Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe, Archaeology, Art History, Academia, Renaissance, Magical Realism, Shane POV, Autistic Shane Hollander, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Improper Use of Neoplatonism, Dom/sub Undertones, Hollanov Reverse Bang 2026

Language:

English

Collections:

Hollanov Reverse Bang 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-01 Words: 28,948 Chapters: 12/12

The Fencer

Summary

Dr Shane Hollander has spent fifteen years looking for a statue most scholars believe never existed. He finally gets his vindication when it turns up on a construction site outside Florence, perfectly preserved in all its Greek-god beauty and carrying an untranslatable inscription.

It would be the best day of his life if the insufferable linguist dispatched to help decode the text didn't have the exact same face as the statue that's possessed his thoughts since he was seventeen.

Notes

Here's the art work that inspired this fic. Hollanovshome is an INCREDIBLE artist.
Go check out her work on AO3 and tumblr if you don't follow her already.
When I first saw the art, I was instantly enamoured with it, and also very intimidated, because it's so damn gorgeous. As nerve-wracking as it was, I'm very grateful I got to claim this beauty and work on this project for a few months. I hope you enjoy the fic, Gina!

As will become very obvious in a second, I have no background in archaelogy, art history or philosophy. I'm just a casual hobbyist with an internet connexion, various sleep-disorders and an obsessive brain. So if you're considering reading this, I'm going to ask you to roll with the vibes and not expect to find only accurate information on these topics in a fanfiction about hockey-players in love. I wish I had more to offer than what a bunch of fairly throrough Google searches might, but here we are.

Major thanks to Pine67 for beta-reading this story and giving me so much precious feedback and encouragement over the course of its writing. I couldn't have asked for more. And shoutouts to our mods, it was a joy to be a part of this fest. See you again next year?
Check out the Hollanov Reverse Bang 2026 collection.

PS: I desperately need to visit Florence again, now. Turns out fic writing isn't such a cheap activity after all.

Chapter 1: The Discovery

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

—Attributed to Michelangelo

Today's inventory was from Prato, 1482, and the notary, one Bartolomeo di Niccolò, had been a useless idiot. Shane had figured out as much about three minutes in. The handwriting was beautiful, the methodology pure garbage.

The full bingo of sloppy notarial deeds was right there on the page: miscounted silverware, displaced decimals, misspelled names, duplicates… On page three, a chest of linens was described as containing "various things, also some books." Shane wanted to reach back through time just so he could throttle the guy.

Various things, also some books. Very useful, Bart, thanks a lot.

Examining probate inventories was, to most art historians and archaeologists, a necessary evil, and a punitive one at that. A tedious and mind-numbing task best assigned to one's least favorite intern. But this was a part of the job Shane excelled at and one that, had he branched out into a different career path, he might have kept doing for fun. 

On top of being his preferred base material as a provenance specialist, household inventories were, in Shane's opinion, the most truthful documents history had produced. They constituted an emotionless account of a person's life through the listing of their belongings at the time of their death. Embellishments were rare, deliberate lies virtually nonexistent. 

What he was looking for were missing works of art, not a precise tally of underwear owned by some Italians five centuries dead. He'd gladly leave those to the anthropologists to write dissertations about, bless them. Truly interesting finds were few and far between. Only once in nearly fifteen years of looking had Shane spotted the description he was waiting for: una figura di marmo, un giovane con la spada a due mani. A marble figure, a young man with a longsword.

So, he kept looking. And looking. And looking some more. Good old Bart might have been a moron, but he was Shane's moron now. Somewhere in the eighty-four pages of his slovenly notarial output, between piles of stained linen and a chipped chamber pot, there might be one little line about a marble sculpture of inestimable value. And he was prepared to read every last page of as many inventories as it took until he located The Fencer.

Lo Schermidore. A marble statue from the late Quattrocento of greatly disputed authorship, described in eight written sources and sketched in four. Seen in person, as far as anyone could prove, by exactly zero living scholars. 

Some believed the statue had never existed, that the various accounts had each described different works. Others believed it had once existed but had been destroyed at the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, like every other thing of beauty Savonarola had gotten his bigoted hands on. 

Shane not only believed that it had existed and survived the bonfire, but that it was still around, somewhere, just waiting to be found. He'd held that belief since he was seventeen, when he'd seen one of the alleged sketches at an exhibit. It had done something to his brain he still couldn't explain, altered its very chemistry. He'd been looking for it ever since.

Most archaeologists in his field who hadn't gone commercial worked out of museum basements, or the polished offices of the universities that paid them. Thankfully, Shane's fellowship at the University of Toronto only required him to show up on campus roughly four times a year. The rest of the time, he wrote papers on attribution, authenticity and the documentary traces of objects nobody could prove had existed. To relax, he drafted strongly worded emails to peers who made light of his 'romantic attachment to probably fictitious objects'. And, when the mood struck, as it had today, he went nuts on the digital Archivio di Stato di Firenze.

He was halfway through page nineteen of Bart's inventory when his laptop dinged with a notification. It was an email from Vincenzo, one of the few colleagues who supported his search. He opened it immediately.

Shane clicked the attachments open.

The first picture was a mess. A phone camera in low light, the back of something half-buried in dirt that he could barely make out. He scrolled to the next one. Wider angle this time, tarp dragged half-back over soiled stone, a mud-caked boot in the corner of the frame. 

He scrolled again, and then stopped breathing until he felt lightheaded.

The hand was the first thing he noticed. With the sword's tip touching the base, the marble hand rested lightly on the pommel, all relaxed fingers and loose wrist, in a unique pose none of the sources could agree on. 

Shane zoomed in on the face.

He'd spent the better part of fifteen years trying to figure out what una bocca che pensa could mean. A mouth that thinks. The Fencer had been described this way in an early sixteenth century letter, after a showing in a Medici-adjacent collection somewhere in Southern Tuscany. Shane had read it so many times he could quote it in Italian, in English, and in the dubious French translation that made the rounds among collectors three centuries later. 

The surviving sketches each depicted a different version: a smirk, a glower, a stern appraisal, a generic Renaissance pout. The face on Shane's screen wasn't smirking, not pouting, not judging, at least not exactly. The brow ridge was strong, the cheekbones high and cutting. There was a pronounced curve to the cupid's bow, a fullness of the upper lip, that Shane's eyes couldn't stop tracing.

He finally understood what the author had meant.

His skin felt too tight, his heartbeat too loud. Shane closed his eyes, falling back on the breathing exercises that sometimes kept the sensory spikes at bay when he caught them early enough. Four counts in. Hold. Six counts out. He clung to the numbers, steering his attention away from the image on the screen, counting and counting until his body finally stopped winding itself into a knot.

He'd been wrong about this twice before. Three times, if he counted Pistoia, but he'd never truly believed in that one anyway. He'd just had to make sure. Naples had been the worst yet, making him fly halfway around the world and miss his best friend's bachelor party to see a nineteenth-century forgery, competent enough that it had already fooled two specialists before him. The disillusionment had been so profound that his behavior on the flight home had involved a disgraceful amount of mediocre airport wine and an incident he refused to think about. All in all, he had a perfect score at being wrong about Lo Schermidore.

The fastest way over was the overnight Air Canada direct from Montreal to Rome. Then, provided he downed a gallon of dangerously potent Italian coffee, he'd catch a train to Santa Maria Novella and arrive in Florence early in the afternoon. There, he would pick up a rental and drive himself the final twenty minutes north to Fiesole. 

With another few clicks, he booked a few nights at a mid-range hotel in the historic center. Overpriced and underserviced, but this way he could walk by the Battistero every day and let its perfect symmetry lend him some peace of mind.

He wrote back to Vincenzo.

Vincenzo knew him well enough not to take it the wrong way.

He packed in twenty minutes, a few changes of clothes, cameras, laptop, the external drive that held the entire world's knowledge about The Fencer. Only when he was ready to leave, shoes on and carry-on bag hanging on his shoulder, did he call his mother to let her know he was back to his antics, as she liked to call it. He kept the call short.

The drive to the airport was an hour forty five. He was on the highway, somewhere past Casselman, when he remembered something.

Hayden picked up on the first ring. "You absolute prick."

"Well, hello to you, too."

"You're bailing."

"I'm sorry."

"On Ruby."

"I'm really sorry?"

"Ugh. No, you're not. You're constitutionally incapable of being fucking sorry. Where are you?"

"Highway 417."

"Going where?"

"Italy."

The line went silent for a few moments, but not the kind of silence when no one was talking. Shane immediately knew Hayden had muted his side so he could curse him into oblivion. 

"Swear jar's on me, I guess?" Shane joked, but his heart wasn't in it.

"Shane."

"Yeah."

"Is it…" Hayden sighed in resignation. "Is it the thing?"

"I don't know."

"Shane."

"I don't know, Hayd. It could be. I can't tell for sure from photographs, and I've been wrong before. Fuck, I'm probably wrong now."

"Okay. So you're flying to Italy."

"Yes."

"To look at a statue."

"Yes."

"That is probably not the statue."

"Given my track record, almost certainly not. But…"

Hayden exhaled. Shane could picture him leaning on the kitchen counter with a dish towel on his shoulder, the kids using his distracted state to exact quiet destruction upon his beautiful house.

"All right," Hayden said. "Here we go again. What do I tell Ruby?"

"Tell her I'll bring her something."

"Just because she's highly corruptible doesn't mean you can keep buying her affection. She's going to grow up thinking you're a vending machine."

"I'm her godfather, that's like the entire point of me. I'm pretty sure she's already figured that out."

"I don't think I like you two's relationship."

"Just tell her I'll bring back a shit-ton of biscotti, okay?"

"Perfect, that will double as teethers for Amber."

"How many teeth does that baby need? I thought she was all done."

"Hey, you're the one in the wrong, here. You don't get to talk shit about my kids. Also, you're the one who's making my daughter like weird stuff."

"Have you considered that maybe the kid is weird stuff?"

"Okay! Travel safe. Don't drink airport wine. I won't bail you out again."

"One time. It happened one time," Shane huffed. "And it wasn't even the shitty airport booze. I was just being pissy."

"Sure. You know I'm having it put on your headstone either way."

"Bye, Hayden."

"Bye."

Shane ended the call and drove the last thirty minutes with the radio off, lost in thought. The road widened out toward the airport exit, then morphed into endless rows of cars and buses.

He parked in long-term and sat with the engine off and the photograph zoomed in on his phone. The curve of the mouth. Not just the mouth: the cheekbone, the brow, the angular cheek. It looked so right. The rightest it had ever been.

Chapter 2: Lo Schermidore

Chapter by chinesebakery

By the time his rental car pulled into Fiesole, Shane had been awake for twenty-nine hours, and he was so wired on ristrettos and adrenaline he could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips.

The part of his brain that handled diplomacy and good judgment had shut down for the day, but he was technically awake, upright and functioning. The weather was nice. He'd had two pistachio cannoli for lunch. And now, he was on his way to either the single greatest moment of vindication in history, or having his hopes dashed once again.

Hope was something he'd been actively avoiding. The photographs were promising, but the trip had been long and arduous enough that his mood and expectations had taken a simultaneous dive.

The interim storage facility had been hastily set up at the edge of an industrial park that ran along the construction site, dominated by an idle excavator. Vincenzo Leone was waiting outside, nervously flicking the ashes off a cigarette. When Shane slammed his car door shut, Vincenzo looked up and raised a hand.

"You are here!" With three long strides, he reached Shane and engulfed him into an unneeded hug, which Shane stiffly endured.

"I'm here."

In person, Vincenzo was shorter than Shane remembered, broader across the shoulders, and considerably more rumpled. He had not shaved and, by the look of him, hadn't slept much either. Still, his affable disposition shone through.

"You look terrible," Vincenzo said, sounding sincerely chagrined about it.

"Sorry to say, you're not looking that good yourself."

"Sì, but for me, it is normal." Vincenzo grinned and squeezed Shane's shoulder. "I tell everyone, this Canadian scholar looks like a football star with a nicer haircut. Now they will accuse me of lying."

He started walking and Shane wordlessly followed through the halted construction site.

"Mancini's inside," he said, over his shoulder. "The Soprintendente for the whole province. He is, I have to say, a little skeptical of you."

"He doesn't believe this is the Fencer," Shane guessed.

"He doesn't know anything for sure, but he has heard a lot about you and your, err, pursuit."

"Wonderful."

"It will be fine, I am sure." Vincenzo paused at the door of a prefabricated building marked Soprintendenza Archeologia: solo personale autorizzato. "Shane."

"Yes?"

"Before we go, are you ready?"

"Ready for it to be the Fencer, or for it not to be?"

"Either." Vincenzo shrugged. "Both."

Shane considered it. Since the last time they'd met, he'd grown significantly less optimistic, as a rule. Besides, there was currently too much caffeine coursing through his body for him to properly feel anything but tension.

"After Naples," he admitted, "I'm ready for it to be nothing, first and foremost."

"Bene." Vincenzo nodded gravely and with that, he pushed the door open.

The interior of the prefab was roughly the size of two shipping containers stacked together, lit by ancient tube lights that buzzed distractingly. 

The far end of the space had been partitioned with movable screens to create an office. Through the gaps, Shane could make out a desk, a moka pot on a portable burner, and a man in a suit sitting in a plastic chair.

Vincenzo led him in and knocked on the partition screen with formal deference. Mancini stood up. He was in his sixties, tall and slightly stooped, with a face that had known liberal amounts of sun and smoke. His handshake was firm, his gaze curiously assessing.

"Dr Hollander," he said, the greeting rolling out through a very thick Italian accent. He released Shane's hand. "You came quickly."

"Dr Mancini. Thank you for accommodating me."

Mancini inclined his head a fraction.

"Tell me, Dr Hollander, before I take you in there. What do you think you are going to see?"

The question could very well be a trick designed to expose him, but in his current state, Shane didn't have the energy to lie convincingly. He defaulted to the truth. 

"I think there's a real chance I'm going to finally see Lo Schermidore. The odds are higher that it's either a very good forgery, or a real Quattrocento work that's just not the one I'm looking for. Either way, the photographs were good enough that I had to come and see for myself."

Mancini's face did not move. He gave the smallest possible nod before he picked up a key from the desk, and gestured toward the door.

They went back outside and walked to a second prefab, a near-identical unit just a few steps away. The handwritten sign taped to the door read Reperto 2022/047. NON TOCCARE. A find number. Don't touch. 

Mancini unlocked the door himself and stepped aside to let Shane go first.

The space was empty except for a wheeled wooden cradle parked in the centre on which the statue lay, still partly wrapped in clear plastic sheeting. The upper half was exposed, harshly lit by two construction-grade work lamps on stands. Someone had wrapped a string with a number tag around its neck. Shane intended to object to the indignity as soon as he could speak again. 

He ignored the noise of the tube lights and began a methodical circuit of the cradle, starting at the feet and moving counter-clockwise, while Vincenzo and Mancini observed from the door.

The marble was Carrara with pale blue undertones, so fine that the thinner parts of the sword looked almost translucent in the electric light. The legs were in classical contrapposto, the weight on the left leg, the right knee slightly bent with the foot turned outward, the hip line tilted up on the left. The hand on the pommel was exactly right. No copyist had gotten the position accurately, with the legs ready to move and the hand at total rest.

Shane completed the tour and stepped to the side until the face came completely into view.

He blocked out the five hundred years of mineral deposit and the thick dusting of soil to focus purely on the geometry: the arched cupid's bow, the steep cut of the cheekbone, the raised texture of a mole on the cheek. Idealized Renaissance figures did not have moles; they had smooth, perfect skin. But the Fencer was unique, and Shane had always known it.

When he finally turned around, Vincenzo was watching him with circumspect concern.

"Well?" Mancini prompted.

"It's him."

Mancini's brow furrowed a notch. "Him?"

"It," Shane amended. "It's the Fencer."

"Cazzo." Vincenzo's mouth curved into a restrained smile.

Fifteen years. For fifteen years, he'd been called a romantic, a fabulist, a delusional whackjob. But he'd found it. He was certain, this time. It was here, on a wheeled cradle in a prefab outside Fiesole. He'd been right all along.

Mancini cleared his throat. "There is, however, a complication." 

Shane turned back to the statue, half expecting a missing limb he'd failed to notice in his daze.

"It's not the statue itself," Mancini clarified. "It's the base."

Shane crouched down to get a proper look. He'd barely paid attention to it on his first circuit. It was a low, stepped block, the shape of a small pedestal, in what probably was a slightly different Carrara than the figure, a touch darker and more veined.

But that wasn't the complication.

Something was carved on the plinth's vertical faces, two bands of inscription running around its sides in clean and confident carving. The upper band was in Latin. Shane's Latin was just competent enough to figure out immediately that he was looking at a classic hexameter line. With an hour to spare, a good dictionary and some proper lighting, he could translate it, no problem.

The lower band, however, was… in something else.

"I suppose you have already determined this isn't Latin."

"It's not Latin," Mancini concurred.

"And not Greek."

"Not Greek. And not Hebrew, Aramaic, or any vernacular Italian dialect within reasonable distance of Florence."

"Etruscan?"

"It's not Etruscan. Vincenzo checked first thing this morning."

"Of course." Shane sat back on his heels and studied the second band more carefully. The characters had the proportions of letters, vertical strokes, horizontal serifs, the occasional curve or loop. Some of them looked vaguely like rotated or mirrored Latin letters, others like nothing he'd ever seen. "A cipher?"

