Winter in Edinburgh was a slow bruise, the kind that lingers under the skin—dark at the edges, aching when pressed. It stretched across January in a smear of damp stone, breath-clouded air, and nights that started too early and ended too late. Evan watched as Barty unravelled to a soundtrack of stumbling in at three a.m. The muffled thud of his boots against the floorboards, the tinny rattle of a lighter flicking open and closed. Low voices in the hallway, always someone new—Evan didn’t even bother learning their names. He rarely saw the same face more than once. Barty tried to hide behind charm and bravado, but it was too sharp, his wit cutting too deep, his low laugh hollow and brittle, like he was daring someone to stop him. It wasn’t just the drinking, or the revolving door of strangers, or the nights that bled into mornings. It was the silence. The pauses between jokes, the way he hadn’t picked up his camera in weeks—unless he was being paid. No sudden flash, no click of a shutter catching you off guard, no half-muttered curses over a missed shot. He wasn’t reading either. No battered poetry books abandoned on the table, no half-scrawled verses piled under coffee mugs, no damp, dog-eared epics curled on the edge of the bath. That was maybe the worst of it.
Barty was usually consumed with making things—whether it was words, or pictures, or even the occasional paint-smudged canvas. He was always in the thick of something, some new project pulling him under. Now, there was nothing. No restless hands reaching for a camera, no frantic scribbling at four in the morning. Just empty space where creation used to be. Instead, he was picking up extra shifts at the god-awful ’80s-themed bar he worked at, the one Evan loathed and only ever stepped foot in under extreme duress. The bar work was meant to be a side thing, just to get him through the quiet months. Not that photography had ever been the steadiest income, but Barty had been doing well—really well, especially since he started doing weddings. He had been pulling fewer and fewer late-night bar shifts, trading neon lights and shitty synth-pop for morning shoots and actual sleep. But now? Now it felt like he was avoiding jobs. Avoiding picking up his camera. Avoiding anything that forced him to feel.
Barty was a force of nature, like a tidal wave, or a thunderstorm, his enthusiasm for life infectious and unstoppable. It was part of the magic of who he was, but since Reg left, that energy had changed, turning twitchy, half-feral, like he was always one step ahead of something sharp-toothed and hungry. Like if he stopped moving—stopped drinking, stopped fucking—it would catch him, drag him under. And Evan wasn’t sure if the constant motion was keeping him together or pulling him apart piece by piece. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe it didn’t even matter anymore.
“I’m fine,” said Barty, sprawled across the couch, an unlit cigarette rolling between his fingers. His eyes were half-lidded, lazy, his free hand absently stroking Plato where the cat lay curled and purring on his lap.
Evan sat on the floor, his back against the other couch, legs stretched out before him. “No, you’re fucking not.”
The record player in the corner spun “Damaged Goods”, all jagged guitar and angry drums. Evan’s choice, of course, and for once Barty was too drunk to complain, or notice the not-so-subtle comment on his state of being that Evan’s pick implied. The window was open, letting in a sharp gust of January air. Outside, drunk students—the stragglers of the night—called to each other in the street below as they staggered home. The distant wail of a siren cut through the quiet, and the smell of snow lingered in the air like a promise—or perhaps a threat.
Barty sighed, rolling his head to the side, turning to look at him. “What am I supposed tae do?” he asked. “He made his choice.”
“Yeah, and you’re both bloody miserable.”
Barty huffed a laugh, but there was nothing real in it. “We didn’t work. I tried, Rosie. For four fuckin’ years, I tried. What else was I meant tae do?”
“Could’ve just told him you weren’t happy,” pointed out Evan, not for the first time. “Could’ve asked him to change instead of telling him to get out.”
Barty’s jaw tightened. “Fuckin’ did.”
“No. You yelled it at him when he was too angry to hear you. Not the same.”
It was late, or early, just after four in the morning. Evan was tired, but he didn’t particularly want to leave Barty alone. He was sadder than usual tonight, quieter, and he’d come home from his shift alone—a rare occurrence these days.
