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The wind can be heard whistling through the air, moving against brown, fuzzy curls. The sunlight grazes them with warmth, sparkling with gentle light. Perhaps it’s spring, maybe even a breezy summer day. Somewhere in the distance, cicadas make their presence known with cheerful buzzing.
The details of the scene are quite vague, there doesn’t seem to be a set time and place — only a feeling that oozes from every corner, a feeling of peace.
Next, there's a faded silhouette, almost like a shadow. It belongs to a kid, that much is clear. No face, just a mop of brown hair as it moves through the wind. Despite the lack of visible features, the boy appears to be around 10, maybe 11 years of age.
Henry gradually blinks himself awake. He slowly regains consciousness as he starts to recognise his surroundings, blinking away the remains of his strange dream.
He’s in his flat in London. David, his trusty emotional support beagle is snoring happily next to his feet, providing him with warmth on a chilly March morning.
He checks his phone just to see the time and groans to himself as he sees the big 7 a.m staring back at him. Wishing he could have rested for longer, but knowing better than to laze around in his bed.
He already sees a bunch of messages in the group chat he shares with his friends, The Ink-redible Gang — a silly name they used since their second year of art school that’s unfortunately stuck over time.
They’re his family, really. All met by chance while doing a project together at university and their fate was forever sealed as Henry’s people. But God, he hates how they’re all such early risers. The pings must have woken him up.
Because today isn’t just an ordinary morning in March. The date on his phone shows him that today is the 12th of March, which means it’s his 25th birthday.
He’s choosing to ignore the messages for now. Besides, he’s feeling that familiar itch in his fingers.
His dream was odd. Nothing really happened in it, but there was something about it he can’t quite explain that makes him feel compelled to pick up his well loved paintbrush and use it in the only way he knows how.
He slowly wakes up, makes himself his morning tea (he truly can’t start his day without a cuppa), and moves to his favorite room in his flat – his home studio.
In front of a blank canvas, he picks up the brush, mixes blue and orange to create a brown shade in his palette, and ignores the outside world for a little while as he starts to paint a head full of curls he has never seen before.
ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌙✨☁️🎨
The same evening he celebrates his birthday with his Ink-redible Gang. The group consists of Lisa and Jordan, the extroverted lesbian couple who keeps their group glued together, Isa, who’s currently in the middle of a rant about her new job, Tom who’s rocking a mullet next to him, and Pez, sitting from Henry’s other side, his best mate who he’d be utterly lost without.
He’s watching his friends and sees the lines of laughter around their mouths, the wrinkles around their eyes as they smile, how happy they all look in the vicinity of each other. He gives into the feeling of warmth he feels with Tom and Pez from each of his sides.
They’re his little family. After all, they’re all he’s got.
They don’t ask if his family wished him a happy birthday, they already know the answer. It doesn’t hurt him anymore; their lack of presence in his life. He’s grown numb to it. The only family that he needs is in the room with him, right now.
And yet, in a room full of people that he cares so deeply about, he can’t help to feel that achingly familiar feeling in his chest — that gaping hole that he can’t seem to be able to shut. Because even in moments of happiness, there’s still hollowness inside of him, reminding him that maybe there’s something wrong with him, broken.
Isa interrupts his little melancholy moment when she asks him about his exhibition.
He can’t help the way he physically lights up.
At just 25, Henry knows he’s extremely lucky for his place in the London art scene and the name he made for himself. Every year, he’s reaching incredible milestones he never even imagined himself achieving, as a sad little boy who couldn’t even see himself studying what he loved.
He accepted an offer at the beginning of the month to hold an entire exhibition of his own paintings in April of next year. An entire exhibition — all his. He gets to set up a theme, to curate his own work, to make all of the big creative decisions.
It’s thrilling.
He thinks about 8 year old Henry, who was blissfully happy with his life back then — singing along to Freddie Mercury in the living room with his Father, performing theatrical renditions of the lyrics while his family watched with adoring smiles, not knowing the tragedy that was about to tear their family apart a couple of years later.
He thinks about his teenage years, all blurring into one blurb of coldness and misery in his head. Henry tries not to dwell on those years too much, doesn’t see the point of intentionally hurting himself with the memories, with being reminded of the absence of his father, of the warmth of what was once an adoring family, but quickly became a sinking ship.
He worked so hard on building himself from the ground up, he’d rather forget all about the loneliness, feeling transparent in your own home, having to feed your own mum since she couldn’t be bothered anymore, the hollowness in his chest that kept on spreading, and spreading, and spreading.
He doesn’t remember much from his teenage years, no.
What he does remember is discovering the one thing he could peacefully lean on when things got too much – sketching, drawing, painting. His armour; from the world, from his own thoughts, from his family.
He remembers working day and night to build his portfolio with his limited art supply and getting out of there as fast as he could. He remembers getting a scholarship to a fancy art school with a free dormitory to live in. He remembers, for the first time in a very long time, feeling free.
His luck? Apparently he was actually good.
For years, he used the pen, the brush, and the canvas as tools to escape from his reality. As shields to protect himself from the spreading emptiness, hoping if he’ll paint faster, he’s going to catch the void before it’ll reach his heart. He poured his entire heart into his paintings, even his most simple sketches.
And it paid off — he immediately stood out, becoming one of the best in his year. His final project at the end of his degree did so well he got offered a permanent spot at an art gallery.
He worked his ass off to be where he is today. Small Henry would never imagine older Henry with a list on his phone of potential themes for his own art gallery.
He enthusiastically tells his friends about it; about how far he’d come, about the list on his phone. Some of the ideas are: the passage of time, the beauty of the everyday, the price of grief.
“Have you dreamt about your soulmate, Hen?” Jordan asks after a moment of silence with a glint in her eyes. He can tell she’d been waiting for the right moment to ask this question, perhaps the entire night. She’s always been the romantic one out of their group.
Her and Lisa are not even soulmates, but it never held them back, why should it?
Henry snorts and shakes his head. Hoping that his head movement will be able to shake away the weird dream he had last night with it.
“To our Hen’s successful exhibition, then!” Pez says with a grin on his face, before he plants a wet kiss on Henry’s cheek. Luckily, Pez is always able to read Henry’s discomfort. That’s what a real soulmate is like, he reckons.
“Cheers!” they all yell collectively, as they clink their glasses of gin.
And yet, the gaping hole in Henry’s chest still remains.
🌙✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
The next night, he dreams of a red bicycle stranded in a field. The sunlight is bright as it beams on the grass, almost making it glow. There's a silhouette of a boy again sitting down next to the bike – he still can’t make out a face, the details are vague and foggy.
He opens his eyes suddenly to his dark bedroom. The abruptness of his waking startles him. He grabs onto his blanket and lets himself feel the comfort of the fabric as he slows down his breaths. David, probably sensing his sudden shift in bed, is cuddling next to his thigh, tickling him with his wet nose.
It takes him a moment to recognize again the old feeling in his chest — the emptiness, as it spreads a little further tonight than it normally does. He slowly rubs his chest with his hand, as if it’ll make the hollowness disappear.
He can’t shake off that weird feeling that dream gave him, and the way it makes his chest feel tighter than it normally does.
Almost on autopilot, without processing his movements, he stands up, gulps quickly on a glass of water, and enters his home studio to scratch that itch again, to paint.
🌙✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
In the next dream, he sees a small smile, probably belonging to the same kid — though he still can’t see a full face, only a mouth.
He hears laughter. A pure laugh, the kind of laughter that comes from your belly, from deep within your soul. He can almost feel the vibrancy of that sound rack up through his body, the way it tickles him gently. He feels like his chest is glowing.
He wakes up from that dream crying.
🌙✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
Every night like clockwork his strange dreams persist, and with them, Henry wakes up with an unexplainable itch to paint the images that appear to him throughout the night.
A scratched knee, a faceless silhouette running, a pair of worn out converse, a boy standing on a glistering field, dreams where he can feel the joy spilling from every corner — those are especially hard for him, making the gaping hole feel more present.
Very quickly, he realizes a pattern. The scenery changes, the atmosphere of his dreams, objects come and go, but the boy – the same mystery boy appears in all of his dreams, without exception. He can’t see his face fully in his dreams, only glimpses of him, close ups, a silhouette, the back of a head.
