Chapter Text
Everyone has a soulmate; it’s always been like that.
You may not have met your soulmate (or soul mates ), yet, but it’s almost certain you will. Maybe you already have. Maybe you pass them every day, on your way to work; your way to school; your way home. Or maybe you don’t yet know them - you’ll certainly know when you have. Hopefully.
When you do meet your soulmate, you will receive your mark. We all know this, of course; we grow up hearing people murmuring about theirs, catching glimpses of the more prominent or larger flowers blossoming over skin. Of course, there are some people who have their mark and don’t know who from - and it’s much more likely than you would at first think. If you interact with many people on a daily basis, for example in a busy office or bustling department store, how could you know who it was?
There’s a catch - of course there’s a catch - it would simply be too easy if, as soon as soulmates met each other, their mark appeared as if by magic. The details are blurry, and no one really understands it yet, but the process has been described more times than you could count: when you and your soulmate meet, something happens between the two of you, leaving both with identical flower marks some time later. Even how long the marks take to show up varies from person to person. Of course, this all relies on you touching at some point - and it can’t be accidental, either. This part is vital. A firm handshake could do it, or a pat on the back - but if you and your soulmate bump into each other in a crowded room, no one would be any the wiser. Where your mark appears depends on this point of contact. Many people have vines or leaves wrapped around their hands, weaving between their fingers. It’s often harder for them to know who their soulmate is, and harder still to cover this mark if the need arises.
Daniel Jacobi is 29 years old, and although he still has plenty of time left, he gave up finding his soulmate a long while ago. He thinks he’s damaged, you see - he’s not, obviously -, preferring to spend time poring over briefings or carrying out ‘controlled’ detonations with perhaps a little too much recklessness than is expected for someone who is perfectly matched to someone who will want to meet him; to know him. To love him .
When pressed for an answer, he might say that he doesn’t believe in soulmates, or the bond between them. In reality, he dreams of the first time he’ll see flower buds bloom somewhere on his body. He might say that life would be a lot less painful if there weren’t a fixed number of people who would perfectly match you, or if you couldn’t tell whether someone was or wasn’t your soulmate. He’d be right, at least partially. Many people believe this at first, and set out to defy society’s expectations by flaunting their mark-less relationships. That is, they flaunt them until they are over, usually because one party realises that they do want to wait to find their soulmate. In this aspect, Daniel Jacobi was different . His previous relationships have been fleeting, and he’s done his utmost to avoid commitment.
He saw what commitment did to his parents.
They were soulmates, and very happy together. When, just after his twentieth birthday, his mother was taken ill, no one could believe it. There were no signs, no warnings .
As you’d expect, his father took it the worst. She was - had been - his soulmate, after all. Jacobi had been prepared to comfort him, to pause his career to help him in any way he could. He hadn’t been prepared for the mark that once had brought his father so much joy, the mark that he knew his mother sported the other half to on the back of her hand, to start to change . Discussing what happened to marks after death were practically taboo - and consequently, few were properly prepared for the inevitable seeping out of their mark’s colour, or for the expansion that happened almost over night. Jacobi had heard rumours of people who had met their soulmate, but not yet learned who they were waking up in the middle of the night only to watch in anguish as their mark lost its colour, the washed out shades bleeding around the once pristine flower.
That reminder would be with them for the rest of their life, a constant message that they were once again alone in the world.
Daniel Jacobi didn’t want to end up like that. He told himself that he’d rather have no mark at all than a decayed one. It turned out neither of these would be true - at least, not for a long time.
When he had joined Goddard, Daniel only wanted to get away from the people who new him. What better way, he had thought, was there, than creating a whole different identity. Really, ‘joined’ was the wrong word - no one joined Goddard. They were only recruited , and from that exclusive circle, few made it to the position Daniel Jacobi was now in. Specifically, two others had made it to the position Jacobi was in - or at least, similar ones. Alana Maxwell was one of them. Warren Kepler was the other (although he would protest vehemently that his position was much higher than either Jacobi or Maxwell’s).
In regards to their own situations with their soulmates, Maxwell and Jacobi were on similar ground. Like him, she thought her work was more important, even confiding to him on one quiet day that she hoped she would never find out who her soulmate was.
Kepler was a different story. He tried to be inscrutable on the subject, but his hand twitched towards his waist any time someone mentioned the word ‘mark’, even when unrelated to soulmates. A few weeks into his new position in SI-5, Jacobi had caught a glimpse of a dark, shriveled petal on Kepler’s side as he bent down, and resolved to try not to bring the subject up around him.
However, when Maxwell and Jacobi were alone together, they speculated endlessly on who could have shared the other half of the man’s mark, or wondered to each other who the new, bright-eyed lackey with the buds of a fresh flower blooming on their neck had met, and whether they would have a happy ending, together. Maxwell wasn’t convinced - but Jacobi knew her well enough to be fairly confident she hoped, as he did, that they would.
In the few short weeks that Jacobi had been part of SI-5, he had got to know Maxwell incredibly well, and Kepler not at all, but when, on only their second mission together, one of the hostiles shot straight towards Kepler’s chest, Jacobi instinctively hurled himself in front of him. Kepler hadn’t been wearing one of the bulletproof vests that day; he’d thought that he would certainly not be venturing into the field for this particular mission. It was meant to just be reconnaissance, and they hadn’t expected to actually engage with anyone. If Jacobi had chosen not to wear one, things would have been very different.
As it happened, Jacobi’s vest caught the bullet, but the impact left him with a number of fractured ribs and enough bruises to leave him wincing for weeks afterwards. Luckily, this all happened near the end of the mission, and they were retrieved only a couple of minutes later by another of the Goddard teams. Jacobi was fairly unsteady at this point though and an exasperated Kepler had swung his arm around Jacobi’s waist, Maxwell mirroring him almost instantaneously. Together, they helped him hobble towards the extraction point, and Jacobi gracelessly looped his arms around each of their shoulders, wincing with every step.
It’s one of the doctors who tells him, back at the official Goddard hospital. He’s having his ribs bandaged when they make an offhand comment about the flower meanings - it’s one of the more researched topics regarding different types of marks - and ask, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, whether Jacobi knows what his means.
Mind whirling - what mark??? - he manages a coherent reply (although, how , he has no idea), and throughout the next agonising hours of debriefing and mission reports, it’s all he can think of. Jacobi doesn’t remember much from the meetings, and contributes even less - Kepler will undoubtedly admonish him for it at some point for it.
Kepler.
It can’t be Kepler, can it? Kepler already has - had - a soulmate. He’s heard about cases of people with two different soulmates, two different flowers etched onto their bodies, but the numbers are miniscule - even fewer have been confirmed.
Who else could it be, though? He couldn’t think clearly enough to go through what had happened that day, the painkillers had made the memories fuzzy and blurred at the edges.
It just didn’t make sense .