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mirasmirages · 8 days ago

Text

Soulmates

Written for @winterbreakadvent

James belongs to @starliight-whump

Contains: nightmares, magic, rejection, magic, aftermath of torture, cauterization, soulmates

3698 words

James had had nightmares for as long as he could remember.

The first big one was when he was five, a dream about fire surrounding him, taller than he was, with no way out. He woke himself screaming and coughing, and it took his parents all night to help him calm down.

For months after that, he dreamt of loss. He didn't know what he had lost, but he was sure it was something important. Something irreplaceable.

His sister had dreams too, but hers were usually fun dreams, about talking to animals and going on adventures. She could go on for hours about her dreams, and when she did, their parents would smile and say her soulmate must live an interesting life.

When James told them about his dreams, they looked sad, and told him it was just a dream.

Over the years, he learned not to talk much about his nightmares. Most of them weren't very interesting, anyway. They were normal, about going to school or being with his family, but there was always an underlying sense of dread. An invisible monster waiting to jump out at him. But people didn't understand, and he could tell it made his family sad to hear him talk about it, so he stopped.

Julia had a party for her twelfth birthday, and one of her friends gifted her a book of spells. It had a blue cover with gold foil details, and all the spells had to do with soulmates. There were ways to find your soulmate, to contact your soulmate, and even to break the soulmate bond.

James was fourteen, and didn't believe in magic. There was no evidence that it was possible to contact your soulmate before you met them. Still, he sat with the girls as they paged through the book and settled on a double page spread that looked a lot like a Ouija board, but was just called a "communication board."

He watched as they each tried to contact their soulmate and either be disappointed or pretend it worked. It wasn't the least bit convincing, but he played along to be nice.

Everyone had a turn, and James thought they were finally done, when Julia's friend Mary turned on him.

"James has to do it too," she said, and all the girls agreed, pestering him until he sat down in front of the book.

It felt stupid, but they all looked so excitedly at him, he didn't want to disappoint them. So with the tiniest roll of his eyes, he started spelling out a message with his fingers.

"No, James," Julia interrupted. "You have to do it for real!"

"I am doing it for real!" James argued. What he was doing was as real as what everyone else had done!

"No, you're not! You have to mean it!"

James huffed in annoyance. "Fine."

He took a deep breath and put away his annoyance at all of this. He loved his sister, even if she was a stupid little twelve-year-old, so he could do this for her. He thought about his soulmate, and who they might be. What could be happening in their life to send him a neverending string of nightmares. When he met them, he would do everything he could to save them from that. Maybe, if this worked, he could start saving them now.

He released his breath, and started spelling out a message.

Hello

My name is James

I'm your soulmate

He waited for a reply, and even if he didn't believe it would come, he still hoped. He was still disappointed when none came.

"See?" he said, voice going hard to mask his hurt. "It's not real. I knew it wouldn't work."

Julia stopped playing with the book after a few weeks, and somehow it made it's way onto James's shelf. He mostly ignored it, because it was stupid, but sometimes, when the nightmares were bad, or when he was sad about something in his own life, he would pull it out and trace his fingers over the letters. Little messages he wished he could tell his soulmate. Stories from his life when he had no one else to tell, or that he hoped he would find them soon. That he loved them.

Like a secret diary that no one could read, he traced out messages to his soulmate. The nightmares grew worse, a new flavor of fear from before.

One night, when James was eighteen, he woke up in the middle of the night, the sound of a gunshot ringing in his ears.

He pulled the book out from under his mattress with shaking hands and opened it in his lap, taking deep breaths to calm down.

Are you okay?

He spelled the question out with his fingers, wishing more than anything that he would get a reply. Wishing that magic was real so that he could magically bring his soulmate to his room where they would be safe.

And then, for the first time, something happened.

Gold swirled in the air in front of him, spelling out glittering handwritten letters.

STOP

Oh.

James choked on a sob.

It wasn't that his soulmate hadn't gotten his messages.

It was that they didn't want them.

He closed the book and put it back under his mattress.

His soulmate didn't want to hear from him.

He hid under his blanket and cried.

