Chapter Text
None of the spells Kent casts give him send him any dreams about Jack. Not even when he’s sure of his technique, sure of his focus, not even when he’s worked past the nightmares that get in his way. Instead, when he dreams about his soulmate, he dreams about being angry.
There are a lot of people in the Southwest who will meet up to get high and work magic together so they can dream about their soulmates. Kent joins them more often than is good for his career or his health, except he’s convinced that if he can’t clarify the hazy images in his mind, if he can’t get a lead on the absence in his heart that’s tormenting him, he’s not going to have a career or a self to come back to.
He almost always spends days after a dream retreat in a bad mood, haunted by raised voices and slamming doors and the thought, I can’t wait to get out of here. Sometimes they’re born from memories from before his dad walked out on them, or memories of the bitter years after when he was desperate for attention and approval. He recruits both a psychologist and a familiar to deal with them, because they’re intruding. It makes them quiet down, but it never brings Jack any closer.
So Kent begins to suspect that while the fishhook in his heart still has Jack’s name on it, but whatever the link is between them, it can’t be invoked in a soulmate’s name. Which drives Kent nuts because he used to be so sure. Jack used to be so sure. They used to be so sure of the future they’d have together and Jack just... cut that off, like it didn’t even matter, and told Kent to move on without him like it wasn’t severing a limb. Kent would give everything he has just to hear it straight from Jack’s mouth, No, it isn’t you, just so he can be absolutely certain Jack isn’t the one for him and put the entire fucking thing to rest.
Sometimes Kent stands in the circles of people who are calling for love, invokes his soulmate, and dreams of anger so intense that he’s alive with flame even as he walks into the sea, burning fiercely underwater. He dreams a fight behind a school where he takes a hit to the jaw and he yearns, Kent yearns, to teach that dream-self boxing, to keep his hands up and deliver a right cross. To win cleanly and clearly, not to be left behind that building with a crawling sense of shame and uncertainty about whether they’ll come back, whether it’s over.
The best dreams that they share are always about hockey and Kent is almost an independent person here, almost a figure on his own, though he can’t ever see the other dreamer’s face; they play against each other, again and again, duelling up and down the ice, trying to slide the puck by or steal it away; the teams around them are ephemeral, irrelevant. When one of them scores it’s not a defeat. It’s inevitable, and intimate, like kissing in the dark, like bracing against a gust of wind you knew was coming. They play as hard as they can, every time, but losing is still the best part.
“I think, like,” one of Kent’s fellow dreamers says one morning-after, as she drags on a joint and Kent eats a breakfast burrito, ”you’re scared of anyone getting close, but when you find that somebody has, it’s a relief.”
“It’s a sexual metaphor for penetration,” another guy further down the circle says, but he says that for almost anything.
The more control that he has over his own dreams, the more fearlessly he can walk into his old memories, the more sure he is that this is someone else. He’s dreamed about himself as a separate person; as an adult he’s tried to comfort the child he once was. He’s walked in dreams behind Kit’s eyes, and on waking remembered, as though it had really happened, the time when he was eight and a cat came to him when he was crying, the way she eeled into his lap and his tears dropped onto her fur. He’s done it, and it’s healed him in ways he can’t describe, and now he thinks he’d recognize himself. This isn’t him.
He begins to think it’s his soulmate. He begins to think his soulmate needs to get the hell out. So he wakes up aching, imagining a kid just like himself, wishing he had a way to cut a more direct channel between them and say, Here’s my number. I have money. You don’t have to stay.
And just when he thinks that, everything changes.
The only time he’s had time to cast the dreaming magic since regular season started, the dreams were entirely different. He dreamed endlessly, so many details he was still writing them down three days later. A softer dream, full of new places and moments of unexpected sanctuary.
The only lit terminal in a computer lab in a darkened building at night, and the golden room he reaches beyond when he walks through the screen.
The little puzzles someone wants him to put together with wrench and screwdriver, that he alone knows how to solve, and the small rich candies they give him every time he triumphs.
The river he and his hockey team glide down as though the water were ice, the ducks they make friends with, and the feast at the bottom of the lake they find.
It’s also the first wholeheartedly erotic dream he can remember, in all these sessions of trying to reach his consciousness out across the lonely miles; sharp, unexpectedly vivid, sharing a bed with the person whose face he can’t see and it’s warm, comfortable, like pools of skin pouring into each other, waking up from sleeping together and moving from pleasant languor to a spark of sexual pleasure.
“Hey,” he says to Sexual Metaphor guy at breakfast, drinking burned coffee and not really expecting an answer, ”what does it mean if I dream about being penetrated?”
Which is not to say it wasn't awesome; he's being a shit because he can. It’s just.
He dreamed about Jack last night, too.
Jack, leading the hockey team down the river; Jack, making him do drills on the ice as he darted in between piles of red and golden leaves. Jack, whom he’d wanted to scream at, who didn’t fucking belong here.
So fuck it, he visits Zimmermann the next time he’s in the area, drives out to Samwell after a game in Boston. Jack can come back with him or not but he at least owes it to Kent to give him a fucking answer.
It goes badly, and Kent doesn’t even get the yes or no he’s looking for.
He stops on his way out of the house, even though he knows he’s under the streetlights, even though he knows the party guests can still see him, because he has to lean against a tree and lean over, dry-heaving, before he even gets to his car.
Frosty grass crunches underfoot behind him and one of the Samwell students says, ”Hey, are you–”
“I’m fine,” Kent says roughly, straightens up and pushes away from the tree. He gets to his car without even looking back.
He goes back to that tree later that night, asleep in his bed in Boston; he’s on his hands and knees and the cold is gone and someone puts their arms around him, rubbing his back while he vomits out bile until his stomach is empty. He’s crying, snot running out his nose, and this person is smoothing his hair away, wiping his face with a cloth, awkwardly rocking him back and forth.
He feels hollow and empty, worse in his chest than a fishhook, and this person just goes on holding him.
When he wakes up he finds himself staring at his palm, where he could have sworn there was something written. He stumbles around until his morning coffee wondering why he washed a number off his hand without writing it down first, and it’s only after coffee that he realizes he didn’t actually swap numbers with someone at Samwell. He only dreamed he did.
Well, dammit, he thinks, then resigns himself to a workout and breakfast.
Except after breakfast a number of haunting familiarity texts his phone, skeleton-bare without contact information, and the message says: Hey hockey guy, is this u?