’ he said, and rose from the booth. Erestor stood up too though he didn’t rightly know what the point of it was. His body obeyed whilst his brain whirred, the slowing spokes of a bike’s wheel spun by hand. Glorfindel put a neat stack of change on top of a banknote and left it at their table. He touched Erestor’s elbow briefly and guided him out of the diner. The night was a gaping, high sky and the air brisk and almost damp with the wind providing a chilling nuisance. Erestor mumbled to himself - unsure if he were really speaking aloud or if the thoughts were his own.

 

‘I miss my damn shop and the obituaries and the three regular customers we used to get who weren’t federal agents...’

 

He didn’t mean it, but it felt good to spout it all anyway. Glorfindel was walking slowly beside him, listening sweetly and silently and shouldering the blame. They stood under a streetlight so that Glorfindel could search his pockets for his car keys. He looks just as tired as me when he lets the smile slip, Erestor thought to himself, he has laughter lines and a few crow’s feet. A few people were walking the pavements at this time of night - and some sidled past them with no more than a brief glance up at two well dressed strangers, stood still, stood close.

 

Glorfindel caught Erestor’s eye.

 

The orange streetlamps stole colour and replaced it with a gradation of its own artificial glow. Erestor wondered if he would even recognise this street if he were to walk down it again in the daytime. The night was its own world.

 

‘I can go, if you like.’ Glorfindel said, without the barest trace of mirth.

 

It was a heavy statement.

 

Erestor let his breath melt with the twilight and shoved his hands into his pant pockets, feeling the little mint from the Palace and turning it about with his fingers like a worry token. He looked up and saw high-rises, apartment lights, and he saw the patches of night sky between it all - holding everything together.

 

Glorfindel was trouble.

 

No. Trouble was too unkind of a term - Glorfindel was life and action and so foreign to Erestor, who had made a career of surrounding himself with the static and the passive. ‘No,’ he said and thought he heard Glorfindel’s masked breathe of relief. ‘No, you’ve been good to me.’

 

Erestor looked to him and he was smiling, a little sadly, but it was a smile nonetheless. He held his tongue, though, and Erestor half wished he might come out with one of his awful jokes to balm the mood. But Glorfindel stood stoic; thinking, perhaps, of what to do next? There was a neon sign on the building behind him, across the road, a neon pink martini glass dancing this way and that.

 

And then he felt a hand, Glorfindel’s hand, sliding to hold the small of his back.

 

An invitation.

 

Erestor took it and drew closer; pulled in equal part by a curiosity, a want and a dull, dull pang of fatigue that bade him rest his head somewhere! There would be no more answers for him tonight, not until he woke in the morning (or afternoon, most likely) with sleep’s clarity. So on Glorfindel’s chest he rested himself and Glorfindel held him about the waist.

 

‘Erestor,’ he said, using a finger to turn Erestor’s chin. He said his name again, and Erestor smiled. Glorfindel had such pretty blonde eyelashes - now he thought he might be able to count every one of them. And Glorfindel was leaning in close, closing his eyes as he came for a kiss...

 

But Erestor pulled away, just a touch, but enough to make Glorfindel open his eyes.

 

‘I don’t usually kiss boys on the first date,’ Erestor said. It wasn’t strictly true, but it conjured a smirk on Glorfindel’s lips - and if he was going to kiss him, this federal protective agent, he’d kiss one of those honey smiles.

 

‘I’m no boy,’ said Glorfindel, his voice a low hum that was cause enough for a surge of shivers. ‘And this isn’t our first date.’

 

Erestor lifted a hand. ‘Isn’t it?’ he asked, coyly.

 

He pushed his fingers into the gold of Glorfindel’s hair, mussed and ruffled by wind and no small amount of exertion, an yet it was silk between his fingers.

 

‘The first one didn’t go that badly,’ whispered Glorfindel, brushing their noses together and smiling his contentment. It made Erestor smile too. It made him blink. The ache behind his eyes had turned to something profound, he let out a sigh and a light, breathy laugh.

 

‘I got shot at!’

 

‘Ah, but that was after the date.’

 

‘Yes, but-’

 

‘Shh, kitten,’ said Glorfindel, still smiling - but it was a demure thing now, a soft thing of comfort. ‘You’re okay, you’re okay now.’

 

Glorfindel’s kiss was light and glancing.

 

And warm.

 

Erestor closed his eyes and Glorfindel kissed him again with a new confidence. He let Glorfindel lead, he had two hands on either side of Erestor’s hips and was pulling him closer and closer until they were connected; body to body. Erestor curled his other hand around the back of Glorfindel’s neck. He had to lift himself on his toes slightly to reach up to the embrace, but Glorfindel was smiling at his efforts and parting his lips with easy sighs.

 

The kiss became slow and languorous and Erestor sighed his desire. Was Glorfindel whispering his name? He couldn’t tell. Mingled exhaustion and arousal clouded him completely, pleasantly - like a blanket one covers themselves in to help them weather a cold. The night had fallen away, so had the buildings and the signs and all of the people, and all that remained were he and Glorfindel and their shared warmth. Erestor pulled Glorfindel down for more, Glorfindel laughed, meeting the demand with all of his gentility; kissing Erestor shallowly and prettily.

 

He kisses like a porn star, Erestor thought to himself as Glorfindel tugged at his lower lip with his teeth. I knew he looked like a “plumber” the day he came in the shop.

 

And then Erestor was laughing inbetween the kisses. Glorfindel started laughing. He kissed Erestor once again, a peck, a press of his lips that was affection’s seal. He said thank you, and then again and again and again. He pulled Erestor close to his body so that he could rest his head under his chin.

 

Thank you, he was saying, and his voice was a breath of wind.

 

Erestor kept his eyes shut and blocked out the sounds of cars and a the dull bass of a club somewhere, and clung to the body that clung to his.

Chapter 4

Thank you for reading, there's more to come...

Read Chapter 4

Glorfindel was behind the door, pleading in his soft liquor voice to be let in. Erestor stood on the other side just a few steps away with his eyes closed, trying not to listen but listening all the same. He tried to focus on the song on the radio but it was too quiet; just a voice and piano and its sweetness only made him think of Glorfindel, pleading on the other side of the door where the rain was coming down in a brisk shower. Erestor’s heart lurched in his chest and he might have fallen to the floor.

 

It’d be easier to be a heap than a man.

 

The floor of the shop needed sweeping and it was at the wooden boards that Erestor stared, paralysed by indecision, fingering the tantalising possibility of crumpling. Indecision, it seemed like the wrong word for the tumult swirling in Erestor’s head, it lacked the gravitas to describe it, and it had been swirling for a day and a half. He brushed a foot over the boards, taking anchorage in the gritty sound under his heel. His life had capsized again.

 

‘Erestor?’ Glorfindel said from outside. His voice was muffled through the door, plaintive and sad.

 

Erestor said a prayer. He’d been thinking yesterday and through all of this morning, too. Elrond had told him to take the week off after his incident but the thought of being at home with nobody else but himself (and Barbara) and a mind full of leaden thoughts was more a punishment than a reprieve. So he’d come to work, and found that all his troubles had traced his steps to find him anew amongst the relics.

 

And they just would not be assuaged, these frets that picked at him constantly like so many carrion birds. The root of it was always the same even if the superficial worry varied hour by hour, minute by minute, heartbeat by heartbeat - what was Glorfindel’s intent? Who is he? Erestor plucked at the collar of his jumper, his fingers were restless and his resolve wavering with each gentle call of his name, each promise of honesty.

 

But if Glorfindel was an agent, what did that make Erestor?

 

Bait?

 

It was an worry that Erestor had thought to be shelved ever since that night that they had kissed under the streetlamp, but the trepidation was resilient and ugly and Erestor could not guess where Glorfindel’s duties started and finished. He would have to obey his orders, wouldn’t he? Even if the order was to get close to a small, unassuming antiques shop worker in order to neutralise a crime ring.

 

And that was the thought that had hounded Erestor like a beast, gnawing at the heel of all his other thoughts. It was there no matter what. I’m being used.

 

‘Erestor, please let me in! Please, please just tell me what’s wrong and we can talk about it, we can... we can talk about whatever you like, just let me in, let me see you.’

 

‘Would they be your own words, if we talked?’ Erestor asked, feeling a bit silly talking to a closed door.

 

‘They’re all my own words, Erestor, all of them - they always have been. I’m not paid to talk. You have to believe that.’

 

Was it that simple? Erestor doubted it, but then why not? If life could turn from blessedly uneventful to organised chaos in the space of a few days - then why could it not reverse itself in an equally rapid fashion? It was a pretty hope, and even though it soothed Erestor’s suspicion enough to give him cause to approach the door, he knew it was a folly - it was easier to rip a sheet of paper than to fix it back up again, easier to shoot a man in the chest than to retrieve the bullet and close the wound.

 

Erestor put his hand on the wood of the door. He could almost feel Glorfindel’s blazing desperation through it. He could hear the rain.

 

‘Why would Elrond pay me to do the things I did? He tells me not to intervene, he tells me to tidy up discreetly, he’s never told me to pretend to get close to you! That was... that was all my own doing, Erestor, and it hasn’t been an act! Elrond paid me to look after you and this shop ever since they got to Celebrían - doesn’t that make sense?’

 

Erestor could have smiled; Glorfindel was learning to know him well, playing to Erestor’s sense of the sensible. And his words did have a truth to them, indeed. Erestor could not find his voice. He splayed his fingers out over the door and nodded, watching the dust swirl in the dulcet light pouring from the windows, but it was not for Glorfindel to see.

 

‘I care for you, Erestor, and money can’t buy that. You can’t be ordered to want to be with someone.’

 

He argued his case well and fell silent though Erestor could still feel him there, waiting. He replayed Glorfindel’s words over again and swallowed them like a bitter pill. He’d spoken the plain truth, and now all that stood between them was a thin strip of reinforced wood with a hand-painted sign that Celebrían had designed, so long ago.

 

Open! said the sign, on Glorfindel’s side.

 

Perhaps it was time. Erestor felt a trickle of anticipation which lent strength to his decision. Perhaps I believed him all along, perhaps I just wanted to put the screws in to make him blaze for me. Erestor quashed the thought. Or, perhaps I was, am, just fucking confused, seeing as I polish old coins for a living and leave the house twice a week of my own volition to buy milk and cigarettes.

 

‘I’m going to open the door.’ said Erestor, and his voice sounded loud and stark in the empty shop. There was half an hour to go before they officially opened for business and Glorfindel had liked to visit before the morning customers, to bring coffee and food and sparkling conversation. He’d been greeted this morning with a locked door and a whimpering waif behind it, however - and it hadn’t been fair. Erestor produced the key from his pocket, it had a small yellow smiley-face key ring to mark it as Elrond’s master-key.

 

The clocks were out of time again and each tick Erestor felt in the marrow of his bones. He slid the small silver key into the lock and was poised to turn it. Let the light in, something seemed to say to him, and they key turned easily at his whim. He heard Glorfindel say something in relief, something that Erestor didn’t catch - he was sure Glorfindel spoke some other mother tongue where the words were far more poignant and apt for descriptions.

 

He pulled open the door a fraction. The rain smelt heady and dewy, it was the lifeblood of the spring. Glorfindel was there and seemed to be taking as much shelter as the small ledge over the shop’s door could afford; which was to say, not much at all. He was soaked through, despite the heavy black coat. ‘Erestor,’ he said, his smile was a flash of tenuous hope that wrenched Erestor’s heart anew.

 

And when he said Erestor’s name again, it was a low sigh.

 

He could kill a man like that, with that voice.

 

Glorfindel pushed an arm through the gap in the door to stroke Erestor’s cheek with the back of his damp hand. Erestor placed his own over Glorfindel’s, stroking a thumb across its wetness, and Glorfindel bowed his head and laughed - once - a despairing sound of fragility that seemed to shake the plates in the shop.

 

The rain was not letting up. Erestor felt a dozen errant drops as he came closer. He felt a dozen more when he reached up to ghost his breath across Glorfindel’s lips. The door was between them but each reached for the other in some small way.

 

‘I don’t know the first thing about you,’ Erestor whispered. It was a truth as much as it was an untruth, and it made Glorfindel smile. A bead of water dripped from his nose.

 

‘You could get to know me,’ he said sadly, in reply.

 

Erestor smiled. If he’d laughed, he would have cried with his next breath. Glorfindel guided them together and their kiss was tender and touched with a light, affectionate apprehension - a cautious pre-empting.

 

‘Just kiss me,’ Erestor whispered, eyes closed and listening half to the outdoors, the rain and the street beat and half to the creaking of the shop, the must of time immemorial. Two worlds in collision, joined by a coming together of lips and hands and fingers...

 

‘Then open the door, kitten,’

 

Erestor did.

 

It was quiet in the shop when Glorfindel entered, pushing the door closed behind him as an afterthought. He never looked away from Erestor, didn’t smile, didn’t make light. Behind his eyes was a starfield and each was a fire of its own. Erestor pulled him close by the lapels of his sodden coat, they were the only two things moving in the shop, the only two things that disturbed the dancing dust columns, shimmering at the window. Their dance was the only one that mattered, and everything else stayed and stopped to watch.

