Note: This is a sequel to Rainbow Ride and House of Stone, sort of. I reserve the right in the future to decide that it never happened.

"Love alters not with his brief hours or weeks,
But bears it out, even to the crack of doom."
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

A young man about twenty years of age walks down the maglev platform. He is of middling height and tan skin, almond-shaped brown eyes, and a round face, with slick raven hair. He is listening to a recording chip of baroque music and so he does not notice the old man sitting on the bench behind him. He begins to hum along to the music. The old man gets up.

"Harry, you're being awfully quiet tonight. Is something wrong?"

"Um, no."

"Yes there is, I can tell. What is it?" I draped one arm around him chummily, and he started to weep. I was stunned. "Aw, Harry, what is it?"

"Tom - " he choked out. "So kind - so good to me - no one else has ever been like this for me."

I lifted up his face in my hands. All my pretense and "tough guy" airs were washed away. "Harry, nobody's ever trusted me like you do. You're my best friend, you know that. I'll always be here for you."

"You mean it?"

"Of course."

"Tom, it's - it's - I love you."

There is a god. All this time I had been following him. In one last, internalized trope of a relationship, I had gone with B'Elanna, trying to ignore my deep, romantic love for my best friend. It didn't work out, and now I knew that he had felt the same way about me all along. So much time had been wasted and there was still so much to do. But we had time, didn't we? All the time in the world.

I picked up his face in my hands and kissed him, gently. He broke the kiss and sighed just a tiny, tiny little bit. I embraced him and he embraced me back. We kissed deeply for a long moment. We stood up; he had to leave. He promised he'd be back after his shift the next day. We kissed again to seal our fate together.

The doors swished shut on his departing form, and he turned and gave me a smile which looked like spring. I sat down heavily.

The old man walks straight towards the younger man, falters, and stops. What does he want? He starts to speak. The young man turns off the speakers. "I don't know if ... that is..."

The next day he came to my quarters, and we kissed in the doorway. As kisses go, it was average, I guess; but it was deep and passionate, and ours. He clasped me in a powerful embrace that I hadn't imagined coming from the young man. But I returned it, just as warmly. We staggered four-leggedly to the bed and collapsed onto it. In concert, we pulled off each other's uniform shirt and reveled in the feeling of the flesh of our chests warm together. And then we were one.

The old man looks down. "...if you could please, um..."

The young man looks at him, expectantly.

Our relationship blossomed. We endured the falling-in-love jokes which always spread like tribbles around any couple on a 'fleet ship. One day, B'Elanna was getting a little too personal in Holodeck 2, insisting that I tell her what being with Harry was like. In vivid detail. I never even saw him sneak up behind her until the bucket of water splashed down on her head. We beat a hysterically- giggling retreat. The only thing madder than a wet hen is a wet half-Klingon. That cemented us together in the minds of the crew. And B'Elanna saw the humour in it. Eventually.

"...stop whistling that tune?" The young man looks up, astonished by the importunacy of the request.

One night, we sat down together in our quarters - our quarters. Harry decided to practice the clarinet, and I draped an arm over him and held him close as he played T'shiva's setting of the melody line of Pachelbel's Canon in D. I had told him it had been my favourite piece of classical music since I had been a little boy. My music on a headset in my room was my escape from my father. He would storm; I would run up to my room and play baroque music on my headphones. Purcell, Bach, Pachelbel, Mouret, Vivaldi - the eight-hundred year old names before the advent of flight were my flights of imagination. They took me up, away from the house, with their soaring variations and sweeping scales. They were my first flight experience.

Now I was lying with my head on my lover's lap, listening to him play Pachelbel's Canon in D. The comm broke the music right in the middle of one of the great crescendoes which are the most famous aspect of the canon. Then the sirens began. He dropped his clarinet on the sofa and raced to the bridge with me.

The armada had come out of nowhere and overwhelmed our shields. After we punched holes in a few of them, they drove off - we sustained only minor damage. Part of that minor damage was the explosion of the Ops console. ...plasma burns ...EM shock ...defibrilation ...we're losing him ...neural stimulator ...death occurred at zero four twenty one hours.

The young man is astonished to see tears welling up around the old man's eyes. He murmurs polite assent, tears his eyes away, and strides quickly out of the station. The old man sits down heavily on a bench.

"Captain, Ensign Paris has locked himself in his quarters. I'm reading ... Captain! Sudden fluctuation in life-signs! His life signs are fading fast!"

"Beam him directly to sickbay!"

The old man looks at the scars on his wrists. His hot tears begin to fall, scalding the skin with their brine. He begins to shake, and moans quietly, then drops his head, white with a touch of fading red- gold, into his hands and begins to weep in earnest. The young man has long since left the station. He walks quickly along Market Street until he reaches his apartment block. He keys in his access code, and the door swishes open. He rides the lift up to his apartment, where his boyfriend is waiting for him. They kiss.

"Hi, sweetie," says the young man with flaming hair. "How was your day?"

"Well, Tom," he replies, "a strange thing happened to me at the maglev station..."

end