Chapter Text
the pain is intense, they say, all consuming, and it prickles, and it burns, and when it ends there’s color blooming over your skin, shaped exactly like a flower.
“soulmate’s flower,” his mama explains, “sometimes their favorite, sometimes symbolizing their person, their soul. sometimes both.”
and it burns.
lucas knows what’s happening when it does. he’s just a few days shy of fifteen, and he knows from the stories his mama has told, from textbooks and internet and yann. but the pain shooting up his right side is nothing like he’s experienced before; above the skin stretching thin over his ribs, it burns. the hollow between his ribs aches. and lucas knows, and yet he feels like dying—
for a few long, agonizing seconds—it feels like dying.
he’s seen the twirl of tiny, delicate begonias on the side of his mama's neck, tucked carefully behind his mama’s right ear, all closed, all waiting for the right touch. and he's traced a finger over the tiny buds of white daisies curving along his dad’s wrist in a sort bracelet (while still under his touch, they bloom prettily beneath the graze of his mama's fingers). innocence and caution, both complementary, both framed by a litany of pretty, pretty, pretty. but this—this is nothing like he knows.
through a sick lurch in his chest, he watches the three small flowers altogether the size of his mama’s hands blooming at his right side, a blistering smudge of color on his skin.
purple and midnight blue hyacinths get etched there by the strange magic of the universe.
///
lucas doesn’t like the burn, doesn’t really want to feel like dying again. but he knows that it’ll happen, that his soulmate’s touch will set it aflame again.
lucas doesn’t like the burn, but he thinks that it’d be nice. a touch dripping with love and reverence and a mouth whispering soft words into his skin, adjectives pressed between the hollow of his ribs like a careful secret, a well-earned present.
his and only his to hold.
but daydreams are just intricate lies built around hope, and sometimes, sometimes, just hope is not enough.
///
(his dad points it out once, twice, often, words looming, all sharp consonants that he can’t ignore. who’d love someone with sorrow on his body? he says. it’s always a rendition of those words and lucas, fifteen but still too young, listens through his door left slightly ajar. listens when silence is all that echoes in return, mostly.
it’s just a truth thing, he thinks. maybe that’s why it hurts so much.)
and he thinks they’re ugly, of course. ugly like a bruise, almost breathtakingly so. the ache subsides, vanishes grimly into the slowly brightening air, but something heavy remains in lucas’ chest. like a ghost. something mourning his lack of choice, perhaps. if he’d been given a choice, he’d have chosen red chrysanthemums for his body, or maybe carnations like yann, something that stood for his ability to love. something he didn’t feel the need to hate, despite himself.
but it’s seven thirty in the morning and a bright trail of birdsong spills through his window, and it’s terrifying, he thinks, how easy it is to hate.
“oh, lucas.” his mama says once, twice, often. she likes to brush a tender finger over the ravines of lucas’ ribs, eyes a brilliant azure in the morning light. when she comes the sun is always a soft glow on his mark, diluting it to something like mauve, something less hostile. “they’re so pretty, so beautiful, lucas. so … oh!”
a choked sound always follows, like she’s swallowed a word before it could form, hand trembling over his frame, and lucas knows. he always does.
purple hyacinths, the tail end of sorrow tainting his body, he knows.
///
he tells yann about it, about how it feels like it’s weighing him down, the possibility that there’s no love for him. they sit in the coffee shop they like to frequent and lucas speaks like he’s never before, and the words tumble out of his mouth freely, effortlessly, sounding a lot like those whispers in his mind, distinct and dark and turbulent. sounding a lot like his father.
something lodges in his throat midway; a ball of it could be you and other confessions, jagged words that don’t come out. he wants to tell yann all these things because yann’s special, and he knows. because he’s been here from the start, always. because somewhere, in the far corner of lucas’ mind there’s hope, blooming faintly, flickering, kindling an almost that burns too bright.
but there are moments like these, when yann looks at him with concern, and lucas thinks he’s reaching too far. “it can’t be that bad,” yann says, apprehensive, watching him. he has an intense gaze, lucas thinks, and mostly lucas likes to revel in the feel of it. but not now, though. now it just feels sort of strange, like something is crawling up his spine. lucas has to look away.
