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A/N: DAY 2 GIVE IT UP FOR DAY 2!!! The prompt today was soulmates, so without further ado - a 'you feel your soulmates pain and get their injuries' AU. Oh yes, it will be as sad as it sounds.
WARNING: some wandering and ruminating down paths that are definitely self-harm-y. If you feel this will be triggering for you, please look after yourself and skip this one.
Title from cardigan by Taylor Swift. I'm on tumblr and twitter @ heavensbeehalls, so come connect! If you enjoy, leave kudos or a comment or a funny quote tweet, I treasure them all.
On with your regularly scheduled torture nexus. Same time tomorrow?
She has lived her life in papercuts.
Some people around her have exciting soulmarks. In her line of work, all the people she meets, there are so many. People with burns on their arms, bruises on their shoulders, lacerated faces and nothing but the smiles of the connected.
Her? She hardly sees sign of her soulmarks. Except for the raw red slices that appear almost daily on the tips of her fingers, the sides of her hands, against her knuckles.
She touches those marks in every quiet moment, and wonders about the other half of her soul. The heart at the end of her tether. Her person, who apparently can’t do so much as open a book without slicing themselves to ribbons.
Alone, so often alone, travelling or sitting in a hotel room or waiting for a conference or reading a briefing over morning coffee, she looks at her fingers. Watches a new red line appear, imagines a shadowy face wincing, sucking on a drop of blood, waving their hand around and looking for a band-aid.
She wishes that the soul tether gave her more than just papercut marks on her fingers, bruises on her hip. That it could give her a name, syllables written silver on her heart, the impression of a face.
Maybe her soulmate feels the same. Every time she burns herself on an unreliable hotel room kettle, every time she picks at the skin around her fingernails until it bleeds. Maybe they feel her muscles aching when she works out everything in her head in the gym, or feel her migraines when she can’t head them off, or her cramps once a month.
It feels good, to be connected to someone. To know that despite everyone’s opinion of her - cold Eva Stratt, pushy Eva Stratt, perfect for the job no one wants Eva Stratt - she has someone out there who is the perfect match for her.
When she shuts off her heart to take charge of Project Hail Mary, she wonders if her soulmate feels it. If they know how it weighs on her. If they can share the weight too.
Signing into Grover Cleveland Middle School, she feels the tingle of a new cut on her finger. Third finger of her left hand, thin red line, and she sticks it into her pocket before taking the directions the receptionist gave her to Ryland Grace’s classroom.
He looks up from his computer, his finger in his mouth, and it escapes with a pop when he asks, “Can I help you?”
She holds out her hand, says, “Eva Stratt, I’m with the Petrova Task Force.” And then, because fuck it, because the world is ending, she adds, “And I believe I’m your soulmate.”
He stares at her so openly that his glasses slip down his nose and fall off.
When he bends down to grab them, he thunks his head against the table, and the same dull pain rises into her forehead.
“My soulmate?” he asks, rubbing his head, glasses askew. “I...what did you say your name was?”
“Eva,” she says, and he stares at her. His eyes are very blue.
“I’ve always liked that name,” he says quietly.
She can’t afford to get lost in the movie moment of finally meeting her soulmate. Even though she’s waited thirty-seven years. It’s about the work, about taking him to experiment with the astrophage, about recruiting him to the project, about showing him around.
Not about watching him quietly from the corner of every room. Or staring at the bruises that appear on her arms, her hips, her legs from his loping, charming clumsiness. It makes sense, that the thing that is supposed to be hers comes at a time when she can’t have it. Can’t even chase it.
She’s watching the night in the mess hall that Dubois slips while cutting his food and catches the knife into his thumb, the immediate well of blood. Watching when the same cut appears on Shapiro’s thumb, when the two of them look at each other and Dubois’ eyes fill with tears.
They lunge at each other, right into a kiss, Dubois’ hand in Shapiro’s hair. People applaud, and Eva looks right at Ryland looking at them, his grin glowing like the sun.
Jealousy rears ugly in her chest, and she turns it into a cigarette on the deck of the ship, picking out constellations between plumes of smoke. Trying not to resent him, not to resent Dubois and Shapiro and the wonderful evening they are no doubt having, trying to keep herself together. She’s not a stupid girl crying because her soulmate doesn’t want her back.
Except a tear lands on the railing next to her hand, and she is.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs, and she hastily wipes her hand across her eyes and takes a drag of her cigarette. Pretends not to know by the steps that it’s Ryland behind her, yellow raincoat pulled up against the drizzle.
“You smoke?” he asks, and she nods firmly, pointedly taking a drag of her cigarette. He leans back against the rail next to her, and she sneaks a glance at his profile. The tilt of his nose towards the sky, the stars reflected in his glasses.
