Hey a–leaf-on-the-wind I saw your prompts in the tag and I had fifteen minutes:
When they are thirteen the first girl in their year gets her soul-mark. Abigail Halden. She wakes up with it one morning, Abigail says. Francois. Her father buys her a white fluer-de-lys pin, with the white points picked out in diamonds. A French name.
In their last year of school the janitor turns to face them and the nametag on his chest picks out the light. Francois. Abigail Halden goes pale, and then green. Jim watches like a cat from the back of the hall as she slams the door of the bathroom.
Stupid, he thinks. Foolish. He is sixteen. There is no name on his wrist
Abigail Halden’s parents pull her out of the school and send her abroad, to Paris. She picks up with an artist. Francois. A businessman. Francois. A meat-cutter.
At eighteen Jim spends a breathless summer night unable to sleep. It’s not uncommon. He’s used to it, by now; the insect-rustle of his mind, turning over and over in the dark. The white curtains float in the breeze from outside, and the lawn smells of wet dirt and fresh-cut grass.
At first it’s a scratchy, itching feeling; like bugs crawling over his skin. Jim rubs his fingernails unconsciously over the vein of his wrist. He’s thinking about drugs; there was a boy selling little white press-tabs at the gay bar, last night when Jim snuck in. How much money do you make? The man sniffed, looked Jim over. Jim’s wristwatch covered the tell-tale blank space on his wrist.
More than you, little man. Three hundred so far tonight. The drug dealer tilted his head, curious in a dull sort of way. He hadn’t found his yet, then. He still had to be interested in strangers. What’s your name? A routine question.
Francois, Jim lies. The dull curiosity in the man’s eyes went out like a light.
Move along.
Three hundred dollars a night isn’t bad, and there’s got to be a safe way to pick up with that, Jim thinks –
He only realizes he’s scratched himself bloody when his nails slip on his wet skin and skitter away from his arm. Then the pain starts in; like someone’s carving him open, ripping through his skin with a raw razorblade, branding him in slow agonizing inches. It feels a little like a line of flame through his bones and Jim knows – Jim knows even though he never expected it – what is happening to him.
Jim’s too surprised to cry out; he turns over, in the dark, and watches his fate fall into place. A red scrawl spreads over his white bones, uneven and halting. The letters form slow and torturous; black chicken scratches underneath the bright-red smear of his blood.
Jim stares at it, for a long while, in the semi-darkness. It’s not bright enough to see the edges of it; whether the mark is smooth or jagged, the writing confident or hesitating. Sebastian. Jim remembers Abigail Halden, and begins to feel the corner of his lip turn up in a sneer. He turns his wrist in, hiding it, and rests his lip against the bones of his hand. An old-fashioned name, Sebastian; one you’d pick off a graveyard stone.
It doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean anything.
For the next ten years, he kills everyone he meets named Sebastian.
Then, one night, it happens again; in the dark, in the restless turning hours before dawn where Jim half-thinks he will never sleep again. One of those nights when Jim’s manic mind is pulling London apart at the seams, and he’s called three hits and a bomb in already but it never seems to make things better.
He smells desert-sand, moondust, white and choking. He doesn’t know why. He smells hot metal – gunpowder – the curious and unique stink of the barrel of a gun shoved up right against your nose. His heart starts to pound, hammering against the walls of his chest, and he hears someone yell –“SEBASTIAN!” – like an echo, too far away to be real.
Jim stares straight forward into the dark, refusing to look. I am stronger, he thinks. Soul-mates are for people. For humans. Soul-mates are for people who wake up in the middle of the night and wish for a body beside them – and I am stronger, stronger, stronger –
His teeth are grinding together, hard enough that he can taste the bone in his mouth. He can feel the grit of his edges crumbling, enamel stripped away by coffee and cigarettes. I am stronger. He can feel something like heat over the skin of his chest, a tightness. You’re lucky, he thinks, at Sebastian – whoever he is – you are lucky to be dead. I would never have loved you. What an idiot, with a psychopath for a soulmate. You are lucky you never found out just how empty that promise on your wrist was.
Jim tries to imagine what his writing would look like, on another man’s skin, and can’t. It doesn’t matter, anyways. Sebastian is dead. Jim shuts his eyes in the dark, alone with the pain.
Thirteen years later the scar is nothing but a white line on Jim’s wrist; wrinkled and pale tissue like melted wax. He doesn’t hide it, anymore. Sometimes people are sympathetic; they think it makes him human, makes him like them, to have loved and lost. Mostly, everyone assumes Jim killed his soulmate. He doesn’t mind that. He probably would have, if he’d gotten the chance.
When he meets Colonel Sebastian Moran, a new recruit from the Berlin branch, Jim isn’t thinking about soulmates. He hardly ever does. That’s for children; for children and victims, not for the spider in the center of the web. Soulmates are leverage to be applied, and nothing more.
Jim reaches out and takes Sebastian Moran’s hand. They shake. Moran is a large man; head-and-shoulders above everyone else in the room, his slicked-back shock of white hair incongruous with his tawny, tanned skin. He has a wide swath of scar-tissue over his nose, a slashing trail of a bullet like the off-hand flick of a pen.
Sebastian’s palms are calloused, preternaturally warm. When they touch Jim’s cold skin electricity jumps in the scant space between them; white lightning, sharp and smelling of ozone. Jim feels his eyes widen. Jim feels his face go pale, and then green. He stops himself from looking down with an effort. Sebastian’s suit is bespoke, perfectly cut, tight over his broad chest and nipped in through his narrow waist. There’s no way his wrist would be showing.
But he knows. Jim can see it in those pale blue eyes; the predator’s instinct, wary and gloating with the scent of his prey.
“What’s your first name?” Sebastian asks.
It’s a nice voice, Jim thinks. Deep and rumbling, like velvet on gravel. He thinks of tigers, and desert sand, and summer rain in the dark of the night. Jim smiles. He knows it comes off a little crazy – wide and white and sharp-toothed in his narrow face. “John,” he lies.
Sebastian’s smile is lop-sided. His canines jut jaggedly outwards, like fangs. “Sorry,” he replies, “I could have sworn you said James.”
They’ve been holding hands a little too long now. “So,” Jim asks, “How was being dead?”
And Sebastian throws back his head, and laughs.
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