Work Text:
Tucker’s a few weeks past eighteen when he’s woken up by his shoulder setting itself on fire.
He rolls out of bed with a muffled curse, painfully aware of the nine other men he’s sharing a room with and the fact that they’ve all got to be up at five thirty tomorrow morning – he doesn’t want to be that one asshole that stopped everyone from getting a proper night’s sleep – and stumbles to the bathroom. At least there he’ll be able to see what’s going on.
The lights and the mirror in the bathroom are surprisingly unhelpful.
There’s no blood dripping from his shoulder, no knife through it or bone poking out from it; nothing to indicate that he’s hurting at all, other than the deep creases of pain between his eyebrows and at the corners of his eyes, the straining tendons in his neck.
It’s not just pain, he realises, as he bites down on one hand to keep from crying out and scrabbles blindly at his shoulder with the other to try and work out what the hell is going on. It’s a burning, like something’s being branded into his shoulder, and his stomach sinks through the floor as he realises what’s happening.
He stands there, fingers white-knuckled around the stainless steel of the sink and shoulders hunched, eyes downcast. He wants to look, desperately wants to see what’s happening – oh god, please don’t let it be what he think it is, please – but he can’t do anything other than ride out the burn with the occasional grunt of pain, entire body tense and shoulders shaking.
When the burning subsides, he finally drags his shirt off with shaking, clumsy fingers, discards it on the floor and twists around so he can see his right shoulder, where his mark is.
Where his mark was.
It’s gone now, the white-gold D that used to stand out bright and beautiful against his skin, scrawled in the messy handwriting of someone with too little time and an absent mind. Instead, there’s a scar, thick and ugly and puckered, as if the ink has quite literally been seared out of his skin.
For a second, his breath catches in his chest, and he bites viciously down on his lip to quell the startled sob rising in his chest – not for the pain, but for a life lost, for a soulmate he never had the chance to fall in love with. It’s irrational, stupid, because he didn’t know them and there was no guarantee he’d ever have met them anyways, but…
But still.
He opens his mouth when he realises he’s made his lip bleed, teeth puncturing through soft skin in his distress. Cursing quietly, he heads into a toilet cubicle to grab some toilet paper, pressing it to the small cut and wiping at the trickle that’s already run down his chin.
Bending down to pick up his shirt, he nearly misses it, only a flash in the corner of his eyes. Frowning, he pauses, straightening up with his shirt clutched in his hand. There’s something on his shoulder, directly over the scar that now adorns it, and he squints at the mirror until he can make out what it is.
This tattoo is different, very different to his last one. Gunmetal grey, it’s hard to notice against the darkness of his skin, not a scrawl but a neat, angular W. It looks like it was printed rather than written, the font formal and computerised, and he sighs, dragging a hand through his hair.
“Fuckin’ peachy,” he mutters, rubbing at his shoulder. He should be grateful, he knows – it’s not guaranteed you’ll get another soulmate if your first one dies – but he can’t help feel like it’s cruel. Like he’s been denied the ability to grieve.
He pulls his shirt on, hides the new marks that he instinctively, irrationally hates, flushes the bloodied tissue down the toilet, and goes back to bed. He doesn’t sleep.
-x-
It takes weeks for the W on his shoulder to stop feeling like it’s burning a hole through his armour, and over a month to stop hating the sharp-edged neatness of it, stop hating what it stands for.
-x-
Church is the first one to notice it at the base he gets transferred to, the grey W warped by the shiny scar tissue underneath it when Tucker wanders into the kitchen one morning shirtless. It’s a little hard to see against the dark of his skin, especially for someone as bleary-eyed and obviously in need of coffee as Church, so it’s the scar that gets commented on first.
“What happened to your shoulder?” asks Church, still half-asleep and voice thick with morning roughness that overlays his curiosity.
Tucker’s hand shoots up to cover it, an automatically protective gesture. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” he mutters, pushing toast into the toaster and staring at the timer, willing it to count down to zero so he can take it and get the hell out of here.
“What is it?” asks Church, through a mouthful of food. “Were you injured, or- woah, is that your soulmate tattoo?” His hand drops to his hip, thumbing automatically over his own mark. “That’s a fucking weird tattoo, man.”
“I said, I don’t wanna talk about it.” Tucker’s voice is sharp, uncharacteristically hard as he grabs his toast and stalks out of the kitchen back to his room, where there’ll be no more prying eyes or uncomfortable questions.