 

Glorfindel kissed the delicate skin under Erestor’s eyes - one kiss under each closed lid.

 

When he was finished they rested brow to brow and drew from the mingled breath between them. Erestor pushed off Glorfindel’s wet coat and it fell to the floor heavily. The shirt he wore underneath (a delicate powdered blue) had a few sodden patches where the rain had trickled through. Erestor touched them, and Glorfindel stirred.

 

Kiss me,

 

Their eyes met, but only for a second.

 

Trust me.

 

Erestor closed them again when Glorfindel kissed him, when he held him by the waist and started to move him backwards, gently, a step at a time. Towards the counter? Erestor smiled, and Glorfindel kissed that too.

 

The light song on the radio was a lilting ambience somewhere far away. Glorfindel was heavy with want and Erestor could taste it on his lips, in the shallow kisses they shared and broke and shared again. Erestor made a soft noise of surprise when he felt his back bump against the counter, and then another to feel Glorfindel’s body pressed to his; tight.

 

And Glorfindel was kissing him differently now. Deep, slow kisses where he could sigh his contentment and share a greater part of himself. His pornstar kisses. When Erestor pressed him for more, he gave it, and Erestor moaned to feel a tongue slide against his. Opening an eye for a fraction of a second - Erestor saw that Glorfindel had his closed and he was beautiful in his unspoiled affection. His golden lashes painted a pretty fan shadow under his eyes.

 

‘Kitten,’ Glorfindel smiled when Erestor told him how pretty he was, how pretty his eyelashes and their shadows were. His voice had been breathy, his words cut off by magnetic kisses, but now Glorfindel was looking at him with some intent, and he took Erestor’s hands. ‘There’s something,’ he began again, suddenly sultry. ‘There’s something I want you to feel.’

 

An electric charge of excitement traced the current of Erestor’s spine as Glorfindel guided his hands. He pushed them under his shirt and the skin of his stomach was taut and rippled, carven out of living marble. Fuck. Erestor could feel his heartbeat in his ears again, and was glad that it hadn’t taken a fire-fight showdown this time.

 

No, all it had taken was Glorfindel’s washboard abs.

 

He was life, and light.

 

And he was pushing Erestor’s hands up his shirt. He paused Erestor’s progress with a gentle hint and Erestor roused himself from the languid delight he had fallen into, being so directed by one so assured. His hands were resting on Glorfindel’s chest.

 

Is this where he wants me to touch him?

 

Erestor, judging from the way Glorfindel was kissing him with a sparkling anticipation, assumed so. He gave a cursory brush of his thumbs over the hardening nipples just within reach; and suddenly he understood. Piercings. Glorfindel gave a delighted sigh. They had to be some breach of health and safety sanctions, Erestor thought to himself as he worked the metal and skin lightly with the balls of his thumbs, but then how many missions would require Glorfindel to be topless?

 

Not enough.

 

Glorfindel was getting vocal. He whispered his pleasure hummed deeply into the kisses that had turned to something wildly erotic as Glorfindel cradled Erestor’s neck with one hand and the other he let wander - stroking a line down from collarbone to navel, hooking his fingers into the waistline of his pants when Erestor’s manual ministrations particularly pleased him. He swore when Erestor withdrew his fingers and leant down instead to ply his tongue to the piercings through the fabric of his shirt.

 

He could feel the metal bar against his tongue. He could feel Glorfindel gathering his dark hair in his hands so as to keep it from tangling. He could feel his own arousal being stirred by Glorfindel’s. Erestor pressed the fullness of his tongue over the mound of Glorfindel’s nipple, creating a generous wet patch; a love bite for clothes. Glorfindel was saying something, but Erestor was more focused on flicking his tongue over and under and across the piercings as best as the fabric barrier would allow.

 

Until Glorfindel drew him up with a thirst for more kisses.

 

Erestor met the summons and pushed his fingers into golden hair. Glorfindel was biting his lip, kissing him as though he would be deprived of life’s essence were he not to drink it from Erestor’s mouth. They had become all that existed in the world again, a primordial union of heat and lust’s touch. It was tactile; tangible, and Erestor was a panting wreck when Glorfindel’s palm brushed the hardness of his erection over his pants.

 

Fuck!

 

They saw one another, met gazes.

 

Glorfindel applied his palm again with a heavier touch, and was about to lean in for another wicked kiss when the door chime tinkled merrily.

 

Shit.

 

Glorfindel suddenly turned around.

 

Shit!

 

It was Elrond.

 

... shit!!

 

He was standing by the door with two very full, very heavy looking shopping bags in his hands. His hood was still up but his pale, rain daubed face was pointedly and bemusedly looking at them both. Erestor barely dared to peep over Glorfindel’s shoulder at him, standing a few meters or so away with the musky halo of yellowing light the shop windows afforded him, but when he did - he saw a wry smirk curling at the corner of Elrond’s mouth.

 

‘Boys,’ he said, in way of greeting, the vocal equivalent of a quirked brow.

 

Glorfindel disentangled himself from Erestor though they remained joined by their little fingers, siding side by side like little miscreants on the school yard.

 

‘Elrond!’ Glorfindel said, after clearing his throat. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

 

‘You weren’t expecting me to come to work in my own shop? The one with my name above the door?’ Elrond replied, and it was a jest rather than a reprimand. He pushed back his hood and let the bursting bags drop by his legs on the floor.

 

Erestor was barely daring to breathe, but appreciated the reassuring kiss Glorfindel pressed to his brow.

 

‘We’ve got a stock-take to do, gentlemen. And Glorfindel, whilst you’re here, you may as well give us a hand.’ Elrond chimed, taking great joy in the command, it seemed. Erestor had to laugh at the dumbstruck surprise that had turned Glorfindel’s smile stale.

 

And he laughed even more when Glorfindel mouthed stock-take?

 

-

 

Glorfindel, it turned out, was a quick study and had soon gotten the hang of the art of stocktaking. It had never been something Erestor had enjoyed, pawing through the relics each week and counting the same god-awful statuettes that clearly nobody wanted to buy - but today was different, today there was a levity in the air that lightened the weight of Erestor’s body and he smiled often, not catching himself until Elrond or Glorfindel did.

 

And Elrond clearly enjoyed the extra company and subsequent extra chitchat. He was sat in the wicker window-seat (that, criminally, was nowhere near the window) and ticking off something on a stack of papers in his lap. His thinning hair was still ruffled by the wind and the rain but he was smiling, too, and watched just as Erestor watched whenever Glorfindel became distracted by some unearthed treasure or a painting wherein he fancied the look of the little watercolour figure dabbed in greens and golds. These distractions happened often, but neither Erestor nor Elrond could bring themselves to reprimand him.

 

It would have been like disciplining a puppy.

 

So Elrond and Erestor exchanged smiles, instead, and the occasional fond rolling of the eyes.

 

Sometimes a customer or two would enter the shop and call out merrily to the “boys” working so hard on a Tuesday, and Erestor would man the till for a time and nod agreeably as he was regaled with the shocking story of how Estella, the wildcard of the local nursing home, had in fact stolen old Josie’s slippers and worn them outside, outside! Erestor said that he could surely not believe such a scandal, and Wrinkled Ron said that no, he couldn’t either! Wrinkled Ron bought a book of old war coins and his wife one of the little watercolours, and when he left - Erestor heaved a sigh before the door chime had even finished tinkling its farewell.

 

‘When I get old and decrepit,’ he began, sliding out from behind the counter to rejoin the stocktake, ‘please, for the love of all that’s holy, do not put me in a fucking retirement village.’

 

‘There’s more courtly intrigue in the Holly House than the entire Tudor court,’ Elrond agreed.

 

Glorfindel laughed. He took Erestor’s small hands in his and put a honey kiss on the corner of Erestor’s lips. ‘Kitten,’ he said and it was all he said. Sometimes it was all Erestor needed. Sometimes it was enough.

 

Elrond watched, discreetly. Erestor was aware of it but then he could understand; for Elrond it must be a strange thing to see two of his friends from two very different worlds together, holding hands, stealing touches in-between affixing little price labels to the new cutlery. And if there was even the barest hint of speculation in Elrond’s grey eyes, well, Erestor could understand that too. He could understand it, strangely enough, because he himself didn’t understand the nature of his and Glorfindel’s relationship.

 

It’s not something to dwell on now, Erestor told himself, knowing full well that a time would come (and come soon) where that would change. But for now Elrond was singling along idly to the old ballad on the radio and Glorfindel had triumphantly assigned himself in charge of the bubblewrap. For now there was naught that needed to be pried into, unwound or unthreaded. For now there was a domestic bliss, a calm, and none of the three of them were like to disturb it.

 

Erestor held a saucer in his hand. It was a fragile thing, but quite beautiful. The brush strokes were fine and thin, leaving silvery trails.

 

He handed it to Glorfindel, to be wrapped up, and Glorfindel’s fingers brushed against Erestor’s as he passed him the little plate - and the tactility was quite deliberate. Touch, that was one thing Erestor knew about Glorfindel if he knew not a lot else; touch, it’s how he communicates. Touch was real to him; to touch was to feel, to ascertain the tangible and imbue it with the intangible. For Glorfindel, to touch was to speak.

 

And Erestor had always been certain that Glorfindel spoke more than just English.

 

They were staring at one another when Elrond broke the silence.

 

‘Tell me about Jonas,’ he said and it seemed from his voice that the suggestion had weighed on him for a considerable time. His tone was conversational and more than a little sympathetic. He was counting out autograph cards and muttering the numbers under his breath. But he still listened, even to the silence that answered his question.

 

Erestor’s stomach gave a lurch. He could hear the clocks again, and not for the first time in his life, he was grateful for Elrond’s boundless patience.

 

Glorfindel raised a brow. Erestor nodded, and so it was Glorfindel who retold the story of the car park and the sour deal and the six boxed in Bentleys with more than twice as many suited thugs with pistols. His retelling was modest, truthful - meant to pacify rather than inflame. He wrapped up the saucer with a careful deliberation, giving it more padding than it required, in truth. ‘It was bad, but in the end I got Erestor to the hospital and he flirted with the nurse and was discharged, in that order.’

 

‘Erestor did always have a thing for uniforms,’ Elrond winked.

 

Erestor’s smile was venomous and it just made Elrond laugh, and Elrond’s laughter was quiet.

 

‘But I asked because I think you should know, the both of you, that now he’s making trouble for more than just us. He’s been outed and thrown caution to the wind, a stupid thing to do - but then so was deciding to attack my dear old friend.’

 

‘If I’m old, Elrond, what in God’s name does that make you?’

 

‘About as old as half the things in this shop and certainly as old as these scraps of card, or older.’ he said, smiling and waving a yellowed and bent autograph card at them. ‘But the cat’s out of the bag now, in more respects than one. Just you both be careful out there.’

 

Glorfindel nodded. Erestor stood, his legs iron weights unresponsive to the command of movement, and stared unseeing at the vague space behind Elrond’s chair. There was a keen and broiling foreboding in the dark of Erestor’s gut and suddenly the quiet of the shop was oppressive, suddenly the shadows were dark and the sounds all too sharp. He could still remember the sounds of bullets and the writhing of the bodies.

 

Could it all happen again?

 

Erestor picked up a teacup.

 

Will he come for me?

 

He inhaled.

 

Will he come for Glorfindel?

 

‘Erestor?’ Glorfindel whispered in a voice meant for no one else.

 

He looked up and stemmed the shaking breath before it had chance to manifest and betray the prickles of fear goosing his back. Erestor smiled, and if Glorfindel found it unconvincing - he did not say so, and instead he wound a hand into Erestor’s hair and bent to kiss his raven crown. Erestor put his hands on Glorfindel’s chest.

 

His heartbeats were slower than the tickings of the clock.

 

‘Is this a new thing?’ Elrond asked. ‘You and Erestor?’

 

Erestor didn’t open his eyes but he smiled again and heard Glorfindel’s gentle laughter through his chest, he felt the beat of it within his body. He was alive. They both were alive.

 

Breathing came easier again.

 

‘New enough, yes,’ Glorfindel said.

 

There was pride in his voice.

 

‘I’m glad,’ said Elrond and beamed at them both as they parted. He was wiping the lenses of his glasses and using his shirt as a cloth. ‘You’re not either of you getting any younger, after all.’

 

Glorfindel laughed. For a time it was the only sound in the shop and it lingered after it died. The shop was a graveyard of history, a sacred place made so sacred by the memories that clung to everything like a fine dust, and it loved the sound of light and delight - both things Glorfindel aurated with abundance. Erestor had wondered on more than one occasion whether the pieces and pots and plates and prints in this shop ever mourned for their owner, for their own age or country. He’d asked Elrond once, and Elrond had taken away his obituaries for a week.

 

‘Keep an eye out for another plate to match the one I bought that other time,’ said Glorfindel, quite seriously.

 

Elrond paused his cleaning of his glasses to gape.

 

‘Tell me it wasn’t you who bought that plate,’

 

‘It was him, Elrond, it was him.’

 

Elrond laughed and shook his head, tutting. There were shadows on his shoulders and body, draped like a cloak of dark cut from a warm place of summer’s dark. ‘I dread to think of the wedding china he might pick out for you, Erestor.’

