paper dolls

[ lara and lawson

one letter one shots, installment #6

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"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Lara could only nod silently as she stared, mouth agape, at the tiny creatures of flame floating around them, sparks dancing around their minuscule bodies.

"Fireflies." Lawson smiled as he watched the human girl admire them, her wide, chestnut-colored eyes catching light, glowing like smoldering embers. Unbeknownst to her, a group of them had fallen into formation around her head, a radiant crown of light.

"You can see these? Everyday?" she asked, turning to face him, awe lining her words. The fireflies scattered.

"I'm a spirit, Lara. We're of the same kind." He raised a hand, inviting a firefly to perch on his pale fingers.

Lara looked at the way this boy and the firefly mingled with each other, how either one regarded the other with such calm familiarity, as if they'd spent years in each other's company. And they had, she knew — as easy as it was for her to forget it, Lawson Murray was a ghost, a wraith, and the sole line that separated them happened to be one neither of them could see.

She reached out to touch the creature, and sighed in muted frustration when her fingers slipped right through its body. Lawson chuckled and blew it gently away, drawing closer and taking her warm hand in his. She let him, feeling the cool presence of his almost fluorescent skin against hers, reveling at the ethereal, utterly magical sensation.

And at how, the moment the sun rose – the moment the barest slice of it broached the horizon –it'd all be gone.

"Still aren't used to it?" he teased, raising a hand to the side of her face and tracing the smooth plane of her cheek with a finger. She shivered, forgetting about the garden, the dusk, the tiny flames dancing around them — everything but him, him and the way his not-quite solid touch made the very being of her spark alive like the most brilliant firefly.

How did things come to this?

How did she end up crossing paths with this person, this dead, eighteen-year-old boy who seemed to her more real than any other human being she'd been with before?

"Lara," he said, stirring her out of her thoughtful stupor. She blinked, taking in his still, sharp face, the uneven line where the soft locks of his hair met his forehead.

"Was it you?" she blurted. "That's why I found you, in the middle of a forest. Why I can touch you. Why I can see you. Why I — why I feel so much for the ghost of a total stranger.

"Because you weren't. You were my soulmate," she said, searching his dark eyes for an answer she already knew. "You were my soulmate, but then you passed away. That's why" — she pulled aside the collar of her blouse, baring a clean patch of skin — "that's why this is gone. Isn't it? L.M. They were your initials, tattooed on my skin, up until the day you died."

Lawson said nothing for a spell, brushing a feather-light thumb against the bare skin just below her collarbone, as if he could feel the letters of his name still imprinted there, as invisible and as real as his presence. Lara covered his fingers with her own, taking them away, making him look her in the eye, however tear-filled they were. "Isn't it?"

The boy hesitated for the briefest moment, a flicker in his movement, before slowly lifting the rumpled collar of his shirt to reveal two bold, black letters, eternally written in script on his otherwise spotless skin. "L.L." He paused, watching her face slacken at the sight of it, all resolve gone, replaced by something like forlorn serendipity. "I spent my whole life looking for her, the person I was meant to love.