#cel chats

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DO YOU KNOW WHAT MY FAVOURITE GODDAMN UNDERRATED SOULMATE AU IS? the one where you’re born with heterochromia but one is your own eye colour and one is your soulmate’s

When Juno was young, he just assumed that his mom’s eyes were naturally mismatched. He and Ben existed so that meant she’d found her soulmate, hadn’t she? He grew out of that dream pretty quickly when he realized how many kids in Oldtown had parents with mismatched eyes. Because of that, he could never really prove which eye belonged to him; well, he wouldn’t have been able to prove it, if it wasn’t for the day Ben came home with an oblivious look on his face and two bright blue eyes. Those eyes weren’t bright for too long. Juno actively does not think about it.

He knew, sort of, that his fiancé wasn’t his soulmate when they met. He knew, sort of, that they weren’t soulmates when they got engaged. He knew for sure that they weren’t soulmates when the wedding fell apart at his feet. After that, he kept a pair of coloured contacts in his house at all times. He couldn’t stand to look at the blue, but all the fancy tech in the world couldn’t quite emulate the brightness of the one in his skull so he settled for a shade of lighter brown that he found on the cheap.

Peter spent hours as a kid staring into a haunted blue eye that he knew couldn’t belong to him – it just wasn’t a colour one found on Brahma. He might have had nothing for all those years on the street, but he didn’t have no one as long as someone else had his eye. There was someone out in the galaxy undeniably tied to him.

They don’t realize it when they meet. Rex Glass is a man with two bright eyes, Juno Steel a man with an exhausted look in his. It’s not uncommon for Dark Matters agents to keep their status a secret, so Juno assumes that both Rex’s eyes are contacts and doesn’t dwell too much on the familiar brightness. He doesn’t realize until he pulls the contacts out blearily the next morning that Peter Nureyev is even more of a pain than he thought. He can live with the blue more than he expected, though. They’re way too old to look anything like Ben’s.

Juno wonders if breaking the heart of your soulmate, if abandoning them, will put their old eye back in your skull. He guesses he’ll never know: there’s a crater where a bright, hopeful eye used to be.

A/N: this is what you wanted, right?

16. things you said with no space between us

Juno Steel is the kind of man that balls up his fists, squeezes his eye shut tight, and swings. It doesn’t matter what he’s hitting, so long as someone hurts for it – and if Juno’s the one hurting then all the better. For every Miasma, there’s a dozen Cassandra Kanagawas. An ache in his fists is a small price to pay for the trail of ruined lives he leaves behind, and when that ache isn’t enough he’s a little more direct.

It took Peter a long time to puzzle this out. He’d never been the kind of person that would punish himself for his many sins. Maybe it was because he moved across the galaxy at speeds so breakneck that consequences never quite managed to keep up, or because he’d thrown away his conscience in a red room on New Kinshasa two decades ago. There was so much to do that he could never find a spare moment to wallow in self pity; not that he often wanted to.

He’d started picking at that thread during their brief adventure. The funny thing about spending so much time wondering why Juno consistently ruined his own life, consistently denied himself pleasures, was that Peter had found himself blindsided when he woke up and Juno was nowhere to be found. Hyperion City certainly had a sense of irony.

A lot has happened since then – a dozen flights, lovers, and skies on Peter’s end, politics and a revival of the past on Juno’s – but Peter can tell that that irony has remained intact. Through the window, the skyline’s unparalleled sunset looks exactly as it always had, despite Peter’s world having flipped on its head the moment his shuttle had touched down on Mars.

If Peter rewinds the last few months in his mind, it could almost be that night after they’d escaped the tomb. Even further back and they could be sitting together before Rex Glass made his grand exit. All of these moments overlap and Peter is left with this:

They sit on the couch in Juno’s apartment, Juno with a thick layer of bandages over where the cybernetic eye had been only days ago, and Peter fighting not to recoil from him. They’re far enough apart that they’re not touching, but close enough that what little space is between them feels cavernous and awkward. Peter could reach out for Juno if he wanted to, but that would require boxing up anger that he thought had gone away months ago. It is far too quiet.

Juno Steel is a man who will close his eyes and swing, hoping to hit whatever moves because then he can relax in the knowledge that the bruises were well earned. Peter tells himself now, looking at Juno slowly being crushed by his need for Peter to punish him for leaving, that he had been caught in the crossfire between Juno and some infinite wall he throws himself at every day. He didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt.

They’ll talk about the fact that Juno did hurt him, though. Some day. Another day, when Juno hasn’t lost an eye for the second time and Peter can stand to look him in the eye without wanting to shout at him.