Sena

"You're always running toward storms," he murmured, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "And I... I follow like a fool chasing thunder."

Kaveri's gaze didn't waver. "Maybe you're not chasing. Maybe you were always meant to walk beside the storm."

He stepped closer.

"You terrify me," he confessed - not as a man afraid, but as one who has known beauty too sharp to hold. "Not because of your fire. But because every time you walk away, I forget how to breathe."

A pause. A heartbeat.

"You should have let me go," she said, voice barely above wind.

"I did," he replied. "Every night, in dreams. And every dawn, I woke up burning."

He reached for her hand - not in haste, but with the reverence of someone touching fate. Their fingers met, the contact soft but searing, like a spark born not from friction but recognition.

Then, in that moment suspended between lifetimes, he whispered in Sanskrit - a verse from a poem she knew but had never heard from his lips:

"Yatra nari pūjyante, ramante tatra devatāḥ."
Where women are worshipped, there the gods rejoice.

"You are not mine," he said. "But I will spend lifetimes proving I am worthy to walk in your light."

And when he kissed her, it wasn't with possession.
It was with prayer.