— V. E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Chapter One: The Stranger

On the 18th of June 2006, a tornado outbreak broke out in the state of Nebraska, generating fourteen significant tornadoes that carved a path of destruction through the Midwestern and Southern United States. All in all, the outbreak caused 804 deaths and upwards of 3,000 injuries throughout Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri.

Typically, it is tropical cyclones—hurricanes—which are named, not tornadoes. Irma, Sandy, Katrina. Hurricanes are persistent weather systems, more easily tracked than tornadoes, more destructive and thus requiring more warning. Naming a storm makes it easier for the media to report—therefore, easier for communities to prepare. Tornadoes, however, are transient weather systems; impermanent, they can last hours or they can last minutes. They are there, and then they are gone.

The tornado that tore through the agricultural town of Claire, Nebraska on the 18th of June would later be named after the very place it destroyed. Like all the tornadoes of its family, Tornado Claire developed from a supercell: a thunderstorm characterised by the presence of a deep, continually-rotating updraft a few miles up into the atmosphere known as a mesocyclone. This is how it happens: as the storm's rainfall begins to increase, it pulls with it an area of swiftly-descending air. The downdraft accelerates as it approaches the ground, taking the mesocyclone with it—as the mesocyclone descends below the cloud base, it takes in the cool air from the downdraft part of the storm. Here, the warm air in the updraft and the cool air in the downdraft converge, birthing a rotating wall cloud.

The downdraft—known as the rear flank downdraft—focuses the mesocyclone's base, forcing it to draw air from the ground in an area that only grows smaller and smaller. The updraft intensifies, pulling the mesocyclone down and creating the condensation tunnel that becomes a recognisable tornado.

Tornado Claire took mere minutes to form. It took even less to level Claire, Nebraska—though its citizens had been aware of the storm that had developed over the past few hours, the squall line appeared to be moving towards Missouri. They were sure they were safe.

They were not.

Of the 804 overall deaths caused by the tri-state storm, 96 of them were Claire citizens. With a wind speed rate of over 200 miles per hour the twister itself was retroactively designated an EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, the highest category a tornado can receive. Tornado Claire—as well as the thirteen fellow twisters that comprised their family—caused three-billion dollars' worth of damage. That figure, however, accounted only for financial loss.

The storm didn't just take property—houses, or homes. It took friends. Family.

Sons. Daughters. Fathers. Mothers.

Aarthi Lennox was helping her daughter pack her suitcase for a trip to Omaha when Tornado Claire touched down. Her husband and two sons were across town buying snacks for the four-hour drive from Claire to Nebraska's largest city—close to the town hall, Lee, Brandon and Andrew heard the tornado warning sirens the moment they sounded through their town of 4,500. They immediately sought shelter in the town hall basement. Aarthi and Lark, however, did not receive the alert until it was too late.

Lark Lennox does not remember how she survived; Lark Lennox does not remember a lot of things. But she does remember those few moments, those too-brief seconds between the sound of the siren and the sound of the storm as it tore through her home, her life. She remembered her heart, thundering like the dark sky above. She remembered her house, obliterated in an instant. She remembered her mother, holding her tight.

She remembered lightning, even though Brandon—who went on to become a meteorologist, a stormchaser—said that the chance of lightning in a storm decreased the moment a tornado touched the ground. Perhaps this is where it began, her love of fiction and false reality.

Lark Lennox does not remember how she survived. All she remembers is those few moments between life and death, girl and storm. All she remembers is how fleeting those moments were, those precious last seconds she had with her mother before the tornado named after their hometown took everything Lark knew and left nothing behind.

There was not enough time. There will never be enough.

🫀

When Lark Lennox wakes that Tuesday morning, it is raining.

Lark has always loved the rain. Though bad weather has followed her her whole life—a literal dark cloud that hung over her head, tracking puddles across the threshold of her childhood, flooding out plans and people alike—she had come to first accept it and now, adore it. It helped massively that, in Lark's expert cinephile opinion, the best parts of movies always took place in the rain. With romantic comedies her specialty, Lark has such scenes memorised—written in her head, her heart, in bright red ink.

Pride and Prejudice (2004): Mr. Darcy's first proposal to Lizzie, bestowed upon her in the Rosings Park pavilion after they both seek shelter from the weather beneath its roof. Drenched in both rain and arrogance, Darcy is taken aback when he finds Lizzie's response to his proposal similarly saturated in disdain.

