Chapter Text
Jeremy is twelve when it happens.
It spreads like water spilled across a table. His arm aches all day, and he wonders at multiple points about the chances that he’s having a heart attack (his sisters don’t stop mentioning that for a week afterwards) but he wakes up the next morning not dead and with a splash of something that, as he watches it, fades into a bright, spring green, stretching from wrist to shoulder, that makes him smile instinctively.
His soulmate is happy.
It’s not unusual to get a mark so early. Nor is it entirely normal, but that doesn’t bother Jeremy. In small-town America, it probably should do. Nothing good came from being different, he thinks, but when Jeremy shows his mom the splash of colour sprawling up from his wrist to his shoulder, the back of his dad’s neck lights up in a swipe of blinding yellow and she makes him pancakes for breakfast, so… maybe it ain’t so bad to be this kind of different. The pancakes are really good, and his mom strokes his hair, and she’s so infectiously happy that Jeremy is too.
When he shows his friends, the reaction is different. Some of them are spooked by it; they’re still kids, they say, it’s super early, how old is Jeremy’s soulmate? Some of them are fascinated, and Jeremy becomes the talk of the cafeteria for approximately five minutes, until Charlie Green drops his lunch tray and the conversation moves on.
No one really knows how it works. There’s no real set time for it. One day it’s not there, the next day it is, and the best anyone can really figure (past it’s just fate) is it shows up when it’s needed. But the it’s just fate argument really does win out on this. People don’t understand the soulmate thing, that’s why they call it soulmate. It conjures up images of the universe working, the wheels of destiny turning, conspiring to bring people together at just the right moment and in just the right way. Not that it’s common to find one’s soulmate, not at all. The world is vast, it sprawls out in every direction, and among seven billion people, to find your One? It’s a needle in a haystack kind of situation. It’s more than rare, it’s practically impossible. The odds are astronomical.
Jeremy’s parents managed it, though. Somehow. He thinks that’s probably what makes him such a fierce defender of his mark. The slightest insinuation that it’ll come to nothing, that he’ll spend his teenage years, his twenties, thirties (the best years of your life) searching for that person whom he’ll never find, and Jeremy is ready to fight. He’s small and scrappy and propped up by the conviction that he will find his soulmate and prove people wrong. It serves him well, even if his counter to every argument is essentially what if it does happen? What if it does, right? What if, one day, the person the universe has decided is the perfect fit for him shows up right on his doorstep? It’s not unthinkable, it’s not something that’s never, ever happened before, and just because it’s something that has been largely relegated to 80s movies and pulp fiction, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still happen. He should be wary about getting his hopes up too much, shouldn’t he, but he isn’t, because Jeremy Knox is by nature an optimist and nothing about this situation is bad.
Nothing is bad, and then it is.
Jeremy is twelve and a half. It’s about five in the morning when he wakes up. He doesn’t know why he wakes. Nothing wakes him. But he’s there, wide-eyed, staring up at the ceiling and hating the fact that he’s up so early during summer break. It’s not fair, he thinks despondently as he leans over to pick up the glass of water on his nightstand. And then drops it. Water spills across the floor just as colour had spilled over his arm not six months earlier. The colour is still there, but it’s not the same; he calls for his mom before he registers he’s doing it. The telltale burn in his eyes gives him a second’s warning before the hot tears roll down his cheeks, but he can’t stop staring at his arm even as his vision blurs and wavers. The combination of indigos and reds and deep khakis is awful, muddy, purpling like bruises where the colours meet and swirl together. He stares and stares, and he can’t put it together, not when the day before he’d woken up yet again with green and blue blending into a minty kind of colour that had left him walking on air all day. Now it’s some kind of horrible storm cloud, it’s injury, it’s negativity Jeremy has never felt before and doesn’t recognise, but he knows it’s bad.
His mother bursts into his room, and she takes one second to make sure he’s not in danger, then fully recognises his state.
“I think they’re dying.”
“Oh, honey.” Her gentle tone does nothing to soothe him, and she settles lightly onto the bed next to him, swipes her thumbs under his eyes, reaches out to take his hand and coax his arm away from his chest where, without noticing, he’s tucked it inwards as if to stop his soulmate from hurting. Her sharp intake of breath says much more than her next words do.
“Cariño, no, if they die the colours fade. It’s alright, it’s going to be okay.”
