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A year or two after the birth of the Harbour and the end of Fateheart - the winter months.
The weather outside is frightful. Zachary likes having a job - likes going up to the outer world every day, walking through city streets and ducking out of rain to get himself coffee. And he loves - absolutely treasures - the feeling of slipping back into the library, confident enough not to have to glance over his shoulder as he makes his way past the desk, the carpet dust-thickened and muted beneath his brogues, and heads down to the basement, finding the door to the Harbour beneath the faculty library. The Owl who nods to him, the feeling of something wonderful, something private, something real.
The cool Harbour air rising into the cave, that feeling of being far above the world even as he steps below it.
The first winter of his PhD at Berkeley university he keeps forgetting that things like weather and hail storms and wind exist and has to go back down the elevator, all the way back up the first few floors of the Heart-tree and into the apartment to get his coat. And as the winter deepens, his Ravenclaw scarf and a bobble hat - which do not match but which were both made for him by his best friend and he’s very fond of them.
But clearly not fond enough to ever remember to take them, so at home in the easy, light summer air of the Harbour at all times of year.
Eventually he agrees with the porter Owl to add a coat stand to the small room which houses the door, and this solves the issue somewhat (he told the Owl to "guard this scarf with your life", which he feels a bit bad for because, knowing the Owls, she is taking this completely at word).
The other aid in surviving the weather is the Harbour itself, which seems to be supplying him with an increasingly questionable carousel of patterned sweaters.
It’s not unknown for the Harbour to offer them clothes - they kind of appear, neatly folded on the shelves of the walnut wardrobe complex which makes up one wall of Zachary and Dorian’s bedroom. Or they’ll be on velvet hangers, tucked innocently in amongst the silk and the blazers as if they really have always been there.
The first one Zachary finds is innocuous enough: a knitted turtleneck, cream-coloured with a large, happy red flower on the front. Zachary looks good in a turtleneck, he knows this much. He’s not sure about the flower, but he puts it on, shaking his curls out after he’s squeezed through the high roll of warm acrylic wool, replacing his glasses and padding out to the kitchen to join his husband for breakfast.
“Oh,” Dorian says, looking around at him, putting down his bowl.
“Bit much?” Zachary says, glancing down at the flower, assuming this is what Dorian is staring at.
“No,” he says too quickly, and Zachary grins. “This is good, you’ve been complaining about how much you forget to dress for the weather up there.”
“Yeah, clearly the bees heard me,” Zachary says and Dorian opens his arms to him. Zachary steps in, combining the embrace with an attempt to reach the granola on the counter behind them.
Dorian squeezes him. “You are the lone blossom amongst the fields of snow. The impossible spring that triumphs over the drifting nothing,” Dorian says into his ear, and Zachary chuckles.
“I’m trying to eat breakfast, is what I am,” Zachary says, but Dorian tugs him back into place, kissing his face. He touches the flower, though he is perhaps really reaching for his heart (the flower’s quite big, and the areas overlap).
But Dorian has got his story-telling face on, and Zachary pretends to sigh, looking back at him as Dorian turns his head, mischief and the far edge of wonder in his eye. His voice still makes his stomach swoop.
“The fire of summer, each year, beaten back to the last blossom,” Dorian murmurs, fingers lifting his chin, eyes searching his face as he tells him the story. “Each flower succumbs to the snow, and the crystal cold consumes all colour. All but one. And he guards the hope of returning sunlight. He keeps the fire. Till even the frosts are melted by the sheer thing of him.” Dorian is smiling. “Time will turn and from that lone bloom will once more come many. Colour cast across the earth. Triumph is the brave flower that lasts through the dark.”
Dorian kisses him.
“You blow my mind,” Zachary says after a moment. “It is literally a sweater with a flower on it.”
Dorian grins and lets him get to the granola. “You look good in a turtleneck,” he offers, as if this is more than enough of a reason for such theatrics at 7.30 in the morning.
“Oh,” says Zachary smoothly, getting himself a bowl. “I know.”
-
The next week it is a relatively innocent dusky blue crewneck sweater of heavy cotton, with a vintage-style, two-toned image pressed onto it of a kitten playing in a teacup. There’s a slogan, the name of some long-extinct brewery maybe, or a brand that used to make coffee in a different time, who knows. Certainly not Zachary, who puts it on over his linen button-up and adjusts the collar in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door, frowning a little.