Four Weddings and A Funeral (1994): after admitting at the altar that he loves not his bride but someone else, Charles is met in the rain by Carrie, to whom he professes he has loved since the day they met.

          CHARLES: There I was, standing there in the church, and for the first time in my whole life I realised I totally and utterly loved one person. And it wasn't the person next to me in the veil. It's the person standing opposite me now... in the rain.

          CARRIE: Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed.

(Classic.)

There are a thousand of these moments, soaked wet-through with melodrama and feeling, and Lark knows each and every one of them by heart. Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991); Belle clinging to the Beast's dying body, confessing her love as it showers around them, the downpour water first and the bright, absolving, transforming light. The Sound of Music (1965), when Liesl and Rolfe take refuge from the rain in the Von Trapp estate gazebo. A Cinderella Story (2004) and its iconic climax, where Austin rejects his father—"You're throwing away your dream!" "No, Dad. I'm throwing away yours."—and runs to Sam.

But these are just honourable mentions; they don't compare and frankly can't even begin to compare to one of Lark's favourite scenes in all cinematic history. The It's not over! scene from The Notebook (2004)—or, rather, the one that directly precedes it, when Allie and Noah row across the lake and the rain begins to pour.

Lark has encoded this scene to memory, analysed it within an inch of its life and squeezed out any and all semblance of symbolism she could find. Noah's love—and Allie's love for Noah, however reluctant—is the rain, all-consuming and all-encompassing. It's a storm, one that that soaks to the bone, through clothes and skin and societal expectations. As it becomes clear the rain is more than just a light shower—as love, though easy when true, is anything but light—Allie tries to cover herself with her cardigan, a cardigan symbolic of the class divide that separates her from Noah.

Though Allie resists the rain at first, her resolve falters after a few moments and she forgoes the cardigan, choosing instead to embrace the weather and all it—all whom—it represents. What follows, once the lovers reach the shore, is one of the most iconic on-screen kisses of all time.

In the screenplay—which Lark has read, because Lark is just that type of person—screenwriter Jeremy Leven describes the scene:

          ALLIE fights the rain at first, trying to stay dry. But then, it becomes a downpour, raining so hard it's ridiculous.

That was the kind of love Lark wanted. Something so full and whole and inevitable, something so ridiculously pathetically real that you could not do anything but laugh. Laugh in the face of it all, laugh at the universe, laugh at what—who—it has brought you.

That said, when the universe finally brings that who to Lark, she will not laugh. She has been waiting for him her entire life, all twenty-two years of it, and to her it, he, is no laughing matter.

Lark sits up in bed, pushing back her heart-patterned quilt. Tucking her curtain-like bangs behind her ears, she turns to look out the window. The rain traces clean and delicate rivulets of water down the glass, and Lark thinks of him—the Soulmate, with a capital S.

The Stranger.

In the pale light of the morning, Lark closes her eyes and attempts to draw forth his image: red hair—a shade that wavers between auburn and copper—and eyes as green as spring.

The thought of him calms her. She has long since stopped telling people about the Stranger, her stranger; though everyone she has told—her friends, family—entertained her at first, they had soon come to believe Lark had simply made him up. To them, he was nothing more than the lovechild of Lark and her loneliness; she'd met him in no place but a dream, apparently, even though Lark was sure she knew him from memory.

The image of him was like a memory, Lark could admit that; he was blurry, blacked out in some places and overexposed in others. It was like a connect-the-dots, a blank colouring-in page that Lark was forced to fill in by hand. Dot by dot, colour by colour, she was creating her future.

Depending on who you asked—her father, Lee, or her brothers Andrew and Brandon—she was creating a fantasy.

Fantasies, however, have always been one of Lark's principal gifts. And she could admit without lying, to herself or any other, that it was a fantasy she had made of the Stranger. The real world was just so lonely, and with nothing tangible to work with—not her words, nor her faith—Lark filled in the gaps of her memory herself, imagining the specifics of her soulmate and the destiny she was sure they shared. Recalling what her head did not remember but her heart knew to be true.

