Andrew stared out the hospital window as Glasgow split itself in two.

He fidgeted with the hem of his rough cotton shirt, the top half of the outfit the hospital had given him to replace his blood-soaked clothes. Andrew wished he still had that blue Yes Scotland shirt, the one he’d removed to staunch Colin’s bleeding. At least then he’d have some tangible connection to the man he loved.

His faint reflection in the window made him look like the ghost he should be right now. The ghost he’d gladly become if he could go back in time and give his life for Colin’s, rather than the other way around.

Another reflection moved behind him, the pacing form of his friend John, who was phoning the rest of the Warriors to tell them Colin was fighting for survival on the operating table. Fergus was on his way to join Liam, Robert, and Katie here in the crowded waiting area, where they sat with Colin’s father, grandmother, and sister.

A hand touched Andrew’s elbow. “Did you phone your family, mate?” John asked in a hushed voice.

Andrew shook his head. “What family?”

“C’mon, they’ll find out soon enough from the police or the media.”

Andrew nearly laughed. The media. On the wall-mounted TV, BBC Ten O’Clock News spoke of Prime Minister Cameron’s speech, First Minister Salmond’s resignation, and the upcoming Ryder Cup golf tournament, but not a word about the riots spreading through Glasgow from the tinderbox of George Square. It made this night feel more surreal than ever, like he barely shared a reality with the rest of the world.

John nudged him again. “Gies your phone and let me ring them.”

Andrew thumbed in his passcode and handed over the device. “Try Lady Karen, my cousin. She’s listed in my contacts as Killer Shrew.”

“You people are strange.” John gave Andrew’s back a comforting pat as he stepped away.

Andrew went to sit with the others. Emma slid over to make room on the orange vinyl sofa. She hadn’t cried yet, from what he’d seen, but her face was gray with fear.

“Tell me again,” she said, twisting her hands together so hard, her knuckles cracked. “Tell me how Colin saved you.”

Andrew’s stomach soured at the memory, but he shared it again in a whisper. He added no embellishment, for it needed none.

As he’d told the police, he wasn’t sure what fate had awaited him in that black car, where or to whom it would have taken him. But his walk toward it had felt like a death march.

It had all happened so fast, Reggie’s surprise appearance at the edge of George Square, offering a friendly hand to help him away from the scuffle. Once Andrew was within arm’s reach, that friendly hand had revealed a gleaming blade aimed at his kidney. Reggie had ordered Andrew to walk, to not look back when Colin called his name. To act against every instinct.

Get in the car or I’ll cut him, too.

Andrew had tried to hurry, but hesitated at the last moment.

“If I’d just done as Reggie ordered,” Andrew told Emma, “your brother would be well and whole.”

“Naw, Colin’s too fast.” She laid her head on Andrew’s shoulder. “He was always gonnae reach you.”

Mr. MacDuff stood abruptly. Andrew looked up to see him hurrying across the waiting area to meet the surgeon. As the men spoke, too far away to hear, Emma reached out, taking her grandmother’s hand on one side and Andrew’s on the other. He gripped it so hard he thought he’d crush her bones, but she just squeezed back in response.

Finally Colin’s father turned from the surgeon with a grim nod and came back to them.

“Colin’s out of surgery,” he said, “but not out of the woods. His blood wasn’t clotting well enough for them to do the-the—” He waved a shaky hand at his own side. “To put him back together. Reconstruction, that is.”

“Now what, then?” Colin’s gran asked.

“He’s to stay in ICU for twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours, until he’s stable enough for them to operate again.”

“Can we see him?” Emma asked her dad.

“Aye, soon. But maybe only for a few minutes, and he’ll be—well, he’ll look a state, hooked up to all those machines. It can be scary for weans.”

“I’m not a wean.” She swiped at the tears dribbling down her cheeks. “And I’m not scared.”

“That’s a relief,” Andrew told her. “Because I’m terrified, and I’ll need a brave partner.” He wasn’t talking rubbish either, trying to buck up her spirits. The thought of seeing Colin on the edge of life scared him witless.