He is still fiddling with the cuffs of his shirt, setting them over the ends of the sleeves, as he enters the kitchen. Dorian doesn’t immediately look up from his book, but holds a hand out to him, as he often does.
Zachary takes it and Dorian kisses his fingers, glancing up and then doing a double take.
“Cute,” he says, nodding to the kitten.
A kitten who, Zachary is quick to learn, used to be a tyrannical baron at the head of an intercontinental empire of tea-trading merchants. His ways were so reprehensible that he broke the heart of the sea itself, which bled a deep blue sorrow (or something), and then turned the baron into a kitten (presumably for reasons inscrutable) and trapped him in a teacup until he discovered the simple joys that led him back to the shores of his own humanity, at which point he was permitted to turn back into a human but chose not to because he’d discovered true contentment (or something), and remained a kitten the rest of his days.
But also still ran the empire of tea-traders. But benevolently. And gave all the profits to cat shelters. Possibly.
Zachary is hazy on the details, torn between exasperation and deep, quiet delight at the way Dorian tells stories when things make him happy. Mostly just caught up in the narrative, nodding along as he eats his granola, blinking as the story ends, grinning at his husband and hurrying up and out to work with his head full of kittens and oceans and storms and tea-traders, wrapped up too warmly in it all to be bothered by the cold. Though that might be the sweater itself and not the story.
-
There’s quite a snazzy one a few days after that, and Dorian is away when it appears. It’s mostly white, but the sleeves are blue, with mustard yellow around the ends of the sleeves and the neck, matching the patches on the elbows. The words ‘moon rabbit’ in cartoonish, retro-video-game-style script across the top become Japanese as soon as he leaves the Harbour, but the bunny in the centre, rendered in a cool modern art style, makes him happiest.
It’s warm enough to be suitable for the late November he pings about in during the day, smiling when two of his fellow postgrads compliment it, but it’s also not so warm that he pulls it off as soon as he comes back through the door, leaving his coat with the porter, shaking melting snow out of his hair and wiping his glasses. He almost forgets he’s wearing it as Dorian comes home.
But Dorian notices it immediately. He’s only been gone two nights and that’s usually enough to put both of them in mind to do little else but dwell in each other for a bit. But Dorian pulls him up on the couch and nods at the sweater.
“The celestial bunny,” he says, smiling, and kisses it, leaning his forehead against Zachary’s chest. Zachary is kneeling up over him, carding his fingers through his hair.
“Oh don’t you dare,” he says, smiling. Because he doesn’t need to be able to see Dorian’s face to recognise the look in his eye.
“To do what?” Dorian says, lifting his head in surprise.
Zachary kisses him. “Derail me,” he says once he has released him. “I haven’t had you here for three days, and while I love your story-telling, I am not-”
“Oh, you would deny me, would you?”
“I think you might be the one denying me, here,” Zachary says, raising his eyebrows. They both narrow their eyes, faces close, something of a stand-off happening between them.
Dorian slowly meets his lips, kissing him as if he can’t help himself. Which apparently he can’t, because he pulls a fraction of a distance away and says in a low voice:
“High in the night, higher than moonlight-”
Zachary tries to groan, but it comes out as laughter. “Okay, but can you multitask?” he interrupts, pleading with his smiling husband.
Dorian takes his glasses off for him, a look of wicked amusement on his face, then pulls the sweater up, beginning to undress him as he tells him the story.
-
“No, Dorian, okay, no, I actually don’t have time,” Zachary says, holding up his hands in genuine apology.
Dorian closes his mouth, frowning a little. “You’re up at your usual hour,” he points out.
Zachary holds out the bottom of the sweater, displaying it between them at the kitchen counter. “Yes, but there are so many dogs on this one,” he says despairingly. He looks at his husband’s face. “And you have names for all of them, don’t you?”
Dorian considers the dogs, all embroidered in different poses, some spotted, some fluffy, some sprinting full-pelt (and one playing a lute, for some reason). “Mmm,” he agrees seriously. “And genealogies.” He points at a dalmatian in the bottom right-hand corner. “This one is responsible for a bank heist in the fifties that disrupted the western peanut economy for fourteen years.”
Zachary laughs, then gives him a helpless look. “I love you. I love you so much, and I love your stories. But can we do this after work. Please.”