“Reggie texted me tonight, while I was at work.”
Evan’s grip on his glass tightened. He looked down into the amber liquid. Ah, there it was—the reason for the defeated look in Barty’s eyes.
“Yeah?”
“Aye. Said he wanted tae talk. Haven’t answered, no sure if I will.”
“Why not?”
“Scared I’ll fuck it up.”
“That all?” probed Evan.
Barty made a noise in the back of his throat, something low and bitter. “Naw.”
“What else?”
Barty’s voice was quieter this time, rough around the edges. “I want tae hurt him. Want him tae miss me.”
“That’s really fucking dumb.”
“I know,” said Barty. “But doesnae change the fact that I want him tae know what it’s like, know how much he’s fucked me up.”
“Could tell him,” said Evan.
“Never been good at talking tae him about feelings,” came Barty’s response. “Everything else? Aye. But the hard stuff? Nae chance, cannae do it.”
“If you can do it with me, you can do it with him.”
“It’s different wi’ you. Easier.”
Evan groaned. “No shit, you fucking muppet.” He let his head fall back against the cushions of the couch, addressing the ceiling above him. “You’re not in love with me. Of course it’s easier. Didn’t say it was easy, just said you’re capable.”
There was a long pause and then Barty sighed a little wistfully. “Sometimes I think I could’ve been, Rosie.”
Evan raised his head, studied Barty, his sharp profile silhouetted against the dim light. Barty wasn’t looking at him; he was staring at Plato with a distant expression on his face. “Remember the night we met?” he asked.
“Vividly,” said Evan. “You told me I had the artistic sensibilities of a Travelodge. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or impressed.”
Barty frowned, eyes still fixed on the cat. “You were wearin’ a fuckin’ gilet, an’ called The Smiths music for folk that like tae wank tae their ain misery. I think I made a fair enough observation, given the circumstances.”
“Fuck off. What’s your point?”
“Did you no stop tae wonder why, even though you were dressed like a pure wanker an’ kept slaggin’ aff ma favourite bands, I still stayed in that kitchen talkin’ tae you all night?”
Evan shrugged. “Probably because you realised I was the only interesting person at that party, not to mention the fact that deep down you knew I was right. Morrissey is a self-entitled whiny prick, and don’t even get me started on the rest of the bullshit you listen to.”
Barty raised his eyes from the cat. “I stayed ’cause I thought you were tidy. Wid’ve gone hame wi’ you that night if you’d asked.”
Evan frowned at Barty, surprised. “Really?”
Barty smiled, but it didn’t reach his dark eyes. “Aye. Actually fancied you for a while, a good couple o’ months at least. Thought somethin’ might’ve happened but it didnae. Then you offered me a place tae stay, an’ we ended up being pals.”
Barty lit the cigarette he’d been fidgeting with, then added, casually, easily: “Sometimes wonder, though, if I’d made a move back then before we were pals, if you’d have gone for it wi’ me. Think we would’ve been good together, would’ve worked well. Act like a married couple half the time as is. Probably would’ve been easier if we could’ve just fallen for each other. Would’ve been healthier, that’s for sure.”
He took a drag, blissfully unaware that Evan was frozen. Staring at him, unable to look away—his limbs turned to lead, knuckles white where he was clutching his glass. It was like a fucking punch to the gut. It was all Evan could do to force himself to breathe, his chest constricting painfully with each drag of air.
“But then fuckin’ Reggie,” Barty continued, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “Was a goner the second you introduced us. Still mind the first time I saw him—that trip tae Oxford. Only went alang ’cause I was bored, an’ in one weekend, my whole life changed. Could barely look him in the eye. Most gorgeous man I’d ever seen—couldnae believe it when he kissed me. Never thought he’d go for someone like me, never thought he’d ruin me either, tae be fair.”
