- XV -

* * * * *
         ". . . I mean really tell me, honestly . . . is there a point to everything? That's all I really want to know. If there's some point. Because right now there doesn't seem to be much of one."
         "Well, hm, I imagine there is."
         "You imagine? How can you just imagine? Don't you know?"
         "Everything is such a broad term, you know. I think that's your problem, when you come down to it."
         "My problem. What the . . . what the hell do you mean by that?"
         "Because, my boy, you keep looking for the big picture when it's just random chaos, that's the way everything is set up. You keep looking for your actions to have some sort of universal consequence when in reality we're all just little blips in a very large screen of static, if you want to think of it that way."
         "Is that so wrong though, I mean, to want some . . . meaning, because, I don't know, I keep looking for meaning and it's not there . . . I mean, what the hell was tonight about, can you tell me that there was some reason for tonight. Just one reason."
         "I thought I was fairly thorough, actually."
         "Not that, that's not what I meant. You know that, stop playing games with me. I mean, you know, the other thing."
         "The thing you can't bring yourself to face . . ."
         "You don't understand the first thing about-"
         "About people. I know. You told me already. I don't know a damn thing about people and I already gave you my answer to that. I'm not repeating it."
         "Then why the hell did everything happen tonight? That's all I want to know, just why? Is that so wrong?"
         "There's not a damn thing wrong with it, honestly, but you're really going about it the wrong way . . . what happened tonight was because someone thought they'd get cute. We put a stop to it before any damage was done-"
         "Done? Did you see the way-"
         "I saw. I was there. And I repeat, no permanent damage was done. Okay?"
         "I don't believe that. I don't. Even right now, God, my hands are shaking, look, they keep shaking."
         "Probably because you've downed about eight cups of coffee."
         "Your brother, he kept refilling it. While I was drinking it."
         "Mm, well he has some strange ideas, I guess he thought he was being helpful in his own way. But listen, and I mean listen, don't look for larger reasons where there are none. And be lucky that you were there, or something worse might have happened."
         "Oh God, I don't . . . I don't even want to think about that. I really don't."
         "I know you don't and because you were there you don't have to. And maybe, if you want to look for a purpose, maybe that was why you were there."
         "But why couldn't I stop it. I should have known, I should have-"
         "Because maybe it had to happen, and maybe this was the best we could do with the situation. The problem is, you don't know and you refuse to accept the limits of your knowledge. Being what you are doesn't grant you omnipotence, nor does it make you caretaker of the world."
         "But . . . what the hell else am I supposed to do, I mean, I see, I read, I hear all those things, all those terrible things that go on . . . all over the world . . . why can't I stop them, why can't I be everywhere. It's like . . . I'm trapped in a chair and I can hear the entire world and they keep screaming and I can't move to help them. Even when they're right outside my door. People keep dying and I could help but I'm so . . . I'm so helpless. Do you know what that feels like? To be so helpless."
         "More than you'll ever realize."
         "And even tonight, I was there and I just, I just didn't know what to do. How to act. What to do. What am I supposed to do, tell me, what the hell is my purpose. Why me?"
         "Your purpose, I'm afraid, is whatever you make of it, for better or for ill. There's no rulebook or instruction manual that comes with the distinction. It's up to you to make the best of it."
         "That seems . . . that's so unfair. I never asked for any of this. I never wanted it."
         "You did once. You looked at the stars and wished to go there every night. It's only when you thought it was impossible that you convinced yourself there was nothing out there."
         "There is . . . the only thing out there is death . . . just death. It's like I'm walking knee deep in blood all the goddamn time and I come back here and it's no better because . . . because . . ."
         "Your friends don't blame you. You may like to think that because you feel you don't deserve friends after . . . what happened, but everything you do here, you do to yourself."
         "Oh God . . ."
         "There's nothing else I can tell you. You choose to see what you want, whether it's sublime beauty or sheets of death. It's all about perspective. That's all it is."
         "Goddamn but how can I . . . how can I see the beauty, there's just this wall of death."
         "You saw beauty tonight. You know you did. Where was the death there?"
         "That . . . that was different."
         "Really? I beg to differ."
         "And . .. and, anyway, then it all went to hell anyway. Like dangling the carrot in front of my goddamn face and then yanking it away right when I reach the pit. Tell me, does God allow this, or do God just do this to us for fun? Because there has to be a reason."
         "I can't say I've asked God personally, our paths don't cross that often . . ."
         "Don't . . . don't make fun of me, if there's no God, then, why can't there be a God, I mean, you're sitting right in front of me, why can't God exist, why can't I call him to task for all of this."
         "Because you'd be blaming the wrong person, really. God didn't cause any of this anymore than anyone else did tonight. The worst acts can be propagated by one person sometimes and that's what happened tonight. Wherever God was, I don't think any of this was really his concern."
         "But . . . is there a God?"
         "I imagine so, in the sense that you're talking about. I've never met him personally but there's a lot of deities in this Universe I've never encountered. No reason to, they do their jobs and I do mine and everyone is happy. So long as nobody is throwing planets around, life's good. No, don't look for order when there's only life. God may have set the pieces on the board but how you move is totally up to you. Your decisions, your actions, your consequences."
         "No . . . no order? That just doesn't seem . . . it's not fair. How can you . . . rely on anything if you can't expect anything . . . how, I don't understand . . . oh God . . ."
         "Let me put it this way, would you rather be fated to die at twenty and know that because everything is perfectly ordered or have the freedom to take your own life in your hands and do with it whatever you desire."
         "But that's the point, my life, it's not . . . it's not mine anymore, don't you see . . . don't you see?"
         "I see perfectly. And your life is still your own, there's just been another level of complexity added to it. That's all."
         "But besides, your example, it's just poor, it's just a poor example. It's loaded. Because there are good things to come from order, not everything has to be bad."
         "And yet you assume that life will automatically gravitate toward that which is good . . . that's one of reasons you are what you are. Faith like that can't be taught, you're just born with it. In reality there's no logical reason to choose one form over the other."
         "That's so comforting."
         "I thought so."
         "I was being sarcastic."
         "I wasn't."
         "So in the end, you're saying, it, it makes no difference. Is that it? That no matter what I do it won't have any effect because there's nothing but chaos out there? I don't want to believe that, I can't. I just won't."
         "In the grand scheme of things it makes little difference that's the point I keep making and you seem to keep ignoring . . ."
         "I'm not-"
         "Shush . . . you're not going to move galaxies or sunder planets or anything of the like, so if you're got it in your head that you're some sort of universal savior, then get rid of those thoughts now. We don't even do that, I don't have that kind of power, the only beings that do have the greatest responsibility around. But you are not them, nor are you expected to be . . ."
         "But-"
         "I said quiet until I'm done, okay? What happened tonight was horrible from your perspective but you still had a choice, and if your choice had been different, things could have been much worse . . . all right? Are you seeing what I'm saying? You changed something and it didn't alter reality but it made a difference. That's all anyone expects. Choices."
         "But I didn't have a choice, I really didn't. What the hell was I supposed to do, goddammit, walk away . . . that's not an option, that's not an option at all. What kind of choice is that?"
         "Ha . . . that right there, that's the choice between right and wrong. Right there."
         "What?"
         "You really think you had no choice at all back there. That there was only one thing for you to do?"
         "What are you talking about, what the hell do you mean . . . what the hell else could I have done? There was nothing else to do, that's what I'm trying to say . . . if that was the best I could do, that what the hell good am I? Huh? What good am I?"
         "I think, when all is said and done, you're going to work out just fine. Just for that reason."
         "Because I can't even help one person. Is that the reason?"
         "No, don't be stupid. Because for the simple fact that walking away wasn't a choice."
         "That . . . that can't make a difference. That can't be right."
         "My friend, it makes all the difference."

* * * * *
         Opening the door is like staggering back into the daylight after being imprisoned from years in a dark, dank cave. Light's a foreign friend, you know that you should know it from somewhere but you can't seem to recognize the face, the talk, the slouched posture. Air hits you in the face like misted frost transported straight from the Arctic and just the taste of it sends your chest to shivering, your entire body trying to curl away from it, back towards warmth, safety.
         Brown's been plunged into darkness so deep that he's forgotten what sensation even was, he's faced light so sharp and piercing that he could feel his eyes trying to melt down his face. But there's really nothing to compare with emerging from a crowded party and feeling like someone has broken down the walls of the box that you were stuck in. The world is wider, the air clearer, even this pitiful attempt at brightness dazzles his eyes, even though it's all stars and streetlights. He breathes out, rubbing his arms to combat the sudden chill, seeing his breath slither from body, take gaseous form and curl into a dance before dissipating for parts unknown. He watches it with detached amusement, trying to see shapes in it, but his mind can't capture all the permutations fast enough, it's here and gone, rendered unto memory before he even had a chance to get to know it well.
         "Godspeed, my friend," he whispers, grinning at his crazy thought, even as more mist erupts from his mouth to swiftly join the first in oblivion. Some nights were made for crazy thoughts, you're not supposed to think in a linear fashion, you don't have any sort of choice, taking the straight and narrow path won't get you anywhere but right to the end. And you'll stand there wondering what everyone was talking about.
         "Hm, Joe? You say something?" Jina's fumbling with something that looks like a pack of cigarettes, leaning against the door with an intent expression on her face that would make Brown laugh if he didn't think she'd get offended.
         "I was noting," Brown comments, leaning on the black metal railing at a jaunty angle, "that if I were immortal then the lives of all you pitiful mortals would just be like these puffs of air I keep forming, brief and utterly meaningless."
         He's still grinning when Jina finally looks up at him, her face spelling all sorts of odd thoughts. With her hair partially covering her face, Brown thinks again how much she's changed, how much she hasn't changed. How the changes were in all the right places.
         They stare at each other, locking gazes across a distance Brown can feel yawning wider with each second. His comment wasn't too far from the truth, every second everyone he knows is aging, taking another step down life. And yet he gets to skip all of that, gets to arrest his forward motion for as long as he wants, as long as he can stand it before the years become too heavy and he either has to break or go mad. Brown used to be afraid of dying, like everyone else, but now he's not sure if he should be afraid of never staying dead. But why him, why does he get to take the shortcut and see it all whenever everyone else gets just a small piece? Is that fair? Would he give up this chance were someone to offer him the option.
         He's not sure.
         "If you're thinking that the mole on my head is utterly repulsive, don't worry," Brown quips, placing one hand on the railing and crossing one leg over the other, Chaplin style, "I agree and I'm getting it removed over the weekend."
         Jina finally just shakes her head, laughing, a bubble she can't keep locked up inside. "I think you've only gotten nuttier over the years, Joe. Honestly. Do you drive your friends in the army nuts like this?"
