A/N: Um. Hi. I didn't really expect to be back here, ever, and certainly not in this fandom. But this movie really charmed me somehow. I think the thing that got me was his face during that scene in the rain, I mean my God, I have never seen anything more heartbroken. And I didn't find any fics up here that really captured that feeling, so I guess I had to write one.

He watches her walk away and the widening distance between them tugs, hard, like a string wrapped round his innards. The cord stretches, then snaps, and the recoil stings worse than iodine, worse than defeat, worse than anything he's ever known. The rain makes him shiver and he crosses his arms to keep the chill out, but it's useless to try. Cold seeps through his bones and into his chest, squeezing tight around the space where his heart should be.

It doesn't seem fair that he should still be able to hurt this way, not after all the trouble he went to to keep himself alone and isolated and safe. Besides, he should have seen this coming, should have expected this. After all, he is frozen and dark and wrong and strange. A bad guy. While she? She is warm, and bright, and everything he never was and cannot have.

What is the point in being evil if it doesn't keep him from craving her embrace; if it doesn't stop his lips from burning, still, from that first and last kiss they ever shared? It is too easy to picture her smiling at him (no, at Bernard, not at him, never at him), too easy to feel the ghostly pressure of her hand in his. For once, his mind has betrayed him, so he decides to just stop thinking for a while. His heart folds shut like a flower in reverse.

So that's it then, he supposes. Time to go home. But home is a trillion miles away and he can feel the vast vacuum of space bearing down on him with a steady pressure that makes it difficult to breathe. He is collapsing under his own weight, a dying star. Destiny pulls him back into her bitter orbit.

She looks back, but by then he is already retreating, already slipping into the vortex, already gone.