"Could be," Vincenzo offered from a few steps behind him. "Alberti disc, perhaps?"

If Shane's modest cryptography knowledge was to be trusted, Alberti's cipher originated from the mid fifteenth-century, a few decades before the statue was carved. Could someone established within the Florentine intellectual circles of the time gain access to it? Probably. But this script looked too consistent for a two-alphabet model.

Shane shook his head. "It looks like a coherent system. Like a whole alphabet."

"Nomenclator?" Vincenzo tried. 

"Nomenclators are just substitutions. The same patterns would repeat in clusters." Shane pointed to a section of the script. "The symbols repeat with the frequency you'd expect from a natural language."

Mancini, who had been standing in silence, exhaled loudly. "You think this is a language."

"I don't know. It could be."

"A language that no one has ever seen."

"That we know of."

The silence that followed felt oddly antagonistic.

"Trithemius?" Vincenzo said, half-heartedly.

"Trithemius wasn't published until the sixteenth century."

"I know. I just felt like saying it."

After a few more moments of silence, Mancini announced, in a noticeably defeated tone, that he had some phone calls to make. Shane stood up and reached for his camera. He took photographs of the visible sides, section by section, angling his phone flashlight low against the stone to magnify the contrast, while Vincenzo excused himself, presumably for another cigarette.

When he came back in, he was looking at Shane with an overcautious expression.

"Listen. I know a man."

"You know a man," Shane repeated, grasping at the absolute last threads of his patience.

"So." Vincenzo cleared his throat. "Last year, in Vienna, there was a symposium. I went because they were paying for everything and the hotel was nice. There was this man, he gave a paper on Linear A."

"Vincenzo–"

"Just, listen. He stood there for over an hour with half the room against him and he just, pfft, talked his way out of every objection."

Shane rubbed his eyes. "Linear A predates Ancient Greece. We're looking at a fifteenth-century Italian inscription."

"Yes, yes, I know."

"So why are you telling me about it?"

"Because this man, he doesn't just study ancient writing systems. He works on everything. Anything you put in front of him. Cryptography, dead languages, scripts nobody can read. He has, come si dice, an unusual brain."

"Unusual." The word immediately tripped an alarm in Shane's mind. In his experience, scholars who claimed to work on everything were usually dilettantes. 

"For languages. He sees patterns other people do not see."

"And you think this unusual brain of his would help us?"

"Probably, yes. He is, I'm told, often available. He moves around a lot. Moscow. Boston. Roma. Wherever something interesting is happening."

"Does he have a name?"

"Sì, Ilya Rozanov."

That rang a bell. Shane remembered reading a paper of his, a few years back, on a Venetian diplomatic cipher. The conclusions were correct but the methodology, highly debatable. The guy relayed on instinct and luck way too much for Shane's liking. 

"Rozanov," he repeated flatly.

"You know him?"

"I know of him."

"And?"

"His approach is lazy."

Vincenzo nodded. "I have heard the methodology critique. He is, some say, more intuitive than rigorous. But the results…"

"Right." Shane sighed and wrote the name down, intending to catch up with the guy's bibliography when he felt less like a corpse. "Okay, fine. I guess he could be useful."

"I will go tell Mancini. He should be the one to call."

"Why?"

"Because when an institution calls, he probably answers. When it's a colleague, sometimes he calls back months later, or not at all."

"So, he's an asshole."

"He's, err, very demanded. And hard to reach. I've heard a rumor that sometimes he disappears for a year or two, maybe longer. No one knows where he's been."

"Ah, the elusive genius routine," Shane deadpanned. "My favorite."

Vincenzo squeezed Shane's shoulder and stepped out of the prefab. Through the open door, Shane heard Mancini's voice carrying over from the other unit, but couldn't make out what he was saying.

He looked at the statue, harshly lit by the two work lamps, the string and label still hanging around its neck, like a leash or a price tag. With great caution, Shane lifted it off and set it on a corner of the cradle. He felt better immediately.

Chapter 3: The Epigrapher

Chapter by chinesebakery

Shane was in no state to navigate the narrow streets of central Florence among Italians whose relationships to driving safety and etiquette were fundamentally different from his own. He left the car at Parterre, picked up his carry-on and walked south toward the Mercato Centrale for a bite, now his body remembered he hadn't had anything but coffee and dessert in over ten hours. 

He went straight upstairs to the tourist-friendly food hall, since he felt about as tired as a tourist who'd walked around the city all day and processed more Renaissance architecture than one brain could handle, and picked the first combination of bread, veggies and cheese that looked good. He ate it standing up over a bar height table in about three minutes. It had been quite a day.

Outside, the sun was still halfway up the sky and the air too warm for the clothes he'd picked the previous day to face the brisk Ontario spring. He cut south through Via dell'Ariento, past the leather stalls and the souvenir booths that sold the David's genitals printed on every imaginable surface, and headed toward the Piazza del Duomo. There, a young man with a guitar was going through the nineties' greatest hits for a group of tourists, his back turned to the cathedral. Everything was exactly the way Shane had left it.

He paused in front of the Battistero to stare at its perfect, soothing symmetry. 

The memory of his first trip to Florence was very clear in his mind, probably the sharpest impression left of his childhood. At the time, his parents were holding on to the hope that the visit would finally cure him of a hyperfixation they didn't understand. What had started with a postcard sent by a family friend had turned into entire days spent at the library on Wellington Street, compulsively going through their late Middle Ages art bookshelves, and a growing wealth of knowledge the Hollanders felt ill-equipped to foster.

Seeing with his own eyes the works he'd been relentlessly studying had not cured Shane of his fascination. On the contrary, it had solidified it into some kind of lifelong pursuit. 

Shane's family had never been particularly art-oriented. There was no art displayed in the home, except for his grandmother's watercolors, and an afternoon at the museum was never the first choice for a fun Hollander family outing. If anything, his parents both hoped Shane would grow to love hockey the way they did. They never missed an opportunity to remind him that the sport was the entire reason they had met and fallen in love, back in university. But Shane had no interest in hockey. Shane had no interest in much of anything, save for Italian Renaissance art and history, and since they loved their son very much, Yuna and David Hollander had made their peace with that. 

On the Piazza, the guitarist started playing the opening chords of Wonderwall. It was Shane's cue to walk the last three minutes to his hotel, and finally get some rest.

That night, Shane slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up disoriented and mildly alarmed by the clanging sound of delivery carts supplying nearby restaurants, amplified by the narrow, empty streets. The memory of the Fencer lying on its wooden cradle had him sitting up so fast the room briefly tilted. 

He got ready on autopilot and pulled into Fiesole at ten past nine. The excavator was still idle but the construction site was no longer deserted. Workers in hard hats were already bustling around a tarp-covered pit at the edge of the foundation trench.

The door for Mancini's prefab office was propped open with a brick. Inside, the superintendent was on the phone, in the middle of a heated conversation. Shane walked straight to where the statue was waiting. As he approached, he heard Vincenzo's voice, his accent growing stronger as he spoke fast and animatedly. Then another voice, lower, drier, in a different accent. Eastern-European, probably Russian. Shane paused at the threshold.

The man looked nothing like a scholar.

Starting with what he was wearing, a sleeveless black shirt that exposed a set of arms and shoulders that did not belong to any desk-bound academic Shane had ever met, paired with athletic trousers and shoes, when most of his peers would maybe go for business casual if they were feeling particularly laid-back. His dark blond curls were slicked away from his face, his posture almost insultingly loose. Whatever Shane had expected from a widely demanded and, in all likelihood, insufferable know-it-all of an epigrapher –tweed, perhaps, or at least a collared shirt– this was not it.

But then, the man turned his head Shane's way and, for an absurd second, he considered the possibility that he was still asleep in his noisy little hotel room. 

Ilya Rozanov's face looked exactly like the statue's. Not a passing resemblance, not an interesting similarity in expression or trait: his face was its face. It was a little more lived-in, more mobile, certainly, but they had the same distinctive mouth, the same strong cheekbones and chiseled jaw. The same mole on the cheek. Which was impossible. Obviously.

While the statue's authorship was somewhat controversial, there was very little debate when it came to dating the work. All eight written accounts and four sketches that described it had been scrutinised into oblivion, appraised and counter-appraised. The Fencer was almost certainly five hundred and thirty years old, give or take a couple of years. This Rozanov guy couldn't be much older than thirty.

Either Shane's lifework had all been a joke, a mockery forged by some contemporary Russian prankster with access to very niche material and a proficiency that bordered on superpowers, or something was supremely wrong with the situation.

Rozanov straightened to meet his eye. There was a sardonic quality to his smile that immediately irked Shane beyond any reasonable measure. 

"Dr Rozanov." Remembering proper protocol, Shane held out his hand. "I have read one of your papers."

"Only one?" Rozanov asked in an accent that was undoubtedly Russian. After half a second of hesitation, he grabbed the outstretched hand. 

Shane couldn't help but stare while he noted the minute differences between both faces. Rozanov's eyes were a striking shade of blue, and the left corner of his mouth curled a fraction higher than the right. Shane's mind needlessly provided an image of the Fencer wearing the same crooked smile, frozen in pale marble.

"It made an impression," Shane offered.

"I am glad to hear it." Rozanov's smile widened into genuine amusement. "I look forward to hearing your objections."

Shane, who'd never once backed out of an erudite argument, felt a jolt of excitement at the challenge. "I look forward to making them."

Vincenzo, meanwhile, was practically bouncing in place. "Bene," he said, clapping his hands together. "I've been waiting for this. Ilya, will you tell him what we discussed earlier?"

"Can you not..." He looked like he was trying his best not to roll his eyes. 

"Tell him what I told you. Please."

When Rozanov turned back to Shane, the crooked grin returned. "Vincenzo is convinced," he said, his tone growing weary, "that I bear a striking likeness to your statue."

"He does," Vincenzo insisted. "A striking likeness. They look exactly the same, Shane. Look at him!"

"I'm looking." Against his better judgement, Shane let himself gawk some more. The bone structure was identical, the texture of the skin entirely different in all its flawed humanity, with stubble, lines and scars. 

His eyes dropped to the mouth he'd been studying for so long. Instead of smooth, unyielding marble, the lips looked soft and supple. Human. Alive. The sheer impossibility of it made his pulse stutter.

If Rozanov was bothered by his examination, he didn't let it show. He simply stared back with unabashed interest.

"And?" Vincenzo prompted.

Regretfully, Shane tore his gaze away to glance at the cradle, as if one last verification was necessary to settle the matter.

"There is a resemblance," he conceded at last.

"A striking resemblance," Vincenzo repeated, satisfied.

That afternoon, the statue was moved to the restoration laboratory of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, under the supervision of one of their conservators. A team of specialized handlers appeared with a custom-made crate tucked in a flatbed truck, and deposited the Fencer with the same care as if it were a body. 

By mid-afternoon, the statue was set up in its own studio, under a bank of conservation lamps so precisely calibrated with daylight-balance, ultraviolet and what-have-you that if the statue had pores, Shane could have counted every last one of them.

Carmela, the conservator, met them at the door. She was perhaps fifty, with grey hair pulled back in a bun and the hurried demeanor of people who revel in being overworked. She walked them through the setup, squinted at Rozanov when she took in his face, then made it clear that she did not intend to be in their way, and they were not to be in hers, before she disappeared to her workstation. 

Shane approached the statue with measured steps. It was the first time he was seeing the Fencer as it had been meant to be seen, upright and standing on its own plinth, magnified by proper lighting. Under the calibrated lamps, with the surface dust reduced by Carmela's preliminary cleaning, a host of new particularities were visible to the naked eye.

The figure looked less like a sculpture and more like a man cast in marble, the way only the most extraordinary works ever managed to feel. Shane's gaze was drawn to the thighs, to the way the muscle in the left leg flexed and sat the way it would have on a living body, anatomically correct in a way that ignored the standards of its time. The chest and abdomen were perfectly defined as well, down to the obliques.

It wasn't the most glaring particularity.

Renaissance nudes had, by convention, famously small dicks. The Greeks had decided two millennia earlier that modest genitals were the telltale sign of a respectable man, and the Renaissance had carried on Greek customs without challenging them. David, Perseus, Hercules and every other notable male figure from the same period of the Florentine republic were notoriously under-endowed.

But the Fencer wasn't. His attributes were definitely the wrong size for a fifteenth-century nude. More than adequate, however, for a regular guy. Shane was slightly alarmed when the thought crossed his mind that he should take measurements, at some point. Just so he could figure out how much of a deviation from the norm he was dealing with. 

He made himself stop staring and, for the time being, entered his observations into his iPad.

As the afternoon stretched into early evening, he kept scrutinizing the marble body and writing down every minute detail that might be of interest. The most noticeable one was the irregularities at the back of the right shoulder that weren't mentioned in any known account. Not conspicuous, but still there. He zoomed in and took pictures from every angle to document it.

"You found the shoulder thing."

Shane hadn't heard Rozanov approaching. He was now standing on the same side of the figure as Shane, a few respectful steps away.

"The shoulder thing," he repeated flatly.

"Mmh," Rozanov nodded. "It looks a little different."

"Like the polish is a different grade than the rest of the figure," Shane concurred. "That could mean a number of different things. Or nothing at all."

"What sort of things?"

Shane glanced at the shoulder, then back at his iPad. "Carver's decision. Workshop apprentice's mistake. Amateur repair. Incompetent restoration attempt. Who the hell knows."

"How do you tell which is right?"

"I can't, for now. Carmela's lab will run surface analysis. Until then, I'm not going to pretend I know what it means."

"You are being very prudent." Rozanov's tone was observational but still, Shane took it as a diss of some sort.

"I have been wrong about this before."

"Yes." Rozanov tilted his head. "I have read the paper on the forgery in Naples."

Of course he had. Out of all of Shane's papers, Rozanov had elected to read the one recounting the time he'd been spectacularly, humiliatingly wrong.

"Is a good paper," he continued. "You came to a bad conclusion with the right reasoning. Is the best way to be wrong."

"Right." No matter how hard he tried, there was no suppressing the bitterness in his voice. "It only cost me four months of my life, most of my goodwill at the Burlington Magazine, and a lifetime of favors owed to a friend of mine."

"Mmh. But the method was good."

"Thanks."

"Is not a compliment." The lopsided smile returned. "Just an observation."

As Shane stepped back to take in the figure in its entirety and, incidentally, put some distance between Rozanov and himself, the two of them ended up perfectly aligned in his field of vision, the marble face and the human one. The same lights casting the exact same shadows. He didn't have the faintest idea of how to formulate that observation into his note-taking app.

Chapter 4: Methodology

Chapter by chinesebakery

The Latin inscription turned out to be useless nonsense. Three lines of impeccable hexameter, photographed and enlarged and projected against the studio wall, and all it amounted to were Ficinian platitudes: the mind beholds the form, the hand fixes it in marble, beauty outlives the flesh that bore it. And water is wet, Shane added to himself.

It was the kind of moral epigram any humanist with a half-decent tutor and a copy of Ficino could have produced to show off and sound smarter than he was. It named no artist, no patron, no subject and no place, and could as well have been carved on a random fountain, or any Medici-sponsored chapel around town. 

"Pretty," Rozanov said. "And useless."

Shane did not particularly enjoy being beaten to the obvious by someone who looked like he'd rolled out of bed ten minutes earlier.

"It tells us the patron knew his Plotinus," he said, just to be contrarian. "Or more likely, knew someone who'd read Ficino's translation and lifted the good bits at a dinner party. Which narrows it down to roughly every educated Florentine in the last quarter of the 15th century."

"Yes." Rozanov was sitting backwards on a swivel chair, forearms folded over the backrest. "So, we move to the lower band."

"No, we don't just move to the lower band," he huffed. "We've barely spent an hour on the Latin. We should give it at least until the end of the morning."

"Why?"

"Because we're not finished!"

"We have read and translated it. The vocabulary is generic, the message is cliché. Is all documented and added to the file. What else do you think you will find?"

"Marginalia. Erasures. Anything that suggests it wasn't carved at the same time as the figure."

"And if there is nothing?"

"Then I will have done my job. Properly."

"I see. Your professional ego is worth more than everybody's time, yes?" Rozanov folded his arms over the back of the chair and rested his chin on them, smirking. His hair was still damp at the temples from whatever he'd done before showing up, and he looked less like a scholar than someone who'd been hired to play a scholar in a Hollywood blockbuster. He'd dropped his denim jacket and underneath, he wore a black shirt that looked at least one size too small.

Shane narrowed his eyes, considered a few comebacks, then went back to the photograph.

By mid-morning, Vincenzo'd retreated to the second workstation to make a few phone calls, ostensibly to give them space. He kept shooting tense glances to their side of the room, as if he expected a bomb to go off any minute.

Shane had logged exactly four observations on the Latin band: two minor, one probable, and one that was of such little consequence, it barely mattered whether it was correct or not. None of them changed their initial conclusion that the inscription said no more and no less than it appeared to say.

"Fine," Shane scoffed.

Rozanov didn't move. "Fine what?"

"Let's work on the lower band."

"Ah." He unfolded himself from the chair in one fluid motion that Shane found insufferably smooth. People in their fields were not supposed to be this smooth. "Was that very painful?"

"Shut up."

Rozanov looked excessively pleased with this response.