         "Nah, I only save it for the special people," Brown replies, still grinning. "Those barracks boys can't appreciate my singular brand of humor . . ." he takes a sliding step forward, feeling full of bounce, feeling a night's worth of alcohol sloshing along with him. "Not like you, my dear. Only the rare breed like you can fathom it at all."
         She laughs again. "You're so full of it. You know that, right?" Jina braces one foot on the door, the motion making a hollow clunking noise. She's gotten a cigarette out now and is fiddling with the lighter. Sparks fly in the air but nothing catches. Pausing for a second, she takes the cigarette out of her mouth and shakes it at Brown, like an eleventh finger. "I mean, you come swaggering out of nowhere, no explanation and yet you act like you've never been gone."
         "Perhaps I never have been . . ." Brown remarks, snatching the lighter from Jina's hands before she can protest, dancing back out of her grasping reach and lighting it in a smooth practiced motion. He holds the flame before his eyes, feeling the heat tickling his nose. Jina, rendered into wispy haziness, stares at him indignantly. "Ever wonder who that weird guy was with the fake looking beard that kept driving past your house? Certainly wasn't the local ice cream man, I can assure you."
         "Oh sure like you didn't have better things to do over the last few years than go spy on me . . ." Jina replies, taking a few sly steps forward, hands behind her back. The simple stance accents her figure pleasantly. "I mean, that'd be really pathetic if you did, Joe. Really." Her eyes don't leave his face.
         "Pathetic?" Brown asks in a shocked tone. "Devotion and loyalty count for nothing? Nothing at all?" He shuffles his feet, keeping a stark distance from her. "Why, I thought you'd be flattered, Jina. I really did." His voice drapes itself in mock sorrow but his face can't hide anything. The single flame dances between them, flickering. There's a cool wind sifting night's ashes over them, trying to pin it down, blow it out.
         "Flattered?" Her face only betrays the slightest telegram before she feints forward, her hand daring to dart out. Brown's dodged lasers in his time though, and when it comes to combat, even friendly, the world might as well move in slow motion. Perhaps it is, the world helping grind the gears of the night down to nothing. Stopping time, freezing them all. Then everyone would stay the same, locked in their current guises. "That you tried to stalk me?" Jina's voice calls out with put upon indignance. Staying the same wouldn't be such a bad thing, Brown realizes. As much as he likes change, sometimes you just want some stability, some fixed position to base yourself.
         "I rather like to call it keeping tabs, myself," Brown jibes, executing a half step forward and then back. Jina flinches from the onrushing flame but she was never in any danger, Brown sees to that. "You ladies out there," and he circles to the right even as Jina attempts to keep up with him, "you think it's all safe but what do you know?" She's keeping up with him though, not bad for the gal.
         "Oh, that's right," Jina stops for a second. Her chest is moving up and down as it tries to compensate for her effort. "I should place my life in the hands of Joseph Brown, clown genius. I might as well tell them to rob me and shoot me right now."
         "You could but . . . hey! none of that . . ." he cuts his sentence off as Jina makes a desperate for his wavering hand. In an action that he had practiced in his head a dozen times during their conversation, he flicks the lighter off, tosses it in the air even as her hands find the empty space surrounding his wrist, and then lets his other hand lace around his back to nimbly snag the plunging lighter before stepping back, turning on his heel and standing sideways to her, as if saluting a charging bull. Snapping his hand up in a smart motion, he clicks the lighter back on.
         "You're going to have to try harder than that, now," Brown grins at her. She sighs and just shakes her head again, her hands on her thighs, bending over a little. Her breathing is coming a little faster now, and there's a mild redness to her cheeks.
         "Come on, Joe," she nearly gasps out, "before I run out of lighter fluid in that thing and I have to get another one . . ." then she gives a cough, covering her mouth and bending over.
         Brown laughs a little, taking a step forward, the click of his boots on concrete the only other sound in this quiet night. "Oh come on yourself, how much can a little thing like this cost? Really, you are going to have to try harder than that, my dear."
         She glances up at him, her face set, wincing a little as she tries to catch her breath still. "You'd be surprised . . ."
         and then she launches herself at him, giving a little yell just to catch him off guard.
         Brown was expecting the motion anyway, her breathing was all wrong for someone trying to get their breath back, but he doesn't see any point in letting the game continue indefinitely. He resists valiantly, but the coolness of Jina's hand closes around his hand and the lighter a second later. He stares at her, the gap so much shorter now and finds that he has nothing to say. The two of them must look like a right pair of idiots, standing out here in the cold all tangled but he can't bring himself to move away. Her eyes chill him with their blue reflections, and the lighter remains a link between them. Jina's hand seems to suck the warmth right out of him, but what replaces it is nothing that he can say he doesn't want.
         At which point he notices that she's shivering a little.
         "Oh geez," he says, gently disengaging her, breaking whatever spell the world was trying to cast on them and feeling a bit cheated for it, "here you are all freezing and me without any jacket to offer you. What kind of gentlemen am I?"
         "No kind at all," Jina teases, snatching her lighter back, keeping her eyes on his hands in case he tries to repeat the stunt again. She pulls the cigarette from before out of a pocket and sticks it in her mouth, holding the lighter up to the end.
         "Oh, fine then," Brown says. "You know what, even if I had a jacket, I'd still let you freeze your ass off out here."
         She narrows her eyes and crinkles her nose at him in lieu of actual comments, making a small noise that gradually gives way to frustration as she tries to get the lighter sparked again. After a moment she takes the cigarette back out of her mouth. "See? You used it all up. Thanks a lot," she accuses, though there aren't any barbs in her words. Jina could get a light from anyone inside, that's not the problem.
         "Oh, no I didn't," Brown disagrees, cupping his hand over hers and snapping his thumb down the striker. A sparks jumps, dances and then ignites, causing Jina to blink with surprise at the sudden flame.
         Brown steps back and curls his fingers, blowing on his fingernails in a tried and true motion you can only learn from the movies. "See? All in the wrist."
         Jina doesn't say anything, just shakes her head in a motion that's supposed to come across as sad, her face briefly obscured by her hands as she cups them around the cigarette. The flame glows, throws highlights on her features, coloring them orange before fading out completely. In a smooth motion she takes her hand away, closing the lighter with a click and slipping it back into her pocket, taking a puff of the cigarette before removing it from her mouth and holding it. Acrid smoke drifts between them, sinuous.
         Brown finds that he's been watching her the entire time, almost staring. If she noticed, or disapproved at all, Jina gives no sign, but there's a subtle tension underscoring the moment, it's in her eyes, there's something she wants to say to him. Maybe, he can't be sure, really. He's not good at reading people, military men aren't supposed to read the subtle emotions, the fine gradients, it's all in the broad strokes, you have to know anger, sadness, depression, fear, when someone is going to snap when you need them most. But when someone is close to breaking and they might need you, when it's the other way around, you've no idea. Because you're not supposed to need anyone, right? That's how it works, right? Build up the wall and pretend that nothing can touch you, convince yourself that just because death is a foreign enemy that every problem in your life has vanished . . . nod and smile when they give you the pep talk and carry forward regardless.
         "That's a bad habit, you know," Brown says lightly, as a way of breaking the silence.
         Jina gives him an odd look, along the lines of what are you talking about before seeming to notice the cigarette in her hand for the first time. "What? Oh. This?" She takes a drag on it, the end flaring like a comet falling to earth, and then blows the smoke right into Brown's face, laughing as he waves his hand vigorously trying to clear the air, coughing a little as he does so.
         She's still laughing as Brown blinks tears out of his eyes, covering his mouth to cough one more time. In his blurred vision, she seems some sort of monster, a creature trapped on the other side of a membrane, only seen sparingly, something you can't reason with or fathom because you'll never understand it. For some reason it makes him think of Tristian and he wonders how they see him? Just like that? Or something different, something worse perhaps. The monster they once knew.
         "Oh you think you're cute don't you?" Brown says to her, grimacing a little. "Real cute. But you'll pay for that," and he pulls his lips back to show a smile he used to practice for interrogations, "oh yes you will." He starts to take a step forward, arms clasped lightly behind his back, like he's about to do something evil.
         Jina just gives him a narrow look and dances back a step, her feet balancing on the end of the concrete landing, grass inches below her. "Oh come on, Joe . . . no hard feelings now, huh?"
         "I think it's a little late for that . . . you're going down, I'm afraid," and with a darting motion he feints to the left, causing her to jump to the right. The sudden motion makes her lose her balance and she wavers on the edge, surprise not even having time to register.
         Brown knows she wouldn't be hurt, really, maybe just her pride, but he's too much of a gentlemen to let a lady take the fall for something he did. With a practiced motion he slips around to the right, his arm going around her to scoop her up and help her regain her feet. Doing this, he reflects upon how much less pressure there is when doing this as opposed to saving someone the exact same way when they're about to fall a thousand feet into the ocean.
         Jina's not playing along though, not being a good lady and just letting him catch her. She tries to keep her balance and leans forward even as Brown intersects with her. And then with a speed that Brown has to be somewhat proud of even as it happens to him, she shifts her weight, as if realizing what he's attempting to do and doing her best to sabotage it. Brown has no idea what she actually had in mind but the next thing he knows she got her full weight pushing against his motion, sending him staggering back with her against him, striking the wall next to the door with a thud that he can feel vibrating in his back. Sandwiched between the wall and Jina, his foot scrapes a bit on the concrete as he tries to keep from sliding down.
         Smoke wafts up into his face and he turns his head away sharply to avoid breathing it in. She's managed to keep the cigarette. Now, that's devotion to a habit, he thinks. Still, the smoke is giving him bad memories of running through dark firefights, the world just flashes of light and sound, the only constant the dank stench of something burning. No matter what's on fire, it always seem to smell the same in the end.
         The curious thing for Brown is that he's noticed that Jina hasn't moved away from him, almost like she's keeping him pinned, keeping him in one place so he can never get away again. They really used to be such good friends, Brown thinks with a hint of longing, Jina was friends with everyone, one of those girls that you couldn't help but get along with. Just look at two of her friends, him and Tristian. You can't get much different than that. And no matter how much they've all changed, she still treats them like no time has passed at all. Maybe for her it hasn't, there are times when you think you've blinked and lost five years, life streams along in a constant blur, you can't catch your breath for fear of falling behind. And Brown looks at her and he feels the old familiar sadness again, the realization that time isn't a blur for him anymore, it really doesn't even have any meaning. He wishes he could stop thinking about that, but he knows that he can't let himself forget about it. It wouldn't be right, to pretend that he's the same as everyone else now when the difference between them is so minor and so vast as taking the left fork in a road when everyone else took the right. No matter how much you try to turn around, you can't find the way back, sometimes you can cross the intervening distance, visit a little, renew old friendships but you can never stay, you can never leave your path.
