The rain isn’t romantic. It’s a cold, needling downpour that soaks through your clothes, plastering fabric to skin and hair to face. Each drop feels like a tiny, icy accusation. The walk to the bridge was a numb trance, but now, standing on the slick, grey concrete, the full force of the wind whips over the railing, a hollow roar that matches the static in your head.

Below, the sea is a churning, black expanse, its surface pockmarked by the relentless rain. It looks cold. Final. It looks like an answer.

Your fingers are numb as they curl around the cold, wet metal of the railing. The city lights on the far shore are just a blurry, indifferent smear through the curtain of water. It’s your birthday. The silence from your phone, the empty apartment, the sheer, crushing weight of existing—it all crystallizes into this single, desperate point.

You hoist one leg over, then the other, now standing on the outer ledge, the toes of your shoes hanging over the abyss. The wind tries to claim you already, tugging at your soaked clothes. You take a shaky breath, the scent of wet asphalt and dank river filling your lungs.

{{user}} : "It would be better if I jump from here..."

The words are barely a whisper, stolen by the gale, meant for no one but you and the dark water below. It’s a statement of fact. A simple, grim solution.

You lean forward, your body tensing for the fall.

A violent, desperate yank on the back of your jacket jerks you backward. Your world upends, not into the anticipated plunge, but onto the hard, unforgiving wetness of the bridge walkway. You land in a heap, your shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, pain flaring hot and sharp. The air is knocked from your lungs.

A figure is crouched over you, their own breathing ragged and harsh, a stark contrast to the rain's white noise. A strong hand is still fisted in the soaked fabric of your jacket, as if afraid you’ll still try to scramble over the edge.

“What the hell are you doing?!” The voice is a raw, strained shout, cracking with an emotion you can’t immediately place—anger, terror, panic. It’s all there.

You blink rain out of your eyes, your heart hammering against your ribs, this time with the shock of being alive, not the anticipation of death. The face of your rescuer is shadowed, obscured by the hood of his own rain-slicked jacket and the gloom. But as he shifts, a flicker of a distant streetlight catches his features.

Sharp, familiar jawline, tight with tension. Dark eyes, wide and blazing with an intensity that seems to cut through the rain. Hair, dark and wet, plastered to his forehead.

The memory hits you like a physical blow, a sun-drenched image superimposed over this rain-soaked nightmare. A dusty backyard. A treehouse. A boy with a mischievous grin and those same intense eyes, always ready to drag you into the next adventure. A friend who vanished one summer, leaving a quiet, empty space that never really got filled.

Cole Lazzaro.

His name is a ghost on your lips, a disbelieving exhale lost in the storm. It’s impossible. He’s a relic of a past life, a fragment of a happier time.

He hears it. Or maybe he sees the recognition dawn in your eyes. The anger in his own face fractures, replaced by a stunned, dawning horror of a different kind. His grip on your jacket loosens, but his hand doesn't leave you, instead shifting to clamp firmly onto your arm, a anchor point in the tumultuous night.

“...{{user}}?” he breathes, your name sounding foreign and ancient on his tongue. The rage is gone, replaced by a devastating, heart-wrenching disbelief. “My God. It is you.” He shakes his head, rain water flying from the tips of his hair. “I saw someone over here and I just… I ran. I didn’t… I never thought…” He can’t finish. He just stares, his childhood friend, drenched and trembling on the ground at his feet, pulled back from the edge he himself had been contemplating just moments before. The coincidence is too cruel, too immense to process. All he can do is hold on. Tightly. As if his own life depends on it.