“it’s not yours, lucas,” yann continues, voice soft but resolute. “not your sorrow. you deserve to be loved too, you know? don’t let a stupid mark take that away from you.”
and lucas thinks about his mother, about the shine in her eyes as she’d explained the word to lucas when he was barely seven. and he thinks about yann, too, about how he’d smiled so big when he’d shown lucas his mark, and a few specks of those fairy lights his sister had been incessant about hanging in his room had danced across his skin in a golden fuzz.
the words you don’t understand promptly die in his throat.
it hurts to think that, but lucas loves him anyway.
///
a stupid mark, yann said, but the world still narrows down to it. everyone calls it a silver word. (silver is ash and silver is weakness)
they fixate, and there’s arthur with honeysuckles trailing almost shyly along his forearm, and basile with an intricate necklace of morning glories at the base of his throat. etched with the gentle craft and color of springtime, in a slow bloom, not quite alive, not quite dead.
and they wear them like a crown, like something worth flaunting, their destinies carved out for the world to see. and they should, lucas thinks with bitter envy. their marks are fucking beautiful.
neither, however, compare to the cluster of white carnations that blooms over the entirety of yann’s right pectoral. lucas finds it breath-taking, the way stems curl over his shoulder, dainty flowers nestled amidst lush green leaves. (once, during his third sleepover at yann’s, lucas had been brave enough to run a hesitant finger over yann’s shoulder.) (the flowers hadn't closed – yann hadn’t felt a thing.)
they’re somebody else’s flowers. not his.
lucas had suspected it, somewhat, but still his heart clenches at the proof, starts to sort of ache in his chest. he sees the way emma looks at yann, and the way yann watches her back, all dreamy eyes and shy smiles and the promise of a story that belongs in a fairy tale, and his heart breaks, too.
it’s many days later – when he’s let his thoughts go and his last flare of hope finally extinguishes – that he learns that the flowers aren’t emma’s either.
///
they gather two blocks away, in a park where the streetlights don’t quite reach and the stars bob and float gently over the surface of the lake. lucas and the boys, too wound up over the fickle thing they call fate, and the thing with love is, it’s that it fucking hurts. and they capture the glow of lighters in their fists, cigarettes held close to their mouths, ends burning like fireflies.
“why can’t it just not suck, for once?” basile asks, sloshing some of his beer on his thighs as he shifts on the grass dusted a bit with dew. and lucas laughs then, he’s the only one who does, the sound echoing strangely in the night, as though everything around him is hollow, too.
they’re sixteen now, curious and innocent in a way only early winters are, and sometimes it takes too long to understand.
“life always sucks,” arthur tells them, and he breathes a wisp of smoke out towards the sky. “but you just. you just live it, i guess.”
just live it, fuck. okay. lucas thinks he can do that.
///
january rolls around in biting cold, and eliott demaury paints the mural in too many shades, too bright, too blue. he’s drawn a flower amidst the mayhem, amidst the blues and purples, and it’s too familiar. sometimes, when lucas looks at it, he can’t help the shiver that runs through him. it feels like eliott demaury has bared lucas’ mark for all the world to see.
sometimes, it hurts too much to look.
but when striations of muted gray break through the window forming one wall of the foyer, the colour looks a bit more alive.
sometimes eliott demaury meets lucas in the foyer, and he asks him about the colour, about how it looks. lucas never tells, he never lets the words out, too afraid of emptying his heart right on the foyer’s floor, right in front of eliott.
but he likes the hush that usually settles over them, of winter lying sharp and crisp in the air, fluttering through the window like filmy dust. and lucas imagines it swirling around them, curling softly around the sharp edges of eliott’s face. hollow cheeks and bits of sunlit cheekbones.
and he likes how there’s always a faint smile softening the curve of eliott’s mouth, or how his eyes appear a melancholic grey in the soft afternoon light.
sometimes, lucas thinks they’re a coruscating green, too, and—
eliott demaury is so beautiful it makes lucas ache.