ache | darcy/johnny, soulmates (part three)
“Johnny?” Sue’s annoyed face popped into his vision, frowning. “What are you – you were supposed to be at Stark Tower two hours ago!”
“Not feeling well,” he muttered, exhaling slowly. And, he didn’t – he’d been wracking his brain for the past week, trying to remember something, anything, with no luck.
“Johnny, you can’t—” Sue started another of her lectures, but stopped short when she caught a second look at his face. The irritation in her face morphed into one of concern. “Johnny, what happened?”
“… Nothing.” He sighed, closing his eyes. He didn’t want to admit that he’d fucked up, yet again – what kind of idiot didn’t even remember his soulmate saying his words? He had enough reminders, thank you very much, without having to listen to another one of Sue’s lectures about responsibility and self-worth and all that crap.
He felt Sue settle into the sofa cushions next to his head. “You used to say that every time Ava Green ran away after you tried holding her hand.”
“I was six, Sue, Jesus,” he snapped, glaring up at where Sue was hovering over his head. “I’m twenty-eight now, in case you didn’t notice.”
Sue, to her credit, ignored the vitriol in his voice; instead, her gaze landed on the hand tracing the words written on the exposed skin of his forearm. When Johnny noticed, he hastily drew back his hand, folding his arms over his chest to hide the soulmark.
“You found her,” she said, and Johnny swallowed before shrugging a little.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “No big deal.”
“And?” Sue pressed. Johnny’s fists were coiled tight, his shoulders hunched next to his ears, and she waited patiently as Johnny debated on what to say.
“She’s okay, I guess,” he said, and there was so much false bravado that Sue knew something had gone wrong. “Took one look at me and just swooned, y’know. All that good stuff.”
Sue hummed. “Johnny…”
He held her gaze for a moment, then looked off to the side, defeat written across his face. “I fucked up,” he murmured softly. “Like, really, really fucked up.”
Sue raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think, Johnny—”
“She said she didn’t want a soulmate if it was me.”
Sue froze, and fury began to curl through her body. “What kind of—”
“It’s not her fault!” Johnny’s hand clamped down on her arm, and Sue looked up in surprise. He sounded so vehement, so defensive, and she couldn’t understand why. “She…” Johnny let go, carding his fingers through his hair in agitation as he sat up, slumping against the back of the couch. “We’d met before. She said my words, I said hers, and…”
When he winced, Sue felt her heart ache a little at the look on his face. “What did you do?”
“My words to her were a rejection,” he said dejectedly. “And to make things worse, I don’t even remember meeting her… like, it’s right there in my head – she looks so familiar, I just can’t remember who…”
Something in Sue’s head clicked, and she thought back to Johnny’s senior year in high school, when some of her friends there had told her about a rumor going around. Something about how some girl had pretended to be Johnny’s soulmate, and the girl’s name was—
“What’s her name?” Sue asked, her stomach sinking.
“Darcy Lewis.” And when Sue winced Johnny looked at her. “You know her?”
“I know of her,” Sue said slowly, and she recalled Jane’s brunette assistant – she knew the girl had looked familiar, she just never realized… “She went to high school with you.”
Johnny gaped. “How do you even know that?!”
“I heard rumors, from Alexa,” Sue admitted, and Johnny could only vaguely remember the young freshman girl who’d been Sue’s shadow during her senior year. “She said something about a girl who apparently pretended to be your soulmate at a party. According to her, you brushed the girl off as a fake and proceeded to make out with two cheerleaders for the rest of the night.”
“I don’t even remember – ” he stopped, and paled. “Lewis. She’s… fuck, she’s Greg’s little sister.” He laughed a little, the sound raw and bitter, and buried his face in his hands. “Fuck, he never talked to me again after that, no wonder… fuck!”
“I wonder why, though,” Sue muttered to herself, but Johnny stilled, looking at her.
“What?”
“She… she knew her own words, right?” Sue asked carefully, and Johnny nodded slowly. “So I guess what I’m wondering is, how’d she know? And really, why’d she ask?”