The dreams also never depict a clear scene – they’re almost like vignettes; gone before he can even process what he saw in them.
But one thing is for certain, Henry has never seen the boy before in his life.
The second thing he’s certain about is that the long list of ideas he has for his exhibition is worthless now.
As long as he’s dreaming, he needs to follow the muse whenever it calls. He’s not sure what he has in his hands yet, it’s too early to tell, but he has an entire year to connect the thread between his paintings and see where it’ll lead him. For now, he needs to trust his subconscious and keep scratching the unexplainable itch he feels.
And so – like clockwork; he dreams, he yearns, he paints.
Every morning, he watches as the paint beneath his fingers comes alive on the canvas, and as the mystery boy slowly starts to become a living, breathing thing in Henry’s mind.
✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁☀️🎨
It’s July, and Henry’s out on a walk with Pez, using the heatwave to their advantage as for once the sunny weather this summer will allow for a nice day in the park with David trotting between their legs.
“What have you been up to, mate? You’ve been cooped up in that studio of yours and I've missed your mug, you know. Does it mean you’ve decided on a theme for the exhibition yet?” Pez asks before taking a sip from his iced matcha.
“Actually, I’ve been having these dreams,” Henry says hesitantly. He knows it’s something extremely odd to even begin to explain.
“Naughty ones?” Pez asks with a raise of an eyebrow, “Have you been painting me naked for the last few months, you cheeky bastard?”
He fondly rolls his eyes. “If you want a nude portrait to impress your dates, you could just ask, you know.”
“I don’t need a portrait to impress them, my lovely Hen. They can have a taste of the real deal,” he winks as they find a bench to sit on. David immediately starts to bark and demand to be picked up on the bench so he could sit with his friends like equals, and Henry is more than happy to oblige.
Pez continues. “Okay then, what have you been seeing in those dreams of yours?”
He takes a deep breath before he starts. “I’ve been dreaming of a boy? He’s 10, maybe 11. Nothing much happens, they’re like vignettes. It can be just the boy’s mouth, or him running in a field. They keep happening every night, it’s all rather strange. When I wake up, I feel so drawn to the images I've seen in my sleep, I feel almost like in a trance to immediately paint them, as if I'm afraid they’ll disappear from my memory,” he admits, finally putting what he’s been feeling for the past few months into words.
There’s a moment of silence, but it’s not awkward. Never with Pez. He seems to process all the information Henry just shared with him.
Pez speaks after a moment. “When did the dreams start?”
“My birthday,” he replies.
Pez hums. “Well babes, I don’t mean to be the voice of reason here, but have you considered you’ve been dreaming of your soulmate as a kid for the past few months?”
His soulmate.
Yeah, right.
Henry scoffs. “It can’t be, I've never seen that boy in my life, I'm certain.”
He would have remembered those distinguished features; that laugh, those curls, his long eyelashes.
Above all, his childhood was extremely lonely, he would have remembered having a friend.
So if he’d never met him before, how could it be possible that he’s his soulmate?
He shakes his head and watches from the corner of his eye the gleam in Pez’s gaze that suggests he does not fully believe him.
ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌙✨☁️🎨
The thing about soulmates is that they’re quite rare to find, but it can still happen.
It’s not an everyday matter among people, but it’s still on the back of everyone’s minds; that small voice in their heads that thinks about the ‘what if’ possibility — that small chance of you out of everyone meeting and finding their soulmate in this lifetime.
The rules are quite simple.
Your soulmate is revealed to you on your 25th birthday in your dream, but only if you’ve met them before. From that night, your fate will be sealed as you’ll continue to dream about your soulmate until your very last breath. Quite dramatic, but these things have to include some flair for the dramatics, do they not?
If you haven’t, you’ll continue to dream about human-sized caterpillars or just eating strawberry cake at the park, whichever your subconscious mind prefers. That’s the fate of most of the population anyways.
There’s also the possibility of the both of you never having met before; the universe is vast and the chances of two souls who were destined to be perfect for each other to meet in this lifetime are quite slim. Hence their rarity.
Even though Henry immediately refuses Pez’s suggestion, he can’t deny it would make the most sense. He started to dream the night he turned 25, and he’s been dreaming consistently about the same person, it does all add up.
But blimey, he does not know that kid. He has never seen him, he swears on it.
Weeks pass, and he’s only feeling more haunted by the mystery boy from his dreams. Only now, he’s starting to ask himself questions he stupidly avoided, too occupied in the art of creating. Questions like – “who are you?” and “where do you come from?”
But he’s feeling helpless, knowing the only clues that he has are his own dreams.
So that’s what he’ll do. He'll dream, and he’ll paint, and hopefully he’ll find the connecting thread between the paintings for his exhibition. And maybe he’ll even solve this strange little puzzle along the way for his peace of mind and discover where his mystery boy comes from.
✨🍁ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
Months pass, and with them so do the seasons. The air is crisp as the wind is blowing through the once green trees that have since turned orange. There are leaves scattered all over the ground, like the perfect autumn crime scene. The cold weather is a welcoming breeze on Henry’s pale skin, as he moves through the streets of London.
London has always looked best in November.
His dreams have also been evolving lately, just like the weather.
The mystery boy — he’s been growing. He’s no longer 10, he’s older now. 12, maybe 13. He’s taller now, his curls are behaving differently in the wind, he carries himself in a different way.
He dreams of hands now, reaching out to hold his. Most nights, the dreams will end before the hands are able to reach him. He would wake up feeling a ghost of a touch on his fingers as he’s painting, almost guiding him though each stroke.
Occasionally, though, those hands would successfully find his own in the dark and be able to lock with his own. The gaping hole in Henry’s chest aches as he mixes up the colours in his palette to paint those longer fingers intertwined with his own chubby ones.
That’s another development, he now dreams of himself alongside the mystery boy.
He dreams of them riding bicycles together, them near a cottage gate talking – he sees their lips moving, but he can’t hear a sound. He dreams of them sharing earphones, of them lying on a field – he sees the sun beams through the trees above them and almost feels the way the wind caresses his skin.
Still — he never sees the mystery boy’s face, never all of his features. He always just sees a part of a whole.
He’s only five months from his exhibition now, and he just got out of a meeting at the gallery he’s expecting to host his work. The place is great, even if Henry isn’t entirely sure what his show would be about yet. When the gallery owner asks him about it, he mumbles something about dreams, and he thinks that’s good enough for now.
When he’s leaving the building, he accidentally stumbles into a person who seems to be rushing their way inside.
“Oh! I didn’t see you ther– wait, Henry? Oh my god, it’s so good to see you!”
The woman in front of him has long, wavy brown hair. Her chocolate eyes are staring at him with recognition, like she’s looking at an old friend.
He can’t recognize her at all.
“Oh, hello, yes!” He says awkwardly. He never quite learned how to fully navigate social interactions. Especially not challenging ones, like how to pretend to know a stranger who seems to recognize you.
“How have you been?” the stranger asks. Her eyes look so kind. He feels sad.
“Not too bad, and you?” He wants to bury himself alive.
Her fond, kind eyes scan his face. She must see the emptiness inside of his icy eyes as they look back to her warm eyes with guilt, she must sense how utterly clueless he is about this interaction.
Her expression turns cold, and with that so does her words. “You know, I wouldn't have expected rudeness from you out of all people. Not after everything that happened.”
She storms past Henry and into the building, as he’s starting there at the entrance, feeling completely lost. He hasn't even gotten her name.
He can’t explain it, it’s more of a feeling than anything, a hunch.
But he’s convinced she’s related to his mystery boy.
He slowly starts to walk to the direction of the tube. Even though the pace of his steps is slow, his thoughts are racing.
He thinks about Pez’s comment all those months ago — even if he denied it, if the probability of it being true is closer to zero, he can’t deny how strange it all is.
He thinks about his home studio — the scattered paintings all over his walls, canvas, shelves, at every surface available. The paintings that have been occupying his entire space and haunting his mind.
And in the center of it all — there’s the mystery boy.