Dorian rubs his mouth, eyes narrowing. “Okay, but you do realise the trade-off is that I’m going to have had another eight hours to think about it?”
“God, you need more to do,” Zachary says, grinning, and kisses him. “Compromise. You tell me about one dog at a time and I wear this for…” he looks down again, counting rapidly.
“Thirty-five days?” Dorian says, beating him to it by nifty use of basic multiplication.
“Yeah never mind, I actually don’t know if I can do that,” Zachary mumbles, and Dorian laughs, reaching for his coffee again.
“I shall find a way to condense the tale,” Dorian tells him, but the tale still takes him an hour that night, over cocktails they share in the private bar behind the bedroom, Zachary nodding along and quickly losing to the bottom of his martini glass the details of which dog married into which other lineage as they reach the fourth or fifth generation of the dog dynasty. Not that Zachary minds: the interwoven details about their exploits as stewards of an ancient grove of musical monkey puzzle trees (the same green as the sweater) are captivating.
In fact, Zachary hasn’t minded any of it - has positively loved it, actually - until the geese.
This sweater is a little bit reminiscent of the kinds of tablecloths that might be displayed proudly in the kitchens of people who think that ears of wheat make good centrepieces, but the pair of geese at the centre, and the flowerpot before them, caught mid-tumble, remind him uncannily of the Untitled Goose Game, which is one of his favourites. He’s sure it’s deliberate on the part of the Harbour, but he’s also sure that the reference will go straight over Dorian’s head.
But he isn't home when it appears. And that particular day sees the conclusion of a rather tense escapade with a Cat and a unit of the Siberian military. Dorian finds him that afternoon in California and takes him out for a late lunch, walking with him through the snow to a café they both favour for its Vietnamese coffee (dark, dripping through the stainless steel filter into the condensed milk, swirling the bitter with the sweet). And the mood is such that there is not much space for thoughts of geese or flowerpots.
Not until much later that evening, when the two of them are coming back from a late evening in the outer Harbour. Leander had complimented Zachary’s geese, and Zachary had marked the way Dorian had looked then at his outfit, noticing it possibly for the first time, his eyes lined and a little shadowed with the weight of the week he’s been having.
When they make it home he pulls Zachary with a great sigh onto the couch in the apartment. The air around him smells of winter and wine, of sumac and sesame and the cigar smoke of the Harbour jazz theatres. Dorian holds Zachary to himself, fingers in his hair, keeping his face to his own, kissing him in that way which lets them both know they are home.
Zachary is a little wine-drunk and more than happy to start undoing the buttons of Dorian’s shirt, and Dorian lets him, looking across his body with a relish which Zachary, for maybe the first time in their relationship, mistakenly assumes is for himself.
But it turns out that it is in fact for the geese.
Zachary goes to pull off the sweater and Dorian stops him. He grips his wrists.
“Zachary. My love. My wonderful Zachary.”
“Yes?” Zachary asks, slightly wrong-footed by the intensity in his voice. He sits straddled across his waist, Dorian holding his arms.
“Let me tell you a story.”
Zachary blinks at him. Dorian is clearly trying not to smile, staring up at him, his voice in that gear he gets into.
“Of Isaac and Ishmael,” he says. Then his eyes flick down to Zachary’s sweater. “Two geese, in the garden of God…”
Zachary bows his head, trying not to laugh.
“God is, of course, the flowerpot,” Dorian tells him earnestly.
Zachary nods, smiling widely. “Knocked askance by their constant tussle?” He starts to pull his hands away but Dorian grips him more tightly.
“Not at first. Let me tell you of the first goose,” Dorian says solemnly, and then, much to Zachary’s disbelief, proceeds to embark upon what seems to be a thinly-veiled fable about the Middle East (in hindsight the names of the geese really ought to have tipped him off to that one).
Zachary nods, bemused, and a little drunk, and continues slowly trying to take off Dorian’s clothes. Which he partially succeeds in, but every time he turns his attention back to his own clothing Dorian stops him, still talking.
“Look, Dorian, I am trying to have sex with you,” Zachary interrupts.
“Ah, but the second goose,” Dorian continues, once more holding his wrists.
“Oh my god,” Zachary exclaims, turning his head to shake in silent laughter. He looks back down at his husband, who has stopped, mouth twisting in a rueful kind of way. Zachary looks at his face. His tired, wonderful, perfect face. His eyes, attentive, bright, mellow, content right now, when so much of his time and energy is spent in the face of fire and darkness. His mouth closed. His voice quieted by Zachary’s interruption.
