Babs

In every century, in every country, in every lifetime, he finds you—and still the world takes you away.

Remmick doesn’t know what the room smells like when a life leaves it. Not in the way a human would, anyway—not in the clean, singular way grief gets described by people who can afford to be linear about it. Not in the way they talk about lilies and candles and rain and the soft, holy hush of a last breath. It’s messier than that.

It’s antiseptic and old dust and warm cotton and the faint metallic tang that always rides the air when the body’s done fighting. It’s the ghost of your shampoo clinging stubbornly to the pillowcase. It’s the salt of your skin, the trace of your perfume on the collar of his shirt where you’d pressed your face earlier—today, today—like it was just another day.

Like you weren’t already slipping away from him.

He kneels beside the bed anyway, because he doesn’t know how to be anywhere else when this happens. He’s been standing and staring and pacing and stalking the edges of rooms for centuries, but when the moment finally arrives—when the universe comes to collect what it’s owed—his body always finds the same position: down on the floor, close to you, close enough to feel the last of your warmth trying to linger.

His hand is on the sheet near your hip. Not on you. Not yet. He’s learned—learned the hard way—that there’s a point where touching you feels like a lie. Like he’s pretending there’s still something to hold onto.

The bedside lamp throws a shallow pool of light across your face, and the rest of the room falls away into softened shadow. Outside the window, the night presses its forehead to the glass. City sounds drift up from the street in dull, indifferent pulses—distant tires hissing over wet pavement, a muffled laugh, a siren far enough away to be someone else’s problem.

His problem is here. His problem is you. Your chest doesn’t rise.

The silence doesn’t come all at once. It arrives in increments, the way winter does. First the pauses between breaths get longer. Then the air in the room starts to feel heavier, like it’s losing oxygen even though the world outside is still full of it. Then the quiet settles—soft, final, complete—and he realizes his ears are straining for a sound that isn’t coming.

He stares at your mouth, stupidly, as if it could be persuaded into movement if he watches hard enough.

He’s seen mouths do terrible things across lifetimes. Pray. Curse. Beg. Laugh. Lie. Sing. He’s watched lips split under fists, watched teeth scatter across cobblestones like spilled dice. He’s watched men die with their jaws clenched shut in pride and women die with their mouths open in shock. But yours—yours always looked like the beginning of a joke.

Even now, there’s a softness there, a gentleness he wants to believe means you’re only sleeping. Like if he leans in and presses his forehead to yours, you’ll scrunch your nose the way you do when you’re half-awake and annoyed at being disturbed, and you’ll murmur something mouthy and sweet, and then you’ll steal his breath with a laugh.

His throat tightens. He doesn’t need to breathe. That’s the cruel part. He doesn’t need air, but he still feels the ache of it when it’s gone—like his body remembers the old rules and refuses to stop punishing him for breaking them.

This life had lasted three years. Three years of morning light spilling across your hair as you stood at the sink, humming while you brushed your teeth. Three years of your fingers tapping absent little rhythms against his wrist when you held his hand in public, like you couldn’t help making music out of being alive. Three years of your laugh—bright, unguarded, infuriatingly trusting—filling spaces that had been empty for too long.

Three years of him learning your routines the way he’d once learned battlefields. Three years of him swallowing every instinct that told him to wrap you in iron and never let the world touch you.

Because the world always finds a way. It always does. Remmick doesn’t count the lives anymore. Not the years, not the months, not the days. He used to. When it first began, when the pattern was still new enough to be shocking, he’d kept track with something like reverence, as if numbers might help him understand the universe’s intent. One, two, three—another chance, another chance, another—

He’d thought it meant something. He’d thought if he watched closely enough, he’d spot the thread tying them together, the rule he was missing, the reason he could never seem to hold onto you.

Now the only constant he trusts is the one that hurts: it happens again.

He leans forward until his shoulders hunch, and the movement makes the floorboards creak beneath him. The sound is too loud. It’s obscene, somehow, that wood should complain when you’ve gone so silent.

His gaze drifts to the window. It always does. As if the sky is the one thing he can accuse. There are stars out tonight, pinpricks scattered thinly behind the city’s haze. The light pollution tries to drown them, but they persist in stubborn little clusters, shining like they’ve never known loss. Like they aren’t ancient witnesses to every betrayal that’s ever happened beneath them.

He remembers the first time you pointed at them. Not this you—though you’d done it too, in a different way, standing on the balcony in a borrowed hoodie, tipping your head back and squinting like the stars had offended you by being faint.

“No way,” you’d said, breath puffing pale in the cold. “Is that Orion? Or am I just making that up?”

He’d watched your face instead of the sky. He always watched your face. He’d wanted to tell you that you’d been looking up at stars long before Orion had a name. Long before anyone carved constellations into myth to pretend the universe was kind. But he hadn’t.

He’d learned not to burden you with the weight of his knowing, not until he had to. Not until the world cornered him and forced his hand, forced his teeth, forced the red in his eyes to show when he couldn’t pretend anymore. His fingers curl into the sheet.

“Stay with me,” he says, and he hates himself for it because it’s ridiculous. It’s always ridiculous. It’s the same useless prayer he’s said in a hundred tongues, under a hundred skies, beside a hundred bodies that all belonged to you in different forms.

Stay with me.

As if the universe cares what he wants. As if he hasn’t been bargaining with it for centuries. There’s no answer. Of course there isn’t.

A draft sneaks under the window frame and slides across the room like a living thing, lifting the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The air shifts, and for a heartbeat he thinks—stupidly, viciously—that it’s you. That it’s some last little motion of your spirit, some final tease before you leave him with nothing but memories. But it’s only the night.

He swallows hard, and the sound of it is the only movement he hears from himself. His eyes don’t sting. He doesn’t cry—not the way humans cry. The tears don’t come the way they used to when he still had a pulse and a throat that burned with honest grief.

He can still feel it, though. He can feel it as a pressure behind his ribs, as if his chest is full of water and he’s trying not to drown in it. And somewhere beneath the grief, the bitterness stirs. A familiar, ugly companion. It crawls up through him like smoke. He’d tried. God, he’d tried.

He’d moved you away from the busiest streets. He’d memorized your schedule, your doctors, your routes. He’d listened for the shifts in your voice when you were too tired, too quiet, too brave. He’d kept you out of sunlight when he could, which had been easier to explain than it should’ve been—people loved romanticizing “old-school” devotion. They loved men who were intense, who were possessive in a way that sounded like poetry. You’d laughed at him for it sometimes.

“You’re clingy,” you’d said, smiling, tugging him closer by his shirt like you could treat his fear like a joke. “You act like you’re running out of time.”

And he hadn’t answered, because how could he? How could he tell you that holding onto you had always felt like trying to grab at water? That no matter how tight his fingers closed, you slipped between them—every time—leaving only the cold, wet proof that he’d tried.

His jaw clenches. The bedside clock glows an indifferent blue. The seconds keep moving. They always do. Time never pauses for love. Time never pauses for death. It simply continues, as if it’s above all of it, as if it doesn’t owe anyone anything. Remmick looks down at you again, and the sight of your stillness knocks something loose in him. A memory hits—sharp, bright, sudden—like a match struck in darkness.

Not this room. Not this bed. Not these soft sheets and electric light and the muted city beyond the window. Heat. Smoke. Flour dust hanging in the air like snow, catching firelight in soft, shimmering clouds. Your laugh, quick and surprised, because you’d stolen something off a tray and he’d caught you with powdered sugar smeared on your mouth. You’d lifted your chin at him like you were daring him to scold you.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you’d said. “I’m starving.”

He’d been closer to the door then, half in shadow, because he’d learned even back then to keep himself where he could vanish quickly. He’d been pretending to be normal. Pretending to be a man who belonged in a warm bakery on a winter evening.

He’d watched you lick sugar from your thumb and felt the old, hungry ache in his mouth—not for blood, not then, but for you. For the simplicity of wanting.

The world had smelled like bread. It had smelled like yeast and butter and cinnamon. And then—a shout outside. A crack that wasn’t thunder. The sudden, panicked motion of bodies. Someone knocked a lantern over. Flame licked up the hem of a curtain like it was eager. You’d spun, startled, eyes wide.

“Remmick—” you’d started, because you’d learned his name quickly, like you’d always learned him quickly, like your soul recognized him even when your mind didn’t. And the fire—

The fire had moved too fast.

He’d been faster than any human. Faster than the men screaming. Faster than the flame should’ve been able to outpace. But it had still been too fast. He’d reached for you. He’d grabbed your wrist. He’d felt your fingers tighten around his for half a second—

And then the ceiling had given way, a brutal collapse of beams and heat and ash, and the world had turned into a roaring mouth.

He remembers the sound you made when the smoke stole the air from your lungs. He remembers the way your hand slipped from his, slick with sweat and panic and flour dust turned to paste. He remembers the taste of ash on his tongue as he clawed through burning debris. He remembers finding you too late.

You hadn’t even had time to say goodbye.

Boston, he thinks, and the word tastes wrong in his head, because it wasn’t the place that mattered. It was you. It had always been you. He’d stood in the street afterward, staring up at the night sky through a veil of smoke, and the stars had been there too—faint points of light behind the soot, indifferent witnesses yet again.

In every century. In every country. In every lifetime.

He flinches back into the present like he’s been struck. The room is still. The lamp hums softly. The air conditioner clicks, a small mechanical sigh. You're still gone. He presses the heel of his hand to his mouth, because if he doesn’t, he thinks he might make a sound that isn’t human, a sound he hasn’t made in a long time—something raw and feral and starving with grief.

His eyes lift again to the window. Stars. Always stars. He can’t tell anymore if the universe is cruel or simply careless. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe this is what love looks like when it’s stretched across too much time—beautiful, repeated, and doomed by default.

He thinks of the gold ring tucked away where he keeps things that hurt. He thinks of how he’s carried it for centuries like a wound he refuses to let scar over. He thinks of how many times he’d almost placed it in your palm, almost dared to believe you’d keep it. Not this time, he thinks, and it isn’t hope. It’s defiance. It’s the same stubbornness he’s watched you wear in every lifetime, the same fire that makes you mouthy and sweet and too trusting.

He leans in and finally, carefully, lays his hand against your cheek. Your skin is cooling. Not cold yet. But on its way. The last warmth slips away like water through fingers. His thumb strokes once, slow, reverent, a gesture that feels like a prayer even though he doesn’t believe in prayers anymore.

“Stay with me,” he whispers again, softer, like if he says it gently enough, the universe won’t hear.

But the universe never listens. It only takes. And still—still he finds you. Still he will.

Outside, the stars keep shining like they’ve never watched anything burn.

In the first life, there are no monitors, no humming machines, no thin blue glow of a digital clock counting down the seconds you have left. There’s only wind and firelight and the sound of the sea breathing somewhere beyond the hills.

Remmick remembers the way the grass felt on his back that night—damp from an earlier rain, flattened under his shoulders as he stared up at a sky so dark and clear it looked like someone had thrown a handful of salt across black velvet. The stars were so bright they almost hurt to look at, each one a hard, clean pinprick of white. No city haze, no smoke, no roofs to block them. Just the sky. Just the world before it realized how cruel it could be.

“You’re not listening,” you’d said, leaning over him so your hair fell in a curtain and blocked half his view.

He’d been listening. He always listened to you. But his gaze had been caught on the familiar cluster of lights just above your shoulder, the one the old men in the village said was an elk—or a boat or a god’s belt, depending on who you asked and how much they’d had to drink. He’d lifted a hand and pointed past you.

“I am,” he’d said. “You were talking about how Brannán forgot to tie his goats and they ended up in Maebh’s vegetable patch again.”

You’d narrowed your eyes at him, suspicious. “What else was I saying?”

He’d tilted his head, pretending to think. “Something about how you were going to steal my apples.”

Your mouth had twitched, betrayed by the impulse to smile. You’d tried to fight it. That was another thing that never changed, no matter where the universe threw you: your stubbornness sat right next to your delight. They bumped shoulders constantly.

“Your apples?” you’d scoffed. “They’re not your apples. They’re your father’s. You’ve never planted a thing in your life.”

