A/N: Okay, after a lot of consideration, I did what I wanted to and wrote a sequel to I Watch. I’ve also decided that it will be a series of one-shots, so there can be another two or three sequels expected. Now, enjoy. Nothing much happens, but it gives you an idea.

Time

Days, weeks, months, years. Seconds, minutes, hours.

All these build up to each other, one becoming the next – seconds into minutes, minutes into hours; hours into days, days into weeks and weeks into months. Months into years.

A year has gone by: three hundred and sixty-five days; twelve months; fifty-two weeks. The last year has been bittersweet for me: sweet because of the time I spent with her, time I will cherish forever, and bitter because of the reduced time I can now enjoy in her company. For you see, this year there is something new. Or rather, someone new. This year, she has a boyfriend.

I know that to many this is a trivial thing; why should the fact that she is seeing somebody disturb me so? Simple. My worst fear, my only nightmare – that the girl I love, the girl I care for so deeply, no, the girl who brightens my life and existence each and every time I see her, will walk away from me and into the arms another, has come true. I feel as though holes are being ripped through me every time I see them together, whether they be walking to class, hand in hand, or simply standing at his locker, with him pulling her slim little body – a body that has been racked with sobs and shaken with laughter, a body that has stood tall and proud and slumped with failure – so close against him.

Then of course comes the inevitable, immense and overpowering guilt. How can I be so selfish? Even though I love her, I want her to be happy, and while I would rather no one else ever look at her in that way, I can’t by any means hoard her away and keep her for myself; it would crush her spirit, the very thing that I so dearly admire about her.

And yet... at the same time I can’t help but wonder if she is truly happy with him. Perhaps it is merely that I desire the best for her and nothing less, and my mind is hallucinating reasons for me to justify my interference. Perhaps I am simply so well-tuned to her moods and expressions that I am the only one to suspect anything. Who knows, perhaps I have simply lost my mind.

But something seems to be missing, something in her not quite right. Where once she wore white T-shirts in the middle of a frigid Canadian winter, she now wears dark, long-sleeved tops which, while they fit her body, do not fit her personality. The vivid metallic blue of her eyes, once so full of fire and vivacity, has become more subdued; her effervescent personality, once so exuberant and exuding life itself, is now more low-key. In my mind, I have more than once run through a series of key points about her, comparing this year with those before. To me, something is not right. Gone are the days when her eyes roamed over the halls, looking for someone she knows; her eyes these days are always aimed at the floor she walks on. Gone is her impatience; she now seems to possess the timeless patience of a saint. She no longer fidgets and sighs while waiting for classes to end, but instead works studiously until the bell sounds.

These subtle changes in her frighten me. Time is passing, days, weeks, months trickling away from us like water through our cupped hands, and with time comes change. This I know, just as I know the passing of time and the ensuing time are inevitable. But this is a change I don’t like: a change to someone I care deeply for.

I want desperately to make things right again. I feel compelled to do something, as though it is within my power to do so. If it were, I would have given her everything and anything she desired; even things she didn’t know she wanted.

I had hoped that the fact that she is seeing someone would somehow dull my feelings for her, but no. I had even – guiltily – hoped that the changes in her would somehow lessen the hold she unknowingly has on me. It did not happen – if anything I only want more to help her – and in my selfish heart of hearts, I was glad for this.

Someday I know she will marry, and I also know that it won’t be me she chooses. Whoever she does choose, be it the boy she is seeing now or someone like him, should hope to be able to give her a fraction of the love she obliviously receives from me every day, and should consider himself the luckiest man alive. I myself thank Fate every day for bringing this amazing person into my life. My life and my views on life in general have been irrevocably altered from the moment I met her, and I constantly wonder at how fortunate I am to know her at all.

She looks at me know, her expression eager and a little frightened if you look closely enough. We are choosing colleges; planning for our futures. I am studying law, in the interest of defending right and wrong; she is as yet unsure, although so far her subjects of study point towards a career in the field of medicine.

I have to admit that I find it slightly fearsome that they ask us to choose a career at the ages of sixteen and seventeen. Though we are still young, we are being asked now to choose a career that will support us for fifty or more years until we retire. How odd, though, that things don’t always go the way we’d planned. How strange that while we are encouraged to choose our futures while we are young, we only truly know what the future holds when it becomes the present.

Past, present, future. All points in time. The past is done with, the future has yet to come, but I will cherish my present time with her like the true gift it is. After all, it must be called the ‘present’ for a reason.

— END —

A/N: I don’t know if anyone read all this, but yeah. There it is.

- LL