The only thing he feared more was never seeing Colin again at all.

Just after two a.m., Andrew finally sat at Colin’s side, in a chair squeezed between the bed and the array of beeping, sighing machines that kept his boyfriend alive.

“It’s me, love.” He reached out and slid his fingers over Colin’s, his breath hitching into a sob. “Sorry, I just need a moment. I didn’t know if I’d ever touch you again.” He drew in a deep, antiseptic-smelling breath, then let it out. “There. All emotions safely tucked away. Nothing to see. Which is good, because you can’t…see.” He swallowed hard. “They say you’re heavily sedated, but that you might still be able to hear me. Which is also good, because talking to oneself is an eccentricity not currently in vogue.”

Colin just lay there, of course, breathing with the help of the ventilator tube in his mouth.

“I’m sorry it took so long for me to get in here. That’s your fault, what with your capricious core temperature and breathing rate.” Andrew’s own lungs seized up at the memory of Colin’s respiratory arrest an hour ago. “It’s for the best, this delay, so I didn’t have to visit you whilst wearing those dreadful hospital clothes. John went to my flat and fetched a decent shirt and trousers for me. They don’t match—Fergus has all the fashion sense in that relationship—but his heart was in the right place.”

Andrew ran his gaze over Colin’s body. They’d removed the warming pad from his chest, as his temperature had finally stabilized. Now the white sheet made him seem so pristine. But Andrew knew that beneath it, Colin’s wound was still partly open, his innards too swollen with fluid to allow full closure yet.

“All the Warriors were here tonight. The waiting area was one big gay vigil. I took pictures, of course, but for your eyes only, not the public’s. Not every moment in life needs social-media documentation.”

He slid his fingers back to touch their tips to Colin’s, remembering how once, lying in bed, they’d compared the lengths of each of their fingers, with a final scoreline of 5 - 5. Now he had to fight the urge to clutch Colin’s hand and beg him not to die.

“Oh! John also fetched my earphones.” Andrew pulled his phone from his shirt pocket. “He’s a star, isn’t he? He offered to stay here all night with me, but then—” Andrew cleared his throat. “But then my parents and brother arrived, so they’ve got that sorted.” His throat thickened at the memory of his family’s tears as they’d held him. “George looked as though he’d have actually missed me if I’d died. Needless to say, I’ve been dis-disowned.” He paused, his chest aching with his next words. “Elizabeth didn’t come, of course. Things are very…difficult for her at the moment.”

Andrew straightened up and wiped his eyes. “Enough about my family.” He opened his music app and cued Colin’s current favorite tune, “Every Other Freckle” by alt-j. “We loved this song from the first time we heard it. You said it made you ‘pure dead horny.’” He put one of the earphones in his own left ear and tested the volume. “Not sure how you could tell the difference between that and your usual state.”

Andrew inserted the other earphone into Colin’s right ear, then started the track. To keep the wire between them slack, he scooted closer, folding his hands atop the bed railing and resting his chin upon them.

Gazing at Colin, Andrew mouthed each dreamy, obsessive lyric along with the singer, then hummed the intricate, overlapping interludes.

When the track ended, he played it again. “Remember how you didn’t get the song’s Flashdance reference, so we watched the film? And you said, ‘I’ve finally found my heteroception’? And I told you Jennifer Beals would be fifty years old now, and you said you didn’t care?” He reached out to touch a lock of Colin’s ink-black hair. “I think that was when I fell in love with you. Because I imagined a day in the distant future, in the highly unlikely but theoretically possible event I am no longer beautiful—and it felt like on that day, you would still be by my side.”

Toward the end of the song’s third play Andrew stopped humming, stopped talking, stopped lip-synching, for he now realized the lyrics were written almost entirely in future tense. It was a list of things the singer was gonna do to his beloved. Even the imperative chorus, the command to Devour me, was a hope and a plan.

“You will do everything one day,” Andrew whispered to Colin’s pale, still form. “I promise.”

Andrew was blethering again.

