the song of my heart (plays in you)
Written by: @thelettersfromnoone
Prompt 108: Everlark fall for one another over a blood transfusion. It happens not once, but twice. His blood runs through her veins, and now hers runs through his. What are the odds they would save each other’s lives? [submitted by @mandelion82]
Rated: Teen and up; mentions of: car wrecks, physical and mental trauma, amputation.
Tags: One-shot, Soulmates, Time Jump(s), Blood-Oaths.
Word count: 2342.
Notes: Unbetaed. All mistakes are my own. Thanks to @javistg and @xerxia31 for being amazing hosts for this exchange ❤️
“The blood [of the covenant] is thicker than [the] water [of the womb].”
“Mama, tell the story again?” Grey eyes peek up shyly through dark eyelashes, fingers curling the folds of her mother’s nightgown. “ ‘bout the dream-people?”
“It’s late, darlin’,” Mama murmurs with a soft smile. She presses a kiss to her daughter’s brow. “Papa will tell the long version tomorrow, hm?”
The girl’s lower lip pops out in a pout- papa is the better storyteller, but she wants to hear the story tonight. She snuggles against her mama’s belly, whispering a ‘night-night’ to the baby they say is growing in there.
“There once was a boy who was called to war, to fight for a king in a land far from home. Though he survived many times in battle, one day, an enemy struck him, and he was hurt, something terrible. At death’s door, his friends brought him to a healer’s house, who saved his life. As he recovered, he grew to love the healer’s daughter, and she grew to love him. In time, when he was recovered, his king came calling on him again. Before he left, the boy and the healer’s daughter made a blood-oath. They drew their own blood, and held their wounds against one another. They vowed that, from that moment until they met again, the song of their blood would call out for one another, no matter how far.”
Her little hand reaches over to mama’s, pressing their palms flush. “Like this?”
“Mhm,” Mama interlaces their fingers, kissing her daughter’s knuckles. “Just like this. Every night, while he was away, all they needed to do was close their eyes, and they could feel one another’s feelings, and see through one another’s eyes.”
“Till forever?” The little girl’s eyes are growing heavy, a yawn coming in spite of her best efforts. “Mama, it’s til’ forever, right?”
Mama doesn’t answer straight away. When she does, it’s soft as a butterfly’s flight; “Till forever, until they found each other again.”
The little girl’s breathing evens out, eyes slipping shut.
(She’s always wanting a happy ending.)
She’s twelve and using the computer unsupervised the first time she looks it up on a whim. She is meant to be researching poetry, but that quickly becomes dull.
Instead, the rabbit hole of the web sucks her in.
According to the internet page that comes up, a Blood-Oath Soulmate is defined as a myth, steeped in legend: a couple who, when faced with separation, make a blood-oath that allows them to see, hear, and feel one another across the thousands of miles.
The origin, exactly, is unclear. It’s a myth with several cultural variants- in her own region, Twelve, and in the northern regions of Åtta, Tio, and Tretton, the war is won, and the boy returns to the healer’s daughter. By contrast, in the southwest, they say the boy earned a glorious warrior’s death, and the girl grieves but honors his memory. In almost all the other regions, the myth is drawn out, many side-adventures and evils hinder the boy’s path home, and by the time the boy finds his way back to his love, amidst a continent of misery, they both are old and grey. It’s not clear where the myth started, some say it’s a retelling of an old Sumerian tale; others, that it comes from Viking oral lore. Some, still, argue that they all are true, that the same fate spreads itself throughout time, throughout the world, in different ways.
All modern experts, essentially, concur on the matter of the story’s implausibility. The human body replenishes its blood count within weeks, one discussion board points out.
It was just a myth to make humans feel their love could be impermeable, or withstand the tests of distance and challenges, claims another. Or, one user with a profane avatar states, the modern meaning is just guess-work and the cultural context and any kernels of truth will forever be lost.
And everyone knows there’s no such thing as a soulmate.
Kat feels her stomach clench as she quickly exits the browser, lonely in the wake of her father’s death, and her mother’s subsequent depressive episode, and still clinging to her mother’s hushed telling of a love that is palpable down to the bone.