Zachary leans down and kisses him lightly. “Tell me about the second goose,” he says imploringly. Dorian frowns at him, though he has let go of his wrists. Zachary takes the chance to cup his face in his hands. “The second one is Ishmael, yes? No… wait… Isaac?”
Dorian scowls. “I don’t believe you were paying enough attention to the first goose, Zachary Ezra.”
“Please tell me about the second goose. Please.”
“No, no, I see where your priorities lie.” Dorian's expression is dark, but Zachary catches the scent of his laughter, there in his wonder of a voice.
“I want,” Zachary says, with a great deal of breath and theatrics, lying down on top of him, “to hear about the second goose. Please.” He kisses Dorian’s face, winding his arms beneath his head, which Dorian raises and then rests back in Zachary’s embrace. “Please.”
He turns his head to kiss his face and he can feel his smile beneath his lips. Dorian wraps his arms around his ribs and says, with a sigh of contentment, "Well now, the second goose, brother of the first-"
"Wait," Zachary says, sitting up quickly, adjusting his position so Dorian can breathe beneath him.
Dorian looks up at his suddenly serious expression and Zachary pushes his glasses back up, frowning.
"Are you okay?" Dorian asks, clearly abandoning the geese in response to this new tenor of the conversation.
Zachary is staring out at the bookshelves, thinking. He gazes away for long enough that Dorian looks genuinely concerned by the time he looks back.
"Zachary?"
"Well, I had been assuming that all of these stories take place in the same… well, if not the same world, exactly, then the same canon, but if the geese are an allegory for the Middle East then that introduces some point of alignment with our world, which makes me rethink a lot of the references."
Dorian blinks. But meets him there immediately. "Well I wouldn't say it's allegory so much as it is plagiarism. For all I was feigning single-minded direction there I'm honestly too tired to come up with a good story." He sits up, an arm around Zachary to keep him in place. "My strengths lie in performance, not composition."
"Well, I have an entire rail of sweaters which give lie to that," Zachary smiles.
"I'm sorry. I wish I had considered the implications of my world-building choices before speaking," he says earnestly, a hand at his waist, one stroking his face.
"Why are you apologising? Sometimes a legitimate conclusion in literary analysis is that something is just not that well written." He adjusts himself a little, shifting a leg to a more comfortable angle. "Not that I'm saying that the ugly-sweater-verse is anything less than a literary triumph-"
"Now there's a question," Dorian says, interrupting him with a keen look. "How much should a reading of a text consider authorial consistency? Or quality?"
"Mm, that's an interesting one. Should quality even be a factor in reading a text? Feels like an obvious yes, but then how the hell you gonna quantify that?"
"Surely it's no difficult matter to establish a universal metric by which to value art?" says Dorian, and they laugh together, leaning back against the cushions. The following conversation is one of those ones which makes both of them forget that they had started off aiming for other things. One of those conversations that makes them both forget pretty much everything, trundling around in a happy, mutual, tipsy wonder, agreeing, disagreeing, valuing the same things, valuing each other, sharing the world between their hands and voices.
Makes them forget everything except why they are married to each other. Why he loves him, and why he loves him too.
-
After New Year's Zachary finds a sweater he really, really likes. It is a muted and tasteful rainbow-striped turtleneck, and Kat just about loses her mind over it (she's always been fond of stripes). It's more colour than he might have gone for once, but Zachary looks good in it, and thinks it hardly deserves its place on what he and Dorian have fondly dubbed the "Ugly Sweater rail".
He thinks it is his favourite, but the third time he wears it he can't help but feel that something is off. But the wardrobe mirror won't tell him what, and neither will his instincts.
He doesn't figure it out until he has finished breakfast and brushed his teeth and returns to the kitchen, pulling his shoes on, to say goodbye to Dorian for his first day back this term.
Dorian kisses him goodbye and Zachary sighs, realising what's wrong. Maybe the Harbour had caught the mess he's made of Dorian's last sweater story, with the geese, and misconstrued his momentary exasperation as not wanting them anymore. Maybe he can write to the kitchen about it, get the bees back on track.
"Zachary?"
"I just realised something," he mumbles, looking down at the stripes. "I might go change," he bites his lip. He will be late if he changes. Or he hopes he will.