The high-res scan was already queued, and with one click, the lower band filled the projection screen, every chisel mark blown up to topographical resolution. Forty-eight characters, give or take. No word breaks, no punctuation. Thirteen distinct symbols by Shane's count, possibly fourteen, depending on what the hell that hooked stroke at position nineteen was supposed to be.

Rozanov stood very close to the wall, close enough that the projection lit one side of his face and left the other in shadow. He spent a long minute staring at it. Shane, who'd spent his entire career resenting the academic trend to overperform 'thinking', was annoyed to discover that this wasn't what was going on. The jovial nonchalance was gone, replaced with razor-sharp focus.

"The repetition," Rozanov said.

"What repetition?"

"Position four. Position twenty-three."

Shane stepped closer to the wall and counted. He had logged all thirteen symbols, stared at them until they blurred together, written down a number of possible groupings. He hadn't, however, seen a repetition at positions four and twenty-three. He saw it now. A four-character sequence, identical or near enough, with minimal variations between the occurrences.

"How did you see that?" 

Shane regretted the question the second it left his mouth. Of course he had, spotting patterns in scripts was his specialty. Still, his years studying the Fencer should have given him the advantage, and he was irrationally irked to lose a second point to Rozanov in as many hours. 

"Mmh."

"Forget I asked." Shane stepped back from the wall. "What do you think it is?"

"A name."

Behind them, Vincenzo coughed very audibly. Neither of them turned. Shane had known something like this would be coming sooner rather than later.

"A name," he repeated, his brows furrowed in frustration. "Based on what?"

"Length. Position." Rozanov pointed to position twenty-three. "The carver slowed down here so he could cut deeper. You do not do this for things that don't matter."

Shane stepped in. The second occurrence did look marginally deeper than the first.

"Or his chisel slipped."

"Not likely. Does it look like the work of a beginner?"

Shane huffed. "That's a hunch, not evidence."

"Is your job to find evidence, no?" 

Rozanov was clearly having a good time, unaware, or unbothered, of the way Shane's blood pressure was spiking. He wasn't opposed to a good professional argument. He thrived on a heated professional argument, actually. But Shane didn't deal in intuitions and gut feelings. He felt powerless against those.

"How can you even methodologically defend it?" Shane demanded. 

"I am not trying."

The frankness derailed him. He'd expected Rozanov to run headfirst into an argument, not to glance at his bait and leave it untouched. 

"Well?" Shane said, with a long-suffering sigh. "Aren't you going to defend it anyway?"

"You would like that." It was a statement, not a question. 

There was something about Rozanov's grin that short-circuited Shane's thought-process. Was it the dissonance caused by seeing the fencer's face with an expression that didn't belong to him? He couldn't say.

"Okay," Rozanov continued with a one-shoulder-shrug. "I will write down justification for you, with frequencies and spacing and clever reasoning, just so you can read and say it is not good enough. Then we can keep going, yes?"

"Yeah." That sounded pretty great, actually. He was already looking forward to tearing it apart.

"Good. More fun for me when you have to admit I am right."

As Shane returned to his workstation, he wasn't sure which one of them had gotten this round, technically, but it still didn't feel like a win. A tie, he decided. He could live with a tie.

Lunch time rolled by without him noticing. Vincenzo brought back focaccia and put one in front of Shane without comment. Rozanov took his outside. Through the studio window, Shane could see him at the edge of the courtyard with one foot up on a low wall, his lunch in one hand, still wrapped and untouched, a cigarette in the other. He flicked the ashes off with a casual grace his marble doppelgänger could never exert. The resemblance was striking, he'd give Vincenzo that.

Shane ate at the workstation, staring at the repetition at positions four and twenty-three, still up on the wall projection, the two sequences facing each other, a pair of bookends to a sentence Shane couldn't parse.

He took his phone out and scrolled down his contacts until he reached his old friend J.-J. Boiziau, who now taught philosophy at a Parisian university. The contact card was a tiny image of a Greek bust J.-J. had set himself, years ago, as a joke. Shane stared at it for some time, weighing the pros and cons of bringing it to him. J.-J. was an excellent resource, but his contribution could land a little… out there.

He tore off a piece of focaccia and walked out of the studio to dial from the cool concrete corridor.

J.-J. picked up just before the call went to voicemail. "I'm in office hours, Hollzy," he whined.

"Yeah, well. Who's there?"

"No one. Which is exactly why I love office hours!" 

"Did they even interview you before they gave you a goddamn permanent position?"

"No need. They saw a picture of me, that's all it took." He dialed down the humor in his voice before he said, "Hayden tells me you're in Italy again."

"Hayden has a big mouth."

"He's worried about you. So am I, a little, but I'm soldiering through. Is it about the statue?"

"It's about the statue, yes."

"For real this time?"

"Yeah. I think so."

There was a small noise on the other end. "Does it count as enabling if I tell you I'm happy for you?"

"Thanks. Listen, I'm not calling just to interrupt you not working. There's an inscription on the base of the statue. Well, two inscriptions. One's in Latin, just some preachy bullshit, and another one in a script I've never seen, that doesn't fit any known cipher system."

"Oh, you must be losing your mind."

"I am, actually, yes. So anyway, I need to ask you a question."

"Go for it."

Shane leaned against the corridor wall and looked at the toes of his shoes. It was a reasonable enough question to ask, as long as he left out the whole 'the guy I'm working on this with looks like he modeled for the very statue we're studying and it's messing with my head' thing, because J.-J. knew him far too well and would never let it go.

"Hypothetically," Shane started, "say you commissioned a statue in Florence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. You're educated, you have means and access to whatever circle's doing the best work in town. When you get your statue, you have someone carve some bland as fuck epigram in Latin on the base. Why the hell would you also inscribe it with something no one can read?"

J.-J. hummed with interest. "Someone probably could. You just don't know who."

"I guess, yeah, but why?"

"Most inscriptions are addressed outward, yeah? So, your Latin quote, it's meant for whoever happens to pass by and knows a bit of Latin. Give them a little ego boost for being able to read it when the less educated can't."

"Right."

"The unreadable thing is private, which means one of two possible audiences." J.-J. paused for effect. "First, a specific reader who shares the key with the writer. Florence was full of closed societies at the time, as you know. Like the Platonic Academy, for instance."

"So it's just a private club thing? Only sharing with the in-crowd?"

"Could be that, yes. Many of those destroyed their archives when they broke up the band."

"Right, okay." Shane didn't like that one. No archives meant they wouldn't find anything solid to support their research. "What's the second one?"

"It's meant for a reader who hasn't arrived yet."

Shane took the phone away from his ear to glance at the screen in disbelief. "Care to elaborate?"

"Say your contemporaries can't read your text because you're not writing for them. You're writing for someone you think will arrive, eventually, with the means to decipher it. Could be a descendant, or a future member of the same closed society you're in. A figure you believe in for religious reasons. The neoplatonists were deep into that stuff. Ficino's circle thought certain truths were latent in matter, waiting for the right reader to find them."

"If you're talking about fucking time travel, I swear to god…"

"No time travel. Just a message left for someone who hasn't been born yet."

"That sounds fucking insane."

"Well, you asked."

"I guess I did."

"Shane."

"Yeah?"

"Why are you really asking me this?"

He took a breath and looked at his shoes some more. "Professional curiosity?"

"You don't have professional curiosity. You have professional obsession. When you hit me up with philosophical questions, it usually means you're falling into a brand new rabbit hole."

"There's no new rabbit hole," he promised, and it was technically true. He'd been down this one for longer than he and J.-J. had known each other.

"Sure, sure."

"Anyway, break's over," Shane lied before he could be interrogated further. "Bye, J.-J."

"Eat something good for me, please. Talk to you soon."

He ended the call and stood in the corridor with the phone in his hand for a minute. A reader who hadn't arrived yet. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that?

He wanted to write it off and focus on the more rational theory. Closed societies were, in fact, all the rage at the time. The Platonic Academy alone could account for half the unreadable inscriptions in Tuscany. It wasn't entirely impossible that some documentation had survived whatever mass-delete fest their members had decreed at the time. A mistake, an oversight. Someone too proud of their own work to destroy it entirely. They just needed to search harder.

It was almost certainly that.

It should have been the end of it, but the other reading caught on something he wasn't prepared to look at directly. It echoed with the statue's anachronistic features, bounced off the uncanny resemblance with Rozanov in a way that made Shane queasy. So, instead of dropping it entirely, he just filed it away. For now.

He would not, however, mention any of that esoteric bullshit to Rozanov or Vincenzo. He wasn't that stupid.

When Shane came back into the studio, Vincenzo had gone out and Rozanov was at the wall projection alone, scrutinizing the second occurrence.

"You took a long lunch," he said, without turning.

"I was away for fifteen minutes," Shane shot back. "Just took a phone call."

"I did not think you were a sociable person."

"A work phone call."

"Ah, that explains it, then." 

Shane ignored the smirk and crossed the room to sit down at his workstation. He opened a new document and started typing up a version of J.-J.'s theory, watering it down enough that, should someone read over the notes, Shane wouldn't have to resign and be made an example of academic infamy. 

"Dr Hollander?"

"Yes, Dr Rozanov?" Shane replied without looking up, making no effort to mask his impatience.

"Have you formed an opinion about my resemblance with the figure?"

Shane stopped typing. Rozanov was still half in profile, examining the projection, his tone perfectly casual.

"There are no opinions needed," Shane said prudently. "It's a coincidence."

"Yes. Probably." When Rozanov shrugged, the muscles in his shoulder rippled under his golden skin. "Vincenzo will not stop bringing it up." He turned, finally, and looked at him with a tighter version of his patented half-smile. "I thought, perhaps, you have decided what you thought about it. As a scholar."

"As a scholar, I have decided it's a coincidence."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Is settled, then." He turned back to the wall.

Shane stared at his unfinished notes, at the cursor blinking patiently. Across the room, Rozanov stood with one hand resting against the wall, perfectly composed, the projector's light catching him across the cheekbone in a way that made it very difficult, in Shane's scholarly opinion, to focus on ciphers and ancient closed societies.

Chapter 5: After Hours

Chapter by chinesebakery

Three days passed, during which their work settled into a rhythm that was almost domestic. Vincenzo in the corner with his coffee and his reports, Rozanov at the wall projection, a notebook in his hand, and Shane at his workstation, battling with both the cipher and Rozanov, in roughly equal measure.

The name argument continued. As promised, Rozanov had submitted a three-page hand-written defence of the theory in surprisingly elegant cursive. Shane had returned it with thirteen objections in red ink. The next day, four of the objections had been answered with diagrams that didn't address the methodology problem, but made the underlying claim significantly harder to dismiss. At which point, Shane had stopped objecting in writing and started calling it out loud, which might have been, he realised with some chagrin, exactly what Rozanov had been hoping for.

Vincenzo started showing up to work with noise-cancelling headphones.

Evenings were Shane's favorite part of the day. Carmela and her team left at six. Vincenzo went home to his wife soon after, and Rozanov disappeared to wherever Rozanov disappeared to, taking his chaos and his disruption and his disrespect for Shane's methodological rigor away with him. The building grew perfectly quiet and still, and then it was just Shane and the statue. 

On their second day at the Opificio, Carmela had given him a key card, with a quiet look that said she knew he would need it. On the first night, Shane told himself the after-hours lighting was better to perceive surface anomalies. By the third, he'd admitted to himself he just liked the way the warmer glow wrapped around the figure, softened its expression, and concealed the slight traces of chisel strokes where he didn't need to see them.

It was just past nine on the fourth night. The studio was empty and peaceful, silent except for the soft droning of climate control, when Shane heard a door open and close at the far end of the corridor. 

He'd killed the overheads after the others had left, and was working by a single directional lamp swung low over the figure. Bright light raked the marble at an angle that brought out the slightest tool mark on the figure's surface, while the DSLR around Shane's neck had the kind of lens needed to shoot a yacht from the shoreline. 

Shane moved around the statue in a slow circle, stopping at the left flank. He adjusted the lamp by a few degrees before lifting the camera. He took a few frames at a spot beneath the shoulder where the fencer appeared to have two small blemishes close to each other, one big, one small. They looked like little moles, round and raised, faint but unmissable up-close, deliberately put there. He kept taking pictures, adjusting the zoom and angle.

He'd been on the left shoulder for the better part of two hours, although he couldn't have said, if pressed, what he was looking for exactly. The face was the one part he kept avoiding. He'd taken enough pictures to fill up a hard drive of a decent size, in proper lighting, he just… avoided looking at them.

The mole, the cupid's bow, the curve of the jaw: they all had become elements of a problem he would rather not think about. So, he worked on the shoulder, the inside of the wrist, the handle of the spada. The long shallow groove of the spine, when he was feeling particularly feisty. But not the face. Never the face.

He had also stopped working with his eyes alone. His gloved hand, the one not holding the camera, kept finding its way to the marble. A fingertip on the inside of the elbow. The flat of the palm at the back of the neck. Light contact, the kind a conservator might make to check for surface variation.

"You missed dinner."

Shane did not jump at the sound of the low, accented voice. He took some pride in how perfectly still he managed to remain, save for the goosebumps at the back of his neck. He turned to find Rozanov leaning in the doorway, holding a paper bag with the logo of the osteria around the corner on it. 

"There was no dinner," Shane said.

"There is now."

Rozanov stepped into the studio, shrugged off his denim jacket, and set the bag on the workstation. With another few long strides, he was standing next to Shane and the statue. The directional lamp lit his face from below as he straightened up, the way a child holds a torch under their chin to tell a ghost story. The effect was less menacing than it should have been.

"Vincenzo says you have been here every night this week."

"I didn't know he was such a gossip."

"He thinks you are obsessed."

"Yeah, well, Vincenzo's obsessed with saturated fats and I'm not on his case about it."

Rozanov flashed a small, private smile that didn't reach all the way to the corners of his eyes. He glanced at the figure, then at the camera in Shane's hand.

"Find anything interesting?"

"Not really, no."

"And yet you keep looking."

"That's how it works. You look until you find something. Then you keep looking, in case you missed something else."

"Is a beautiful work of art." Rozanov took a step toward him. Shane instinctively took one back. 

"It's an important work, yes."

Rozanov stepped around the statue to join him. Slow, deliberate, his head moving a few degrees to track each plane of the figure as he passed. He stopped at the left flank and tilted his head, glancing at Shane. 

"You have been at this for some time."

"I'm being thorough."

"Of course, you are."

Rozanov bent to study the arm Shane had been examining all evening, his eyes moving slowly up from the wrist to the clavicle. Shane watched him do it, and couldn't stop the comparison from assembling itself, the marble forearm he'd photographed from four angles, and the one a foot to his left, same tendon, same turn of the wrist, one of them carved and one of them living. He'd spent so many years studying this body in stone, learning its shape from words and sketches, whether it was at his desk or in fantasies and dreams. 

"Dr Rozanov."

"Yes, Dr Hollander?"

"What are you doing?"

"I am doing what you have been doing."

"What have I been doing?"

"Just looking," Rozanov replied, his voice dropping down. "At what is in front of me."

The wrongness of seeing it move was almost more vexing than the wrongness of wanting it to. Because of course, he did want it to. He'd imagined it taking life for longer than he would ever admit, wanted it in the shameful way you were never allowed to want a work of art, the impulse to touch going against every professional instinct he owned. 

And here was the Fencer, its eyes intent on him, the bocca che pensa he'd argued about in several languages, pliant and warm and so close. Too close.

In the low lamp light, he could see the grain of stubble along Rozanov's jaw, the texture of his skin, the shadow of his lashes over his eyelids. Shane didn't move. His brain had failed to supply the necessary commands to his legs.

"For days, you look at me the same way you look at this." He gestured to the marble without turning, and kept his eyes on Shane. 

"That's not..."

"Don't." His lips curved into a knowing smile. "I have no interest in what is not."

He lifted one hand and placed it, very carefully, on the side of Shane's neck, his thumb settling at the pulse point where Shane's ear met his jaw. The touch was light, diagnostic, not unlike the way Shane had been laying his own gloved hand along the inside of the marble's forearm all evening.

"This is what you have been thinking," Rozanov said, his voice low. "Yes?"

Shane's focus went, stupidly, to the camera caught between them, the way the strap had ridden up and was digging into the skin at the back of his neck.

Rozanov leaned in and Shane felt his breath over his face, right before the press of his lips at the corner of his mouth. It was soft and brief, almost tentative, but enough to turn off every faculty his brain possessed.

The kiss, when it came, undid something Shane had kept bolted for half his life. The mouth he'd only ever seen idealized into cold perfection was none of those things now. Soft, a little chapped, opening against his, and the shock of it wasn't that he was kissing a near-stranger in a conservation lab, but that the marble was finally, impossibly, kissing him back.

Rozanov pulled back, just enough to look at him. Shane knew he should move away, say something, end this before it got further out of hand. Yet he couldn't bring himself to do any of those things. 

Rozanov appeared to take Shane's stillness as an assent. He released him only to take hold of the camera strap, gently lifted it over his head and set it down somewhere. Shane let him do it, waiting, his lungs tight, his gaze lost in the empty space behind Rozanov's shoulder. 

The hand that had been on Shane's neck earlier slid into the hair at the back of his head and tugged just enough to force Shane's chin up. Rozanov's pupils were blown wide. He didn't move again until Shane's eyes dropped to his mouth.

