“You think so?” I asked, wondering if he was saying what I thought he was saying.
“I know so,” he growled. “You’re like my Nebula Ally on fucking speed, man.”
My throat thickened as I accepted what he was implying. Ally equalled friend. And I didn’t know why I’d expected him to say something different. I realised I didn’t really care in that moment though. I was fucking privileged to be Caleb Altair’s friend, and if that was all we were ever destined to be then that was enough for me. Because I’d spent most of my life loving the moon without ever resting a paw on its surface. So Caleb would be my new moon, my unreachable love hanging over me in the sky. And I would show up to watch it night after night with no resentment in my heart, just a lone Wolf on a mountain, trying to get close enough to bathe in its light.
S eeing how our lives could have been without Lionel plaguing every move we made left me with a crushing weight in my chest over all he had taken from us. From the twins. They hadn’t deserved to suffer the life they had. They hadn’t deserved the shitty foster homes and no stability, they hadn’t deserved the poverty, the nights going hungry, the lack of any kind of parental love to surround them.
It still angered me to this day to think of them in the conditions I’d found them in. That cold apartment with mold on the ceilings and my girl in those well worn bunny pyjamas with a look that said I’d just stamped on her last nerve.
Fuck, if I could go back and do it all different I would. I’d walk into their place, sit them down and fucking hug them for one. And for two, I’d bring the Heirs there with me, and I wouldn’t let them leave until the lot of them had bonded. Everyone could have saved themselves a whole ocean of heartache if we’d figured all of our shit out sooner.
But I’d learned a long time ago that hindsight was the enemy of the future. We couldn’t go back, what was done was done. What was lost was lost. Our feet were facing forward and the doors behind us were sealed shut. I may have had enough regrets to fill the sky, but they were as useful to me as carrying around a ton of rocks on my back. And mostly, I’d set them down and left them in my past. But seeing that vision had reminded me of all the ways Lionel had been responsible for so much of the torment in our lives.
It had been strange to see myself in a world where my life had never been ripped away from me though, coming home from a Pitball tournament only to meet Blue and find ourselves enthralled with each other. How much easier it would have been for us if that had been our fate…
Would she have preferred that version of me? He’d looked happy, stress-free, no hint of darkness in his eyes. This version of me was hard and cold at times, but she was the one who broke through all of that. She was my sunshine after an eternal winter, and I didn’t know whether to grieve the life we’d missed out on or be thankful that we had still found our way to each other regardless.
In the pit of my gut, I felt a strange detachment to the man I’d seen in that vision too. He wasn’t me. I’d parted ways with him the day Clara had died and Lionel had bonded me to Darius. And if he wasn’t me then that meant Darcy wasn’t herself in that vision either. She was a girl raised in Solaria, she’d had the gleam of privilege about her that the Heirs often carried, and I wasn’t sure this version of me liked it. I wanted my Blue. The one who had come to this world ignorant and who I had watched blossom into a Fae queen. Our story wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t easy. There was struggle and divide, arguments and pain. But it was ours, down to every gritty detail, and I found I wouldn’t have exchanged it for that pretty, simple life I’d just seen. I was possessive of my Blue, and maybe it was selfish of me to think that way after all she had been through, but there wasn’t a single thing I’d have changed about her, and to become who she was today, she’d had to be broken, put under pressure so she could emerge like coal into a diamond.
“Oh how easy it all could have been, as simple as a sandworm riding a sea breeze,” Geraldine sobbed.
“Those people aren’t us,” I voiced my thoughts and Darius looked to me with a frown.
“At least they had a future,” he muttered.
“So do we,” I hissed. “Stop talking as if your fate is sealed. You can defeat Lionel.”
He shrugged and Geraldine wiped her eyes on her sleeve, sniffing deeply. “Perhaps you are right, Orion, perhaps this is the better way. The juiciest grapefruit is never hanging at the bottom of the tree after all.”