There's a shadow by his shoulder. Rush snaps back into himself with a surge of adrenaline as though someone had let off a firecracker in his ear.
He'd been standing, feeling the hot alien breeze whisper past among the dust and the stones. Driven out of his office by the crush of chattering idiots, the bastards who couldn't tell they lived only in a half-world now, the glory of it sucked out into emptiness, he had come outside, where it did not hurt so much to be half-dead. He had hoped for solitude, to put down for a moment the brave face, ease the grip that held him together and be for a while the broken thing that he was.
But Young is here.
The man came too quietly and is now standing too close, one knee bent, his arms spread wide on the balustrade as he looks down on the moonscape of Icarus as if he owns it.
They say he's a broken thing too. That he turned down command of this mission because he didn't have it in him any more to care about the great mysteries of the universe. That he's seen too many terrible things out there, fighting among the stars. That he's lived through too much pain, and now he only wants to go home.
If it's true, then Rush frankly finds it contemptible. But he doesn't believe it's true.
Right from the first day, when he had been dumped here among all these airmen with their buzz cuts and their parade rest and their identical fatigues, so uniform they had to have their names written on their chests so you could tell them apart, there had been something wrong about Young. Something that stood out. At that first formal handshake, when he didn't know the man from Adam, Rush had felt a jolt of warning travel down his arm and take up residence in his bones.
He's been watching ever since, working to figure out what his instincts are trying to tell him. And yes, there must be something here to fear. Something more than the beaten-down, faintly ironic calm that Young projects for all he's worth.
If there had been nothing, Rush would not have been so conscious of the man's presence next to him, would not have startled out of his reverie as if he was waking up, with his heart pounding and his skin tight, would not be watching out of the corner of his eye, fascinated and wary as he would be if there was a wasp in the room. A present threat, a predator.
"Evening," says Young, in what purports to be a pleasant tone, leaning his weight onto his forearms and turning to face the sunset, pretending that he hadn't been watching either.
He had been, Rush knows it. Rush is always looking up to find himself under Young's scrutiny – that level, implacable gaze that makes his hands damp and the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It itches, it itches like heat rash under his skin that he doesn't know what it means, doesn't know what he's done to deserve it.
"Spying on me again, Colonel? I'm doing nothing more sinister than taking the air, I assure you."
Young straightens up, turns to look at him. There's a great boiling of topaz clouds behind him, lit by the sinking sun and in that radiance his hazel eyes, which so often look dark as Rush's own, are golden as the eyes of a lion.
Rush thinks he's stepping back, is astonished to find himself moving forward instead, closing the distance between them, swept over by something he hesitates to call fear - something closer to the thrill of discovery. Is he finally going to find out what this is all about? His fingers twitch by his side as if to reach out and grasp the truth, pull it out of the other man's skin.
Young is scarcely taller than him, but he's twice the width. He's got more muscle in his forearms than Rush has in his legs, and he knows how to use it. Rush has seen him pick up a disobedient marine and hold him against the wall with his feet kicking for long enough to deliver a disappointed tirade. It's almost certain that if Rush fought him he'd lose. But he thinks that if he could just wrestle an answer out of him – some kind of explanation or relief for this ever-present over-active tension between them, then it would be worth it.
But Young is already backing off, so fast it might be called a recoil. His craggy face is closed down over something. Disapproval? Disappointment? "It's not your sunset, Rush. I'm allowed to watch it too. But you want to be alone? I get it. Fine."
He's walking away, and Rush wants to grab him, hold him in place, demand to know what the fuck caused that reaction. There's a kinesthesic rush through his fingers as he imagines curling them into the waistband of Young's black dress pants, right there where the hollow of his spine makes such a convenient hand-hold. The warm strength of Young's back would press against his knuckles and...
And the imagining cuts off, baffled. And then what? He can't think that Young would take kindly to being manhandled. He can't think they would talk, beyond flat denials and accusations of paranoia. There would just be shouting and shaking and feeling like he was going mad, because he was obviously missing something huge, and no amount of digging through personnel records and interviewing the man's friends ever seemed to uncover what it was.
No. He looked back out over the spectacular view, keeping the balcony to himself for the moment, out of some bloodyminded instinct to protect his own territory. No, talking won't do. His instincts – his jumping blood and speeding breaths, his hyperawareness of Young's presence and movements – have him more and more convinced that Young is simply dangerous.
How remains to be seen. Maybe he's a Lucian Alliance mole. Maybe he's just unhinged and needs a close eye kept on him in case he goes on a rampage. At any rate, if he's as irrational as he appears he should not be permitted to continue in any job that involves supervising the kind of firepower he currently has at his command.
Young is dangerous and Rush needs to stop him. The strange connection between them might well be as simple as that.
He smiles at the setting sun, as its last rays fill the valley with lines of molten gold. Gloria took everything with her when she left – love and peace, music and beauty, contentment and kindness - everything but curiosity and the drive to understand.
There is nothing left to him but the puzzles. But he will figure Young out if it kills him. At least, when he is around the man, scraped and irritated by his overweening presence, choking with frustration and the need to shake Young until something finally happens, he doesn't feel so much like a ghost. If he wasn't quite so suspicious of the man, he might almost be grateful for that.