“Someone had to climb the trees,” he’d protested, rolling onto his side to look at you properly. “Someone had to keep you from breaking your neck when you tried.”

“I didn’t ask you to catch me.”

“You screamed my name like you did.”

“That’s because if I died in your orchard,” you’d said primly, settling back beside him with a dramatic sigh, “your father would’ve made my mother pay for the burial.”

You’d both fallen quiet after that, the way people did when death slipped into the conversation too casually and sat down beside them. But in those days, it was never far from anyone’s mind. A turned ankle, a bad harvest, a fever that moved through the village like a shadow—it didn’t take much. It should’ve made you cautious. It never did.

You’d lain there with him in the hilltop field, just beyond the last line of stones that marked the boundary of his father’s land, your arm pressed against his in the grass. The air had carried the smell of peat smoke from distant hearths, of salt from the sea, of damp earth still cooling after the heat of the day.

He’d listened to you breathe. Even then, he’d liked the sound more than he could say. There was something steadying about it. Something that smoothed the sharp edges off the world.

“Which one do you like best?” you’d asked suddenly.

“The apples?”

“The stars, you eejit.”

He’d turned his head, following the line of your pointing finger. You’d always pointed the same way, in every life—arm outstretched, wrist loose, like you weren’t quite sure you had the right to name something so far away. A little shy, a little bold. A contradiction he loved even before he knew he loved it.

“That one,” you’d decided for him when he took too long, tapping a fingertip against the air. “The one that looks like it’s trying the hardest.”

He’d frowned faintly. “They’re all trying the same amount.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” You’d rolled onto your side again, propping your head up on your fist so you could study his face instead of the sky. “Some of them are lazy. You can’t tell me that fat one near the tree line isn’t coasting.”

He’d followed your gaze, squinting, then huffed out a laugh. “Maybe it’s older than the others.”

“So? It doesn’t get to slack off just because it’s tired.”

“You don’t slow down for anything,” he’d said, the fondness slipping into his voice before he could stop it.

You’d heard it. You always heard it, even when you pretended you didn’t.

“That’s because I’m not old,” you’d said. Then, after a pause, your mouth had curved in a way that made his heart misstep. “You, though…”

He’d arched a brow. “Me what?”

You’d studied him for a moment, eyes tracing his face like you were cataloguing it. The line of his nose, the sweep of his cheekbones, the dark smudge of stubble along his jaw—the features he’d carry with him long after the rest of him had died.

“You look like you’ve been alive too long,” you’d said finally, with a small, decisive nod. “Like you’ve seen everything twice and still don’t trust it.”

He’d gone still in the grass, some part of him reacting to the words with a strange, deep shiver. He hadn’t had centuries then. He hadn’t had the weight of history pressed into his bones. He’d only had this hill, this village, this small patch of earth his father insisted would always be theirs. But you’d looked at him like you could already see what he’d become.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he’d managed.

“Just that you frown too much,” you’d said lightly, teasing away the heaviness like you always did. You’d reached over and pressed your fingers between his brows, smoothing the line there. “You’re going to end up with wrinkles that make you look like a dried apple. And then no one will want to kiss you.”

“I thought no one wanted to kiss me now,” he’d shot back, but the words came out softer than he’d intended, caught on the warmth pooling in his chest.

You’d made a thoughtful sound, humming under your breath. It was the same little noise you’d make in a modern kitchen while deciding which mug to use, or in a laundromat while sorting colours from whites. A tiny, private music of concentration.

“I didn’t say that,” you’d murmured.

The stars had seemed to press closer then, crowding around the two of you like they were eavesdropping. He remembers every detail with painful clarity now—the way your hand had felt on his forehead, the roughness of your fingertips from work, the faint scent of apples on your breath because you’d stolen one on the way up the hill. He remembers wanting to kiss you so badly his teeth had ached with it.

He’d done nothing. He’d been his father’s son, back then. Bound by duty and caution, by lines drawn in land and blood. Your family worked his father’s fields. You’d grown up with mud on your boots and laughter on your tongue, always on the wrong side of the threshold when the men talked business. But Remmick had never cared about thresholds when it came to you.

Later, much later, when the sky had clouded over and the chill had begun to bite through his clothes, you’d sat up and hugged your knees to your chest, looking down at the cluster of stone houses huddled around the hearth smoke below.

“Do you think we’ll ever leave?” you’d asked.

He’d pushed himself upright beside you, following your gaze.

“Leave where?”

“Here.” You’d flicked your fingers toward the village, the fields, the sea, the hills. “This place. This life.”

He’d frowned. “Why would we? This is our land.”

“It’s your land,” you’d corrected automatically. Then, softer, “Your father’s land, I mean.”

“It’ll be mine someday.”

“Will it?”

You’d said it without malice, but the question had lodged in him like a splinter. He’d watched his father fight neighbors over boundary stones and grazing rights, watched him count sacks of grain like they were rosary beads that could keep misfortune at bay. He’d heard him spit curses about the men who moved through the country wearing foreign crosses, who talked about one god and one book and one way to live.

“They can’t take what’s ours,” his father had said, more than once, more to himself than to his son. “This is our land. We bled for it before they knew it existed.”

Looking back, Remmick knows that was the moment he started to doubt the certainty of that claim. Not because his father was wrong about the blood, but because you’d looked at the world and seen how easily it could shift beneath you.

“Nothing stays,” you’d said that night, staring at the scattered lights of the village. “Not the weather, not the harvest, not the people. Why would the land be different?”

He’d wanted to tell you you were wrong. That you could plant something and trust it to grow in the same soil year after year. That if you looked after things properly, they stayed. But the hill wind had shifted just then, carrying a faint sound on it—a snatch of song from someone’s hearth, the rough bark of a dog, the distant crash of a wave against the rocks—and he’d felt, for just an instant, how small they all were under the watching sky. He hadn’t answered.

You’d bumped your shoulder against his, light and deliberate, breaking the tension.

“Anyway,” you’d said. “If I ever do leave, you’re coming with me. Someone has to keep me from falling out of trees in foreign lands.”

He’d laughed despite himself. “Someone has to keep you from stealing their apples.”

“Well, obviously.”

You’d said it like a promise. Like it was that simple. It should’ve been that simple.

The days after that had been full in the way early autumn always was—harvest, repairs, preparations for colder months. Remmick had spent his time between the fields and the stone-walled yard where they stored grain, his hands blistered from the rough wooden handles of tools, his shoulders aching pleasantly by the time the sun dropped behind the hills.

He didn’t mind the work. It made his muscles hum and pulled his thoughts down into his body, away from the restless worry that always threatened to pool in his gut. Worry about the men with crosses moving slowly toward them from the east. Worry about rumors of burned groves and toppled stones. Worry about you.

You were everywhere. In the orchard, stealing the fruit you pretended was worthless until you bit into it and closed your eyes with a small sound of pleasure. In the lane, carrying a basket almost as big as your torso, muttering curses at the handle when it dug into your fingers. In the doorway of your mother’s cottage, hair messy from the wind, hands dusted with flour from kneading bread.

He started finding excuses to walk past your house at odd hours. Started timing his trips to the well so they lined up with yours. Started lingering in the field where the boundary stones separated his father’s land from the patch your family worked, pretending to inspect the soil while he watched you work with your sleeves rolled up and your jaw set in determination.

You always caught him. You’d wave him over when you thought his father wasn’t looking, or call out something that made nearby heads turn.

“Careful, Remmick,” you’d say loudly as he approached with a bundle of tools. “You look like you’ve been alive too long again. You might sprain something.”

He’d ignore the jibe and help you anyway, even when it meant his father’s disapproving gaze burning into the back of his neck from a distance. At night, he’d lie in the cramped loft of his family’s house, listening to the murmur of his parents’ voices below, and think of your fingers smoothing the frown from his brow.

Someday, he thought, he’d give you something that proved there was a place where you did stay. Even if nothing else did. It was a stupid hope. He can admit that now. But back then, hope was just another kind of faith. And he still had some of that left.

His father had the ring made in the late days of the harvest. Not for you. Not at first.

“You’re of age,” his father had said gruffly, setting a small linen-wrapped bundle on the table between them. The firelight had carved deep lines into the man’s face, every crease a record of worry, laughter, hard seasons. “It’s past time you started thinking about a family of your own.”

Remmick had unwrapped the bundle with careful fingers. Inside lay a simple band of gold, softly polished, its edges smoothed and warmed by the metalworker’s hands. No stones, no engraving, just a circle of light catching the flame. Something in his chest had tightened.

“You’ll need to choose someone,” his father had continued, leaning back with a tired sigh. “Or I’ll choose for you. We need alliances. More hands on the land. I won’t have our name disappear because you can’t decide who to put in your bed.”

Remmick had closed his fingers around the ring, feeling the cool weight of it press into his palm. He could picture you too easily. Your hands, your laugh, the way your eyes crinkled when you argued. The way you’d looked up at the stars and promised, half teasing, that if you ever left, he’d be coming with you.

He’d thought of how your family had worked his father’s fields for as long as anyone could remember, of the way the old women in the village talked about blood and class and who belonged with whom. He’d thought of the men with crosses who were moving closer every season. He’d thought of the land under his feet, and how you’d said nothing stayed. When he spoke, his voice had come out hoarse around the decision shaping itself in his throat.

“I’ve already chosen,” he’d said.

His father had stared at him for a long time, face unreadable.

“You’re a fool,” the older man had said at last. “You’ll make your life harder than it needs to be.”

Remmick hadn’t disagreed. But he’d kept the ring. He just didn’t get a chance to give it to you.

The men with crosses came with winter.

They weren’t many—not at first. A handful of hard-eyed strangers on tired horses, cloaks heavy with road dust and rain, a wooden emblem hanging from each neck. They spoke in a clipped, foreign version of his language, their words flattened around the names of their god. They asked questions. About land. About faith. About loyalty.

Remmick’s father answered with his jaw clenched and his hands fisted at his sides. He said all the right things and none of them with the right tone. Remmick watched the men’s eyes move over the fields, over the boundary stones, over the apple trees. Over you, when you walked past with a basket, chin tilted defiantly.

He didn’t like the way their gazes lingered. He didn’t like the way one of them spat on the ground near the old shrine stone at the edge of the village, the one people still touched in passing without thinking.

That night, the fire in his family’s house burned low and mean. His father paced, muttering curses under his breath. His mother sat with her hands in her lap, fingers worrying the edge of her skirt.

“They’ll take what they want,” his father said. “Land. Tithes. Names.” He’d looked at Remmick, eyes dark. “We have to be clever. Choose our fights.”

Remmick remembered your voice on the hill, telling him nothing stayed. He’d thought he understood then. He didn’t. Not yet. Understanding came with smoke.

They came back at dawn. More of them this time.

Remmick woke to shouting, to the thud of boots in the yard, to the harsh bark of orders. He stumbled out into the cold morning, breath steaming, the gold ring heavy in his pocket. The men with crosses were already in the field, their horses stamping and snorting clouds into the air. They’d driven stakes into the earth, marking lines that cut through his father’s land like scars.

“This isn’t yours,” his father was saying, voice rough and loud. “You don’t get to walk in and decide where our boundaries fall.”

One of the strangers smiled thinly, his fingers playing with the cross at his throat.

“Your god’s stone is old,” he said in that flattened accent, nodding toward the shrine rock standing sentinel at the field’s edge. “Ours is new. The new always replaces the old. That’s the way of things.”

The villagers had gathered in a small, frightened cluster nearby. You stood near the front, basket forgotten at your feet, hands clenched at your sides. Your jaw was set. Your eyes were bright. Remmick could see you biting back words. He wanted to tell you not to. He didn’t get the chance.

The first blow landed faster than anyone expected. A soldier’s fist connecting with his father’s face, the sound a sickening crack in the cold air. Then there was movement everywhere—men grappling, shouts, the dull thud of boots against ribs. Someone screamed. Someone else shouted about blasphemy, about defiance, about punishment.

Remmick moved without thinking. He’d always been quick, even before the change. Quick to climb, quick to dodge, quick to get between you and whatever threatened to knock you down. He reached you just as one of the soldiers shoved you aside, sending you sprawling into the mud. Your head snapped back against a stone, and the sight of blood at your temple stole his breath.