Against every impulse of self-preservation, Shane's lips parted immediately. The sound he made when Rozanov's tongue slipped into his mouth was humiliatingly raw to his own ears. All he could do was pull him closer, until a strong leg slotted between his thighs and pressed into him.

Rozanov's other hand wrapped around his jaw, tilting his head back, angling him just the way he wanted. Another tug at the nape of his neck, and Shane let out a sharp, stifled gasp right into his mouth.

Shane's hand wrapped around Rozanov's bare shoulder, exploring the play of hard muscle under soft skin and, just this once, praising his taste for sleeveless clothes, when Shane's thumb crossed a small raised spot and, about an inch further on, another one, smaller. 

He opened his eyes.

The directional lamp's light grazed Rozanov's head, tilted from their kiss, and fell squarely around the bare shoulder sticking out of his tank top. There were two moles there, side by side. One large, one small, exactly where Shane had spent two hours documenting them on the marble figure just a few feet away.

Shane stepped back, too fast, and hard enough that he hit the workstation behind him. He didn't turn to see what had clattered on the floor.

"I have to..." Shane couldn't finish the sentence. What he had to do was leave immediately, put some space between the two of them so he could breathe, and think, and breathe again.. "I have to go."

"Okay." Rozanov's voice had gone flat, his face closed off, unreadable. His lips, though, were slick and reddened.

"I–I'll see you tomorrow," Shane said as he gathered his things with shaky, uncertain hands. 

He picked up his iPad, the camera and all the rest, and purposefully did not look at Rozanov, or even at the statue, while he scrambled out the door.

He did not stop walking until he was three streets away from the Opificio, in a warm Florentine night that smelled of roasted tomatoes and garlic from nearby restaurants. He almost collided with a group of tourists pressing around a wine window, and even then, he just kept walking. His gloved hand, where it had been on Rozanov's shoulder, was still lightly stained with chalk.

Chapter 6: The Notebook

When Shane arrived at the Opificio the next morning, half an hour early, he found Rozanov already standing by the projection screen, and instantly, his plan was derailed.

The plan was simple enough: get in, settle, occupy the room before Rozanov could, so that whatever happened next, happened on Shane's ground. He'd rehearsed the whole thing on the walk over, what he'd say, the exact degree of cool, unbothered nothingness he'd project, the way he'd react if Rozanov tried anything shady.

"Good morning," Rozanov said, in a tone that gave away absolutely nothing.

"Morning." Shane made it to his workstation with a stiff gait, only just managing not to stare. He set his bag down and missed the edge of the table by a couple of inches. His hands had been doing that kind of thing since roughly four in the morning. Once he'd given up on sleep, he started mulling over his conversation with J.-J. and ultimately spiraled down the philosophical rabbit hole his friend had warned him about. Knowing that in a matter of hours, he'd have to spend the day in a closed room with Rozanov, and somehow behave like a professional.

Shane could do professional. He strived for professional. He'd built an enduring reputation out of being the least personable man in any given room, and he liked it well enough. It kept annoying and incompetent people out of his way.

So, if Rozanov wanted to behave as though no part of him had recently been pressed against any part of Shane, then Shane would out-behave him. He would be the absolute best at it. A generational talent.

His confidence lasted approxivatively an hour, which was about how long he managed before he caught himself watching the line of Rozanov's forearm at the projection screen, and had to physically move his chair toward the wall to keep himself from staring. It turned out he wasn't able to will himself into indifference after all. The best he could do was focus on the work, and hope he'd find something interesting or weird enough to catch his attention until it drowned out the rest. And, in the meantime, keep up appearances.

He thought he was managing, up until Vincenzo arrived, looked at the pair of them, and said something in Italian under his breath that Shane elected not to translate.

It helped that there was real work to hide behind, and that Rozanov looked equally willing to drown himself in it rather than address the awkwardness of the situation. 

Which meant that, around half past eleven, Rozanov cracked the sequence.

The four-character succession, it turned out, wasn't a name but a verb, the second one emphasized, or qualified slightly, its meaning inferrable. After that, it came apart fast. Rozanov stood at the projection calling out groupings and Shane cross-checked each of them, while Vincenzo stood behind and cheered them on. Within the hour, they had something that resembled a sentence.

It wasn't a language, exactly, or rather, not one language. The grammar borrowed from Latin, the word order leaned Greek, and the letters appeared entirely made up. A script invented by someone with a solid classical languages education and too much time on their hands. Which didn't solve the 'why', but helped decode the 'what'.

"Can you say it all in English?" Vincenzo asked. "All of it. Slow."

Rozanov stood with one hand flat against the wall, under the projected characters.

"The hand that frees me, gives breath to the stone. I am not born, I am freed. Or… Let out, maybe. Same verb, different emphasis."

A heavy, uncomfortable silence dropped over the room, until Vincenzo cleared his throat. 

"Well," he said, "that is…"

"It's an artist's boast," Shane said fast, reaching for the nearest explanation. "It's the same as the Latin one, just a tad more conceited. Look at me, I'm so good, I give life to marble!' Every workshop in Florence probably thought that's what they were doing, anyway. The Platonic Academy practically franchised the idea."

Rozanov didn't reply, he only stared at the projection with his jaw clenched tight. The easy nonchalance had drained out of his posture.

"It is strange," Vincenzo remarked, "to speak as the statue in the first person, no?"

"It's conventional," Shane said. "Classic neo platonist doctrine, repackaged into middle-school-level poetry. Everything is derived. Beauty doesn't originate in the art, it's some preexisting, ethereal essence descending into the material world. The sculptor as a midwife. Very trendy with the intellectual crowd of the time. You can thank Ficino for making Plotinus cool again."

"You don't think is more?" Rozanov asked. He still hadn't turned around. "Just, what, brag?"

"I think it's a sales pitch, yes."

Rozanov made a small sound, not quite a laugh. "I need air," he muttered, and walked out of the studio with a stiffness that didn't fit his body. Shane watched him go, taking a petty satisfaction in being the one who had kept his composure.

Vincenzo watched the door swing shut. "He is upset."

"He's fine."

"He translated his own statue saying it was let out. It knocked the wind out of him. You saw it too. "

"It's not his statue," Shane replied through gritted teeth.

Vincenzo gave him a long, unimpressed look, and then, mercifully, let it go. 

"I will go check on him," he said, and left Shane alone with the writing on the wall.

Vincenzo was charged with letting everyone know Rozanov wouldn't be coming back that day. That, in itself, wasn't strange. Rozanov kept his own hours and answered to no one, least of all Shane. What was unusual was that he'd left behind the notebook that so rarely left his hand.

The studio had emptied out, leaving Shane alone with the Fencer again, when he went to power down the projector and found the notebook sitting on the lower shelf of the equipment cart. The black leather cover was worn out and split in places, with corners furred from being shoved in and out of bags. The elastic band that usually held it shut had been pulled to the side. 

He could guess what was in it, in the general sense. Working notes. Hypotheses. Diagrams. The same thing Shane had hundreds of files about on his iPad. There was nothing in there he had any right to, and almost certainly nothing he didn't already know, or couldn't guess. He told himself that, and reached for it anyway.

There was only one problem. It was all in Cyrillic.

It was one thing to take a peek, a peek was almost certainly accidental, perfectly innocent, and, frankly, harmless. It was another thing entirely to go through the effort of deciphering notes written in an unfamiliar language.

Besides sparing his conscience, there were a number of reasons to stop right there, but none of them were particularly persuasive. Whatever he'd written down in there was professional material that Shane might need to advance his own research. In the absence of Rozanov himself, he would only be accessing information he had every right to see. It wasn't his fault if Rozanov insisted on scribbling into a notebook like a secretive teenager rather than uploading his findings to the cloud in their shared folder like an actual professional and member of this team. 

It wasn't snooping so much as accessing relevant information he was entitled to, in the event of an unexpected absence. Or at least, that was what he would be pleading, if caught. It had nothing to do with how increasingly bizarre Rozanov's likeness to the figure was turning out to be, or how he was starting to wonder whether he was having a bit of a psychotic break. Not at all.

One page. He would read just one page, find nothing interesting in it, and move on. It was only practical. A way to keep himself from obsessing about all the precious information he might have missed until the end of time.

He carried the notebook to his workstation like it was made of glass, opened the translation app on his phone, and held the camera over the most recent notes.

The app caught after a second. The real page stayed underneath, ink and grain and the shadow of Shane's own hand, and then the English assembled itself over the script in light boxes, lagging and twitching as it overwrote the Russian.

The same question Shane had been turning over all day, in the same words, in a handwriting that wasn't his. So Rozanov had landed on it too, and buried it in Cyrillic where no one would look. Shane needed it to have a rational answer. He needed that fast.

He turned back a page.

They both knew on whom. Anyone with functioning eyes could see it. What unnerved Shane was that Rozanov seemed as lost as he was. Not that Shane had assumed he had an explanation, only that it hadn't once occurred to him to stand in the man's shoes. It had to feel pretty strange, using a middle ages statue as a mirror, and wondering how the carver had seen him so clearly.

Shane put the phone face down. Across the studio the Fencer stood under the one light still on, and he half expected it to smirk at him before he made himself look away. 

The Canadian. He'd assumed he was the one observing, that Rozanov was a piece of the puzzle and he the one solving it. And what the fuck did he mean by 'what he'd done'? He hadn't done a thing beyond fly out here, take some pictures, and try to do his job.

Well. Maybe one other thing. He turned the phone back over and made himself keep going.

The app held the translation for a few seconds longer, then lost focus and dumped the overlay, leaving him with plain ink and a page he couldn't read. He didn't try to bring it back. 

Blackouts. Absences. There was a perfectly ordinary medical term for that, and it had nothing to do with marble. Some kind of seizure thing, the kind people managed and didn't advertise to colleagues they barely knew. That would explain the inconsistent publishing history, the years Rozanov dropped off the map. It would explain a lot, if Shane let it. And he was definitely going to let it.

Because the alternative was that a man had written in earnest that standing near a statue that looked freakishly like him was the only thing keeping him fixed in the present. Shane didn't believe in that kind of thing. He was going to need to not believe in it fairly hard. 

When Shane looked up, the studio had gone dark beyond the one lamp he'd left on, and his phone screen was black beside him. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there. He closed the notebook, pulled the elastic back to the left where it had been, and set it on the cart, in the dust-free shadow where it belonged.

He made it all the way back to the hotel before he called Hayden. It was the middle of the afternoon in Ontario and Hayden's side was its usual chaos: cartoon soundtrack, several parallel negotiations involving children, the ordinary clatter of a life with other people in it.

"Twice in two weeks," Hayden said. "People are gonna talk. Hang on." The negotiation ended with a shrill cry and the not-quite-slamming of a door. "Okay, what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. Why does something have to be wrong?"

"Because you don't call when you're good. You text me five times in a row in the middle of the night and act offended that I'm asleep. So, what's wrong?"

Was it surprising that Hayden could call him out with such certainty, fifteen seconds into a conversation? Not really. Hayden had a way to read his mood that was both annoying as fuck and deeply grounding. There was no point in pretending. Granted, he didn't understand a tenth of what was going on in Shane's head, but he can always tell whether it was good or bad. Being best friends since Grade 1 tended to do that.

"The statue's real," he said. "I confirmed it. It's the Fencer. It's… everything I thought it was."

"Oh, shit, Shane. That's– I mean, that's huge news. You did it." On Hayden's end, a cartoon song shrilled while he processed the information. "You proved them all wrong, and that's your favorite thing to do, so… Why do you sound miserable?"

"I'm not miserable. It's just, there's plenty more to do. There's an inscription on the base. Two of them, actually. We finally cracked the second one today."

"And?"

"And it's fine. It's a maker's boast. Standard period stuff." He pressed his forehead to the cool glass. "There's a linguist here. They brought him in to work on the cipher. Rozanov."

"Okay," Hayden said, cautious. "What about him?"

Shane braced before he answered. This was the part he didn't know how to put in words that wouldn't have Hayden staging an intervention, and he couldn't even blame him if he did.

"He looks like the statue," Shane said, wincing to himself. "Like, he really looks like it."

"O-kay." Hayden, clearly, did not see a problem there. "Hot guy, good bones, I'm with you so far."

"No. He basically is the statue, Hayd. He has the exact same face, same height, same build. Same mole on the cheek. It's on the marble, and it's on his face, in the same place." He was talking too fast now, the way he hadn't let himself all day. "And he has two more on the shoulder, that aren't even in any account and I documented off the figure–"

"Okay, Shane, pause." Hayden said, in the patient tone Shane had heard him use with his kids a thousand times. "Sounds like you've been looking at this dude pretty closely."

"Yeah, well. That's part of the problem."

"Which is?" Hayden said, very evenly.

"Which is that we…" Shane shut his eyes. "Something happened. Last night. With him. It doesn't matter."

"It clearly matters."

"It doesn't matter for this. What matters is that he…" Shane caught himself before he got into the whole snooping thing. There was more than enough to talk about before he opened that particular can of worms. "He's acting like there's something wrong with the inscription. With the statue. Like it means something specific to him and he won't say what. Like they are, somehow…" He was getting ahead of himself again, leaping the gap before he'd measured it. "I think I'm losing it. I've wanted this so long that now it's here, I don't know if there is a mystery or if I'm inventing one on top of everything because the real thing isn't, I don't know… Strange enough?"

The line went quiet while Hayden assembled his answer.

"Okay," Hayden huffed a breath. "Here's what I think. I think you've been awake for about a week straight. I think you flew half-way across the planet on a whim into the single biggest event in your professional life, and your brain, which is a very good brain and also a complete maniac, has decided to celebrate by finding the one part of this that it can chew on forever instead of just, God forbid, enjoy the win."

"That's not–"

"Wait, I'm not done. The resemblance is freaky. I believe you, okay? Admitting it's freaky. You know what's more likely than a centuries old statue and a 21st century guy having the literal same face, bodysnatcher-style? Two things. One, you've been obsessing about this Fencer guy since you were seventeen. You told me yourself it rewired your brain. And now, you've met some good-looking dude in proximity to it and your pattern-machine's gone into overdrive. You've seen the Fencer in clouds, Shane. I still have the pictures on my phone."

Shane said nothing. He had, in fact, sent Hayden pictures of a fencer-shaped cloud, a few years back.

"And two, whatever happened last night happened, and you're clearly antsy about it. So turning the man into some cursed mystery is a really, really convenient way for you to never let it happen again. You with me?"

To Shane's dismay, Hayden had a point. "That's one way to look at it, I guess," he conceded, reluctantly.

"Drink some water. Eat an actual meal and get some sleep. And tomorrow, you do your thing. The maniac-brained Shane thing. You want to know if the resemblance means something? Don't sit in the dark spiralling about it. Run it down like you do everything else. You'll find a normal answer and then you'll have no choice but to call again and admit I was right. Which, mind you, I'm already looking forward to."

It was, annoyingly, solid advice. Treat it as a provenance problem, the one kind of problem Shane never got wrong.

"Yeah." Shane's breathing was slowing down to an acceptable rhythm. "Okay. Yeah."

"I think what you're trying to say is, 'Thank you, Hayden, you're so smart'."

"Don't fucking push it."

"Ah, that's the Shane we all know and sometimes love." Something crashed faintly on Hayden's end, followed by a small voice. "I have to go, Arthur's broken into the snack cupboard again. Get some sleep, okay? And Shane?"

"What?"

"Congratulations. Really. You found your statue and you got yourself some. Try to enjoy that for like five minutes before you ruin it, yeah?"

Chapter 7: The Investigation

Chapter by chinesebakery

Shane resolved to follow Hayden's annoyingly good advice and let his maniac-brain run loose. He'd do the one thing he'd never once gotten wrong, and track the provenance of one Ilya Rozanov.

He ate first, because he'd been instructed to and was jittery to a point where he couldn't tell a suggestion from a command. The place two doors down served him branzino with a glass of wine for courage he drank too fast and instantly regretted, and pasta he finished without tasting a single bite. Then, he carried the laptop to the too-small desk, angled the lamp away from the window, and fired up the databases he routinely used to investigate dead people.

Aiming them at a living man felt about as ethical as reading a stranger's diary, which he'd essentially just done, anyway. The part of his brain that needed to keep digging until he found something, anything, had been switched on. It didn't come with an off switch.

He started with ORCID, where Rozanov's profile was insultingly thin. He cross-checked with the author indexes of the few journals he respected and the many he didn't. All that turned up was a handful of publications, no institutional affiliation, and a contact email on a domain that seemed vaguely sketchy.

It was when he began to review the citation history that things started to take a turn.

There was the Venetian cipher paper from 2021. Lazy method, correct conclusion, exactly as he remembered. The kind of intuitive guesswork that should have been wrong and, infuriatingly, wasn't. Before that, an edited volume on Quattrocento merchant codes from 2011, the contributor bio listing him as an independent, which in Shane's experience meant either independently wealthy or unemployable. And before that, a co-authored thesis on Linear A epigraphy. In 1998.

After triple-checking, cursing the excruciatingly slow internet connection into oblivion, and staring at the date for a while, Shane started a new spreadsheet. He intended to build a timeline, the way he'd build one for any object with a contested history, to log sightings and the gaps between them. One column for the citation, one for the year, one for the source, one for his own confidence that it was the same man and not a father, an uncle or a random homonym. The discipline of it was grounding, as always. It allowed for an orderly conversion of a messy human story into a clean, documented sequence.

Except, there was nothing clean about this particular sequence.

