Lovely Hues | Fillie AU

Chapter Twenty

When Millie was a young school girl in north London, she found talking to be one of her favorite and most practiced hobbies. She would talk for hours if no one stopped her and sometimes she did. She talked to her family, schoolmates, neighbors, store clerks and sometimes even random bystanders on the street.

She'd talk about her home that was said to have been owned once by the Duke of York in the eighteenth century. He had bought the land she grew up on and built her house with tons of secret pathways that led all over the city and into other important buildings and spaces. Once these tunnels had been found, the earl was forced to board them up and sell the property which was purchased by her grandfather.

When she first told this story, she knew it was a lie but the more she told it, the more flare she gave it, the more she actually came to believe it. As long as it kept her imagination flowing and voice-box utilized, she wasn't as concerned with factual words.

But she also talked about her dream to one day open her very own cafe where she would serve the most high quality teas and biscuits. This desire was true. She would serve a different flavor of scone every day, and connected to her little eatery would be a bookshop that specialized in all things eclectic. There would be one-of-a-kind books, odd knick-knacks and antiques that had you questioning not only what century it was from, but what universe as well. She was always sure she'd be able to find such things.

The first day she could remember where she found herself more raptured with someone else's words than her own was a mild fall day in the year 1936 when she was a bright and bubbly sixteen year old. She was in her school's courtyard, frantically trying to finish reading the chapter that had been assigned in world history the previous day when she heard him.

His voice had cut through the chatter and stole all her attention away from her school work. It was smooth, with the cadence of someone who had a monopoly on all of the kindness in the world. And his laugh. It was like little cherubs were singing into her ears. She had to find the person connected to it and when she did, she was smitten. She knew she'd found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

It wasn't a logical thought, she'd always known that, but it was so obvious to her that thinking otherwise made her feel like an imbecile. Marrying Louis was as natural as waking up in the morning. It seemed pre-ordained and his death left her questioning everything she ever believed about the world. About God. She and Louis shared a soul, she had been sure of it. She had never questioned that thought because when she first met him, she had felt like she found the last piece of the puzzle that she didn't realize was missing. With him, she always felt complete, and when they were separated, she felt a dull vacancy in her aura. And that's how she thought she would have to live the rest of her life. With half a soul. With half of her. It would be a half-life. A hollow life.

But then Noah showed up and she felt such a familiar vibrancy in him. Louisa had been drawn to him as well and the more time they spent together, the more Millie came to understand that maybe soulmates were a more transient thing than she had thought because she started to believe that Noah also held the other half of her soul. How two people could hold so much of her, she found it hard to comprehend, but nevertheless she believed it to be true.

Marrying Noah felt just as pre-ordained as marrying Louis had felt. Things started to feel right again and her faith strengthened. She thought she was really starting to understand the ways of the world and how God interacted with them on it. She had pain but she had joy, too. It was the natural current of life. One ebbs and flows through happiness and sadness like waves in the ocean. Cresting joy led to troughs of despair, only to rise back up.

The tsunami of death, however, upheaved her life once more. But the calm that followed led her back to more neutral waves. She didn't quite believe in soulmates as much as she believed that her soul was attached to other souls, and those souls would find hers when it was time. Her family. Her children. Louis and then Noah. All of them, souls that were knit together by God's hand.