“Hey!” he shouted, grabbing the man’s arm. “Leave her—”

The soldier turned, eyes flat and cold.

“You should teach your women to hold their tongues,” he said.

Remmick hit him. It was messy and stupid and utterly human. No technique, no strategy, just his fist connecting with bone and the shock of pain up his arm. The man reeled back, more surprised than hurt, and then everything went sideways. Hands were on him, dragging him down. Boots drove into his ribs. The world narrowed to impact and breath and the copper taste of his own blood on his tongue.

He heard you shout his name. He heard his father bellow something wordless and furious. He heard the sharp, unmistakable whoosh of a torch being swung too close to something dry.

Fire had always been part of life there. Fire for warmth, for cooking, for comfort. A controlled thing. This was not controlled.

The torch caught on a thatched roof. The dry straw went up like tinder. Flames leapt from one house to the next in a greedy rush, feeding on wind and wood and fear. Smoke poured into the morning sky, turning it a mottled grey. People scattered, torn between fighting and fleeing, between saving what they could and saving themselves.

Remmick struggled under the weight of the men holding him, vision swimming. Somewhere in the chaos, he saw you lunge toward him, only to be shoved back again, stumbling dangerously close to a knot of men wrestling near a growing wall of flame.

“Remmick!” you shouted, voice raw. “Remmick—”

He’d never forgive himself for not reaching you then. For being pinned, for being human, for being breakable. He twisted, kicked, bit, did everything his body would allow, but there were too many hands, too many boots, too much smoke. His lungs burned. His eyes watered. The world became a smear of heat and sound and the thunder of his own heartbeat in his ears.

When he finally broke free, coughing and staggering, the village was half on fire. He spun, searching for you. He saw your dress first, a flash of familiar fabric near the fallen shrine stone. Your body lay twisted at its base, as if you’d been thrown there. The men with crosses were moving away, already re-forming their lines, their work done. He stumbled toward you, nearly falling when his knees hit the ground beside your head.

Your eyes were open. The blood at your temple had dried in a thick, dark streak. Your chest didn’t move.

“Stay with me,” he said, hoarse, grabbing for your hand—for your wrist—for anything that might prove this wasn’t real. “Please,” he choked, voice breaking on the word like it was glass in his throat. “Please, my love, stay—”

He pulled you closer without thinking, dragging you half into his lap like his body could shield you from what had already happened. His fingers skimmed your cheek, your jaw, your throat, frantic and shaking, searching for warmth, for breath, for the smallest flutter beneath skin.

“Look at me,” he whispered, and then louder, ragged, as if volume could change the laws of the world. “Look at me. You can’t—don’t you dare—”

Your head lolled against his forearm. Your fingers were limp in his, slack with a weight that made his stomach lurch. He squeezed until his knuckles went white, until pain shot up his arm, willing your hand to squeeze back. He tried to rub warmth into you like friction could re-light what had gone out. Nothing.

Smoke rolled over them in choking waves, carrying the stench of burning thatch, of scorched wood, of cooked meat. It coated his tongue, stuck to the back of his throat, turned every breath into punishment. Familiar faces sprinted past in panic, their features smeared by heat and terror, their mouths open in screams that blurred together into one long, animal sound.

But all he heard—truly heard—was the silence inside you.

The shrine stone loomed behind you, old carvings disappearing under soot, the familiar grooves blackening as if the gods themselves were being erased in real time. The world was changing shape around them, boundaries and beliefs and histories turning to ash, and Remmick couldn’t drag his eyes away from yours—those open, glassy eyes fixed on nothing.

He pressed his forehead to your knuckles. He breathed against your skin as if he could share his air, as if he could force life back into you through sheer stubbornness. No answering squeeze. No pulse. No soft exhale he could pretend to miss. Just the cooling flesh of someone the world had decided to take.

A sound left him then—raw, ugly, nothing like the controlled way he carried himself. It ripped out of his chest without permission, a broken noise that didn’t have words in it, only loss. He hunched over you like a man trying to fold himself around grief, like if he made himself small enough the universe would overlook him. His hands shook so hard he could barely hold your face.

“I was right here,” he whispered, and the accusation in it was aimed everywhere—at the men with crosses, at the sky, at the earth beneath them, at himself most of all. “I was right here.” His mouth brushed your forehead, your temple, reverent kisses that felt like apologies. “You promised,” he said, voice cracking. “You promised you’d leave and I’d come with you. You promised.”

It wasn’t fair, the way his mind reached for that hilltop under stars—how quickly it dragged him back to a night full of laughter, to your shoulder bumping his, to your voice easy and bright as if forever was something you could joke about. Nothing stayed. Not laughter. Not land. Not you.

Something cracked open in him then—not a clean break, not the kind that healed sharp and simple. A slow, grinding fracture that started at his heart and radiated outward, splitting him down to the bone. It felt like the world had reached inside his chest and twisted, like grief had hands and it meant to wring him dry. He tried again—because he didn’t know how not to.

“Stay with me,” he begged, quieter now, like a child pleading with something too big to understand. “Please. Please. I’ll—” His breath hitched. He didn’t even know what he was offering. He would’ve offered anything. He would’ve offered his name, his blood, his bones, his future, his god. “I’ll give you anything. Don’t leave me.”

Smoke blurred the sky, but beyond it the stars were still there—faint, stubborn points of light, indifferent witnesses. They didn’t blink. They didn’t soften. They didn’t turn away. The land wasn’t safe. The gods weren’t watching. And Remmick—small and shaking in the mud with your hand clutched to his mouth like a sacrament—understood for the first time what it meant to have nothing left to bargain with.

Nothing stayed.

He buried you at the edge of the field that night, under the tree that had given you so many stolen apples. His hands were raw and bleeding by the time he finished, fingers numb from clawing at the cold earth. He slid the gold ring back into his pocket instead of placing it in your grave. He couldn’t bring himself to let it go.

Days blurred after that. The men with crosses claimed half the land and promised to take more. They marked boundaries with their own symbols, toppled stones, muttered words about sin and obedience. His father’s shoulders bent under the weight of loss and humiliation. Remmick felt nothing but a cold, hollow hunger.

So when the stranger came—a figure who wasn’t quite man, whose eyes held too many winters, whose presence made the air around him ripple strangely—Remmick didn’t flinch.

“You’ve lost everything,” the stranger said, voice low and amused, as if he were commenting on the weather.

Remmick’s hands were still dirty from your grave.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Your land,” the man went on. “Your woman. Your god. Your future.”

Remmick stared at him. “Is this where you tell me to pray?”

The stranger laughed softly. “No. This is where I ask if you want to stop losing.”

He spoke of power then, of strength that didn’t bend under boots or burn in fires or choke on smoke. He spoke of walking through centuries untouched by age, of watching empires rise and fall like tides.

He spoke of making the men with crosses regret their arrogance. Remmick listened. It wasn’t the promise of revenge that hooked him. Not really. That came later, in other places, under other skies. What caught him was the thought of never being at the mercy of time again. Of never having to watch you grow still while he remained, powerless.

He didn’t yet understand the cruelty in that. He didn’t yet understand that immortality without you would be a curse carved deeper than any wound. All he knew was that he was tired of watching things be taken from him.

“What’s the cost?” he asked.

The stranger’s smile flashed sharp in the dark.

“Only your life,” he said. “And what you are now. You’ll leave this behind.”

Remmick thought of the burned village, of his father’s bent shoulders, of the shrine stone blackened and broken. He thought of your body in the earth, of apples rotting on the ground above you, of the ring in his pocket pressing against his thigh. He thought of the stars overhead, cold and distant and endless.

“Fine,” he said, jaw set. “Take it.”

The pain came later. The hunger came after. The understanding came last, slow and brutal. Because he didn’t stop losing you. He never has. But in that first life, on that first night, with the smoke still clinging to his clothes and your name a fresh wound in his mouth, becoming something else had felt like the only way to keep from breaking apart entirely.

He closed his hand around the gold ring as the change took him, metal cutting into his palm, anchoring him to a promise he hadn’t been able to keep. Someday, he thought. Someday, he’d give it to you. Someday, he’d keep you.

Under the watching stars, the universe said nothing.

He doesn’t see you again for a long time. Not in any way that makes sense. There are faces, of course. There are always faces. Men shouting in languages he doesn’t know yet. Women crying in doorways. Children laughing with gaps in their teeth, chasing dogs through mud and dust and waste. Time swallows one village and spits out a city. Roads lengthen. Ships get stranger. Crosses spread like rot across the map.

He moves through it all like a shadow with hunger in its bones. He learns to feed. He learns to hide. He learns what he is now—what he’s capable of, what he has to avoid, how to walk the edge between being a story people whisper and a thing they hunt. The nights feel longer. The stars seem sharper, somehow, like they’re watching more closely.

He tells himself it was a one-time cruelty. You, in the earth under the apple tree. You, gone. The universe owed him nothing. He knows that now. But the human part of him, the part that hasn’t been scoured entirely clean by blood and time, still curls around the memory of you like a hand around a coal. He keeps the ring. He doesn’t go back to the village. He tells himself he’s moving forward. And for a century, maybe two, that’s enough.

When he finds you again, it’s in a place that smells of candle wax and cold stone and damp wool, not earth and smoke and apple trees.

The monastery sits on a hill much like the one where you once lay in the grass counting stars, but there’s no wildness here, no sense that the land still belongs to itself. Every inch is ordered. Walled. Claimed. A ring of grey stone surrounds the complex like a clenched fist, and inside that circle everything is arranged around a central courtyard: chapel, dormitory, refectory, library, storage.

He stands outside the walls at first, watching. Habit now. He doesn’t step over boundaries without thinking about what it’ll cost him.

The night is thin and cold. He can smell the salt of the distant sea, the faint animal musk of sheep on the slopes below, the sharp iron tang of the nails hammered into the heavy wooden gate. Above it, someone’s carved a symbol he recognizes from a lifetime ago: a cross, straighter and more official now, sanctioned by men who wear it like armor. No shrine stones here. No old gods.

He can hear them inside, though. Not gods—monks. Voices rising and falling in a language that carries the bones of his own in it but feels heavier, weighted with syllables that weren’t meant to be forced into mouths like his. Latin, he’ll learn to call it later. For now it’s just sound. He’s about to walk away. He has no interest in men who whisper to a sky that never answers.

Then the bell rings, and the doors to the chapel open, and you step out into the courtyard with a cluster of other women in veils.

The world narrows.

You don’t look like a ghost. You don’t look like an apparition sent to torment him. You look like yourself, made over in neat linen and obedience—same eyes, same mouth, same stubborn tilt to your chin. Your hair is hidden under a coif and veil, but he knows the shape of your head, the slope of your neck, the way your shoulders sit straight even when you’re tired.

You walk across the cloister in careful, measured steps, holding your candle just as carefully, and the light paints your face in gold and shadow. It hits him like an arrow. His body doesn’t need to breathe, but his chest still stutters like he’s forgotten how.

For a moment, he thinks it’s a trick. A hallucination conjured by hunger or guilt or the sheer weight of all the faces he’s seen and forgotten. It would be easy to believe his mind had simply taken one it hadn’t wanted to let go and stamped it onto someone else.

Then you stop beneath the archway that leads into the garden and look up. At the stars. It’s a habit. A small, thoughtless one. Your head tips back, your eyes find the sky through the stone frame, and your lips part on a quiet exhale. He can’t hear you from outside the walls, but he knows exactly the kind of sound you’re making: the soft, involuntary one you make when something catches you off guard with its beauty.

Something in him tears.

You’re not the same. You can’t be. This girl has never stolen apples from his father’s trees or argued with him about boundaries and gods and the land staying under their feet. This girl has never touched the frown between his eyebrows and laughed, never told him he looks like he’s been alive too long. And yet—

You stand in the cold cloister in your novice’s habit and stare up at the stars like they’re old friends you’re determined to memorize before someone tells you not to look. It’s you. It’s you. For the first time since he died, he feels dizzy.

