Chapter Text
At the exact moment of Harry’s 15th birthday, he can feel it bloom across his skin. After school, when he’s standing in front of the mirror and admiring it, he feels absurdly proud. Like he hadn’t been up last night unable to sleep for worry that he wouldn’t get one. In the face of that the (now it seems so) absurd worry that he wouldn’t have a soulmate, the prospect of finding them looks terribly easy.
Eggsy had kind of forgotten in all honesty. So when the hot flare of something blasts across his hip, it makes him falter enough that Rottie catches him right in the stomach. He stumble inelegantly on the walk, right into Poodle’s punch to the face. Eggsy turns into his fall, scrambling up and away, not looking to continue the row when his ears are ringing and the persistent burn on his hip is taking too much of his attention.
When he gets to the public toilet in the park, he lifts up his shirt and shoves down his pants enough to expose his left hip. Eggy hisses at the look of it. Prods it gently and is thankful that there’s no flare of pain. Because it looks like there should be. A starburst of white with a trailing edge, raised like a scar and there’d be nothing to say otherwise except he didn’t have it yesterday and he hasn’t ever been shot. Because this? This is definitely a gunshot wound, and it’s not his. That leaves only one option.
“Shit.”
Harry hasn’t actually been worried about it, finding his soulmate. He had his mark and the general good advice of the day is to live your life and you and they will cross paths. A fated meeting.
So every new person Harry meets is a potential, even people he’d met before were given their fair shot, now that he has his mark. But it isn’t them. Isn’t any of them. He tries to keep his chin up. Some people meet their matches much later in life, and as Harry’s still in his teenage years, his parents smile slyly and laugh at his impatience.
“No matter when you meet your soulmate, Darling,” his mother says, “tomorrow or twenty years from now, that’s when it’s fated, and you will not be poorer for it.”
He makes the correct noises, tries to bury his obvious upset. But ever since Harry got it, ever since that beautiful thing appeared on his chest, he’s been waiting with little patience.
It’s just. They’re perfect. Whoever they are, whoever this mark belongs to, they’re actually perfect. Everyone must say that about their destined, but Harry means it. Really and truly.
He knows he’ll find them. Knows they’ll coming into his life or he into theirs and then he’ll show them how much they’re loved. Until then he’ll trace the mark with his fingers every night and hope his other knows that Harry’s waiting for them.
Eggsy crashes at Jamal’s for a while after that. The flat isn’t really an option right now. Eggsy’d been had by some druggie with a gun, demanding product Eggsy swore up and down he didn’t have until the first warning shot—that was a warning only for how twitchy the dudes hands were.
Eggsy gave it to him then, some of Dean’s ‘inventory’ that he was supposed to bring to an exchange fifteen minutes before the whole fucking mess. He wasn’t about to lose his life for some shit drugs. But he wasn’t stupid either. Eggsy kept as much as he could dare to in the face of the shaky man with the shaking gun that still had a wisp of smoke coming from the end. If he lost some, he’d only get beat. If he lost it all…well, gunshot might be preferable.
Rottie and Poodle found him on the way back to the flat. They didn’t even wait to get the story before they started wailing on him. Not that he expected to sit for a cuppa, but still. When they got his pack and the drugs that he was able to keep, Rottie said that Eggsy was keepin it for himself. And so they started in on him again, both knowing full well that Eggsy doesn’t even do drugs.
And then the mark happened. His soul mark.
Looking at it now in Jamal’s mirror, he sees he was right from that first impression in the dirty broken glass of the public toilet. It spider webs a few centimeters in all directions, one bit trailing father still on the outer side, and at the center is the raised pucker of silvery skin. He doesn’t really like to touch it, brain still telling him with conviction that it’s going to hurt. At this point his bruises from Rottie and Poodle are all but gone. This though, this is going to stay.
“Fuckin’ hell, mate,” Eggsy pulls down his shirt, but from the wide-eyed look on Jamal’s face, it’s obvious he saw it, “that bastard pull a gun on you, Eggsy? I shoulda known when you said you was staying here for such a stint without calling your mum or nothing.”
