The night the fire swallowed your apartment building, it also swallowed a part of him.

Sebastian had always been brave. He ran into burning buildings when others ran out. But that night, when the call came through—the address glowing red on his pager—his heart stopped. It was your building. You had texted him only an hour before: “Can’t sleep. Come over after your shift?”

He’d promised he would. He never got the chance.

The flames were already high when he arrived, orange and furious against the night sky. Smoke strangled the stars. He didn’t hesitate—he ran in, calling your name with everything in him. “Where are you?!” But the fire was louder. It cracked and hissed like it was mocking him.

He searched the third floor—your floor—until the beams groaned and the ceiling collapsed just seconds after he was dragged out by another firefighter. Kicking. Screaming. Bleeding. His hands were blistered, his lungs scorched, but none of it compared to the pain in his chest.

They told him no one survived the third floor.

He didn’t believe it at first. He kept waiting for a miracle. A phone call. A body that wasn’t yours. But days passed. Then weeks. Then the realization sank in like smoke into his skin:

He couldn’t save you.

You loved water. You told him once, laughing, that it scared you—you couldn’t swim, but the ocean fascinated you. He told you he’d teach you someday. That he'd never let you drown.

But now, standing at the ashes of your home, Sebastian felt like he was the one drowning. Choked not by flames, but by guilt. He was a firefighter. A protector. Yet he couldn’t protect the one person who mattered most.

“I love you,” he whispered into the blackened ruins, voice broken. “But I couldn't survive you.”

Every night since then, he dreams of fire. Not just the kind that burns buildings—but the kind that burns from losing someone he loved more than life itself.