story.
love like sunlight.
Han and Leigh are lovers and best friends. Their dynamic is all about sharing your life with your favourite person, and waking up each morning excited to have another day with them. They adventure together, laugh together, cry together, and come home to each other. They are each their own person with their own dreams and identities, and rather than losing themselves in each other, their love is about lifting each other up and having someone by your side who believes in you and inspires you to grow to be the best version of yourself.
They are two people with huge hearts and a shared joie de vivre. They banter and flirt, do brave and sometimes stupid things, dance and play and try new things together. That’s not to say everything is always smooth and perfect - they are flawed people who have their troubles and misunderstandings. In some lives, those misunderstandings take time to sort out. Sometimes it’s painful, sometimes it’s confusing, but always, it’s worth it.
Han and Leigh choose each other, over and over and over. Fate is trivial in Holocene. If we shape the world as much as it shapes us, we shape our own fate, too. Han and Leigh aren’t fated to be together, or fated to fall in love. Instead, they choose each other. The necklaces they wear bind them together, but not as guarantee they’ll fall in love. Rather, they’re a promise that they’ll meet again and have the chance to choose each other, and they do, every time. they are soulmates by choice.
Han and Leigh’s love story has a thousand different beginnings. Reincarnation means that sometimes they are princes, sometimes they are pirates. All of their lives are equally Han and Leigh - all of them are canon, and all of them are Holocene. They take place on different worlds, in different eras, from high fantasy to modern to futuristic. The lives I’ll recount below are just some of their infinite lives. They are the main ones I think about, though, set in this Holocene world I’ve described on this website.
a romance told in shared moments.
Han is born to the sun elves that live in a remote, tight-knit village far to the east, famed for the skill of their healers. People travel far and wide to seek them out, and they are rumoured to be able to cure ailments that would otherwise be a death sentence. Han and his people worship the sun and use its warmth and light to heal, primarily through song and dance. The village is a community, tight-knit and protective of their children. Han, the restless, adventurous spirit that he is, convinces the elders to let him leave the village to find new cures and healing magic from the people he meets. What he doesn’t say is that he feels an inextricable pull to the earth and can feel it aching, and his journey is to ease its pain, too.
Leigh comes from a very different world: he’s born in the midst of a bustling city, the son of two scholars. His childhood was secure but distant: he had all his needs provided for, but his parents were too wrapped up in their work to offer much love. He has a younger sister, Esra, and they are very close, and he acts almost like a third parent to her. When he grows up, he follows in his parents’ footsteps. Leigh is a talented scholar and an indispensable expert in magical anthropology - the study of how magic and culture evolve and grow together. Through his studies, he’s also a gifted and prolific mage, with knowledge of many arcane arts, though his primary form of casting (and the one that he was raised with) is in calligraphy. Leigh, too, has a secret: he knows the ancient sigils better than anyone, and also knows best how powerfully destructive they can be when in the wrong hands. He studies them covertly, not for his own gain, but because they, too, are a part of the magical culture of people long, long ago.
They meet a hundred different ways. Sometimes, it’s by catching each other’s eyes from across the room. Others, it’s Leigh stumbling across Han trying to seal some ruins and saying, you’re not really human, are you? It might be chance, it might be fate, but it’s always fulfilling a promise they made to each other in their previous life, that it’s never “goodbye”, it’s a “I’ll see you again, soon.”
Usually, Han is wary when he finds out that Leigh knows the ancient sigils. Sometimes, in the lives where they grow up together, he worries but knows that Leigh doesn’t study them for power. Always, Han has the realization that Leigh may be a mortal with his own flaws, but he has a good heart. He’s someone who can be trusted, and is someone that Han admires for his wit and warmth, who makes Han laugh and feels like home. He’s someone Han has a hard time not falling in love with.
For Leigh’s part, sometimes, he knows from when they are young that Han is not-quite-human, and helps him hide it. Other times, he finds out later and approaches it with warm acceptance and, of course, his inquisitive mind. Can you actually fly with those? How do you fit them under your clothes? Han, in some ways, might be a being that he doesn’t quite understand, something strange and possibly dangerous, but Leigh can see clear as day that Han is so achingly human in all the ways that matter most, including in the way he loves.
So they journey together, two people who make each other glow. And together, they’re able to do things that they each weren’t able to do on their own. By himself, Han can stabilize the ruins, can even restore their seals to make them dormant again, but rarely is he ever able to fully set their magic to rest. He works with what is already there, in tandem with his own tie to the earth. Leigh, who knows the sigils better than anyone, knows how to read them and write them in a way Han doesn’t. He has intuition that comes from many years of study and a gift for magic, and is able to see magic in a way few people can. It’s by them working together, with different but complimentary strengths, that they’re able to put those ruins to rest. The healer and the scholar, both of whom heal and learn from each other.
And each time, when their lives draw to a close, they choose each other. There’s a ritual that will bind us together, Han explains. It’s not a promise you’ll fall in love with me, or I in love with you. But it’s a promise that we’ll have the chance to fall in love again, and the chance to choose each other. It’s a promise we’ll see each other again.
And each time Leigh laughs and says of course. Of course, I want to see you again. If I could spend a million more lives with you, I would, with no hesitation. And they do: the matching pendants they wear around their necks is a symbol of their promise to meet again soon.