Chapter Text
Eliot is six when he gets his first soulmark, fourteen when he gets his second. His first sits on his left hip, a small, delicate snowflake-like pattern appears with a flash of connection. A flash of belonging. To what, he’s not quite sure. The second appears on the inside of his right wrist, it’s simpler, a circle with wavy lines that reminds him a bit of the sun. Like all soulmarks, they’re gold.
As a kid, he doesn’t worry much about them. Soulmarks aren’t promises. There’s no guarantee that you'll ever meet them, just a hope that you might someday. Occasionally, he gets flashes of pain on his hip. Not enough to raise any red flags. Nothing that couldn’t be explained by a rather rambunctious childhood, but Eliot worries nevertheless.
When he starts dating Aimee, thoughts of meeting his soulmates leaves his mind entirely. After all, soulmarks aren’t promises and he has a girl that can match his temper and fire and he’s gonna marry her when he gets older. 2.5 children, white picket fence, the whole nine yards.
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Parker is born with a soulmark on her left hip.
She learns quickly that she has nothing, belongs nowhere. Everything Parker’s ever had has been taken from her, her home, her parents, eventually her brother, but the soulmark remains. It’s stupid, she knows, to stake your hopes on a complete stranger, but when she’s cold and hungry and her newest foster parents are too loud and hurting her, she can’t help but find comfort in the fact that someone. Someone out there is waiting for her, wants her. Someone out there is feeling the pain alongside her, a phantom hand holding hers and telling her to endure. Promising her that someday she will be wanted and loved. It’s stupid and it’s so, so stupid, but she has nothing else so she holds onto that.
When she’s eight and on the streets, she finds another in the shape of a flower between her shoulder blades.
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Hardison is born with two soulmarks, a flower on his back and a swirly circle on his wrist, golden and shining against his dark skin.
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Eliot is 16 when he joins the Army. He finds a recruiter who hasn’t met their quota, who’s willing to fake a few papers, and enlists. The recruiter asks if he has any soulmarks.
He says no.
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Eliot is barely 17 the first time he kills. It’s his first firefight, the first time his fight or flight response kicks in and he chooses to fight, like he will every time after. It’s the first time he gets shot, he doesn’t remember the bullet entering his body, but the pain is all too real. And as his vision fades, he feels with terrible certainty that he is dying.
It’s the first time of many he wakes up to white hospital walls and the beeping of heart monitors and the static of distant announcements over the PA.
He is barely 17 when he first understands why the Army offers to remove the soulmarks of any soldier who has them. Out there somewhere, innocent strangers were paying for his mistakes. Taking his bullet wounds alongside him. More collateral damage from a war that they never asked for. Out there, there were people who were soulmates with a murderer.
Eliot is sure, whoever they are, they don’t deserve this. Whoever they are, they deserve better than him.
The night he’s discharged from the hospital, he takes his knife and digs those marks out of his skin.
If soulmarks were promises, then he had broken his.
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Parker’s not sure how old she is, but it’s December and the streets are rapidly becoming too cold to stay on. She’s been curled up in a cubicle of an abandoned office building, unable to move, her soulmark burning in shared pain for the last two days, but today it’s faded enough that she can no longer ignore the growling hunger in her stomach.
She unfolds and creeps outside, the cold biting easily through the thin coat she had picked up a few months ago. She’s making her way downtown when suddenly, the pain in her hip flares up, her vision blacks out.
When she regains her senses, she’s curled up in the snow. She’s not sure how long she’s been laying there. But worse than the cold and hunger that have drilled all the way into her bones, is the lack of connection. Something that has been there for as long as she can remember, is gone. Has been taken from her.
Parker doesn’t remember crawling back to her building, but she must have. All she remembers is the sobbing, the emptiness, the loneliness. The soulmark that was all that she had for so long, was nothing but a pale scar left on her hip. It’s stupid, so, so stupid, to have believed that anyone would have been waiting for her.
It is winter when Parker learns that she has nothing, and the only way to keep anything was to steal it.
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Even in his earliest memories, Hardison could never remember a time where the mark on his wrist wasn’t a pale white scar.
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Everyone in his unit notices Eliot’s new scars. No one says a thing.
The next time he wakes up in that white hospital room, it’s a small relief to know that there isn’t anyone on the other end of the line.
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Parker checks her back in the mirrored reflection of the dark windows every morning, terrified that one day, she will find the golden flower dull and dead.
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Hardison wears long sleeves.
It’s bad enough that he’s a black kid with dead parents being passed from foster parent to foster parent like a hot potato. He doesn’t need them to know that his soulmate’s dead too.
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Later, when he finds himself at Moreau’s doorstep, Eliot will wish that he had dug deeper that night. Dug deeper until he hit an artery and bled out. He will wish that he had never lived long enough to see himself become a monster.
If there is a saving grace, it is that there are no soulmates for a monster like him.