The more time has passed, the more he finds himself purposefully wondering about him. What’s his name? What does his face actually look like? What’s his actual age?
Does Henry even know him? Is he even real?
He’s going mad, not knowing.
He quickens his walking pace. Enough’s enough, he thinks with more determination. He needs to actively seek for answers.
✨🍁ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
Trying to solve a mystery is harder in real life than it seems in the books, but Henry knows that a good place to begin is probably with his own life, within his childhood. Freud would be thrilled with his decision.
Beatrice, his older sister, is the only family member he keeps in touch with. He believes talking with her would be a good place to start.
He and Beatrice try to meet for dinner every few months, but it’s awkward at best, hostile when the ghosts of their past are in the room with them. It’s evident they’re not as close as they wish they were, not as close as they were when they were kids, back when everything was alright. But at least they try now, and that still counts as something.
He brings a few of his paintings with him to her flat hoping maybe she’ll be able to recognize the boy in his paintings, even if he hasn’t.
She shakes her head, but before he gets to be fully disappointed, she opens her mouth and says something that will shift everything.
“It’s weird you’ve been drawing him near Mary’s cottage.”
That's what she tells him.
It’s the way she says it, so simply, as if he’s supposed to be in on the joke.
He frowns, because he doesn’t recognize his Gran’s cottage. In fact, he hasn’t been there since his Grandad passed away, when he was six. He didn’t even go to her funeral when she passed away a couple of years ago.
Nobody mourned over Mary.
Phillip, his oldest brother, was the only one who cared enough to manage her estate.
Henry tries to keep his voice steady as he speaks. “I don’t even remember what it looks like. You know I haven’t seen it since Grandad’s funeral.”
Beatrice is quiet for a while.
The silence is deafening.
“That’s not true, Hen,” she tells him.
His frown deepens.
“Was there a trip we took I've forgotten?” he suggests, trying to piece in the clues.
Maybe he met the boy there, but he was too small to remember him.
Bea looks at him with so much pity in her eyes he starts to worry.
“Oh, dear,” she says.
And so, Beatrice starts to tell him his story.
But he’s merely a spectator, standing on the sidelines, hearing it as if there’s cotton stuck in his ears.
She tells him how after their father died, when he was only ten, their mum didn’t know what to do with three young kids in her household after being freshly widowed. How her grief was so grand, and Bea and Pip were old enough in her view, despite both of them being just kids themselves, it was only logical to send little Hen just for the time being to her own mum.
Even though Mary was objectively horrid to everyone. Even though she never kept in touch with her grandchildren. Even though, when Henry’s father passed away, she never bothered to come to the funeral, as she never approved of her own daughter's marriage – his mum still decided it was the best decision at the time to send him there, just until she recovered.
Only that day never came.
One summer turned into a full year, and a year turned into two, and in a blink of an eye, Henry spent five years under his Gran’s thumb.
Five whole years. Gone from his memory, just like that.
That would explain the hole in his chest, the hollowness he stopped fighting with, but rather just accepted as the default state of his existence. It would explain his teenage years blurring in his head into one continued sequence, and him never revising them down in memory lane.
He’s in shock. His jaw hurts from clenching too tightly. His chest – it aches, it aches so much.
“C-can you tell me a bit more, please?” he asks Beatrice. He’s about to have a breakdown, he doesn’t know where to even start.
His sister shakes her head and looks at him the way he’s grown used to in their shared dinners, the way she would look at him when she knows she’ll tell him something that will disappoint him.
“We didn’t keep in touch. You know already my regrets about those years, you know how it was at hom—”
He interrupts her, not being able to stand the sound of her excuses now. “Do I? Because I just discovered that I wasn’t there, apparently."
She lets out a disbelieved breath. “I was hanging around with the wrong people, you know that, Henry. I was a bloody teenager being drugged out of my mind with kids twice my age. Mum was out of it all of the time, Pip was a stressed mess. There was no adult in charge. Grief was taking a hold of us all and it took the worst from us. And unfortunately, none of us knew how to handle it, so we thought, at least you’re being saved by being sent to Gran. At least you’ll turn out to be the normal one. And I mean, I wasn’t that wrong,” she says defensively.
“Because feeling like my chest is being torn apart and a gap of five whole years from some pretty fundamental years of my life is pretty normal, Bea,” he says frustratingly.
They’ve had conversations before about their past. There’s a reason they never were able to maintain a close kin like they had when they were eight and ten years old, after all. Henry guesses this is why.
“Please,” he gains the strength to ask calmly. “You can cut the rubbish. Just help me fill in the gaps.”
He knows it hurts her to admit she hasn’t been there for him in their childhood. It’s a complex situation, and it’s not like he was there for her as well. But Henry really needs to find answers right now. They can expand on this on some other day. At least that’s the white lie he tells himself.
She gives him a small nod before continuing. “We kept in touch for the first few months when we thought you’d stay there for just a season. I think the last time we talked was at your 11th birthday. All I knew was that Gran was a bit rigid with you. She forced you to take up piano lessons and you weren’t keen on that.”
Piano lessons? He can play the piano?
His fingers twitch reflexively on his lap.
Then — what about the boy?
“Have I never mentioned anyone? a friend?”
She shakes her head in shame. "I'm sorry, but we really didn’t talk that much after that, I was too out of it.”
Five whole years, and his own sister knew nothing about his life. She couldn’t even recognize he had a whole chunk of his life missing from his memory until now.
But it’s clearer to him now, what his next step should be.
He needs to go back to the source of his pain, the threads seem to be leading him to one place, a place he’d been unknowingly avoiding for most of his life – his Gran’s cottage.
✨🍁ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
The next morning he hops on a train to the small village where his Gran’s estate resides.
Mary lived in the countryside, approximately two hours away from the city. He never actually took the train there, well, not that he remembers. It feels bizarre to know he’s headed towards a place where he unknowingly spent years of his life. He wonders if he ever called it his home.
The minute he steps off the train, he feels it. The air feels different. He isn’t sure if it’s his mind playing tricks on him or if it’s just the air quality being better in the countryside than the city.
There’s fog today on the forecast, which only contributes to his state of unrest.
Mary’s cottage is secluded from the rest of the village. It’s surrounded by a big field, with only one steep road leading to it from the village center. It’s exhausting walking there from the station by foot. She always liked feeling superior as it was.
As he’s walking on that steep, gravel road, hoping no car will decide to pass and seal his fate today, he feels as if there’s a band of hornets in his chest, making a home there. His hands feel clammy in his coat pockets. Breathe, Henry, he tells himself. It’s not like Mary is going to be there to welcome him with her claws.
He starts to see her cottage in his land of vision. The only thing visible for miles in this small village in the middle of rural England. As he steps closer to her cottage, his chest starts to burn. Why is he so nervous?
He assumes it’s just the dread for what’s to come, the fear of the unknown.
The small gate to the cottage is open. Henry presumes no one is brave enough to come close to Mary’s estate. And even if they had, he doesn’t give a sodding fuck. He hopes they robbed the whole garden.
The gate is wooden and has seen better days. He opens it and doesn’t bother closing it behind him. There’s a small path leading to the cottage door. He walks on it with careful steps, trying to calm down his rapidly beating heart.
As he reaches the door, he takes out a key from his coat (cheers, Pip), and opens the large and uninviting door.
He doesn’t know what he expects to find inside. Bats, monsters, scary creatures waiting in the shadows.
It’s just a house.
Gray, dull, organized.
It’s preserved neatly. He never asked Phillip what he ended up doing with the place, he never cared, but it looks almost untouched. It smells like dust, but isn’t as bad as he had imagined it would be. His rapidly beating heartbeat is slowly calming down as he scans the grounds.
He walks around the space, expecting to feel anything, something, a memory — but nothing comes back to him.
He enters a large room with a dusty piano next to a large bay window. Not a flashback, not a burning headache, not a thing. He just feels sad. Wonders if his fingers will remember even if his brain doesn’t. Thinks about trying it, but decides against it, too afraid to discover the truth.
He decides to go upstairs and explore the second floor of the house.
He enters what appears to be the master bedroom and regrets it immediately. It’s horrendous; floral patterns, beige all around. A fashion crime, truly appalling.
