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“You and I, always dizzy, from looking up
You and I, always reeling from a white screen lovers film
You and I, open gauges spilling with feeling, filling every street
Were you a dream?
You were my own personal comet
You were my own personal ring
Loving you made me understand why people lived
Loving you was living to me.”
- Cosmos, Blegh
“I’ve got to tell you what I feel!” The words rip out of him, striking out like a bolt of lightning hitting the earth. His mother gasps behind him as his father’s eyebrows raise in an emotion he can’t pinpoint, but it’s not pleased. A voice that sounds suspiciously like Mr Keating cheers for him in the back of his mind for finally saying it, but Neil can barely hear the praise (it doesn’t feel like a success, it feels like the start of something much, much worse).
His father’s lips are moving, quick and sharp over the words, demanding him to elaborate on what he's just said. But Neil can barely remember saying it, doesn’t remember the words leaving his brain from his mouth, and he wishes he could take them back. He feels like a character in a mystery novel who's being interrogated. He feels like he’s let slip the damning evidence the detective needs to convict him of the crime, that somewhere in his attempts to defend himself he's only made himself the guiltiest party in the room and the prime murder suspect. It’s like he's been played, left to either double down and let it happen, or try to appeal to somebody else and get them to vouch for his own innocence. He feels like he's been beaten at his own game (or maybe he never started playing, you had to play to win, and all he felt was loss).
“Nothing,” is what Neil says when his father asks for him to tell him how he feels. His father takes it as it is; his mother dismisses him to bed with a pitying look. He feels like a child being put in the corner for being too loud. His heart is in his throat, the pounding drowning out the noise and restricting his breathing (he’s struggling to catch up with everything, his world is spinning out of control and the universe is spitting in his face).
When his brain catches up with him again, he’s in his bedroom, the door shutting softly behind him despite the itch in his fingers to rip it off its hinges. He’s alone, again. Though, that's never really been true. He’s always had his soulmate (not in the way he wants, not yet).
Soulmates have always been a fascinating topic in the Perry household - mostly because his parents aren’t soulmates themselves. His mother is soulbroken, his father is soulblocked; neither got the love they were promised but they got what they had (maybe they weren’t promised it in the first place, maybe this was how the story started).
His father had always kept a tight hold on his soulmate situation. Neil knows basically nothing about them. Not a name, a point in time, a reason - anything. There isn’t much to say because Neil doesn’t have anything to go off of. All he knows is that his father’s soulmate had severed their connection, and that his father’s bare wrist branded him the bitter man he is today. When he was younger, Neil would wonder if maybe, his father and his soulmate would’ve worked out, if he’d be different (he already was, was the realisation he came to). His father couldn’t care less about soulmates, especially Neil’s; he used to go on tirades about how Neil wouldn’t need his soulmate, because he’d be too successful and satisfied anyway if he followed the plan (he wonders if his father had had a plan like this for himself, at one point. He wonders if maybe his father is telling himself these things more than he is Neil).
His mother, however, adores her soulmate maybe more than anything in the world (maybe even Neil, though he can’t fault her for that). Marley Hammond had been 24 when she’d gotten into a car crash on an intersection. The other driver had died on impact, but Marley had died three hours later in hospital from a punctured lung, unconscious through it all. His mother had held her hand as she went, up until her soulmark had disappeared in smoke and brimstone, and Marley’s had stained her wrist like blood on carpet. He’d seen a picture of the two of them once while snooping through his mother’s drawers as a child; it was faded, corners well-worn from years of love and faded from sun damage. A laughing, blonde woman in her late teens, and his mother, brighter than he’s ever seen her be despite the lack of colour in the photo (nowadays, his mother looks haunted, like maybe she never left that hospital room in her head).
Ever since he could remember, Neil has longed for his soulmate. Aching for them in his bones like they’d been carved into his spine. For the longest time, their thoughts, the little reminders on his wrist that they were there, real, and somewhere waiting for him enthralled him. His mother’s melancholic nostalgia and his father’s cynical dismissal had manifested into an obsession in Neil, a hummingbird in his chest sweeping through him for the flower with the nectar it was starving for. Neil wants everything his soulmate is willing to give him, wants to drink them in, wants to ponder their every move like they were playing chess, and trace every brushstroke of their skin with his fingers. He wants real, true love, wants his heart to swoop into his knees with every touch and every look (he also, wants Todd, but he hopes these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. God, he hopes Todd sees his thoughts on his wrist. He hopes he’s been seeing Todd’s).