“Fucking Reg,” agreed Evan, downing the last of his whisky in one go. It burned, but he barely noticed it against the burn of Barty’s words. The burn of what could’ve been, the burn of hearing, after all these years, that they could have been. He knew he needed to brush it off, that Barty would never have said it if he had even the slightest idea, that he was drunk, and sad. He reached for the packet of cigarettes on the table, needing something to do with his hands, lighting one and using the inhale as an excuse to close his eyes, to take a deep nicotine-filled breath, to run a hand over his face, to try and steady the waves of emotion coursing through him. And then, when he could, he opened his eyes and did what he always did, what he’d been doing for years—he turned the pain into a joke, pretended it didn’t hurt, and tried to make Barty smile.
“I barely tolerate you as my best friend. I’d have fucking killed you as my boyfriend.”
It worked. Barty smiled as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Haud yer wheesht. You cannae live without me or the cat.”
The words were teasing, light, but they felt heavy to Evan. The truth of them sitting thick between them. Because it was true. He couldn’t. Barty could burn himself alive and Evan, like the idiot he was, would continue to stand too close to the fire, pretending he wasn’t going up in flames right alongside him. Evan grabbed the whisky bottle off the table and refilled his glass, suddenly needing to be a lot drunker than he was.
Reg showed up two weeks later. Evan opened the door to him, and his first thought was, fuck, he looks even worse than Barty. Reg had always been pale, but now he looked bloodless—like a ghost, like something had hollowed him out from the inside and kept going. Some force eating away at whatever was left. He had dark circles carved under his eyes and looked like he’d lost weight, his already sharp features more angular than Evan had ever seen them. He looked like crap. He looked like heartbreak. Evan didn’t think—just grabbed him, hauled him into a rough, unsteady hug. Beneath his arms Reg was all hard edges and dead weight, like a structure that had already decided to collapse and was only waiting on the signal. Evan gripped tighter anyway, like he could squeeze something back into him, force some warmth into the bones. It wouldn’t work. Only Barty had the power to fix this. Evan knew that, but still he tried anyway. Then he stepped back, turned to Barty, and hit him with a look like a blade—sharp, unflinching, carved out of pure command.
“Talk to him, you fucking idiot.”
Evan yanked a coat off the hook in the hallway and walked out. He didn’t need to be here for this. They didn’t need him, and Christ, he couldn’t stand the thought of being trapped in that flat with whatever was left of them. It was cold—the kind that cut through layers, burrowed deep, and settled into your very bones. He should’ve grabbed a hat, gloves, something, but he didn’t turn back. He walked the length of Queen Street, cut across York Place, then started the climb to Calton Hill. The wind had teeth up here, needling his cheeks raw, knifing through the thin coat he’d grabbed without thinking. He let it in. Welcomed it—something real to feel, something other than the cocktail of emotion inside him.
The last of the Hogmanay tourists were finally gone, and the city had slumped back into its usual midwinter hush—brittle and waiting, stretched thin between the dead season and whatever came next. At the top of the hill he hauled himself onto the monument’s lower ledge, fingers stiff on the cold stone. A pair of underdressed teenagers clutching cans of Strongbow lurked in the shadows of the columns, their laughter carrying on the wind. He walked along the ledge to the far edge of the structure, and looked out over Leith and the docks. Below, the Firth of Forth sprawled out in shades of silver and steel, still and endless. The lights of liners and cargo ships blinked like distant signals, scattered across the water, lost in the last scrape of winter light.
The days were still short—barely half three and the light was already bleeding out. There wasn’t that much difference between here and London, maybe an hour, a little more if you went further north. He’d never checked, but it felt like more. The dark came heavier in Edinburgh, stretching the nights long and lean. And in summer the days seemed to go on forever, the light lingering so late into the evening it felt almost indecent, like it was overstaying its welcome. Maybe it wasn’t the light. Maybe it was the seasons themselves. They felt stronger here, sharper-edged. London was stagnant even in winter—cold, sure, but grey and inert, a constant low-grade drizzle that never broke into anything worth feeling. Edinburgh was never still. There was always wind. Always the air shifting—warm, cold, rain, shine—always in transition, like something breathing.