There’s another room down the hall. All of the white doors in the main corridor look identical from the outside, but there’s something about that specific door – he cannot explain it. He feels a pull towards it.
The moment he turns the doorknob and takes it in, that’s when it hits him. A wave of nausea, his vision blurring, and before he knows it, he finds himself sitting on the floor, hugging his knees close to his chest.
It’s unexplainable, but he can feel it all over his body.
This room must have been his.
He tries to calm his breathing. He closes his eyes tightly and focuses on the sound of his own heartbeat, even if it’s too fast, but all he hears are shouts, crying and begging noises. He can’t tell if it’s his imagination or a memory threatening to pour out.
He touches his own warm chest, trying to provide himself with some comfort. He opens his eyes and looks at the nearly empty room he’s in, but his vision remains blurry. He tells himself he’s alone, there’s no one here to harm him, it’s alright. He follows the movements of his chest underneath his shaky hand. It’s alright, he repeats to himself.
At some point, once his breathing is regulated, he decides to slowly stand up on his shaky legs.
Now that his vision is no longer blurry, he can properly inspect his surroundings. The room is stripped of any memories or personality. For the most part, it looks like a deserted guest room. A bed, neatly made, fitted for a teenager. A wooden closet in the corner of the room, and a wooden desk with nothing on top of it. No trace that a person ever lived here.
He opens up all the drawers, but all he finds are just a few empty papers.
He tries to look under the bed — nothing.
Then his mind suddenly thinks of something, and he decides to follow its lead.
He lifts up the mattress from the bed, and discovers — everything.
There’s a stack of papers, but unlike the ones in the drawers he found, these are filled with life. These are his sketches.
He always assumed he had started to sketch when he was sixteen.
So much of his life was based on a lie. One big mystery, and he never even questioned. There was no one to communicate the truth to him, no one to notice something was wrong, that something was missing.
And him — he was comfortable living with his own emptiness as it was consuming him whole, never questioning himself before as to why it went so deep into his bones.
He’s skimming through the sketches and can’t help the choked laugh that escapes his mouth. He sees a sketch of a cow, of a red bicycle, of pinkies intertwined. He recognizes them immediately from his more recent paintings, and his heart hurts.
He hadn’t developed his style yet here, but he can still see sprouts of who he is now as an artist. It’s heart-shattering to see his birth as an artist only now, never being aware it happened so early in his life. He missed on so much.
Among the sketches, he finds a sketch of a boy.
His boy.
It’s the first time he sees the face of his mystery boy, fully. The unruly curls, his big brown eyes, the long eyelashes, the shape of his lips.
Henry wants to cry.
With shaky steps, he approaches the closet next.
There are still some jackets hanging on the rackets; a jean jacket, a gray hoodie. They look well loved.
He’s starting to think he left in a rush.
He looks down and finds a shoebox of some old sneakers. They look like they belong to a teenager, with grass stains on them. He saw those sneakers before, in his dreams.
He thinks he sees something inside of the shoe.
He fishes out a small, blue MP3 player.
He tries to turn it on, but it’s out of battery. Of course.
It’s getting harder to breathe again. He grabs the sketches and the MP3 player and neatly puts them in his coat’s pocket, as if he’s handling historical artifacts and not the only remains of his own teenage years. He quickly gets out of that cottage, as if he’ll be burnt alive if he stays there for a second longer.
When he’s outside, that’s when he's confronted with it.
A view that’s been haunting him for months. He’s been so terrified to enter Mary’s estate, he didn’t even see where he was going, where he’s been standing all along.
The field.
There’s fog covering it; the grass glistens from the wetness, but it’s still his field. The same field he’s been seeing in his dreams, again and again, his mystery boy and him. The stranded bike, them running, laughing, the shadows of the trees on their faces as they lie on the grass.
Fuck. his chest burns.
He walks towards the field, stepping on the grass with his expensive docs, not caring about the wetness or the fog. He walks and he walks and he walks, feeling like a Jane Austen protagonist — brooding. He walks without a thought in his mind, only a pull, a tug in his chest, telling him to keep walking forward until the invisible thread that’s been leading him to this place will bring him to a halt.
He reaches a large oak tree.
He feels a sharp pain in his head that makes his knees turn to jelly as he falls onto the wet grass.
A memory floods back, drowning him with its forceful stream.
He sees two boys lying on the grass together underneath this very same oak tree. Their bicycles lie beside them; red and blue.
It looks like spring. The wind is kind as it blows through the brown curls. He sees pale fingers holding onto a pen, sketching on a notepad.
It’s him and his mystery boy.
The mystery boy is sharing an anecdote about his day, sharing how annoying the boys in his class are, while Henry’s humming and sketching peacefully in his notepad.
They look so young and carefree.
Suddenly, the boy notices him sketching and asks to see the drawing. Henry shyly refuses. Oh, he’s sketching him. It’s the sketch he saw. They’re jokingly fighting now over the sketch until it turns into a tickle fight. Somehow, the mystery boy ends up sitting on top of Henry. The happiness in the boy’s face mirrors his own.
He imprints their smiles to his mind.
The last thing he hears before the flood of memories throws him back ashore, is the mystery boy grabbing the sketch from his hand and saying, “You're going to do great things one day.”
The cold wind brings him back to the present and he’s quickly back to his gloomy reality, on his knees as he’s being evolved into a gray, cold hug by the fog.
The oak tree in his dream was in full bloom; green and magnificent.
The tree in front of him looks like a shadow of what he saw.
He’s trembling.
He thinks somehow in between bickering, he heard a name.
Alex.
AlexAlexAlexAlex.
His heart is racing like crazy.
How can it feel so right?
As he’s trying to regain his breath on his trembling knees, with tears in his eyes, in a place he was convinced not long ago he had never visited, but now somehow feels like he knows it like the back of his hand, one thing becomes clear through the fog.
Alex is real, and Henry needs to find him.
✨🍁ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
When he wakes up in the morning from his dream, the gaping hole in his chest only spreads, now fully reaching his lungs, clogging his breathing channel as if there’s a heavy rock on his chest.
He sits in silence on his bed for a few moments before he even finds the strength to face the day.
The dreams don’t worsen after his visit, per se. It’s just that he has context for them now. He feels like he knows his mystery boy. Now, he starts to see facial features more clearly; the golden tones in his mystery boy’s eyes, how it aligns with the rest of his face when he smiles.
Now, he has a name for the boy — Alex.
He just woke up from another dream where laughter took a centric part. It’s still ringing loudly in his ears. This time, they were indoors, on a bed.
Later in the day, he takes out the MP3 player from his coat, and connects it to the charger he got from the store especially for this. While he waits for it to come back to life, he’s trying to figure out how to find his Alex.
He starts with facebook. He hasn't logged onto his account in ages. He never had the habit of checking it in the first place. Pez forced him to open one for himself when they met, since he never had one growing up. At least, not one he remembers having.
He starts there. He looks for himself, as odd as it sounds. But he finds nothing.
He looks for his own name in the search engine, maybe Alex was looking for him at some point, but — nothing. Just a few art critics reviewing his earlier work.
He searches — ‘Alex’.
What a daft idea. As if it’s not one of the most common names in the world.
He leans back in his chair and releases a huff of frustration. His eyes avert to the red alerts of notifications that have been piling up while he’s been gone. Guess he should clean it up while he’s here. He goes to his friend requests inbox and scrolls aimlessly, seeing if he’d missed anyone important.
That’s when his heart stops.
Alex Claremont-Diaz.
His mystery boy, at the very bottom of his friend requests. He sees the date — sent 6 years ago.
He shakingly clicks on the profile.
It’s private, you can’t see much.
Alex apparently currently resides in California, he wears glasses, his birthday is also in March. He's the most beautiful person Henry has ever seen.
That’s all the information he can maintain on him.
He tries to think logically about this situation.
He drafts a message in his head.
‘Hi Alex, you may know me, but I don’t seem to really know you.’
Tacky.
‘Hi Alex. I think you may hold some crucial information over some formative years of my life. I'd like for us to reconnect and exchange numbers.’
