It rained the way it always does in Huasheng City quietly, like the sky was apologizing for interrupting the living. I hadn't planned to be out. I'd just been walking, trying to silence the noise inside my head, I was not sleeping well and every reflection in every window still showed him. Ruan Ye's face had followed me for weeks, and I kept telling myself it was because I missed him, because trauma does strange things to the mind.
I didn't notice where I was going until the noise of traffic thinned and I found myself before an iron gate. A cemetery. The kind that doesn't try to look beautiful just rows of stone and weeds, the faint hum of insects between the graves. I almost turned back. But there was something about the silence inside those gates that felt like an answer waiting.
I walked in.
The rain had stopped, leaving the earth damp and dark. I trailed my fingers across the names on the stones as if reading them could slow the racing in my chest. Then I saw it.
Ruan Ye.
The letters were carved cleanly, the date beneath his name unmistakable. Months before my accident.
For a moment I couldn't breathe. I actually laughed, a broken, disbelieving sound. Someone else must have shared his name what were the odds? I crouched, tracing the engraved line again, slower this time, until my fingers started to shake.
The birthdate matched. The photograph inset in the corner matched. The curve of his smile, the one that never quite hid his dimples.
My knees hit the ground.
I must have sat there for minutes—or an hour—before I noticed the sound behind me. A footstep on wet earth. I turned.
He was standing a few paces away, umbrella in hand, the rain making a silver blur around him.
"Li An." His voice was the same as it always had been, soft, certain.
My throat closed. "This isn't funny."
"I didn't mean for you to find it like this."
I stood up too fast, the world tilting. "Find what, Ruan? Your grave? You died before the accident do you understand what that means?"
He lowered the umbrella. The rain slid through him in thin sheets before settling again, as if deciding whether or not he was real. "I didn't lie to hurt you. I didn't even remember I was gone."
"Don't—don't say that." I took a step closer. "You were there. The accident, the nights after—I talked to you. You held my hand."
"I tried," he said. "When you were between living and dying, the distance faded. That was the only time I could reach you."
Something inside me snapped. All the days I'd waited for messages that never came, all the calls that rang into silence—it all made sense now, and I hated that it did. "So what are you now?" I asked. "A dream I keep waking up to?"
"I'm still me." His eyes—those dark, steady eyes—didn't waver. "At least the part that loves you."
The words hurt more than they comforted. "You should have told me. You should have found a way."
"I couldn't." His voice trembled. "The dead don't choose the doors they're allowed through."
I wanted to shout, to push him away, but instead I reached for him. My hand met his chest—solid, warm. The heat shocked me.
He looked down at where our fingers touched. "Sometimes I get to be real for a little while."
"Real," I repeated, my voice cracking. "And then what? You disappear again?"
He smiled—small, tired. "Until you stop looking for me."
"I can't." The confession came out before I could swallow it. "You think I could ever stop?"
We stood there in the rain, two fools arguing with the impossible. The clouds thinned, the cemetery brightened to a gray that was almost silver. I remembered the promise we once made, if one of us ever lost the other, we'd find a way to come back. I used to think it was just something lovers say.
He stepped closer until I could see the faint shimmer where light bent around him. "Li An, I don't remember how I died. I only remember loving you and waking up to silence."
I felt the tears before I realized I was crying. "Then let this be the last silence."
For a moment neither of us moved. The city beyond the gates faded to nothing but sound: rain on leaves, the slow rhythm of breath that didn't belong to either life or death.
Ruan reached up, fingertips brushing the side of my face. His touch was warm, like the last memory of sunlight. I closed my eyes.
"You're shaking," he whispered.
"So are you."
He laughed, the sound breaking halfway through. "Guess some things don't change."
I opened my eyes and met his gaze. There was fear there of vanishing, of being remembered only as absence but there was love too, steady and familiar.
When he leaned forward, the world seemed to hold its breath. Our foreheads touched first, then the smallest distance vanished between us.
It wasn't a kiss that belonged to the living; it was quieter, as if the air itself folded around us. I felt the warmth of him, the rain cooling on my skin, the impossible nearness of someone I'd already lost.
For that heartbeat, he was here.
Then the light shifted. The rain stopped completely, and he pulled back just enough for me to see the calm on his face.
"Don't forget me," he said.
"As if I could."
He smiled once more the same crooked smile from the photograph and the air around him shimmered. When I blinked, he was gone, leaving the umbrella where he'd stood.
I picked it up, still warm in my hand, and looked at the stone again. The engraved name no longer frightened me. It felt like a promise fulfilled.
The clouds began to part, letting through a thin thread of light that reached the ground like a farewell.
I whispered his name once more, not to the stone but to the space beside me, and started walking home.