Over the last…Colin didn’t know how long (hours? days? weeks?), he’d heard many voices, some real, some imagined. His uncle James’s voice clearly fell into the latter category, talking about a soldier he’d served with who’d lost an entire torso to an IED, yet somehow survived. His mother’s voice, promising that if Colin lived she’d never miss another birthday—well, he wasn’t sure which category that belonged to.

But one voice he knew was real, because it spoke utter nonsense.

Andrew had mentioned a few important bits, like the Warriors winning Saturday’s match after nearly canceling it on Colin’s account. Or like Andrew’s family showing up to support and dis-disown him, his brother going so far as to stay by Andrew’s side while Colin underwent another…however many surgeries he’d had. Or like Andrew’s plan to oversee Colin’s full home recovery at his own flat, which was cleaner and quieter than Colin’s and had “an extra bedroom for any family members who’d care to stay a maximum of two consecutive nights.”

Mostly, though, Andrew had prattled on about the London Fashion Show, along with his theories on who killed Lucy Beale on EastEnders and who deserved to win The Great British Bake Off.

At first, Colin had considered shuffling off his mortal coil to escape Andrew’s endless chatter. But after a while, it began to soothe him, like a white-noise machine. More importantly, it anchored him to this world more than any of the medical contraptions attached to his body.

He’d saved Andrew’s life, and now Andrew was saving his.

“You probably don’t want to hear about politics,” Andrew was saying now, “but there’s sensational news on that front at last.”

Colin fought to stay conscious. His mind felt draped in a heavy gray blanket.

“There’s a group online calling themselves ‘the forty-five percent,’ after the Yes proportion of the vote. Seems a silly label to me, drawing attention to the fact we lost, but it’s given people something to rally around, so I suppose it’s healthy in the short term.”

Colin imagined Andrew’s voice dismantling the gray blanket.

“It’s totally taken over Twitter. Everyone’s got 45s on their profile pics where Yes badges used to be. Not me, of course. I set trends, I don’t follow them. Talking of followers, you’ve got ten thousand now. Including me.”

Thread by thread, word by word, the blanket unraveled.

“And you’ll love this. In George Square, there’s now a peace flag hanging beside a Saltire, on the fence by the war memorial. People have been leaving hundreds of bags of food-bank donations all weekend. Yes, I know, if you were conscious, you’d be saying food banks shouldn’t need to exist at all. But the point is, George Square is a place of hope again, and after Friday night’s riots—oh, you missed that, didn’t you? Forget I said anything. There were no riots.”

Riots?

“Seemed like it at the time, though,” Andrew muttered. “Erm…what else? Oh, the Scottish Nationalist Party’s membership has increased by fifty percent since Thursday’s referendum. They’re getting hundreds of new applications every hour. Soon they’ll be the third largest party in all of the UK.

“But what this all adds up to, of course, is me being right. I said Scotland wouldn’t be put back in its box. People like you have found your voice and now you all won’t shut up. You won’t give up.” He squeezed Colin’s hand harder. “Right?” he whispered. “Don’t die just to prove me wrong. That’d be so bloody…typical of you.” Andrew’s voice broke, and his next breath was a sob. “I’m sorry.” Warm lips, much wetter than usual, pressed against the back of Colin’s hand. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

Using every bit of his strength, Colin parted his lips with a dry pop. “National,” he whispered. God, his throat was killing him.

Andrew jerked. “Colin? Was that you?”

Colin swallowed, which hurt even more than speaking. “Scottish National Party.” He opened his eyes and laid his hazy gaze upon Andrew’s face. “Not ‘Nationalist,’ ya knob.”

Andrew laughed and wiped his eyes. “I knew that. I was only trying to get a rise out of your miserable self. And it worked. I’ve resurrected you.” He kissed Colin’s palm and held it against his own cheek. “My brave warrior has returned to me.”

“Shhhhhut up.” Colin’s lashes fluttered shut, then open again. “I love you, Lord Andrew.”

At long last, his boyfriend was speechless.