He’d always liked that Edinburgh was built on hills. That even after centuries of stone and steel, the city still had wild places in it. Places that hadn’t been smoothed over or tidied up, that made you feel small in the way that actually mattered. Calton Hill was his favourite of the seven—not the most dramatic, not the tallest, but the best view in the city, hands down. People always assumed it would be Arthur’s Seat. They were wrong.
From up here, the whole city spread out below him in layers, the way it always did—nothing quite flat, nothing quite straight, everything stacked and crooked and strangely beautiful for it. Princes Street was strung with lights, gaudy and bright against the grey wash of sky. Behind it, the castle sat on its black rock, solid and unmovable, the kind of thing you stopped seeing after a while and then caught off guard on a certain evening and remembered all over again. Further out, the Pentlands rolled soft and distant. To the other side, the Firth of Forth cut a long silver line to the horizon, the lights of cargo ships blinking out on the water. And behind him, Arthur’s Seat reared up from the park—all jagged cliffs and dark volcanic rock, old and indifferent, like some mythical beast out of some ancient story about knights and dragons.
Evan let himself take it in, let himself breathe. Then, for half a second, his mind slipped—Barty and Reg, back at the flat. He shoved the thought away. He didn’t want them here. Not in this place, not in his head. He’d come here to be alone, to scrub himself clean. He wasn’t bringing them here, too. This was his place.
It had taken everything Evan had to shake Barty’s words off, to bury the regret and the what-ifs before they hollowed him out completely. But they were relentless, creeping into his thoughts, curling like smoke into his dreams every night. Nightmares dressed as memories, his mind twisting him and Barty into some version of domesticity that was never really bliss. Because it was never just them. Reg was always there, fractured and silent, a spectre of ruin. And Evan would wake up choking on it—misery, guilt for something that never happened, guilt for wanting it. A sick weight of pain, loss and shame swallowed him as he lay in the dark. They’d come so often, so vividly over the last two weeks, that he’d started drowning them out with weed and Xanax, desperate for silence, for a full night’s sleep. It had helped, wrapped his mind in a blanket thick enough that he could distance himself from it, a temporary solution, a way to numb the worst of it so that walking into the kitchen and seeing Barty every morning didn’t hurt, didn’t feel like an insult to Reg, until it felt almost normal. Because Evan had to be normal, couldn’t let Barty see what that conversation had meant to him—how much it had hurt. Barty didn’t need that now. Didn’t need it ever.
Evan dug in his pocket, fingers searching for cigarettes, but came up empty. Instead, he pulled out his phone. The screen glowed in the dim light, casting his face in blue. He raised it, took a picture of the view, knowing full well the photo wouldn’t do it justice. It never did. Maybe if he were Barty, he’d be able to capture it properly—but he wasn’t a photographer, and the view never came out right in his pictures.
Still, he did it anyway.
It would sit in his camera roll alongside a hundred others. Images with no destination, no real purpose. Just relics of wanting to share something, to show someone a place that mattered. Not that he had anyone to send it to. No one waiting on the other side of the screen. Just him, standing on a hill in the cold, holding onto moments that didn’t matter to anyone but himself. He stayed on the hill until the last of the light was gone and the cold had sunk too deep into his bones to ignore. Then he made his way down, hands jammed in his pockets, feet moving without much purpose. He wasn’t ready to go back to the flat, not ready for whatever waited there, so he meandered, taking his time.
He ended up at Star Bar. It was buried in a quiet side street, tucked away in a residential bit of New Town, the kind of place you didn’t find unless you already knew it was there—or you stumbled into it by accident. One of the bartenders ran a vintage clothes shop out of the basement. It didn’t have an Instagram or an online shop—she just took you down if she liked the way you looked. There was an urban myth about the bar, something about a real human skull hidden somewhere on the premises, written into the lease, passed down through tenants like some macabre inheritance.
Evan scanned the bar as he waited for his Guinness. There were at least four or five skulls scattered around—one on the back bar, another perched on top of an old piano in the corner, a couple wedged onto bookshelves, one sitting on the window ledge like an afterthought. The décor was caught somewhere between emo nostalgia and someone’s disorganised living room—half dive bar, half chaotic shrine to the weird and the morbid.