Jeremy sobs, leaning over to sag against his mom - he’s almost 13, and he’s just starting to grow out of this, but when you need your mom you need your mom, you know? and Jeremy won’t ever be ashamed of that - and cradles his arm again. “But what happened?” he asks through hitched breaths and snot and raw, wet eyes, and his mother doesn’t answer.
“Chéri, faut nous faire confiance, s’il te plaît.”
Jean’s mother is crying.
“Ils veilleront bien sur toi. Je te promets.”
The betrayal is unfathomable. It crawls up Jean’s throat, it wraps itself tightly around him, binds him until he can’t speak or even breathe as he steps onto an airplane - the first airplane he’s been on! - with two strangers and a boy he doesn’t know and leaves his family behind for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.
His wrist is bright red, like a warning light. It tells him someone else is afraid.
Jeremy spends the next day in a state of near catatonia. Even his sisters know to leave him alone. He lies in bed and he stares at his arm and he watches the awful, muddy colours of betrayal and sadness. His mom brings him soup. He doesn’t eat it.
“You have to eat,” she murmurs, smoothing his hair away from his forehead. Jeremy doesn’t reply.
She sighs and leaves him alone.
The shifting play of colour over Jeremy’s skin doesn’t lighten up the next day, nor the day after that. He doesn’t really understand what’s going on, because he’s not quite 13 and that kind of agony is far away from his own experience of the world. He’s never seen a soulmark like his. It’s big, so big, and so dark. The colour, he knows, isn’t specific to his own mark, but it’s pretty fucking specific in his town. No one he knows sees those colours so regularly. No one he knows sees the blacks that set his teeth on edge. The yellows, so bright they’re almost neon, an unsettling not-colour that makes him anxious for reasons he doesn’t fully know yet. The white, the deep red, the horribly bright red. It spooks him every time he sees it. He doesn’t know what they mean - it’s only been a few months, he doesn’t recognise every awful thing his soulmate feels, but he knows that it’s awful. He knows that whatever is happening, it’s bad. What’s almost worse than that, though, is walking around with evidence of the bad stuff splashed across his skin. Walking through town and seeing people stare is enough to make him want to stay home for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t. What he does is raise his chin, smile brightly, and put on a jacket as soon as the air cools down enough to allow it.
He spends the whole summer like that. They go to Mexico to visit his mom’s family, and Jeremy wears t-shirts with elbow length sleeves and deflects questions about the indigo stain with disarming smiles and questions of his own designed to change the subject. When they get home, he’s more tanned than ever, but his arm is an ugly combination of black and bright, bright yellow, almost too bright to be yellow. Like a neon light, a cheap, buzzing sign that signals to anyone who sees it that this is not a place to hang around.
Part of Jeremy wonders what colour he is: whether he’s gentle yellow, like his mom’s happy colour; whether he’s dark blue, like the colour that makes him feel so sad, so lonely, that when it shows up on his arm it breaks his heart; whether he’s something completely different. He’s always thought about that, even before his mark showed up. He’s wanted to know what he would look like on someone else’s skin. It’s the kind of thing kids dream about, and then grow out of dreaming about, only Jeremy’s fast approaching his teenage years (as his abuela calls them) and he hasn’t stopped dreaming yet.
He still thinks about that green. The first sign of someone else out there.
It’s strange how much that colour sticks in his mind. He never sees it anymore. He hasn’t seen it in months. But he remembers exactly how it looks on his skin, he recognises it in the strangest places, and every time he sees it, he remembers how happy it made him. He’s associating colours in the world more and more with the ones he sees on his arm; it’s not good, because it just reminds him that the person he’s thinking about could be on the other side of the world, might never be in the same place as him. It’s silly, it’s sentimental, and it’s bordering on unhealthy, but Jeremy wants so desperately to meet them that he uses the links he draws to remind himself of that. To remind himself that one day, he’ll find whoever it is that’s hurting so badly, and he’ll do everything in his power to make sure they never feel that way again. When he’s grown up, he’ll be able to do that. Right now, all he can do is watch the shifting emotions and respond to them the only way he knows to; he smiles.
His mother once told him that if he smiled, the world would smile with him. And, well, Jeremy really hopes that’s true right now.
By the time school starts up again, he’s good at smiling and even better at ignoring his mark.
Jean thinks about his soulmate in shades of yellow: soft buttercup yellow; bright, glowing yellow; the sort of yellow that spreads like warmth, like melting butter on toast. It’s the colour he sees the most.
He never used to like yellow. It wasn’t that he hated it, but it was never a favourite. Too bright and it would set him on edge; too dark and it just looked gross.
