sharp | darcy/johnny, soulmates (part two)
When he finally learned her name, it took everything he had to stop himself from running to her.
Darcy. How many girls did he go through, looking for that one name?
The words written on the inside of his forearm were tiny and cramped, the letters nearly illegible if Johnny hadn’t spent hours upon hours staring at the dark words running from the inside of his elbow to his wrist. In fact, he hadn’t even realized what the words had said before college – it was only after a persistent roommate and a few hundred magnifications that he finally knew his words.
Besides, he figured that if he said his soulmate’s words, the girl – at least, he assumed it was a girl, with his track record and all – would’ve told him immediately and shown him her mark. He had even made his handwriting unique – a neat draftsman’s typeface, stylized into a thick-line spiked text – in order to recognize his mark on sight.
So when he walked into Stark’s labs, eyes falling upon the bobbing head of thick brown hair peeking at him from over her laptop, he shoved down the fluttering nervousness in his gut and approached her, stopping only when her gaze snapped up to meet his eyes.
She was even prettier, up close – the surprise on her face softened her features, making her eyes look impossibly blue and wide as her lips rounded into an O-shape that had him thinking dirty, dirty thoughts. But in the span of a second, her expression shuttered closed, and he found himself feeling like he had just experienced something wonderful and was just about to lose it.
“Can I help you with something?” she said sharply, and just like that the air in his chest left in one great, sweeping gush.
Not her.
“Erm, well, I – ” he stuttered nervously, and for some reason he couldn’t look her in the face, dropping his gaze to her desk. “Sorry, I just wanted to ask – wait, is that your handwriting?”
“What?” Darcy looked confused, but when Johnny snatched her notebook off her desk her entire face paled. “Hey! That’s mine, you – ”
“It’s you,” he cut her off, a little breathless and a little dizzy and a little disbelieving – he’d found her, he’d found her after almost twenty-eight years – and he looked up at her, a huge smile growing on his face. “You’re her! You’re my soulma – ”
Her next words cut into him like a knife. “I don’t want you.”
He stilled, raising his head to look at her, and she didn’t look anything like he thought she would. Instead of laughter or happiness there was an aura of misery surrounding her, like the calm before a tempest, and all he could manage to get out was one tiny, desperate word.
“What?”
“I don’t want you,” she repeated, more forcefully this time, but when she moved away he grabbed her by the wrist.
“Wait, wait, what?” His head was spinning, and he felt like everything was slipping through his fingers. It was her handwriting – the notebook matched and everything – so why didn’t she say the words? Why was she rejecting him? “Hold on, this is your writing, how – ”
“Jesus, you don’t even remember, do you?” she laughed bitterly, yanking her arm away from him. “God, you’re the same as you’ve always been.”
“Wait, we’ve met before?” he asked, bewildered, and it made sense, but… how could he not have remembered? “When – how? You didn’t – nobody ever said they – ”
“You think I want a soulmate who outright rejected me after I said his words?” she spat at him. Under the vitriol he could hear the hurt buried deep in her voice, and so when the words finally registered he froze.
“What do you mean I rejected you?”
She yanked up her sweater, pulling down the waistband of her leggings a little, but Johnny didn’t leer or make lewd jokes as he normally would have. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the seven words, sharp marks slashed across the pale skin of her hip, and his heart sank.
You – my soulmate? In your dreams, Lewis. In his handwriting.
“I was stupid enough to think that maybe it wouldn’t be as mean as it sounded, but it wasn’t.” She pulled her hands away, her clothing hiding the awful, awful words from view, and she shook her head. “I don’t need a soulmate, Storm. Lived this long without one, and I sure as hell don’t want a soulmate if it’s you. Now please, get out.”
He said nothing as she pointed to the exit, only nodding thickly as he turned and trudged out of the lab. When the door slid closed behind him, he leaned back against the wall, staring blankly at the floor.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.