Such things were trivial, but it was a person's novelty, their quirks, that made them loveable. According to Lark, the Stranger liked coffee; he tolerated tea. He had a lopsided grin—his smile was slightly wonky, but in the best way, the way that fit his face perfectly (and fit his dimples, too, which Lark was convinced he had.) He liked animals—dogs over cats, because he probably had the former growing up—and he played some kind of sport. Hockey, maybe.

He liked movies just like Lark did. Though he favoured sci-fi films over Lark's personal preference of romantic comedies. But of course, he was more than willing to compromise on (the hypothetical) movie night.

Because that's what soulmates do.

He also had a romantic name. Darcy, or Joe, or Jesse—the kind of name you could shout without shame through a torrential downpour, as you call your lover back to your side so you can confess the feelings you have been trying so desperately to deny but only now you realise, as the sky splits itself open, cannot be escaped.

Feelings. Love.

There are some things you just can't run away from.

Lark opens an eye. No, not Joe. Joseph sounds better—more formal. More dashing. Opening her other eye, she sighs. The image is gone, leaving her alone with her life and the bad weather that came inextricably with it; with her sigh comes a roll of thunder, and she shudders like a child as the sound shakes through her bedroom. Her apartment—sitting upon a laundromat that was nestled in the cheaper end of the fashion district—was old, but it had always been reliable. Aside from the sometimes-spotty hot water supply and the occasional roach appearance, Lark had nothing to complain about.

But with every storm that laid siege to Keystone City came that deep, suffocating childhood fear: that this thunder, this lightning, would be the city's last.

That today the sky would be all too willing to swallow Keystone whole just as it had the town of Claire, Nebraska, so many years before. After all, Lark was a magnet for bad weather: she'd brought the storm before. Who was to say she wouldn't do so again?

Located right by the intersection of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, Keystone was a city already prone to vicious weather events. Kansas, after all, was one of the many central U.S. states that comprised Tornado Alley—a states-wide stretch of land where twisters were most frequent. It had been years since Keystone had been directly affected by a tornado, but Lark had seen her fair share of storms.

It had been a storm that had taken her mother. And it had been Lark herself who had taken that memory and traded its trauma for something much more palatable: a love for rainy days and overcast skies that she could supplement with loved-up fantasies. (Falsehoods.) Reality was a tapestry and to think too hard into the one she had fashioned for herself was to expose a gaping hole in her own memory—a hole as dark and as endless as the sky on that day, as open-mouthed and all-consuming as the twister that had taken hold of her mother and never let go.

But Lark didn't want to think about that—so she didn't. Her mother was her first heartbreak and the heart, unlike reality, was not so malleable. Not so mendable. Not so self-correcting. It could only be broken so many times, and there was no point revisiting its old wounds; furthermore, no point reopening them.

So Lark vanquished the thought. And that was that.

The alarm clock on her bedside table tells her it is eight o'clock in the morning. It takes Lark a moment to remember her plans for the day; the art of removing a thought or emotion was still one she hadn't quite mastered. Like general anaesthesia, it couldn't be localised to the wound. Instead, it numbed everything, leaving Lark empty.

She blinks, getting her bearings. And then, she remembers what she must have forgotten: Andrew's fiancée, Soraya. Coffee. Nine-thirty a.m.

In the same way Andrew was like his father—laid-back, kind, loving—Soraya was like her mother. Practical, if not pragmatic, and punctual down to the minute. With the wedding preparations already more than enough cause for stress, Lark definitely did not want to be late. And considering Soraya was slowly shedding her skin to reveal herself as a regular Bridezilla, scales and all, Lark did not want to be the reason her future sister-in-law's day fell behind schedule.

Lark's own routine ever since her most recent heartbreak had been an endless cycle of quiet self-wallowing—or, perhaps more accurately, self-destruction, but at times the two felt interchangeable. She'd spent the last six months desperately trying to distract herself from reality, living out her own Lark-brand reboot of 50 First Dates (2004). But unlike Lucy, she was actually able to remember every single date she went on. So, it wasn't really like 50 First Dates at all—but that was not the point.

The point was that her life felt cyclical. Repetitious, like she was reliving the same day over and over again, the same date, the same dinner. Lark had built her life around her heart and its fragility, built a dam to stop a flood that would leave no survivors if left unchecked. She could imagine it, a weather system to rival all others, a natural disaster that could move through towns and leave nothing behind, leave no building nor man still standing.

