Fire & Ice | Soulmate AU 1 |

chapter one

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I've never been thrown a birthday party.

I've been to other people's parties, of course, but never had the slightly surreal experience where I'm the cause for celebration. All the attention my older brother, Derek, and I ever got from our parents was negative. The only way they would have ever thrown a party for us is if they were replaced by different people entirely. I definitely can't expect anything from then now considering they died five years ago. It was all on Derek to take care of us from then on and at that point we were barely scraping by.

This party isn't just a birthday party. It started off as a congratulatory get-together to celebrate my induction into the League. Someone must have caught wind that it also happens to be the day after my birthday, though, so things only escalated from there. They even went as far as to blow up balloons.

I'm sitting on a couch on the common floor of our team's base of operations. I have to fight back a yawn for the third time in five minutes. I'm a kind of dead tired that I haven't been in a while because of the entrance exam I had to take yesterday. Two days ago I was just Lake. Now I'm Agent Ford, an integral part of a defense and response team charged with the protection of New York City. It's particularly weird for me due to the fact that I happen to be the youngest person to ever join the League. I turned the minimum age, 21, just yesterday. Most people wait at least a couple years until they're ready to take the plunge which makes the average age of induction 23. I really couldn't see myself doing much else, though, so I didn't waste any time.

"So tell me how it feels, Lukas," JD says, grinning at me over a plastic cup of soda that I'm almost completely sure is spiked. He tosses my new League badge at me and I manage to catch it just before it hits me in the face.

My face scrunches up and the corners of my eyes crinkle at the sound of my legal name. I stopped going by "Lukas" around the age of six. I fell into a lake near my best friend's house and was under for over an hour. By the time my friend, Atlas, had returned with paramedics in tow, all the adults figured I was already dead by the time they pulled me out onto the ice. I was blue and hypothermic when they finally did, but I didn't suffer any brain damage and only spent two days in the hospital. The local paper wrote a story about it and called it a miracle. I shouldn't be alive and functioning by most medical accounts, but when I presented with my powers a month later, I had my answer as to why I survived. When I got back to school after the hospital, all my classmates had already started calling me "Lake." The name stuck.

My parents hated the new name. The nickname was nothing but a reminder to them that I was one of those "enhanced freaks" we saw on the news all the time. The news reports rarely ever portrayed people with powers in a bad light, but my mom was always weird about powers and the people who had them. She would spit out the word "League" like it was a bad taste in her mouth.

"Come on J," I whine. "I hate people calling me that." He's never called me Lukas before, but he's also been unconvinced my real name is "Lake" since the very beginning. I'm not really surprised he's so smug about finding out he was right.

"Why? It's your name, isn't it?" he says reasonably, quirking a blond eyebrow. "Even says that on that fresh new ID badge." He definitely has a point. It's unreasonable for me to be so defensive every time a legal document is printed with "Lukas" on it, but something has always stopped me from legally changing my name. I've gotten as far as filling out the paperwork, but they always end up in the trash.

"I'm being serious." I say a little more sternly. "There's a reason I don't go by it."

His honey colored eyes flick all over my face for a second before his gaze drops back down to his cup. He nods.