Chapter Text
Light filtered through the palm trees overhead, leaving dancing shadows over Lance’s sun-kissed skin. He felt himself sink, gratefully, into the sand, relaxed. At peace. Further down, he could hear Mateo’s happy laughter as Anna chased him through the shallow waters of the beach shore. Beyond them, clear blue water led to the black of deeper ocean, stretching on forever. A contented sigh left his lips as he lay back. He’d forgone the beach towel in favor of the smooth, unbroken waves of white sand, let it sift through his outstretched fingers, digging his heels in, until he sank. Lower, lower, lower.
He was completely buried in it. The cool sand turned frigid around him, the sound of his nephew’s shrieks were muffled as burning cold sand filled his ears, his mouth, his lungs. He felt an almost unnatural hush fall over him as the sand took over his body. He lay suspended in a frozen sea until a suppressed scream broke through to him suddenly. A wash of fear rushed over him, compelling him to move. As soon as he made to break free, the ice melted to appease him. A moment's breath of relief was wiped away when Lance realized the heat that had freed him was a suffocating wall of flames, licking upwards, endlessly. He turned around frantically, hoping to find an escape, but no matter where he looked the fire was there to greet him. Deadly tendrils of smoke threatened to fill his body with ash. A flash of red.
It took a moment for Lance to process that the red wasn’t from a burst of flames, but a person. A red sweater draped over tense shoulders, silhouetted against white-hot flames. Black hair brushed the pale line of a neck. The mournful pose looked familiar to him, but Lance’s smoke riddled brain couldn’t manage to supply the name that sat on the tip of his tongue.
Like that, the flames went out and he was left alone in the dark with the stranger in the red hoodie. Shoulders shook, a sound like water dripping out of a broken faucet reached out to him as if from a great distance. Each drop sounded like grief.
Grief, grief, grief.
It hit him like a tidal wave, like stormy eyes, deep as a galaxy, opening up to swallow him.
Grief. Loneliness. Fear.
Lance couldn’t tell if they were his emotions or the stranger’s, or if it even mattered either way.
Words scrawled their way across his skin. Every single thing he’d written to his soulmate in the hopes that he’d get a response, now painting him black like the darkness surrounding him and, he noticed, words that were not his, scrawled in a red like blood. His racing thoughts couldn’t keep up with the words as the crawled up his arms, his chest, his neck. Before he felt the ink slip over his eyes, he looked frantically to where the stranger had stood, seeking out his last hope of escape. But where they had stood now only lay a red sweater, gently rumpled and still. The last thing he saw before the darkness overtook him was red ink, passing over his irises, pupils blown wide. Spelled out before him:
“I’m sorry.”
Lance’s body jerked as if shocked. He was laying in a pool of sweat, shivering in the breeze wafting through his open window. It took a minute for him to control his breathing and even longer before he focused enough to look at the time.
Flinching when the light from his phone proved to be too bright, he found that it was only 4:03.
He groaned and fell back onto his pillow. After twenty minutes of restlessly laying down, Lance threw his blankets aside and resigned himself to crawling out of his bed. He felt around blindly for a pair of sweats and a long sleeved t-shirt to put over his boxers before popping out the screen of his window and lowering himself onto a small patch of roof. He stared up at the sky, intending to stargaze while he calmed his heart rate, but clouds blocked out the stars. The only light he saw was the streetlamps lining the road.
Lance sighed, guess there’s no distracting myself with constellations.
Naturally, his thoughts drifted to the dream-or rather, nightmare- that he’d had. It had been so vivid, but already he’d forgotten everything except the colour red and overwhelming sadness. It made him miss something he couldn’t name; something wistful twisted in his gut. He missed trips to Veradero beach with his farher’s side of family, sitting around at his grandma’s house while the smell of homemade garlic knots wafted through the house, listening to his brothers rant about crazy inventions they wanted to make, hanging out with Hunk at the park everyday that he could, talking to Ana about soulmates. He missed his childhood. The dreamy feeling of wondering what life would be like in love.
For a fleeting moment, Lance considered the blue sharpie, shoved haphazardly into the kitchen drawer. He missed loving the idea of having a soulmate. Especially now that he knew he didn’t have one. Or was sure he didn’t have one. Or was sure they would never answer even if they did exist, that he’d never know the reason why they didn’t answer. The guessing game just made him feel worse about the whole thing, so he put it away completely, crawled back through the window, out of his room.
