soulmate/fantasy ish kl au of sorts 😳

new au idea i’m actually excited about!? i have a lot to figure out and idk how far i’m gonna get but here’s a short thing i wrote.....if u read it i hope u like it!

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Lance had been seven when his mother gave him the stone.

A parting gift, he supposes. She’d been sick for years, had recently started coughing up blood. At the time, he thought he was dreaming when she’d leaned over him in his bed in the middle of the night, just a loving shadow planting a warm kiss to the curls at his hairline. “Be happy, little bird,” she’d said, a whispering ghost, pressing something cool and smooth into his palm.

When he woke the next morning, it was still early, dawn just a suggestion on the horizon outside his window. His little sister was lying in his bed with him, crying into his back, and his fingers were curled around a pendant he’d sometimes seen hanging long and loose from his mother’s neck. His confusion was all at once wide and restless, a startled animal. He didn’t remember taking the necklace to bed with him.

He’d called out to his sister, he’d turned to face her. It wasn’t unusual to wake to Rachel’s sorrow—she had always been so easily wounded, so offended by a simple no. But on this particular morning, she was clutching their mother’s favorite shawl to her heaving chest, eyes swollen with tears, breaths wet and uneven. Her pain was real, and it tore through Lance like a bolt of lightning.

He didn’t say anything to her. He was too afraid to ask and she was too distressed to explain, huddling against him when he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at her stricken expression. They laid there until Veronica had crept into the room hours later the slant of the midsummer sun hot against his back.

A part of him still hoped when he heard the door swing open that it would be their mother, wondering why they hadn’t come down for breakfast, gentle and chastising. But Veronica’s face, too, was reddened and puffy, and she confirmed what Lance suspected as she drew the threadbare curtain across the window to keep out the heat.

It’s been twelve years. Lance wishes he could have been there when she passed. Rachel—who had still been young enough to sleep in their mother’s bed at night—had woken up beside her still body and fled to his room. He’s glad that she had been too young to remember anything but the grief and the fear and the sweeping sense of being something very small in a world that is not kind to small, delicate things. Though seven years old, Lance only remembers his dream, and he has spent every moment of his life since with that pendant around his neck, settled beside his heart beneath the loose fabrics of his shirts.

It’s a bright, petal-pink, perfectly oval and smooth as a river stone, and fits snug in the palm of his hand. It stays cool against his skin, never soaking in the warmth from his natural body heat, a welcome balm during the blistering summers here in the Flatlands.

Sometimes he imagines the cool relief swallowing him, like slipping into a blue-green oasis or biting into one of the fresh melons from Veronica’s garden. He imagines being somewhere where the air is sweet and humid, where there’s grass and life and everything is green and rich with wonder. He imagines the coolness of dusk, the chill under a blanket of stars, the way his mother might smile and the high, clear soprano of her song. He imagines Rachel curled up beneath the faded wine-red shawl against the cold, her face gentle and unworried in her sleep. He imagines Veronica saturated with joy as she leans against his shoulder, the early aging lines around her eyes and forehead softened, gone.

Lance likes the cold. The idea of it. The weight of it against his chest.

So, the stone is comforting, because it’s cold to the touch, and because it was his mother’s. It keeps her close. It keeps the dreams real.

“Be happy, little bird.”

Perhaps Lance likes to imagine a lot of things.