         All the time these thoughts cross his mind like flocks of migrating birds, and in the interim Jina hasn't budged. Brown can't find it in his heart to gently guide her to stand somewhere else and perhaps there's a small selfish reason for that as well. He's only human, when you come down to it. Besides, she seems fairly comfortable there. He settles back against the wall, letting his head touch it just fleetingly, as if to ground himself.
         "Comfy?" he asks her, some part of him figuring that if he calls attention to it, she might move away.
         "Almost," she mutters at him, before shifting her body so that she's move lodged against his side, pressed closer to his shoulder. "There," she notes with some sense of finality, closing her eyes and taking another drag on the cigarette, "now, that's better."
         "Glad you're happy," Brown says neutrally. His hand is brushing against her arm, lightly, he can feel the raised hair on her arm, the Braille markings of the goosebumps. She's still shivering a little but in the proximity her body feels entirely warm, a heat sink.
         "Joe . . . I'm really glad you came tonight, it's been really good seeing you again . . ." her voice is cheerful, but muffled a little, as if trying to speak from underneath a pillow someone has pressed down over your face.
         "Well same here," Brown replies cordially. "It's always a kick getting insulted by our hometown's finest . . ." and he manages to finish the sentence before she drives a playful elbow into his ribs. He exhales sharply but it's mostly for comic effect, there was hardly any effort in the motion. Like it was just something she felt she had to do.
         "Now, now," she cautions, flicking a little ash off the cigarette, watching it tumble to the ground, growing cold, getting dark, dead before it even impacts. "Really though," she asks, and there's a probing tone to her voice, "why tonight? We haven't heard from you in like five years, Joe, why the hell did you pick tonight to rejoin the human race?" Her face is partially hidden from him and he wants to see her face, to see if the question in her eyes matches the hidden question in her voice. But he can't be sure, he really can't be.
         "Well you know I've been a tad busy," he tells her airily, slipping the words out before she has a chance to question them too intently, "and besides," swiftly shifting the subject, "Tristian wouldn't have come tonight if I didn't go, I don't think. I had to drag him out of the house to begin with."
         "Yeah, he's really changed," Jina laughs a little, though there really isn't any inherent humor in the situation. There's a sense of closure to her tone, and he gets the sense that she doesn't want to talk about the subject anymore. Which suits him just fine, it touches on too many tangents to his life now, too many things that he might reveal in these unguarded moments. Never could resist a pretty face, could you, Brown, he thinks to himself wryly. God, you'd make a horrible spy. Spill your guts to the first buds of renewed friendship.
         Her head is tucked right against his chest, the cigarette dangling from the hand farthest from him. He feels her shiver against him again and he thinks it's from the cold but he's not sure. "He really has changed, hasn't he?" she murmurs suddenly and Brown realizes that there's a lot she wants to say on the subject, a lot she doesn't know how to say. Not that he can blame her, to him it's all second nature, an added skin that he can put on or take off, for her it's the glimpse of an entire world that could stagger your imagination enough to leave it gasping for breath.
         "In some ways," Brown replies, keeping his tone level. Now it's he that really doesn't want to discuss this, but he can't bring himself to change the subject, he can sense that there's rusted floodgates locked inside of her and maybe a gentle hand and a listening ear might open them. It might all come out and all that pressure that keeps building up would go away. He knows the feeling, the first night that he realized, really realized that his parents were dead and never coming back, he just sat in his room, shaking so violently that he thought he might fall apart, just arms and legs dropping off from the strain, until he was just this quivering crying torso. "But in a lot of ways he hasn't changed one bit, he's just hiding it, he wants everyone to think that he's totally changed."
         "But why?" she asks him, and there's a pleading note to her voice, the same kind of thing you do when you shake your fist at the inevitable. The first time he found a dead child on a battlefield, Brown felt that, he knew then there was some things he could never stop and never change, some faces he could never save. Being a soldier never meant saving the little things, it meant the big picture. Tristian wants to do just that though, save each person one step at a time and even while Brown has accepted that will never accomplish that, Tristian never wavers from that goal, no matter how many setbacks or defeats, his course always remains clear. Tristian won't accept anything else and Brown envies him a little for that. He took the easy way out and just gave life what it wanted to avoid suffering. Tristian said no right to its face and has been suffering ever since. But Brown can't imagine his friend making any other choice. He really can't.
         "I don't know," Brown admits after a second, feeling very somber and yet placid at the same time. "Maybe he's afraid that you'll all want to stay his friends and he'll wind up hurting you all again. I don't know."
         "We don't hate him, you know. No one does," Jina sighs, pressing into him a little bit. Brown welcomes the added pressure, it reminds him of where he is, who he's with, what he's doing. "I think he does all the hating for himself, sometimes." She makes a sniffing sort of laugh again, staring down at the ground. Brown wishes his neck would bend that far down so he could see her face. He can't tell what she's thinking, why she's saying these things, what the whole goal of this is. She turns her face up to him suddenly, her cheek still pressed against him, her hair masking most of her face, only one eye visible to him. It's enough of a look. And her smile, he can see her smiling at him. "So did you actually come back just to see me, Joe?"
         He grins down at her, "Oh but of course. If I had come here and you weren't anywhere in sight, I would've just turned right around and went back home."
         She giggles a little at that. "I inspire such devotion."
         "Well there is no party without you, you know," Brown deadpans. "I think everyone here knows that."
         "And what about Tristian?" she asks him suddenly, her face a little cagey.
         "Oh, him, he'd be totally on his own, totally and completely." Brown laughs, glances up at the sky and gives a sort of salute to the air, "I'd be like, see ya buddy, you try to enjoy yourself, but I know I won't be."
         "But didn't he drive you here?" Jina pointing out slyly.
         "Oh hell, I'm a soldier, Jina, the best of the best, a couple mile walk on a brisk winter night is what we consider a vacation," he tells her in his best macho tone. Then he pauses a beat and shrugs, taking her along with him, "Or I'd just hotwire his car and let him do the walking."
         Jina laughs again at that, shaking against him. In this darkness, pressed together like this, she seems so much smaller than he remembers. He wonders what that's supposed to mean. "You really know how to flatter a girl, don't you?"
         "Why, do you feel flattered . . . hey, I was just kidding-" he defends himself from her elbow again, shuffling closer to the wall, finding it unyielding and not really caring either way.
         Silence settles on them like snowfall. The air is clear enough that it cuts like a knife into your lungs, the perfect kind of winter air, pure and unsullied by anything dirty, making you feel like every cloudy breath that you emit is carrying poisons away. With Jina huddled against him, Brown can't say that he feels cold at all, though Jina gives a shiver now and then. She hasn't asked to go back inside though, it's probably the night, even when you know that there's a thousand people inside, a night like this can make you feel like you're the only person in the entire world. Even the low grade hum of a passing car, headlights blazing like some sort of search lamp, a prowling probe, even that can't shatter the illusion.
         "We're feisty tonight, aren't we?" Brown says after what feels like forever but is really only a moment. "Perhaps a little too much of the hard stuff, hm?"
         She laughs, a muffled sound that he feels more than he hears. "You drank more than me and you're still standing. I think I'm all right."
         "Oh we're spying on me now, are we? Fine way to renew a friendship." There's a jocular tone to his voice, even as he tries to act put upon.
         "What can I say, I'm only concerned. Who knows what bad habits you might have picked up over the years?"
         "Well certainly none like this," and he touches her hand, the one that's holding the cigarette. It's almost burnt out now, and he distantly wonders if she'll light another one, if they'll go through the little game again. There's a chill to her skin and he cups it for a second, rubbing it a bit for warmth. It's an almost instinctive motion, one that you don't learn in the military and he finds himself feeling startled that he does it. What is he doing?
         "I know," Jina replies, giving a sigh of insincerity, "I know, drinking and smoking, it's a short trip to Hell for me. What ever am I going to do?" She looks up at him suddenly and he realizes how clear her eyes are, even as smoke drifts between them, her eyes seem to cut right through it. Slicing through the mist.
         "Well, hey, as long as you're not driving, I think Hell will have to live without you for a while yet," Brown comments. He cocks an eyebrow at her. "You aren't driving, right?"
         Jina responds with a snorting sort of laugh, a quick sharp gesture. In the process she looks down but Brown thinks he catches something streaking across her eye, a window opened that she had intended to keep sealed. "Of course not. Me and Lena take turns, tonight's my night to get drunk off my ass."
         "Seems like a good system. But you see, my dear," and the sound those two words make is something highly pleasing to his ear, "you made the mistake of finding friends who drink . . . my boy Tristian probably will never touch a drink for as long as he lives, thus leaving me to attempt to float my liver away on a sea of beer." He gives a contented sigh. "It's a good life. Life's just good."
         "Yeah," she says but there's a weird note to her voice. She shivers suddenly, a chill that seems to run through her entire body. The cigarette is almost down to the filter and with practiced ease she flicks it away. Brown watches it make final descent, sparking and flaming the entire way down, reminded uncomfortably of a shuttle falling toward a planet, wrapped in flames and voices over a radio forcing him to make promises to loved ones that he could never keep.
         She presses against him and makes a small noise, a word he can't catch. "Want to hear something funny, Joe?" Her voice doesn't sound like she's about to tell a joke and Brown feels himself tense in time to her tone. Protect the fairer sex, that's the code of chivalry, right? Except they don't need protection and you're both equally helpless against whatever is bothering her. Brown thinks he knows what's about to come next, damn his insight. Tristian thinks he's the only one to watch people, but Brown's done surveillance, stared at the same spot for hours while operating under some strange pretense. It's always the same trick though. Always. You stand in one place long enough and the world will open itself up to you. Whether you want it to or not.
         "As long as it's not that story of you and that sordid affair with the football player from the next town over."
         "What?" her voice is confused, briefly, failing to note the cadence of his words and his lack of honesty.
         "I mean, really do you have any shame-"
         "That's not what I meant . . ." and her body feels very taut, a cable strung out to keep a building anchored, vibrating finely in the wind.
         "Well what did you mean? I thought it was fairly clear." perhaps he can sense the oncoming topic and he wants to steer it aside. He's really trying but in the end he knows he's not being fair to her.
         "Joe, I'm trying to be serious here," her voice is level.
         "Gee, I thought you were trying to be funny-"
         "Joe."
