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His name is Julián --but it isn't, he knows that it isn't. His name is Scott, and his middle name is Julio because Mom wanted him to have a name that sounded of home, and his abuela only ever calls him that when they speak on the phone. But his name is Julián, he's got no extended family that he knows of, he's spent his life from foster home to foster home, and full moons make him uneasy but he can't quite tell why.
He's just turned sixteen when the dreams start. They come at him like a flood, like someone opened the dark room's curtains and let the bright morning sun in all at once. The first time he wakes up terrified, he wakes up breathless --he looks around for an inhaler he never even had, clutches at his side hoping to feel the sticky warmth of blood staining his ripped shirt but finds nothing there. He writes it off as a silly nightmare (there's no such thing as werewolves).
They keep coming, night after night --one time he dozes off in class and wakes up with a start, with the ghost feeling of a sword digging into his gut. He apologizes to the teacher, does his best not to fall sleep at school again, but the little sleep he gets at night doesn't actually make him any less tired and he too often wakes up gasping for breath, wheezing through a closed-up throat even though he's never had any symptoms of asthma before.
He dreams of his own death. He dies with his two best friends by his side, and when he comes back there is a darkness inside his chest, there is a new-found hunger that spurs the beast inside him. He dreams of other deaths. Allison was his first love, Allison dies in Scott's arms with a mouthful of I love you's and her lips blood-stained, and Julián feels that grief with the same intensity he felt his parents' death.
It's a hot summer night --his new foster home has AC but he feels guilty turning it on, his sleep is more restless than ever. In the dream, his heart stops in a shock of electricity and death is a warm mouth full of too-sharp teeth; he himself is death and the fangs are his, he's going to devour himself.
The third death isn't planned, he feels the way his guts give in to the claws tugging at them, he feels the blood coming up his throat. He's spent a few months with this family already and María wakes him up gently, runs delicate fingers through his hair and whispers "It's okay, Juli, it's okay." She doesn't push when he doesn't want to tell her about the dreams, she just gives him a sad smile and tells him that she'll be there whenever he needs to talk.
His last death --Scott's last death-- is bittersweet, release and loss at the same time. He dies surrounded by his friends, with his lover clutching his hand. (He dreams of her a lot. Her name is Kira, her smile is crooked, her eyes grow sadder as the years go by. Julián --Scott-- grows older, his hands get rough and there is a line of worry between his eyebrows that only gets deeper and his hair slowly fades to grey; but she's just as young in every dream. The only wrinkles in her face are the ones that form as she gives him a sad smile and kisses him goodbye, whispers "I love you," and then Scott closes his eyes and everything goes black. Julián wakes up more rested than he's felt in months --it's still a couple hours until down and he looks up at the full moon in the sky, wonders if he should tell María about this. He chooses not to.)
After the last death, the dreams stop for a while. He thinks maybe it was stress, or the depression, or his hormones. María is delighted to see him doing better, Trisha promises they'll get him a new e-reader for his seventeenth birthday. They insist on paying for him to see a therapist, they offer nothing but unconditional love and support. Sometimes, when Julián looks at Trisha for a while, he finds something familiar in the way she smiles, but he can never place it.
He falls asleep studying for his SATs, dreams that his name is Sofía and he stumbles upon Kira in a busy street of New York City. Julián doesn't know New York, but he doesn't know California either, and yet he finds that every street and shop and statue that he sees in his dreams really exists or existed in a time now gone. He (she) sees Kira outside of a Colombian-owned café in 72nd street. She looks exactly the same, but Julián (Scott? Sofía?) doesn't, and Kira looks at her in confused awe for a long second, stares until someone bumps into her shoulder and makes her drop her coffee cup. Sofía rushes to help her, and Kira's eyes fill up with tears.
In a dream, he sees Allison. Julián is now Max and Allison is called Laura, and they don't remember each other. She still has a dimpled smile and a musical laughter, she still makes him feel like he's breathless every time she looks at him. They fall in love hard and fast --they lose each other too soon this time, too. Julián wakes up thinking that maybe they're just not meant to be. (There's no such thing as fate, she'd said, but maybe their fate is to be apart).
There's a life where he meets Malia when they're children and they grow up together, and they both remember the other at the same time. Malia is just as blunt as she was during their first time together, her name is now Anne and she sneaks through his bedroom window at three in the morning and shakes him awake, whisper-yells "Matíiiias, I had a dream I knew you in another life!" She tells him about dozens of lives she remembers, lives hundreds of years ago. "I think I only remember three lives," he tells them, and so she makes up for it by telling him all she can remember about the Renaissance.
In that life, he doesn't meet Allison, but he crosses Kira once --she looks at him from inside a car in London and she still looks exactly the same, but sadder. The car doesn't stop, Matías never sees her again.
All the way through college, sometimes every night and sometimes once every full moon, he keeps dreaming of his past lives. He remembers people and places and feelings and random things he heard other people say while walking down the street. His mind fills with the things Scott learned in vet school, Sofía's musical talent, Matías endless comic book trivia knowledge. He longs for every friend and every lover. He feels the ghost pain of scars that aren't actually there, looks in the mirror almost expecting to find Scott's tattoos on his skin or Sofía's long, curly hair falling over his shoulders.
He finally places Trisha's smile --it's the same she had in another life, but then her name was Alan and she was the closest thing Scott had to a father for a good part of his life, and Julián wants to tell her this but he doesn't know how to.