He sounds like an arsehole.
‘Hi Alex, it’s me, your soulmate.’
This is utterly ridiculous.
No matter how he looks at it, he can’t just accept the friend request after it’s been sitting in his inbox for years. His message sounds ridiculous to his own ears even though he’s the one living with this reality, so he can’t imagine what Alex's reaction is going to be like. It’ll sound like an insane excuse. This is far too important to him, he can’t risk it.
He can’t reach out, and it breaks his heart.
The MP3 pings from beside his laptop as it vibrates back to life.
The same night, he lies on his bed with his earphones on, as he tries to let the music help him connect the pieces of what’s left of his old life.
The melodies that welcome him from the earphones are not scary, unfamiliar ones.
It’s the same songs he used to love as a kid. The same songs he used to listen to with his Father, when they’d dance in the living room together and act out the lyrics theatrically. Queen, Elton John, Bowie, Prince.
But among those familiar notes, he recognizes songs that don’t belong in the same fashion. Songs he likes now, as an adult, but he never got to listen to with his Father.
LCD Soundsystem. Arcade Fire. The Killers. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Kid Cudi. Blur. Nirvana. Daddy Yankee. Lil Jon.
Songs that he likes now, that almost make him feel nostalgic for a time and place that never was. When he listens to all of them, he realizes he’s always been so fondly attached to them all for no reason.
Then at the very last, catching him off guard, a voice memo starts to play.
The voice of a teenager filling his ear.
“Hey, H! Hope you liked my gift. Now Mary the wicked witch can never get mad at you for enjoying your own music. We showed her.” There’s a giggle, then a snort. “Henlex one, Mary zero. Took the liberty to add a few songs of my own into the mix, so you can always think of me even when I'm not with you, which is never, HA! See you probably soon, bye!”
A stab to his chest.
He can’t see his room through his tears.
In this very second, two things become clearer to him:
- He had an awful time down at his Gran’s place. No wonder he erased all of it from his memory.
- The audio recording makes it all the more evident just how close Alex and him were to each other. How much of a loss this must have been to Alex, to himself. How much they loved one another.
His heart keeps on breaking.
When he finally manages to fall asleep that night, his dream is extremely vicious and dark. This time, he dreams of shouts, of doe brown eyes, now filled with tears. Fingers gripping onto a blanket tightly as it’s being ripped out from his hands.
He feels torn apart as he paints those images as dawn breaks.
✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌨️🎨
The yellow trees outside of Henry’s window now turn crisp and brown. They look like a skeleton of what they once were; colourful, full of life, vibrant and beautiful. Henry can relate to them.
It's the 25th of December and everyone is celebrating, but he’s cooped up in his home studio, just him and a face he’s been growing so accustomed to now, a face he can paint with his eyes closed. Every wrinkle, every bump, every curve, familiar like his very own.
He knows if he finds his phone, he’ll find at least 10 unanswered calls from his friends and a hundred of unanswered messages from their group chat. He gets like this sometimes. His friends are always respectful and understanding, it just never happened on a holiday before. Even David is staring at him sadly from the floor with pity in his big, dog eyes as Henry is trying to piece out his life.
He steps away from the window and looks at the mess of his studio, at the paintings.
He sees the progression of the faceless boy in his paintings, how he slowly becomes less of a blurry image, how he’s slowly becoming Alex.
A face he sees in his dreams clearer and clearer, ever since his countryside visit.
He also notices how Alex looks a bit older in his dreams, too; he looks about 14 now.
His dreams got progressively darker, as well.
Before, the images in his dreams were scenic and peaceful. He heard laughter and felt joy. The sun kissing his cheeks, the wind caressing his skin.
Now he hears screams, fights, sees tears, in vague, distorted images. He feels the pain, oozing from every corner, feels it physically when he wakes up.
The gaping hole in his chest — it keeps expanding as the days go by. Something he didn’t think was possible. But it hurts so much he can barely get out of bed most days. The only thing keeping him moving are his paintings and his obligation to his art.
He hears another vibrating sound coming from a distance, probably where he last left his phone. Must be Pez looking for him.
One mental breakdown at a time.
He should probably take a shower, get out of his house to grace society and meet his friends, and say hello to the skeleton trees on his way out.
✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 ☁️🎨
After the new year passes, he tries to leave panicked Henry in the past and get his shit together. New year new me, he mumbles under his breath as he stares into his reflection in the mirror. He has an entire exhibition to organize on his own, after all. He can’t afford to lose touch with reality now. He’ll need to reschedule that to May.
The realization that he has an entire art show to curate lands on him like a bucket full of ice cold water. He realizes he was too focused on solving the case of his mystery boy and his dreams, that he forgot there’s a deadline in front of him, rapidly approaching.
There are people who have been looking for him that desperately need him to email them back. Which he’d be more than happy to do, once he’ll know what his bloody exhibition theme is.
He has it in his paintings; he can sense it, the invisible thread all around him, leading into one conclusion. They tell a clear story, his paintings. He just needs to read them from start to end and try to comprehend what it all means. He runs his fingers through his greasy hair as he paces through his studio.
He feels like a mad scientist trying to bring his creature to life, standing in front of his paintings. He’s been painting every single day for the past 10 months, most of his paintings can barely fit into his room anymore.
After hours of pacing in his room, he thinks he has it.
It’s quite obvious, isn’t it?
“I have always seen you”
— A story of dreams, and how they brought me back my missing piece.
A crucial part of being an artist is learning to be okay with being vulnerable. With baring your soul to others.
He takes a deep breath, and writes down his introduction for the gallery. Every artist has one, it’s mandatory. Henry prepared a rough draft with dry facts about himself since November, he showed it in the meeting he had with the gallery.
He tosses that paper and begins from scratch.
He writes facts about himself, but this time he doesn’t spare the details, he writes anything that should be relevant to his exhibition.
Beneath that, he adds another section. The most important to this major event in his life; he writes his story.
He’s no writer, but he tries to convey what he truly feels, exposing his truths and his thoughts. A crucial part of being an artist is learning to be okay with being vulnerable.
He writes about the gaping hole in his chest, about all the early years of his life blurring in his mind into one block, about the hollowness he walks with, even as he found his people, his calling in this life, stuff that filled him up with warmth and meaning. Deep down, he still felt empty and cold — something was always missing.
He writes about his dreams; how they’ve started on his 25th birthday. Most importantly, about his mystery boy and how he wasn’t able to recognize him. He writes about his feelings throughout the entire year, how haunted he felt by his own dreams, about Pez’s theory and how impossible it felt to him. But then — meeting that stranger on a chilly November day, about meeting with Beatrice, about discovering the gap of five years of his life.
“Maybe the hole in my chest should be explained now, five whole years gone in a blink of an eye," he writes, hand twitching from the intensity of his writing. As if the pressure of his finger can transfer the sincerity of his emotions through ink. “But I know, I know the ache I feel is from the absence of a person. From the memories I shared with him that should have been there all along, but weren’t. And now, all that’s left is a gaping abyss, subconsciously waiting for the day he’ll come back to me.
My soulmate — My Alex. This exhibition is dedicated to him.”
He puts down the pen on his desk and releases a breath.
ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌙✨🌤️🎨
Before he knows it, the aroma of flowers blooming all around makes it clear that April has finally arrived. It’s been raining for the entire month, but somehow, on the day of his exhibition, the sun decides to come out of her hiding place.
Henry has always preferred the spring.
The day of the exhibition is nerve wrecking.
Pez jokes that he acts like the bride on her wedding day with the way he’s been running around with twitchy fingers, snapping orders at people all around him.
But he thinks the metaphor of a pregnant woman in the final moments before she’s due would be a lot more appropriate to his case.
His baby is about to be open to the public. His bare soul, revealed for the world to gawk at. He’s about to be truly seen, and that’s terrifying as much as it is exhilarating. But you can't make good art without being vulnerable.
The exhibition starts at eight in the evening and it seems to be going well enough. The Ink-redible Gang are through the door first, and he’s eternally grateful for their presence and support. If anything, he’s upset he can’t spend the entire night clinging to them, hiding from everyone the minute people actually start to show up. But alas, he, the artist, is required to mingle.