         "Okay, Jina," Brown forces cheer into his voice, squeezing her a little to show no hard feelings. The effort somehow winds up with her standing even closer to him than before. He's not sure how that works. Her hand has brushed against his, a light pressure that conveys a tingle up his arm. It's the little things. The little things that become the glue that holds the night together. The things no one ever talks about. Maybe it's implied. "What funny thing do you have to tell me?"
         "It's just . . ." her voice is surprisingly hesitant, and she seems to press her head closer to his chest, he can feel her the softness of her cheek even through his shirt, "oh, I don't even know how to say this but . . . you remember, you remember that thing, what happened, you know, at the restaurant. With Tristian? He told you about that, right?"
         "Yeah, he did." None of them want to talk about it, Brown can tell that much. They all wish that amnesia would strike them and they could forget about it. But something keeps making them discuss it, some stupid silly human habit to try and find understanding, reason when maybe there is none, when maybe the chips fall in a way that's just so fantastic, so outerworldly that it's too strange not to be true.
         "It was really bad, Joe," and Jina's voice is a fine gulp, even saying those few words seems to take more effort than she can handle. He can't see her face and he wishes he could. "I didn't know what was going to happen, I mean, I thought, I thought I was going to . . . die . . ." and her voice nearly cracks on the last word. Brown very much wants to reassure her, tell her everything he knows, spill it all right then and there and he realizes that if thought it would do the slightly damn bit of good, he'd do it in a heartbeat just to make that quaver vanish from her voice, just to smooth the wrinkles in her mind, in her heart and make it all just a little bit okay again.
         "It wasn't Tristian, Joe," Jina gasps suddenly and a shudder that he thinks might break her runs along her body. He puts an arm around her to steady her but it's not necessary. Jina's got herself under control, it might be a bare thing but it's still there. She wants to give herself that much dignity, that much poise. "I don't know what it was, but it wasn't him . . ."
         "I know," Brown whispers, knowing that his head is so close to her ear that she can hear him. Her hair has the smell of oil and shampoo and whatever other things girls put into their hair, the things you can't help but try and drown yourself in. But you have to try and be comforting, be calm, people rely on you Brown, you might not be a military man right now but you're a friend and in the long run that's why you boss and order those soldiers around, why you write that letter every time one of them doesn't make it back, write it with your own shaky handwriting. Because even if they don't realize it and you don't act like it, you're their friend. And if you can be a friend to a bunch of people that you rarely see face to face, you can be a friend to this girl right here who's only crime was knowing your friend Tristian and being in the wrong place on the wrong night. "But it's over now and I don't think it'll happen-"
         "I wanted you to be there, Joe," the sentence bursts from her.
         "What did you say?" Brown finds himself nearly gasping out the words. That was not what he had expected to hear.
         "I wanted you to be there," Jina repeats in a barely audible tone. "I really did." She gives a shaky laugh and brushes some hair out of her face. He thinks he sees a brief glimpse of something shiny coating her face and he wishes he could be sure. "You think that's silly right? Stupid. I mean . . ." and she just shrugs, her eyes hidden from him.
         "It's not," Brown notes simply. "Keep talking if you want. I'm listening." He thinks he sees her smile and her hand tenses against his for a second, but he stops himself from holding her hand. That wouldn't be right, he knows. It's a line he can't cross, as much as he wants to, as much as he can barely avoid doing so.
         "It's just, when it . . . when the thing that . . . that wasn't Tristian," she sounds like she's trying to describe the color red to someone who has been blind from birth, "when it first started doing . . . that stuff, the only, the . . ." her voice is thick for some reason, and she pressed so tightly against him that he finds that he has trouble drawing a breath in, "the only thing I could think of was that . . . and oh God this is stupid, but I thought that if you were there, you would have figured something out, it never would have gone as far as it did . . ." her voice is lost in a little cough and she braces herself against him, her entire body trembling. Brown can feel his own hand shaking, empathy cutting his body like shards of broken glass. Dear God, he thinks, if Tristian saw this it would snap him in two. It really would.
         "That's just a stupid thought, right?" Jina says again, laughing a little at how stupid it is. Only thing was, it probably wasn't stupid, if Brown had been there, maybe it would have listened to him, maybe Jina wouldn't be confessing this to him in near tears. Maybe. If. You could live your life by that and never get anywhere, if the universe has taught Brown anything it's that there's no certainty to anything, no good triumphs over evil anymore than evil will triumph over good, no stable pillars of reason, for every solid theory you have there's a contradiction that tears it to pieces.
         It's less stupid than you might think, Brown thinks, but he can't say that outloud, it would invite too many questions, questions he can't answer. You either have to be totally open or hide it completely, he thinks Tristian knows that now but it's probably too late. Events have tipped and broken the scale and nobody knows how to fix it.
         "Did you ever meet . . . it, Joe? You know, that thing, that, looks like Tristian?" Her voice seems distant, a far away echo. Jina's not in right now. It's tempting to get lost in memory but you might blunder somewhere that you don't want to see. That's the risk that you, that everyone takes.
         "Yeah," Brown states simply, remembering those times, times that he could never explain to Jina. He remembers watching it cutting an assassin in half just by passing its hand through the man. He remembers it catching a laser that someone shot at it, in the middle of a firefight, catching the laser and flinging it back like Zeus with his thunderbolt, disintegrating the man's head completely, leaving only bloody empty shoulders and a staggering directionless body. Images captured as if through syrup coated film, slow and grainy, projected dreams of a madman. Brown remembers those things, remembers that it has the face of his best friend and can't help but shudder. So much for military life jading him. "Yeah, we've met." He licks his lips, finding a need to take a deep breath. "And it scared the living hell out of me."
         Jina sniffs and he's not sure if she's laughing or agreeing with him. Brown likes to think that there's nothing in life that you can't find some humor in, but he's come to realize that there are some forces that just aren't very funny.
         "I've never cried about it," Jina admits somberly, her voice muffled against his chest. He can feel the heat of her head through his shirt, it makes the rest of him feel very cold indeed. She pauses a second, drawing a deep breath in and then continues, "When it . . . when I got back to the house, I wound up on the floor and I just . . . I just sat there, I didn't know what the hell to do, I didn't know what the hell had just happened. I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt numb and frightened and cold and . . ." her voice breaks off again, and he can feel her reaching for breath, finding strength from somewhere. This is turning out to be a strange night, a strange party. Not at all what he's expected but the good has very much outweighed the bad so far.
         He wants to say something to her but he can't think of anything remotely appropriate. Yeah, the first time they teleported me, I felt like crap too. It's enough to make you feel totally helpless, impotent even.
         But Jina's got more to say, fortunately for Brown. "I don't know . . . how long I was sitting there but I heard a noise in the next room, in the bedroom and . . . I guess I got up and went in, I don't even really remembering doing so . . ." she laughs, a sound Brown desperately wishes sounded happy, "it's funny how the world just feels like a dream, Joe, it's just . . . nothing feels real. At all.
         "And I went in there and . . . Lena was curled up on the bed," Jina's voice cracks again, a terrible sound, the sound of someone trying to let themselves get torn in two. Even with the memory distant, it can still reach out and hurt. "She wasn't saying anything, she was so still that I thought she was dead and I went . . . I went over to her and touched her and . . . her eyes were open and she looked at me and she said . . . she said it happened, didn't it and I don't remember what I said but . . ." her hand squeezes his tightly suddenly, her nails are shrapnel in his palm, but he'll accept the pain, accept the transfer, "oh God, we just held each other, all night, until we fell asleep . . . but I didn't cry, Joe. I couldn't." She's looking right at him now, her face pale and clear in the neon cast of the outside lights, "Lena did a little, she was shaking so hard that I thought . . ." she stops, licks her lips. Her eyes close tightly for just one second. Just one second's peace is all she needs to collect herself.
         "Jina, no one said-"
         "I know, I know," Jina shakes her head, sighing a little. "But I feel like I should, like I should have, you know. Like when someone dies, because . . . because ever since it's been like he died and someone else is walking around in his place. Like we lost him that night." Brown knows exactly who she means. "I think we did lose him."
         Her head is against his chest, and she's staring right at him. Brown's chin is resting on her forehead, her hand clasped lightly around his. He's still not responding but he can feel her breath on his neck and he wishes he were just a little drunk because then he'd have no problem, he'd have no goddamn problem and he probably wouldn't even feel bad about it.
         "It just takes time," Brown says, and he's an expect on time, he knows. It's just some vast ocean to him, the deeper you dive the darker it gets, the greater the pressure but the more wonders you can find.
         "Is there still time?" she asks him simply, a question he doesn't have an answer for. "Because . . ." and she's leaning forward now, shifting her weight so that she's standing in front of him, facing him, her face nearly level with his, "because it's like there's never time anymore." Why is she whispering? But he knows. He knows. The moment calls for it. It couldn't be any other way.
         He gives her the best rogue's smile he's got, a lopsided flash of a grin. "There's always time. Don't ever think otherwise."
         "I don't know what to think anymore, Joe," Jina says softly, and his body is cold where she was pressing against him, but it's overcome by the warmth now suffusing him, a warmth he can't place. "And furthermore," as she drifts closer, even as Brown finds the magnetism of the moment far too alluring, even as they get locked into a course that neither of them can stop, "I don't care either."
         The smell of her breath washes over his face and her eyes are satellites in his vision, his heart is pounding in a way that he's sure she can sense
         even as the door clicks and swings open, the crack of the whip to shatter the fragile statue of the situation. Broken pieces of time settling all around them and vanishing, Brown and Jina suddenly separate, Jina having a slightly sheepish, slightly guilty expression on her face. But her eyes are telling a different story, a different book entirely. Brown just shrugs, a motion that only she can see and gives her an equally sheepish smile. Not meant to be, he guesses. Oh well. But there's the aftertaste of regret there, even he has to admit that.
         "Am I interrupting something?" Carl asks mildly, raising an eyebrow, even as he casually opens a carton of cigarettes and takes one out. It dangles between two of his fingers as he stares at both of them.
         "Not that I know of," Brown replies easily, placing one foot against the wall, his knee pointed at Jina's stomach. Jina merely just shakes her head, taking a step back and leaning against the railing. Brown half expects her to take out another cigarette, and after the events of the last few minutes he probably wouldn't stop her. She doesn't but he notices that her hand is clutching the railing tightly, as if to steady herself. The wind gently rustles her hair and she brushes a little out of her face almost self consciously.
         "It's nuts in there," Carl comments, probably for the sake of conversation as much as anything else. Brown doesn't recall asking him what conditions were like in there but he doesn't really feel like going back in, nor can he just stand here in silence. It wouldn't be polite.
         "Yeah, it was getting a little crowded last I checked . . . came out here to get some air . . ." Brown replies, stretching his arms over his head. "I like parties and everything, but sometimes you need to get some breathing space."
