1775

The paintbrush slides across the canvas, swishing, snakelike in its bold, smooth curves. The artist pauses, dips the brush, holds it up to measure against the sitter's coat, frowns, blends in a little more of the white and is satisfied. The studio stretches out like a lesson in perspective, its vanishing point cut off by a pair of twelve-paned windows and the walls hung with pictures finished and unfinished; with new canvases and those with rags of old paint still clinging to their edges. Lukas moves his eyes as far as he can without turning his head, takes in the portrait of a young woman with an empty space on her lap where her child will appear at the next sitting, manages not to smirk at the general who has, out of some misguided sense of achievement, chosen to be portrayed wearing the burnished armour and imperious glare of a Caesar. At the painter's gesture, he returns his gaze to the place in front of him – not into some dignified middle distance, but at the viewer. It is a bold choice – his own. He refuses to blush and flirt, to smile and hide it behind some coquettish hand gesture as a man in his position might be expected to. If he is to be memorialised, let it be with a shred of his self-respect still attached.

The door opens, is thrown open with exuberance, and into the room steps the king, followed, as he must always be, by two guards. The artist, shocked by the visit, panics, throws down the brush, falls convulsively into a deep brow.

"Your Majesty." he says, averting his eyes as he rises. Ridiculous, Lukas thinks, to be afraid of this young man.

"Mathias." says Lukas, and comes no further to bowing than inclining his head, as one might do to greet any friend. The artist blushes at the intimacy shown by the simple use of the name.

"Please, Maestro, continue!" Mathias says brightly, but his presence has put a stop to all work. The artist picks up his brush, nervous, dabs superfluously at a corner of the background, and can do no more. "I came only to inspect the work," Mathias continues, striding over to the canvas. He does not need to bend down to examine it; the portrait, when it is done, will be life-size. He lets his eyes move over it from top to bottom, approving. The face, perhaps, is a little severe – he would have liked Lukas to smile – but there is no denying its masterful execution, and it is an expression he has seen many times before. "Excellent," he says, giving the relieved artist a smile of his favour. To Lukas, he says, "I will have it placed next to mine."

"I hardly think that's the place for it." Lukas replies, stretching his stiff muscles and then straightening up again, shallowing out the inward curve of his back. Mathias cannot surely be thinking of the long gallery in the palace, where kings are placed next to their queens. No, not the place for him at all.

Mathias walks over to Lukas, who goes with him. "High time that brother of yours was released from his lessons, I think," he says good-naturedly. "The schoolroom's no place for a boy on a day like this."

"You spoil him," Lukas replies, making no secret of his disapproval. "A boy of fourteen should be devoted to his studies." Life at Court is a ceaseless parade of entertainments, and Lukas feels that his efforts to push Emil away from a life of pleasure and towards one of productivity are doomed to failure. He would have preferred him to stay at boarding school, but Mathias insisted that he be brought to the palace and be educated by his own tutors, respected men from the university. Emil, too, has been painted, was chosen from the hundreds of eligible boys to be in Mathias's coronation portrait; to go down on one knee and, like Moses with the tablets, to hold on a cushion the orb and sceptre. And it is known throughout the Court that he was not chosen for the prestige of his family, for he has no title, or for his wealth, or even for his beauty, but because his brother lies on his back for the king.

Mathias laughs, knows that Lukas is right, changes the subject.

"I really do like your portrait," he says as they leave the studio. "I thought it wonderful – dazzlingly beautiful."

Lukas blushes. "You'll prefer it to me one day," he says darkly. "When I don't look like that anymore." Without Mathias, he would never have been painted. The portrait shines with his luminous beauty but, like the moon, he shines not with his own flame, but with the reflected glory of the king.

Mathias shakes his head, amused. "And if I said I love you more than any of that?"

"I would not believe you."

"And if I said that, after rescuing your brother from his Latin master, I was retiring to my chamber for the evening?"

"I would accompany you." Lukas says with a smile. It is not Mathias who will be pierced with the glare of his painted eyes, but the Court and its intolerable artifice. He loves Mathias, but such a thing is difficult when faced with the gossips' caprice. They whisper, but will not speak out loud. Mathias has not married and never will, and so the murmuring is trapped behind cupped hands for fear of losing the chance of a cut of the royal fortune one day in the future. Lukas has decided to send Emil far away from all this once he has finished his education. He will ask Mathias to find him a wife and a government job over in Iceland or up in the northern reaches of Norway. Lukas will not have him here, will not let him drown in the cloying decadence of the Court. Lukas is trapped by his beauty; it is his dearest wish for Emil to be free to do something of worth.

…

1793

Enough years have gone by for the portrait to be a memory rather than a reflection, for the webbing of cracks to begin to appear at the corners, and the smallpox stalks the palace, cruel and pestilential. Mathias paces the corridors, preoccupied both by this drama and by the concerns of a kingdom that stretches to the northernmost tip of the world. He has had to declare a quarantine, and the pleasure-seeking courtiers are unhappily constrained, their whispers rising to fever pitch. In the last few days, the Court has lain silent, for the Master of Music is one of the casualties of the epidemic. The Master of Music… A realisation flashes across his mind. He stops, turns, speeds up. Something terrible has just occurred to him.