He does his part of shaking hands with critics and people of the art world. But the evening is mostly a blur to him.
He hears a lot of praise from all around him but it’s almost too much, too overwhelming. He knows it’ll hit him later, when he’s alone with his David. He’ll be replaying all of their words back to his dog, and it’ll sink in. For now, he’s dissociating.
There are people touching his shoulders, telling him what a marvelous job he’d done, how brave he is. Old professors he admired, colleagues, friends. The room gets a bit too warm, and it quickly becomes too much. He makes an excuse in the middle of a conversation with a photographer saying he needs more wine, and uses the table holding the wine glasses as an excuse to hold himself, even if it’s just for a moment.
He takes a deep breath, trying to have a moment alone. Fingers clutching tightly onto the white table cloth.
The table is placed strategically. The gallery itself is very wide, and the table is located near the entrance, allowing people to take a glass as they enter to enrich their experience.
It’s also located in the best possible location for Henry to gaze around the whole entire space like a lurker. Watch people’s reaction passively as he’s catching a moment of silence.
His exhibition is divided into three main sections; the first — between the ages 10 to 11. Those are filled with extreme close ups, bits and pieces of a whole, fragments of memories. The second — between the ages 12 to 13. Those are soft and tender in their appearance, clearer images filled with joy. And the third — age 14. It starts just as soft, with the addition of Henry into the paintings, but turns dark rather quickly. Ending the exhibition on a pessimistic note.
His eyes shift through the gallery, taking it all in. How crowded the room is, the chatter of the crowd, all the people discussing his own work. It’s exciting as much as it’s scary. He finally lets go of the table cloth from his deadly grip.
That’s when he notices him. His breath hitches.
A mop of curls.
The world momentarily stops turning on its axis.
He’d recognize that brown cloud of softness anywhere. His fingers traced after them for hours and hours. He knows their perfect shade in the sun, in the winter, in a dark room only being lit by a bedside lamp.
When he closes his eyes, those are the curls that haunt his mind, the same curls that started it all.
Alex is standing in front of the second part of his exhibition as his head full of curls mirror the ones in the painting in front of him. Henry watches with his heart in his throat as Alex slowly moves his feet, from painting to painting, until he reaches the third section of the exhibition.
It feels like Henry's under a trance. He finds himself moving with careful steps, trying to match Alex’s own pace, just so he’ll be able to watch Alex’s expression better. His movements are slow, like a national geographic photographer, too afraid to stir the wild animal. He’s pretty sure he stopped breathing a while ago.
He watches as Alex reaches the very last painting of the exhibition — blue and red bicycles, stranded in a field together. But the weather isn’t kind like it was in his first paintings, it’s stormy, and there's no mystery boy left in the image. His void in the painting is noticed. Just like the void he left in Henry’s chest.
After the last painting, there’s an official picture of Henry alongside the introduction he’d written all those months ago. His soul, out there for his own soulmate to see.
He watches as Alex reads his words carefully, square glasses framing his face perfectly. His caramel coloured eyes start to fill with tears and his nose starts to shrivel. His doleful eyes follow the words frantically, and then – he looks up.
Doe, teary eyes meet his own, in a similar state. And the world stops.
The lights dim. Time slips away from his fingers like molasses. There’s no one else in this room but Henry and Alex; the strangers, the childhood best friends, the soulmates.
He’s not sure who moves first. He lost control over his body a while ago.
Before he knows it, he stands in front of his mystery boy. The same boy that’s been haunting his mind for a little over a year. Or maybe, since he was 11 years old.
His soulmate.
It’s Alex who speaks first.
“I always told you you’d do great things one day.”
Henry releases a wet laugh, considering he’s more tears than human at present.
How can Alex be here?
He doesn’t even know what he expected out of meeting Alex for the first time. He’s not sure he ever thought about it, his mind never allowing himself to fully hope. Perhaps he imagined anger, resentment, frustration.
He didn’t expect Alex to look at him like that. To smile at him so brightly, similarly to how the sun glistened over them in his earlier dreams, so softly, so kindly. His heart is hammering wildly, doing cartwheels in his chest.
They gravitate toward each other until their foreheads touch. Alex’s glasses fog up from their proximity, from Henry’s erratic breathing. The curls tickle his forehead, it’s the best feeling in the entire world. And Henry —
He doesn’t feel it anymore.
The hole in his chest.
He draws a hand up and moves it in circular motions. He can imagine what they look like to an outsider; tears in their eyes, foreheads touching, Henry’s hand on his chest.
But at this moment in time, he could not care less. He feels so happy he could die as he thinks to himself — finally.
🌙✨ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁🎨
It’s around 2 a.m. when he and Alex find themselves at his apartment, trying to comprehend everything that just occurred.
“How were you there?” Henry asks in a small voice, laced with disbelief. They’re sitting on his sofa. Two teas in front of them, getting cold.
“My sister, June, sent me an invite to the exhibition. She’s an art journalist. I’m actually in town visiting her,” Alex replies.
And suddenly, it all clicks. The woman he bumped into in November.
He sent a summary to a bunch of journalists about the exhibition a few days before so they’ll publish their reviews on the day after the opening. She probably saw his dedication. My soulmate — My Alex. This exhibition is dedicated to him.
He studies Alex’s eyes and sees so many questions in them, mirroring his own. It appears neither of them know where to start. Alex’s mouth opens, but no words come out.
“It’s okay, Alex. You can ask me anything,” Henry says. Enjoying the way Alex’s name rolls on his tongue.
AlexAlexAlexAlex.
Alex opens his mouth once more and asks delicately. “Do you remember…anything, now? After the dreams?”
Henry pauses for a second before he talks. “I remember glimpses of things. It’s all a mess, really. Can’t really tell what I've been dreaming and what I've been actively remembering ever since.”
Alex gives him a small but sad smile, clearly expecting a different answer.
Henry offers a further explanation. “I did have a few flashes that were clearer to me. Us in the field, just being playful. I could tell we’d sit there a lot, under that oak tree. You told me I'd do great things one day.”
“You remembered that,” Alex says with disbelief.
Henry nods, almost shyly. It’s weird how he feels like he was intruding on an intimate moment, even if he was intruding on himself.
Then he furrows his eyebrows as he concentrates on the darker bits.
“I also remember screams and chaos, hysterical crying. I know something bad went down at my Gran’s cottage, but…” He shakes his head. Just thinking about it makes him feel uneasy.
Alex clears his throat. “Yeah.” He looks at the big clock that’s on Henry’s wall. “How are you feeling right now? You’ve had quite a day, Mr. Artist.”
Henry shares a small but genuine small with Alex. Of course Alex would be kind and considerate. Despite the hour, it’s not exhaustion that he feels clinging to his bones, it’s warmth spreading inside of him.
Henry replies, “Frankly, the only thing I can think of right now is if I were to walk this earth for another second without knowing about our story, I would lose it.”
And that’s when Alex tells him everything.
How they met in the early spring. Alex crashed his bike into the field in front of Mary’s cottage, scratching his knee in the process. Henry watched the whole thing from the window and rushed to his help. He convinced Alex to enter Mary’s cottage, put a band-aid on his wound, and let Alex talk about how dull and gray Mary’s cottage was.
Apparently, their bond was instant.
Alex tells him about bike rides; how they’d ride without a destination in mind, wind blowing through their hair, feeling liberated. How their favorite pastime was to get lost in the fields, where no one would look for them.
Alex shares how he struggled a lot in school. It took him a while to understand the locals’ accents as a kid, and they teased him relentlessly in return. His rough start determined his entire stay at their village.
Henry was like a breath of fresh air, so unlike everyone else around him. He shares how kind Henry was to him, how he was able to recognize that same sadness that he saw in his own eyes. Maybe that’s why they saw one another when no one else did.
He shares that Henry was home-schooled at the cottage by some tutors, away from the rest of the kids in their village. Mary always insisted on him keeping his distance from everyone else. Her weird superiority complex persisted.
“That never stopped you from learning things by yourself, though. You held a new book in your hand every week about a new topic. You were so smart, but you never made me feel smaller than you. You taught me everything you learned by yourself. Philosophy, mythology, astronomy, literature."