(She can’t decide if knowing it’s ‘just a story’ hurts or helps more. The veneer of childhood is always treasured for a reason.)
She is seventeen when it happens.
A flash of a medical room. Harsh fluorescent lights. Thick, strong hands trying to block the light out. Starched sheets, scratching skin. A pinch of a needle and stifled shout-
She wakes covered in sweat.
Something is wrong, niggles at the back of her mind. Her pounding heart beats out wrong, wrong, wrong. She pushes it away, presses the thought down. She manages to lull herself back to sleep, a deep, imageless thing, but the wrongness sticks with her.
The next night is nearly identical, except the stranger’s hands are tearing off the bedsheets. A stump of a knee rests where a leg should extend. A panicking voice, a nurse, shouts for help as the struggling and screaming begins-
“Where’s my fucking leg?!”
Kat wakes with a jolt, strangled gasps as she pushes her own blankets off, hands grasping at her limbs, the phantom terror and horror bringing bile up her throat.
What was that?
A dreamless sleep doesn’t find her again, her eyes bruising with nights of nightmares and days of exhaustion. The hospital, the scratchy sheets, the nurses and medications and injections.
One week, then another.
She’s in Civics class when it occurs to her.
The blood drive, at the beginning of May. She’d turned seventeen, and finally weighed enough to donate blood.
Could it be…?
She sleeps in, one Saturday morning, when they are fitting a prosthetic on her stranger; crutches and halting steps as those beefy hands grip support bars.
“Just a step further,” a voice encourages.
Shame and frustration, and a deep, croaking voice lashes out of the throat-
“I can’t!”
You can, you can, you can, she tries to will the stranger her confidence.
The figure stills, and for a moment, she thinks they can hear her.
“I’m done,” they say, and in spite of the disappointment on the nurse’s face, a man in a white lab coat agrees, and helps them back into a wheelchair.
Kat feels the sinking failure, the desperate yearning to help this person, this stranger. There are only nurses and doctors, in her dreams. She knows what it means to be lonely, even when there are people around; what it means when you wake up in emotional pain, but have no one to share it with.
She wants to tell her stranger it will all be all right, but the weeks pass and she can only confide her secret to herself. They wouldn’t believe her, even if she could say it in person.
Where is your family? she tries to ask.
They never seem to hear her.
(Waking becomes harder, but she can’t confide in anyone that she wakes wishing she could live in her dreams without them thinking she’s gone mad.)
They are kneading dough, seated at a wood table in a cluttered kitchen. The prosthetic is fitting to the leg, tender today but not sore, exactly. She can smell the flour and feel the silky-smooth texture between her fingers. Smoothe jazz music is playing, from a radio over on the counter. She feels a hand squeezing her stranger’s shoulder.
“Looks good, Pete.” It’s a gruff voice, but not unkind.
“Needs to rise,” her stranger- ‘Pete’!- retorts. They don’t look up, but she can feel a flush on her ‘Pete’s’ cheeks.
“We got some coursework from the school, then.”
(She doesn’t realize this is the last she will dream of her stranger.)
The dreams evaporate, after eight weeks, as abruptly as they had begun.
In the aftermath of her first dreamless night in over a month, she wakes to the dawn breaking with no images from her stranger.
‘Pete’.
She tries to will herself back to sleep, compel visions back from the brink. It’s the first night she thinks to try and remember the names of the doctors and nurses, or the location of the hospital. The nametags are foggy in her memories, a nurse Jackie or Jenny and a last name they had abbreviated to, ‘A.’
The internet doesn’t help her any more than her own mind can. ‘An amputee named ‘Pete’ who likes to knead dough and is doing high school coursework at home’ doesn’t do much in a White Pages search.
She writes it all down, then, each snippet and sound she can recall. She keeps the journal under her mattress, knowing her mother won’t bother, and her baby sister wouldn’t dare to look.
Like a madwoman, she rereads her own accounts, adds notes to it every morning, hoping the dreams will start again. But every morning, the dreams seem more as if they were fantasies, and her journal reads like fiction.
A year passes.
Her dreams now are either blank, or memories of ‘Pete’.
