Snow had thinned to fine dust by the time New Year's Eve arrived, leaving the city bright and brittle under a pale moon. Verdenne glittered with lights; shop windows wore garlands and paper stars. From their apartment the world looked like a painting—soft, distant, impossibly beautiful.
Inside, the apartment smelled of something warm: cinnamon from the stew simmering on the stove, the faint residue of Lior's gardenia and Kaein's wisteria clinging to the coat on the peg. Witty the cat flopped across a cushion, declaring the evening his, tail flicking at the edge of a ribbon and then curling into a small, satisfied ball.
Lior was at the sink, rinsing a dish. He moved with a quiet surety, sleeves rolled, hair still damp from the shower. He hummed a half-song under his breath, a habit he never quite lost from years of early departures and late returns to airports. The domestic rhythm steadied him—the small, ordinary things that made life make sense.
Kaein came up behind him and draped an arm over his shoulders. The touch was easy, familiar; two bodies that had learned each other's maps. "You always do that," Kaein said, smile soft. "Humming like you know the words."
Lior tilted his head, pressing a kiss to Kaein's jaw as if he could print the moment there. "Only the good parts," he murmured. "So they don't forget us."
They ate together, slow and deliberate, then retreated to the couch with mugs of something spiced and hot. The city would have fireworks, people would shout and sing in the streets, but for the two of them the countdown had a quieter dignity. They'd chosen this year to stay home, to make the night small and honest.
As minutes crept closer to midnight, they wrapped themselves in a blanket, knees and hands knotted together. Kaein watched Lior more than the TV, the way the lunar's profile softened when he relaxed, the way his fingers tapped an absent rhythm against the mug. A warmth rose in him at the sight, that steady, private heat that had nothing to do with pheromones and everything to do with the fact that this man had chosen him.
Lior's voice came low, suddenly heavy. "What if we had never met?" he asked.
Kaein blinked. The question was small, almost like a child's worry—the sort that aches in the chest because it is too big for easy answers. He turned his head to look at him. "What do you mean?"
Lior swallowed, eyes finding the window and the stretch of city beyond it. "Before all of this. Before… everything changed. Before the news, before the tests, before we understood what any of it meant. What if the old world had stayed the old world? Would we have still found each other? Would we—" He broke off, throat bobbing. "Sometimes I think… maybe if we'd been braver when we were younger, if we'd said what we felt, we wouldn't have lost ten years. Maybe we'd have been family sooner. Maybe—" He turned toward Kaein, voice raw. "Maybe I would've had you sooner."
Kaein reached out, thumb stroking Lior's knuckle. The question shifted the room—the quiet made suddenly vulnerable. "We would have," he said firmly, and then softer, "We always would have, Lior. There are some things that time can't change. It can delay them, confuse them, make them complicated. But it can't erase who we are to each other."
Lior's lips trembled into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "You say that like you're not full of the same regrets."
"And I was—" Kaein admitted. "I thought if I kept my head down and did what I had to, life would follow a cleaner arc. I thought practicality was a kind of love. I learned it isn't. Love is messy and terrifying and… stubborn." He leaned forward and brushed his forehead to Lior's. "I was stubborn for the wrong reasons. But I found you. And I think—that means we were meant for the longer story."
They watched the small digital clock on the mantel, each green number a tiny promise of time passing. Lior's hand found Kaein's face, thumb wiping at the corner of his eye before it could shine. "I'm scared," he confessed, the word dropping into the small space between them.
Kaein tightened his fingers in his hair. "Scared of what?"
"Of losing you." Lior's voice was blunt, honest and aching. "If—if one day you don't come back from work, or you get some new opportunity far away, or… God, if something happens. This world has changed so much. I can't imagine waking up without the smell of you in the blankets. I can't imagine my days not being shaped by your laugh, your hands. I'm attached to you in ways I never expected, and some nights the thought of losing you makes my chest—" He stopped, breathing hard. "I don't think I could bear it."
Kaein's throat tightened. He had felt that current under the surface too; Lior's fear was not foreign to him. He gave a small laugh that was half-cry, resisting the sudden fierce want to protect, to fold time over itself until they were forever insulated. "I'm afraid too," he said, quiet. "Of being the one who leaves behind someone like you. What if my duties take me away? What if I make a choice and it pulls us in different directions? Sometimes I think—what if the rut takes me somewhere I can't control? I carry inhibitors in my bag because I'm terrified of forgetting you when the biology gets loud. I know that sounds ridiculous."
Lior shook his head, anger and tenderness mingling. "It doesn't sound ridiculous. It sounds like courage—carrying your fear and not letting it make your decisions for you."
Kaein's eyes found Lior's. "You are my courage sometimes," he answered. "You steady me in ways the world doesn't. If I leave you, it wouldn't be because I want to. It would be because something else—health, work, fate—forced my hand. But I don't plan to leave you. Not ever, if I can help it." He pressed his lips to Lior's knuckles. "You are the only one who sits in my chest like a light."
They held each other like that until the television counted down the last ten seconds of the year. The city outside swelled into a roar—fireworks popped like distant thunder and then spread light across the sky. Inside, Lior and Kaein kissed through the midnight, small and fierce and full of the belief that their clasp could alter the shape of the world.