Eggsy places his hand lightly against his shirt over the soul mark—the wound—and thinks for a moment that it does hurt.
“Mate, Dean doesn’t have the balls for it, ‘sides, where’d a wanker like him get a gun? No, some druggie man—American by the accent, caught me in an alley and—” Eggsy makes the finger motion. Gun going off. He can almost hear it again. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe he did get shot. The druggie caught him in the hip and he’s been healing up at Jamal’s. He could almost believe it.
“God,” Jamal seems beside himself and Eggsy has the best mate ever, caring about him like that, “we gotta have my mum check it, yeah? She gets off shift at nine.”
“No, ‘s fine, all done with.”
“Eggsy, gunshot wounds don’t just heal like nothing!”
“Well, this one did, Mate.”
It’s when Harry nearing the end of university that he really starts to worry. He thought he’d found his other half a few times, thought he was done searching and hoping and waiting. But they were never it. No matter how hard Harry wanted it to be the person in front of him—even when he couldn’t believe in his heart that there would be another he’d love more—it never was.
The woman, the one Harry was willing to forsake marks for, to say hell to fate for and never leave her side, to recite all the greatest love stories that featured un marked or mismarked pairs that fought against the cruel hand of fate to find their true love to show his devotion, his resolve…she found her soulmate the week before he planned his declaration. For that Harry’s kind of lucky. Saved him from making a right tit of himself, didn’t it.
To see her and her soulmate together though, even as it hurt like nothing else, he could say he’d never seen someone so happy, so alive with love.
He’s overstayed his welcome at Jamal’s. He’s got to go back to the flat sometime, yeah? Might as well be now. Eggsy breaths out and taps the medal hidden under his shirt, just to feel it. As he’s stepping out the door, ready to start the march back, the idea comes to him so quick he can’t believe he didn’t come up with it before. He needs to get back to the flat, check on his mum and resume the pitiful thing known as his life. But Dean’s not going to take excuses. His position as Michelle’s son only goes so far, and for how gone she’s been lately it really doesn’t count for much.
His word means nothing. But even Dean won’t ignore proof.
Eggsy goes back to the flat, walks right past Rottie and Doberman and through the door with such steadfast determination that it takes them both a moment to process who it is. Dean’s on the couch with a beer in his hands and there’s his mum, sitting beside him with the telly on, seemingly engrossed in daytime tv before he interrupted. She hadn’t tried to call him. He’d checked.
“Eggsy!” she’s halfway to standing when Dean puts his arm out, blocking her way with more presence than force. She looks at him, then at Eggsy before she sits. Her hands are shaking. He wonders if Dean’s been withholding her drugs because of him. He can feel Rottie and Doberman behind him now, looming.
“Show your face again, will you? After swiping my product and failing to uphold your end, eh, Boy?”
“I didn’t steal your drugs,” Eggsy spits, yanks his clothes aside to show it—the jagged edges of the mark that’s supposed to represent his very soul and how it ties with another—“I got fucking shot for your goddamn drugs.”
“Oh, baby…” his mum puts a hand to her mouth, eyes wet. She doesn’t get up.
Dean stands, comes over with his eyes narrowed and Eggsy can feel Rottie and Doberman coming closer too. (This better fucking work.) Dean prods it, hard. Eggsy doesn’t have to fake the hiss of pain as much as he’d like.
“How’re you still alive, Boy?”
Rottie comes around his left side and gives the wound a look, then he looks at Eggsy with something like impressed. Eggsy ignores him, feeling to exposed as it is. Let’s his shirt fall flat.
“Lucky.”
Dean laughs, “Not enough to not get shot.” He pulls out his wallet, “Go get me some smokes, boy.”
Eggsy grabs the cash. Mum stays sitting, looking at him but not seeing him. He turns abruptly. Doberman and Rottie startle as he walks between them with the same purpose he arrived.