ALEX #9
Silence fills the line. Does he already know what I am going to ask?
"You know, that conversation we had with Bay on my eighteenth birthday was very eye-opening for me. But a few things we talked about that day never matched with what my dad told me during all these years. Please, tell me what happened on the day I was born."
Lake Nolan stays silent.
I swallow hard, my voice turning pleading. "Please. It is really important. Four days ago something happened, something I cannot explain, an awful event, but I have this strange feeling that there is an explanation for it and that you might be the one who knows it."
"Can you tell me what happened?"
I hesitate. Saying it out loud means risking everything, but maybe Lake is someone I can trust.
"I went into heat. One of my college friends came over. I said no, but he would not listen. He went into rut, his eyes turned red, and he tried to rape me, but then something happened and I… killed him."
"Oh no, sweetheart! Are you safe now?" Lake breathes out.
"Yes, everything is under control, but it is about the way I did it."
"The way you did it?"
"Yes, I just… it was like I drained his life out of him. He turned gray, almost like a mummy."
The line drops back into heavy silence. I hear his quickening breath, even the muffled rush of a fast heartbeat.
"Alex, what did you do with the body?"
I groan in irritation because this is not the part that matters. "I took care of it, everything is fine. I want to know if you know anything about the circumstances of my birth, because during our talk back then you sounded nervous, like you knew something, right?"
Another long silence, but this time I refuse to give up.
I wait and wait, and finally Lake begins to speak, soft and slow.
He tells me how he met Albert Strada in a prenatal yoga class.
How one day their car broke down and Albert offered them a ride.
How bad his husband, Max, looked and how silent he was the entire way home.
Then he tells me about the accident and I tremble, just tremble…
Then he begins to talk about the birth. His voice cracks when he reaches the part where he saw that I was being born too.
A long silence follows, and then he says it.
"You were stillborn."
Now it’s my turn to be quiet. The story feels unreal. My dad never mentioned any of this. And suddenly, there’s this whole hidden layer?
"What does that mean?" I whisper. "Maybe I just wasn’t breathing. Plenty of babies have trouble breathing at first. Their lips can be bluish…"
Another patch of silence. I feel like this entire conversation is made of pauses more than words.
Then Lake finally speaks again.
"I could tell you it was just a brief stop in breathing, I could say something comforting to make it all sound normal, but then I wouldn’t be completely honest with you.
" He takes a deeper breath. "You looked like you had been dead for a while. You had large bruises on your body, maybe the car belt pressed into your dad’s abdomen during the crash and crushed you.
You were gray, you were not breathing, your heart was not beating, and your body was already cooling.
I held you in my arms. I wanted to give you something human, a little warmth, before they… buried you."
My knees weaken, and even though I am leaning on the kitchen counter, I drop to the floor, pressing my free hand to my forehead.
"Then how is it possible that I am alive now?"
Lake lets out a trembling exhale.
"When your body and Bay’s body touched, something strange happened. There was a flash of light that stunned me, and when I came to, you were alive, the color was back in your cheeks. A miracle."
What the hell… I try to process it all. Was Bay really there for me from the beginning? Emotions erupt within me.
"Hold on, I am alive because of Bay?"
"That is what it looks like. When your bodies made contact… something miraculous happened."
"Like a resurrection? How’s that possible, for fuck’s sake… I do not understand anything," I mutter nervously, rubbing my temples, forgetting not to curse on the line.
Lake clears his throat.
"For years… I built a theory in my mind about what happened."
"What do you mean…?" I whisper, constantly dizzy. I have to pull out my inhaler as I start wheezing.
"I kept thinking about it, analyzing it for years, and eventually I came up with a theory, though I cannot say how true it is."
"Tell me. Tell me what you came up with," I beg, my voice shaking, desperate for some explanation that might give me peace, that would make sense!
"I imagined that Bay’s soul must have split that day."
"What…?"
My hands shake, no, my whole body shakes, because this feels like one of those moments in life when you know you are about to hear something that affects your very being.
"Your original soul was gone long before we woke up, maybe an hour, I do not know how long we were unconscious."
"An hour? That’s long! Are you telling me I am some kind of zombie?"
"I really do not know."
"A revenant? Like those undead creatures from folklore…"
"I do not know, Alex! I doubt there is a word for what you are, and maybe do not give yourself one. There is no need to torture yourself."
"But why would this even happen? Babies die all the time, and nothing like this happens. Why me?"
"My theory does not answer everything. I have a few guesses, but none of them are solid."
"Tell me the guesses, please."
Lake exhales heavily, and I can feel he is struggling with the idea of sharing something he is not certain about, but he probably does not grasp how desperate I am, how much I need something, anything, that might help me understand.
"I imagined that maybe your body originally held Bay’s twin soul."
"Twin soul?"
"Yes, a rare type of fated mates."
"I have never heard that term. I thought we all had souls that are halves of a whole and we spend our lives searching for our other half?" I whisper with a trembling voice.
That is the whole True Mate thing. Two halves coming together, becoming one again in two bodies. Every kid in the ABO society knows this stuff.
"Not all souls are like that. Some powerful souls, the kind people call sorcerers, are born whole. Formed from two twin seeds of soul energy. Yours and Bay’s might have been like that.
But Bay could not pull back your original soul; it was long gone.
And somehow, in that process of trying, his own soul split and settled inside your body, bringing it back to life. "
What the hell.
That sounds just absurd.
Why would something like this happen? Why would a newborn baby consciously try to save anyone? And give him part of his own soul? Absurd. Something is off here.