Rozanov's earliest indexed paper was a 2003 monograph chapter on Novgorod birchbark glosses. Competent, dry, the kind of thing a careful postdoc would produce. Except the chapter was a reprint, and the original had run in a Leningrad philology annual. Which meant Soviet, pre-1991. If Rozanov had published that as a graduate student, he'd be pushing sixty now. 

A reprint could be misdated; catalogues did that constantly. He noted it, flagged it and moved on, because people fucked up all the time and one glaring mistake proved nothing.

Then he found more.

1979. A panel on undeciphered scripts, a conference proceedings out of Tartu, Estonia. In the participant list, between a Finnish runologist and someone from the Hermitage, was one I. G. Rozanov. The bio was three lines and gave an affiliation Shane couldn't parse through the Estonian, but the name was there in the scanned PDF, attached to a talk on, of all things, anomalous Quattrocento marginalia.

1952. A footnote in a Moscow State dissertation, thanking Rozanov for assistance with a Mycenaean transcription. No initial. Probably nothing.

The Soviet years came spaced out and thin, but from 1991, the citations thickened. Vienna, Boston, Lyon, Moscow. A cluster in the early 2000s, a gap, another cluster. The man got easier to see the closer the record came to the present, like a figure walking out of fog. By 2021 he was everywhere Shane had already known him to be, the diplomatic-cipher paper, the Linear A circus in Vienna that Vincenzo wouldn't shut up about.

The citations spanned seventy years.

A family practice. A grandfather, a father, a son, all working the same narrow field under the same name. Russian academic dynasties were real. It would explain the span, the gaps, the spread. It explained everything except the distinctive moles carved into Carrara five centuries before Rozanov was supposedly born. Everything, except the Fencer. 

The conference volume from some 1995 Salzburg colloquium took real digging, but it had a contributor photograph. Grainy, half a face in poor lighting, a conference lanyard cutting across the jaw. Half the face was plenty. It was him. Not a father, not an uncle. The same mole, the same mouth, thirteen years earlier than Shane standing across a studio from it. 

The record wasn't even. It thickened in patches and thinned in others, and one of the patches was steep. Somewhere around 2008, the citations didn't just resume after one of Rozanov's gaps, they multiplied. Three papers in eighteen months, four more the next year, when the decade before, he'd only managed two. 

2008 was also the year Shane had seen the Fencer's face for the first time. The whole catastrophe of his adult life started in a touring exhibit in that winter, with a brown-ink drawing behind glass that had rerouted everything he was ever going to be.

There had to be an explanation. There was always an explanation. Finding it was the literal definition of the job, and Shane was one of the best at it. Possibly the best Rozanov had ever had cause to be nervous about. If Rozanov had the sense to be nervous, which he clearly didn't, lounging around in his stupid sleeveless shirts with his infuriating smirks.

The bravado lasted about as long as it took to scroll back to the photograph. Because the rational version, the one he'd been so certain he'd find, had to account for a man seventy years old and thirty at once, and wrote in his private notebook that standing near a statue was the only thing keeping him fixed in the present. And meant it literally. 

He was a rational person. He believed in provenance, in the unbroken chain. He believed in the boring true answer hidden under the beautiful false one.

Outside his window, two men were arguing without any real heat in front of the shuttered trattoria. Florence persisted, indifferent and beautiful, while three streets away the face that had rerouted his entire life lay on a wheeled cradle under conservation lamps. 

By the time he crashed down into bed, Shane had admitted defeat. He hadn't set out to prove Ilya Rozanov was impossible. He'd set out to prove he wasn't, and he'd failed. 

The next morning, Rozanov arrived at ten past nine in a seemingly good mood, which Shane distrusted on sight. Same denim jacket, same coffee thermos set down with its heavy proprietary thunk, but he came in with a spring in his step. The smirk at the corner of his mouth loaded, ready to fire.

"Good morning." He took a sip of coffee, eyeing Shane over the rim. "You are here before me. Of course."

"You left early yesterday."

"Mmh. I had to make a call. Very boring. Money people." He waved at the vagueness of money people and their universal inconvenience. "You look like hell, Dr Hollander. Something troubles your sleep?" Another slow sip. "Or someone, maybe?" 

Shane didn't have anything for that. On a normal morning, he'd be open to play another round of their usual deadpan volley, the only game between them he reliably won at least half the time. This morning, with no sleep and the column of dates still printed behind his eyes, he had no clever comeback to offer. 

"I slept fine," he said, exhausted.

"Mmh." Rozanov let it go, which he wouldn't have on a normal morning. 

They started a rather convincing impression of working.

The script swam every time Shane looked at it, and his attention kept sliding off, back to the previous night. When he reached for the espresso at his elbow, he misjudged the distance and knocked the cup, catching the spill with the side of his fist half a second before it reached the photographs.

Rozanov threw him a quizzical look.

"It's fine," Shane said, to a question that hadn't been asked. He blotted the workstation with a wad of tissue, carefully avoiding his gaze.

Fortunately, Vincenzo was in a chatty mood and filled the workspace with noise. He'd been reminded of a man in Lyon, someone who once tried to pass off a plagiarized reading as his own. In Vincenzo's telling, Rozanov had utterly demolished him from across a conference table, with an entire palaeography panel watching.

"He never published again, this man," Vincenzo said, with relish. "Not one paper. Ilya, you remember him? The one with the terrible cravat?"

"I remember the cravat," Rozanov said. "Is the most original thing he ever produced." 

Vincenzo laughed, delighted, and went on arranging his swabs.

"Lyon," Shane said automatically, because it was the type of information his brain was trained to store and hand over on command. "The colloquium from 2019."

It came out before he could stop it. Nobody volunteers a conference year unless they've been studying someone's resume at two in the dead of night. 

Rozanov's pen stopped against the page mid-stroke. "Is there a reason you know about my old Lyon colloquium, Hollander?" he said. 

"It came up." Shane kept his eyes on the script. "When I looked into your work."

"My work." Rozanov set the pen down. He did it with great care, the way you set down something you might otherwise throw. The smile was gone. On him, that was worse than shouting. "Before, you only read one paper. Lazy method, you say. Today you know my colloquia." His blue eyes went flat and hard. "You have been busy, Dr Hollander."

Across the room, Vincenzo had gone still over his swabs.

"People check references," Shane said.

"References, mmh." Rozanov repeated like the word tasted foul. "What references did you find in Lyon?"

"The kind that are a matter of public record. You publish, people read it. That's sort of the point."

"You did not read. You investigated me. Is your job to know the difference, no?" 

"It's also my job to know who I'm working with before I put my name next to theirs." Shane heard the prim little snap in his voice and didn't care. "Forgive me for doing due diligence on a man whose entire methodology is I had a feeling and got lucky." 

"Ah." Something in Rozanov's face sharpened. "Yes. The methodology. You are very brave about mine, with whatever you did last night that put those circles under your eyes. Was it worth it, the rigor? Did it make you feel better?" 

Shane's jaw set. "At least I was working," he said.

"On me. You were working on me."

"Somebody had to. You weren't exactly forthcoming about the part where your–"

He stopped, right up to the edge, before he could say anything damning about the dates, the impossibility, all the things he couldn't say in a lit room with a witness.

"Not now," Shane said, his voice low, and regretted it immediately, because there was no version of not now that didn't insinuate later. 

Across the studio, Vincenzo cleared his throat. 

"No," Rozanov agreed, after a moment. "Not now."

Chapter 8: The Question

Chapter by chinesebakery

The last of them to leave was Carmela, who capped her solvents, washed her hands for the precise length of time the protocol demanded, and paused at the door with her light jacket over her arm. She looked at Shane, then at Rozanov who was stretching by the window at the far side of the studio and hadn't pretended to be working for the last half hour.

"Don't stay too late again," she told Shane. "It's not good for the marble. Too much breath in the room." She lingered for another moment, on the edge of a question she had the tact not to ask, until her sensible shoes clicked away down the corridor, and they were finally alone. 

Shane had spent most of the day drafting an opening in his head. He was leaning toward clean and procedural words designed to sustain the higher ground. I owe you an account of something. The reassuring distance provided by professional vocabulary, something you could set on the table under a conservation lamp to demystify and document.

"I read your notebook." So much for the professional record route.

"I know," Rozanov said, flat and neutral. A little tired, perhaps. He was standing at the windows with his back to the room, his reflection laid faint over the courtyard glass. He didn't turn.

"I ran it through a translation app," Shane added. "The recent pages."

"Of course you did."

"I know what you wrote. About the blackouts. And the way you feel when you stand next to it." He took a breath, and made himself keep going. "About me."

The reflection in the glass held still.

"I didn't take it," Shane said, and hated the pleading edge in his voice. "You left it on the cart. I only read a few pages."

"Only a few." Rozanov turned around then. "This makes it okay?"

"No." Shane resisted the urge to shrug. "It doesn't. Obviously."

That was not the way he'd planned for this conversation to go. He'd meant to be cool, unbothered by the mere acknowledgement of a procedural lapse. Instead, he was conceding one point after another, and that was not something he usually allowed. He blamed it on the combined effect of The Fencer and Rozanov staring back at him simultaneously.

Rozanov crossed to the bench across from the workstation and leaned back, all relaxed shoulders and long legs stretched out in front of him.

"You are very sorry," he provided, and let the r's roll an extra turn. "Is what you are supposed to say next."

Shane thought about lying and immediately dismissed it. He wasn't good at it and it wouldn't hold. Rozanov was too annoyingly perceptive for that.

"I'm not. Not really," he admitted. "I know I'm supposed to be. But if it was on that cart tonight, I'd probably do it again."

Rozanov let the silence stretch, then leaned his head back against the wall. The low hum of the climate control system pressed into the quiet of the studio, mingling with the lingering bite of Carmela's solvents.

"You read my notebook. My private notes, my work." The r's had stopped rolling. "And you cannot even lie to be kind about it. You sit, you tell me you would do it again, like is nothing. Like I am another one of your dead Italians.

"That's not what it was."

"No? Then what?"

"The inscription. Every explanation that I come up with makes me feel like I've gone fucking crazy." He caught Rozanov looking at his hands, the way they nervously knotted and unknotted, and set both hands flat on the workstation. "I want to know what you think it means, and what you're not telling me."

"Mmh." The smile came back, thin and unconvincing. "Not a sales pitch, after all."

"Then tell me what it means. Not the statue, you. What are you?"

"You are the one who investigates. So, investigate."

"I tried. I built a timeline. It's what I do, it's the one thing I'm good at. You give me an object with a contested history and I find every place it's ever been seen. I order it, fill in the gaps, solve the mystery." He made himself hold Rozanov's gaze. "It's what I was trying to do, anyway."

"And did you?" Rozanov's face sharpened. "Solve my mystery?"

"How can you stand here now and be the same Ilya Rozanov who's been publishing for decades?"

"Maybe I am not."

"I saw your picture," Shane let out, his voice shaking. "Twenty years old, looking exactly like you do now. The timeline is seven decades long, and I'm not even positive I found everything."

"Enough." Rozanov pushed off the bench and took two steps toward the middle of the room, the Fencer at his back. "You think I have not done this counting? You play with your little app and your spreadsheet. You find seventy years and you feel very clever, yes? Good methodology." He flashed a smirk that faded almost immediately. "Now, try a number that does not stop. Try not knowing where you were for years not in your spreadsheet. You fill the gaps, then tell me what it is, because I would like to know."

"You mean you don't–"

He shook his head with vigorous emphasis. "I have a winter that lasts years. Boston, the nineties, a job with colleagues and a bar I like. No memory of arriving there. Entire years, gone." He tipped his head at the cradle without looking at it. "Not like a child forgets, just… erased."

"Blackouts," Shane muttered. "When did they stop?"

"The day they dig the statue out, I wake up on the kitchen floor, bleeding from my nose. When Mancini calls, I already know where to go." His hand went up to rub at the side of his face. "Since I am here, I am only here. Days go by the way they are supposed to. First time I can remember."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Oh, you think?" Rozanov asked, raising an eyebrow. "I do not know what it is. I only know what it does."

"Tell me, then," Shane urged, staggered and urgent. He'd been hoping for answers, but with each passing moment he only felt more confused, more lost.

"No."

"No?"

"You first." 

"What about me?"

"Fifteen years, Vincenzo says. The whole field tells you the statue is not real, you will not stop. Your entire career on the line for maybe nothing." He moved into Shane's space, stopping a step closer than he needed to. Shane had to remind himself not to stare at the curve of his mouth. It was second nature to him by now. Not staring. "Tell me how a teenager in Canada sees one drawing of some old Italian statue and changes his whole life."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"A lot, I think."

"I just saw a sketch and got obsessed with it. Pretty sure it happens all the time. Ask any art history scholar, they're all fixated on one work or another."

"And you never once ask yourself, why this one?" His voice dipped lower and Shane's eyes were dragged down to his lips once more. "Of all the lost things in the world, you chose this one. No reason."

The Fencer stood off to his side. The sharp glare of the conservation lamp threw the marble face into sharp relief and for once, Shane didn't want to look at it.

"I don't know why," he admitted. "I never did. I think maybe I've been scared of the answer."

The corner of Rozanov's mouth curled up, only slightly. "But you came anyway." 

His hand wrapped around the side of Shane's neck, his thumb rubbing at the hinge of his jaw. They were standing so close now, Shane couldn't hold his gaze without getting distracted by his mouth.

"How long did it take you to decide to fly here when they told you?" Rozanov asked in a tone that was equal parts curious and playful.

Shane swallowed hard, his throat tight. "I don't know. Fifteen minutes?"

Rozanov seemed to like his answer. His ironic grin stretched into a softer, genuine smile, baring his teeth and lighting up his whole face. Shane was instantly mesmerized.

"Do you really believe it is a coincidence?" Rozanov pressed. "That we are both here because of, what? Some academic happenstance?"

"Ilya…" Shane breathed out, the first time he had used his given name aloud. He liked how soft the world felt in his mouth.

This time, Ilya didn't ask for permission. He just leaned forward, slow enough that Shane could have stepped away. Instead of retreating, he closed his eyes. For a split second, his brain tried to categorize the precise pressure of Ilya's mouth, the sudden, overwhelming tactile reality of him in case this, too, could be documented and studied under a lamp. But the warmth of Ilya's mouth burned through the threads of Shane's logic. There was no method to the way his pulse picked up, no safe academic distance left to him from making a low, desperate sound. 

When Ilya nipped hard at his bottom lip, every instinct in Shane to observe from afar shattered, replaced by the sheer, grounding weight of the flesh and blood man in front of him. 

Shane's fist tangled into the front of Ilya's shirt. When he found the two moles on his shoulder, the large one and the smaller one an inch below, he pressed reverent kisses on each of them. Ilya made a low sound against his mouth that had nothing composed or controlled left in it. His hand dipped lower under the hem, down to his right shoulder, and found a patch of long-healed scar tissue that matched the Fencer's unexplained irregularities. He wasn't rattled this time. It took him a second to realize he'd been fully expecting this. Looking for it.

Ilya broke away to survey his reaction. When he didn't find any alarm in Shane's expression, he leaned in again, only slightly. He kept his forehead near Shane's, his hand still at his throat, his eyes shut. From so close, he looked younger and much older all at once.

"I am still angry at you," he said, although there wasn't a hint of anger in his voice.

"I know."

"Good." His thumb moved along Shane's jaw, not quite a caress, more like checking he was real. 

"I'm not sorry I read it," Shane said, giving in to a slight petulant instinct. "I'm sorry it hurt you."

Ilya opened his eyes and turned his chin up towards him, urging him to meet his gaze. They stood like that long after every instinct in Shane telling him to look away had quietened down, until he'd finished counting the shades of blue, green and gold in Ilya's eyes.

"I have not forgotten your question," Ilya said softly. "About what I am."

"You're not going to tell me."

"No." The corner of his mouth lifted a fraction. "Not because I keep it from you. Because I am asking it also. You understand? Every day, I am asking it. I thought, with the statue, the inscriptions, finally, an answer is coming. But I do not know more than you do. Probably a lot less. You have been studying me with better methodology."

"Shut up," Shane huffed in reflex.

"Maybe with your boring method and my clever instinct, we will find it."

The alarm panel blinked red by the door, waiting to be set. Outside, the city slumbered, undisturbed. And Shane, who had spent his entire adult life solving ancient mysteries with fastidious, exacting work, stood in a conservation studio with a work of art he'd been chasing and the inexplicable man he yearned for, agreeing to a quest that felt either doomed or ruinous, because there was nothing else for him to do.

Chapter 9: The Third Script

Chapter by chinesebakery

The next morning, the sun still rose over Florence the same way it did on any other day, heating the terracotta roofs and casting shadows into the narrow streets. Vincenzo arrived shortly after 8:30 AM, balancing three espressos on a small tray and complaining loudly about the tourist traffic around the Ponte Vecchio.

Shane and Ilya resumed their professional roles with a synchronicity that felt both fragile and thrilling. They shared a secret now, one that required a mutual, unspoken containment. Neither of them bothered to label what had shifted between them in the dark, but the air in the room was irreversibly altered. When Ilya leaned over Shane's workstation to point at a monitor, he didn't attempt to maintain a polite distance. His chest brushed Shane's shoulder, a deliberate point of contact that sent a sharp spike of awareness straight down his spine. 

Each time they caught each other's eyes across the room, there was a shared, silent acknowledgment of what they started and had no intention of stopping. 