         Carl chuckles a little at that. "Funny. And here I am . . ." he ducks his head and cups his hand around the lighter, the end of the cigarette flares into burning life even as he takes a quick drag before removing it from his mouth and exhaling, ". . . soiling all your good air." Honestly, Carl doesn't look like he cares either way.
         Brown waves away a cloud of smoke that makes a beeline for his head, as if trying to buck his physiology and do some real damage. Not going to happen, he thinks amusedly, his hand dispersing it easily. "Air around here wasn't too swift to begin with, so I think we're talking a relative thing."
         "True, true," Carl nods, taking another drag on the cigarette, longer this time. The hand holding the cigarette lazily drifts back over to the door, indicating and pointing to it. "They really miss you in there, you know. At the bar."
         "My adoring fans," Brown quips, giving Jina a look. She hasn't said anything at all this far into the conversation. Brown can't figure out why, maybe she's trapped in her own line of thinking. Secretly he wishes that Carl would go back inside. Maybe he's only having the one cigarette and then the cold will get to him. "Have they started the chanting for me yet? I refuse to go back in if they're not chanting."
         "Heh," Carl says, the cigarette dangling out of his mouth. "No, they're not up to that point yet. Sorry. There's really no one at the bar though now, people are mostly helping themselves."
         "What happened to whatshisname . . ." Brown's memory, which can remember all the complicated maneuvers required for a beachheading invasion exercise, suddenly draws a blank on a name. Funny how life surprises you like that.
         "Sam?" Carl supplies, cocking an eyebrow at Brown. His cigarette has gone out for some reason and he's resparking his light in an attempt to relight it.
         "That's it," Brown concurs, snapping his fingers. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Jina nod absently, like she's not really here, only catching every other word. He gives her a questioning look for she's not really paying attention. Oh well, have to get the bottom of that later. "What the hell happened to him? Last I talked to him, he wanted to stand there all night."
         Carl just shrugs. "Beats the hell out of me. He left the bar suddenly and I haven't seen him since." A brief wave of disgust shifts across Carl's face, too fast to really be noticed, though Brown gets a glimpse. It might be from the cigarette or it might be from memory, things like that there really aren't any nuances to.
         "Ah well, maybe I'll grace them with my presence later, you know, make sure the gears are still moving along smoothly," Brown states, waving his hand in the air like he were the grease that kept the world going.
         "Good luck," Carl murmurs. "Doubt there'll be anything left by the time you get back in there, though."
         "Still, gotta try anyway," Brown replies, casting another glance at Jina. She's still not really looking at anything. "It's the military man in me, you know. We've got to keep trying no matter what." Brown's not sure why he keeps reminding everyone he's in the military, it's only a matter of time before he runs into someone who is in actual military and starts asking him questions about where he's stationed, stuff like that. Oh yes, I normally find myself in a giant city of platforms set above an endless ocean. That'll go over real big. Everyone'll think he's just giving them a line a bull, like always. The great thing about a reputation, it gives you something to live up to. A target, so to speak.
         "Oh, so you're the guy in the military," Carl comments, his eyes widening a little. "People have been talking about you on and off all night."
         "Really?" Brown asks with mildly disinterested surprise. Nothing he didn't expect. "I imagine they're nothing but good things."
         A snort from Jina's direction lets Brown know that she's tuned back into the conversation. Carl glances at her and there's something in his eyes that Brown can't easily place. His other hand is in his pocket, like he's scratching there.
         "You hope," Jina mutters, under her breath enough to make it seem like she's talking to herself but just loud enough so that Brown can hear. Funny girl.
         "I was loved by all," Brown tells Carl, who only gives him a strange look. Carl isn't into Brown's brand of absurdist humor apparently. Oh well, his loss.
         "You vanished after high school?" Carl asks him, pointing at him with the cigarette.
         "According to legend," Brown parrys, crossing his arms over his chest. "But to this day, no one can say for sure." He takes a few steps forward, launching himself off the wall, waving his hands in the air like he's telling a ghost story. "They say that Joseph Brown only appears every five years . . ." he turns to Carl and grins, "like the mysterious El Dorado. And you just have to be lucky enough to not be around when he returns." Jina's shaking a little, her mouth upturned in the barest of smiles. She's watching Carl's reaction, which seems to be momentary confusion.
         "Ah. I see," Carl finally says, giving his head the briefest of shakes. Casting another glance at Jina, he then turns back to Brown, blinking as if a thought had just occurred to him. To Brown it seems manufactured, to someone who's used to basing everything on timing, he can tell when someone else is trying to do it. "Oh, hey, either of you friends with that Tristian guy?"
         Brown and Jina share a look, both with varying degrees of puzzlement. Brown decides he might as well speak first. "Well, he drove me here, so I guess that makes him my friend," he deadpans.
         "Oh you're just using him and you know it," Jina jokes, though that seems to be mostly a front. She's interested in what Carl has to say, as far as Brown can tell. Brown has to admit mild interest as well but he can't imagine someone like Carl possessing great insight about anything. He seems far too blunt, too linear, everything laid out in thin strips of lines, for him it's just a matter of picking which path to choose that day.
         "I know. I'm so shameless," Brown agrees. Then his face changes into something blandly serious as he turns back to Carl. "What dark deed has Tristian done this time? You can never let that guy out of your sight, let me tell you." But there's a undercurrent to Brown's voice and he can tell that Carl can sense it. Tread carefully here, boy.
         "No, no, I've been just hearing . . . you know, things about him, all night . . . you know, just . . . things . . ." Carl responds, stubbing his cigarette out against the wall and throwing it on the ground. Whereupon he then stamps on it, twisting his foot a little. Brown thinks it's just a bit excessive, but that's only his opinion. Carl shakes his head, putting his hands in his pockets. He's staring intently at Jina without really staring at her. Brown's not the object of his attention, that much is obvious. "That whole restaurant incident . . . that's just messed up. I mean, it really is."
         Jina stiffens a little at the mention of the situation but otherwise says nothing. Brown doesn't know if Carl knows who was involved in that and so he refrains from saying anything. In fact he'd rather just let Carl talk. If he's going somewhere with this, he'd rather let the man sink or swim based on his own merit.
         "I mean, how can someone . . ." he shakes his head again and Brown thinks that Carl is either feigning sincerity or its just an emotion he's not all that used to, like trying to fly a fighter jet when you've barely mastered a bicycle. After a pause he fixes Brown with a startlingly piercing gaze. "You wonder . . . how someone can do that to his friends."
         "Everyone makes bad judgements," Brown points out. He spreads his arms a little, deflecting Carl's argument. "I mean, hell, if mistakes counted against friendship, I'd be a very lonely man indeed."
         "That's not what I'm saying," Carl interjects. Jina is staring at some middle point between them, her eyes slightly unfocused. Carl glances at her as if to see if she's listening to what he's saying and whether she's at all interested. The answer to both questions appears to be a resounding no, though it doesn't seem to perturb Carl all that much. "What I'm saying is . . ." he breaks off and peers right at Brown again, as if trying to see through some carefully crafted illusion. Brown knows that the best illusion is what you hide in plain sight. ". . . is that have you seen any of those people who were there that night . . . you can pick them right out in a second, they've all got this look on their face, like they're haunted . . ." he stops and addresses Jina, "your friend you came in with, Lena I guess her name is, she looks fine most of the time but then sometimes, I think when she thinks nobody's looking, she's looks like the goddamn walking dead. You know what I mean?" He takes his hands out of his pockets and starts to rub them together for warmth.
         Jina bristles a little at the implied barb at her friend. Even Brown wants to leap to Lena's defense. Carl's being deliberately abrasive it seems but to what end he has no idea. "Maybe you should stop watching her and give her some privacy," Jina says slowly. Her face looks flushed and her hand grips the cold railing with enough intensity that it trembles a little. Like she's trying to choke it. "It was a lot to go through."
         "Just my point," Carl comments, not even answering Jina's first accusation, like it's beneath him. Or he didn't hear it. Brown's not sure what to think of Carl, one moment he's acting like someone you could easily get along with and the next it's like he's trying to bait them, provoke some reaction. He points at Brown again, sticking his other hand back in the pocket. The only sounds around them are night noises, rippling wind, deep throated rumbling of car engines, distant radio sounds filtering through stone and glass. Their voices seem to be the only clear link to civilization around. "You said you've made mistakes but . . . you know, have any of your mistakes ever, like, traumatized people. Because I look at those people and it's like they were caught in an earthquake, right? Just walking around with those deer caught in the headlights looks. You'd think they're waiting for something else to pop out at them and screw with their heads."
         "They're just frightened," Brown counters, trying not to look at Jina. He wishes she'd say something, she's too quiet. "Same as everyone else when faced with stuff they don't understand." His eyes narrow a little. "And I don't think I need to say this, but keep in mind you weren't there."
         "After the stuff I've been hearing, I thank God I wasn't there," Carl replies easily, giving Brown a thin smile. It's all point and counterpoint, two people arguing some abstract point when the concrete foundation to all of this is walking around inside the party somewhere. Brown wonders what Tristian would have thought of all of this. Probably would have agreed, he figures. Probably a good thing he's not here. Though Brown still allows himself a glance at the upstairs window. No reason why he couldn't be listening. But the draped shadows tell him nothing.
         "But the thing is, earthquakes and crap like that," Carl presses forward with his point and maybe this is the point he's been striving to get at, "you can't fight nature, right? You can get as mad as you want with stuff like that but in the end, what can you do?"
         "Nothing," Brown agrees slowly. He thinks he sees where this is going but he's rather let Carl shoot himself in the foot with it. Still even the fact that they're having this discussion is giving him small chills. It's probably worse for Jina, at least he lives with discussing matters like this all the goddamn time. For her, it must be like revisiting the murder scene where your entire family was slaughtered. Nothing but chalk outlines and dried blood but your mind can easily fill the gaps in. Outlines are just scaffolding for the imagination. Tristian, what kind of can of worms did you open? Couldn't you have just left well enough alone? Would just one night have killed you?
         "But here, with Tristian, I mean, hell, why does anyone even talk to this guy anymore? Really." Carl's looking at Jina, trying to peel the layers away, strip her to the core. Or maybe even a different kind of stripping. Carl's eyes are hooded, fathomless. His motions are easy, casual but there's a carefully cultured tension lurking behind it all. "Hell, if I were him, I wouldn't talk to any of them ever again . . ." now it's his turn to spread his arms wide. His eyes are smiling with satisfied victory. "After all, I'd never be able to face myself in the mirror if I did that to my friends. I'd never be able to talk to any of them ever again without being reminded of the crappy thing I did to them."
