Reborn To Save My Broken Lover

The beeping of the machine was the only thing that felt real. A steady, cold metronome counting down the seconds of her life.

Genesis Greene felt herself floating, untethered from the body that had failed her. The air scraped her lungs with each forced breath, a painful reminder of the fight she was losing.

Then, the beeping faded, replaced by the soft sound of weeping.

She saw her own funeral. A polished cherrywood casket. Her mother, a ghost in a black dress, leaning on her father's arm. Friends from school, their faces pale and confused. They were all there, saying goodbye to the girl who had everything and then, suddenly, had nothing.

The scene shifted. Days, weeks, months bled into one another. The mourners stopped coming. The flowers wilted.

But one person remained.

A boy. No, a man. Cas Riley.

She knew him from school, but only in the way you know a name on a roster. He was a shadow in the back of the classroom, a ghost in the hallways. Quiet. Always alone. Always looking like he was carrying the weight of the world on his thin shoulders.

Now, he was at her grave.

He brought a single white rose every morning, placing it gently on the cold stone that bore her name. He never cried. He just stood there, his eyes as empty as a winter sky, his frame growing thinner with each passing season. He was withering away, just like the flowers he brought.

One day, in the biting wind of a late autumn afternoon, he collapsed. His body hit the frozen ground with a soft thud, and he didn't get up.

A pain, sharper and more profound than any her disease had given her, ripped through Genesis's soul. It wasn't her pain. It was his. The crushing weight of a love she had never known existed, a love so powerful it had literally stopped his heart.

He loved me.

The thought was a cataclysm.

He loved me, and to me, he was just a name on a list.

She gasped, a real, ragged gasp that filled her lungs with air that didn't hurt.

The smell wasn't antiseptic and death. It was chalk dust and cheap cleaning supplies.

The sound wasn't beeping. It was the low drone of a history lecture and the scratching of pens on paper.

Genesis blinked.

She wasn't in a hospital bed. She was sitting at a wooden desk, the sunlight of a September afternoon streaming through the large classroom window.

"...Chelsea Nolan?"

"Here," a familiar voice chirped from the desk beside her.

Mrs. Gable stood at the front of the room, a clipboard in her hand, her lips pursed in their usual state of mild disapproval. "Cas Riley?"

Silence.

Genesis's head snapped up, her heart hammering against her ribs. She scanned the room, her eyes landing on the empty desk in the far back corner by the window. His desk.

Mrs. Gable made a small, contemptuous sound, a little tsk of