He finds Lukas sitting at his desk, poring over one of his hundreds of books. He bursts into the room, causing Lukas to look up at him in startled irritation.

"You were speaking to the Master of Music." Mathias says, his tone unintentionally accusatory.

Lukas colours vividly. "And what of it?" he demands. "He is one of the few people in this court who will speak to me as if I am anything more than a prostitute."

"I meant nothing by it," Mathias says apologetically. "I meant only to say that he has the pox."

"The great or the small?"

"The small." Mathias says grimly.

"Ah," says Lukas, chastened and understanding. He is afraid. As a child, he was never blessed with the milkpox, the mild disease that leaves one with a lifelong immunity to its terrifying variations. If the smallpox comes for him, it will be with full force. It is a fearsome thing. People die from it, go blind, are disfigured by the sunken scars left behind by the blisters. His hand involuntarily goes to his face. What would he be if he lost his beauty, even if it is already faded by the years that separate him from his portrait? "I spoke to him for only a few minutes." he says, trying to reassure Mathias.

"Nevertheless…" Mathias persists. "You've not had it, have you?"

Lukas shakes his head. "Never." he admits.

Mathias is worried, reaches for Lukas's hand, twines their fingers together. "Be well, then," he says, the idea of losing Lukas flickering through his mind and bruising his heart with the faintest echo of what the pain will be like if such a thing happens. "I love you." he says, and kisses him.

"And I you," Lukas replies. "But I am perfectly well. You have far more important things to worry about than me."

Once Mathias has left, Lukas stands up to pick out another book, leans against the wood of the bookshelves to steady himself against the nausea, against the sudden, sickening trembling of his vision. He did not tell Mathias about it, and nor did he mention the headache that has been plaguing him since yesterday morning. It is nothing. This sickness, annoying though it is, will pass without incident. It is nothing.

…

The pustules rise after a few days, pale and fluid-filled, crowding every inch of flesh and even arrayed along the paper-thin skin of the eyelids. The blisters itch like nothing on earth. As Lukas lies under the boiling heat of fever, they are volcanic. It is unendurable. He longs to rake his nails all over himself, leave the sores to seep and bleed and scar. There is a light spilling under his closed eyelids, blooming red, but he cannot bear to open them for fear that the blisters will burst and flood his eyes with their liquid. He lifts his hand, blindly running it up and down the sores on his arm. Someone seizes his wrist, then the other, and pulls his hands away. He protests.

"Leave them," a man says. "The scars will be worse if you scratch." The voice swims out of the red darkness.

"Mathias." Lukas says, identifying the speaker.

"Yes, my love, I'm here."

The kindness breaks Lukas's heart – the love, the tenderness. It is years now since he blazed with arrogance in the painter's eye. He has come to love Mathias even more than he did then, more than he could ever hope to say.

"Why are you here?" Lukas asks. "You have business to attend to, do you not?"

Mathias gives his hand a comforting squeeze. He is glad that Lukas cannot see the look on his face as he surveys his ravaged body. The scars will be nothing like Mathias's own scattering of little white marks from the milkpox of his childhood. They will be horrendous. They will be disfiguring. Lukas will be devastated when he sees himself, if he sees himself, if he does not go blind.

"It is early in the morning," Mathias reassures him. "A little after four o'clock. I can stay a good three hours with you."

There is a candle burning, then, Lukas surmises, against the darkness outside. The palace is silent, most of its inhabitants asleep, their nightly festivities doused by fear of infection. It is a lonely vigil Mathias is keeping and it is an unforgiving Court that, come dawn for the men of business and ten or eleven for those of pleasure, will wake around him.

"What are the people saying about me?" Lukas asks.

Mathias strokes his hands, grimacing at the thought the gossip that swirls through the chambers of the palace. He wishes for Lukas's sake that the scabs would simply fall away and leave no trace of themselves, but such a thing is impossible.

"I do not know." he lies.

Lukas snatches his hands away, scrunches them into fists, contorts his face with the pain of trying not to scratch. "Tell me!" he demands.

Mathias acquiesces. "They are saying that I am distracted by you, and that I see your illness as more pressing than the running of the state." He finishes while still unfinished.

"What else?"

Mathias breathes in, steels himself for the piece of truthful gossip. "They say you will no longer be beautiful."

"They are right," is all Lukas says, and turns away, screwing his eyes up tighter and pulling the blankets around himself. It has come. The day when all the Court glories in his downfall has come. Mathias will pick a new favourite, and Lukas will have nothing and no one. "Leave me." he adds tersely, the dampness of rising tears in his voice.

Mathias sees that he has made a mistake.

"Do you want anything? Water? Something to eat?" he asks, then remembers that the sores in Lukas's mouth and throat make it excruciating to swallow anything. "I could read to you from one of your books." he finishes lamely.

"I want to die." Lukas says despairingly.

"Don't say…"

A furious sigh, a reluctant correction. "I want to sleep."

