Unbeta'd.

Characters are not mine.

Occasionally, once every while, I look out the front windows of the dais in the library and wonder. It faces the west, where the sun sets, and from there I can watch it seen below the grown like an eye blinking shut.

As the day draws a final breathe, I hold mine. There, illuminated for me in so fitting a set of colours – red, burgundy, magenta, violet – is the silhouette of a satellite. On evenings, while the sun winks out of existence, it lights the tall and silent monument of my youth. This unused and ancient piece of equipment, once upon a time so vast in its technology, now sits empty and untouched. And I think to myself, as the final violets and indigos of eve fade into navys and blacks of nightfall, that it is still.

It is still facing me.

Its central unit sits, pointing at the manor-house like a beacon, like it's watching and waiting in its entombed silence. It embodies my youth in a way, my greatest and worst achievement, and the day I knew I would lose everything for the worst possible reason. This massive metal structure, decades old, sits and watches me as I watch it.

Sometimes, only sometimes, I allow myself to watch the wall there beyond the now paved path. I can see two young men standing there, and perhaps they are a bit to close. Perhaps they are laughing too hard, smiling to wide, and their eyes a bit too large as they grab at each other's elbows. They share a moment that is so precious to one, and so foreign to the other; the image of a candelabrum, of a woman singing soft lullabies, of a mother's love. They clutch at each other like lifelines and they laugh, the hysterics of decades of pain and of being alone, of losing a mother and never really having one, of finding someone else who just knows. Who just understands and doesn't ask, won't ask until you're ready, overwhelms them entirely and it's then that I must turn away. I turn away from the way their eyes meet, the way their hands linger. The smell of sweat and the summer haze; fresh grass and sharp aftershave and old leather shoes.

I find myself not alone, at that moment. In that moment, when my eyes leave the satellite, my own orbit feels pulled. Almost as if he hears me, I can see him sitting just there to my left by the hearth. He's calm and collected, grey eyes full of wisdom, grey hair swept in such a familiar fashion that even years and a helmet later couldn't change. He's older now, the face in which those old and aching eyes are set, and he looks on me as though seeing me is painful. My own face is reflected at me then, in his eyes, pain. So much, the deepest ache one can feel. An ache so deep it passes bone, tissue, organ. Surpasses mind, heart. An ache that penetrates even my soul, his soul, two souls meant to stand beside one another and yet can never quite reach each other. He wears a black turtle neck, dark slacks, and in one hand holds a crystal tumbler.

Just as quickly as he appears he is gone, a ghost of something I can never have, will always want, and can never admit to.

My eyes turn to the satellite, and where it watched me, and I know he can feel me at this window. And it is irony, that this is the closest we ever come. Have ever been. Like a pane of glass is all that separates us, that it is so simple a wall to break.

Neither of us ever will.