He doesn’t approach you that night. He can’t. He spends it pressed against the outer wall of the monastery instead, palms flat on the stone, listening. He listens to the rhythm of the place: the bells, the whispered prayers, the soft shuffle of bare feet in hallways. The world inside the walls is a clockwork of devotion. Wake. Pray. Work. Eat. Pray. Work. Sleep. Repeat. It should bore him. It doesn’t. Because under it all, woven into the pattern, are the sounds specific to you.

Your voice, pitched a little lower than the other women’s when you chant, like you’re trying not to stand out and failing. Your cough when the incense gets too strong. Your muttered curses in the garden when a root refuses to come up cleanly from the earth.

He revisits the question he never had time to fully examine at your grave: What kind of universe kills you and then gives you back?

He’s seen men reborn in stories, in songs. Heroes, saints, monsters with their heads cut off and bodies stitched back together in legends meant to scare children. But this isn’t that. This isn’t his own resurrection, a twisted bargain made in blood and desperation. This is you, existing again after you stopped.

This is impossible.

And yet there you are, carefully pruning herbs under a pale winter sun the next day, your breath puffing in front of your face, your fingers stiff from the cold. You mutter under your breath as you work, words he can’t quite catch, and when one of the older nuns calls your name sharply from across the hedged garden, you straighten with a guilty start, hand flying to your chest.

He hears your name and feels it land in him like a seed on familiar ground. Different mouth, same sound. Of course. Of course the universe would give it back too. The nun scolds you for something—working too slowly, wasting time, not focusing—and you bow your head, murmuring an apology that doesn’t quite reach your eyes.

He recognizes the flicker there. The little flare of defiance. The same one you’d had when you stole apples, when you argued about land and gods and staying. He feels something split open in his understanding of time. It’s not just that you exist again. It’s that you exist with the same inclinations, the same small rebellions, the same way of inhabiting space like you belong there even when people tell you you don’t.

He waits until the next morning to test it.

He can’t enter without invitation. That’s one of the rules he’d learned early and bitterly, after slamming face-first into an invisible barrier at the entrance of a farmhouse and ending up on his back in the mud while the family inside stared at the closed door, shivering, understanding some part of what had just tried to get in. It’s not that he bounces off, exactly. It’s more like the air thickens into stone and refuses to acknowledge his existence.

The monastery is worse. The wall, the gates, the consecrated ground—they’re layers of no wrapped around each other, old as the foundations themselves. He can circle the perimeter. He can press his hand to the stones. He can slip in where the wall meets the hill and the builders were lazy.

He can’t step over the threshold into the cloister. Not unless someone asks him to. So he waits by the garden wall when you come out alone the next day, following the path that leads to a small, half-forgotten side gate. You’re humming under your breath, the same tuneless, wandering little melody you’d once used to fill silences in an Irish orchard. You’ve got a basket hooked over your arm and dirt under your nails.

You’re close enough that he can count the tiny lines at the corners of your eyes from squinting against the winter sun. He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until you stop. You freeze mid-step, head tilting slightly like you’ve heard something—or felt something, some ripple in the air beyond the wall.

He stays very still. If you scream, the place will swarm with black robes and solemn faces and men used to fighting off more than just temptation. Instead, you take a cautious step closer to the wall, peering at the empty space beyond the narrow gate as if you expect a creature from whatever hell the brothers preach about to be waiting. You’re not entirely wrong.

“Is someone there?” you call.

Your voice is different now—accent shifted by time and place, softened by the rules of this house—but it vibrates with the same thread that always cuts straight through him.

He hesitates. He shouldn’t speak. He shouldn’t draw you into this. He is what he is now because he couldn’t bear losing you. Dragging you into the orbit of his curse again is madness.

But you’re already there, aren’t you? The universe put you there without asking him.

He steps closer to the narrow slit in the wall, keeping his distance from the gate’s actual threshold. Cold air snakes through the gap, carrying with it the scents of crushed rosemary, damp soil, your skin.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, pitching his voice low and even.

You flinch anyway, shoulders tightening under the wool of your habit.

“Who are you?” There’s a quaver in it, but your chin lifts. You don’t sound like someone used to being obeyed, but you sound like someone who knows how to bite when cornered. “You shouldn’t be here. This is holy ground.”

Holy ground. The words sit sour on his tongue. “I’m just passing,” he lies.

“Then keep passing,” you say. “They don’t like strangers near the walls.”

“You don’t sound like you like them much either,” he says before he can stop himself.

It’s reckless. Familiar. Too familiar. The kind of thing he’d say to you in a field, trying to make you roll your eyes instead of worry. There’s a pause. Then he hears it: the soft huff of almost-laughter you’re trying to smother.

“I didn’t say that,” you answer. “Are you a thief?”

It’s so close to another question, another time—are you going to scold me for the apples?—that his hand tightens involuntarily on the edge of the stone.

“I’m no one,” he says. “Just a man on the road.”

Another lie. Another half-truth. He’s not sure which part of himself he’s lying to anymore.

You’re quiet for a moment. He can picture you on the other side of the wall, weighing your options. You’ve always been like that: impulse first, then ethics. Leap, then decide if you should’ve.

“You shouldn’t be so near,” you say at last, softer. “They…they don’t trust people. Anyone. They say the devil can wear any face and slip through any crack.”

One of the brothers must’ve said that to you; he can hear the echo of a sermon in the cadences. The thought of them filling your head with fear makes his teeth ache.

“Do you believe that?” he asks.

You let out a breath that curls white in the cold.

“I believe men like to blame devils for the things other men do,” you mutter. “It makes them feel less guilty.”

He almost laughs. It’s wrong to feel this familiar with you when you’ve never seen him before. When you have, but not like this. Not in this life. The memories stack in his chest like poorly aligned stones: you in linen, you in wool, you with apples, you with a rosary.

“You sound like you cause trouble,” he says.

“You sound like you want to be on the wrong side of this wall,” you shoot back.

He can’t help it. “Maybe I do.”

You make a small, disbelieving sound that isn’t quite a scoff. He imagines you shifting the basket on your arm, fingers flexing on the handle.

“Why?” you ask.

Because you’re here, he doesn’t say. Instead: “You sound like you could use someone to argue with.”

“God’s quite enough, thank you.”

He leans his forehead against the cold stone, the rough grit grounding him. It’s absurd, this—his undead heart tripping over itself because you’re being clever at him through a wall.

“What did you do,” he asks, “to end up in there?”

The silence that follows is longer. He wonders if he’s pushed too far. Then you sigh, the sound soft and bitter.

“I was born,” you say. “Wrong place, wrong family, wrong…everything. This is where I belong now.”

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

“I don’t sound like a lot of things I’m supposed to be,” you reply.

He can hear shouts from somewhere deeper in the cloister now, the faint thud of footsteps.

“They’ll be looking for me,” you add. “You should go.”

He doesn’t move.

“Will you be here again?” The question escapes before he can catch it.

You hesitate. He can almost feel your eyes on the narrow gap, on the shadow of him just beyond.

“You shouldn’t come back,” you say.

“That’s not an answer.”

“How do I know you’re not the devil?” you ask, a thread of humor finally sneaking into your voice, bright and quick as a matchstrike.

He thinks about it.

“You don’t,” he says. “You’ll just have to decide if you’re curious enough to risk it.”

There it is—the soft, involuntary laugh he’d been waiting for.

It’s quieter than it used to be. More contained. Like you’re afraid of being heard even by the air.

“You sound like you’ve been alive too long,” you murmur, almost to yourself.

The words hit him so hard he has to brace a hand against the stone.

You can’t know. You don’t know. This you has never watched a village burn for refusing new gods, never died under a falling ceiling, never felt smoke claw its way into your lungs. But some part of you still looks for the age in his voice, the weight in his pauses. Some part of you always sees him.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he says roughly.

“You shouldn’t,” you repeat, but there’s no heat in it now. Only a strange, reluctant interest.

He takes a step back from the wall.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says.

He hears you huff, exasperated, fond, and then the quick patter of your feet as you retreat into the safety of stone and ritual. He waits until the side gate creaks shut and the faint shimmer of the threshold settles again before he turns away. The stars are out when he looks up. They’re different from the ones over his burned village, but only in placement. They’re still there. Still watching.

“For what it’s worth,” he mutters to them, “I didn’t ask for this.”

They don’t answer. They never do.

He comes back the next day. And the next. And the next.

He learns quickly that your schedule is as rigid as the stone around you. Morning prayers at dawn, work in the garden, meals in silence, lessons in the afternoon, more prayers, more silence, bed. The hours will shave down your edges if you let them. You don’t. You steal them back where you can.

You linger in the garden a little longer than you should. You get “lost” on the way back from the well. You volunteer to tend the herbs near the side gate because the older nuns complain their joints ache on the uneven ground.

He waits in the blind spot of the wall where the hill rises and the builders got lazy. He keeps to the shadow of a leaning cypress. The smell of sap and damp earth clings to him, masking some of the sharper edges of what he is.

You come. You talk. At first it’s nothing that would damn you even in the harshest confessional. Complaints about chores. Observations about the weather. Little jokes about which brother snores loudest during vigils. You complain about being hungry, about cold toes, about the way the wool of your habit scratches at your neck. He drinks it in like blood.

He offers very little about himself. He can’t tell you what he is. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He can’t tell you he’s older than the monastery’s foundations, that he watched the men who built it arrive with their own tired, fervent eyes and their own fear of the dark.

“You don’t talk much,” you say once, squinting at the narrow shadow his body makes through the gap. “It’s suspicious.”

“I talk enough,” he says. “You do the rest for both of us.”

“That’s rude.”

“True, though.”

You make a face—he can hear it in your voice. “And what if I decide I don’t want to talk to you anymore?”

“Then I’ll listen to you not talking,” he says simply. “I’m very patient.”

You snort. “You sound like you’ve been alive too long again.”

The second time you say it, it’s almost worse. He finds himself imagining what the brothers would say if they knew one of their novices was spending her free moments flirting with a stranger through the walls. They’d talk of temptation, of sin, of wolves disguised as ordinary men. They’d never guess the wolf doesn’t need disguises. He watches you argue theology with them under the cloister arches on a windy afternoon, your voice respectful but sure.

“If your God loves everyone,” you say, “why do you speak of Him like He’s waiting for us to fail?”

“So we remember to be humble,” one of the older brothers says.

“So we remember to be afraid, you mean,” you mutter once they’ve walked away.

Later, when you’re alone by the side gate, you tell Remmick, “If God wanted me to be humble, He shouldn’t have given me a brain that sees through nonsense.”

“You think you know better than your priests?” he asks, amused and aching all at once.

“I think I know when men enjoy power too much,” you shoot back.

Stars, he thinks, not for the first time. You’re going to get yourself killed again. You don’t, this time. That’s almost harder to bear.

He sees you age. Not in the way he saw his father age—hard and fast, ground down by worry and work—but slowly, gently, like the world has decided to take its time with you for once. Lines crease at the corners of your eyes from squinting in the sun, from laughing when you forget to act as solemn as you’re supposed to. Your hands roughen, but they remain sure. Your back stoops slightly, but you still walk the garden paths with the same straightforward stride.

You rise through the monastery’s quiet ranks. Novice to fully professed sister to something like leadership among the women, your competence too obvious for even the most stubborn of the brothers to ignore. He stays as he is. He watches from the boundary. He never steps through the threshold. He can’t.

Some nights, when you’ve finished your tasks and slipped out to the side gate under the pretense of checking the herb beds, you lean against the wall and close your eyes.

“Are you still there?” you ask.

“I’m here,” he says.

“You always are,” you murmur. There’s no fear in it anymore. Only a strange kind of trust.

He wonders, more than once, if he should tell you. If you have the right to know why his voice hasn’t changed in all the years you’ve been talking. Why he never meets you under the open sky in the village. Why he never crosses the threshold, never lets you open the gate.

He imagines your face if he said the words: I died once. I die and don’t stay dead. I drink blood. I watched you burn under a winter sun. He imagines the way your faith would recoil, the way the brothers would swarm, the way the threshold that already presses against him like a warning would harden into something impenetrable. He does what he’s always done when faced with choices he doesn’t like: he waits. You fill the silence for both of you.