Calm down, Lark.

Lark unplugs her phone from its charger and checks her notifications. She has your run-of-the-mill daily updates: a few messages from friends here and there, a couple of memes forwarded and posts reshared; a text from Soraya confirming their coffee date this morning; a daily affirmation from Lark's favourite horoscopes app; and a notification from a sports news app she thought she'd deleted from her phone.

Alas, she had not.

Homecoming: Ashton Hart returns to his roots at the Moylan Iceplex for one last skate.

Lark didn't want to think about Ashton Hart. She didn't want to think about her mother, either.

She didn't want to think about a lot of things, actually.

Lark finds herself staring at her phone, unable to remember why she was on it. Oh, wait, yes—checking her notifications for the morning. She goes through her messages, replying here, leaving on read there; quickly watching through the videos one of her more sleep-avoidant friends had sent her overnight; and finally, confirming with Soraya that they were meeting for coffee at—

Nine-thirty.

It was eight-thirty now. Where had the time gone? Lark pushes the numbness aside, not bothering to question its presence, and practically leaps out of bed to get ready. She showers quickly, skipping her typical fifteen minutes of freestyle Taylor Swift shower karaoke for a much hastier five-minute rinse, then rushes to get dressed and put on her makeup.

The outfit of the day: a lace-up cami over a long-sleeved, sheer black top with a corduroy miniskirt the colour of blackcurrant juice, paired with her favourite knee-high black leather boots. Lark stares at her reflection in the mirror, considering her options for outerwear; the rain had only grown heavier, the rolls of thunder more frequent.

Eight fifty-six. There was not enough time.

Lark grabs a black sweater and pulls it on. It effectively ruined the silhouette of her outfit but knowing how much of a magnet she was for bad weather, this was a sacrifice that simply had to be made.

Nine-o'-two.

Lark fumbles around for her keys, coming up empty. Her apartment was just short of being a studio—a technicality her landlord took advantage of when charging rent, in typical landlord fashion—but it always managed to feel like a mansion whenever she lost something of importance. Sorting through her possessions, she looked for her keys as systematically as she could: in her handbag first (nope), on her desk (not here), in her desk (not here, either), on her nightstand (not even close.)

What she did find was her old diary.

Lark knew it was dangerous to revisit the past. Been there, done that—how many times had she sat down to clean her room, only to rediscover a relic of her childhood, only to be paralysed by nostalgia at the sight of an old photograph or toy?

This was a different kind of numb. Somehow, the diary had wedged itself in the space between the wall and the back panel of her nightstand. Lark slid her hand into the gap, working out the diary and pulling it out to hold in both palms.

The sight of the book stirred something in her; bright pink with a red felt heart on the cover that had since lost its soft fuzz, just holding it in her hands brought a warmth to her chest—and a sadness—she could not explain.

The diary had been through a lot, that was obvious: the first few dozen pages were buckled with decade-old water damage, their writing half-lost to time. Lark flipped through as delicately as she could, peering at the paper through mascara-thick lashes. The diary was more empty than not, with a cluster of entries at the beginning that became more and more sparse as time went on. The most recent one was written when Lark was seventeen; after a hiatus of multiple years, a younger Lark must've revisited the diary to write one last entry.

It was about her high school boyfriend, of course. Another thing, another person, another heartbreak, she didn't want to think about.

What was the first entry? Lark returned to the first page. This diary is the property of Lark Lennox, someone had written in dark blue pen. Lark didn't recognise the handwriting, but any concern or curiosity she might have had dissipated the moment she turned the page. The first entry was dated the 25th of June 2006—a week after Tornado Claire.

Suddenly, it all made sense. There were no gaps Lark had to fill in here. No spaces, no voids. No doubt some concerned relative had bought her this diary following the death of her mother, hoping that Lark would better work through her feelings if she wrote them down. Lark flicked through the pages idly, her brows furrowing. She stopped a quarter-way through the book, at a double-spread that was blank save for a drawing she had done sometime in 2013.

She'd graduated from gel pens at this point, and so the drawing was rendered in a more sensible black ink. But she'd gone back over with coloured pencils, their pigments thick and creamy, and the addition of colour meant that she—nearly ten years later—could make no mistake.

She'd drawn a boy. But not just any boy.

