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SEBASTIAN POV (1)
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(day 1656)
"You are a fucking idiot!"
He narrowly avoids getting hit in the face by the phone Santana chucks at him, and watches it shatter on the floor, the carpet barely dulling the sound. It's the third phone she's broken in his vicinity in the four years they've worked together and he's deserved every single one, though he did wish she showed a little restraint.
He sighs, one hand covering his face, the other reluctant around a glass of scotch — it's never been his drink, he doesn't drown his sorrows with alcohol, but he hoped it might chase away the taste of Blaine's mouth, of his lips, of the memory of the skin-to-skin contact even though he'd all too willingly pursued it. He hates that he gave in, first to the idea of mending broken fences, then to Blaine's desperate kiss, and now he's fighting the urge to see Blaine one last time, before he gets on a plane back to Lima, Ohio, where he'll forget all about him. It's what he needs to tell himself to get through the next moment, the next hour, the next day, knowing he broke Blaine Anderson's heart.
"Calm down."
"Don't you tell me to calm down." Santana trots over to him, her heels ruining the floorboards. "I was enjoying a perfect R-rated morning with my girlfriend and I get a call from Hunter saying–"
"He was going off the college either way."
He looks up, defies Santana head-on because he can't hear this right now. He's all too aware of what he did, how he did it, and how stupid it may prove to be, but he can only follow his own judgment on this. Someone like Santana, or Hunter, or even Blaine, could never understand the depths of his convictions, how he felt about soulmates and all the bullshit that entailed.
Santana's eyes turn red. "Don't give me that I-don't-care attitude, Smythe."
He gets up from the couch and walks over to the kitchen counter where the rest of the scotch gratefully waits — after another sip, the liquor burning a judgmental path down his throat, he's loathe to find Blaine still there, on his skin, in his pores, the memories etched onto the insides of his eyelids. No one will convince him he hadn't done what he needed to, but his determination hadn't included going to see Blaine after that day on the beach, kissing him back when he'd resolved to push him away — a kiss near identical to their first, that gut-twisting sense of– of– home.
But Blaine had to learn to be without him, he had dreams of his own no one should ever feel the need to give up simply by the grace of a tattoo. And Blaine would, he'd give it all up in a heartbeat to be with him. Shouldn't a soulmate be the one person in your life who'd never ask for that kind of sacrifice?
It's a romantic notion, that Blaine came ready-made by the universe just for him, that someone somewhere tried to right his parents' mistake and created the perfect person for him to love, a true soulmate, a boy so in love with the idea of love it infected those around him. And for a time, those times they really talked and the rest of the world hardly mattered, Blaine had. That's why he kissed him back, that's why he came back for more, for that featherlight touch of something solely Blaine's.
But he stopped believing in romance a long time ago, and he never put any stock in soulmates.
And he sure as shit won't put his heart on the line like that again — Blaine shouldn't put his heart on the line either, not in this strange and corrupt world he lives in, where people's lives are open to dissection, to scrutiny into the last detail, where the idea of love lived only on a screen. Blaine was naïve and innocent, and, for now, he should cherish that. The world would become a whole lot harder soon enough.
"He didn't belong here," he says solemnly, the liquid in the bottom of his glass swirling, turning, taunting him—he knows of other ways to chase away the taste of someone, that's why he has Adam on speed dial, but it all seems too disrespectful now. "Or with me."
"You're his soulmate."
His hand slams down on the marble countertop. He's so sick of that word, he's so tired of an entire social system based on loving a person the universe tells him to love. The universe has never told him anything he wanted to hear, never helped him out, so he doesn't owe it anything in return. If anything the universe owes Blaine another shot in this sadistic Russian roulette.
"I can't be who he wants me to be."
"No"—Santana shakes her head, tracking back towards the door, her disappointment in him palpable in every word—"you're afraid to be who he knows you to be."
He snatches the glass from where it rests against the marble, and swings it across the kitchen, where it shatters into pieces against the gray backsplash. Scotch drips down his fingers, onto the floor as he sinks down. A tear, maybe two, slips down his cheek. He's not a complete idiot, he realizes as well as anyone close to him his past experiences made him bitter, closed him off to opportunities that could prove to be a whole lot healthier than keeping Adam handy to sleep with. But there's a secret he's kept his entire life intricately interlaced in all that he can't ignore.
Ironically the two people who know his secret would tell him to take a chance, to keep taking chances no matter how often you get beat down, to believe in a universe that's kind and giving, that love's out there for every single person, soulmate or not. His parents always did have a sickeningly sweet notion of romance.
His eyes wander over the barcode tattoo on the inside of his left wrist and he wonders if it would be a mistake, that same featherlight notion that drove him closer to Blaine in the first place.
What is he really risking seeing Blaine one last time?
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