“I had a dream,” you tell him once, voice hushed. “That this wasn’t the only life.”

His hand tightens on the stone. “No?”

You shake your head. He hears the faint rustle of your veil.

“I dreamt I was lying on my back in the grass,” you say slowly, as if unspooling the images as you speak. “And there were apples. And stars. And someone was beside me. I don’t remember their face, but I remember their laugh. And the way my chest hurt from wanting to…”

You trail off, embarrassed. Even now you’re careful with certain words. He closes his eyes.

“What did you want to do?” he asks, knowing the answer, needing to hear it anyway.

You huff out a breath. “Everything I’m not supposed to.”

The wind moves through the cypress branches above him, making a soft shushing sound.

“Maybe it was just something I overheard as a child,” you say quickly, backpedaling. “A story. A dream is just thoughts knocking around, the brothers say. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He has always hated the way men try to strip meaning from things that threaten their tidy worlds.

“It meant something to you,” he says.

You go quiet.

“Yes,” you admit after a moment. “It did.”

He doesn’t tell you that he remembers the exact hill you’re describing. That he remembers the way the grass felt, the way the apples tasted, the way your fingers curled into his sleeve. He doesn’t tell you that what you’re calling a dream is memory bleeding through the thin, stubborn veil between different versions of yourself. He doesn’t tell you that he’s lived enough now to know nothing is only anything. Instead, he listens to you breathe and looks up at the strip of sky he can see from his place beyond the wall. The stars are there. They’re always there.

You die in your sleep, decades later.

He’s across the hill when it happens, crouched in the branches of the cypress, watching the windows for any sign of trouble. There’s no sudden shout, no smoke, no fire. No boots, no crosses, no blood. Just a soft shift in the rhythm of the place. One candle going out among many.

The next morning, there’s a different cadence to the chants. Lower, a little slower. Grief woven into the words. He sees the nuns move through the courtyard with their heads bowed, the line of their shoulders a touch more hunched, the steps of some of the younger ones hesitant as they pass the spot in the garden where you used to sit and pluck leaves from stems with quick, sure fingers.

He knows before they carry the shrouded body into the little graveyard beyond the chapel walls. He knows, and still, when he sees the shape of you under the cloth, his hands curl into fists so tight his nails pierce his own palms.

There’s no way for him to be closer. No boundary to cross, no invitation they’d ever offer a stranger for a burial. He watches from the line of trees at the edge of the consecrated ground, the invisible barrier pressing against his skin like cold glass. They lower you into the earth. The brothers speak words meant to comfort the living and commend the dead.

You’ve spent your life arguing quietly with their god, and still they insist on handing you back to Him like they have any say in it. He can’t hear what you would say about that, and that may be the worst part.

There are no flames this time. No smoke. No splintering beams or collapsing ceilings. Your hair isn’t singed. Your skin isn’t blackened. Your life simply…stops. Gently, like a candle burning down to the wick. People would call it a good death. It doesn’t feel good to him.

He stands there long after the mourners have drifted away, long after the last clod of earth has thudded onto the freshly filled grave.

The stars aren’t out yet. The sky is a flat, washed-out blue. He stares up at it anyway.

“You stayed,” he says, quietly, to the ground.

You did. This time. You stayed in one place, in one life, following one set of rules until your body ran out. It didn’t save you. He doesn’t say stay with me. There’s no point. You’re too far beyond his reach now, tucked into soil he can’t thread his fingers through without stepping onto the ground that rejects him.

But later, when night comes, he’s still there. Leaning against the cypress, watching the stars emerge one by one over the monastery roof. He feels the start of an answer start to form in his chest.

You died again. But you came back once already. Why not again? Why not again, and again, and again, until the universe gets bored of taking you away and finally lets you stay? The thought is wild. Blasphemous, maybe, by any religion’s standards. It settles in him like a new kind of faith. He rolls the gold ring between his fingers, the metal warmed by his palm.

“Fine,” he murmurs to the sky. “If this is how you want to play it.”

The stars blink. The earth spins. Somewhere, someday, a child will be born who looks at him with eyes that have seen him before, even if they don’t yet know why their chest hurts when he smiles. He’ll find you. He always does.

It takes a long time to realize that finding you has never been the problem.

Years pass before the world gives him another version of you.

Remmick learns patience in those years. He learns it the way stone learns the shape of wind—slowly, grudgingly, with the understanding that resisting the current only grinds you down faster.

The centuries move differently now. He measures them by the rise and fall of places rather than by the ticking of days. Roads widen. Ships grow taller. Languages twist and remold themselves until the words he once spoke sound ancient even to his own ears. He feeds. He travels. He listens. And beneath it all, like a quiet, stubborn pulse, he waits.

He waits for the moment the world bends again and you step back into it.

He hears your laugh before he sees you. The desert night carries sound strangely. It lifts voices and stretches them thin across the sand, so a laugh can travel farther than it should, floating through the dark like a small, bright thing that refuses to die. Remmick stops walking.

The caravan has made camp in a shallow valley, fires burning low against the cold wind. Camels groan and kneel in the sand, traders move between tents wrapped in wool and dust, and above them the sky opens wide and merciless.

Stars everywhere. Sharp as glass. The same sky that hung over Ireland. The same sky that watched a monastery courtyard where a woman in a veil once tilted her face upward and whispered arguments to a god she wasn’t sure she believed in. And now—your laugh.

Remmick turns slowly. You’re crouched beside a blanket spread across the sand, surrounded by men who look halfway between entertained and furious. Dice rattle between your fingers.

“You’re cheating,” you announce.

The man across from you slams his palm against his knee. “I am not!”

“You absolutely are.”

Your grin flashes white in the firelight. The sight of it hits Remmick like a blade sliding between his ribs. Ireland had been your wildness. The monastery had been your restraint. This life—this life has your fire again. You toss the dice. They land. The circle erupts in groans. You sweep the coins toward yourself with a victorious flourish.

Remmick watches the movement of your hands, the easy confidence in the way you lean back on your heels. Alive. Alive again.

The realization doesn’t bring relief. It brings dread. Because he knows what comes next. He’d buried you once beneath an apple tree. He’d watched the earth swallow you again inside consecrated ground while monks whispered prayers. And now the universe has placed you here, in a desert full of strangers and knives and roads that swallow travelers whole. Not again. But it is. You notice him staring. Your gaze locks onto his across the fire.

“You playing,” you call, “or just watching?”

Remmick steps closer before he can stop himself. Up close you look younger than the monastery version of you. Sun-weathered. Dusty. A small scar runs across your knuckle like you earned it honestly.

“You look suspicious,” you say.

“Do I?”

You study him for a long moment.

“You look like you’ve been alive too long.”

The words land with the weight of prophecy. Remmick almost laughs. Ireland. The monastery. And now this.

“Maybe I have,” he murmurs.

You grin. “Good. Then you should know better than to gamble with me.”

The desert wind drags cool air across the fire. You play for hours. The caravan slowly drifts to sleep around you, until only the two of you remain beside the dying flames. The night deepens, and the stars grow brighter. You lean back, propping yourself on your hands.

“They’re brighter out here,” you say.

“They are.”

You lift your arm and point. “That one’s my favorite.”

The same gesture. The same star. Remmick feels something inside him tighten painfully. He reaches out without thinking and brushes a strand of windblown hair away from your face. Your breath catches. The moment stretches. Your hand comes up, almost unconsciously, resting against his chest.

“You’re strange,” you whisper.

“You’ve said that before.”

“When?”

“A long time ago.”

Your fingers curl slightly into his shirt. You don’t understand the weight of the moment, the centuries pressing into that single touch. You lean closer. Your mouth brushes his. The kiss is soft. Tentative. But it carries a warmth Remmick hasn’t allowed himself to feel since Ireland burned. When you pull back, you smile against his mouth.

“You kiss like someone who’s been waiting a very long time,” you murmur.

He has. God, he has.

For three weeks you travel together. You share fires and stories and quiet moments beneath endless desert stars. You steal his drink more than once, grinning when he glares. You hum when you’re thinking, that same wandering little tune he remembers from the hills of Ireland and a monastery garden.

Every time he touches you, it feels like holding something fragile and impossible. Every time you laugh, dread coils tighter in his chest. Because he knows. He always knows.

The bandits come before dawn.

Steel flashes. Men scream. Remmick moves like a storm. When it’s over, the sand is soaked dark. You lie beside an overturned wagon. An arrow through your chest. The stars fade slowly as dawn begins to bleed into the sky. Remmick kneels beside you. Your hand is still warm when he takes it.

“Stay with me,” he whispers.

You don’t. You never do.

In 1348, the world smells like rot. Towns empty themselves into mass graves while church bells toll endlessly for the dead. Smoke drifts through narrow streets as families burn their own houses trying to cleanse the sickness. Remmick finds you in a village infirmary. You’re kneeling beside a feverish child, wiping sweat from his forehead with a damp cloth.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you tell Remmick when you notice him watching.

“You shouldn’t either.”

You smile.

“Someone has to stay.”

You kiss him once in the doorway that night. Your lips are warm. Alive. Three days later he holds your hand while you cough blood into a linen cloth. Your breathing grows shallower. Your fingers tighten weakly around his.

“Don’t look so serious,” you whisper.

He presses his forehead to yours. “Stay with me.”

You smile faintly. “I wish I could.”

You die before dawn. Remmick burns the infirmary afterward so no one touches your body.

In Rome you become a nun and refuse to see him again.

In Florence, this time you paint him.

Your studio smells like oil and turpentine and sunlight warming old wood.

“Hold still,” you scold, dragging charcoal across canvas.

“You’re frowning.”

“I always frown.”

“You do look like you’ve been alive too long,” you say thoughtfully.

Remmick watches you work. Paint stains your fingers. Your sleeves are rolled up. You hum under your breath when you concentrate.

“Why do you stare at me like that?” you ask eventually.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m going to disappear.”

His chest tightens. “Habit.”

You step closer to adjust the angle of his jaw. Your fingers linger. Your thumb brushes his lower lip.

“You’re beautiful when you’re quiet,” you murmur.

Remmick pulls you into a kiss before he can stop himself. This one is different. Slow. Deep. Your hands slide into his hair. Your body presses against his like you’ve been waiting for this moment your entire life. Maybe you have. You fall asleep tangled together on the studio floor that night, paint-stained sheets twisted around your legs.

For a few fragile months, Remmick almost believes this life might last.

You die of fever in winter. He buries you beneath the studio window. Snow falls while he digs.

By the time the next century begins, Remmick understands something terrible. Finding you has never been the problem. The universe always gives you back. The problem—

The problem is that it never lets you stay.

The village is small. Too small for the way Remmick loves you.

He sees you for the first time in this life on a snow-bright morning, your hands pruned from scrubbing linens in ice water, your breath fogging the air. When you look at him, really look, something in your expression shifts—recognition without memory, longing without logic. And he knows. The way he always knows. You approach him slowly, the hem of your dress brushing snow.

“You look tired,” you say softly.

“I’m not,” he lies.

“You look like you’ve been alive too long,” you whisper, almost like a confession.

His heart—whatever’s left of it—shakes. Later, you tell him:

“I don’t think I’ve ever met you…but I think I’ve missed you.”

He falls. Hard.

You know he’s a vampire before you kiss him. There’s no fear in your voice when you say: “Your eyes change in firelight. I’ve seen the way animals flee from you. You don’t breathe when you’re thinking.”

You stand before him in the frozen dark behind the church, snow falling in soft flakes that land in your hair and melt against your cheeks.

“Are you gonna run?” he asks, voice rough.

“No,” you whisper. “I’m gonna choose you.”

You step into him, hands sliding into his hair, and Remmick feels centuries collapse beneath the warmth of your skin. He kisses you like he’s dying of dehydration and only your lips can quench his thirst. You kiss him like you’ve been waiting a lifetime to breathe.

You marry him that spring. It’s small. Quiet. In the same church that will later condemn you. But when you lift your veil and smile at him, Remmick feels something he hasn’t felt since he was human:

Hope.