That message from his soulmate was the most painful thing James had ever felt. He skipped school the next day and stayed in bed, alternating between feeling devastated and furious. How could they not want to hear from him? Wasn't the whole point of having a soulmate that they would be perfect for each other?

He stewed over this for weeks, refusing to talk about it to anyone. His parents worried about his sudden bad mood, but he didn't explain, just muttered something about nightmares until they left him alone.

It was such a bizarre idea that his soulmate didn't want to talk to him, and once he was able to see through his own hurt, he started to wonder, was it something he had done? His soulmate sent him a steady stream of nightmares, but James hadn't given much thought to what he might be sending in return. Maybe his life was so boring his soulmate wanted nothing to do with it.

He decided that if his soulmate didn't want to hear from him, he would respect that. But since there was no way to stop their dream connection, he decided that instead of messages, he would send his soulmate good dreams every night, to make up for whatever horrible life they were leading.

He took up running, and spent time exploring the outdoors so that his soulmate might see it too. He kept practicing his piano playing even when life got busy, in the hopes that his soulmate would hear. He ate good food, and had fun experiences, and kept his own life from being too stressful so that he would never be the one sending nightmares.

Even through his increasingly bad nightmares, James managed to lead a good life. He went to college, and then med school, and then got a residency at a hospital near his family. He got a car, and a house. The blue book stayed on his shelf, and sometimes he would flip through it, but he never sent another message to his soulmate after they asked him to stop.

He woke up in the middle of the night, rolling out of bed and barely made it two steps before he fell to his knees and threw up.

For a second he thought about cleaning up, or calling someone, but then his body seized with pain, and all he could do was lay there, curled up, his body screaming with pain.

He was going to die.

No. Worse.

His soulmate was dying.

It felt like hours before he was able to move again, the scorching pain subsiding, making room in his body for cold and exhaustion.

James pushed himself onto his hands and knees, and made his way to the bookshelf with the book. His hands shook at he pulled it from the bottom shelf. It opened in his lap to the communication board page.

His soulmate had asked him to stop, and he had respected that, but this was different. He put his fingers on the page and traced a message.

Are you okay?

For a long minute, there's no reply.

Are you alive?

Again, no answer.

Please be alive

Please

Just give me a sign

Anything, please

Please

Over and over, he traced the letters, increasingly desperate when no reply came.

He was sobbing, tears soaking the paper, when suddenly, there was a gold shimmer in the air. There were no letters, but that was his soulmate, giving him a sign. James wiped his tears on his sleeve and traced out more messages.

Where are you?

There were more golden swirls, but no words, so James tried again.

I want to help you. How can I help?

He watched as the gold struggled to make sense. There were squiggly lines that dissolved as soon as they arrived, but then, finally, it managed to spell out a message.

I'm fine

"You're not fine!" James shouted at the words hanging in the air in front of him. His soulmate was dying, and they still wouldn't let him help!

Why wouldn't they let him help? James couldn't understand it, it was so heartbreaking and infuriating. And, he decided, it wasn't their choice.

He flipped through the pages of the book, until he found the right one.

There were a lot of spells in the book. Some were simple and innocent enough, like the communication board. Others were more complex, and claimed to let you see through your soulmate's eyes, or hear through their ears, or to take their place. That was the one James turned to now. Maybe, if it worked, he could find out where his soulmate was, and then he could go there and help.

If not, well. It had to work.

He got to his feet and started gathering materials. Bowls and herbs from the kitchen, candles from the living room, rowan twigs from outside.

It didn't take long to set up, but every second was another second where his soulmate was alone and dying. When he finally had a small altar set up like the book instructed, he used a candle to light the twigs and herbs on fire, and then he closed his eyes and tried to meditate.

He pushed everything else from his mind and focused only on his soulmate. Remembering the pain he had been in earlier, he invited it back, feeling the leftover pain weighing down his soulmate's body, until their bodies merged and he could feel the cold concrete floor pushing against his cheek.

Opening his eyes, he found himself in a dark basement, only lit by the moonlight shining through a small dirty window.

In the middle of the room was a single chair that had been knocked over.

