Work Text:
Everyone is born with a memory, and like a true memory – though there are some who’ll argue this point – it changes over time.
You decide not to go to that concert after all. The memory changes.
You crash your car and have to take a later flight. The memory changes.
You flunk out of university. The memory changes.
Because if your soulmate was written in stone from your first breath, before that, even, well… how much of a match could that really be. You’re not you yet, and they aren’t them either. Better to wait until you’re settling into your bones and your skin doesn’t feel quite unlike yours anymore.
But for now, there is a memory.
Unlike a true memory, this is not an event in the past, rather, it’s from your future. That’s why it changes, see, and that’s why you can change it. You don’t need to feel panic in the face of predestined future and lack of volition. Your memory is for you.
When you’re young, you can’t tell which one it is. (What is a memory? What is a soulmate?) but eventually you’ll get a talk and then, well. That memory that comes to you, of snowflakes on the back of your hands and someone wrapping a scarf around your neck, when you remember that now you can separate it from all of your other memories because you’ve never actually been to the snow.
So that’s how it works. You get a memory. Your memory is of your soulmate.
Eric Richard Bittle’s first memory is the smell of strawberries, the taste of chocolate on his tongue, and the scratch of dry grass under his legs.
When he turns seven, Eric takes a tumble down the stairs, and misses a class excursion to an art gallery that might otherwise have planted the seed in his brain for a university path that did not eventuate.
Eric’s second memory is of being surrounded by water, hand held by another, the sun lighting up the back of his eyelids a vibrant red.
Eric’s third memory is the smell of a woodfire, the stickiness of marshmallow on his tongue. It doesn’t stay for long after he moves to Madison.
Then a series of memories which Eric barely has time to identify as he contemplates university.
Eric Richard Bittle’s final memory settles in when he sends his application to Samwell University. It’s the smell of flour and butter, the taste of blueberries, a soft laugh whose owner he doesn’t yet know. It’s his final memory, but it doesn’t know it yet. It changes on and off through Bitty’s – that’s what he goes by now – first year.
Sometimes a small change. Pecan instead of blueberries.
Sometimes a bigger change. A kitchen still, but there’s no baking, it’s dancing instead, and that same soft laughter in his ear.
Sometimes it goes away completely. No laugh. The feel of a different hand around his waist.
Second year it settles. The soft laugh comes back and the blueberries return and when Bitty takes up residence in the Haus he feels it in his bones. He’s close.
He changes the curtains in the kitchen and his fingers tingle. He reorganises the fridge and he can feel it in his toes too. He buys punnet after punnet of blueberries and though the tingle remains in his fingers, his memory is yet to eventuate.
As is the only way the memories happen, Bitty is totally unprepared, unexpecting to find himself living it out.
The flour and butter smell is a constant. The blueberries are nothing new. So why is it this time, this moment, this one conversation out of the hundreds Bitty and Jack have had.
Bitty bumps into Jack. He chirps. He throws a puff of flower over Jack and then…
It happens.
The laugh.
The soft laugh that’s been keeping Bitty company for months.
It’s Jack’s laugh.
But that’s the other thing about your memory. Your memory is for you. It’s the moment most special to you. Your soulmate, well, they get their own one, a different one.
Bitty feels. Nervous, excited, happy, scared. He shakes with all of that feeling and can’t say a thing to Jack, who’s distracted with half a mind on his pie and half on talking about his future.
The memory, it becomes a true memory.
Nothing changes.
The further away from it, the more Bitty works it all up in his head.
You can’t prove you’ve had your memory. All you have is the hope that they’ll trust you’re telling the truth. When you tell them. If you tell them. (People do most of the time. Your memory is for you, after all, and so by the time it happens you’re half in love with them. They’re half in love with you.)
Bitty waits for the right time. He waits. He almost says something when… no, that was going to be a lie. He just waits.
Then Jack is graduating and it’s too late. Bitty can’t spring it on Jack just as he’s leaving. It’s unfair.
He says goodbye instead. Wraps Jack up as tight as he can handle, straightens the already neat tie so he doesn’t have to see Jack’s eyes up close.
Then he cries. For a lot of things.
He cries so much that he doesn’t hear the footsteps and slamming of doors that precede Jack’s arrival at the doorway of his old room.
It takes Jack calling his name to cut through Bitty’s thoughts, and then it’s all Bitty can do to pull himself back together, be there for Jack, for whatever this is.
He falls apart again a moment later when Jack kisses him.
And kisses him again.
And then again.
When he pulls back, Jack has this look in his eyes and Bitty would say with one-hundred percent certainty that Jack just lived his memory. Because Bitty knows that face.
He wonders what it was, what memory Jack has been living with since… who knows. He starts wondering about that too. When did Bitty become Jack’s memory?
There is so much he wants to know and so much of him he wants to be known.
(A hug at graduation. Someone fixing my tie.
Blueberry pie and your laugh.)