"Don't change, this is my favourite one yet," Dorian says, surprised.
Zachary looks at him, a little abashed by the sadness in his throat. "Well yeah, it was mine too, until now."
"Love?"
"It hasn't, I dunno," he gestures at Dorian. At the lack of story that had not interrupted his breakfast. "There's nothing on it. So there's no story."
Dorian looks startled. Then he laughs. "That's what's making you sad? Oh, my love," and he picks Zachary up entirely, arms around his chest, lifting him out of his glumness and spinning him around until he's laughing.
"You are the story in this one," he whispers to him, letting him back to the ground and kissing his face. "You are the story in each of them. You are the triumph of the flower that outlasts the dark. You are the heart of the ocean that carries all ill to its rest. You are the tree at the heart of the garden that sings. You are the thread of the tale that makes a god out of a flowerpot and a story out of a yarn. Your name is joy. You are the only wonder."
The stripy one, Zachary thinks, might be his favourite after all.
-
The sweaters continue through the cold weather, and the cast of characters is now immense. The sweaters are getting weirder and weirder and Zachary wonders if the Harbour is also mourning the nearing end of the cold weather.
Or if it's just having a bit too much fun, actually, because there is one in late March which is downright hideous. It’s a cardigan, not a sweater, and the blues and reds and greens all clash. It is in panels, vaguely adorned with motifs of the four seasons. One of them is a cornucopia, spilling with fruit. One is an unidentifiable lumpy yellow fruit with a leaf. One is a basket of grapes. One is, inexplicably, a trowel. Leaves of various shapes and colours scatter across the sleeves, which are baggy. The wool is authentically scratchy, the low V neckline unflattering.
Zachary holds it for a moment, still in his pyjamas, frowning.
“That’s like my coat,” Dorian comments from across the bedroom.
“This is nothing like your coat.”
“It is. They both have leaves on the sleeves.”
Zachary raises an eyebrow but can’t tear his eyes away from the disaster in his hands. “That is hardly enough basis for comparison. Your coat is excellent. This is… awful. I’m not wearing this.”
“You should,” Dorian tells him, and Zachary looks over at him in disbelief. Dorian is buttoning his shirt. It is Saturday and Zachary has not had to get up for work. Neither has Dorian. They’ve decided to go have brunch somewhere above ground. Both vaguely thinking Madrid, because Dorian had been there earlier that week and there are places made of lakes and quiet and beauty that will not be complete until he has taken his husband there with him.
“Or you could wear the kittens again,” Dorian suggests, coming over to him.
Zachary laughs. “I’m not wearing the kittens. I’d like to actually get some reading done,” he tells him as Dorian leans in to kiss him.
One of the sweaters the Harbour has produced for him is an over-the-top creation bearing a ball of yarn and three kittens doing what could only be described as ‘frolicking’ across the maroon knit. Dorian has named them Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos respectively, and each time Zachary wears it he is treated to increasingly outlandish expositions about the Fates and what their dance may tell of the coming days, usually with a heavy undertone of allegory about what it means that they, too, are kittens.
“Fate in its tripartite youth, bounding after the unravelling thread of Time. Too early in their days to know they are a love story-”
“Look, keep telling me, by all means, but can you please pass me the yoghurt.”
For a good few months now the characters from other sweaters have started to make appearances even when he isn’t wearing them. The tea-trading kitten baron, for example, it turns out was transformed into a kitten by the kitten-Fates on behalf of the sea. Who has lapped at the moonlight over which the celestial bunny hops. And the bespectacled dog on another knitted sweater has turned out to be the spirit of academia, and the book he is reading is the book of names (the names, specifically, of a whole lineage of magical gardener dogs). And also he’s in love with the teddy bear on the other one. Because of course. But the teddy bear can’t remember anything because he’s trapped in a box (the embroidered bear has a cute little zig-zaggy border which quickly became a tragic metaphor for the broken mind). But the teddy bear is beloved of the Fates, apparently, and the line of cross-stitched apples on another cardigan is their gift to him, nurturing him with the fruit of the years he gave in their service, even though love is beyond his reach now forever.
Zachary is considering writing it all down.
“What is it going to be today? I’m assuming the cornucopia is a metaphor?” Zachary says, stalling instead of putting it on. Dorian takes it out of his hands, looking over it with light in his eyes.