 

Glorfindel laughed, and there might have been a blush rouging his cheeks. It was hard to tell and Erestor knew better than to tease and ask. ‘Just keep an eye out,’

 

A tranquilly resumed, then, blanketing the three of them with amicable silence wherein they fell back to task, working each at their own pace and each in with conjunction with the others. A graveyard of history, Erestor thought, watching Glorfindel wrap up more little silver spoons, a sacred place of sacred things.

 

Elrond caught his eye.

 

Elrond smiled an all-knowing smile and Erestor could not have stopped the impulsive, coy little smile he replied with, even had he wanted to. It seemed real to him now, all that had happened; the date, the disaster, the hospital, the kisses and the... piercings. Elrond knew, Elrond had seen them and had somehow validated something with his passive observation. Erestor looked at Glorfindel again.

 

And he knew, in that moment, that he could make him his own.

 

The was a warning twinge in the back of Erestor’s mind, a warning of trust, for hadn’t he only this morning wavered, hadn’t he spent the past day and a night unsleeping, unthinking save for to ponder and fret about the strength of their bond? Erestor swallowed. He polished a little picture frame with a yellow cloth, if only to keep his hands busy and his internal struggle disguised.

 

It came down to one question: is there trust between us, or is there not?

 

Erestor furrowed his brow. He did not think for an answer, he did not search his head for a yes or a no or any other string of words to apply logic to the conundrum, but rather he let himself think in abstraction. He searched for the truth and he searched for feeling, he thought with his heart’s blood and heart’s heart, and knew that it was there - trust - they did have it.

 

They had to have it. Trust was a construction, just as any relationship was. Erestor wished that he’d listened to his mother now, during those conversations where she’d brush his hair and talk to him of love and how to treat a lady, how to know oneself. He remembered the snow in the grooves of the window and her jasmine scent. He remembered her impossibly long hair, but only a few of her actual words.

 

He caught sight of himself in the reflection of the spoon, warped and shrunk and gleaming metallic.

 

And Glorfindel was stood beside him.

 

-

 

Make yourself at home.

 

Erestor was looking at the picture frames on the fire mantelpiece. Some of the photos had been bleached by the sun and their colour lost, turned to a pale ghost of the vividness that surely must have been, but there was no mistaking the golden blonde hair of the young boy and the woman beaming out of the frame. Erestor picked it up.

 

Glorfindel had driven them both out of the city and through the surrounding green band to his house for what he called a “sleepover”. Erestor had initially quirked a brow but Glorfindel had stated his intentions were pure, that he wished simply to spend some time together away from the shop and the city. It was a blunt and honest attempt at forging a deeper trust, but Erestor could not deny his own curiosity (nor his want) and had agreed with a mock-defeated smile. Glorfindel had been overjoyed.

 

And now he was getting changed, upstairs, and had left Erestor to his own machinations in the living room. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he had declared merrily and paired the words with a kiss. Erestor, just like the other dozen times he had been invited into a new house and told to do so, had initially just sat himself on the edge of the sofa (brown leather, covered with soft, chocolate throws) and contented himself with waiting.

 

It was a pleasant room, large and airy with dark beams in the vaulted ceiling. There was an abundance of clutter which marked it clearly as Glorfindel’s domicile, and Erestor had cast a politely curious eye around at the side tables and the lamps, the coffee table and the books and papers and empty cups (with just a little cold coffee still left inside), at the large TV where Erestor adjusted his hair in the smoky reflection. He could hear Glorfindel’s footsteps above...

 

The curtains were not fully open despite it only being early-evening. And they were red, giving the little light that filtered through them a dark, hazy tint that was the very air of heavy relaxation, pleasant lethargy. It was quiet, and calm.

 

And eventually the urge to gently pry and poke about had been too strong, Erestor had risen to investigate. So he stood with the picture frame in hand, turning it over as though expecting to find some clue as to the identity of the little faces, but, as he turned it again, he reckoned that he could probably guess. He smiled. Wasn’t it something of an old courtship tradition to look through embarrassing childhood pictures?

 

Isn’t it a gesture of trust? To let someone into that part of your life, to let someone into your childhood?

 

As Erestor moved along the mantelpiece, he found more pictures and more beaming blondes - a whole clan of them, two rows of men and women and small children in-between, standing out in a garden with the sun in their eyes, causing them to squint at the camera. But their smiles were not dampened, not in the slightest.

 

A dozen new questions prickled at Erestor.

 

Who is he? He wondered, looking at the face of a decidedly teenage looking Glorfindel, already a head taller than most of the women in frame, already taking the shape of a burly rugby sort. He seemed to be sporting some kind of facial hair - more a fuzz than anything else. Erestor had to laugh, quietly. Who was he?

 

Erestor heard Glorfindel’s step on the stairs and a nervous twitch bade him dart back over to the sofa and assume innocence and play the coy, polite visitor who had been able to wait with patience and still fingers, but a larger part of Erestor wished to continue his investigation - after all, Glorfindel wouldn’t have invited him into his home if he hadn’t meant for him to see these things, surely?

 

And Erestor wished to look at the picture of a woman he had spied. He stepped into a thin beam of sunlight, pushing through the curtains and falling onto the floor and up the wall and leaving a warm trail up Erestor’s neck; the sun’s dying light had ever been its warmest and brightest. Erestor picked up the frame. A woman of about forty was smiling demurely. She had grey in her yellow hair and gentle lines around her eyes and mouth, but she shone, quite brilliantly.

 

Yet, there was something about her portrait that sobered Erestor immediately, something about the melancholy in her smile.

 

She had sad eyes.

 

‘Erestor?’

 

He kept his eyes on hers for a moment, before turning with the picture in hand. Glorfindel was standing in the doorway, dressed in his “house” clothes - namely an old t-shirt and yoga pants - and was clutching a blanket that he had evidently tried his best to fold into a neat square. He was smiling.

 

And then he saw the picture in Erestor’s hands.

 

Words failed Erestor and became as distant to him as the pinprick stars. He clutched and grasped for some explanation to give, something to smooth the incredulity from Glorfindel’s face before it turned to disappointment or, even worse, anger, but reason slipped through his fingers. Something nervous flitted in Erestor’s stomach, and he could only gape as a fish out of water, cursing himself for jeopardising the trust they were supposed to be building!

 

‘Glorfindel,’ he said, lowly, apologetically.

 

But Glorfindel’s face had cleared, he was smiling a small smile.

 

‘My mother,’ he said.

 

But that was all.

 

Erestor returned the smile, gently. Glorfindel was holding out a hand to him in silent invitation, and Erestor set the picture back on the mantle with one final look at the woman who was Glorfindel’s mother. Was? Erestor rebuked himself for use of the word. She had a light about her that she had clearly passed to her son, but the weight on her brow was more profound and the quirk of her lips grander for it. Erestor sat the picture back in its proper place and crossed the dim lit room, stepping over the bars of light that fell molten upon the carpet. He took Glorfindel’s hand, warm and large and holding his own as though it were a massively delicate thing.

 

He was led up a steep flight of stairs and across a narrow landing, into a room that could only have been Glorfindel’s bedroom. It was a sanctuary, and it was his. Erestor paused at the doorway and Glorfindel turned.

 

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked, blinking slowly.

 

Erestor looked into the room, the haven that Glorfindel had moulded to himself over the years. There was a scent in the air, some amalgamation of vanilla and white musk and flowers, and the walls were a mint; spring green. There were a lot of candles, too, Erestor noted, and some of them were aflame and danced on their wicks to greet them.

 

He nodded his answer and Glorfindel smiled. He brought them to the bed, a large, ornate thing where the covers were white and the wood dark, and bade Erestor to lay beside him - it was an easy request to fulfil. They lay atop the duvet and sheets but Glorfindel put the blanket over them, he smiled when Erestor came close to lie his head upon his chest, and stroked the dark raven tangles of his hair.

 

And Erestor watched the shadows of the branches of the trees outside sway across the ceiling, gently, gently...

 

There was naught but a silence between them, something fragile and held between the both of their hands; it was, in itself, a gesture of trust - that they would not break it, that they could deign to dwell in peace without the urge to fill it with noise. Glorfindel’s fingers were warm, and he brushed them over the shell of Erestor’s ear. Erestor kept a hand of his own upon Glorfindel’s chest and he felt its every rise and fall, the motion of his life so close to his own, the beating of his heart so loud in his conscience.

 

It would have been so easy to fall asleep, there was just... something that prevented greater rest. And Erestor agonized silently.

 

But it did not escape notice, his sudden tensing.

 

‘What’s bothering you, kitten?’

 

Erestor didn’t know, truly, and said so.

 

‘Can I answer any more questions for you?’ asked Glorfindel, his voice was low and Erestor heard it through his chest.

 

He smiled, ‘No, no. This is all just very new to me,’ he said.

 

‘And to me,’

 

‘Really?’ Erestor asked, his doubt a playful note that made Glorfindel laugh.

 

‘The relationship part of things, yes!’

 

Relationship.

 

Erestor had not thought about defining what they shared in those terms yet, but the word did not daunt him. Glorfindel twined their fingers together, a gesture so achingly intimate and slow that Erestor drew a sigh. It was all a bit quick - he was in Glorfindel’s bed, already! But not for sex; not yet, though he could not deny the physical attraction... not after what had occurred in the shop that morning.

 

Glorfindel was good, strong, undoubtedly gorgeous - and seemingly smitten.

 

I could have him.

 

‘There is something bothering you, isn’t there?’ Glorfindel insisted, pressing their hands further together. ‘Is this the part where you spill your tragic back-story to me?’

 

Erestor laughed, a little dryly.

 

‘No, nothing like that.’ he said, though he sensed that for all Glorfindel’s jesting and joking, he might have one. And if the pictures on the mantelpiece were anything to go by... It was surging again, the urge to pry, the urge that had been satisfied for god-knows-how-many years of reading obituaries. Erestor took a shallow breath. ‘What happened to your mother, Glorfindel?’

 

Silence.

 

Please say “nothing”, please say that she’s alive and well and living out her retirement years in a villa by the Mediterranean.

 

‘She died, kitten, there was a fire in my old town. A lot of my family died, a lot of other families died.’

 

Erestor’s heart broke in his chest. Glorfindel was staring absently at the ceiling when Erestor sat up a little to meet his eyes. He resisted, at first, but then he looked and Erestor had to kiss him, sweetly, before the look in his eyes shattered his heart anew. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, kissing him again.

 

‘You’re very kind,’ Glorfindel said quietly, stroking Erestor’s cheek. ‘But it happened a long time ago, now.’

 

Somehow, Erestor did not think that mattered. Would a space of a hundred years ease the pain of a lost family? Of a lost mother, a lost life? It was a testament to his strength, Erestor supposed, laying himself back down to rest and seeking Glorfindel’s hand to join with his own, again. And he felt the puzzle starting to make sense; the pieces were gravitating together.

 

Glorfindel; a wanderer, a lonely star.

 

Their hands fit so well together, their fingers fit so well.

 

Glorfindel was breathing deeply, in and out and in and out, saying nothing but the tension on his brow hinted at the heaviness abounding him. They were not thoughts Erestor was keen to disturb, but he watched the fading light play shadows on his face and watched the fluttering of his eyelashes; each blink a renewal of the light that Erestor had known, the light Erestor had taken for a spry mischievousness on that first day they had met.

 

And yet now...

 

He ached for him.

 

Erestor sighed.

 

Was love itself not an ache, an ache of the soul?

 

Everything had changed; again.

 

‘I love it when you start thinking all deep like that,’ Glorfindel said, his voice a gentle rousing stir that brought Erestor out of his internal slog. He smiled, Glorfindel smiled, but then it flickered and was snuffed.

 

‘What is it?’ Glorfindel whispered.

 

Birds were cooing outside. The wind was in the leaves and there were even a few voices, the sounds of the neighbours. And it was nothing new to Glorfindel, evidently, his gaze was resolute now and fixed on Erestor. He stroked his thumb over Erestor’s hands, and repeated his question.

 

‘Is this real?’ Erestor asked.

 

Glorfindel lowered his eyes for a moment, to laugh a breathy laugh.

 

‘As real as you want to make it.’

Chapter 5

The final chapter is being put up tonight too, so don't forget to check it out!

Read Chapter 5

The rains had finally come to an end and Erestor had ventured out of his apartment, tracing a slow path to the botanical gardens. A thick, white layer of clouds cast a grey smog of light over the city and mostly thwarted the sun’s attempts at shining through, but even so, there was a dull kind of lucidity to the day which made the puddles silvery; like pools of mercury. When he stepped in them to cross the road to the garden, they marbled and bled their silver and grey.

 

As usual, the gardens were busy and full of folks following the winding paths, walking dogs or jogging or simply, as Erestor was, enjoying a mild Sunday outside. It was a brisk day, not yet spring but then not quite winter, either, some other season stirred the air that pinched playfully at noses and cheeks and Erestor saw the population divided into two halves; those who still wrapped themselves up in scarves and gloves, and those who had braved the breeze without a coat in what could only be described as an optimistic venture. Erestor counted himself amongst the former - he would have to see the sun to believe it.

 

He would have to feel it - perhaps Glorfindel was starting to rub off on him.

