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Michael dropped his backpack on the floor by his chair, ignoring the heavy thud of the thick tome inhabiting it as he sat down in the visitors chair. He immediately scooted it closer to the hospital bed, threading his tail out under the backrest before he laid a hand on top of Lindsay's.
Her hands were cool to the touch, warm only because blood was still flowing through her veins thanks to the help of the machines pumping for her.
The beep of her monitor filled the silence until Michael finally let out a breath, using his free hand to scrub under his glasses and at the heavy bags under his eyes. He'd been studying all the ancient books he could find as if he was about to go through finals week all over again.
"Hah." The laugh held no humor, more of a defeated sigh that dragged the tips of his ears down like gravity had increased around him. "I wish this was high school again. I'd give anything to go back in time, to before...this."
He swallowed thickly and looked away from her peaceful face, instead watching the electric green line bouncing up and down with her artificial heartbeat. As long as that little line kept going, Lindsay had a chance. She might recover naturally. Fuck what the doctors said, it was still possible.
"You'd probably hit me if you could right now." The cat hybrid murmured softly, squeezing her cold hand and looking back at her. He wished he could see her looking back at him, one more time. "I used to bitch so much about high school. It used to seem so hard, so stressful. Now I can see how much of a cakewalk it all was. Hand holding. Fucking show up, fucking read a book, fucking write a paper, fucking here's your diploma!"
Michael's fangs showed as he bit out the last few words, voice rising from a whisper to a scoff. Now his life consisted of nothing. He had no goals anymore. He didn't really have deadlines, not like how it used to be. His life just was now.
It'd been great with Lindsay by his side. She made the unending grind of adulthood fun. He had something to look forward to after work, he had something to think about when he was alone, he had someone to love and who loved him back.
Life had been so fucking perfect.
Then the stupid accident happened, a cliche car crash on a cliche night by a cliche drunk driver.
"That sort of shit is supposed to happen to other people, Linds. Not to me." He lowered his eyes in guilt as soon as the words left, looking at he pale, cold hand. A knot formed in the back of his throat like he was going to either choke or vomit. "Not to you."
He trailed off after that and just clenched his eyes, trying not to start bawling in front of her. She deserved better than that. She deserved so much better than a lot of what she was given.
"They say that I need to sign the papers." Michael's words rolled out of his mouth like a confession, slick and evil and poisoned. He felt no weight lifted from his shoulders saying it to the darkness of his clenched eyelids. "Your soul is gone. All the magic detection this place can afford has confirmed it. You're barren. Just a...just a body with a pulse, now. All of our soulmate shit doesn't glow anymore, either."
His ears pinned back, remembering the first night he'd slept alone in their apartment after her soul had departed. All of the soulwork paraphernalia given to married couples with matched souls had gone blank. What used to fill the rooms with swirls of colors that reminded them of their love, colored to their moods and their 'inner light' and powered by the two of them, was dead.
Blank metal, empty crystal, dark hallways and a room as black as a cave.
He'd known she was gone before the hospital had even called.
"Life support is expensive. It's taking up bed space in the hospital. They have therapy and counseling options available." He listed off to no one, opening his eyes to slits and looking down at his wedding ring. The stone in the center was swirling sluggishly with dark gray, a thunderstorm of depression, the only soulstone connected directly to him and not the both of them. He didn't need to look to know Lindsay's ring was a blank white, devoid of anything to fuel it.
"I'm going to do it tonight." Michael clenched his hand around hers, ears momentarily flicking forward as his eyes flashed up to her face, determination written across his features. "I've read enough about the ritual. Opening the portal isn't hard, it's getting in and out that's the hard part. But I don't care."
His soulstone ring pulsed once, bloodred.
"I'll do it or I'll die trying."
---
"Are you super sure that this will work?" Ray asked, long ears twitching at the base but unable to move as well as Michael's due to the weight and lack of appropriate muscles on a human head. Despite the hindrance in mobility they were still nearly as telegraphic of his mood as most other animals.