Groaning, James made himself sit up and take stock of his soulmate's injuries. The pain was stronger in this body, but it was less diffuse. He could feel the bruising in his gut, which were different from the burns on his shoulder, which were different from the cut on his arm.

The arm is the most worrisome. It was still bleeding, slow waves of dark blood in time with his heartbeat. There was a puddle of blood on the floor, and James didn't know how much blood this body had lost. He needed to deal with this immediately.

He used the chair to push himself to his feet. His vision blacked out. When it finally came back to him, his eyes fell on a table under the window. If he could, he would throw up.

It almost looked like the tools laid out for surgery, except that instead of sterile and precise instruments, these were knives, pliers, a hammer, a blowtorch, all covered in varying amounts of blood.

How did his soulmate end up in this situation? Why did James leave them alone for so long, just because they asked? If he had just kept messaging, kept asking, maybe this could have been avoided.

Gritting his teeth, he scanned the room for anything he could use to treat the wound. There wasn't much. Whoever had done this had barely even left his soulmate with clothes on, just a pair of boxer shorts. No belt that could be used for a tourniquet. Even if he had a tourniquet, he doubted he would have the strength to tighten it enough.

There was a sink that turned on pretty easily. James splashed some water on his face and drank a little, then tried to clean some of the blood from the wound.

He went back to the table of torture instruments and didn't quite admit to himself what he was about to do. It wasn't a good option, but it was the best he had.

He picked the cleanest knife in the lineup and turned on the blowtorch. At least his soulmate wouldn't have to be the one to experience this additional piece of torture. The metal of the knife glowed red, and then white along the edge.

Holding his breath, with no hesitation, James pressed the flat side of the knife against the wound.

His gritted teeth were not enough to hold back the scream. There was a sizzling sound, and the smell of cooking meat, and a level of pain he had never experienced before. His eyes were screwed shut, but he had to open them to see if it worked.

It wasn't pretty, but when he lifted the knife away, the wound was no longer bleeding.

He dropped the knife on the table and sank to the floor, dry heaving and sobbing uncontrollably.

It took a surprisingly short time to calm down, maybe a minute or so. This body was too exhausted to sustain his panic, and in a way, maybe that was a good thing.

The heat of the knife kept burning into his arm still. James sat on the floor staring into the air.

There was a door on the other side of the room. Slowly, he realized that this hadn't just happened to his soulmate, someone had done it. Which meant that they might come back. Which meant that James had to get out.

How much longer would he be able to stay in this body? Getting to his feet was enough to make his vision go black again, and he had to hold on with everything he had to not disappear. He barely made it across the floor, and when he reached the door, he realized he had no idea how to break the lock.

It turned out he didn't have to. The door was unlocked, and swung open on unwilling hinges.

The door opened to the outside, concrete stairs leading up from the basement. He climbed them on hands and feet, and didn't let himself collapse when he reached the top, no matter how much he wanted to. He was out, but he was far from safe.

He was outside a small house with broken windows and peeling paint. There was a gravel road leading up to it, and he couldn't see any other houses, just sparse trees and nothing. He couldn't see a car or other signs of people.

It would be a long walk from here to wherever he could get help. James wouldn't know who would be safe to ask for help if he did find someone. Still, he had to get away from here, so he put one foot in front of the other, and started walking away from the house.

He got three steps before everything started spinning, and he fell to his knees, catching himself hard with his hands, and he woke up in front of his little altar.

The bowls he had burned the herbs in were filled with water. While James had been in his soulmate's body, his soulmate must have been in his, and they--he?--had extinguished the fire and ended the ritual.

James lay back on the floor and covered his face with his hands.

It had worked. He had used a ritual from the book, and it had worked, and he had, hopefully, helped save his soulmate's life.

He rolled to his side and reached for the book, flipping it to the communication board.

Are you okay?

The air shimmered in front of him like blotchy ink before spelling out,

Thank you

Despite how exhausted he was, James didn't think he could sleep, and staying home all day with nothing to do didn't seem like a good idea, so he took a long shower and went to work.