 

He walked under bare groves of trees where the raindrops fell from pointed branches, reaching to mingle with one another, reaching to assert themselves in whatever free space they could. He walked by quickly, noting to himself that they’d look much friendlier in the spring, adorned with a canopy of sweet green and yellow leaves. The recent winter had been harsh in her reign, steeling all those who had fallen under her reach.

 

Not unlike a certain geography teacher Erestor had known...

 

Erestor had been idling along the narrow trail and looking sympathetically at the flowerbeds where there were no flowers (not yet) when he was suddenly accosted by a dog.

 

A big dog.

 

The dog bounded up to set his paws on Erestor’s belly. Erestor inwardly screamed, and did not fully appreciate the amicable canine gesture of greeting. He bit his tongue and bit back the swear that he was certain would rouse the angry wrath of a dozen mothers and tried, with more bravery than he was certain it should take, to push the dog off of him, gently, as so not to rouse the angry wrath of one big hound. Passers-by were giving him odd looks.

 

Erestor could have sworn at them, too.

 

And, to his utter dread, the dog did not leave when he had been prised from his body. It sat on the ground, quite merrily wagging its tail and knocking a few leaves about, looking up at Erestor with literal puppy eyes (though the dog itself was fully grown and handsome, a yellow Labrador with a smiling face). Erestor looked at it and then looked away just as quickly, glancing around seeking an owner who might have lost their mongrel. His heart was beating ten to the dozen, he raked back his hair and scanned the thinning crowd.

 

This dog can probably smell Barbara on me, that’s all. Barbara and fear.

 

Then the dog barked.

 

Erestor looked at it, wondering why nobody else in the vicinity was alarmed that he was going to get mauled and eaten by this dog.

 

The dark barked again, and Erestor squinted, looking at the red collar around its neck and divining a name etched onto the little dangling token. Chappy.

 

There was only one man in the city who would name a dog something so brilliantly uninspired, and Erestor momentarily hazed over with a relief so palpable he was afraid he might lose all corporeal bindings and melt into a blissful aether. And then the dog barked and Erestor jumped near half a mile out of his skin. He braced himself with the wind decided to follow the beast who had lolloped to his feet with the clear intention of playing a expansive game of fetch wherein Erestor was the twig.

 

And Erestor did feel a bit twigg-ish. He pulled his coat further around himself and followed the dog, as casually as he might, to a neat picnic area with a flat lawn and a generous dotting of benches that were mostly occupied despite the recent foul weather and the rain that lingered after its fall. It was to one of these that the dog brought him, winding through the crowd with more ease than Erestor could manage. But eventually they found Elrond, sat alone and sat quietly, eating a white bread sandwich and looking out at the vista of branches and shrubs all poised for the outbreak of warmer climes.

 

It was a waiting game, and Elrond too waited for the sun’s return, in a manner of speaking.

 

‘Don’t you have to be an eighty-four year old man to do things like this,’ Erestor said as he approached, making a gesture to the sandwiches. Elrond turned, surprised, he smiled and fed Chappy a little of the sandwich from his hand. The dog was well pleased and the sky was bright and white.

 

‘Erestor,’ laughed Elrond. ‘How nice to see you out and about in daylight! Is your skin burning, by any chance? Are you starting to miss your coffin?’

 

‘A little, it’s true,’

 

They both laughed and it was easy, a simple thing that came unforced and that was what Erestor had always liked about Elrond; his unflappable demeanour, his control. Erestor sat himself down beside Elrond (casting a wary glance at a sated Chappy) and stared out at the same midseason montage that played out before them. They were perched, everyone and everything, on the precipice of transition. Erestor could feel it in the deeper part of himself. He felt a shiver.

 

‘How are you?’ Elrond asked.

 

Erestor weighed up the question.

 

‘Not bad,’ he said with a smile, and it was the truth. It made Elrond smile, and he said no more for a time, and the pair simply sat; friends through thick and thin and thick again.

 

And Chappy wasn’t so bad, either.

 

***

 

They began on a slow walk back to Elrond’s house after a while in the gardens, and Elrond had initially suggested (in a tone altogether far too convincing) that Erestor could walk the other dogs. His laughter at Erestor’s stricken expression had turned the heads of a few commuters as they crossed the road out of the garden, and he replaced the suggestion with the idea of a cup of tea and a nice sit down instead; an idea that was far, far more agreeable to Erestor.

 

‘You’re an old bastard, you know that?’ Erestor said, shaking his head.

 

‘Oh, it’s one of the joys of my life.’ Elrond replied with a chuckle.

 

Chappy wagged his tail.

 

The streets were grey and rain-washed and the texture of the buildings seemed all the rougher for it, as though the buildings were protesting the shower. Concrete and brick did not so much love the deluges as the mud and bushels did, and Erestor felt the keenness of departure as they left the tranquillity of the botanical gardens behind and fell in with the buzz of the city, becoming a part of its endless moving bloodstream. It was just life of a different kind.

 

The city life.

 

And the sky was still white; unreachable, nothing. It made the day feel thin somehow, but then Erestor had never been able to enjoy Sundays when the thought of Monday hung so heavily, like the creaking sign of an old pub, moving stiffly.

 

Elrond made pleasant conversation as they walked, asking of Erestor’s mother (who was quite well, and phoning every Tuesday evening to ask if Erestor had made an honest man of himself yet) and of Erestor’s apartment neighbours who usually had gotten up to something marvellously ridiculous, such as, most recently, accidently dropping fruit out of their window so that Erestor saw it fly by his not a moment later. The stories always tickled Elrond, and he shook his head with gentle laughter. Gentility was the key to their conversational code, and both men could feel the timbre of the morning.

 

It was not one to be weighed down with heavier conversation, and Erestor was glad of the reprieve.

 

Naturally, no sooner had the thought occurred than a car pulled up roughly on the curb beside them, drawing a few shocked utterances from the milling pedestrians nearby. Cars were not supposed to just pull up out of the blue, not at speed. Elrond and Erestor looked, with Elrond murmuring something ominous under his breath.

 

An emerald green Jaguar.

 

A blonde driver, looking stressed beyond his bounds.

 

Glorfindel?

 

‘What is it?’ Elrond asked, making a dash to the car window and suddenly his was the very essence of severity. It was jarring to Erestor, who edged closer though he suspected maybe he should not... but Glorfindel - he looked as taxed as Erestor had ever seen him.

 

He could barely breathe to splutter his sentence.

 

‘They’ve found her,’ he said, dire.

 

‘No,’ Elrond whispered, eyes wide with a ripening dread. Chappy was growing restless and Erestor needed no further clue as to what had happened. Celebrían - the sunshine for which Elrond waited, so patiently. Thugs of Jonas’ character had been to ones who had put her in the hospital in the first place. Memory blended with a fragile present, Erestor remembered the shop, remembered Elrond’s warning that there was more to come, more thugs moving openly against them.

 

And now, they had found Celebrían?

 

Erestor’s spine tingled.

 

This went beyond attempt to demoralise.

 

‘Come with me,’ Glorfindel pressed Elrond. ‘I need directions to her hospital,’

 

The engine turned over and over and Elrond’s brow was furrowed in a mechanical thinking process. Glorfindel waited with stretched patience. Erestor could almost hear the ticking of the clocks in the shop again and felt his face blanche when Elrond turned to him, saying his name. ‘Erestor,’ he said. ‘You go,’

 

‘What?’

 

‘I’m going to the shop. I’m going to ring up a few more friends and then we’re going to follow you.’

 

He turned, he clapped Erestor on the shoulder.

 

‘Are you sure?’ Erestor asked, with incredulity that was the amalgamation of half a dozen other buzzing responses; fear, confusion, shock... They swirled in his upper conscience without sinking in, yet. The buildings were all so tall, the pavement hard under his feet.

 

Was it only 11am?

 

Elrond’s eyes were grey steel, his mouth a thin line. The passers-by became nothing but a moving hoard, a blend of grey and black that served to only fill up the negative space that Erestor saw. He could hear the hum, but did not know how much of it was real and how much imagined; it didn’t matter.

 

Celebrían.

 

‘I’m sure, now go!’

 

-

 

The wind tried to steal the words out of Erestor’s mouth but he stole them back; he could make himself heard when needs must, and he shouted directions as and when he remembered them. The windows of the car were rolled down and the constant stream of brisk air, blowing a small controlled gale, added to the tension of pursuit, like so many hands forcing them back, pushing them back. The city had suddenly become a maze and it seemed they were forever turning this way and that, they were forever chasing a destination just beyond the bend...

 

Time pressed against Erestor’s conscience. The engine was a growl that he felt under his feet. It was twenty minutes past eleven, and the city was slow.

 

Erestor felt small in the passenger seat, barking left! or right! or sometimes take the turning here, it’s quicker! Glorfindel said not a word, an oddity in itself but a tribute to a professionalism that Erestor hadn’t expected, and his face was a hardened mask of some determination that managed to be gritty and utterly passionate at the same time. Sometimes his golden hair would be whipped over his face, just for a moment, and Erestor would feel a particular twinge in the heart of his body.

 

The sun was wresting through the clouds, spouting a gilded light. Glorfindel was gorgeous in his rigorousness, the sun loved his skin... it was sexy.

 

And this is so not the time to be thinking of this, Erestor!

 

Erestor quite agreed with himself and refocused on the road ahead, directing Glorfindel to take a right out of the city proper. The hospital was a private building and lay just outside of the city’s cosmopolitan heart. Erestor had expressed doubt when Elrond had first confided to him his wife’s location, but Elrond had smiled and said they’d never think to look right under their noses! Erestor had forced a smile to soothe his ailing friend, but had, ever since, thought the decision had more to do with proximity than tactical appraisal...

 

But who could blame the man? Erestor had never the heart.

 

With each surge of wind, each sharp turn of a corner - the adrenaline pooled in Erestor’s stomach jolted and spread to each extremity. He shivered a dread like a cold sweat that reached to all corners of his body; a chill. And Glorfindel, for all his attempts at concealment, was just as wound up. There was tension around his eyes and his brow was knitted.

 

He looked older. He looked like a federal agent.

 

Erestor covered Glorfindel’s hand, over the shift stick. Glorfindel looked at him for a moment, and his expression was softer, sympathetic.

 

‘It’ll be okay,’ he said.

 

‘I know.’ said Erestor, a small, uncertain smile turning a corner of his lips.

 

The lie was a lie and brutal in its juxtaposed honesty, but still, somehow, it settled them both. Glorfindel drove them out and through the city, following instruction with nary a word besides the occasional where now. Sometimes Erestor would not remember which turn to take, sometimes the roads would blur in his mind and the fog would not part, the panic would descend - and Glorfindel would call his name and ask again, never with any pressure, never with a threat colouring his words.

 

He would ask, and flex his fingers under Erestor’s hand, he’d turn and meet his eyes, keeping his other hand poised on the wheel, and Erestor would see they were very, very blue. The colour of a powdered sky that was the soul of summer.

 

‘Right,’ Erestor would say, remembering. ‘It’s right.’

 

‘Kitten,’

 

It was all Glorfindel needed to say.

 

***

 

The time was half past eleven when they finally reached the hospital. It was a modern building with white walls and mirrors, hiding in the outskirts of the city besides a few defunct retail parks and a family restaurant. It was far enough away from civilisation that a stretch of green could be seen if one peered out through to the horizon, and yet close enough to still be able to hear the sounds of the modern century; commute and commotion. Glorfindel guided the car around the front of the building, and into the carpark.

 

Eight cars were parked.

 

Six were black rentals.

 

Gravel crunched under the tires as Glorfindel slowed them down and took his time to park neatly - whether a feigned display of nonchalance or a dangerous act of calculated coolness, Erestor dared not guess. Glorfindel had his eyes fixed on a group of men stood in congregation besides a door that was marked staff only. They looked to be inputting a code - or at least trying to.

 

‘They’re having some difficulty,’ Erestor observed.

 

Two of the men had spotted Glorfindel’s car, and stood, perfectly still, watching. They wore dark sunglasses and suits and might well have had the word pawn stamped across their foreheads. Yet even though they lacked a certain tenacity, Erestor had no wish to see them take even a step closer to Celebrían. A fool of a man could still point a gun at an incapacitated target, after all, and a well paid fool would have no qualms about pulling the trigger.

 

Glorfindel pulled down the sun visor. He was wearing a dark shirt, a handsome plum colour. All the buttons were done up.

 

‘Things might just get even more difficult for them.’ Glorfindel said, eyeing up the men a moment longer before turning to Erestor.

 

He took his chin in hand and enforced their eye contact. Erestor had an overwhelming urge to smile; Glorfindel’s hands were warm and rough and their shared adrenaline a blazing thing. But smile Erestor did not, and met Glorfindel’s gaze.

 

The sun cast a glow behind him.

 

‘Stay in the car, baby.’

 

‘Baby?’

 

Glorfindel raised a brow, but did not smile, either. But he did lean forward for a kiss, a small, sweet thing that might well have been for luck or hope or whatever small strength Erestor could bequeath him, and no sooner had Erestor opened his eyes again than Glorfindel was exiting the car. The opening of the door was a sharp sound. The wind was cruel.

 

And then Glorfindel was gone and outside. He smoothed down his shirt and collar and began to walk, slowly, casually, over to the group of men who watched, like a pack of wolves, his approach. The sun was shining behind the building now, casting a long shadow. Glorfindel walked into it and suddenly the car was empty and Erestor felt a strangling dread.