Red hair. Green eyes.

Nine-ten. Lark closed the book and placed it on her nightstand. Now was not the time for a walk down memory lane; that could come later, perhaps in tandem with her sad-girl playlist and a glass of wine.

As if discovering her diary was the cue for her keys to reappear, Lark found them tucked away in the pocket of a coat she'd left hanging by the door. Sighing in frustration to herself, she shoved them into her handbag alongside her wallet and phone. Then, she finally departed, forgoing an umbrella and pushing away all thoughts of her mother, her diary, her Stranger—stepping out of her head, and into the storm.

🫀

Lark had agreed to meet Soraya in Allender Square, which would have been an easy commute on a good day. However it was decidedly not a good day. The moment Lark left her apartment the weather decided to double down and ruin not just Lark's plans, but those of anyone who happened to be out and about in Keystone City at a quarter-past-nine that morning. (Sorry, everyone.)

As if her morning could not have already been disrupted enough, the bus to Allender Square passed Lark by not once, but twice. The second time the bus refuses to stop—its driver waving dismissively at Lark through the window as the vehicle drove past—Lark gives up, knowing she probably looks like a madwoman in her attempts to hail it down.

Nine-twenty. She's screwed.

Allender Square is five minutes by bus, fifteen on foot. Lark takes a moment to make her decision: whether she will wait for the next bus to come at nine-twenty-four and risk it ignoring her again or she will leave the safety of the bus shelter and venture out into the rain.

She's seen worse, survived worse—so she chooses the rain.

This choice sends her down the slope that delineates the fashion district from the rest of the city. This choice sees her weave through the pedestrian traffic by the strip of artisan coffee shops in the newly gentrified Arts Quarter, the crowd bogging her down by three minutes. This choice places her at the intersection of Sixth Street and Proust at nine-thirty-two (late!) just as a motorcycle reaches the traffic lights at the crossing.

This choice places her right in the metaphorical line of fire as the motorcycle—going just a little too fast in a road made slippery by standing water—hydroplanes.

Lark steps over the gutter and onto the crossing just as the motorcycle spirals out of control. Allender Square in sight, the world is but a blur in rainy periphery. Lark, with all her knowledge of fate, all her faith in it, does not even see it coming.

Her attention is elsewhere—on the lightning that comes from nowhere and yet appears everywhere, all at once. There's something so foreign about it, and something so familiar. Orphaned, no thunder follows it after it strikes. But Lark doesn't have time to process this, doesn't even have time to blink before it's over, it's gone, and she's on the other side of the street, safe and sound in the arms of a stranger.

"You okay?"

Lark blinks up at him. The rain made the world blurry. Blacked out in some places. Overexposed in others. Lark found her arms wrapped around the other's neck; she blinked again, but it did little to clear her vision.

"I'm fine. You're fast." She craned her neck to look back at the road. "Is the driver alright?"

"Yeah." The stranger didn't even bother to look. "It's you." He said. You. The word held a weight, one Lark was unsure if she was meant to carry.

"It's... me?" Lark's eyes followed the back of the motorcycle driver, watching them as they miraculously regained control of their bike and simply drove away. Okay, asshole.

"It's you," he repeated. There was something intangible in his voice, and it made Lark pause, turn back to look at him. She removed one of her hands from his neck so she could wipe her eyes.

The stranger was nice-looking—with half of his face covered by a scarf, there wasn't much she could say about his appearance. His hair, made dark by the rain, had fallen into his eyes.

There was something about him, though, that comforted her.

(However, it could have simply been that he was holding her, like she was delicate, like she was something he had to protect, and it had been a long time since someone had been this close. A long time since someone had wanted to be this close.)

Lark stared at him for a long moment. Had they met before?

"Can you stand?"

As if on a delay, Lark took a few seconds to reply. Then, she was clearing her throat—so was he—and nodding. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good. Sorry." She stood straight, and the stranger released her from his arms. "I mean, thank you."

"You're welcome." He gave her a partially-obscured grin. In his hand was a bouquet of pink roses. Half-crushed, he mustn't have let them go when he pulled Lark out of the way—he had sacrificed them, and their beauty, for some girl he'd never met.

(Don't romanticise a stranger, Lark. Not this early in the morning. You buy pink roses for a reason—they're not thank you flowers, or condolence ones. They're for partners. Lovers. Girlfriends.)