Church never asks questions about it again – a silent agreement between the two of them, though Church never apologises for his initial questions. Not that Tucker expected him to. He’s careful to leave his shirt on at all times after that, though. His shoulders are never uncovered again.
(Other than when he sleeps, of course. Then, he lies in bed and wraps an arm over his shoulder, thumb running across the dips and ridges that mark out where his golden D used to be, and quietly mourns for the soulmate he never got to know.)
-x-
There’s something wrong with Epsilon. Wash knows it, the moment they attach the tiny chip to the back of his neck, the moment the AI downloads itself into his head and starts screaming.
The weight and pressure of it, of Epsilon’s distress, sends them both collapsing to the floor; sends Wash’s hands tangling in his own hair and his knees curling into his chest, trying to protect himself, ground himself in the physical pain against the information that’s making his skull fracture and crack beneath the sheer volume and horror of it. It doesn’t work, doesn’t work, and he when he closes his eyes Epsilon grabs him and sweeps him up and he’s lost inside the tangled lines of code that make up the butchered, broken AI.
AIs don’t have soulmates. AI fragments definitely don’t have soulmates – the idea’s ridiculous, laughable in every way. How could a computer be in love?
But Epsilon is. Every inch of him aches with it, burns with it, and through the memories of torture and failure and death after death after death and system error and I need more time!, there’s a letter carved into the centre of him, code hollowed out and mangled to leave one final mutilation behind.
And Wash knows, knows as they scream out with two voices and one mind, scream for what’s been done to them and by them. He knows exactly what that A stands for.
“Allison!”
-x-
As it turns out, Tucker’s not the only one with an unusual soulmate tattoo on blue base. Caboose’s tattoo is… weird.
“Do you even know what this is?” asks Church, gesturing to where a navy C is scrawled across the centre of Caboose’s palm in flowery lettering. It’s mostly a rhetorical question but, as usual, Caboose misses the finer points of intonation and meaning and takes it seriously.
“Yes,” he says, sounding proud of himself. “It’s the name of my best friend! You’re my best friend, Church.”
Tucker doubles over laughing as Church swears a blue streak into the air, wondering quite how anyone can be that oblivious.
“My first name isn’t even Church!” he howls, denial and semi-genuine fear written all over his face. “No, no. I’m not Caboose’s soulmate. No fucking way am I getting stuck with him for all eternity. No way. Besides, I’ve already got a soulmate, so it can’t be him.”
Wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, Tucker shakes his head. “Calm down, dude. There’s probably plenty of Churches in the galaxy.” It’s not exactly a common name, but the sheer numbers of humans out there makes it ridiculously unlikely that any name won’t be shared by at least one other person. “Besides, it’s not even like it says Church, it’s just a C.”
“There are?” Caboose asks, wide-eyed. “There are lots of Churches?! He got cloned? Who cloned him?” He looks slightly offended when Tucker starts laughing again, but only slightly, busy with being confused.
As the three of them watch, the letter on Caboose’s palm flickers for a second, blurs and disappears, to be replaced with an aqua T.
“What the hell?” breathes Church, grabbing at Caboose’s fingers to press a thumb against the T now written there, in something that looks suspiciously similar to Comic Sans. It disappears as Caboose’s attention focuses on him, the C appearing in its place, and Church drops Caboose’s hand like he’s been burned.
Caboose looks alarmed as he pulls his hand away, clutching it tight to his chest with wide eyes, fingers curled protectively over the name on his palm. “What is it?” he asks, staring intently at Church. “What has happened? Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, Caboose, I’m… fine,” says Church, running a hand through his hair and frowning. “Just- does it do that a lot? Your tattoo, I mean. Does it change what it says depending on who you’re talking to?”
“Yes,” says Caboose. “Of course it does! I have lots of friends. I have you, and Tucker, and Sheila, and I used to have Flowers, and there was that one time the yellow guy didn’t shoot at me, which sort of makes him my friend…”
“Well,” says Tucker, finally over his laughing fit and looking at Caboose with a raised eyebrow. “That’s weird. Really fucking weird.” He shrugs, though, not looking overly bothered. “Hey, look on the bright side, Church – at least you’re not stuck with him forever. Just for however long we’re stuck in this box canyon.”
It is really weird, and Church has never heard of anything like it before in his entire life – but hell, they’re all sort of weird. Caboose with his name-changing tattoo that marks whoever he’s talking to as his soulmate, Tucker with the tattoo right over a scar that he refuses to talk about, and himself…
He reaches down unconsciously, presses a palm over the jagged slash of a midnight-black T on his hip, hidden underneath his shirt, and sighs. “Just most of forever, then,” he says, groaning quietly at Caboose’s delighted gasp.
