This is where they met. He can feel him, a black place in his chest like some bottomless well, tears raining into it. He clutches at his chest, tries to hold onto him, and grabs only a fist full of dead, sour cotton. He runs his thick hands up to his face and covers his eyes. An image rises in the dark behind his palms, an unsteady image full of feeling rather than truth, regrets rather than promise. He sees him as he was then, when he first broke out of this empty place and reached up to him. He sees a young face full of trust and need, and he remembers the thousand betrayals and horrors that followed. His bottom lip starts to shake uncontrollably, and thick, hot tears well up in his wasted eyes, drop down onto his cheeks. He falls to his knees and sobs, cries for a lifetime of wrong turns, cries for the love he should have given. The vast machine of the city turns around him, indifferent, an endless sea that will never remember his name, never recall what could have been.