"Yes." Michael had the heavy book open on the bathroom counter and turned to the right page. He was stripped down to his boxers as he re-read the passage describing what was necessary, cringing only a little. His determination to see this through was more than enough to quench the fear bubbling in his stomach and eroding his insides towards his heart.
He straightened up and turned to Ray, his ears rigid and shoulders stiff. His bunny friend was looking more nervous than him, hands wringing and slim body tucked into itself. His friends only form of soulstone jewelry was a necklace he kept hidden under his clothing but MIchael could see it glowing through from the intensity of the owners emotions, looking like someone was holding a flashlight underneath cloth.
"All you have to do is hold onto my ring and make sure I don't die." Michael said like it was simple, already working the metal off of his finger. Its colors were almost vibrating, fighting with each other like dogs for meat and trying to glow as intensely as Ray's. He hissed at it like it was offensive for not going out like all the others and felt like a piece of him had been snipped away once it was gone.
He ignored the tan line on his finger and held it out to Ray, expression fierce and stomach emptying when it passed over to his friend. A chill went up his spine, from tailbone to skull, when it completely stopped having contact with him. He'd had that soulstone since birth and it had been in a ring for years now.
Shaking himself out of it with a fluff of his tail, Michael turned away and picked up the silver blade. It had inscriptions all along it, as per usual with magic items. The spell and incantation was in the engravings, to be activated by whatever the spell required.
Being the ancient and highly illegal, incredibly dangerous spell to open a rift into the soulscape, it of course required blood and flesh.
Michael stepped into his friends bathtub (for easier clean up if he fucked up) and reached up to his left ear, gripping the plush furred appendage lightly. He didn't need to cut the whole thing off, but the spell needed something fleshy and he couldn't make himself take a toe or some of his tail. Plus, nicks in cat ears looked badass, right?
"Just the tip." He joked hollowly, closing his eyes as he pinched with one hand and stretched his ear taut. He knew Ray was looking away and he couldn't blame him for not laughing. With a final sigh and the memory of Lindsay and her cold hands and their empty soulwork spurring him on he slid the blade across in a quick jerk, severing the very end of his furred ear in a second.
It stung immediately, bleeding heavily for such thin skin. He cursed angrily but brought the little piece of himself down, not sparing it a glance before he began rubbing it along the blade, making sure to smear his blood around too. He didn't realize the piece was getting smaller and smaller until it was gone, all of the blood slowly disappearing in tandem with the etching along the blade starting to glow.
He could feel something starting to pull at him, like a string was attached to something in the exact middle of him. As that string started to tighten he could feel the resisting pull of another string, coming from his ring finger and leading to Ray.
Perfect.
"Don't tell Geoff." It was the last thing he got out before the string in his middle suddenly jerked, like he was a fish on a line and whoever was holding the pole must have decided it was time to reel 'er in.
There was a flash of out-of-body where he could see both him and Ray, his friend looking scared shitless while his own body suddenly collapsed down into the tub like his bones had turned to liquid and he was trying to become the world's first cat-puddle.
Then the color bled out of the world and he wasn't moving while everything else in existence rocketed past. The spot inside of him burned, fire radiating outward until he was silently engulfed, screaming soundlessly into the whirling vertigo taking up his vision.
Then it all stopped.
He was momentarily left standing on nothing, existing in nothing, his every sense tuned into a world that didn't exist and that was simultaneously black and white, a void of every color.
As soon as he thought of anything the world was suddenly ripped away, color seeping in and lines breaking out of the void to create shapes. It was dizzying to witness but he had no eyelids to blink and give his conscious a break from it all and was forced to endure, his mental capacities stretching to the limit until he thought his very being was going to pop and the soulscape would win yet another soul to inhabit it.
But then the thought of Lindsay floated to the top of his fading self and he latched onto it, curling his being around the fleeting memory of her smile and the shine of her red hair in the sun. With those to cling to he remembered more, the way she liked to rub their ears together and call it a modified eskimo kiss, or how she wished her curling tail was as long and fluid as his.