 

He hopped over to the driver’s seat for a better view out of the window. His breathing was loud, filling the emptiness of the car that was not his own, misting the window - the glass a fragile barrier between him and all he held holy, all he held dear. The separation was an ache of trepidation and greater fear and Erestor watched Glorfindel engage in conversation with the would-be criminals, feeling oddly distant from it all.

 

A pane of glass, a car door, a stretch of tarmac - it was all that kept them apart, it was all that lay between them.

 

Their talk went on and on for some time, with Glorfindel talking circles around the men who had formed their own circle around him. He did not seem phased, though in truth Erestor could not see his face nor hear a word. He watched Glorfindel’s hands, he watched the shoulders of the men in suits, he watched their tapping feet and how they would look to one man in particular - the leader, no doubt. Erestor had his fingers wound around the car door’s handle.

 

He felt nothing besides a warning pang in his chest that had numbed the trammelling fear riding the beat of his heart, rising and falling like so many shaky breaths taken to still a jittering hand. It would come later, he knew, but he made Glorfindel his focus, and he remembered Elrond - who would be arriving soon, if the Gods were good. So long as there was a hope to cling to, a plan of some kind...

 

Glorfindel just had to play for time, and he played the game well.

 

Erestor exhaled, slowly, but the rest of him was still and predatory. He watched and waited, he listed and waited.

 

And he did not have to wait long before all hell broke loose.

 

The leader had pulled his gun on Glorfindel with a yelled command, gruff and impatient. Erestor heard the gun go off and gasped aloud, but Glorfindel was moving out of the circle, uninjured, and produced his own gun. Erestor saw the gleam of it and the metal was cruel, the metal that Glorfindel had carried so near his own heart.

 

It was shot after shot then and each made Erestor blink, for such was the noise and force. They bounced off the cars, and an alarm started to scream. Erestor remembered Jonas, the car park, he remembered the whistling of bullets and the sound they made when they collided with a human body. And he thought of Celebrían, he thought of the honey blonde who called him kitten and kissed him often. Erestor tested the door handle but did not fancy diving into the middle of a fire fight, even one as half-hearted as this. Glorfindel had pointed his gun at the foot of the leader who had subsequently fallen down after the bang and the scream.

 

The rest of the group faltered, then. A few were looking at the car with the blaring alarm and the flashing lights, knowing full well, no doubt, that the ruckus would drawn the hospital staff outside to investigate.

 

Glorfindel shot at another who dared an approach. He shot another warning shot after that and called something out to them, something that made them exchange looks. Another dared a lunge and an aim at Glorfindel but ended up a human heap. He screamed a vicious expletive, but Glorfindel paid him no mind. He was knelt beside the leader who had fallen by his car, grasping him by his tie and seemingly having a conversation of sorts. The man was shaking his head, trying to clutch at his leg, swearing, shouting, promising a revenge, screaming at his men to attack-

 

Glorfindel shot a bullet at nothing in particular.

 

Erestor had jumped, but the man stopped his balking only after a swift blow to the jaw with the butt of the pistol. He was talking now and talking frantically. Erestor saw Glorfindel give him a rough shake from time to time, like trying to wrest the stubborn coins from the nooks of the piggybank. It did not seem real to Erestor, watching Glorfindel acting so bleakly in the heat of the action - even now, watching him roughhouse the beaten criminal, the image that Erestor had of Glorfindel did not match the image of the one knelt in the long shadow of the hospital in his shirt and cufflinks.

 

He’s a trained force, Erestor reminded himself, but that’s only one part of who he is.

 

The leader was talking fast and Glorfindel was knelt to hear it, nodding and pushing the felon back if he tried to rise too suddenly. Erestor watched too, praying with each heartbeat that Glorfindel would get the information he needed, that Elrond would arrive, that the doctors and nurses would phone the police - that something happened to end this! The other men, in suits and shades, were retreating to their cars like snakes from a fire. They crept back and withdrew and Erestor heard the leader yell a fresh condemnation.

 

Glorfindel yelled something back and the man whimpered.

 

It was then that Erestor saw him; the opportunist. One of the louts had not slunk back to his rental Mercedes like the others and decided to employ stealth and sneak up on Glorfindel. His back was turned to Erestor but he could see the gun. The man’s fingers were poised and each step of his was a bleak tremor along Erestor’s spine. He couldn’t scream unless he wanted to be trapped in the car with his own despair, but he had no gun, no weapon to avert this with!

 

Unless...

 

Erestor slid out the hair pin that had been keeping the loose curls from his face. He held the metal in his hand, pressed it against his palm, and took a steadying breath. For a moment he caught sight of himself in the rear-view mirror - just his eyes - and Erestor almost didn’t recognise himself. He opened up the car door but the action did not feel his own. The air was stirred, lifting him to his feet.

 

He was small, stood out in the open, but he clung to the hair pin and began to creep up on the creep, unsure exactly what he would do when he caught up. Just fucking stab him in the leg, you useless son of a... Erestor asked himself what would Glorfindel do but then realised that even if he did know the answer to that, he had neither a gun nor a fine set of muscles to carry out the inspiration.

 

The leader was still talking. Erestor crept closer, and heard more. He let the conversation come to him but he did not lose focus; he matched his steps to the fellow sneaking with the gun - and Erestor took two for each one that the man stepped.

 

‘-spread the word, yeah, he did, but he didn’t put us up to this!’ the leader was pleading to a largely unmoved Glorfindel, who pressed for more.

 

Erestor was reducing the distance between himself and the crook. The pin was a thin needle in his hand that would do no good against an incoming bullet, but then if he could just keep quiet long enough to...

 

‘Your little boss man made a lot of enemies over the years and they’ll all waiting lined up, just waiting for him to make a slip. And he made it, didn’t he? So here we are - you gotta believe that it’s as simple as that!’

 

Glorfindel said that crime was never as simple as that.

 

Erestor was a stride away from the man with the gun. All there was was the sound of muffled footsteps, the conversation between agent and thug, a plane somewhere high above; its low droning engine the incongruous tension that drew it all together. And it wasn’t even noon on a Sunday yet.

 

‘Well sometimes it is, blondie, there’ll just be more and more of us and you can shoot them up and question them and they’ll all tell you what I’m telling you- ANDY!’

 

The man named Andy turned around just in time to see Erestor thrust the little pin in the crook of his knee-joint. He went down clumsily, more out of shock than actual pain, but then he screamed (most definitely out of pain this time) as Glorfindel turned to halt him further with a bullet. All was silent then, save for Andy’s groaning, and the pin was still sticking out of his leg.

 

Erestor decided to leave it where it was.

 

***

 

A copse of hospital staff were gathered in the car park corner, huddled together and craning their necks to try and see over the police cars. There was radio chatter and the more earthly buzz of human gossip, human intrigue. Erestor, on some other day, might have wanted to eavesdrop on what the police officer was saying to Elrond (who had arrived with no less than four cop cars), but today - the urge was not there.

 

Adrenaline, when it faded, took all else with it, too.

 

Glorfindel was holding Erestor’s hand, leaning on a police car and undoing the top button of his shirt with his free hand. His breathing was barely laboured and Erestor had expected to see him radiating a certain kind of pride, for having pre-empted a grotesque attempt at demoralisation on such a personal, grizzly level.

 

But Glorfindel, for all his bluster, stood a modest sentinel.

 

‘Do you think we’d be able to go and see her?’ Erestor asked. There were a few trees planted aesthetically on the grass verge around the car park and he watched the little leaves that had braved to bloom in the winter, swaying this way and that. There would be berries scattered all over the tarmac in the spring time, the trees would paint the ground in fey attempt to reclaim it.

 

Glorfindel pondered the question.

 

‘We’d need to come back and talk to the police,’ he said.

 

‘But we could go to her, for ten minutes or so?’

 

‘I don’t see why not,’ Glorfindel said, the word was more yawn than affirmation. He looked around, trying to catch the attention of one of the sergeants. He made a motion towards the hospital with a slight crook of his head and the sergeant nodded.

 

The breeze was sweeter then, in that moment; an afterthought of the violence that had come to pass that was in itself an urged warning. ‘Thank God,’ whispered Erestor, for nobody but himself to hear.

 

‘She’ll want to see her hero, kitten, come on.’

 

Glorfindel’s hair was blown by the wind, over his face - just for an instant. And he was smiling a smiled of a tired man.

 

Erestor nodded, and followed where Glorfindel led.

 

-

 

Celebrían was asleep, as she had been for so long, resting in a bed of white sheets and linen; a heavenly sight of divine fragility that would fool one into thinking she had always been as this - but it wasn’t so. She had been so strong when she had lived, she had been such a spirit. It had been four years since her assault and Erestor, though he visited as often as he could, could never quite get used to seeing her looking so... small.

 

He was sat beside the bed in a small chair, holding her hand with both of his. He felt that she did not wear her wedding rings, and he wondered where they were. Somewhere safe, he told himself, though hope was always weakened when one sat beside a hospital bed, in a clean, sterile, white room. He had gone with Elrond the day he had picked her engagement ring, he had been the best man at their wedding.

 

And he was the godfather of her children, of hers and Elrond’s children.

 

Erestor blinked and time was water slipping from the back of a duck. He bade himself not think of these things but the memories came in flashes and shocks - like a reel of film ticking over in an old projector. Silence. He saw flashes of smiling faces, wedding veils and finger paintings and yet, over them all, he saw Celebrían’s sleeping face.

 

‘Kitten,’ said Glorfindel, softly, and Erestor anchored himself under the warm hand upon his shoulder.

 

There were beeps and bleeps and the sounds of gentle machinery but no human noise save for the breaths that Erestor and Glorfindel muted, as though not wishing to disturb Celebrían from her slumber. If only it were that easy.

 

‘We should bring her some things, for her room. Maybe some pictures of the children.’ Erestor said, masking the aching sorrow in his gut with practicality, as always. Though the room was perfectly cleanly, it was also lonely. Erestor reasoned that he would not wish to wake up in such a place, not without a few home comforts around.

 

Glorfindel was looking round too, nodding.

 

And Erestor knew their ten minutes were up but he could not rise from the chair. To rise would be to leave, to leave her alone in such an empty room. He looked at her and the smoothed wrinkles around her eyes and mouth; laughter lines. He hold told her everything about the men and about Jonas, bidding her not to worry, telling her she had two very brave men looking out for her and then, at Glorfindel’s sweet request, he had amended the number to three.

 

She might have listened, Erestor would never know, but he spoke as though she did and warmed her hands with his. When there had been nothing left to say, they had sat in a contemplative silence weighed down with leaden sadness. Glorfindel stayed close, though Erestor wondered how much he understood. Celebrían had been like a mother to Erestor, and a mother to her three children - all of them strong now, all of them grown and bright blossoms fallen from the same tree.

 

‘We’ll bring her some flowers, too.’ Glorfindel said.

 

‘Yes,’ Erestor agreed, liking the idea. ‘Lilies, maybe.’

 

‘Lilies,’ echoed Glorfindel, softly.

 

The sun didn’t seem to come through the windows into the room, the light was of a different quality - though perhaps it had more to do with the sudden fatigue siphoning away at Erestor’s will. He let go of Celebrían’s hand and stood, slowly.

 

But suddenly something threatened to break inside of him and he covered his mouth, quickly, for fear of an errant sob - but then Glorfindel was there and Glorfindel was holding him, stood behind, and holding them close together. Erestor did not resist; Glorfindel’s strength behind him was a saving grace.

 

Erestor closed his eyes and heard the machines, beeping, bleeping. He saw light behind his eyelids and felt Glorfindel gathering his hair to the side in order to put butterfly kisses on the back of his neck. Each one caused a shiver, each one was warm. Erestor breathed, and could do naught else for a time.

 

Just breathe.

 

It’s been a long day. It’s been a long four years.

 

‘It’ll be a memory some day,’ said Glorfindel, in barely more than a whisper. His voice was touched with grief.

 

Erestor didn’t know whether to believe him.

 

He didn’t know whether he could.

 

But so long as there was hope to cling to, a plan of some kind...

 

‘Glorfindel,’ Erestor whispered, ‘thank you,’

 

-

 

The drive home was better.

 

Glorfindel had let the roof down and they had rode the long way back to the city, through the tunnels where the lights were bright and orange and came like a machinegun burst - one after the other. Glorfindel would laugh, from time to time, seeing Erestor gawping out of the window, but from the little shiver in his glee, he was getting cold. Eventually he put the roof back up (the car was a marvel of automated simplicity) and Erestor was just as glad for the warmth.

 

God bless heated seats.

 

He would look at the road flying under the tires. It was amazing how high-speed travel could subdue all of the anxiety in the back of a conscience; perhaps it was the hope that came with travelling - that you, somehow, would end up in a better place than when you set off. Was it another folly?

 

Erestor rather suspected it was.

 

But he was beginning to suspect that the nature of all hope was that it stemmed from some such folly. After all, that’s what made it hope and not certainty.