The door opened, and a blurry figure in blue scrubs entered. “Mr. MacDuff, welcome back.” He recognized the friendly female voice as one of his nurses.

“Thanks,” he whispered, though such a small word could never convey the gratitude he felt toward her and her colleagues. “Water?”

“Not for a few days,” she said. “We need to be sure your plumbing’s in working order. You needed quite a lot of repairs down there.”

His fingers found the top of his sheet, and he started to lift it to look. The nurse gently pushed it back down.

“Trust me,” she said. “You’d rather not see at the moment.”

Fine, I’ll wait until you’ve left the room.

He held still while the nurse—Rita, according to her laminated name badge—gave his lips and the inside of his mouth a generous swab of something more thirst-quenching than water. The relief was immeasurable. “What about my knee?”

Rita blinked at him. “Knee?”

“I hurt it. Before I got stabbed. Did I tear a ligament again? When can I play football?”

She shared a look with Andrew that filled Colin with dread.

“Was it my ACL this time?” An anterior cruciate ligament tear would mean months of recovery, maybe even surgery.

Andrew spoke slowly. “Colin, you nearly died.”

“I know, but I didn’t, and I need to get back on the pitch.”

“I’ll fetch the doctor,” Rita said. “She can explain it all.”

When the nurse left, he looked at Andrew. “Is there room for two in this bed?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then go home and sleep. You look complete shit.”

“Firstly, I’m incapable of looking complete shit. Secondly, I can’t leave your side, because you could still die, of sepsis or pneumonia or an embolism.”

Colin stared at him, waiting for the thirdly that never came. “Perhaps a bouquet of flowers would have been more cheery.”

“Sorry.” Andrew swiped his hands through his hair, which somehow still looked decent. “I’m so scared for you.”

“Why am I here?” When Andrew looked at him with alarm, he added, “I know I was stabbed. But why Reggie?”

“Because he was paid to. He told the police he was to scare me and turn me against you and your, erm, sort of people. He threw the rock through my window, but when I didn’t report it, their whole plan was scuttled. So he marked up my Bystander photo and—”

“Wait, whose plan?”

Andrew looked miserable. “The one person in my family who always treated me like an adult. All along he was manipulating me like a puppet.”

“Who?”

“Jeremy. And when I didn’t dance when he pulled my strings, he-he tried to cut them.”

If not for the sedatives, Colin knew his skin would be crawling with horror. “Your brother-in-law? He seemed so nice.” Despite being a Tory. “Was this a hit by the Conservative Party?”

Andrew shook his head. “They weren’t planning to kill me, according to Reggie. They just wanted to get me alone, talk sense into me. Jeremy hoped I’d return to the fold, repentant. But they knew I wouldn’t come quietly or voluntarily. Hence the knife.” He sighed. “As for the Tories, there’s no evidence that anyone but Jeremy and Reggie knew about this quasi-kidnapping plot.”

“Are you sure? I’ve seen House of Cards, both versions.”

Andrew gave a bitter laugh. “Jeremy, of course, denies it all, says Reggie has grievances against me or some such nonsense. I suppose the police and eventually the courts will sort out who’s telling the truth.”

Fatigue suddenly overwhelmed Colin, and he turned his eyes to the ceiling, a view he sensed would become excruciatingly familiar.

Andrew kept going. “If I’d not been so strident online Friday, Jeremy wouldn’t have felt the need to-to contain me. I should’ve listened to you when you told me to keep my mouth shut. Tweeting that image of my disownment telegram was the stupidest, most drama-queeny thing I’ve ever done. Which is saying a lot.”

Colin was too tired to comment, so he let Andrew continue.

“Then I had to go and tweet those pics at George Square, which made it easy for Reggie to track me down.” Andrew’s voice choked again. “And I almost got you killed. I will never, ever forgive myself.”

Colin said nothing. He was out of breath, out of words. So he reached out his hand until Andrew took it, and kissed it, and wept fresh tears upon it.

Then Colin closed his eyes and smiled. He’d had something worth giving after all.