Soulmate Cravings

Meltdown

(A/N: When everyone looks to a shining light, sometimes they forget that the light sees only darkness. While the world around you may seem dark, sometimes it's because you are the light that is shining. You shine like a beacon Kash! I'm so thankful to have met you in this life!)

(A/N 2: Also, most of this chapter is an internal freakout, because in all fairness there's a lot for Tine to unpack in a short amount of time to get this story going, so he's going to unpack it in this chapter and then the following chapters are going to be a lot of conversation getting the two leads on the same page.)

     Tine raced home. The world of myth and reality had combined, and monsters surrounded him. Part of his system was doing cartwheels to find the man of his dreams existed. He had always believed Sarawat was nothing more than a dream, and even if he did dream of past lives and Sarawat had been real in the Bronze Age, that meant that there was no way he could be alive today. But yet, he was here. It was his face, and Tine's old incarnation's name that had fallen from his dream's lips, and it was his dream's name that once Tine uttered it made his dream's eyes widen in surprise that Tine knew it. His dream had somehow become reality, and maybe, deep down, some part of Tine had always known that there was a chance Sarawat existed for him, which was why he'd never been able to fall in love with anyone else, regardless of how hard he tried.

     While a part of his system was in euphoria, the rest of his system had realized that this was bad, very, very bad, because if Sarawat existed, then so did everything else in his dreams. All the dreams he had known deep down were past lives, that he had spent his life trying desperately to debunk, sincerely hoping they were just the product of night terrors and an overactive imagination, because who would want to be a reincarnation of that much blood, death, and cruelty? Who would want to remember every mother, father, brother, sister, and every other family member they ever had, that they had ever loved, being slaughtered mercilessly in front of their eyes, every lifetime for over 3000 years? He felt suffocated as panic swallowed him and he threw his window open, taking lungful's of the cool night air, trying to calm the seas that were ruthlessly crashing into his heart.

     Every gory word he'd ever written, in every journal from his dreams, was real. They had happened, and he had experienced it. Felt it repeatedly as he woke up screaming in the night, calming himself with mantras of it just having been a dream, but they had never been dreams. They were memories. Lifetime after lifetime of watching his entire family get brutally massacred repeatedly, his tormentor making sure he watched every death, every time, before they finally took his life as well. The cold maniacal laugh that followed him through the centuries murdering him over and over again because the man they wanted was hopelessly in love with the soul that lived in Tine's incarnation at the time and not with Tine's tormentor. Because no matter how long his tormentor held off his and Sarawat's souls from reuniting, Sarawat still waited for his soulmate and never looked at his tormentor even once, not even for a moment, and for that Tine's soul had to pay in blood to appease his tormentor's jealousy, like a sacrifice.

     He never knew his tormentor's name, barely knew their face. They were always careful to keep enough of it hidden behind a cloak to keep the features from being recognizable. The only parts of them that Tine could ever remember were the way their red eyes would glow from beneath the darkness of their cloak, and the way their red lips would smirk with enjoyment while they ripped apart his family with their bare hands. The manifestations of what few features he remembered were the foundation of his nightmares throughout his dreams. He had never understood his tormentor's hatred towards him, or who the 'he' was that his tormentor referred to until his soul had been reincarnated as Tine. The incarnation that remembered everything in his dreams. The incarnation who believed his dreams were myths, but had still plotted them well enough through time to have been able to get the main recurring reasons and plots behind each persona's death.