The memories grounded him until he remembered his friends too, Ray's long and fluffy ears, Geoff's curling horns, Gavin's ridiculous wings, Jack's lion's mane, Ryan's stout cow horns. The jokes, the teasing, the family that he had created. It all created an outline for his sense of self, an image of who he was emerging onto the landscape and filling up like a drawing in a coloring book.
Michael shivered violently once the last of his essence had poured itself back into him, feeling sore and bruised in the center of himself. There was a very faint simmer along his ring finger and he remembered his purpose here, thankful that he was still connected to Ray though his hindbrain wondered how he was going to get back considering how he'd gotten here.
He saw lush grass and rolling hills when he looked up, the picture of paradise if not for the fact it was devoid of any human as far as he could see. He furrowed his brows and did a circle, despair rising within his chest.
Had he actually gone insane? Did the soulscape really take him and this was his purgatory? To live forever with the memory of his friends, or Lindsay, but to never see them or anyone else ever again? The tingling of his ring finger would torment him until he felt like chewing it off, an animal trapped, seeking release from sanity in order to feel peace?
"Nothing that bad." A male voice said from behind him, making Michael whirl around, heart in his throat and eyes wide. His eyes widened even more when he saw the man was Geoff, his heart clenching while his understanding of the world took a step to the left and out of his skull.
"What the fucking hell are you doing here?!" He screamed, a mix of shock and anger making him tap into his usual vault of curse words and layer himself away from the problem in anger and vulgarity. He didn't understand how his boss could be here, in the fucking soulscape.
"I'm not really Geoff." Geoff -it?- replied, familiar lidded eyes regarding him coolly. He even had all of Geoff's tattoos, down to the fresh ones along his fingers. Michael's ears went back with suspicion and even more confusion, baring his fangs.
"So what, you're his evil soulscape twin?" He sneered. His heart was still going a mile a minute trying to understand everything and his anger was helping him keep his head and not freak out like a little girl.
"No." The not-Geoff ran tattooed fingers through it's hair and gave a gentle, if humorless, smile. It made Michael even more wary. "I am who you most needed to see."
"Bullshit!" Michael spat the word and backed up the sentiment by taking a step forward, fists clenching and every insecurity he felt in this strange world becoming his armor, his weapon against whatever-the-fuck in front of him. "I came here for Lindsay's soul, not to have a conversation with Geoff's! He's not even dead, get the fuck out of here!"
"You can't comprehend this world. You can't understand what I really am." Geoff's evil twin spread his arms wide, gesturing at the miles of empty space around them, the grass beginning to shiver like there was a breeze Michael couldn't feel rolling through. "So, you see me as Geoff. Geoff you can understand."
"If that's true why not Lindsay? Or Ray, or any of the others?" Michael didn't relent in his stance but the way that the not-Geoff was moving, as familiar as the body was, the movements were wrong. The words were wrong even if the voice matched. Maybe...the books did say the soulscape was so fucked up most people never came back, and those who did were usually gibbering idiots or refused to talk about it.
"You needed me to be Geoff because Geoff is your savior." There wasn't any joke to it and that's when Michael knew it couldn't have been his boss. That guy couldn't have said that sentence without a smirk or some joke about worshiping his god-like dick. "Deep in your very being, in the core of who you are, you trust Geoff. Geoff will fix everything. Geoff will have the answers. Geoff will protect you. So, here he is. Your souls protector, guiding you when you are lost."
"You make it sound like he's my soulmate." Michael scoffed now and would have blushed at the way this guy went on about Geoff and his views on said boss. He'd already found his soulmate and was here to retrieve her.
The fake Geoff only gave him a sad smile, shaking his head. Before he could speak Michael stepped forward and gripped him by the shirt, any fear completely obliterated by even the thought of some soulscape Geoff-wannabe implying that Lindsay wasn't his soulmate.
