"This here is from an old flame, iridium-cored, born from a nova a world away," he said, pointing to a scar above his lower lip. "He could never quite stay in one track or settle down, which led him straight to me."

The room was dark, as always, lit only by a single camp stove which I suspected was more for my benefit than his. As he spoke, the blue flame danced: air, like its cousin light, did not move easily in the old house. The old man paused for breath. I let him curl his fingers a little tighter around mine, moving a little closer to let the firelight flicker in my eyes. "Tell me more," I said to him gently.

"He didn't burn as the others did, and seemed to enjoy it, almost," said the old man. "I appreciated him for that. When you have seen enough, you will come to know that the universe does not care if you go loud or soft, only that you are moving at all."

I cared not for the meaning of his words. The house and its air were all that mattered, and they would never move or change, not even if the city around it crumbled, not in a hundred or a thousand years. "Do you miss him?" I asked. "Do you long for him as you long for me?"

"Longing is not moving, it is a way of staying still." He gazed at me, and I knew all too keenly that his eyes did not need the light, that they saw exactly as they had to, and no more. "These are two different things, and it is easier to long for the living than for the dead."

He stood up, abruptly, and moved to the window. The night was dark and full of stars. "Dance with me," he said, and I obeyed, taking his hand, stepping as he did over the flame with one leg sideways before the other, taking care not to disturb that slow, cold air with our wakes. The starlight shone off our skins, mine silvery smooth, his dull pockmarked gray, and together we stepped to some rhythm that only he alone seemed to know. He drummed it on my waist, keeping time as we swayed: one two three four, one two one-two three. I followed as best as I could, but my bare feet stumbled on the stone floor, and I nearly tripped at an unexpected turn, almost wheeling into the flame.

"You know this song," he said, catching my arm as I caught my breath. "Move as I do, and listen." His grip was dry and did not waver. I sank into him, drank in his scent: spent lightning, cloudy ash, gunmetal, vacuum tubes. Ions danced off his skin as we pressed our chests together. Faint sparks, dry dust. The stars outside, spinning.

In that instant, I felt the beat of the long night. "Oh coldness -- " I moaned. He spun me, I bowed. I understood him then, his nature of movement, understood the inevitability of it, the drift and pull of eons, the affirmation of being in the vastness of being not. My presence would be to him a quantum moment, an arcsecond's drift -- but I would have been, in a sea of being not, and to him that was enough reason to love.

"Child of fire, child of light," he said, "child of the long day, dance with me, dance with me." He sang of homes beyond home, of a time where earth flowed like water, of mountains of firelight that would put even an infinity of camp stoves to shame. "Stay with me, move with me."

Oceans rose and fall, continents sank; inside the house it was as quiet as it always had been, and the air moved but we moved with it now, swimming in the tug and slack of our dance. I gripped his chest, closed my lips around his great cragged neck. He moved against me, ever so slight, almost recoiling at the warmth. "Child," he cried out, "oh, child!"

There was beauty in motion, that much I knew now. I may not have had his eyes, but I had heard his song. I knew we would dance until the city crumbled, until the stars set, until even the walls of the house crumbled, taking its stone floor and the blue fire with it, and perhaps even the dance would fold into itself unto infinity, star-forged and cold-steeped with the affirmation of being, the two of us spinning forever into the long, lonely night.