But there was still work to do. Carmela needed the environmental reports, Vincenzo was pressing them for an update on the second band of inscriptions, and the Fencer stood in the center of the room, indifferent to all the messy, human entanglement going on around him.

Shane spent the first hour hiding behind the familiar mechanics of his camera. He adjusted the directional lamp, dragging a harsh raking light across the marble to document the chisel marks near the plinth. He swapped his standard lens for a macro, aiming for the lowest edge of the base to a narrow, unpolished strip of stone just above the wooden cradle. He leaned in, his right eye pressed to the viewfinder, and froze.

Shane lowered the camera slowly, blinking hard. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, this time without the lens. There, etched faintly into a space he knew for a fact had been completely blank 48 hours ago, were new markings. They were shallow, almost imperceptible unless the light hit them at a painstakingly specific angle.

His pulse hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. By now, he had photographed every square millimeter of this base, multiple times. He'd run his globed hands over this exact spot. The stone had been smooth. He was absolutely certain of it. And yet, faint markings trailed along the bottom edge, where the marble was slowly unveiling a new secret.

Shane's first instinct was to call Ilya over, to point at the impossible script and demand an explanation. But what if he was wrong? What if the light had simply never hit this exact spot at the perfect angle?

He backed away and pulled up the digital archive on his tablet. He found the high-resolution files from the first day in the studio and zoomed in on the lower plinth until the pixels blurred. Nothing. Smooth stone, just like he remembered. He wasn't crazy. He wasn't hallucinating. The statue was changing.

He glanced over his shoulder. Vincenzo was arguing with a supplier on the phone in rapid-fire Italian. Ilya was by the window, stretching his long arms over his head, looking more present and animated than he had all week.

Shane looked back at the faint script, and didn't say a word. Very carefully, he raised his camera, adjusted the exposure, and took a picture.

The ensuing days were defined by an excruciating, magnetic proximity. 

They didn't talk about the notebook, the inexplicable chronology, or the kiss. The invisible thread pulled taut between them caused the physical distance in the room to silently, gradually collapse. 

At the Opificio, their initial hostility was replaced by an acute sense of awareness. While the boundary between them hadn't dissolved entirely, it had thinned out into something sheer and ineffective. When they reviewed 3D renders at the workstation, instead of standing on opposite sides, they leaned into each other's space, conspicuously enough to pique Vincenzo's attention. 

In the breakroom, when they reached for the same bottle of water, their knuckles would brush. Rather than pulling away immediately, the contact would linger for a few moments too long, each of them wordlessly daring the other to pull away. 

"Thirsty?" Ilya asked, his voice dropping into a low, quiet register that felt entirely inappropriate for the workplace.

Shane kept his hand exactly where it was. He could feel his own pulse ticking frantically against Ilya's wrist. "I was here first."

Ilya's mouth curved into a challenging smile. "You are welcome to fight me for it." Then, he twisted the lid off the bottle and took a large gulp before he handed the water back to Shane, and stared unabashedly at his mouth while he took a drink. It was exhilarating. And also mildly exhausting. 

Vincenzo, for one, seemed thrilled by the sudden lack of tension in the studio. "It's a miracle," he whispered to Shane one afternoon. "You two are finally acting like civilized people."

Shane had merely hummed in response, his eyes fixed on the line of Ilya's throat. Civilized wasn't the word he would have used. He felt as if he was walking around in a constant state of simmer, every nerve ending in his body braced to fire up.

The proximity didn't end when they left the studio. By silent agreement, Ilya simply waited for Shane by the heavy security doors. They walked the winding, cobbled streets of Florence as the heat of the day broke. They ate together in dimly lit trattorias, sitting shoulder to shoulder at tables meant to comfortably accommodate large families, arguing about Latin syntax and fifteenth-century politics over plates of freshly made pappardelle.

Outside of the lab’s stuffy environment, Ilya had a dry sense of humor and was prone to observing the tourists with a detached, aristocratic amusement.

"You look at this city like it is a museum," Ilya observed one night, swirling the last of his Chianti in his glass. 

"It basically is." Shane shrugged. "Half the buildings are UNESCO heritage sites. Every stone's been cataloged into oblivion."

"Mmh. So this is why you like it." His eyes flickered back to Shane, assessing. "Everything preserved and locked behind glass. No surprises." Ilya's knee pressed against his under the table. "Is safer, to love something that is already over, yes? It cannot change. Cannot disappoint." Ilya kept his eyes on him as he took a sip of wine. "You spent so long looking for something static and the moment you find it, it starts changing. Ironic, no?"

"This is a…" The counterargument he reached for didn't come. "Very reductive reading," he finished, in a pitiful admission that said-reading was absolutely correct. Ilya's smile grew wider.

When they finally left the restaurant, the air was thick and still warm. Ilya guided Shane through the crowded piazzas with an easy, if slightly infuriating confidence. As they turned into a sinuous side street, a Vespa whipped around the corner, the engine roaring loudly against the cobblestones. 

Ilya's hand flattened against the small of Shane's back, his grip firm as he steered him out of the way and against the rough stone of a building. The scooter blew past, but Ilya didn't drop his hand, leaving them standing inches apart in a dark alley. Shane's heart jumpstarted in his chest, hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

Ilya's thumb stroked a deliberate line against Shane's spine, right through the light cotton of his shirt, in a way that felt both casual and deeply territorial.

"I wonder," Shane managed, his voice dropping into a rough whisper, "how long we're going to pretend."

"Pretend what?"

"That we're just working together."

Ilya's mouth curved into a devastating smile as he stepped a fraction closer, invading Shane's space further, until the scent of wine and faded cologne wrapped around him. "I am not pretending anything. I am just letting you catch up."

At the end of the night, they parted ways at the corner of Shane's hotel, the air between them heavy with unmet possibilities, only to start the cycle all over again the next day.

But every morning before Vincenzo and Carmela arrived, and every evening after they left, Shane photographed the bottom of the marble. He didn't tell Ilya. He wanted to be absolutely certain before he introduced another impossibility between them.

Within the first couple of days, the faint scratches had deepened into recognizable cuts.

The next evening, they'd curved into distinct characters. That night, after Ilya'd gone, Shane spent hours running comparative analysis on the typography and cursing the unreliable internet connection of his hotel room all over again, a cold sweat pricking his hairline.

Before the end of the week, the characters formed clearly defined words. It wasn't the strange cipher they'd been struggling to translate on the second band. It was Latin, crude and hastily carved. He knew Latin. He could figure this out on his own.

Then, on a Friday morning, the bruising on the stone had fully surfaced. The sentence was stark and so easily legible; Shane didn't even need the magnifying lens of the camera anymore. He stared at the completed sentence as his stomach sunk with dread.

The door clicked open, followed by the familiar cadence of Ilya's footsteps. 

"Vincenzo has cornered a very polite security guard and is giving him a spontaneous lecture on Brunelleschi's linear perspective," he announced, an edge of amusement in his voice. He walked over and stopped just behind Shane. "You're staring at that same spot again."

When he failed to answer, the amusement vanished from Ilya's tone. "Shane?"

"I have to check the lighting levels in the secondary lab," Shane lied, his voice too tight. He didn't wait for Ilya to respond before brushing past him with a stiff stride.

The rest of the day dragged on while Shane's jittery panic intensified. Every time Ilya looked up from the projection screen, Shane found an excuse to cross the room, to talk to Carmela about the humidity reports he'd already filed, or just stand outside in the courtyard and stare blankly at the gravel.

By the time the afternoon faded into evening, the silence in the studio had grown heavier than lead. Shane hadn't touched his camera since morning. He'd barely spoken three words that weren't strictly academic.

Ilya, of course, had noticed. For the last two hours, he'd stopped pretending to be working and spent most of his time slumping into his chair to stare at Shane with sulky intensity. When the security door clicked shut behind Vincenzo and the studio settled into an absolute hush, Ilya straightened immediately.

"What did you find?" he asked, his voice clipped. "Are you going to tell me, or keep on pretending I am not here?"

Shane gave him a shaky nod. He reached out to switch off the harsh overhead conservation lamps, leaving only the low-slung directional lamp to rake its light across the lower base of the statue.

"Before you see this," he started, stepping aside to give him room, "You need to know that I checked the baseline photos. I checked them every day this week."

Ilya frowned, stepping out from behind Shane to look at his face, taking in the rigid set of his jaw. His gaze snapped to the statue, following the invisible line of Shane's focus down to the unpolished strip just above the cradle.

Shane watched Ilya's throat bob as he swallowed. For a suffocating moment, neither of them breathed.

"You can read it," Shane said, barely above a whisper.

"Yes," Ilya muttered back. He reached out, his hand unsteady, fingers stopping just shy of tracing the newly formed etching.

"Lapis corpus, tempus umbra," Shane recited. The Latin felt heavy and ancient on his tongue. "Qui sine fine quaerit, eum in vitam vocat."

Ilya lowered his hand and turned his head to look back at Shane. The raw vulnerability in his expression betrayed the last remnants of the guarded, unbothered scholar. 

"Stone is the body, time is the shadow," Ilya translated, his voice rough, a humorless rumble in the quiet studio. "He who seeks without end, calls him into life."

They stood there, in the harsh glare of the conservation lamp, the impossible marble standing between them. This wasn't an artist's dedication or a warning meant for the general public.

Shane hadn't just been called to study an accidental discovery at a Fiesole construction site. He'd spent fifteen years hunting a ghost. He'd poured his entire professional life, his unwavering obsession, his relentless focus into proving this exact figure existed. That the Fencer existed. His single-minded devotion hadn't just been a search: it had become a beacon.

"It's about us," Shane breathed out. The realization felt gigantic, crushing with the weight of its impossibility. He stared at Ilya, his pulse roaring in his ears. "I didn't just find you. I pulled you here."

Chapter 10: The Arno

Chapter by chinesebakery

The Trattoria was closed, the iron security gate pulled down over the glass, but the piazza outside was still radiating the day's trapped heat. Stripped of the warmth of sunshine and the slow-moving herds of tourists, Florence looked like an entirely different city. Still beautiful, still old, but not as intimidating.

They walked without a destination, steps clicking against the flagstones at a matching rhythm. The newly bled letters on the plinth, along with the ominous translation that rewrote the second half of Shane's life, hadn't produced much of an argument or a panic attack. Instead, it had rendered them both mute, in fear speaking too loudly might cause some ancient magic to manifest.

Shane kept his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his fingers curled into fists. 

"What is it like?" Ilya asked as they rounded a corner toward the Arno, his gaze fixed straight ahead. "To know you spent so long looking for a ghost."

"Not a ghost," Shane muttered. "Ghosts don't leave fingerprints. Ghosts don't…." Kiss like that. He swallowed hard. "They don't stand in conservation labs drinking too much coffee and arguing about methods."

"Maybe not all of them." He slowed, stopping near the stone railing of the Lungarno. Below them, the river was a black mirror reflecting the moon and the amber glimmer of street lights. "Ghosts are memories. I think we are something much worse. A… problem. Or an equation."

Shane stepped up beside him, leaning his forearms against the cool stone. "Problems have solutions. Variables you can test and control."

"And do you feel very controlled, Dr Hollander?" Ilya turned his head. The mockery was gone, and all that was left was exhaustion, layered with a brittleness that made Shane's chest tighten. "Because I feel like I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, and you are the only ground."

"I don't know what I feel," Shane muttered, and felt stupid for it. A memory came to his mind, a row of feelings flashcards with carton faces and labels, neatly lined on a desk. An adult he didn't fully trust, the certitude that whichever card he pointed to would be wrong.

"But you know who you are, in the right time and place." Ilya closed the distance until his shoulder pressed solidly into Shane's. "I wake in places I didn't travel to. Speak languages I never studied. Then the light goes off again. I thought maybe I should not exist."

"Don't say that. I need you to exist."

"Then tell me what this is. You are the expert. What's on your little spreadsheets?"

"I tracked your records back seventy years, all your citations and lectures. But before that, nothing." The scholar in Shane surged forward, desperate for data to anchor the impossible reality. The questions always came first, he couldn't help it. "What's the oldest thing you remember?"

"My memory is not a line. Is like pages torn from a book, all out of order." He looked over the dark water, his jaw setting tightly. "Scents, mostly. Sea water. Burning wood and… bronze. Melting. I am standing on a sea wall, watching ships on the horizon. Not Italy." When he paused, his eyes shone. "I remember a woman. My mother, I think. She puts her hands here, on my face, when she talks to me."

Shane held his breath.

"And a workshop in Florence. Cold. Wet. I don't know  anymore, if I was a man who died there, or a thought someone put into stone."

Ilya reached out, his fingers brushing the back of Shane's hand. "After they pulled the statue out of the mud in Fiesole," Ilya continued, his voice dropping to a lower register, "the blackouts stopped. Not slow, all at once." The look he gave Shane was almost accusing. "For a long time, something has been pulling me here. To now. I did not know it was a person."

It was absurd. It violated every law of science, history, archaeology, and common sense. And yet, he was looking at the exact lines of the face he had traced across printouts of seventeenth-century sketches and museum brochures since he was a teenager. And that same face was looking back at him with so much hope and affection he could barely stand it.

"I didn't do anything," Shane said. It came out rougher than he wanted. "I just wanted to be right. And to prove everyone else was wrong, I think."

"And you were." Ilya's lopsided grin appeared, faint. "You were… catastrophically right."

"What happens now?" he asked. "When Carmela's conservation report is finished and the Fencer's shown in a climate-controlled gallery somewhere? Does the… anchor snap?"

"I don't know." Ilya reached up, cupped the side of Shane's face, his thumb sweeping gently across his freckled cheek. "But I am very curious to find out."

The resistance in Shane's mind –that final fragment of academic restraint, the instinct to analyse from a cautious distance– came crumbling down. He couldn't tell if it was Ilya's word or his touch that did it. But before Ilya could cover the shred of vulnerability he'd just bared with a smirk or a joke, Shane kissed him. 

He could see it so clearly now. All those years of searching, the wasted nights, the scornful peer reviews and lonely, freezing winters, had all led him to these exact coordinates in time and space.

Ilya groaned against his mouth, his arms wrapping tightly around Shane's waist, lifting him up slightly as he backed him against the stone bridge railing. The hard, undeniable friction of their bodies wiped away any lingering abstraction. They weren't a historical anomaly or a theoretical problem to solve anymore. Just two men breathing the same warm Florentine air, burning through the distance they had spent a lifetime bridging.

"Can we go?" Ilya murmured against Shane's lips, his breath hot and ragged as he pulled back just far enough to look into his eyes. "To your hotel or mine, anywhere, I just… don't leave me alone to think about you all night again. I will go insane."

Shane nodded and pulled his hand back from the dark blond curls at the nape of Ilya's neck. 

The walk should have been ten minutes; it took closer to thirty, because they kept stopping. A doorway in Via de' Neri. The cold stones of a dark alley. Once against a shuttered pharmacy, until a passing couple said something Shane didn't catch but that made him blush anyway.

The reception desk was empty when they came through the door. The building was old, all creaky stairs and no lift. Ilya had him against the wall on the first landing, one hand flat on the  plaster beside Shane's head. The last few steps took an eternity.

Before the door was even fully locked behind them, Ilya had his back pressed into it. Shane had no hesitation left in him. His hands fumbled with Ilya's fly and immediately dug underneath to grab at hard, hot flesh. The whimper that escaped Ilya's mouth when Shane wrapped his fingers around his cock nearly undid him right there.

He'd been with men before –not many, and not very memorably– but he'd never wanted like this. Hadn't known that wanting could warp this far around someone else, his own body barely registering. His mouth on Ilya's throat earned him a broken sound he wanted to hear again immediately. It was electrifying, this sound, as were all the little huffs and hisses that followed every progress of his hands down Ilya's body. He wished he had more patience, that he could take all the time in the world to explore and admire him, but the urgency was too great, the need too pressing.

His knees hit the floor in one smooth motion, but the way he fumbled with Ilya's trousers and underwear wasn't nearly as slick. The denim gave way with a sharp rustle, pooling around his ankles. Shane cupped the solid weight of Ilya's thighs, his fingers digging into the firm muscle, anchoring himself to the heat radiating off him.

Looking up, Shane saw Ilya looking down at him, his head resting against the doorframe, his chest heaving. His eyes had gone dark with a raw, hypnotic focus. When Shane's mouth finally wrapped around his cock, his hum of relief echoed Ilya's ragged one. 

Ilya's face lit up with pleasure was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. His mouth fell open, his brows furrowing as he kept his eyes locked on Shane's face. He let his fingers tangle into Shane's hair, giving it a firm tug. His other hand slid under the collar of Shane's shirt to trace the top of his spine.

"Such a pretty mouth." His thumb grazed his bottom lip, pulled it down a fraction, and Shane hummed happily in response.

Shane worked him with intent, blissful eagerness. Nothing mattered but the taste of salt on his tongue, the heat of Ilya's body and the shuddering breaths he let out every time Shane swirled his tongue over the head of his cock.

"Shane, fuck, stop. Stop," Ilya choked out, his fingers tightening in Shane's hair, pulling him gently up to him. "Enough."

Ignoring the ache in his knees, Shane let himself be drawn up and dragged urgently toward the bed. They barely made it, hitting the mattress sideways in a mess of tangled limbs and half-discarded clothes, before Ilya’s body covered Shane’s.

