You know when you think someone's messed something up, but you really don't want to tell them? That was how I felt walking up to the Smithsonian Institute's Observatory. I'm a geek for everything space-related, and I know that the observatory isn't the telescope a lot of people assume it is. Instead, it's the receiving station for the super-telescopes based out in the middle of the Arizona desert. It's also not accessible to the public.

I smiled a little awkwardly at Joe-Moe as he buzzed at the locked glass door. I was pretty certain we were about to get turned away. I didn't mind missing out too much: I knew I'd be likely to enjoy whatever we ended up doing. What I did mind was the idea of seeing him embarrassed. It's probably my second-biggest secret that I hate seeing people hurt or upset. It's probably the thing I hate most in the world just after getting my heart trampled all over.

Life sucks, hey?

The guy on the other end of the intercom, when he patched through to us, was clearly eating something. It was pretty hard to hear anything other than crackle, munch, "in?"

"Hi," Joe-Moe said. "It's Joseph Moritz. Is that Brandon?"

"Joseph... Oh. Yeah. Come on in."

I glanced at Joe-Moe as the door buzzed.

"Pretty well-connected for a jock."

"Pretty and well-connected," he corrected, and pulled me through the door into a small, very underwhelming lobby that looked about as space-age as my aunt Trish's living-room and which smelled like a student house.

One of the chipboard doors opened and a slim, dark-haired teen-or-something emerged, complete with the most disconcertingly beautiful blue eyes I've ever seen. Despite the side-swept fringe that hung over them and his slightly hunched shoulders and air of uncertainty, I was a little bit awestruck. Where Joe-Moe was gorgeous, this kid was beautiful. 

"Aren't you supposed to be studying?" Joe-Moe asked him, which I admit confused me a little bit.

"I got finished early for the day," the kid said. "And anyway, you can't use Brandon without getting me into the bargain." He glanced at me, a quick, curious look, and then back at Joe-Moe. "I didn't know you were bringing anyone."

"Yes, you did," Joe-Moe retorted. "This is Helena. Helena, my brother, Axel."

"Hi," I said, holding out my hand, still with that sense of awe. It reminded me of meeting the lead singer of a boy band everyone was into when I was thirteen. All I could see was that pretty face and it made me slightly awkward. And when I get awkward, I naturally resort to some kind of joking cruelty towards someone. "Woah, how come you got all the nice-looking genes? Joe-Moe, you need to complain to someone about that."

"I'll see if I can get a refund." Joe-Moe squeezed me around the shoulders while Axel gave me a small smile. 

"Brandon should be finished with his simulation thing in a sec. I'll see, if you're ok to wait."

"No problem," I said, as he vanished through the door again. 

"You're not allowed to fall in love with him instead," Joe-Moe said quietly, without seeming to be concerned at all. "Just so you know."

"But he's so pretty," I murmured, and then kissed him on the lips with a smile. Despite all the awe, and his brother's breath-taking beauty, when it came to sheer sexual magnetism, Joe-Moe might as well have been the only guy within a square kilometre.

Axel reappeared, looking relieved.

"He's all done. Come on in."

As we entered a dim room with an impressive array of screens, I found out where the student kitchen smell was coming from. Scattered around a series of desks were enough take-away food containers and empty drinks cans to have fed most of MIT. 

We also found Brandon, who was alone and apparently oblivious to the chaos. 

He was a tall, really slim red-head in thick glasses. He was hunched over a desktop, typing furiously on a keyboard. It looked like he was coding in Visual Basic, at a glance, but so much more quickly than I was able to that it was embarrassing.

Axel went over to stand behind him, watching him patiently as he worked, and then, eventually, interrupting with a slight brush on his shoulder.

Oh, I thought. So that's why we're allowed to be here. 

Brandon glanced up, saw Axel and gave him a blank look.

"All ok?"

"Yeah," Brandon said, distractedly, and then glanced at Joe-Moe. "Oh. Yeah, sure. I was just - it's fine."

He quit whatever he was doing and swung his chair along the desk to the next machine.As he moved the mouse, suddenly the screens above us sprung to life. 

My stomach actually squeezed at the sight. We were looking at a nebula, a circular, blue and yellow fountain of light blown up on all array to the extent that it looked like I could walk right into it and disappear into the dust clouds.

"Is that the Pegasus Nebula?" I asked, taking an instinctive step towards it and then coming up against the desk and regretting having to stop.

"Ah, yeah," Brandon said, looking at me with what I could see was slight irritation (and I know - I get that reaction a lot.) 

"Wait, are you a star geek too?" Axel asked, unfolding his arms and looking like I'd suddenly become interesting.