Todd Anderson is… ethereal. He’s unreal, he’s untouchable in the way stars and the moon and the cosmos are, but he’s there, he sleeps across the room from Neil and talks to him about poetry and laughs with their friends and runs lines with him for his play. From the moment they’d met, Neil has wanted him to be the one, to be his soulmate. Why else would the universe send him an angel, golden haired like a halo or a crown on top of his head, and eyes so barely blue that Neil dreams of holding his face close and picking out every speck of blue he finds. He wants Todd, wants Todd to be it; the missing puzzle piece, the other half of his soul, the nectar he’s been thirsting for (he doesn’t know he’s been right all this time, he doesn’t know what Todd needed to tell him, he doesn’t know how close he’d gotten to being whole).
He thinks of his soulbonds, of his people. Charlie, his brother with all of his quirks and passions and determination to do something, to do more, to be more. Meeks, living up to his name but never backing down either, never willing to give up if he started searching. Pitts, silly and clumsy but not incapable, where he lacked in tact he made up for in love and kindness. Knox, scatterbrained and kooky, but in tune with the world in a way none of them could ever grasp. Todd, pulled into their orbit like he was meant to be there all along. They’re his people; he’s theirs, and nothing can change that (he loves them more than he loves himself, and they love him; it’s not enough).
Neil has spent his whole life wanting. He wants Todd, he wants his soulbonds to stay strong and for his people to be his people for the rest of time (he wishes Cameron could be part of it, too, but that's not how his story goes), he wants to act. He wants to live deliberately, he wants to suck the marrow out of life, he wants to die being able to say he had lived (but he never gets what he wants, he’s Neil Perry, this is how his story goes).
He rips his jacket off and strips off his shirt despite the frosty chill. He’s on fire, he’s burning up like a space shuttle leaving the atmosphere, or maybe more like a match to gasoline in a parking lot. It’s all too much; it’s not enough at all. He cracks the window open and stares out it, pure white staring back at him as the wind breezes past like he's not even there. He places the crown down on the window sill, screaming out into the snow IwashereIwashereIwashere in a way Neil fails to (he doesn’t hear it screaming, pleading for him to come back once he turns away).
For the second time in his life, he’s certain he knows what he wants to do, and he’s going to do it. He wonders if his soulmate knows, too. He wonders if they’ll ever know who he was, how much he loved them, how much he wanted them with every fibre of his being and how his every hour was fueled by their connection; by them. He hopes - Todd or not - that whatever has shown up on their wrist isn’t going to panic them, or at least, maybe that they're asleep, or not paying attention. He hopes, for once, that his soulmate isn’t as irrevocably obsessed with him like he is with them, that they haven’t spent their lifetime waiting for him and that they’ve got everything they want without him. He doesn’t want them to worry; he doesn’t want the last moments of their connection to be tainted (he doesn’t want them to have last moments at all).
He doesn’t look down at his own wrist as he opens the door of his room. He can’t. If he does, everything will come rushing back and he’ll lose his nerve and cry himself to sleep like he does every time something like this happens. This is the last time. He can’t let himself be reminded about the one thing he’s guaranteed, and if he was supposed to look down, he will. That's how it works; everything that will or won’t happen has already happened. The irony of the situation isn’t lost on him - that his mother has spent her life with a ghost on her arm, and that his own soulmate will too (history is doomed to repeat itself. This is the kind of detail that only happens in stories, the kind that makes the reader connect the dots and their stomach drop).
Even now, as he wanders down the stairs and towards his father’s office like a phantom in his own house, he can feel the pull, the ache. The hummingbird keeps searching, unaware of what he is about to do to it - to them. He knows this is it, the ending since the beginning. A heavy weight settles in his chest, it feels like resignation, like destiny, like the universe itself is circling inside him for the first and final time. He and the universe are finally syncing up, finally on the same page (the final page).
His father’s office is surprisingly warm, though it could be the adrenaline pumping through his veins that gives off that effect. The key is where it always is - his father is a lot of things, predictable included amongst them - and the rug is lush under his feet as he approaches the desk. He sits in his father’s chair; as a child, this would’ve been the greatest crime, but now, it’s just a chair. It’s always been a chair. In between his fingers, the key is freezing. It inserts easily into the lock, turning with a soft click. Neil doesn’t bother putting it back in its place (his father will end up doing it anyway, or at least, that's what Neil predicts will happen).
Gun in one hand, universe in his other, the story ends. Neil Perry dies, alone, aching, wanting. (His soulmark, not enough this time, gone ignored and red like berries, reading I love you, Neil for the rest of time).