What did it mean to be a soulmate? To know someone in every world, in every universe? To slip effortlessly between where they ended and you began?
He’d meant what he said, that he believed Libby Rhodes to be present in every theoretical universe of his existence; to be a person of great significance in every single one. It was too familiar, too traceable. Too many places their lives would have collided, a web of unavoidable consequences where coincidence dressed up like fate. Within it, Nico truly believed all their other outcomes ricocheted, but eventually returned. Other lives, other existences, it didn’t matter. They were polarities, and wherever they went, his half would always find hers.
But this world, this life, it wasn’t theoretical. This was their universe, and their universe had laws, where in addition to the constancy of polarities, there were limitless variables, too. Newness. Wonder. Love. There was a world where the sky was purple, one where the Earth fell off its axis, one where Gideon was born with hooves, all the ones where something went awry in Gideon’s hellhole of a past. The ones where he and Nico never met.
A variable could mean a rarity—a shooting star, a singular event. The chance for the birth of the universe itself. So maybe it wasn’t every eventuality. Maybe it was just one sliver of an outcome because it had only required one chance to get it right.
So it wouldn’t be forever. Did that make any of this less precious, less beautiful?
No. If anything, the opposite.
He hoped Gideon would understand.