I realize Lake has most likely drifted away from reality. What he is saying sounds like pure fantasy. He must have crafted some narrative for himself to cope with everything he witnessed, the accident, the birth, the shock.
So I do not even try to ask for details, because I do not want to give him a reason to drown me in more fantastical scenarios born from the mind of someone who went through a deeply traumatic event. I do not believe he was thinking clearly. He had just given birth. Right after a crash. In shock.
It doesn't make sense unless we're both missing something.
But… there is still one thing I have to ask. Maybe this time he will not answer with a bizarre theory. I hope so.
There is actually a part of his story that could fit something… real. I choose my words carefully.
"Do you think all my allergies are because that soul is not my original one and my body is reacting to it, almost like rejecting a foreign guest?"
"It is possible," Lake whispers. "But these are all just my theories. I spent years digging through articles online, and what I told you is just a summary, but there may be other explanations."
I sigh. So just as I thought, these are his bizarre conclusions. Okay, time to burst his bubble.
"But if my soul is a half of Bay’s, then why did our compatibility fail to show we were True Mates? That should not happen in any of these scenario." I let a little irony slip into my tone. It is hard not to.
Silence.
Well, I pointed out an obvious flaw.
Lake clears his throat.
"As I said, I do not know how to explain that," he adds quietly.
We both fall silent. I know he means well, he is a good person, but this conversation is not leading anywhere. I sincerely doubt he remembers that day clearly. Trauma warps memories.
Lake stays silent a moment longer, then says, "I truly do not know what happened back then. I’m fully aware that what I suggested is hard to believe."
"I admit that it is. It just doesn’t seem to add up," I spit out, unable to deal with the bitterness and disappointment rising in me, because I was counting on answers that would finally pull me out of this uncertainty, and instead I got a handful of vague speculations.
But that could come off as rude, so I correct myself, because I respect him a lot and have always adored him.
"But I appreciate it anyway. I’m sorry for my tone, I’m just… even more lost now."
Silence returns again, unchanged and heavy.
Lake must sense how deep my displeasure is, because he adds in a quiet and gentle voice, "I am sorry I do not have more for you.
But maybe this version will be clearer, more acceptable…
" He draws in a breath. The tone he uses now is unusually careful.
"Perhaps your souls were never True Mates nor Twin Souls.
But Bay is a sorcerer, and he simply brought you back to life. And nothing more connects you."
A cold shiver runs through me. No, no, resistance, inner resistance arises!
I know, I just know, that Lake also does not believe this. He says it for me, for the sake of my bitterness and the skepticism he hears in my voice, because he does not want to leave me with nothing but disappointment. I am grateful, but it also makes me… deeply unhappy.
At last he lets out a soft sigh and says, "Maybe your gift emerged then as a reaction to the shock your soul went through?
Or maybe you are a sorcerer like Bay and Snow?
Snow can predict the future in certain circumstances, and he has these additional talents.
There are very few like him in ABO communities.
Who knows, after all, you two share those unusual amethyst eyes," Lake laughs with embarrassment. "Maybe you are someone like that too?"
His tone is now a bit more cheerful, as if he wants to lift my mood, give me at least something.
I press my fingers to my temples hard enough that it hurts, and even the massaging does not help anymore, I cannot keep listening to this.
"Thank you very much for everything you said, I appreciate the honesty. I am sorry if I sounded skeptical, it is just… it is a lot. Really a lot," I tell him, because I know he had good intentions, he wanted to help, not throw me into confusion, and yet that is exactly what has happened.
"I know, sweetheart, I am sorry you went through something like this… it must have been a shock."
I squeeze my eyes shut, unable to bear one more kind word that might fall from his lips. With a trembling voice, I say goodbye and try to end the call, but suddenly Lake says,
"Wait, Alex! There’s something I wanted to thank you for."
There’s a short pause as he takes a deep breath.
"For being there for Bay, and for supporting him when we, as parents, failed to see what was really going on. I can’t thank you enough for surrounding him with light during those dark days."
My eyes fill with tears in an instant.
"So you know."
"Yes. And I still can’t forgive myself for not being there for him, for being the reason those people even came."
"No, don’t think like that. You suffered too. We can’t always stop evil. But you both survived it, and that’s what matters most."
"Thank you, I appreciate your support. Thanks to it, Bay pushed through the horror. I’ll always be grateful. And the awareness that he had you helped me deal with it too."
"There’s no need to thank me. I loved him, and I still do. He closed that chapter and moved on."
Another short pause
"I have to go. Take care."
I end the call because the words get stuck in my throat. I choke down my emotions, force them deep into my system, fighting the overload until I finally manage to quiet them, at least a little.
For a few minutes I sit still on the floor, strangely numb.
Then, slowly, a hesitant sense of acceptance begins to rise, drop by drop, seeping into my veins as I replay everything that was said in my head. I analyze the entire conversation in my mind, sorting it all out, trying to make sense of it.
Could there be a grain of truth in what Lake said, after all?
Was I really born dead, gray, cold, bruised?
And did Bay bring me back to life?
An abomination.
That’s who I am.
Something foreign, a revenant dragged back from the barrier between life and death, something capable of bending that boundary, stretching it, pulling people to the other side.
Did Lake make it up in post-traumatic shock… or not?
The moment I killed Oswald resurfaces in my memory. The awareness of what I did presses on me, hard, heavy.
His gray face, those empty eyes, his body stiffening under my touch.
I slide down even further, my head pounding as I lie flat on the floor.
And I fall asleep.