The penny drops.
“Oh my days, it’s you,” Zachary says, mouth dropping open.
“What’s me?” Dorian asks, a little too innocently.
"You started this. The sweaters are from you."
"Hey now, that's not true-"
Zachary takes the cardigan back out of his hands. “I’ve been assuming that it was the Harbour, well-meaning but increasingly deluded. But I should have known - this isn’t the first time you’ve interfered-”
Dorian raises his eyebrows. “Interfered?”
“Have you or have you not forgotten that during the dream you made me wear a whole parade of tapestry waistcoats for no good reason?”
Dorian’s eyes are brimming with amusement. “I have not forgotten. In fact I’m a little sad that you don’t wear them anymore. Maybe we should bring those back-”
“Oh god no, please, I’ll take the ugly sweaters.”
“-And the reason, in case you have forgotten, was high taste and a sense of fashion.”
Zachary laughs with him. “You think three piece suits are the epitome of good fashion,” he says, taking off his pyjamas and pulling on clothes.
“Zachary, I love you but I’m not sure either of us are the highest authority on what constitutes ‘good fashion’.”
“And what is that supposed to mean, exactly? At least I don't have an entire wardrobe compartment of silk shirts.” Zachary is pretending to be derisive, but he’s also taking the cardigan off the hanger, undoing the buttons of it.
“Love, you’ve been dressing like an ethically-conscious humanities underclassman since before you actually were an ethically-conscious humanities underclassman.” Dorian is smiling at him in the mirror, leaning against the wardrobe behind him.
“But you’ve only known me since I was an ethically-conscious humanities postgrad, so how could you possibly make such a claim,” Zachary says, grinning. He pulls the cardigan on over his black turtleneck.
“Conjecture. I know you very well.”
“And I know you,” Zachary says, looking at himself in the mirror. The cardigan is gaudy. It’s ridiculous. But with the simple black, the elegant turtleneck silhouette and chinos, he hates to admit that it kinda works. He turns around to Dorian, who is also surveying him, a melting affection in his expression.
“Just tell me honestly if you’ve been conspiring with the bees this whole time to undermine my reputation on campus as an ethically-conscious, quirky humanities student,” he says, mock-seriously.
Dorian laughs. “Undermine? I think you mean exacerbate.” He steps forwards and reaches for his hands, his fingers curling around his husband’s. “And no, it genuinely was the Harbour.”
“I don’t believe you,” Zachary tells him.
“I may have… expressed my enthusiasm to the kitchen after the third or fourth one,” Dorian says, smiling in a way which makes Zachary forget slightly what he was pretending to be indignant about. “You don’t mind them too much?”
“Wh- the ugly sweaters? Or the stories?” Zachary looks down at the cardigan, then back up at his husband.
“This makes you happy, doesn’t it?” he says after a moment, looking at his face. Loving him. Forgetting, in the light of his gaze, to be anything other than sincere.
Dorian considers him solemnly. He shrugs a shoulder, a casual expression that doesn’t match the glowing warmth in his look. “I’d say something glib but really I can’t pretend I’m not having the time of my life.”
Zachary lets out a slow breath. “I really can’t wear this, Dorian,” he says eventually. Slowly, seriously. “I have limits.”
Dorian looks at him, then bows his head, nodding. He opens his mouth but Zachary interrupts him, continuing in just as serious a tone.
“For instance, I refuse to wear a knitted cornucopia full of fruit if I don’t know what the fruit is for.” He raises his eyebrows. “Or, in fact, who owns the cornucopia...”
Tell me a story.
Dorian blinks at him. He looks down at the cornucopia, and then back at Zachary, who is now smiling.
Dorian’s returning smile contains in it the whole, vast, enterprising world, and the brilliance of an imagination that has found someone to witness it, a voice that can’t wait to make itself heard.
He kisses Zachary, then turns his head to whisper into his ear.
“You may have heard of the geese. They walk the ancient middle world…”
Zachary is laughing. Actually he’s mostly wondering. Or delighting. Listening to a story. Walking with him through the world above the world, hand-in-hand. The people on the streets of Spain glance at his sweater, and the scarf and hat that do not match, but it only makes Zachary smile harder, clothed in a world built only for him, warm in a private universe made of ugly sweaters, their yarn spun by bees and the voice of the man who loves him. His storyteller, Dorian.