“Do you really mean that?” he asks, like a kid who’s been told Christmas is coming early. “Are you really going to stay here forever? That is fantastic, we can have sleepovers every night and I will get Tucker to make us cookies.”
And just like that, Blue Base is back to normal.
-x-
Church (or Epsilon, whoever he is now, but he still feels like Church) doesn’t even have a body in the memory unity, let alone skin, but he somehow knows he has a soulmate tattoo. It’s on his hip, he can feel it there, like some strange kind of phantom limb – a jagged T, black and striking, slashed across the skin he doesn’t have.
It aches, insistently, like a hole inside of him that he can’t quite fill.
“I forget you,” he says, in the end, voice soft and tight with the effort of stopping it from shaking. The pain in his hip flares one last time, huge and jagged and overwhelming, before it goes – leaving a hole behind it that’s, somehow, even worse than before.
He doesn’t feel relieved, just numb; like a hand’s wrapped around his throat and squeezed, until the world drifted out of focus from lack of air.
When he turns around, Tex is gone.
-x-
No one asks Carolina about her soulmate tattoo, which is probably a blessing.
To be fair, no one’s asked Wash about his, either. Caboose talks about his all the time, except he calls it a best friends mark. Tucker mentions his every so often, but it’s brief and vague and more often than not some joke about how the universe is depriving so many people of fantastic sex by only giving him one soulmate. It always falls a little flat, like his heart’s not quite in it.
Epsilon- Church has been silent on the subject since he left the memory unit, other than to put five dollars (that he didn’t have) into the betting pool that’s sprung up between blue team and Donut as to when Grif and Simmons will finally get it on.
Tucker had asked him, once, if he knew what Carolina’s soulmate tattoo said, and he’d shook his head, moved away before Tucker could press further.
He’s never seen it – impressive, considering the close quarters they all kept and the low priority that a sense of decency had on all of their mental checklists, so it’s probably somewhere fairly private – but he could probably take a guess at what it said, regardless.
He remembers the way York used to look at her, the way she’d tilt her head in towards his just the slightest bit whenever he was talking to her, and he suspects that her tattoo is no longer a tattoo, but a scar.
-x-
“You keep doing that,” says Wash, absently, peering over at Tucker who’s sat on the ground, rubbing his shoulder. They’re both breathing hard, Wash sporting a split lip and a Tucker aching ribs and a cut over one cheekbone – neither of them are pulling their punches, even though they’re only supposed to be practicing. It’s not really in either of their natures.
Tucker looks up, frowns. “Huh?” His fingers don’t leave his shoulder, rubbing slow circles into skin covered by fabric the same colour as his armour, an unconscious gesture that he draws some modicum of comfort from.
“Your shoulder,” clarifies Wash, reaching one arm over his shoulder and the other behind his back to stretch, wincing when something clicks. He’s not old, yet, not by a long shot, but every reminder that he’s not as young as he used to be grates on him. “You keep touching it. You’ve not injured it, have you?”
Shaking his head, Tucker pushes himself to his feet again. “Nah,” he says, hand falling back to his side. “An old scar. It just- aches, sometimes.” He shrugs his shoulders, half-drops into a basic defensive stance with his arms raised, expecting another round of Wash yelling at him about weak punches and sloppy defences – before straightening when he realises the other man is still staring at him, a question in his eyes.
“I- lost my first soulmate,” he explains, after a second, quiet and awkward. It’s been years, and the memory of it still manages to make the cockiness drain out of him, manages to make him feel hollow and aching. “I was just turned eighteen, still in basic training. Happened in the middle of the night. I… was lucky, I guess, I got matched up a second time, but…” He shrugs one shoulder and grins, a flash of white teeth that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Wash stares at him for a second, blankly, before realising that the expectant look in Tucker’s eyes means he’s supposed to share his story in return, and his fingers brush over his forearm before he can stop them. There’s a patch of skin there, pale and discoloured where everything else is pink and tan from the sun, and his fingertips linger there for a second before he shoves his hands in his pockets.
Tucker’s always assumed it was a burn or something, just another scar – god knows Wash has enough of them – but something in the tightness of Wash’s jaw makes him think differently. Perhaps he lost a soulmate, too.
Then Wash says, “I don’t have a soulmate,” curt and clipped, and Tucker starts.
“You mean, they died?” Sometimes people just don’t have soulmates, not even a platonic one – it’s unusual, though, a one-in-a-thousand chance. After all the other crap that’s been heaped on Wash, Tucker struggles to believe the universe would be cruel enough to inflict that on him, too.
