Ink | Soulmate AU | ✓

twenty-six | inked

   Very gradually, I sensed my lethargy draining, my need to do something returning. I felt blood run in my veins again, slower now, and my heart beat monotonously against my rib cage. A tingling sensation encased my arms and legs, some sense of life returning to them. My head swam dangerously through a sea of murky water, but at least I wasn't drowning.

   I was a million years wiser now. I knew things I shouldn't have known, shouldn't have to have known. But I did. Real life experience was beyond me, now, as was the material world; the spiritual was all that remained to discover.

   I didn't need to cry. The moment had passed.

   I opened my eyes.

   He wasn't there.

   I'd half expected him to be standing in front of me, the boy from the photograph, ready to guide me home. As if this had all been a dream, just a really bad nightmare that was over now. Waiting to take me back to reality.

   No, this was reality. He was dead. I was alive.

   Not for much longer.

   I stood. I don't know how. I was about to take a minute to compose myself, decide if there was any last words for me to share with this crowd who gazed so expectantly at me, when it happened.

   Someone stood up.

   Who was it? My eyes strained to see.

   Zahira, about halfway back in the audience. The girl in the yellow hijab. She held her arm up at a funny angle, and for a moment I wondered why, until I noticed there was a word scribbled there in blue ink pen.

   It took me a moment to focus. My eyes were tired, so tired, desperate to close and go to sleep forever, but I willed them not to; I forced them to work, to read the word, and they did.

   INKED.

   A second later, another girl stood up: blue hair, pink highlights, and a red checked blouse on top of a Nirvana T-shirt... Matty. The Scene girl who lived down the street from me, the one I used to date. I'd forgotten she was even here for a moment.

   She stood on the far right side, a little further back than Zahira, and she also held up an arm - I didn't have to read it to know what it said. The exact same word, in the exact same pen, in the exact same handwriting. One of them had written it there, and it had transferred to the other as well.

   Zahira and Matty were soulmates. And they were Inked. Was that why Matty had been so angry to discover I was Inked? Because she knew I had someone else, someone I couldn't help but love more, and so did she? Was she just trying to deny herself?

   A tiny amount of my loneliness faded, just slightly, as I stared in shock, unable to respond to this show of courage and support; then they were both making their way along the rows of seats towards each other, their fellow students astounded, and then they were embracing in the aisle--

   Just as a tall, bony boy near the front, on the left, stood up, his face flushed; I didn't recognise him. He held up his arm too, and I knew he was one of us. His soulmate obviously wasn't in this room, though, because there was silence for a moment. Privately I wondered if his soulmate was dead.

   Then, the screeching sound of a chair scraping across a tile floor as the Professor stood up as well, staring off into the distance.

   Without warning, all my afflictions with him fell away. I didn't have the energy to hold a grudge. He had suffered as I had, and I couldn't hate him for what he'd done. I just didn't have it in me.

   We stood, the five us, in a room of five hundred others, not a word spoken between us - and yet we were so incredibly close in that moment. The kindness and bravery they had shown me, such that I had forgotten humans were capable of, left me speechless. I couldn't even smile in return. Nothing could repay the debt of gratitude I now owed them all.

   Suddenly I realised I was the only one without the word on my arm. There was no space for it in any case; both my arms were still covered in flowers of every variety from shoulder to wrist, the reminder of George I would carry with me for the rest of my life. Not that that would be very long, I had to keep reminding myself.

   Perhaps it was the light, but I could have sworn the Inky flowers looked a darker black than they had a moment ago. They seemed to shimmer as I moved my arm. It was beautiful. I held my left one in the air in unison with the other Inked in the room, as I bowed my head.

   I'd never forget this day. Even in death, I'd remember them and their honour. I loved them all. And I loved myself despite everything. I was doing this for the right reasons.

   Next thing I knew, I was gone. The lecture hall was far behind me, and I was walking quickly towards the University exit for what I knew would be the last time. I wasn't upset. I didn't turn back. It was over.

***

   I don't know how I missed him - the boy.

   As I left that building for the last time, out of the huge front double doors, he was there. Watching me.

   I didn't look up in the trees as I walked out of those gates with my head held high.

   That was my mistake.

   I wouldn't have thought to at the time.

   But he was there. Sitting in a tree. Watching me.

   The boy from the photograph.