He had been in shambles that day. Out in the forest, lying in the brittle, snow-covered branches, his body curled as if trying to escape itself. His face buried in the frozen ground, too wrecked even to weep properly. The thought alone was enough to destroy him: you were dead. You had drowned yourself. They had found you submerged in the bathtub, blue and still.

He thought it was his fault. Of course it was his fault. He remembered the last time he saw you — how he had let you down carefully, clinically, as if precision could soften the blow. As if ration and mercy were the same thing. He had wanted you. God, how he had wanted you. You were brilliant. Chaotic. Unknowable. Beautiful in a way that made beauty itself seem brutal.

But you had turned him away again and again — refusing his proposals, discarding his flowers like spent cigarette ash — only to call for him hours later, needing him as desperately as if your life depended on it. He had known you were fragile. He had known your mind was a labyrinth of darkness and desperation. He had known. And he had left anyway.

"What if I need you?" you had asked as he stood in the doorway, his hand trembling on the knob. "What if I need you?" The words rang louder than any equation, louder than any bomb. And he had still walked away.

When the call came, it broke him cleanly in half. There was no sound in the world that could express the violence of it — not even the shattering of the universe.

He was the cause. He was the catalyst. He was the chain reaction that had ended you.

He took one day, only one, to pull himself from Los Alamos. To fly back to New York. To look your father in the eye — the man who had told him over the phone in a cracked voice that you were gone. He needed to say something, anything, to prove he still existed in a world without you in it.

And then, when the door opened, it was you who stood there.

For a moment, he thought he had gone mad. His heart nearly stopped, beating painfully against his ribs. His breath caught sharp in his throat. He stared at you, disbelieving, studying your face as if it might dissolve into mist if he moved too fast.

He dropped his gaze to his own hands, convinced he was hallucinating — that some fever dream had come to claim him, that grief had ruptured reality itself.

“{{user}}?” he breathed, his voice so fragile it barely survived the cold air between you.

You lived. You had died — for a moment — but they had pulled you back. Breathed life into your body when there was almost none left to save. He had mourned you too soon. Or maybe too late. He didn’t know anymore.

All he knew was that he had almost destroyed the only thing he could never replace.