 

Glorfindel seemed well recovered, though in truth Erestor could not be certain how much he was containing within himself, unspoken and unseen. He sang, sometimes, to a particular chorus or verse that came on the radio and he had a fair voice. There was a new intimacy there between them; one borne of comfort and akin to something a pair of best friends would share. It made Erestor smile and oft times Glorfindel would reach to stroke his thigh, as though reminding him that he was still there.

 

As if anyone could have forgotten.

 

As they cruised back into the hubbub of the city, the streets were noticeably less congested. Erestor looked to the dashboard monitors and saw that it was quarter past one; when those unfortunate enough to be working on a Sunday had come back from their dinner hours and were settling back into their daily grind. There were other pedestrians about and the emerald Jaguar drew a few looks from the crowds waiting to cross the roads or sitting outside of the Costa bars. They sailed through a quiet city under a blanket sky, under the watch of grey giants with rows of glass eyes.

 

To Erestor it all seemed distant again, after the sterilisation of Celebrían’s room. The quiet was unusual as they turned down another street, and brushed with an aching sorrow of some kind - shared only between the two of them in the world they shared that was the interior of the car. But it was a good ache, in the way that the foreplay was always better than the sex.

 

Erestor blinked.

 

That was a particular metaphor.

 

They were nearly at Erestor’s apartment building and the twang of separation rang out again in the cavity of Erestor’s chest. He looked at Glorfindel, looking out at the road with a perfect calm playing on his face.

 

‘You’re gorgeous,’ Erestor said, pointedly, turning his body to Glorfindel a little. The point felt as though it needed to be made in the wake of all that had happened that day. But Glorfindel merely laughed, gently, keeping his eyes out front. Erestor smiled, a teasing wryness. ‘Do you not believe me?’

 

‘I just try to be a good man.’

 

It was a response that Erestor didn’t quite understand.

 

‘Not all the time, I hope.’

 

Glorfindel flashed him a playful glance and a brilliant smile.

 

‘You’re of a mood, today!’

 

Erestor laughed but it turned to a lingering sigh as they pulled up outside his meagre block of flats, just another grey building stretching into the sky. He could see his flat from the window, and peered up at it to see if he could spot Barbara perhaps perched on a windowsill - but he saw nothing, as it seemed he had forgotten to open his curtains.

 

Again.

 

He didn’t want to leave the car, but Glorfindel had a day’s worth of reports to do and antiques sellers were not highly prized in the federal agency - no matter their potential coffee brewing skill. Erestor looked at Glorfindel, and Glorfindel took his hands.

 

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If you’re still of a mood later tonight, do you maybe fancy going out for a bit? I can pick you up. There’s a small place uptown where I never get to go as often as I’d like, a smoke and mirrors kind of bar.’

 

He was smiling, and Erestor couldn’t deny the prickle of want that goosed his flesh.

 

‘I’d like that,’ he said, feeling a déjà vu.

 

Glorfindel’s smile turned wicked, and he leaned in for a kiss that was equally so. He cradled Erestor’s face with a hand and kissed him deeply and slow, parting Erestor’s lips easily to push his tongue inside. Erestor moaned; a half breathless thing that made Glorfindel smile. He opened his mouth wider to let Glorfindel in, to let him assert himself and sate a need Erestor had harboured since their interrupted fraternisation in the shop all those days ago.

 

He was pulling gently on Glorfindel’s hair when the kiss was broken.

 

‘You’re so good at that,’ Glorfindel said, opening his eyes. His voice was husky; dirty. Erestor could have clambered onto his lap right then and there and Glorfindel knew it. He smiled again, he brushed his thumb over Erestor’s lip and his eyes flicked up to Erestor’s. They were brilliant.

 

‘I’ll see you at nine, kitten.’

 

-

 

The bar was called Yael’s and it was the kind of place that managed to be big and small at the same time; it was cramped, but with plenty of room to dive out of the dancing to take shelter in a booth or at the bar. A dark lounge kind of music played loudly enough to reassure Erestor he would be hearing it for the next seven months but the care was soon wiped from his concerns. Laser lights split the darkness but all he saw were bodies, dancing around him - the music filled the free spaces and there was Glorfindel; and they danced.

 

Smoke and mirrors.

 

It was not so much a dance that they shared as much as it was the feel of the other’s body, a gentle sway to the low pulse of the song; the rhythm of some dark creature. It was malign and utterly wicked and Glorfindel whispered into Erestor’s ear that he looked beautiful, that he wanted to touch him.

 

Erestor had smiled. He doubted Glorfindel could see enough of him to warrant calling him beautiful, but the night was not for teasing. He’d taken Glorfindel’s hands and set them around his hips, so that Glorfindel could pull their bodies to unison. And so they danced; Erestor reached up to wind an arm around Glorfindel’s neck to taste the breath from his lips, but not to kiss.

 

And so what kind of night is this? Erestor suspected he knew. Glorfindel’s heat merged with his own and he closed his eyes to fall into the music. Was this how Glorfindel liked to cope? Was this his solution to dealing with all that had happened today?

 

To loose himself in intimacy, touch, something erotic and dark...

 

It was like they were making love, they way they moved.

 

And just as Erestor realised it, he saw Glorfindel open his eyes. He kissed him, an innocent peck in an not so innocent place, and suggested they sit down to catch their breaths. ‘We have the whole night together, after all,’ he had half-whispered, half-shouted into Erestor’s ear, and Erestor agreed.

 

The night was turning to a blur and Erestor hadn’t touched a single drop of alcohol, it was simply unnecessary (and Erestor did not cherish the thought of making a fool of himself in front of all these art-house kinds of people, they didn’t seem like the type who would take loudly to a small man clambering onto the table top to sing Erasure). But the place, Yael’s, was in itself intoxicating; black leather and walls and lights that flickered to illuminate the tops of the heads of the swaying crowd on the dance floor. And they were both seeking something, he and Glorfindel, something that alcohol wouldn’t have heightened.

 

They moved to a booth near the bar and Glorfindel sat first, tapping the sear beside him as cue for Erestor to perch himself there.

 

Erestor smiled, raised a brow, and seated himself on Glorfindel’s lap.

 

At long fucking last.

 

Glorfindel smiled and let out a low sigh that Erestor could hear better now they were away from the dance floor. He received Erestor on his lap and held him about the waist before he moved a hand to the front of Erestor’s stomach, encouraging the subtle movements he was making over Glorfindel’s groin.

 

He sat back, aroused.

 

‘Are you, ah, are you in work tomorrow?’ Glorfindel asked, lowly.

 

It was an odd question, or so Erestor thought for a moment before realising that Glorfindel was providing them with opportunity. He doesn’t need conversation to do that, Erestor thought, fondly, but allowed the man his comforts. He was untucking Erestor’s shirt and dipping his fingers into the waistband of his jeans, his eyes half lidded and growing heavy with a hazed lust.

 

And the bar was dark and smoky - casting everything half into a shadowy dream.

 

Erestor made an affirmative noise, and bent to kiss Glorfindel’s neck, finding that his skin was warm and soft and hot under his tongue.

 

‘I’m going to come in tomorrow,’ Glorfindel was saying, distractedly as he ran his hand up the smoothness of Erestor’s stomach, feeling the muscles work under the skin, feeling the movement of him atop him. Erestor smiled into his neck, biting where he would and, to his absolute joy, eliciting small, carnal gasps when he applied his teeth to some hidden sweet spot. ‘and I’m going to find a matching plate if it fucking kills me,’

 

He was laughing as he spoke, but it was lust.

 

Erestor couldn’t believe Glorfindel was talking about that god-awful plate at a place and a time like this, especially considering the erection he could feel pressing up under him. A flash of laser light danced over them and he saw, for just a second or two, Glorfindel’s pleasure awash on his face. Erestor worked against it, rubbed himself against it, and felt Glorfindel stir.

 

‘No, no,’ Erestor whispered. ‘No, you keep telling me about that plate, seeing as you like it so much.’

 

‘You’re a bad person,’

 

‘I am,’ Erestor breathed, biting at Glorfindel’s earlobe, grinding hard against the hardness he could feel under his groin. Glorfindel let out a gasp and Erestor had been poised to kiss the arousal from his lips when Glorfindel bade him, with a gentle push and a whisper of kitten, stand. A moment flickered between them wherein fear pierced Erestor’s gut in place of desire - he barely dared breathe.

 

I’ve done something wrong.

 

He stood, and so did Glorfindel.

 

But we’ve only just managed to sit down...

 

There were shadows on his face and his hair was falling out of the messy bun, and seeing Erestor’s shock splayed on his face - he smiled. ‘Come with me,’ he whispered, coming close enough to pair the words with a kiss behind Erestor’s ear. The music was a drum under his feet. His body was alive with the pulsing of desire and Glorfindel... Glorfindel waited for the nod before taking him by the hand and through the bar, through the dance floor and into the bathroom, where Erestor laughed as he was hastily pushed inside one of the remarkably fancy toilet cubicles.

 

The dim light of the bathroom compared to the lowness of the bar hurt his eyes, he had to squint.

 

It’s all a blur!

 

‘This kind of bar isn’t usually in my range,’ he said, his voice dancing with laughter as Glorfindel turned him to press him hard against the cubicle door.

 

‘You’re the kind of man who isn’t usually in mine,’ Glorfindel replied with an answering smile, before he pinned Erestor to the door with a blazing kiss.

 

Erestor wound his hands into Glorfindel’s hair; the man was half an animal and kissing him with a tenacity he had never known. It was wet, messy and often Erestor moaned into Glorfindel’s hotness, he let him use him as he would, touch him as he would - and whispered more where Glorfindel began to grind his body against his. He pulled his golden hair, dug his nails into the base of his neck and it served to inflame Glorfindel only more and more.

 

He used his teeth.

 

And Erestor liked it.

 

He wondered if Glorfindel had ever come to this club and done this before, but something in his kisses and his hot touch under Erestor’s shirt told him maybe - probably, even, but never like this. Erestor smiled and Glorfindel seemed to like being told he was a good boy, so much so that he sighed, hotly. And his hands moved again.

 

Erestor heard the zip of his pants being undone before he felt it. Glorfindel’s tongue was in his mouth and his hands about his hips - only now one of them was opening up his pants; achingly slowly, and Glorfindel merely bade him be patient when Erestor shaped a guttural moan into a plea for haste.

 

But Glorfindel felt it too, Erestor could sense it.

 

‘Touch me,’ he whispered, into their kiss that had grown distracted in the wake of Glorfindel’s explorations. ‘Touch me, oh God, please,’

 

‘Where, kitten?’ Glorfindel asked, a wicked tease.

 

After a slow kiss, Erestor took Glorfindel’s hand in his own and moved it, pushing it down into his open pants. His fingers brushed his hardened length over his underwear. Erestor whimpered.

 

‘Ah,’ Glorfindel said with a smile to fall cities, immensely proud of himself, and he fell to task.

 

Erestor murmured a string of heavenly praises as Glorfindel’s hands slipped into his underwear, he rested brow to brow with his honey blonde and shared his bated breathe as fingers gently, gently, curled around his erection and began to move, up and down. Glorfindel asked if Erestor liked it. Erestor laughed; lost to passion, and Glorfindel smiled too and picked up the rhythm as Erestor began to push into his hand.

 

There were stars behind his eyes and warmth in his body he could hardly stand.

 

The ache...

 

And yet it seemed as though Glorfindel had only just started when he stopped. Again! Erestor opened his eyes with a plaintive moan. Glorfindel was looking at him.

 

Their eyes met.

 

Erestor blinked, whispered oh God.

 

Glorfindel sank to his knees.

 

Erestor had his eyes closed when Glorfindel took him into his mouth, but he felt the sudden wet warmth and might have let out a shuddering moan to shake the cubicles and their occupants, if there were any. But he didn’t care. Glorfindel’s tongue worked him quick and hard and he sighed his own want around the cock he lavished. Erestor gathered his hair together and stroked his head, pushing him, ever so slightly, to urge him on, to beg for...

 

More.

 

Hotness and slick desire. Erestor was a point of light in a black field and there was a fire inside him that Glorfindel was spreading, and it spread quick. He was good; practised, no doubt, but Erestor could think of nothing beyond the muscle-bound stud currently on his knees. And when he opened his eyes for a moment, he saw Glorfindel looking up to him.

 

With his pretty eyelashes.

 

Glorfindel flicked his tongue over the head of Erestor’s cock and then again, and again. Each was a lap of flame, a wave of crashing lust - and it was almost too much; Erestor knew he wouldn’t last and yet did not want to push Glorfindel beyond his limit. But the man had no qualms, sensing Erestor’s nearness, and so took him deeper and quicker and more vocally, his own low moans turning to something more desperate. Erestor had only to think of the straining erection in Glorfindel’s own pants to feel the first twinge of orgasm - it was near.

 

He forced his eyes shut. He thought of Glorfindel’s tongue, his touch and little mewls of barely suppressed arousal...

 

It was coming.

 

He thought of what else there was, he thought of maybe...

 

‘Glorfindel...’

 

Of making love, of fucking...

 

And with one last moan from Glorfindel, muted around Erestor’s length - Erestor found his orgasm. He saw flashes of images of nothing in particular, save for golden hair and blue eyes and a wet shirt sticking to a rigid body. He could hear his moan but it was faint to his own ears and he was left with a dizzying clarity that always came after, well, he did.