It's around the time he's moved to his first apartment that he remembers another life. This one was short --they're all childhood memories, blurry snapshots of a warm little town in Perú and isolated, context-less faces. A child's memory is hard to reconstruct, but Julián thinks he might have died in an accident. He only dreams about that life three or four times, but the images stay with him.
"Excuse me?" there's a light tap on his shoulder, a soft voice that sounds embarrassed. Julián shifts in his seat so he can turn comfortably to look at the person speaking. "Do you mind if I..."
The woman stops mid-sentence, mouth agape. Her short blonde hair falls over her left eye, but Julián can still see the warm brown of her irises, the sharp with in her glance. She hesitates, takes a step back as if she'd been struck --like a punch to the gut, she takes her right hand to her chest and her lips are bright cherry pink but the image overlaps, he sees them red for a moment.
He moves to stand slowly, she doesn't step away again. "Allison?" he asks, and he sees the tears swelling up in her eyes and how she tries to move her arms and finds she's still carrying her coffee and her computer. He smiles at her, takes the coffee from her hand and puts it on the table, then grabs the computer and leaves it on the chair. "Hey," he says, and then she's got her arms around his neck and she's whispering his name like a prayer ("God, Scott. I thought I was crazy. Scott, I thought I'd never find you. Scott--") and if the people in the coffee shop stare, he doesn't care.
She runs her fingers across his cheekbone, whispers "you've still got this scar" almost in awe. She's got a birthmark right below her sternum, like a shadow of her first death. They fit together easily, though their bodies are different and their stories have separated many times, like the crevices of their souls were meant to complete each other.
"I didn't believe..." she says, tucks her hair behind her ear, "I was too scared to actually see a professional, like-- I don't know, a diagnosis would make it real." She bites her bottom lip, grabs his hand. "I'm sorry, I don't think there's anything wrong with you, you know that."
He didn't get a chance to tell her this the second time around, either, so he tells her now. He tells her about Scott's depression, about the asthma coming back, how he thinks it might be something he'll carry forever. "You are the strongest person I've ever known," she whispers, kisses him softly, promises this time around she'll be here for as long as she can.
"I met Kira one time," Allison says. (Her name is Audre, but they don't even use their new names anymore, they're just Scott and Allison around each other.) "She'd left California a couple years ago, and I didn't recognize her then."
They talk about her --Allison never truly got a chance to understand what Kira's lifespan could mean, and her hands fill with tears when she finally gets the sadness that Kira carried with her in the life they spent together. "I never understood why she left," she whispers, but understanding doesn't make it easier. They talk about the life she spent with Scott the first time, the life that Allison should have gotten to share with them. They're together now, and there's no point in resenting the things that were robbed from them a century ago, but Allison still wishes she'd gotten a chance to be part of the things Scott tells her about.
They've got a good life, though, as good as they could hope for. They are happy, and in love, and they try not to let nostalgia win them over. "I should have guessed you'd end up as a teacher eventually," Allison says, leans her chin on his shoulder while Scott grades papers. They stay like that, she whispers nonsense in his ear until he eventually gives up on work altogether. Late at night, tangled together in bed, she kisses Scott's cheek and asks "do you think we could find her?"
He's waiting for Allison to finish her shift at the garage --he's been lingering in the sidewalk for a while now, because he always gets here early and Allison always comes out late. Moreno, the garage owner's dog, rushes to his side and paws at his calves until Scott leans down to scratch his head.
"How are you, buddy?" he asks, and the dog barks and rolls onto his back, shows Scott his belly. He remembers being good with animals through all the previous lives --even in that too-short one, he had a house full of pets that always seemed happy to see him. While the thought of having the weight of depression over his shoulders through all of his existences makes him resentful; the idea that maybe this easiness around animals and children is, too, a fundamental part of his soul is a relief.
Allison taps his shoulder gently, greets him with a kiss that tastes of too-sweet coffee (she's always liked it like this). They get Moreno back inside the garage before leaving, and Allison laces her fingers with Scott's as they walk down the street.
"Remember when we said we were going to visit Paris?" he asks her, and they talk about how much they'd need to save to spend a couple weeks there instead of all the reasons they didn't get to in their previous life together. They get on the bus laughing, Allison mocking Scott's still terrible French. Scott looks around for some place where they can sit, finds a familiar face instead.
Kira's dark eyes meet his and Scott tightens his grip on Allison's hand, tugs at her to get her attention. Her hair is short and fiery red --the dark roots are starting to show already-- and there's a scar on her forehead that wasn't there the last time Scott saw her. Her white t-shirt is just transparent enough that he can tell she's got a tattoo on her shoulder, though he can't guess what it is. Allison gasps by his side, and she's the one to pull him along towards Kira. The bus starts moving and Allison asks "can we seat here?"
Scott's apartment is Scott and Allison's apartment by now (there are letters addressed to Audre lying next to the door, half of her clothes are now in his closet), and Kira's smile is tinged with nostalgia when they invite her in. They tell her about how they met this time, about the years they spent together a couple lives ago, about how much they've missed her --after a century and a half, Kira still hasn't learned to let herself cry without shame, and the tears slip down her face as she makes a visible effort to stop herself from sobbing.
Scott wants to kiss her until the nostalgia fades from her eyes, tell her that it's okay, that he doesn't resent her for outliving them, that it doesn't matter as long as they keep finding each other. Some things he say with words, some he traces onto her skin. "Stay," he tells her. "For as long as you can," Allison adds.
When the three of them fall together in bed and fill in the gap of missed years and missed lives with memories and kisses and soft touches, Scott truly feels complete.