(Soulmates.)

(In other words, he was probably taken.)

She'd spent her life searching for that beautiful stranger, but Lark often forgot she herself was a beautiful stranger, too. Even in her current state, she was heart-stopping—with her thick dark hair that clung to the sides of her face, framing it perfectly. Her features, soft and sweet, accentuated by well-matched lipstick and eyeshadow. Her smile, that played on the corners of her lips, shy but not unsure.

The way the stranger looked at her was intriguing. Paradoxical—like he knew her face already, like he'd never seen it before, like he'd never see it again.

Lark could read emotions like an open book—even without her abilities, she was fluent in facial expressions and body language. But this stranger—she couldn't read him at all. There was too much happening in his head, in his heart. This and this and this. Very much like the lightning she was so sure she had seen, his emotions were bright, blinding, brief.

Hers were so permanent they felt like a disease.

"I'm sorry about your flowers."

"It's okay," he says. "They're just flowers."

"I doubt your girlfriend would agree with that."

The stranger stared at her, his head tilted ever-so-slightly to the side. Then, he laughed. "No, I don't think she would."

"Pink roses are actually my favourite flower."

"Really?" He didn't sound surprised. But maybe that was just disinterest. He stared at her again, then held out the bouquet. "Do you want them?"

Lark's eyes fell to the flowers, the individual droplets of water that beaded on the petals like pearls. She laughed awkwardly. "I couldn't take them from you."

"They are half-crushed, to be fair."

"Not good enough for your girlfriend?"

The stranger shrugged. "She finds beauty in everything. But I think you need them more than she does right now."

Lark wiped the water from her eyes once more. Even though they were partially crushed, the flowers were still beautiful. "Your girlfriend and I have something in common, then." She took the flowers. "It's probably for the best. Half-crushed roses aren't exactly the epitome of romance."

"But they are the epitome of nearly-got-hit-by-a-motorbike."

Lark laughed as she tucked the flowers into her arms, cradling them in the crook of her elbow. Her sweater was soaked all the way through, and she was shivering, but she didn't care. "There's enough time to get her new flowers. I work at the florist down the street, actually. In Allender Square? I could get you a thank-you-for-saving-me-from-getting-hit-by-a-motorbike discount."

He grinned again, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. "Do you give out a lot of those?"

"Oh, yeah, hundreds." Lark smiled. "Seriously, though. Thank you. For saving my life."

"It's nothing."

"And for the flowers, too. I've never received nearly-got-hit-by-a-motorbike flowers before."

"There's a first time for everything."

"Half-crushed or otherwise, they're beautiful. They might actually brighten my day."

"Rough morning?"

Lark laughed, cocking her head towards the road. "You think?"

Again, the stranger didn't even bother to look. His gaze remained fixed upon Lark's face. "Sorry."

"Don't apologise. Honestly, it's probably just gonna get worse from here."

He lifted an eyebrow.

"Murphy's law," Lark said, pressing her lips into a thin line. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So catch me getting hit by a truck at noon, or something. Can I count on you to save me again?"

"Definitely." He paused, adjusting his scarf—it looked familiar to Lark, though she couldn't quite place it. Something about the shade of the yarn; a mustard yellow, it stirred a memory within her, a memory that was just out of reach. "You know, I think your day's gonna get better."

"Really?"

"Much, much better." He spoke with the air of a prophet, like he'd seen the future and knew this to be true. "I think it's going to be one of the best days of your life."

"Assuming I don't get hit by a truck."

"Assuming you don't get hit by a truck." The stranger laughed, and so did Lark. The sound was lost in the rain, but Lark could feel it in her throat, her chest, her heart.

The stranger's expression turned serious then, as if he was going to say something else—but Lark inadvertently cut him off. "Do you have the time?"

"Yeah, I do." Swiftly he composed himself and then he was pushing back the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. "It's nine-forty."

Well. Soraya couldn't be mad at her if she had a legitimate reason—though, to be fair, she was already running late when she crossed the road. "Shit. I'm running late."

"Ha. So am I."

"I'll see you around?" Lark hated how hopeful she sounded—she saw the world through a rose-coloured lens. It was so easy for her to fall in love, and so difficult to fall out of it.

"Maybe."