So it’s weird that Jean’s soulmate reminds him of yellow.
His mark is a beautiful thing. It has been since the day it appeared, curling from the back of his hand, just under his index finger knuckle, around his wrist and wriggling up the vein on the inside of his forearm before it tapers off into nothing. He spends an inordinate amount of time staring at it. And he’s angry; he was always going to be angry. He’s angry that he’s here, in a strange country. He hates the people who took him; they don’t let him speak French, they slice his accent out of his throat and leave him with ugly, bland English. He hates the Nest; it’s dark, he doesn’t get to see the sun, he has to share a room. He hates Exy; it’s an incredibly American sport, and its only upside is that he gets to take out his anger on the boy whose family took him.
That idea gets beaten out of him within a month.
He trains hard because he has to train hard. There’s a number drawn on his face reminding him that he will never be the best, but he’s been chosen and that means he has to constantly strive to be the best. He’s always, always moving towards a goal that takes two steps back for every one he takes forward. It’s not fair.
He’s pissed, and he responds to what upsets him accordingly. It makes him incredibly disliked. Maybe, he thinks, if he pisses them off in return they’ll send him home. If he rebels, he’ll get his way. He’ll escape. It doesn’t happen.
What happens instead is that the boy with the sharp, mean face and unkind smile is given the task of adjusting his ‘attitude’. The boy’s brother watches and does nothing, says nothing. When it’s over and Jean is shaking on the floor, throat raw and dry from pleading, the brother comes to his side and says, in halting French, “lève-toi.” He says, “tu dois arrêter de l’énerver.” He says, “ne lui demande pas grâce.” Jean stands up and swears, spits blood on the floor as his knees shake under his weight and the brother slides a careful arm around him.
“J’veux partir,” he says, “j’veux plus être ici.” He gets an unapologetic shrug, but he also gets bandages and what little aspirin the brother can give him.
Sometimes, Jeremy’s arm is purple. It starts with either deep red or sky blue. One of those colours will inevitably swirl into the other, and the purple explodes across his skin like a paintball. It’s bright, it’s in-your-face, it’s defiant. It refuses to be ignored or overlooked. He’s proud of his soulmate when that happens, because it feels like they’re fighting back. At thirteen, Jeremy can’t imagine what they’re fighting back against, but he’s clever enough to know that it’s something bad.
The feeling of dépaysement, Jean hopes, will fade. In a year, maybe two. By the time three years have passed, it hasn’t faded. But he’s much better at pretending it has. He thinks, I don’t belong there anymore. That’s not home. It doesn’t help. Because if that isn’t home, and this isn’t home, then he has nowhere.
Life at a university when he’s only fifteen is weird. It’s taken him years to shed his accent - years and so many bruises - and it’s a process that is absolutely helped along by Riko and his hatred of Jean’s native language. He doesn’t let Jean have anything of his own. Out of spite, Jean teaches Kevin French early on. He doesn’t tell anyone and neither does Kevin, but Kevin will come to his side when Riko leaves him alone, will kneel next to him and talk so quietly that if it weren’t for the crushing silence that sits heavily over the Nest, Jean wouldn’t hear him. In return, Kevin shares his voice with Jean, lets him co-opt it and practice mimicking him to even out his own voice. But even with his new, neatly clipped American accent, Jean doesn’t belong there. He’s too young, for starters. He’s too serious. His soulmark is too bright. He’s not as good at Exy as the other two (at least at first. That changes.) He doesn’t have a family anymore. He's property. When he turns fifteen, he hits a year long growth spurt that doesn’t stop until he’s over six feet tall, lanky and self-conscious next to the other two. It’s a relief when Kevin comes up just a couple of inches shorter than him. Riko isn’t as angry. When he draws on Jean’s face, tracing over faded ink, he doesn’t dig his nails into Jean’s cheek to hold him still.
That’s worse, somehow. The facade of kindness.
Jeremy is seventeen. He’s on his way to Exy practice. His backpack is falling off his shoulder, his racquet is trying to trip him up, and he’s five minutes late. He shoulders through the door of the locker room and cries out, stumbling, as his arm lights up white. For a moment, his brain tells him that he’s the one in pain. Then it catches up and he wishes it hadn’t. It’s been a while since his soulmate has hurt so much that it eclipses everything else, but now the only colour he can see is white. There’s a dull ache on his cheek, just below his temple, and his eyes are watering in sympathy. He doesn’t know what’s happening, he thinks he must have hit his face on the door when he tripped, but when he makes his way over to the mirror there’s no bruise or anything. Just pain.