"Well, I don't know about geek," I hedged.

"She's a geek," Joe-Moe said.

"You don't even know!" I protested.

"It's not exactly a hidden quality..."

I tried for A Look, but I couldn't help smiling. It probably didn't help that in the blue-green light from the screen, his eyes almost glowed, and the dim room was making me think bedroom kind of thoughts. 

I could see that he was thinking them too, and it was just the sexiest thing. 

"Hey, Brandon," Axel said, leaning over the desk. "Show her the new supercluster."

I actually looked away voluntarily from those green eyes. I couldn't help it. 

"A new one?" 

"Pretty much," Brandon said, trying to sound off-hand but not quite doing it. "Like, this week."

Pegasus' gorgeous rearing head-like clouds vanished as he navigated his way through some complex files. 

"This isn't live," he said. "The images were taken Monday to Tuesday and Wednesday to Thursday."

Something sprung up on his screen, and then in a moment was replicated on the array above him. 

I stared at it, absolutely fixed on the black and gold image. I knew about those clusters. Our own, Virgo, held some eight thousand galaxies, and was within a much larger one named Laniakea, which held hundreds of thousands. 

This was more like the huge supercluster. It had delicate, spreading fingers that must have contained thousands upon thousands of galaxies. It was glorious.

"How far away?" 

"Sixty billion light years, give or take," he said, and he finally seemed to be losing his irritability at my excitement. "It hasn't been named yet, but it's currently numbered 989/934."

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Axel said, and put his arm lightly on Brandon's shoulder. I glanced at Brandon, who seemed oblivious as he zoomed in on the brightest part of the image, which was like the palm of the hand. 

"It is," I agreed, and felt strangely emotional. Here was a place I was guaranteed never to reach in my life-time, brought up onto the screen via a distant telescope waiting patiently in the night-time of an Arizona desert. All, just now, for me. 

I felt Joe-Moe move up to stand behind me, and I reached down and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, accepting, I think, that I was thanking him but unable to look away from it all.

We spent an hour there, flipping through view after view, and after a while, even Joe-Moe started to get enthusiastic about it. I found Axel's enthusiasm as great as mine, but I couldn't warm to Brandon, who seemed detached and condescending about it all, however brilliant he might have been. 

After the hour, he was clearly getting tired of us, and said he wanted to check on the live imaging. 

"What are you looking at?" I asked, not quite willing to enter the real world again. 

Brandon paused for a moment, and then gave a small smile and brought up a new image. 

I squinted at it, in vague recognition. "Is that the Dumbbell Nebula?"

"Close," Brandon said, and gave me a slightly condescending smile. "Only about six thousand light years off. That's Eta Carinae viewed through an enhanced Hubble filter."

I couldn't reach out and touch it, but I could look and look. I'd read so much about this system. It was one of the few systems that was actually changing now: a binary system made up of one superbright star that might have been unstable, and one smaller star that orbited with it every five years. The two of them sat amidst large clouds of dust, and in the nineteenth century had made up the brightest star in the sky.

Since then, they had peaked and started to dim, and long before I was born, they ceased to be visible to the human eye. The fascination everyone had over them was the timescale of these changes. They were happening now, during human lifetimes. And in space, that's a rarity.

"Anything interesting going on?" I asked, watching those two shapes with a strange longing. Despite their huge differences, they'd been bound to each other for millions of years, neither ever making it outside the other one's gravity. In the loneliness of space, they were companionship, somehow.

"Possibly," Brandon said, with that smug smile. "We're looking at their mass. We had the Large Magellan trained on them a few weeks ago and there were indications of an alteration in mass and brightness since our last observation."

"Really?" 

That was more than exciting. It was almost, possibly, a little scary. Because changes meant there might be a supernova. Stars like Eta Carinae burned brightly, but never for long. And if they went supernova, there would be effects we could actually feel. An increase in radiation to the point of harm was unlikely, but not impossible if the supernova kicked out enough energy. I remembered someone saying once that even if the atmosphere absorbed all of the radiation, there would be light enough from them for us to read at night. 

"Looks like it, but we have to check," he said. "That's what I'll be running tonight."

I watched the two of them, trying, absurdly, to spot any signs of change in that beautiful twin star. As a teenager, I'd been excited about the thought of a supernova this close and soon. I'd willed something to happen to these two stars. But now, watching them, I felt nothing but sadness. They were going to blast apart from each other, and one of them probably wasn't going to survive.

Joe-Moe went to squeeze my hand again, picking up on something I think. I squeezed it back, but then I moved away from him with a heavy feeling.

"Thanks so much, Brandon, Axel. We'd better go and get on with boring life."

And I led the way outside.