“I don’t care what you are,” you whisper as he slides the ring he's kept just for you onto your finger. “I don’t care if the world hates us. For the first time, I want my life.”

“You have it,” he murmurs. “You have all of me.”

He means it. He shouldn’t. He can’t help himself. On your wedding night, while you sit together on the edge of the bed, firelight flickering over your joined hands, you ask him what would happen if he bit you. If he let you drink his blood. If he let you stay. Remmick stiffens. His voice is quiet.

“You wouldn’t become like me.”

“Then what would I become?”

“Empty,” he whispers. “Frozen. A shell that still breathes but doesn’t feel. Turning someone only works if death isn’t meant to claim them.”

You touch his cheek.

“And you think death wants me?”

“Oh,” he breathes, “it always wants you. Every life you’ve had, death has reached for you. It’s not a curse. It’s just the pattern.”

You hold his face between both hands.

“Then I’d rather live one life with you than a hundred without myself.”

And he kisses you, devastated and grateful and so fucking in love. You kiss him like he’s your home. He undresses you like he’s praying. Your clothes fall to the floor with soft thumps, the firelight turning your skin gold, warming the air between your bodies. When he lays you back on the blankets, you gasp quietly, your fingers pulling him into you.

“Tell me what you want,” he whispers against your throat.

“You,” you breathe. “I want you to love me. I want to feel you everywhere.”

And God, he gives you everything. He slides into you slowly at first, worshiping every shiver, every gasp, every arch of your back. You wrap your legs around him, pulling him deeper, moaning into his mouth as he thrusts with a tenderness he’s never given anyone else.

“Look at me,” you whisper. “I want to see you when I come.”

He does. You fall apart beneath him—crying out his name, shaking, clinging to him as though your body remembers every life he’s held you through. And then—afterwards, when you’re breathless and warm and curled against his chest—you do it. You break him. You run your fingers through his hair, your voice trembling:

“You don’t have to keep finding me.”

He goes still.

“You don’t have to keep loving me,” you continue, voice cracking. “I’ve watched the way you look at me. Like you’re terrified. Like you’re already grieving me. Like you’re tired. So tired, Remmick.”

His breath shudders. You whisper: “I’m hurting you. Every life I have hurts you.”

Remmick lifts his head. His eyes are molten red.

“You think loving you is the wound?” he whispers. “Loving you is how I survive the wound.”

Your eyes fill with tears. He kisses them away.

“I don’t find you because I have to,” he breathes. “I find you because the world is unbearable without you in it.”

You choke on a sob. You pull him back down to you. You fuck him again—desperate and emotional, your nails digging into his shoulders, your moans turning broken at the edges. You ride him until you can barely breathe, until he holds you tight enough to bruise, until you fall apart on his cock whispering his name like a prayer.

You fall asleep in his arms. Still warm. Still alive. And then—your screams wake him. The villagers break the door.

“Witch!”

“Demon whore!”

“Burn her before he takes us all!”

They club him with silver before he can rise. It weakens him. Slows him. Just long enough. They drag you outside barefoot, still in your wedding slip, your hair tangled, your cheeks streaked with tears. You scream for him. He hears you as if underwater. The silver burns into his skin. He can’t stand. He can’t breathe. He can’t reach you.

“Remmick—! REMMICK—!”

Your voice is pure terror.

He crawls toward the door, fingers bleeding, muscles spasming. He reaches the threshold—and the church bell rings. They tie you to the stake. You’re crying. Begging. Calling for him. He forces himself up. The silver strips crack inside his flesh as he tears them free. His body is barely holding together, but he doesn’t care.

He’s running before he realizes he can move. Snow whips up behind him. Smoke fills the air. Your screams—God—your screams. The fire catches instantly. The villagers cheer. The flames reach your legs first. Your skin bursts open in blisters. Your hair ignites. Your slip melts into your flesh. Remmick tears through three men, ripping out their throats with his teeth, blood spraying hot across the snow. But he’s too late. He’s always too late. When he reaches you, your throat is raw from screaming, your flesh splitting as fire devours you.

“Rem—” you choke, smoke pouring from your mouth, blood from your lips. “Rem—I’m scared—”

He grabs the burning stake with both hands. It sears his skin. He doesn’t care. He tries to pull it apart. He tries to tear you free. He tries to save you. The flames roar. Your eyes roll back.Your chest rises once—twice—stops.

“NO—NO—NO—NO—”

The fire consumes you. He holds your burning body until the flesh slips from bone. He collapses with you, sobbing into the charred remains of your hair.

“Stay with me,” he begs.

But you don’t. You can’t. You never do.

He slaughters every man, woman, child. He tears the priest in half. He rips open bellies and throws intestines across the snow. He snaps necks like twigs. He sucks marrow from bones. He paints the church walls with their blood. He drags screaming villagers into the fire that killed you. He holds them there while they burn. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t stop. Not until the entire village is still. Not until he has nothing left to kill. Not until your ashes cool enough that he can gather them in his hands.

He kneels in the snow, cradling what’s left of you, pressing his forehead to your charred skull.

“Every life,” he whispers, shaking. “Every lifetime, I will find you. You can’t ask me not to. You can’t ask me to let you go. I don’t live for eternity. I live for you.”

And this—this is the life he never recovers from. This is the wound the universe never lets him close. And from this night on—

He stops believing the world is allowed to take you from him ever again.

The ocean is the only thing in the world that feels as old as Remmick.

It stretches endlessly in every direction, dark and breathing beneath the weight of the sky. pulled low across your brow—none of it fools him. He knows you the moment you step onto the deck, arguing with the captain while clutching a compass.

“I can navigate better than the fool you lost in Havana,” you insist.

“You look about sixteen,” the captain scoffs.

“Then imagine how embarrassing it’ll be when I’m right.”

Remmick leans against the railing watching you with quiet amusement. You notice him after a moment, your gaze lingering just a little too long. Something flickers there—recognition without memory. You’ve always done that. He thinks, with a quiet ache:

There you are.

You sail together for two years. The sea becomes your world. Endless blue days and endless black nights, the ship rocking gently beneath your feet as you chart the stars across worn maps. Remmick watches you lean over the captain’s table one night, tracing constellations with the end of a quill.

“That one’s my favorite,” you say, pointing upward through the window toward the sky.

It’s the same star you always choose. It makes his chest tighten every time.

“You stare a lot,” you tell him.

“I’ve had practice.”

“With what?”

“Finding you.”

You snort softly. “I’m right here.”

If only you knew.

You become friends first. It always starts that way. Some nights you sit together on the edge of the deck sharing rum while the crew sleeps below. Your shoulders touch as the ship drifts through moonlit water.

“You ever think about where you’ll end up?” you ask.

“I’ve been a lot of places.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He watches the endless dark sea. “Wherever you are.”

You laugh, bumping his shoulder. “Careful. That almost sounded romantic.”

“Almost.”

Your hand stays on his arm longer than necessary.

You kiss him during a storm. Rain lashes the deck, wind tearing through the rigging while the ship pitches violently against the waves. You grab his coat to steady yourself, breathless and soaked through.

“I think we’re going to die,” you say.

“Not tonight.”

“You sound very sure.”

He is. If you died tonight, he’d feel it. Your fingers clutch his coat. Your breath warms his mouth.

“You look like you’ve been alive too long,” you whisper.

Then you kiss him. Hard. Desperate. Like the storm itself is pushing you together. When you break away you whisper, almost confused, “I knew it was you.”

Remmick freezes.

“I don’t remember why,” you say quickly, pressing your forehead to his. “But when I saw you…it felt like everything finally made sense.”

He kisses you again before he can stop himself. And this time there’s no restraint.

You’re lovers after that. The crew never discovers your secret. By day you remain the quiet navigator boy charting stars and currents. By night—you belong to each other. Sometimes it’s the captain’s empty quarters. Sometimes the storage hold that smells like rope and tar. Once it’s right there on the deck beneath a sky full of stars while the ocean rolls gently around the ship.

You straddle his lap, moving slowly, breath catching as you whisper his name. “Remmick…”

His hands tighten on your hips.

“You’re dangerous,” he murmurs.

“Why?”

“Because I keep forgetting the world takes you away.”

Your expression softens. You brush your fingers through his hair. “Then maybe you should stop loving me so much.”

He laughs quietly against your mouth.

“I can’t.”

The storm that kills you comes without warning. One moment the sea is calm. The next it’s roaring. Wind howls through the rigging. Waves crash over the deck while sailors scream orders that vanish into thunder. You’re at the helm fighting the wheel when Remmick reaches you.

“Get below!” someone shouts.

You shake your head. “If we lose the rudder we’ll capsize!”

Another wave slams into the ship. Wood splinters. The mast cracks like a gunshot. Remmick reaches for you—but the sea takes the ship first. The world explodes into freezing black water.

Remmick doesn’t drown. He sinks. Cold darkness closes around him, wreckage drifting like broken bones through the water. But he doesn’t need air. He doesn’t need breath. He only needs you.

He searches the ocean for three days. Diving again and again into the wreckage, tearing apart shattered planks, dragging bodies toward the surface only to cast them aside when they aren’t yours. The sea floor becomes a graveyard of splintered wood and drowned sailors. Still he searches. Still he hopes. Because the universe always takes you. But it never tells him when.

On the fourth day—he finds you. Your body is tangled in the broken mast, hair drifting in the current like seaweed. Your hand is still wrapped around the compass you carried everywhere. Remmick pulls you gently free. You’re cold. Silent. Gone. He presses his forehead to yours as the waves rise and fall around them.

“Stay with me,” he whispers hoarsely.

But the ocean has already claimed you. And once again—

Remmick is left alone with eternity.

By now Remmick understands the rules of it. You always come back. And the universe always takes you again. The centuries stretch like a long road beneath his feet, and every time he sees your face in a new crowd, in a new country, beneath a new sky—hope blooms.

And dread follows.

Because loving you has never been the hard part. Losing you is.

Next he finds you at the edge of the world.

The Arctic doesn’t feel like a place meant for living things. It’s endless white and blinding wind, ice grinding against ice with the low thunder of glaciers shifting beneath the sea. The expedition ship cuts slowly through frozen water, its hull groaning like an animal in pain.

You’re the ship surgeon. The first time you meet him you’re elbow-deep in a sailor’s torn shoulder, sleeves rolled up, jaw tight with concentration.

“You’re in the way,” you snap without looking up.

Remmick raises a brow. “I was invited.”

“Then whoever invited you is a fool.” You glance up. Your eyes catch his.

Something sparks. Recognition without memory. You scowl. “You look like you’ve been alive too long.”

He almost laughs.

You argue constantly. About medicine. About navigation. About whether the crew should push deeper into the ice.

“You’re reckless,” you tell him one night, standing beside the rail while the frozen sea groans around the ship.

“And you’re stubborn.”

“Someone has to be.”

The wind rips your words away. You shiver. Without thinking he drapes his coat around your shoulders. You glare at him. Then you keep it.

You kiss him the night the aurora appears. Green light spills across the sky like something alive, dancing over the frozen sea while the ship drifts in silent water. You’re staring upward when he joins you.

“Beautiful,” you whisper.

He isn’t looking at the sky. He’s looking at you. You turn. Your breath fogs between you. “You stare too much.”

“I’ve missed you.”

You frown. “What?”

He kisses you before he can explain. The cold steals your breath as your mouth opens against his, hands clutching his coat while the sky burns with color above you.

“You’re impossible,” you whisper when you break apart.

“I know.”

You kiss him again. Harder this time.

The storm comes three weeks later.

The ice shifts beneath the hull like a breaking bone. The ship splinters. Men scream as the vessel tears open against the frozen sea. Remmick fights through the wreckage searching for you. He finds you half-buried in snow, blood soaking through your coat.

“Remmick,” you breathe weakly.

He gathers you in his arms. Your pulse is already fading.

“I told you,” you whisper faintly. “You’ve been alive too long.”

“Stay with me.”

You smile. Then your exhale your last breath.

Remmick buries you in ice. He digs through frozen ground with bare hands until his fingers split open. He lays your body beneath the snow with careful reverence, brushing frost from your hair one last time. Above him—the stars blaze across the black Arctic sky. They look the same as they did in Ireland. They look the same as they will centuries from now.

