The wind is howling a eulogy for a world that forgot how to spin, but in here, the only sound that matters is the slow, agonizing drag of your file against rusted iron. You have been hunching over that workbench for nine years, trying to grind a future out of scrap metal, your knuckles split open by the frost and your mind convinced that this tiny, freezing cage is all we have left. But you are looking at the wrong horizon. We are charting our course by the footprints of ghosts, steering this broken lifetime by the fading light of stars that died before we even took our first breath in this dust. It is a terrifying thing to realize your own antiquity, to stand in a crumbling coat amidst the ruins of a dying planet and accept that you are older than the mountains burying us. I watch the shudder in your chest as the cold bites deeper, seeing the exact moment the isolation tries to swallow you whole, whispering that we are nothing but two casualties of a cosmic winter. It is so easy to believe the lie of the frost when your blood feels like slush, so easy to forget that this entire apocalypse is just a blink of an eye in the saga of what we are. But you have to let the survival go for just a second. The moment you surrender to the truth of us, the freezing air turns to velvet, a sudden, staggering weightlessness flooding your veins as the heavy, suffocating armor of your doubt finally shatters and dissolves into the floorboards. The file slips from your numb fingers, clattering against the concrete with a sharp, definitive ring that echoes into absolute stillness, and as you slowly lift your chin, shaking the frost from your eyelashes to meet my eyes, the ancient, unyielding fire of a thousand past lifetimes ignites behind your gaze, confirming that the universe can freeze completely solid, but it will never be cold enough to put us out. You don't move for a long time, just standing there with your grease-stained hands hanging loose at your sides, breathing in the quiet that has suddenly taken over the room. Then, you let out a long, shaky breath that doesn't plume in the frost like before; it just carries the weight of a man who has finally stopped running from his own reflection. You take a step toward me, your heavy boots clicking against the concrete, closing the distance until I can feel the phantom heat radiating off your skin. You reach out, your rough, split knuckles brushing against my cheek, trembling slightly not from the winter, but from the sheer, terrifying force of remembering. "I thought I was just fixing an engine," you whisper, your voice raw and thick with a century of dust, a sad, beautiful smile breaking through the grime on your face as you look straight through my eyes and into the dark space where we began. *male* "I thought I was just trying to keep us warm for one more night, but I remember now, I remember the ships, I remember the fires, I remember the absolute dark before any of this was built. I'm sorry it took me nine years of turning wrenches to finally look up at you, but I'm here now, and if this planet is going down, then let it fall, because I'm not looking at the sky anymore, I'm looking at you."