“Crazy down there tonight, huh?” he asks, and she just looks at him. “Annie and Martin? So wild. Like being in a movie. I’m really happy for them, you know? They seem to suit each other. And they looked so happy. I love love, don’t you?”
“Usually I prefer to smoke alone,” she says shortly.
“So you can cry and no one knows?” he asks, and she blinks at him. “I can see the tear streaks, Stratt. Why are you up here alone, crying?”
“Why don’t you use that big brain to think back on the events of this evening and wonder why I might be upset,” she snaps, and he looks wounded by her scolding.
“...Are you upset because I didn’t shove my tongue down your throat when we met?” he asks, and she rolls her eyes. “Stratt, I was at work, the kids were around-”
“Always about the kids,” she says acidly, and stubs out her cigarette. Pushes back a temptation to stub it out on her own palm, make him feel the sting of their burn.
When she pushes past him, he catches her wrist in his fingers. She stares at the length of them looped around her bones, the golden tone of his skin next to her paleness.
She flicks her eyes up to his, the galaxies in his blue looking at her.
He pulls, and she staggers, and they’re kissing. His hand sliding into her hair, slowly carding downwards, the tips of her fingers curled into the back of his cardigan. How firm he is pulling her closer, the soles of her shoes squeaking against the damp deck.
Her hands slide up to the back of his neck, feeling the tufts of his messy hair, pulling him closer. Their breath mingling, his glasses pressing into her face, and when he breaks the kiss he presses his forehead to hers, their noses brushing so sweetly.
“Is that what you wanted?” he asks softly, and she nods silently. “Stratt...Eva, do you think I don’t want this?”
“You’ve stayed away from me so far,” she sniffs, and he smiles, brushing a tear away from her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“Do you understand how cool you are?” he asks, and she huffs out a wet laugh. “You’re basically ruler of the world. You make handling all of this look easy. And you’re...really gorgeous. I’ve always had a thing about redheads.”
“Your last girlfriend was blonde-”
“You know that?” he asks, his cheeks going ruddy. “Just...I mean, it didn’t mean much, we both knew we had different soulmates, and I-”
“I am not jealous,” she says, and pulls him back down, kissing under the stars, his hand wrapped around the small of her back and pulling her close.
So this is their soulbond. Fondly watching bruises bloom on her hips, because Ryland is incapable of rounding a table without bumping against it. Watching his idly rub his temples in a meeting when she’s had a low-level migraine the whole morning.
It’s leaving ghosts on each other. A faint smudge of a bruise on her collarbone, the shadow of the much more vivid one on Ryland’s. Pale pink fingermarks on his hips, where hers are vivid red.
Their soulbond is the agony lancing her hip when they hit the ground as the research centre explodes into spectacular flame behind them. Finding the bruises on her thigh, her knee, her elbow.
And she wonders, when she tells him to go, if he can feel how her heart is breaking.
When he looks at her across the room, betrayal splashed dark across his eyes, and whispers, “But we’re soulmates.”
The guards hear. He lets them hear. And she blanches, and can’t say anything as he wrestles away and runs.
She feels the scuff of grass on her thigh when he’s shoved to the ground. The grip of hands on her wrists, the sharp spike of the needle full of sedative sinking into her neck.
When, three days later, she’s dragged roughly into handcuffs, she wonders if his wrists burn in his coma.
They ask her, during the trial. Even though her guilt is assumed, they ask, “Ms. Stratt, is it true you have a soulbond with Doctor Ryland Grace?”
Her finger ghosts across the spot of her neck where she still feels the needle going in, night after night, and she says, “Yes.”
“So when he dies out there, you will too?”
“Objection - relevance?”
She stares at the people in black who want her dead, and thinks of how she’ll die if Ryland does. It’s not conclusively proven that soulmates will die together - too many coincidences, too many biases, too many beliefs in the strength of love.
Her heart can take loss. It has before. It will again. Her punishment will be living on without ever feeling the sting of another paper cut.
Locked up, she wishes for sensation. Staring at her hands, looking for a sign. A thin red line.
The years pass. Her mind starts to melt in and out of reality. Activist groups call for her to be released. Call for her to stay. Someone pleads for a mistrial. Fails. She becomes eligible for bail, but rejects the hearing.
Ryland sits in the corner of her cell like a ghost, wearing that yellow raincoat, watching her. And she scratches at her fingers until they bleed, thinking of papercuts.
When she wakes up and finds a bruise on the inside of her arm that isn’t hers, she stares at it all morning. Touches it. And, eventually, presses her lips to it, trying to send her sorry soaring through the stars.
More start to pop up on her skin. She’s even paler now than she was then, grey with the weight of the world. And she touches every little bruise, every tiny cut, so reverently.
