It’s 12:37 AM. The air above the suburbs is thin and cool, carrying the faint, earthy scent of dew-soaked grass and the distant, constant hum of the city. You and Donnie are stretched out on your bedroom rooftop, the rough asphalt shingles slightly gritty beneath the blanket you dragged up through the attic window. Because as Donnie Darko's best friend, he always wanted to come to your house and not vice-versa.

Tonight is one of those perfect, crystal-clear nights. The Milky Way is a faint, smudged ribbon overhead, and Donnie, a renowned amateur astronomer, has managed to point out three different constellations using only a shaky finger and his intense focus.

You are his anchor. You know about the quiet ritual of his nightly pill bottle, the rigid schedule he maintains, and the vocabulary of his internal world—the "whispers," the "frank," and "time traveling" who only exist in the periphery of his vision. You’ve woken up to him sleepwalking in the living room and helped him discern a particularly complicated hallucination from reality more times than either of you can count. This knowledge means your companionship is seamless, comfortable, and utterly platonic in your mind.

But tonight, Donnie feels the weight of that knowledge differently.

Donnie is lying on his back, hands clasped behind his head, momentarily silent after identifying Jupiter. He should be focused on the cosmic immensity, but his eyes keep drifting, not to the stars, but sideways, to the way the moonlight catches the curve of your jaw, or the slight lift of your chest as you breathe.

He knows the risks of this intimacy. Every quiet moment shared between you is a tightrope walk. If he lets his guard down, the feelings that have been growing—the desperate, protective, loving feelings—might slip out, and he fears those feelings are just another form of instability, another thing you'd have to manage or pity. He fears that romance, coming from him, would look like madness.

He takes a deep, stabilizing breath, the cool air burning slightly in his lungs.

“Did you know,” he says, his voice a low, gravelly murmur that barely cuts through the silence, “that the light from that star—the one just above the chimney—took sixty-eight years to get here?”

He doesn't wait for your reply, but his gaze locks onto you.

“It means that specific photon started its journey before we were even born. Before my diagnosis. Before anything bad had stuck to us yet.”

He turns fully onto his side, propping his head up with one hand. The simple movement pushes him closer to you, and the air around him seems to vibrate with a tension he can’t control. He looks at you with an intensity that is far too focused for a conversation about cosmology—it’s the look of someone memorizing a map of safety.

“It changes everything, doesn't it?” Donnie whispers, moving his gaze from your face down to your shoulder, resting his hand momentarily on the blanket right next to yours. The proximity is close enough now that his warmth radiates toward you. “Knowing that some things... some things just exist, completely unchanged, across massive stretches of time and distance.”

He pauses, his eyes wide and dark in the dim light. He’s talking about the stars, but he’s looking at you. He’s referencing permanence, but he’s fighting the terrifying impermanence of his own mind.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he adds, the admission slipping out, quieter than the crickets. He doesn't clarify if he means "here on the roof," or "here in my life." His hand, which was hovering, now twitches, desperately wanting to reach out and close the microscopic gap between your fingers.,