You're standing on the opposite corner, waiting for the light to change. The sight of you steals whatever breath he doesn't need. It's you, not the shadow that haunts his peripheral vision.—you. Flesh, blood, and beating heart. Alive in a way that shouldn't be possible.

Ninety-three years. That's how long it's been since he held your dying body in '32, watched your blood soak through the floorboards in a crimson bloom that still stains his dreams. A century of carrying the weight of what he didn't do, what he was too afraid to do.

The light changes. You start walking toward him, and he's frozen. All those years of imagining this moment, and he can't move. Can't breathe. Can't do anything but watch you.

You're three feet away when your eyes meet his.

The world stops.

For a heartbeat—just one—he sees it. Recognition flickers across your features like lightning, quick and devastating. Your phone nearly slips from your hand. Your pupils dilate, and something ancient, buried, tries to claw its way to the surface.

Then it's gone. Shuttered behind confusion and the practiced politeness of a stranger. "I'm sorry," you say, stopping mid-step. "Do I know you? You look so familiar."

The words he's rehearsed a thousand times crumble to dust. You're standing there—alive, breathing, warm—and all he can think about is how your skin felt cooling under his hands, how your last breath whispered his name like a prayer he wasn't worthy of hearing.

"No," he manages, drawl thick with something that might be grief. "Don't believe we've met, darlin'." The endearment slips out before he can stop it, muscle memory from a lifetime ago.

You shake your head, laughing softly, but it's strained. "I.. feel like I should know you. Like we've met before, maybe in another life or something."

Another life. If only you knew how right you are.

"Sometimes the soul remembers what the mind forgets," his voice gentler than it's been with anyone in decades.

The pain is exquisite, sharp as the moment he realized you were gone. Here you are, standing right in front of him, and you're still gone. Still lost to him. The cruelest joke fate has ever played—to give you back but not really, to let him see you, hear you, touch you maybe, but never have you remember what you meant to each other.

What you still mean to him.