After the initial fireworks settled and the city settled back into its soft murmur, they sat on the balcony, bundled, watching the lingering sparks of light. Kaein tucked his hand into Lior's, thumb stroking the soft pad of his thumb—an anchor, a promise.
"Can I tell you something stupid?" Lior asked, voice thin in the cold.
"You can tell me anything," Kaein said.
Lior chose the words slowly. "Sometimes I wonder, if we had confessed earlier—if I'd told you at nineteen, if you had told me—would we be in the same place? Would we have Witty? Would we have… this?" He gestured vaguely to the city, the apartment, the life spread between them.
Kaein's laugh this time was softer, edged with tears. "Maybe. Maybe we'd have a different story. Maybe pain would have been less, or more. Maybe the person you would have become at nineteen wouldn't have been the one you needed now. People change; life changes. I like the person you are now. I like the person I am now. We found each other when we were ready, not a moment sooner."
Lior inhaled sharply. "I just—sometimes the what-ifs feel like knives."
"And sometimes we stitch them into quilts," Kaein said, half joking, half serious. "We take the torn bits of 'could-have-been' and make something warmer. That's what we do. We're very good at mending." He squeezed Lior's hand. "And besides, Witty would never have come. He would have been a different cat in a different life. This Witty is ours."
They both laughed, small and wet around the edges, and the sound chased away some of the sharpness. The night was a thin, good thing.
Later, as the city eased into the first hour of the new year, they moved inside. Lior made coffee without looking, the old comfortable dance of two people who knew how the other took their mug. Kaein leaned his head against the kitchen counter and watched him, feeling an upwelling of fierce affection so bright it startled him.
"You worry about the rut more than I do sometimes," Lior said out of the blue, stirring cream into a cup. "But the way you plan—the inhibitors, the notes—we could write a handbook."
Kaein smiled without amusement, then became serious. "I carry them because I learned to fear losing myself. It's not that I don't trust you. I trust you more than anyone. It's that biology can be loud and unforgiving. The inhibitors are small acts of control. They let me be present. They let me choose you."
Lior set the mugs down and approached, hands settling on Kaein's shoulders. "You always choose, though. You chose me when you walked into that airport all those years later. You chose me again and again. I don't need you to be perfect. I just need you here."
His voice, steady and sure, settled in Kaein like a warm hand.
They spent the rest of the night small and close: slow kisses between tasks, fingers finding each other in the pockets of coats, a lullaby hummed as they folded clothes. They read old messages—embarrassing teenage sentiments—and rewound their steps through memory until each one felt less like regret and more like the path that brought them together.
Before sleep, they lay side by side. Lior's arm flung over Kaein's waist; Kaein fit like a piece slipped into place. In the dark, Lior's voice softened. "If we ever had children—" he started, and then paused.
Kaein's hand settled over Lior's. "I've thought about it," he said. "I don't know the exact shape of it, not yet. But I know I want to try. With you. To see what kind of life we could make. Maybe they'd be stubborn, maybe they'd take after one of us more than the other. But they'd know love."
Lior exhaled. "I'm terrified and excited and everything people say about having kids. But thinking about you as a father—" He stopped, and the rest was a hush.
"You'd be good," Kaein said simply. "You'd be patient in ways I admire, fierce in ways I need. We'd figure it out."
Lior's laugh was wet. "You – always the professor with perfect answers."
Kaein's reply was a squeeze and a kiss in the dark.
Sleep came like truce. When Kaein woke in the pale morning, Lior was already awake, watching him with an expression that had nothing to do with anything, everything to do with devotion. For a second, fear flickered at the edges—an echo from the night's confessions—but it was worth it. They had said things that unlatched some old fear, and in saying them aloud, they had woven reassurance from vulnerability.
Later, over a slow breakfast, Lior folded their plans for the year—dates, flights, classes—into careful folds, making room for spontaneity and for the small rituals that kept them tethered. They made lists of what to do if one of them had to be away during a rut, planned for extra bottles of inhibitors in strategic places, and scheduled a tentative spring trip to see Kaein's family.
It was practical and slightly mundane, but such work steadied them. They calmed the world in little ways.
When the day unspooled, Kaein went to his lecture and Lior to the airport. They lived in two orbits that night, the same sky over each of them. In the lecture hall, Kaein spoke about patterns in human behavior, about the surprising persistence of certain attachments. The students listened, unaware of how personal some of his words had become, unaware that beneath his measured academic surface sat a man who'd spent a night listing his fears out loud and had been held through them.
Lior performed his pre-flight checks with the same measured care, feeling the faint print of Kaein's smell on the fabric of his jacket the whole way. The city below shrank as they climbed, and the miles were honest, indifferent. But in the quiet hum of the cabin, even with the professional protocols and the neutralizers in place, Lior felt a steady comfort in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was keeping a light on for him.
They were not immune to the world's uncertainties. They were not naive. But they had chosen, sincerely and repeatedly, to face fear together: to say the words that hurt, to make plans that steadied them, to fold love into habit so the emergency of biology and fate might be met with mundane readiness.
When the next New Year came and with it the inevitable questions of what-if, they would know how to answer: not with certainty, but with each other. And sometimes—most nights—they would simply lie, entwined, smelling of gardenia and wisteria, and remember how they had held one another through midnight.