"Look at me," Ilya groaned and parted Shane's legs with his knee. His fingers found his face, cupping his jaw with a reverence that made Shane's chest ache.

"I'm looking." Shane's hands slid up Ilya's arms to feel the healed patch of scar tissue on his shoulder.

"I want to fuck you," Ilya rasped into the shrinking space between their lips. "Is it okay?"

A breathless almost-laugh broke out of Shane's throat as his legs wrapped instinctively around Ilya's thighs to anchor him deep. "Yes." He was certain he'd never wanted anything this much in his life. "Yes, please. I need– I need you."

To Shane's consternation, Ilya was determined to keep their pace agonizingly slow. He peeled off the rest of Shane's clothes and set out to press lazy, languid kisses down his chest, catching the sharp hitch in Shane's breath when his teeth grazed the sensitive swell of his nipple. His hands were broad, warm and heavy, smoothing down Shane's waist, anchoring his thighs open while Shane writhed against the sheets, urging him to move faster.

When Ilya shifted lower, his curls brushing the inside of Shane's thigh before his mouth finally closed around him, Shane's head snapped back into the pillow.

Ilya took him in with agonizing patience, teasing him lazily with his tongue until Shane was ready to beg. When he finally drew him deep into the heat of his throat, Shane's hips bucked off the mattress in a desperate, poorly coordinated bid for friction. Ilya's mouth was slick, skillful and suffocatingly warm, but it still wasn't quite the fullness he was desperate for.

"Ilya–" Shane gasped out, his voice cracking as he reached down blindly for Ilya's shoulder. "I have–" He cleared his flushed throat. "I have things in my toiletry bag."

Ilya lifted his head, his lips wet with spit as a lazy smile curved his mouth. "Things?" Ilya repeated innocently, his voice low and raspy. "What sort of things?"

"Shut up," he muttered, flustered and mildly annoyed at the sheer satisfaction radiating off Ilya. "In the leather kit, by the sink."

Ilya took pity on him then, and pressed a lingering kiss on the inside of his knee before he rolled off the bed. Shane watched him cross the room, gloriously naked, returning moments later with a foil packet and a travel-sized bottle of lube.

The cap opened with a slick click. Shane's breath hitched as Ilya shifted downward, slicking his fingers and pressing his thumb against Shane's entrance. The slick glide of his touch made Shane arch his back with a quiet, needy sound. Ilya stroked him gently first, spreading the slick warmth over sensitive skin, before pressing one long finger inside.

Shane let out a low groan, his knuckles turning white where he gripped Ilya's shoulders. "Ilya…"

"I know, doktor. I know," Ilya muttered against the inside of his thigh, his voice thick and tender, and gave his taint a long comforting lick that made him shudder. Then, there was a second finger working him open with a deliberately slow rhythm, until Shane's hips began to meet the thrusts on their own. "Look how easy you take me. How well you open for me." Ilya purred again against Shane's skin. "Do you want my cock?"

Shane gave a frantic, desperate nod, his hands pulling at Ilya's back.

"Mmh, no," Ilya murmured, a wicked gleam in his eye as he held his fingers still inside him. "You have to say it."

"Yeah," Shane choked out. "I want it, come on."

"Are you sure?" Ilya asked with a mock-frown. "I don't know if you are ready."

"Fuck!" Shane's hips were jerking in the most erratic way as he tried desperately to get Ilya's fingers on just the right spot. "Want your cock in me. Need you to fuck me now, please, I can't–"

Instead, Ilya removed his fingers entirely, causing Shane to let out the neediest whine.

"I know, malysh. I know," Ilya cooed, trailing open-mouthed kisses and little nips all the way up Shane's body, still unrushed, until he finally lined himself up at his entrance.

"Please," Shane sobbed, so painfully needy. The sound of his own voice sent a fresh wave of heat creeping up his face. It should have felt mortifying. A complete, permanent turn off. He'd never been so aroused in his life.

Ilya pushed inside him with a slow stroke, halting when his slick cock was buried halfway inside of him, his body shaking with the effort of holding back. His cock felt huge, stretching Shane up just the right side of pain.

Ilya's forehead came down to rest against Shane's. "Okay?"

Shane nodded again, before he remembered Ilya's earlier command. "Yes. Fuck. So full. Don't stop," he pleaded, testing the give of his body by wrapping his leg around Ilya's thigh. "Please, don't stop, please."

Ilya began to move in long, deliberate strokes, each one a little deeper than the previous one, until his pelvis was slapping against Shane's ass hard enough to snuff out every remaining thought in his head. The physical demand of Ilya's body anchored Shane to the room, to the mattress, to the solid weight of the man on top of him, so present and yet so far removed from the rest of the world. 

Shane clung to Ilya with all his might, his breath breaking into short, helpless hitches as the tension built, thick and suffocating. Their lips kept snagging on each other's, too messy to properly kiss, just close enough to lick into each other's mouth. Ilya was over him and around him and so blissfully deep inside him, the only words he had left were more and harder and need you.

"Oh, fuck, Shane," Ilya groaned, and it was such a relief to know he wasn't alone in this, that Ilya felt it too. The desperation, the hunger, the awe. 

As their rhythm started to stutter and unravel, Ilya reached between them, his hand closing over Shane’s aching cock. 

"Come for me," Ilya ordered, his body tensing with the first jolts of his climax. "Now." A few quick strokes were all it took. Shane’s head fell back into the mattress as he came with a sob-like groan, spurting his release over both their stomachs and chests as Ilya shuddered on top of him.

They lay there for a long time, Ilya's face buried into the hollow of Shane's neck, the room quiet save for the heavy rhythm of their breathing. Shane kept his arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, refusing to let go even after the adrenaline ebbed away into a warm drowsiness, with Ilya's breath steady against his collarbone.

Slowly, Ilya’s hand moved up, his thumb tracing a quiet, lazy circle against Shane's arm.

"Still here, doktor," he murmured into his skin.

Shane closed his eyes, his fingers gently working through the damp curls at the back of Ilya's head. "Good," he whispered, letting his head sink back into the pillow. "Me too."

Chapter 11: Emanation

Chapter by chinesebakery

Shane lay flat on his back, staring up at the wooden rafters overhead while his chest heaved in ragged breaths. Every muscle in his body had gone slack, dissolved into a warm lethargy that he couldn't remember ever feeling before. 

Beside him, Ilya propped himself on one elbow, his damp curls plastered against his forehead. His gaze was fixed entirely on Shane, tracking the slowing rise and fall of his chest with an intensity that bordered on predatory. There was no threat in it, only disbelieving awe.

"You're staring," Shane muttered, his voice hoarse and dry. 

"I am allowed," Ilya replied, his mouth curving into a half smile. "You have been staring at me for much longer."

"I guess that's fair," Shane conceded with a small huff of a laugh. "Don't feel obligated to catch up on everything at once, though."

Shane finally turned his head to meet Ilya's blue-green eyes. The lingering adrenaline was receding, leaving behind a strange, acute clarity. Even now, with Ilya's weight settled warm along his side, some part of Shane kept expecting something to go terribly wrong. He'd wanted this so badly, for so long, that he'd conjured it out of nothing. Which was not the way reality usually worked.

So, he did what he usually did when dread came gnawing at something good: he set it aside and tried to cover it with a list of things that actually were tangible. Like the damp curl at Ilya's temple. Or the many moles covering his body, more than Shane could total, since he kept losing count somewhere around the ones he wanted his mouth on. The ridiculously attractive line of hair that ran down from his navel. Present, countable things. The anxiety thinned out as the list got longer.

"What happens in the morning?" he asked, looking around the shadowy room before returning his focus to Ilya. "Do we pretend none of this is happening?"

"Are you talking about the statue," Ilya murmured, his hand sliding down from Shane's chest to press lightly against his stomach, "or the way I made you scream into the pillow ten minutes ago?"

Heat swiftly crept up Shane's neck. "I didn't scream," he said, slapping Ilya's hand away. "Just gave you some positive reinforcement."

Ilya's low chuckle vibrated through the mattress as he let his hand rest on Shane's hip instead.

"I think if we tried to explain the statue," Shane continued, his voice softening into something serious, "we'd never be allowed near a museum or a research grant ever again."

"Probably." Ilya's thumb traced a series of circles against Shane's skin. "Do you want to pretend we are not–"

"No," Shane interrupted, shifting onto his side so they were face-to-face, the remaining distance between them closing completely. "I don't think I can fake not wanting to be near you anymore. I'd probably go crazy." He reached out to lightly tangle his fingers into the curls at Ilya's temple, brushing them back from his forehead. "Besides," he added with a crooked smile, "I think Vincenzo's getting pretty invested. It'd be mean to keep this from him."

Ilya's smile was amused and almost unbearably soft. "Oh, he already knows. He knew before you did."

"The conservation board might not be as understanding," Shane closed his eyes, his hand sliding up to grip the broad plane of Ilya's shoulder, his fingers grazing the long healed scar tissue. "We're still going to have to lie through our teeth."

"I am an expert liar." Ilya's lips brushed Shane's with a quiet smile. "And you have a very convincing scholar face. We will be fine."

The morning sun still hung low by the time they reached the Via Guelfa, the back of their hands brushing against each other with every other step. The quiet tension from the night before still hung between them. It was lighter now, but persistent, following them right through the grand arched entrance of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

Vincenzo was already there, hovering near the central workstation with a magnifying visor perched atop his messy hair, and a cup of espresso balancing precariously on top of a cardboard folder.

"Ah! The dynamic duo arrives." He turned around and waved dramatically, before he took in Shane's nervousness and Ilya's irrepressibly smug expression. His eyebrows shot straight up toward his hairline as he squinted through his visor, his lips twitching with an overexcited grin. "My goodness. You two look like you either solved the riddle of the universe last night, or you forgot to sleep entirely."

"It's neither." Shane cleared his throat and made himself busy. "We were working late on the photographic comparative analysis."

"Yes, of course." Vincenzo nodded solemnly, though his eyes danced with mischievous glee. "I see the dedication in your eyes, doktor. Carmela!" he called out toward the archive room. "Come look! Our intense Canadian scholar has finally learned how to relax."

Carmela stepped out, holding a stack of reports. She took one look at them and offered Shane a warm, secret smile over the top of her clipboard. "Leave them alone, Vincenzo. Some people actually focus on their work."

Ilya didn't even try to hide his smirk. He leaned against the edge of the restoration table, tight beside the fencer, and crossed his arms with a lazy grace. "Ignore him. He is only jealous because no one wants to do comparative analysis with him."

"You wound me." Vincenzo gasped, clutching his heart in mock offense. "But fine, keep your secrets." He stepped closer to inspect the base of the statue, where the newly surfaced Latin text sat stark against the stone. "The oxidation on this lower band… it settled overnight. It's remarkably stable now." He looked up at Shane, his goofy expression giving way to genuine wonder. "Whatever you two compared yesterday, it worked. The marble looks… at peace."

Shane looked over at the Fencer. The statue stood silent, heavy and motionless under the conservation lamps. The deeply-rooted pull Shane had always felt toward it didn't feel as strong. In fact, his attention was irrepressibly drawn to the warm, living man standing beside the marble, who was looking back at Shane like nothing else in the world mattered to him. 

"Yeah," Shane admitted, stepping beside Ilya and letting their shoulders brush. "It really does." 

He should have been able to leave it at that. Vincenzo was happy. The stone was stable. He and Ilya had barely gone two minutes without touching each other in one way or another. 

Still, underneath all the good, ran a thin note of wrongness he could never entirely tune out. It was nothing, but it took too much space, like being far from home and not being able to remember locking the door. A constant, low-level tremor of dread. 

Shane slipped around the heavy curtain separating the restoration bay from the dark-room archives, holding a stack of catalog sheets he'd already checked twice. He just needed a minute alone where nobody could see his face.

The unease had intensified as the day went on. Somewhere between too much caffeine and Vincenzo's third bad joke, his thoughts had slipped the leash completely. If there was one room in the building that could bring them back into line, it was the archives. Quiet, windowless, ordered top to bottom, every object exactly where the ledger said it would be. He filled his lungs with the scent of old paper, and the racing in his head began to level off.

He never made it to the sorting table. A hand shot out from behind a stack of folio cases and pulled him into the narrow alcove between the Renaissance survey volumes.

His muffled gasp died against Ilya's mouth. The kiss was short, almost chaste, but it immediately short-circuited Shane's brain. His reaction was pure muscle memory. Shane backed Ilya into the edge of a bookcase, his hands sliding under Ilya's shirt to press flat against the warm skin of his back, drawing him flush against his chest. The catalog sheets slid off onto the low shelf before Shane remembered where they were.

"Not here!" he hissed against Ilya's mouth.

"Mmh, you are the one having your way with me," Ilya pointed out, smiling against Shane's skin.

It was puzzling, a little. Every partner Shane'd ever had –which was, admittedly, not many– had complained about his restraint, his hesitation, his apparent lack of interest in being touched. 

With Ilya, the reluctance just never showed up. He'd had him backed into the closest surface before he'd decided anything at all, and he dreaded to think how far he'd have gone if the sheets hadn't hit the shelf first.

"This is not a complaint," Ilya said, reading the sudden stillness in his face. "Do it again, please."

"We're supposed to be working." It came out with no conviction at all, and it never occurred to him to pull away. He tilted his head up and brushed his lips along the warm line of Ilya's jaw. 

"Vincenzo has roped a delivery man into a debate about lime plaster ratios." The low rasp of his voice went straight down Shane's spine. "We have at least ten minutes."

Ilya leaned in again, taking his time, his mouth warm and faintly bitter with espresso. His thumb found the side of Shane's throat and rested over the pulse going hard under the skin.

"Your heart is racing, doktor." His lazy smile pressed directly into Shane's skin. "Nervous someone will catch you slacking off?"

"I'm not slacking off." His hands slid up over Ilya's shoulders and looped behind his neck. "I'm… conducting field research."

"Ah. Field research." Ilya's voice was dripping with delight. He shifted his weight, settled his thigh between Shane's, bracing them both against the shelf. "And what are your preliminary findings?"

"Findings indicate," Shane murmured, leaning up to kiss the corner of his mouth, "that you're extremely distracting."

"An occupational hazard," Ilya agreed, all teasing gone, and he held Shane's gaze.

From the main room, Vincenzo's voice carried over the top of the partitions. Ilya let out a sigh, pressing one last kiss to Shane's lips before he stepped back a single inch, his hands lingering on Shane's hips.

"Duty calls." His eyes hadn't lost any of the warmth. "Go back before Vincenzo comes looking for his favorite Canadian."

Shane smoothed down his own shirt, then reached over and tugged Ilya's back into place where it had rucked up around the waist. "Five minutes," Shane said, catching Ilya's hand and giving it a firm squeeze before letting go. "Then you're helping me index the secondary photos."

"Looking forward to it."

It was shortly before lunch break when Shane excused himself to call J.-J. from the loggia at the back of the studio, where the wifi dropped to one bar and Vincenzo's radio couldn't reach. He picked up immediately, like he'd been waiting for someone to entertain him.

"Shane Hollander again, quel honneur." Something rattled on the other end. "I hope you bring me another riddle."

"I have a question about the inscription."

"Of course you do," J.-J. said around a mouthful. "Which inscription? You told me there were two."

"Three actually, but that doesn't–" Shane looked down into the courtyard. There was a miserable-looking potted lemon tree, down to a single leaf. He caught himself willing it to stay put. "Okay. The first inscription's three lines of hexameter, textbook Ficino. The mind beholds the form. The hand fixes it in the marble. The beauty outlasts the body it came from. I filed it as a boast on the first day."

"Hollzy? Casting a harsh judgment? Je refuse de le croire."

"Yeah, well, it's not my fault that every workshop in Florence carved some version of the same thing. Look how talented I am, I give life to stone." He kept his voice bored. "So, what if it isn't a boast? What if it is, say, an explanation. Instructions, maybe. What is it about?"

"Ah. Now this is getting interesting," he said cheerfully. "It's describing emanation. The whole Plotinus staircase in three lines."

"Humor me, please."

"Okay, walk with me here." Papers were shoved aside on J.-J.'s end, a chair dragged closer as he entered lecture mode. "So, at the top, you have something called the One. Not a deity, necessarily, but the source of everything. It's beyond being, beyond thought. It's where every scrap of beauty downstream comes from. Really neat shit, the One. And then it all pours downward. First is the Intellect, which is where the Forms live, the perfect originals of everything. Then Soul, the go-between that brings down the Forms into the world and gives them life. Then it goes all the way down into matter, at the very bottom. Beauty rides that current down with everything else. So, the mind beholds the form." He recited it back like a line of scripture. "Your sculptor, he's saying that before any chisel touches anything, the real thing lives up in the Intellect. He looks up, catches sight of it, drags a copy down into matter. But a copy's all it ever is. The real thing never leaves the top." 

Something poured on his end. Coffee, Shane guessed. 

"By that logic," J.-J. continued, "your Fencer's not very much of anything. Just a shadow, not the thing that cast it. A leftover."

Shane thought about the marble's mole, its scars, the curve of its mouth. How painstakingly identical it was to Ilya, down to the smallest detail. 'Leftover' was not the word that came to mind.

"So, that's a dead end," Shane concluded.