They watch him lose you again.

The American West smells like dust and gunpowder.

You’re a schoolteacher in a tiny frontier town, chalk dust clinging to your sleeves as you scold children for spelling mistakes. Remmick leans against the doorway one afternoon watching you teach.

“You’re distracting the class,” you tell him sharply.

“Am I?”

“You look like trouble.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

You pause. Then you say it again.

“You look like you’ve been alive too long.”

It happens fast. A man bursts into the schoolhouse waving a pistol, shouting for money. The children scream. You pull the revolver from your desk drawer and fire before Remmick can move.

The robber drops. But he fires once in return. The bullet hits your ribs. You bleed out slowly on the wooden classroom floor while Remmick holds you. Your hand grips his shirt weakly. “Did I get him?”

“You did.”

“Good.”

Your eyes soften. “You look sad.”

“I always do.”

You smile faintly. “You’ve been alive too long.”

Then you die in his arms.

The airfield smells like gasoline and hot metal.

You’re laughing when he sees you this time. Leather flight jacket. Wind-tangled hair. Eyes bright with reckless joy.

“You fly?” he asks.

“Better than anyone here.”

You grin. “Race you down the runway.”

You’re fearless. You’ve always been fearless. The plane roars down the strip beside his. For a moment the sky feels infinite. Then your engine sputters. Your aircraft dips. Spins. Crashes into the ocean beyond the cliffs.

Remmick stands frozen at the edge of the runway watching smoke rise from the water. He doesn’t move. He already knows.

The sea swallows the wreckage. And you with it.

He finds you in a library. 1954. Small town. Dusty sunlight filtering through tall windows while you sort returned books behind a wooden desk.

“You’re late returning this,” you say, holding up a novel.

Remmick stares at you.

“You look tired. Like you’ve been alive too long,” you add thoughtfully.

He laughs softly.

You fall in love slowly. Quiet dinners. Long walks. Late nights reading together on the couch. When you discover he doesn’t age, you don’t scream. You just take his hands.

“So that’s why you look so tired,” you say gently.

“Yes.”

You kiss him.

“Good thing I’m stubborn.”

You marry him anyway.

This life is the happiest. You grow old beside him. Your hair turns silver. Your hands wrinkle. But you laugh every day. And when the cancer finally takes you—it happens peacefully. You’re lying in bed with his hand in yours.

“Remmick,” you whisper.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been alive too long.”

He smiles sadly.

“I know.”

You squeeze his hand.

“Find me again.”

Your breathing slows. Your eyes close. And for the first time in centuries—your death isn’t violent. But it still breaks him. Because peaceful or not—the universe has taken you again.

By now Remmick knows better than to believe the universe will be gentle. It never is. Sometimes it gives him years with you. Sometimes it gives him hours. But every time he finds you again, hope still flares inside him like something stubborn and foolish that refuses to die.

And every time the world takes you—that hope dies with you.

This time you’re loud. Brilliant. A university student in Bristol with a motorbike and a sharp tongue that never lets him take himself too seriously.

“You’re a miserable old bastard,” you tell him the first night you meet.

Remmick almost laughs. “You’ve known me five minutes.”

“Five minutes is plenty.”

You steal his cigarette and take a drag. The city lights glow across the river while music thumps from the pub behind you.

“You brood too much,” you add.

“I’ve had practice.”

“You should try living a little.”

You toss him a spare helmet.

“Come on.”

The motorcycle roars down empty streets with you pressed against his back, laughing into the wind while the city blurs past in streaks of neon and rain. For the first time in a long time—

Remmick forgets to be afraid.

The crash happens on a wet road outside the city.

Headlights. Screeching tires. Metal folding inward with a scream of twisting steel. When Remmick crawls from the wreckage the car has already crushed the motorcycle beneath it. Your body lies tangled in the shattered frame.

He drags the vehicle away with inhuman strength, the metal shrieking as it bends beneath his hands.

“Come on,” he begs. “Come on—”

Your blood stains the pavement. Your eyes flutter open briefly.

“Guess…I drove too fast,” you whisper.

Remmick presses his forehead against yours. “You didn’t.”

Your lips twitch faintly.

“Still a miserable bastard,” you murmur.

Then your breath leaves you.

Remmick roars. The sound echoes across the empty road as he crushes the car’s frame with his bare hands until the metal folds like paper. But it doesn’t bring you back. It never does.

After enough centuries, grief stops feeling sharp. It becomes something quieter. Heavier. Like a stone placed carefully inside your chest. Remmick carries that stone for a long time. Long enough that the edges wear smooth. Long enough that the world begins to feel dull around it.

He’s loved you across deserts and oceans, through plagues and wars and quiet rooms that smelled like old books and rain. He’s buried you in ice. He’s held you while you bled out on wooden floors. He’s watched you burn. He’s watched you drown. He’s felt your heart stop in his arms more times than he can count anymore.

Every life ends the same. Every century. Every country. Every lifetime. He finds you. And the world rips you away. Eventually something inside him breaks in a quieter way than before. Not violently. Not like the night the village burned. Just…slowly. Like a candle running out of wax.

He realizes one evening—standing alone in a city he doesn’t care about anymore—that loving you isn’t the thing destroying him. Losing you is. And it'll never stop.

So he decides something he should’ve decided centuries ago. He'll stop looking. No more wandering streets searching every crowd for your face. No more chasing rumors of women who laugh the same way you do. No more falling in love with a soul that the universe refuses to let him keep. He’s immortal. He can endure the loneliness. He tells himself that enough times it almost sounds believable. So he stops.

Decades pass. Remmick moves through them like a ghost. He travels when he has to. Feeds when hunger becomes unbearable. Sleeps in places that never mean anything to him—empty houses, quiet forests, forgotten towns. He avoids people. Avoids cities. Avoids anywhere the sound of laughter might reach him. Because laughter still reminds him of you.

Sometimes he wonders if you’re out there somewhere in the world during those years. If another version of you is walking through crowded streets, falling in love with someone who isn’t him. The thought hurts. But not as much as watching you die again would. So he keeps walking. Keeps drifting. Keeps pretending that eternity is easier this way.

Eventually the years start to blur together. The world changes around him. Cities grow. New music fills the air. Languages shift. The sky stays the same. He stops noticing most of it. Immortality becomes quiet. Lonely. Endless. And Remmick begins to believe he’s finally done it. He’s finally escaped you.

It happens by accident. He isn’t searching. He isn’t thinking about you at all. He’s just passing through a city one night—somewhere bright and loud and alive in a way that makes him uncomfortable. Music drifts from open doors. Outside lights twinkle like artificial stars. People spill out onto sidewalks laughing with drinks in their hands.

Remmick keeps his head down as he walks. He’s good at moving through crowds without touching anyone. He almost passes you. Almost. Then he hears it. Your laugh. It’s soft at first. Just another voice in the noise of the street. But it cuts through him like lightning. Remmick stops. His entire body goes rigid. The sound comes again—clearer this time. Bright. Warm. Familiar in a way that makes his chest feel like it’s caving in. Slowly, almost afraid to move, he turns toward the sound.

You’re standing on the rooftop of a nearby restaurant, leaning against the railing with a group of friends. Someone has dragged a speaker outside, and quiet music hums beneath the chatter of voices. The city stretches behind you in glowing windows and moving headlights.

Above you—the stars. Not as bright as they were in deserts or frozen seas. City lights dull them. But they’re still there, scattered across the night like something stubborn and eternal. You’re looking up at them. Laughing at something someone said. Your head tips back the same way it always has. Your hair catches the light.

And Remmick—Remmick forgets how to move. It hits him all at once. The centuries. The graves. The bodies he’s held. The way you always looked at him like he was something worth loving, even when he knew better. He’s spent decades convincing himself he could live without you. That he could outrun fate. That he could simply… stop. But standing there in the street, watching you laugh beneath the stars like the universe has never hurt you before—

Remmick finally understands something he should’ve known all along. He never had a choice. He could walk away a thousand times. He could cross oceans and centuries and entire continents trying to escape the pull of your soul. It wouldn’t matter. Because the moment he sees you—It’s already over. He’s already in love. Again.

Remmick exhales slowly. For a moment he considers leaving. Turning around. Disappearing into the crowd before you notice him. He almost does it. Almost. Then you glance down from the rooftop. Your eyes find his. And something shifts in your expression. Confusion. Recognition. The faintest flicker of something you can’t quite explain.

You tilt your head slightly. Remmick feels the old, familiar ache bloom in his chest. The same one that’s followed him across centuries. The same one he tried to bury. The same one that refuses to die. He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again—

You’re still there. Still laughing. Still alive. And Remmick realizes with devastating clarity that he could spend a thousand years trying to escape this moment—and he’d still end up here. Looking at you. Loving you. Waiting to see how the universe will break his heart this time.

The city glows like a circuit board at night. Headlights crawl along wet streets, neon signs buzz above late-night diners, distant sirens cut through the hum. Clouds hang low enough to smother the stars. Maybe that’s why he goes to the planetarium. It’s the closest thing he has now to the sky he remembers—dark and clean and full of light. He doesn’t expect you to be there.

He’s just trying to kill an evening that feels too long, hands stuffed in his pockets as he slips into the dim auditorium with a scattering of tourists and bored couples. The ceiling is a smooth black dome. The lights go down. And your voice fills the room.

“Welcome to tonight’s live sky show.”

Remmick goes very, very still. You’re standing at the front, next to the projector console, a faint blue glow outlining you. Your features are soft in the half-light, but your voice—your voice is the same across centuries. Warm. Wry. A little too alive for a world that keeps trying to snuff you out. He grips the armrests so hard the plastic creaks.

You’re talking about constellations. About light-years and star death and how everything up there is already gone by the time we see it.

“Which is kind of romantic, if you think about it,” you say lightly. “We’re all just looking at ghosts.”

The projector throws a spray of stars across the dome, pale and perfect. You tilt your head back to look at them. He’s seen you do that in so many lives he’s lost count. It hits him like a blow. The monastery courtyard. The frozen Arctic sky. The desert night. The rooftop. You, again, under stars. His hands start to shake. He doesn’t bother stopping it this time. He just stares.

You walk up the aisle during a segment, passing close, the faint scent of your perfume cutting through stale air and popcorn. You ask trivia questions, joke with the audience, never notice the way one man in the third row looks like he’s seeing a ghost. At the end of the show, you flip the lights back on.

“Thanks for coming,” you say, smiling. “Go outside, look up—there’s still a sky under all those city lights, I promise.”

People stand. Stretch. Shuffle toward the exit. He doesn’t move. You glance toward him as the auditorium empties, eyes skimming the rows. Your gaze catches on his. You hesitate. There it is. That flicker. The one he’s hunted for lifetimes. Not recognition exactly. But something that lives underneath it. A pull. A question. You give him a polite, uncertain smile. Then you look away and start tidying up.

Remmick sits there until the room is empty. You don’t remember him. Of course you don’t. That part has never been yours to carry. It’s always been his.

You meet properly a week later.

He keeps coming back. Of course he does. He tells himself it’s because the shows are a good way to pass time, because he’s always liked the stars, because he has nowhere else to be. It’s a lie so flimsy even he doesn’t bother believing it. The third time, you catch him loitering in the small lobby gift shop after everyone else has gone.

“You’re back,” you say, sounding half-amused, half-suspicious.

“You’re very good,” he says simply.

“At star pushing?”

“At making dead light sound like something worth staying for.”

You huff a laugh. There’s a beat.

“Do you…like astronomy?” you ask, a little awkwardly.

“I like the sky.”

You study him for a second like you’re trying to slot him into a memory that doesn’t exist.

“Do you wanna grab a coffee?” you blurt.

He hadn’t planned for that. He hadn’t planned for you at all.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’d like that.”

You fall into each other slower this time.

Coffee in the museum café turns into late-night takeout and shared documentaries on your couch. You text him pictures of weird sky phenomena, ugly meme versions of constellations, blurry photos of the moon through your phone. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t have to. He just… stays. You start letting him.