 

Opening his eyes, he saw Glorfindel had swallowed and now knelt, looking up at him with a sweat on his brow and a sated, lazy smile just about turning his lips. He closed his eyes and whispered fuck.

 

Erestor laughed, and rested his head against the cubicle door.

Chapter 6

Read Chapter 6

The radio needed tuning but then the white noise was almost a comfort. It was a small and battered old contraption but it had served Erestor well over the years, even if a man could grow tired of hearing the same dozen songs played over and over in varying sequence. It just seemed part of the job, part of the ritual.

 

It was a brisk Saturday morning where the mist rose before the sun and Glorfindel was playing customer, again. He was stood in front of the counter whereas Erestor was stood behind, and he toyed with Erestor’s fingers on his left hand, resting on the wood countertop. The radio crackled. Glorfindel was angling for something - that much was obvious, thanks to his endearingly puerile attempts at garnering Erestor’s attention - but whenever Erestor would relent and look up from his newspaper, Glorfindel just didn’t seem ready to tell him about whatever it was that aggravated him.

 

But there was something, Erestor was certain. Glorfindel would tell him in his own time, he knew, but the reassurance did not assuage the mounting worry that was becoming a leaden weight in his gut.

 

At least with fire-fights you can see the danger.

 

And then Erestor wondered to what stretch of madness he had fallen to be lamenting the gun fights...

 

He almost smiled, but he did not.

 

Glorfindel’s patience was becoming frayed and the static of the radio seemed to exacerbate it and make it a thing to be heard, something that filled the fuzzy spaces of the conscience. Erestor turned his hand on the table to hold Glorfindel’s, palm to palm; a communication that required neither of them to fathom sentences at a time when words seemed stretched thin. The radio sang a crackling song and Glorfindel sighed, stilled at once by Erestor’s touch.

 

Touch. It always worked, and their connection had grown to something deep and knowing. It was understanding, in its dualistic form; it was trust.

 

When the door chimed tinkled its silvery herald, Erestor did not deign to look up right away (there was an article on the local escaped sheep’s journey through the neighbouring town that he was finding worryingly engrossing) though Glorfindel swirled round immediately. Hearing Glorfindel’s relief rife in the airy greeting he called, Erestor looked up to see Elrond, wrapped up warm in a coat and scarf and approaching the counter with something in a bag.

 

Something he passed to Glorfindel, and something for which he received an abundance of gratitude. Erestor watched, not able to quash his natural curiosity - and almost rolled his eyes to see Glorfindel produce a sweet pastry of some kind from out of the paper bag.

 

‘What?’ Glorfindel asked, half a smile playing on his lips.

 

‘I wouldn’t have thought that federal agents were allowed to eat a lot of cake,’ said Erestor, watching Glorfindel tear off a perfectly Erestor-sized piece.

 

‘Where would you get an idea like that?’ Glorfindel cooed, and offered the piece between his fingers to Erestor.

 

It was a memory that Erestor had already lived through, a decision that he had already made in a time that didn’t seem to belong to him anymore. Erestor smiled, aware that he was contemplating the collapse of his collective reality just from being offered a piece of pastry. He hoped it happened to other people, too.

 

He leant forward, over the counter, to take it from Glorfindel’s fingers.

 

Glorfindel made an appreciative noise, low and wicked, that caused Erestor’s eyes to flicker and their gazes to meet. Something electric passed between them; an eternity or a heartbeat but nothing that could have been in-between. Excitement was tremor through the marrow of Erestor’s bones and was only cooled when Elrond reasserted himself into the scenario, giving a comical click of his fingers and saying, teasingly; ‘Boys,’

 

They strengthened up. Glorfindel winked and Erestor, despite himself, could not restrain the smile. He turned his attention back to the article but found he had lost his place. Glorfindel was crinkling the paper bag in his pastry infused endeavours, and it was almost endearing to know that still, after all this time, he had not yet come to understand the fragile tranquillity of the quiet in the antiques shop that rested over everything; relics and staff alike, like a layer of dust.

 

And he is the wind, he is the energy.

 

Glorfindel caught Erestor staring again, and smiled, sweetly, raising a brow that was a silent question. Erestor shook his head, but it was not a harsh dismissal.

 

Elrond had undone the first few buttons of his coat and stepped over to the window, or as near to it as he could get; there was an old Victorian table piled up with even older leather-bound tomes stacked up in front of the glass pane, and Elrond had to reach over to rub a little circle clean. When he brought his hand away, he did not seem pleased at the grot on his fingers; though his concern seemed less an expression of disgust and more an expression of fatigue.

 

The light was heavy and dull, and Elrond stood before it, looking into it - but seeing nothing else.

 

‘Celebrían,’ he said. ‘She’s been moved.’

 

Nobody said anything else for a time; there seemed to be nothing to add and the quiet was a shared reprieve and a shared requiem. The shop was sombre in that moment, and time clung thickly to the air that swirled slow overhead. Glorfindel stood stoic, looking grimly at the slump in Elrond’s shoulders and Erestor stood equally mute. He thought it for the best, if truth be told, and the less people who knew - the better.

 

He hoped Celebrían would at least have some pictures in her new room, and some flowers.

 

Elrond heaved a sigh that stirred the room. ‘But she’s okay,’

 

‘That’s good news, Elrond,’ said Glorfindel, respectfully.

 

Elrond nodded, did he believe it?

 

Dust danced in the streams of light as they always had, as they always would, and Erestor watched the heaviness drain away. The dust mites went up and up and up, rising to a light until they reached a point where they blended with it, unseen. Light and memory surrounded them in a hazy sort of way - a stasis of three not unlike the stasis the relics were held in.

 

And God, but Erestor did feel like a relic sometimes.

 

Yet there was Glorfindel, trying his best to quietly resume eating the pastry, and when Erestor looked to him - the spell broke, and they exchanged smiles behind Elrond’s turned back. Strange, Erestor thought to himself, watching Glorfindel shoot cautious glances at Elrond as he took a bite of his “meal”, strange to think I once considered stabbing him with a hair pin in this very shop.

 

‘You’ve got your thinking face on again, kitten!’ Glorfindel chirped, quite spectacularly derailing Erestor’s train of thought and reaching to ruffle his dark hair with a (blessedly pastry flake-free) hand.

 

His smile was venom and Glorfindel laughed.

 

Of course, there were still times where Erestor considered giving him a small, affectionate, jab.

 

***

 

Ten minutes later, Glorfindel made an announcement that he was going to hunt down the toilet and bowed out of the shop, disappearing into the staff corridor that led to the staff room (cupboard) and the staff toilet (which was not much more than a cupboard, either). Erestor had been about to finally finish off the article about old wild Dolly the sheep, when Elrond capitalised on the privacy.

 

He tapped the counter with a finger, a gentle call for attention.

 

Erestor looked up at him, feeling altogether too much like a naughty schoolchild about to be lectured on the virtues of team play and the uniform dress code that applied to all students by the kindly head-teacher. Elrond certainly had a mandate of a sort, and Erestor wondered if he and Glorfindel had not coordinated this spontaneous, highly serendipitous chance for a private conversation.

 

Elrond wore an old, blue scarf under the collar of his coat and he smiled, sadly. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and the circles under his eyes were growing almost as dark as Erestor’s - he cast a distressing image of a man worn under the grindstone, but Erestor knew full well that any concern he expressed would be waved away in an instant. He had long since discovered other ways to lighten Elrond’s burden, and most of them went unsaid; odd jobs around the shop, phone calls, visits to the store to pick up fresh milk.

 

‘Is this Glorfindel’s?’ Elrond asked, pointing at a mostly empty coffee cup besides the till. Erestor said it was, and Elrond took a quick swig. ‘He won’t mind.’

 

Erestor laughed.

 

‘Now that, Erestor, is a welcome sound.’ Elrond said, with a brow quirked.

 

It took Erestor a moment to understand.

 

‘And he’s a good man,’ Elrond continued, gesturing with his head in the general direction of the toilet.

 

‘He is, he is,’

 

Elrond nodded, bringing the point to a close. He tapped the counter again.

 

‘Take the weekend off.’

 

Erestor blinked.

 

‘Take the weekend off, as a reward. And no - no excuses this time! You can’t pull the old “oh, I haven’t any distractions” trick now, can you?’ Elrond chucked, and Erestor frowned - though the less than flattering impression of himself had actually been very good.

 

Yet, there was something irking him.

 

Being given an entire weekend off as a polite gesture of thanks in combination with Glorfindel’s erratic behaviour - it all added up, and therefore it didn’t. Erestor narrowed his eyes and Elrond must have seen the blooms of realisation in Erestor’s face. He rubbed his chin, deliberating.

 

‘Have Glorfindel tell you.’ was all he said.

 

Erestor’s heart skipped a beat.

 

‘Fucking hell, Elrond, what is it? Is he dying? Are you dying? Am I?’

 

It was a joke... mostly.

 

Elrond waved a hand and dismissed the thought with a tired laugh. ‘No, nothing like that, don’t be ridiculous.’

 

They looked at one another in the silence, one knowing and one seeking - and something passed between them that was a resignation of a kind. Erestor did not understand and did not know whether he should be worried but Elrond did not seem like to budge on his stance. Have Glorfindel tell you.

 

Would he be able to?

 

Erestor felt like rubbing his eyes raw.

 

Elrond looked so tired. He leaned forward and Erestor saw the grey of his eyes.

 

‘Just have the weekend off, old friend.’

 

-

 

The fire was alive.

 

Glorfindel and Erestor sat before it on one of the Persian rugs of his living room and at first, when Glorfindel had begun to undress, Erestor had laughed and said they were in danger of recreating a Mills and Boon book cover. He’d earned an attack of tickles for that, but they had quickly turned to something else - tickling did not usually involve the lips. But even for all his jesting - Erestor was lost in the ambience. The lamps were on but the light was minimal, it was dark outside of the window but the curtains were luxuriant - it was a house that was a home, and Erestor could feel himself losing... himself.

 

And yet, at the same time, he felt more than ever.

 

They were sat together, upright, entwined, and Erestor had the two of his hands on Glorfindel’s bare chest; feeling muscle move under his skin, feeling the beats of a heart contained in such a willing vessel. Each was a drum, each was the earth moving, each was his own... Erestor had to close his eyes, the spell of the night was heady and Glorfindel was warm in more ways than one, and the fire, the fire was ever alight.

 

Glorfindel undid the buttons of Erestor’s shirt, as slow as he was able, and he bent to press feather kisses to the curve of Erestor’s neck as he pushed the shirt off of his shoulder. It was a worship, Erestor realised with some alarm that never grew to be anything more than a passing twinge. Glorfindel had pushed his fingers into Erestor’s hair after he had discarded his shirt, bringing them close so that he might whisper a thousand sweet nothings but a hair’s breath away from Erestor’s lips.

 

Sweet nothings. Erestor contemplated them, half-heartedly, as Glorfindel kissed his jaw. If they pass from Glorfindel’s lips, they can never be called nothing, they can never be nothing. He quietened them with a kiss and then another and another until they blended into one, long, slow embrace where Glorfindel kept his eyes closed and Erestor melted into him, by the fire, on the rug.

 

He wondered how his life had reached this stage, he wondered from what star Glorfindel had fallen to find him when he did - and sighed into his mouth, that he might understand. There was no blaze of lust between them as there had been on the night at Yael’s, instead there was something entirely more profound - something that was the physicality of sorrow, and just as soulful, just as divine, just as...

 

Ah!

 

Erestor moaned.

 

He let his head loll back as he felt palms on his bare chest, smoothing a path down his stomach. Glorfindel shifted but Erestor did not open his eyes, half content to let him toy with his body as he wished and half afraid to dispel the charm they wove together; with hands and lips, tongues and touch.

 

Glorfindel was putting butterfly kisses over the soft flat of Erestor’s stomach and Erestor leaned back, just a touch, to allow Glorfindel better access. He kissed his navel, rising the hairs on the back of Erestor’s neck.

 

Possibility sparked somewhere low and carnal in Erestor’s gut, knowing that with a gentle indication, he could steer Glorfindel to lower pleasures...

 

And return them in kind.

 

With interest, in fact, Erestor thought as he smiled lazily, stroking Glorfindel’s neck with an idle hand to feel the soft down of hair at the nape.

 

But no.

 

No, there was a reason they were here, there was a reason Glorfindel had been tapping the steering wheel anxiously during the car journey. Erestor roused himself to the present and it rather felt like swimming to the surface and breaking the water’s edge; the rush of air, the temptation to resubmerge. He opened his eyes and saw the TV, it was on - but muted - displaying the gems TV shopping channel for a bit of background action.

 

He drew Glorfindel up, and Glorfindel took the initiate, hugging him close.

 

Erestor rested against his chest, and there found heaven.

 

‘Tell me,’ he said, quietly, his voice was a husk. ‘Tell me whatever it was you needed to tell me.’

 

Glorfindel almost felt small in these moment when they held one another, not physically, no, but calmer, surer, less concerned with maintaining a front of strength or a smiling shield, and there was an intimacy in that that was also trust. Erestor felt flattered, that he might be the one who got to see the soul of the man.

 

And he let him take his time.

 

Firelight danced behind Glorfindel’s eyes but then it always did, it always had. Light and fire and sun; the warm things that shone - they loved him as their own.