He’s alive. Her Grace is alive.
The soulbond didn’t snap. She could write back, if she wanted. Draw I’m sorry on her forearm. Carve I believe in you into her thigh. I had to do it on her palm. I didn’t want to on her stomach. I never wanted it to be you across her back.
Crowd her skin with an endless script of I love you I love you I love you.
She wonders if his psyche has snapped like hers. Or if he’s holding it together just fine, and she’s given him her sanity like he gives her his hurts.
The days, the weeks, the months pass, and she stares at herself, waiting for new bruises. Starts to resent clothing, because it means she might miss a sign from him. Longs for something more than a faint bruise. Fears worse.
Worse hits her arms first. Dull ache in her elbow, the thought of a bruise appearing.
A sharp lance of pain across the bridge of her nose.
And then weight on her chest, clamping down, her breath shortening, her panicked heart running faster and faster.
Her hand groping for air when she slips to the ground, guards yelling, alarm blaring, someone running into her cell.
A faint voice, in and out of focus as the world wavers black at its edges. “Stay with us, Ms, Stratt, stay with us.”
It stops as soon as it started, leaving her collapsed in a heap on the ground, twitching and gasping for air.
They keep her in supervision overnight, and she runs her fingers back and forth over the new cut on her nose, her lungs still shuddering for lack of air.
When a new bruise appears on her elbow, she cries so hard the doctor sedates her. Sobbing in utter relief that he’s okay, he’s alive, that he didn’t die out there unable to breath and stealing her oxygen too.
Not that it matters. She’d give it to him.
Time passes in and out of loops, scattered stars. She’s an empty void, a yawning shadow, lost in dreams of stars and stones, always hungry. Little spots on her skin, the doctor saying it must be the soulbond. Always a smile on her tired lips. He’s still alive.
When Carl comes to her cell in the middle of the night and springs her free, she can barely hear him when he tells her about the beetles. Hears him swearing at the state of her, angrily chuntering about everyone he’ll hurt for her, scooping her out of the black car and back onto the Gansu.
Full of people she remembers, old faces that blanch when they see the state of her. Lamai back to nurse her healthy again, tutting over the marks on her arms. “Grace must be in a state out there.”
Carl is the one who puts in front of the videos from the beetles. And she blooms under Grace, staring at him, running her fingers back and forth across the burn scars on the back of her hand that match his.
He smiles at the camera, holds up a finger and shows the lens a papercut. “That’s for you,” he says, and she nods, knowing it was coming. Weeks of watching these videos on repeat. She knows every gesture, every word, every breath.
Her heart still skips when he tells the camera, “I love you.” Soft, secret, perfect.
It’s harder to put herself back together knowing she’ll never see him again. That he chose someone else.
Having a job to do helps. Giving orders. Making the world turn again, bringing back the sun.
It helps, too, to draw a heart on the inside of her wrist with the pointed end of a pen. Blooming in red and white welts.
After a few minutes, another, wobblier heart appears next to it, and she smiles.
They spend five years carving through the ice, her new, smaller crew around her. Watching bruises blossom and fade on her skin, occasionally scratching something into her wrist. He doesn’t always see it before it fades. He doesn’t always answer.
She’s awake in the middle of the night, afraid of the same dream of watching the Hail Mary burn away with him in it, when she feels the tingling in her arm.
Looks down and sees a crudely-written COMING HOME.
She feels it when he splashes down back onto Earth, jerks awake with a fire ache licking at her hips and back.
Waits a month to see him, Carl always on frantic phone calls, barking commands for information.
She feels ridiculous, but she takes a notepad to see Ryland again. Stares at him when he’s ushered in by the President, crowds roaring, yellow jumpsuit and gold wings tagging his name.
He looks right up at her. And she slowly, deliberately, draws the edge of her paper across the third finger of her left hand.
Ryland beams. Crosses the room in a few short strides and pulls her into his arms, his nose buried in her hair, her paper cut leaving a rusty stain of blood on his jumpsuit when she catches herself on his arm, dizzy.
“Is this real?” she asks quietly, and he smiles. Pinches her wrist, nails digging it, and she watches the welt appear on his wrist too.
“You’re crying,” he breathes, and she becomes aware of the salt streaks down her cheeks, burning hot on her cool skin. “Don’t cry, baby. It breaks my heart.”
“I broke it first-”
“Ssh,” he breathes, stroking her hair, tangling his fingers through the silver. “I love you. I missed you. You have no idea...when I remembered you, every bruise was a blessing. You’re so smart to figure out how to write to me.”
“You didn’t always see it-”
“Tell me everything I missed,” he says, and buries his mouth in hers so hard there are teethmarks on his lower lip too.