         Even Brown winces at that pronouncement, knowing how closely it bites to Tristian's actual mental state. There's something about Carl he's underestimating but he can't put his finger on it. The oiliness of his speech, but even then it only appears once in a while, hard to pin down, slipping through his fingers before he can say for sure.
         "He's our friend," comes the whispery hiss, and Brown whips his head around to look at Jina. But she's still looking down, and the voice might as well have been the wind. Her arm is shaking like a wire caught in a storm, and her other hand is clenched tightly, the knuckles whiter than winter snow. For the first time since he's come out here, Brown finds himself feeling very cold indeed.
         Then Jina, after a beat passes, looks up at him, her expression beautifully placid. "Joe, I have to get something from my car. Do you want to take the walk?" Her voice is a constructed pleasantness, a bank teller informing you that your account is overdrawn. Carl might as well not even be there. But the other man doesn't even seem to mind, he's just watching Jina with a veiled gaze. His hands are back in his pockets, one ankle crossed over the other.
         "Sure," Brown says after a second, casting a glance at Carl, who's not looking at him at all. Though his eyebrows have gone up a little, it doesn't affect the rest of his face at all. Without saying another word, Jina turns on her heel and descends the concrete and stone steps, her shoes making dull clicking noises, the only other sound suddenly. The night takes the noise and crumples it up, throwing it back to them as warped echoes.
         Brown's about to follow her when he feels a hand on his arm. He pauses, seeing Jina stalking off ahead, her pace unwavering. He could have fallen into quicksand behind her and she wouldn't notice, so intent is her mood.
         "What is it?" he says a bit abruptly to Carl but he's not really in the mood for anymore of this nonsense.
         "Just had a question," Carl asks mildly, his face pure banality. Before Brown can even tell him where to stick his question. "I was just wondering . . . is she seeing anyone?"
         "Is she . . ." Brown narrows his eyes, dislodging Carl's grip on him with a snap of his arm. "I don't think your her type, pal. Trust me. Especially not after that little display."
         "I see," Carl replies neutrally, as if Brown had just told him that he was wearing the neatest outfit he'd ever seen. Then he smiles in a toothy way. "Because when I walked out here . . . the two of you would make a cute couple, I thought. If you're not already, that is." Carl's voice is breezy, flighty. Brown can't catch the meaning, it's colored air passing through his fingers.
         "I'll keep that in mind," he replies, deciding on leaving his tone cheerfully ambiguous. And without another word he turns from Carl, nearly leaping off the steps at a run to catch up with Jina, hoping that she hadn't started walking home or something. With his luck she was sitting in her car, and he had no idea what it even looked like. Just his damn luck.
         Carl's laughter, a bubbling, oddly out of place sound, floats after him. Brown risks one glance back as he's taking off but only sees the last slivers of indoor light as the door slides shut. "Damn weirdo," he mutters to himself, shrugging and continuing on.
         The darkness is like cascading layers of satin curtains, he has to keep shoving some aside to continue on and even then he can barely see anything in front of him. Brown has to catch himself to keep from breaking into a sprint, running at a breakneck pace down the campus dorms sidewalks wouldn't make a good impression on the security now, would it? Still, anger must be propelling Jina fairly far. Amazing what a little motivation and a desire to get the hell out of somewhere as fast as you can will do to someone.
         One of the lightpools stabbing down from the darkness illuminates her figure suddenly, she's caught in silhouette, rendered in shadow. Her steps appear to have slowed a bit, and Brown increases his pace accordingly.
         "Jina!" he calls out, his voice a lonely sounding thing. He keeps waiting to hear background music, the swelling of strings, a violin screeching out mournful sighs. Spending too much time in the party, he thinks, you start to think that life's got a soundtrack. Instead it's just drops of sound in rivers in silence. His voice is snuffed out before it's even born really.
         Jina stops and turns toward the sound. Her eyes are shadowed things even from this distance. Standing underneath the lamp, it turns her shadow into a stunted parody of her form, a gnarled dwarf of a girl. She seems to be hugging herself, her breath wrapping around her face. It's cold out. But then it is winter. Things like that tend to happen around this time.
         She says nothing and doesn't even move as he comes over to her. Brown's not sure what to expect, there's an itching pressure in his chest where her head was resting before but he can't imagine himself getting that lucky again. That was a tentative thing, brought on by the coarse emotion of the moment, a passing deal that won't get repeated again, he's sure. Nor would Brown attempt to bring it about again. That's not how he operates, that's now how he is. These people are his friends but there are parts of him he can't share. Tristian's mistake can't be his.
         "So," he says with a grin, putting his hands in his pockets and looking left and then right, "where is your car really?"
         Jina's face had looked pensive as he approached, but once he says that she breaks out into a shy smile. "Sorry about that," she apologizes, pushing a strand of hair out of her face, "but I had to get out of there." She casts a disgusted look in the direction of where they had just come from. "What the hell is up with him? What the hell was all that crap about?"
         "Probably just beer talking," Brown replies by way of mollifying the situation. "You know how people get . . ." and he leaves the words dangling, giving her a line to reach out and grab onto.
         "I know, I know," Jina sighs, rubbing her arms again. Brown resists the urge to rub the heat back into them for her. Careful. Careful. "It's just that . . ." and she looks down and then tilts her head a little to stare at him, almost owlishly, "people who weren't there . . . they don't understand. They think it's just some sort of . . . of a joke, or something."
         "What else are they going to do?" Brown notes pragmatically, kicking himself even as he says it. "It's not like they can easily admit to it. Even you guys can't." Jina says nothing, just looks down at the ground, at her shoes, maybe at the coiled worm that is said to exist at the center of the earth. No coiled worm you say? Don't believe everything you read. Gently, Brown reaches his hand out and touches her arm. "Come on, you're going to freeze out here, we might as well go back inside . . ." he gives a sudden vicious grin, "maybe we can get Carl drunk and have him do something compromising." Jina still says nothing but a small smile peeks out from her face. "You know that appeals to you," Brown cajoles softly. "Admit it. Just a little bit."
         She gives a little laugh but instead of going with him, she suddenly grabs his arm and slips it under hers. "I'd rather take a walk." Brown stumbles forward a few steps, having this bizarre of toppling on his face and taking her down with him. Maybe he could be the cushion. Naughty Brown. You must not think bad thoughts.
         Catching up even with her, Brown arranges his arm so that it fits more easily. It fits easier than he'd like to admit. They match strides perfectly, slipping into a strolling easy walk. From distant windows come distant grainy songs, fragments from another planet, squinting at one of those tiny little black and white screens and wondering why the hell people even bothered wasting their time. Brown thinks he can see the moon behind a heavy cloud, but its frosted light isn't reaching them. The world is broken down into components, a minimalist painting with all the pieces put into their own little boxes. The soapy glimmers of streetlights stuck into one corner. All the sounds in the world crammed into another corner, just the steady tapping of shoes on concrete. Radar into the night. Are you out there? Please don't bother us.
         In the place that he now calls home, a place that Jina could barely imagine, Brown would walk along the platforms at night sometimes, just stand out there in the brisk darkness, feeling invisible wind on his face and hearing the steady drumming beats of waves hitting rocks distantly below, misted spray lashing his face like playful tickling whiskers. On a night like that, in a place like that, he could stand there and feel like he was the only person in the entire world, maybe in the universe. There's a comfort in a solitude like that.
         This is just the same, only he finds that sharing that solitude with someone makes it that much better. Cliched thoughts lose none of their meaning when they start to come true. Only two people in the entire range of existence, the stars and cars are just intangible observers, no stronger than the ghosts that keep trying to clutch out from the past. Brown's been in the past, walked like a spectre in the last seconds before a great disaster wipes out everyone around him, ripped himself forward to catch the dying spasms of a star from the surface of a raging planet. The past and future are just buffers, things to keep us from breaking out of the present. Locked in our chronal boxes, we can never see the fullness of time, but we can appreciate life for what it is, a finite junction of time, measured in seconds or centuries, bordered by the deeds you do, folded out by the things you always wish you did. There are three dimensions to space, four dimensions to time, but in the end it comes down to the simple things. A faint touch. A soft word. The look on someone's face when you've given them what they least expected. Time is defined, bounded by such things, everything else is just excess, fluff to make you think it all means something else, when it's only the small gestures that resound out into the darkness. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
         Jina's bare arm is a constant on his sleeve, causing the cloth to rub up against his arm. Her face is staring straight ahead, blissfully neutral, the kind of face that tells you the person would be smiling if they bothered to. But they rarely feel a need to show the world if they're happy or not, so on goes the mask. And people stand there and wonder why you're not happy that their trying to cheer you up.
         "Why did you leave, Joe?" her question comes suddenly, a signal tossed out into the air. Brown nearly loses stride for a second but regains himself before she notices. It's not a question he can easily answer, not even a question he can give a complicated answer to.
         "That was a long time ago, Jina . . ." Brown murmurs by way of stalling, and maybe it is a long time ago, by the way they reckon time. You've got those seconds trapped in their little pockets and some days you can see down and watch them zipping past you. Tiny moments you'll never get back. And you let them slide by anyway because that's what it means in the end to be human, having that chance, that choice to waste your goddamn life as you see fit.
         Her hand tightens around his arm almost imperceptibly. In that moment Brown knows that he won't be able to lie to her. "I know, but I still want to know." She gives him a sideways smile, her body a warm flare against his ribs. "Five years. I think you owe me that much."
         Brown takes a deep breath, stops walking. He can't keep walking anymore, it's like he's trying to run from something. He's not better than Tristian, when you come down to it, he just cloaks his deceit in jokes and misdirections, a stage magician doing funny motions with his hands so you don't notice the rabbit he's stuffing down the top hat.
         "Jina," he says slowly, quietly, facing her now, "I had to get out." The words shudder past his lips, a truth that he hadn't admitted to himself for years. "It had nothing to do with anyone, I just . . . I just had to leave."
         She doesn't say anything to him, just stares at him with sober eyes. His reflection is caught in those eyes and behind that reflection perhaps another one, but maybe not so much a reflection but a portrait. Joseph Brown at eighteen. For five years that memory was all she had of him, that mental portrait and yet here he is. You never think you'll ever update the photographs, you look at the last photograph of a dead relative and you know you'll never see them older than that, not a day not a second not a lifetime. And so you resign yourself to it and in the end it just fades away.
         "I wish you had stayed," Jina says softly, not looking at him, as if ashamed to even face him. Her thoughts are laid out across her features in block letters, pages from a book she thought she had closed long ago. "It was weird how you . . . how you just . . ." she stops, takes his hand, looks down at it. For some reason he can't stop her. They're all caught in the flow, every single one of them, it's taking them all apart even as they stand there. "How you just left." Her eyes are begging for explanation, an explanation Brown's not prepared to give.