His coach eyes him critically when he finally makes it onto the court, pale and drawn. He thinks he’s about to get sent home. If he gets sent home, he thinks he’ll lose his mind, and it must show on his face because no one says anything about the way he looks. He plays hard, until he’s out of breath and his legs are burning, and he manages to forget about the pain in his face. He doesn’t look at his arm until after his shower, while he’s getting dressed.
There’s nothing there.
It’s not that there’s nothing bad, not that it’s grey and blank like it sometimes is. There’s no colour at all. Jeremy’s never seen anything like it. He knows where the mark should be, and it’s not there. He sits down heavily on the nearest bench as he stares at the empty skin, thinks about crying. Doesn’t cry. He doesn’t know what he would be crying for, he can’t think. His head doesn’t work, it’s full of cotton and it’s buzzing until he can’t hear anything else. It feels like his brain’s been numbed. Like part of him is missing.
His mom’s words come back to him, filtering across years and cutting through all the muddled colours that have been on his skin. If your soulmate dies, the colours fade. His soulmate is dead. They’re dead and he never knew who they were. All Jeremy has done for the last five years is try to help a stranger without ever even knowing their name, where they are, all he’s been able to do is just fucking smile, and now they’re gone. He’ll never know, he won’t get the chance to know. When he drags himself off the bench, his legs are shaking, and he barely makes it to the trash can before he vomits.
Jeremy is seventeen years old and there’s nothing where there should be something. It’s too soon, his mind yells. He swallows back a fresh wave of nausea, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand as he straightens up. The idea of telling his mom terrifies him, but his mark is... his mark was so obnoxiously big that he can’t exactly hide its loss. He scrubs clammy hands over his face and sniffles, and out of pure instinct, a smile slides onto his face.
He smiles because at one point, he had to.
And the longer he smiles, the more his eyes burn, until he’s simultaneously sobbing and grinning, and he has to look insane but there’s no one around to see him so he cries and cries until there’s nothing left. And then, because he’s late and he has to pick up his sisters from ballet on his way home, he gathers his stuff and leaves the locker room, eyes raw but dry, mouth tilted up at the corners. He doesn’t say a word to his sisters, and he thanks God that they don’t notice, just pile into the backseat of his car talking a mile a minute, lean over to kiss his cheek and pull his hair, then settle into bickering about something he doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to listen to. It’s so normal, and it’s so much harder to deal with. Nothing can be normal, surely.
Jeremy takes his time getting out of the car. The girls pile inside, calling for their parents. The sky is blue and clear. It’s warm when he opens the door. He can smell hot asphalt and grass. He focuses on that as he steps out and sees his father on the porch, raising a hand to greet him. There’s a band of something around his wrist; deep grey. It’s like a storm cloud. It’s dark, charcoal coloured. He wouldn’t even have noticed if he weren’t acutely aware of what he’d expected to be empty skin. It’s a bracelet, thin enough to be almost invisible. Jeremy almost breaks down all over again. There’s someone out there.
He grinds out as cheerful a greeting as he can manage as he jogs up the porch steps, and his dad squeezes his shoulder as he disappears inside. Jeremy, on the other hand, takes a minute or two to sit on the steps, backpack leaning against his feet, and pull his jacket off so he can watch colour return. It’s muddy, dark, grey verging on black, but it’s there and he’s never been so grateful for that. He sits there for much longer than the minute he’d intended. The sun is sinking, trembling in the red sky as it lowers towards the horizon, when his mom comes to the door to bring him in for dinner. His jacket is abandoned at his feet, and he’s staring at his arm still. The colour has reached his shoulder again, but it’s faded somehow. Like it’s projected onto his skin, rather than indelibly inked there. He’s afraid to look away in case it disappears completely.
“I think they’re dead,” he says to his mom for the second time in his life when she sits on the step next to him. She smooths his hair back, lets him lean against her, and sighs.
“If your soulmate dies, the colours fade away,” she murmurs again. It’s meant to reassure him, he knows that. It doesn’t reassure him. He doesn’t understand how the colour can return, but Maritsa’s mouth is pinched in worry when he raises his head, so he doesn’t mention it. He smiles, and she smiles in return.
“Thanks, mamá.”
Jean isn’t one for hope. He’s been in the US for seven years now, and he’s just signed away the next five to Edgar Allan University, as if he had a choice otherwise. They have owned him since the day he stepped onto that plane, and, he knows, they will own him until he dies or retires.