He manages to miss the warning signals, the way one of Wash’s hands has curled into a fist, the defensive hunch of his shoulders and the shadows in his eyes.
“No.” Wash bites down on the inside of his cheek, a muscle in his jaw jumping, curling a protective palm over the discoloured skin near the inside of his elbow. “I had one. Before the-” He swallows, closes his eyes, exhales slowly.
“The freelancer project,” he continues finally, flat and monotone, like he’s talking about ancient history instead of his own past, “was cutting-edge. We had the best technology, the best back-up, the most highly trained and well-equipped operatives of any division.”
He opens his eyes and they’re angry, cold and sharp-edged as steel. “There was an incident.” Connie betrayed them, priceless technology and important information leaked into the hands of the enemy, a life wasted for something he hadn’t even understood at the time. “An operative ended up… emotionally compromised. They decided, after that, that in order to minimise that risk all freelancer operatives would have their soulmate tattoos removed. Forcibly, if necessary.”
Tucker’s eyes widen. “What the- fuck, I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen! That’s fucking messed up. I-” The apology sticks in his throat, unnatural and spiky, and by the time he manages to choke it into his mouth, Wash’s back is turned.
“No more training today, private,” he says, head held high and shoulders squared, fighting stance written in every line of his body. He’s looking for a fight, looking for violence, and Tucker takes an automatic step back. “Dismissed.”
Tucker isn’t stupid enough to argue with that.
-x-
“Me and Doc aren’t soulmates,” says Donut. “He’s got a G on his ribs, and I… well, I’m not sure what it is, but I think it might be some kind of alien letter. But since we’re not exactly meeting that many new people or aliens at the moment, we figured we’d give it a go, right? Not got anything to lose, after all.”
He watches Wash shudder, feels the flinch of it from where the ex-freelancer’s head is cradled in his lap, and for a second he thinks the other man might be having a lucid period – but then Wash moans, opens eyes that are bright and cloudy with fever for a half-second, and his heart sinks.
“Grif and Simmons are soulmates,” he continues, bright and determined, because he can’t think of anything to do other than talk, and he can’t think of anything to say other than dumb romantic nonsense, as if they don’t have bigger problems. “I don’t think they’ve realised it, yet, but Grif’s got an R on his ankle, and Simmons has a D on his thigh – I saw it in the showers. So I suppose I cheated in that betting pool Tucker set up, hmm? Because I already know for sure that they’re soulmates.”
Wash’s eyes slip shut again, lips half-parted, and Donut can feel the heat coming off his forehead with his palm an inch away from the skin.
Untreated shoulder wounds, cramped, dirty cells, and regular interrogation is, apparently, a bad combination. The skin around the injury is red and swollen, infected, almost as hot as his forehead, and the noise Wash makes when Donut presses tentative fingers against it is small and broken.
“You should prepare yourself for the worst, son,” says Sarge, quietly. “He’s not looking good.” His eyes are heavy, old in a way they’ve never been before despite him being the oldest of them all, and Donut can’t stand it.
He looks away, cards his fingers through Wash’s sweat-soaked hair, and carries on talking – because it’s the only thing he can do.
-x-
“Your first name is David.”
It’s not exactly the first thing Wash wants to hear after being held hostage for a month, especially not from the first familiar face he’s seen since he woke up in what he’s guessing is the rebel’s medical ward, held together by bandages and stitches and antibiotics. “I don’t go by that any more,” he says, quietly, voice raspy with both disuse and over-use. “What, no welcome back, Wash, thanks for sacrificing yourself so I could live?”
Tucker’s practically vibrating with excitement, the name Locus had used to address Washington feeling like fire on the tip of his tongue. “Yeah, but it’s still your first name,” he says, perching on the edge of the ex-freelancer’s bed crossing his legs under him to keep them from twitching. “When did you join project freelancer?”
Groaning, Wash turns his face into the pillow, closes his eyes. “What the hell is this, twenty questions?” he asks. Every inch of him aches, worry for Donut and Sarge heavy in his chest – no one’s told him anything about them, except that they’re alive – and now Tucker’s trying to start up the interrogation he’s just escaped all over again. “Piss off, I want to sleep.”
It’s not enough to deter Tucker, though, who grabs his wrist. Thankfully, it’s the one without an IV in it, but it’s unwanted physical contact even so and Wash tries to pull away. “When?”
“I was twenty five,” says Wash, to try and get him to shut up. His shoulder still aches, despite the actual medical attention, and the last thing he wants to do right now is contemplate the past.