"Listen hear, whatever the fuck you think you are! Lindsay is my soulmate, she's the only one who has ever made my soulstone react! She's the only one I care about like that! I may have been stupid, it may have taken me a while to figure it out, but I fucking did and I'm sticking by her! I will not abandon her here!" He was roaring by the end of it, shaking the guy and nearly pulling him off the ground in his anger. Tears had started to collect behind his rage, muscles trembling as he choked out his next words. "I'm not leaving without her."
"Don't you realize it yet?" The Geoff clone looked straight into Michael's pain, piercing him to the bruised and battered core and deeper, hooking every atom with that one gaze. His arms gestured out, sweeping away the beauty and the grass to leave emptiness with the two of them the only formed beings.
"Take your pick, Michael."
Suddenly within the emptiness swirled something, a collective of some things, formless and weightless but with a presence that pressed in at all the boundaries within Michael. He began to feel crushed by it all and still he couldn't look away from not-Geoff's eyes, his edges erasing into the masses filling up the universe.
"We're all the same down here."
Geoff's words pulled him back from the brink, painted a silhouette that he was able to occupy with the tentative knowledge that he only existed at the mercy of this thing holding him together. The knowledge crushed him, tears streaking down his face and whole body shaking like he was coming undone at the seams. He found his voice in his despair, clawing up out of him in a last ditch effort to save himself.
"No. She's special. She can't be gone." His words scratched like glass and he wished the soulscape would swallow him up, blur away his pain until he was nothing and everything and he could be with her again. But Geoff wouldn't let him, that intense gaze pinning his conscious like a sword through the heart, cutting him and killing him with no room for escape.
"No one is special. No one is exempt. No one is anyone." Geoff dropped his arms down and the grass was back, the presence of the soulscape pushed away somewhere so that the only thing Michael could feel was pain. He collapsed down and sobbed, full and deep, his soul hurting more than a physical body could contain. "What you know as a soul is nothing but a flame, passed from candle to candle as life goes on. No one soul is different from the next."
"B-but...she was so...she was my soulmate!" Michael cried into the grass, tail belted around his middle, curled up at Geoff's feet like a dying animal. If only he were really dying.
"There are no soulmates." Geoff kneeled down and placed a hand on Michael's shaking form, feeling the pain of his conscious and the soul-rending agony of the truth. "Every soul poured into a creature is devoid of personality. A blank slate, ready to experience life in its own way. Any soul is just as compatible to you as Lindsay's was in the beginning."
"Then how...how are there soulstones? Why doesn't it go off for everyone?!" Michael's voice was raw and if he had really been crying this hard, back in the real world, his world, he would have been rendered mute by now. His tears and anguish would have driven him to exhausted sleep by now, too.
"Your soul doesn't dictate who you are, Michael. The universe doesn't pre-determine who you should be with or who you shouldn't be with. It doesn't decide what you will be good at and it doesn't chose what you will do with the gift given to you. The soul is your ability to choose your own path in life." Geoff removed his hand and instead placed it on trembling curls. The cat hybrid had been reduced to a childlike state of betrayal, his ideas of a parental universe guiding and orchestrating his every move, giving him intrinsic purpose, stripped away and leaving him flayed to the bone. "If you want to be with someone, if you want to be something, then do so. There is no one but you to do it."
"I..." Michael curled up on himself and closed his eyes with a visible slump. His ears fell, expression utterly defeated where he lay on the grass, wishing all over again that it had been him in the accident instead of Lindsay. "I want to go home now."
He didn't hear if Geoff had said anything and he didn't see if the world spun around and bled color like last time. There wasn't any fanfare to it at all.
All he felt was a warm blossom of heat from his left hand and then the grass was gone.
---
"Jesus dicks dude, how could you let him do that!" Geoff's voice was the first thing Michael heard and it made him cringe from the memory of his recent conversation. He moaned softly and felt a headache pounding all through his head, his cheeks soaking wet and his body bone-tired.