"I'll stay with you." Mathias promises.

"I want you to go," Lukas snaps. "Go to bed, Mathias. You're the king, for God's sake. Your work is far more important than me. If I die, what will the world have lost?"

He is in one of his black moods; nothing Mathias can say will make any difference. No amount of love could lift away his scars and smooth his skin to its former unblemished state.

"I love you." he says.

"Blow out the candle as you leave." Lukas replies, pulling the blankets over his ruined face.

…

Fashion has changed since Lukas was young. Skirts have narrowed, shedding lace and bows and rich colours. Men too have lost the flamboyance of the years in which he came of age, and all people have abandoned the powdering of hair and faces. If ever there were a time to wish for the past, it is now. He has nothing now to cover the pits of fallen blisters that cover his body, no means of concealment, only the triumphant stares of the courtiers who have long waited for the lover of the king, the one who has his ear and his heart, to be brought low.

"It's so wonderful to see you up and about again," Mathias says, as the two of them watch the dancers circling the ballroom. "Although I suppose I'll have to give the Princess of Sweden a twirl or two in a moment." It is their shared joke, Mathias's half-hearted flirtations with women, just to keep the marriage rumours alive, but today Lukas does not smile.

"I don't want to stay at Court," he tells Mathias. "I can't live with all this," he says, gesturing around the room, at the vapid, perfumed meaninglessness of it all. "And I expect…" He shakes his head.

Mathias turns towards him, concerned. "You expect…" he prompts.

Lukas sighs. "To be replaced," he says. "You fell in love with my beauty, and my beauty is gone."

Mathias shakes his head. "Come outside with me." he says, and Lukas is relieved to be led out of the maddening, glittering ballroom and away from the people who talk behind their hands.

It is freezing; it is late autumn, They sit together on a carved bench, and Lukas runs a hand over the scrolled edges of the stone. It is as rough as his own skin feels to him when he touches it each morning – every day that sickening contact, every day when he wakes up and forgets, for a needle-thin fragment of a moment, that he is ruined.

Mathias resumes their conversation.

"I fell in love with your beauty," he admits. "Because that was the first thing I saw of you, when you were a servant with the bruise of your master's hand on your cheek. Then I fell in love with you for quite different reasons, and I barely remembered that I had ever lusted after you – that I had ever done anything other than love you." He wants to kiss Lukas, but not here. It can wait until they are behind closed doors, where not even the whispers of the palace can slip inside.

Lukas brushes away a tear that flows unevenly down his pitted face. "The fact remains," he says. "That I can't live here anymore."

Mathias shrugs, then nods. "I understand," he says. "Although… Your going will not be without its trials. The nights when I thought I was going to lose you were the worst of my life," He gives a wan smile. "And now it appears that I'm to be without you after all."

"I am leaving this place," Lukas replies. "Not you. Wherever I live will be yours too. My bed will be ours."

Mathias slips an arm around him, cups the curve of his hip for a moment, then relinquishes his hold for fear of his being caught. "I know, my love, I know you must leave," he says, though it weighs heavy on him to think of the days and nights he will spend surrounded by the double-talking courtiers, the ministers who explain the running of his own kingdom to him with contempt disguised just enough for any riposte on his part to look like paranoia. But he knows Lukas cannot stay. He knows that the Court has never given him any pleasure. "You can have one of my country estates," he says. "But promise me one thing."

"What's that?"

"That I can keep your portrait," he says, quite seriously. "I have always loved it."

Lukas shrugs. "What is it to me now? I would be like an old woman putting on her wedding dress if ever I looked at it again."

"I fell in love with its power," Mathias explains. "Not its beauty. There is so much of yourself in it. I had wanted you to smile and flirt and charm, and yet you resisted all that. When I too tired of fashion and artifice, I came to admire you. I admire you now."

Lukas stands up abruptly, chilled to the bone, and sets a few frost-painted twigs dancing with the motion. "Shall we go back inside?" he says. "It would be a great pity to survive the smallpox only to die of cold."

Mathias laughs, gratified at the small show of humour that was rare even before the scars. "We should, yes." he agrees.

Lukas pauses with his hand on the door. "I admire you too, Mathias," he says. "One rarely finds good men in places like this."

Coming from Lukas, such words are high praise. Mathias smiles widely, gratified. "Admiration is all well and good," he teases, "but what about love?"

"That as well, of course." Lukas calls over his shoulder as he enters the palace and begins to climb the stairs.

Mathias runs up behind him, throws his arms around his waist. "Wrong staircase, I'm afraid."

"Really?" Lukas asks, his frown just the same as ever, just the same as the one that shines like white fire out of the frame in the long gallery. "Where are we going?"

Mathias holds him tighter, leaves playful kisses along his neck. "To my chambers, my love," he says. "Where else, beloved? Where else?"

…

*Lies down* Well, today was a productive day! I really hope you enjoyed this, and I'll try to keep some oneshots coming over the summer.

Note: The 'great pox', as opposed to smallpox, is syphilis, if that scene left you wondering.