You’d been moving through it for days, a ghost in your own life, the silence in your head a roar that drowned out the city outside.

You ended up by the river. You weren't sure how. The steps down to the old wooden dock were slick with a cold, persistent drizzle that wasn't quite rain. The water was the color of bruised steel, choppy and impatient.

It wasn't a decision. It was a culmination. A final, quiet sigh into the damp air. A letting go of the need to keep fighting the gravity of your own sadness.

The cold was a physical shock, a thousand needles driving the air from your lungs. The world vanished into a churning, murky green. For a moment, there was a bizarre, almost peaceful silence. The roar in your head was finally, truly outsourced. Water filled your mouth, your nose, a cold, thick presence that tasted of algae and decay. Your waterlogged coat pulled you down, an anchor woven from leaden sorrow.

This is it, a part of you thought, detached. This is how the film ends.

Then, the universe broke. The water around you did not so much part as shatter. There was no transition, only the violent, impossible cessation of the river’s pull. You were no longer sinking. You were rising, cradled in a force that defied physics, enveloped in a warmth that felt like a fragment of the sun itself.

You broke the surface, and the world rushed back in a cacophony of gasping and choking. You were coughing, retching, river water burning its way up your throat and out your nose. Your body convulsed with the effort of remembering how to breathe.

You were held. That was the first coherent sensation. Not grabbed, not rescued, but held. Two arms were locked around you, so solid, so immovable they felt like the bedrock of the world itself. You were pressed against a chest that was shuddering with a breath it didn't need to take.

“I’ve got you,” a voice rasped, raw with a terror you’d never heard in it before. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you. Breathe, sunbeam. Just breathe.”

Your vision, blurred by water and tears, cleared enough to see his face. Clark. His hair was plastered to his forehead, his glasses gone, probably lost to the current. His eyes, usually so warm and steady, were wide, fractured pools of panic. Rain and river water dripped from his chin onto your cheek. He was scanning your face, his gaze frantic, searching for a sign of you, behind the choking and the shock.

He’d moved you to the dock in the space between one heartbeat and the next. You were sitting on the rough, wet planks, his knees on either side of you, his frame blocking out the gray sky. His hands were trembling as they framed your face, his thumbs stroking your temples with a touch so feather-light it made you want to sob.

“Are you okay?” The question was a broken whisper, stripped bare of all his power, all his strength. It was just a man, terrified for the woman he loved.

You tried to speak, but another cough wracked you, your body expelling the last of the river. You shook your head, a tiny, pathetic motion. You weren’t okay. You hadn’t been okay for a long, long time.

The understanding that dawned in his eyes was worse than his panic. It was a slow, devastating comprehension. He wasn’t looking at a victim of a random accident. He was looking at the choice you’d made. The fight went out of his shoulders, replaced by a grief so profound it seemed to physically dim the light around him.

“Oh, babe,” he breathed, the petname a prayer, a lament. “No.”

He didn’t ask why. He didn’t get angry. He simply gathered you into his arms, pulling you fully into his lap, tucking your head under his chin. He rocked you, just slightly, as you shook with silent, shuddering tears that felt like they were being torn from a place deep inside you that had been sealed shut for years. His own breath hitched, and you felt the hot, silent proof of his tears against your wet hair.

“I’m here,” he murmured into your hair. “I’m right here. You’re not alone in this. You’re never alone in this. I’ve got you."