It was a struggle to focus on work, which was bad when not being focused could mean injuring or killing a patient. Still, James was used to working long hours, and this wasn't that much worse than the end of a 28-hour shift.

He was taking a short break outside when an ambulance came in. There were nurses running out to meet it, but James went a bit closer too, in case they needed an extra set of hands.

The ambulance workers rolled the gurney out of the car, and James felt like his heart was going to stop. He didn't know much about what his soulmate would look like, but he knew one thing.

The burn on his arm where James had pressed the knife.

James stumbled closer, getting a look at the man's bruised. He gripped the side of the gurney so tight his knuckles went white.

"Excuse me, Doctor?" one of the nurses said.

James barely heard her.

She touched his arm, pulling him back to reality. He looked at her, then back to his soulmate.

His soulmate was here, alive, in his hospital.

James had saved him.

His soulmate's face was bruised and swollen, it barely hinted at how handsome it must have been before last night. He was awake, watching James with a frown, and then his eyes widened in recognition, and he turned, trying to get away.

James should be used to this by now. It wasn't the first time his soulmate had rejected him.

Still, it hurt.

He lets a nurse lead him away, to a staff room where he sat on an uncomfortable couch while trying to process the fact that even when they met face to face, his soulmate rejected him.

Why would he do that? How could he? James's mind was filled with white noise, but the questions still pushed their way to the surface. How was it possible that James had spent his entire life wanting to meet his soulmate, while his soulmate wanted nothing to do with him?

He took the rest of the day off, and the day after, but he didn't go home. Instead, he sat in the waiting room, hoping his soulmate would change his mind about not wanting to see him.

At the end of the second day, he was losing hope, and by the third day he was considering if he should give up and go home.

There was a ritual in the book for severing a soulmate bond. Just the thought of it brought fresh tears to his eyes, but maybe that would be the kindest thing James could do for his soulmate.

He buried his face in his hands and tried to imagine it. Not having any more nightmares, and not having anyone out there who would be perfect for him.

"Hi, uh, Doctor Kennedy?"

James looked up at the nurse in front of him. There had been a few of them, checking on him every few hours while he had been in the waiting room.

"I'm okay," James said, wiping a sleeve across his face.

"That's good to hear," the nurse said. "But it's not that. The patient says you can see him, if you still want to."

James entered the room after a hesitant knock at the door. He had no idea what to expect, if his soulmate had really changed his mind or if he was just going to tell James to get lost one last time.

His soulmate was asleep in bed. Next to the bed sat a woman, with brown curls and red lips.

James's heart sank. Was that his soulmate's girlfriend? His wife? What was James supposed to do if his soulmate turned out to be married to someone else?

She looked up and smiled at him. "Are you James?" she asked.

He nodded silently.

"Henry told me you saved him. Thank you."

Henry. That was his soulmate's name. James nodded again, taking a few steps closer.

Henry looked better now, after his skin was cleaned and his wounds bandaged. The swelling had calmed down a bit, showing the shape of his face more, but the bruises had darkened since the last time James had seen him.

"He's awake," the woman said, and poked Henry in his side to make him flinch. "He's just being stubborn."

She stood, and held a hand out to James, who took it.

"I'm Maya," she said. "I'm Henry's friend. I'm sorry you have to meet him like this."

That was his name again. James finally knew his soulmate's name! He smiled, and looked at Henry, who scowled at him.

Maya shook her head and gently smacked Henry's arm. "Be nice." She turned back to James. "He's not so bad if you give him a chance," she said. "I'll give you two a chance to talk."

She left, and James took her seat next to the bed. He looked at Henry, and Henry looked back, with wonderful hazel green eyes. This was his soulmate, and James knew his name now, and the color of his eyes, and he was alive. James smiled, and he could feel his eyes fill with tears.

"Hi," he said

Henry's voice was rough when he replied.

"Hi."

#mira writes #soulmate AU #OC: Henry Baker #Character: James Kennedy #Character: Julia Kennedy #OC: Maya Campbell #nightmares #magic #rejection #aftermath of torture #cauterization #whump writing #I hope you like it!#Comments make me happy

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