Henry likes to think about the stars often, considers them as his wee luminous friends of the night. He looks up at them and just knows. He has a favorite planet, has an unhealthy Jane Austen obsession, likes to get into philosophical debates with his friends, and reads mythology books for fun. He never questioned where his knowledge came from.
How foolish.
Alex seems to freeze in the middle of his speech. That’s when Henry’s eyes search what has Alex halting, and that’s when he spots it. The small, blue MP3 player sitting on his desk, in the corner of his living room.
“I found it inside of what I assume would be my old converse,” Henry says.
Alex releases a small breath. “Yeah, Mary…she didn’t like the songs you used to listen to around the house, she forbade you from listening to them out loud. I stole that thing from my sister and downloaded a bunch of songs you loved and then some that you and I listened to together.”
Oh. The length in which little Alex went for little Henry. His heart squeezes in his chest at that admission.
“That’s so sweet, Alex, what you did for me. I get the sense you really were there for me a lot in a really shitty time, I'd imagine,” he admits, craving to know more about the nature of their relationship. Needing to know everything.
Alex’s brown eyes hold so much inside of them. He’s fidgeting with his fingers on his lap while his gaze is fixated on his own movement, as if he’ll find the answers there on how to cure the soul’s agony.
Alex speaks after a moment of silence.
“You were my savior, H. I was so alone there, I felt so out of place, and then, there you were,” Alex says as he lifts his gaze from his fidgeting fingers to look at Henry’s face.
Alex’s eyes shine from unshed tears behind his specs as he continues to speak after a moment. “You were everything to me. I moved to that godforsaken village when I was eight, and all that time it was so bad. My environment was bad, my parents were absent, and when they were home, all we heard was them shouting at one another. It was a horrible time.”
Henry’s pretty sure you could hear his heart shattering all the way to Buckingham palace.
Alex continues, “But when you found me on that field, when your chubby hands grabbed mine and led me inside of Mary’s cottage, when you put that band-aid on my wounds and laughed as I called her house colorless and boring, I didn't feel it anymore, Henry.”
Alex puts a hand on his chest, and moves it in circular motions.
“That awful feeling, it was slowly fading away with each day of us laughing together, of us just existing together. You were my everything.”
Henry finds himself holding his breath, and feeling it. Feeling it all so deep within his bones. Alex’s voice is wobbly as he speaks from the heart, and all Henry wants to do is wrap his arms around him tightly and kiss his forehead, but he isn’t sure they're there yet.
Henry clears his throat. “Were we ever…?” he asks. It hurts, not knowing. But he knows Alex will understand, they share a soul, after all.
Alex nods and smiles gently, almost bashfully at him. It’s so beautiful his entire body lights up from the inside.
Alex tells him about them.
“We’ve always had this unspoken thing between us, I think it was just as clear for you as it was for me. Even though we were just kids, it didn’t matter.” He shakes his head.
And Henry gets it, he really does. Because despite it all this is his soulmate sitting next to him on the sofa, after all those years.
“I think we already understood back then that this is something bigger than us,” Alex continues. “We intertwined our pinkies and enjoyed moments of silence, looking into each other’s eyes without any words. Knowing every moment of laughter and conversation carried something more, beneath the surface. We just didn’t really discuss it.”
And Henry nods, thinking he understands how two young teenagers would enjoy the intimacy of existing together without moving further. How beautiful and naive.
Alex takes a deep breath, but it comes off too shaky. “And then— then everything changed.”
Henry’s eyes make direct eye contact with Alex’s deep brown eyes, and sees sorrow in them, and he understands.
He understands which part of the story comes next.
“One weekend, Mary was out of village for business. She’d do that sometimes, leave the cottage all to you. Very naturally I'd join. We’d normally watch movies and just talk until the late hours of the night, but this one time, this unspoken agreement between us just… broke."
Henry against his better judgment finds himself gasping. His fingers reach out towards his own lips, almost feeling the ghost of a touch there.
“We kissed,” he finds himself saying. Not asking, no. Saying, remembering.
Alex nods hesitantly, letting Henry soak in on the information.
Henry closes his eyes, and he thinks he can see them, on the bed he saw in the cottage, except – it was full of life and warmth, unlike the cold state he saw it in. He sees two silhouettes on a bed facing each other, merging into one. He opens his eyes and looks directly into Alex.
Alex’s eyes are filled with tears. “Our lips touched, and I felt like I was arriving home. You held me in your arms the whole night. I felt so at peace until—” Alex pauses his sentence to take a shaky breath.
Henry asks hesitantly. “Is this related to the screams I keep hearing in my dreams?”
Alex releases a cry as he hears his question, and nods. “Mary, she – she came back so much earlier than she had to, and we were still in bed cuddling, and—” Alex squeezes his eyes tightly, as if it’ll make the memory go away.
And Henry —
Henry remembers.
This time, the flood of memories is violent when it reaches him.
He closes his eyes and he sees it with clarity. He hears the same shouts he’s been hearing for months now, only now the intangible mumbling becomes understandable, and he hears them for what they are; bashes and curses.
The cries become clearer too. It’s Alex, crying beside him, as Henry’s trying to cling onto the blanket they were snuggling under not even ten minutes before, as Mary is trying to pry it out of his hands.
The blanket rips, Mary’s yells become more aggressive; they turn into threats.
Alex is sitting in the corner of the room now, while Henry is yelling at Mary, barely seeing the room through his tears.
He remembers now, that feeling of dread. He remembers knowing his Gran’s influence was vast and spread like wildfire. He remembers now how most of the village was owned by her, how important she was to every event, every decision, the power she held.
It comes back to him so suddenly, that fear of existing as who he really was under his Gran’s thumb. How he and Alex held hands, but never in the village square, always when no one was watching, always aware. She drained all the colour from his life.
So when Mary threatened to destroy Alex’s life entirely in their small village unless he’d leave Henry alone — it was believable. She was threatening to tell his parents, kick him out of school, send him back to America, all those obnoxious threats. Every few minutes, she would open her mouth only to send another one into the air, more evil and sinister than the last one.
Henry frowns, “I can’t remember what happened, after.”
He thinks he’s starting to puzzle the pieces together now. The day he returned back home, and how cold and numb he felt. How he spent the entire day in his old room feeling dissociated from his own reality.
But he isn’t sure how he ended up there.
Alex starts to speak again. “The thing is, I was just fourteen years old. If I was older, I'd never—” He gets choked up on his words.
Henry can almost feel his pain; he’s aching for them both.
Alex shakes his head, almost to shake himself out of his own dark thoughts. “Even if I was just fourteen, I felt that loving you could never be wrong. But I knew Mary could actually have the power to separate us, I knew she could do so much harm, and I couldn't lose you. I promised to leave you alone, but I was already planning in my head ways for us to meet in secret, how to make it all better. That same evening, you were already on a train back to London. I was so naive.”
Henry can’t hold it any longer, he gets closer to Alex on the sofa and puts his hands on top of Alex’s shaky fingers, the ones that are on his lap. He stops Alex’s fidgeting as he takes his hands to his own and holds them closely to him. “You were a kid. We were kids. Mary was far too powerful for us, there is nothing we could have done. You did your best, I need you to let go of that guilt for me, all right?”
He sees the hesitancy in Alex’s eyes and it speaks volumes. It speaks of the heaviness he must have carried inside of him, all this time. At least Henry had the privilege of forgetting.
Henry squeezes Alex’s fingers, trying to convey his message, feeling more confident in their proximity by the minute.
“The truth is, Mary was a cunt and she was forced to take care of her sensitive, queer grandson, and once she no longer could deny he was in love with a boy, she saw red,” Henry puts in. “I think she would have destroyed everything in her way that day. And who could even fathom a reality where my idiotic brain would decide to protect myself from losing you by just erasing five entire years from my memories?”
Alex releases a small laugh. It’s weak, but it’s still there, so Henry considers that a win. Alex replies, “When you say it like that, it all sounds rather romantic than the biggest tragedy of my life.”