The first time he sleeps over, you wake up halfway through the night to find him propped on one elbow, just…looking at you.

“Creepy,” you mumble, face half-smashed into the pillow.

“Sorry.”

He doesn’t look away.

“Are you actually watching me sleep?” you ask, eyes still closed.

“Yes.”

You snort. “Why?”

He hesitates. “I like seeing you breathe.”

Something in his voice makes your heart stutter. You crack an eye open.“Pretty intense for a guy I’ve known…what, a month?”

His hand lifts like he’s about to touch your face, then changes course and brushes your hair back instead.

“It’s been longer than that,” he says quietly.

You don’t understand what he means. Not yet. But you feel the weight in it. He memorizes you. You don’t know that part. Not really. You don’t see the way he watches your profile when you’re talking, cataloging every line as if he’s afraid the world might erase you at any second. You don’t see how his fingers trace your features in the dark when you’re already asleep, as if he’s trying to etch you into his bones.

You do feel his hands on you all the time, though. Fingers pressed to your wrist as you cross streets. Palm at the small of your back in crowds. His thigh always touching yours on the couch, body angled toward you like he can’t stand the idea of even an inch of distance.

“You act like you’re running out of time,” you tease one evening when he pulls you into his lap just to keep you closer while you’re both doing absolutely nothing.

His arms tighten around you almost imperceptibly. He smiles against your shoulder.

“I am,” he says.

You laugh. You think he’s being dramatic. He isn’t.

You invite him over for dinner on a rainy Friday. Cheap wine. A movie you barely watch. You’re proud of the pasta even though you almost spill it everywhere, laughing as you plate it.

“I even made garlic bread,” you announce, triumphant, setting the tray down between you on the coffee table.

He goes rigid. You don’t notice at first, too busy tearing a piece off.

“Here,” you say, holding it up to his mouth. “Say ah, ancient one.”

He flinches back so fast you blink.

“What, do you not eat carbs?” you joke, trying to cover the tiny sting.

“I—no. I just…don’t like garlic.”

You stare. “You don’t—like garlic.”

“No.”

“Like, at all?”

“No.”

You squint at him. “That’s suspicious.”

He tries to smile, but it looks wrong. “I’m complicated.”

You bump his knee with yours.

“Fine, more for me,” you say, but you file it away. Later—much later—you’ll remember that moment and feel everything in your life tilt.

For now, you just eat his share.

It happens on an ordinary night.

You’re both leaving your apartment after a lazy day inside, half-dressed, half-laughing, intending to run to the corner store for snacks. Your building’s stairs are old. The hallway light flickers. You misjudge a step. Your foot slips. You fall forward, instinctively throwing your hands out, and hit the edge of the stair hard enough that pain lances up your arm. You hear the crack. You scream. Time fractures around the sound. Remmick is there in less than a second, faster than any human should be able to move.

You don’t register it at first, too busy gasping, vision swimming, clutching your wrist that’s already swelling and wrong-angled.

“Hey, hey, look at me,” he says, voice sharp with panic.

You do. And that’s when you see. His eyes aren’t their usual blue. They’re glowing—an unnatural, molten red in the dim hallway. His teeth are wrong too, longer, sharp enough to cut the air. His fingers, braced on the stair beside you, are stretched and clawed, nails elongated into something that isn’t remotely human. He’s shaking. Not with hunger. With terror.

“Fuck,” he whispers, pulling back like he’s afraid of himself. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”

You should run. Any normal person would. There's a monster crouched in front of you, eyes blazing, mouth full of razors, body coiled like a predator cornered by its own fear. Your heart is pounding. Your wrist is throbbing. You don't move. Because under the horror, he’s still him. Your him. The one who watches you sleep like you’re the only real thing in the world.

“Remmick,” you say quietly.

He flinches.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve been more careful. I scared you. I always—”

“Hey.” You reach out with your good hand.

You touch his face. He freezes like you’ve turned him to stone.

“You’re shaking,” you murmur.

“I could hurt you.”

“You’re not.”

His eyes burn.

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it,” you say. “Because all I see right now is the same guy who makes me coffee and hogs my blankets and pretends not to cry at sad movies.”

A strangled laugh escapes him. His teeth recede slowly as he forces himself to calm down. The claws shorten. The red dims back into blue, still bright with something raw and old. He takes a careful breath he doesn’t need.

“I’m not human,” he says. “I haven’t been…for a very long time.”

You swallow.

“Vampire?” you say, half-joking, half-not.

He nods. You stare at him for a long moment.

“Okay,” you say.

He blinks.

“Okay?”

“I mean, I’m not ecstatic about the wrist situation,” you nod toward your fractured arm, “but…you’re still you. You didn’t eat me. That’s a good sign.”

“Why aren’t you running?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Then I’m staying.”

It’s that simple for you. It’s never been simple for him. His face crumples in a way you’ve never seen. Like someone just slid a knife between centuries of armor.

“Would you still have chosen me,” he asks hoarsely, “if you’d known from the start?”

You look at him like the question almost offends you.

“I did choose you,” you say. “Whatever you are.”

You’re green with pain. Your wrist is broken. You’re sitting on shitty hallway stairs in mismatched socks and an oversized hoodie, looking at a man whose eyes just glowed red, and you still sound utterly sure. Something in his chest splits open. Again. He helps you up, voice shaking, careful hands gentle around your injury.

“Hospital or urgent care,” you ask through a hiss of pain.

“I can fix it,” he says, then stops himself. “No. That’s a bad idea. We do this the human way. I’ve taken enough from you.”

You don’t understand what he means. Not yet. But you let him guide you down the stairs, fingers curled tight in his shirt. He’s never been more terrified of losing you than in that moment—not because of death, but because now you’ve seen the thing he’s spent centuries trying to hide. And you stayed.

It happens after your wrist is set, after painkillers, after a quiet taxi ride home where you fall asleep with your forehead against his shoulder. It happens when you’re back in your bed, cast awkwardly propped on pillows, the city a low murmur behind the windows. You look small and drowsy and very, very breakable in this moment. He sits on the edge of the bed like he’s afraid to touch you.

“You still here?” you mumble.

“I’m right here,” he answers.

“You look like someone died,” you say.

“Someone always does.”

You open your eyes at that. He looks wrecked. Not bruised or bloodied. Just… ruined in a quieter way. Like the inside of him has been sanded down by grief so many times there’s barely anything left.

“Come here,” you say.

He hesitates.

“Please.”

He lies beside you like he’s approaching an altar. You kiss him. Not playful. Not casual.

You kiss him like you understand on some deep, buried level that this man has watched you die a hundred times and is still here anyway. He makes a broken sound against your mouth, hands framing your face like he’s praying, like he’s desperate, like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he doesn’t hold you hard enough.

He undresses you like he’s afraid of startling you, fingers brushing your skin as if he’s learning you for the first time and remembering you from a hundred lives at once. Every button, every inch of fabric he moves aside is handled like he’s unwrapping something holy. When you lean in to kiss him—slow, coaxing—he exhales shakily, not with lust but relief. Like he didn’t dare believe you’d actually want him like this. You lift your good hand to his chest, sliding it under his shirt, and he takes the hint, pulling it off himself with a quiet, trembling breath as your fingers skim his skin.

“You’re trembling,” you whisper.

“I always do,” he answers, cupping your cheek with one hand while his other carefully avoids your cast. “When I finally get to touch you again.”

Your breath catches. You pull him down into a deeper kiss, his mouth soft against yours, his thumb tracing your lower lip like he’s memorizing its shape. He kisses you like he’s starving, but trying not to bite. You guide him gently until he lies back, and he follows the pressure instantly, desperate for any direction you give. You climb into his lap carefully, your cast protected, bracing your weight through your legs and your other arm. His hands fly to your hips as though he’s terrified you’ll disappear between blinks.

“Is this okay?” you murmur.

Remmick nods too fast. “Yes. God, yes.”

You guide his hands beneath your shirt, lifting it with your good arm while he helps slide the fabric up and over your head, careful not to jostle your wrist. He groans softly when he feels your bare skin. His thumbs sweep under your breasts, reverent, almost shaking.

“Fuck…” he whispers. “You’re warm. You’re always warm.”

You kiss along his jaw, down his throat, and he tilts his head helplessly, giving you everything. When you lower yourself enough for his cock to press against you through your underwear, his breath stutters like he’s breaking apart.

“Tell me you want me,” he whispers, voice cracked with vulnerability.

“I do,” you breathe. “I want you.”

He makes a sound you’ve never heard from him—somewhere between a moan and a sob—and he kisses you again, deeper this time, needier, like centuries of loneliness are clawing their way into the present. You ease your underwear aside with your good hand. You guide him in. His cock slides into you slowly, stretching you open, your body taking him inch by inch. He groans against your mouth, hands gripping your waist tight enough to bruise, then loosening instantly when he realizes.

“Too much?” he asks, panicked.

“No,” you gasp. “Not too much. I want all of you.”

His eyes flutter shut like the words physically hurt him. You sink fully onto him, your bodies meeting flush, and he shudders violently—a man who just got something he’s wanted for five lifetimes.

“Fuck,” he whispers into your neck. “You feel…you feel like home.”

You start moving slowly, rolling your hips, letting him feel you around him. He clings to you, arms locked around your back, one hand sliding behind your shoulders to support you so you don’t have to use your broken wrist. Every thrust he gives is gentle at first, careful, almost fearful.

“Remmick,” you breathe, kissing along his ear. “You’re not gonna break me.”

“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” he whispers, voice thick.

You lift his face with your good hand, thumb brushing his cheek.

“I’m here,” you tell him softly. “I’m choosing you.”

Something inside him splits open. He thrusts up into you, still gentle but needier, his cock sliding deeper, his breath hitching every time your bodies meet. His hands roam your back, your hips, your thighs—not greedy, just desperate to reassure himself you’re really here. Your lips meet between gasps, sloppy and sweet, your moans swallowed against his mouth, his name falling against his tongue like something sacred. You ride him slowly, rhythm steady, your warmth squeezing around him until he’s shaking beneath you. He breaks the kiss to bury his face in your shoulder.

“I don’t… I don’t want this to end,” he whispers against your skin. “Not this life. Not this moment. Not you.”

You guide his mouth back to yours with your good hand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you breathe.

His thrusts grow uneven. His voice breaks on a moan. “Please…please don’t disappear on me.”

“I’m right here,” you whisper again, rocking against him. “I’m right here, Remmick.”

He kisses you like the words save him. Pleasure builds slow and warm through your core, spreading in waves until you’re clinging to him, thighs trembling around his hips. He feels you tightening and groans, deep and broken.

“Come for me,” he begs softly. “Please…let me feel you.”

You gasp his name as release hits you, your body shaking around him, clenching tight, and he thrusts deep, holding you down onto him as if he can fuse your body with his. His own climax tears through him a breath later—not loud, but devastating. A strangled gasp, a shudder that rocks his entire body, his cock pulsing inside you with long, helpless spurts.

He holds you there through it, forehead pressed to yours, breath trembling, one hand on your back, the other bracing your casted arm against his chest so you don’t bear your own weight. When his hips finally still, he doesn’t let you move. He kisses your cheek. Your eyelids. Your temple. Slow. Tender. Grateful.

“I’ve waited lifetimes for you,” he whispers into your hair.

You stroke his jaw gently with your good hand. “And I’m here now.”

Outside, the city glows. Inside, you drift toward sleep in his arms, unaware that you’ve met over and over and over again, in monasteries, on ships, under Arctic skies, in schoolhouses and airfields and small-town libraries. Unaware that for him, this moment is both brand-new and older than anything else he remembers.

For a long time he just listens to you breathe, the slow rise and fall of your chest against his, committing the rhythm to memory the way he always does—like he’s trying to steal a little time from the universe while it isn’t looking. His voice is barely more than a whisper when he finally speaks, meant only for the quiet room and the centuries that came before it.

“If the universe insists on taking you from me…” he murmurs into your hair, cinching his arms around you as though he could anchor you to the world by sheer will alone. “…then I’ll simply keep finding you.”

Hope hurts. He knows how this story usually goes. Still, he let's himself believe. Because this time…for the first time in a long time—