         "I had to leave," Brown says again, as if that explains everything. But he knows it tells her nothing, she can never understand. Both his parents dead, frozen images of shattered photographs. His last memory of his mother is a numbing droning flatline and a body trying to twitch one last time before death, his father a creaking, swinging thing suspended by rope and pulled down by a depression worse than insidious gravity. There are other things, happier things, that he wants desperately to remember, a baseball game in the park drenched in neverending sunlight, nights by the television, everyone sleeping late on the weekends. But they're all swept away, in the end, no matter how much you try to hold onto them. The power of a final moment can stagger you even with the padded distance of years between you.
         "I know, Joe," Jina says finally, lowering her head. Her hand still in his, she starts to walk back toward the apartment door. For no other reason than he can't bear to break the grip, her hand small and warm in his, he goes along. A tether joining them, one of them is anchoring the other but who? And why? As they walk slowly, she starts swinging her hand, a jaunty gesture that's seemingly out of place. But it's not. There's primal beauty here. Just look closer. "I just thought . . ."
         "You thought I'd tell you?" Brown prompts her. Her only answer is a silent nod, still not meeting his gaze. Her vision is focused totally on the ground, one foot in front of the other, doing a little skip once in a while.
         "I thought you'd say goodbye at least," Jina whispers, her hand tightening suddenly, whether from the reflex of buried memory or taut tense emotion, he's not sure. He can't be sure. There are words he can't say, words that lodge in his throat because they aren't the right shape for this place.
         "Oh, Jina," Brown whispers as well, feeling a stabbing pain striking him right behind the eyes. "I couldn't. I'm sorry."
         "Was it that hard, Joe? What were you afraid of?" Her voice has a small quaver to it, she doesn't really want to know the answer but she has to ask the question anyway. Biting her lip, Jina continues to look down at the ground, stepping over a faultline in the sidewalk, her shadow growing longer and then suddenly popping back into the stunted growth from before. An eerie effect to say the least.
         "Jina . . ." and Brown runs a hand through his hair, feeling something open in his mind, a gateway to those bygone years streaming back into his mind. Moments and voices, pictures and memories, sounds and smells and sensations, breaking out of amber, a life that happened to someone else because that Joseph Brown had to die before the new one could spring to life from the blank clay. But you did your job too well, didn't you? No one wanted to forget about you and in the end maybe you hurt them just as much as Tristian wound up doing. "If I . . . if I had tried to say goodbye . . ." he swallows, closing his eyes briefly, trying to keep the past away, trying to fight it back. It'll kill him yet, it'll drag him right down with infernal weight. ". . . do you think I would have been able to leave? Honestly?"
         "I . . ." and Jina just shakes her head after a second. Her nose crinkles a little, as if she's smelled something funky. When she looks up at Brown again, the light is catching her eyes and shimmering, like there's some sort of clear film coating them. "Goddamn Joe," she murmurs, looking down again, scuffling her shoe on the ground in a minor act of frustration, "you take stuff like that and . . . things I've heard a dozen guys say before and you . . ." here she gives a brief smile, pushing some hair back to tuck behind her ear. Brown remembers that motion and seeing it makes something coil up inside his stomach. Memory can never be a perfect substitute for experience but at times like this, when the past is just a step through a glass wall and you can see it as clearly as you can stare into the bottom of a still lake, it comes damn close. Maybe close enough. "You make them sound like you just made them up right now."
         "That's why I had to leave," Brown deadpans. "With a talent like that, I would have had all the guys trying to kill me if I had stuck around." Gently disengaging his hand from hers, he gestures into the night, "Far and wide I had to run," he states, flashing her a grin even as he points his fingers into the direction of the stars. "From country to country, jumping from alias to alias . . . all so I could have the right to use my great gift for good and not for evil." He clasps his hands behind his back, the stance he uses during inspection, ramrod stiff and proper. The cheerfully crazed expression on his face nearly ruins the effect completely. "For God and country, isn't that what they say . . . it was my moral duty."
         Jina stares at him, a half smile curving on her face, as if not sure how to respond to that. Finally she just shakes her head and says, "You are nuts, Joe. Totally crazy. You must drive your sergeants out of their minds."
         I do, except I do it because I'm in charge, Brown thinks wryly but refrains from telling Jina that. "One tries one best," he says, haughtily, pointing his nose into the air. "I've got high standards to live up to."
         "Yeah," Jina replies but her voice seems to hint that her mind is elsewhere. She rubs her nose, as if trying to get feeling back into it, sniffing a little. Then her chest seems to heave, a breath deeply taken. Brown dearly wants to warm her up but he can't do that, it's not his right, he gave it up five years ago when he said goodbye to the world, stepped sideways and was gone. Just a sliver stick in the eye of time. Now only the liquid remnants of the party can heat her up now, staggering motion and people jammed in a space too small. You try to stay cold in that and you'd have to be a corpse. There's just no way. Part of Brown wants to get back to the party, wants to keep renewing friendships and enjoying himself until the night's over and he has to disappear back into his little dimension. In the party there are people who would more easily believe in the existence of fairies and elves than life on outer space. Of time travel. He can't blame them though, it's a slippery set of concepts, nowhere for the mind to grasp. Like this cold winter's night, you have to peer into the blackness until your mind starts resolving shapes but you only have so long before the chill penetrates your bones.
         Brown finds himself wishing that there are more people around, he likes the solitude and everything but this is his home planet, for the love of God, he's been away from it for so long that he can't help but want to take a nosedive right into the belly of humanity. Yet there's no one around, occasionally he hears the stern clanking of a door shutting but he can never see the person performing the activity. There are open windows and lights illuminating those windows and sometimes shadows doing silent theatre in those small screens. The night's soundtrack crackles from a hundred radios dotted with static, coupled with a wind too low pitched to hear except as something in your soul and just the prickling sensation of a thousand beating hearts trying to make time slow down for just one second.
         Brown and Jina glance at each other and something unspoken passes between them. There are more questions in Jina's eyes than she knows how to ask. But the words for them she just doesn't possess, she's just fumbling with the language, trying to get it across like a tourist searching for her lost hotel.
         After a second they start walking again, but Brown keeps his hands clasped behind his back. If Jina notices the distinction this time she makes no mention of it. Brown won't bring it up and he's already starting to feel bad that he came to this party. Just seeing a person can bring back all the wrong memories, like restarting a movie right where you left off, blink and here you are five years later. And if Jina is going through anything like what Brown can feel churning in his stomach, it must be hell for both of them. But it's been too long, you can't recapture something that died premature in the first place. It's just stumbling around in their clumsy ways out here, blindly following walls and trying not to fall through doorways, sometimes finding each other and grabbing hold because you're afraid you might never find someone again. But that's just the party talking, the mentality you wear over your personality like a loose glove, they can wrench the clock back and pretend that nothing has passed, that the intervening years were just some weird dream that happened to someone else but there's no fooling when morning comes, when the party's over.
         "I was at your father's funeral," Jina blurts out suddenly, risking a look at Brown before turning back to staring straight ahead. Brown hears the words like a punch to the side of the head, and he almost stops walking for just a second. For a long shimmering moment her voice is the only sound ruffling the air around them.
         "Oh . . . I didn't . . ." he stammers but there's really nothing else to say. That's nice. Did he look good? What else can you say? He's glad that no one is out here listening to them, they'd probably think that the two of them were rehearsing for some play, all these weird questions plugging up their heads for five years now just spilling out. Something they have no control over.
         "I . . . guess I felt that I should have gone . . ." Jina shrugs, twisting her hands nervously together. He's never seen her look so uncomfortable. "Because . . . you know, I felt bad and you were my friend and we had just . . ." She stops, using both hands to push her hair back from her face. Her cheeks are slightly colored, she obviously doesn't want to be telling him this but some force inside her is pressuring her. The night and the times and the air, all pressing you up against that wall, making you talk, dragging every last secret out of you. A night for revelations, Brown thought to himself before. It's apparently true.
         "Gone out?" Brown prompts her gently, smiling at the memory. His comment to her about going to a movie and not seeing all of it could have applied to him as well. To both of them. He had been quite the youth. "You still didn't have to, though, Jina . . ." he tells her, advice that's five years too late, but fondly given nonetheless. "One date does not a relationship make," he states broadly, as if quoting from some obscure male dating resource guide.
         "I know, I know," she replies, laughing a little, unclasping her hands and letting them swing a bit at her sides. A casual even walk, like the kind the models should be doing when they strut down the runway. "It's just I hadn't . . . seen you and I hadn't gotten a chance to talk to you since, since your father died and I wanted to . . ." she shrugs helplessly. "I really don't know why I wanted to go. Just to see you I guess, tell you I was sorry.
         "But I saw you there . . . and . . ." her pauses are strobes lights into the darkness, memory flashing back to her in bits, a tape unwinding, "you were standing in the . . . the front row and you didn't look sad at all, no, you looked sad but at the same time you . . ." she takes a deep breath, holding it in for a second before exhaling slowly. Like meditation, trying to bring it all back. Make it live again. "You looked content at the same time, like this was the . . . end of something and you were closing the book . . . oh I don't know . . ." she grabs a handful of hair and squeezes, frustration radiating, before finally letting it go, hair and arm falling back at the same speeds. "I don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm not making any sense at all." Her shoulders are slumped with a vague feathery sense of defeat, her hands folding around the air, trying to form shapes where words won't do.
         Throughout the conversation they're still walking. The door's getting closer. The door back to the party, back inside into the other shadow world. Brown knows with abrupt finality that when they step through that door this conversation will be over, relegated to history and a shared memory. He's not sure he wants it to end. He's not sure he can stop the ending. Each step brings them a bit closer, each motion inevitable. Even if he stopped her right here, even if he grabbed Jina and held her back, eventually they'd go through the door. It's not a process he can stop.
         "No . . . I think I know what you mean . . ." Brown tells her, trying hard not to speak quickly, feeling like he's fighting against molasses in the air. Have to get it all out. This isn't a conversation that has a place in a party, it's for two people, two old friends walking along down a dimly lit path. Brown's been walking on the darker portion of the sidewalk and he wonders what his profile must look like to Jina. Half shadowed, blackness eating at the edges of his skin, his face, like any second he might just take one step sideways and vanish back into the darkness. Disappear. But instead of stepping sideways they're always stepping forward. Almost to the stairs now.