None of the skulls looked real. He figured the legend probably wasn’t true. But he liked thinking that it was. One pint turned into four, and then five, each one pushing off the moment he had to go home a little longer. At some point he pulled out his phone and ended up on Instagram—sent a message he probably shouldn’t have. Something pointless, something just to make himself feel like he wasn’t entirely alone. He didn’t get an answer, but hadn’t really expected one. It wasn’t really about that. It was just a way to keep his thoughts from circling the drain, from settling too long on the mess of himself.
It took fumbling with his keys at the flat door for Evan to realise he was drunker than he meant to be. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the alcohol sat like a dead weight in his stomach, sloshing thick and unpleasant with every step. The lights were on in the living room. Low voices drifted through the hall, muted but steady.
They were still talking. Evan didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one.
He moved quietly, not wanting to draw attention to himself. He was too drunk, too lost in the four-hour spiral he’d just put himself through—his life choices, his fuck-ups, all of it dissected and picked apart under the dim glow of pub lights. He wasn’t in the right headspace to open his mouth around either of them, not without saying something he’d regret. So he kept his head down, grabbed a glass of water from the bathroom—avoiding the kitchen, which was attached to the living room—and made a beeline for his bedroom, scooping up a meowing Plato on the way. The bed swallowed him as he flopped onto it, the world shifting slightly beneath him. He pulled on his headphones and cranked the volume, letting the sound smother everything else. Plato squirmed in protest, claws pressing into his shirt, but eventually gave up, settling against his side with the long-suffering patience of a cat who knew he wasn’t getting out of this particular situation anytime soon.
Evan didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke, the light spilling through the window was soft and grey. He dragged himself into the kitchen, stretching as he walked, his head pounding in that thick, miserable way that reaffirmed that he’d drunk too much and eaten too little the night before.
He stopped short.
Barty was at the small table, both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, staring into it like it might hold some kind of answer. His face was pale, eyes rimmed red, and Evan didn’t need to ask to know he hadn’t slept.
He was alone. Shit. Not good. Evan cleared his throat, and Barty flinched—just slightly, but enough. He blinked up at him like he’d only just realised Evan was there.
“Where’s Reg?”
“Gone.”
One word. Flat. Hollow. Evan’s heart cracked open at the sound of it. Because in that one word he heard Barty’s entire soul—raw, desperate, broken. It wasn’t just an answer. It was an admission.
“What happened?”
“Said he misses me, wants me back.”
“And?”
Barty let out a strangled laugh, finally meeting Evan’s gaze. His mouth curled, but it wasn’t a smile—just something sharp-edged and humourless, something brittle. What came next came in a torrent, words mashing into each other as if fighting to be free.
“A said naw. No if it wis gan tae be like afore. Telt him bein’ his secret wis killin’ me. That A couldnae keep on wi’ it. Love him mair nor onythin—mair nor A should, mair nor’s ony guid for me—but A cannae bide like that nae mair. A cannae be hid awa. That A wantit mair. That A wantit him—really wantit him—that it wisnae enough. A wantit the hale lot, aw o’ it. Him stannin’ aside me like he meant it. Telt him how much it hurt. How much it’s aye hurt. That A’d spent years pittin’ on a face, actin’ like it didnae tear me up inside. That A wis done wi’ it. That A wis fair sick o’ pretendin’ it didnae matter. That if he couldnae—if he widnae—gie me that, then he should jist get hissel tae fuck.”
Even after over half a decade in Scotland—and four years living with Barty, who had a tendency to slip into heavy Scots whenever he was particularly drunk, excited, or upset—it still took Evan a few long seconds to untangle the meaning behind the sprawl of words cascading out of his best friend’s mouth.
Evan frowned. “I take it he didn’t take it too well?”
“Said he didnae ken if he could gie me whit A wis askin’ for.” A pause, then Barty made a face—a sort of pained grimace. “An’ then the prick said he wanted tae be pals while he figured hissel out.”
“Fuck.”
“Aye.”