(Sometimes he wonders if it’s better to be owned than to be alone.)
Jean lives in the dark. He wears black, he plays in black, the number on his face is inked in stark, permanent black. He lives in a dark room with a boy with a black smile, and the only colour he has is wrapped around his wrist, indelible and shining even in the dark. A vivid reminder of his soulmate’s continuing existence. He doesn’t think it makes much of a difference to him whether they’re alive or not.
(It’s not true. If his mark weren’t there, he would shatter.)
It’s dazzlingly bright. There’s always colour. Even in what must be his soulmate’s worst moments, when the colour is stormy grey-blue, like slate under lashing rain. There’s always colour; it never dims, never fades. It’s like there’s too many feelings going on at once for his mark to convey.
(His favourite is when it’s yellow.)
Yellow like a nightlight. It doesn’t burn, it glows. It’s like the sun he so rarely gets to enjoy anymore, like sunset clipping the tips of waves. He doesn’t see much yellow in the Nest. It’s happiness, it’s contentment, joy, optimism. It’s hope for the present and for the future. Jean will always struggle to find the words to truly express the brightness, but it doesn’t matter. His soulmate clashes unapologetically with the darkness of Edgar Allan. That’s what Jean needs. The douleur exquise of staring at a mark that glows, clear and calm, against a backdrop of black and knowing that whoever this ribbon of sunlight belongs to, he won’t meet them. They’ll always be happy, and they’ll always be out of reach, because for him the sun is unattainable. It can’t break through the shadow of the Nest.
He wonders if his soulmate’s mark stands out. If his own mark is so out of place, he concludes, his soulmate’s must be too.
Good, he thinks.
Jeremy is eighteen and his soulmate is afraid.
Well. Jeremy’s soulmate is always afraid. If it were any other situation, he might wonder if it’s a college thing. He’s on edge every morning, waiting for the mail. USC hasn’t given him an official offer yet. He’s sure they will, which sounds spectacularly conceited and yet is, fundamentally, the truth. Still, he’d like to have the letter in his hands sooner rather than later, that’s just human nature. USC is his dream school, after all. So all things considered, Jeremy would have put the blaring red of his skin down to an overreaction to college applications if it weren’t for who his soulmate is. For once he can’t focus on it; his abuelita is sick, he’s desperate to hear from USC, and he chooses to deal with his own negative emotions because those are the ones he can work through. He can’t afford to put them aside right now, because if he does then eventually they’ll overwhelm him.
He doesn’t look. And he doesn’t look. And then something happens, he doesn’t know what, but he feels it before he sees it. There’s a moment when he catches a glimpse of shifting colours on his skin while he’s out on a run; his stomach twists instinctively and he sighs through clenched teeth, shakes his head, picks up the pace. He’s afraid of what he’ll see if he glances down, so he waits until he gets home, taking the stairs two at a time in his rush to get up to his room before he can get roped into a conversation. He perches on the edge of his bed and sweeps his fingertips lightly up the length of his forearm, tracing the black that’s crept like a shadow across his skin. It makes his chest tighten. It eclipses everything else. When that colour shows up, it always, always, bleeds into everything else, muddies whatever else his soulmate is feeling. That’s the only reason Jeremy thinks he knows what it means; because when he’s tense, when he’s that anxious, it tends to block out everything else. The only thing he can think about is his anxiety.
He wonders, like he always does, what is so stressful.
He smiles, like he always does.
It’s Kevin who first brings Andrew Minyard to Riko’s attention. The guy’s a psychopath. Maybe he and Riko would get on, Jean thinks with bitter amusement.
They do not get on.
What ends up happening, Jean hears afterwards - as regimented as the Ravens are, gossip this momentous still flies around the team - is they show up, Andrew takes one look at Kevin and refuses point blank to sign. What ends up happening is Andrew steps into Riko’s space (Jean shudders at the idea) and tells him in no uncertain terms that one: Kevin is better than him, and two: he will not join the Ravens because a team that relies on hobbling its best players for the sake of its captain’s ego isn’t a team he’s interested in. Some accounts offer up a third argument: fuck off.
Riko and Kevin return in silence. Jean doesn’t ask what happened. He keeps his head down and for once, this doesn’t fall back on him. It falls back on Kevin. Jean patches him up afterwards. He doesn’t say anything to get onto Riko's radar, but when Riko sees what he does for Kevin, it doesn't matter how silent he is.
Andrew Minyard signs with the Palmetto State Foxes not a week later.