And Henry falls a little bit more in love right then and there. He allows himself to touch further, as he leans in to plant a soft kiss on Alex’s hands. He notices they’re not shaking anymore.
When he looks up, Alex glances at him with a glint in his eyes. That’s great, that means he read the room right.
“Besides, how dare you call that box in your head anything less than brilliant, I bet that hasn’t changed a bit since we were fourteen,” Alex says with a steadier voice.
The room is warmer now with the two of them holding hands and their knees bumping on the sofa. “Be careful,” Henry says, “or I might just believe you.”
In the end, they stay up talking until the sun starts to peek from Henry’s living room window. The sunlight gently grazes on Alex’s curls when they notice it’s getting late, or erm, early. Henry feels lucky he got to see him like this — Alex’s caramel eyes, and the way they glim when the first morning sunrays come in contact with them. It’s everything. He can’t wait to paint it later.
They don’t end the night without the promise of meeting tomorrow. Too eager to see one another again, hopefully with less tears involved.
Henry lies on his bed with a hopeful smile on his face, looking forward to his dream instead of dreading his own mind. And for the first time since he can remember, he falls asleep feeling complete. No pain.
ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌙✨☀️🎨
Over the following days, he and Alex are like two peas in a pod, too scared to let the other one out of their sight. The outside world gets a bit hazy as he puts it on hold.
He tries to process the high of his gallery opening and all the good reviews it brought, one of them being June’s own piece. He’s more nervous to read her words than anyone else’s, but he’s lucky Alex is there by his side when he reads it. He lets him hold onto his hand for comfort.
He feels it all over his body; the pull towards Alex, this unexplained closeness, the immediate comfortability which is something he struggles with. It takes a while for people to get under his layers, but with Alex — all of that hesitancy is gone. It seems like he was already there, glued to his bare skin.
It’s more than just the science behind their soulmate bond that makes Henry feel this way. They used to share something so tender at such a fragile time, providing each other with safety when it wasn’t available for either of them and that means something. That means everything.
And Alex is an open book, willing to share absolutely everything with him.
He discovers Alex’s parents divorced a short while after everything went down. Alex’s father moved back to the states while his mother stayed behind. They gave them a choice. And while June decided to stay, Alex decided to move to California with his dad. It was an easy decision to make, according to him. Mary’s presence in their village was poisoning the ground they stood on, and he got too exhausted to fight, her claws on Henry were too tight.
Alex shares he always foolishly thought he’d come back for Henry. He would come visit his mom twice a year, and he’d search for sandy hair and pale blue eyes, and without fail his heart would break all over again when he wouldn’t find him waiting for him under their usual oak tree.
He started to visit less and less with the excuse of being busy, but the truth was; it hurt. It hurt making peace with the fact that he might never see Henry again. He just couldn’t do it anymore. His mother moved to London two years ago and so did his sister, and yet he would still hesitate to visit. This year was the first time he visited in a while, under June’s insistence.
Alex shares about his life in California; how he met friends who didn’t think he sounded funny for once, got prescribed glasses, and experimented with dating, and slowly started to live his life. But he always felt a bit detached, like he left a part of his soul behind.
He studied social work, always felt like he wanted to fight for the smaller person. He shares with Henry how, on his especially hard days, he would think of Henry, and it helped to push on forward. He just recently graduated, and is now pondering on the next steps.
And that's when Alex's dreams began.
“What did you feel when you first dreamt of me?” Henry couldn’t help but ask. It’s been a few days since they first reunited, and they feel a lot more comfortable in the presence of each other.
They’re having a picnic at the park while sitting on Henry’s emotional support Snoopy blanket, with David on Alex’s lap (that traitor, abandoning him so quickly).
Alex pats David on the head. “In all honesty, I just knew. Everything clicked into place. Never thought there would be someone else.”
The answer satisfies Henry deeply, making him feel warm under his jacket. But also– “Weren’t you upset, that you dreamt of me knowing I've been dreaming of you for a year without reaching out?”
Alex hums, he seems to be too focused on giving David the best ear scratch of his life. Yet Henry thinks it’s safe to say the gentle smile that spreads on his face is directed towards him, and not at his dog.
“I can’t lie to you, it stung a lot,” Alex says softly. “I felt like I was reliving a lot of my childhood trauma in the first few days. But I don't know, seeing you again in my dreams…felt like a piece of myself came back to me, if that makes any sense?”
It makes perfect sense.
“I think,” Alex continues, “when June insisted on me coming for a visit in April, I kind of felt it then too, like I was going to see you again soon. Honestly, I was going to forgive you no matter what happened. The conditions of our childhood weren’t normal, I had no idea whether Mary was even still alive or not. Which, by the way, good riddance.”
Henry snorts. He’s so incredibly fond.
“I was so clueless as to what happened, and I'm sorry it took me so long to come to you.” Alex lifts his gaze from David to Henry. He looks at him with so much sincerity in his caramel eyes. Henry is positively smitten.
“So what now?” Henry asks, feeling bold. Voicing out what they’ve been dancing around in circles for about a week now. He knows Alex doesn’t have a return ticket to California just yet.
“I think maybe, it’s safe for me to finally make my way back home,” Alex says.
“Oh?” Henry says as he tries to hide the disappointment in his voice.
Alex's eyelashes move gracefully as he blinks. “I haven't considered England as home for quite some time now. But I think we both know it was never about the location.”
Henry stares at him for a moment, at the confident look on Alex's face. The way he’s still scratching David’s head while smiling at Henry cheekily. He can feel the red painting his own cheeks.
“Henry?” Alex asks as he leans closer. He releases his hand from David's grip and starts to gently caress Henry’s cheek.
“Yeah?” Henry leans into the warm touch of Alex’s large hand. Both of them choose to ignore David’s whines.
“I’m ready to return home, to you,” Alex confesses.
And when their lips touch, it feels like the final missing puzzle piece has been brought to its place.
Alex tastes like coffee and the grapes they shared earlier. His lips are soft as he moves with ease against Henry's. David is causing a fuss on Alex’s lap now — but none of that matters. Henry’s feeling so happy he could die.
ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 🌙✨☁️🎨
Henry’s dreams have changed since he reunited with Alex. Instead of the past slowly revealing itself to him in dreams, he now dreams of present times. The dreams are simpler with a narrative to them, and they’re never as eerie as they’ve been before. For once, he can peacefully dream at night. He can just be.
He still likes to paint his dreams every once in a while, but he no longer needs to resort to them to draw his muse. He's always right there beside him when he’s awake.
Just last night, he dreamt about him and Alex eating strawberry cake on a bench in the park. Anticlimactic and oh so glorious.
He wakes up to Alex planting kisses all over his face.
“What did you dream about this time?” Alex asks him with his deep morning voice. He’ll never grow tired of hearing it, no matter how many months have passed.
“Strawberry cake, and you?” Henry likes this little ritual of theirs. There’s no such thing as leaving their bed before they’ll exchange their dreams with each other.
“I dreamt that you woke me up in bed by making me coffee, mhmmm–” Alex’s words are interrupted by Henry shoving a pillow in his face.
“You did not, you bellend. Try that again,” he says with a grin on his face.
“Okay! Fine. I dreamt of a human sized caterpillar interrupting us on our walk.”
Henry laughs loudly. “I love your mind. Why do I get all the boring ones?” He pouts.
Alex dramatically gasps. “How dare you, Mr. I erased five years of my life until they casually unveiled in front of me in my dreams. Say thanks to your boring dreams, please.”
And Alex is right. How lucky he is that he gets to soak in the simplicity.
“Hey, should we go out to eat some strawberry cake today?” Alex’s eyes grow in size with child-like wonder in them. Henry adores that man with his entire being.
Henry confirms their plans with a kiss, morning breath be damned.
It's the weekend, so he and Alex lie in bed a little longer today, they allow themselves. At some point, David jumps on the bed to ask for his usual morning cuddles, and they're more than happy to provide.
The gaping hole in his chest is now replaced by a glowing light. He’s grown quite familiar with it over the past few months with Alex by his side.
He gets woken up by the laughter he previously only dreamt about. He gets to meet with his friends now, without feeling that ever-lasting guilt of something missing from his life.
For once, everything is in its right place.