cassiemoonie
"If this universe buries us, will you still look for me in the next?"
"I will crawl through ash and ruin to find you. Even if loving you destroys me every time."
Adelaide had been dreaming of drowning again.
The same cold rush.
The same crushing dark.
The same pair of arms wrapped around her as the ocean swallowed them both.
She never saw his face clearly, only the outline of him - broad shoulders, rough hands, a warmth that didn't belong in the freezing depths. And always, just before she woke, she felt his lips brush hers in a desperate, final promise.
"I love you."
She woke gasping, salt on her tongue, heart racing as if she'd lived the moment instead of dreamed it. Her mother said it was stress. Her friends joked she needed to stop reading tragic romances. Adelaide tried to believe them.
But the dreams felt too real.
Too familiar.
Too much like something she had lost.
Sometimes, in the seconds between sleep and waking, she heard him whisper a name.
Elijah.
She didn't know anyone by that name. Yet it felt like a memory.
And somewhere deep inside her - deeper than logic, deeper than fear - she knew the dreams weren't dreams at all.
They were echoes.
-------------------------
Far from the life she now lived, in a world she no longer remembered, a pirate once stood on a cliffside shore, staring up at a girl whose foot had just snapped a branch in the quiet.
Elijah hadn't meant to look. He hadn't meant to care. But when Adelaide turned toward the sound, sunlight catching in her hair, something inside him shifted - as if he had found something he'd been missing long before he knew it was gone.
Their story began with that broken branch.
It ended beneath the waves.
And now, in another universe, Adelaide dreamed of a death she had already lived... and a man her soul had never forgotten.