[On an ordinary evening, Guy fell to bed with his life as blessedly in order as it could be, relegated here. Luceti, in seven months, had shown its colours, both frightening and generous. The last, drawn breaths before sleep claimed him had been against the neck of his Julian Bell, clothes discarded for--finally--a chance to do more than declare his love for the poet with pretty words, but to make it. Everything was changed when he woke.

There's a feeling that accompanies loss, one that is rooted deep in paranoid intuition, the very feeling that, in knowing something is terribly wrong, the mind refuses it. Guy shoved it away, hoping to hell it was all in his head. Yet there was wrenching feeling in his gut, bequeathed by that unease in the atmosphere and the little details one wouldn't notice otherwise being so very strikingly off. Something inside him had begun to sink and break.

Guy was grappling with a feeling all humans in a state of loss know. It is a moment when the heart catches hysteria and shifts between settling in the acid churning in one's stomach and hopping up to block the throat to make breathing and speaking laborious. In a way, Guy had grown accustomed to fried nerves, a heart that often beat rapidly with worry, the weight of stress that bent his back and the painful--yet righteous--pressure on his mind. Loss was something he seldom knew, but paranoia is and always had been a bosom friend of his.

The moment he woke without Julian's beautiful body in his arms, warm and bare, he knew.

Guy had spent his life collecting things and giving them away, seldom losing anything. Now, he walked a barren household and collected what remained. Two stories of near complete emptiness, and a gaping sense of loss, flapping about in his hung open jaw.

All three of them, in a night, gone.

There was a cup, in the bathroom, and Guy could smell the scotch in it from the hall. Like a tombstone, solemn on the ceramic sink, it stood, Kim's toothbrush inside. The philanderer's double, a scent of a memory in the wake of Kim Philby's vanishing act. Scotch and toothpaste. Guy walked away.

In the kitchen, once cluttered, there was an overwhelming sense of vacancy. Two books rested on the still-greasy floor where the table had once been. Anthony had picked it out. Now, there were just the leather bound memorials to his and Julian's name. Two volumes of flattery. A sketchbook filled with Guy's face as his dear Anthony saw it, and the last resounding words--meant for him alone--that a dead poet could bestow the world.

If asked, Guy would never be able to reason his numb search around a clearly empty house, but his soul was aching and groping for remnants of those he had always loved most. He went to the closet last, and after room after room of spacious nothing, he looked upon the only pieces left.

Anthony's coat. Kim's favoured tie.

With the volumes clutched in hands, Guy left. Anthony's coat weighed over his shoulders, rounded them with grief, and Kim's tie coiled around his neck, like a scarf, unknotted but wholly successful in covering the knot in Guy's throat.

Julian Bell's flame had gone out again. Anthony and Kim were back where they belonged, fighting fascism. Only Guy remained, his former happiness extinguished.

Anguish was strange to him in that it stole none of his understanding away. He knew them to be all right, relatively speaking. Yet it was also potent enough that there existed no amount of relief to be had in knowing them to be ripped away from him and that he was alone in Luceti. Time waited for all of them while in this place, and time would wait for him, too.

Ah, but Julian... in the arms of the angels again.

Guy holds his anguish as he holds his gin: bitterly, easily, and half-dazed. He walked the ways of Luceti, wings twitching, but low on his back. Anthony had never made such alterations to his clothing, and Guy was strangely comforted by the weight of the cloth enveloping even the feathery, gangly and useless things on his back. If he couldn't have Anthony's embrace, or Kim's eyes, or Julian's mouth...


Guy, unabashedly, is drunk for weeks, and will never set foot in House 32 again. On April 9th, when he can’t bear to speak them but can, just barely, write their names, he pens:]

It is with great regret that I inform the citizens of Luceti that three men have left us.

Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby returned to England; Julian Bell rests with God.