She could blame it on her family friend, and his stupid insistance that she attend Prom; or maybe the girlfriends she eats lunch with, who guilt her by saying that everyone needs a life outside of school, and after-school jobs.
Kat had only driven into town because she needed a damn dress. Two weeks later, and she would have been exhausted from Prom as she crossed the school stage, collecting her high school diploma.
Nothing pans out the way she imagines it will, though.
She’s alone in the car when a truck in the oncoming lane overturns at a curve in the road.
Pain bursts on her head. Flames against her skin. Crushed metal, and broken glass. In the distant fog of wailing sirens, she can hear first responders attempting to call out to her.
The only thing she remembers seeing clearly, between the accident and the hospital, is smoke rising into a blue, cloudless sky, through a shattered windshield.
“You lost a lot of blood, Kat,” the doctor says, tone not unsympathetic. “We had to do a transfusion.”
“Oh.”
She blinks, a haze of morphling in her preventing her from fully comprehending. Some broken bones. A neck brace. Burns on her face and arms, but not as bad as they first had thought- she won’t need skin grafts.
All small mercies.
Her sister and mama are there, balloons and flowers and hugs a-plenty. Get-well-soon cards from several classmates and family friends.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” her mama murmurs, as the doctor leaves.
“Okay.”
Mama runs her fingers through Kat’s knotted hair, while her sister clings and tells her how much she loves her.
She’s not numb, not beneath the morphling. But she’s so damn tired and her skin itches under the bandages.
(She can’t comfort her family while they try their hand at comforting her.)
She is washing her hands in the hospital room sink, when she feels a jolt, a compulsion; a chill down her spine and gooseflesh down her arms. She looks in the mirror, and feels in awe, feels a foreign elation. A burst of affection, a warmth.
She can’t reckon with it, can’t justify it.
It’s just… her own face. Sloppily braided dark hair. Healing stitches on her cheek, and forehead. Silver eyes, surrounded by a bruise, set in a narrow face. She gulps, leaning in closer, and trying to grasp the sensation. Out-of-body, might be the right term- dissociative, she’d read about once, for Health and Wellness.
There’s a knock on her door, the nurse doing a check, and as Kat turns, the warmth dissipates.
The nurse comes in not long after, checks her vitals and asks a series of questions.
“My name is Katniss Everdeen.”
That warmth in her chest is back, the hair at the base of her neck stands straight.
She scrubs her hands over her face, focusing on the simple questions the nurse is asking.
“I’m eighteen years old. I’m graduating from PPH12 in Sommen in one week. I’m at Merchant Memorial Hospital.”
In the bathroom that night, she stares at her own reflection, and wonders if maybe that feeling of someone looking over her shoulder- more like looking through her eyes- if maybe….
She fogs up the mirror, and writes her room number. She stares at it, for a time, before scoffing at own ridiculousness, and wiping it away with her towel.
She only has one day left before being discharged, though she’ll miss graduation and the parties that would entail. She can’t say she is particularly disappointed; she’s never been a party person.
She’s awake when the door to her shared hospital room opens. She pays it little mind. The curtain around her bed is pulled taught, her roommate jabbering away on their phone about the food service as if this were fine dining, rather than a hospital. Kat is reading a get well card, this one signed by the whole senior class and class advisors.
There’s a thrumming in her veins, but that might be them weaning her off of the morphling.
Curtain rings scrape against metal, and she barely glances up, the nurse rounds due any minute now. Normally, though, the bubbly nurse who does the day-shift is already bustling with an overwhelming enthusiasm that makes Kat question how exhausted the nurse is at the end of the day.
Maybe it’s a different nurse or a doctor or mama, or-
The blue eyes that are boring into hers are ones she has only seen in her dreams; she can finally see blonde curls framing them, familiar thick, strong hands brushing through the curls.
“Pete?” she croaks, certain she’s finally lost her damn mind.
His eyes widen at the sound of his name, lips parting.
“I found you.”
A tone of surprise, as if he’d driven all this way, but in expectation of disappointment.
“Peeta,” he introduces himself, edging closer. His hand carefully takes hold of her own. “And… I’ve waited a long time to meet you, Katniss.”
(Her name has never been spoken as sweetly, and her heart has never felt so full.)