That’s too early by about two years, Tucker realises, after some quick mental math, and his shoulders slump – until he realises he’s been asking the wrong question. “When did you start going by Washington, instead of David?” he asks. “Properly, not just as a code name.”
Wash stills, face still mercifully hidden by the pillow so that Tucker can’t see the string of emotions that runs across it. “Maybe a year, two years after that?” he offers, wearily. “I don’t know, it wasn’t really a… conscious thing.” Just something that happened, as his new-found family fell apart around him and he began to realise that maybe, just maybe, he’d been on the wrong side of the line.
Tucker crows, a loud noise of victory that startles some of the other patients and gets him a dirty look from a nurse treating some low-ranking soldier for a minor training injury. “I knew it!” he says, and it’s only the tenuous remaining threads of his sense of decency that stop him from pulling his shirt off to show Wash his shoulder. “I knew it! You’re the W!”
“…What?” Wash stops trying to suffocate himself in his pillow and turns to stare at Tucker, eyes sleepy with painkillers and full of abject confusion. He’s steadily getting the feeling that he’s missing something important.
Instead of answering, Tucker kisses him. Hard.
It’s a fairly nice kiss, as kisses go. Tucker’s lips are warm and dry and a little bit chapped, the hand he brings up to cup Wash’s jaw pleasantly familiar from the times they’ve sparred together, and god only knows how long it’s been since anyone’s touched him with anything other than pain in mind. But it still doesn’t really answer the question of what the hell is going on.
Perhaps everyone’s gone mad whilst he’s been away. That might explain it.
“My soulmate tattoo was a D, before… before,” says Tucker, when he finally pulls away, licking his lips in a motion that’s probably unconscious nerves but comes across as more successfully seductive than any of his overblown attempts at flirting. “It changed when I’d just turned eighteen. You’d have been twenty six, twenty seven at that point, right?” He pauses, sighs impatiently when he sees the non-comprehension in Wash’s eyes. “It turned into a grey W.”
Understanding sweeps across Wash’s face, and his expression softens into something like sadness. “Tucker… I don’t have a soulmate. We’ve been over this.”
“I know, I know, you don’t have a tattoo. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a soulmate!” There’s something almost pleading in his expression. “What- what was your tattoo, before they removed it?”
“A blue L,” says Wash, refusing to meet his eyes and see the disappointment in them. Tucker’s a good man, underneath the laziness and irresponsibility and the hundred frustrating quirks that make him who he is – he’s driven, charismatic, intelligent, and a good leader when he puts his mind to it. Attractive, too.
His chest aches, and he tells himself it’s his ribs, not the knowledge that he could have grown to love Tucker, if they were soulmates.
But instead of slumping in defeat, Tucker smiles. It’s crooked and bright and kind of beautiful, and he holds out a hand in old-fashioned formality as if they hadn’t locked lips just seconds ago. “Hey,” he says, softly. “My name’s Lavernius Tucker. Nice to meet you. And it’s aqua, not blue.”
Something catches in Wash’s chest and tightens, chokes the air out of him for a long, weightless second. He’d always assumed, when they’d removed his tattoo, that the universe had reassigned his blue- aqua L to someone else, found them someone new and whole.
Apparently, the universe can be a lot kinder than he realised.
He doesn’t say any of that. What he says is, “You asshole! You never told me your name was Lavernius!”
“You never told me yours was David,” counters Tucker, arching an eyebrow, but he’s grinning like a puppy, all teeth and dimples and crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
Wash practically growls. “My name is Washington. Don’t call me that.”
“Fine, fine,” huffs Tucker, rolling his eyes and rubbing a thumb over the creases between Wash’s eyebrows. “Whatever, Washington. Shut the fuck up and kiss me.”
“Romantic,” grumbles Wash, but he tangles a hand in Tucker’s hair a heartbeat later and pulls his head down so he can kiss him, hard, split lip and missing tooth be damned.
They pull apart only when Wash needs to breathe, wheezing a little through fractured ribs, and Tucker passes the time it takes for him to recover by kissing every damn freckle on his face in turn. He manages one cheek and half of Wash’s nose before Wash tilts his head to catch his lips again, gasping like he needs Tucker to breathe.
Wash gets reprimanded and Tucker gets kicked out not too long after that, on the basis that they’re in a medical ward and not a high school corridor, and making out is not allowed – no matter how happy they are that Wash’s still alive.
He sneaks back in, though, less than ten minutes later, so neither of them particularly mind.