Justin got out of the car, and just stood there staring up at the house. He pushed his hands into his pockets, and waited for Brian to join him at his side.

“It’s strange how a house can symbolise so much,” Justin said, and he felt Brian shrug his shoulders next to him.

“It’s still just a house,” he replied.

Justin pursed his lips. Maybe once it had been just a house - just bricks and mortar, windows and doors, empty rooms. But then Brian had bought it, and while it was absolutely still a house, it was their house, and he had bought it for him.

That meant everything.

“Come on,” Justin said, and he reached for Brian’s hand, linking their fingers.

Brian didn’t try to resist, his body language compliant but guarded, as if he knew he had to follow, not just for Justin’s sake, but because it was inevitable - this final closing of a chapter on both of their lives. Maybe he would even be able to sell the house after this.

Justin led him around the back into the long, sprawling yard, the lush green of the grass rusty from the winter, and disuse.

They stood there for what seemed like an age, just looked out over the ground, everything still in the half-light of the evening, the dimming sun sending splashes of auburn and bronze across the pebbled paths.

Justin sighed, from deep down within his belly, from a place that he had pushed down as soon as he had left Pittsburgh on his flight to New York. Everything about Brian he kept there - the resentments he had collected over the years, like wild flowers he dried out and pressed into a book, so he could look at them later, and remember, but they would be faded, and wouldn’t mean the same.

He also kept the good times, locked up inside a box where he wouldn’t be able to get to them too easily. The way Brian’s hair began to curl around his ears when it got too long, the stretch of his shoulder muscles when he wrapped his arms around Justin, and kissed the sensitive spot on his neck that always made him shiver. And the words too - those precious, rare words that Brian sometimes spat out like they had been hurting his throat for far too long. Words like ‘I miss you’, ‘I love you’, and the always painful ‘it’s only time.’

It was only time, of course, but it was laughable that the sentiment came from the one person who kept time like a caged animal, beating and slapping it into submission, until it was fancied that even the clocks in his home stopped if he so much as glared at them.

But wasn’t that the point of it all? That Brian, who needed control like he needed sex, fucking it hard until it keeled over and acquiesced, gave it all up just for him? So that he could find his own time, his own pace, his own method of getting through the day and making it good for once. Making it his.

Justin looked up, blinking as a white fluffy flake settled upon his eyelashes.

“It’s snowing,” he breathed, and he looked up at Brian, his face full of awe.

Brian nodded, his tongue sticking into his cheek, staring at Justin for a long, drawn-out moment, his eyes dark and hooded, but with a tiny flickering light that refused to burn out, hiding deep down inside.

“Sure it is, Sunshine,” he said finally, his breath freezing in the air. He stepped a little closer, and reached out, tilting Justin’s face up towards the sky so he could kiss the snow from his lips. “But after snow comes the thaw.”