"Cool," Lark said, and then she was stepping away, away from the stranger and towards Allender Square. She had to leave now or—

"I'm Lark, by the way." She couldn't help herself. Having only made it a few feet, she turned back to look at the other.

He simply smiled. Lark found herself smiling back, then remembered—she was late. There was not enough time. She began to walk again, and so did he.

Only when the stranger was in periphery, simultaneously silhouetted and illuminated by the bright lights of the traffic that had come to a stop at the crossing, did she notice he had red hair. The rain had made it look dark—brown, nearly black—but, backlit, she could now see it clear as day. Auburn, or copper. Wavering somewhere in between.

Her heart ached a little, and the flowers felt heavier in her arms. But if it was going to happen, it would. It was fate.

It had to be.

Lark smiled to herself and went on her way. The sky above groaned, though the sound of thunder—all too familiar to Lark—didn't faze her. The flowers had put her into too good a mood, and she decided, since she was already late, she might as well make a pit-stop to the florist and buy Soraya a bouquet, too. A card, maybe—she'd never formally congratulated her future sister-in-law on her engagement, and knowing her brother, that was something Soraya deserved to be commended for.

Lark arrived at the shop (right at the mouth of Allender Square, directly opposite the café she was meant to meet Soraya at) soaking wet, practically pooling rainwater at the door. She waved at one of her favourite co-workers, Max, then headed for the counter, picking up a bouquet of sunflowers on the way. The Enchanted Florist kept the good stuff behind the counter; finding it unmanned, she stepped behind it to take her pick of the premium cards.

Lark scanned the wall for a Congratulations card. Good Job, Happy Birthday, My Condolences...

"Uh, are you allowed to be back there?"

Lark turned her head so swiftly she could've had whiplash. Standing before her was a beautiful stranger—a boy.

Red hair. Green eyes.

Lark turned back to the wall, taking one more moment—for dramatic effect—to choose a card. Settling on a gold-foil Congratulations on the Engagement! with a matching metallic envelope, she looked over her shoulder at the other. He hadn't moved from where he stood, and the flowers arranged on the display behind him only made him prettier, the hydrangeas, tulips and baby's breath playing wingman in a way that worked a little too well on Lark. "Who're you gonna tell?"

Max wouldn't care. But this guy didn't have to know that.

"No-one, if you tell me your name, beautiful." In another universe, Lark would've cringed, but right now—in this moment, this world, this reality—she could do nothing but smile. At the sight of it, the stranger smiled too, and Lark's gaze dropped immediately to his lips.

He had a lopsided grin.

It fit his face perfectly.

Just like she knew it would.

"How about you tell me yours?"

He considered her for a moment, his expression boyish, amused. Then, he stepped up to the counter and offered her his hand. She put down her card and her flowers to take it.

"Wally West. Have we met?"

Author's Notes

🫀  dedicated to all my friends, but specifically sweetjawregui who has been the berenstein support crew since day one, as well as the original lark lennox apologist. thank you so much for your support for the past few years now, i think? two years? maybe? not to pull a lark lennox but: i love you always! time is nothing!

🫀  anyways, regarding the story/this chapter itself! please don't ask me any questions, i don't want to spoil anything! i love talking about this story so if you ask me things i won't be able to resist spilling. i also apologise for the tornadogenesis nerd-dump at the beginning of the chapter. not every chapter will be so science-y!

🫀  this chapter is on the longer side but future chapters won't be quite as dense. there's also a lot going on, but i'd love to know your thoughts, especially about lark and her character so far! we love a girlboss who gaslights herself into thinking everything's okay. she's just like me fr.

🫀  if anyone was interested, the three names lark references as romantic names are (mr.) darcy from pride and prejudice, joe bradley from roman holiday (1953) and jesse wallace from the before trilogy (1995-2013). i personally think it's hilarious that lark dreams of all these romantic men, with all these romantic names, and when she meets Her Stranger™ his name is... wally. you win some, you lose some.

🫀  also, here is a beautiful edit that my incredible friend gardenskies made for heartflash, featuring lark's comic faceclaim, madelyne pryor!

[There should be a GIF or video here. Update the app now to see it.]

🫀  anyways! i hope you enjoyed this chapter. please let me know what you thought! votes and comments especially are much appreciated! 🫶🫶