It was somewhere near Powderhall in that dark slip between tonight and tomorrow, the kind of hour that feels peeled out of the world’s ribcage, raw and stinging, and I was cutting through the dead-end stretch behind the old sheds when I saw Jamie standing there like he’d stepped straight out of a half-rotted memory, thin as a shadow stretched too far, and his shoulders jittered in that restless fox-twitch way he always had even when we were kids bunking class, throwing stones, daring the world to break us before we broke it, and I felt that old mixed ache flicker up—love and fear and something sour-sweet in between—because Jamie at thirteen had been a storm in human shape, and Jamie now looked like the storm had burned through him and left only the lightning scars.

     The streetlamp above him flickered as if trying to remember how to be alive, and the light came down in stutter-beats across his face, making him look older then younger then older again, a kind of time-lapse ghost lodged in a living body, and he grinned that crooked Jamie grin, all teeth and tremble, and said something that sounded like “aye lad, long time, eh?” but then the words dissolved into a soft slurry of half-formed syllables—longtide, ladtime, aye-yeh, aye-yin—as if his mouth was attempting to speak in two dialects at once, one belonging to Jamie the boy, the other to whatever he’d become since.

     We’d always loved him for that wild spark, that dangerous magnetism that made him seem older, wiser, immortal, but feared him too because he could flip moods like a coin, and no one knew which side it would land on: laughing or violent, sweet or razorblade, myth or menace, and seeing him again, years later, with that shaking jaw and too-bright stare, I felt the same electric uncertainty fire up in my stomach like an old machine reluctantly switching on after years of dust.

     He asked me for nothing—didn’t beg, didn’t flinch, didn’t angle for money or mercy—just stood there with that bizarre sidelong tilt of the head, like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear, some deep under-road murmur rising from the pipes or the pavement or the marrow of the city itself, and then he said, softly, strangely, “d’ye mind the glass, lad?” and the way he said it—glasslass glissloss—sent a shiver through me because I knew he meant Slateford, thirteen, that day we smashed the cracked windows until the factory nearly sang.

     He laughed then, or tried to, but the sound came out jagged, a scrap-metal chuckle scraping the cold air, and for a moment I swear the building beside us rustled back, and the loose sheet-metal shivered like an old beast stirring in its sleep, and Jamie jerked his head as if listening to it speak—ye hearin’ it too lad? the bang’n clang, the aye-bricht shatterchant?—and maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t, but something in the air felt charged, the way it does before a storm, the way it did when Jamie was thirteen and hadn’t yet fractured into all these trembling pieces.

     He stepped closer, too close, and the smell of him hit me—cold sweat, street-dust, some chemical tang beneath it all—and the fear-love knot cinched tight in my chest because here he was, the boy I’d followed through every reckless game, the boy who once told me “aye lad, the world’s no’ big enough tae scare us,” and now his hands shook like loose wiring sparking at the joints, and his eyes jittered with a frantic light that made it hard to tell if he was looking at me or through me or past me into some other, darker room in his mind.

    “I’m no’… I’m no’ lost, ye ken,” he murmured, but the words tangled, half-swallowed—no’lost nolust no’last—a strange melted mantra that sounded like reassurance and denial and prophecy all at once, and he pressed one knuckle to his temple as if trying to hold something in place before it slipped completely.

     And I wanted to tell him something real, something solid, something brotherlike or lifeline-like, something that might anchor him back into the world where our childhood still existed, but the words clogged in my throat because what do you say to a boy you loved and feared who now moves like a ghost hauled upright by habit, a boy whose name feels too fragile to speak out loud?

     We stood there in the half-light, two scraps of the same old street, and the city murmured around us, pipes sighing, wind teasing loose tin, some unseen drip ticking like a cracked clock counting down, and Jamie whispered—“d’ye mind who we were, lad?”—and there was a flicker of him then, a flash of the thirteen-year-old he’d been, bright and furious and unbreakable, and it hit me so hard I nearly staggered.

     But then it passed, the moment shuttered, and he turned away, one shoulder hitching like he was shrugging off the world, the tremor in his hand catching the streetlamp-glint like a signal flare, and he drifted off into the night with that sideways gait that wasn’t quite a walk, wasn’t quite a stumble, something unclassifiable, a motion inherited from all the wrong roads and all the right hurts.

     I didn’t call after him. I didn’t dare. Just watched him fade into the Powderhall dark, the city swallowing him like a name half-forgotten, half-remembered, half-mine. And for a long moment the silence rang with his voice, lostlost notlost ye ken lad lostnotlost, looping in my chest like a cracked record I was never meant to fix.