"See, that's so you. You'd stop right there and call it quits." J.-J.'s chair creaked forward again. "You don't want to stop on the way down, Hollzy. Nobody's saved by the descent, the whole thing's written for the climb back up. And here's the part your inscription's too pleased with itself to say. Okay, the beauty in the stone? It's not the destination: it's just bait. A lure."

"I don't follow."

"So, you see a gorgeous thing and it yanks you, right? And the yank has a direction. It's trying to drag you back up the same stairs the light came down. You start with the stone, because that's the part you can see. But the stone's only beautiful because something higher is shining through it. And that higher thing is only a piece of what it all pours out of, which is the One, right at the top. That pull, it's eros. It's what walks you up the steps. And the lover –that's you, in our scenario– is the one who's feeling it. Your job's simply not to fight it. Let yourself be carried up."

At seventeen, Shane had stood in front of a sketch behind glass, letting it rewrite the chemistry of his brain. He’d called that the start. On J.-J.'s account, it had been but a hook he'd been hanging off of this whole time.

"What if I don't want the climb? What if the copy's enough for me?"

"You already know this one. Narcissus leans over the water, sees this beautiful thing, falls so hard he can't let go. But when he reaches for it, the water takes him. And let me tell you, Plotinus has zero sympathy for Narcissus." His voice lost its bounce. "That's the warning tucked inside your nice little inscription. Grabbing the beautiful body and trying to keep it, that's not love. It will get you drowned. The copy was never supposed to hold you, just to lead you somewhere past it."

"Well, fuck me." Shane scrubbed a hand over his mouth. The jewel of Western thought, and it read like a checklist of all the ways his life was fucked. "Last time, you said something about writing meant for a reader who hasn't arrived yet."

"Yeah, I remember. Certain truths just remain asleep in the stone until the one person who can read them shows up." His voice slowed, becoming careful. "Why? You about to tell me the reader showed up?"

"One more on the model." Shane kept his tone flat, trying to keep his dread internal. "The, uh, copy in the stone. Once it's down there, what holds it up?"

"Nothing. It's nothing of its own." The humor was gone now. "That's the depressing part. Down there, nothing holds itself up. A thing that low is only real as long as something higher keeps its attention on it. Contemplation, and only that. Once the attention's gone, well, it doesn't die, exactly. It was never alive enough to die. It just stops being held, slides back into nothing."

Shane didn't answer. Down in the courtyard nothing moved.

"You've gone real quiet on me, bud." J.-J. sounded mildly worried now. "Are you going to tell me what this is really about?"

"It's for the report," he said. "On the statue."

"Sure thing." He didn't pretend to believe him. "Look. We've been friends ten years, Shane. You know you can talk to me."

There was a sudden gust of wind and the lemon tree's last leaf turned on its stem.

"Sorry, I have a call coming in on the other line," Shane said, and hung up before J.-J. could ask anything more.

After the line went dead, Shane stood by the balustrade, his thumb pressing against the glass until the screen went dark. Down in the courtyard, the single leaf drifted off and hit the flagstones.

Chapter 12: Galleria dell'Accademia

In the three weeks that followed, Shane went through the digital folders J.-J. dumped into his drive with a single-minded focus, as if he was trying to reverse-engineer an obvious trap. In the dead hours after Ilya fell asleep, he binge-read everything: scans of early editions and out-of-print translations, thesis abstracts, endless commentaries and interpretations.

He approached the Neoplatonic staircase the only way he knew how: like a corrupted provenance record, hunting for logical inconsistencies, overlooked flaws he could isolate and exploit. 

Problems were supposed to be something you could solve, but this one wasn't budging.

He couldn't find a lever. The texts were too abstract, the commentary needlessly obscure, but the more infuriating thing was that it all looped back to love. Treatise after treatise, the same irrefutable insistence that the only true thing you could say about the source of everything was that it loved. That love flowed the whole way down, into the copies, the shadows, the leftovers and the stone at the bottom of the stairs, and that nothing down there was ever held by cold intellectual attention alone. 

Shane had no use for a philosophy of love. It was useless for risk management, the one concept no two scholars could ever agree to define. All he wanted was a practical way to guarantee that Ilya would be in the bed next to him when he woke up in the morning.

He read until the letters swam and the lines bled together. Still, there was no lever. Perhaps there had never been one. There was only the choice to love someone with the full risk of losing them, or to start grieving early to get a head start on the pain. 

The one thing he kept snagging on was Narcissus. J.-J. had called it a warning, a reminder that reaching for an image would only get you drowned. But Narcissus drowned because the reflection had no substance. His hand broke the water and there was nothing there. It was surface the whole way down. 

Whatever Ilya was –a copy, a shadow, a leftover or a miracle– he held on. He picked fights for sport, routinely stole all the covers, and looked at Shane from across the room like he was the only thing worth watching. They woke up every morning all tangled up together. And the sex, well. Shane would definitely not have achieved that level of mind-blowing proficiency on his own.

If the image loved you back, was it still just an image? And did the lover reaching for it stop being Narcissus?

"Shane."

The sound of his name pulled him away from the screen. He hadn't heard the floor creaking, or Ilya cross to the small desk, naked and unselfconscious. For a second, Shane let himself look, completely helpless to stop it.

"You're doing it again," Ilya said, his voice still thick with sleep.

Shane tipped the laptop half-close, shielding the screen from Ilya's view. "I'm almost finished. Just checking some footnotes for the paper."

"Is three in the morning." Ilya wasn't paying any attention to the screen. He just looked down at Shane with weary patience. "How many footnotes do you need to check?"

"The fact that you have to ask tells me all I need to know about your methodology."

Ilya reached down, his finger gently pressing the laptop to push it all the way closed until the blue light died. "Are you going to tell me what is keeping you awake, or do you want to keep pretending you are working?"

Shane looked back at him, the knot of weeks' worth of terror and exhaustion tightening in his throat. He tried to muster his most pedantic lecturer's voice, to frame it as a theoretical problem rather than blind panic. "I'm trying to find a catch," Shane said, his voice less steady than he wanted it. "I've been reading everything, trying to understand the logic of how you're here so I…"

"So you can keep me?" Ilya offered. He didn't look angry, but all teasing dropped from his face, leaving only wariness.

"To make sure you don't fade out again," Shane admitted. "To make sure I don't wake up one morning and find you gone, because whatever held you here has snapped. I've been through all of it. Every angle. There's no version where I get to be sure."

"You think I don't know this?" Ilya asked gently, his thumb tracing the sharp bone under Shane's cheek. "I've been pulled in and out of the dark often enough. I know better than anyone that nothing can hold us here by force."

"How do you live with it?" Shane's hand came up to grip Ilya's wrist, holding it to feel the solid weight of him. "How do you just walk around everyday acting like this is fine?"

"Is not fine." He leaned down until their foreheads touched, and his breath came warm against Shane's mouth. "It terrifies me every time I open my eyes. But driving yourself insane will not do anything. It only steals the time we have together now."

Shane shut his eyes and let his breathing sync with Ilya's.

"Narcissus drowned reaching for the image under the water," he muttered. "The reflection he couldn't stop looking at. And I've been looking at your face–"

"I am not water. And you are not drowning." Ilya's voice was firm and conclusive. His fingers laced into the hair at the back of Shane's neck, drawing him up out of his chair until he was standing flush against him. Shane's arms wrapped tightly around Ilya's waist. "We do not get a guarantee. Nobody gets one. But I am here now, and I wish you would come back to bed."

Shane buried his face into the side of Ilya's neck, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling the rhythmic expansion of his lungs against his own chest. The unanswered questions weren't any less terrifying, but for the first time in days, the panic quietened.

"Okay," Shane said, kissing a trail up Ilya's throat. "Okay.

Shane sat hunched over the dual monitor, glasses low on his nose. Open on the left was the final high resolution scan of the plinth, the Latin inscription clean and unequivocal under raking light. Open on the right was a draft document titled The Fencer Final Report (Hollander - Rozanov).

"You're using 'unprecedented' again," Ilya said from where he was draped over the edge of the second desk, his long legs stretched out so far his sneakers almost brushed Shane's ankles. "That is three 'unprecedented' over two pages. The peer reviewers will think you write a press release for an auction house."

"It is unprecedented." Shane didn't look up from the screen. His fingers hovered over the keys before resuming at an aggressive, rhythmic clip. "An uncataloged mid-fifteenth-century marble featuring a secondary classical Latin epigraph with anomalous sub-surface mineralization? What word would you prefer, Dr Rozanov? 'Neat'?"

"I would prefer 'singular'," Ilya replied, the teasing plain in his voice. "Or 'unusual'. Keep the North American drama to a minimum."

Shane stopped typing, letting out a breath that was half sigh, half laugh. He rubbed the back of his neck, where the knots that had lived there for years were finally starting to give. He leaned back in his chair and turned to look at Ilya. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, exposing forearms turned a pronounced shade of gold from the hours they'd spent walking the city together. 

"I need your opinion on this," Shane said, gesturing at the second section of the methodology. "Chemical analysis of the secondary oxidation within the Carrara matrix suggests a localized, non-standard structural reaction to ambient humidity prior to excavation." He pushed his glasses back up the ridge of his nose and ignored the fleeting wolfish expression on Ilya's face. "Does it work as an academic version of 'We have no idea why this statue bled Latin letters after five hundred years, so please don't ask again'?"

Ilya's mouth curved into the crooked smile that undid Shane a little every single time, the same way it did that first morning in Fiesole.

"Is not bad." He pushed off the desk and crossed the two steps of space between them, coming to rest behind Shane's chair. His hands were light on the wooden backrest, his thumbs grazing Shane's collar. "It says everything the Soprintendenza wants to hear."

Shane reached up without looking and found Ilya's wrist, the pulse ticking steadily under his skin. "They're going to approve the exhibit loan based on this paper."

"And then?" Ilya leaned down until his chin rested lightly against the top of Shane's head.

"And then the Fencer stays in Florence, like it should." Shane shut his eyes and let the warmth of Ilya's chest against his back wash over him. "And so do we. Right?" 

He'd meant it to come out more certain. Behind him, Ilya went still.

Shane had run all the parameters a hundred times and always came to the same conclusion. They didn't know what was keeping Ilya here, whether it was the marble, the city, Shane himself, or some combination of the three they could never isolate. So he was determined not to touch any of it. No straying from the marble, no leaving the city, no changing any of the terms of a thing that was, against all odds, working. It was the least scientifically sound position he'd ever held, and he would defend it to the grave.

The other side of it, he tried not to examine too closely. What he was offering to Ilya was a small, fixed, entirely predictable life. One place, one time, one fastidious academic to keep him company. He couldn't imagine a less appealing proposition for a man who'd had five centuries of adventure. 

"I submitted the paperwork for a continuation grant this morning," Shane added quickly, "since the lower chamber in Fiesole isn't even half-excavated. But that doesn't mean you have to–"

"You do not have to uproot your entire career for a grant." Ilya's voice had cooled, his fingers tightened around Shane's wrist with a stiff, unnatural restraint.

"I'm not staying for the grant, you asshole." The snap was a cover for the anxious sting underneath. Shane spun the chair around to face him, but the moment their eyes met, all the heat drained out of him. "I'm staying for you. If the statue's the anchor, and you get too far away from it… I'm not testing those odds. I'm not testing any of it." He looked down at their hands, and suddenly it hit him. The still, painstakingly cautious life that Shane was offering wasn't what Ilya wanted. Nobody but Shane would want that. "But I shouldn't have assumed you would…"

Ilya's cool mask slipped, his brow furrowed. "You have a life." It sounded almost like an accusation. "A house. A family. The annoying friend with all the children who keeps calling you. A job at a University that puts your name on things." He shook his head. "You can't give everything up to stay near a piece of rock because of me."

"I'm not giving up anything!" Shane huffed. The sudden fear of rejection that had gripped him moments ago started to recede. "You keep talking like I'm losing something. I've spent so long looking for something everyone told me wasn't real. Flying to Naples, to Pistoia, making a fool of myself, because I was so sure it was out there and I'd know it when I saw it." He held Ilya's gaze. "And I was right. It was everything I ever wanted. It just wasn't the statue."

Ilya went quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice wasn't as steady. "You cannot say things like that, and expect me to keep arguing."

"Then stop arguing and listen to me, instead of telling me what you think I want." 

"But you are so good at taking directions."

"Shut up." Shane's mouth went soft around the corners. "Unless you're telling me you're the one who's going to get bored–"

A shaky laugh broke out of Ilya. He held Shane's eyes, then bent to rest his forehead against his. "If this is the boring you mean," he said against his mouth, "I think I can do five hundred more years."

He tipped his head and brushed their lips together, brief and soft. When he pulled back, the shadow in his eyes was gone. He reached over Shane's shoulder for the mouse and scrolled down to the bottom of the draft, past the sections that conveniently declined to decipher the last band of script, down to where two signature blocks sat side by side: 

Dr Shane Hollander, Department of Art History, University of Toronto

Dr Ilya Rozanov, Independent Research Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Ilya clicked into the blank box above their names, then handed the mouse back to Shane.

"Finish it," he said, his lips brushing the skin just below Shane's ear. "Your conclusions, Dr Hollander."

Shane drew a breath and settled his hands over the keyboard. The words came easily now, no longer driven by the grinding, obsessive need to prove the rest of the world wrong.

While the precise mechanism of the inscription's manifestation remains a subject for ongoing material study, the physical integrity of the artwork is now fully stable. The stone requires no further intervention.

He hit Save and shut down the laptop.

Out in the main lab, the heavy wooden doors clicked shut as Vincenzo left for the evening, a cheerful "Ciao, ragazzi!" trailing down the hallway. Shane reached up, wrapped both his hands around Ilya's waist, and pulled him down until Ilya had to plant his hands on Shane's thighs to keep his balance.

"Done," Shane said, and kissed the corner of Ilya's mouth.

"Done," Ilya agreed. His thumb swept across Shane's cheekbone, his fingers grazing the dark browline frame resting on the bridge of his nose. 

Shane started to lift a hand to take the glasses off, but Ilya caught his wrist, holding it firmly against his chest. 

"Mmh, no," Ilya chided, his eyes sparkling. "Glasses stay on."

Epilogue

Early winter in Central Italy was very different from what Shane was used to in his native province of Ontario. The air outside the Galleria dell'Accademia felt pleasantly cool as the guests gathered in front of the facade.

The main hall stayed hushed through the private evening viewing, save for a continuous murmur that swelled the closer you drew to the statue. Spotlights cut through the high arches and bathed the Fencer in flattering light where it stood installed in its permanent alcove. The marble appeared serene, majestic, and entirely at peace. It belonged here now, among the other Renaissance masterpieces, beside a crisp institutional plaque crediting the Opificio and the lead conservators. 

Shane stood a few paces back, hands shoved into the pockets of his coat. Ilya came to rest his chin on top of his shoulder, an open catalog tucked casually under one arm.

"What do you think?" he murmured. "Do I look good in proper gallery light?"

"I don't know how I feel about all these people ogling it every day."

"You ogle me all the time." Ilya tipped his head to speak straight into Shane's ear. "I like it when you are possessive. Is hot."

Here, a few miles from the Fiesole mud they'd pulled it out of, Ilya was entirely present. No fading, no blackouts, no slipping away. Shane had stopped trying to keep up with the numbers, how far from the marble they were at any given time. He didn't know what held Ilya here, or for how long. Somewhere in the last months they'd spent together, grossing out everyone around them with how disgustingly in love they were, he'd made a kind of peace with the not-knowing.

"It looks smaller under their lighting," Ilya complained, his voice low enough that it didn't echo off the vaulted ceiling.

"It's not smaller." Shane's expression grew amused. "You're just used to a different perspective."

"We should try several different perspectives later, just to be sure," Ilya agreed with only the hint of a smirk. He cut a sideways glance at Shane, eyes catching the warm light of the gallery. "How was the dig site today?"

"Messy," Shane sighed. "Cold. Full of uncatalogued sixteenth-century tile fragments. I'll need my co-researcher to come look at the site plans tomorrow morning."

"I will think about it." The lopsided smile came in fully now. "You should know I am very expensive. And my methodology is very unorthodox."

"You're already on the grant." Shane caught his hand and wove their fingers together.

"Good. Then I can afford to take you to dinner before we pick up your parents from the airport on Tuesday." Ilya bumped their shoulders together. "Your mother texted me again. She wants to know if there is anything you secretly want them to bring from Canada."

"Just maple syrup and their blessing." The lump of feeling came up before Shane could brace for it. "My mom already likes you better than me anyway."

Across the hall, Vincenzo waved frantically from the podium, gesturing for Shane to come over. He was practically radiating with pride.

"Do you really have to give this speech?" Ilya grumbled, his forehead pressing briefly to the side of Shane's head. "I don't want all these people ogling you, either."

"At least I'm fully clothed," Shane pointed out, turning his head to press a quick kiss to Ilya's temple.

"A minor detail." Ilya let go with a pout, his fingers dragging along Shane's coat before they dropped away. "Go on, doktor. Show them how brilliant you are."

Shane straightened his jacket, took a step toward the crowd, and looked back at Ilya. A thousand unanswered questions were still waiting in the mud at Fiesole, and some might never have an answer. Whether Shane had helped call him up out of the stone, or been a bystander to something that would have happened anyway. If there would ever be a day when whatever tethered them together wasn't strong enough. But what he had was Ilya, standing in the soft glow of the gallery, watching him with plain and unshielded affection. Shane answered with an equally sappy expression, and crossed the bright hall toward the microphone.