         "Do you?" Jina asks and there's a vague hint of sadness in her voice. Brown wants to wipe it away as best he can. But he can't. "Because . . . seeing you like that it . . ." she gives a shaky laugh, unsteady in the otherwise silent air, "I thought I would never see you again, Joe. I really got scared that I'd never see you ever again."
         "I'm sorry, Jina . . ." Brown replies.
         "I tried to find you after the funeral . . ." Jina says suddenly, risking a look at him, as if she might find herself talking only to the air all this time. Her voice is faintly insistent, the frustration five years gone floating back to the surface, nearly truly dealt with. "But you weren't there. You weren't there at all. It was like you just vanished." She stops and takes his arm with both hands. He can feel the chill through his sleeve. They've been out here too long. The cold is numbing them, wearing them down. If he stays out here much longer he might just tell her. Tell her everything. "Joe, where did you go?"
         What can he tell her? That he left right after the funeral because a billion year old robot was waiting to take him to a pocket dimension where he would become effectively immortal and join a military organization based on time travel? Would that make any sense to her? The sad part is, it probably would make a strange sort of sense. She's seen the ghosts that plague Tristian, stood next to one, there are things out there that people can barely comprehend but that doesn't mean you can't believe. People can hardly fathom the concept of God and yet there they are every week, calling out prayers and praise. Most people believe in aliens anyway, they want to believe that there's something else out there, that when they stare out at the stars the stars are staring back.
         Her eyes are silent pleas. It's all Brown can do to look away and shake his head. Even without looking at her he can feel her presence, her hands on his arm, the gentle pressure, tightening ever so slightly and then loosening, slackening off.
         "I can't, Jina. It's personal. It really is. If there was one person I would tell, it'd be you, but I can't. I just can't." Only silence answers his reply and he half expects to turn and find the door slamming shut, the same it way it did for Carl before. Nobody there.
         But she's still there. Their walk has taken them to the bottom of the steps now. Just a few feet up and through the door and it's all over. Her expression occupies a space somewhere between resignation and resolution, and after holding his stare for a just a second she blinks and looks down, as if embarrassed to have even broached the subject.
         "It's okay," she murmurs. "I understand." Brown's not sure if she does. She probably think he's not worthy of her trust or some nonsense like that, when that's not the problem at all. Brown knows he's making the right decision, in this time when Tristian's demons are all too close to them, when the mention of the incident can still cause visible flinching as if from something hot and sharp, he can't throw another boulder into a lake already overflowing. That would be the crime, then and he could only blame himself.
         Jina's going up the steps now and Brown very much wants to stop her. Words are caught in his throat still, if he wanted to even say something it could only be through gestures, an outstretched arm, a wordless gasp. But there's nothing he can say to halt the progress, the process, time moves on regardless. This must be how it feels, Brown thinks, this racing, this desperate attempt to get all your thoughts out, like living with a ticking clock right behind your ear. This must be what they feel like all the time.
         And it's exhilarating. He's following her up the steps, feeling the crush of time pushing down on them, steering them in directions that can only be described as forward. Without that sense, without that desperate fighting for one more second, nothing would ever get said, nothing would ever get done. It's when people think they have all the time in the world they start to let things slide, a word that could be said today relegated to the next day. And then the next. Because the road looks forever in the distance and you've no reason to press. But the door's right there and it's the end of the line and if that trembling moment of wanting time to stop made you say all those things that wouldn't normally say, well maybe then mortality's a good thing. If it keeps people honest with each other, then you really can't complain, in the end, can you? Can you really?
         Brown isn't in any position to say anymore. Mortality's a distant cousin that only visits relatives every once in a while, never having the nerve to show up at his door and stop and have tea. The nerve, you say. The utter nerve.
         She's so silent as she climbs the stairs. Brown very much wants her to say something. It's like he's going to lose her when she walks through the door, like all his memories are going to drain out of his head and none of the last half hour will have ever happened.
         "I'm really glad that you came tonight, Joe . . ." she's saying, not even turning around to face him. He can only go by the sound of her voice, the rise and fall of her words. "Whatever your reasons were." There's a hint of a joke, a bright smile. When all else is said, she's happy. Brown can't hope for anything more than that. She stops at the top of the stairs, one hand on the railing, palm firmly planted at the peak. "Because I really did . . . I really never thought I'd see you again . . ." her shoulders shrug and then slump again.
         As she's speaking he continues to climb the stairs, until he's right behind her, almost towering over her. She's so small, not short, but he can't stand there and not feel a little protective. High school is the sliver in your eye that you can't ever get rid of, its effects radiate throughout your body, throughout your life.
         Her head is bowed a little now, maybe she's trembling a bit but he can't bring himself to do anything. He wants to turn her around and hold her, wants to do anything but just stand there. His head is near her shoulder, he wants to get a look at her face. Her hair is covering the side of her head and for some reason Brown finds his fingers tracing it gently, pushing it back. She's got a ghostly smile crossing her face. Slowly her hand comes up to touch his. Neither of them move for a long time.
         "I think . . ." Jina says slowly, turning toward him slowly, it's all slow motion now, just reflections and refractions of past events. Nothing's original but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it the second or third time. "I think that the worst thing about you . . . you know, when you left was that I never got to say goodbye . . ."
         "I wish I could have done it differently . . ." Brown tells her, tries to tell her but he can't explain it, maybe in the end there was no excuse. Maybe he was just still some punk kid who thought he was knew what he was doing, leaving his entire life behind but not slashing the strings . . . or even worse burning them so that the fire went back to the people he cared about the most and burned them. And they can still feel the blistering heat years later. His presence ignites it, dry wood crackling to flaming life. In this night it flares like a beacon, there are stars out there where the only light we ever see from them is the burning embers of their death throes and the heat fills your chest to the point where you can't speak anymore.
         So they don't.
         Life draws the cables tighter and Brown finds himself moving toward Jina even as she's moving toward him. Or maybe neither of them are moving, maybe it's just the ground, the slithery fingers of the night and the cold pushing them closer. Her face is the only thing he can see and even then he can't see that because his eyes are closed and he sees hers close at the same time.
         Contact.
         Without knowing why, without wanting a reason other than there's a longing that can only be measured by the strength of a clasped hand, of a locked gaze, of bodies standing close enough that the barest breeze of a touch is enough to trigger feelings that you can't explain or want or deny. It's a feeling of throwing yourself across the gap, knowing that you're going to fall but that someone will be meeting you halfway and that makes the fall all the better. Wind whistling through your lungs, through your ears and you can't stop laughing.
         Of a kiss, five years lost, found against a backdrop of darkest night. Stranded in the cold, searching for warmth, finding a friend and holding tight and never letting go. For that brief span of time, you can't let go, even if you wanted to.
         When Brown finally finds the strength and will to pull away, he finds he has to stagger back a step, the world seeming too constricted, the world swimming around him. His heart is hammering out a melody in his chest and he might just drop dead right here. Right here, you understand. And his heart will heal itself and start beating and it'll be the same song again.
         His back touches the wall and he braces himself. Jina's staring at him, her face not exactly smiling but her eyes are shining all the same.
         She takes a few steps toward him and places her hand on the doorknob. "That was the goodbye I never got a chance to give you," she says softly, taking his hand and squeezing it affectionately.
         Brown just stares at her hand, soft in his. "Then we're even now I guess," he replies with a small smile, not looking directly at her.
         "You could say so."
         "All the debts paid off, hm?" Brown jokes with her but there's a seriousness to his underlying tone at the same time. He squeezes her hand back, wondering when he'll finally have the courage to let go.
         "About time, right?" Her voice is equally jocular but there's a thin slick sadness in there as well. There won't ever be a repeat of this, both of them know that. That time was five years ago and five years gone. It's been too long, too much and they could only ever recapture it by fooling themselves, by pretending that it was some other time and this was some other place. You can't do that to someone. It's not fair. To either of them.
         Brown knows this and even as he's standing there, he can sense Jina realizing the same thing. "Good," he finally says, nodding his hand, still not looking directly at her. "That's real good."
         A long pause. A car whistles down a lonely road, its destination reduced to nothing more than a sound clip and a brief glimpse of a hunched steering figure.
         Jina gives a sort of sigh and says, "It's cold out there, I think I'm going back inside."
         "Yeah, you'll catch your death out here, girl . . . you'd better go . . ." Brown says, smiling a little, staring at her hand. He doesn't want to see her face. He just wants to remember how it feels, how all of this feels. He wants to carry it with him forever.
         "Are you coming?"
         "In a little bit," he answers her simply. "Where they station me, it's really warm most of the time . . . I don't get to feel winter most of the time . . ." he props one leg up against the wall. "I think I'll enjoy it out here a bit."
         "Don't stay out here all night, though. Okay?" Her voice is teasing, motherly. Her hand squeezes his once more, and then is withdrawn. Its absence leaves a cold spot on his palm.
         "Sure thing . . . Jina . . ." he says, staring down at the ground, at his knee even as his peripheral vision shows the shadow of the door opening, batters his ears with the faint drumbeats of a band trapped behind wooden walls and stereo speakers and then the cut off finality of the door slamming shut. He thinks he hears her light, fast footsteps ascending the stairs but he can't be sure. He probably hears nothing at all.
         Brown just stares at his hand for a long time, still imagining he can feel a pressure there, a lingering ghost that curls around him like perfume escaped from a cracked bottle. He wishes he could inhale it all, carry it inside him but that's not the way the world works. Memory is your luggage and your burden, it's all you can carry and not a pound more.
         "I think I'll enjoy it . . ." Brown mutters to himself, taking a deep breath and feeling it rattle inside his lungs. He holds it in, still staring at his hand. Slowly, he closes his hand into a loose fist, trying to keep it all from escaping.
         With a jagged motion, he brings the fist up to his chest, letting it rest there. Brown stares up finally, at parking lot with its empty and silent cars, at the road with its lone travellers, at the parking lots beyond with their lights stabbing the night with knotted holes and finally at the stars themselves, the original lights, the original holes in the darkness.
         Letting that breath out, he feels his hand sink down with the rest of his chest. In that breath he can feel more than hear words escape. There's a smile lighting up the inside of his head and a tingling on his lips that he's just starting to notice now.
         "Ah hell," he says finally, bowing his head and laughing a little, air ripping through tightly compressed lips. For some reason he's finding all of this funny. His chest jumps with the sound and the motion. The ghost pressure is already fading from his hand.
         "God damn and hell . . ." he whispers tersely, his hand unfolding and his eyes briefly and tightly closing, as if trying to block the whole world and just focus on one moment.
         He wants to shout something to world, but he finds that's he's said all he really wants to on the subject. There's nothing more he can add that would make any sort of difference.
         And when all is said and done, it's the way he prefers it.