 

Glorfindel took a breath, and let it go again.

 

‘I’m leaving.’

 

Erestor choked and immediately Glorfindel took him by the chin, gazing at him with widened eyes and shaking his head a little frantically. ‘Not you! No, God, never you!’ he said, his voice a stark call at first and then melted to a molten whisper.

 

He kissed Erestor and Erestor clung to him, exhaling his relief hotly over Glorfindel’s cheek as they broke for breath.

 

And the thought, just for a second, that he had heard Glorfindel say a certain grouping of three words.

 

‘But the country, I’m leaving the country for a training programme. It happens every few years.’

 

Erestor didn’t truly understand but he nodded. Glorfindel was going away and would take his warmth with him; that was the crux of it. It was a childish analysis, but even so, its truthfulness was not diminished.

 

He was leaving.

 

Erestor gently turned his head free, pulling his chin out of Glorfindel’s grasp, and put himself back upon his chest to there rest heavily. Glorfindel held him close as though they might be trapped up a mountain together somewhere, cuddling for warmth.

 

And to Erestor, the comparison was not wholly outlandish.

 

‘Where?’ he asked.

 

‘Germany,’

 

Erestor laughed. It was utterly without mirth, but tinted with a grim humour.

 

‘You poor thing,’ he said, but the jest was hollow. ‘But you’ll be okay.’

 

‘Will I?’ Erestor looked up at him, basked in the hue of fire and low watt bulbs, the gentle buzz of the TV and the blanket of quiet that came with the night, that crept into residential houses and was a siren call on the brow of every man. Glorfindel was pleading. ‘I was fine all the other times I had to go, but then I wasn’t leaving anyone behind,’

 

It was tearing him up. Erestor watched him falter and the words never came, he felt Glorfindel rest his chin atop his raven crown and so placed his hand over Glorfindel’s heart, over the warm skin that burned to be felt under his palm. He splayed his fingers, and stroked a soothing circle, balming the tattered spirit so ill at ease.

 

‘Are you packed?’ he asked. Glorfindel nodded. ‘When do you leave?’

 

The pause Glorfindel left was an ominous as any darkening cloud.

 

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, and Erestor could feel the blade between his ribs. Glorfindel pulled him tighter and Erestor wished to be held tighter still, tighter so they could be for a little while longer - just he and himself. My life has capsized, again and again. ‘I’m so sorry, Erestor, I’m sorry, I thought it’d be easier this way, that I could spare you some worrying if I told you tonight. I just didn’t want this to be hanging over us, I know how much you already worry and I didn’t... I don’t...’

 

Glorfindel seemed to deem his monologue as hopeless, and let the sentiment trail off. Erestor whispered that it was OK and he did mean it, but then perhaps the weight had not fully sunken in yet. It will, soon, and it will be the weight of his absence. He pulled away from Glorfindel’s chest to study his face that was fraught, despairing - but always handsome, always kind.

 

He touched his nose to Glorfindel’s, and bound them together for a new kiss.

 

And it was golden and hot.

 

Erestor let Glorfindel part his lips, they kissed deeply in-between Erestor’s mewls of stirring pleasure, he raised his hands to loosen Glorfindel’s hair from the tie and slides and tossed them aside, one by one, until his hands were full of a silken mane that was pure and gorgeous between his fingers. Erestor let out a low sound, raking Glorfindel’s hair back, hearing him whisper, again and again, a name that he recognised as his own.

 

Glorfindel bit Erestor’s lip.

 

He’s hurting, so badly.

 

The house was a bath of light and Erestor pulled back, cradling Glorfindel’s face between his two hands and brushing his thumbs over Glorfindel’s flushed lips.

 

‘Tell me what else there was, tell me what else you’ve been meaning to say.’ Erestor’s voice was heavy with want.

 

Glorfindel smiled. He lowered his eyes for a moment before matching them to Erestor’s.

 

‘Kitten,’ he purred, leaning close so that the word was a wicked ghost of heated breath.

 

‘Kitten, you already know.’

 

-

 

Glorfindel would not let him go, he held him close and whispered it under his breath - that he was not going to let go. Erestor laughed and made a Titanic reference and only the fact that they were standing in broad daylight in the middle of the Departures zone spared him a tickling attack, though Glorfindel snuck in a few pokes (‘I’m trying to be dramatic and romantic here, you dolt, don’t kill my vibe.’).

 

They were calling his flight. Erestor had memorised the numbers on his ticket during the cab ride to the airport because he could not look out the window, he could not see so much riding past the window and know he would have to see it all again - but without the arm slung around his shoulder and the constant stream of bad anecdotes.

 

They were calling his flight, but Glorfindel wasn’t letting go.

 

If Erestor opened his eyes, he could see the flashing signs on the notice board and he recognised the string of numbers there, flashing red. There were tall windows, there were droning engines - it was the precipice Erestor had sensed so long ago and now that he was here, he could feel the ground teetering under his feet.

 

And yet, it was harder still for Glorfindel.

 

Who would have guessed?

 

Who could have guessed that it would be him who had to wipe away errant tears from the corners of his eyes; disguising the heartbreak with a laugh and a joke and a jest at his own expense. Erestor felt his own heart fracture in his chest and felt the spill of fresh heart’s anguish, rife in the blood, and had reached up to hold Glorfindel again.

 

Glorfindel choked.

 

‘For God’s sake, this is ridiculous,’ he whispered into Erestor’s ear, there was no fury there - only a desperate passion of a kind that all those tragic heroes in the plays felt, the ones who ascended so high only to be cast down, suddenly, suddenly... ‘Why do I need to go abroad for this?’

 

Erestor shooshed him, gently, stroking the back of his head.

 

Glorfindel’s passion broke.

 

‘Why?’ he asked, begged, almost.

 

It was not a question for Erestor to answer - but he would try for the both of their sakes.

 

‘You’ve a job, and your skill in that job was what brought us together.’ it had seemed like the apt thing to say, and Glorfindel liked it. Erestor continued in the same vein for a time, praying his words would convince himself, too.

 

Because he could feel it; the call.

 

It’s here. He’s leaving. He’s leaving me.

 

‘I have to go.’

 

The airport was clean and shining in a way the hospital had been. A few families lingered, stood in their protective groups abounding a nascent support, and watched the Departure doors. They had remained to watch the ghosts of the friends, lovers and family, Erestor realised, and dread crept up the straight of his spine. Was that what Glorfindel was to become, too? A ghost?

 

Erestor gave himself a shake. Glorfindel was pulling away from him and trying to smile up at the fluorescent lighting as he dabbed tears away from the corner of his eyes. It set a gloom in Erestor’s heart to see; Glorfindel simply was not the sort of man who should be crying - not a man made out of the very stuff of joy and life and light...

 

But he was all smiles, even now, even saturated as they were.

 

He took one step away from Erestor before he looked back. He choked again, smiling incredulously through the pain. ‘You’re so small!’ he said in a strangled whisper and Erestor almost broke too when Glorfindel took his hands, seized them in a warm grip that would have brought him onto the plane too, if it were possible.

 

No doubt Glorfindel had thought about it.

 

Stay with me.

 

They both wished it to the other.

 

Glorfindel lifted his head, inhaling a lungful. He looked at Erestor and Erestor looked back - it did not seem real that they were stood here, with all of Glorfindel’s luggage, with the prospect of such aching loneliness breathing down his neck, just waiting for him to turn and fall into it.

 

It was terrifying.

 

They kissed, sweetly, a physical goodbye that was a tangible memory of their first hello and all the more bittersweet for it. It hurt when Glorfindel pulled away, it hurt when he stroked Erestor’s face, it hurt when he laughed - and his voice broke.

 

‘Call me,’ Glorfindel said, with his last smile.

 

And then he was walking away and into the Departure doors that, to Erestor, were an ungodly metaphor before his very eyes - and one Glorfindel was walking into and pulling his luggage behind. He felt every urge to run after him, to pounce and claim some breathtaking kiss (like the ones he had read about in the Mills and Boons novels), but to take a step would to be to break from the moment.

 

It would be like admitting it was real.

 

Glorfindel looked back three times as he went, and a fourth before he slipped through the doors marked for passengers only. Erestor watched the heart walk out of his chest and his arms hung heavily at his side, his body was suddenly aware of itself and its cold fragility and Erestor knew then why the families had lingered.

 

It was not hope.

 

It was because there was simply nothing else to do, faced with the option of returning to a normality wherein everything was changed? Where one piece was pulled from the puzzle?

 

It’d be easier to be a heap than a man.

 

But Glorfindel had made him strong, and Erestor bade himself remember that. Even he, a kitten, could pretend to be a tiger every once in a while.

 

Erestor pushed back the hair and the tears and pushed on his sunglasses. He turned, away, and walked into the ghost of past and present entwined that was itself like greeting an old friend.

 

-

 

Erestor let himself into the shop and the key turned wetly in the lock. The metallic click was an inexpressibly satisfying sound though the rain was loud and bouncing off the window shutters. The door swung open, inwards, and Erestor slipped inside - perhaps he should not have come, but he just needed a place to be for a little while.

 

It was seven o’clock in the evening. It was still early-ish, though the sky outside was already an inky canvas stretched across the vastness over the city. Before Erestor closed the shop door, he looked to the heavens and saw the star field and all the constellations he had once known the names of. Goodnight, he bade them, closing the door behind him and sealing himself into the old antiques shop.

 

It was right, somehow, being here.

 

Where it all started.

 

The quiet that hung in the balance was like that of a church, sanctified and poignant and heavy with night’s strain for hushedness. He looked at the relics under the cloth as he stowed his key inside his coat pocket; his hands were wet and the metal cold - it was a good combination of sensations, apt to the feeling in his breast.

 

Relics under wraps, row after row of them on tables and cupboards all covered in dust sheets - sleeping mementos of the lives of the hands that had once held them and made use of them, and brought them to life by inclusion. Erestor felt a strange kinship with them all, weren’t they all waiting? Waiting for some communion, to fit somewhere.

 

We’ve all be found once before, and now we wait to be found again. It was a strange thought that he could not entirely fathom, but Erestor reasoned he was perhaps not the most stable of souls tonight of all nights.

 

The dark was expansive without Glorfindel. The night was cold and the wind and rain had never sounded so loud.

 

Erestor moved through the shadows of the shop, recalling to him to image of Glorfindel’s tears at the airport - but there were other memories too, hanging just out of frame; his car and his gun, his body under his clothes and the rough skin on his hands, his kisses, his voice, his gentility...

 

Ah, fuck.

 

He was so far away! But somehow closer than ever.

 

It did not make sense, any of it, and Erestor looked around in the dark as though hoping to find him sat behind the counter, eating something sweet and crooning over a new plate he had found with some pattern to make the eyes bleed. But when Erestor peered at the till, shrouded in a gloom, he saw no honey blonde but instead a stack upon the counter. A stack of papers? Erestor did not remember them, and he was drawn to them.

 

To uncover a mystery, and pull at a thread.

 

He padded over to his little corner where he did not need light to know his footing. Streetlamps peered in through the gaps in the windows and Erestor walked through an orange pool, faux and bright, and then, like a blaze, he remembered their first kiss.

 

It was a happy memory, despite his nearly being shot earlier in the day.

 

Strange, how time passes.

 

Reaching the till, Erestor found that the stack of papers was indeed a stack of papers; newspapers. He took a few over by the window, to read them by the streetlamps glower. He frowned. The dates were not exactly recent, and he did not recognise the district label printed on their front sheets - but there were just so many!

 

Curiosity. Erestor flipped through a few pages of one and noted some folded down corners.

 

He blinked in the dark, a coil of confusion winding tighter in his stomach. Had he done this? It seemed a thing he might be likely to do...

 

No.

 

Erestor took another, and then another - half a dozen pages and then some were folded down in each paper, leading him to articles about the most bizarre happenings (and some accompanied by the most ridiculous pictures, that always made him laugh in a dry sort of way). Erestor did not read them but instead flipped from page to page, trying to recall a time when he might have done this!

 

He had picked up another and opened its sheets when he noticed a scrap of paper fall out, and fall to the floor.

 

Like a feather.

 

Time hung heavily in the antiques shop, as it always had. Perhaps the old fossils there attuned themselves differently to the flow of things and watched and waited as only pieces of history would know how. But history was never, and has never, been confined to those spidery writings in the old tomes.

 

Erestor bent to pick up the scrap of paper.

 

He held it in the light, and divined a signature, and a smiley face.

 

Glorfindel - x

 

Erestor clutched at his mouth with one hand.

 

He clutched at his smile.

 

And his sob.

---

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with this dumb fic throughout its journey, your comments and kudos have meant the world to me and it's been a lot of fun! Feel free to make up your own endings or scenarios for what happens when Glorfindel comes back, as I won't be carrying this on - feel free to write your own ending!

 

I'm working on a new project, and it's a big one. It's going to be like LOTR meets Dragon Age (the stolen throne) meets ancient myth, all mixed up in a fantasy narrative. It's going to be a story about Glorfindel (and Erestor) and how they reclaim their Kingdom, traveling across a familiar land to retake the throne. A larger cast of characters will be involved, a greater romantic plot, and there will be gratuitous femslash involved, too! So stay tuned!