"Holy shit he's alive!" Geoff again, a shadow looming over him and upon cracking his eyes open he realized he was sprawled out on the bathroom floor, head propped on something soft and fluffy. He could feel even more tears well up, uncaring of the fact Geoff and Ray were in the room and watching him cry like someone had force-fed him glass. He felt his boss transfer him from the towels or hoodie or whatever had been cushioning him to Geoff's lap, tattooed fingers carding through his hair and soft, concerned words falling on his ears. "Buddy, it's okay, come on, tell me what happened."
"She's not coming back." Michael croaked, slamming his eyes shut as his heart spasmed with the truth. She wasn't coming back. Oh god, what was the point of his life without Lindsay in it? What was he going to do?
"What?" Ray this time, hovering in the doorway. He had Michael's ring in his hands and his soulstone pendant was glowing off the charts, radiating a color as thick as the cat's. Geoff's was a ring like Michael's that he wore on his middle finger and it had been shimmering to the same pitch as the other two younger lads since he caught sight of the cat hybrid collapsed in the bath and bleeding from a cut ear and a head wound from hitting the edge too hard.
"We're all the same down here." Michael whispered it bitterly, making Geoff squint and Ray tilt his head in confusion. The older gent picked up the towels Ray had given him and put pressure on Michael's cut, though it hadn't been bleeding for a while. The cat didn't flinch, starting to laugh derisively, a manic edge to it as his ring pulsed and shuddered in Ray's grip and his tears came harder.
"We're all the fucking same down here!"
---
"I'm sorry I couldn't do shit for you." Michael was back, sitting in the same chair by the same bed in the same hospital. Lindsay's hands were just as cold as before and Michael still wished he could trade places with her.
He lowered his ears, the left one no longer bandaged. Its tip was noticeably cropped compared to the right one but he didn't care. Half his head was shaved anyway so his head wound could be stitched, so he pretty much looked like a piece of shit.
It matched how he felt.
"I signed the papers today. It's the last time I'll get to see you before...before the funeral." Michael squeezed her hand reflexively and swallowed the coiling snakes of emotion wanting to strangle him from the inside. He still wore his soulstone wedding ring, its grayscale having shifted to colors at last though they were still dark and saturated with sadness. He didn't have the heart to convert the stone into a bachelors ring and he didn't think he ever would.
Geoff had said that was okay with him and Ray seconded it.
"I'm still in love with you, Linds," His eyes traveled to the monitors, the relentless scrawl of lines telling him her heart still beat and her lungs still worked. He felt betrayed by the equipment and looked back to her face, lanced by her beauty all over again. "and I always will be, but...I don't even know what I'm doing with those two, it might now even work out, you know? And it's kinda fucked up I got two, I know, but it just sort of...happened."
They weren't even official, though they weren't officially not official either. After he'd passed out in Geoff's lap and woken up in a hospital bed sporting stitches and bandages he'd been slowly trying to explain the unexplainable. Geoff understood more of it than the bunny but Ray was willing to accept even without understanding. Somehow, understanding and comfort and raw wounds being soothed led to...this.
A very tentative 'this' that technically, by Geoff's ruling, wouldn't become anything more until Michael wanted it to but Michael wasn't scared. He was too tired to be scared. He just wanted to stop hurting and Geoff and Ray helped him with that.
"I'm happy it happened. You showed me what it's like to be loved and god, Linds, I can't go back to being alone and angry all the time. I know you wouldn't have wanted that either. You were too nice to want me to pine for the rest of my life." He bit his lower lip, fangs pricking skin delicately. He could feel the familiar sensation of tears sliding down his cheeks and he didn't bother wiping them off.
He stood up and leaned over, tilting his head first to flicker his cropped ear across her soft, unmoving ears. He choked back a sob, muttering something about 'damned Eskimo kisses' before he leaned down and kissed her on the lips, one last time.
When he leaned back there were dripped tears on her cheeks, too. He laughed at himself and wiped them off gently, heart quivering.
"Good-bye, Lindsay. I'll always love you."