For a gut-twisting moment, he pressed his ear to Mateo’s door, hoping, praying beyond belief that he wasn’t crying again tonight, heard nothing but a soft snore. Lance breathed out his nose in favour of a heaving sigh and made his way downstairs.
He wished, for a second, that maybe his sister would be awake, that they’d finally have a chance to talk but when he approached the kitchen, she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t. Normal people didn’t wake up at four in the morning.
Lance plopped down on a stool at the kitchen island after grabbing a bottle of water, eyes still adjusting to the dim buzz of light from over the stove. Immediately, he focused on the junk drawer where he’d stuffed the blue sharpie. Not for the first time he wished he was as smart or mechanical or as busy as Hunk. If he was, maybe he could be tinkering away in the garage, building a robot, working on his car, any number of things other than obsessing over soulmates.
Lance was starting to get tired of feeling like he wasn’t meant for love. No matter how many girls he flirted with, spent hours planning dates, the perfect outfit, the perfect place, an embarrassingly long time practicing conversation starters in front of the mirror so his date would never get bored, they always left shortly after. Sometimes, he wished they even left because of him. But it was only ever because of soulmates. In the end, they had never taken him seriously. He was a placeholder, practice. They’d never stay around long enough for their budding relationship to turn into something more. The part of him that had spent every morning and night writing to his soulmate for two years understood. The tiny part of him that still wanted to believe in true love hoped that they never stuck around because one day, his soulmate would show up too. Until he started dating Plaxum.
Plaxum had been his first real girlfriend. They’d been good friends since middle school. At first, he’d thought of her as a sister, she was dorky, with a silly laugh and a warm smile. She and Hunk always got on well because they were both huge nerds. But she loved swimming and played video games with Lance when he was sad and they’d sit around and read comic books and when she came to the beach with him they’d pretend they were mermaids. It wasn’t until their sophmore year of highschool that Lance realized she was pretty.
He’d called Hunk and they’d ridden their bikes out to the park the afternoon of his epiphany and sat under the giant oak tree at its center where Lance had then confessed that he had never realized just how much he liked Plax. He’d talked and talked until he ran out of words and Hunk had tossed a stray rock into the sand pit and told him to “ go for it, Lance.”
And so he had. And when she’d said yes, he’d felt like he was walking on a cloud, living in a dream. For the first time since he’d learned about soulmates, he found that he didn’t care about them at all. He was just so happy that this pretty girl he’d known for forever, shared so many memories with, was his girlfriend.
She’d kissed his cheek at their homecoming dance, held his hand at the mall, around the halls of school, he took her on a picnic date at a beach that couldn’t quite compare to the ocean but didn’t matter as long as she was there, and she invited him as her plus one to her aunt’s wedding. Every little moment had felt like something special.
Then, one day in July, just before their junior year had started, she told him her family was moving to California. She wanted to go to a highschool closer to the ocean, somewhere she could surf afterschool and that taught her subjects she needed to secure a major in marine biology, her parents wanted to be closer to family so they’d applied to jobs along the west coast. She had smiled and told him that she was glad she’d gotten to know him. Glad they’d spent their time together. “You were the best first boyfriend a girl could ask for,” she said, “and you are my best friend. I love you, but this was a choice we made as a family, y’know?”
And he had known, he knew he’d choose his family too. He knew she couldn’t stay if her dreams were calling her to the coast. He often wished he could move too, somewhere warmer, wished he could have taken her with him to Cuba, so she could see his family’s home. But it never happened and a month after she was gone, they’d video chatted and she said she could feel it, her soulmate was there in California. A week later, she proved herself right.
Lance had tried so hard not to be bitter about it, but he couldn’t believe they’d known each other six years, dated for almost an entire year of that time, and yet this person she had just met was her soulmate. Suddenly, she was in love with someone else, and it felt like all his time with her had become so insignificant. It was the first time he’d thought about soulmates since he’d started dating her and it left a bad taste in his mouth.
He’d gotten so caught up in his happiness that he’d never stopped to think that she had a soulmate, someone that wasn’t him. He’d wondered if she had ever spoken to them while they were dating, realized that he was probably the only person who thought they’d last a long time.
After Plaxum, he flirted around, but nothing ever came of it.
Lance sighed, trying to pull himself out of a spiral of negativity. Things were good now. He could finally make jokes about soulmates without it feeling like he was covering up his insecurity, he had college, his parents, some really cool friends. Ana was home now and he got to see his nephew every day and maybe even if he couldn’t help himself he could help ‘ them at least. Romance was fun to think about but it didn’t have a place in his life right now.